Music and Freedom

by Zoe Morrison

  He blanched. I thought he was going to vomit. I turned around quickly, got the plastic salad bowl from the draining board, held it out to him, but he shook his head.

  ‘I’m just … I’m awfully sorry,’ and the poor man, he was in agony. ‘We thought we should tell you immediately. We shouldn’t have done it like this, we should have found a friend.’

  It was a massive heart attack. Edward was about to return a lob when he collapsed on the court, reaching up, back arched. Racquet dropped.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said.

  All right? All right? I had outlived him! My ribs were creaking, my diaphragm expanding, I could breathe again. I could breathe! I started to feel light-headed, everything was white, bright, buzzing, singing. But the young man was asking me something, he wanted me to go with him to the infirmary. I spiralled towards the ground.

  When we arrived, the two others who had been playing tennis were standing by the body, which was under a green sheet, talking about the game. It would have been a winner, they said, of the shot Edward had been attempting. If he hadn’t died, that is, someone said. Me.

  A funeral fit for a statesman at the college; a rehearsal the day before. Would you stand there, Mrs Haywood. Good. Now we all rise. Will your son be attending today? Just tomorrow. I see.

  The eulogies were as expected. A magnificent mind. One of the best the country has ever seen. A lifetime of service. An example to us all. A list of his honours, positions, medals. Richard declined to speak; some of his music was played instead (a requiem he’d written for a pop star some years before).

  A few dons came over afterwards, murmuring their commiserations, but not many. They were interested in Richard, though, those Oxford men, lining up to shake his hand, smirking up at him, so tall in his tight suit, his pointy shoes, his extraordinary hair. All the women looking his way, too.

  Then, thank goodness, Richard touched my elbow, said it was time to go home. At the door I was taking the cups and saucers down already in my head; we could finally talk. Until I realised he wasn’t coming in, he was just dropping me home. So sorry, have to get back to London. You’ll be all right, won’t you, Mother?

  I went down to the kitchen and sat at the table. At one point I got up and put an egg in a saucepan on the stove, but I didn’t light it, I just sat there watching it.

  In the morning I was still in the kitchen watching it, the dawn reflected on the side of the saucepan. In my hands was the black patent leather handbag, peeling at the zip – a hand-me-down from Bess – which contained my purse, a hanky and the keys to the door. I got up, walked down the hall, but instead of walking out the front door I went up to the bedroom and closed the door.

  The phone rang; mail dropped to the floor – letters about Edward’s papers, wanted for collections, universities, museums, libraries. I replied to none.

  Edward’s solicitor rang, requested a meeting, earliest possible convenience. I went up to London, walked all the way from Paddington to save the money of a tube ticket. There was a wind in Hyde Park that day, circling, picking things up, putting them down – leaves, twigs, rubbish were all lifted, danced, dumped. It was in the solicitor’s office too, I soon noticed; the blinds on the windows suddenly lifted and rattled, making me start. The solicitor told me that Edward’s seams of wealth, of which I had no knowledge whatsoever, would be managed by a series of trusts. The allowance I had been left, I quickly calculated, would barely cover basic living. He took out a photograph of one of Edward’s London houses (again, I’d had no idea). There were two cars in the garage, one a Jaguar.

  I walked back to the train station, every bit of me shaking, realising belatedly that I had not eaten or drunk all day. With the few coins in my purse I bought a cup of tea at the station, and how extraordinary, I remember thinking, staring at the tracks, that the man could hate and humiliate me, even from his grave.

  ‘Apparently I’m in charge of some bloody trust,’ Richard said on the phone that evening, ‘and I have to pay all your bills, or something equally ridiculous. Christ, he was a … Anyway, I’ll do it for now, but we need to get you some cards so you can manage for yourself, also change that fucking crazy allowance he’s given you. I’ll get onto it, all right? I’ve got to go now.’

  More phone calls; I didn’t answer. More letters; I left them on the floor. I rang Richard a few times but he wasn’t there. Bess came calling, I watched her waiting on the doorstep, watched her leave.

  He had died and I was free. Cue the Hallelujah Chorus. Cue the end of Beethoven’s Ninth. Or cue nothing at all. It doesn’t matter, just walk out that door!

  But I didn’t. I sat looking out the window or lying on the floor. The man had died, but I still couldn’t leave, and I couldn’t understand why.

  The world kept turning, the arts circle met, the charity rosters rolled on, and I didn’t do any of it. Instead I started to burn his papers and books, the ones that all the letters mentioned first, which gave me warmth, faintly, briefly. I was forgetting to eat, although this was not deliberate yet. Then one morning in late September, sitting at the window, feeling hungry (but dully, nothing sharp about it), I decided that if I wasn’t going to leave, if I couldn’t reach Richard, if I couldn’t do these things, then I would like to die instead. There was nothing dramatic about the decision; it was just a soul quietly giving up. I remember looking over at my knitting needles, which I hadn’t touched in weeks. There was a pullover on them, unfinished, for a baby girl in mauve and blue wool – perhaps someone else could finish it, I thought. I would leave the pattern handy.

  I sat at the piano and struck a note with my finger: A, concert A, a sixth above middle C, and I heard an orchestra tuning up, long bows on open strings, perfect fifths splitting, opening, closing, surging, bowing, the woodwind, the brass, the growl of the double bass. A, A, A, everything playing that note until it, too, began to fade, waiting for the music to begin.

  60.

  Oxford, October 16th, 2005

  I was on the floor in the front room listening to the first movement of the Rachmaninoff being played over and over. My fingers were moving against the carpet, my chapped lips opening, closing. I was very thirsty. The hunger might fade, but my God, this thirst.

  When the playing stopped I lay in wait to see if I had died or if it would start again. The phone had rung once, twice, three times; now it was going again, and I could not get to it, I could not move, and this upset me. I began to weep, or was it raining, for when I inched my head to the left I could see drops on the glass.

  The rain became harder; I could not hear the music. I gripped a wall, clambered onto the stool in front of the piano.

  The rain skittered off the gutter, sluiced down the drains. A cyclist flew past the window wearing a jacket that streamed out behind her, flapping, rippling; dark wings. The rain diminished as suddenly as it had surged and the music surfaced through it.

  I crashed my hands in fists onto the keys. The music stopped, but then continued. I pounded my fists over and over. The music stopped, then started from the concerto’s beginning. I did this again and again, my arms shouting in protest, my hands shrieking. Every time, after a small pause, that music continued.

  Instead of trying to drown it out I started to correct it. When I heard a wrong note I found the right one and played it back, one finger extended, over and over again, as loudly as I could. This made the music stop for longer, but the right note was always played back, as if in polite acknowledgement. I started to correct other things, not just wrong notes. Incorrect rhythm (I bashed the correct rhythm out on one note repeatedly), misplaced rubato, ill-judged dynamics and expression. I corrected it all. And everything I did the music listened to and incorporated. But this could not last, surely. After a while I noticed that the music was getting slower, the pauses more frequent, and after a long correction to do with the shape of a phrase (during which I had pulverised my finger) it stopped for a long time. Had it disappeared?

  I sat at the keyboard, waiting, hurt
finger at the ready.

  I looked out at the dark road, slick with the rain still sprinkling down. I played the concert A a few times, just to be sure. But nothing came back, no music at all. It had finally gone.

  The next morning, there was a knock on the front door.

  II

  61.

  Currabin, December 17th, 2006

  When I finished writing last night, I hid these pages beneath the newspaper on the kitchen table, came back out, the parrots were shrieking in the gums along the drive, and as if on cue my neighbour Shirley rounded the bend and bustled towards the veranda, a bottle of wine in one hand, a dish of her lamb casserole in the other.

  ‘He never listens to me,’ she said.

  We both looked over at the paddock next door where Harold, her husband, was riding his tractor wearing a pair of large earmuffs. I don’t know what he’s up to out there; I thought you weren’t supposed to work heavy machinery through this soil anymore. Yet every evening, there he sits, riding the tractor up and down. I’ve almost got used to the noise, rrr-rrr, rrr-rrr.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s what I used to think.’

  ‘About my husband?’

  ‘No, I meant about mine.’

  We sat in silence for a bit.

  ‘I suppose he’s nice otherwise,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘He looks nice.’

  The tractor was over by the fence, throwing up a huge cloud of dust that glowed golden in the falling light. I did think Harold was nice, actually, the few times I had met him, but what would I know? He’d come over with Shirley not long after I arrived, sat on the veranda and sucked slowly on a bottle of beer. He wanted to make sure I knew that there was a drip system on the property attached to a rainwater tank. He wanted to make sure I was using it to water the orange trees. We batted this topic to and fro politely; I have no intention of using it, I think the trees should be allowed to die.

  The two of them are clearly having problems, which might explain Shirley’s visits in the evenings, with her bottles and her casseroles (unfortunately not to my taste, although I don’t tell her this because her intentions are so kindly, and, well, kindness, what else is there?) It probably explains the tractor, too, come to think of it.

  Shirley and Harold have two children who live in Mildura and have families of their own. They have friends, enough work, are healthy and are involved in various good works in the community, yet this issue between them, whatever it is, is clearly making her most unhappy.

  Now she stared at him, leaning forward a little. ‘Do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know him. He just looks … honest. I think it’s the way he sits. But that could be rubbish,’ I added quickly. ‘You’re the one who’ll know best.’

  She nearly left the rest of her bottle behind. I had to call after her to take it. She will be back this evening, I guarantee it.

  62.

  Oxford, October 17th, 2005

  A young woman stood at the front door. She was thirty-something, tall, had long brown hair with a fringe, an attractive, open face.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m the piano player from next door.’

  The house was falling down around me. Doors were blowing off, walls crumbling, windows melting to pools, and there I was amid the structural ruin, a suspension of dust spinning around me.

  ‘Emily,’ extending her hand. I reached out and was clasped then released. ‘I was wondering,’ looking at me, right in the eye, ‘if there might be a better time for me to practise.’

  I stared, open-mouthed.

  ‘Perhaps I’m too loud,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Sorry about all the wrong notes,’ her expression neutral.

  I looked down at her hands: unusually large, the nails were short. I wanted to touch that hand again, feel it, the flesh, the warmth.

  ‘You know the concerto well. Have you played it yourself?’

  After a beat, I nodded.

  ‘Well, I just thought I’d come around and introduce myself. I’m performing it soon, you see, and I wondered if we might be able to negotiate some times when I could play … uninterrupted.’ It sounded slightly rehearsed, the way she put it.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I said, still not quite believing.

  She blinked.

  ‘Next door,’ a little louder than before. ‘I’m the one playing the piano.’

  ‘But it’s vacant.’

  ‘Just the top part, the house. I’m in the basement flat.’

  ‘Basement flat?’ Such a thing did not exist.

  ‘You don’t have one? It’s the old cellar. The entrance is down the easement. There’s a gate.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘I suppose you can’t see it from here.’

  I looked at my porch, at hers.

  ‘I moved in properly a few days ago, but I was coming and going before then for a bit, once I got the piano in. The thing is, I’m really quite woefully underprepared at this point and —’

  ‘So you need to practise.’

  ‘Yes,’ shoulders relaxing, ‘that’s right.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ I said.

  ‘Uh …’ her gaze slid next door.

  ‘I mean your accent.’

  ‘Oh. A place called Orange Town, just outside Toronto. And you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you from here?’

  I licked my lips. ‘I’m from here.’

  ‘Right.’ Hands into her pockets.

  ‘I’ll be quiet,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks,’ but she was frowning again when she left.

  I closed the door, retreated to the chaise longue to think. I looked around. I was shocked to see the place still stood, unaltered.

  63.

  Oxford, October 18th, 2005

  The next morning I was upstairs putting some clothes into a bag; I was packing. In order to have the energy to do this I had eaten several Custard Cream biscuits, an apple, also a packet of sausages cooked in the frypan and dipped in sauce. I was holding a vest, as my stomach considered all this food (producing a vast grumble and churn, pains shooting out every which way), which was so old it was grey, and it had a rip under the arm. Had I kept it as proof? Of that night he heaved me out of the back door and I grabbed the frame and resisted for once, wailing no, no, but he wrenched me off anyway and put me outside on the cement in my underclothes. It was freezing that night, then sleet started to fall. I scraped at the door like a dog, whimpering, in disgrace. It was as if they were the only options back then: out or in. I folded the vest, put it in the bag.

  I heard her play the note, the concert A, several times: A, A, A. But I paused before I went downstairs and by the time I got there the note had stopped.

  When she practised the concerto that evening I sat by the wall listening carefully. She was getting a lot of things wrong, so much so that I wondered if it was my recollection of the work that was at fault. I got out my old score, followed the music with a finger, turning pages, flipping back as she repeated passages. No, it wasn’t me.

  She didn’t practise long; I’d have thought she would keep going for hours. I would have kept going for hours if I’d been playing like that and had a concert coming up.

  The next morning: onto the good clothes, which had hardly been worn – the black velvet frock, the bolero jacket. Performance clothes, of a sort, for I had got better at those college dinners, it had not taken me long to learn the right way to talk; to make conversation that neither elicited nor required any response. Once, before a dinner, I’d walked down the stairs and Edward had said, before he’d even seen me, No, don’t wear that, wear that other dress I got you, which amazed me. How had he seen me, was he omnipresent? Although, looking back, it was just because of the structure of the staircase – he could see me descending before I could see him, nothing more.

  I heard her play a minor third, C-E flat. I got downstairs in time, but at the last minute I lost my nerve, veered away from the piano, into the study.

 
C-E flat, she played; the sound was muffled in the study. I picked up a bit of paper, watched the fire travel upwards towards my fingers.

  C-E flat; C-E flat.

  Then she played a short piece of music. It was modern and wan, it had a simple melody that dipped and lifted. It was very beautiful and I went towards it, towards the wall, and when she finished she played the concert A, and straight away, before I could think, I went to the piano and played it back, A-A: Hel-lo.

  A few minutes later, another knock at the door.

  ‘Hi there,’ smiling.

  No doubt about it, this woman was glowing. Her skin had the look of someone who exercises, sleeps well, eats well, works well, has interests. Every movement she made was sharp; there was nothing defeated in the way she carried her body. This was a woman in full command of herself, I thought. Yet she didn’t play like that.

  ‘Has the wall always been like this, so porous?’ she said.

  I cleared my throat. ‘No.’ Quite the opposite, I could have added. Apparently no one ever heard a thing.

  ‘I think the landlord only recently converted the basement into a living space. It was a wine cellar before then.’

  ‘Is it dark?’

  ‘Surprisingly not. They’ve made it into one big open space, studio style, and the entire back wall is glass, so the light pours in, and there’s a view of the garden. Best of all, I finally have a place to myself to play uninterrupted and whenever I want.’ Then she fell silent, as if she’d said the wrong thing.

  I cleared my throat again. ‘I must apologise for —’ but she didn’t let me.

  ‘Ever since we spoke I’ve been meaning to come around again and apologise. I didn’t say at the time that I learnt some very useful things when you played through the wall like that. I hope you’ll reconsider and continue doing it.’