The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  He was buried next to your dear mother, my uncle wrote. Holland sorted it all out, good man that he is. You’re left well provided for. I remain your guardian in law, and your dear uncle, always, with love. Valentine.

  I tried to bring to mind a picture of my father, but I could not. All I could hear was his voice, his words bitten back into his throat as he spoke them; and all I could see were minute splinters of bamboo, surfing rivers of blood and salty fluids until they formed a microscopic log-jam. Such an effect – to make an orphan – from such a tiny thing.

  ELECTRICAL BY NATURE

  Winter had given way to sweet wet spring, then to the warmth of summer, but by February the heat had become humid and inescapable. Madame and I still met each Tuesday and Thursday in the smoky dark of her room, behind her heavy curtains pulled against the sun. It was on one of my Thursday visits to Madame Petrova that she first spoke of the Professor.

  ‘A Russian, of course, as you would guess from his name.’

  She blew smoke at me over her glass, then tossed the vodka down her throat in one movement. There was buffalo grass in the bottle on the low table between us, a thin discoloured stripe of grass bent by the low glassy meniscus where the vodka met the air. The vodka burned my throat; I had learned to toss it back in one hit, as Madame did, to let it rush through my blood and my limbs. I felt its warmth in my gut, and my groin.

  ‘He is a little mad, I think. He says he has a machine, like a musical instrument, but electric – can you imagine!’ She blew air through her lips and nose at the same time, somehow breathing in a circular way, unnatural.

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘You should play for him, I think. He wants to find someone to play this machine for him, someone talented, he says. Perfect pitch is what he needs in this player.’

  ‘I play the cello, you know that. Why would I learn a new instrument – not even an instrument, a machine!’

  ‘But you have perfect pitch.’

  ‘Yes, I have perfect pitch. Why does a machine need perfect pitch?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She blinked at me, shifted in her seat, waved her hand at her face and blew air from her mouth to emphasise the heat. ‘But’– she shifted forward in her seat – ‘are you not a tiny bit curious to know about this machine of his? He calls it’– she had saved this up for me, knowing my fascination – ‘Music’s Most Modern Instrument.’

  My curiosity was piqued, as she had known it would be. I thought of my uncle, far away across the country, at home with his magazines – Science and Invention – his gramophone, his poetry, all the products of this, his beloved fabulous century. How he, too, would itch to know more.

  ‘On what does he base this – odd – claim?’ I asked her.

  She shifted again, sucked her teeth, dragged on the ubiquitous cigarette.

  ‘Apparently’– she shifted further forward then, eager, the day’s heat cast aside in the excitement of musical gossip –‘this machine is played by the waving of hands, like conducting an orchestra. It is played without the player touching it, not with a bow, nor by blowing. It is neither wind nor string, brass nor percussion. It is a kind of – I think – electrical voice. This is how modern it is: the voice of electricity, and of the body, combined. Yes, electrical, somehow.’

  She sat back in her seat then, settling herself back on the chaise. Her curranty eyes widened as much as they could in her fat face, in the sheen of sweat on pallid, indoor skin.

  I could not imagine how what Petrova had said could be true. I could only wonder at how such a thing might be possible. And so I agreed; I would play for this Professor. I would play for the chance to see this magical machine of his. Such are the decisions we make in our lives, on a whim, at a word, on a feeling, and such are the decisions that change the courses of lives, not just our own. I could not know, that day, that this was such a decision.

  Madame had arranged our meeting for a hot afternoon in February, and I recall dressing with care for the heat, recall dispensing with undergarments as I often did to allow the air to circulate freely, to cool me. The dress I wore that day – my favourite, worn often that summer – had vertical black lines like wires finely drawn over a white background.

  I found myself face to face that day with the Professor in Madame’s smoke-hazy back room – face to face for, like me, he was tall. He too was dressed in black and white that day – neat black trousers, a sharp line running down from belt to toe, defining the centre of each leg; a crisp white shirt and a rather pretentious cravat. His eyes were piercing green, and he blinked seldom; his hair and moustaches were tamed with Macassar oil and pomade, fragrant with perfume. He took my hand when we met, bent slightly over it, dipping his head in a nod. As he started to speak, his heavy accent overlaying grammatically perfect English, his eagerness and excitement over his invention were compelling. He seemed part salesman, part shaman. He described a wooden casing containing valves and wires and transformers that translated tiny movements of the hands to music, amplified not by the shaped body of the instrument – like the cello – but fed instead by wires to yet more electrical forms. I was intrigued; I wanted to see these things, to hear them. But first, Madame told me, I must play for him.

  So I took up my cello and bow, seated myself, arranged my skirt – carefully, recalling the state of ventilation down below – over my legs straddling the instrument, and played for him, Bach, the Sarabande from the fourth suite. My eyes closed, my head lolling to the music, I lost sense of time passing until I reached the final bars; then I raised my head, and my eyes opened as I drew the bow across the string to sound the final note and let it sit in the air between us.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Professor. ‘Yes, you must come and play my Aetherwave Instrument, this is clearly so. Come. I will show you.’

  Madame nodded. I hastily replaced my cello into its case and snapped the case shut, eager to follow the Professor.

  We walked side by side the two blocks to his building, not talking, stepping briskly despite the heat. He lived in a tall old house on Underwood Street, loaned its use by absent patrons, he told me as we walked. He stayed in a flat on the first floor, but used the large basement as his work room and studio. The cello case banging against my leg, I held the railing to steady myself as I descended into a small anteroom opening into a large, low-ceilinged space tangled with wires, tubes, conglomerations of leads and devices connected to other conglomerations, and then to others still. The Professor threaded a path through the midst of it all, beckoning me to follow him. I propped my cello in its case carefully against the door and followed the Professor, until we stood before a wooden box on a low tabletop. In the box, two tall tubes – like tin cans – were wound around with copper. The copper coils flanked glass bulbs, bulbs and wires within them, attached by black bakelite bases to a wooden platform. Ceramic cards, more coils, a large black box; all connected by wires, by clips, in seeming chaos. The box had a long metal rod, an antenna or aerial extending perhaps two feet into the air; and to the side there extended a teardrop-shaped loop of similar stiff metal. The Professor talked with enthusiasm of trimming condensers, of transformers and valves, of vacuum tubes and farads and induction, of capacitance and pitch, of limitless notes. I was lulled by the poetry the words made as the Professor spoke; but could he really, as he described it, create music out of the air with a wave of his hands?

  He flicked an electric switch and the machine in front of us hummed to life. We waited while it warmed; a smell like lightning, like magic, like dry rain, rose from it, as bulbs glowed into life and heat radiated from the electrical components into the already stifling room. He warned me not to touch the machine’s innards, warned me of the danger of shock from the electrical currents. I imagined I could feel its threat as I could feel the sweat trickling down my back and legs.

  The Professor raised his right hand towards the upright aerial, while his left hand approached the loop. And as his hands neared the metal, there was a high wailing – a voice disembod
ied but somehow everywhere, aerial, electric. Magical. He moved his hands and fingers to change the pitch and volume, to swerve the voice high and low, soft and loud. He wobbled his right hand and a warm vibrato issued.

  But the Professor’s amateur noodlings quickly frustrated my perfect ear and twitching fingers – I ached to try to play the thing myself. He, frustrated by his inability to achieve the potential he saw from his machine, did not take much convincing. And so it was that on that hot February afternoon in 1928 I put aside my beloved cello and for the first time raised my sweating arms and drew my fingers through the air to cause music to issue from a tangle of wire, glass, bakelite and wood. I did not play perfectly that day – that would come after long practice, take some time to achieve – but that day, when I first raised my hands to the machine, that was when I first felt my hands disrupt the electromagnetic field, felt the waves swell through the blood and flesh of my body; felt electrical by nature.

  In the many years since that hot day, this instrument has become known as the theremin. But the Professor and I, we called it by the names he coined: aetherphone, or Aetherwave Instrument. The first time I played the aetherphone, I felt the rush of the electrical field through my body. I felt like a god. I felt like a queen. I felt like a conqueror. And I wanted to play it forever. I can’t describe the feeling accurately. It was part visceral sensation, part physics; the relation between body and air, electrons aligning. A crystalline cold swept through my body when first I played the theremin, swiftly replaced by a bone-warming heat, a calm like none I had known. I recall bowing my head in awe.

  I hold one regret from that day: that I put my first love, my cello, aside. But it was to take up a bigger love, a greater thing; it was to step into the future. This was Music’s Most Modern Instrument. And I was to become Music’s Most Modern Musician.

  BIRTHDAY

  In the days and weeks and months that followed that first meeting, I could not have been kept from my visits to the Professor’s studio by a team of horses. I’d go there each morning; depending on my mood and the weather I’d walk or catch the tram to Oxford Street, then from Oxford Street I’d cut across and almost run the last three hundred yards to the Professor’s. Learning to play the theremin was unlike learning to play the cello. There was no touching of soft unaccustomed fingertips to thick strings taut across a wooden neck, no blisters of skin to overcome, no calluses to build. My arms were strong from swimming, so the pain of muscles holding arms aloft was slight. My pains came from the straining of fingers against nothing, against the air, against the sound, against the letting go of my preconceptions and the adoption of new ways of holding my body. I became a novice once more; I had everything to learn.

  The Professor worked me hard each day; more to the point, I worked myself hard. We worked closely together, for long hours – physically close, as we experimented with different ways that I could hold my body in relation to the machine. But there was no hint of romance. The Professor was a man focussed on his machine, and his interest in me was purely as an extension of it, as the means of realising its potential. And my only care was to become as proficient a thereminist as I was a cellist, to prove myself a modern musician.

  A week before my eighteenth birthday, I received an invitation on ivory linen stationery. It seemed that the Professor had been talking to Madame Petrova, Petrova talking to Mrs Britten, Mrs Britten to Mr Britten, and that it had been decided that I was to be introduced to society, to play the theremin at a party at the Brittens’ house on the night of my birthday.

  The Brittens were patrons of the arts. Musicians, painters, sculptors, writers; they gathered them all, opened their arms and their wallets to them, bought their first pieces, funded their concerts, even took them as lovers, if rumour could be believed. Mrs Britten had white blonde hair cut in a severe and fashionable bob, sharp tips curving in to emphasise her pointed chin. She was beautiful, despite – or perhaps because of – her severe look; her age was somewhere from forty to fifty-five. Her husband looked older, and had about him the stance, the demeanour, the very smell of a rich man. He was a lawyer with an eye for art and women, and the money to assure he had both.

  On the night of my birthday, the Professor arrived in the Brittens’ car to pick me up, although it was just a short distance, easily walked, from my house to their mansion in Elizabeth Bay. But no, they had insisted, the Professor told me, and my silken shoes were thankful for it, designed as they were to swish and step the night away on a smooth, chalked dance floor, not to walk on Sydney roads. A man in a cap drove the car; the Professor handed me into the back seat and lowered himself in after me. We pulled into the short driveway that curved from the road, through gates, to the front of the big house in Elizabeth Bay, the night fiery with lights, murmuring with voices and soft music, scented with petrol and flashing with the headlights of cars sweeping around the drive.

  The Professor stepped out of the car and onto crunching gravel. As I stepped from the car and straightened my back to stand next to him at the foot of the steps that led to the grand front door, he held out his hand to me, and I took it with mine. He was in evening dress. My dress was silk, cut on the bias, simple and clinging, fluid against my body. Its colour was oyster, or shell or ivory – the colour of something cut from an animal; an organic colour, a non-colour that both absorbed and reflected the colours around it. It had thin straps, slick and slippery. A short capelet capped my shoulders, the same fabric as the dress and tied at the front with thin ribbons of silk. I needed no coat or jacket to warm me; the night was mild, and I was young. The Professor faced me, took both my hands in his, and smiled.

  ‘Enjoy this, my dear. It will be the first of many such nights.’

  He patted my hand with his, turned to face the house and hooked his right arm towards me. I slotted my left arm through his, squared my shoulders, and we stepped up to the bright house in front of us.

  The door was opened by a deferential man in evening dress, who bowed his head and ushered us towards the double doors that led from the entrance hall. The Professor opened the doors with a flourish, and led me through into a room of generous proportions. A semi-circle of people stood there, all dressed in their evening finery, black, white and silver dominating their dress as it did the room’s furnishings. They turned to us as we entered. Mrs Britten stepped forward and introduced the Professor to the room. He bowed, low – a very Russian bow – and all in the room applauded gently, murmuring, heads nodding to each other. He raised his hands to the small crowd, smiling and accepting their applause as he took a step back, took my hand, and raised it in his.

  ‘Mesdames et messieurs. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your kind applause. But tonight is not for me. Tonight I give you a talented young woman who will soon be a famous young woman. You will not forget this night, my dear friends. This is the night I introduce to you, and to the world, Miss Lena Gaunt, and the shining star she will become.’

  I bowed my head as he spoke, but was drawn to raise it as all in the room applauded. They applauded me. Me. I raised my eyes and looked around, saw the well-groomed faces, old and young, the fine clothes, the raised eyebrows, mouths moving with words or carved into smiles.

  ‘Lena Gaunt – mesdames et messieurs’– the Professor pushed his hands through the air to call for their quiet –‘Lena Gaunt will play for you tonight one of the most astonishing musical instruments you have ever seen or heard. Yes, Miss Gaunt has been working with me for some months now, perfecting the art and science of Music’s Most Modern Instrument, and we can now reveal this to you, my dear friends. My most honoured patrons, Monsieur et Madame Britten – Edward and his lovely wife, Delphine – have bestowed their generosity upon Miss Gaunt and myself in inviting you all here. We will demonstrate for you – I give you – the aetherphone, this most magnificent instrument of my invention, played without touching, played by drawing the hands through the aether, by the modern science of physics and the human body combined.’

  The Profess
or acknowledged the applause, waving his hands in the air. He stepped aside and turned, and so I too turned, to see the theremin set up in the centre of the room, the amplifying speaker looming behind it. A glossy black grand piano was set back behind them, Madame Petrova seated there, beaming at me, cigarette in her lipsticked mouth, nodding her head at me in encouragement, her hair piled more extravagantly than usual and looking in danger of flying off her head and into the piano’s wires. The people still applauded; I turned at a touch at my elbow, to find Mr Britten had appeared. He led me to the theremin. It made a low hum as I approached. I touched a hand to it to silence it; not yet. Mr Britten stepped aside, raised his hands.

  ‘My friends! Quiet if you will. Miss Gaunt will play for us on this amazing Aether Machine. Delphine and I’ve been looking forward to this evening very much. Miss Gaunt,’ he addressed me, ‘when you are ready, please.’

  He stepped back into the crowd. They all faced me. The Professor was at the front, to the side, his hands held together under his chin. Delphine Britten stood next to him.

  I lifted my dulling hand from the aerial, moved my hands and body to the starting position I had perfected, a neutral position: not touching the machine but positioned so that the tiniest movement would elicit the desired tone. I felt in control. I knew exactly the movements I needed to make with my fingers, my hands, my arms and my body to play for them.

  The Professor nodded at me; I nodded in response, Petrova and I exchanged glances, and then I closed my eyes as I heard the first notes of Saint-Saëns’ ‘Le Cygne’ from the piano. As the first note from the theremin issued from the speaker behind me, I heard a collective intake of breath. My eyes opened as I played, and I saw the response of the audience – some leaned away, almost fearful of the electrical machine; others leaned forwards, wanting to see, to know, to embrace this new thing.