Ming Fong eyed Wendy, who sat with mittened hands covering her ears in an attempt to concentrate on her music. “Wendy looks scared.”
“She isn’t scared,” said Gilda defensively. “We just wondered who gave this to her.”
“Scared,” said Ming Fong, turning back to her music. “That card looks like bad luck.”
“What are the two of you talking about?” Wendy peered over her shoulder at Gilda.
“Nothing.” Gilda hastily stuck the tarot card back in her bag. She had to admit that Ming Fong wasn’t acting particularly guilty. Maybe she’s just a good actress, Gilda thought. She was about to ask Ming Fong a few more questions when the boy sitting across the room grabbed his chair and shuffled closer to the three girls, drawing both Ming Fong and Wendy’s attention.
“Reading fortunes, are we?” he asked. “Any luck for me?”
Wendy reached over and pinched Gilda. It was her sign that she thought a boy was cute. Gilda took another look at the boy and saw that his ears stuck out a little, his nose was a bit crooked, and his skin was very pale—almost translucent. His blue-gray eyes were a striking contrast to the floppy, eye-grazing layers of his black hair. He had dimples when he smiled. She pinched Wendy back much harder.
“Ow!”
Professor Heslop approached the group. “Excuse me. This is a serious international competition,” she whispered. “I don’t know how you do things in America and China, but here in England, we show respect for the performers onstage by keeping quiet during a competition.”
“I’m English, actually,” said the boy. “And I know for a fact that we show as little respect for performers as possible in this countr y.”
Professor Heslop wasn’t amused. “Quiet please, the lot of you; or I will have to ask you to wait outside in the rain. I have to go check on the front entrance now, and I expect you all to behave yourselves.”
The group fell silent until Professor Heslop was out of earshot.
“In America, we just throw greasy McDonald’s hamburgers at the stage throughout the whole performance,” Gilda whispered. “It’s our way of showing appreciation. How do you do things in China, Wendy?”
“We throw chopsticks and raw fish.”
“Shh!” whispered Ming Fong loudly. “Be quiet! I don’t want to wait outside in the rain.” Ming Fong put her headphones back on.
“Bit of a Bossy Britches, isn’t she?” said the boy.
“Tell me about it. Ming Fong drives us crazy.”
“No.” The boy pointed a thumb at the door through which Professor Heslop had just exited. “I meant Heslop.”
“Oh, yeah. A real gorey granny.”
“You mean ‘granny gore.’ All crotchety and grumpy.”
“I prefer ‘gorey granny.’”
He looked bemused. “You don’t often hear an American trying to talk like a Scouser.”
“I’m not trying to ‘talk like a Scouser.’ This is how I always talk.” Grateful that she had studied her Handbook of English Slang so carefully, Gilda remembered that Scouser referred to the slang used in the city of Liverpool where all the great “oldies” songs by the Beatles originated.
“I’m from those parts. Well, I’m actually from a little toilet of a village up north called Crawling.”
“Sounds charming.”
“Oh, it is. Nobody’s heard of it. So—what are you playing?”
Gilda wished that she was actually competing in the competition so she could talk to this boy about her music. “I’m playing the Rach Three,” she whispered.
His eyes grew wide. He actually looked scared. “Seriously?”
“Just kidding, unfortunately. I’m actually Wendy’s page-turner and manager. And my name is Gilda.”
“Nice to meet you, Gilda. I’m Julian.”
Gilda shook his hand, reflecting that most of the boys she knew at school never offered to shake hands with a girl. His hand felt warm and noticeably well-developed, as if his hands were older than the rest of his body.
“So, Wendy has her own manager?”
“That’s right.”
“Sounds like she’s got it sorted.”
“She’s extremely sorted.” Gilda noticed Julian eyeing Wendy with interest and felt a possessive urge to redirect his attention before Wendy jumped into the conversation. “Wendy’s had some problems adjusting to a foreign country, though,” Gilda added.
“Can’t blame her,” said Julian. “It’s bloody gloomy this week.”
“Plus, she overslept this morning, so she’s in a really gormless mood.”
“She doesn’t look gormless.”
“Excuse me.” Wendy peered over her shoulder at Gilda. “Do the two of you mind not talking about me when I’m sitting right next to you?”
“I’m Julian.” Julian extended a hand to Wendy.
As Wendy shook Julian’s hand, they heard a rush of polite applause from the concert hall following the conclusion of Gary’s performance.
“Thank you, performer number seven,” a man’s voice projected over the diminishing clapping.
“That must be Professor Waldgrave,” Wendy whispered.
“It was a technically adept performance,” Professor Waldgrave continued from the performance hall, “but you must keep a steadier tempo and maintain more control. It was as if you were riding a horse that got away from you and you had no sense of where the music was going to end up. And speaking of music—let’s play some next time, shall we?”
A murmur of surprised, sympathetic laughter welled from the audience. Gilda couldn’t help but feel sorry for Gary.
“Ouch,” Julian whispered.
“Omigod, I’m toast,” Wendy muttered.
“Wendy, you play better than Gary,” said Gilda. “Professor Waldgrave has a point; Gary’s performance was kind of boring.”
“What I meant about that comment,” Professor Waldgrave continued from the performance hall, “is that you must think about color. It was as if your entire performance was colored in shades of brown. I felt as if I were watching a young child scribbling with a single brown crayon. And if the performance had a scent, it would be smelly.”
“Bollocks!” a woman’s voice piped up.
Julian snorted with amusement.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your comments are far too harsh, Nigel.”
“That must be the bizarre Professor Maddox,” Julian whispered.
From the backstage room, Gilda, Julian, Wendy, and Ming Fong sensed a tense silence descending over the audience in the concert hall; it was surprising to hear the two judges voicing such blunt and public disagreement with each other.
“We have to keep in mind the difficulty of this piece. There were some quite lovely moments, and he played with great confidence. Fine job, performer number seven. Just try to find that little spark that really gets your audience excited.”
A jolt of adrenaline surged through the backstage room as Professor Heslop hurried through the door and gestured to Ming Fong that it was time for her performance. Ming Fong removed her mittens, placed her music on her seat, and stood with her thin arms folded across her chest and hands wedged in her armpits. In her feminine dress she looked even more diminutive than usual, like a fragile doll.
Gary emerged from the concert hall. His round face looked flushed.
“Good job, Gary,” said Gilda and Wendy politely.
“Sounded like old Waldgrave gave you the verbals, mate,” said Julian.
Gary looked confused. “He said I didn’t play music.”
“Maybe add more dynamics next time,” Wendy suggested.
“If there is a next time.” Gary looked dejected.
“How’s the piano out there?” Wendy asked. One of the things she dreaded about piano competitions was walking onstage to play on a completely unfamiliar instrument.
“Kind of stiff. It’s cold in the room. The acoustics seem great, though.”
Gilda had intended to ask Gary if he knew anything ab
out the tarot card that had turned up in Wendy’s room, but the topic seemed impossible to broach right after Gary had been humiliated onstage.
“Good luck, Ming Fong,” said Gary glumly.
Ming Fong nodded but didn’t look at Gary. She was already in another world—the world of her own performance.
“Good luck, Wendy,” Gary added, even more forlornly.
“Thanks, I’ll need it.”
“I’d stay and watch you, but I should probably go practice.” Gary hesitated, as if hoping that Wendy would beg him to stay.
“Don’t go practice, mate!” said Julian. “You should celebrate. There’s a whole town out there full of meat pasties and college girls!”
Gary smiled uneasily. “I should really practice my sight-reading before tomorrow. I’ll see you guys later.”
“Performer number eight will play the Bach C Minor Prelude and Fugue from the ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’ followed by Chopin’s ‘Ocean’ Étude,” Professor Heslop announced.
With iron-straight posture, Ming Fong walked onstage toward the piano. A moment later, a barrage of staccato sixteenth notes burst from the stage like machine-gun fire.
Ming Fong played with such effortless speed, efficiency, and perfection, the music almost didn’t seem human. Something about her playing made Gilda think of steel parts moving quickly down an assembly line to be hammered and drilled by little robots. Her performance was at once mechanical and beautiful: it was as if Ming Fong had transformed from a little girl wearing a frilly dress into a tiny factory of sound that exploded with streams of brilliant sparks and silvery smoke.
“Bloody ’ell,” Julian breathed. “She has fingers.”
Gilda was alarmed when she looked at Wendy: her face had the pale, clammy appearance of someone who might get sick at any moment.
“Here, you need to breathe!” On impulse, Gilda reached into her handbag, uncapped Wendy’s bottle of strawberry shampoo, and thrust it under Wendy’s nose.
Wendy took a deep breath.
“Now—just relax.”
“Omigod, I’ve never been this nervous in my life. I feel like I’m going to be sick.”
Gilda wondered if she should have brought a barf bag for Wendy, just in case. “Whatever you do, don’t park a custard onstage, Wendy.”
“Thanks. Big help.”
“Just picture the judges in their knickers,” Julian suggested. “That Waldgrave is a loony sod anyway.”
A burst of applause followed Ming Fong’s performance.
“Thank you, performer number eight,” said Professor Waldgrave after the applause died down. “Now, I have to be very frank with you . . .”
People in the audience held their breath. Was Professor Waldgrave ruthless enough to destroy the spirit of the tiny girl who sat at the piano wearing a pretty red-and-white dress—a girl who played faster than a speeding bullet?
“I loved it,” said Professor Waldgrave.
The audience released a sigh of relief tinged with disappointment. After all, it had been more interesting to watch Gary receive harsh criticism.
“It was crisp, accurate, perfectly pure playing. I believe Mr. Bach would have liked your interpretation of the music.”
“She’s better than me,” Wendy whispered. “I don’t know how it happened just in the last month, but she somehow got better than me.”
Gilda grabbed Wendy by the shoulders and gazed directly into her eyes—a gesture she had seen Wendy use when trying to get her little brother’s attention when he misbehaved. “Listen to me, Wendy. Don’t worry about Ming Fong right now. You’re only competing against yourself, okay? Just focus on your own game out there.” Gilda felt as if she had turned into some kind of athletic coach. “Now—just close your eyes, take a whiff of your strawberry shampoo, and try to think about your own music.”
Wendy closed her eyes. Music came to her, but there was a problem. It wasn’t the music she was supposed to perform. It was as if some music virus had entered her mind—an alien composition that was attaching itself to the crucial brain cells containing her competition music. Bach and Mozart were being replaced by a simple, melancholy theme in A minor—music she had heard somewhere, but where?
Then, with a surge of nausea, Wendy remembered the music that had pulled her out of sleep in the middle of the night. No, Wendy told herself. Please don’t think about that. She tried to focus on the Bach French Suite—the first piece she would play—but for some reason, she was having a hard time remembering the opening melody.
Something is wrong with me, Wendy thought.
Ming Fong practically flew from the concert hall into the backstage waiting room, her face illuminated by a brilliant smile. Professor Heslop congratulated her warmly—something she hadn’t yet done for any other performer—then signaled Wendy to prepare to walk onstage.
“I’ll go watch you from the audience,” said Gilda.
Wendy nodded mutely. Gilda noticed that her hands shook slightly as she removed her thermal mittens.
As Gilda made her way toward the performance hall, she had the uneasy feeling that she had never in her life seen Wendy so scared.
13
The Disaster
The performance hall of the Holywell Music Room resembled a horseshoe-shaped indoor amphitheater. Rising up from the stage floor were a semicircular series of red, curving benches from which the audience peered down at the performers below. Two gilded, octopuslike chandeliers hung from the high ceiling, and organ pipes decorated with floral designs perched just above the stage.
Gilda made her way up the steps and found a spot in one of the upper rows just as Professor Heslop stepped onstage to announce Wendy’s performance selections. From her seat, Gilda could see the bald spot in the middle of Professor Nigel Waldgrave’s thinning auburn hair. Bizarrely, a fat orange cat perched on top of the music score in front of him. Gilda remembered Mrs. Mendelovich’s comment: “He loves nobody but his cat!” Professor Waldgrave must REALLY love his cat if he can’t even leave it behind while he judges a piano competition, Gilda mused.
A striking woman with dark curls literally springing from her head and pointing in several different directions at once, Professor Rhiannon Maddox was dressed from head to toe in somber black. Her pointy, lace-up boots made Gilda think of a witch’s costume for Halloween. She and Professor Waldgrave sat with their bodies turned sharply away from each other as they scribbled notes to themselves.
As Gilda watched groups of college students and gray-haired ladies who had wandered into the concert hall and were peering down at the piano below with bright, self-satisfied expectation, she suddenly felt intensely nervous for Wendy. Something about the position of the piano on the ground floor below made it look exposed and vulnerable, and she realized for the first time that the task of performing for this audience at Oxford University was actually monumental—on par with walking a tightrope or getting shot out of a cannon at the circus.
Stay calm, Wendy, Gilda thought. You can do this; you can do this. . . . Gilda closed her eyes and tried to use her psychic skills to send Wendy some luck.
As she walked onstage, Wendy felt strangely removed—as if she were watching herself from a distance as she approached the full-grand piano shining like black ice on the stage floor, its keys stretched in a wide, gap-toothed smile. Feeling far too aware of the eyes peering down at her from above, she sat down at the piano bench and twisted the creaking knobs to adjust its height. Take your time, Mrs. Mendelovich had told her a thousand times. Listen for the music before you play.
But nerves took over, and Wendy launched into the music too quickly. She watched with amazement as her hands moved through the fast, frantically joyful Bach “Gigue.” Luckily, her fingers had a physical, completely unconscious memory of their own and they managed to breeze through the notes despite her sense that she was watching someone else’s hands. Wendy marveled that her fingers could function so well despite her panic. At the same time, she was petrified that her hands would fail her at
any moment. All it would take was a tiny gap—a single missed note—and the whole thing would fall apart.
Wendy breathed a sigh of relief as she concluded the Bach without a memory lapse or major stumble.
Her second piece—the Mozart D Minor Fantasy—was more simple and exposed than the fast-paced Bach. A mournful melody in the right hand alternated with chords in the lower register—like an orchestra that plunged the music into darkness before the return of a single, poignant voice. Mrs. Mendelovich had worked with Wendy to perfect every detail of this delicate, sensitive music, hoping that the piece would showcase Wendy’s ability to play “at a more mature level.” All the other kids would stick with music that featured what Mrs. Mendelovich called “big technique”; Wendy would stand out by demonstrating her more sophisticated artistry—her ability to control moments of silence as well as the notes themselves.
Usually, when Wendy performed the Mozart Fantasy, she heard her teacher’s voice in her head, guiding her through the music—“Soft here; steady!” and “Build now! Crescendo!” But Mrs. Mendelovich’s voice did not come to her this time. Instead, there was another voice she didn’t recognize—the maddening intrusion of that dream-melody in A minor.
She missed a note. It wasn’t a subtly missed note; the dissonant sound was like a sudden stab wound in the middle of the music. Wendy was so surprised, she actually stopped playing for a moment.
Oh no, Wendy! Gilda thought, struggling to keep from standing up in her chair and running to Wendy’s aid. Whatever you do, keep playing, keep playing, keep playing!
A snowdrift of silence settled across the concert hall.
Where was she in the music? Wendy realized with horror that she was lost. She glanced into the audience and saw the judges watching her expectantly. Was it her imagination, or was a cat also sitting on the table watching her?
“I’m sorry,” said Wendy, her small, clear voice carried by perfect acoustics up to the highest levels of the performance hall. “Would it be okay if I started over?”
Gilda couldn’t believe what she was seeing. This sort of thing simply didn’t happen to Wendy. Everyone knew that Wendy never caved under pressure. In fact, Gilda had come to regard Wendy as virtually invincible when it came to any kind of performance, whether it was a math quiz, a school talent show, or an international competition. She did her best to send Wendy a thought message: Stay calm. Forget everyone is looking at you. You can do it; you can do it; you can do it....
The Ghost Sonata Page 7