Not Ours to Keep

Chapter One: The Consignment

The workshop smelled of spruce shavings, spirit varnish, and the cold ash of last night's fire, and Hana Resnik had never in her life smelled anything else at eight in the morning.

She came down the narrow stairs in her socks, hair still flat on one side, and stood in the doorway. Her father was already at the bench under the window, a viola clamped face-down in a cradle of cork, its back off, the ribs open like a small boat. He had the good lamp pulled right down so the light lay flat across the wood. He did not look up.

"There's toast," he said.

"There isn't. There's bread and there's a toaster."

"That is what toast is, before it becomes toast."

Stefan Resnik had a way of speaking that made even his jokes sound careful, as if he were testing the grain of each word before he set it down. He was forty-nine that spring, a tall, stooped man with grey coming into his black hair and forearms like a bricklayer's. His father had come to England from Ljubljana in 1959 with a suitcase and a set of gouges. Stefan had inherited the gouges and, Hana sometimes thought, the suitcase feeling too — the sense of a man who had never entirely unpacked.

The workshop occupied the ground floor of a thin brick building in one of the lanes behind the concert hall, a street so narrow that delivery vans had to fold their mirrors in. Above it were three rooms and a bathroom with a boiler that shrieked. Hana had lived there since she was two. In the mornings she could hear cellists warming up in the hall two streets away when the windows were open, long low scales climbing the air like something breathing.

"Mum says I'm coming to the gallery."

"Mum says a lot of things. Mostly correct." He turned the viola a quarter turn and made a small mark with a pencil no longer than his thumb. "Take a jumper. That place is a fridge."

It was the last Saturday of April 2005, and Hana was fourteen.

Her mother was waiting by the front door with the car keys already in her hand, which was her way of announcing that they were late. Christine Resnik was small and quick and wore her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, where she then failed to find them. She had grown up in Bath, gone away to Bristol to study history of art, come back, married a man who mended violins, and made a life out of arranging beautiful objects and persuading people to buy them.

She worked three days a week at the Pyne Gallery on Milsom Street, and often, unpaid, a fourth. The gallery sold decorative arts — silver, glass, minor paintings, the leftovers of large houses. It was not a serious gallery. But it paid a salary, monthly, on the twenty-eighth, and in the Resnik household a salary that arrived on the twenty-eighth was a kind of religion. The workshop paid too, when Stefan was well. There were seasons when he was not well, when he did not come down the stairs at all, when the phone rang and rang in the workshop below and nobody answered it, and in those seasons it was Christine's twenty-eighth that kept the roof on.

Nobody said this out loud. It was simply understood, the way the shape of a room is understood in the dark.

"Right," Christine said as they walked up towards town, because parking on a Saturday was a fool's errand. "There are nineteen crates and one van driver who has to be back in Cheltenham by two. You are labour. Do you accept these terms?"

"Am I paid?"

"You are fed."

"That's exploitation."

"That's the arts," said her mother.

The Pyne Gallery had a green front and a bell that jangled and a back room with a stone floor that had never been warm since the eighteenth century. The consignment had come from a house called Netherstowe, out past Painswick, where an old man had died and left four nephews who agreed on nothing except that everything should be turned into money as quickly as possible. Roderick Pyne, who owned the gallery, was seventy-six and had recently begun to talk about Provence in the way other men talk about heaven.

He met them in the back room with a clipboard he was not consulting.

"Christine. And this is the daughter. Good God, you've grown a foot."

"That's what feet do," Hana said, and he laughed too loudly, and then wandered off to answer the telephone and did not come back for an hour.

They worked. Hana learned the rhythm of it quickly: the crowbar, the squeal of nails, the drifts of shredded paper that got into everything, the mothball smell of a dead man's linen cupboard. Her mother called out and Hana wrote on the sheet. Pair of plated candlesticks, Sheffield, damaged. Regency work table, veneer lifting. Twenty-two pieces blue and white, assorted, chipped. Two boxes of books nobody would ever read again.

At half past eleven her mother stopped.

"That's not on the manifest," she said.

Behind the Regency table, wedged upright against the wall as though someone had set it down for a moment sixty years ago, stood a hard case. It was black, or had been, with a rubbed leather handle and two brass catches gone green. It was shaped like a body. Hana knew, without knowing anything, that it was a cello case.

Christine checked the manifest twice, and then the van driver's docket, and then rang the auctioneer in Cheltenham who had packed the lot and who said, over a bad line, that if it came off the lorry it came off the lorry, and could she sign the docket please.

"Open it," Hana said.

"It's not ours to open."

"It's not anybody's. It's not even on the paper."

Her mother looked at the case for a long moment with an expression Hana would think about for years afterwards — the small, guilty pleasure of a person whose whole working life was other people's abandoned belongings.

"We'll wait for your father," she said. "He'll only sulk if we look first."

Stefan came at four o'clock, in the green coat he wore in all weathers, having walked up through the Saturday crowds with his hands in his pockets. He kissed his wife on the temple. He looked at the case for perhaps three seconds before he crouched down beside it.

"Where's this from?"

"Netherstowe. Or nowhere. It isn't listed."

He put his thumbs on the catches. The left one opened; the right had rusted, and he worked at it with the small screwdriver he carried the way other men carry a pen. Hana remembered the sound it made when it gave — a dry, reluctant snap, like a knuckle.

He lifted the lid.

Inside, in a nest of moth-eaten green baize, lay a cello.

Hana's first thought was that it was ruined. The varnish was black in places, crackled all over into a web of fine lines like the glaze on an old cup. Two strings had snapped and curled up into little wire flowers. The bridge lay flat, warped like a tile left in the sun. There was dust in the f-holes and a bloom of grey mould along one rib.

Her father did not touch it for a long time. He knelt on the stone floor with his hands on his thighs and looked, and Hana watched his face do something she had never seen it do. It emptied. Every ordinary thing went out of it.

"Stefan," her mother said.

"Wait."

He lifted it out — two hands, one under the neck, one under the lower bout, the way you lift a person who cannot lift themselves. He turned it in the grey light from the yard window. He held it up and looked along the belly at a low angle, so the light skimmed the surface and showed every hollow. He looked at the scroll for an especially long time, turning it under his thumb.

"Somebody's mended this," he said, half to himself. "A long time ago. Beautifully. Look at the join, you can hardly — " He stopped himself.

"Is it any good?" Christine asked.

Hana's father laughed. It was not a happy sound; it was the laugh of someone who has just been told an enormous and unwelcome fact.

"Chris," he said, "this is not a school cello."

He carried it to the window and showed them the back, where the two-piece maple had a figure in it like water moving. He showed them the corners, and the way the edges were worked. He showed them a place on the lower bout, on the treble side, where the varnish had worn clean away to bare wood in a patch about the size of a hand — a shallow, polished hollow, the colour of honey.

"Somebody played this every day for fifty years," he said. "That's a belt buckle. That's a man's coat, over and over. You don't get that in a hundred years of a case." He put his palm against it, not quite touching. "There's no label. Somebody's taken the label out."

"Why would you take a label out?"

"Because of what's on it," said Stefan.

Roderick Pyne came in eating a sandwich.

"Ah," he said. "The mystery item."

"I'd like to take it home," Stefan said. "I'd like to look at it properly. It's damp, Roddy, it's been in an unheated room for years. Another winter like this and the back opens up and you'll have kindling."

Pyne looked at the cello the way a man looks at a bicycle in the rain. "Is it worth anything?"

"It's worth not being kindling."

"Then take it, take it. Write me one of your reports." He waved his sandwich at the room, the nineteen crates, the hundreds of small objects that would have to be photographed and priced and hauled about. "Honestly, if you knew what I've got to get through by Tuesday. Write me a condition report and we'll put it in the June sale with the rest of the — " and then the bell jangled at the front, and he went, and that was the whole of it. Eleven seconds. Hana counted them later, in her head, hundreds of times.

They walked home at six with the case between them, Stefan on the handle and Hana steadying the bottom end, laughing at the corners because the lanes were too narrow and a man outside the pub called out to ask if there was a body in it.

"There is," said her father. "Be quiet about it."

At home he set the case on the bench, opened it, and stood looking at the cello with his arms folded while Christine made pasta upstairs and shouted down that he had ten minutes.

"Come here," he said to Hana. "Put your hand there. No — flat. Feel that?"

The bare patch was smooth as a river stone and warmer than the rest.

"Somebody loved this," her father said. "Whoever they were."