IT WAS ALWAYS A RELIEF TO play the school Steinway, to feel the smooth keys beneath my fingertips and the sustain pedal beneath my right foot, and to hear the notes as they sound and know I produced them. Away from the piano, my flat chest and pale freckled skin made me feel invisible, but when I sat down at the instrument I somehow grew taller and more powerful in my seat, as if I were riding a horse sixteen hands high and could see and hear everything.
And did those feet in ancient times…
I didn’t mind playing ‘Jerusalem’ yet again. My job was straightforward: read the music, translate that through my fingertips into black and white keys as it was written, and play at a consistent speed so the whole school could sing along, and at a volume where everyone felt confident about raising their voices and keeping them aloft. I understood the piano—its vocabulary, its technical capabilities and its emotional range—and enjoyed the power at my fingertips. How easy it was to help the singers find the note they needed, so subtly they didn’t even know I was helping them, or to confuse them in an instant if I chose. If I were to stop suddenly, so would everybody else. Even Miss Jackson. I could induce an instant silence in hundreds of girls, though silence was always the last thing I wanted to hear. It was comforting to feel I could control one thing in my life, when so much of the rest of it was out of my hands. I was the captain of this ship, if only for a few precious minutes.
In 1832, when George Eliot was a thirteen-year-old student at Miss Franklin’s school at Coventry, she was considered ‘the best performer in the school’. But the teenaged Mary Anne Evans felt highly ambivalent about her skills at the piano. A recollection of her as a highly musical thirteen-year-old student describes her sensitivity as ‘painfully extreme’. She would dutifully perform for visitors ‘though suffering agonies from shyness and reluctance’, then ‘rush to her room and throw herself on the floor in an agony of tears’.47
My own extreme sensitivity was the opposite of Eliot’s, occurring away from the piano rather than at it. I might worry about making a mistake, but it was one I could cover, and later I would practise to ensure I’d never make it again. But away from the piano, one error could result in death of the irrevocable, social kind.
At the piano I glanced up at the most senior students, warbling from the upper storey of the assembly hall. I hoped that in a year or so, when I reached their age, I would have their curves as well as their confidence. It was all very well being able to perform a Mozart sonata from memory or play a new piece at first sight, but what did it matter if you weren’t invited to parties and didn’t know any boys? Earlier that year my friend Joanna had shunted me out of the way as soon as she met Matthew at one of those parties. With her boyfriend, her shoulder-length blonde hair and her eye-popping breasts, Joanna had entered a social orbit in which mysterious friends outside our school, who knew boys of similar ages to us, hosted parties that those boys attended. An orbit to which I, with my braces, monobrow and inconvenient location, was denied access.
Playing through ‘Jerusalem’ by rote, I thought about how pathetic and ugly I was. I couldn’t blame Joanna for tiring of me. While she had become a woman, I had remained stuck in girlhood, practising my piano. Joanna’s cheeks teemed with huge white-headed pimples, but Matthew still wanted to kiss her. There must be more to the business of being a woman than I knew. It couldn’t have been just my braces or hairy legs—something else must be wrong with me. Maybe it was because I had perfect pitch.
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
As Joanna never invited me over to her house anymore, and told me nothing about what she and Matthew did at weekends, I concluded that beside attending the occasional party they did nothing but have sex. In the words of ‘Jerusalem’, they had built their own green and pleasant land, in which his sword did everything in her hand but sleep. Leaving me with the ceaseless mental fight, a struggle that was both endless and already lost.
It wasn’t so long ago that Joanna and I had made each other laugh so hard that tears ran down our cheeks and we gasped for breath. When we swooned over Paul Weller and spent weekend afternoons repetitively playing his Style Council albums. When we watched crude Mel Brooks movies and invented sexual fantasies for our prim grey-haired English teacher Miss Anderson, whom we were convinced was still a virgin like we were.
Like I was.
Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was the girl after my own broken heart: ‘She spent whole hours at the pianoforte alternately singing and crying; her voice often totally suspended by her tears.’ When she wasn’t miserable at the piano, Marianne was miserable with a book in her hand: ‘In books too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present was certain of giving.’ At home the piano was the perfect location for me to wallow in self-pity. I could have a good cry about how unhappy I was at school, keeping my back to the rest of the house. I took comfort from the pent-up tears inching down my cheeks, knowing that the only other place I could do this safely was the shower. Despite the noise-absorbent shag pile under my feet, I was attuned to the warning sounds of an approaching parent, which gave me time to drag the back of my hand across my eyes and apply my happy face.
Marianne Dashwood’s thoughts as she cried, played and read were purer than mine. The idea of sex fascinated and revolted me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The third verse of ‘Jerusalem’ was teeming with phallic references: a bow of burning gold, arrows of desire—even a spear, for goodness’ sake. It was amazing that Miss Jackson allowed us to sing the hymn at all. Did Joanna and Matthew do it in bed? Did they lie under the sheet or on top of the duvet? On a couch with an old towel laid down first, or in a secluded park under a blanket and a hollowed-out tree? When they kissed, how did they breathe? Wasn’t she afraid of becoming pregnant? How would you even put on a condom? Maybe she was on the pill. But how did she get to the doctor without her mother knowing? Did Matthew’s thingy stand up straight or stick out? Did she kiss it? If she did, didn’t it smell? How did they clean up all the goo that must go everywhere? In Dolly magazine I’d read references to a mysterious ‘wet patch’. It sounded disgusting.
After four verses, ‘Jerusalem’ finally came to an end. ‘Thank you, Victoria,’ Miss Jackson said. I should have been pleased at her mistaking me for someone else, yet again, but as much as I longed to disappear at the piano, I depended on it as the one thing that helped me to stand out. Our principal’s misattributed gratitude was as reliable as her admonitions against eating in public and applauding in church, activities that she considered equally vulgar. Just as well she wasn’t a mind-reader—she’d have had a conniption at my filthy imaginings.
In November 1838, after hearing an oratorio performed by the Choral Union in Coventry, George Eliot described her complicated feelings about being an accomplished musician in a letter to her dear friend and former teacher, the evangelical Miss Lewis. ‘It would not cost me any regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict worship,’ she began piously, though she immediately qualified her enjoyment: ‘nor can I think a pleasure that involves the devotion of all the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an expertness in so useless (at least in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred) an accomplishment, can be quite pure or elevating in its tendency’. A very wordy way of saying that to give pleasure by performing music is an accomplishment that takes god-like dedication and skill, but is pointless. That’s nothing if not ambivalent.
In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Elliot finds solitude and privacy at the piano while she accompanies others dancing (including Captain Wentworth, whose engagement she had broken off eight years earlier), ‘and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing in return but to be unobserved’. To be useful, and to be left alone: I suspect that was the true goal of my high school music career. This is where George Eliot got the wrong end of the stick about performing for an audience: it isn’t an appeal for attention, but rather a defensive strategy in which your instrument functions as an effective tool of border protection. The piano in fact affords you great privacy. At the piano you do not have to engage in conversation. You do not have to risk saying the wrong thing. You sit at your instrument for a reason; you are there for active purpose. Not to be looked at per se, as if you were posing awkwardly for your portrait.
Despite her rejection of me, I still believed reviving Joanna’s friendship to be a worthy goal. In his Letters to a Young Lady, Czerny wrote: ‘There is no higher satisfaction than in being able to distinguish one’s self before a large company, and in receiving an honourable acknowledgement of one’s diligence and talent.’ But Czerny was wrong. I had received a bucketload of honourable acknowledgement, but as far as I was concerned the higher satisfaction would be to have Joanna’s friendship again. And maybe a boyfriend.