The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  When she had finished her lunch Sadie washed and tidied away the plates, not even leaving the cup and saucer to dry on the draining board. She had rinsed them in such hot water that the dish towel slid smoothly over the warm surfaces. Several years before Hugh had seen an electric geyser in the wash-room of the ware-house where he worked, and had bought one and wired it up for her. This was now one of her great pleasures – cleaning dishes in such hot water that they almost dried off themselves. She loved the feel of a dry dish towel skiting off a warm plate. It was additional pleasure that plenty of hot water made it possible for her to now think of her piano.

  Sadie had expected McKay to give her a piano tutor from which to work but instead he had given her a cyclostyled pamphlet in which the rudiments of musical notation were set out and had ordered her flatly to learn the value of the notes, the meaning of the time signatures and a few common musical signs. ‘I mean, you’ve had enough gumption to bone up on a few rudiments without my help. I’m going to teach you to read music, Mrs Anderson, but that doesn’t mean wasting my time telling you what a semi-breve is, or a crotchet – it’s all in there, so you get it learned up, by Monday if possible, right? Oh, and you can have a go at these five-finger exercises, seeing as how you’re gasping to get your fingers on the keyboard. That should keep you amused till Monday.’

  Sadie had spent the previous night reading through the pamphlet, feeling some of that appetite whose edge had been honed by McKay. Now she had the afternoon free and, feeling the same hunger, she took the book of exercises, put it on the fretted music stand and sat down on the piano stool. McKay had told her how to practise.

  ‘Remember you are looking for speed, security of rhythm and intonation. That’s what you’re after, right from the beginning. And you’ve got to get over the feeling of strain in your muscles. Now, on Monday, when you come back here, these’ll be the only things you will be able to play – but you’ll play them like they were wee tunes.’ He demonstrated on the big Steinway, to Sadie’s delight. ‘Playing exercises is a bore, you know, your drudgery –’

  She had interrupted him at this point, just by looking at him as if to say, ‘I can face that.’

  ‘Oh, I ken,’ he waved his palm in front of her face disclaiming interest in anything she was going to say. ‘I know, you’re a hardened housewife. But nobody learns anything bored. Boredom is your attention straying. Now, what you’ve got to do is this! Drudge, drudge, drudge away. But! Anticipate and relish what it is going to bring you. Nae oos and dust coming back down. But freedom and liberation in these auld fingers and muscles. You must take pleasure in the movement of your fingers and with the drudgery that pleasure will increase. It’s the only way to learn. Enjoy yourself, enjoy your fingers. That’s a lesson for a marriage-hardened house-wife, eh? Harder than you think. Anyway, when you come here on Monday –’ as Sadie sat at the piano she had to smile at this recollection of McKay, ‘I don’t want any of this.’ He had sat at the piano, intense concentration on his face, tongue out to the side of his mouth, playing a blocked, stumbling series of notes. ‘Even if it’s well played it is not enough. I want this.’ He smiled arrogantly, swaying his head easily on his neck burlesquing a gallant expression of nonchalant physical anticipation then, first flourishing his hand languidly above the keyboard, he played, the keys rippling under his hand while a brilliant cascade of notes sang out from the magnificent big Steinway. ‘Like a wee virtuoso, right?’ Even as the flashy spray of notes chilled her somewhere, like eau de cologne on the skin, she had to laugh at his comical mimicry.

  Yet though this recollection made her smile, she sat at the piano feeling reluctant to begin. Sadie had a tremendous amount of physical vigour which made her able to tackle domestic drudgery without hesitation, but the music before her made her uncomfortably aware that she would have to read the bass clef, something she had never done before. But more than the difficulty of tackling something new was the ground of her inertia. It was a weird social embarrassment like the diffidence some people know before picking up a fork in an expensive restaurant. The cluster of black notes on the paper, hard and black and defined against the paper’s whiteness, suggested nothing of sound to her and the keys beneath her hand, ordered and strict, seeming somehow untouchable and hygienic. Yet she screwed herself up, and forgetting McKay’s example, his casual and familiar bashing of the keys, out of her own act of will she reached out a struck middle C with her right thumb. Not over the keys, as McKay had shown, but with the stool too distant from the piano she reached out and touched the note. It sounded, like a sparrow cheep, meek and ragged, then lost itself in apology. She had sounded her Doh and broken that silence of many years standing. Sadie came out of a dwam of concentration about an hour and a half later, unaware that she had pulled her stool in to a comfortable distance in that time. She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece, closed the exercise book and sat still on the stool feeling slightly dizzy and numb, as if wakened from oversleeping. Yet she could remember that sleep, remember every note within the range of her exercises in the bass clef which had so frightened her, remember with her fingers every figuration of the five notes she had been playing and with her thumb the precise moment of crossing to play the C major scale. She felt neither tired nor impatient but simply a warm sense of accomplishment that some grist had been broken under the mill of her effort. And on Monday when she saw McKay there would be more, which was what she desired – more and more and more.

  McKay never locked his front door when at home, so most of his pupils waked in and yelled their arrival, but Sadie always rang the bell, and when he opened she remained standing on the threshold like a hare about to run. She wore a tweed coat, a head scarf, and carried a big leather shopping bag with zipped pouches in the sides. On her face was a characteristic look of alert wariness. He had to invite her in and she never followed him straight into the music room, but stood in the doorway, watching him. He had to tell her to remove her coat, and where to put the bag. She moved with a constraint that McKay privately called ‘the close-mouth shuffle’. He had seen hundreds of these women shuffling up and down Glasgow tenement stairs, crouching over their breasts which they held clutched in their forearms like valuable parcels. Women who confined themselves, or were confined, to their purdah, their families, their neighbours, their domesticity, their streets, their shops. Outside these they all wore the same self-conscious closed face as like Sadie’s when she stood in his hall waiting for him to tell her where to put down her bag, hang up her coat. She had stood in the hall furtively taking everything in without moving her eyes but giving herself away to McKay by the slow panning movement of her face as she looked around. Another purdah characteristic, he thought. She was too polite to stare knowing that sight was a critical faculty, yet too wary, too apprehensive outside her habitual surroundings not to desperately, surreptitiously, familiarise herself. For a moment he had been alarmed, almost angered at this small, persistent, dowdy woman – and he wished he had not taken her on as a pupil. But he remembered their previous interview and how much he believed in formal musical education and the formal tradition of European musical art, while maintaining that its source was a vulgar musicality which could be found anywhere and he refused to be surprised at its origins. ‘Have you ever tried to play a Jew’s harp, for Gawd’s sake?’ he’d say and speak of boys he’d heard sitting on a close step playing jigs on mouth organs, the bowler-hatted work’s foreman who played a sweet and fluent cornet, the Scots fiddler busking in the street. He was prepared to appreciate and admire musicality however expressed, and was never surprised at its unexpected appearance, even in this dowdy little purdah woman. Even (if asked) in a little girl with a frayed lilac cardigan.

  Yet when Sadie came creeping into the music room he had to make a conscious effort to accept her presence there. She was like an awkward guest at a dinner party, he thought. Everything about her denied the possibility of performance. Her movements were the neat, exact, movements of a seam-stress, now that she had b
ecome a little more at ease, but with none of the expansiveness needed to play a bloody piano. She had cast off some of her dowdiness with the tweed coat and headscarf and McKay was slightly disturbed by her physical attraction. Irish, he thought, with those teeth and that thick auburn hair. Her skin was of a type which goes so well, yet so seldom, with auburn hair; freckled, not dark but with a surface opaqueness in contrast to the usual pale, dry, transparent skin of red-haired people. It had no youthful bloom but a reliable adult evenness of colour and texture. The taut skin over her strong-boned face verged on gauntness but the rest of her body was strong, almost plump and her breasts, high inside the short sleeved shirtwaist blouse, were big in contrast to the small rib-cage beneath. If she stuck them out, thought McKay, she’d be a right little pouter pigeon. He had a drill-sergeant impulse to shout at her – ‘straighten up, arse in, chest out.’ Which was what he would really have to do. For this quiet little woman really wanted to play the piano.

  So she was astonished when near the start of the lesson, after playing all her arduously learned exercises, McKay screwed his eyes in disgust, covered his ears and yelled at her, ‘Oh my Gawd, my Gawd!’

  She stopped and turned to him, dismayed. He lifted his arms high, dropped them to slap his thighs, grinned at her, turned up his eyeballs to the ceiling, shook his head and laughed. ‘What a nice little domestic sound that was! Like a spoon tinkling in a tea-cup.’ He walked over to the piano and with an expansive salesmanlike gesture he patted and caressed the woodwork with his huge hand, leaning over and speaking to her while rubbing a corned of the woodwork sensuously, as if easing an itch with the middle of the palm of his hand. ‘This, Mrs Anderson, is a piano. It is not a musical cigarette box, nor a Swiss chalet, but a big strong noisy instrument built to take abuse. It will not come to pieces beneath your hands.’

  I was playing too quiet?’ Sadie sat with her hands clasped in her lap, looking straight at McKay, her lips pursed, her eyes suddenly dewed with anger. In the whole set of her body was a different question: Why not say what you want and cut the cackle?

  McKay smiled, said, ‘Don’t look at me in that tone of voice. Do you think I’m being o’er sarky?’

  Sadie tossed her head like a young girl and said, ‘I get enough of that at home.’

  ‘You have my apologies. Just play the bloody thing louder.’

  Sadie positively thumped the piano and the notes sounded out, uneven, ragged, infirm, harsh.

  McKay smiled again and leaned forward grinning provocatively and said in his broadest Glasgow accent. ‘And that sounded like you was scrubbin’ claes on a washin’ board.’ Then he looked at her, his head flirtatiously to one side, his shoulders set in a frozen shrug, full of blatant charm.

  Sadie’s response to his outrageously false manner this time was to turn her head away, as if to say, ‘He’s hopeless.’ But a little smile strayed round her mouth.

  He said, ‘I’m embarrassed. I don’t know what to say to you. I might give you the sack.’

  ‘You’re giving up already?’

  ‘No, not really.’ He waved his big hand, reassuring her, then he walked up and down the room pouting, standing for a while thinking, tapping his bottom lip with his forefinger so that it made tiny fleshy smacking sounds. He spoke as if to himself.

  ‘I’m wondering what would be the best approach.’

  Suddenly he turned on her in the middle of a stride and shot out a question.

  ‘Are you intelligent?’

  ‘Intelligent? I don’t know – I was clever enough at school.’

  ‘Ach, that’s not what I meant. If you had real intelligence you would understand that question.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What I meant was gumption. You know. Gumption. You know what that is?’

  ‘I know. I might even have some –’

  ‘Then you should know why I shouted at you. That sound you made was not a tune. Tea-cups and scrubbing boards. That was your autobiography. In which I’m not interested. Forget the dust and oos. No rubato. You play with your fingers, not with your life.’

  Sadie nodded and muttered, ‘Aye’, darkly, and McKay stood and looked at her for another long moment. Then he came over and sat down beside her on the stool. ‘Shove o’er a bit.’

  ‘Forget about exercises just now,’ he said, ‘I’m going to tell you something.’

  Since she had faced up to his shouting without wilting she might be all right – and it would serve another purpose. She was too old, he thought, for slow learning. She simply didn’t have the time. If she could take in the rudiments quickly then he would be able to make music interesting to her. He suspected that her physical relationship with the piano was her weakness, the athletic act of playing. But the mere question of sight-reading music, counting, relating the stave to the keyboard had to be dismissed, brutally and quickly. McKay explained all this to her.

  ‘I can’t do this with a young pupil because they’d find it too painful. Your age is an advantage for if my teaching hurts then you’re old enough to understand why. What I’m going to show you involves study so intense that you’ll have to learn it in a few weeks. Are you prepared to face that effort?’

  ‘Uhuh.’

  ‘It’ll be worth it, you know.’ McKay spoke almost pleadingly for it was something he had often wanted to try out on the right pupil. Perhaps one that didn’t matter too much.

  ‘All right,’ said Sadie.

  ‘But first of all, so that you get the point, I’m now going to teach you all about music in one lesson. For it’s as simple as that. You can learn it all in one lesson.’ He nudged her and put on his flirtatious act. ‘Of course that’s only in a manner of speaking. We start by playing this note, holding down this single key. Give it pedal, if you like. And there it is, the whole thing. If you listen you can hear it all in the one note – everything!’

  He went on to show her how, from the sound of a single string, the greatest European major-minor harmonic system was built up. He showed her the key cycle, letting her work through it herself when she caught on. He explained the triad and its place in simple harmony; he demonstrated the nature of the intervals, their change of mood in augmentation and diminution, the relatedness of the major and minor keys. Though he did all this quickly, discursively, treating the whole thing in a general way, he realised he had caught her. A warmth swelled up in him towards her as he noticed her excitement. It was as if she had already heard all this and had been waiting for it to be articulated. Waiting for a notation to be put upon it; and with that neat and exact quality which was in her she was catching and ordering that notation to what she could hear with her (and this struck him more and more forcibly) magnificent ear. And he too had excitement to communicate, an excitement at stretching his pupil’s powers, which is the true mark of a teacher. He enthusiastically demonstrated that great feat of analysis by which European music created the world’s greatest art tradition, teasing out and separating the complex sound of a single string to re-assemble them in the Bach fugue, Mozartian counterpoint, the Beethoven sonata, the Wagnerian opera; he spoke even of the great modern puzzle, the Twentieth-century fear of the tonic.

  And he showed how it had all evolved from the middle C which he thumped over and over again. Sadie’s Doh.

  McKay’s assessment of Sadie was not quite right, though to teach her he conceded that she might have something individual (apart from her magnificent ear) which should be taken seriously. His doubts were strong for he recognised in her that refusal that had taken place all these years ago, on the morning when Mrs Bermant tested her ear. Of course he had not seen it as a specific occasion, but as generalised denial of a type well known to him. He too came from those teeming streets – in his case a slum in Govan, and he too had overcome an inheritance of inertia. His expectation of her failure mingled with hope for her success but expectation was strongest.

  His judgement was proved not quite right by Sadie standing up for a month to his brutal assault on her capaci
ties. He had forced her to count her ta-ta-ti-fi through numerous scores, counting bar by bar, drumming and tapping, accenting and skipping, beating and tripping, in that strange activity which was at once an intellectual exercise and physical co-ordination, arrest and movement, analysis and synthesis, arithmetic and rhythm. For hours she sat at night with a difficult piano score borrowed from McKay on her lap, poring over it, finger under each bar, foot tapping, lips moving silently; one, two, one, two-and – in Alla Breve and Waltz, compound and simple, common and triple – wrapped in a concentration outside which lay the arithmetic dust and oos. It was, McKay had said, like breaking stones with one hand and setting jewels with the other, or (more coarsely) ‘like rubbing your belly and pattin’ your heid.’ But these rhythms in their opposition and merging were more familiar to Sadie than he knew. Her body remembered the streets of her childhood, the clapping of hands, the smack of a ball, the swish and slap of a skipping rope ca’ed in duo; the counting, the common time –