Music and Freedom

by Zoe Morrison

  ‘I have been working extremely hard, when I am able to,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll have no problem then, will you?’

  He got up; I took the cups to the sink. Standing there, washing them out, what arose in me was a rage at him, at all of them, so huge, and with it a determination to succeed so enormous that it was bigger than me, and I felt a rush of new, boiling, seething energy. I would do this concert, I thought, even if it killed me. And as I was putting the cups away I thought, for just a second, and would that prove them right or me? I decided this didn’t matter, I would not be distracted by semantics, I would just get on with it.

  The next morning I knocked on the door of a nearby vicarage. The church had a hall that I knew contained a piano because I had heard it being played sometimes as I walked by. I told the vicar, a middle-aged fellow with floppy hair and an earnest smile, that I was a pianist from Australia looking for somewhere to practise, and this man, this kind man, said, Well, you must use our hall, we love to hear music, and we would love to help you. And just like that, he gave me the key.

  So whenever Edward was in the house and I needed to play, I went up the road to the church hall. And when Edward said, What are you doing, where are you going? I said, I’m going to work very hard on that concerto, you’ll remember the concert is in October. And he’d look at me, a bit unsure, as if trying to decide whether to stop me, and I would just walk out. And once or twice I’m sure he followed me, maybe he even stood under one of those big trees on the other side of the road and listened for a bit, just to verify it; I decided that I didn’t care about that either. I got back in time to make the dinner, so he couldn’t complain.

  I hammered at the concerto. I attacked it with hands and axe and pick and saw. The music was a stony, arid, weed-choked field that I had to clear and plough and plant in order to eat. How I hated that music by then. How I hated its bloated intensity, its clichéd themes, its predictable arches.

  Late summer turned into September, the days were still warm, the parks in full green glory, and I saw none of it. I did the housework in a frenzy, then cloistered myself in the front room or the hall and attacked the concerto again. My hands hurt terribly by this point; my fingers seemed to move too slowly on the keys, even missing notes. I did not stop, I could not stop. I shook my hands out sitting at the stool, and kept going.

  When the conductor got in contact through Edward in late September to arrange a rehearsal with the orchestra, I could play it. I knew all the notes. Not that that is readiness to perform such a work. For example, I was still striving so hard to play the solo part I could not really concentrate on the ensemble work.

  The rehearsal went badly for other reasons. The lead violinist stopped playing frequently to argue with the conductor about entries, fingering, interpretation, all petty points, and whenever she did the whole thing had to stop. In fact the entire string section seemed to be waging some sort of war with the conductor, who resorted to bellowing at them to keep quiet and play, although I noticed he couldn’t resist taking them up on some points. And then the rehearsal was over, people were filing into the chapel for evensong, and that was it; we hadn’t even reached the end.

  I sat at the piano watching the musicians pack up. Then I got up, put my score back in my bag beside the groceries I’d bought on the way over.

  I went back to the church hall with its bare wood floor, its white-painted walls, its spinning dust motes and those cheaply framed religious pictures on the walls (Jesus in robes with a glowing heart; a crowd of men with mouths open in surprise; men looking up towards Jesus with hands clasped and sad eyes), sat again at the old upright and played the concerto over and over. I was trying to make it part of myself; I was trying to tie myself to it in order to free myself from it.

  47.

  Oxford, October, 1951

  The morning of the concert. I woke, lay in bed not moving, then remembered what was about to happen. I got up quickly to use the lavatory.

  Downstairs, Edward was playing opera music in his study. The church hall was occupied on a Saturday morning; choir practice. The opera continued. Why do opera singers never hit the note squarely? I thought. Why does the orchestra shimmer around the voices, there, but never quite accompanying? The light was hard, bright. I watched a man walk past below with a dog on a lead, swinging a stick; on their way to the meadow. The clocks of the town started their slow, unsynchronised chime.

  I was standing at the basin in front of the mirror washing my hands, when I noticed that the little finger of my right hand was curling slightly inwards. When I tried to straighten it, it didn’t respond. I pulled at it with my other hand, but it returned to that odd curled-up position. I dressed and went downstairs, put the kettle on the stove, sat at the table, looked at my hand again. Now the fourth finger was doing it too. I stood up quickly and shook my hand vigorously. I looked again; there was no change – both fingers were bent.

  The kettle whistled; I picked it up, held it poised. I was about to tip the boiling water over myself, but something stopped me; something within me considered this and dismissed it. Instead I walked up the hall to the piano.

  I played a C minor scale. The two fingers played their notes slowly, as if with hesitation. I played a rapid passage of the concerto up the top of the keyboard and they could not keep up at all. It was as if something had been cut, a tendon, or a synapse, something that links thought and action.

  A beat of silence, and then another.

  There was no front room anymore, no body within it, just space around me, white and airless space, a mouth opening to the shape of an O, no sound coming out. The view of a hand, three fingers straight, two fingers curled; the view of a piano.

  ‘It’s breakfast time,’ he said at the door, frowning. ‘What are you doing?’

  I was lying on the chaise longue.

  ‘Have you been sleeping? It’s breakfast time. Get up. What is the matter with you? You look terrible. Sick.’

  I got myself to a sitting position.

  ‘Something has happened to the fingers on my right hand,’ I heard a voice say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something has happened to my fingers, the fourth and fifth fingers on my right hand.’

  ‘You’re panicking again.’

  ‘I can’t do the concert, Edward. We’re going to have to —’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘ah-hah,’ and now he was smiling, wagging his finger, ‘a little ploy, I see, to try again to get out of it.’

  ‘This is not an excuse, Edward. I cannot play. I have damaged my —’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Looking back, I can see now that —’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘One is not supposed to practise like —’

  ‘Show me your hands.’

  ‘One is simply not supposed to play the —’

  ‘Show me!’

  And I stood there, both hands up, palms facing him, ten fingers raised to the ceiling.

  ‘You’re clearly hysterical. They look perfectly fine.’

  I stared at them. I stared at him. They did look fine. Had he performed some sort of black magic to prove his point?

  ‘You’re seeing things that aren’t even there. You’re beside yourself. You need to do something to take your mind off things. That will help.’

  I recalled then how George and Hetty and I used to lark about before a performance. Rather than do another run-through we’d tell jokes and have a drink, perhaps something to eat, and I wondered if he might have a point. So when he said, Come in here, I’ll give you something to do, I followed him. And when he gave me a big jar of copper coins to sort and count in his study, that is what I did. I sat on the rug in front of the fire, which he had lit, even though it wasn’t cold, and I counted and sorted the coins several times to make sure I had things right, then I made patterns with them on the rug.

  When he got up from his desk and sat in the armchair reading, with his legs stretched out, I stayed on the rug. And when h
e wasn’t looking I examined my fingers, and they still looked fine, as if what I had noticed before was either exaggerated or imagined. And I did think about getting up and testing them again at the piano, but some strange inertia kept me sitting on the rug beside him, that little fire at my back.

  And the day ticked away, and the fire burnt down, and soon it was time to dress and go to the theatre.

  Backstage, the noise was darting around me in small circles, coming then going, coming then going, the musicians were laughing, talking, playing, tuning. I looked down at my hands. Both fingers had curled inwards again. I turned to him.

  ‘Look, it’s happened again. Look!’ putting my hand to his face.

  He grabbed it.

  ‘Stop that. You’re mad.’

  ‘You have to see.’

  He frowned over my fingers for a second.

  ‘You’re doing that deliberately. Straighten them out.’

  ‘I can’t, I tell you, I can’t. I would if I —’

  The conductor, all flapping tails and mutton chops, red in the face, bustled over like a rooster; he shook Edward’s hand.

  ‘Three minutes, Mrs Haywood, and we have a full house.’

  I lurched to the door, I almost fell. Edward grabbed my arm.

  ‘Pull yourself together. Pull yourself together, for Christ’s sake. You go out there and do what you’re supposed to, and you do it well.’

  Members of the orchestra were staring at us. I was embarrassed, I was ashamed. I was standing backstage with only three functioning digits on my right hand. He left. The orchestra fell silent, formed a line, then they filed out, and soon I was walking onto the stage.

  I remember looking up and seeing the ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre beyond the lights, the painted sky, the cherubs gambolling in the clouds with ribbons, a scene depicted many years ago and over-painted repeatedly. I remember looking at the grey-brown clouds, the smudged cherubs with missing smiles, bodies in fragments.

  I sat at the piano, my hands on the keyboard. A white baton danced before me, two black arms were thrusting, jerking, the baton was hitting the air harder and harder, a seething face behind it. My hands, with their missing fingers, clattered up and down on the keys, and when it was all over I went to the lavatory and hid in there until the theatre was empty.

  I crept out of the toilet. I pushed on a heavy door, let myself out into the night. Keeping close to the wall of the theatre I crept around its perimeter. Then I sat on the steps in the shadow of the railing where I could see people pass. I did not have my key or bag; I didn’t think I’d need them.

  From where I sat I had a good view of the White Horse pub across the street, the bar below street level. I watched two men buy drinks, chink glasses, laugh at something then look away from one another and around the pub.

  In the end I walked home, slinking up the back streets. I knocked when I got there; there was no answer. I went around the back, climbed in through the kitchen window, clambered over the bench. Then I checked the house in the dark; he wasn’t there.

  48.

  Oxford, October, 1951

  In the waiting room there was a baby in a pram lying still. Its eyes were wide open but were rolled back, looking at nothing. A few seats down an old man bent and hacked into a cloth he held in both hands.

  The doctor was old, tired. He diagnosed a conversion disorder, focal dystonia produced by hysteria. He feared my hands could deteriorate further. Performance was clearly the trigger, so that had to be avoided, but any piano playing was a great risk (he said sadly) because it could make matters worse, even impede basic functioning. I must not play at all, he said.

  All right, I said, because I had no intention of doing so anyway.

  That week after the concert I was a creature without a shell again, and this was when he came back to the house. I wish I could have found it, that hard little home that fitted me well, to tuck into. But I couldn’t find my shell, couldn’t rustle up an adequate substitute fast enough. Or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what I was like that day; it would have happened anyway.

  I was sitting at the window. I had not left the house since I visited the doctor; mostly I had been in bed. When he came in, making that noise with the key at the front door, I did not move. He turned the light on; for a few seconds I closed my eyes against it.

  ‘This place is filthy,’ he said.

  It didn’t matter to me anymore, you see. I felt him move behind me, heard him go down the hall, into the kitchen, then come back.

  ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Get up and look at this mess. I’ve never seen it in such a state – it’s abominable.’

  I got up and stood before him, my head spinning. I was not sure I would be able to remain upright. I noticed, vaguely, that he was still wearing his travelling gloves, the tan ones, soft, fine leather, he was running his index finger over the mantelpiece, but I was not taking this in properly, the possible consequences. He inspected the finger of the glove, rubbed it with his thumb, got out his handkerchief, spent some time cleaning it.

  ‘Come here.’

  I didn’t move. I had run so hard, for so long, and got nowhere, and where was there to run to anyway? I did not know, I could not see, and when he came for me he drew back his gloved fist. He hit me hard in the stomach, below my ribs. I doubled over, clutching myself, fell to the floor. A few seconds then the pain hit me.

  He stepped over me; I heard him pick up his bag, go upstairs.

  When I could breathe again I sat up. I was sure there would be blood, that it would be gushing from me, from this great, gaping wound, the pain was so intense. But there was no blood on that new carpet in that grand old house with the antiques in the rooms and the paintings on the walls and the smooth, white ceilings, and the man upstairs unpacking his suit; there was nothing at all.

  49.

  Oxford, October 15th, 2005

  I was in bed having a conversation with myself about where to position my body, because there was no getting out of bed now, I could not even lift an eyelid. Such a weight.

  As I began to drift I heard the scales again, the technical work, and I was home, my mother was sitting beside me, telling me to do this one and then that one, it was a random drill and I was following, arpeggios next, up and down, hands all over me, pummelling me, shoulder, clavicle, head, spine.

  When the music came it was my body that reacted first, that sudden jolt of recognition, bile jerking into the throat. I spat it onto the floor beside the bed. What I could hear clearly, although it was very soft, was the repeated bass note, the grand pianissimo to fortissimo crescendo, the beginning of the Rachmaninoff Concerto in C minor, number 2. And then it stopped.

  I lay still, barely breathing. It started again from the beginning, the bass note beating, beating, the treble in its heightening response. Like a spectre I rose from the sheets, got down the stairs, clutching at the wall with my hands, and navigated the house one last time, brushing things with my hands, checking it all once more – the gramophone, the sound system, the piano – for sound, for life. Then I propped myself up at the window and once again dragged my gaze over next door’s rain-slicked porch.

  50.

  Oxford, October, 1951

  He beat me badly after that a few times a year. Never a blow others could see – he was clever about that. A belt around the legs or across the back; a kick on the bottom that sent me sprawling; a punch to the abdomen. He was strategic about it too, always in control. This was no flying off the handle, no striking out while drunk (he never drank much, Edward). This was considered. This was action and consequence. This was explained and justified.

  My face was slapped because I had made a mistake with his laundry. I was screamed at and kicked because I was late with his dinner. I was hit for not answering quickly enough. When it was particularly bad he tucked me up in bed afterwards and brought me a cup of sugary tea. Sometimes he sat beside me, holding my hand, and explained things to me.

  It was just that I was so hopeless, we
ak, stupid and lacking. Some of it I couldn’t help. Women were like this. I was sick (women sickened easily). I needed assistance, correction, instruction; my lack of a decent education was a pity. I needed to do better. All the wives he’d seen did better than I did. He was worried about me, me and my illness. I could get sicker.

  (I think this is what he must have told them after the concert. My wife is not well. She needs a lot of looking after. This recent bout came on suddenly, just before her concert, and it has been a great shock to me. Thank you, yes, it is a terrible burden.)

  Women, he said, had trouble understanding things and speaking the truth. It was partly hormonal, partly the way their brains were structured; they had an immature understanding of the world. I needed to try harder to get things right.

  There was another philosophy as well, linked to his academic work, something about the world consisting of self-interested individuals. The stronger and superior will naturally rise to the top, he intoned. (Sometimes at this point he brought me ice wrapped in a tea-towel to put where I said it hurt; he was indulging me, he knew it didn’t really hurt at all.)

  The Steinway was covered with a shawl, a vase of silk flowers was put on top: anemones – red, white and deep purple-blue, with black centres (a Union Jack in abstract miniature, I once thought). It turned out they were a bad choice of ornament; they collected the dust terribly.

  51.

  Oxford, November, 1951

  Speech was dangerous. I became a tight-rope walker.

  ‘Baroque, this piece of music,’ he said, listening to Mozart.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said (it wasn’t, of course). But the tone must have been wrong; he looked up sharply. ‘Oh yes,’ I said again, better, it seemed. ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘It’s warm,’ he said, another time.