The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne Page A

goats had outlived her? Daniel sighed as he thought of the animals leaving her and being replaced, like the foster children she had raised and then let go, time and again.
    Daniel pulled out his house keys. Alongside the key to his London flat, he still had Minnie’s house key. The same brass key that she had given Daniel when he was a boy.
    The house smelled damp and was quiet when he opened the door. From its depths, the cold reached out to him like elderly hands. He slipped inside, pulling the sleeves of his sweater over his hands to warm them. The house still smelled of her. Daniel stood in the kitchen letting his fingers move from the crowded work surface to the sewing kit, to the boxes of animal feed and the jars of coins, buttons, and spaghetti. The kitchen table was piled high with newspapers. Mindful spiders scuttled from the floorboards.
    He opened the fridge. There wasn’t much food, but it had not been emptied. The tomatoes were shrunken, wearing furred gray hats. The half bottle of milk was yellow and sour. Lettuce was wilted to seaweed. Daniel closed the door.
    He went into the living room, where the last newspaper she had read was lying open on the couch. It had been a Tuesday then, when she had last been in the house. He could picture her with her feet up, reading The Guardian . He touched the paper and felt a chill. He felt both close to her and distant, as if she were a reflection he could see in a window or a lake.
    Her old piano was open by the window. Daniel pulled out the stool and sat down, listening to the wood strain under his weight. He pumped one of the pedals gently with his foot, letting his fingers fall heavy on the keys, the notes discordant under his touch. He remembered nights as a child when he would creep downstairs and sit on the stairs, the toes of one foot warming the other as he listened to her play. She played slow, sad, classical pieces that he did not recognize at the time but which he had learned to name as he got older: Rachmaninov, Elgar, Beethoven, Ravel, Shostakovich. The drunker she became, the louder she would play and the more notes she would miss.
    He remembered standing in the cold of the hall, watching her through the ajar living room door. She was heavy on the keys, so that the piano itself seemed to protest beneath her. Her calloused, bare feet pumped the pedals as strands of her gray curls fell in her face.
    Daniel smiled, sounding single notes on the piano. He could not play. She had tried to teach him once or twice. His forefinger found the notes and then listened to the sound of them: cold, shuddering, lonely. He closed his eyes, remembering; the room was still thick and heavy with the scent of dog. What had happened to the dog when Minnie died? he wondered.
    Every year he had known her, on the eighth of August, she drank herself into a stupor listening to one record over and over again. It was a record she wouldn’t let him touch. She kept it tight in its sleeve except for that one day of the year when she would let it spin and allow the fine needle of the stylus to find its fingerprint threads. She would sit in the half dark, the living room lit only by the fire, and listen to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major. Daniel had been at university before he knew the name of the track, although he had memorized every note well before then.
    Once, she had let him sit with her. He had been thirteen or fourteen and still trying to understand her. She had made him sit quietly, turned from her and facing the record that scratched its way into the music as she waited, her chin bobbing up and down slightly in expectation of the notes and the pathos that would find her.
    When the music started, he had turned to watch her face, surprised by the effect the music had on her. It reminded him of his mother injecting heroin. The same rapture, the same devout attention, the same bewilderment—although she would seek it out again and again.
    At first Minnie would seem to follow the