‘I felt pulled toward my grandmother by what little I knew and an urgent desire to find other parallels between our experiences as musical girls. I wanted to explore how our experiences reflected those of other girls drawn from the pages of history and fiction who had sat at the piano over the course of its history. I came to believe that setting aside Alice’s mask of old age might help me to understand my own voyage around the piano—and help me to find my way back.’
‘Staring into the piano’s black mirror was like seeing into the future, glimpsing the girl I would become, the girl who could play the piano and understand the world around her through her fingertips, and let her hands speak for her when she could not.’
First published in 2018
Copyright © Virginia Lloyd 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material.
If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the publishers at the address below.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100
Email:info@allenandunwin.com
Web:www.allenandunwin.com
ISBN 978 1 76029 777 0
eISBN 978 1 76063 586 2
Internal design by Romina Panetta
Set by Bookhouse, Sydney
Cover design: Romina Panetta
Cover illustration: Loui Jover, Her Sonata, courtesy Saatchi Art
for Nate
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
ENDNOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’
1
‘YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TWO CHILDREN, a boy and a girl,’ the clairvoyant told my mother Pamela, when she was thirty-five and desperate for a baby. In Hunters Hill, a kind of Stepford-upon-Sydney, childlessness was next to godlessness. Especially after a decade of marriage.
It might have been 1968, but there were no outward signs of revolution or even social unrest in the leafy peninsula where the Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers flow into Sydney Harbour. All that awkward business was in the 1840s, when convicts escaping from nearby Cockatoo Island swam to shore and hid in the densely forested finger of land known as Moocooboola, or meeting of waters, to its original inhabitants. Despite the pill and the war in Vietnam, Hunters Hill was the peninsula that time forgot. John hunted and gathered, while Pam cooked and cleaned. When she wasn’t doing either of those things, my mother attended meetings of the local chapter of the Young Wives club. One hundred years after the publication of Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives, these young married women were the living sequel to Little Women. But young is a more forgiving adjective for a wife than good. In real life, the one mistake a good wife could not make was that she be infertile. In desperation, Pamela followed the recommendation of her hairdresser, whom she consulted more regularly than any priest, and made an appointment with a clairvoyant.
‘I don’t want you to speak,’ the clairvoyant said when she opened the door to her apartment, decked out in a flowing white caftan. ‘That’s how I do business. I don’t want you to give me any information whatsoever.’
She ushered Pamela inside and they sat down across from each other at a square wooden table in an otherwise sparse room. Natural light seeped through drawn curtains.
‘You have no children,’ the clairvoyant announced, as if it were news to the good wife sitting across from her. ‘Don’t worry about it, dear, you’re going to have two.’
Pamela’s eyes widened. She couldn’t see how that would happen. None of her doctors had ever spoken with confidence about her chances of conceiving.
‘You’re going to have the girl first, then the boy three years later,’ the clairvoyant continued.
Enchanted by the authority of her prediction, my mother never imagined its every detail would come true. More than forty years later, though she struggles to remember what she did yesterday, my mother recalls the prescient woman’s exact words.
‘There’s one other thing you should know,’ she added, with a performer’s gift of timing. ‘Your daughter is going to be very musical.’
2
DO YOU STILL PLAY THE PIANO?
At my twentieth high school reunion, it was the only question anyone had for me. Nobody cared whether I was married or divorced, gay or straight; when I had left my home town of Sydney, or for how long I had lived in New York. The reunion coincided with a trip home, and curiosity about my former classmates got the better of me. I’d had no contact with the vast majority of them since leaving school.
The truth was that I had been widowed more than three years earlier when my husband John died of cancer. I had moved to New York to try to figure out what to do with myself, and I still didn’t have a clue. This wasn’t the sort of self-portrait you could sketch after a quick hello and a you’re looking
