My mother was, as always, pleased to see me. The feeling was not entirely reciprocated.
The modern (and when I say “modern,” I mean post-1900) approach to counseling is based on listening and occasional interpretations and suggestions, allowing the patient, over an extended period, to gain an understanding of his problems and to devise ways of dealing with them. My mother came from an older tradition of personal observations and advice, repeated until the patient conceded defeat. In my mother’s case, the beating over the head was combined with razor-sharp insight.
“You never did get over that married woman in Australia, did you?”
“Potatoes are good. How do you get them so brown?”
“Kylie. That was her name, wasn’t it?”
The misunderstanding was the result of a flippant remark back in 1990. Kylie was then the archetypal Australian name, and I had never bothered to correct my mother. Her lectures were easier to take with Angelina’s name left out of them.
She didn’t wait for confirmation. “She’s done you a lot of harm. She should have been ashamed of herself, carrying on with a young man. An innocent traveler.”
“Mum, I was twenty-six. I was older than she was.”
“She was married. When my mother married my father, she knew he was off to the war, and let me tell you those American servicemen would have been all over her. She was a very attractive woman when she was young. You’ve seen the photos?”
“No,” I lied.
“Of course you have.”
“Don’t know, Mum—it’s been a long time.”
My mother went to get the photos. Whenever she needed an exemplar of marriage, she cited her parents. She and Dad had not done so well. Dad had an ego the size of a baby grand. He was a natty dresser, a lover of music of all kinds, and a womanizer. He knew everyone in the Manchester music scene—the Bee Gees, the Hollies, the Smiths in their early days—and had a million stories. I would wager he went to the Judas concert at the Free Trade Hall, whatever he told my mother.
Even as a teenager I knew he was playing around. He drank, too, another habit I inherited. I managed to avoid the smoking that gave him lung cancer, but my mother can take the credit for that. My father was only a peripheral part of my life by the time he checked out.
I had three definitive moments with him, all tied to the piano. It was hard to imagine how a definitive moment with my dad could be tied to anything else.
When I was a kid, learning the instrument the old, hard, classical way, he came up while I was practicing.
“Not much fun, is it?” he said.
“You’re the one making me do it.”
“Tell me a song you like. ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’?”
“Dad! I’m seven.”
“It’s a good tune at any age. But you choose.”
“The cherry cola song.” It was playing constantly on the radio at the time.
He shook his head. “Don’t know it.”
“Yes, you do.” I hummed a few bars.
“You want to learn ‘Lola’? It’s a lot harder than ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic.’”
I nodded.
“Your mam won’t thank me for this.” Dad played the first notes of the chorus with his right hand. “Now you do it.”
“I can’t.”
“Start anywhere you like. Play any note.”
I played an A sharp, of course. In our family the B flat was always referred to by its alternative name, and sometimes as the Adam. Mum and Dad had their notes too, though it was of no interest to my mother.
At Freddie Sharp’s funeral, I played “No Regrets,” the song he had requested, in F sharp. Loudly, on the black keys. He had surely expected the recorded version, rather than the irony of his deserted son singing it. I did it in the original French—“Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”—which hardly anyone there would have understood. That was the night I decided to go to Australia.
Dad sang Lo. And then La. “Play the second note.”
“I don’t know which one it is.”
“You’ve only eighty-eight choices, lad. It won’t be far away. Seldom is.”
It took me two or three tries to find that it was the A sharp again, and then I found the third note. It got easier quickly and gave me a satisfying sense of achievement.
“You can do that instead of lessons, if you want. I’ll show you what to do with your left hand once you get the hang of it. Starting on any key I choose.”
“I don’t have to do lessons?”
“It’ll save your mam and me wasting our money. But you don’t get owt for nowt.”
I knew that good things came with conditions.
“You have to practice every day. Twenty minutes. That’s all. If you can’t find a piano, you can sing.”
“For how long?”
“I told you. Twenty minutes. It’ll go as slow as a wet weekend some days; other times it’ll fly and you’ll want to do more. And you’d be silly not to.”
“I meant, when can I stop?”
“Never. Never ever. But no lessons. That’s the deal.”
That deal would ensure that I got plenty of practice and developed a good ear, but never learned to read music. If you can’t play the dots, you can forget about being a professional pianist.
A few days later, Dad bought me the single of “Lola,” my first record.
It must have taken me two or three months to learn to play—and sing—the Kinks’ ode to gender ambiguity in eleven keys. Twenty or more minutes a day that my mother had to listen to her seven-year-old son singing about being picked up in a Soho club by a woman who talked like a man. She kept her thoughts to herself, or at least from me.
When I had it down, Dad showed me the chords to play with my left hand—to begin with, just once at the beginning of each phrase, as I would do twenty years later to accompany Angelina singing “Angel of the Morning.”
“Feel good?” he said.
It did. I was just listening to a basic harmony, but the sound of a note against a chord touches something fundamental in us, more so when you play it yourself. My dad had chosen his words well. It didn’t just sound good, it felt good.
“That’s why you want to play music,” he said. “That’s the thing to remember.”
I remembered it. Some musicians lose their love of music, particularly popular music, or it loses its power to move them. They are like comedians who understand how jokes are constructed or magicians who know, literally, how the trick is done. Music never lost its power for me, though I moved from playing to listening.
The third moment with Dad was when I was twenty-five, a few months before he joined the heavenly choir. I was playing in a bar in London—Soho, in fact. He walked up to the piano and it took me a moment to realize who he was. He had lost a lot of weight and his face was gray. He was still impeccably dressed.
He smiled and said, as though he didn’t know me, “Can you play ‘For Once in My Life’ for me?”
I was more than familiar with this song, a favorite of his that I liked to think had a connection to better times with my mother. I just played it, without singing, concentrating on getting it right. I had always been in awe of my father’s musicianship.
When I had finished, Dad said, “Play the first few bars again.”
There is an augmented fifth on “life”: a four-note chord if you add the seventh. An easy piano or guitar book would write it as a straight G major. But the melody note is a B, a third, and the sharp note in the accompaniment adds a bit of contrast and edge. It was a touch that probably only the singer would notice in a noisy bar.
I played it again, with the seventh, and Dad watched and said, “Bugger me, lad, you’ve listened. You played it properly. I’ve always faked it.”
He put a twenty in my tips jar and said, “You’ll be all right.” Then he moved so he was standing behind me and said, “Do you remember ‘Lola’?”
I sang “Lola,” and by the time I was finished, he had gone. That was the last time I saw him.
* * *
A day that had started with moving out of a twenty-year relationship continued with quitting my job, and ended with moving in with my mother was always going to be tough. Claire had left a message on my phone: I wasn’t asking you to leave; I’m sorry I misjudged the situation with Sheilagh and didn’t give you a chance to speak; call me when you’re ready to talk. It was kind, but it changed nothing.
Angelina had also replied, and gave no indication that I had been out of line with my message about leaving Claire. How was I feeling? Did I have somewhere to live? If our recent contact had anything to do with the breakup, she would swear there had been nothing of substance. It had never been her intention to come between Claire and me, just as she hoped I did not want to disrupt her marriage.
I sent a brief and rather formal reply, thanking her for the concern and assuring her that she was not responsible for my actions, that Claire and I had been contemplating going our separate ways for some time, and that I had never harbored any illusions about a relationship with her.
* * *
I had cause to revise my thinking after my mother went to bed. An e-mail from Angelina, sent just after seven A.M. her time.
To: bee.flat@zznet.co.uk
CC: charles.acheson@mandapartners.com.au
Hi Adam
I don’t know what your work and accommodation situation is, but Charlie and I are heading off on Friday to our place in France (Burgundy), arriving Saturday. We’ll be there for a week then going on to Milano. It would be great to see you after all these years, and you’d be welcome to stay for the full week and beyond if you wanted to. If you can get to Lyon or Macon we can pick you up from Sunday morning onwards.
Hope things are working out for you.
Kind regards
Angelina
Milano, not Milan. And Charlie Acheson not Charlie Brown. What did he think, or know? Not everything, because he was not copied in on the second e-mail.
Dooglas
PLEASE come. I’d love to see you.
Love
Angel
I slept on it, but in the morning I had a decision to make. There was the practical problem of work: I was still committed to two weeks on the London job. Whether or not I accepted Angelina’s invitation, I needed to put in some face time, so I took the bus to the station and boarded the early express to London. It was midafternoon in Melbourne. I e-mailed Angelina from my phone:
Do you have a broadband Internet connection in France?
I thought it unlikely, but decided that if the answer was yes, I would go.
It’s France, not Albania. Are you really coming?
Looking forward to it. xxx
In my London lunch hour, I booked tickets on the Eurostar to Paris and the TGV to Mâcon with a stopover in Paris on the Saturday night. It would have been possible to do the full journey in a single day, but I hadn’t seen Paris for a long time. I e-mailed the arrival time to Angelina, copying in Charlie.
I got an e-mail straight back—from Charlie.
Got it. Thanks. All good. What’s your mobile number? Mine below. Will meet you at Macon TGV station. You’ll probably recognize my wife … Any probs, just call. Any food prefs? Looking forward to meeting you. Charlie.
I was going to be living with this guy for a week. Did he know I was Angelina’s former lover? I was not going to take anything for granted. Claire knew about Angelina, but only in concept. I had not mentioned her in living memory. I doubted she would remember her name.
I texted Charlie my mobile number and did a quick Internet search, turning up two Australian Charles Achesons. “Director—Mergers and Acquisitions Partners” looked a better bet than “Legendary Try Against All Blacks.”
Late Thursday night, at my mother’s insistence, I e-mailed Angelina again: Anything I can bring? There was no reply—they were probably on the plane.
My mother was supportive of me taking time out with Australian friends. Small doses of each other went a long way and “It’ll give you both a chance to think about things.”
To confuse the situation further, Claire texted me.
Sheilagh came over totally distraught. Thought it was her fault. I set her straight, but you should contact her. Stay safe. We should talk. Call me when you’re ready. Elvis missing you. Love, Claire.
I had texted Stuart with the news the previous day, and he would have told Sheilagh. It had not occurred to me that she would put herself in Claire’s shoes—or, more likely, imagine herself catching Chad in the same circumstances. A hug is just a hug, unless you’re looking for an explanation for your partner’s changed behavior. And “I was comforting a friend whose marriage had broken up” is a perfectly good explanation unless you already suspect there’s something going on.
I texted Sheilagh:
Claire and I have split up. As you know, we have been doing our separate things for a while now. Absolutely nothing to do with you. I’m OK. Kill em on Tuesday. Beatles first single was My Bonnie.
Then I texted Claire to tell her I had contacted Sheilagh and would be spending a week or so in France with friends from Australia. I signed off Love, Adam. If my mother had been monitoring our messages, she would have wondered—aloud—what on earth the problem was.
Friday morning I did some shopping for her, packed my kit, and took the train to London, where I put in a half day with the client and checked into a hotel in the West End. Sunday and Angelina, not to mention Charlie, did not seem far away. There were so many unknowns. But what did I want?
Once, a long time ago, I had asked Claire for her project-manager take on why my client was ignoring sound advice that he had paid good money for.
“You need to know where he’s coming from,” she said. “Think about what he might be trying to achieve by rejecting your input. Make a list of all the possibilities.”
“It could be anything. He doesn’t want to lose face; he wants to get rid of me; he actually believes I’m wrong.…”
“Write them all down and I’ll tell you which it is.”
In the end there were six items, after I’d resisted the urge to include the facetious ones.
Claire didn’t look at the list. “Number them a to f. And your answer is g: All of the above. People are complex. They’re never just pursuing one thing. Sometimes even contradictory things. So if one thing doesn’t work out, they’ve got something else.”
My list of goals for the visit to France would have included a reality check so I could ground myself before moving on with my life. Plus the chance to reestablish an old friendship. And, if I was honest with myself, I was hoping that there might be a terminal problem with her marriage that had led to her contacting me. In which case, the scenario that a day ago I had dismissed as an impossible fantasy might become reality: I might have another chance.
All of the above.
* * *
On the morning of my departure for France, it was raining. I gave up on trying to hail a taxi and caught the Tube. It was my forty-ninth summer in England. One word, one simple promise back in 1989, and at this moment I could have been riding home from the Australian Rules football on a Melbourne tram to the loving arms of Angelina and our three children. I could not imagine it. Too much time had passed.
There was, of all things, a piano at St Pancras station, an August Förster upright that had been painted a bluish green. It looked the worse for wear, and I would have assumed it was only for decoration had there not been an Eastern European–looking guy in his mid-twenties playing “C Jam Blues” and sounding good with it. He finished, earned a round of applause from the half a dozen travelers standing around, then picked up his backpack and walked off.
It was less than four months since I had listened to the girl at Manchester station singing “Someone Like You” and thought that I would never again feel alive enough to step up and play, but today I almost reflexively slipped onto the stool and did a big intro to “For Once in My Life.”
I sang my heart out and sensed a crowd building, responding to the volume and perhaps my enthusiasm.
The player who had preceded me reappeared. He gave me a grinning thumbs-up before rummaging in his backpack to produce a harmonica, a chromatic, the authentic Stevie Wonder instrument. I nodded back and he played a solo, giving it as much as I had been giving, the two of us owning St. Pancras station at eight A.M. on a wet Saturday morning.
I was swept up in the euphoria of playing, of being free, and of limitless possibility. More than that, I felt a change, perhaps one that had already happened but was only now announcing itself, a rising sense of confidence, of self-worth. I was twenty-two years older and wiser than when I last saw Angelina. If I had another chance to touch what my heart had been dreaming of, I was going to take it.