I felt pathetic at the preparations I had made to come face to brave face with other faces in their late thirties. I’d carefully applied concealer, which usually lay dormant in the cupboard under the bathroom sink. I’d put on a pair of particularly high heels to optimise the length of my legs, which after all these years I still wished were longer. Why I cared what these women thought about the length of my legs is beyond me. I’d been worried that I would be more wrinkled than my peers, or the only one without a ring on my wedding finger. And appalled at myself for having those thoughts.
My former classmates and I agreed on the balminess of the October evening, how fabulous we all looked, and how we really were ‘old girls’ now. The regrettable terminology of alumnae put me in mind of livestock trussed up for display. After twenty years, the dynamic remained unchanged: we were still women dressing up for each other.
‘Are you still playing the piano?’ came the first question, from a woman gripping the stem of her champagne flute as if for balance. It wasn’t even 8 p.m. ‘You teach piano, don’t you?’
Taken aback, I said, ‘Actually, I haven’t taught piano in years. I worked in book publishing, then—’
‘Oh,’ she said, clearly disappointed. ‘But you still play, don’t you? I’ll never forget you playing for school assembly all those years.’
For assembly, twice a week for six years. For the choir. For the madrigals a cappella group. For the solo instrumentalists and the aspiring opera singer. I played for anyone who needed an accompanist, and for whoever asked me. The piano was my first love and, from the age of seven, I spent thirteen years studying the instrument and performing classical music, undertaking annual exams and participating in competitions that to this day remain some of my most vivid experiences of success and humiliation.
The onslaught of unanticipated questions from other ‘old girls’ told me it would be a long night, and my first glass of champagne soon emptied. But before I could find the bar, I saw Astrid approaching. Astrid, the one old girl who distilled everything I had loathed about attending an all-girls school. Even now she was olive-skinned and radiant, a mature version of her fourteen-year-old self, who would have won a contest for prize bitch out of a competitive field. As a pale freckled girl whose braces glinted in the unforgiving Australian sun, I would gaze at Astrid from the corner of my eye in longing and despair. Her hair wasn’t a mousy brown, falling straight like water, but a halo of tousled chocolate curls. Her frequent laugh, natural and wide-mouthed, revealed rows of perfect white teeth. She sat in the back row of our classes, at the desk nearest the window, a commanding position that enabled her to monitor events both outside and inside the classroom. Astrid never hesitated to offer an opinion to the teacher, or to answer a question, and being incorrect seemed not to faze her; she would receive news of a wrong answer with a nonchalant shrug, while if I made one mistake I would stew in hot embarrassment for the remainder of the class. ‘Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned,’ Joan Didion wrote in her 1976 essay ‘Why I Write’. I must have missed the classes on self-esteem. All I knew was that Astrid seemed to understand something about living in the world that I did not. Even now I longed to ask her what it was.
Watching her move in my direction, a huge smile on her face, I became convinced she beamed in the direction of someone just behind me. We had barely exchanged words at school. I couldn’t fathom what she could possibly have to say to me.
‘It’s great to see you!’ Astrid said. ‘How have you been? Do you still play the piano?’
I attempted to steer the conversation in a different direction, but she was having none of it.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’ve got three kids, can you believe it? But really, I’ve never forgotten you playing the theme from—’ Surely she could not be serious. I knew what she was going to say, and still I couldn’t believe she was actually going to say it.
‘You know, the theme from The Man from Snowy River. You were fantastic! You still play, don’t you?’
In Music classes, waiting for dour Mr Jones to show up, I turned pop-music tricks for my classmates. With the popularity of Billy Joel, Elton John, the theme from M*A*S*H and movie soundtracks, the early to mid-1980s were generous to piano players. The song requested most frequently was ‘Jessica’s Theme’ from the 1982 movie The Man from Snowy River. The film score was so popular that, more than thirty years later, it remains in Amazon’s top fifty soundtracks of that decade. Allegedly ‘Jessica’s Theme’, my signature tune, was partly responsible for a subsequent generation of little Jessicas.
I wasn’t the only teenager with a hopeless crush on the film’s star, Tom Burlinson, who plays Jim Craig, an intelligent but poorly educated horseman from the remote high country of rural Victoria. He’s in love with Jessica, the headstrong daughter
