‘And then?’ I say.
‘Well,’ Grandma says, ‘I was naturally quite frantic about the cello. Finally I signed a promise that Rosie need never play the thing again and then your dad went out with a spirit lamp into the woods and dug it up. I still thank God that it hadn’t started to rain.’
‘Have you still got it?’ I say, excitedly.
‘Most certainly,’ Grandma says, ‘I couldn’t possibly have got rid of it. It’s a very beautiful old cello, you know. It belonged to your great-great-grandfather.’
We pick up the String Trio and proceed to the concert. I sit transfixed, staring at the cellist, who incidentally is female and pregnant. I say nothing on the way home until we have dropped off the String Trio. Then, when we are alone in the car, I say to Grandma, ‘Can I try and play it, Grandma?’
‘What’s that, my dearest?’ she says.
‘The cello,’ I say.
Grandma looks really pleased. ‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘I’d absolutely adore you to play it. Tell you what. Why don’t you come and stay with me, and we’ll get you some lessons with a friend of mine. And we’ll keep it a secret, shall we?’
Grandma is good at little conspiracies. She has lived alone in Hampstead since her husband died, which happened just after I was born. She is surrounded by musicians of calibre. She herself plays the piano and the harpsichord. When she isn’t playing, she’s gardening. I love to stay with her, especially without the String Trio. She has that firm, headmistressy style that my mother absolutely lacks. She has a penetrating grande dame voice that always gives my dad the heebies in public places.
The cello doesn’t have a case like a modern cello, made of moulded fibreglass. The case is a huge matt black wooden box, like a coffin, that stands upright on the floor. It’s about as big as I am, maybe bigger. It has two brass bolts and a slightly pocked purple baize lining. The bow lives alone in an engraved glass tankard that stands on Grandma’s writing desk.
‘Now the bow is not to go in the box, Stella,’ Grandma says. ‘Unfortunately, the case has a weevil that likes to eat the horsehair. It won’t do the cello any harm.’ I like to believe that the weevil has entered the box as a result of my dad’s burial procedures.
The cello itself is beautiful. It is slightly smaller than the one at the concert and it has a different sort of end pin. This one isn’t detachable and it isn’t as clumpy. It’s a smooth chrome shaft like a shiny nail that slides out from the cello’s insides when you loosen a small nut at the base. It has a beautiful gleaming fingerboard made of ebony. It has fine tuners on the tailpiece.
‘That’s because, in its time, some very good cellists have played it,’ Grandma says. ‘Most of us don’t actually need the fine tuners.’ I resolve, recklessly, that one day I will need the fine tuners.
The cellist neighbour has agreed to give me lessons. He is a sweet old Dutch recitalist, now retired, called Joonas, who has lived in Frognal Lane these fifty years, ever since he left The Hague as a young music student fleeing the Occupation. He is bent into a question mark with osteoporosis. He wears his trousers almost under his arms. First he tunes the cello, banging on individual piano keys and twiddling with the pegs. Then he sits me on a pretty upright chair and puts the cello against my chest so that the C peg is tickling my left ear. I am feverish with excitement. (‘Do you have fever in your left ear, Stella?’)
Though he puts my left hand on the strings and my right on the heel of the bow, he does not say a word about left and right. Perhaps Grandma has forewarned him about my dafty brain. Then he asks me to sing to him, so I sing bravely with the cello between my knees. Thinking of Aunt Rosie, I sing ‘Michael Row Your Boat Ashore, Alleluiah.’
‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘This cello will be happy with you. You will sing together. You will be friends.’
Then he tells me a story. He says that long ago – ‘perhaps seven hundert, eight hundert years’ – people already had a sort of violin, and they sang in strange, high-pitched, nasal voices. He pauses and, to my surprise, he sings an extended twelfth-century whine that strikes my ear like the soundtrack of Mother India. A little old man like a bag of bones in worsted and Viyella. His shoes are shiny brown with perforations. He has jaunty yellow socks with Prince of Wales diamond patterns. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘when they once began to sing like you, Stella, so beautiful, so deep with open throat –’ he stops ‘– for this, of course, they needed soon the cello.’
I sit taller on my pretty chair, feeling that, but for the likes of me, the cello might never have been invented. As I do so, and lest I think he has been dismissive of the violin, he tells me that long ago, ‘not quite seven hundert, eight hundert years’, when he was a boy in The Hague, his next-door neighbour had had the honour to billet Yehudi Menuhin, the boy wonder, the touring virtuoso in short pants, and that he and the little violinist had played with spinning tops together in the street, crouching together on the paving stones.
‘So, in the street. With spinning tops,’ he says.
The man is magic: I walk on air all the way back to my grandmother’s house – I and my new friend in the big wooden box. The box has a homely, scoop-shaped carry-handle made of brass, just like the ones on our kitchen dresser drawers at home. Aunt Rosie’s cello and I are in love.
Music-wallahs are often crushing bores, as I know better than most, perhaps, from my years of contact with the String Trio. I have various explanations for why the cello suited me; for why it so quickly became my friend and remained so when the piano was always so much my enemy. But I won’t unload them on you, if only because my reasons would sound like extracts from ‘Pseuds Corner’. I will say that there is a particular way, because of the stance and the instrument’s size, in which the music becomes a part of you; the music runs up and down your left arm. It leaves you so much freedom and yet it binds you so much with form. Form was good for me. It changed my life. It bound me to something. Perhaps it is extravagant to say that it gave me vision. God knows. I was in all other respects so completely all over the place; a person still so lacking in ‘the coping skills’. The cello protected me from the angst and drang of the GCSE and the A level exams – those routine demands for which I had remained so peculiarly ill-equipped emotionally, neurologically, conceptually; demands which made me cling all the more to my mother, who made a full-time job of seeing me through. ‘Mummeee!’ My mother, who became my own personal tugboat, always there to guide me into harbour. Oh, Christ. I do not wish to belittle her achievement. I was her one, onerous, unlikely work of art.
Yet it was never with her, only with the cello, that I experienced glimpses of what Yeats so divinely calls ‘the cold and rook-delighting heaven’. Only with the cello, and perhaps while turning cartwheels. I had found a higher, colder and more exquisite interaction. I had found a way, at last – at last – of playing on my own.
And I was lucky with my teacher. In the last letters we gave and received before he died, Joonas and I had some jokey little exchange about bowings. He’d sent me a pair of two-bar transcriptions from Bach’s Cello Suite in D. The first, that he had copied from the hand of Anna Magdalena Bach, looked like this:
The second, from a modern published version of the same passage, looked like this:
‘But this,’ he wrote, ‘is the mindless modern mentality, dear Stella. It is like paint-by-numbers. It is like reading words without sense.’ Then he wrote out his last sentence again in plodding, regular spacing, letters in clusters of four, to mock the even groupings: ‘It is like read ingw ords with outs ense.’ I wrote back to him as follows: ‘Dear estJ oona sbef oreI mety ouIu seda Iway stor eadw itho utse nsel ovey ouSt ella.’ ‘Dearest Joonas, before I met you I used always to read without sense. Love you, Stella.’
When I turn seventeen, my mother lets me down – my omnipresent mother, who has personally tutored me through every coursework essay; who has acquainted herself with every syllabus; who has recommended improvements to my syntax, corrected my spelling and advised upon rearrangements of, and
extensions to, my paragraphs. My mother, who has always been available to ‘test’ me on every conceivable subject, no matter how mind-numbingly boring – my mother has failed to notice that, in order to enter the music department of Edinburgh University, a candidate needs not only to demonstrate proficiency in his or her major instrument, but has also to submit evidence of competence upon a keyboard instrument up to, or equivalent to, Grade VII.
My heart is set on Edinburgh University, I don’t really know why. At fifteen, I go there with my father, when he gives a talk at the Festival. We stay for one night in the George Hotel and I love the miniature jars of honey and marmalade that come with the room service breakfast. We spend the next night in a nice, cheap little B and B that is awash with pink nylon flounces. Before we check out, Dad and I sign the visitors’ book where the two parties above us on the page have filled in the ‘comment’ space. ‘Very nice ‘n’ quite,’ the first party has written. The next party has written, ‘Peaceful ‘n’ quite.’ I watch Dad write, ‘Quiet nice ‘n’ quite.’ Then we leave, sniggering gleefully. My joy lies in the realization that I can at last be counted among the élite who can spell both ‘quiet’ and ‘quite’.
In the evening, just before we go back home on the sleeper, we go to see a troupe of Romanian acrobats – a show Dad chooses in deference to my gymnastical accomplishments. I fall, not only for the acrobats, but for all the student bustle in the cobbled courtyard of the Pleasance Theatre and for the views of Salisbury Crags.
Naturally, I say nothing to my mother about the keyboard requirement, which suddenly jumps out at me from the prospectus, but my heart falls with a thump into my boots, and stays there all week.
And my despondency is exacerbated that Saturday evening when I happen to coincide with my cousin Sheila in the Oxford High Street. One of my circle has already told me that Sheila is co-habiting in a dug-out on Port Meadow with a drug dealer who was expelled from public school. They share the dug-out, I’m told, with a litter of puppies who aren’t yet potty-trained. The friend has actually penetrated the dug-out in the hope of retrieving a garment illicitly borrowed from her mother and loaned on to Sheila, who can’t or won’t give it back. She is particularly graphic about the effect of the puppies’ bowel actions on the earth floor of the dug-out.
By contrast, I have not seen Sheila for nearly two years and to do so leaves me startled and discomposed. She and her man-friend are touching passers-by for money. I watch in disbelief, as Sheila burbles beggars’ catchphrases about the price of a cup of tea. She says ‘mate’ and ‘cheers’ to people. Then she approaches me without knowing who I am and I fork out a quid with shaking hand. Suddenly, once I have moved off with my friends, she calls out after me in her Oxford High School accent.
‘Hey,’ she says, ‘aren’t you my cousin or something?’
‘That’s right,’ I say.
‘Aren’t you the one that’s thick?’ she says. The unreconstituted overkill.
‘That’s right,’ I say again.
On the way to the pub and through half the evening I wrestle with the discomfort of finding myself Sheila’s donor when history has so firmly cast me as her supplicant. In the event, I can’t quite handle this reversal in our fortunes.
A bit of me admires Sheila for baling out. She seems suddenly more acceptable to me than her older sister Claire, who, having taken a degree in maths like both her parents, is now making a pile of money in the City. An unnerving clone of Aunt Sally, Claire has become her mother’s terrible twin. They use the same hairdresser. They have monthly facials in the same beautician’s parlour. They dress in different sizes of the same Karen Millen suits.
To buoy my spirits and entertain my company, who are curious about the connection, I tell the story of how I once thought Sheila’s music certificates were mine.
‘Sheila Goldman, Stella Goldman – well, they are nearly the same,’ I say.
It’s only on the train going home that it occurs to me how I can right the balance between us and place myself once again in Sheila’s debt; how Sheila can be restored to her position as donor, and I to mine of supplicant. I need to steal that certificate – the one stating that Sheila Goldman has satisfied the examiners of her proficiency upon the pianoforte to Grade VII – and, having stolen it, I need to get it doctored by the only person I know, other than my mother, whose handwriting is good enough. In short, I need the dinner lady’s daughter. I need Michelle.
In the event, the theft is easy. At sixteen, my parents had got me into the lower sixth of a comprehensive school in Oxford, just a stone’s throw from the String Trio’s house in Charlbury Road. So every weekday morning I put my bicycle on the train and bike to school from the railway station. It is with ease, therefore, that I proceed to the house in my lunch hour the following Monday and lean my bicycle against the String Trio’s garden wall. The front door is unlocked and the aged cleaner is managing so busily with a vacuum cleaner on the stairs that she doesn’t hear a thing.
I slip the certificate, clip frame and all, into my schoolbag, leaving behind me a telltale hook and four grubby right angles patterned in dust on the wall. Then, flush with my success, I make my way to the office supply shop in the Banbury Road, where I match the cream-coloured parchment from a range of pastel-tinted Tippex and I buy a nice, broad-nibbed, italic pen. After that, I colour-photocopy the certificate, trim the copy and shove it into the clip frame. I return promptly to the music room and hang the copy on the wall, where I decide it looks pretty damn good.
Then, on the way out, I run straight into the Uncle Fiddle Anorak in the hall. He is dressed to go out, in faded beige baggies and a really nice old jacket that looks as if he’s made it himself out of weevilly pool-table cloth. It reminds me of the inside of my cello case. I also notice, for the first time in my life, that he’s good-looking.
‘I came by to see if I could borrow a copy of Heart of Darkness,’ I say. Thanks to a childhood spent covering myself against every form of incompetence, I seldom have a problem with inventing excuses on the spot – though I must admit that, where Aunt Sally would have inspected my person for bulges, unnerved me with eye contact, and routed out my true purpose within seconds, the uncle merely flings open the door to the downstairs study and indicates the shelves.
‘Novels are somewhere about,’ he says. ‘Sally’s got them all classified. Please help yourself.’ And with that he is gone. I watch him through the low sash windows of the study as he proceeds down the path and flings his left leg over the crossbar of my bicycle. It’s a much-coveted old policeman’s bicycle – one with an all-encasing chain-guard and a Brooks leather saddle and a bell – yet I have to let it go. I take Heart of Darkness for the sake of authenticity, and then I return to school on foot.
That night I go and see Michelle. Having got pregnant at sixteen, Michelle had then opted to have the baby and to leave school, though she had just then got four As and three Bs at GCSE. At eighteen she left her mum’s place and moved into a real dump of a B and B with syringes all over the bathroom, thus rendering herself homeless. Now she’s just been housed in a little flat of her own on her mum’s estate.
Michelle seems much older since the baby and she isn’t quite so much fun. She’s never skimped on her exercises and, right now, she looks pretty slinky in shiny leggings with patterns of citrus-fruit segments which she wears with one of those little tops that shows your belly button. It’s made of tangerine cotton shagpile.
‘Could’ve made it out of my mum’s bathmat, I suppose,’ she says, when I admire it. ‘Excuse the feet.’ She’s got her feet in huge quilted slippers with toucan beaks at the toes. I covet them immediately. Somehow, Michelle has always had the art of making me covet her goods.
I notice that she has the piano in the flat and that it’s standing open, with sheet music on the stand; also that she’s got an Apple Mac on which she’s making herself computer literate with the aid of a manual. The babe is plumply asleep, breathing evenly. His name is Max.
Michelle makes me a cup of coffee as I explain my purpose. ‘Bloody hell,’ she says. ‘Stell-a!’
‘It’s only the “i” needs lengthening,’ I say, apologetically. ‘And there’s an extra little leg on the “h”. It’s just that I wouldn’t trust myself with a bottle of Tippex.’
‘Me neither,’ Michelle says. ‘You always did have two left hands, didn’t you?’
I watch her respectfully as, after a few test runs with the brush on scrap paper, she Tippexes out the tiny vertical down-stroke of the ‘h’. Then she crosses its tall stem with a flourish. After that, having waited for these little tamperings to dry, she deftly extends the lower-case ‘i’, making a perfect ‘l’. I stare at the finesse of her handiwork.
‘It says Stella,’ I say in wonder. ‘My God, it really does say Stella.’
‘You could have had my Grade VII, I suppose,’ Michelle says, ‘but you’d’ve had to change your name by deed-poll.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Look. Thanks a million, Michelle.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she says. ‘You’ve got the certificate and I’ve got the piano. Fair exchange.’
On the doorstep I hover awkwardly. ‘Perhaps we could start playing together, Michelle?’ I say. ‘We could work up a few little sonatas. We could play them to Max.’
‘Get off,’ she says, slightly as though she’s putting down a child. ‘I’m much too busy. Have fun in Scotland.’
‘If they have me,’ I say.
‘I expect you’ll fall in love with the MacLeod of MacLeod,’ she says.
‘Not likely,’ I say, pulling a face.
‘Send me an invite to the wedding,’ she says. ‘Bye now.’
I do get in. And I do fall in love, though not with the MacLeod of MacLeod. About the interview I remember almost nothing except that everyone is nice to me. And that somebody shakes my hand on parting, admires my cello and says, ‘Given your name, Miss Goldman, we might have expected you to play the horn.’ Joke. My dad’s got quite well-known through a book he wrote that got made into a film. It’s called Have Horn; Will Travel.
The Travelling Hornplayer Page 11
