He also said nothing—until, rising to leave, he collided gently with a cymbal and set it softly shimmering.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Drums.’
He nodded knowingly: ‘If your neighbour offends you, give his children gifts of drums.’
‘I beg your …?’
He stepped down hard on the bass drum pedal: PUM.
‘Ancient Chinese proverb,’ he said.
He paused again as he passed the electric keyboard pushed deep into a corner, half-hidden.
‘Every fish has its depth,’ he murmured, then headed off in search of his daily fix of newsprint, without looking back, leaving me puzzling over the phrase for hours.
We waited backstage in the Glenelg Town Hall for our collective name to be called. The small side room was fogged out with cigarette smoke, and the smoke of other herbs, and crowded with musicians who all seemed nearer to Whiteley’s age than to ours. Leather jackets and mirror sunglasses were of no help here. Taste had moved on to cooler, more casual styles: loose Eastern shirts, sandals, rimless glasses. The temperature of the music we could hear from the stage had cooled too …
I could feel their absurd hopes of fame and fortune drain from Scott and Jimmy as they sat huddled together in a self-protective leather kraal. Even Whiteley was silent for once, sitting slightly apart from us, distracted, clutching his drumsticks, perhaps wondering exactly how he had got so quickly out of touch.
I tried to distract Jimmy. ‘When are you going back?’
‘Might do a few gigs,’ he said. His vocabulary resembled Whiteley’s more and more each day. ‘Rick has contacts. Then we’ll head east. A slow trip up the coast. Rick heard about some radio job in Newcastle …’
‘What about you?’ Scotty asked. ‘Thought about coming with us?’
‘I wouldn’t fit in the van.’
He laughed, guiltily: ‘Tell Reggie I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ I said. ‘I fly home the day after the piano competition.’
‘Think you’ve got a chance?’
‘More than we’ve got here,’ my tongue wanted to say, but at the last moment chose to follow orders.
‘Maybe,’ I said instead. ‘You coming to listen?’
‘Where is it?’ Jimmy put in.
‘The Conservatorium. In the City.’
I paused, watching them check each other’s expressions.
I let them off the hook. ‘It’s not compulsory,’ I said.
‘It’s not our scene.’ Scotty was spokesman. ‘We’d just get in the way. But good luck.’
It was a parting of the ways, I sensed—a foreshadowing of the break-up of the band even before it had played. The knowledge was on us quickly, without warning, and we tried our best to prepare: saying our goodbyes, reassuring each other that, yes, we’d had some great times. And having done so we rose when our collective name was called and walked out onto the stage, and plugged in our various instruments and played together for the last time—or more apart than together: loudly, awkwardly, unenthusiastically.
Afterwards, side-stage, nothing remained to be said. The boys planned to drown their troubles in some bar that would fail to recognise their age. Whiteley knew a club they might try—some health club in the city, Men Only. And so I left them, bequeathing my electric keyboard to the remnants of the band, not bothering to wait for the announcement of results.
I needed an early night. Keller was arriving early the following morning, and the next two days held far more promise for me than this world of squalid, foolish dreams.
He noticed immediately the absence of the drums.
‘The dance band is gone?’
It was the first direct mention he had made.
‘It’s not a dance band.’
‘You play dance music, no?’
‘We play rock’n roll.’
‘Ah, yes—rock and roll. That is more a … fast march? Common time. With major sevenths. Like this …’
I’ll never forget that image of him: the ancient brick-faced Viennese virtuoso in his white suit, belting out twelve bars of fast blues.
‘Good music,’ he nodded, approvingly. ‘It simplifies. Prevents thought. Gives easy orders …’
I sat silently, waiting.
‘You wish to play this music instead? In the Piano Competition?’
‘It’s over,’ I said. ‘We lost.’
‘We never lose,’ he chided me. ‘We only learn.’
Here Endeth The Lesson, I mouthed silently. For the first time I found his neat packages of advice glib, predictable, even irritating. He smiled at me: a knowing, all-wise Confucian smile, and I felt an urge to blaspheme.
‘We’ll win it next year,’ I said. ‘When I get a decent electric piano. And a bigger amplifier.’
He worked me late that night, partly as punishment no doubt. For the first time he remained for dinner: eating with some difficulty the allegedly ‘German’ sausages that Gran had bought and kept frozen for this eventuality.
I was still working at my keyboard at midnight when I glanced across to find him fast asleep at the other piano, in sitting position, his red, grizzled head slumped forward on his chest …
Gran had the spare bed in my room encased in her best linen within minutes, and a pair of spare pyjamas neatly folded on the pillow. Against Keller’s sleepy protestations, she manoeuvred him towards the room.
‘I must summon a taxi, dear lady.’
‘Nonsense. It’s far too late, Mr Keller. We would be honoured if you would accept our hospitality.’
His presence seemed to produce a kind of stilted, archaic speech from her, as if it were contagious.
‘A token of our esteem.’
He rose early the following morning. The sun was barely up, the traffic still silent, the only sound a single dove warbling softly, repetitively, somewhere. Watching him struggle free of the bedclothes, his joints seized up in the cold air, I realised for the first time how old he was.
Oh, I knew the figures, the birth year—knew that he was eighty-one, perhaps eighty-two. But somehow he’d always seemed younger: frozen in that indeterminate common age of alcoholics, the pickled late middle age they remain suspended in until death.
Watching him that morning I recognised him for the first time as the octogenarian he was, a whole generation older even than my grandparents.
After bathing and shaving he returned to the room, wrapped in towels, and began to pull on the various complicated jigsaw pieces of white linen and elastic that my grandmother had spent the small hours of the night ironing and starching. I spied on him secretly from bed: the thin, undernourished legs; the belly swollen by booze; the dark terracotta of the face suddenly becoming white flesh at the neckline as if he had been moulded from pale putty, or white clay, and only the topmost portion had been fired.
Then he lifted his arm to tug a garment into place, and for the first and only time I saw the number.
Tattooed on the pale hairless skin of his left forearm, just above the watchline: six faded blue digits.
And then just as suddenly the tattoo was gone, a shirt sleeve yanked over it, a cuff being firmly buttoned down.
‘You were a prisoner in the War?’ I blurted out.
‘Everyone was a prisoner in the War,’ he murmured, dismissively.
‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Was your wife with you? Which camp?’
He continued dressing in silence.
‘What was it called?’
‘There were many camps,’ he finally muttered, and rose and left the room. ‘Their name is always the same.’
Our weekly consultations resumed on our return from the South. At first I suspected that Keller was disappointed in me, but his emotional climate might easily have been part of his annual mood cycle: a reflection of the arrival of November, and the worst dog-days of the Wet. A great weight of humidity pressed down once again on the town, a pressure that seemed to force him back into his shuttered room, brooding, flicking through his scrapbooks
, drinking endlessly from his flask of schnapps.
It was only now that I realised he had not drunk at all in Adelaide.
‘I could have played better,’ I tried to persuade him.
He shook his head: ‘No. We prepared fully.’
‘I’ll practise more next time.’
‘No. Next time—less.’
His advice teased at me, as always. What could he mean? Which way to take it? I hoped all would become clear the night he accepted—for only the second time in two years—my parents’ invitation to dinner, to discuss my future.
High school was finishing; the educational resources of Darwin could take me no further. Adrift in the timelessness of childhood, the dwindling weeks of that year still seemed a lifetime to me, but to my parents my predicament worsened each week. Thick Syllabus Guides from various Southern universities began appearing in the house, scattered casually about the front room, like coffee-table books, for light reading.
‘Medicine in Adelaide looks interesting,’ my father might suggest, thumbing through.
‘Anything but medicine.’ My mother had her own ideas. ‘Law in Melbourne? Rosie will be in Melbourne. And you could take Music as an extra.’
‘Languages perhaps. You enjoy languages, Paul.’
Suggestions were handed back and forth between them, new arguments and rationalisations produced, positions swapped. And through all the talk one thing rapidly emerged, unsaid: they no longer felt they had a concert pianist on their hands. A music teacher, perhaps … but not a performer. I had managed only a distant third place in Adelaide, and their disappointment was clear to me—even, or perhaps especially, when they pretended otherwise.
The two winners, they never tired of reminding me, and themselves, were so much older,
My mother did her best that night. Once again the food was Viennese, or as near to Viennese as the markets of Darwin allowed: schnitzel, potatoes, homemade sauerkraut—left over from the year before, she joked—and a bottle of some Hungarian-style wine that my father had got his hands on somewhere.
All of which, as before, was wasted on Keller. As my parents began discussing the merits of various music schools in the Southern states he cut them short:
‘Enough of this stool polonaise.’
‘Musical chairs,’ I interpreted, familiar with the expression, one of his favourites.
‘A conservatorium can teach him nothing,’ he said.
‘How do you mean, Herr Keller?’
‘It will make him an adequate teacher—if he so wishes.’
I nurtured vague ideas of something more ambitious:
‘What about Julliard? Or the London School of Music? What about Europe?’
‘Europe has come to you,’ Keller said. ‘Europe has nothing more than this to offer.’
And he held out his two hands, palm up.
‘Perhaps Paul has to discover that for himself,’ my mother said, annoyed by the man’s certainty.
He smiled: ‘Perhaps. I wished only to save him time. A small hurt now to avoid a wasted life.’
‘It’s not fair,’ I said. ‘To make these decisions on the basis of one competition.’
‘It is not the competition,’ Keller told me. ‘You should have won the competition. You were the best.’
This was the news to me, the first I’d heard of his judgement. My spirits rose.
‘They want me to study at the Conservatorium,’ I said.
‘What else can they teach you?’
To play with feeling, I almost said. With abandon. To play Rachmaninoff and Liszt. To play Liszt’s transcriptions of Wagner.
‘What is the difference between a great and a good pianist?’ I asked him, repeating one of his favourite questions.
‘Not much,’ he admitted. ‘Little bits.’
‘What if I stayed here. Learnt from you. Could you teach those little bits?’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps not. We would need many years. It is always a gamble. You are my best student, yes. One in a thousand. But a concert pianist is one in a million.’
‘I want to stay.’
‘We will discuss it,’ my father murmured, but I could already hear his decision, as I’m sure could Keller, who, if he was disappointed, managed to hide it with as much thoroughness as he hid everything he felt.
‘More wine, Herr Keller?’
‘Please.’
I should have taken a greater part in that discussion; made a more forceful stand. But in the end, none of it seemed important enough. I was not yet involved in my future imaginatively or emotionally; the future was still too far off. I dreamt of New York and Vienna, yes—but there seemed plenty of time. I was content to let others make decisions that in no way seemed important, or pressing, or irreversible—yet.
More pressing was the possibility of snatching a few minutes at Rosie’s after dinner. Rain was falling outside; the perfumes of the earth folded back on themselves and multiplied. The rich, dank air filled my nostrils; I wanted to be out in the warm rain, pushing through the wet vegetation, physically part of it. That world and I were moulded from the same substances, I knew: we shared the same pollens, scents, sexual triggers, the same cycles of fertility; the same molecules. As my father talked wine I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the night, to the wet earth smearing itself with greenness: the thickly spread jam of tropical life, a vast croaking, rustling, crawling abundance.
And thus, while I listened, the future became the present, unchallenged; and all too soon the regretted past.
I visited the dark shuttered room above the beer garden in the Swan for the last time the night before I left for the South. School was finally over; Life about to start. My entire class seemed to be flying off in the small, hot hours of that night: Rosie to Melbourne, to study medicine; Megan Murray to Art School in Sydney; Bennie Reid—a surprise for everyone—to Naval Officer Training School, Nowra.
A giant party of bonfires and forbidden booze was planned on Casuarina Beach: a last farewell to the carefree life we still only half sensed was passing from us. The distance that remained for us to travel together had shrunk to hours, but the end was still not squarely faced, not yet fully imagined.
And yet I somehow knew that all that Darwin had meant to me would be contracted and distilled into that last night: pinned in my memory like one of Bennie’s flawlessly mounted butterflies.
I arranged for Rosie to collect me from the Swan at eight sharp—I did not want to be late.
Both piano lids in Keller’s room were closed: the first time I had ever seen this. He was sitting in his armchair when I entered—facing a second armchair, a new chair which I had never seen before, and could only believe was bought new for the occasion.
‘Sit,’ he gestured gruffly.
A small coffee table had apparently also been purchased; two empty glasses waited on the polished surface. As I sat, my teacher filled each glass with several fat fingers, or thumbs, of neat schnapps.
‘Our hours together are over,’ he said, and drank.
My throat clogged with a painful lumpiness which I tried to blame on the schnapps. Or perhaps that lump was words: suddenly I found I had nothing to say, could produce no recognisable noise.
‘You have enrolled?’ he finally asked. ‘In Adelaide?’
I nodded, reluctantly: ‘Law. And music—performance. I wanted to stay here.’
‘It is good that you are not staying,’ he finally said. ‘I also wanted you to stay: but for me, not for you.’
I sat with my eyes fixed on the polished woodgrain of the coffee table.
‘You are my teacher,’ I said. ‘You’ve been like a father to me. Taught me everything I know.’
He raised a quibbling finger: ‘I have taught you everything you were able to learn.’
I couldn’t believe my ears: our last hour together and he wanted to insult me. The rush of feeling I had felt for him, the warm lump in the throat, vanished.
‘I don’t mean to hurt you,’ he
said. ‘But better a small hurt now …’
‘Than a wasted life,’ I finished for him, tersely. ‘Yes, I know.’
‘You are very talented,’ he said. ‘But.’
I waited, but he said no more.
‘But?’
‘A small word containing many small things.’
He refilled his schnapps glass for the third time.
‘However,’ he mumured at length. ‘My affection for you does not depend on those small things.’
Affection? To hear him admit it, to actually utter words of love, however understated, astonished me.
‘I once had great plans for my own son, Eric,’ he said. ‘I had begun to teach him—he showed great promise. Perhaps I have been too hard on you because of that. A father’s hardness.’
‘You never speak of him. Or of your wife.’
‘It is … unspeakable.’
I glanced at my watch: 7.55. I wanted to know more, but at what price? Rosie might already be waiting, parked in the street. I knew she would be wearing nothing underneath—her face had blushed with excited shame as she had told me the day before …
‘They died in the War?’
‘They died during a War. The War was incidental.’
He poured out another drink, downing the clear fluid in a rapid, almost continuous series of sips. I gained the impression he was fortifying himself, gathering strength.
‘You know a little perhaps of the history of my country? You have heard of Dollfuss? Of the Anschluss?’
‘No.’
‘You have heard perhaps of Hitler?’
‘Of course,’ I bristled.
‘Herr Hitler was an artist. Like you. Like me.’
This seemed to border on the incoherent. How much schnapps had he downed before my arrival?
‘No-one in Vienna enjoyed his art. He left a bitter man. Later he came back—with many friends.’
I didn’t know whether this childish schoolyard version—history reduced to schoolyard politics—was for my benefit, or served some ironic, drunken purpose of his own.
‘I know a little …’ I began.
Maestro Page 11
