Allegretto, by Miriam Feld

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Her granddaughter had asked for the Schubert, and so, after lunch, Liesl Adler lowered herself onto the piano stool and arranged her hands on the keys as carefully as a woman arranging flowers on a grave.

‘Only if you like, Omi,’ said Hannah, who was nine and already sorry she had asked.

‘Of course I like.’

The room was warm and smelled of coffee. Outside, on the Finchley Road, a lorry changed gear with a groan. Liesl looked at her hands. They did not look like hers. They looked like the roots of something, knotted and spotted and swollen at the knuckles, and she had the strange idea that if she waited long enough, her real hands would come back from wherever they had gone.

She began. The first phrase was there; she felt it come up through her wrists like water up a stem. The second was not. Her fourth finger would not lift. It lay on the key like a sleeping animal, and the note under it went on sounding, flat and stupid, long after it should have stopped. She played the phrase again, and again the finger refused, and she heard herself make a small noise in her throat that she did not like.

In Vienna, in 1936, she had played this piece in a hall with gold on the ceiling. Her teacher had wept. Her mother had worn the grey silk. Every one of those people was gone, and the hall had been bombed, and the only place the music still lived, she had always believed, was here, in these ten fingers. Now it seemed it was leaving those too, quietly, without asking her permission.

Hannah was watching her with great, careful eyes.

Liesl took her hands off the keys and laid them in her lap. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think it is your turn. Come. Sit. I will show you where the music begins.’ And as the child slid onto the stool beside her, Liesl put her bad hand over the small, quick, unknowing hand, and guided it, and felt the first note go out into the room, true and clear, as though it had never been away.

How does the writer show Liesl Adler’s thoughts and feelings about growing old?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Liesl
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.