Music and Freedom

by Zoe Morrison

  ‘It is, yes,’ I said, although it was freezing.

  Another time he asked me, ‘Have you seen a demand and supply graph?’ drawing something out of his wallet.

  ‘Uh …’ trying not to look at the wallet.

  ‘Well, is it yes or no?’

  ‘I think I’ve seen one,’ quietly, not yet knowing the consequences.

  ‘And what about the blanks on either side of the graph, have you noticed them?’ And now he was smiling.

  I waited, not looking at the wallet; looking, perhaps, at the wall behind him.

  ‘That is where you are. Not even on the graph, not even between the axes. You are off the page entirely. You ought to think about that. Now, there’s a shilling. Spend it wisely. And give me the receipts.’

  I was limping slowly around the house. There was a letter from Hetty, who was still in Edinburgh, saying she would be in London, and why didn’t I come down for a few days, we’d stay in a hotel, see some concerts, have a lark in the capital. And he wouldn’t give me the money. He wouldn’t give me the money for the train ticket, or the place to stay. He said Hetty was obnoxious and to be avoided. I didn’t know what to tell her; I felt so ashamed of this situation I had got myself into. I told her I had something else on that I couldn’t get out of, and she thought, no doubt, that I was brushing her off, perhaps even that I considered myself above her now, enjoying the easy life, married to an Oxford professor.

  I was polishing the floor. I was ironing shirts. I was dusting a shelf of volumes on economic theory. I was thinking about Australia, a place so far off it might as well have been a fantasy. I was thinking about playing the piano again, which I would do, I thought, as soon as things got better; I’d find a really good doctor, a modern one, to help me, fix me.

  I had my head in a kitchen cupboard, I was wiping a cloth in the crack between the wall and floor. I was searching for something, I was hiding from something. I got up, put the cloth down, walked out the front door.

  52.

  Oxford, December, 1951

  I sat on the platform, bag beside me, in my pocket savings I had scrimped from the housekeeping.

  I had written again to Hetty and asked if she might need some assistance in Edinburgh. She wrote back saying she didn’t, and I could tell by the tone that she was still offended about London. You can visit if you like, she wrote, but you can’t stay here, she’ll think you’re an intruder, which would be funny for about five minutes, then horrible, so not worth it. Why don’t you get Edward to pay for a hotel?

  My letter to George was returned (he was in Europe by then, I found out later).

  My letter to Rachel in Whitby was unsent. I couldn’t work out what to say, what words to send to that happy, bustling house on the hill.

  My letter to my mother’s cousin in York was oblique, but she wasn’t stupid. Marriage is a challenge, she wrote back. You must have fortitude. Sometimes men are bad-tempered, but it usually passes. Try to get things right. I do recall you were not one to be humble; perhaps this requires some correction on your part. We would gladly host you and your husband for tea.

  A train clattered in; I watched the people get off and get on. I felt the money in my pocket, enough for the train ticket and a week in London, at a stretch, until I could find something else, a job, it didn’t matter what. It had taken a long time – weeks – to save even this, and had felt dangerous (it was dangerous). Bess had given me a stew recipe that used virtually nothing, tasted all right and lasted for ages.

  Thinking of Bess lifted me.

  At the end of the day I got up and went back to the house.

  53.

  Oxford, December, 1951

  Bess had come to the door a couple of weeks after the concert. She said she was part of an arts circle with a group of women, all college wives. Every month on a Tuesday they met to discuss artistic matters, usually around a theme (classicism; romanticism; impressionism; the avant-garde), and she invited me to join them at the next one. I said no (the thought of it, facing such people after that concert, facing anyone, talking). But she returned and asked me again a few days later.

  ‘The problem is,’ she said, pushing her hair behind her ears, ‘I’m down to lead a discussion on music and nationalism and I don’t know a thing about it. Alice, could you suggest some New World composers I might mention?’ And later, after I’d given her some tea and a few names and thoughts: ‘Well, you’ll have to come now, won’t you, you’ve practically done the whole thing for me. None of us know a jot about music; you don’t realise how much your presence would be appreciated. You’d be doing us a great favour.’ I knew what she was up to.

  I got to her place early, helped her set up. When the doorbell rang it was Stella, who had just returned from a dig so she couldn’t have been at the concert.

  Enid next. She got away on Tuesday afternoons by leaving her children with a woman down the street (whose children she looked after on a Wednesday when that woman went to her fencing club).

  Then there was Penelope. ‘Oh yes, Alice Haywood,’ she said, when Bess introduced me, and she looked away, and I knew she’d been at the concert, and just as I was about to vomit right there on the fringed rug, Bess said, ‘Alice will add some much-needed musical expertise to our circle.’

  ‘What luck!’ Penelope said. ‘We certainly need it.’

  These women did not sit, hands in their laps, watching, holding everything back. They sat forward, spoke passionately, argued intensely; ideas really mattered to them. Their intelligence was like electricity zinging across the room. Stella argued with such impeccable logic it bored through everything, until Enid sailed in and eloquently rebutted. Once or twice when Penelope made a point she raised a fist in the air.

  A question about music came up that day to which no one knew the answer; the conversation went round and round. Finally I thought, oh well, here goes, and I told them what I knew, and that was it, I was part of it.

  We spoke for hours. Frank came home and stood at the door of the sitting room, smiling in that way he had, his eyes nearly closing behind his glasses. He disappeared and came back with glasses of sherry filled to the brim, also a bowl of nuts he’d roasted himself, passing them around on a tarnished silver tray.

  When we heard whistling and pots clattering in the kitchen, Enid whispered, ‘What’s he doing now?’

  ‘Cooking dinner,’ Bess said. ‘Well, I can’t cook, can I?’

  ‘What does he make?’

  ‘All sorts of things. Baked beans on toast —’

  ‘That’d be right.’

  ‘Irish stew, shepherd’s pie, braised celery, roast pigeon, and on special occasions a thing called paella, which is quite delicious. He got it from a book by Elizabeth David. He’s devoted to her recipes.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well, you’re too busy to cook, aren’t you?’ Penelope said.

  ‘Doing what?’ said Bess.

  ‘Saving our souls,’ I said, out of the blue.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘we’re all doing that, every one of us together, including you,’ turning to me.

  We met for years. Sitting here, I still miss it.

  I never told any of these women about Edward. Once, I planned to tell Bess, but there was a conversation that day in our arts circle meeting about a failed Oxford marriage. The divorce had affected the man’s career badly, one of the women said, and they all nodded. They spoke of the woman involved without sympathy; she’d always been difficult to get along with, someone said. She was a neurotic, another person added, and no doubt terribly hard to live with, too. No children, either, said another, then trailed off, because a few of us sitting there still had no children. And Bess listened to all this, occasionally nodding. She was a great supporter of the institution of marriage; hers was happy. I realised then this was not a conversation one had. One did not speak badly of one’s husbands in a way that was serious. Marriages were sealed boxes.

  I learnt a lot about how to live in Oxford from these women
, and I made some good friends. I kept expecting Edward would try to prevent me attending; perhaps because the other husbands supported it he didn’t.

  When we finished that first evening, Bess and Frank stood at their front door waving and smiling, shoulders touching, and I walked home in the twilight virtually hugging myself. Then into that grey and silent house, and there he was in his study, angry about his dinner, even though I’d prepared it and left instructions on how to heat it.

  54.

  Oxford, 1953

  I made it onto the charity rosters. I started helping at a soup kitchen run by one of the churches on St Aldates, joining the other women in the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon, scrubbing out the huge pots caked with overcooked stew and barley. The men sat at long tables eating with their heads close to their bowls. It moved me to watch them eat; they were so engrossed in their food, the old ones, in particular, the way they silently relished it. There were never any women among them; I don’t know where the homeless women ate. The more gregarious ladies doled out the food at the counter. The young priest ate among the homeless, his freshly ironed sleeves rolled up, his clean hair neatly parted. At the end we lifted the huge pots back onto the racks, still warm from the wash, and I walked home, glancing behind me now and again, half-expecting one of those men to come up behind me and tap me on the shoulder.

  Over the summer, when Edward was away, there were dinner parties at Bess and Frank’s house (hummus, ratatouille, cucumber soup; back then he had to go down to London to get his ingredients), picnics in the parks, walks in the countryside. I still wasn’t pregnant, another sadness among many (our barrenness was my fault, of course; I was faulty all the way through). Sometimes I looked after other people’s children during the holidays, those were times I cherished. We’d sing and cook, go for adventures in the meadow, play down by the river. But I was never entirely at ease during the summer; sometimes Edward dropped in out of the blue. Even if he was supposed to be in America, he might suddenly turn up. But there was still some release, and a lot of peace to be had. Autumn arrived too quickly; it was Michaelmas again, the start of another academic year. He came home for good, the town filled up with bicycles going fast, students, academics.

  We went to a dinner party at Bess and Frank’s once during Michaelmas term. It was unusual, the timing of it; perhaps Frank was in denial that summer was really over.

  ‘What was it like, growing up surrounded by orange trees?’ Frank asked, drawing me into the conversation, for I had been unusually quiet. (When Edward wasn’t there I talked a lot.) And perhaps he was keen for stories of a sunnier place.

  I glanced quickly around the table; was I the only one who could tell how uncomfortable Edward was with this turn of conversation? Indeed, with any conversation that had me at its centre?

  ‘Hard work,’ I said, keeping it short.

  Frank thought I was joking and laughed.

  ‘Hard work?’ he said. ‘I’ll say!’

  ‘I don’t think there was much water, Frank,’ Bess said, shrewder.

  ‘It was mallee land before they cleared it for citrus,’ I said. ‘Mallee doesn’t need a lot of water; it can tolerate drought. So they had to bring the water in.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Frank. ‘And there I was imagining an idyllic childhood. Children basking in perfumed groves of citrus, eating fruit with dripping fingers.’

  ‘Well, we all ate fruit, of course, but in order to grow it my parents had to dig furrows along the lines of trees most mornings for irrigation. The water was brought from the river in big open channels and you dug the furrows to bring the water from the channels to you. I knew of two children who fell and drowned in those channels.’

  ‘Oh dear! I have learnt something new, haven’t I? I never imagined.’

  One of Frank’s friends sitting at the end of the table said he’d heard of mallee: it could not only tolerate drought, but also fire and marauding animals. Its roots stored food underground and could sprout again and again.

  Frank had cooked paella that night, he’d been up to Covent Garden again to get his ingredients, and when the dish was set before Edward he huffed and frowned, until Frank finally said, ‘All right there, old man?’ which made me nervous, because Edward was so clearly older than the rest of us but didn’t like it pointed out.

  ‘What is this?’ he said, barely getting the words out.

  ‘It’s paella, old chap, brilliant stuff. Mediterranean food from a sunny climate. Happy food, you see; Alice knows all about it. Tuck in.’

  Edward glared at his plate, his fork, and I started dreading leaving, the night ahead. And Frank went on and on about Elizabeth David, how she’d lived in Greece and was evacuated to Egypt during the war; how, when she came back to England she was so appalled at the state of the food she viewed it as a violent insult to humanity. She published her first book in England before anyone could even get hold of most of the ingredients.

  When we got home that night Edward hurt me, and all thoughts of Elizabeth David, oranges, mallee and paella scattered.

  55.

  Oxford, May 15th, 1972

  I had been anaesthetised. I woke in a white place, clouds billowed around me, I was smiling.

  I heard the rattle of cutlery on crockery, the curtain around the bed was whisked aside. There was a nurse with a trolley, a neat smile. She gave me tea and buttered toast, and this was nice, but there was something else I desired with all my heart.

  ‘In a minute,’ she said.

  And then he was brought to me, wrapped in a blanket.

  I was forty-one; I was resigned to my inability to have children. This was a miracle to me.

  He had a shock of dark hair, big brown eyes. He was my mother, my father, the siblings I had never had, the extended family I had never met, but most of all, best of all, he was none of these people, he was himself, and he, tiny being, was staring up at me, into my eyes, as if to say: There you are, at last.

  I held him to my face and smelt him. I was waking up, I was awake.

  56.

  Oxford, 1972

  Richard’s birth coincided with the oil crisis, a waning economy and heightened attacks on Keynesianism in academia as well as by the government and the media. Edward’s work started to receive the reception he had always coveted. He was busy lecturing all over Britain and other parts of the world. He wasn’t going to miss a moment of it; he had been waiting so long. As a consequence, Richard and I were mostly left alone during his early years. Across the Atlantic Friedman was busy with his popular columns and broadcasts, and Edward, envious of the man he viewed as the one to beat (despite, broadly speaking, being on the same team), worked even harder. When he wasn’t away he was in his office writing, or at meetings.

  On the rare occasions he was home he was mostly easier to live with. He found fault less, at times he even expressed gratitude for things I did for him. Other times he would revert and do cruel things, order me to ignore Richard when he was crying, but I was cleverer then, something finally mattered, and I would feign indifference, shrug, say, fine, let him scream the house down, and he’d give me a look of consternation and tell me to go to him.

  So these were happy years. Caring for Richard felt like a dance, a synchronicity of movement and feeling. Sometimes we got out of step, then looked for our rhythm again, danced on. It emptied me out, it filled me up. With the other mothers and children we created a little community with its own sense of time, its own geographies, its own ways of relating. Caring, acceptance, generosity, patience, humour, kindness, creativity and love: these were the things we aspired to.

  Richard showed such an interest in music that I started him young, which Edward didn’t much like (You’ll make him a nancy boy). But we did it anyway when he wasn’t around. I taught him piano first, then organised violin lessons, because I wanted him to learn an instrument that was played with others, an instrument that, played solo, had the musician standing before the audience, not sitting with his head down behind a big block of wood
. Before he went to school he was already making up little themes and variations.

  Sometimes I pictured him playing with my parents, hide and seek among the orange trees, or down by the river fishing for yabbies, or learning to look for snakes before jumping over a log.

  57.

  Oxford, May 15th, 1979

  When Richard turned seven, Edward came home for his birthday, which was unusual. We were standing in the kitchen, the three of us, singing around a sponge filled with jam and cream and strawberries, singing at seven little candles. Richard blew them out, he and I ate a piece, then another each, Edward refused any (he’d been on television earlier in the day; he wanted to stay trim for future appearances). Richard and I went upstairs and I ran his bath.

  When I came back down Edward called me into his study and told me he had enrolled Richard at the Dragon School in North Oxford, where he would start in a few months as a boarder. I remember standing before him feeling as much shock and pain as if I had been hit again for the first time.

  ‘No,’ I got out finally. ‘That is not right. It would not suit him.’

  Edward was smiling in a way I knew so well by then.

  ‘Not suit him, or not suit you? You think I haven’t noticed,’ and how bitter he sounded, how hateful, ‘this thing you have going between you. It’s sick. He needs to be removed from your clutches.’

  I was aghast; I could not bear this.

  ‘He is a child, Edward. He is seven. He needs his family. He needs love. This is what we all need, I think,’ and I almost felt sorry for him for a moment, sitting at his desk, fiddling with the papers in front of him, pretending not to listen.

  Edward’s once lustrous hair had thinned, a bald patch at the front was steadily getting bigger. He spent a lot of time in front of the mirror every morning, arranging his hair over this bald spot. He was wearing a new suit, highly polished shoes, also new. These days he regularly advised Cabinet, appeared on television, chaired committees, gave plenaries. I saw in front of me a man who was so successful in many worldly ways, yet so lacking. A man who had missed seven years of his only child’s life, who had no real friends, and who seemed to have no sense of joy, or peace. A man so convinced of his view of the world that he had to prove it, prove it, prove it.