by Zoe Morrison
He was asleep on the floor, shattered furniture all around him. She tapped his leg with her foot. He woke with a snort, then a yelp at the sight of my mother with the axe. Je-SUS! he shouted, and he started crawling towards the door. Don’t move, she said, lifting the axe, and he stopped, extended a hand. Don’t you move, she said, and the hand stayed mid-air, shaking. Don’t you ever try that again, she said, do you hear me? And he stared at her, said nothing, eyes saying it all. Did you hear what I said? she said, slowly raising the axe higher, I know what you were going to try. Did you hear me? And he nodded then, finally. She looked at him for a bit longer, turned around, took the axe back outside to the shed, locked the shed door, put the key on a chain around her neck beside the crucifix and started another day.
I left not long after, with my Bach, my Beethoven, my ‘Happy Farmer’ and my ‘Andante’. With a trunk that had taken a year to pack. With an orange, slightly squishy, in my hand. Keep playing, my mother said, standing on the quay. Keep playing, won’t you, dear, won’t you? My father blew his nose in long honks that rivalled those of the ships, my mother seemed to sway with their force, the seagulls’ screams reached a higher pitch and I sailed away.
6.
Oxford, October 6th, 2005
After the scales and arpeggios there was music. Bach, the first prelude of Book I of the Preludes and Fugues. It almost made sense, a baroque beginning; I could see myself dreaming this up in my depleted state. A grand recital, it would be, to march me to my death. I was momentarily lulled, standing by the fire, moving my fingers in the air, listening. One can embellish that prelude, try to make it into something it is not, but this was played simply, beautifully, each note perfectly weighted and connected to the next. It was an even meditation in the key of C, which had always suggested morning sunshine, orange juice and wholesome beginnings to me.
I jerked back, realising where I was. I stared wildly at the old gramophone, the dusty knobs, then over at his fancy sound system, all those steel buttons – was it turned on? But it wasn’t even plugged in.
The Bach stopped for a second, a minute correction was made, then it wended its way to its close.
I felt wetness on my face, looked up at the ceiling, searching for the leak, the beading drip. But the roof was intact, the walls stood tall.
When I rang that day there was a long pause, then: ‘If you have something to say,’ and the voice was icy, ‘I think it might be about time, don’t you?’ At which point I started swallowing convulsively, my hand shook on the receiver; he hung up.
I burnt some books, many books (Against the Welfare State; Capitalism and Humanity; The Road to Serfdom; Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason; The Fatal Conceit). I picked up an album by Debussy, the first book of his Preludes, found number two (‘Voiles’) and then I was away, away, on thoughts of ships and waves and harbours.
7.
Southampton, September, 1938
I stepped off the boat, the ground moved beneath me, my legs buckled. I got up straight away, fell again, grabbed onto the nearest thing, a short snub pole, a row of which traversed the pier all the way to the land, looped with the thick ropes of anchored ships. People were everywhere, jostling, pushing, calling. Even the sky was crowded, with a host of small grey clouds, squabbling sea birds, a sooty haze and bits of boats and buildings. With my hands still on the pole in front of me I willed myself forward, but got nowhere. I sat on the edge of the pier, out of the way.
I’d been seasick for most of the trip. A kind young couple from Melbourne had looked after me. They’d brought me tea, tins of dry biscuits, even books. When things got better they knocked on my door at mealtimes and I sat with them. They were newly wed, and held hands under the table when they had finished with the cutlery. Their faces glowed, although that could have been from the sun and wind: they spent a lot of time up on deck.
And now they had left, waving farewells, disappearing into the port building where we were to collect our luggage.
I eyed the distance. It wasn’t any longer than the strip of earth between two rows of oranges trees, from house to fence, which I regularly ran playing catch with the neighbours’ children, or by myself for the sheer pleasure of it. Feeling the soil’s crust crack beneath my bare feet, the soft, dry dirt beneath. Smelling the orange blossom, the saltbush, the gums, and the birds hiding in the hot scrub. Singing ‘Andante’ to myself in my head. I started forward. Slowly, from one pole to the next, I made my way down the pier.
I was met by a man who worked for the ship company. He showed me through the customs house and onto the train, which wound its way north and arrived at Darlington in the evening. The only person on the platform, besides the uniformed conductor waving the train onwards, was a tall, thin woman with her back to me. As she turned around I saw a sallow face, pinched mouth, narrowed eyes. Alice Murray? I nodded. Your luggage? Pointing to my suitcase. She faltered then, her eyes flicking towards the tail of the retreating train. That’s all? I nodded again. Come, she said, and we walked quickly along the platform out of the station.
I remember her gloved hands on the steering wheel as we drove from one town to the next, darkness punctuated by dim, flashing lights, and then there was only darkness as we passed through the North Yorkshire moors. At the end of the trip the car drove up a slope into a courtyard and stopped. There was a cold wind, very strong, that made it hard to pull the suitcase towards me from the back of the vehicle. The woman got a small torch out of her pocket, we followed the little sphere of light jerking before us up the path.
In a large kitchen I was given a bowl of tepid soup that tasted of brine, of sea-spray – even the cubes of vegetables floating in it, the pieces of barley, had that taste. A cold current of air in the room wound its way around my ankles, my neck. Then we went up a narrow, winding set of stairs (also freezing), and now she was walking in a way that made no sound, each foot put down carefully. The dormitory had a line of identical beds. In each of them a girl slept: a row of small bodies curled around themselves, for this room was cold, too. I could not take my eyes from those sleeping girls. The one nearest to us had her mouth open and was snoring softly. The white sheets against the black night made the beds look legless – white boats floating into the dark. Wordlessly she showed me where to place my shoes, the section of cupboard where I was to hang my clothes, and the single drawer where everything else was to go. An immediate sense of constriction when I saw all of this, as if I had stepped into a box.
The sheets had a coarse, hard texture. I squeezed myself between them, moved my legs around to loosen their tuck into the mattress. I had a sensation of falling, falling down a long way into darkness.
When the girls woke in the morning they looked at me without expression, eyes pausing and sliding on. They started to dress. It was presumed that I would know what to do. So I watched, copied. We went into a bathroom, took turns to splash cold water onto our faces, rub them with soap.
Later a girl was chosen to show me around. She was older than the ones in the dormitory. Outside, that wind was still there, and it whisked her long fringe into her eyes or out of them, depending in which direction she stood. She showed me around several buildings, then took me to the hockey field, which we stood beside for some moments. It seemed to be the climax of our tour, this desolate oblong of shorn grass with nets at both ends and white chalked lines. I glanced at her. Her eyes were squinting hard into the wind, her lips pursed. She had started to look like the woman from the night before, and I wondered if this expression on these people’s faces meant I was expected to say I was impressed, or grateful.
I looked past her to the town of Whitby below. In the harbour dozens of fishing boats were tethered, they rocked and reared in the choppy water. On the opposite side of the bay from the school, up on the grassy cliffs, stood the ruins of Saint Hilda’s Abbey, white, skeletal, half there, half not. You’re shivering, the girl said. We’d better go back in.
8.
Whitby, North Yorkshire, 1938
>
On my second day I was introduced to Miss May, the piano teacher.
‘Alice Murray,’ she said, and she stood when I walked into that room at the top of the stairs of the Victorian building. The room was warm, which seemed extraordinary. I looked around, saw a bar heater in the corner. She kept it on all day, I heard later, against regulations. There were potted ferns, a brass watering can; the place smelt like a greenhouse.
Miss May wasn’t old or young; her hair was piled on top of her head, escaped wisps stood up all around it.
‘Play something,’ she said, smiling, beckoning to the piano, a large upright.
I took off my coat, climbed onto the stool. I felt energised for the first time since I had arrived, as if warm water were flowing fast through my body. I played Beethoven, the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata. What noise it made, what shout. Such confidence music has, even when transplanted. And just the same in that room as it had been at home, which seemed miraculous.
She leant forward, ‘Who taught you that?’
‘My mother.’
And there she was in a flash, standing in the kitchen, slitting apricots in half, flipping out the stones. Make it more staccato, she shouted, as if the keys are too hot. Ouch! Ouch! Afterwards those apricots drying on racks in the sun, shrivelling, getting smaller and smaller, sweeter and sweeter.
‘This place must be quite a change,’ said Miss May, examining me. Her grey eyes were slightly hooded.
‘I beg your pardon?’
She got up, went to the music cabinet in the corner and started pulling things out, looking at them, pushing them back in.
‘It must feel cold.’
‘A bit.’
When I’d been told I was going to meet my piano teacher I’d gone to the bathroom, breathed hot air onto my hands then stuck them beneath my armpits, and it was only October.
‘Try that,’ setting a piece down before me.
It was by Béla Bartók, the nationalist composer who collected folk tunes from his native Hungary and Bulgaria. The tune was weird, nasal, the bass pounding, atonal, repetitive. I pecked then bashed at it, finding its rhythms surprisingly satisfying.
‘Oh, well done. That was excellent. Didn’t you take to that well? Now, what about this?’
A piece called ‘Dance of the Wild Horses’ by another nationalist composer, this time from South America. (Miss May had musical friends, she told me later, who travelled.)
I played it for my first performance at school. Up I walked past the rows of silent, watching girls and teachers, Miss May sitting with her head slightly tilted, looking demurely downwards. I sat at the piano, inched up the seat.
I started the piece very fast, at a kamikaze speed, or was the music playing me? And riding me hard, soon I was rolling behind it, I was flying in the air, the whole instrument started to shake and I galloped on, hands flying, hitting, body rocking, dancing, fingertips just clinging on, a tearaway. I ripped the last glissando up and down the keyboard, crashed the final triplet of hooves and pulled my hands away. Silence. Then an eruption of applause. It was thunder, lightning, rain on the roof. It was a great, sweet-scented downpour, and it drowned out everything else.
It was easy in the end to assume a different accent, a different way to be. When you learn to play an instrument from an early age you are also learning to mimic, as well as to perform, and that is what I did. I made friends easily, although those hockey girls were not really my sort; I was able to garner enough respect and affection to save me from the worst of it. And I always had the music practice room to retreat to. Sometimes I felt as if I were in a very long concert, and when it finished I would go home and turn back into me.
9.
Whitby, North Yorkshire, 1940
Miss May took me to many concerts in the years that followed. We often caught the train to York. Even when the war started we kept going. Once during a concert in York the air-raid siren started. She pointed to a note printed in the middle of the program: ‘If the alarm sounds, the concert will continue. Patrons may leave if they wish, but please do so as quietly as possible, avoiding any disturbance.’ We remained in our seats.
My great-aunt had died by then. She had left money in an account at the department store in town to pay for basics like shoes and soap and underwear, but there wasn’t much, and I was always frightened it would run out. No cash, either, so no treats, and no tuckbox from home at the end of holidays, which were mostly spent at school unless a friend invited me to her house.
When I stayed at the school I could practise for as long as I wanted. With the other girls who were left I would lie in the sun on the hockey field, which had been allowed to return to seed, then take myself off to the practice room. It was tiny, a cell, just the instrument, a stool, a door that closed and a tall narrow window looking out onto the roof. I’d climb sideways out of that window in summer, sit on the roof and watch the gardener and his young assistant below. In winter I’d sit with my hands in my lap and watch the rain clouds roll in over the cliffs and wish that rain home. Back then I still prayed to a god in that sky, a large, benevolent man with a languidly pointing finger.
I did not write to Mother asking to return. I knew there was no point. But I wrote to her often and told her about everything. I worried about her, about both of them, and the block. I longed to be back there, always. My yearning for home was like a song that never left my head.
She replied about once a term. Some girls got a letter once a week. My mother was busy, I told myself, that was it. When I got older I decided it was because she had little left to give. She’d had to sever so many parts of herself by then that all that was left were soldered bits and blunted ends. In her letters she always asked for more information about what I was playing. When and what are you performing? Have you learnt a concerto yet?
My father wrote once the entire time I was at school, a postcard, it looked like he had used a number of different pens. The writing sloped haphazardly downwards and contained a quote from Job, unfinished, reference missing.
After the ‘Dance of the Wild Horses’ Miss May gave me the Prokofiev Toccata in D minor, a study in virtuosic anger, beating discord after discord, crashing crescendo after crescendo, that relentless pounding bass. My god, I loved playing that sort of music, I should have played it more. Why didn’t I? Why did I ever play anything else?
But Miss May said it was time to advance. She pulled out of her cabinet the first of the Romantics she taught me, a Liszt Consolation.
‘This requires an entirely different technique,’ she said, smoothing the pages open in front of me. ‘Less bash, more squeeze and knead. A touch that lingers at the keyboard, approaches it with ease, lifts up slowly from it, gently. “Sticky fingers” said Liszt.’
I started to play, but the melody, so beautiful, so yearning … I stopped, pretended to be squinting at the music.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, just the D flat major, it’s unusual.’
‘Oh yes, isn’t it cryptic, and so soft and tender, all those black notes taking your hands forever inwards. Here, let me show you.’
As she played I started to invent a secret technique. When those beautiful, terrible melodies threatened to undo me, I pictured a set of glass vials lined up in rows along my ribs and poured my tears into them.
‘Here. You try.’
I sat down, lifted my hands, began again.
‘Wring the emotion out of it,’ Miss May interrupted, demonstrating with two hands, which looked like they were strangling something. ‘Press your fingers into the keys deeply, join each of the notes together, each one, link them, do not allow any space between them.’
I took a breath, continued.
‘Not that much. Hold back a bit. You need a balance.’
I stopped again. No, I had not yet mastered the Romantics.
10.
Oxford, October 7th, 2005
Beethoven, the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata, first theme of the first movement, was hammering its
elf into the house.
This time I was determined. I got down the stairs as fast as I could, knuckling the banisters with both my hands, seeing stars, seeing nothing, seeing white, then stood staring at the piano, reeling. It did not move, it did not sound, why did I persist in trying to see that sound?
The music built again, the even quavers pounded, the rippling broken chords, soon they were wrapping themselves around me and I was caught. I started playing it in the air, arms jerking up and down, hands jerking back and forth, not caring for a moment what was real and what was not. Mid-phrase the music stopped.
I felt cold after that, even colder. It was the hunger, which had almost taken me over, it had a grip on me now and restricted movements of my head, my eyes; I could see less and less. I was going to have to do things faster. I made a cup of tea, spooned in a little sugar.
Into the study. I packed texts into the grate (The Market, Unfettered; Market Supremacy). I lit a match with a shaking hand, a flash of light, of warmth. I held it there.
I filed all of the works I possessed by John Field, every pretty nocturne. With one looping gesture I swept it all up, dumped it into F.
I’d originally thought I would give all the scores to Richard, my son, who lives in London and is a composer, and quite famous for it. Premieres at the Proms, at Carnegie Hall, recording contracts, soundtracks for movies, international tours, profiles in the arts pages of the dailies (his genre is described as ‘post-minimalism’). But I knew he wouldn’t want them, he had told me how much he detested such music, especially the Romantics – Rachmaninoff (a cliché, Mother, pure Hollywood), Chopin (over-dressed fop, says it all) and Liszt (show pony, basically) – which meant the scores would end up at the Oxfam Shop on St Giles, if not in the rubbish, although I hoped the filing would prevent that, would make them look more valuable, or valued.