Music and Freedom

by Zoe Morrison

  I was happy. I was happy listening to Emily practising next door, hearing her improve. We no longer disagreed about the interpretation, she had incorporated a lot of what I had spoken about, so the breadth was there now, but it was still very much her own. My role was to help her play as best she could; I didn’t insist on my interpretation, such as it was, and maybe that was changing anyway. Meeting with her regularly was a great pleasure, and meeting with others, old friends and new, that was an awakening in itself.

  I was walking to the edges of the city and back in the dark; I was packing things away in the house; I was burning Edward’s papers and books, when I remembered; I was cooking and eating (oranges, fish, apples, cake). I visited the Botanic Garden, the modern art museum, even a tourist attraction with a little train and displays with buttons to push called ‘The Oxford Story’. I listened to a radio station that played pop songs like Emily’s.

  ‘Why is that music so catchy?’ I said to her, after I’d listened to an eighties pop marathon on the radio one Monday morning. ‘I feel uplifted when I listen to it. Is it the harmony, do you think? Or the beat? Or the way it’s so familiar? It’s like reading a murder-mystery, isn’t it, all that evil solved within two covers. They always end on a perfect cadence, those songs, don’t they? And nothing’s evolved in this type of music, they’re the same structure as Elvis Presley.’

  She laughed and said she thought I was right.

  The winter deepened; dark afternoons and black nights were accompanied by the beauty of her playing on the other side of the wall.

  One night the air held the scent of snow and when I woke in the morning it was drifting down in front of the window. I heard children laughing, looked out, and there they were, a whole band of them in coloured hats and mittens and coats playing in the snow-smothered street, building a person with sticks for arms and one of their own hats on its head. Then Emily walked onto the pavement and I tapped on the window so softly she can’t possibly have heard, but she looked up anyway and I waved, and she waved back and smiled and held out her arms, as if to say, look at this, see this, and I nodded, so beautiful.

  The phone rang, it was Richard standing in a street in London, something to do with the lawyers and money for me. He said it was snowing, and I said, yes, it’s white here too, and, oh Richard, it’s so beautiful! And he laughed and said, What’s happened to you, Mum? You’re so happy. And I couldn’t breathe then, I couldn’t breathe. I remember it now as the pinnacle of my happiness, that moment, that morning, that day; I could circle it on a calendar, I could note the time. What more could I want? I thought.

  70.

  Currabin, December 18th, 2006

  It is midday. The stumps of the orange trees have started to shimmer in the heat as if considering a magical disappearing act. The sweat slides in slow tracks down the backs of my legs. They said on the radio this morning that elderly people should remain indoors (something about our kidneys). I walk a slow circuit from table to kitchen tap to lavatory.

  Most people here have given up on oranges. It’s grapes now, which are no better in terms of requiring water, but they fetch a higher price. Harold and Shirley have gone fancier still with walnuts, espaliered plums. She asked me about the drip system last night; I lied and said it was turned on in order to get her to stop talking about it. It’s not that I feel malice towards the oranges, it’s more like empathy.

  Now the sun is dimming, a breeze has crept across the veranda and lifts a strand of hair, a loose piece of paper. The track of sugar ants just beyond my left foot has started moving faster across the tiles, so perhaps it will finally rain. The stumps remain steadfast, though. When there is a storm here there are two types of lightning: sheet lightning, which illuminates whole sections of the sky, and fork lightning, which reaches down like a claw from the heavens. I was taught this as a child, standing beneath the roof of a tin shed, following the pointing finger of a neighbour, and when the rain rolled in and drummed on the roof, drowning out his voice, drowning everything out, I remember starting to shiver.

  71.

  Oxford, December 10th, 2005

  After one of our Monday sessions, Emily asked me why I no longer played the piano. I could have told her a story about arthritis, but instead I told her the truth. Well, partly. I told her about the paralysis that had affected me during my own performance of the concerto.

  She was troubled by this. She took my hands in hers. She said it was extremely sad, a tragedy, indeed a great injustice that someone with my knowledge and passion for music would suddenly be unable to play, and so permanently.

  ‘Can the doctors not do anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But medicine changes so quickly, doesn’t it? Perhaps you could try again if you haven’t seen a doctor in a while. I could come with you,’ she added. ‘Sometimes it helps to have someone else there.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘At the time, what was the advice exactly?’

  ‘That I must stop playing the piano because to continue could cripple my hands completely.’

  She didn’t like that.

  ‘To just leave it like that! Have you tried to play much since the concert?’

  ‘Only,’ and I held up one finger.

  ‘Maybe you should just try,’ she said. ‘I mean, how could it hurt? What is the worst that could happen if you tried, just for five minutes?’

  After she left, I remained standing at the window. I started to feel the presence of the instrument beside me. I had always felt that the piano looked like a bull ready to charge, yet now I admired its steady planes, the flat top, the curve of the side. It reminded me of the landscape of my childhood: there was a boy who used to ride around the district on a bicycle with no handlebars, and I thought now, standing by the piano, that he hadn’t needed any, for there were no hills or sharp corners, it was a straight, easy path before him. Perhaps this is our perception at the beginning, when we are children. What different countries I entered when I became an adult, a woman, when I had a child. What could equip you?

  I pulled on my new scarf and gloves and walked to the meadow, across the grassy expanse towards the canal. A couple of cows stood watching me, swished their tails, then loped off to join the herd. When I got to the edge of the canal I stood for a long time looking at the black, brackish water. A longboat chugged by; it had a line of neatly pegged washing on its deck. A woman sat below it on a deckchair, face to the sky, wearing sunglasses, although the day was grey. The water swelled around the boat and settled back down. All I needed to do, I thought, was simply play the piano? All these years, that was all I needed to do? Ignore the advice and just play? A rage swept through me then that was so sudden and extreme it frightened me. I turned quickly, away from the canal, and walked back to the house. I decided that if Emily were to raise the matter again I would tell her I was reconciled to not playing. I also decided that I would forget about our conversation, about her suggestion; yes, it would be better to do that.

  But Emily did not forget about the conversation, and I did not say my line about being reconciled. The next time she came around she brought a stack of papers and put it down on one of the front room chairs. I thought it was something to do with her work, but as she was leaving she waved her hand in the direction of the stack and said, ‘I’ve been doing a bit of research. These are papers on musicians’ focal dystonia. Apparently treatments have really improved since you were diagnosed. It’s fascinating reading.’

  I left them there.

  The next time she said she had watched a video on her computer of a woman with the condition doing some simple hand exercises that had helped her to play the piano smoothly again, and then she demonstrated them.

  The session after this she said, Any thoughts? while wiggling her fingers, and I said, Oh, not really, and she gave me a half-smile and averted her eyes, which I didn’t like much.

  That night I did have a look at the papers, but it was all medical jargon, academic-speak, and I soon a
bandoned them. I sat down at the piano and looked at the keys, so many of them laid out in front of me, a cadaver’s grin. The score of the Rachmaninoff was on the stand and I raised my hands slowly, closed my eyes. I heard the first line of the solo part of the concerto in my head, moved my hands forward as if about to play, but I got up instead and walked around the room.

  I sat down again, looked at the music, raised my hands, got up again and walked about. This was how it proceeded for some time.

  Finally I pretended to myself that it was nothing, that it didn’t matter a bit, and I sat down again at the piano, glanced at the music, heard it in my head. I remembered my mother’s words about the piece ‘Andante’, how one note will always follow another, that they will come, and I moved my hands towards the keys, and at that moment the fingers on my right hand contracted, as surely as if someone had taken my hand in theirs and closed them as one would a door.

  I sat at the piano for a long time. I started to think of the meadow, of the canal. Of entering the dark of the night and walking across to that black water. Rehearsing what I would do, stepping into it, feeling my body sink, weighed down by my sodden coat, which would be impossible to struggle out of, my mouth filling with the sour water, my lungs, all of me saturated.

  I got up. That is it, I thought, that is the end; we cannot talk of it anymore, and I would tell her so when I saw her next.

  72.

  Oxford, mid-December, 2005

  I didn’t tell her when I saw her next. She left for Toronto a few days later. It was a long-planned visit, three weeks over Christmas, but somehow I had forgotten about it; I suppose I hadn’t wanted to remember.

  Immediately, the house went quiet. Then the centre of the city as the students left, and staff went away. The park emptied of runners and women with prams. The house grew colder and darker in the midwinter freeze. One day I went into town and bought boxes of the highest wattage lightbulbs I could find and screwed them into every socket I could reach, which did make the house lighter, but lit up like that it looked even worse, the smudged grey walls, the cracks that had emerged in the front room, the frayed carpet, the gloomy furniture.

  My walks and outings started to tire me. I would find myself in a strange street, staring at a house with a tatty wreath on a door, thinking, What am I doing here? I’d return home exhausted to cook a meal I did not want to eat; I just wanted to slump, slump in that house, my faithful mausoleum, and do nothing at all. The blackness that had almost overtaken me seemed close again. It lurked in all the dark places: the inside of cupboards, the bottom of saucepans, in the long weeds and grass between the house and the shed. How easy it would be to pull it on again, I thought, like a pile of soiled clothes lying in the corner on the floor. I could feel the foul tug of them over my head and up my limbs, smell their stench. To have it return like that, so suddenly and unexpectedly, after such happiness, was almost worse.

  I forced myself to eat. I tramped to the frozen park in the mornings. I sat next to the wall and imagined Emily playing. I put the radio on and listened to pop songs.

  I decided that my short-lived enthusiasm for life had been dependent on Emily’s presence and that this indicated another fault in my character, a grave one, and then everything that had gone before started to feel shaky.

  On Christmas Day I rang Richard but he wasn’t there; I remembered he had gone to Spain for the holidays. I tried Bess, but she didn’t answer either; she and Frank often went at this time of year to the Isle of Wight, where one of their daughters lived and hosted the whole family. I couldn’t think of anyone else to ring. What a life, I thought; what an aftermath.

  I sat in the front room for a long time doing nothing, then fetched the score of the Rachmaninoff. It was as if I were in a sequence of thought and action and silence from which I couldn’t fathom an escape.

  I started to think about the relationship between the solo part and orchestra, which Emily and I had not yet discussed. It was time she started practising the work with another pianist who would play the orchestra part (as transcribed for keyboard) on the piano, while she played her solo part; this is a normal element of the preparation for the performance of a piano concerto.

  I imagined myself in this role; a little fantasy. I’d play the orchestra part on my piano while she played hers next door. People in the street would stop short and listen, transfixed by the music, a crowd would gather at the window. I set the score on the stand and pretended to play the accompaniment, moving my hands back and forth above the keys. Why could I not do this?

  I got up, put some music on the gramophone – Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Strauss – disc after disc, and sat listening impatiently. How they bored me, those recordings. All that music by old dead men, great hoary relics shuffled around concert programs, put up again and again in front of a willing audience. I flicked on the radio: Lionel Richie, ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’. I turned it off then sat in the silent house thinking about the music I would like to hear; for a moment I could not think of any.

  As the date of Emily’s return approached I felt relief. I went into a hairdresser on Walton Street and had my wispy hair trimmed to just beneath my ears. On the way home I bought a cream sweater I had been eyeing in the window of a second-hand shop for some weeks. That night Richard rang me.

  ‘I rang last night,’ he said. ‘Were you out?’

  ‘Yes, I think I was …’ (I had started to walk again in the evenings.)

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  ‘Yes, I remember, of course I remember.’ I shifted the phone to the other ear. ‘How was Spain?’

  ‘Same old, same old. Mum, I’ve had a call from a collector, a private collector, who wants to buy some of Edward’s papers. Stuff from the fifties and sixties. Parts of them were published, but they were heavily edited and he kept the originals. Apparently these are now considered to contain some great missing piece in the global history of economic thinking. I wouldn’t give a shit about any of this normally, except for the fact that he wants to pay an extraordinarily large amount for them. So I thought I’d better check we still have the originals before agreeing to sell.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Do we still have them? You haven’t given them to the library? Mum? Hello? Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘You don’t have some sort of attachment to these papers, do you?’

  How could he even think that? I still didn’t say anything.

  ‘Mum, do you think you might be able to answer me? Did you understand what I said?’

  ‘I’m not attached to them.’

  ‘Good. So they’re in the study then.’

  ‘Er, well, I suppose I would have to look …’

  ‘Mum, are you all right? Are you eating?’

  ‘Yes. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘What about Martha?’

  ‘Martha? Christ, I haven’t thought about her for months. I seem to go through women like water these days. Look, the reason I’m pressing is because he needs to know now whether he can have them or not. There are some other economist’s papers in Boston he’s also interested in; it’s probably just some spiel to get us to sell, but shall I tell him yes?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure what’s in the study, actually …’

  And it went on like that for a while, me stalling, him insisting, until he finally said, exasperated, ‘Could you please look for them and ring me tomorrow morning?’ He added quickly, ‘I’m afraid I can’t walk away from this sort of money, so could you just do this for me, please? I haven’t asked for much,’ and he hung up.

  I haven’t asked for much. But my boy, my boy, you will never know how much I gave. When will I tell you? And if I did, would you hear it?

  I went into the study, opened a desk drawer, miming actions with no purpose. I had burnt those papers already, of course. I hadn’t thought about the money. I went to the kitchen, made myself some dinner, took a pot of tea
to the study and sat in front of the fire.

  I heard a car in the street, watched from the window as Emily heaved her suitcase out of a taxi, pulled a black coat over her white shirt wheeled the case across the street and over the kerb. I raised my hand and tapped on the glass but she had disappeared down the easement.

  73.

  Oxford, January, 2006

  Richard rang in the morning. The collector had already telephoned him. When Richard mentioned his ageing and sentimental mother the man had upped the price. Richard wanted to collect the papers straight away.

  ‘I’m busy today,’ I said, ‘seeing people.’ (It was true; it was Monday, I was expecting Emily.)

  ‘All day?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Mum, please, could we have a conversation about this? Are you able to do that?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Could I come up this afternoon?’

  ‘This afternoon would be tricky.’

  He expelled a sigh.

  ‘Richard, I’ve been doing a bit of cleaning lately.’

  ‘Riiiight …’

  ‘There was such a mess in your father’s study, it was clogged full of junk. It should have been cleaned out years ago, frankly …’

  ‘What are you saying, Mum? You haven’t thrown them out, have you?’

  ‘Not thrown them out, no …’

  ‘Well, what then?’

  But I was too frightened to tell him. Even though it was just Richard, my son, he had picked up some of Edward’s verbal style, and the similarity now unnerved me. He got more frustrated with my obfuscation and insisted I tell him what had happened, or else he would assume I was not competent to answer, which enraged me. I hung up, he rang back, and so it went on, until I pulled the phone socket from the wall.

  A few hours later I heard a knock on the door and hurried to it, thinking it was Emily, then something about the timbre of it made me pause.