Maestro

by Peter Goldsworthy

  ‘Terrible,’ he shook his head, finishing.

  ‘Sounded fine to me.’ I tried to remain nonchalant, understated.

  I sensed immediately that he’d been practising. Perhaps only once or twice—he would have needed no more—but his apparently casual plucking of the Scherzo from a pile of sheet music, his feigned indifference in whether I entered the competition or not: these were suddenly revealed to me as a sham. He could lie through his teeth as much as he liked, but sooner or later his hands—his wonderful hands—would betray him.

  Together we began to take the Scherzo apart, phrase by phrase.

  ‘This part is not for the stopwatch. More a … slow bike race. Do you have them in this country? You must keep the note aloft without playing—the memory must linger through a silence longer than you can bear … and then more. You must keep the hands still, the bicycle balancing with nothing but nerve …’

  Two hours must have passed in this fashion. Sometime during the second of them my father must have crept unnoticed into the room and sunk himself into the armchair.

  ‘Enough of your solo piece,’ Keller finally said. ‘What of the concerto?’

  This was news to me; ‘I have to play a concerto?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘With an orchestra?’

  ‘It is possible. But a second piano, more probably. Taking the orchestral part. And that is how we will practise.’

  He began fossicking once more in his shelves.

  ‘I have very little of this music. We will have to make do.’

  Another clump of torn, yellowing pages was set before me: the piano part of the Beethoven G Major. My father half-rose from the armchair, peering at the score. Perhaps he wondered if it was another first edition.

  ‘Let us dismantle,’ Keller said.

  And so began the most concentrated period of study I had ever experienced. We finished at midnight, my father periodically leaving us to phone my mother with progress reports, revised meal scheduling—and I suspected, to grab a beer and sandwich at the bar downstairs. I also was hungry—I had not eaten—but there was no informing Keller of such trifles.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he finally said, closing his piano, ‘we begin the second movement.’

  My relief was brutally cut short. ‘You want to see me tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course. We must practise daily.’

  How could I tell him that I planned a different sort of practice, that I needed to write out new chord changes and bass riffs for Reelin’ and Rockin’? I could not even have told him that I needed to study for school exams: Differential Calculus and Great Expectations and Garibaldi’s First Landing on Mainland Italy. All of this was, suddenly, nothing.

  ‘Even so the boy will not be ready,’ Keller was saying to my father. ‘Do you still wish him to play?’

  ‘It seems an opportunity …’

  ‘Then I am forced to travel with him. We must practise till the last. Of course I will play the second piano in the competition. Otherwise we cannot guarantee the accompaniment. Most play this Beethoven far too slowly.’

  ‘We couldn’t ask …’

  ‘It is necessary.’

  The wall was still there—the pretence that my incompetence, or someone else’s, was to blame for the fact that he must travel South with me. But I didn’t for a moment believe him. Nor did my father. His eyes met mine as Keller muttered crustily to himself, and he winked.

  ‘We appreciate the sacrifice,’ he murmured, realising it was pointless to protest further. ‘Perhaps we could help with something towards your costs. An air fare …’

  ‘Impossible,’ Keller snapped, his gruffness perhaps compensating for the glimpse he had allowed us of a more tender inner core. ‘Of course I could not accept.’

  This was another revelation, in a day of revelations. I had always believed—prompted perhaps by my parents’ joky references to his drinking habits—that Keller lived day-today, financially. Or bottle to bottle—dependent on each week’s tuition fees to pay for the next glass of schnapps. His refusal of financial help now was the first clue that money was the least of his worries. And also a clue that his contempt for teaching music to me was just another charade. Clearly he didn’t have to teach. His contempt was fuelled by feelings far more complicated and contradictory than I had thought.

  The implications were obvious: his exile was chosen, not forced upon him. He had enough money to fly anywhere he pleased, to live anywhere he pleased.

  But chose not to.

  Now I felt a Territorian’s contempt for Adelaide and its neat rows of suburbs as we circled to land. A temperate zone city of grandparents and churches, I decided. Of rotary clothes hoists and rose beds and apricot trees and cream-brick Dream Homes. All the old wonder seemed to have vanished, the magical City of years past—the Capital City of the land of Childhood—had become just another city, lowercase. My contempt was no doubt far greater than any native Territorian would have felt: I was one of the converted, always the most zealous believers.

  I was to board with my grandparents in their seaside suburb; Keller had taken lodgings at a nearby motel, within easy walking distance.

  The rest of the band were following by panel van, slowly, their air tickets cashed in for extra spending money.

  Each morning Keller arrived for breakfast, a little out of breath from the walk, but resplendent in white suit and panama hat, pince-nez and walking cane.

  Grandmother Wallace was most taken with her Continental Gentleman and his gruffly formal manners. Breakfast was the only meal he shared with us, and she soon determined to make the most of it: to lift it beyond the realm of the daily and mundane. I could set from memory a replica of the perfect Still Life she laid out on the table each morning: the carefully folded Advertiser, the two canary yellow hemispheres of grapefruit in their bowls, separated by a more richly yellowed cube of butter; the sky blue milk-jug and matching sugar bowl filled to the brim with their differently textured whitenesses; the pot of tea snug in its knitted navy blue cosy, the steam that rose invisibly from its spout suddenly rendered visible, swirling, where it entered the slanting morning light.

  Conversation over the breakfast table also belonged to a higher, mannered plane, as if brought forward from later, more formal mealtimes.

  ‘Have you had the pleasure of hearing our orchestra, Mr Keller?’

  ‘This is my first visit to Adelaide, Mrs Wallace.’

  ‘You must miss having an orchestra in the North. Ours is highly regarded. When Mr Rubinstein was touring—some years ago—and played here he said …’

  ‘Could you pass the newspaper, dear lady?’

  Keller was always far more interested in the headlines than in the opinions of Mr Rubinstein.

  ‘Have you heard Mr Rubinstein play, Mr Keller?’

  ‘Once,’ he murmured. The implication was one that only I could hear.

  ‘He played the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto,’ she continued. Perhaps you know it?’

  I didn’t know where to look: ‘Of course he knows the Tchaikovsky, Gran.’

  ‘In fact I have seldom played it,’ Keller said—with a careful politeness designed to be taken in two ways, as if speaking two different languages simultaneously—carrying a different message to each of us.

  ‘It’s a wonderful piece,’ she decided to remind him. ‘The opening chords especially.’

  His red, corrugated face remained bent to the morning paper: COSMONAUT IN RECORD FLIGHT. BIZARRE MURDER—SUICIDE PACT.

  ‘We used to subscribe, of course. To the orchestra. But Wilfred gets so tired now. I believe a concert is scheduled this Saturday night …’

  ‘Unfortunately I have a prior commitment, dear lady.’

  Wilf—my grandfather—was not so easily impressed. After a few initial attempts at communication—offers of a beer, politely declined, attempted reminiscences of the War, tactfully deflected—he returned to his sleep-out bedroom, to which he had been banished from the master bedroom some years before, an
d in which he spent most of his days listening to horse races and reading detective fiction.

  After breakfast we practised: a three-hour stretch. In that time the Concerto might be allowed one or two partial hearings. At first there was only one piano; a second had been hired, but not yet arrived. As I played, Keller sang the orchestral part. His hoarse, breaking voice, I decided, would be much better suited to the blues, or even Chuck Berry.

  Occasionally he spent our morning ‘consultation’ playing himself: filling in the background, playing various contrasting snippets from other pieces, relating anecdotes from Beethoven’s life, demonstrating the different techniques of interpretation used by different artists, even at times improvising amusing parodies of whatever phrase or harmony we were examining.

  ‘Parody,’ he liked to tell me, ‘is a form of homage, yes. And a form of … immunisation. But also fun.’

  Fun was not a word that emerged easily from that wrinkled prune-mouth. It seemed a grim sort of fun as he turned my precious Czerny studies upside down and hammered out the melodic line, backwards and inverted, accompanied by absurd harmonies. Like so many of his sarcastic verbal asides, there was something not so much amusing as tormented in all this.

  At noon he would vanish, by taxi, returning shortly with a thick stack of newspapers. As I ate my lunch he would sit in the lounge, reading, limiting his own midday meal as always to coffee. But no schnapps. It was a sight I had often seen in Darwin, on the balcony of the Swan: Keller hunched over his papers, elbows propped on the table, pince-nez adhering somehow to his nose, his brow furrowed, his gaze frequently switching from paper to paper mid-column as though comparing different versions of the same story.

  ‘I can see you are a kindred spirit,’ my grandmother told him, scrabbling to find common interests, or some shared language. ‘I can’t seem to get started in the morning without my Advertiser.’

  ‘I loathe all newspapers,’ Keller assured her. ‘The goitre of the world, a friend of mine once described them. But we must study the goitre, carefully. Like doctors. Pathologists.’

  He read those newspapers as closely as Bible texts, as though some sort of answer, or final explanation, or even cure could be discerned there, given enough time.

  ‘Anthropology,’ he explained to my grandmother, a little less harshly. ‘The proper study of mankind is man, to quote one of your English poets.’

  She fussed about him, fetching fresh coffee, plying him with questions, steering the conversation onto safer grounds.

  ‘Where do you have such lovely summer suits made, Mr Keller?’

  ‘I am fortunate, dear lady, to have found a very fine Chinese tailor. In Darwin.’

  ‘Very fine’ was his highest compliment, his single superlative. The most praise my playing had ever received was ‘fine’, or more usually, ‘adequate’.

  After lunch, textual analysis of the newspapers completed, we returned to the keyboard, and a shorter, more disciplined session: two hours of studies and exercises, ending, in the late afternoon, with one unbroken performance, under ‘concert conditions’.

  Then he would leave, driving off alone by taxi to eat at some Hungarian restaurant he’d discovered, his white Panama dazzling above his red face, a white cane tucked beneath his arm.

  ‘Spend time with your grandparents,’ he would murmur, excusing himself. ‘I am too much between you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t read about it, Paul! What we didn’t get up to!’

  Keller had left by taxi only seconds before—a near thing—as the panel van reversed into my grandparents’ gravel drive. Jimmy Papas’s black-bearded head craned from the driver’s window, twisted backwards, beaming. The sun was setting, light leaching rapidly from the world, colours greying, fine detail blurring into shadow. But the van still glittered, green-blue, finding sufficient light somewhere, the centre as always of the visual world.

  Scotty climbed from the passenger door, crumpling an empty beer can. He flipped up the hatch and began unloading the black boxes and cables of our musical life-support system.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Can’t practise at the hotel. They won’t hear of it.’

  ‘You want to practise here?’

  ‘There’s nowhere else.’

  ‘But my grandparents …’

  Somewhere inside the house two elderly innocents sat watching their favourite quiz show.

  ‘Give them our rooms at the Grosvenor,’ a voice suggested from inside the van. ‘A second honeymoon while we practise here for the week.’

  Then Rick Whiteley emerged, disengaging himself from a tangle of equipment and empty beer cans.

  ‘Where’s Reggie?’ I asked.

  ‘Rick’s on drums this trip,’ Scotty told me. ‘Reggie couldn’t make it.’

  Suddenly no-one wanted to meet my eye.

  ‘Whiteley’s playing drums? With Rough Stuff?’

  Whiteley stretched his small limbs, and brushed himself down. ‘I get by,’ he said. ‘I hold my own on skins.’

  ‘He’s fantastic,’ Jimmy added. ‘We’re bloody lucky …’

  A week on the road, in mid-summer heat, struggling—I suspected—from one oasis of refrigerated beer to the next, had taken high toll of Whiteley. His face had aged twenty years: an accumulation of morning-after faces, perhaps, each applied directly to the ruins of the previous morning-after beneath, with no time for repairs. His afro hair style needed re-perming; his Zapata moustache had lost definition, reclaimed, resumed, by the surrounding stubble. He looked his age, whatever it was.

  I had no idea what was going on. Where was Reggie? And why would a middle-aged disc jockey want to play drums with a band of school kids? And travel two thousand miles wedged among amplifiers and beer cans to do it?

  Also I was worried about Keller.

  ‘We might be able to practise at night. After my lessons.’

  My grandmother appeared framed in the rectangle of the front door, back-lit, drawn by the voices.

  ‘Paul,’ she called, squinting out into the half-darkness. ‘Are you there? Is everything alright?’

  These are my friends, Gran. Members of my … ensemble.’

  It seemed easiest to borrow my mother’s term.

  ‘This is Jimmy. Scott. And …’

  ‘Richard,’ Whiteley stepped towards the door, honey-voiced. ‘From the radio station. I’m looking after the boys in town. I wondered, Mrs Wallace, if the ensemble might practise here. For a few days. Just until the concert.’

  ‘We’re very loud,’ I warned.

  ‘I remember once hearing the 1812 Overture in the old soundshell,’ Gran began.

  ‘Ta, muchly,’ Whiteley interrupted, then turned: ‘Bring the stuff in.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I cornered Scott and Jimmy inside the house, with Whiteley out of earshot, fetching in another drum fragment. ‘Is Reggie crook?’

  ‘He was looking sick when we left,’ Jimmy snorted, and laughed.

  Scotty seemed more concerned: ‘There wasn’t room in the van, Paul. We took a vote. Reggie went along with it. We need Rick—he has contacts in the South.’

  ‘Reggie could have flown down. What about the money from the air fares?’

  ‘We spent the money already. New amps. A mixer. And the van needed some work.’

  ‘Then Whiteley should have flown down. He’s got money coming out his ears.’

  ‘He’s got nothing,’ Jimmy said. ‘He’s been sacked. And you lay off him, Paul. He’s a good mate.’

  ‘Me lay off him?’ I began—and finished, as Whiteley appeared in the door.

  Much of that first evening was spent in makeshift cleaning and repairs. The various bits of drum meccano no longer wished to fit together. The new amplifier facings were warped and blistered; the speaker boxes were clogged with dust, the first guitar chord that Scotty struck exploded a fine, red cloud into the air, further smaller puffs following with each chord.

  We laughed, loudly, together, suddenly mor
e at ease.

  ‘Which way did you come? Straight across the desert?’

  ‘There were a few detours.’

  I wrenched open a window: ‘I suppose we could use it on the Big Night. Something to grab attention. Fill the speakers with dust.’

  ‘Fill your own speakers with dust,’ Jimmy growled. ‘Think about it. A publicity gimmick. The band from the bush …’

  But the artistic direction of the band had passed out of my hands somewhere between Darwin and Adelaide.

  ‘You’re not a bunch of hicks,’ Whiteley said. ‘You’re a rock band. Professional musos. Where you come from doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Forget it. But I’ve some other ideas. Rock arrangements of some classical melodies. I wondered what you thought.’

  ‘Let’s hear them.’

  I banged out a rough, syncopated version of the Chopin I’d been practising with Keller all week. The melodies had fixed themselves in my mind, an irritating background noise that I couldn’t shake off, a stuck record playing the same phrases again and again. By distorting them, I hoped I might exorcise those sounds.

  ‘Nice beat,’ Whiteley commented.

  ‘Ta, muchly,’ I parodied him, bravely.

  ‘But you’re trying to do too much. Rock music is always simple.’

  He paused, and added another familiar line from his repertoire of radio patter: ‘A trap for young players.’

  ‘Not our scene, Paul,’ Scotty added, a little awkwardly.

  ‘Did I show you my tattoo?’ Jimmy was pulling off his jacket, trying to change the subject: an act of tact and sensitivity I would have put beyond him. ‘Don’t touch—it’s still swollen.’

  I chose not to demonstrate my Chopin improvements to Keller when he arrived the following morning. Nor did I make any reference to the set of drums parked between the two pianos, or the rest of the equipment scattered about the room. As always I was determined to keep my two musical worlds apart, certain they were immiscible.