Girls at the Piano

by Virginia Lloyd

  I’d started to fantasise about one day writing books and plays. The marks my new English teacher gave me for my essays were so good that I felt for the first time that I could form an original opinion about a text and clearly express it on the page. Despite the increasing intensity of my piano studies—I was preparing for eighth grade, the final level of exams prior to the performance diploma—I really couldn’t see any point in continuing to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, which seemed the inevitable next step. Even if I was good enough, which I doubted, I already knew I didn’t aspire to join an orchestra or teach. The only place I wanted to play the piano was on a stage like in the Basement, as part of a jazz ensemble. But I dismissed the idea as ludicrous: I’d never seen a woman pianist in a live jazz band, and there were no women pianists in the bands in my father’s record collection.

  My mother never once encouraged me to aspire to marriage for its own sake. ‘These days, when girls earn money and go where they please, I just don’t know why you would,’ she said repeatedly. Then, as an afterthought: ‘Unless you wanted children, of course.’ I think she had concluded from my limited childhood interest in dolls that I wasn’t overly maternal.

  In the mid-1980s, when my mother first began drip-feeding me what I heard as her preference that I remain single, my parents had been married for twenty-five years. In her words I hear ambivalence about the institution of which she remains a member—and the fact of her financial dependence on my father. I hear her saying that while it’s nothing personal, if she had felt she’d had another choice to make, she might well have made it.

  As a teenager I thought the point of our education was that we could make our way in the world independently of—or interdependently with—men. Reading Emma, I felt coerced into admiring Mr Knightley because he owned most of the surrounding land. As far as I could tell, all he’d done was inherit it—literally born lucky. Other male characters with admirable traits but fewer resources were passed over like barren ground. It infuriated me that a school whose supposed mission was to encourage young women to live fulfilling and independent lives was feeding us this diet of fantasy. That it was somehow acceptable, even encouraged, for a teenage girl to aim for a rich man rather than become independent. Reading about the social calibrations of bright young women thrown together because of proximity and socio-economics, at the expensive girls-only school my parents struggled to pay for, felt claustrophobic.

  I failed to grasp the sexual politics of Austen’s world: the inconvenient truth that in the early decades of the nineteenth century, marriage was the one chance any woman had of making a secure future for herself. Austen’s portrait of small-town English life, her nuanced characterisations of unremarkable people, and her empathy with Emma’s struggle to keep from meddling in other people’s lives and to know her own flaws, passed over my sixteen-year-old head like the elements of the periodic table in Chemistry class.

  My naive sympathies lay with the troubled heroines of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a romantic fictional universe in which working-class women were admired from afar, then from close up, then left for dead, socially and financially speaking. In Hardy’s novels, men often held the power to ruin a woman’s life, but the passion between the characters seemed beautiful and painful and true. In reading, I could indulge my insatiable taste for melancholy, fascinated by the exquisite struggles of fictional others, because I’d not experienced anything like it and was quite certain I’d be clever enough to avoid that sort of thing.

  Emma Wedgwood was one of the more naturally talented of the many upper middle-class women studying the piano in Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century. With a family fortune made in pottery, Emma, like so many of her contemporaries in fiction, was never in the market for an actual job. As a star piano student at the Greville House school, she performed for Prince George of Wales’ consort Mrs Fitzherbert, studied with the virtuoso pianist Ignaz Moscheles, took several lessons with Chopin, and completed her grand tour of Europe when she was sixteen. By the age of thirty, Emma Wedgwood had had the economic luxury of declining several offers of marriage. When she accepted the proposal of her first cousin, the naturalist Charles Darwin, she understood her job was to propagate the species.

  In his 1871 Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, written more than thirty years after his marriage to Emma, Darwin argues that birdsong and human music are the outcomes of the evolutionary process called sexual selection: ‘The impassioned…musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his half-human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their mutual courtship and rivalry.’49

  Ardent passions indeed: following their wedding in January 1839, Emma Darwin was pregnant for more than a decade, bearing ten children, of whom seven survived. As this picture of domestic harmony suggests, music-making remained an important part of their marriage.

  ‘The suspicion does not appear improbable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females, or both sexes, before they had acquired the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm,’ Darwin concluded.50

  One hundred and twenty years after Darwin published these words, such ancient charms were working on me through Vince Jones and his band. Our love wasn’t mutual, but I didn’t care. I parsed the lyrics of his original songs, looking for insights into the workings of his mind, imagining the day when we met and became—what? Friends? Colleagues? Lovers? Truly it was as ludicrous a fantasy as that entertained about marriage by the girls with whom I had studied Emma.

  On reflection, I suspect what I responded to most strongly was the distinctiveness of Jones’s own compositions and the unmistakeable sound of his voice. It was probably the first time I had experienced, regularly and up close, the extraordinary power of an original creative artist. It was his voice—not just in the sense of his distinctive singing style, but also of his unique approach to songwriting and interpreting familiar tunes by folk and soul singers—that so charmed me, in the Darwinian sense. I suppose that’s what I wanted to be myself: original and distinctive in some way. Yet I felt as ordinary and invisible as everyone else, and too self-conscious to risk standing out.

  The members of Vince Jones’s band always wore suits. Perhaps it was because they were from Melbourne, where somehow I already understood that the men dressed with more care than their Sin City counterparts. But to be honest, I didn’t care what they wore: their melodies and rhythms, as Darwin put it, were enough for me. Their clothes weren’t for my benefit. If they were willing to don a suit, I reasoned, then it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that one day I could drag one of them home to meet my parents.

  18

  PETTY OFFICER JOHN HENRY EDWARDS STOOD just over six feet tall in his Royal Navy uniform, his hat in one hand, a bottle of whisky for his host in the other. While on furlough with Alice’s brother Vincent, Mr Edwards had endeared himself to the Taylors in two key respects. First, he had attended church on both Sundays since he and Vincent had been ashore. Second, he had recommended Vincent be reclassified on the Mameluke from stoker second class—a filthy job that demanded the relentless shovelling of coal into the ship’s boiler—to stoker first class, a promotion worth an extra five pence per day.

  Alice, who had heard about little else than Mr Edwards for the past two weeks, wasn’t surprised to see him sitting at the dinner table when she returned from the Sunday service at Gardner Street. But she found herself disappointed. Mr Edwards was polite but distant, withholding the smile that had dazzled her when Vincent had introduced him after her Windsor Halls recital.

  As the men discussed the intricacies of the Mameluke’s engineering, Alice wondered how much this effort at sociability was for the purpose of pairing them off. At first she had flattered herself to imagine that Vincent and her parents weren’t-so-subt
ly trying to bring them together. But nothing in Mr Edwards’ behaviour suggested he was here under false pretences. The Mameluke was in repairs for a few short weeks, and that was all. Once Alice had wrestled her unreasonable hopes into that logical straitjacket, she looked up and caught her mother’s eye. Her left eyebrow was raised slightly in a gesture that managed to be both commentary and question about the stranger at their table. At least Alice was clear on her mother’s agenda.

  ‘And where do you call home, Mr Edwards?’ asked Charlotte Taylor during a pause in the men’s conversation.

  Alice observed Mr Edwards put down his knife and fork and wipe the corners of his mouth with his serviette, as if weighing how much he would share with his hosts. The air in the room, already heady with smoke from her father’s pipe, thickened in the silence.

  Then, his voice quiet, Mr Edwards began to speak of his wife Ann and their son Alistair. About how they had been married for several years before she became pregnant, and about how he had feared to go on active duty and leave her in Plymouth while she was yet to give birth. Around the table the Taylors listened to the story of the telegram that conveyed the news of Ann’s haemorrhage giving birth to Alistair, who did not survive his mother.

  ‘The Mameluke’s my home, Mrs Taylor,’ Mr Edwards said. ‘I’m not ashamed to say I’ve even been glad of the war. Wouldn’t have known what to do with myself otherwise.’

  When he stopped speaking, Mr Edwards looked hard at Alice for a moment, then lowered his eyes to his empty plate.

  Vincent broke the silence. ‘Had no idea, John,’ he said. ‘Bloody awful.’

  Alice’s father reached for his serviette and coughed for the sake of doing something. Her mother filled the awkward void with the sort of phrases Alice expected Mr Edwards had heard a thousand times.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ Alice added for want of what, she realised, she really wanted to say. That her empathy was as bottomless as the ocean for this man who had known loss of an order she could hardly fathom, and that she felt petty for the small aggravations she nurtured. She stood to clear the plates, not just because she felt more secure when she was in motion, but also because her action signalled to Mr Edwards that she believed that life unfolds in small moments like this one, and that feeling for another person—much like the revelation of a new piece of music—was a matter of gradual understanding and restraint. To be working as a choirmistress and performing regularly, with a home to return to and people to love—these things suddenly appeared precious and fragile to her.

  Mr Edwards pushed back his chair and stood too. ‘Please, Miss Taylor, let me help you,’ he said.

  19

  IN THE HUMID CONFINEMENT OF THE English Lit tutorial room, other first-year undergrads waxed lyrical about the Renaissance love poetry of Thomas Wyatt while I clung like mould to my vinyl chair. Our poodle-haired tutor smiled encouragement at his most frequent contributor, Jeremy, who needed no encouragement to start talking or, once he was underway, to continue.

  ‘It’s fascinating to imagine Wyatt writing these poems while travelling as an ambassador for Henry the Eighth,’ Jeremy said. He must have been paying attention during the interminable lectures by the dour Professor Johnson, whose ghostly intonation could lull the worst insomniac into a restful nap.

  Jeremy wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I’d pictured the men I would meet on the University of Sydney campus. Although he was still a teenager, he dressed like a middle-aged academic in cardigans and spotless cream-coloured loafers. Not only had he read and understood every work set for tutorial discussion, but he had also conceived an opinion about it that he could express without hesitation in front of others. Jeremy spoke in complete sentences with the low volume and even tone of a guided meditation. His Shakespeare essay—composed entirely in iambic pentameter—had made him an instant star of the English department.

  ‘Extraordinary, to think Wyatt was translating Petrarch and writing the first sonnets in English,’ Jeremy said.

  Extraordinary, I thought, to be able to think of anything to contribute to the conversation.

  The tutor turned to the three or four of us who sat in stunned silence every week. ‘Does anyone else have something to say about Wyatt?’ The class understood his question to be rhetorical. I had nothing to share with the room but carbon dioxide.

  Sitting in the tutorials or among hundreds of strangers in the cavernous lecture halls of the Wallace Theatre and the Merewether Building, I felt as useless and invisible as the first-year Arts student that I was. Considering myself a refugee from high school, I had assumed I was immigrating to a country where I at least spoke the language. I hadn’t anticipated an environment in which I would feel perpetually stupid, and have nothing to say and no language in which to articulate it. I had no lofty professional goal, no specific social justice cause burning inside my middle-class breast. All I had brought with me to classes was a generic passionate intensity and a fantasy about writing books and plays.

  I was still studying the piano and working toward my diploma—the culmination of all those years of exams at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. I had locked myself to the piano stool for years, the key in my own hand. Now, aimlessly drifting about the campus, I was no longer chained to the instrument but still preferred not to stray far from it.

  In Anton Chekhov’s 1898 story ‘Ionitch’, pianist Ekaterina Ivanovna meets up with her former suitor on her return to her home village after years of intensive training at the Moscow Conservatory. Ekaterina, whose nickname is Kitten, had rejected Ionitch’s marriage proposal because she loved music ‘frantically’ and wanted to be an artist. Back home again, she is more circumspect. ‘I was such a queer girl then,’ she confesses to Ionitch, who has long stopped thinking of her. ‘I imagined myself such a great pianist. Nowadays all young ladies play the piano, and I played, too, like everybody else, and there was nothing special about me.’

  On the university campus, the specialist knowledge I’d gained through twelve years of serious piano study was redundant. I was like Ekaterina returning to her village, only in my case the village was neither a familiar environment nor the utopia I had impatiently craved throughout high school. When Ekaterina arrives in her village she discovers, like many a passionate traveller has done, that while she may have changed, everything else has not. My experience was the opposite of Kitten’s: I hadn’t changed at all, I had in fact gone nowhere, yet everything around me was different, foreign, frightening. Away from my piano, I was a useless nobody, aimless as the lost Kitten.

  When a job came up at Mrs Dalton’s ballet school in Hunters Hill, I leapt. It was at this school, although inside a different church hall, that I had fumbled a year’s worth of jazz ballet steps as an uncoordinated six-year-old. Twelve years later, like Kitten returning to her Russian village, I was going back to dance classes—minus the leotard. Everything else remained unchanged. The elegant and reed-thin Mrs Dalton, who had struck fear into my tubby torso, was still teaching, still elegant, and only marginally less thin.

  Twice a week for three hours I accompanied classes of girls while they learned to plié and pirouette, a dream part-time job that required no preparation. On campus I might have been clueless about Renaissance poetry, but I could still play a new piece at first sight. All I had to do was quickly identify appropriate music from the books piled on the battered upright, according to Mrs Dalton’s instruction. A piece with a rhythmic pattern that answered the call for ‘skipping music’, for example, or passages of semiquavers that met the brief for ‘running music’, or lots of staccato so that my fingers leapt off the keys just like the dancers’ slippered feet during ‘jumping music’. At the end of each class, the youngest girls, lined up in rows of pink tutus and white legs like oversize packets of marshmallows, thanked ‘Miss Virginia’ in singsong unison. Inside the ballet school I was happy because I felt useful.

  As my shift wore on into the early evening and the girls grew taller and older, I couldn’t deny the physical benefi
ts that years of ballet lessons and home-based practice had effected in their adolescent bodies. Looking at the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old swans from the corner of my eye, I could see that their training had literally shaped the young women they would become. All those countless exercises and repetition to drill technique into their minds and muscles would influence both the shape of their thighs and their capacity to do the work required to reach any goal they set themselves.

  Despite my serious piano study, I had developed a strong aversion to repetition as a way of rejecting the routines of my own childhood. Now I saw that repetition—the self-discipline and satisfaction accrued in days, weeks, months and years of activity and practice—could be, in and of itself, honourable. I had interpreted Mrs Dalton’s self-presentation as a passive resistance to change—she still wore her straight grey hair in the same severe style, blunt cut at her collarbone, and she still stood at the front of her classes in third position—but suddenly I saw her, solid and implacable, as part of a continuum of knowledge. Her life had been shaped by ballet, and she had chosen to pass on her expertise to generations of future dancers. Teaching was a manifestation of personal value, and repetition its necessary and active expression. This was as true at the barre as it was at the piano, on the tennis court, in my father’s fundraising efforts and even in my mother’s domestic routines.