by Zoe Morrison
‘Hmmm,’ she said.
I started to climb the tree outside, gripping the branches in my hands, wedging my feet against the trunk.
‘You know Rachmaninoff’s compositional output was relatively small,’ I said.
She didn’t say anything; she just kept looking at me.
‘Some say he was heartbroken about being forced to leave Russia after the Bolshevik revolution; a rather romantic explanation,’ I found myself declaiming. ‘In fact, he didn’t have the time to compose. He had to be a concert pianist to earn his living. He disliked the life of a performer, all trains and practice, he said. He only had the summers to compose. At the end of his life he realised that he’d made the wrong choices about how he’d lived and he regretted it deeply. People who visited him before he died wrote that he was the saddest man they’d ever seen. Anyway, the upshot is that we’re left with less Rachmaninoff.’
The clouds were racing each other now, the branches of the tree had started to clatter, I was at the top of it, I was reaching up to the sky. Who was in there, talking so eloquently in that room with the piano? Not Alice Haywood.
‘When he performed,’ I said, ‘except for the occasional memory lapse, he never made a mistake. He was the most accurate of pianists.’
‘Right,’ she said, and then she frowned, turned back to the music. ‘But I’m not sure how this matters when it comes to interpretation. This work is about grand emotional expression, surely, not single-mindedness or perfectionism. It’s pure expressive romanticism, a rebuttal to Enlightenment thinking, all the rationalists and pragmatists, with their hypotheses and proofs and truths.’
I didn’t understand.
‘In order to interpret a work correctly,’ I said, and this was straight from music school, ‘you need to get to the spirit of the composer, their moods and intentions. You need to understand those fully in order to express the music accurately. Rachmaninoff had to leave his country forever, he was a famous performer whose talent had given him a career he hated, but he needed the money so he had to do it. You know his audiences would demand his C sharp minor Prelude, and if he didn’t play it they would start to chant? He loathed that piece in the end. So yes, I suppose you could call that emotion.’
‘It’s an interesting question, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘this notion of the right interpretation and the truth of the composer’s spirit, how to translate that into music. I mean, surely these things are arbitrary and subjective. It’s one of the things that’s always puzzled me about classical music scholarship, this idea that one has played Debussy incorrectly because it’s not how minstrels would have sounded in Paris in 1910. But who really knows what they sounded like? And why does it even matter? I see there are parameters. Bach, for example, played with a lot of rubato is wrong, but even then does it necessarily sound bad? Not to those who have a schmaltzy C major Prelude played on an electric keyboard at their wedding. And why should they be wrong? My point is that even if I were to play with his biography in mind, his spirit, as you say, which I happen to think is not compulsory, I’d still question your interpretation of it – in this work, anyway.’
‘Oh yes?’ I was out in the street, I was up the tree, I was looking down the road.
‘Oh, absolutely. I mean, you talk about sadness and regret, but this was composed in vastly different circumstances. He had recovered from his nervous breakdown and writer’s block and this concerto flowed out of him, just like that, he was healed, and it received glorious praise. It launched him, launched who he was. So I think it’s about the triumph of hope over desolation, music over silence, life over death. It’s the music of resurrection, surely.’
I eyed her.
‘Resurrection.’
‘Yes.’
‘I think it’s a myth, that story,’ I said finally. ‘I think they make up those sorts of things to fill programs and musical dictionaries. How could they possibly know?’
‘They do research, presumably.’
I sniffed.
‘Well, you believe the stories about him being the saddest man alive. Why can only misery be verified and trusted?’
‘Disregard the rest of his life,’ I said. ‘The piece could still be about the humiliation of that first performance of the symphony, or the loss of his ability to compose, or of entering a place of darkness so complete that you are nothing that you thought you were; you cannot even lift your body from the floor. It could still be about that.’
‘Possibly. I suppose it’s all in the music,’ and she looked back at the score.
I didn’t speak for a while.
‘When did you play it?’ she asked.
‘Oh …’ looking out the window. ‘A very long time ago.’
Silence again.
‘I wonder …’ I hesitated. ‘What would have happened if there was no family estate for Rachmaninoff to flee to, no great doctor, no successful treatment, just Moscow scorning and discarding him?’
‘You’re making an argument about privilege.’
‘Or happenstance.’
‘Both?’
‘A disastrous reception of the first symphony, which becomes the only symphony, a young Russian unable to do what he loves, alone in Moscow, hearing music in his head that remains forever silent. Why did it not happen like that?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose circumstances dictated otherwise.’ She lifted a leg, uncrossed her knees. ‘Or perhaps he just wanted to compose very badly and nothing was going to stop him, he just needed some help. Everyone needs help from time to time, we’re all human. We need connection, recognition. It makes us who we are, partly, the way others see us; it brings us into being, or does the opposite, of course. I was just teaching on this, actually.’
Silence. A car went past in the street.
‘What if the help doesn’t arrive?’ I said.
‘You don’t think it does, usually? Don’t we look for it over and over, whether we know it or not?’
You are young, I thought. You have lived a blessed life. You have no idea how the rest of us live. You will never play Rachmaninoff properly. I got up and went into the study to the file boxes.
‘Take these,’ I said, handing her Moszkowski’s Etudes de Virtuosité and his Three Concert Studies. ‘They are good technical preparation for this work.’
‘How kind of you! I’ll copy them and return them to you … same time next week?’
When she left, I lay down on the floor with my arms stretched out, palms up, looking at the ceiling. Then I got up, sped down the hall, out the back door, and stood in the little square of garden, staring up at the dark-blue sky, searching it.
68.
Oxford, November, 2005
She started coming every week, usually on a Monday. She always played the concerto through, and then we discussed it. It was what she used to do with her teacher in Toronto, she said, before a major performance. Between these sessions I listened to her practise on the other side of the wall, and thought about what she needed to work on. Her visits gave me a reason to eat, because I had to have the energy for them; I would get on with dying once her concert was over.
She was practising longer and more intensively. She did an hour or so of technical work in the morning before she left for the university, then practised the concerto when she got home, and often into the night. It was as if she were teaching it to herself from scratch, pulling it apart, examining it, putting it slowly back together. I heard her play one hand of a section, then the other hand, listening carefully, assembling it again – one hand, both hands – until she played the whole section through. Then she did it all over again. Line after line, section after section, page after page: inspecting it, contemplating it.
In mid-November she started working on the technically most difficult parts of the concerto. One Monday when she played it through I marked each bit that wasn’t perfect and took her through them.
‘God, Alice,’ she said afterwards, rubbing her face.
‘You can do it,’ I said
. ‘All the other bits are better than I’ve heard it played before.’
I wanted her to know the concerto as well as Rachmaninoff himself. When you listen to his recordings you can hear him bringing themes and accents that sound almost singular, like anthems out of an apparent morass of notes. He makes the piano sound at one minute sonorous, at another percussive, at another like a single voice, at another like an orchestra, then silvery bells, then lightning and thunder. I wanted her to have that power, to feel that freedom of expression. I wanted her to get so far beyond the technical complications of the work, make them nothing, so that she could play it exactly as she wished. I wanted her to make it an extension of herself. I wanted the notes to be within her so that all she needed to do was think about how she wished to execute them. Yes, I will admit it: I wanted to hear her do what I had not. But it was not only that.
I started to wonder why she was working as an academic, given she was such a consummate musician.
I asked her one day, as she was rushing off to mark undergraduate essays (the topic: famine, its political causes and consequences).
‘I need an income,’ she said. ‘I need to eat. Besides,’ trying to stuff her score into her already bulging bag, ‘I like it, most of the time. I like to work on things I believe in, I think it’s important.’
‘Don’t you find it dry?’
She slung the bag over her shoulder.
‘There’s actually a lot of emotional amplitude in academia. It’s just hidden and comes out in strange ways.’
‘Like what?’
‘Extreme views; irrational beliefs masquerading as some great truth; quibbles over nothing that last decades. I think a lot of academics hide themselves behind intellectualism and apparent objectivity, whereas a lot of the time it’s really just a power trip, about getting authority and keeping it.’
I didn’t say anything. She looked back at the piano.
‘You can’t play this music and hide, though, can you?’
I was taken aback.
‘Maybe you can,’ I said.
‘I don’t think I can, not if I want to play it properly. That was the problem before, you know, I hadn’t engaged with it enough. I wasn’t listening properly, I was holding back. Out of practice, I suppose. I’ve realised recently that in my work and life at the moment I can pretty much forget my feelings if I want to, pretend they don’t even exist. But when I play this … well, it’s the opposite. I can’t fail to be moved. For the thirty minutes or so this concerto lasts I can just let go.’
Not long after this she rearranged her teaching commitments so she could practise harder.
Sometimes, on a Monday, we listened to other music. Other versions of the concerto first, then things like Bach’s double violin concerto, Saint Matthew’s Passion, the Adagio by Samuel Barber. Then she started bringing around her beloved pop.
‘Alice,’ she joked the first time, ‘you can’t tell anyone about this, all right?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s officially bad music taste.’
She pressed play.
Cyndi Lauper, ‘Time After Time’; Whitney Houston, ‘How Will I Know’ – ‘The eighties, Alice, a golden age of pop.’ Then the Waifs, ‘London Still’; Ryan Adams, ‘Desire’. Then a song with a fast beat called ‘Missing’. She turned the music up loud, put her arms up, moved her head and hands, soon she was dancing. The shelves in the study started to shake, the floor vibrated, the dust rained down, and I looked at the floor, embarrassed, thrilled.
She played me a lot of that music. Madonna, Dire Straits, Billy Joel. All the ‘bad music’ she could find. Like sweets, she said, like fizzy wine. And everything she played I liked.
I think she started to become for me something like music itself, or what music was becoming for her, a means of liberation, a returning to oneself. She played for me, she spoke to me and listened to me. And it was satisfying to be working anew at something I had failed at so spectacularly. The feelings I experienced when I knew that I was helping her were incomparable; I was helping to prevent her from making the same mistakes I had made. She was always thanking me, too. I was connected with music again, yes, but in a way that was not unsettling, unlike the music through the wall, which had prompted such torment, doubt and recollection. I could shape this music of hers, transmute it.
I felt propelled by an energy that had me pacing about the house, particularly after she practised. I was restless inside, impatient, repulsed by those old grey walls, the floors and ceiling, that still stood around me. One night when she was playing next door I opened the front door and stood on the step. Out there her playing was even louder. The air was cold and I puffed in time with the concerto for a while, watching the beat emerge in white puffs of breath in front of my face. Then I walked down the steps and out the gate.
I walked on dark pavements, beside unlit gardens and slabs of black lawn, hearing her playing in my head, treading its beat into the path. A car pulled in front of me, a garage door slid up; a woman rode past on a bicycle, legs pumping hard, and everything was in time with that music, everything. I walked up Woodstock Road, right to the top, stopped to catch my breath, and watched cars circling the roundabout and entering the ring-road that encircles the city. I watched a runner jogging up the other side of the road. She, too, got to the top, flopped over, touched the ground, then turned and jogged back.
I started walking back down side streets and back streets, wherever took my fancy, down streets of identical houses, down laneways paved with stone. Past a church with a noticeboard out the front, white letters pressed into black background: He Bled for You. When I got home there were bags of food on the porch with a receipt resting on top; I took them down to the kitchen, packed it all away.
Richard had bought me three bags of oranges now, all of which I had hidden. I pulled them out, peeled a bagful, and roasted the fruit in the oven coated with sugar, honey and juice. The second bag I juiced, put the jug in the fridge. I boiled the last bag without peeling the fruit and made a cake with the pieces, mixing them with eggs, sugar, butter, flour; it rose lumpen, monstrous, moist.
I started leaving the house between Emily’s practices and going into town, walking in and out of shops already festooned with Christmas decorations. I used the credit card Richard had got for me; my first purchase was a clutch of green and purple grapes in a little plastic box, which I ate on a bench outside the store, shivering with the cold, eating them one by one, feeling their solidity explode inside my mouth.
I bought some new clothes: first some things to keep me warm on my walks – a pair of red gloves, a purple scarf, a soft green sweater – and then some underwear.
Sometimes I went into one of the new cafes that seemed to be all over the place, with lines of students at the counter, rows of cakes behind glass. I’d order something and sit in the noise and warmth, solitary and undisturbed, yet not alone. This, I thought, was a very different Oxford from the one I had known.
I started to walk in the mornings in the South Park, where the puddles were already frozen, the grass crunchy with frost, and a mist sometimes hovered, tall and thick. One day a group of runners burst out of the mist, streamed around me, ran on. I walked to the pond, ducks slid across the icy water, ripples broadening behind them, down to the river. Through the kissing gate, onto the boardwalk, where all around I could hear the dripping leaves, the flow of the river, the rush of the lock. Two swans glided upstream, their breasts pressed into the water.
69.
Oxford, December, 2005
By now Emily was playing parts of the concerto as if she were surfing it, as if the music were a wave coming towards her and she was pushing herself towards it, standing up, balancing, becoming part of it, part of the wave, part of the water. The first day she sounded like that I walked into town with my head high, the green and gold leaves of the trees on St Giles fluttering against the pale-blue sky.
I went into the Covered Market, saw branches of holly in buckets, and
Christmas lilies, petals just parting. In the mall a man was busking on a piano that had its front removed, he played it with his wrists arched high. I rounded the corner into Broad Street, the buildings were golden in the early fall of light. Through the courtyard of the Bodleian Library, past the Radcliffe Camera, towards St Mary’s church I walked, and the shapes of those buildings, the trinity of square roof, round dome, triangular spire, how perfect they seemed, as if someone had thought it up and made it so.
When I got back that evening Quentin Kidd was in his front yard, and when I greeted him he did a double-take. Hello, Alice, he said, drawing closer, his face moving like a boy’s. We spoke for a while about the mild day, the news, his garden, and then his writing. After that we spoke more often and I even started to wonder if he lingered outside when he saw me returning from a walk.
I talked with others who lived in the street too. Henry, the handsome man across the road who spent hours tending to his front garden; Caroline, the American with a bright-pink bicycle. I had tea with Bess a few times, and with some others in the old crowd. Sometimes sitting in the house at night I could almost sense the proximity of these people, sitting just a few streets over, or even closer, perhaps next to a fire or heater too.
I contacted Richard and we had conversations about nothing significant, but it was something, a start. There were so many things I had to tell him before I died, I knew that, but I was feeling less urgency. Perhaps I felt that when the time came I would simply be able to say them after all.
And always this restless energy kept beating, beating, beating.
I caught the bus to different parts of the town, as far as they went. Up the Cowley Road, the bus slowly emptying out until it was just me, the driver and an elderly woman with a shopping trolley. The last stop was a housing estate; I got out with the woman and walked around until I reached a tall fence with traffic behind it; another part of the ring-road. Back at the bus station I could smell the chippy, that delicious scent of the hot cooking fat in the pans.
