As Jacqueline walked slowly across the stage, I watched her every step, fascinated and envious. That kind of poise could not be taught. It could not be taught by Mr MacFarlane, at least. And certainly I had no poise of my own, with my utilitarian outfits, my braces, and eyebrows that threatened mutiny over the bridge of my nose—they looked like two unmown strips of lawn. I had yet to encounter Frida Kahlo’s proud monobrow, but even if I had I’m pretty sure the discovery wouldn’t have liberated me from my shame about my dark hair growing in places I didn’t want it. Frida didn’t have to turn up at school every day and face the blonde and hairless hordes: she and her massive eyebrow could just stay indoors and paint.
From the very first note Jacqueline played, she touched the keys with command and authority, and also with something that wasn’t visible to the eye but more powerful for its intangibility. She played the same notes in the same order as I had, but the effect was transformed. There was an abiding sense of her deep connection to the work, as if she had seen through the signs and symbols printed on the page to the emotions roiling beneath the notation, and in her playing had conveyed her deep respect for the ocean as she sailed across the glittering water.
After the brief presto the prelude finishes with a six-bar coda that allows the pianist unusual freedom of expression and a variation of tempo between a slower adagio and returning to an allegro ending. Listening to the contrast between Jacqueline’s presto and coda sections, I heard clearly the limitations of my own interpretation and wondered how it was that she and I could spend hours every week practising the piece, only for my performance to sound technically accurate but thin, as if I had only skimmed the surface.
The eisteddfod audience clapped politely as the last few competitors played through their Preludes and Fugues, but the result had already been decided. Jacqueline was so obviously Best in Show I couldn’t figure out what was taking the adjudicator so long to announce the winner.
Finally the judge stood and cleared her throat. ‘I’m going to award this one to Susan,’ she declared to the hall of raised eyebrows, ‘because she has played well all day.’
And what, I wondered, did that have to do with the price of fish? Woody Allen might be right that 80 per cent of success lies in simply showing up, but the remaining 20 per cent allows for a wide margin of error. Susan, a girl whose performance had been technically more competent than mine but equally bland, shook the judge’s hand as my father rolled his eyes at me. He was already thinking of the long commute home from this parallel universe where alleged experts made us wait on uncomfortable seats for their irrational pronouncements. We were sitting inside a church, after all.
Susan held up her small trophy with an apologetic smile: everyone, including the winner, knew she didn’t deserve it. Jacqueline had played all of us under our plastic chairs. I never saw her at another eisteddfod.
Mr Jones strode into the assembly hall, his suit jacket billowing behind his long thin frame like the tail on a crotchet. He had been teaching music at Wenona for a long time, but no one knew how many years exactly; at our age time was as impossible to grasp as the twelve-tone scale.
I scuttled away from the grand piano, where I’d been playing ‘Jessica’s Theme’ on request. Again.
But Mr Jones couldn’t have cared less about my choice of material. He considered me neither talented nor exceptional, and endured my regular presence at the school’s piano as any other condition of his ongoing employment.
‘Apologies, girls. Forgot where we were meeting,’ he muttered, dispensing each word as if it were coated in something sour. ‘Come on, line up. We’ve wasted enough time already. If you don’t have your music, stand next to someone who does. Virginia, go to the piano and play A, will you?’
A well-intentioned classmate piped up. ‘She doesn’t need the piano. She can just sing it like she does in madrigals.’
Anyone who has sung in a group knows that A is the note from which the singers work out the pitch of their respective first notes. Our weekly madrigals rehearsals, which were usually held in a basement room that had excellent acoustics but no piano, began with the choir mistress asking me to sound the starting note: my sense of pitch was so accurate that she didn’t need a piano.
Mr Jones tilted his head slightly as he considered me, his black hawk eyes unblinking. After a pause, he said, ‘You don’t have perfect pitch.’
I shrugged, intuiting it was best to say nothing. Until Mrs Wilcox had suspected and tested my memory for pitch, I thought that everyone recognised notes by name as soon as they heard them. In the same way that most people can identify the colour of the sky or a fire engine, I can tell you what note almost any sound is, without reference to anything outside myself. I know, for example, that my printer spits out pages in a fuzzy C; the warning beep of the truck that reversed into a parking spot outside my window this morning is a B flat; and my doorbell’s two-note chime is in the key of D major.
At school I considered this simply a freak of memory and took it for granted, not realising how unusual it was. My musicality seemed more like a curiosity than a practical asset—interesting, possibly, but useless. I didn’t see how it might translate into something I could use in ‘real life’, which would begin promptly when I left this witches’ cauldron and went to university.
‘Go and stand over there, facing the wall,’ said Mr Jones. ‘Go on,’ shooing me to the nearest side of the hall with one hand. At the cuffs of his shiny black suit was a permanent cloud formed by the stick of white chalk he gripped tightly and waved around like a poor man’s baton during class.
He moved briskly to the piano. Moments before he’d been urging us to attention: now he had all the time in the world. My classmates, not knowing what was happening, sensed that it was nevertheless important and fell quiet. Even Joanna, whom I liked to think of as my best friend at school, began to pay attention.
Mr Jones played a note with one bony finger. It reverberated through the otherwise silent hall.
‘B,’ I said, straight away. My first mistake. Immediately I understood I should have waited a few seconds before responding. To at least pretend it took a conscious effort.
Mr Jones said nothing but pressed another note.
‘E flat.’ I couldn’t help myself. The sound was as identifiable as my own face. I could no more pretend not to recognise each note than I could stop blinking. It wasn’t my fault: absolute or perfect pitch is a genetic accident occurring in approximately one in ten thousand people.
Mr Jones increased the frequency of his note-playing and varied the register—playing some notes way up high on the keyboard and others low—but it made no difference to me.
‘A, F sharp, B flat, D,’ I shot back at him, emboldened. With every correct answer he stabbed the keys harder, as if the increasing violence of his dismay could change the pitch and catch me out. This was a game that would continue until Mr Jones decided it was over.
Without being able to see my classmates, I could only imagine their boredom. It was one thing for me to entertain them with show tunes and a medley of Top 40 songs; to be revealed to have a freak musical skill, beyond even the teacher’s grasp, placed me in an entirely separate camp. Joanna wouldn’t be pleased at my distinguishing myself in this way. My role as her friend was to remain on par with—or preferably slightly behind—her in intellectual and social achievement. She gave me my edge over her in Music as long as I didn’t do better than her in Japanese, Economics and English. If recent history was a guide, she would ignore me for a few days until she decided I had been sufficiently punished for doing something she couldn’t compete with.
Mr Jones shut the lid of the piano, and I returned to sit among my peers. But I had been cast out, and it was too late to return from wherever it was that I now found myself.
In 1839, in a letter to her aunt Elizabeth, the future novelist Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) described a ‘desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures’ when playing the piano. She described this
ambition punitively, as her ‘besetting sin’, fearing the power of her desire to perform for others. Her adolescence was characterised by an intense internal conflict: she sought praise but couldn’t abide receiving it. Was it possible to be moral and to put oneself on public display? How does one reconcile the desire for admiration and the need to quench it? This is where shyness can become a tactic to disguise attention-seeking behaviour, a defence against being thought too aggressive and showy. To perform and then to agonise over it—especially if you’re accomplished—is to remain suspended in a delicate balance between the poles of inner conflict. Rather an exhausting way of living, really.
I still wonder why Mr Jones wanted to disprove the fact that I had perfect pitch. Perhaps he felt outraged to learn that mere chance explained my consistently high marks in his classes, rather than his abilities as a teacher. Maybe he was furious that the unfairness of life was epitomised by an awkward fourteen-year-old girl who neither asked for nor appreciated her random gift. I wonder if Mr Jones somehow knew, his bitter gaze resting on the back of my white neck as I accurately named each note, that I would waste this ability; that I would abandon the piano and drift for years, casting about for an anchor as reliable and trustworthy as the starting note A.
10
THIS PHOTOGRAPH OF ALICE MAY MORRISON Taylor was taken in 1910 when it was well past September in Glasgow. Despite looking as if she’s waiting for her children to come home from school, Alice has just turned fifteen.
While the bulky school uniform and cross-legged posture reveal little of her physically, I like to think this portrait tells us quite a lot about Alice as a teenager. She has taken great care with her appearance and her off-camera gaze, which calls attention to her creamy complexion and her partly open mouth. But is she expressing apology, surprise, boredom or impatience? Maybe it’s just the awkwardness of not knowing how to relax in front of a camera, or how to be oneself in the careful quiet of the portrait photographer’s studio. How staged and formal Alice’s sombre comportment seems when you think of today’s teenagers showing off their most flattering angles for ubiquitous cameras. The old convention of not smiling for a portrait photograph gives the impression that the subject led a life devoid of humour and colour—but that would be as false a conclusion as to interpret the beaming smiles of social media as literal ‘happy’ snaps.
Look at Alice’s hair. That’s a lot of hair for one head. Biologically speaking I didn’t inherit mine from Alice so I can’t blame her for it, but I wonder if she considered hers, as I came to view mine, equally blessing and curse. Her lustrous dark-brown tresses are arranged in some kind of complicated braiding, wound around her head with what looks like a network of pins. Did she construct that elegant bird’s nest herself, or was it her mother’s work? Of course I’m wondering if she had excess hair in places where she didn’t want it, and whether she accepted it as God’s will or devised home-made remedies to counteract a fuzzy upper lip.
When I turned fifteen I was yet to have a period, but seemingly overnight the Black Forest had marched all over my lily-white legs, making camp on the tops of my pale feet and even, the horror, my big toes. Coarse dark hair had crept along my upper thighs and over my abdomen, far north of where I’d always assumed the tree line would end. Long black strays had even appeared around my nipples like scouts from an advance party, which I yanked off with my hardworking tweezers. Monitoring the enemy was a covert operation requiring constant vigilance.
I was hirsute.
Hairy.
Hideous.
The models who reclined and cavorted in the glossy pages of Dolly magazine, which I consulted like a map of foreign territory, looked tanned and happy. Their teeth were straight. Their legs were smooth. There was no sign of hair around their bikini bottoms. Surreptitious surveillance of my classmates’ limbs indicated that no one else had hair anywhere they didn’t want it. In bed each night I prayed that if God would only turn back the advancing tide then I would definitely believe. In a recent class, Deborah Best had explained inflation, trade deficits and the Gross Domestic Product as easily as if she had already completed a four-year degree. My grasp of economics was less than solid, but a Gross Domestic Product was exactly how I thought of myself.
Aside from being a hairy horror, I had freckles on my face and arms, and braces on my teeth. I clearly grasped the meagre value of these assets in terms of how the law of supply and demand applied to a boy’s interest in a girl.
The care Alice took to prepare for the portrait indicates a young woman very conscious of her body, even if she does not yet know what pleasures and betrayals it is capable of. The composition is so formal and contrived that it carries a slightly desperate whiff, as though the photographer, if not the subject herself, is determined to shape the future observer’s impression of her. She is, if not a reader, then someone who wishes to be thought a reader. Or at least a reader of the King James Bible, the book she would have been most familiar with, seeing that there weren’t many at home and Partick didn’t get a public library until 1935.
It’s an uncanny experience to gaze at Alice like this. In her unblemished face I recognise the old woman, though in photographs of an elderly Alice her teenage self is nowhere to be found. Perhaps a portrait will always be a kind of Rorschach test of the viewer’s preconceptions, influenced by one’s relationship to the subject. I wonder what Alice made of this portrait. Did it feel truthful to her, or a fiction composed for the eyes of others?
That Alice feels distant to me isn’t so much a matter of time, though the photograph is now more than a century old. We’ve all had the experience of coming across photographs of strangers out of the past, thrust before your nose as you browse in the wooden boxes of a second-hand stall or antiques shop. In Alice’s case I like to imagine she is holding herself back, pressing her real self like a cut flower behind the photographer’s glass. By now she has been a soprano in the Dowanhill Church choir for three years. Once a week she takes a piano lesson with a Mrs Ramsay of 16 India Street, Partick. She would have paid for those lessons herself, most likely from her job in a haberdashery a few doors down Dumbarton Road, and perhaps she found the job in order to pay for the lessons.
I can only imagine how peaceful Mrs Ramsay’s home must have been for Alice: an oasis compared to the formless symphony of knives and forks and cups and plates she practised in. That a woman could earn her living through the love of music would have been difficult for Alice to believe. Until she encountered Mrs Ramsay, Alice would have associated women’s work with her mother’s domestic rituals and with the mindless keeping of the haberdashery.
Did Alice consider herself lucky to have been born a woman? She never had to do the kind of physical labour that caused her father’s bone-tiredness at the end of every day. Around the dinner table she must have noticed her brothers watching their father as they got older: seeing him, a mountain of a man, physically diminished by his job, recognising his lack of choice about how he earned the money that fed and housed them, and gradually understanding that their lives were likely to be variations on his theme.
The ambitious young woman in the portrait longs to be taken seriously. By now, though she is an increasingly visible figure in the musical life of her parish, I suspect that Alice nevertheless feels constrained by the yoke of her domestic responsibilities and a growing guilt. She must sense the gulf that is opening between what her parents expect of her and what she knows, with increasing certainty, that she wants. And what she wants is to live a life in which music plays a central rather than peripheral part. Though to all appearances Alice may strike the casual observer as a pious and reticent girl, she has a passionate intensity and capacity for playfulness that she has permitted only Nance, and occasionally her piano teacher, to see.
I like to think that when Alice first saw her photograph she was disappointed, because it captured her as the accommodating and secretive daughter she is at home. I look at Alice as a young woman and think, I would really like to unders
tand you better. And yet even as I recognise that desire, I suspect that whatever she felt most deeply either came out in her singing and playing, or remained silent.
11
I HAD A LOVE WHOSE NAME I dared not speak to my piano teacher: improvisation. The notes that weren’t written down were the ones I loved best, the ones my fingers gravitated towards by default. But as Mr McFarlane’s student, I diligently practised the works he’d chosen for that year’s grade examination, in addition to the scales and arpeggios that were the foundation of any musician’s study. As I was an advanced student heading towards the pointy end of eight examination grades, my daily practice comprised the constant repetition of the same notes in the same order.
My goal was a discernible improvement in accuracy and expression from one piano lesson to the next. Typically one section of each work needed special attention, whether it was clarifying the separate voices in a Bach fugue, perfecting a trill in a Beethoven sonata, or, in the case of Mozart—the composer who presented my greatest challenge—striking the balance between lightness of touch and emotional connection. Always with Mozart I felt defeated before I’d really begun to get the notes under my fingers; merely learning the right notes in the correct order was so far from what was necessary to fully convey the delicate beauty and formal perfection of a Mozart piano sonata, and I had neither the proper temperament nor sensibility to play it. I never felt that way with Beethoven, though his sonatas were no less of a technical challenge; nor with Bach, despite the demands of the fugues in particular. I felt a strange sense of kinship with Bach and Beethoven, which I never felt with Mozart. Kinship aside, the time I spent closely studying the works of those and other composers had made me realise how much I chafed on the limitations of faithfully respecting the fully notated score.
Girls at the Piano Page 9