Kate Coghlan writes mystery, suspense and ghost stories and has completed the first draft of a novel. This short story pays tribute to a workshop in the forest, which makes harps (and possibly magic wands). Kate has a BA in French and Philosophy from the University of Sheffield, a CIM Diploma in Communications and Marketing, and a WSET Diploma in Wines and Spirits. She has worked in communications for over twenty years, and she was inspired to write fiction while promoting the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. She is a Non-Executive Director at Goalball UK.

Twitter @Kate_Cogs

Email: Katherine.coghlan@gmail.com

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Glissandos at Dusk

“You’ll learn on the job,” the owner said on the phone. “Nobody knows how to make harps until they get here. How would they?”

I might have scraped through A-levels, even won a place at university, but I’ve only ever enjoyed working with my hands. School was unkind. Taunts of ‘Troll-Joel’ still rang in my ears, and at home my mum called me a ‘clumsy oaf’. College suited me better, and after two years I left with a woodwork diploma and a list of local apprenticeships. The one in the harp workshop grabbed my attention; it sounded almost magical. I was surprised I was the only one from college to apply. It was a lucky break because most got better marks than me, were better spoken and better looking. They had girlfriends too. They wouldn’t have got lost finding the place on their first day. 

I scribbled down the address and directions from the man on the phone but my notes didn’t seem to have anything in common with the road ahead. You needed a strong stomach for the bends and a car with a full tank. After leaving the town, I took wrong turn after wrong turn, into hidden dips and over forested hills, circling around the same bends again and again until I found it: a huge old house with outbuildings, tucked away in a tangle of trees. 

I pulled up outside a barn with a peeling signpost, ‘Brandon Harps, est. 1943.’ The stones on the driveway crunched as I stumbled out, queasy from the journey. The door was shunted open, revealing a stooped man, as old as my grandad. I guessed he was George, the man I’d spoken to. He looked me up and down and said, “So you’ll be Joel then.” A dusty welcoming committee of four or five men had gathered behind him. “Better not let him at the saws yet,” he said over his shoulder. 

George passed me to ‘Young Danny’, a middle-aged rocker-type with a tattooed neck and a ponytail sneaking down his back. We entered the workshop and I felt eyes on me. My rucksack caught something which clattered to the floor. I felt my ears burn, but Danny waved a hand in the air and said, “No worries. Leave it.” 

My friends would laugh if they saw the age of my co-workers; most were old men in cardigans which smelled of damp wool and woodsmoke. What would I have in common with them? My mates still lived at home and met at the pub for a quiz every Saturday night. These guys probably trundled back to old dogs and thatched cottages. Maybe that’s why nobody else wanted the job.

I followed Danny’s ponytail on a tour of the buildings that seemed to go backwards through the production process, starting with a showroom which displayed the finished harps. Twelve or thirteen of them stood in the small room, a similar crescent shape but different heights and finishes, mahogany, maple, walnut and ash. They all faced the same direction, like sails caught by a gust of wind.

“You won’t come in here much,” Danny said. “You’ll hear the customers playing. The harps are mostly made to order, although you’ll see a few oldies in George’s room. They last forever with a bit of refurbishment.”

He led me to the tuning room next, where George was bent over an upside-down harp, fiddling with its metal pedals. I looked around and saw a row of older harps. One lurked in a corner, grey with dust and cracked in several places across the woodwork. 

I pointed and said, “That one’s been waiting a while.” 

“Don’t touch it,” George snapped, and the harshness of his voice made me step backwards. More softly, he said, “A delicate one that, needs expert care.”

Danny gestured around the room, “Every harp that leaves the workshop gets tuned and checked by George. He’s the last Brandon left. Still lives in the old family house over there.”

He nodded through a grimy windowpane to the derelict house. It was the sort of place that gets rescued by the National Trust, then visited by my grandma on special occasions. It’d need a lot of work before opening to the public and serving scones though. One window looked like it was patched up with clingfilm, and the gutters strained away from the walls like they were trying to escape.

Danny pointed at a notice board pinned to the brick wall behind George. “That’s the Brandon family.”

A stern group frowned out from a yellowed photograph, surrounded by newspaper cuttings which curled away at the corners. I nodded and kept my face neutral. I thought of my friends working in factories and garages under the gaze of scantily dressed models, and I wondered if I’d ever see girls in here. I imagined harpists as floaty tree-huggers who believed in meditation and healing with crystals. Not my type.

My perfect woman was called Becca. I saw her at the pub quiz every Saturday night, where she drank pints of beer and shared chips with her friends. She had short red hair and she threw her head back when she laughed. She fielded the music questions for her all-female team and knew so much about pop and classical music that I was sure she must play an instrument. I imagined her holding a mahogany harp, her black-painted fingernails gliding up and down the strings. Every time I saw her, I promised myself that I’d speak to her before Christmas. 

“Now metalwork,” Danny said, as we stepped through a chunky wooden door, into a room with stone tiles, exposed brick walls and the dry, dusty heat of machinery. The shelves ran floor to ceiling and were stacked with open-sided boxes with handwritten labels. Two men were bent over, like in an operating theatre, coaxing metal branches into shape like a buckled skeleton. “That bit connects the pedals to the strings to change keys,” Danny explained. This meant nothing to me; I’d struggled with the recorder at school.

“We’re upstairs,” he said, and our boots clanged on the steep, cast-iron spiral staircase as we climbed up to the first floor. The woodwork room was in the rafters, wedged between sloped windows looking over the forest. The air was cool and smelled of freshly sawn pine. It vibrated with the clatter of cutting and hammering. Danny showed me to a workbench, several centimetres thick and pockmarked with the work of decades. I traced my fingers over its deep gorges, then perched on a stool to watch Danny sanding down a handful of tiny, cylindrical rods.

“You could be making wizards’ wands, for all I know,” I said.

He winked and replied, “I am.”

Over the next few months, I learned to slice the wood into thin panels, then feed it onto a mould for different shapes and sizes of soundboard. I’d place the smooth timber in, then watch it be sucked into shape over the hours. The vacuum gave a low, steady white noise like the drone of an aeroplane. Once in shape, we waxed and polished the frames until they shone. Sometimes the chemicals stuck in my throat, so I levered the rusty windows open and breathed in the smell of wet leaves. 

When our machines were quiet, the music would reach us in mellow drifts of notes and chords, clear, bright cascades that made us put down our tools and listen. The swirling melodies made us feel calm, and I started to understand why nobody ever left.

In the silences between music and our equipment, Danny chattered about the history of the business and the family. He told me that George’s older sister, Lucy, had died as a teenager, and their parents had never recovered. George had taken over the business at the age of twenty, and although he tuned the instruments, he never played them.

“She was a great harpist, you see,” said Danny. “That’s her old harp in George’s room. He’s talked about restoring it ever since I started. Moved it from the house last year but hasn’t touched it since.”

The rhythm of work was broken mid-morning for coffee, and I was always reluctant to take a break. I was sure I’d spill my coffee. I imagined myself tripping and causing a domino effect, knocking over harp after harp until they all lay shattered in pieces. I felt tongue tied with the other men, especially with George. The others treated him with deferential respect and followed his rules without question, even a strange one about leaving on time. Everyone had to be out of the building by 5.45pm, which was awkward for customers who wanted to visit after work. I’d have gladly stayed on; most evenings I only had Mum’s quiet company to go home to.

The job was a chance to prove myself. I emptied the scrap bins and wiped down the surfaces more than my fair share. I watched Danny and the others at work and tried to copy every detail. Driving home through the dark woods, I repeated the processes over and over in my mind to commit them to memory. My thoughts transferred from harps to Becca at night, sometimes combining the two. I longed to know if she played an instrument. I felt sure she’d be as fascinated by the harps as I was.

The windows darkened early in the weeks before Christmas, and I’d lose track of time. Once, I raised my head from the cutting board and saw that everyone else had left. The clock on the wall showed it was 6pm, but I’d been too absorbed to notice. Jumping up, I swept the tools to one corner of my workbench, grabbed my coat and rucksack and started down the metal staircase. The now familiar sound of harp music spiralled up to me. I recognised it as a glissando, a sort of musical waterfall which tinkled all the way up and down the scales. I was relieved that the showroom was still open; they must have waited for a late customer.

My footsteps echoed on the stone floor as I approached the showroom, sounding out a clumsy percussion over the delicate notes. I knocked before entering the room, but there was no answer, so I pushed the door open. I looked around the room and it was empty, except for the harps. The only light came from the moon, filtered through snow-heavy clouds, and grimy windowpanes. The harps faced me from the shadows. They looked like horses waiting to be fed, polished and proud. 

Who was playing then? Was it a recording? I didn’t think the workshop had speakers, or any modern equipment at all (I suspected that customers here still paid by cheque). I frowned at the harps then edged around them to a writing desk on the wall. There was no sign of equipment on the tabletop or inside the drawers.

I backed out of the showroom and turned down the corridor. The door of George’s tuning room was slightly open. I approached it and squinted to see inside. So, George does play after all, I thought, and I wondered if he was on Lucy’s harp. Music filled the dark air, bouncing around the brick walls. It sounded like more than one player, but harp music could be deceptive. Players use both hands, eight fingers at a time, Danny had told me. The effect could be overwhelming, like a wave sweeping you up then plunging you down to the gritty seabed. I left quickly that night, hoping that he was too absorbed to hear my tyres on the gravel.

The next day I couldn’t concentrate on my work; the memory of George’s pure, chiming chords drowned out every other thought. Staying late was deliberate that evening. I felt nervous anticipation as I waved the others off and promised that I’d pack up soon. As the windows glowed with the violet of dusk, a flurry of glittering notes reached me again.

This time I crept straight to George’s room and peered through a crack in the doorway, not daring to push it open fully. Harmonies resonated around me, but the room was too dark for me to see. I remembered a trick from Scouts, and squeezed my eyes shut for a few moments before opening them. It helped; my eyes picked up a flicker of movement from the oldest instrument in the corner. It was at a different angle to the others, tilted backwards, as if resting on a shoulder. Something caught in my throat as I realised that the strings were moving. I could see them bending slightly from the middle then straightening back again, almost like they were plucked by invisible fingers. My instinct should have been to run, but instead I stood transfixed in the doorway.

My breathing was heavy, and I fought to control it. I wiped my damp hands on my trousers, opened the door wider and stepped inside. Narrowing my eyes, I tiptoed closer to Lucy’s harp and tried to pick out the shape of the player. There was a woman hidden behind the instrument, feminine fingers sweeping across the strings, thin wrists dipping up and down. Her arms were pale and she wore something white that flowed down to the floor. Her bare feet were visible below the fabric, tapping a rhythm, toes lifting now and then to reach the pedals. My breath felt tight in my throat. I was terrified she’d see me and stop playing. I didn’t want to break her trance. I backed away from the doorway, turned, and fled.

I lay awake that night and tried to understand what I’d seen. I’d imagined Becca playing so many times, it was hard to separate the image from that of the mystery harpist. I hadn’t seen the player’s face. I wondered if Lucy and Becca looked alike.

The next morning, I rose early and left without breakfast. When I arrived at work, I went straight to George’s room. He wasn’t in yet, so I examined the pictures on the wall, trying to identify his sister’s face from the sepia crowd.

I jumped when a wrinkled finger tapped the photo.

“That’s her,” George said. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

“She was a wonderful player. I still hear her sometimes,” he said as he turned to face me. “I think you hear the music too, don’t you? Not everybody does.”

I stepped backwards and looked at my feet, cheeks burning. I guessed he was in his late eighties, and his sister died as a teenager. It couldn’t possibly have been her playing in here last night. 

I glanced over at the old harp and said, “Why don’t you fix it?”

He raised the palms of his hands towards me, and they were dotted with red blisters like burn marks on the scaly, dry skin. “She won’t let me,” he said. “Look what happened when I moved the harp over from the house. She’s not forgiven me yet. Maybe never will.”

He watched me with dull, wet eyes as I stepped closer to the old harp and raised a hand towards it. I rested a palm on its neck and stroked it gently. 

“All fine,” I said, lifting my hand to show my unblemished skin. George blinked and shook his head. 

I placed my hand back on the wood and felt the solid warmth of its history. “Can I help fix it?” I asked. “I can bring my tools down here if you don’t want me to move it.”

I stayed late the next few nights and didn’t hear any music. I examined the splintered wood on the soundboard, found matching timber to patch it up and held the pieces together while the glue set. The surface was bubbled and pitted and gave off a faint smell of woodsmoke. I sanded it down and rubbed in wax until it gleamed like a fresh conker. George sat and watched me without speaking.

“You’re a good lad,” he said when I’d finished, and he dipped a hand into his pocket to pass me a crumpled fifty quid note.

That Saturday, I walked into the pub feeling taller, like I was being pulled up by newly tuned strings. Christmas music was playing, and the fairy lights were on. It was the last quiz and the biggest prize of the year. My teammates looked confused when I walked straight past them, and up to her table. I stood there and waited until she noticed. The bridge of her nose puckered with crinkles when she smiled up, and she gestured at the empty stool next to her.

I pulled back my shoulders, took a deep breath. “Hi, I’m Joel. I make harps.”