At school I considered this simply a freak of memory and took it for granted, not realising how unusual it was. My musicality seemed more like a curiosity than a practical asset—interesting, possibly, but useless. I didn’t see how it might translate into something I could use in ‘real life’, which would begin promptly when I left this witches’ cauldron and went to university.
‘Go and stand over there, facing the wall,’ said Mr Jones. ‘Go on,’ shooing me to the nearest side of the hall with one hand. At the cuffs of his shiny black suit was a permanent cloud formed by the stick of white chalk he gripped tightly and waved around like a poor man’s baton during class.
He moved briskly to the piano. Moments before he’d been urging us to attention: now he had all the time in the world. My classmates, not knowing what was happening, sensed that it was nevertheless important and fell quiet. Even Joanna, whom I liked to think of as my best friend at school, began to pay attention.
Mr Jones played a note with one bony finger. It reverberated through the otherwise silent hall.
‘B,’ I said, straight away. My first mistake. Immediately I understood I should have waited a few seconds before responding. To at least pretend it took a conscious effort.
Mr Jones said nothing but pressed another note.
‘E flat.’ I couldn’t help myself. The sound was as identifiable as my own face. I could no more pretend not to recognise each note than I could stop blinking. It wasn’t my fault: absolute or perfect pitch is a genetic accident occurring in approximately one in ten thousand people.
Mr Jones increased the frequency of his note-playing and varied the register—playing some notes way up high on the keyboard and others low—but it made no difference to me.
‘A, F sharp, B flat, D,’ I shot back at him, emboldened. With every correct answer he stabbed the keys harder, as if the increasing violence of his dismay could change the pitch and catch me out. This was a game that would continue until Mr Jones decided it was over.
Without being able to see my classmates, I could only imagine their boredom. It was one thing for me to entertain them with show tunes and a medley of Top 40 songs; to be revealed to have a freak musical skill, beyond even the teacher’s grasp, placed me in an entirely separate camp. Joanna wouldn’t be pleased at my distinguishing myself in this way. My role as her friend was to remain on par with—or preferably slightly behind—her in intellectual and social achievement. She gave me my edge over her in Music as long as I didn’t do better than her in Japanese, Economics and English. If recent history was a guide, she would ignore me for a few days until she decided I had been sufficiently punished for doing something she couldn’t compete with.
Mr Jones shut the lid of the piano, and I returned to sit among my peers. But I had been cast out, and it was too late to return from wherever it was that I now found myself.
In 1839, in a letter to her aunt Elizabeth, the future novelist Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) described a ‘desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures’ when playing the piano. She described this ambition punitively, as her ‘besetting sin’, fearing the power of her desire to perform for others. Her adolescence was characterised by an intense internal conflict: she sought praise but couldn’t abide receiving it. Was it possible to be moral and to put oneself on public display? How does one reconcile the desire for admiration and the need to quench it? This is where shyness can become a tactic to disguise attention-seeking behaviour, a defence against being thought too aggressive and showy. To perform and then to agonise over it—especially if you’re accomplished—is to remain suspended in a delicate balance between the poles of inner conflict. Rather an exhausting way of living, really.
I still wonder why Mr Jones wanted to disprove the fact that I had perfect pitch. Perhaps he felt outraged to learn that mere chance explained my consistently high marks in his classes, rather than his abilities as a teacher. Maybe he was furious that the unfairness of life was epitomised by an awkward fourteen-year-old girl who neither asked for nor appreciated her random gift. I wonder if Mr Jones somehow knew, his bitter gaze resting on the back of my white neck as I accurately named each note, that I would waste this ability; that I would abandon the piano and drift for years, casting about for an anchor as reliable and trustworthy as the starting note A.
10
THIS PHOTOGRAPH OF ALICE MAY MORRISON Taylor was taken in 1910 when it was well past September in Glasgow. Despite looking as if she’s waiting for her children to come home from school, Alice has just turned fifteen.
While the bulky school uniform and cross-legged posture reveal little of her physically, I like to think this portrait tells us quite a lot about Alice as a teenager. She has taken great care with her appearance and her off-camera gaze, which calls attention to her creamy complexion and her partly open mouth. But is she expressing apology, surprise, boredom or impatience? Maybe it’s just the awkwardness of not knowing how to relax in front of a camera, or how to be oneself in the careful quiet of the portrait photographer’s studio. How staged and formal Alice’s sombre comportment seems when you think of
