Soon after the concert, Mrs Wilcox suggested to my mother that I would improve more quickly if I had my own instrument. Mum promptly informed my father that the time had come to buy me a real piano.
Her clairvoyant had been right.
With my father I roamed a piano display room, thrilled at the thought of my practice sessions at Mrs Weird’s house coming to an end. Surrounding me were black pianos, brown pianos, and a vast gleaming piano the colour of white chocolate. Until that moment I hadn’t realised that grand pianos came in different sizes, or that anyone other than Liberace had access to a white one. We proceeded past the Steinways and the Bösendorfers, the Kawais and the Beales, to the display of modest uprights that occupied the far corner of the room. A salesman began to pay us attention using his peripheral vision.
Dad nudged me onto a stool. ‘Go on, play something,’ he said.
Neither of us had any idea what to look for in buying a piano. I was sitting before a small reddish-brown Yamaha, transfixed by the sheen of the wood and the polished white notes, smooth as the collars on the shirts Mum ironed for Dad. Did brand-new pianos arrive by plane, or by sea? How would you get one out of the store and into your house? And where would your mother allow you to put it? At seven I had no sense of what a piano cost, or what other purchases my parents had deferred so that I could have one.
Our generation-spanning ignorance must have been obvious to the salesman, who drew nearer as I attempted to reproduce by memory a simple melody from one of my beginner’s books. In my nervousness, the fingers of my right hand tripped over each other.
‘Oops! That’s the wrong note,’ I said, before playing the melody correctly.
‘The important thing is she knew she’d made a mistake,’ said the salesman, now standing at my father’s elbow and confident of a sale.
Dad interpreted his ego-stroking comment as proof of my precocious talent, and the chestnut upright arrived at our house ten days later.
A shining Japanese-manufactured piano now stood in one corner of what in our house was known as the Sitting Quietly room. Before now I had only ever gone in there to read, curled up on a high-backed olive-green sofa chair. It was a great place to be by myself. Covered in pale golden wallpaper and straw-coloured shag pile, the room featured a square glass coffee table that only ever had one empty ceramic bowl sitting perfectly in its centre. A still-life painting, minus the life.
When I lifted the lid of the keyboard for the first time, I was surprised to see a sash of purple felt draped across it, as if the Yamaha had just won a beauty contest for its perfect but modest proportions. I didn’t know which note to touch first. The black keys looked like the mane of a wild horse. I pressed a white key near the middle with the tip of my right index finger, as if I feared it would bite me. The instrument settled in the tufted carpet, its brass pedals hovering above it like three tiny feet. You could raise the top of the piano and prop it open with an in-built stick that stood up in a special cavity in the underside of the lid. When you played the piano with its lid open, it echoed and rumbled more loudly than when the lid was closed.
After a few days my mother placed one of her porcelain figurines along the piano’s closed top. Her Lladró collection—polished tableaux of labour and romance that included a pair of courting Mexican peasants (complete with sombreros) and a captain of the British Navy consulting his map of territories yet to be colonised—abhorred a vacuum. She had often mentioned that she would have loved to learn the piano when she was a girl, but that her family was too poor to afford lessons. Now, with the upright making itself comfortable in the Sitting Quietly room of her own home, my mother chose to dust it as if it were the largest figurine in her collection, rather than touch the keys directly with her fingers. In later years I would remove the figurines so I could practise with the lid open, but back then I had to ask her to remove them. There was a connection between my mother’s insistence that my hair be tied back at all times and her preference for keeping the lid of the piano closed, but I failed to see it then.
The piano tuner, who arrived two weeks after the instrument, wasn’t happy about its location. Its back was exposed to the large window that looked east to the Tarban Creek bridge, where the sun rose on the cars and trucks that drove across it all day and night.
‘He said, “You’ve got two walls of glass meeting in this corner. The sun will stream in and cause it to go out of tune,”’ my mother reported when I got home from school. ‘He said it’s the worst place for the piano.’ She shook her head, her eyes flashing at the memory. ‘The hide of him, telling me where to put the piano!’
I felt sorry for the tuner. He probably knew what he was talking about, but not that it was no use offering a contrary opinion. The only alternative would
