by Patrick Gale
Vernon was almost entirely unsociable away from school and it was hard to imagine him doing anything so ordinarily youthful as mooching around the town on a bicycle or sitting on someone’s bedroom floor to play with a Scalextric set, although he once laconically admitted to enjoying a week-long game of Diplomacy against himself. After a cricket game in which they were both batsmen who, inevitably, were never called, Vernon appeared to recognize Eustace as a kindred spirit.
It started with Trollope. Inspired by Eustace’s unusual first name, Vernon told him the plot of The Eustace Diamonds . All the plot. Eustace must have been a good listener because Vernon followed this up with the plots of Can You Forgive Her? and Barchester Towers . They became experiment partners in science and Vernon, who was effortlessly good at Latin, helped Eustace remember third declension endings. A few times he came home with Eustace for tea, which is when he so amused Eustace’s father. He said he liked old people, which was no surprise, because rumour had it his own parents were ancient, and he spoke to the residents with great formality and close attention.
Vernon was quite unmusical. He claimed he quite enjoyed Gilbert and Sullivan and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches and some rock albums but said that the rest of music, from Couperin to The Carpenters, struck him as no more than noise and he preferred silence or birdsong. He respected Eustace’s cello lessons and the new devotion they involved, however, which Eustace was touched by. He liked hearing about Carla Gold, whom he likened to a character in his beloved Trollope, and he seemed to enjoy dramatizing his situation.
‘You’ll need to see less of me to concentrate on your music,’ he said. ‘But that’s perfectly all right. It might become your calling and one should respect callings. There again it might be a hobby like plastic models or stamps, but I hope for your sake that it isn’t: hobbies are so predictable and demeaning.’
He pronounced hobby with an exaggerated H that amused them so much it became code between them. If either of them came across a boy involved in some traditionally male pursuit that struck them as especially pointless, oiling a cricket bat, say, or collecting Dinky toys, Vernon would draw them out into expressing enthusiasm and then say, ‘It must be good to have a . . . hhhobby,’ and Eustace would have to walk smartly away lest his giggling give offence.
Miss Gold had cast a powerful spell and Eustace proved an apt pupil. He continued to practise religiously every day, sometimes more than once and he soon found that he was thinking far more about it than any classroom subject. This might not have been the case had any of his schoolteachers been glamorous or even attractive. They were all male, which made the spell of Carla Gold’s floaty clothes, tumbling hair and delicious scent all the more potent. Her focus was total. Music mattered to her, whether she was instructing him in the mysteries of bow hold, harmonics or tuning. She also had few of the usual personal boundaries of a teacher and freely revealed herself in chance comments, frank opinions and little rags of colourful gossip.
He progressed rapidly through the positions, at least from half to fourth position. Fifth position and the daunting sounding thumb position had to wait, she said, until his tone was fuller and more confident. She was very keen on confidence. Also on posture. Soon after his first few lessons she had produced a framed reproduction of a very dramatic-looking cellist called Madame Suggia, painted by Augustus John.
‘I want you to look like her when you play,’ she said. ‘Not the mad expression or the dress, of course,’ she laughed, ‘but her bow hold and posture. See how her left foot being stuck out like that balances her right arm as she extends it? But look at her wrist! So flexible and such good pronation in her upper bow arm. Yes, you produce the sound with the bow on the string but you draw out that sound with that left foot, with your right elbow, even with your neck and the small of your back.’
This sounded completely mad – barking , as Vernon said when Eustace told him – but when she encouraged him to adopt Madame Suggia’s posture and to perform what she called swan bowing, he could hear the difference. Suddenly he was playing loudly, really loudly, without pressing especially hard. And she laughed at his surprise at the sound he was making.
‘That’s it!’ she shouted. ‘Now you’re playing! Reach for that sound when you play scales, when you play anything. Anything else and Ivan is speaking, not singing. Can you feel the difference?’
He nodded.
‘Where do you feel it?’
‘Well . . .’ Eustace thought. ‘In my ears, obviously, but also in my chest and knees.’
He came to love that sensation of each note vibrating through the body of the instrument and into whatever part of him held it, his knees, his chest, his left hand. She encouraged him to play each scale slowly at first, not letting go of any note until he had found its core. Mining the note , she called it, finding the gold in each one, even on parts of Ivan where the tone could be a little woolly, like fourth position on the C string. She made it sound like a moral imperative. However apparently banal the exercise or tune he was playing, she expected his tone to be evenly rich, his tuning perfect.
‘Otherwise there’s no point. Otherwise you’re not bothering and you might as well play football.’ Miss Gold despised football. It was a point of agreement between them that sport was largely without purpose, benefit or beauty, though she admitted to a guilty crush on George Best and watched Wimbledon for Nastase and Borg.
Towards the middle of his second term with her, she invited him to join Cello Club. This was when she brought all her students together in a nearby church hall. Most of them were far more advanced than Eustace but Carla Gold was kind and made sure his music was never more than he could manage. The benefit was the thrill of hearing a group of cellos playing together. She sat them in a circle which she joined, sitting between Eustace and a very solemn young girl playing a tiny quarter size. First they played scales and arpeggios to get used to one another’s sound, then they played games, launching the scales and arpeggios in succession to produce shifting chords. Then they played some rounds and canons. Finally Carla Gold produced pieces she had adapted, or that her own teacher had once arranged. These were cleverly scaled so that the most advanced players were up in thumb position or carrying melodies while players like Eustace and the solemn girl had their moments of glory, too, playing pizzicato accompaniments or holding crucial bass lines which felt like weighty foundations to the harmonies soaring above them.
Walking home, he felt everything in his life shift a little as the idea of becoming a cellist for a living took root.
He told nobody, certainly not his parents or Miss Gold, but became even more assiduous, routinely practising before and after school and paying special attention to his scales and arpeggios now that Carla Gold had shown him these were music and not simply chores. The only person he eventually told was Vernon. Vernon was a superb keeper of secrets. He harboured his own ambition to write a magnificent and devastating novel about the state of the nation. He then planned to die at thirty-two, so as to die younger than either Mozart or Jesus.
‘Good for you,’ he said solemnly when Eustace told him. And his quiet respect for the ambition was all the more valuable for music and the pursuit of music being mysteries to him.
The realization that he wanted to be a cellist when he grew up improved Eustace’s focus on his school lessons. What had previously seemed largely unbearable suddenly fell into perspective as a mere stage to be worked through. It was like thumb position. He had shyly asked one of the most advanced pupils about this at Cello Club, an impossibly sophisticated teenager called Gabriel, who had hair just like Leo Sayer’s and called Miss Gold by her first name.
‘It hurts at first,’ he said, ‘especially if you’ve got steel strings, because they can dig into your thumb like cheese wire, but then you develop a pad next to your thumbnail and before you know it, no more pain and it feels totally natural.’
To his amazement, Carla Gold shared his dislike of school. ‘Maths was the worst for me,’ she confesse
d, impressed that this was his one really strong subject. ‘I was sick one term and never caught up. I used to pretend I needed the loo and then hide there for as long as I dared, so of course my maths got worse and worse. But Jean sorted me out. Jean Curwen.’
‘Your cello teacher. She sorted out your maths?’
‘Jean’s amazing. She’s no ordinary cello teacher. She saw I was suffering, saw it was getting in the way of me progressing, so she sat me down one afternoon and instead of teaching me the Mendelssohn sonata we were working on, she helped me understand algebra. In forty minutes. She’s an incredible communicator. You’ll meet her one day. When you’ve cracked thumb position. She was one of those players who could have been a household name – she had the gifts, the passion, the support of Casals for heaven’s sake – but she’d decided you couldn’t be a good soloist and a good wife and that her calling was to teach instead.’ And she went on to mention two famous players Jean Curwen had taught. ‘She runs a cello school. They teach just enough subjects there for it to pass as a school – only subjects she approves of, mind you, like French, Italian, German, music, art history and she drags in some poor mouse of a woman once a week to teach maths if need be – but really it’s all about the cello. Hours of practice a day. One-on-one lessons from Jean at least twice a week. Terrifying and utterly transformative.’
‘And you went there?’ Eustace asked.
She nodded. ‘She gave me one lesson then offered my parents a full scholarship. Actually it was no such thing. She simply took me on as a charity case at her own expense but I imagine there were enough fee-paying students there to subsidize me. I stayed for two and a half years.’
After his first evening at Cello Club, everything that had bothered Eustace at school, teachers who sneered, boys who teased, fero-ferre-tuli-latum , the causes of the Hundred Years War and his inability to kick a ball with any accuracy fell into perspective. He now had a clear ambition in life that lay beyond them, and he saw they would last only so many terms. He realized he had been too passive, letting awful things happen to him. He determined to meet them half-way. He might not be able to kick a ball with any vigour or do anything about boys who knocked his books on the ground and laughed but he could make a point of asking teachers to explain things he didn’t understand and tick off mysteries in Latin or physics the way he now ticked off scales and exercises. Countless boys had tackled them before him; how hard could they be?
Added to this was something he couldn’t even share with laconic Vernon: a sense that he had become one of a lucky few admitted, by the almost accidental process of coming to have cello lessons with an inspirational teacher, into the blessed circle of the musical, for whom nothing, neither maths, nor food, nor Latin, nor friends, was as important as music.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘It’s time you had your own cello,’ Carla Gold told him. ‘You’re growing out of Ivan already and I think all this is taking hold, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ Eustace nodded, thinking suddenly how awful it would have been if she had said, Actually I think this is a complete waste of both our time and I think you should stop.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a word with your mother and tell her the time has come to spend some money. There’s a good dealer we can visit in Bristol.’
It might have seemed odd, her saying she’d talk to his mother, since he never saw them together, always arriving at and leaving lessons and Cello Club on his own, but he knew they saw one another. They met for coffee and cake sometimes and occasionally his mother would let slip that they had gone to a concert together, usually a lunchtime one, in St George’s Brandon Hill. This last detail gave him a little flash of jealousy because Radio 3 sometimes broadcast concerts from there, so it carried the same distinction in his head as the equally mysterious Royal Albert Hall or St John’s Smith Square.
Before Carla Gold, his mother had not really had friends. His father had no friends either but then he was laughing and friendly with everybody so went through his days with people being nice to him. His mother was aloof, however, and full of judgement, so he had sometimes worried that she might be essentially unlovable and friendless.
His mother had always been overtly dismissive of friendship between women. It was childish, she said once, to pursue such a thing after one was married, and she often repeated an anecdote in which a new woman acquaintance had alarmed her by taking her on one side at a party to ask, Would you be my friend?
‘So pathetic,’ his mother said, having imitated the woman’s wheedling tone, ‘and a bit creepy, really, like some overgrown schoolgirl.’
This new friendship made no difference to her at home. She continued to complain bitterly about the same things she always had, but her discreet, offstage outings with Miss Gold were clearly having an effect. She began to dress a little more like her, acquiring the sort of floaty dresses and ethnic shoes Miss Gold favoured, and she started to wear her hair in a looser, more natural style, which his father said he preferred. There were changes around the house as well, notably big, framed posters – one of a voluptuous Klimt woman lapped in gold leaf, and one of a mournful Burne-Jones redhead, who Eustace privately thought looked as though she was on the point of being sick.
‘Your father and I have agreed it’s time you had your own cello,’ his mother announced. ‘I’ve some money set aside for it and Carla says we can go to Bristol to choose one. Good ones are usually a shrewd investment apparently, so if you ever give it up, we can always sell it again. We can stay overnight, to make a thing of it. I know it’s not far, but it’s never a quick decision,’ she added, as though she had been buying cellos for years.
It was the Easter holidays, after he’d been learning the cello for over a year. During the spring term he had been allowed to join St Chad’s little orchestra. This was a ragbag of players brought together at random, far too many trumpeters, lots of timid violinists and one, hunted-looking viola player, but he looked forward to their Friday afternoon rehearsals, and not just because they took the place of games. He liked Mr Ferguson and appreciated that he was doing his best to have them play proper music, even in easy arrangements. The March from Aida . Chanson de Matin . The Lieutenant Kijé Suite . It was a revelation to find that boys Eustace had always thought of as the Enemy played instruments and had this softer side. Jarvis, his terrifying football-mad house captain turned out to be a violinist and seemed to think Eustace slightly less useless now that their eyes were meeting across a music stand. There was only one other cellist, who sat in the senior position because he was older, and he seemed incapable of playing in tune or producing even a trace of vibrato. It made Eustace realize what a good teacher Miss Gold must be.
So, strangely, he found he was missing school. Not only was there no orchestra in the holidays but no Cello Club and no cello lessons. Carla Gold had said there was no reason why lessons shouldn’t continue if he wanted them to but he had heard his father sigh heavily over the bills so lied and said perhaps it was best not, in case they went away. But they never went anywhere ever; the implication being that there was no need since they were lucky enough to live in a town with a beach.
Guessing all this, it seemed, Miss Gold said he could always call round during the holidays to talk things over or to have a little play if he felt his practice was losing direction. He was very tempted but didn’t like to as, in his father’s eyes, taking advantage was nearly as bad as showing off.
Going away to Bristol for the night with his mother and Miss Gold felt a bit like a holiday, to them as much as to him. Both women had chosen rather carefree floral dresses, as if by prior agreement.
‘Snap!’ Miss Gold laughed when they collected her.
Everyone was in high spirits and Eustace had to make an effort not to talk too much with the excitement of having his two worlds align so pleasingly. Taking him aside after breakfast, to slip him some spending money – something he did only very rarely – his father specifically warned against this.
‘
Remember not to do all the talking,’ he said in a funny man-to-man way. ‘They may have, you know, grown-up lady things they want to discuss without you butting in.’ And he laughed, to show it was not serious, although it clearly was a bit.
So after initially showing off a little, and leaning between the front seats to make comments, he was good and sat back in his corner of the rear seat while his mother drove them, and he enjoyed doing the reverse of showing off, which was to sit so quietly and unobtrusively that people quite forgot you were there. His mother liked driving and drove rather fast once they were out of town. She laughed a lot and said naughty things about people like the headmaster’s awful wife at St Chad’s and a new resident they had, who was a brigadier’s widow and so bossy his father had taken to calling her the Brigadonna behind her back.
‘Though Brigantine would suit her better as she has a bosom like the prow of a ship,’ she told Miss Gold and it struck him that perhaps his mother was showing off as well, just a little.
They had stayed in Bristol overnight before, in a small hotel, which, for all the novelty, had been depressingly like an old people’s home and therefore just like where they lived. But Miss Gold, who insisted Eustace must call her Carla in the holidays, said that they were staying with her accompanist and his artist friend in Clifton, as they had lots of room.
‘Two chaps,’ she added, with a sort of backwards nod to indicate Eustace in the back seat. ‘Is that OK?’
‘Of course,’ his mother said. ‘But better not tell your father, Eustace, all right?’
‘All right.’
‘His father can be a little old-fashioned,’ she explained. ‘But what fun. And the money we save can go on a really nice lunch. Escape!’
They all laughed and Eustace accepted one of the blackcurrant éclair toffees Carla passed around and sat on quietly in the back seat feeling an unusual twinge of disloyalty towards his father.