The Station Piano That Learned One Tune

There is an upright piano at the end of platform two, painted blue by a school art club and bolted to the wall so that nobody can wheel it away. Most of the day it is played badly and cheerfully by whoever is waiting. But every weekday at 7:31, a man in a grey coat sits down and plays the same small waltz, round and round, until the 7:42 pulls in, landing on the last note just as the doors open.

Nobody knows his name. The regulars call it his tune, which is not quite fair, because after two years of mornings half the platform can hum it. The woman at the coffee kiosk times her milk frother to its quiet bars. A boy on his way to school has learned the left hand just by watching, and plays it on the strap of his rucksack. Even the pigeons seem to know when to move away from the bench.

In winter the waltz starts in the dark and ends in daylight, the morning sun arriving along the tracks just before the train does. Commuters who have never exchanged a word stand in the same places every day, coffee in hand, facing the piano rather than the timetable. Nobody would admit to coming early for it. Quite a few people now arrive at 7:30.

Then one Monday in March, the man did not come. At 7:31 the piano stood there with its lid up, and the platform felt like a room where the clock has stopped. At 7:33 the boy put down his rucksack and played the left hand, stiffly. At 7:34 the kiosk woman, who had never touched a piano in her life, found the melody with one finger. By 7:40 a stranger in a cycling helmet had joined in the middle, and it sounded, everyone agreed later, terrible and exactly right.

On Tuesday the man came back with a cold and a scarf. He played the waltz as usual, a little slower than before, while the whole platform hummed along under its breath. When the 7:42 slid in, the driver leaned out of his cab and gave two short toots on the horn, in perfect waltz time. He had, it turned out, been listening through his open window for two years too.

Nobody has asked the man where the waltz comes from, and he has never offered. It seems right to leave it that way. A tune that belongs to one person is a performance. A tune that half a platform can finish without him is something else: a small, shared habit, kept going by people who would never call themselves musicians, every weekday at 7:31.