by Joan Clark
Inside the box of sheet music, Moranna finds the Beethoven Bagatelles Edwina insisted she play to keep her fingers limber. Every morning, after she’s practised scales, Moranna plays five or six of these bagatelles. These were Beethoven’s early pieces and as she plays them, she can hear how he used them to work out his later compositions. The music isn’t flamboyant, rather a subdued exploration of sound, and she thinks she can feel him stretching toward the next note and the next. But being Beethoven, he couldn’t resist a burst of chords announcing a sudden and dramatic storm.
Picture a woman wearing a red lace blouse, a pink satin bathrobe and a purple wig, sitting on a farmhouse veranda surrounded by wooden people on a muggy August day. She’s reading a week-old newspaper while waiting for customers to show up. The morning passes and no one does, but shortly before noon a blue car with a broken muffler rumbles up the driveway. The woman ignores it and continues reading the bad news of the world. The car stops. Only then does the woman bother to glance at the stranger in an effort to decide if this one is a serious buyer. The woman’s heart leaps with joy, for the driver of the car isn’t a stranger but someone she knows.
Brianna gets out of the car and, opening the door on the passenger side, takes Gemma by the hand and leads her along the overgrown path toward the house. By the time her daughter and granddaughter reach the veranda, the purple wig, pink bathrobe and red lace blouse have been stuffed beneath the chair and Moranna stands before them in a T-shirt and kilt, her unravelling braid falling partway down her back. She is a woman who has played many parts in her life but is at last content to be none other than herself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are several people who either read an early draft of the novel, or provided comments and information useful to the story. Thanks to Gerry Crawford, Bob Oxley and Mora Oxley, Anne Hart and Bernice Morgan. Special thanks to my sister, Gail Crawford, without whose help this novel would be much poorer.
Of the books I read about mental illness, the one that most inspired and informed me was A Mind That Found Itself by Clifford Beers, who in 1928 helped found the American Foundation for Mental Hygiene.
Grateful thanks to my agent, Dean Cooke, for his perceptive reading of the manuscript and his invaluable comments. Special thanks to my editor, Diane Martin, for her encouragement, suggestions and support, and to Jennifer Shepherd and Marion Garner whose enthusiasm for the novel went a long way to helping me stay on course. Thanks also to Heather Sangster, Deirdre Molina and Suzanne Brandreth. Lastly, thanks to Jack Clark, who gave me a boost when I needed it most, which was at the beginning, when I lost my nerve.
JOAN CLARK is the author of the novels Latitudes of Melt, The Victory of Geraldine Gull, and Eiriksdottir, as well as two short story collections, From a High Thin Wire and Swimming Toward the Light. She has also published five children’s novels and two picture books. Born and raised in Liverpool and Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, she lived in Sussex, New Brunwick before moving to Calgary, Alberta. For the past twenty years she has lived in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2006
Copyright © 2005 Joan Clark
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Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2006. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2005. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Clark, Joan
An audience of chairs: a novel / Joan Clark.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37536-0
I. Title.
PS8555.L37A93 2006 C813′.54 C2006-900144-8
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