12

Perth, 2000

Celia made her way to James’s place for a meal. You had to be ready for anything with him these days. No, he’d probably always been eccentric. How long ago was it that he’d given Mickey a lift to the theatre – Mick recounting with delight the hair-raising journey on his return from the show.

But today the old musician was grumbling, putting the newspaper down as Celia arrived for a light lunch. She gave him a peck on the cheek and leaned, arms folded, against the door jamb, ready for talk, while he seized a ladle which he plunged into a cauldron of something. Two sports heroes had had pages (reams! he said) in the daily papers about their lives and their deaths. Aussie blokes who died within twenty-four hours of each other, doing the very thing they loved doing, as James insisted: ‘I could die playing the piano – would that make me a national hero?’ He didn’t want an answer. Dangerous pastimes, yes, he went on, car racing and swimming among wild beautiful creatures in the sea, and they gloried in doing these things, but they hadn’t done anything heroic for anyone else. Yet they were being covered with glory; their families were being offered State funerals, for heaven’s sake! ‘The deaths of those who have contributed to the country’s cultural life go unnoticed!’

‘C’est la vie,’ said Celia, now looking at postcards on his fridge.

‘C’est la mort, if you ask me,’ said James, moving around his little kitchen, tasting, waving a spoon. ‘The death of civilisation.’ He was on a roll. Did she remember, he asked her in a non sequitur only he could get away with, Anthony the precocious boy from Malta whose parents were so crafty they pretended they were dirt poor? In fact they were socking money away, cunning sods, and buying up land while he, the piano teacher, was practically teaching the boy for nothing, out of the goodness of his heart! Later, to add to the insult, as an international concert circuit pianist Anthony was in town and contacted James with a free ticket to his concert that night. James accepted it, subsequently realised that he’d double booked and had to pull out. Anthony was outraged and shunned his old teacher thenceforth. This acrimony was all before the serving of the soup.

Celia clicked her tongue and called Anthony names. The good thing about being with James was that, faced with his furies, she was made to feel benign, tolerant and calm. James then went on to describe how, years ago when he, the teacher, had been in London and had offered to practise the Brahms No. 2 Concerto with Anthony. The newly-famous lad had been delighted. However when James arrived with music (and eager eyes – she could just imagine it and felt a pang for him), Anthony had been too busy, oh much too busy. It was for this work, the Brahms, subsequently in Perth that the free ticket was available.

‘Is that the piece with the stunning cello part in the third movement?’ asked Celia, wanting to get him off this round of indignation.

‘That’s the one. Stunning indeed. The whole concerto is glorious but very tricky in spots and I’ve heard Anthony racing through it, showing off his mastery.’ He stirred and put the lid back on. ‘But Brahms wouldn’t have wanted it played so fast; he’d composed that in the latter part of his life, after all, and his fat fingers wouldn’t have fallen comfortably onto the notes.’

Celia smiled, thinking of Brahms’s fat fingers, and James lapsed into silence, dwelling on how Anthony hadn’t given his old teacher his due in a number of ways. Then he went on to talk about Clara and Robert Schumann as if they too had lived in Perth and taken lessons. James chatted about their friendship with Brahms – the familiar and loving way he talked, he might well have been there with the three of them. ‘The trouble with Robert was that his later music never achieved the fragrance of his early work,’ he said. ‘Of course he was mentally ill, poor chap.’ She nodded, even though not quite in agreement with all that.

They finished their soup and bread and went for a run in her car. Celia, driving, was asking questions, and they enjoyed little lapses and silences now and then. James started on a story about one of his good friends who’d just died, in a state of far-gone dementia. On and on he prated, stating his disappointment – so it seemed to Celia – at another friend who’d stopped inviting the confused woman anywhere or indeed visiting her, because, the other person said, she couldn’t stand those crazy conversations with someone who doesn’t know what day of the week it is.

Celia knew that this kind of aversion comes out of fear. She said nothing, remembering someone who had died in the same way. She also recalled that James himself had once complained about this same sick woman (as if she could help it!) that she’d kept repeating phrases over and again to him. It was easy for him, because he lived in another city and he could keep his distance and maintain a dignified disappointment in others who couldn’t manage their distress.

They drove through the large park, admiring the flowers, and in between their stops and starts he talked about a couple of ex-pupils. One girl called Eva whom Celia hadn’t heard him mention before. A girl with a rippling voice and a natural brilliance at the piano from the time she was a small girl. But she had a ghastly mother who wrung every bit of creativity and talent out of her by nagging and scolding.

‘Then she discovered she could sing,’ he said after a moment, recovering a little. ‘She had a radiant voice in fact, though with a tendency to sing over the note at times.’

‘Oh, that gives me the willies.’ (Celia was currently trying to rid herself of so much profanity and going back to old-fashioned phrases). ‘But it’s hard to get back on the note once you’ve strayed, I think. As if you’re actually trapped in the record’s groove.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, stroking his chin. ‘It depends on the key: D major is not kind, it’s unforgiving in fact, to a soprano.’

They had ended up at one of the southern beaches and went for a walk along the sand.

‘And what about Jeremy? Any news?’

‘Shocking news.’

Jeremy had purloined household items from his mother’s house while she was away, when he’d been offered weekend hospitality there: a dishwasher, sheets, silver – all stuff that didn’t belong to him. James found this unforgiveable: ‘It’s obviously going towards drugs, the money, and the mother doesn’t bother herself to ring and ask him for it back. She’s got too much to do with her other children and grandchildren.’

When James heard of this theft he’d called on Jeremy and admonished him. But Jeremy, facing down James’s fury, maintained his outward equanimity. He said very little, hardly defended himself.

‘Though he always was rather passive, wasn’t he?’ said Celia. ‘It’s surprising you got him to show the amount of passion he did, at the keyboard.’

Old friends and former pupils: James thought of them a great deal. But it was always Jeremy who settled in his mind, Jeremy who had more magic in his touch than any pianist James had ever taught. She knew that his pupil, in spite of his old teacher’s anger at his so-called lack of dedication, had seemed steady as Gibraltar in the early days, before he changed. When is the moment that we fall? she wondered. At what point had this boy taken his first wrong step?

Many times over she had asked herself why she liked James. Probably it was his passion, his engagement in, and attention to, small matters. He helped take her mind off her own gloomy thoughts. They had by now returned to his house and she parked her car carefully in his driveway. Dusk was falling, and she was looking forward to a good meal. He didn’t seem tired and on the way home had invited her to eat with him. She agreed but said she’d just pop back to her place for a few minutes and throw together a salad while he ordered what he called some quality take-away food.

Once back at his house, sitting in an armchair, she realised that she hadn’t picked up a bottle of wine. Still, James always had a drop in the house. It was a warm evening and a cleansing white would start them off well. Even if she’d got a bottle of her favourite, James would have said no, no, he had wine. And so he did as it turned out; a small cask in which there remained at least two glassfuls. She quaffed hers and looked around.

‘Did you want another glass of wine?’ he asked, presently, as he set out cutlery. She quietly tapped fingers on her thigh under the table. Does the sun shine in Australia?

The Thai take-away then arrived and James cursed because they had only brought him one serve and he wondered if that would be enough between the two of them?

Celia sighed, and arranged plates while he wondered if he had another cask somewhere. Thank God she’d had the prescience to bring a salad, plus the rest of the dressing in a jug. She had baptised it, she told him, but they might want a little extra. He thought they certainly did, and when she turned her back to fetch the pitcher of water from the fridge he had his way with the little jug. She returned to a salad well awash with oil and lemon.

Afterwards Sally and friend Daniel called in on the off-chance – had they heard her silent pleas? – with home-made pavlova and brandy. James brought coffee. They had been to the movies and were full of it. Midway through Daniel’s explanation of the French film, indeed halfway through a sentence, James bellowed:

‘What do you think of Almodovar? I think he’s a good director and as you know I love Spanish films, but he’s turned dirty.’

‘What, sexually explicit?’ asked Sally.

‘His last film was filthy: whores all but doing it in the open, showing their titties … disgusting.’

Celia moved about in her chair. What the blazes was wrong with him? ‘That’s what the story was about, prostitutes, motherhood …’

But he was off, hearing no one’s opinion, spouting his own.

He’s like a child, Celia thought, commanding all attention to his opinions. I want to have done with him.

But she didn’t. Whenever she reached a point with James where her patience wore thin he would win her over again with his involvement in learning a new language, his passion over Ethiopia or the latest hot-spot in a developing nation, or his genuine sorrow over a friend’s circumstances. And there was no one she liked more who she could talk with about music.

The evening wound up and she agreed to meet him the following week to see an opera.

The Opera was good: Tosca – more than satisfying. Not perfect, but what is? The audience listened for that long high note Puccini had put in which had to be followed in resolution by a long low note, all in the one breath. Would she do it? Yes! Only a woman in her full strength would have the stamina. Can you tell someone’s age by the voice? Practically always.

James was a close friend of the soprano and they went backstage to pay their respects. The singer’s disappointment in her own performance was harrowing to see, white plump shoulders heaving as she, with back turned, could think only of that fatal moment when something possibly distracted her and she got slightly sharp and was unable to climb down from just the half of a semitone that would set her right. She had put herself in the corner of her dressing room, like the class dunce. ‘I was all over the place,’ she sobbed, unable to recall, as James chided, full of empathy, the good notes, the true tone she’d achieved in the First Act, the catch of weary torment that made the aria ultimately a success. This is a lesson for life, thought Celia, thinking only of our humiliations rather than our triumphs.

As they drove home Celia asked him whether one could, as a matter of fact, help anyone when they were in that state. James said that you could only give temporary relief and offer consolation through your company, your conversation, even gifts.

‘Or with sex,’ Celia said, reasonably. ‘That can be some solace.’ He grunted.

‘But you can’t make it better,’ said Celia, ‘as Mummy once promised, by kissing your skinned knee.’ And she made one of her sighs as they continued in silence.

‘I don’t know where most people find comfort,’ said James after a while. ‘In family, I suppose. I can’t go along with the God business. But there’s always art and music.’

‘And the swans with their cygnets in the park,’ she reminded him.

James was troubled for his friend the singer in her misery as he looked out the window.

‘I’ll ring her tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and remind her of how well she did last season in the Seraglio. She reached the high F without the trace of a squeak, which is what most singers have to do with it. And her English version of Muzetta in Figaro. You’ve got to really laugh that line, not sing it, and she did just that. No soprano worth her salt would have taken a scrap of notice of the lyrics.’ And he did a frightful rendition of a Muzetta: What a bloomer, ha ha ha!/full of humour ha ha ha, so that Celia at the wheel snorted and they sang it together: Very merry har har har.

‘You did well to stick to the piano,’ she said, as they trundled in her old car down the street towards home.