The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (5 page)

O
n that first day, as on many later outings, we retired to Uncle Valentine’s big house by the sea, after we had swum. Afternoon tea was served in his front room, where the piano sat waiting for me. I was allowed to play whatever I wanted to play on his piano, and Uncle Valentine encouraged me, clapped and stamped as he had on my first day at school. During the week I would learn new pieces to please him, complicated pieces to show off.

Then, after I had played, it would be Uncle Valentine’s turn to show off. He would play me gramophone records on the His Master’s Voice player that stood against the wall, the latest recordings ordered in for him by the music shop in the city. We did not have a gramophone at the Misses Murray’s up in the Hills, and I had only the very slightest recollection of the cylinder phonograph Father had so rarely played in my earliest days, in Singapore. I had never before seen – let alone held, or examined – a gramophone record. Uncle Valentine, himself enthralled as much by the technology as by the modern sounds it let him hear, was keen that I should share his delight. He explained to me in detail each part of the machine, how it moved, how it worked
with the next part, and the next, all of them working in concert. He would let me wind the gramophone, gently move the arm to place the needle in its groove, and then I would sink into the soft chair by Uncle’s side, in time to hear the hiss before the music, the hiss and pop that was the lead-in, the signal for what would come after.

In this way, I came to hear the pieces I had learned to play on the piano in the solitary music room up in the Hills; but now I heard them with their full orchestration. I heard sounds I realised I’d been straining to hear, the gaps between the notes I’d played, timbres unreachable by the piano, heard resonance above and below and through and around.

And one day I heard it: the low sound, like a human voice, low and warm, deep blue like the dark deep water. It hummed then sang out from underneath the piano, rising from the amplifying horn above the rotating recorded disc.

‘That sound,’ I said. I rested my hand on my uncle’s arm, and he covered my hand with his.

‘Casals. Playing the cello, darling. Beautiful instrument. Bigger than you, probably.’

‘Can I play it?’

He looked at me. ‘I suspect you can play anything you put your mind to, Helena. Would you like to try?’

I pulled my hand out from underneath his, grabbed his big hand in both of mine. ‘Can I? Oh please, please, can I?’

On the way back to the Misses Murray’s, Uncle Valentine drove slowly past Spanney’s, on Hay Street. We stopped the car, and Uncle tried the shop’s locked door. We peered in through the windows, leaving wet smudges, leaving empty-handed,
unable to see what the shop’s dark interior held. But three days later, the Spanney’s van pulled up outside the Misses Murray’s school and delivered me a half-size cello, packed in a hard black case lined with red velvet. In the music room I lifted it out – even this fractional size was as big as I was – and fitted myself against its back, its body, smelled rosewood and spruce, touched horsehair on the bow. I shaped the curve of my arm to its body, ran my fingers down the thick strings and heard them hiss and screech – just lightly – under their breath. With my right arm, I reached the strings and plucked the thickest, heard its resonance, its low growl. I turned my back on the piano, picked up the bow and measured its weight and heft in my hand, and started the long process of learning to play my first true love, the cello.

I became completely absorbed in learning the cello, then and in the years that followed, throughout the remainder of my schooling with the Misses Murray, to their horror and despite their protestations to my uncle that the violoncello was not appropriate for a young lady, that its tone was too deep, too manly, that the posture one had to adopt to play it was – well, unladylike. But Uncle Valentine’s winning ways overcame their protestations. The not inconsiderable matter of providing me with a teacher was also dealt with by my uncle, who engaged a music tutor, Mr Coulson from the boys school in the city, to travel up to the Hills to give me a weekly lesson. Mr Coulson taught me the rudiments I needed to play; showed me how to hold the cello as if, he said, it was a standing child leaning backwards, trusting,
into my lap; taught me how to bow, taught me
pizzicato
,
vibrato
. While Miss Murray the younger had guided me ably in my early years learning the piano, her greatest contribution to my cello-playing was to leave me alone. As soon as I completed my schoolwork for the day, I sought out the music room, frowning and growling at anyone else who thought they might colonise my space. Beyond my weekly lessons, I developed my technique by listening, with my ears and my whole body, to the sounds I made, by changing and reflecting and responding to the music I played.

I remained a solitary child, happiest in my own company. I did my work well enough in the classroom, but I didn’t care for the games and silliness of the other girls, who teased me, for my way of speaking – formal, grown-up, foreign-sounding – as much as for my obsession with music. It was Uncle Valentine, not the girls my own age, whose company I cherished. He continued his visits, and we continued our outings. There would be gaps and unexplained absences when I would not see him for months at a time –
fingers in pies, and so on, my dear,
he would tell me on his return – but then, unannounced, there he’d be, swooping up the hill in his big black motor car, sweeping into the music room, to drive me away for the day, to the beach or, increasingly, straight to his house by the sea, to settle in the big soft chairs in the front room and to listen to recordings on his gramophone. We would only leave the Misses Murray’s after I had performed for him though, something I loved, a piece I had kept safe in the forefront of my brain knowing it was a piece for Uncle Valentine, that he would love its
intricacy, its gaiety, its depth or its modernity.

As well as music, my uncle’s house was filled with the many modern conveniences that his comfortable income allowed. In contrast to the ancient, dark austerity of the Misses Murray’s, all blacked wood stoves, Coolgardie safes and draughty fireplaces, Uncle Valentine’s kitchen gleamed with the newest electric appliances, the stove and refrigerator kept humming and full by his housekeeper, Mrs Anderson. Well-thumbed issues of the magazines he loved –
The Wireless World, The Electrical Experimenter,
joined later by
Science and Invention
– fed his enthusiasm and curiosity for all things new, and prompted many of his purchases. He was an amateur, a buyer of others’ inventions, neither a tinkerer nor an inventor of his own.

‘I leave the inventing to the geniuses, and the building to those that are good with their hands,’ he told me. ‘But you and I, my dear Helena, we get to enjoy them; we get to play with them all, all of these wonderful new toys! How very lucky we are to live in this fabulous century.’

Infected by his vigorous enthusiasm, I too flicked hungrily through the pages of
The Wireless World
and
Science
and Invention
, intrigued by the poetry if not the detail of anodes and ohms, connections and resistance. In those magazines of my uncle’s, and in the slim literary volumes on his shelves, I found pages alive with the buzz of the next new thing. Like me, they were of this century, not the last; they looked forward, not to the past. If these are possible, I thought – this machine, or this poem – if these are possible, then anything,
anything
might be possible.

D
uring my many years with the Misses Murray, once I had learned my letters and words, I wrote to my parents every Sunday, a single page of onionskin paper, topped
Dear Mother and Father
and tailed
Your daughter Helena
. And Mother wrote to me each week, a letter to match, a page. Mother’s letters were as invariable as the tropical climate she and Father lived in:
I am well; your father is busy; we had the Atkinsons for tea; it is so warm.
My letters to them matched hers:
I am well; Uncle Valentine is busy; it is warm,
or
it is hot
, or
the rain has come
, or
the
wildflowers
are out.
I live for my music, I wanted to tell them, but somehow did not. Father would sometimes write a line on the bottom of Mother’s letter, almost always a variation on
Study hard and behave yourself
. They were so far away. I can’t say with certainty that I missed them.

It was towards the end of my school days that I received a letter addressed in Father’s handwriting. My first thought was of illness or disaster. I left the letter resting for an hour on the closed lid of the piano, behind me, out of sight, as I played my cello.

When I finally opened the letter, it was businesslike,
as Father always was. I was to finish school this calendar year. I should reside with my uncle until passage early in the new year could be arranged for the two of us to Singapore, where Father would meet us for the trip home to Malacca.
Home
, he called it. My parents had moved there, from Singapore, ten years before, but I had never lived in Malacca.
Employment will be arranged for you here,
he wrote.
There is an excellent school for the English community, they will take you on to teach. Your mother is delighted at your imminent return,
he finished.
Study hard and behave yourself.

And so, that December I said goodbye to the Misses Murray, shook their hands firmly in mine and climbed into Uncle Valentine’s car with my trunk, my cello and my leather valise of sheet music piled in the back. We drove down the hill for the last time, to the big house by the beach, where we sprawled all summer, my cello and I. Uncle Valentine would go to his office each morning, wearing his too-hot business suit, his forehead already sleek with sweat before he left the house. But in the evenings we would sit together in the cool of the breeze blowing from the ocean, sipping whisky while we listened to gramophone records, or I played my cello. Uncle taught me to smoke, those hot summer nights – said it was good for my health, and just the most modern thing. I studied the photographs and advertisements in magazines, and copied the poses they showed, draping myself languidly on Uncle’s lounge, crystal tumbler of whisky in one hand, cigarette in the other. Uncle’s gift for me that Christmas was a fine silver
case, which I kept well-stocked with cigarettes from the carved wooden box on his desk.

I spent that summer in luxury, glorious luxury, back and forth between Uncle Valentine’s house and the beach as the summer became hotter and hotter. My cello’s tuning suffered more each day.

One morning at the height of summer, after a week of temperatures well over a century and my cello almost melting, I saw the music store truck pull up at the front of Uncle’s house, and watched as two men delivered a familiar-shaped case to the door.

The cello inside the case was gleaming aluminium, all metal except for its wooden fingerboard. I had never seen anything so beautiful, so modern. It was like a machine, polished to a mirror finish; I saw myself reflected, wide-eyed. Uncle Valentine watched me, smiling.

‘Worth every penny to see your face, Helena. And for you to stop your whining about the weather. It’s the latest thing from America. The advertisements say that it won’t crack or warp, that it’ll last forever. Might just survive the trip to Malacca, eh?’

Full-size to my smaller wooden cello, this beauty had a different voice, at once deeper and brighter. Despite the heat around us, the cello was all cold beauty against my skin. When I pressed it against my legs and plucked the strings, it felt electric, new.

That same day a telegram came from Father, addressed to me. I held it with fingers callused from playing my new cello, perspiring from the day and the playing. The message
was short; my skin felt cold on reading it. Its words ran together, not making sense at first, but finally the sense they made was unavoidable.
Mother contracted fever buried today suffering brief. Maintain planned passage north. Father
.

In the days that followed, as Uncle Valentine and I stepped quietly and carefully around each other with the strange formality that death seemed to require, I realised that although my mother’s death saddened me, I could not say that my sadness was deep. Twelve years of polite but repetitive letters had distanced me from her. I remembered her for her music of the dressing table, from long ago, remembered her sleeping next to me, as I came through my leaky fever. I did not miss her, it occurred to me, quite as a girl should miss her mother. If anything, it was observing my uncle’s grief for his sister that saddened me most.

Still, I played the music I remembered from the end of the war,
larghissimo, lentissimo
, the annotations like a string of saints’ names muttered over a nun’s beads. Ringing from the clear, bright cello, music cut the hot air, elegiac.

M
y theremin has been returned to me this morning, unscathed. They’ve taken care of it, at least. It was returned to me packed in cardboard, held rigid and protected within a wooden frame – like a large tea-chest – constructed around it. The two young men who delivered it set themselves to unpacking it on the footpath when they realised the crate would not fit down the path between the front house and the side fence.

I found one of them attacking the wooden framing with a crowbar while the other watched and scratched his head. I suggested – sternly – that they take care with the crowbar, and told them I would wait for them in the cottage. It took them nearly an hour to unpack the instrument, carry it to the cottage, and install it in the front room; to unpack and install the speaker to which it attaches; and then, bless their mothers for teaching nice manners, to clean away their mess, and make their polite farewells.

The boys have placed the theremin approximately in its accustomed position, marked on the floor by a dark, flattened patch on the rug. I tense my body against one
side of the machine, feel it hard against my body. I waltz it gently across the rug until the position is perfect, just so.

I connect leads, plug the instrument into a transformer, the transformer into the electrical socket, and flick the switch on the outlet. A light hum starts, almost inaudible at first, but increasing in volume as the machine warms and glows into life. I wonder, not for the first time, if I can really smell ozone as electricity arcs and sparks. Can I smell it? Or do I just imagine it, the lightning and rain smell of it, impossibly damp and dry at once.

I adopt a playing stance: address the machine, face it, raise my hands, take a breath and bring my hands in to draw a note. Yes;
there
. I play a note, a trill, a run. I play a scale, C major,
legato
, then D major,
pizzicato
, pinching each note off from its predecessor and its successor. The sound is fine, good; no damage has been done in the shipping to and from Transformer, and I feel my shoulders relax with the knowledge. I should have known that it would take more than a ninety-minute journey by truck and two silly boys with a crowbar to cause damage. It’s lived a long time, this machine, travelled well in its long life; followed me in mine.

I test the instrument and my fingers, my memory: I play Shostakovich, the first concerto for cello, the
allegretto
movement. I feel my head nod and drop away.

Over my soaring playing I just barely hear a banging, a knock, and realise it is sounding from my front door. I drop my hands mid-bar, the resultant discord hanging in the air as I turn away from the machine.

Through the screen door I see the filmmaker is holding the same shoulder bag, wearing the same sunglasses as last week when we first met. I open the door. She smells of the same cool citrus perfume.

‘I’m so sorry. I’ve interrupted you, haven’t I? I heard you playing,’ she says. ‘As I came down the path, it got louder, and I realised what it was. I couldn’t tell whether it was a recording though, or if it was you playing. Actually playing.’

‘It was me. It’s just been delivered home from the festival. I wanted to test it, make sure it hadn’t been damaged in transit.’ I wave her in, usher her with my hands into the dark hallway.

‘And?’

‘Oh’– I make a dismissive noise with my lips, a dismissive wave with my hands – ‘it’s fine. I suspect it’s indestructible.’

‘Do you have someone who can, I dunno, repair it for you? Is it like a car; does it need regular servicing to keep it running?’

‘The man who made it for me – it would have been, I think, 1930 this one – always said I didn’t need to know how it worked, but I should be able to maintain it. There are things I do, to keep it running. Routines. Yes, I suppose, a little like oiling and fuelling a car, like replacing spark plugs.’

‘Could I see it, do you think?’

‘Of course.’

In the room, she stands slightly to the side of the instrument, and too far away to touch it. The ozone smell and the warm, dry hum of the instrument fill the room.
She moves closer, takes a step, puts her hand out, but not in any systematic way, not as a thereminist would approach the instrument. As her hand nears the pitch aerial, I reach past her and, as my own hand trills up the straight metal rod, a series of notes sound, wobbly and incomplete, poorly formed from my awkward position.

‘God, it’s – strange. Strangely beautiful. The sound; it’s warm, isn’t it?’

‘It’s the valves. Old-fashioned glass and solidity. Here, let me.’

I move in front of the machine, into the playing position. She moves away to the side, far enough that she won’t affect the sound. I reprise the Shostakovich she heard me play as she arrived.

The filmmaker watches me, prowling the room as I play. I notice her looking at her hands, looking down. I hear a heavy click and mechanical wind; she is looking down into the viewing lens of an old-fashioned camera, held low at her belly.

I finish playing, trail off just shy of the lead-up to the movement’s ending. I turn to face her. She stands, leaning against the wall in what I know to be the room’s sweet spot, where the sound from the speaker is pure and as perfect as it gets in this little wooden shack. If she has found that spot from five minutes listening, then she has a fine ear, a very fine ear. If she is there by chance, well, she is there by chance. These things happen.

I reach out and touch the camera.

‘Your camera is almost as old as my theremin.’

‘That was beautiful,’ she says.

‘Thank you.’

‘Was it the Shostakovich? The one you played at Transformer?’

I nod.

‘It didn’t sound quite finished. Sorry, maybe that sounds rude, or just ignorant. That wasn’t the end, was it? It sounded as if – well, I wanted more, wanted you to keep on playing.’

‘No, you’re right. There is more, but I didn’t play it. It seemed a little too – perhaps too showy for before we’ve even had coffee.’ We smile at each other.

As I turn to leave the room she places her hand on my arm, just above my wrist, stopping me. ‘Thank you for playing for me. Thank you so much.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘No, it’s not nothing. I’m sorry, but I just can’t get over how beautiful it sounds. Your playing. You draw out the most astonishing sounds. It’s what struck me the other week at Transformer. I’ve heard it played by other people – it can sound so tinny, so gimmicky. You make it sound beautiful.’ She shakes her head, slowly, drops her hand from my arm. ‘Magic. Just magic. No one plays like you.’

‘You’re very kind.’

She follows me out of the front room and into the hallway. I find myself saying to her, not looking at her as we walk, ‘I would like to help you make your film.’ It’s her finding the room’s sweet spot that has done it for me. That she should be there, just there; that she can hear that. That talks to me in a way I can trust. I know – without knowing, without reason – that this is the right decision.