The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (21 page)

P
aris was dark blue, night time, moonlight, deep blue smoke and noise. So soon after the war; so scarred, when we arrived there – and I mean Paris, as well as me. We arrived in the middle of winter, to a cold different from any cold I’d known, a cold with the weight of the whole continent behind it, wind blowing harsh from the east. I bought a coat, scarlet red wool, boiled and thickly felted, and wrapped myself tightly in its warmth.

I dredged schoolgirl French from the depths of my memory. My prim accent soon had the edges knocked off it though, and I added to my limited vocabulary as I copied the sounds I heard in the bars and streets, learned by listening for the music of the language, listening for its tones and timbre, repeating it, copying it, improvising.

Gus played most nights, somewhere or other in the city. I’d go with him, sit at the bar, or at a table, at the side of the stage if there was one, and listen, drinking wine, smoking the Gitanes that Trix used to smoke when first we met; smelling of her. Paris reminded me of Trix. I saw everything through her eyes, remembered her descriptions of it, paintings she’d made of it. Light became fragmented in
my eyes, dark blue, moonlight. Noise became fragmented too; I heard sounds in the streets that rang in different ways in this northern light, at this distance from the ocean. The sounds I heard changed as I learned more of the language, as I came to understand what was said around me in the streets, in the markets.

Over time I fell into conversations with other musicians in the bars, students of music, professionals as well as amateurs. Music was a serious business in Paris. Theories were discussed, new music was played. There was talk of
musique concrète
, found sounds, of the recording and manipulation of sound. But the new magnetic tape technology lacked the immediacy of music performed in the moment. Gus and his band kept on playing their music in real time, on real instruments, making the music new through the bending of sound, the manipulation of wind through metal, or wire forming nodes and antinodes, of wood against skin or metal; they chopped the sound and looped it as they played, tweaking each loop to argue back on itself, emphasising motif and repetition, resorting to melody when they felt the music warranted it.

I stood to the side while all of this happened, talked and listened but did not play. I could have begged or borrowed an instrument – mine was packed away in a tea-chest in the little cottage behind Uncle Valentine’s house – and played with Gus, or found an ensemble to play with, could even have played on my own. I could’ve found an audience if I’d wanted one; the name Lena Gaunt, after all those years, was still known. But I wasn’t ready to play. I could listen to the concretists, the jazz musicians, the classicists, the Fado
singer in the bar on our street, but I didn’t have it in me to play, not then, not yet. There was a lassitude in me – not just from the smoke, although that gave me a blessed liquid heaviness, slowed my heart, coloured everything around me in shades of dark blue, smoke blue, deep water blue, stopped the brightness outside from overwhelming me. My limbs moved as if through honey; no, something more bitter, blackstrap molasses. There was a bitter taste in my mouth, constantly, that nothing could nullify – a soul bitterness – and a big gap in my heart. Gus couldn’t fill it. We lived as sister and brother in our dark Parisian apartment, sharing a bed just to sleep, or to smoke, each turning to the outside of the bed, turning away from one another, backs hunched, as smoke or fatigue or alcohol pushed us out of consciousness. My red coat hung on a hook on the back of the door. Gus’s black coat hung next to it, shoulders stooped away from mine.

Gus and I spent years in Paris, watched the decade click over, left the war years firmly behind. It’s a hazy, smoky time, difficult to remember. We were there. Then we were not. In the end, we drifted apart; that’s one way to describe it, a modern way, a way from a time that hadn’t happened yet. He stayed in Paris. I took the train, then the ferry, then the train, and moved to London; there was a man I knew there, had met in Paris, it’s not important who. But London was a broken place, as it turned out, holes still in the landscape of the city, and in its people. You could turn a corner and encounter a whole block of rubble, an entire street flattened. Almost worse were the streets where a
single house was missing, picked out, gouged out, blank. The whole place still felt raw from war.

If Paris had been blue, London was grey. My red coat felt too red, stood out against the ugly, damaged landscape. The people I knew there were damaged, too. The sounds on the streets, the voices, were ugly, harsh, lacked music. And so I walked, one day, with my clothes in a suitcase, to Paddington station. I stared at the board listing departing trains, and found myself seeking the seaside. I caught the 1:20 to St Ives.

S
t Ives was blue, but a different blue to Paris, a pale blue, watery, salted, marine. The whole sky was brighter. It felt as if the war hadn’t happened. I spent a week in a hotel by the harbour, during which time I found a house to let, a small stone cottage with whitewashed walls, a blue door fronting straight onto the street, a piano in the front room, and a single tiny bedroom at the top of narrow stairs, with a small, paned window through which I could see, framed by narrow houses, a glimpse of the sea.

This was a nursery rhyme place –
as I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives
– removed from the world. I spent most of my time walking, at first; on the beach, and up and down streets that tipped down to old stone walls containing the harbour. I had money still, from Father, my little nest egg that sat quietly in the bank and provided for me. I was not unusual in St Ives, living on my own, no visible means of support. Artists clustered in the town to paint, to sculpt; they came for the weather, the light, the blue; and where there are artists, there are musicians. I kept well outside the complexities of allegiances forming and unforming, of groups and schools and styles. I had had
enough of artists and musicians in my life, by then. I was content to camouflage myself near them.

But after some time in St Ives, something changed in me, and it felt right once again to sit at the piano in my front room and play. I played the music of my childhood, simple pieces, picked melodies from the air – found sounds – played what pleased my ear. As I played, so I found a rhythm to my life. Everything in moderation: music, food, light, morphine. For the latter, I had registered with a sympathetic doctor in Penzance, where the chemist’s shop in Market Jew Street legitimately supplied what I needed, not that it was much. Just a taste. Just a sweet taste. My hands on the keys moved slowly, picked their way up and down the keyboard, through its range. My head dropped low over the keys, eyelids dropped, my eyes closed. I heard not just the music from each key as it was depressed; I heard too the click of my fingernails on the keys; the pop as the pad of each finger pressed against the key surface; the percussion of hammer on wire; the resonance of the wood of the piano, connecting it to the slate floor of my cottage and up through my shoes, my feet, to me. I hunched my elbows in tight against my sides, nodding my head with the sounds I made.

I reached middle age in St Ives, slipped past bearing the summer I turned forty-five. I’d slipped away from people, too; celibacy suited me. I could connect – but with myself, in a closed circuit. The air compressed against me, formed a bubble, cushioned me, preserved me, somehow, like eggs preserved in lampblack.

I lived each day from start to finish, never planning too much in advance. I was a woman who lived in a small town on the edge of an island. I lived by the sea. I played my piano. I kept to myself, although I was on nodding and good morning terms with people I encountered in my day. I settled into life in the town. My shoulders relaxed. Sometimes, I reached the end of the day and realised I had not thought, all the day, about those I’d lost.

But those days were few, even then, even though – by then, before I knew it – ten years had passed since I’d lost Grace. I tried to think of her there, ash in the sea, smoke in the aether, but she felt far away. I didn’t feel as if she was still with me, no matter what I did. I felt as if I’d abandoned her, left her on the other side of the world. But being away was how I could live, then. I didn’t imagine her grown near to adulthood, as tall as me, didn’t wonder what she would have done, who she might have become. I felt only an emptiness, a lack, a failing; a falling apart, when I thought of her. There was a dark black hole in my gut, or my heart, or my soul.

I started swimming again that summer. The water in the bay was cold, always took my breath away. Waves formed, rose and fell, gentle in the cove – no more than a cranny in the rocks, really – where I swam. The rocks reached out from the shore, enclosed me, calmed the water around me. I would leave the salt in my hair each day, let it stiffen; then wash it away, a small weekly ritual, washing my hair in the cold stone basin in the kitchen in my cottage. It was that summer in St Ives that I first cut my hair man-short, nun-short;
I kept it so ever after. I could run my hands over it, feel its thick felt, no longer hair-like, but animal, or like the pile of a silk rug. At first I missed the pressure of long hair pinned at the nape of my neck, balled there. It felt strange to roll my head on my neck muscles, right around, without hitting the smooth, tight bun of hair that I’d worn for so long. Those muscles and tendons and vertebrae had started to creak in complaint; I heard and felt the crunch within my neck, felt it in the back of my teeth, contained within me; not old age – not yet – just middle age.

I would wrap myself in my red coat – even in summer, it was cold when the wind came through – and walk up to the cliff-top, walk into the wind and the sky and the salt air. The wind would push my coat against me, press it into me. I wrapped my short hair in a woollen beret, tucked a scarf around my neck. Salt lined my nostrils, my eyelashes, burned my throat raw.

From the cliff-top, up above the town, I would sing to the wind, scream and howl songs with no words. Sounds I found on the wind I echoed back to it, from deep in my guts, from my throat. I pulled sounds from the air; I made the sounds without thinking, without knowing what they meant, without touching the heart of them. The sounds were blue, pale blue, salt blue, the blue of the sea around me, and the sky reflected, refracted. Those sounds had depth behind them and raw salt rubbed through them.

I
thought of my fame as a thing of the past – or, more to the point, I did not think of it at all. I was concerned with smaller things, things closer to me: rising each morning, eating, walking on the cliff-tops, swimming, playing my piano, my weekly trip to Penzance. I received little mail, just short letters, irregularly, from Uncle Valentine, usually with money tucked into the fold of the blue onionskin paper, his love formally declared at the bottom of the page over the flying
V
of his signature. There was no telephone in my cottage. I was contained, local, unconnected to the outside world.

It came, then, as something of a surprise when I received a letter one day, the unfamiliar return address – Rose Watford Summer School of Music, Cripplesease, near St Ives, Cornwall – typed on the back of the envelope.

On my first meeting with Jeremy, the following week, he walked me around the grounds of the school – a once-grand, crumbling house on the hill near the tiny, unfortunately named village of Cripplesease – and showed me the wing where the school would run, the Folly where small groups could retreat, the Glen where a marquee would be erected and recitals take place, the Salon where students and tutors would meet to share meals each day. I learned that there was no Rose Watford – hers was a name he’d pulled from the air when he started the school, reasoning that the Cripplesease School was hardly a name inspiring success. He made a jug of gin and lemon, with elderflowers and
lemon slices floating prettily on the surface, and we sat on old faded armchairs dragged into the sun, and drank and talked.

Jeremy was a fey man of indeterminate age with a little bit of money, a passion for what had come to be known as avant-garde music, and a talent for bringing the two – musicians and money – together. He had started the summer school after a great-aunt had left him the crumbling pile in Cripplesease. He had, he said, heard that I was living in St Ives. I couldn’t imagine from whom, nor who would be interested. He tapped the side of his nose with his index finger, sipped his flowery gin.

‘You can’t hide fame like yours under a bushel like St Ives, if you’ll pardon the mashed metaphor.’

Always susceptible to flattery and recognition, I raised my glass to Jeremy. We drank gin, we talked of music. We connected, just a little. And so it seemed right to agree; yes, I would play.

I held a masterclass that July at the school. Jeremy appeared at the door of my cottage a week after we first met with a brand new theremin for me to play, to practise on. I kept the theremin –
Got it from America last year. If you’d store it at your house for me, you’d be doing me such a favour,
he said – all that year, and ran a masterclass and a performance class at Cripplesease the following summer, and again the next. Jeremy, I’m sure, was behind the visits of journalists who came to write about me, the odd musician making music that wasn’t music. It was Jeremy who put the BBC onto me,
when we made the first of many broadcasts and recordings after that first summer at Cripplesease. And I suspect it was he who can be thanked for the invitation I received to record and film the performance of a piece to show at the Philips Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Brussels in ’58.

Indeed, before I knew it – and through no fault nor action of my own – I was famous again.

It was strange to find myself riding on the wave of electronic music as it – the modernity of it – again found its time, its place. Articles and photographs in newspapers and magazines followed the Brussels Fair, then a recording that sold well enough to lead to an offer to spend summer and
fall
, as they termed it, in America; that was how I spent the years of my fifties, the ’60s. After the summer school at Cripplesease each year, I would close the door on my little cottage in St Ives, catch the train to Southampton, and board the ship to New York. I played Newport first in ’60, then again in ’62 when they recorded my performance. That record,
Lena Live at Newport
, sold best of all my records, better even than in what was usually, in magazine articles, called my
heyday
, more than thirty years before. I was, I could face it, an old woman by then – I was sixty-one when I played my last Newport Festival in 1971, the year the crowds stormed the fences. They called me
crossover
, then; I had crossed some mythical divide from what was called classical music to what was called jazz. Later they called me experimental. I didn’t care. I just played the music I wanted to hear, played with people whose music excited me: Cage, Glass, Reed, monosyllabic names that sound almost musical as I recall them.

Again, again, I’m getting ahead of myself. Time is all over the place,
like a madwoman’s breakfast,
as Uncle Valentine would have said.

So, through the 1960s I spent half my year in one place and half in the other, crossing the Atlantic each way, each year, on one or other of the Cunard
Queens
. I kept a small apartment in New York – I could afford to, as I paid next to nothing for my cottage in St Ives, and the inheritance I had from my father still sat in the wise investments my uncle had made for me, gave me money for nothing. I was comfortably off. I split my time between the city and the sea, lived separate lives in each. In New York I bought a theremin from an old woman my own age who also had known the Professor; the dear Professor, long-dead by then. I bought fine clothes, dressed myself beautifully again, chic. I bought a sleek chair, all modern lines and leather, from the Herman Miller store. It was all I had in my apartment there: my lounge chair, its ottoman, a bed, the theremin, and a closet for my clothes. I lived a musician’s life, a busy life, there; I lived among people. I enjoyed the fame. I can’t deny that. It was flattering for an old woman – oh, I looked all right then, they even still called me
striking
in those days. But I was becoming old, or at least older.

I appeared on television, once, after Newport. You still sometimes see the footage, fuzzy with age (as I was not yet, not then, not quite). I do look striking. I have seen myself, my flickering self: in a silk sheath, high-necked, pale, the black pattern appliquéd to curve down the front of the dress, black on oyster white, curving up over my shoulder.
My shoulders are straight, strong. My lipstick is dark. My hair is short, nun-like, mannish. I do not smile. I play the theremin, my arms and hands orchestrating music from the machine, a short piece to camera, then applause. My mouth smiles, briefly. I bow. The camera pans back across the set. I remember; I remember the light on me fading, so that I was again in darkness, the crowd’s focus pulled from me.

Over the years though, finally, I did start to run low: on money, and on energy. Keeping up with the younger ones became a drain, and there came a time when I just – lost interest. Then, I stayed in my apartment every day, every night, with myself for company. I emerged only to play my music. I had no time for the energetic excesses of the young. I rejected their preference for the needle, which I’d always found too clinical, masculine. I retained my fondness for the primordial hit of the smoke. I lost my tolerance for them, the clever boys and girls who I had, in the past, been content to let milk my finances, funding their bands and their films, their drugs, their paintings and their parties.

I played; I kept to myself. Myself and the smoke, always smoke, my money up in smoke (just a little, just enough). Things slipped away from me – pawned, lost or stolen, I was never sure which – my mother’s wedding ring, her jade beads. The silver cigarette case Uncle Valentine had given me. It was a strange time, hazy.

It was after the 1971 Newport Festival – I didn’t know it was the final one, not then – that I received a letter in a buff-yellow lawyer’s envelope. My uncle had died. I was
his sole heir. He had left me his house, some money, some shares. Another death; but he was an old man, by then, his death timely, his life well-lived. And yet, with that letter in my hand, something was released. I wept and wept, wept for my beloved uncle, in a way I had not been able to, not for Trix, nor Grace, nor my mother or father. Such uncomplicated love he’d shown me. I wept and moaned until I was empty, wept all the weeping I should have done years before.

Uncle Valentine had come to the rescue in death as he had so often in life. Instead of returning to the salt blue, pale blue of St Ives, I would go to the place I had long ago called home, that southern place, that hot place, my uncle’s house near the tower by the sea.