Choral Society

by Prue Leith

  Be positive, Lucy told herself. She resolved to enjoy singing gospel and blues.

  And she did. The teacher, Nelson, was a pro. He used that ‘patterning’ gesture with his hand held flat to signal higher or lower, while keeping eye contact with everyone in turn, and somehow he managed to lift the group above the only-just in tune into the spot-on tuneful. It was good to feel her lungs fill and her diaphragm working. The sound, round and true, seemed to fill her head. She had forgotten how liberating singing could be.

  The little hall off Ladbroke Grove had great acoustics, and there were some excellent singers – a big black woman with a huge rich-as-velvet voice, and two tenors who had clearly sung a lot before. One chicly dressed woman, with obvious money and style (she’d arrived late in a black jersey dress and strappy leather sandals) had a quiet but very pure alto. There was really only one dud, a rather uptight woman next to her, whose voice didn’t seem to work at all.

  After the class, she forced herself to stay a few minutes and make polite conversation with her fellow singers, then excused herself, explaining she was due back at her daughter’s for supper. She walked slowly, enjoying the replay of melodies in her head, reluctant to break her pleasant mood. Even a little reluctant to face her grandchildren. She’d have liked to go on singing.

  Chapter Six

  For Joanna the whole evening had been a disaster. They’d sung nothing but gospel songs you can learn without words or music. Even she could tell that Nelson was a good teacher, and by the end the group was singing complicated three-part harmonies worthy of Harlem, and most of them were swaying and moving in a wholly un-English way. Joanna had made sporadic efforts to join in, but the pain was intense and the sound almost non-existent, so she quickly returned to miming.

  At one point, still conducting and grinning at the group, Nelson had leaned close, his ear near her mouth. The game was up …

  She’d endured the agony, longing for release. But then, at the end, when everyone else was flushed with success and talking about next week, Nelson came over and took her arm.

  ‘Come with me, lady,’ he said.

  She’d followed him to the piano, out of hearing of the group.

  ‘This group’s no good for you,’ he went on, ‘not by itself. You gotta fin’ yo’ singing voice, and right now you don’ know how or where. Right?’ He looked seriously into her face, forcing her to meet his eyes. They were big, slightly bulging and intense.

  Joanna nodded. ‘Right,’ she said, almost crossly, ‘but it’s no good you saying everyone can sing.’ Her voice didn’t sound right in her own ears. Why was she getting so emotional about this? ‘I can’t do it. I just can’t.’

  Nelson did not challenge this. ‘What happens when you try?’

  ‘You listened to me. No sound comes. Even if you asked me to sing ‘Three Blind Mice’, I could not force any voice through my throat. It just closes, tight and hard. And it hurts.’

  He did not say anything for a moment, just looked straight at her.

  Then he said, ‘I bet you sing fine on your own – in the bath. In the car?’

  He was right. If there was no one around, she could karaoke away with the best of them, sing Cole Porter while watering her posh little garden, or belt out ‘Toreador’ while boiling pasta. She shook her head and said, ‘OK, I sometimes sing a bit on my own, but I don’t suppose it’s in tune.’

  ‘That don’ matter. Point is, you can sing without hurting, which means yo’ trouble is in yo’ head.’ He looked hard at her, forcing her to look at him. ‘I can make you sing, lady, I promise.’

  She shook her head, and said, ‘No, forget it.’

  But Nelson cheerfully insisted. He took Joanna’s telephone number and said he’d put together two or three people from the group, and they could come an hour early, and together they would get her singing. He opened his arms wide, all smiles, and said, ‘And then the Albert Hall!’ and roared with laughter.

  Joanna suddenly realised how ungrateful and feeble she must seem. Indeed what a wimp she was being.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Nelson. You’re a really nice guy. You don’t need to do this, do you? All you signed up for, presumably, was to give a singing class, not nanny me through my problems.’

  ‘No sweat,’ he said.

  Joanna went home surprisingly cheered, and found herself singing ‘Wadin’ in the Water’ as she drove up Kensington Park Road. There was no strain and no pain, just the pleasure of singing.

  Chapter Seven

  Lucy’s serene mood after the singing class gradually evaporated as she walked up the hill. She began to worry that she was late. Grace did not approve of the children staying up. She pulled her jacket close and, head down, quickened her pace.

  Suddenly she was startled by a too-close bike skidding to a stop beside her. She jumped round.

  It was Nelson, the teacher. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten … So sorry. I couldn’t remember your name to call you.’

  Lucy, smiling with relief, said, ‘No, no, it’s fine. I’m Lucy.’

  ‘Oh, yes of course. Lucy. I wanted to ask you a favour.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Lucy, wondering what on earth a forcibly retired food columnist and glum widow could do for a confident, charming, talented (and fashionably black) blues teacher? Whose accent, she noticed, veered from broad Jamaican to the Queen’s English. Was that for show? Self-parody?

  They were standing outside a pub, and it was hard to hear above the noise of music and drink-raised voices. Nelson said, ‘Let’s walk. Where are you going?’

  She told him Pembridge Square. As they set off up the hill Nelson asked, ‘Did you notice that the woman between you and me didn’t sing at all? Just pretended?’

  ‘Yes, I did. She looked so miserable. Joanna wasn’t it? The businesswoman?’

  Nelson grinned. ‘That’s right. That’s her.’

  Lucy could not think where this conversation was going.

  ‘She’s got a problem,’ Nelson went on. ‘She can’t sing with other people. Her throat constricts from anxiety, and then no sound will come. It’s quite common. I thought we could help her.’

  Lucy looked into Nelson’s face and could see his concern was genuine.

  ‘We? I can see you could …’

  ‘She needs a couple of singers who’ll have semi-private sessions with her. It’s the big group that paralyses her. She can sing on her own, she says. I thought I’d ask Rebecca as well. The blonde lady with the alto.’

  Hmm … thought Lucy, the middle-aged trio together. But of course she agreed. How could she not? And besides, the woman’s predicament intrigued her. She’d heard plenty of people who sang flat, or sharp, or were too shy to try, but never someone who tried, but couldn’t make the sound come out.

  The family had waited for her, and of course the table was properly set, with real linen napkins and candles. Grace had roasted a chicken with lemon and tarragon, and the children were bathed and looking angelic in their pyjamas. Lucy, hugging her granddaughter, noticed that her wide mouth, so like David’s, was now sporting serrated new front teeth.

  There was a bottle of robust red wine, and ten-year-old Johnny went round and poured it like a waiter, with one hand behind his back and a napkin on his arm. It was sweet and funny. He’d learnt waiter behaviour for a play at school, he said.

  ‘It’s cool you having my room, Gran,’ he said.

  ‘It’s good of you to let me. But why is it cool?’

  ‘I like sleeping on the sofa.’

  Clare said, ‘That’s because you put the telly on in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I do not!’

  Grace interjected, ‘I’m sure you don’t, Johnny, and Clare, don’t try to get your brother into trouble. Eat up, both of you.’

  The children obediently returned to their food, glowering at each other under their brows in a half-hearted way.

  Lucy, as always, was impressed with her daughter’s control of the children. When Grace had been lit
tle she could only, it seemed, govern with her consent. But Grace was the boss here, and her children knew it.

  Once in bed Lucy found herself, as she still did most nights, talking to David. Not aloud of course, just in her head. She knew some widows actually wrote to their dead husbands, or kept a sort of mourning diary. She just carried on mental conversations, observations and accusations.

  Darling, it’s been over six months now. The worst of my life. But tonight I forgot about you for a good three hours. And I felt a stirring of real affection for my grandchildren, making faces at each other below Grace’s radar. Now I’m under the horrible duvet, but feeling mellow and not sad. Progress, don’t you think?

  Chapter Eight

  When Joanna got home after her disastrous singing class she was in such a good mood that she did something she had not done since Christmas. She rang her parents in Australia.

  She needed to be feeling brave to do this, to face the inevitable accusation from her mother, uttered or unsaid, of having been the beneficiary of a pampered childhood and privileged education and given them nothing back. There was some truth in the charge. She had fled to Europe as a twenty-two-year-old, and never returned.

  Her parents had visited her once but, almost from the moment of their arrival, she had been desperate for them to leave. Her dad had been as generous and affectionate as ever, but she was still in her thirties and not grown up enough to be relaxed about his Crocodile Dundee clothes, coarse manners and expansive loudness. In front of her smart City friends with their pink-striped shirts, button-down collars and mobile telephones (they were new then and the size of bricks, but they were the mark of the new elite) he embarrassed her quite as much as her mother did. More in fact. Her mother, as ever, nagged both her and her father mercilessly but at least she liked London, and didn’t tell people they were talking cobblers, or insist on drinking Foster’s in smart restaurants.

  It was nine in the morning in Melbourne, so Joanna reckoned she should get her mother. She would not be downstairs yet, since she always dressed slowly and late, stuck in some interior vision of herself as a sort of Scarlett O’Hara, surrounded by servants and adorers who do everything for her, but marooned in a ranch miles from the excitement of the city.

  Her mother was almost eighty now, but she had been Miss Australia and had been headed, she reminded everyone frequently, for a glittering career on the stage. Instead, she had made the mistake of marrying Joanna’s father, who seemed a good bet at the time since he was the richest property developer in Melbourne.

  But when he’d made his pile, he’d sold up and bought a 30,000-acre cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere and imprisoned his beautiful bride in it. At least, that was the version her daughter had been fed throughout her childhood. It wasn’t until she could do the arithmetic that Joanna worked out that her mama had been forty something when they moved to the ranch, long past any spin-off glory from her nineteen-year-old flowering as Miss Australia. Poor woman, thought Joanna, I should have had more sympathy for her delusions and her unhappiness, but she irritated me then, and irritates the hell out of me now.

  She dialled the number and almost immediately heard her mother’s voice.

  ‘Hullo, is that you, John?’

  ‘No, Mother, it’s me.’

  ‘Who? Who is this?’ Her voice held a touch of disdain.

  ‘Me. Your daughter. Joanna.’ Joanna spoke loudly and clearly. Her mother was slightly deaf.

  ‘You don’t have to shout you know. I’m not deaf.’

  And I don’t have to ring you up, thought Joanna. But she said, ‘OK, Mum. How are you? How’s Dad?’

  ‘I thought you were John. I’m waiting for a call from John.’

  ‘Who’s John?’

  ‘My hairdresser. He’s good enough to come all the way out to this godforsaken place to do my hair because my back is too bad to jolt over these awful roads.’

  ‘God, Mum, that must cost a fortune!’ The ranch was fifty miles from the nearest town, and there was a nine-mile drive along the gum-lined drive once you were on the property.

  ‘Your father can afford it. It’s the least he can do. And John stays for lunch, so at least I get some civilised company for once.’

  Joanna sighed. How could her mother have been married for sixty years, and still be complaining? Why didn’t they divorce years ago?

  They discussed her mother’s bad back, her thinning hair, her isolation (as always), the weather (drought, sheep dying, farm labourers quitting) – which seemed to give her more satisfaction than concern.

  Joanna waited to see if her mother would ask her one single question. But no. It was always the same. These conversations were only ever about her mother. Joanna still minded, and always noticed. In a way there was a kind of grim satisfaction in each time noting that her mother never showed any interest in her, any concern or affection. Yet when she’d been little her mother had been proud of her. Like a performing monkey or a designer accessory, thought Joanna.

  When she had run out of complaints, Joanna asked, ‘Is Dad still there? I’d like to catch him before he goes out on the ranch.’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  But she did put the call through, and Joanna heard, with guilt and love combined, her father’s broad Aussie accent.

  ‘Darling girl,’ he boomed, his voice at eighty-five as strong as ever. ‘Great to hear you. Tell all. How’s the best head-hunter in the western world doing then?’

  Joanna laughed, ‘Oh Dad, you know I’m not a head-hunter any more. I sold the search business years ago and I now work for Innovest, the venture capital guys.’

  ‘So you did, so you did. I’m getting senile. Well, how is the best venture capitalist in the western world doing then?’

  She told him about her new life, working for Innovest and doctoring companies in trouble, and she felt like she used to when she came home from school with a good report. He was so pleased and proud of her. Then they talked about the ranch, how he was herding sheep by helicopter now. And yes, of course he had learnt to fly it. He had been flying single-engine flat-wing planes for years, so it wasn’t difficult. He loved the chopper, said it was so manoeuvrable you could be a sort of aerial sheep dog. But he still rode out every day on old George, his chestnut gelding – but for pleasure (and to get away from Mama, thought Joanna), not to inspect the sheep or cattle. And come shearing time, he still liked to do his bit.

  ‘I can’t keep it up all day any more,’ he said, ‘but I can still have a fleece off a sheep faster than the lads, and without a single nick.’

  When father and daughter had done boasting to each other, Joanna reluctantly replaced the phone. Why am I not mature enough to put up with her carping? If Dad can, why can’t I?

  Chapter Nine

  ‘But darling, you’ve left home, haven’t you? Surely you don’t mind if I put some stuff in here?’

  Rebecca watched her daughter yank her clothes cupboard open, lift half a dozen hangers off the rail, each heavy with two or three dresses or coats or jackets, then turn to face her before she answered. ‘No, Mum, I haven’t left home. I’m at university. I still need a home!’

  Rebecca waved her hand to encompass her daughter’s bedroom.

  ‘How many times have you slept in this bed in the last two years? Half a dozen?’

  Angelica dumped the clothes on the bed and looked at her mother with a mixture of dismay and affection. She rolled her eyes with exaggerated patience and said, very slowly, as to a recalcitrant four-year-old,

  ‘Mum, I am a student. I have to be in Edinburgh most of the year. Last year I was travelling on my gap year, remember? I was “growing up,” “broadening my mind,” “learning to earn my way,” “loosening the apron strings”. All your phrases by the way.’

  ‘And now you are grown up and free of my apron strings you have quite rightly left home.’

  Suddenly Angelica laughed. ‘Mum, when did you ever wear an apron! I’ve been tidying up after you since I learnt to tie my sh
oe laces. Which Dad taught me, by the way!’

  Rebecca didn’t know how to react. The conversation had taken a turn she did not like. She felt the accusation, and she minded. It was true she was untidy, true she wasn’t domesticated, but it was unkind of Angelica to point it out, and particularly cruel to bring Bill into it. And anyway, Angelica was dodging the question.

  ‘What have my domestic talents, or lack of them, or your father’s abundance of them, got to do with my clothes in this room?’

  ‘Oh, Mum …’

  Angelica came across and put her arms round her. Rebecca was tempted to turn away but she left it a second too late: as Angelica hugged her, a wash of comfort replaced her anger.

  She loved the smell of her daughter: it had not changed since she was little, warm and clean. She suddenly had a vision of Angelica, aged five, telling her and Bill that just because they disagreed with each other, they didn’t have to shout. She smells sensible, thought Rebecca, breathing in. It would be good to have a little cry against Angelica’s neck.

  Angelica spoke into her mother’s hair. ‘Mum, I have to have this room. I’m not completely independent. I still need some place to call home, and you don’t seriously want to chuck me out, do you?’ She stood back a little, looking into Rebecca’s face. ‘Oh, Mum, you look like a child whose balloon has burst.’

  In an instant Rebecca melted. She could never feel put out with Angelica for long.

  ‘Oh, darling, it’s fine. You are quite right, I’ve been a rotten mother—’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Angelica interrupted. ‘Well, I guess if a rotten mother means someone who can’t make a bed or bake a cake, then yes, you are a rotten mother.’ She gave Rebecca a little shake. ‘But I think you’re brilliant. Fun to be with, indulgent, tolerant, interested in me – very important! – and with great clothes I can nick. Pity your trousers are now too short.’