Very soon in the New Year, I have my first piano pupil. She is Libby, a sober, intelligent ten-year-old, with googly blue eyes and straight pale hair. Her mother wants her to “have the opportunity to try lots of things, to see if she likes them.” She is already doing football and French, and learning the recorder.
Having made such a good start, I am sanguine about finding a second student, but the days tick by and the telephone is maddeningly silent. I reread the rubric supplied by the course. Yes—definitely two students—and furthermore, two contrasting students, each posing different pedagogical challenges.
I begin to look at my fiancé with a speculative air.
A few days before the start of the course, Pete is relaxing on the sofa after a day at work, reading a bit of the Saturday paper. “Pete,” I say, “could I ask you a huge favour?”
“What sort of favour?”
“Look, I’m really sorry about this, I wouldn’t ask if I had any other options, but … you know I’ve only got one student?”
“Yes.”
“And if I don’t have two students, I could end up doing the whole course and not getting the certificate, which would be really frustrating.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I was wondering—would you be my other student?”
“What?” He looks sharply up from his newspaper.
“Would you be my other student, and let me teach you the piano—just for a few months, for the duration of the course?”
“What, me—learn the piano?”
“Er—yes.”
“But … I can’t even read music.”
“I’ll teach you. That’d be part of it.”
“But … what would I have to do?”
“Well, I’d give you a lesson every week, and in between you’d need to practise.”
“Practise?”
“Yes—just a little bit, most days …”
“I’m not practising if there’s footie on the telly.”
“No, no, of course not,” I say hastily. “It doesn’t have to be absolutely every day.”
“Hmmm. I don’t think I’d be any good.”
“That doesn’t matter, at all. Anyway, you don’t know that, until you try it.”
And, eventually, he agrees.
I lean down and put my arms round him, resting my face against his hair.
“Thank you, my darling,” I say. “I’m sorry everything is so bonkers, and that this is yet another bonkers thing.”
THE COURSE TAKES place in a large high-ceilinged room, on the third floor of the Royal College of Music’s Victorian building, which looks out through two tall windows on to South Kensington rooftops and sky. I reach a deal with the tutors and the other participants: we will keep the fluorescent lights in the room off, unless it is especially dull or dark outside. However, there are also a number of distinguished visiting lecturers, who blow in to deliver one-off sessions on “Psychology for the Piano Teacher” or “Composition and Musical Form.” They are to make their own decisions about the lights. So if a lecturer bounces in saying breezily, “Now, let’s have some light on the proceedings, shall we?” it is my cue to squirm quietly backwards into the dimmest corner of the room, and put on my hat and mask.
The small kitchen a couple of floors down where we eat lunch and have coffee is cramped and dark, and needs to be lit. I am in a quandary every time we have a break: do I accompany the others, unmask, eat, drink, be sociable and get pain; accompany the others, not eat or drink, and attempt to be sociable through my mask while they consume coffee and sandwiches (always a slightly odd proceeding); or do I withdraw to some quiet, unlit room, and eat by myself, in the undemanding company of one or two grand pianos, as they stalk across pale carpet on elegantly turned legs?
I try all of these over the weeks, in combination and succession. My unusual situation places a strange invisible barrier between me and the other participants, a sort of subtle thickening of the air, through which social interactions, in either direction, find it harder to pass.
It becomes by far the most stressful part of the course.