Music and Freedom

by Zoe Morrison

  The Summer School was held every Wednesday. That first day, we caught the train from Paddington to Oxford, then took a taxi to New College. The streets were almost empty, just a few men on bicycles, almost as if there had been some sort of evacuation. What a contrast it was to central London; the scene was almost pastoral. Except for the buildings, that is, those grand, spired buildings with their studded gates and thick walls; some even had a sort of guardhouse at the entrance. The taxi drove slowly past them. We were silent, taking it all in. Then George started to whistle softly and Hetty tapped her knee; I smiled.

  The porter at New College escorted us down a drive, through an arch in a wall, a quadrangle, a gate in another wall, another gate and quadrangle, to a door. We stepped into a room with a faded silk carpet and a high ceiling. Young musicians stood around holding their instruments.

  During the day there were master classes and rehearsals, then late in the afternoon the room we’d met in that morning was set up for the first concert.

  I got there early, and with a couple of the other pianists watched two men and a woman, college staff, push a grand piano into the centre of the room, at the front, which was to be the stage, carry in music stands, lift chairs into rows. By this point people were streaming in and I turned to look for George and Hetty.

  This was when I saw Edward. He was standing at the back of the room, leaning against the wood-panelled wall with his arms crossed. I would have noticed him anyway, because he was beautiful. He was tall, broad shouldered, and had dark, slightly wavy hair, which looked recently clipped and was perfectly combed. He was classically handsome: high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, also crinkly bits around his eyes – perhaps because he was older than us musicians – which suggested to me a face that had been in the sun, laughing, smiling. He wasn’t doing that now, though, he was staring straight ahead at the empty stage.

  I’d been asked to play part of a Mozart sonata, which I took too fast (I still did that sometimes, as if the music wasn’t enough in itself), and then a Beethoven sonata, the Opus 109 in E major. When I played the Beethoven, for the first time I felt at one with that music. What I heard in my head finally came out of my hands, the two were one. I was the vessel; the music ran through me. The last movement especially, with its hymn-like refrain and variations, it felt elemental to me, the first melody. When I finished the room breathed in, then out, then someone stirred and the applause started. I bowed. He was still standing in the same place, clapping in a small way, private, but he was smiling now, it seemed at me.

  Trestle tables were set up, covered with white cloths; tea and crockery were brought out. There was still rationing then, and some of the food that was served we hadn’t seen for years. Rich cakes and slices, a leg of ham, a block of butter, a huge cob of fresh bread, a few slices already cut, even a dish of sweets; the table was crammed. People pushed out of the rows and crowded around to look, then formed a queue. The room was packed and raucous, people were elated, post-performance. I was being jostled and felt disorientated. I was looking for him, I wanted to put my eyes on him again, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. I made it into the queue, and when I turned around to look once more, he was standing behind me. I nearly jumped. It was as if he’d followed me. I turned my back to him and stood still, silent, staring in front. People were elbowing past, shouting at one another to be heard. I had started to sweat. I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  ‘You played the Beethoven, the 109.’ His eyes were large, brown and looked at me intently.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was very good. It was intelligent.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I have several recordings of that sonata, of all the sonatas. The way you played that tonight was better than any of them.’

  And the way he said it, too, as a statement of fact. I was pink, suffuse.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘You played the Mozart too.’

  ‘I did, yes.’

  ‘That second movement …’ and now he looked away, over my head, and squinted at the windows at the back of the room. ‘Well, do you like that music?’ Swinging back to look at me.

  ‘Oh yes. I mean, it’s beautiful.’

  ‘Tricky, though, isn’t it?’

  Not really, I thought, not at all, a child could play that. But a man had appeared at his side, they started to speak, heads bent together. Then Edward glanced back, murmured, Excuse me, put his empty plate down on the corner of the table and walked out.

  On the train on the way back to London I took the Mozart album out of my bag and reconsidered it. That week I practised it a lot. The next week, once the applause had died down after my performance, I sat back at the piano and played the second movement without repeats as an encore. When I got up I bowed and smiled, deliberately not looking at him at the back of the room.

  The concert finished; the noise surged once more. I thought he would come over to me straight away and talk about the Mozart, commend me, even thank me – but I couldn’t see him. I felt bereft. I also felt foolish. To think I had spent so much time that week practising that little schoolchild’s piece for him.

  I found Hetty and George, who were talking to an oboe player everyone had noticed (he’d played part of the Oboe Concerto in D minor by Albinoni; he looked like an angel Gabriel: curly hair, soft lips), and I made to join the conversation – the gentle words, the funny rejoinders – but I found I couldn’t concentrate. I was thinking I mustn’t have played the Mozart well, that something was wrong with it, although I didn’t know what, and that he had left so he wouldn’t have to talk to me about it. Or else I had misjudged the interaction between us completely; made it into something much bigger than it was, and that thought was even more embarrassing. I found myself suddenly annoyed with the conversation around me – it seemed flippant, silly – and I felt the oboe player looking at me, and I was self-conscious, not wanting him to, not like that.

  I decided to leave. I got my things together at the edge of the room, went back into the crowd, struggling between people with my arms full to tell Hetty and George I was off to catch the early train, and just as I was walking towards the door, there he was, right in front of me, from out of nowhere, his eyes flashing, his lovely hair – a strand had fallen forward and almost touched his forehead, and he was breathing as if he’d been running. When he saw me he smiled, and it was a beautiful smile, like being enveloped in warmth.

  ‘Not leaving already, are you?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, well …’ not meeting his eye, as if distracted, uninterested.

  ‘That Mozart.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ frowning now, looking at the door.

  ‘It was extremely good.’

  ‘Thank you,’ touching my ear, glancing at the door again; of course I had expected more. And how loud the room was, irritatingly so, as if people around us were actually roaring.

  ‘It was almost perfect. When I listen to you play, just you, I am transported.’

  The noise fell away, the jostling people; everything went.

  ‘Let me take those for you,’ he said, pointing to my bags. And then I was lighter, and we floated out through the door.

  Back we went through all the gates and arches of the college into the street, where the lamps were lit, even though it wasn’t yet dark. I remember the feeling of his arm beneath my hand, and light upon light guiding us on our way.

  As we were waiting on the platform, the steam of the train billowing and hissing around us, he told me that his name was Edward Haywood, he was an economics don at the college and involved with the organisation of the Summer School. My name is Alice Murray, I said, but I think you know that already. Yes, he said, of course.

  15.

  Oxford, June, 1950

  The following week, straight after the concert, he invited me on a tour of the college. We left the concert room and stepped into silence. Just our footsteps on the flagstones, no rhythm to it, his legs much longer than mine. I was nervous, I could barely look at him.r />
  ‘What a hush,’ I said, just to say something.

  ‘It’s always like this in summer. Come October the place is transformed.’

  ‘Do you enjoy the peace?’

  ‘I liked the music tonight. Yours most of all.’

  ‘So where are we starting this tour?’

  ‘Right here,’ and he stopped.

  Another quadrangle, smaller than the last, with a shaded cloister, also a pond in the middle with a fountain and a statue.

  He strode over to the pond and started to talk about the fountain and the statue: facts, names, dates. Then he peered at the cloister, which was quickly getting murkier as the sun set, and started on it. I was still at the entrance, listening. His anecdotes about these architectural features could have been entertaining, they had that promise, and he used at times a jocular tone – perhaps someone had told them to him in a way that had been amusing – but there was something wrong with his version; his stories had no point, they were square-shaped like the quadrangle we stood in.

  ‘So there you have it,’ he said, satisfied. ‘That’s your tour for today.’

  I couldn’t believe it. It was as if someone had taken a hammer to that statue in the middle of the pond and with a few big blows destroyed it. He was boring.

  ‘Well,’ I said, glancing away, shifting my feet; they made a crunching sound on the stone. ‘It’s certainly an ancient place. Do you think we ought to be getting back? It’s rather late, isn’t it?’

  He looked at me then, hard, for just a second, and with a few strides he was at my side.

  ‘I’ve been a bore.’

  ‘No, no …’ I laughed.

  ‘Ah, you see,’ pointing, ‘I know now that was very boring for you.’

  ‘Well, not quite that bad, I mean —’

  ‘I reverted. To tutor. Nervous.’

  ‘Nervous?’ But he wasn’t looking at me: topic closed.

  ‘Well, what do you like about this place? It can’t just be the history and so on. Why bring me here?’

  He turned to the quadrangle, as if he were thinking about it.

  ‘I like the way the moss grows up this gutter,’ he stepped over to it, ‘and all over the head of that gargoyle up there.’

  ‘The moss?’

  ‘Without asking permission. And what I really like about that statue is the shape of it, the curve of that shoulder. When it catches the afternoon light at this time of year, because of the way it’s positioned, the very sinews of it are highlighted, exaggerated, and I feel quite sure the artist did this on purpose, that they knew, absolutely, the effect they were creating. Sometimes when I see things like this I want to tell someone about it, what I know to be true.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ and I was staring at him now, and he turned so that he was facing me.

  ‘I like the way you look when you play the piano. The hair that escapes from behind your ear and falls across your face when your head dips … it happens a lot.’

  He reached out, picked up the strand of hair in thumb and finger, hooked it behind my ear, his thumb brushing the edge of my ear, and then behind it, and I had that feeling again of losing my feet, of the earth disappearing beneath me, and just as I was about to go up on tiptoe to kiss him, he said, ‘Come on then,’ and turned away.

  A piano student I’d done a master class with that morning was standing just inside the door and I stopped to talk with her. I could see him close by, he was talking with a couple of men but he had his body angled towards me. He caught my eye, smiled; I excused myself, went over to him – it seemed the only thing to do.

  I can’t remember everything we discussed that night. He must have asked about Australia because I know I found myself telling him things I hadn’t told anyone since I had been in England. I told him how much Australia was still a part of me. How much I missed it, yearned for it, and wanted to see my parents. That I was going back there to be a concert pianist. I remember the way he listened to me, absorbed, those brown eyes focused on me. When we talked about music and literature and paintings it turned out we had similar tastes. When he talked about his work, his field of economics, the passion he exuded, his energy took me with him, and made clear that he was brilliant, inspired, and that his work was his engine, his lifeblood. He had achieved his professorship at a very young age, and had served as an economist in London during the war.

  We stopped only when we noticed the silence around us. We looked up; there was no one else left in the room except a young woman in a uniform quietly clearing the table. We rushed from the college. He found a cab, and when we realised that I had indeed missed the last train to London, he found me another cab at the station, handed over a wad of money to the driver (refusing to even countenance the notion of repayment). As the vehicle started down the concourse he kept pace at my window. I asked the driver to stop, rolled down the glass. Edward stuck his hand forward, over the glass; I put mine out too. We held on.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said, then smiled. ‘You’ll be here next week, won’t you?’ and those brown eyes had grown even larger.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, smiling. I couldn’t help it. ‘Of course I will.’

  I remember the long empty road home, the dark countryside, the loudness of the engine, and a small round moon, very high, flickering in and out of the thick streaks of cloud. I was hearing it all again: the conversation, the music. I looked down at my right hand, the one he had held, turned it over, felt it with my lips. It was not a hand that had been held very much.

  I didn’t tell anyone what had happened to me. I spent most of that week in a practice room at the Royal College or in my room. I practised with a feverish, nerve-filled intensity. I felt hot, took off my sweater, but then my skin felt cold to touch. I felt pangs of hunger and thirst, yet to eat or drink sickened me. I looked for him in the streets of London, expecting to see him every time I went out, except that he was in Oxford, and the thought of bumping into him terrified me, yet it was all I could think about, all I longed for. At one point when I was practising I wrote his name on the side of a score, drew a box around it and then arrows pointing into it; it made no difference, he was in my head all the time.

  I was still playing Beethoven, all the works I had studied with Joiner, but what I was playing that week was so far from his big neat room with the watercolours on the walls it could have been an entirely different genre. This was Beethoven that soared, that walked on clouds and possessed the moon; I saw a little crescent moon that week from my college window and I thought: you are mine.

  I found myself fascinated with the process of playing. This object of wood, string and ivory creating sound – an entirely different dimension – from seemingly nothing, just a few actions of my body and all that was inside me. It was like an experiment, two substances mixed together then changing colour, spitting, fizzing, creating a third, except that to think of science at such a time seemed absurd to me, and entirely missing the point.

  I missed everything that week, except my practice. Meals, appointments, trio rehearsals, sleep. I just kept playing.

  And then the excitement of being on the train again, early on a Wednesday morning, leaning forward in my seat, heart pounding, stomach leaping, train rushing, rushing, chuffing, tooting, that pounding rhythm, the overwhelming noise. I had the window open, I could hear nothing else, travelling towards Oxford.

  16.

  Oxford, October 8th, 2005

  Liszt, Années de Pèlerinage, ‘Sonetto 104 del Petrarca’. I heard the beginning boom and rush of chords, the beaming cadential melody. It was played easily, expansively, the left hand opening itself out, stretching itself over the accompaniment, the right hand singing the melody into space. The ornamentation was played lightly, the dynamics were not overdone, it was played so well it could have been a recording.

  A recording, I thought, lurching to the window, scouring the street for speakers, megaphones, machines making music. Someone was out there playing this music to deliberately torment me. They
had seen me lurking, a thing possessed. But there was no speaker hovering in the air, no gramophone at the gate, just that black and white cat of the neighbours on the bitumen, twitching the tip of its tail.

  The Liszt carried on and on, pressing, pressing. I could bear it no longer. I had to escape it. I started up the stairs, heaving myself up with a swinging motion, but the music came after me, it was chasing me, it was whispering in my ear, Go, go! Up, up! I reached the top, let the banister go, ricocheted in slow motion across the bedroom to the window, heaved the heavy pane up, and the music stopped.

  Cold air fingered my face. I looked at the pavement where the cat had been sitting, at the line of houses (forever that line of houses), the gutter of the roof. Liszt, the virtuoso pianist and composer, the rock star of his age: women in his audience fainted when he played, those repressed and censored Berliners. They wore strands of his hair in clasps around their necks, made his broken piano strings into bracelets, fought over his discarded cigar butts. Liszt, the heart-throb who became a monk and spurned them all.

  I started thinking about the possibilities again. The Americans moving out four months before; I had really seen that, hadn’t I? I turned from the window, back to the silent house.

  I burnt; I filed; I called. When he picked up he didn’t say anything, it was as if he was waiting for something, waiting for me to speak, although I could have been imagining this. We held on like that for some moments. My hand with the receiver started to shake, my mouth went dry. I hung up, shaking my head, I nearly cried, it nearly broke me then. I sat listening to the silence, listening and starving, and glad of it, glad it would be all over soon.