by Archie Hind
Alec, however, kept riding up to her, stopping beside her, inclining his head sideways and saying, ‘C’mon Sadie Maxwell and I’ll gie ye a shot on my bike,’ and when she shook her head he would taunt, ‘Are ye feart?’
‘You would tumble me,’ Sadie had said.
‘Away ye go, I’ll not tumble ye. I haven’t ever scaled anybody yet.’
‘Would you go slow?’
‘If you want I’ll go slow.’
So Sadie was coaxed on to the bar of Alec’s bike. She sat carefully sideways on to the bar and balanced herself while Alec held the bike steady; then he put his arms round her to grab the handlebars, thrust down on the pedal and she felt herself carried away in a delicious surge of motion. After that she hardly noticed the movement of the bike, so unprepared was she for what she would feel. Sadie had played, along with the other children, at games of truth and dare, and at night in the back close she had occasionally kissed and giggled and held off a fumbling, groping boy. Alec however, in carrying her on his bar, directed all his physicality towards controlling the bicycle, and being less aware of her his movements were powerful and frank. His knees pumped up and down with the pedals and each time she felt his left knee under her thigh. She felt the hard violent movements of the muscles in his arms as he controlled the front wheel and the broad, hard curve of his chest on her back, rising and falling. His breath blew on her cheek, his chin was nearly in the crook of her neck and shoulder, and she could smell the mint from the chicklets he was chewing. She felt the rough, rhythmic exhalation in his throat each time he pushed down on a pedal and had a sense of being lifted and carried in the rhythm of his uninhibited vigour.
For a few seconds, just as Alec pushed off, this shockingly intimate juxtaposition with Alec’s body made her shiver, a sharp slightly unpleasant sensation, then as the goosepimples came up she found a strange conditional pleasure in the feeling. She held her body balanced between the nearly unpleasant sensation and a desire to lean back limp against Alec’s big hard chest, a balance easier to hold if she breathed like him with each thrust of the pedal. When he finally let her off she heard him laugh awkwardly as he said to one of his friends, ‘That Sadie Maxwell, she’s a nice wee thing, getting –’ and for a minute or two could hardly pay attention to anything else going on around her.
Sadie had been a few months from her fourteenth birthday then. Less than five years later she was pregnant by Alec so they married. Ann, their only daughter, was born, then Colin, then Hugh. They had been brought together by sharp, clamorous specifically genital sexuality that had eventually died, leaving them with pleasantness, decency and habit keeping them together. Both came from a generation and a class which considered any break in marriage vows utterly disgraceful. This was not out of principle or religious belief, but from sound, ingrained knowledge that good behaviour was all that was economically possible. Perhaps there was also a strange and deep collusion between that original sexual clamour and the later transformation of its binding energies into a mature and stable economic arrangement. Until the boys got older Alec was sometimes not a very good husband, becoming neglectful, indifferent, irritable, sometimes angry and occasionally vicious, but nobody doubted that the marriage should be tholed. Sometimes Alec would say, conventionally, standing in some bar, ‘Ah well, if I was single again,’ and Sadie, perhaps more dangerously would reminisce, but that was all. Eventually Ann had married, Colin gained his apprenticeship, Hugh and Alec were both earning good wages. There were good carpets in the house, Sadie could splash a little at the Co-op, a routine had been established – some sort of contentment reigned.
Yet at night as she lay sleepless Sadie still reminisced. That period of youth had gone when clamorous energies obliterate our histories for a while, and now she found herself consciously returning to these vague hopes and lucid glimpses of childhood and measuring against them her adult life. Now as she lay listening for Colin’s key to rasp in the lock she associated these lucid glimpses with the big piano looming on the other side of the dark kitchen.
The following Wednesday morning at eleven o’clock Sadie went to see Mr McKay, the music teacher whose address the piano tuner had given her. She arrived ten minutes early. McKay lived on the outskirts of the city in a quiet street of bungalows with their backs to a golf course. When she rang the bell McKay opened the door, ushered her brusquely into a front room off the hall, muttered something about still having a pupil and left her. From a room at the back came the sound of a piano being played – brilliantly, it seemed to Sadie.
She sat in an armchair, awed and a little discouraged by the brilliant runs and crashing chords. The soft easy chair took her comfortably and disconcertingly back into its depths so she got up again and sat on a dining chair beside the music-strewn table by the window. She felt easier sitting upright on the hard chair and looked around. The neatness of the house from the outside impressed her, but this room was anything but neat. Though not exactly dirty it seemed dusty and drab. The sideboard was obviously not used as a sideboard. Along the top lay piles of music, books, scores. Both doors lay slightly open, and Sadie got the impression that the inside was crammed with old newspapers. Table and chairs were the only other furniture apart from bookcases. One complete wall was taken up to the ceiling by bookshelves made of untreated wooden planks. What Sadie thought should have been used for display cabinets were recessed into the wall on each side of the fireplace and were also crammed with books. Only a wall containing bay windows and one behind the sideboard were clear of books and they were cluttered with pictures, framed photographs and drawings. Above the fireplace, which held a small tile-framed gas fire, hung huge plates and dishes of coarse looking make, all with the same reddish ornate pattern. Beside the hide covered easy chair on which she had first tried to sit there was an ugly adjustable lamp fixed to a bracket on the wall, and lying beside it in the ash strewn fireplace was a small nude blatantly sensual statue of a woman carved from greenish stone. She was covered in cigarette ash and where her hands met, delicately clasped across her stomach, lay a cigarette butt.
This disappointed Sadie as had the sight of the big man who had brusquely let her in. He struck her as coarse. She could still hear the piano stopping and starting, playing a certain passage over again, and that made her feel more confident because somebody was obviously learning from him.
The piano finally stopped playing. She heard Mr McKay in the hall letting out his pupil, so she opened her bag and took out the piano tuner’s card and held herself armed with it in her hand.
McKay was certainly big and Sadie’s first impression of coarseness was perhaps justified. He seemed in his late fifties; his block of a body seeming mostly bone for it was not over fleshed. He had thick grizzled crew-cut hair, large ugly ears with heavy lobes, his bottom lip stuck out beyond the top one as if he were continually considering a problem. What most gave the impression of coarseness a brick red complexion, like that of a farm labourer or bricklayer who worked outside in all weathers.
He entered the room, squinted against the smoke that rose into his eyes from a cigarette between his lips. He blew away the ash without taking the cigarette from his mouth and immediately started dusting it off his front. Sadie stood up and handed him the card. He studied it while rubbing the bristle on his head with one hand. Again he squinted at the smoke and took the tiny stub from between his lips and, after looking unsuccessfully for an ash-tray, threw it into the fireplace beside the little nude statue. Handing Sadie the card back he shrugged and smiled brightly as if to say, ‘What’s it all about?’ But he didn’t speak. Sadie decided that she didn’t like him at all.
‘Mr Martin recommended you to me. That’s why I phoned.’
‘Aye.’ Sadie again felt disappointed, she didn’t expect this broad ‘Aye’ from a music teacher.
‘Well, I mean, I’ve come to see you.’
‘He recommended me to you?’
‘Yes. Uhuh.’
‘Aye. Well –’ he didn’t continue bu
t stood staring at the floor, rubbing his stubble. It was like a scrubbing brush, Sadie thought, and she felt anger like a spark rising in her breast at this ugly ill-mannered man who stood there not speaking. Keeping me hanging, she thought, just keeping me hanging. She snapped her bag shut.
‘You want to take piano lessons?’ he asked after quite a long silence.
‘Yes.’
‘C’mere.’
McKay walked out of the room and Sadie followed. They crossed the hall into the back room from where the piano had sounded. It was a big room, practically bare except for a Steinway grand piano, a few chairs, a small occasional chair against a wall and a metal music stand in one corner. The wooded floor was well polished and covered by a light carpet. Sadie thought she would have had a different impression if she had first entered this light and airy room instead of that grubby little den. By the time she came timidly through the door McKay was standing in the middle of the room with his back to her. Then he walked to the piano stood and slumped there with his back to the keyboard, legs stuck straight out, heels on the floor, toes pointed upward, hands clasped between legs. His movements seemed too dramatic, too boyish for a man of his age. The thought of that grubby little room made Sadie realise that McKay was unmarried or a widower, and she wondered if his underclothes were clean. The thought brought a rush of sympathy for him with some embarrassment on his behalf, and the realisation that he too was embarrassed.
‘D’ye think I’m a silly auld woman?’
‘No, no, no. I don’t think you’re a silly auld wumman.’
McKay said this rather insincerely, then looking up at the ceiling said almost to himself, ‘At my age I’m not keen on calling anyone old and I’ve learned better than to call anyone a fool. At least no’ without evidence.’
He grinned and addressed her for the first time in a fairly civil tone. ‘I expected you to arrange lessons for one of your kids. It’s unusual to find someone of your age wanting to learn the piano.’
‘Thank you,’ Sadie’s sarcasm was all the more telling, coming out of her diffidence.
McKay wasn’t exactly a bully, but like a few good teachers he had something of the bully in him. Though mostly patient and kindly he used his status to sound off private ideas and often hectored pupils in a semi-ironic, humorous way. He knew and enjoyed a rough demotic style, using colloquialisms and dialect. To certain older pupils he would swear like a trooper and to some others he pretended it was an accident. He was successful because most pupils enjoyed his flamboyant tempers, his parodies of irritation; they were attracted by his colour and the expressive and vigorous language. His memorable imagery drove the music he taught into their minds. His fault was in talking too often over their heads. But his style was almost automatically provoked by any sign of rebellion and Sadie’s sarcastic thanks immediately brought it out. Though he was less heavy than he would have been on a pupil he knew.
‘No, I’ve no prejudices on the subject, Mrs –’ he snapped his fingers at her.
‘Mrs Anderson.’
‘If you want to pay for expensive (and I’m expensive, no two ways about that) piano lessons it’s up to yourself and I’ve no objections to taking your money – I’m a professional teacher Mrs Anderson. But I won’t lie to you.’ He arose and walked up and down the bare room. ‘Frankly, I think you’re daft. You don’t realise what’s involved. Hours of practice and concentration, hours of sheer drudgery and boredom. Do you know – have you any idea of the things you’ll have to do? First you’ll have to learn musical notation.’ McKay illustrated this point by shoving a sheet of music in Sadie’s face and thumping the sheet with the back of his hand. ‘You’ll have to practise finger exercises.’ He went to the piano and played some very unsteady five finger exercises as if he was a learner, his brow furrowed. ‘Then scales passages –’ this time he fingered chromatically up the keyboard in a swift peremptory run. ‘And the kind of music which I teach –’ (he rattled off the first few bars of Rondo á la Turque) ‘– is what is called classical piano.’ He rose from the piano again. ‘I’m not going to charge you expensive fees to teach you to vamp with your left hand while you pick out a tune. You’ll get studies by Czerny, pieces by Beethoven and Clementi – all that kind of old rubbish.’
‘But I want that!’ Sadie cried out, thrilled by the mention of Clementi. ‘Oh, I know what you mean – you think I want to learn to play the piano like someone in a pub but I don’t.’ Sadie was now appealing to him, for when he had ripped off that chromatic run she had lost some of her dislike. ‘I want to learn to play properly.’
‘What’s properly?’ he asked her. His question seemed rude and blunt again but she answered simply, though her voice rose in pitch as she tried to break through what she thought his lack of sympathy. He seemed to her taking up the same attitude as her family.
‘I want to play music that isn’t all fuzzy. I’d like to play – you’ll laugh at this –’
‘I might, but say it just that same.’
‘I’d like to play something like Brahms’ waltz in A flat.’
‘Well, well. It’s a nice wee tune.’ He considered for a moment. ‘It’s not impossible – but.’
‘For a woman my age.’
McKay laughed at her directness. ‘Aye, for a woman of your age.’
‘And that makes me an old fool.’
‘Och, now, Mrs Anderson. It’s not that –’
He sat on the piano stool looking at her and rubbing his stubble again. She could see his puzzlement, his not wanting to turn her down and hurt her.
‘But you think it’s just some kind of notion I’ve got into my head?’
‘Well, yes! It must be!’ For a while he sat, still and silent, his decision, his bottom lip protruding further and further in puzzled exasperation, then he seemed to come to a decision, stretched his arm out with forefinger pointed, and said in a brisk, hard, worldly wise way, ‘I tell you Mrs Anderson, I’m a professional musician. I learned my skill through hours, days, weeks, months and years of continuous hard work and concentration. I had to train like an athlete and study like a monk; I had to develop the manual dexterity of a juggler and I had to learn to count like a bookie; I had to combine the cold intelligence of a mathematician with the hot emotional temperament of the artist; the idealism of a saint with the cynicism of a criminal; the patience of Job with the restiveness of a child. Above all I had to work, work, work and work. At twelve years of age I was playing euphonium with the Salvation Army. Oh aye, Mrs Anderson – round the back courts every Sunday morning farting and blasting guid folk oot of their Sunday rest, excuse the language. And all this not in the Praise of the Lord but to harden my lip. I was an apprentice fitter in the shipyards but I was a fully time served tradesman before I was able to buy one of these damned jangle boxes. Twenty three years of age. Twenty three! Though by that time I knew music. Crammed that fu’ wi’ it that I was sneezing semi-quavers, with a G clef on my brow instead of a kiss curl. When I laughed it was in figures like an Alberti bass. But it was still hard – and in the end I have never been within a kick in the arse of – whit? What? Certain standards –’
‘In a sense I was a fool. I’m not all that out of sympathy with you. If I had known what was ahead of me I wouldn’t have been able even to try. I had to be fool enough not to know and fool enough to ignore my elders and betters when they tried to tell me. Music making – it’s the most demanding and abstract and concrete of all human skills. To start doing it is to be a fool, to continue is to be a bigger one. But I believe it’s a serious pursuit, Mrs Anderson. That’s why I’m a good musician and a good teacher.’
‘All these things you said –’ Sadie looked wan, then suddenly she smiled, brilliantly, showing her big Irish teeth. ‘I might have said the same for marriage, Mr McKay, and that’s why I’m a good housewife.’
McKay put his head back and laughed, guffawed. ‘That’s me told. I see what you’re telling me. Don’t brag.’
‘And what you’re saying is
that I don’t understand. Oh, I’ve been laughed at, don’t worry. It seems you’ve got to be a fool to try anything in this world – except what’s ordinary. But if what you’re saying is right then it’s just as well if I don’t understand, because I’m fool enough to try.’
‘I suppose so. But why now? Why – a woman of your age – why do you want to start now? Why wait all that time?’
‘Because I’ve never had a piano before, and now I’ve got one. I was good at music when I was a wee girl at school. The teacher used to say I had a marvellous sense of pitch. I could sight read and render any tune into sol-fa, right away, singing it, even the teacher couldn’t do it as good as me – and I can still do it.’
McKay wasn’t very impressed but was listening attentively.
‘Then I used to sing these songs for fun (I couldn’t really sing) by Mozart and Schubert and that. But I always listened to the piano accompaniment. Do you know Mozart’s song The Violet?’
McKay nodded.
‘I can only vaguely remember the words, haven’t remembered them for years, but I still carry the notes of the piano in my head. A girl in my class at school who used to take piano lessons was my friend. Do you know this district very well Mr McKay?’
‘No, I wasn’t brought up here. I’m from Govan originally.’
‘Well, I was brought up in the very street I’m living in now. When I was a wee girl there was a field down the street where the factory is now, with cows in that field. It’s all built over now. Anyway, if you went down the side of the field you came to a sort of cul-de-sac with big houses where this girl lived. Her folks were nice, nae side, and sent her to the same school as the rest of us. She used to play Clementi. I’ll never forget that, for her mother used to shout, ‘Anna, have you finished your Clementi?’ Sometimes I waited in the kitchen, sometimes I sat in the room and listened. There was one piece, I remember, where the notes kept repeating themselves in octaves –’