by Archie Hind
‘Eenty, teenty, halligollum,
Pipe clay, up the lum.
Urky, turkey, torry rope,
Ram, stam, toosie jock.’
The triplets, one po-ta-to, two po-ta-to; tempo ad libitum – plainie, clappie, rollie, backie, high Scottische, low Scottische, touch the ground, birlie round; tempo giusto – German boys are, awful fun-ny, this is how they, earn their mon-ney; and so on – one, two, three, aleerie – five, ten, fifteen, twenty, you are out and the game’s a bogy – every measure and rhythm from the strict to the syncopated scliff-thump, scliff-thump as the rope and the scuffed shoes raised dust from the pavement while all the little girls skipped. And playing for keeps, there was that adagio swing, that fundamental rock, back and forward, of plain misery, loss and grief. Besides all this – Sadie could dance. Whatever disuse so many of her faculties had fallen into there was this wry fact – that she had suffered no atrophy of the rhythmic sense, and all this measure she had learned a piacere.
In the question of measure, therefore, Sadie found assistance in past experience. The formal absorption of musical convention she found more difficult, and in the difficulty even more satisfaction. Her concentration, her involvement in learning threw up round her barriers outside which were life’s limitations – her age, kitchen, family, domestic duties – all that restricted her intelligence, if intelligence is an active, confident spirit which would not stand waiting in a doorway. Inside these barriers, inside the learning, she was capable of sharp and sustained intellectual effort, and after all, it was only a question of remembering a few conventions.
McKay was agreeably surprised at her success, at the attentiveness, eagerness, the refusal to be exhausted she displayed. Yet when she stood in the hall before the start of each lesson, and more slowly than she learned music, relaxed into familiarity, the signature of her talent emerged, a childish capacity to absorb appeared in her very gaucheness – her awkwardness. But, as McKay told her during these laborious weeks, signatures can mislead, you don’t know what key it is in until you play it – it might be minor. And Sadie had always known how to diminish.
McKay had began his pounding by simply taking a piano score, pointing to a note and asking her to play it on the keyboard. Sadie had difficulty with the bass clef and the ledger lines. It was a boring, routine technique but presented Sadie with a labour she was in the mood to undertake if McKay sat with her on the piano stool for half an hour, forcing her to these exertions – that one, and that one and that one, over and over again, that one and that one – Sadie herself was able to sit at night until the stave, with its 11 lines, unrolled itself before her with each space and line separate and clear and the black and white piano keys a reflex of these notes. He made her work over the key cycle until the keys and their relationship became a fixed pattern in her head; he gave her bundles of old scores in which she marked the chords and intervals in pencil until a sound had its reflex in a position and shape, and the sharp, black visual notes had their reflex in sound. At the end of that month Sadie had reached the stage in learning to read music where comprehension had set in, when it ceases to be a crude effort of memorising and was becoming a question of honing and refining the act into habit and speed. She was making more than tentative efforts to read a score.
All this pleased, puzzled and surprised McKay who had been prompted to try out this method of teaching Sadie because he thought he had seen some quality of intelligence in her sparking at times through her bland shyness; seen it in occasional flashes of sarcasm and dryness, in knowingness expressed in a grim worldly smile. ‘Do you think I’m too auld?’ or in an equally grim laugh, no more than a snort, an exhalation through the nostrils, ‘A housewife’s work is never done.’ She had surprised him by a greater speed, a greater formal intelligence than these few signs had appeared to warrant. So he attributed her success and her endurance to her gifts. This seemed to him a sufficient explanation, but if ever there was a questionable matter it is this one of gift and it appears a less simple matter when we look at it in the form in which it is bestowed and the conditions it may demand. Sadie too had her richnesses, her complexities and her gift with its overtones. She remembered something of these and suspected how they would manifest themselves in what McKay was about to teach her – or give her, for he called it her reward.
During that month he didn’t curse so much but still blinded a bit. Over the sound of Sadie’s practice his humorous, bullying voice now sounded coaxing, and wheedling.
‘Good. Not bad. Up with the wrists a bit. Don’t pull the keys, you’re not dusting the mantelpiece-up-up. That’s better.’
Weeks went by and his voice became more coaxing, more exhortative – displaying an urgency on her behalf – so the fingers became more and more secure.
‘Aye, you’ve got that thumb moving right – keep your elbow in though, it’s waving like a flag. It’s your thumb you move – just slide it under – uhuh – not bad.’
And so on and so on until the reward was earned.
This was Beethoven’s little sonatina in G.
Aside from the loosening of her fingers Sadie was also finding it less and less necessary to maintain her shy stiffness with McKay. Against his subtle blustering she gradually relaxed until she too could let herself in and announce ‘I’m here, Mr McKay’, hang up her coat, dump her big leather shopping bag and take out her music. And eased into familiarity she also started pattering McKay back. In her fifth week, after McKay had listened in silence as she played slowly but firmly a set of scales, he said, ‘That’s fine. You’re doin’ well. You must have been practising.’
‘I have been.’
‘I always give my pupils a reward if they practise well.’
‘Am I doing well, Mr McKay?’ and Sadie had laughed and attempted, nearly successfully, to ripple a cluster of notes under her hand. ‘Like a wee virtuoso?’
He laughed. ‘Oho. And getting big-heided with it and all. Never mind. Good enough for your reward.’
McKay put a book on the music stand, opened it, and Sadie was taken aback. ‘Sonatina – by – Beethoven. Beethoven? Have I to learn to play that?’
‘No, Mrs Anderson. You haven’t to learn to play it. That’s what scales and exercises and studying notation are for – the drudgery – to learn to play it.’
‘It looks awful hard.’
McKay treated this brusquely and impatiently. ‘Aye, and it looks hard to me when I look at the whole page at once. Take it a bit at a time. You read music, you’ve exercised your fingers, have a bash.’
Have a bash was what she couldn’t do. She panicked. She felt the return of that old feeling that the notes were hygienic and untouchable. The wood of the piano took on the same aloof, polished air as the counter in a bank. As her fingers hovered over the keys and she read the first bar she felt about to take unwarranted liberties with some massive dignitary. She tentatively pressed the keys, playing the first chord, stumbled over the following grace note and played the wrong harmony with her left hand, C instead of D-seven, then rattled off the four quavers much too fast. She only tried the first bar then she snatched her hands away from the keys looking at McKay, terror stricken.
‘Aye, aye,’ McKay said, ‘what’s the matter?’
But Sadie only shrugged and looked helpless.
‘What a wumman,’ McKay said. He walked up and down with his thoughtful bottom lip out, then stood looking at her for while grinning with great good humour. ‘Well, I suppose if I’m going to teach you music I’ll have to teach you –’ He hesitated, then completed his thought, ‘– well, music.’ With a gesture of his arm, expressing mock disgust he waved her away from the piano stool. ‘Away and sit on the chair and I’ll play you a tune.’
McKay sat down and played Für Elise while Sadie sat stiff and upright on a hard chair, her hand clasped in her lap. As he played her face lost some of the hard blank look which had come over it. In the middle section, at the ritardando, the marked slackening of speed where the introductory f
igure is repeated and this time divided between the hands, McKay emphasised the pause and turned to grin reassuringly at Sadie. He did so again in the middle of the chromatic run down into the last section, and she smiled back, sharing their pleasure in the music.
When McKay played those dozens of consecutive staccato As in the bass her stiffness changed to athletic tension in sympathy with his drumming fingers and the sudden dramatic heightening of the music; during the last chromatic run she had felt the notes like loving fingers playing delicately on each knob of her backbone. Moved by a strange feeling of power, she returned to the stool and sat with McKay as if possessing a capacity for richness, for complexity of feeling.
Insights had become available through the clarity; an emotional idea made perfect sense. She knew what it meant and appreciated Beethoven’s sly double use of the piece, which was for Elsie in the concession to young unlearned fingers and that it was for Elsie in that it seemed to express, sensuously, her young bloom, all that was virginal and fresh and downy-cheeked; all that innocent impatient energy, the laughter, the sudden changes of mood, the skittish pauses, the chromatic complexities of feeling, the dreaminess, the indefiniteness, the petulance and questioning of youth – and in approval to put itself with a tender, smiling good-humour in sympathy with all of it. It was a reminder of that tenderness felt by experience towards innocence and freshness; a tenderness which was more than a mere instinct, more than a mere biological determined maternity but the tenderness felt by all existence for its preludes; a tenderness felt by all that is complete for that which is only half-formed, that which is becoming, that which is hovering shyly on the verge of experience; a tenderness which was more than a mere nostalgia for youth; it was, from a sense that the incompletion, the striving, the curiosity characterises more than just youth, a tenderness for the very stuff of life itself.
Sadie watched fascinated while McKay played – this big uncouth-looking man, sitting there at the piano, his bottom lip pendulous in consideration, peering and grimacing through the smoke which rose from the butt-end of the cigarette in his mouth. The ironic smile which twisted his bottom lip was not, she knew, simply an expression of technical assurance, but his recognition and assent to Beethoven’s idea and also a sly hint to her, Sadie, that for all the dignity and pride of Erotica, the agonising complexity of the late sonatas, the icy intellectual heights of the last quartets, this coaxing little piece was written by Beethoven not just to persuade and wheedle the unformed hand into mastery but to assert common human feelings in which all true grandeur was based. It was an assertion of that essential approachability on which genius rests.
She felt touched to be the recipient of this tenderness, and of McKay’s generosity. All the more so for her own capacity to feel the same nostalgia and affection for growth. Even if she had not, inevitably, been reminded of that time more than 30 years before when she had sat on the cushion in the big Bergère arm-chair and listened to Anna playing, even without that particular, and to her moving reference she would have still felt, isolated and clear, that nostalgia and affection.
When McKay finished playing he had turned to her. ‘You know that wee tune, I suppose?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘Fur Sadie,’ and it wasn’t until McKay put his head back and laughed that she clapped her hand to her mouth.
‘Fur Sadie,’ he said, laughing, missing out the umlaut and so turning the word into Glaswegian, ‘Fur Sadie.’
When the alarm went off Sadie stretched her arm out past the curtain and touched the button to shut off the strident noise. Alec as usual grumbled and turned in his sleep. The alarm always disturbed him though he never woke to it if Sadie was quick to cut it off. When she was not he always grunted and nudged her with his elbow.
Sadie got up at once for it was Saturday morning and she had plenty to do. After half dressing in her slip she went to wash at the sink. The kitchen window faced due east and a pale yellow light filtered through the sash curtains which were still drawn. She washed thoroughly, splashing much cold water on her face as she did every morning, even in winter. When a little girl her sister Mary had told her it was good for her complexion. This was one of several ascetic habits Sadie had learned from her sister, though oddly enough Mary hardly ever practised them.
Before going to bed Sadie always brushed out her long auburn hair and before washing in the morning always hastily pinned it up into a bun. As she turned to dry herself she exposed, intimately, the tender nape of her neck to the diminished sunlight; the little unruly fronds of hair were darkened with damp to chestnut and the slight frizz round the mass of her head caught the light to make the golden aureole. As she stood in that quiet morning kitchen she might have been a young girl, her naked shoulders lit by the sun, the small shoulder blades sliding fluently beneath the unflawed skin as she dried herself – or some neat, clean, glossy animal unselfconsciously grooming.
After drying herself she put the kettle on to boil, finished dressing and by seven o’clock had wakened Alec and the breakfast was nearly ready; the tea was masked, the eggs on to boil, the toast being buttered. If he had awakened earlier she would not have stood so easily, her big breasts pouted as she raised her arms to pin her hair, nor as she stood vigorously drying her face and neck, nor would her spine have curved so grandly, swerving down like a clef into the small of her back and flaring out into the mass of her buttocks. Instead she would have crouched and hurried, her face averted, hands covering the deep cleft between her breasts.
Just as Alec, when he rose, turned away to drop his pyjama bottoms. He put on his trousers with his back to her, bending over so only his buttocks were visible through his underpants, and the big hairy thigh, strong and braced as he lifted a foot to put inside his trouser leg. Meanwhile Sadie deferentially buttered toast.
She did not consciously turn her eyes from him. Over the years they both established this routine in deference to one another’s modesty, just as they had a routine for going to bed at night. They had never seen one another naked and both wore their underclothes at night – Sadie her pants and bra under her nightdress and Alec his vest and pants under his pyjamas. Neither had a reason for shame. Both, given some naturalness, could have shown each other a splendid nakedness. Yet even during the most passionate connexions of their early married life Sadie had only pulled her nightdress up over her thighs. Always, after the assuagement of sexual heat, modesty returned. Over the years, with the dying of this connexion, modesty had increased.
It was a terrible modesty that excluded everything from the sexual act but stark genital facts, the ache for detumescence, the need to release tension. It was a terrible modesty that excluded sexuality from the commonplace acts of the day and, denying ordinary acts of touching and looking, denied a way of expressing tenderness. It was a terrible modesty that, in denying exposure, authorised ignorance and secretiveness. The modesty was increased by the memory of the act it sought not to recognise, the act made more brutal by the modesty surrounding it. So Sadie and Alec protected themselves from consciousness of all this by the coy morning clothing routine, moving about the kitchen doing essential chores so that their faces seldom turned to one another. Alec quickly grabbed the key from its hook in the lobby because, until he visited the closet in the stairhead and emptied his bladder, he always had a slight erection. This would not have been an occasion for wifely amusement on Sadie’s part if she had noticed it, but a shameful reminder of their shameful relationship.
This particular morning she was reminded of this relationship by the absence of the piano from the kitchen. Moving the piano to their sons’ bedroom had been prelude to an evening that had ended in Alec’s drunken rummaging inside her while she gasped and pushed towards that consummation she had almost forgotten existed.
Sadie was boiling the eggs when Alec returned from the closet. He was suffering a slight hangover and they did not speak until sitting down to breakfast and after she had poured the first cups of tea. Only on Saturday mornings, when Colin and Hugh
slept late because they did not work at weekends, did Sadie and Alec breakfast alone.
‘Do you want an aspirin?’ she asked.
‘No. No. Tea’ll be fine.’ Alec spooned out the last of his egg, spread his toast thick with marmalade, laid another slice of toast on top and ate vigorously. Sadie said, ‘It hasn’t affected your appetite.’
‘You know me. Can always recover.’
If Alec had time for a smoke after breakfast he always left, drawing fiercely on his fag, blowing smoke at the chimney and tapping ash carefully into the grate, for he hated the sight of ash. Only when leaving for work did he mention the previous night, standing near the door with bonnet on, tapping his pockets to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.
‘That Joe Pringle,’ he said, ‘he can fairly play the piano.’
‘Aye,’ said Sadie.
‘It was a good night,’ Alec said, ‘well, I’m away.’
He left and as she heard his footsteps, light and pattering, go down the stairs, Sadie recalled that it had not been a good night for her. Not a good night at all.
Maybe things had begun to go wrong when McKay, a fortnight before, had given her the Beethoven sonatina to play. In his usual way he stressed the lesson he had tried to impart by playing Für Elise .