Girls at the Piano

by Virginia Lloyd

  Who can say what Alice’s parents made of her exemplary musicianship. But after repeated success in competition, and regular performances around Glasgow, she must have allowed herself to dare hope for something more than a job in Mrs Rankin’s haberdashery. She must by then have come to think of herself as a musician, feeling confident in her skills and expertise, and their usefulness to church choirs in her home town. Surely she would have aspired to a professional life in music. How else to explain the existence of this letter, written by her teacher, Frederick Hervey, dated 19 May 1914:

  This letter certifies that Alice May Morrison Taylor has studied singing with me for the past two years, gaining first class certificates of merit at the 1913 and 1914 Scottish Song Society (with marks of 85 and 90 out of a possible 100, respectively). She has a soprano voice of good quality and range: reaching to A above the score and G below. She sings with good taste and perception and her frequent public appearances have been well spoken of by the press. Her extensive repertoire includes Handel’s Messiah and Theodora. She is a very painstaking and enthusiastic musician and I have great pleasure in recommending her for any important appointment she may seek.

  Not long after, Alice accepted the position of choirmistress at the larger and more prestigious Gardner Street Church, an appointment that reflects her rising stature in the musical life of Glasgow even more than the influence of her respected teacher.

  15

  FIVE HUNDRED PEOPLE SETTLED INTO THEIR seats inside the Hunters Hill Town Hall and waited for the lights to dim. The philanthropically minded folk of the neighbourhood had gathered for a concert to celebrate the opening night of the Rotary Club charity art show, which my father had been coordinating, in addition to the charity golf day, for ten years. He specialised in thankless annual events. My participation as a featured soloist tonight was voluntary too. My specialty was playing the piano in public, an activity I was no longer sure I enjoyed.

  While I sat at one side of the front row waiting to walk on stage, my clammy palms felt as porous as the honey-coloured sandstone from which the hall had been built in 1866. With several minutes still to go before I was due to perform, I was trying to visualise the opening bars of the piece I was about to play from memory: it was in Book Four of the Mikrokosmos, a work that Béla Bartók composed from 1926 to 1939. Recalling pieces note for note had always been a point of pride for me. I could play a Mozart or Beethoven sonata of ten minutes’ duration without forgetting a thing. Usually I summoned the score instantly in my mind’s eye, but tonight, for the first time in my junior performance career, I couldn’t remember how the piece began. Which was ironic given that Bartók felt no shame about performing his own music in public with the score.48

  You’ll be fine, you’ll remember how it begins when you get up there, I told myself, calling my own bluff as I walked on stage to generous applause. Many of those clapping enthusiastically had watched me grow up at the piano. Just beyond the stage lights I could make out Mr and Mrs Kovacek, whose son went to school with my brother; they had announced their separation years earlier but never went through with it due to the expense of divorce. In front of them sat the Bickersons, a codename my brother and I used for a Rotarian and his wife who argued constantly in front of others. Closer to the front the mayor’s glamorous wife sat beside her husband wearing makeup applied like a coat of armour. Her look was all blonde streaks and sequins, an Australian translation of the hit television series Dynasty. Her razor-sharp shoulderblades threatened the spaghetti straps of her sleeveless shift.

  I nodded and smiled into the constellation of faces, then sat in front of the huge Kawai grand piano I had rehearsed on earlier that afternoon. My hair, cut in a long bob that fell over half my face, hid the evidence plainly written on it. For once I had defied my mother, who still insisted I pull it back into a ponytail. ‘So everyone can see your face,’ she’d said. Again.

  Through the unconscious knowledge of trained muscles, the opening of the Bartók miraculously came to me. On stage I exhaled slowly, recognising that this was yet another occasion when there had been no need for me to fret as much as I had. I’d been foolish to let my imagination run away with catastrophic scenarios.

  I was about two-thirds of the way through when I became aware of my hands hovering over the keys. It took me less than half a second to realise that I didn’t know what came next. My mind’s eye, which had always automatically scrolled through the printed music, had failed to turn the page.

  I shook my wrists slightly as if this would jump-start my memory, but nothing changed. I couldn’t recall what followed all the notes I had just played, nor could I experiment while hundreds of ears were tuned in my direction. In life I was often at a loss for words, but at the piano I had never lost the next note. My hands paused in midair, I heard the silence emanating from the hundreds of people watching me.

  As there was no apparent way forward, the only thing I could do was to go back. To the beginning. I started all over again, part of me wondering how many in the audience even noticed I had done so in their relief that I had broken the spell of my silence.

  I was grateful for the curtain of hair that fell across my face. I couldn’t see anyone, not least my mother. She might not have picked up on what was happening musically but would still be wishing I’d at least worn a barrette.

  Working my way towards the part where I had lost all sense of direction minutes earlier, I felt an unexpected rush at having given over to my fingers the responsibility of getting me home—as if, after being paralysed in combat, the only available course of action was to trust my comrades to carry me to safety. Whether muscle memory would kick in this time, I would simply have to wait and see.

  Before I knew it I was playing the last third, flying toward the final bars knowing freedom lay immediately beyond them. For long seconds, my heart in my mouth, I’d considered my options if memory had failed me again. There were none. Like Houdini I had survived a situation in which I’d had no option other than to escape, or to die on stage.

  When my hands finally came to a stop I paused over the keys to emphasise that both performer and audience had reached the end of the sorry saga. I stood up to rapturous applause in which I heard the vibrato of relief.

  After the concert, by the trestle tables laden with self-serve tea and coffee and Arnott’s Assorted biscuits, I smiled and shrugged at a succession of well-meaning people as they congratulated me on my death-defying performance. I responded on autopilot to the whos, hows, whys and whats from old women and older men. Why was Rotarianese so easy for me to speak, I wondered, when I struggled to talk about anything interesting with most girls my age? Because of my intensive piano study and furtive improvisations I often felt older than my peers, but I was too young to be so comfortable with the people who surrounded me now, who really were old. At fifteen I still hadn’t had a period or a boyfriend. Old could wait.

  16

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1917, THE light of Glasgow blinked weakly through the long days, as if even the sun were drained from the years of war. People ground down by fear and loss hungered for beauty, for a reminder that it was sometimes possible still to enjoy life. And so they turned out in their hundreds to hear again the familiar soprano voice that belonged to one of their own.

  The audience at Windsor Halls Church was three times the size of that at any of Alice May Morrison Taylor’s recent concerts. Tonight the crowd included the soloist’s parents, whose enthusiasm for their daughter’s musicianship had dimmed in proportion to her growing public profile and critical regard. Nevertheless Mr and Mrs Taylor were proud to attend Alice’s recital this evening in the company of their son Vincent, home for a few weeks while HMS Mameluke underwent repairs in the nearby docks.

  Singing in public, Alice still felt alive in a way that she did nowhere else. On stage she was in control of her voice, she knew her repertoire, and she felt prepared. She welcomed the jolts of anxiety that arrived before each performance as a reminder that singing for others
was what she loved best. It was the one time in her life when she was the centre of attention. And while she avoided standing out from the crowd when she was among them, Alice felt completely at home on stage with all eyes trained upon her. There really was nothing like the presence of an audience.

  Every time she walked onto a stage and stood silently while the polite welcome applause faded, Alice felt an almost erotic charge. The warm embrace of the spotlight. The undivided attention of strangers. The exquisite quiet just before the conductor lifted his baton, or her accompanist’s fingers touched the keyboard. Alice had grown up in an endless river of noise: her brothers’ scrabbling play inside the house, the clatter of cutlery and the percussion of pots and pans, and her father’s voice booming like a tuba from one end of the narrow tenement to the other. The 502 tram and horse-drawn carts rattling along Dumbarton Road, the distant toll of church bells, the piercing shrieks of trains. And the occasional bellowing of new ships from the Clyde as they departed for the shores of a war that seemed it would never end.

  Some members of the audience, surveying the soprano’s modest home-made silk gown of pale grey—and not for the first time—might have wished she had found for herself a nice young man by now. But even had she been able to show off a waist and a charming smile, luck would still have been against her. Outside the measures of a music score, Alice’s timing was poor. So many of those eligible for the role of husband were either playing their part in the North Sea or casualties of battle. The lists of the dead and wounded of Partick parish weren’t long, but Alice knew some names well. Charlie Morrison, a childhood friend of her brother-in-law Richard. Jim, the older brother of Caroline Ridley, whom she knew from Stewartville school. The son of Robert Ritchie, the local butcher who hadn’t uttered a word since the telegram arrived. The healthy men of fighting age who weren’t away were either excused from service or busy building war ships down on the docks. And if there was one type of man Alice was not interested in, it was a man who had anything to do with ships.

  At times, when the very air of Partick parish felt thick with grief, Alice had allowed herself to wonder what use it was to sing. She found it difficult to reconcile the words of worship her choir sang for the god who had allowed this war to begin—and who had let it continue for years—with the beauty and symmetry of the melodies and harmonies that supported them. A musical work had a beginning, a middle and an end. But not this war.

  On stage, though, Alice found it easy to imagine herself in a different time and place. Covent Garden. Royal Albert Hall. The Paris Opera. Instead of selected highlights, performing a full production of Theodora to a musically knowledgeable and adoring audience. Despite Alice never having been someone’s sweetheart, the role of Theodora, the Christian martyr and lover of Didymus, had become her signature.

  The respectful silence that dropped like a curtain when she opened her mouth was almost palpable. She imagined velvet draped around her, instead of the gown that she had sewn herself from a bolt of her former employer Mrs Rankin’s cheapest silk. In the warmth of the Windsor Halls spotlights, with the electric current running between her and the attentive bodies in their seats, while she sang passionately of love and enforced separations, it was easy for Alice to forget that she was twenty-two and had never left Glasgow.

  17

  IF I’D KNOWN THAT JANE AUSTEN had been a serious piano student as a teenager then perhaps I would have tried harder to enjoy Emma, which, to my profound irritation, was required reading for our final year of high school.

  Although Austen was a much more accomplished musician than her creation Emma Woodhouse, she was not nearly as impressive at the keyboard as her most accomplished pianist, the enigmatic Jane Fairfax. Dedicated to her piano studies, Jane Fairfax was modest about her musicianship, and isolated by her beauty and talent. Though she always struck me as a significantly more intriguing character than Emma, in class I said nothing, by now superbly trained in the art of withholding a dissenting thought. In Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, the isolated but privileged Rachel Vinrace confesses her distaste for Jane Austen to a horrified Clarissa Dalloway: ‘She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait.’ I couldn’t have agreed more. I held so many such thoughts that I felt it essential to share none of them. Listening to the incessant torrent of contrariness in my head made it all but impossible for me to hear anything else clearly.

  I failed utterly to see what enchanted my peers about Emma Woodhouse. I thought she was a self-satisfied know-it-all, a spoiled daddy’s girl held in undeserved high esteem by a tiny claustrophobic community, and who gets everything she wants. Blind to the parallels between my own privileged existence and that of Austen’s heroine, I dismissed Emma as romantic pap. I choked on the limited options available to women in the first years of the nineteenth century, confused as to why we were reading about them in the latter decades of the twentieth.

  Of all the things that bored me about the novel, what bothered me most was its obsession with marriage. The girls in my English class who had swooned over Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice the year before were now gaga about Mr Knightley. Why were sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls in the late 1980s fantasising about marriage to a wealthy landowner, or to anyone? Marriage seemed to be the answer to almost any question the inhabitants of Austen’s novels could think of.

  I was enormously relieved to discover, years later, that Ralph Waldo Emerson shared my concerns about Austen’s primary subject in his private notebook from the summer of 1861: ‘Never was life so pinched & narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, “Persuasion”, and “Pride & Prejudice”, is marriageableness; all that interests any character introduced is still this one, has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming?…Suicide is more respectable.’

  Outside my classroom, a ferocious pairing-off was taking place that had nothing at all to do with wedlock. At North Sydney train station, the girls’ school girls looked at the boys’ school boys looking at them. I would glance up from the novel I was reading to observe them through the windows of the bus, which I had ridden alone from Circular Quay in order to avoid social persecution. The girls boarded the bus squealing over seismic social developments that had just taken place on the train or the station platform, chewing gum to offset the cigarette smoke, their chins bright with pash-rash.

  I couldn’t wait to be rid of the lot of them. Looking down my nose at everybody else was a paltry substitute for self-esteem. I dreamed of the University of Sydney, where I imagined that interesting men who wanted to discuss books and music roamed the campus like bison on the prairie. Before that day came, I could fantasise about Vince Jones and his band of musical men.

  I hurried down the steps to the Basement with my oldest friend, Daniela, hoping no one had observed us getting out of my father’s car. We were sixteen going on twenty-three—or at least, that’s how I liked to think of us. For some reason I regarded twenty-three as a magical age by which I would not only look my best but also have this growing-up thing all figured out and confidently be pursuing my highly successful adult life.

  Because my father had dropped us off for tonight’s gig, Daniela’s dad would be picking us up. At 11 p.m. On a Sunday night. In the era before mobile phones, our suggested pick-up times were estimates at best. It took a few concerts before we understood that jazz clubs operated on a schedule that bore little relation to the advertised performance times, and none whatsoever to the needs of an overprotective parent.

  We had come to the Basement to see Vince Jones: trumpet player, singer and composer. As teenagers, our musical tastes were more mature than the rest of us, as though we were baby giraffes whose long legs had to wait for the rest of their bodies to catch up. Admittedly, Daniela was the one with long legs; my emerging shape was closer to that of a double bass. Make that a cello.

  It was so early in the evening that no one stood at the door collecting entry fees or looking out for horribly underage jazz fans. Onc
e inside, we ordered Tia Marias with milk from bartenders who were kind enough not to laugh, and scoured the cosy venue for a seat with a view of the stage. Depending on how early we arrived at these gigs, we scored a bar stool each, one stool that we shared, or a dark corner of beer-stained carpet near the toilets, where we shifted our weight from one leg to the other while we waited up to two hours for the band to come on stage. When our Tia Maria budget was blown, we sipped water. Inside the Basement, H2O existed only in pricey sealed plastic bottles like a harbinger of the environmental future.

  Vince Jones came to Sydney every three months or so, bringing with him several musicians who looked to be in their twenties, plus an extraordinary pianist named Barney McAll who seemed hardly older than Daniela and me. Fancy being so talented that you could leave school and travel around playing music like this, I thought.

  I can’t remember how I first came to hear the music of Vince Jones. Born in Scotland, like my grandmother Alice, he emigrated with his parents to the mining town of Wollongong on the New South Wales coast in the mid-1960s, when he was eleven. Absorbing his father’s jazz record collection, Jones attributes the beginning of his real interest in jazz to hearing Sketches of Spain when he was fourteen. The sound of Miles Davis inspired a working-class white boy to pick up a trumpet and start writing his own songs, a perfect example of D.H. Lawrence’s idea of the ‘blind reaching out for beauty’.

  From this tough environment sprang a musician who wrote songs about protecting the environment, respect for women, and the nature of power. My ears had been drenched in jazz standards and the Top 40. The lyrics of the former are full of women treating their man wrong, men abandoning women, misery and loss. On commercial radio, all I heard were songs about sex, featuring banal rhymes: Hold me tight / morning light / feel all right and all that…jazz. The dominant number one singles in 1986 included ‘Venus’ by Bananarama, John Farnham’s ‘You’re the Voice’, Madonna’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, and the comic version of ‘Living Doll’ by The Young Ones with Cliff Richard. Jones’s songs, originating from a profound sense of social justice, were a revelation.