Ellie and the Harpmaker

by Hazel Prior

  The cat (who I suspect understands more than she lets on) looked up at me, green eyes glowing.

  “What do you think, Meow?”

  A big, lazy tortoiseshell, Christina’s cat is called Meow because Christina says it’s only fair that animals should be able to pronounce their own names. Meow twitched the end of her tail and said her name twice, which was not particularly useful.

  “Christina, I’m totally in love,” I confided. “With the harp. So much it scares me. I don’t get a single word of the how-to-play-harp books and I’ve no idea what I’m doing, but the sound of the instrument! It’s like a breath of fresh mountain air . . . or a shaft of sunlight rippling on water. It’s like green things growing in a forest glen. Even if all I do is run my fingers up and down the strings, it’s just . . . whoooooa!”

  My hands wove through the air, trying to get it across to her.

  “Ellie, I’m over the moon for you!” Christina grinned. “You needed something like this. The creative stuff is bloody essential. Whenever I’m missing Alex I make myself start a new project and it helps to no end.”

  “Yes, it’s great you’ve got your jewelry.” She was wearing a pair of her own homemade earrings now. They glinted a pale, pearly green against her dark hair. “You’re dead clever to make such gorgeous things.”

  “You make gorgeous things as well! You make gorgeous poetry,” she said, not a hundred percent sincerely. (She’s read some of my poems. She always says nice things, but I know she doesn’t rate them very highly.) “And now you’ve got harp playing too!” She lit a cigarette. Meow spends a lot of time passive smoking. I gave the back of her head a sympathetic fondle.

  “But this is music,” I told Christina, uttering the word in a reverential whisper. “That’s something talented people do, not me!”

  She tutted. “As far as I can see you’ve got all the necessary attributes: Fingers, thumbs. Sensitivity. A harp.”

  “Yes, fingers and thumbs I have; sensitivity—possibly! A harp, yes, now! But there’s an important something I’m lacking.”

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I know. Confidence.”

  “Well, yes, but that wasn’t what I was thinking. There’s another thing I’m lacking too.”

  She puffed out a cloud of smoke. “Go on.”

  I frowned. “My husband’s approval.”

  She flipped her hand back in a dismissive gesture. “Minor detail. Unimportant. One to be sorted out later. In the fullness of time.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The fullness of time. When, I ask myself, will that arrive? It’s a delicate matter and I’ll have to pick the right moment. I’m a wimp and I know it. Clive is great, but occasionally, when I’m stupid, there are repercussions.

  Like that time when Clive and I went to badminton club and ended up playing doubles with Sarah (local sweetie pie) and Terry (local outrageous flirt). Terry was plying me with rather personal compliments and I was flirting back—only a little—because I know he’s harmless. Suddenly I felt a great thwack on the back of my shoulder that sent me reeling. Clive had hit me with his racket. There was a small moment of stunned silence between us all before he leaped in with an apology. “Oh God, El, my poor honeybun! Are you all right? I’m so sorry! I don’t know what happened. I thought the shuttlecock was heading this way . . . I’m sure it was! I thought you’d get out of the way.” The shuttlecock had been stationary in Sarah’s hands.

  We’d trooped off to the pub after the game. I wasn’t really hurt, but I think we were all in need of a little something to steady our nerves. There was no more flirting and nobody mentioned the accident again.

  In wobbly moments I still wonder, was it actually an accident?

  * * *

  • • •

  Too many strings! How will I ever find my way around them all? Red strings are Cs, black strings are Fs—and all the others are sheer guesswork. Lovely guesswork, though. I concentrate hard and try to pick out the first line of “Danny Boy.” It almost works.

  Dan peers round the door. He’s wearing an earnest expression and clearly has something important to say. I wait, wondering what’s coming. Am I trespassing too much on his generosity? Am I coming too often? Am I disturbing him with my slow, plodding attempts at harp practice?

  He scrutinizes my feet, then slowly raises his eyes to my face. “Ellie, I have a question for you.”

  “Ask away!” I say, breezily.

  He clears his throat. “My question is this. Do you like plums?”

  Do I like plums?

  “Yes, very much. Why . . . ?”

  “Plums,” he repeats, as if the future of the universe rested on that word. “There are lots. Of plums. Several hundred. On my plum tree. In the back. Several hundred is more than I can eat. And waste is a thing I don’t like. So I was thinking you should take some plums home. For yourself and your husband.”

  Dan doesn’t know that Clive doesn’t know. Too much explaining . . .

  Dan leads me outside to a little enclosure behind the barn, a bumpy field with three trees. A tiny woodshed stands at one end, stacked high with logs. Robins and coal tits flutter and chirrup in the hedge along the back. September sunshine streams across the grass, threading gold through the green.

  “My orchard!” Dan announces.

  “Glorious!” I exclaim.

  One of the trees is a tall cherry, one an apple that looks as though the fruits have already been picked. The third is bowed low with the weight of plums, amber colored with a rosy blush. The air is thick with their scent.

  “We need a trug,” Dan says. “Luckily a trug is a thing that I have.”

  He disappears into the woodshed for a minute, then reappears with the traditional oval basket for gathering fruit and vegetables.

  We set to work. The plums are oozing stickiness and surrounded by bees. Dan, I assume, doesn’t have much in the way of family and friends he can share them with. So far I’ve never seen another person on my visits. But he’s mentioned his sister, Jo, a couple of times. I wonder if she has much of a say in his life. He implies that she does, yet I know that Dan has a mind of his own—nobody more so.

  “Are you getting on well with your harp?” he asks, as he does every day.

  “Yes,” I reply. “It’s a delight. But my fingers keep getting muddled up. I’m hopelessly uncoordinated. The books help, but I was wondering if . . . if you could show me a little basic technique?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t play the harp. I only make them.” He brightens. “I can teach you how to tune up if you like.”

  “Do I need to learn that? It never sounds out of tune to me.”

  “That’s because I tune it every morning before you arrive.”

  I am touched, and not for the first time.

  “Oh, Dan! I’d no idea! Thank you! And yes, please, I’d love it if you could teach me to tune up.”

  We munch a couple of plums, spitting out the stones. Dan seems to be spitting with care and precision. “I’m hoping they’ll grow and make more plum trees,” he explains.

  “You need more plums?”

  “No, but the world could always do with more trees.” He glances at the trug. “So far we have forty-three plums. How many would you like?”

  I’m amazed. I wasn’t aware he’d been counting.

  “Another forty-three!” I answer boldly, hatching a plan.

  He smiles approval. The sunlight is touching the curve of his cheek and, as he stretches high to reach the fruit on the upper branches, I register again his extraordinarily handsome features. If the universe had planned things differently . . . If I had been single . . . If he had been the sort of person who looked at me the way I was now looking at him . . .

  “I’ve just had a thought!” he cries, his hand circling a plum. “It is a thought I had before, but then I fo
rgot it. Now I’ve had it again! Shall I tell you my thought?” He has an air of eureka about him.

  “Yes!”

  “You could take harp lessons with my girlfriend!”

  “Your girlfriend . . . ?”

  “Of course!” His hands start twitching oddly. “You must have lessons with Roe Deer!”

  “With Roe Deer?”

  “Yes,” he says. “My girlfriend Roe Deer. She lives in Taunton. It is twenty-three point one miles from here. I think she’ll be happy to teach you.” Then a shadow crosses his face. “But you may have to pay her. She’s a bit funny about money.”

  “Of course she’d need paying.” It isn’t the money aspect that’s bothering me. “Could I phone her?” I ask.

  “Yes, of course. Her number is . . .” And he reels off a number he obviously expects me to remember.

  “Could you write it down for me?”

  When we’ve gathered eighty-six plums, two large trugfuls, we return to the barn. He takes me to the notice board with all the photos of women playing harps.

  “That’s her!” he says, pointing.

  It’s the sizzling sexpot of a blonde whose image has haunted me right from the beginning.

  | 7 |

  Dan

  My sister Jo arranged it all because she wants me to sell more harps. It was the first time I’d had a radio reporter in my barn.

  He was ginger haired and blinked a lot. He had a wart on his left cheek with tiny hairs sprouting out of it. He had ginger nose hairs too. He was wearing jeans, black, and a jacket, leather. He said we would be on air after he’d counted three two one. He held up three fingers in front of my face. “Three, two, one,” he mouthed. Then in a completely different voice he said: “Delighted to meet you, Mr. Hollis! So this is your workshop?”

  Yes, I said, it was.

  “I must say, it’s quite a place. An old barn, up a steep lane, miles from anywhere—the last place you would expect to find a business. There is quite a rustic atmosphere in here, with the low beams and a trestle bench or two. But everywhere I look there are harps; harps of all different shapes and sizes. Very intricate and beautiful they are too! You seem to be pretty well set up, Mr. Hollis. How long have you been established here as the Exmoor Harpmaker?”

  I told him twenty-three years.

  “Twenty-three years! Quite some time! But I must say, that seems impossible, looking at you. You don’t seem that old.”

  I told him I was thirty-three.

  “Right. So that means, according to my calculations, you started your own business when you were a mere ten years old. Is that true?”

  I told him yes.

  “Were you actually able to construct a harp at that tender age?”

  I told him yes.

  “That must have been quite a difficult skill to learn.”

  I told him yes.

  “Did you have anyone to help you?”

  I told him yes.

  “Let me guess. Was it perhaps a kind uncle who was skilled in carpentry? A neighbor? But no, there wouldn’t be any neighbors out here, would there? Was it your father?”

  I told him yes. It was my father.

  “Ah! So he was a harpmaker before you?”

  I told him yes.

  “And you always knew, did you, right from square one, that you would follow in his footsteps and make harps?”

  I had to think about this. I would know the answer for sure if the question hadn’t been so cryptic. It all depended on the timing of Square One. If Square One occurred at my birth, then the answer was no. I don’t remember being born very clearly, but I am pretty sure making harps was not uppermost in my mind when it happened. Perhaps Square One was on my first birthday, when I turned one. In this case, again, I don’t think I had great harpmaking aspirations. If, on the other hand, Square One was later on, when I was starting to want more than baby food and nappy changes, then the answer might well be yes. I was about to tell the radio reporter this when he started asking more questions.

  “Could you tell us a little bit about your harpmaking journey? How you fell in love with the profession? How your father helped you along the way? How you fitted it in around school?”

  I asked him which question he wanted me to answer first.

  “Well, maybe if you tell us about the first time you realized you wanted to be a harpmaker . . . ?” And he raised his eyebrows at me. They were very bushy and ginger.

  “Certainly,” I said. “The first time I realized I wanted to be a harpmaker was when I was seven and a half years old. It was Saturday, the twelfth of June, and there were green dragonflies in the garden. I was wearing new shoes my mother had got for me, but they dug into my heels too much. There were four different types of moss growing on the stone by the gate. We had scrambled eggs for breakfast. The weather was fair to middling.”

  “Right,” he said. “Great to have all those details. So what happened exactly to put harpmaking into your head? Were you inspired by a harp your father had made?”

  I told him no. My father did not make harps then. He did not make many musical instruments, but he worked with wood generally. He carved things like bowls and candlesticks and statues most of the time and sold them to tourists. He did some furniture too. My mother was not very interested in wood, but the thing she was interested in was getting free babysitting for me. I was a problem because I did not always do the things I was supposed to do. When I got excited I flapped my hands around and made strange noises and she did not like that. She said if I would promise not to make strange noises and flap my hands around I could go to Storyland in Dulverton. Storyland was on Saturday mornings. Me and five other children got to sit on beanbags in the village hall and listen to a large, gray-haired lady who read stories. I had the beanbag with blue and yellow penguins all over it. It was very difficult for me not to make strange noises and flap my hands around when the storytelling lady came in, but I didn’t because I wanted to be allowed to come again next week and the week after that and in fact the thing I wanted was to live in Storyland and listen to stories forever.

  “This is very interesting,” cut in the radio man, “but I’m sure the listeners out there are wanting to hear about the actual harpmaking.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly the thing I am going to tell you.” I went on to explain that it was in Storyland that I met my first harp. One day—the day of the green dragonflies and uncomfortable shoes and the four types of moss and the scrambled eggs—my mother had dropped me off as usual and I went in and sat on my yellow and blue penguin beanbag. And there in front of me, placed in the middle of all the beanbags, was the most beautiful object I’d ever seen.

  It was like a swan and a heart and a loom and a sailing ship and a hazel tree and a wing and the swell of a wave and a woman dancing and ripples of light on water—all at the same time. And it was made of wood! All of us kids were gawping.

  Then a lady who wasn’t our normal storytelling lady stepped up. She had white skin and tremendously long hair. She said she was filling in today and she was going to tell us a story with some musical interludes on her harp. I have to admit, I couldn’t stop my hands from flapping then and a bit of a gurgle came out of my mouth, but nobody seemed to mind. When the lady started, it took my breath away. The harp not only had the most beautiful body, but it had a soul too. And a voice—the most softly powerful voice I had ever heard.

  “I still remember the story the lady told us that day,” I said to the radio man. “Would you like me to tell it to you?”

  “Perhaps not now,” he said, glancing at the microphone. “Back to the harpmaking?”

  So I related what happened next when I got home from Storyland. What happened next was this: I ran straight to my father and told him he must make a harp. He told me steady on, son, that’s easier said than done. But I kept on at him every day over the next y
ear and eventually he did do it. His first harp wasn’t very good, of course. But he became intrigued and that led him to make another the next year, and I helped him. By the time he made his third harp he had bought the barn and I was making my own one simultaneously. I was then ten years old.

  “Quite a boy!” said the radio man. “Your parents must have been very proud of you.”

  “Must they?” I said.

  “I would have thought so. If my son made a harp at age ten I’d be proud. Can’t imagine that, though. Could never drag him away from the computer games for long enough, the little blighter! Still, your father must have been a great inspiration to you. Do you mind my asking, is he still around?”

  “No,” I said. “He died in a car accident when I was sixteen.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. And your mother? Is she alive?”

  “She died a few months after my father. She died because of a hospital operation that went wrong. I was sad that year.”

  “Phew! I’m not surprised! That’s hard on a teenager. Do you have any other family?”

  I informed him that I had an older sister Jo. I told him how, after our parents died, Jo lived with me here in the Harp Barn for a while and helped sort things out. I mentioned that Jo still does the business side of harpmaking for me. And that she is much cleverer than me. I can only do harps. She can do money.

  “I see. And how many harps do you make in a year?”

  I answered that it depended on the year, but normally it was only about thirty-six.

  “Only! And I believe all your wood is locally sourced, from the woods of Exmoor and the surrounding region?”

  I answered in the affirmative.

  “And you use an Exmoor pebble in the woodwork of each harp?”

  I told him this was indeed the case.

  “I notice that all the harps here, beautiful though they are, are on a fairly small scale. Have you ever considered upsizing and making proper harps?”

  “Proper harps?”

  “Sorry, perhaps I’m using the wrong terminology here. I mean the large harps, the classical harps, the harps you see in orchestras.”