Prosperity Drive (5 page)

Ruth Denieffe was a bit of a prodigy. (In retrospect that sounded like a qualification but out of the mouths of maiden
aunts it had been coolly admiring.
A bit of a prodigy
.) She was sent to the College of Music for piano lessons when she was seven. At eight she was attending singing lessons. By the age of ten she had performed on the radio. Hers was a precocious talent. Her father was immensely proud of her. When she looked back on those early years she remembered little joy in performing; but she savoured his quiet, enormous pride in her. It was his form of love. At great expense she was sent to Mr Jozsef Polgar for singing lessons. She remembered the first time her mother led her up the overhung path to his house. The garden was kept rather than cherished. (It was a time before garden centres.) The house was in what was later to be dubbed the Jewish quarter, when the school at the corner of Mr Polgar's street was converted into loft-like apartments and the dingy little bakery became a place of pilgrimage for atheists to buy pastries on a Sunday morning. But back then it was merely a huddle of worthy red-brick streets backing on to the canal. A sign on Mr Polgar's gate showed a line drawing of a fierce-looking Alsatian and a sign which read
BEWARE OF THE DOG
.

‘Oooh,' Ruth's mother said. ‘I hope he's tied up.'

She was terrified of dogs. Once, on her way to the shops, she had stood for a whole hour at their gate on Prosperity Drive, paralysed with fear, because the Fortunes' dachshund, Queen Maeve, had ambushed her. The silly little sausage dog was stationed at the kerb within a few feet of her and kept up a barrage of barking. Ruth had come home from school and found her mother clutching her shopping basket, white-knuckled, pleading weakly with the dog to go away. Ruth had sent Queen Maeve running with one well-aimed swipe of her foot.

The heavy, brown front door was opened by Mr Polgar's mother, although Ruth's mother mistook her for a housekeeper. She was a knotty little woman, red-handed as if she had been interrupted in the middle of bleaching. Her grey hair was
scraped into a bun. She wore a navy housecoat, sprigged with white.

‘Yes please?'

‘We've come for my daughter's lesson,' her mother said tentatively.

‘And what is your name?'

‘Mrs Denieffe, Mrs Alice Denieffe.'

Mrs Polgar looked at her stonily.

‘I arranged it on the phone,' Ruth's mother went on, ‘with the professor.'

Ruth blushed. The professor bit was aimed at putting this woman in her place, which her mother thought was below stairs. It was a tone she used when she was trying to be masterful but it came out prickly and aggrieved.

‘Please to come in,' Mrs Polgar said. ‘My son will see you.'

Now it was Ruth's mother's turn to blush. Oh, she mouthed to Ruth behind Mrs Polgar's back. They stepped into a russet-tiled hallway. Mrs Polgar showed them into the front parlour. This was a brown room, nicotine-coloured wallpaper, a large foxed mirror over the mantel, a brass bucket housing an unruly fern eclipsing the empty fire grate. A couple of respectable but lumpy-looking armchairs crouched together around the hearthrug defying occupation. Ranged around the wainscoted walls were several other upright chairs, refugees from a dining-room suite upholstered in worn but well-polished leather, but equally forbidding. The door was closed on Ruth and her mother and they were left alone.

‘It's like a doctor's waiting room,' Ruth's mother whispered, ‘except there aren't even magazines.'

Several minutes passed. Mrs Polgar reappeared.

‘You can ascend now,' she said.

They followed her up the carpeted stairs, a red fleur-de-lis pattern, to a return and then up another flight. Straight ahead of them a door stood ajar. Mrs Polgar gestured to them to enter. Ruth's mother, expecting her to follow, marched in boldly,
then turned around only to find the door being closed behind them as Mrs Polgar melted away into the varnished landing.

This was an airier room than the one below, with two sash windows looking out on to the street, and pale leaf-patterned wallpaper. A baby grand piano dominated the centre of the room. Along the wall by the door was a glass cabinet stuffed with sheet music and loitering by one of the windows a couple of music stands, slightly askew like windswept women holding on to their hats. Weak flames sputtered in the high-built fireplace. Mr Polgar, who had been sitting at the piano, bowed between the jaws of the opened lid, stood up stiffly and made his way laboriously across the room, fingering the hip curve of the piano as he inched his way forward. He was a tall, thin man, balding on top but with tufts of tawny hair curling around his ears. The late evening sunlight formed a halo effect around his head, giving him an angelic air as he approached. He was dressed formally like a bank clerk, in a three-piece suit, pinstriped, carefully pressed. He did not meet their gaze, his eyes demurely down-turned, intent on the floor, it seemed. It was only when he drew level with them, and stretched out his hand with an odd jerky movement, that he opened them. They were phlegm-coloured, milkily ghoulish. Ruth's mother gasped.

‘My mother didn't tell you, then,' he said, smiling faintly, as his fingers juggled with air trying to find her hands. ‘That I'm blind.'

When he found her hands, he clasped both of them in his like a priest offering condolences.

‘And where is little Ruth?' he asked, freeing a hand and threading his fingers through the air in search of her head. Ruth's mother hurriedly pushed her into position.

‘Ah there,' he said, smiling again. ‘So, young lady, let's hear you sing.'

He took her by the hand and they moved at Mr Polgar's stately pace back to the yawning piano. It turned out he did have a dog, not a harnessed guide dog – nor the ruthless
Alsatian the sign on the gate suggested – but a small Scottie which sat on his lap during the lesson. When he made for the piano, it scuttled away and sank into a basket by the fireplace.

‘Meet Mimi,' Mr Polgar said that first day. ‘She sits in on all my lessons. If she doesn't like what she hears, she howls. It's Mimi who decides whether you stay or go.'

Ruth's mother stood, gloves in hand, watching their procession uncertainly.

‘That will be all, Mrs Denieffe,' Mr Polgar said when he and Ruth had reached the piano and he had eased himself down on to the padded stool. ‘We'll call you when we're done.'

Suddenly, as if on some unspoken cue, Mrs Polgar materialised at the door and ushered Ruth's mother out.

‘Well?' Ruth's mother demanded afterwards when they were safely out on the street. She had spent the half-hour lesson standing in the unwelcoming front parlour, afraid to sit down.

‘Without even so much as the offer of a cup of tea,' she added. ‘Must be that they're foreigners.'

The waiting had sharpened her air of grievance.

‘Well?'

‘Oh, we just did some scales, and arpeggios.'

‘And?'

‘He said I'd a strong voice, but my range needs work.'

‘Motivation,' Ruth says loudly. It is the first word she speaks and it sounds – as it is intended to – like a reprimand. ‘Why are we here?'

Ruth already knows the answers. Guilt masquerading as a social conscience, a love of books, a social activity that gets you out in the evenings, do-gooding.

‘Why indeed,' smirking Jasper Carrott says under his breath.

‘I just can't imagine what it would be like not being able to read,' offers the Swiss
Mädchen
.

‘Anyone else?' Ruth asks.

‘Books have been such a comfort to me …' the permed matron declares. ‘Mrs Longworth,' she adds helpfully, ‘Mrs Daphne Longworth.' She turns awkwardly in her chair to appeal to the other students in the class. ‘Especially since my husband passed away. And I always wanted to do charity work …'

‘Well, Mrs Longworth,' Ruth interrupts. ‘Let me remind you that literacy is not a matter of charity; it's a right.'

After the first couple of weeks her mother stopped coming with her – it was only a short bus ride away – and so the singing class became for Ruth a time apart, a little oasis away from her mother's twitchy unease, her deep undertow of unworthiness. Ruth treasured the cloistered quietness of those journeys to Mr Polgar's and the joyless discipline of the lesson itself. It was hard work and Mr Polgar was not very patient.

‘No, no, no,' he would cry, banging down his hands on the keys in the middle of a song. ‘Flat, flat, flat. Can't you hear it?'

When he shouted like that, Mrs Polgar would wind her head around the door.

‘Is all in order?' she would ask, looking gimlet-eyed at Ruth as if it was she who was causing the commotion.

Mr Polgar usually ignored the interruption.

‘It's like this. Bah bah bah, bah – bah.' He hummed rather tunelessly himself, Ruth thought. She would watch him when he was in a rage like this, his bleached pupils turned searchingly heavenward. She wondered what he saw when his eyes were open. Was it the same darkness as she saw with her eyes closed? Or was it different? But she didn't ask. Since that first day with her mother, no mention of Mr Polgar's blindness had been made. After a while she simply forgot about it. And yet, and yet it made a difference. Expressions would flit across his face, irritation a lot of the time, a dark cloud of impatience
settling on his brow, but other emotions too that she found harder to read. A sort of rapture if he were pleased, a secretive kind of joy. And of course, his blindness protected
her
. She could pull faces whenever she liked. Frequently, when he made her go over a particular phrase again and again, she would stick her tongue out at him.

Her timing was poor and he would make her sing unaccompanied, using the metronome. She would watch him fumbling with the menacing pendulum – how she hated it, ticking back and forth, back and forth, full of leaden reproach – and she would deliberately shift position knowing that this confused him. Suddenly he would look up and with a strange kind of lostness ask: ‘Where are you? Where have you gone?'

Mimi hated the metronome too. She would dive off Mr Polgar's lap and burrow into her basket, yowling painfully. Frequently she made such a racket that he would turn the metronome off and Mimi would scramble back on to his lap. It was the only time Ruth liked Mimi. She was envious of the little mutt who nestled on Mr Polgar's knees. He fondled her, stroking her thick wiry coat. Sometimes he would bury his face in her coat and make growling doggy sounds and Ruth would look away, embarrassed. That was the thing about blind people: everything about them was visible.

Ruth desperately wanted to please him, because, she supposed, he was so hard to please. His foreign name (refugees, I'd say, her father had said, from the war), his air of suffering and his blindness gave him a kind of unapproachable nobility which unnerved her. It was not that she didn't know how to wheedle affection. When her father came in from work in the evenings she would climb aboard his sprawled but tense limbs as he slumped in the armchair in front of the television. She would drape her arms slyly around him and cradle her head against the rough skin of his neck. Beneath his shirt she could hear the steady thump of his heart. And she would wait for his jaded indifference to give way, for him to throw one arm
lazily across her knees and prop her elbow up with the other and snuggle into the hollow of the armchair until both of them were snoozily comfortable. Meanwhile, stretched out on the carpet watching TV, Barry and John would greet him with a casual ‘Hi, Dad' before turning their attention back to the screen.

‘Boys,' he would say as he sank into the slovenly cushions.

She envied and admired this easy, male shorthand. She had to work harder, she knew. But she couldn't cajole Mr Polgar so easily. The only way with him was to be the best little singer she could be. Early on she had some success – highly commended for her rendition of ‘Where'er You Walk' at the Feis (under-tens), a spot on the radio programme
Young People at the Microphone
, singing ‘The Harp that Once'. But it wasn't enough. Ruth always worried that Mr Polgar had brighter pupils than her, more ambitious, more musical, prettier. Though why should pretty make a difference? He couldn't see, after all.

The more musical, more ambitious, and prettier pupil did exist, though. She materialised one spring evening.

‘Come in, come in, Ruth,' Mr Polgar said, somehow sensing her hesitation when she entered the music room and found the interloper standing by the piano. A stunned twilight threw faint shadows on the busy wallpaper. ‘I want you to meet another one of my star pupils. This is Bridget. Shake hands, you two.'

Neither of them made a move. Bridget Byrnes was very pretty, taller than Ruth by a head, with glossy dark hair and eyes that seemed jet black. But she was wearing a tacky-looking school uniform. The skirt dipped at the front and there was a piece of the hem hanging. The collar of her shirt was dingy and frayed; her tie was not real, but one of those fake ones on a piece of elastic. And there was a funny smell from her. A smell of dampness as if her clothes had not been properly aired or she had bathed in cold water. Her fingernails were
bitten and not very clean. Ruth knew that look from the tinker women who called to the door with their broad ravaged faces and creased palms, leathery women with swaddled children. But she wasn't sure if the look came from being a tinker or just being poor. The girl smiled bashfully, showing a crooked set of teeth.

‘Howr'ya,' she said.

‘Now, I thought,' Mr Polgar said, ‘that it would be good to get my two brightest pupils together for a spot of duets. Wouldn't that be fun? Two voices better than one, and all that!'

He obviously doesn't know, Ruth thought. He has no idea how poor she is. Ruth's experience of poor people was limited. Sometimes it seemed that
they
were poor; when it came to the singing lessons they certainly were. Her father indulged in jocular grumbling about the cost of indulging ‘notions' – and Mr Polgar fell into this category. But then when they passed beggars on the street, it was undeniable that they, the Denieffes, were better off. Ruth's mother would pull her roughly by the arm if she even so much as halted at an outstretched hand, or listened to the pious lament of their woes. She said it was wrong to give them anything because it only encouraged them. They would only use it for drink, anyway. Poverty was something to be feared: not for what the poor in their rage might do to you but for its perilous proximity. As if it might be infectious.