I looked down at my outfit of pants, short-sleeved cotton top and brown flats, embarrassed. As far as Mr McFarlane was concerned, my wardrobe was the major impediment to a career in music. A raised eyebrow greeted me one day when I showed up in a favourite pair of grey overalls; later I learned from another student of his that he had told her I’d turned up ‘looking as if she’d just come in from the garden’. My piano lessons had been the last place I expected my sartorial decisions to be judged, especially by someone overly attached to polyester.
As Jacqueline walked slowly across the stage, I watched her every step, fascinated and envious. That kind of poise could not be taught. It could not be taught by Mr MacFarlane, at least. And certainly I had no poise of my own, with my utilitarian outfits, my braces, and eyebrows that threatened mutiny over the bridge of my nose—they looked like two unmown strips of lawn. I had yet to encounter Frida Kahlo’s proud monobrow, but even if I had I’m pretty sure the discovery wouldn’t have liberated me from my shame about my dark hair growing in places I didn’t want it. Frida didn’t have to turn up at school every day and face the blonde and hairless hordes: she and her massive eyebrow could just stay indoors and paint.
From the very first note Jacqueline played, she touched the keys with command and authority, and also with something that wasn’t visible to the eye but more powerful for its intangibility. She played the same notes in the same order as I had, but the effect was transformed. There was an abiding sense of her deep connection to the work, as if she had seen through the signs and symbols printed on the page to the emotions roiling beneath the notation, and in her playing had conveyed her deep respect for the ocean as she sailed across the glittering water.
After the brief presto the prelude finishes with a six-bar coda that allows the pianist unusual freedom of expression and a variation of tempo between a slower adagio and returning to an allegro ending. Listening to the contrast between Jacqueline’s presto and coda sections, I heard clearly the limitations of my own interpretation and wondered how it was that she and I could spend hours every week practising the piece, only for my performance to sound technically accurate but thin, as if I had only skimmed the surface.
The eisteddfod audience clapped politely as the last few competitors played through their Preludes and Fugues, but the result had already been decided. Jacqueline was so obviously Best in Show I couldn’t figure out what was taking the adjudicator so long to announce the winner.
Finally the judge stood and cleared her throat. ‘I’m going to award this one to Susan,’ she declared to the hall of raised eyebrows, ‘because she has played well all day.’
And what, I wondered, did that have to do with the price of fish? Woody Allen might be right that 80 per cent of success lies in simply showing up, but the remaining 20 per cent allows for a wide margin of error. Susan, a girl whose performance had been technically more competent than mine but equally bland, shook the judge’s hand as my father rolled his eyes at me. He was already thinking of the long commute home from this parallel universe where alleged experts made us wait on uncomfortable seats for their irrational pronouncements. We were sitting inside a church, after all.
Susan held up her small trophy with an apologetic smile: everyone, including the winner, knew she didn’t deserve it. Jacqueline had played all of us under our plastic chairs. I never saw her at another eisteddfod.
Mr Jones strode into the assembly hall, his suit jacket billowing behind his long thin frame like the tail on a crotchet. He had been teaching music at Wenona for a long time, but no one knew how many years exactly; at our age time was as impossible to grasp as the twelve-tone scale.
I scuttled away from the grand piano, where I’d been playing ‘Jessica’s Theme’ on request. Again.
But Mr Jones couldn’t have cared less about my choice of material. He considered me neither talented nor exceptional, and endured my regular presence at the school’s piano as any other condition of his ongoing employment.
‘Apologies, girls. Forgot where we were meeting,’ he muttered, dispensing each word as if it were coated in something sour. ‘Come on, line up. We’ve wasted enough time already. If you don’t have your music, stand next to someone who does. Virginia, go to the piano and play A, will you?’
A well-intentioned classmate piped up. ‘She doesn’t need the piano. She can just sing it like she does in madrigals.’
Anyone who has sung in a group knows that A is the note from which the singers work out the pitch of their respective first notes. Our weekly madrigals rehearsals, which were usually held in a basement room that had excellent acoustics but no piano, began with the choir mistress asking me to sound the starting note: my sense of pitch was so accurate that she didn’t need a piano.
Mr Jones tilted his head slightly as he considered me, his black hawk eyes unblinking. After a pause, he said, ‘You don’t have perfect pitch.’
I shrugged, intuiting it was best to say nothing. Until Mrs Wilcox had suspected and tested my memory for pitch, I thought that everyone recognised notes by name as soon as they heard them. In the same way that most people can identify the colour of the
