Letter to George Clooney

by Debra Adelaide

  At the end of the performances, the compere had thanked the audience for their attendance and their generosity.

  ‘I am sure you all agree that the harp is a particularly beautiful instrument. That the music played upon a harp has the power to bring a special joy to the heart of every listener.’

  Then she asked them to consider something.

  ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘if every child in the world who at the moment holds a weapon in their hands held a musical instrument instead.’

  Along with every other member of the audience, Flora Lindsay breathed the words ‘oh, yes’ to join a sigh of longing and hope that rippled throughout the room and lingered after everyone had gathered their bags and coats and left their seats.

  In the dark foggy car, Stephanie Lee was looking ahead. She was not really listening to Flora, who felt a fat drop of rain crawl down her scalp from where it must have landed in her parting.

  ‘Did you know who that pedal harpist was?’

  Stephanie shook her head again. ‘Actually, I didn’t know any of them.’

  The harpist would perhaps be home by now. In the rain and the dark, would she leave the harp in the van to bring it inside the next morning, Flora wondered. No, of course she would not. She would repeat the process in reverse and usher it inside the house, where she would unfasten the cover and set the instrument back in its place, in front of a music stand, or beside a piano. Maybe, as late as the hour was, she would sit there and run those long supple fingers over the strings again, and play a quiet tune while the kettle boiled for a cup of tea. ‘Danny Boy’. Or a Bach suite. Or maybe Flora imagined the harpist and her instrument completely wrongly. Instead, she might have been at that very minute hauling the instrument into a noisy nightclub, all dim lights and cigarette smoke, to join a trio playing quirky numbers to an enthusiastic crowd of jazz-folk lovers. Maybe the harpist was downing a glass of red wine and laughing at the sober charity audience, their pearl necklaces and cravats and sensible shoes, relieved to be free of compositions by Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Barry Conyngham, to be playing improvised riffs instead.

  But however wild or inaccurate or stereotyped these fancies were, this young woman, this harpist with the shimmering long hair and the strong hands, would not be inflicting any violence upon the world.

  Flora did not find it possible to imagine a world without war or weapons, but was it possible to imagine a world where music could smother or even eradicate conflict?

  ‘Where Frank comes from in Germany,’ Stephanie said, as if reading her mind, ‘everyone in the town was in a choir or a band or an orchestra.’

  ‘Everyone?’ Flora asked. ‘Really everyone?’

  ‘Everyone, apparently. Except for some old people, and the sick.’ She paused. ‘Of course not everyone was committed. But everyone started learning to play something in early primary school, and kept it up for the rest of their lives. Or so he says.’

  Then she talked about her thesis. Her supervisor, Hannah, who held the musical education of Australia pretty much in contempt, had advised Stephanie to complete her postgraduate degree in Norway. She went to a place on the coast north of Bergen, facing the Faroe Islands across the Atlantic Sea. She had interviewed teachers and clergymen, spoken with families, attended concerts, from informal sitting room performances to town hall events and radio station appearances, and had discovered that not only did all the citizens of Gramsund, Norway, indeed play or sing or perform, the town had minimal levels of violence and the crime rate was remarkably low. In the summer months, nonexistent. But curiously, Gramsund, like every town across the country, was required to maintain a regular army corps, comprised of both conscripts and volunteers, part-time or full-time, who served for a minimum of two years. All these army personnel were armed. It seemed, therefore, that every citizen over the age of eighteen had held and handled, and at some stage even owned and operated, a weapon.

  ‘The thing was, though,’ Stephanie said, ‘when they happened, the crimes were really weird.’

  There was a flash of light in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘I think it’s our NRMA man,’ Flora said.

  They got out of the car as he opened his rear door and grabbed a coil of cable. In the white-blue of the NRMA light, his smooth brown hair shone, and when he said, ‘Evening ladies,’ neither of them flinched.

  ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ His smile revealed large straight teeth. With his thick hair shining on his forehead and his luminous smile, he looked almost superhuman, like a Kennedy. The JFK of the repair fleet come to their rescue. Flora’s world brightened a bit.

  Over the years of breakdowns, they had come to have a great regard for the NRMA man, whoever he was. Each time when the NRMA man arrived their relief and gratitude were almost erotic. The man who could appear in the dark, and the rain, and hook up long snaking leads to cars and tap parts and screw caps to revive the engines that had let them down, that man, whoever he was, was beyond value.

  ‘You were going to tell me about Frank,’ Flora said. They settled back under the shelter of a tree. It would have been impolite to wait it out in the car while the NRMA man got wet.

  Stephanie took out a cigarette and a lighter. ‘It never stopped raining in Gramsund,’ she said instead. ‘And it was so cold. You have no idea. Even though it’s on the coast, it’s miserably cold.’ She lit up. ‘I think that’s why they all played music. Especially in winter, they can’t even go outside. I was there for six months and all we did was sit around and sing and play. And drink, of course.’

  ‘You brought me back that duty-free vodka.’

  ‘So I did. Do you still have it? After this I’ll run you home and we should drink it.’

  She ground her cigarette out and reached for another. The NRMA man was now trying the ignition.

  ‘Is it that bad?’ Flora asked.

  ‘Worse. He’s gone off with Hannah.’

  The engine cleared its throat once, twice, then hummed into life.

  ‘I think you’re all good now, ladies,’ said the NRMA man, slamming down the hood. Once more his splendid teeth illuminated the night.

  Flora Lindsay could not say that she was surprised. Hannah had introduced Stephanie to Frank, and Hannah tended to assert her prior claims. The friendship, professional or closer, was buried back in the mists of their shared European past, which was equally misty as far as Flora could tell. It seemed to her that there was an odd symbiosis between Stephanie’s former supervisor, now patron of the Harp Society, and her luthier boyfriend. One summer the three had spent several weeks together when Hannah had agreed to tour the folk music circuit. She had insisted she needed a back-up harp and harpist and on-tap harp maintenance, which Frank provided in one person. Stephanie did publicity.

  The previous year, although she had been unsurprised when Stephanie announced that Hannah would be accompanying herself and Frank when they went on holidays to New Zealand, Flora had still expressed some doubt. Stephanie had just shrugged. ‘There are two islands,’ she had said, implying there was enough room for escape, though for her, or for Hannah, or indeed for Frank, Flora couldn’t say.

  Although her own playing was amateurish, it was Stephanie’s passion for the harp that had led her to Frank. She had in fact abandoned the ethnographic thesis based on Gramsund and returned to research the artisan manufacture of musical instruments in Australia. It was clear that Hannah had never forgiven this, though at the time she pretended to be supportive.

  It was all over a folk harp, fashioned in the land of the harp. It transpired that the interior designer of the Lodge and of Government House – Mrs Ruth Lane Poole – had commissioned it from a Dublin instrument maker, at the same time that she had ordered embroidered fire screens and silk bedspreads from the art workshop where she had once taught. Within a short time the fire screens had become obsolete while the bedspreads, bought for the visit of a duke and duchess back in 1927, were later auctioned for a charity. The first prime minister resident in the Lodge had
no interest in harp music. Musical events in the house were restricted to performances upon the sitting room’s baby grand piano, made by Beale’s in Melbourne. The harp remained ignored by subsequent prime ministers and, while their families occasionally used the instrument for fun, it remained neglected and eventually fell into disrepair.

  Curved and scrolled in the Celtic style, it stood chest high. Its design matched that of the simple carver chairs of the house’s sitting rooms, made of Tasmanian blackwood and featuring lyre-shaped backs, most of which were also long banished from the house. When the place no longer housed families of prime ministers, when many of the grander public rooms were shut up and it was operating on a fraction of its staff, Stephanie Lee had applied to the department that ran the Lodge to investigate the storage rooms, the basement, the attics. No one had known about the harp, until she read through Mrs Lane Poole’s notes and sketches in the National Library and decided to go searching. Come with me, she’d said to Flora. You’re the interior designer, it will be fun.

  It was in the second attic. Stacked behind sets of old golf sticks, dusty wooden clotheshorses, wicker picnic baskets and tea chests filled with mismatched crockery, broken lampshades, old bedside clocks and other discarded items of general household use, it was an unlikely member of this collection, the leftover belongings of passing generations of prime ministerial families. Pushing aside a chest full of ice-skates, football boots and tennis racquets, Stephanie had seen an odd-shaped brown case with rusted clasps in a dim corner next to three faded beach umbrellas. When she had pulled it out into the light and flipped the clasps, both of them gasped aloud when the case opened to reveal the instrument of the angels. Stephanie extended a hand and plucked the strings, still taut though dull and flat.

  Looking around, at the old sporting equipment, the broken fishing rods, the umbrellas, Flora understood why it had been banished to the furthest corner of this house. Outside activities. These were what most of this house’s occupants had been interested in. The old racquets and skates and clubs would only have been replaced with newer ones, as occupants one after the other pursued their tennis, cricket or football. Of all the pastimes this collection represented, music was absent. No broken guitars or forgotten flutes or violins. Not even any recorders. Decades of prime ministerial recreation, and all of it sporting. Among the broken, obsolete items of general household use, there was not a gramophone, record player or even radio in sight. There was no collection of old records, or cassette tapes. No wonder the harp was shrouded in its case, hidden in the corner. It was a small miracle that it had not been sent away, sold to a dealer, or simply discarded like most of the original furniture.

  ‘Let’s get it out of here,’ Stephanie said.

  They gathered it in their arms and dragged it to the top of the steps. It was as if Stephanie had just rescued someone from a wilderness. Found a traveller lost in the desert. It was like seeing Ludwig Leichhardt standing at dusk on a dried-up riverbed way beyond the Darling Downs. Robinson Crusoe on his beach. She held the harp close while from the steps Flora called out to the housekeeper to help them down.

  Stephanie asked Hannah if she knew a good luthier, for the restoration.

  The harp was to feature in the first of a series of cultural events to take place in the Lodge, organised by Stephanie and styled by Flora. The formal sitting room was a place of inadequate furniture and gilt-framed portraits and was, in Flora’s opinion, far too chintzy and yellow. A previous prime minister or his spouse had been overly fond of yellow and gold, she thought. The house was full of it. Wattle-blossom yellow feature walls, polished brass bathroom fittings, wallpaper in gold suede and satin stripes, and the worst horror of all in this room, a lounge suite upholstered in cream linen splashed with yellow and gold cabbage roses. She didn’t think anyone used cabbage rose designs for furnishings these days. She didn’t even think yellow cabbage roses existed. No wonder the room was little used. She pushed aside the slub silk curtains (burnished gold, but still yellow when you thought about it) and opened the window.

  ‘What do you think?’ she was saying to Stephanie when a man appeared at the door. ‘Good enough for recitals and soirees?’

  ‘Well, it is a decent sized room, but not too big for intimate recitals.’ He walked to the centre of the room and shook hands, first with her, then with Stephanie. ‘Frank, from Sutton Forest. I’ve come for the harp.’ Then he moved closer to the wall opposite the windows to inspect the portraits of previous prime ministers in their thick gilt frames. ‘Perhaps you should remove these. I doubt anyone could play with all these eyebrows. So negative.’

  Flora agreed. The faces of Menzies, Whitlam, Hawke and Howard, this close to each other, were collectively forbidding. No one could feel comfortable under their scrutiny. Even the ironically arched brows of Whitlam, while far from hostile, exerted a fierce superciliousness that she was not sure a soiree could resist. And as for Menzies and Howard, bookended along the row by a sheer accident of space, from a distance they seemed all eyebrow now. All resistance and judgment and implacable self-confidence. She marvelled at the vanity of such people, all of them, Holt and Fraser too, with their massive, monstrous eyebrows. Men who would allow their portraits to be painted, to be put on show. Unattractive, most of them. A handful, like Holt or Keating, tolerable at best. To be remarked upon, admired. Were they meant to be intimidating? She would have them taken down if possible. They could be displayed elsewhere in the house. One would not wish to show disrespect, of course, but still, none of these men had ever demonstrated any interest in the musical arts. Perhaps just one. And he would have taken his Mahler collection when he left.

  ‘It’s a pity Mrs Lane Poole’s original ideas won’t work now,’ she said.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘The designer of this house. All of it, from the crockery to the cornices. Most of her furniture is gone now, but the sketches are still around.’

  ‘And why can’t you follow her designs if they’re still around?’

  She shrugged. ‘Well, they’re a bit . . . stiff. Cold. Not warm and sensual enough, not for the harp.’

  Meanwhile, Stephanie was watching Frank.

  ‘You’ve come for the harp?’

  ‘That’s right. Hannah mentioned you needed a luthier?’

  ‘Ah, Hannah,’ she said.

  The harp was apparently the first instrument invented. The earliest were made from hunters’ bows, the twanging of the weapon having inspired the idea of music. Stephanie had done the research, though Flora privately disputed the originality of the harp. She imagined that clap sticks or even drums were the first musical instruments. She suspected music historians meant the first civilised, white, western musical instrument when they made their claims for the harp, but were too afraid to say so.

  In the sitting room, the heavy furniture had been covered in plain silk blankets for the soiree, while enormous cushions were thrown around the floors and piled in corners. The comfortable seats were low, soft. Flora had had the walls painted in deep jewel-like shades, with a paint that shimmered in the lamplight. And she had replaced the overhead lights with low hanging stained-glass lanterns. With the timber panelling around the large windows, the window seats with their velvet tasselled cushions, the deep dark colours, the room looked more exotic than Stephanie had envisaged. The prime ministers’ eyebrows had been removed.

  ‘Frank is on his way,’ Stephanie told her and just the way she breathed the name Flora knew it was already a relationship.

  ‘It’s more dramatic than I expected,’ Stephanie said.

  ‘Red and purples will go best with the harp music. Trust me.’

  ‘Really?’ But she agreed it was certainly better than yellow and beige.

  ‘Wait until you see it at night. The place will glow.’

  When Frank entered early that evening the room did indeed glow. The sun had almost gone and they were just turning on the first of the lamps. He had rubbed back and re-waxed the maple sounding board and repl
aced the gut strings with carbon fibre. The satinwood inlay panel shimmered with new life. And the strings sang again with the sweet divine sound that suggested a gathering of the heavenly host. When Stephanie first sat before the instrument, as was her right, she felt like she was reaching out and embracing a cherished member of her family. She would ask Hannah to teach her again.

  That night, Hannah was their first performer. The light touched the harp’s warm burnished timbers and the glistening strings, and whether they agreed or not that it was the first instrument known to humans, they had all agreed that it was what the angels would play.

  But not teenage insurgents in Afghanistan. Or any combatants, in any country. Flora was still thinking of the recital in the grand house back up the drive.

  Since that night in the prime minister’s Lodge, the Harp Society had organised performances, many of them featuring Hannah, all over the country, in stately show homes like the one tonight. Frank had looked after all the harps, and Stephanie had worked on every event, for little or no money, for the love of the instrument, which she couldn’t even play.

  They got back in the car, where the engine was still humming. As Stephanie engaged the gears and released the brake, Flora Lindsay thought again of the young woman and the great harp, her fingers brushing its strings somewhere, in a bar or cafe, or more likely at home, alone. Stephanie glanced out her window at the rescue van, where the blue light was now extinguished and its owner was in the front seat, writing up his report.