There was something about that amateur concert yesterday. It keeps bothering me, a sense of presence on the periphery of my mind, dripping with persistent annoyance of autumnal drizzle. A misty mystery.
In the pallid morning light I am watching raindrops on the car window. As it accelerates, the drops stay still. They shiver in nervous excitement: not yet… not yet… not yet… YES! Finally resolved, they take off, almost simultaneously, chasing each other to the end of the glass and off, spinning into watery oblivion.
‘Weather talk’ is an expression in English meaning empty conversation, innocuous and meaningless. That is exactly what, slightly contemptuously, I thought of it while living in California. The weather there was nice. The air was warm. The sky was blue. The days were long and easy. Not so in England – you really can talk about the weather for hours here – there is just so much of it…
There is a kestrel flying past the window, slicing through the grey misty air, intent on it’s goal, assured in it’s elegant trajectory. No hesitant trembling there. There is unquestionable beauty in it’s simplicity. But there is also a strange, uncertain beauty in discordant complexity.
What was it, at that concert yesterday? It was the usual mix of of adults and children, playing with various degrees of proficiency: in the adults enthusiasm shoring up insufficient skill and in the children – parental pressure shoring up insufficient enthusiasm. A couple of beautiful, almost professional performances, strategically framed the concert at the beginning and the end. Was it that Liszt piece, with an almost unbearable sense of unrest just under the surface? No… it was that thin old woman, taught and trembling, like a string, like the raindrops, like the tears in my eyes that came, incomprehensible, out of nowhere.
The old woman walks on to the stage, accompanied by a younger one – attentive and slightly apologetic – her daughter, judging by the attitude. The mother is very nervous. Once seated at the piano, she has to take a few deep breaths to calm down enough to stop her hands trembling. For a few seconds she sits still, visibly stealing herself, and then suddenly plunges into her piece. Her fingers tap the keys lightly, with certainty, and there is spring – her eyes young, sparkling with laughter, her hands moving with the unthinking elegance of the kestrel in flight. You could see her sitting in a bright sunlit family room, demonstrating the piece to her daughter, happy in their shared enthusiasm. Suddenly, she stumbles. Her face falls. A look of helpless confusion replaces the sunny smile. Her daughter moves forward involuntarily, as if to help, but then the expression of grim determination replaces that of confusion on the old woman’s face and, with the help of the score in front of her, she plunges on. It is a long piece. Over the course of interminable minutes she forgets the familiar music again and again, every time unable to believe the betrayal of her mind, every time returning to the score with grim persistence, unwilling to accept her loss, her frailty, the signs of decline…
The daughter stops moving forward with each mistake, only her fingers moving, as if willing to transmit their knowledge to her who taught them in the beginning, so many years ago. When there was spring, and light, and mum would remind her of the things she needed to pack for school, and she didn’t have to follow her surreptitiously into the kitchen, just to make sure that the stove was off after she finished… Her mother never taught her to cook. She used to resent her mother’s lack of domesticity – the house was always a mess and meals – a haphazard affair. Sometimes, while rooting through the fridge in search of something edible, she had that bitter feeling of being uncared for, unloved, unheeded… But then there were other times, when her mother would teach her music – or simply play, sharing her passion, offering the music as a gift of love. When she grew up she realised that she kept her room immaculate and learned baking at least in part as a protest. But she also learned to play the piano.
It was a few years before vague worries caused by her mum forgetting and loosing things became impossible to ignore. One day she was making a cake, listening to mum playing one of her favourite pieces in the next room. The music stopped in mid-sentence. She ran into the room, suddenly terrified. Her mother was sitting at the piano, shoulders slumped, arms hanging uselessly by her side. Mum’s face had that helplessly confused expression she came to dread. Her eyes, bright with tears trembling in the lower eyelids, huge with despair, burned themselves into her daughter’s memory, as did her trembling voice, repeating over and over again, with heartbreaking persistence, ‘I can’t remember… I can’t remember… I can’t remember…’
That afternoon she made an appointment with mum’s GP and in a week received a letter with the diagnosis they both dreaded. She cried. Her mum didn’t. She sat there, in the sunlit room, her back straight, her arms hanging limply by her side. After a few minutes of silence, she stood up and walked to the piano, an expression of grim determination on her face. She sat down and started to play.
Over the next few years, the daughter would learn to both love and hate this piece. Listening to it flowing from her mother’s fingers and stopping abruptly, and starting again and again and again – a memorial to past skill, a testament to present spirit, a hymn that denies faith, an ode to loss and persistence.
Cover using The Recital by George Goodwin Kilburne
