by Archie Hind
McKay grinned at her. ‘Did it go anything like this?’ He played a quotation from near the beginning of Clementi’s 1st Sonatina where the G repeats itself eight times in octaves followed in the next bar by a little ornate figure.
‘That’s it!’ Sadie reacted by lifting her face, a little sensuous smile on her lips. ‘It was like getting ice on your spine.’
McKay laughed. ‘Sounds like a cure for a nose bleed.’
‘Och!’ Sadie dismissed the remark impatiently. I even felt that way when she played exercises and scales and made the piano ring out like that. I’d have given anything for to do that. You talk about drudgery Mr McKay. But learning’s not drudgery. I’ve been a housewife for coming on nearly thirty years and brought up three weans in a room-and-kitchen and there’s application and work, work, work and work in that too. And warnings that you’re fool enough to ignore – then scrubbing and cooking and nursing and tending. Wiping snotty noses and washing nappies and teaching and caring. They say a housewife’s work is never done –’ Sadie laughed at this, a short laugh, grim and rather bitter. ‘– It’s true. You can’t keep anything you put your heart and soul into. People change and grow away from you. And all the time the dust and the oos* come floating back down. It’s messy. But you only have to play the piano with your fingers! After your drudgery you are left able to play, and even the scales and exercises you need to play are clear – and, I don’t know –’
‘You think I only play the piano with my fingers? You think sound is less amorphous than living?’ McKay shrugged.
He had been impressed by Sadie’s long speech. He spoke slowly and musingly as if to himself. ‘Well, Maybe. I suppose I shouldn’t brag.’ Then he shook himself, all brisk movement again. ‘No! It’s ridiculous! Look, a long time ago you took a fancy to the piano. You like music. You can’t balance that against your age. I mean, what else have you got?’ McKay’s question was purely rhetorical but Sadie answered.
‘Perfect pitch. If that’s any help.’ She was sarcastic again. ‘Against my age.’
‘Perfect pitch?’
‘Aye.’
McKay stood up, put his hands in his pockets and started to walk up and down the room again. ‘You’ve got a bloody cheek. You really have.’ He faced her and flung his arms around in flamboyant exasperated gestures. ‘Not only, one,’ he struck an index finger in the air, ‘have you got a broader, harder, wiser, wider and more intense experience of life than I have. But, two,’ he stuck up two fingers, ‘you tell me you’ve got mair natural ability as a musician. Well –’ He anticipated her protest, ‘that’s what perfect pitch means. Perfect bloody pitch!’ He sat down at the piano. ‘My arse in parsley. Do you know the names of the chords?’
‘You don’t have to swear!’
‘That’s not what I asked. Do you know the names of the chords?’
‘No. But I know the names of the notes, now that I’ve a piano.’
‘Right. What are these notes?’ He struck a chord.
‘D, F sharp and A.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
Sadie stood up this time. ‘I still don’t think that there’s any need to swear.’
‘Don’t you believe it. Don’t believe it for a minute. I mean, f’r Chrissakes, you were right. And anyway the process of learning is not so pure and abstract as you seem to think. If you’re going to be my pupil you’ll find there’ll be a lot of cursing and blinding done before we’re finished.’
Sadie nodded.
‘So don’t criticise my methods. Ach, tae hell. You’ve got me admitting the possibility.’ He came over to her and took the handbag she had been clutching in both hands. ‘Take your coat off.’ He took the coat and handbag and laid them over the small table. ‘Right. C’mere to the piano.’ Sadie came to the piano and they both sat down on the bench-like stool.
‘So now you’re just another wee lassie wanting to learn the piano. OK? Let’s see what you’ve got. You like music?’
‘I like – what you called – classical piano.’
‘You’ve got a good memory – you can carry a tune in your head?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’ve got these, a love of music, a good memory, and (if you’ll excuse me, Jesus Christ) you’ve got perfect pitch. All you need now is to pay attention, for everything I tell you when you’re sitting on this stool, even when I’m cursing and blinding, is important. All you need beside the other things is a pair of hands –you said it, you play that piano with your fingers. We’ll leave the dust and oos out of it. No rubato*. Now the hands – let’s have a look.’
‘I’m afraid they’re not pianists’ fingers.’
‘The only people with pianists’ fingers are pianists. See these paws?’ McKay held up his big, strong, masculine hands, raw and knuckled and hairy. ‘Oh, the nails are cut short and they’re nice and clean – but otherwise they’re a navvy’s hands – like my father’s – or a tattie picker’s – like my mother’s – or a fitter’s – like my son.’
‘I always thought that long tapering fingers were best.’
‘Oho? And elegant? There’s nothing elegant about piano playing – you watch any concert pianist writhing about the stool with sweat dripping off his nose. No. Or see any book of pianoforte technique. Wait a minute.’ He rose from the stool, disappeared, and returned a minute later with a book he propped on the music stand. ‘These are pictures of great pianists’ hands. They took plaster casts of them you know. There’s a rogues’ gallery for you! Some wi’ paws like lumps of mud, some wi’ hands like emaciated chicken claws. One or two of them are reasonable, Chopin’s, Mendelssohn’s, but look at these big mitts of Liszt’s. Rather like my own, if I say it myself, without the lumps.’
‘Rubenstein had hands like an overfed baby’s. Richter – plain, ordinary looking hands you wouldn’t give tuppence for. It’s only when they play that they become beautiful. Oh, no! Your lovely tapering fingers are frail and need strength, and the wee stubby fingers that fly up and down scales and runs have to learn to stretch and the big broad hand that can compass octaves has to learn speed. You have to work for your advantages just like in real life. Now sit here on this stool – don’t crouch! – it’s a keyboard, not a bloody scrubbing board – make yourself comfortable so you reach the keys without bending forward or back. Take some balance on your feet – it’s like playing snooker, hmm, you wouldn’t know – we might as well start you off right.Now, let’s see what your disadvantages are. Play there – from middle C – with the left hand – like this.’ McKay played the first simple five-finger exercise, slowly. ‘Now you try, with both hands.’
Sadie played, halting and stumbling. ‘I thought so. A good middle-aged housewife’s hands – strong, competent, but with no independence in the fingers. No independence. Right? So, that’s what the exercises are for. We’ll have to get a book of exercises that’ll soon put that right. Your drudgery book full of scales and exercises that’ll soon have you limbered up.’
Sadie was sitting at the piano and the beauty of the instrument, the rows of soft-coloured keys, the polished case, the elegance and definition of its lines, most of all McKay’s words – all seemed to heighten and add savour to the thrilling drudgery McKay was offering.
‘Ach, tae hell. If you don’t put your line in the watter ye never catch any fish,’ McKay said. ‘For Chrissakes, we can be two auld fools thegither.’
The big old piano loomed and bulked across the kitchen, its polished wood and brass reflecting the dim and flickering lights from the fire like the lucid gleams in her mind. Much of her time was taken up by her appetite for drudgery at the keyboard, but there were still other things in her life that could not be ignored.
The dust and oos which she had mentioned to McKay was a reality in her life and a powerful image in her mind. Like any housewife she had an intimate acquaintance with them, and she felt the disorder they represented as an injury, though her own childhood had not been unusually harsh. Mary, her eldest sister, had seen to that,
for Mary had the gift of husbandry, the purse-clutching bitter art of those times. She kept the home clean, clothes washed, let out seams, patched trousers, mended second-hand shoes, walked miles to the cheapest butchers for ham-bones and mince, brought coarse oats and lentils and peas in bulk and the misshapen batch ends of loaves from the bakery. She was prim, light-lipped, tart tongued, a mistress of mean economies and paring, a scrubber, polisher, darner and patcher. These had been necessary skills in those callous and mean-minded times between two World Wars. Her dour fight for what she called ‘decency’ had distorted her life. She often said, ‘Smiles are cheap.’ In her stiff work-chapped hands gutting and frying herring for the family dinner there was as much love as in the flowing lines of a free polymorphously perverse body – however pathetically expressed in huge quantities of ham-bone soup, pease brose, thick porridge, clean patches, and neatly let out seams.
Sadie learned none of Mary’s skills. From leaving school until marriage she had worked in a grocery store, leaving home in the morning at half-past-six and returning at night well after tea-time. During that period in her teens both her brothers had left home despairing of ever finding work. The older one went to Canada where he simply disappeared, the younger one to Birmingham where he found work as a mechanic. Sadie’s lack of domestic experience had created difficulties in the first years of her marriage. Alec, fortunately, had never been out of work for long, but with a young family and her inability to cope properly at first with ordinary household tasks (cooking, cleaning, keeping their cramped little room-and-kitchen tidy) their life and been hard. They got into small, niggling debts. They quarrelled a lot – lived from hand to mouth without proper routines. Eventually she learned better and things became easier, but she remembered these years as stolen from her in some way, and attached a great deal of value to the order established in her domestic life. So she rose every morning at half-past-six, visiting her father and mother and her sister Mary every Thursday and her daughter Anne on Sunday afternoons. The carpets were hoovered each morning before nine, her washing fluttered on the line in the back court every Tuesday afternoon, bed linen was changed on Monday, shopping done on Friday morning, windows washed once a week, mince and dough balls served on Saturday at dinner-time.
Yet she did not pay much attention to these things; though she would never have dreamed of stopping giving her hours and energies to them. The routine was so well established that she found it easy to live her inner life as she went through tasks and chores.
On Thursday morning the day after first seeing McKay she visited her father who now lived on the ground floor of a tenement further up the street from where he had supported his motherless family. Mary still lived with him and had insisted on shifting to a ground-floor flat where he need not climb stairs. Before the visit Sadie bought cold meat, tomatoes for the tea that night, an ounce of thick black tobacco and a packet of chocolate biscuits, then collected from the newsagents a stack of illustrated weeklies ordered regularly for her father.
The front door of his house had been flushed with hard-board and painted with a rich maroon gloss finish. A new chrome letter box had been put in and a combination name plate and bell-push was lit by a little bulb fixed in the door frame. Instead of pushing the bell Sadie rapped the door with her knuckles. She hated the sickly noise made by the chimes, and knew Mary and her father would know it was her by the knocking.
Mary was making a pot of tea with deft movements between sink and cupboard while Sadie took off her coat. One leaf of the kitchen table had been opened and Mr Maxwell, Sadie’s father, sat there writing with a ball point pen. Mr Maxwell not only worked out form for dogs, horses and football teams but entered every competition he saw in newspapers or magazines – crossword puzzles, spot-the-ball, questionnaires. He even wrote letters to the papers, especially to cheap Sunday papers that print and pay money for declamatory opinions. He had started doing this after retiring and both Sadie and Mary had encouraged him thinking that it was good for him to be occupied with something, but they found that Mr Maxwell actually made a profit by these activities, carrying them out with amazing competence. The letters he wrote to the papers were totally cynical and he used to laugh when reading them aloud and saying, ‘Pro Bono Publico has earned himself another quid.’
Mary would tell him proudly, ‘You’re a cunning old bugger.’
The electric kettle Mary was boiling up for the tea came from one of his ploys. He often talked of his ambition to win the big one, the treble chance, the magic number.
Sadie took from her bag the biscuits, papers, plug of tobacco and put them on the glass topped coffee table. Beneath the glass was a large coloured photograph of a Highland stream fringed by autumnal birches, Mary’s idea of contemporary décor. In the fireplace stood a small metal figure of a man in armour carrying a pike, which could be ingeniously dismantled into a hearth-tidy. The chimney piece was hung with paper printed to look like a rubble or dry-stane wall. The other walls were papered bright cream with a pattern of leaves and fragile branches filigreed over it. Against this hung little wooden frames holding narrow shelves on which glittered Mary’s collection of glass animals and figurines – cute dogs, coy fauns and plump innocent birds. All woodwork in the room was gloss-painted off-white, and the draining board topped with a hard, bright washable plastic. It was all too shiny for Sadie’s taste, but she also felt it was cheery and bright and (as the houseproud Mary made sure) clean.
Sadie enjoyed these morning visits to her father and sister. Mary had a tart, worldly hard-headedness expressed in words for which Sadie would have been apologetic. She’d dismiss the chimes on the door, the gloss paint, the glittering animals with a cynical laugh saying, ‘It’s not Buckingham Palace but it’s bright enough.’
In the times when she had brought up a motherless family she had ensured, after each weekly struggle, that there was always twopence for the cinema matinee and sweets on a Saturday afternoon, saying, ‘The weans must enjoy themselves’ as if this was a matter of fact, of necessity, which it wasn’t in many homes. When Sadie’s daughter Anne brought her two little daughters to see Mary she would take down her precious glass animals and let the girls play with them. ‘Children are only weans, they don’t mean to break things,’ she’d say in her sharp worldly tone, as if too adult to care that children might break a couple of small glass animals. She spoiled neither the children not adults around her with her bitter, cheery, cynical tolerance and kindness.
While Sadie tried to undo the knot in the string round the bundle of newspapers and magazines Mary put plates with biscuits and tea things on the glass surface over her Highland burn. Then she sat across from Sadie, poured tea, added sugar and milk, stirred the cups and handed one to her father with a tea-plate holding a wrapped chocolate biscuit.
‘Well, did you go and see your man?’ Mary punctuated this question while sipping tea to show her question was neutral and casual. She knew Alec and Colin had been putting Sadie through a barrage of destructive persiflage about her music teacher.
‘You mean the piano teacher?’
‘Aye.’
‘I saw him all right.’
‘Well – how did you get on?’
‘Fine – except that he’s a funny sort of man.’
‘How come?’
‘He seemed different from what I expected – I mean, he was awful abrupt – and then’ Sadie started to giggle, ‘he cursed and swore.’
‘Cursed and swore?’ said their father looking up from his writing, ‘A funny sounding music teacher.’
‘Yes, he has an awful coarse Glesca tongue on him, but at other times he speaks quite proper – he’s got letters after his name.’
‘Is he any good though?’
‘He’s marvellous!’ This judgement broke out of Sadie with unwitting enthusiasm. ‘Of course, as I said, he’s a bit coarse – but he knows a lot about music.’ She paused, then laughed. ‘Actually he’s quite funny wi’ it. He told stories about how he learned music himself and
had a comical way of putting things. I thought at first he wasn’t going to take me, because of, you know –’
‘Because how?’ said Mr Maxwell, slicing the plug of tobacco with the sliver of blade left in by the filthy old pocket-knife. ‘Is your money no’ good enough?’
‘It’s nothing like that, faither. It’s just that it does look a bit funny, I suppose Alec’s quite right. I mean, at my age –’
‘Aye, the man’s not going to be wasting his time, and quite right.’ Mary said this as if assuming that in taking Sadie he wouldn’t be wasting his time.
‘I got the impression that he’s quite a keen sort of teacher. I don’t think he’s impatient or anything. Oh, and Mary, you should see the piano he has, a huge Steinway grand. Anyway, the thing is, I’m going twice a week, Monday and Thursday mornings. I start next Monday.’
‘Thursday morning?’ Mr Maxwell asked.
‘Aye. That’s the thing. I’ll have to get another to be coming here, if that’s all right?’
‘Well, Sadie. We’re aye gaddin’ about that much that I don’t know if we can fit you in.’ Mary took another biscuit and grinned a sarcastic wee smile. Sadie laughed, thinking that Mary was always sensible and easy.
She got home at lunch-time made herself a couple of tomato sandwiches and a cup of tea, then sat down and reflected on the problem of fitting things in. McKay had told her that, if at all serious she would have to practise a little every day. How could she manage things so that she had some time every day for the piano? She had arranged to visit McKay in the morning at ten o’clock. Monday was all right for she had nothing definite to do that day after seeing McKay in the morning. But on Tuesday she went to the steamie, the public wash-house, because Tuesday was her turn to use the drying space in the back-court. Of course, nowadays, with big spinners and drying cupboards she didn’t need so much time for drying, but she was used to doing her washing on Tuesdays. While she sat chewing at a tomato sandwich she’d wondered if she could start sending her sheets, towels, curtains to the bag wash. They would come back a bit damp, but she could quickly iron them dry. Unless she took the bag-wash stuff to the steamie with her for it was a big advantage to be able to use the calendar. She would have to think about that. There was still the underwear to be ironed on Tuesday night, but Alec and the boys were usually out then and she could manage easily. There wasn’t much to it, especially since Alec had at long last given up expecting starched collars. Wednesday mornings she could visit Mary and her father, getting his thick-black on the way, and she didn’t really need to collect his papers on Thursdays. She only did that because she was passing the shop. The rest of that day there was nothing much except for an occasional baby-sit for Anne and her man. Thursday morning she’d see McKay again and there was nothing much else that day. Friday was crammed, for that day she shopped, changed some laundry, gave the house a thorough going over, washed the inside windows and, once in three weeks, the stairs, stairhead windows and the lavatory on the stairhead landing. And Friday was the night when Alec always went out for a drink. The weekends didn’t have as much routine, so there was always the odd hour for practising. She knew that in spite of routines everything couldn’t be anticipated – there was the occasional night when she’d go to the pictures with Mary, weekend visits to Anne and her grandchildren, or to one of her other sisters, there was always an odd bit of mending to do. She’d have to cope with these things as they came.