by Zoe Morrison
Oxford, February 7th, 2006
Monday again, a week had passed. I sat waiting for her in the front room. Should I just go over there? I thought. Should I just ask?
I watched bicycles glide by. I watched Caroline ride home laden with shopping bags, her front door opening from the inside as if by an invisible hand. I watched Henry bend to look in his letterbox, pull out a postcard from the stack of mail; it was probably from his granddaughter, she was travelling in China. How long was it since I had spoken to these people, or to anyone properly? I watched a large woman walk past with a tiny dog, pushing herself through the air as if she were battling against it, the dog prancing. A gust of wind would have it up in the air, surely, held back only by that lead it was attached to.
She had forgotten. She was busy. I wouldn’t bother her. She would come another day. And then he arrived.
Their daily sessions lengthened into the evening, then into the night. Her own practice, which she started as soon as Richard left for London, grew shorter and shorter until it did not happen at all.
It was at this point that I became distressed.
I tried to reason with myself. I had wanted her to think about the relationship between the soloist and the orchestra, had I not? Indeed, to play it with another? And was she not doing that? But I had envisaged this process as a couple of sessions in a room with two pianos. A process complementary to her preparation, one that augmented it, not replaced it.
I walked around Oxford that week while they played in the two houses, thinking these sorts of thoughts, sweating my cold sweat, breathing my fetid breath, my useless, shaking hands out in front of me.
I went into one of those new cafes, ordered a cup of coffee and sat in the warmth. I decided that I was not this sort of woman anymore, this woman who said nothing, did nothing and avoided everything; there was no reason to be like that now. I would talk with them about what was happening. I would ask them how much longer they intended to play through the wall, what the plan was to ensure Emily’s concert preparation was not affected, to ensure that she was properly prepared. Richard had mentioned a few days before that he had a meeting with his agent in London on Monday, tomorrow, so he wouldn’t be coming to Oxford; perhaps Emily would come to the house and I could speak with her. Or I could go to her. In the meantime I would talk with Richard – in fact, that very night; it would be better to talk with them separately. This cheered me. I bought an iced cupcake as I was leaving, ate it walking back to the house.
The house seemed to be empty, but then I heard a noise in the kitchen.
‘Mum. You’re back.’
He was standing in the kitchen doorway.
‘Coffee? I’ll reheat it,’ talking as if he had something in his mouth. I looked around. Pastries on the bench, half-eaten, crumbs all over the table.
‘Emily had to go and do a lecture.’
‘She was here?’
‘You just missed her. She waited as long as she could. She really wanted to see you.’
I moved stiffly to the sink, twisted the tap, filled a glass with water.
‘She has different commitments this term?’ I said.
‘This was just some special thing she couldn’t get out of.’
I looked at the mess on the table. I didn’t know how to begin to talk to him.
‘Have something,’ he said. ‘This amazing patisserie’s just opened around the corner from me. Here.’
He was holding out a pastry but I didn’t take it. He picked up another one.
‘Or this?’
I took it, fingered it.
‘Don’t worry about the mess,’ he said, ‘I’ll clean it up,’ and he brushed his hand rapidly across the table, gathering crumbs, which he threw into the bin.
‘Richard …’ I put down the pastry and glass, and to begin with I did not look at him, and it was as if I were talking to myself or the shed, the back fence – not the person beside me, not my only child. ‘I’m concerned about this thing you’re doing with Emily, these run-throughs. It’s wasting your time, as well as hers, and it’s ruining her playing.’
‘Ruining it? Mother, come on,’ and he was almost laughing.
‘She loses her tone when she plays with you. All the interpretation she has spent months perfecting has disappeared. And when you come here day and night she has no time to practise. What’s more, when you play together she’s shaping her playing around yours. She’s losing the sense of the solo part entirely.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ he said, as if I was cracking a joke, ‘she is not.’ Still smiling.
I felt a rush of anger then.
‘You know she’s only doing this to be nice.’
He moved suddenly and I swung around, but he was only folding the empty cardboard tray the pastries had come in.
‘I don’t think that’s true, actually.’ He put the tray in the bin. ‘If you’re worried about the solo part being overtaken by the orchestra part you needn’t be; I let her lead.’
‘That’s not what I hear.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘it might be a matter of how you see the concerto as a form, whether you see it as a soloist playing with an accompanying orchestra, or as two sources of sound working together.’
‘Obviously it’s about a soloist with an orchestra.’
‘I happen to disagree with you on that, but, practically speaking, it does depend a bit on the work in question. Now, take the second movement of this concerto, there’s a constant swapping between who is accompanying and who is playing the melody. The roles are constantly being reversed. Sometimes it’s the piano with the principal theme, sometimes it’s the orchestra – it’s the balance that matters.’
‘But there is no balance here, there is no swapping, your playing is nothing like that.’
He laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you’re right. We have a lot more work to do.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Well, I’ll be off then.’
No! I wanted to shout, but he was already stooping over me, kissing my forehead, then he stopped at the door.
‘Mum, you do know this isn’t just my idea, don’t you?’ and he was loping off down the hall, stretching up an arm to brush the ceiling with the tips of his fingers.
I sat at the window the next day, but she didn’t come; of course she didn’t come, I don’t even know why I had expected it.
The morning after, I waited until I heard the gate bang, then I rushed out.
‘Emily!’ I called, ‘Emily!’
She stopped, turned.
‘Alice,’ and something was different, I couldn’t place it. Was it her hair, her skin, her eyes?
‘How are you?’ she said. ‘I came around yesterday, I waited for you.’
‘I’m well,’ I said, although for some reason I was almost crying.
‘I’ll come around again soon. I’m so sorry, I feel we’ve hardly spoken lately. I’ve been so busy with work, and everything else, and, oh God, I’m late again.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you soon.’
‘Next Monday?’
She paused.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Yes, sounds good, Monday,’ but after a few hurried paces she turned again and said, ‘I think Richard’s coming next on Wednesday; shall we make it then?’ And off she ran.
81.
Oxford, February 16th, 2006
When he knocked I stayed in the front room for a while, listening to him shuffle his feet on the porch. Then I climbed the air to standing. When had I last eaten, I thought, moving towards the door in slow motion; was it that cake from the cafe? Or had there been some toast after that?
I opened the door and placed my body in front of it to block the view of the kitchen. I had brought the axe in from the shed, it was propped against the kitchen bench; Richard was beaming at me in technicolour, alive beyond measure.
‘You can’t come in today,’ I said, and now I was out in the street looking at myself, a scarecrow of a woman, her whole body prised into a crack in
the door.
‘Why not?’
‘Something has happened to the piano.’
‘What?’ frowning.
‘It’s broken. It has given up. It cannot stand this thing you are doing, these hideous sounds you persist in making.’
He laughed, head back, as if this was really funny.
‘Let’s see if we can make it better then, shall we?’ and he made as if to come in. I didn’t move.
‘I mean it, Richard. It’s over. That’s enough.’
He looked at me, surprised, then he shrugged a shoulder, scratched his face. Reassessing.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I’ve just realised I haven’t even thanked you for letting me use the piano and the front room for all this time. I’m very sorry. I can see now that it’s been an imposition. I should have checked. You’ve been very generous to allow us to do this; it’s been very kind of you.’
I didn’t say anything for a moment, then I managed, ‘All right. But that time has come to an end.’
‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘that you could bear just, say, three more sessions?’
‘No.’
‘Please, Mum. I would be very grateful. I can’t tell you how significant this all is, what it means to me.’
Means to him? He must have mistaken my puzzlement for wavering.
‘Please let me in,’ and that voice, that voice, even if I avoided the face.
‘Two,’ I said at last. ‘Two more sessions. And that’s it. I’m serious, Richard. You don’t realise how serious I am.’
‘I do.’
He stepped in, an entirely different shape from how he had arrived, shoulders hunched, everything about him dimmed, and he sat at the piano and quietly unpacked his things. I went down to the kitchen, put the axe back in the shed, and walked out of the house.
When I got back that night a strange thing happened. I heard them play a passage, and they were actually playing it together. More than this, it seemed they had finally learnt how to anticipate the other’s rubato, the ritardandos, crescendos and descrescendos. It was a big curve of a phrase that went up in the air like a bridge then tumbled down to a terrible suggestion of hell, and to hear them play like that shocked me, it was extraordinary. Then they started playing badly again, out of step, and there was Richard at the piano, throwing up his hands and laughing.
82.
Oxford, February 17th, 2006
The next day, the last day of their sessions together, I waited for a rainstorm to pass before walking on wet pavements into town. I was tired. Something had been drained, as if a tap had been left on too long.
I passed the delivery door of the Ashmolean and stopped to watch as two men unloaded a large model ship from a van. It was an old-fashioned ship like the explorers used to use, Captain Cook and the like – white sails, complicated rigging – and they carried it with their arms held like slings, one walking forwards, the other backwards; when they got it inside, the door shut with a click.
He was waiting for me when I got back. I let him in then turned to walk on, away from the house, but suddenly I felt I couldn’t, that I had no energy left; but I had to keep going, I thought. I couldn’t remain.
I can’t remember seeing much at all on that walk – gardens, houses, trees, garage doors rolling up, then down; they had disappeared. All that was left were the patches of uneven pavement in front of me and the line between the pavement and the gutter, which is what I ended up following all over North Oxford.
I reached a fence with a train line behind it and didn’t know where I was, panic rose inside me. A train roared past, carriages flashing, clacking, clacking; the train disappeared. I continued to stand by the fence looking at the empty track, unable to move, hardly breathing. After a while a young woman walked towards me on the pavement and I reached out to her, meaning to ask where I was, but she jumped away from me and hurried off.
I backed out of that terrible place, came to the end of the mysterious road. I kept walking until I found a main road, unfamiliar to me, but scanning the horizon I spotted the university science building and worked out which way I needed to go.
When I got back to the house I could hear, from the front gate, that they were still playing, but I could not keep walking. I lowered myself onto the front steps.
Perhaps it was simply a coincidence, perhaps they had played together long enough by then, perhaps they were making a special effort because it was their last day. Whatever the reason, they had discovered how to play that music together. Emily’s playing was beautiful again, in fact it was better than before; that song-like timbre had deepened and become more concentrated, stronger and more directed. At times it was as if she had worked out how to achieve the surge of a crescendo within a single note, defying the very mechanism of a piano. As her notes sang between the two houses and Richard’s moved below them I got up and went inside. He was huddled over the keyboard, back bent with the effort of playing the accompaniment, his hands like cupped structures, bridges, rising and falling. Striding out to play the principal part when it was his turn, mimicking her tone as best he could, then becoming quiet again beneath her part as it surged once more. I still don’t know how they did it, with no nodding or glancing, no visual cues. It was all in the listening, and the music, and the boldness to play loud when one part held the tune, and the ability to hold the rhythm of the other while playing their own part. On it went, they were stepping into the air with each note, they were two blind people walking into a strange room, arms out, hands searching, stretching, pressing, reaching further and further into the music.
83.
Currabin, December 21st, 2006
The piano was delivered this morning. I rented it six weeks ago from a shop in Mildura. The men rolled it down the ramp of the truck, then up to the house, pausing under the low branch of the old elm. What a sight it was. A great black piano amid fields of white-painted stumps. I showed them where to put it inside. Then I sat on the veranda listening to the man tune it. In two days perhaps I will have to ask them to take it back.
After they left I sat in the quiet, looking out across the block, trying to ignore the instrument behind me in the house. I decided that the stumps did not look like a graveyard, as I’d originally thought, but like something more compelling: a monument to an atrocity.
84.
Oxford, February 19th, 2006
I never heard them play the Rachmaninoff together again. True to his word, Richard stopped visiting in the afternoons. But Emily did not resume her practice next door; she stopped playing entirely.
I assumed at first she had gone away, but then I heard the clatter of her gate in the mornings, and the yank and shudder of the pipes. I wondered if the concert had been cancelled (but there were still posters up in town), or if something had happened to her (but the gate banged at the usual times), or if something had happened to the wall (had all the wet weather made it sodden, impermeable?). Maybe my hearing had disintegrated dramatically, or was I deaf only to the Rachmaninoff and Emily’s playing? I put on a recording of the concerto, the opening chords filled the room. I turned it off, sat looking at the street.
The silence of that house had been a comfort to me once; no, more than that, it had been a sign of safety. Now it was simply the silence of lack. Why did she not play the concerto? Why did she not practise now that she could? Play the thing! I wanted to yell, thumping the wall. What are you waiting for? Your concert approaches!
Into this silence, two days later, the music came. It came from her house and was played on her piano, but this was different music, and it was strange. It had no distinct melody or shape, it stopped mid-air and continued somewhere else. Disparate lines ran parallel to one another. The harmony made little sense to me, the intervals, in particular; these were notes with no recognisable relationship to one another. That would not necessarily have been odd, but the rhythm was also uncertain, variable, sometimes non-existent; there was no particular form or structure I could grasp.
Occasionally I thought I heard something I recognised within it, but then it would step away and became opaque again. It went on and on, this strange music, it seemed to have no sense of climax, cadence or resolution.
When it finally stopped, with no warning, and the familiar noises of the evening trickled back into the house – someone moving their bin, people on bicycles calling out to one another – its presence stayed with me, the uneasiness of it, the discordant quality.
I walked into the study and lifted books from shelf to hearth, but I did not burn them; I walked upstairs, fingered clothing, but did not pack it; I looked at food, but did not eat. The silence of the place gradually rose around me from a hum to a singing to a siren.
85.
Oxford, February 22nd, 2006
The strange music started again the next day, in the afternoon. I pulled on scarf and gloves, went out the door and looked at Emily’s house. I could see nothing, of course, just the brick wall of the basement below the porch. The street was cold and there was a scent in the air I didn’t recognise.
I placed my hand on the gate of the easement and pictured myself walking down to her door. What is this strange music? I would ask, smiling. And what has happened to your practice? as if bemused. And she would say something reassuring, provide an excellent explanation, and that night (prompted, in part, by my enquiry) her practice would resume. I kept my hand on the gate for a while, then went back into the house.
The music developed quickly, arcs of weird intonation clashing with one another, strands that were deliberately unconnected moving slowly towards the idea of a rhythm that came together then fell apart.
I was not doing particularly well at this point. I wasn’t eating much, I was paying scant attention to the cleanliness of the house, my clothing and my person (all this I realise in retrospect). I was listening for music I could not hear, but thought I should be able to hear, and its absence concerned me greatly. Why could I not hear it? Where had it gone?