Ellie and The Harp-Maker

by Hazel Prior

  We’d trooped off to the pub after the game. I wasn’t really hurt but I think we were all in need of a little something to steady our nerves. There was no more flirting and nobody mentioned the accident again.

  In wobbly moments I still wonder if it actually was an accident?

  Too many strings! How will I ever find my way around them all? Red strings are Cs, black strings are Fs – and all the white ones are sheer guesswork. Lovely guesswork, though. I concentrate hard and try to pick out the first line of ‘Danny Boy’. It almost works.

  Dan peers round the door. He’s wearing an earnest expression and clearly has something important to say. I wait, wondering what’s coming. Am I imposing too much on his generosity? Am I coming too often? Am I disturbing him with my slow, plodding attempts at harp practice?

  He scrutinizes my feet then slowly raises his eyes to my face. ‘Ellie, I have a question for you.’

  ‘Ask away!’ I say breezily.

  He clears his throat. ‘My question is this. Do you like plums?’

  Do I like plums?

  ‘Yes, very much. Why …?’

  ‘Plums,’ he repeats, as if the future of the universe rested on that word. ‘There are lots. Of plums. Several hundred. On my plum tree. In the back. Several hundred is more than I can eat. And waste is a thing I don’t like. So I was thinking you should take some plums home. For yourself and your husband.’

  Dan doesn’t know that Clive doesn’t know. Too much explaining …

  He leads me outside to a little enclosure behind the barn, a bumpy field with three trees. A tiny woodshed stands at one end, stacked high with logs. Robins and coal tits flutter and chirrup in the hedge along the back. September sunshine streams across the grass, threading gold through the green.

  ‘My orchard!’ Dan announces.

  ‘Glorious!’ I exclaim.

  One of the trees is a tall cherry, one an apple that looks as though the fruits have already been picked. The third is bowed low with the weight of plums, amber-coloured with a rosy blush. The air is thick with their scent.

  ‘We need a trug,’ Dan says. ‘Luckily a trug is a thing that I have.’

  He disappears into the woodshed for a minute then reappears with a couple of traditional oval baskets for gathering fruit and vegetables.

  We set to work. The plums are oozing stickiness and surrounded by bees. Dan, I assume, doesn’t have much in the way of family and friends he can share them with. So far I’ve never seen another person on my visits. But he’s mentioned his sister Jo a couple of times. I wonder if she has much of a say in his life. He implies that she does, yet I know that Dan has a mind of his own – nobody more so.

  ‘Are you getting on well with your harp?’ he asks, as he does every day.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘It’s a delight. But my fingers keep getting muddled up. I’m hopelessly uncoordinated. The books help but I was wondering if … if you could show me a little basic technique?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t play the harp. I only make them.’ He brightens. ‘I can teach you how to tune up if you like?’

  ‘Do I need to learn that? It never sounds out of tune to me.’

  ‘That’s because I tune it every morning before you arrive.’

  I am touched, and not for the first time.

  ‘Oh, Dan! I’d no idea! Thank you! And yes please, I’d love it if you could teach me to tune up.’

  We munch a couple of plums, spitting out the stones. Dan seems to be spitting with care and precision. ‘I’m hoping they’ll grow and make more plum trees,’ he explains.

  ‘You need more plums?’

  ‘No, but the world could always do with more trees.’ He glances at the trugs. ‘So far we have forty-three plums. How many would you like?’

  I’m amazed. I wasn’t aware he’d been counting.

  ‘Another forty-three!’ I answer boldly, hatching a plan.

  He smiles approval. The sunlight is touching the curve of his cheek and, as he stretches high to reach the fruit on the upper branches, I register again his extraordinarily handsome features. If the universe had planned things differently … If I had been single … If he had been the sort of person who looked at me the way I was now looking at him …

  ‘I’ve just had a thought!’ he cries, his hand circling a plum. ‘It is a thought I had before, but then I forgot it. Now I’ve had it again! Shall I tell you my thought?’ He has an air of eureka about him.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘You could take harp lessons with my girlfriend!’

  ‘Your girlfriend …?’

  ‘Of course!’ His hands start twitching oddly. ‘You must have lessons with Roe Deer!’

  ‘With Roe Deer?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘My girlfriend, Roe Deer. She lives in Taunton. It is twenty-three point one miles from here. I think she’ll be happy to teach you.’ Then a shadow crosses his face. ‘But you may have to pay her. She’s a bit funny about money.’

  ‘Of course she’d need paying.’ It isn’t the money aspect that’s bothering me. ‘Could I phone her?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, of course. Her number is …’ and he reels off a number he obviously expects me to remember.

  ‘Could you write it down for me?’

  When we’ve gathered eighty-six plums, two large trugfuls, we return to the barn. He takes me to the cork board with all the photos of women playing harps.

  ‘That’s her!’ he says, pointing.

  It’s the sizzling sexpot of a blonde whose image has haunted me right from the beginning.

  7

  Dan

  My sister Jo arranged it all because she wants me to sell more harps. It was the first time I’d had a radio reporter in my barn.

  He was ginger-haired and blinked a lot. He had a wart on his left cheek with tiny hairs sprouting out of it. He had ginger nose hairs too. He was wearing jeans, black, and a jacket, leather. He said we would be on air after he’d counted three, two, one. He held up three fingers in front of my face. ‘Three, two, one,’ he mouthed. Then in a completely different voice he said: ‘Delighted to meet you, Mr Hollis! So this is your workshop?’

  Yes, I said, it was.

  ‘I must say, it’s quite a place. An old barn, up a steep track, miles from anywhere – the last place you would expect to find a business. There is quite a rustic atmosphere in here, with the low beams and a trestle bench or two. But everywhere I look there are harps; harps of all different shapes and sizes. Very intricate and beautiful they are, too! You seem to be pretty well set up, Mr Hollis. How long have you been established here as the Exmoor Harp-Maker?’

  I told him twenty-three years.

  ‘Twenty-three years! Quite some time! But I must say, that seems impossible, looking at you. You don’t seem that old.’

  I told him I was thirty-three.

  ‘Right. So that means, according to my calculations, you started your own business when you were a mere ten years old. Is that true?’

  I told him yes.

  ‘Were you actually able to construct a harp at that tender age?’

  I told him yes.

  ‘That must have been quite a difficult skill to learn.’

  I told him yes.

  ‘Did you have anyone to help you?’

  I told him yes.

  ‘Let me guess. Was it perhaps a kind uncle who was skilled in carpentry? A neighbour? But no, there wouldn’t be any neighbours out here, would there? Was it your father?’

  I told him yes. It was my father.

  ‘Ah! So he was a harp-maker before you?’

  I told him yes.

  ‘And you always knew, did you, right from square one, that you would follow in his footsteps and make harps?’

  I had to think about this. I would know the answer for sure if the question hadn’t been so cryptic. It all depended on the timing of Square One. If Square One occurred at my birth, then the answer was no. I don’t remember being born very clearly but I am pretty sure making harps was not
uppermost in my mind when it happened. Perhaps Square One was on my first birthday, when I turned one. In this case, again, I don’t think I had great harp-making aspirations. If, on the other hand, Square One was later on when I was starting to want more than baby food and nappy changes, then the answer might well be yes. I was about to tell the radio reporter this when he started asking more questions.

  ‘Could you tell us a little bit about your harp-making journey? How you fell in love with the profession? How your father helped you along the way? How you fitted it in around school?’

  I asked him which question he wanted me to answer first.

  ‘Well, maybe if you tell us about the first time you realized you wanted to be a harp-maker …?’ And he raised his eyebrows at me. They were very bushy and ginger.

  ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘The first time I realized I wanted to be a harp-maker was when I was seven and a half years old. It was Saturday the fifteenth of June and there were green dragonflies in the garden. I was wearing new shoes my mother had got for me but they dug into my heels too much. There were four different types of moss growing on the stone by the gate. We had scrambled eggs for breakfast. The weather was fair to middling.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Great to have all those details. So what happened exactly to put harp-making into your head? Were you inspired by a harp your father had made?’

  I told him no. My father did not make harps then. He did not make many musical instruments, but he worked with wood generally. He carved things like bowls and candlesticks and statues most of the time and sold them to tourists. He did some furniture too. My mother was not very interested in wood but the thing she was interested in was in getting free babysitting for me. I was a problem because I did not always do the things I was supposed to do. When I got excited I flapped my hands around and made strange noises and she did not like that. She said if I would promise not to make strange noises and flap my hands around I could go to Storyland in Dulverton. Storyland was on Saturday mornings. Me and five other children got to sit on beanbags in the village hall and listen to a large, grey-haired lady who read stories. I had the beanbag with blue and yellow penguins all over it. It was very difficult for me not to make strange noises and flap my hands around when the storytelling lady came in, but I didn’t because I wanted to be allowed to come again next week and the week after that and in fact the thing I wanted was to live in Storyland and listen to stories for ever.

  ‘This is very interesting,’ cut in the radio man, ‘but I’m sure the listeners out there are wanting to hear about the actual harp-making.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly the thing I am going to tell you.’ I went on to explain that it was in Storyland that I met my first harp. One day – the day of the green dragonflies and uncomfortable shoes and the four types of moss and the scrambled eggs – my mother had dropped me off as usual and I went in and sat on my yellow-and-blue-penguin beanbag. And there in front of me, placed in the middle of all the beanbags, was the most beautiful object I’d ever seen.

  It was like a swan and a heart and a loom and a sailing ship and a hazel tree and a wing and the swell of a wave and a woman dancing and ripples of light on water – all at the same time. And it was made of wood! All of us kids were gawping.

  Then a lady who wasn’t our normal storytelling lady stepped up. She had white skin and tremendously long hair. She said she was filling in today and she was going to tell us a story with some musical interludes on her harp. I have to admit, I couldn’t stop my hands from flapping then and a bit of a gurgle came out of my mouth, but nobody seemed to mind. When the lady started it took my breath away. The harp not only had the most beautiful body, but it had a soul too. And a voice – the most softly powerful voice I had ever heard.

  ‘I still remember the story the lady told us that day,’ I said to the radio man. ‘Would you like me to tell it to you?’

  ‘Perhaps not now,’ he said, glancing at the microphone. ‘Back to the harp-making?’

  So I related what happened next when I got home from Storyland. What happened next was this: I ran straight to my father and told him he must make a harp. He told me, ‘Steady on, son, that’s easier said than done.’ But I kept on at him every day over the next year and eventually he did do it. His first harp wasn’t very good, of course. But he became intrigued and that led him to make another the next year, and I helped him. By the time he made his third harp he had bought the barn and I was making my own one simultaneously. I was then ten years old.

  ‘Quite a boy!’ said the radio man. ‘Your parents must have been very proud of you.’

  ‘Must they?’ I said.

  ‘I would have thought so. If my son made a harp aged ten I’d be proud. Can’t imagine that though. Could never drag him away from the computer games for long enough, the little blighter! Still, your father must have been a great inspiration to you. Do you mind my asking, is he still around?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He died in a car accident when I was sixteen.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. And your mother? Is she alive?’

  ‘She died a few months after my father. She died because of a hospital operation that went wrong. I was sad that year.’

  ‘Phew! I’m not surprised! That’s hard on a teenager. Do you have any other family?’

  I informed him that I had an older sister, Jo. I told him how, after our parents died, Jo had lived with me here in the Harp Barn for a while and had helped sort things out. I mentioned that Jo still does the business side of harp-making for me. And that she is much cleverer than me. I can only do harps. She can do money.

  ‘I see. And how many harps do you make in a year?’

  I answered that it depended on the year but normally it was only about thirty-six.

  ‘Only! And I believe all your wood is locally sourced, from the woods of Exmoor and the surrounding region?’

  I answered in the affirmative.

  ‘And you use an Exmoor pebble in the woodwork of each harp?’

  I told him this was indeed the case.

  ‘I notice that all the harps here, beautiful though they are, are on a fairly small scale. Have you ever considered upsizing and making proper harps?’

  ‘Proper harps?’

  ‘Sorry, perhaps I’m using the wrong terminology here. I mean the large harps, the classical harps, the harps you see in orchestras.’

  ‘Not proper harps!’ I told him.

  ‘I don’t quite follow you.’

  There was a gap here as I thought about him following me and wondered if that was a thing I wanted. I was pretty sure it wasn’t.

  He scratched his head. ‘Er, although you have been building Celtic harps all these years, you don’t have any desire to try and construct a classical harp, a concert harp?’

  I told him no.

  ‘Don’t you think it would be grand to see a harp that you had made, one of your own harps, playing Mozart in Carnegie Hall?’

  I told him no.

  ‘So you have no interest in classical harps?’

  I told him no.

  He rubbed his wart. ‘I confess, I am surprised. Why is that, Mr Hollis?’

  I decided to explain by using analogies and rhetorical questions. My answer to the radio man was this: ‘Why take a saccharine tablet when instead you can suck an organic honeycomb? Why settle for a racehorse when you can have a unicorn?’

  He gave a low, gravelly laugh. ‘Ah, I think I get your drift. Well, it has been a pleasure talking to you, Mr Hollis. I wish you all possible success in your future harp-making. And if anyone out there is interested in buying an Exmoor harp, please do not try and contact Mr Hollis directly as you won’t be able to. Instead you can contact Mr Hollis’s sister Jo, whose email link can be obtained from our website. She will be happy to talk business with you. That’s right, isn’t it, Mr Hollis?’

  I told him yes, that was right.

  8

  Ellie

  And yet again the vision comes />
  That golden day when you and I

  Were gathering the glowing plums …

  I scrumple the poem and shoot it into the bin. I pick up the phone.

  ‘He’s got a girlfriend!’

  ‘Who? Clive?’

  ‘No, you dumbo! Dan!’

  ‘Ah, your Exmoor harp-maker.’ Christina always sounds amused when I talk about him, which is slightly annoying. I try not to mention him, but sometimes I can’t help it. It isn’t as if I can talk about him to anyone else.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ I stare out of the window up at the hill. ‘It depends.’

  ‘Tell me more.’ I can hear the flick of her lighter down the phone. She’ll be settling down on her settee with a cigarette. Miaow has probably just jumped into her lap. I should ask about Christina’s day at the shop, ask if Alex has rung and if he is still enjoying university life, but that will all have to wait.

  ‘She’s a professional harpist. She’s stunning. Blonde. Enormous cleavage.’

  ‘So it matters that much?’

  I have to laugh. ‘Stop jumping to conclusions. I’m just surprised, that’s all.’

  When Dan first mentioned his girlfriend I’d envisaged someone small, sweetly shy, perhaps even a little gauche. I scold myself for my own crassness. The photo certainly put me to rights.

  ‘Didn’t you say Dan was totally gorgeous too?’

  ‘Those weren’t my exact words, Christina, no. He’s dashing in his own way, I’ll admit. Still, he’s …’ I try to explain what I mean, but don’t seem to be able to express myself very well. I tell her about Dan’s unique take on things, his simple lifestyle and his self-sufficiency. The more I talk, the harder it becomes to understand how somebody who looks like Roe Deer can fit into the picture.