Music and Freedom

by Zoe Morrison

  ‘He is such a magnificent boy, our son,’ I said, and while I was talking he poked around in a drawer of the desk. ‘He is the most loving, intelligent, creative, affectionate —’ but his lip was curling, and suddenly I knew that this was dangerous talk; I stopped immediately.

  ‘Love?’ he said sneeringly. ‘Love? What would you know about that? You’ve never shown me any love or support or —’

  ‘Edward, do not say these things, please.’ I spoke quietly, not wishing to upset him more, determined to make him see sense about Richard.

  ‘I’ve tried so hard to get you to see things; my God, I may as well have been talking to a wall you’re so thick!’ And so on, in the familiar way, but I let it pass over me, waiting for the invective to run its course.

  ‘Edward,’ I started, and I’d rehearsed this in my head while he was talking, ‘don’t you think that, as parents, we might try to improve on what has gone before? Don’t you think that you and I might have done better if we’d had more of a chance to just be ourselves in our childhoods? Don’t you think we might have found things easier if we had not been sent away so young?’

  He slammed the drawer suddenly; I jumped.

  ‘I don’t care what you think,’ he snapped. ‘He’s going. And if you want to talk about improving people, let’s look at you, shall we? You, who moon about here doing nothing, not exactly a productive member of society, are you? You’re a bad example. It will be good for him. It’ll toughen him up, teach him the ways of the real world, rather than this namby-pamby nursery you’ve got here. It’ll give him the best education around. Christ, it costs enough. Anyway, everyone goes there.’

  ‘Not everyone,’ I said. ‘Many children go to the local primary and are very happy there. I’d thought Richard would do the same.’

  He snorted; he was pretending to read the paper in front of him. ‘That place? Don’t be funny.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to lots of parents whose children go there and they think it’s excellent.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the wisdom of gossiping women. We should go by that, definitely.’

  ‘It doesn’t cost anything.’

  ‘Because it’s rubbish.’

  He looked up.

  ‘Get out. I’m not talking about it anymore. The decision’s made.’

  I heard a noise in the hall, Richard; he had finished his bath, got dressed in his pyjamas. How long had he been there? I took him upstairs, read him a story.

  Edward had bought Richard a ball (another first) and we were walking in the park the next day, before Edward left again. Richard ran off with the ball across the grass, he had spotted a friend, and as they played together, kicking it to one another, I brought up the question of school once more.

  I tried every tactic I knew. I flattered and argued and cajoled, and nothing worked; I started to feel that I was making matters worse. Edward was seeing it as a challenge, a chance to stamp his authority. So I pretended to agree with him, to see if that would work, but it didn’t; he thought he had won already.

  When I took it up with him again that evening he exploded, and he hit me and grabbed the back of my shirt and dragged me towards the wall, and I knew he meant to throw me against it, with Richard right there, awake, upstairs, which he had never done before. I managed to struggle from his grasp, got out of the room; he didn’t follow me. I could hear Richard in his bedroom, he had been bouncing his ball against the wall, and the ball had stopped and I knew he was listening, and I knew Edward knew that he’d been listening, too, and the thought of this, amid it all, made me sick. That Edward would do that to another person, his wife, and in earshot of his small son.

  Up to the bathroom, wiping off the blood, cleaning myself up, running Richard’s bath at the same time. Waiting until I stopped shaking before I went to get him. Richard walked to the bathroom stiffly, not looking at me, and I knew Edward’s timing had been deliberate.

  I should have left then, of course, and taken Richard with me. But I worried, I doubted. I worried about Richard’s future, son of a single mother, a cripple, a woman who had not got on in the world. I knew Edward would try to stop me. I worried about paying for Richard’s music lessons, his books, his shoes. I worried that Edward would prevent me from seeing my son at all. I had no belief in my capacity to survive.

  I talked to Marjorie, whose sons went to the school, and she said it was terribly prestigious, academically excellent, and its music program was highly regarded. I talked to Edith, whose daughter was there. Boarding is good for them, she said, and starting them young is best. I knew this wasn’t true, and I should have been more confident, done something more, but I kept doubting myself.

  Was this about me keeping Richard for myself? I wondered, because I was lonely and I loved him so much, and loved to have him close – was I being selfish? Was it because my marriage was so terrible that I wanted him near? Would it be better for his education, including his musical education, to go to the school? Was this premature goodbye another sacrifice I must make for him gladly? All these questions circling, circling, circling.

  When the time came and Richard was due to leave, I smiled and said, Oh, Richard, what a great school, you’ll be so happy there, and his eyes took in my face, and he saw it all, but he smiled bravely anyway, and trotted off with his little cap on, and his new shoes, and his bag over his shoulder.

  58.

  Oxford, October, 1979

  Sadness is demanding. It demands your entire body, the way it asks you to carry its burden; it makes you tire so easily.

  I aged quickly after Richard went to school. My hair started to turn white, lines appeared on my face. My skin became finer and drier and seemed to detach from my veins and bones and pulse. My breath was shallower, I had to sigh sometimes to catch the small portion of air that I needed to keep going. Sadness curled me into myself, asked me to think upon it. Even if I forgot it for a moment, it was still there, calling me back to its cold arms, this terrible grief.

  You stink, Edward said. You’re like an old dishcloth. Surprised, I think, by how low I could go. Get up and do something, for God’s sake. You have no self-respect. (He was right about that; I had disintegrated entirely.) He used me at will, wiping himself off, discarding me.

  Bess called around. I had not shown up at the arts circle or my volunteer work. She knew I was crushed by Richard’s absence; she’d seen many sad mothers, but she could not know or understand the extent of it. She caught me in my nightgown; I pretended I had the flu, easier for both of us. Somehow she got me to start coming on Tuesdays again; perhaps I was too tired to argue with her.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but I’m not talking about music or going to any concerts.’

  ‘We’re talking about Impressionism next time, and jolly old Monet.’

  ‘No Debussy,’ I said. ‘No Ravel.’

  ‘Just painting, Alice, just bits of pink and purple daubed on canvas by a Frog. No music. Although I don’t know why; I find music to be so healing.’

  It makes you feel, is what I could have said. That is the problem with it. I can’t afford to feel anymore. If I feel all this I’ll die.

  Richard came home some weekends, and for the holidays, and when he did I put up a front. I got the house ready and I washed and dressed nicely. He was a different boy already. He was growing up, but it was more than that. He had taken on an abstracted air, as if he were coated with something, and those offhand manners, they were something I recognised all too well. Occasionally he’d hug me and start to cry, but then his tears mysteriously stopped, as if he had given them an order, an order he’d been taught (I’d been taught it, too). This was too much. I held him close.

  I kept holding on. We made the most of the holidays. We swam with friends in the Isis, and I couldn’t help but think that he might have been swimming across the mighty Murray–Darling, a rite of passage. Then he’d have sat on the bank with his friends, perhaps some fishing afterwards, a campfire, they’d eat what they’d caught.

  I wrote t
o him every week. I wished I had wonderful things to write about, the glorious life I might have been living; instead I wrote about current affairs and what I’d seen in the park or meadow. Sometimes I’d include memories of our times together and imagine what we might do the next time I saw him. If I’d had the courage, I would have balled it all up in my hand and written: I love you so much. I love you more than life itself. You are a miracle to me, and a wonderful person. The things you feel are important, never doubt that. But I never did write that.

  At first he replied frequently, in that dear schoolboy hand. Then the letters got shorter and came irregularly. He was busy with other things, which I told myself was good, surely.

  After a while, if I tried to hold him when he came home, he’d pull away. Maybe it was just him growing up. Or maybe he blamed me for sending him away; by then he could see he wasn’t coming back. Edward’s decision had become mine. My acquiescence had sealed it. I don’t think he ever forgave me; the rupture it created between us never healed.

  Sometimes at night I thought about getting out of bed and walking to the school, sitting by the fence, as if I might hear him breathing in his sleep, that beautiful sound. Sometimes I imagined I’d hold up a sign as I sat there on the pavement. But what would the sign say? Maybe: I am near.

  After the Dragon School he went to Charterhouse, Edward’s alma mater, which also had an excellent music program (the best the country had to offer, several people assured me). He started spending his summers with friends, often in St Ives, Cornwall, where his friend Sandy lived. Sandy’s parents were artists (his mother a noted sculptor, his father a painter, and both of them younger than me). When he was nearing the end of school he started socialising in the artists’ circles down there (I read this in a concert program). I don’t think it was just the art and music that attracted him though; this was his surrogate family.

  When he finished school he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Music (more prestigious than the Royal College). What pride I felt then, and what fear. How my child continued to amaze and delight me (even at such a distance). Edward was appalled; he rang me from America screaming down the phone, great waves of the Atlantic lapping in my ears, said he wouldn’t pay for any of it. But Richard had got himself a scholarship. He was enrolled to study viola and the piano, but in his first year he took an option in composition, and that was it, he’s been composing ever since.

  Success came early. A work premiered at the Proms when he was still a student, followed by a recording contract, and so it went. He received popular acclaim, as well as from the classical music fraternity, and continues to do so. He also has a lot of energy. He can conduct one of his nouveau symphonies for the BBC in the morning, collaborate with a pop star in the afternoon, go to some publicity event in the evening, then fall into his studio and work all night. He looks the part too: he’s handsome, sexy, and dresses with eccentric style.

  He didn’t come home much when he was at college. He did bring his first proper girlfriend to meet me, a flautist called Marlena. She had long, wavy hair and a big mouth with large, plump lips. He was like a puppy around her, panting and jumping. She broke his heart, that one, and he was different with women after that, hardened, churned through them.

  The Christmas before last he came home with Martha, an actor; the visit was her idea, I’m sure of it. He sat with his legs out, arms crossed, looking bored while she made conversation about things like the garden, which I’d cleared by then and replanted (bulbs, sunflowers, vegetables; I ended up sitting out there a lot on an outdoor chair I’d scavenged from someone else’s rubbish).

  Who was this man, I thought, sitting in the front room saying nothing while his girlfriend tried hard to be polite and make conversation? Who was this man, so tall, successful and good-looking? This son of mine whom I no longer knew but continued to love with a feeling so strong it nearly choked me. Why was he sitting there like that while she talked? Why did he not lean forward, join in the conversation, tell me something about Martha, look at her when she spoke? Why did he ignore me when I prompted him?

  I had stopped writing to him every week when he’d been at college for a couple of years; perhaps I could no longer bear the silence in return. I found out what he was up to by reading the papers and listening to the radio (pacing around the house as it played, so full of feeling; he wrote such beautiful, unusual music). Why he didn’t invite me to concerts or tell me about them, I didn’t know. I assumed he was ashamed of me. Maybe Edward had got to him, said things about me. Or perhaps he wanted nothing to do with our gaping wound of a family.

  It was when Richard began receiving public recognition that Edward became interested in him. He started visiting Richard in London. He took him out to fancy dinners. I don’t know how much that would have appealed to Richard, and I don’t know what Richard made of his famous father – he never talked with me about Edward; I never asked. But I watched the two of them closely on the few occasions we were all together. Edward listened to Richard, I noticed. I knew only too well how Edward could woo people. He ignored me but was never as rude when Richard was around. Richard was formal with him, stiff. Wary? I wasn’t sure. Once I saw a photo of them in the paper at some event and Edward was standing close to Richard (perhaps hoping some of that cool Britannia would rub off onto him) and Richard was looking at him with an expression I could not quite fathom. I studied that picture. Was it contempt on his face, or just uncertainty, or something else? I wondered to what extent Richard had his father in him. Could he love? Did he treat women well?

  I wanted him to know how much love mattered, love that was giving; I wanted him to know that it enlivened you. I wanted him to know the truth of what had happened to his family, and why, so that he could make sense of things. I’d never even come close. Years I’d had to say all this, but I’d been scared, sad, defeated, and I was still putting it off. Picking up the phone, putting it down again.

  59.

  Oxford, June, 2005

  It was a Sunday afternoon. Edward was back in town and had just left for the tennis courts, swinging his racquet. His legs were wizened, the hair on them curly and white, his knees like two pebbles. I could have told him he was far too old for such a thing, but he’d become health-conscious in his old age, exercised regularly on various machines, and still thought he could do anything. Characteristically obsessive, he’d bought a juicer for the kitchen and demanded I peel and chop all sorts of strange fruits and vegetables to put in it. The machine took all the best bits out of them, stripped them to a thin, warm juice; I would have told him this, too, if he’d been interested, if I could still tell the truth. It took a long time to clean properly, that thing, and when it malfunctioned he called me stupid.

  He was not happy; contentment never found him. You could see in his body the disappointment, despite everything; the way his shoulders hunched, the mean twist of his lips. He expressed scorn and disgust for most others he encountered. I think he was envious of anyone who was happy. I never got a sense, though, that he knew what he was lacking and thus how he might fix it. Quite the contrary: it was always someone else’s fault. He continued to lash out at me, and anyone who unsettled or offended him, as long as it would not affect his reputation. He was the sort of elderly man who wrote aggressive letters to his favoured airline, using all his titles, to complain about, say, the service on the Dubai leg. For a man of intellect he displayed a remarkable lack of curiosity about the world around him. He seldom asked questions. He boasted constantly. He never listened.

  Richard was living in London and was established as a significant composer, but I had not heard any new work on the radio for a while, and when he didn’t appear in the Proms program for a third year running I was worried, but did not know how to raise it.

  I was still involved in charity work, mostly for the homeless. I was never the organiser, always one of the women in the kitchen out the back, or sitting in a cold hall behind a tin of petty cash. Privately, I resented that these activities were
so often tied to a church. I had no faith, thought God was a lie.

  I kept attending the arts circle, too, although sometimes I couldn’t get out of bed, and this depression would last for weeks. Getting dressed became a distant location I could no longer reach. I kept the house as best I could for Edward and in case Richard dropped in (he seldom did); I rarely had friends around, I didn’t have the energy. I knitted for charities and became quite skilled at babies’ and children’s clothes in modern designs. I had wanted a daughter; it wasn’t to be. I worried perennially that Edward would sell the house from underneath me. I grew old. My hands never got better; then again, I never tried them at the piano. Playing was a distant memory, part of being a girl.

  There was a rattle at the knocker that Sunday afternoon, unusually loud; Edward had been gone for about an hour. A young man stood there, a post-doc, who suffered Edward’s company, no doubt in the hope that Edward could help his employment prospects (Edward had a reputation for writing make-or-break references; I suspect one could never be entirely sure which).

  ‘Mrs Haywood?’

  He was bending over to suck in air as if breathing through a snorkel. I invited him in for a glass of water. (It turned out he had run all the way from the courts.)

  ‘I am very sorry. Edward, your husband, is dead,’ he got out eventually.

  I couldn’t speak for a few moments. Then, ‘I don’t believe you.’ I had outlived him? Not possible.