Alice, despite having been privy to the newlyweds’ decision, failed to muster any joy for her sister’s good fortune. Instead she chided herself for her feelings of loss and worried that she would never replace her only confidante. With Nance embarking on a new life, Alice could not help but wonder whether there would ever be someone special she might sing for in her own future.
13
IT WAS ALWAYS A RELIEF TO play the school Steinway, to feel the smooth keys beneath my fingertips and the sustain pedal beneath my right foot, and to hear the notes as they sound and know I produced them. Away from the piano, my flat chest and pale freckled skin made me feel invisible, but when I sat down at the instrument I somehow grew taller and more powerful in my seat, as if I were riding a horse sixteen hands high and could see and hear everything.
And did those feet in ancient times…
I didn’t mind playing ‘Jerusalem’ yet again. My job was straightforward: read the music, translate that through my fingertips into black and white keys as it was written, and play at a consistent speed so the whole school could sing along, and at a volume where everyone felt confident about raising their voices and keeping them aloft. I understood the piano—its vocabulary, its technical capabilities and its emotional range—and enjoyed the power at my fingertips. How easy it was to help the singers find the note they needed, so subtly they didn’t even know I was helping them, or to confuse them in an instant if I chose. If I were to stop suddenly, so would everybody else. Even Miss Jackson. I could induce an instant silence in hundreds of girls, though silence was always the last thing I wanted to hear. It was comforting to feel I could control one thing in my life, when so much of the rest of it was out of my hands. I was the captain of this ship, if only for a few precious minutes.
In 1832, when George Eliot was a thirteen-year-old student at Miss Franklin’s school at Coventry, she was considered ‘the best performer in the school’. But the teenaged Mary Anne Evans felt highly ambivalent about her skills at the piano. A recollection of her as a highly musical thirteen-year-old student describes her sensitivity as ‘painfully extreme’. She would dutifully perform for visitors ‘though suffering agonies from shyness and reluctance’, then ‘rush to her room and throw herself on the floor in an agony of tears’.47
My own extreme sensitivity was the opposite of Eliot’s, occurring away from the piano rather than at it. I might worry about making a mistake, but it was one I could cover, and later I would practise to ensure I’d never make it again. But away from the piano, one error could result in death of the irrevocable, social kind.
At the piano I glanced up at the most senior students, warbling from the upper storey of the assembly hall. I hoped that in a year or so, when I reached their age, I would have their curves as well as their confidence. It was all very well being able to perform a Mozart sonata from memory or play a new piece at first sight, but what did it matter if you weren’t invited to parties and didn’t know any boys? Earlier that year my friend Joanna had shunted me out of the way as soon as she met Matthew at one of those parties. With her boyfriend, her shoulder-length blonde hair and her eye-popping breasts, Joanna had entered a social orbit in which mysterious friends outside our school, who knew boys of similar ages to us, hosted parties that those boys attended. An orbit to which I, with my braces, monobrow and inconvenient location, was denied access.
Playing through ‘Jerusalem’ by rote, I thought about how pathetic and ugly I was. I couldn’t blame Joanna for tiring of me. While she had become a woman, I had remained stuck in girlhood, practising my piano. Joanna’s cheeks teemed with huge white-headed pimples, but Matthew still wanted to kiss her. There must be more to the business of being a woman than I knew. It couldn’t have been just my braces or hairy legs—something else must be wrong with me. Maybe it was because I had perfect pitch.
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
As Joanna never invited me over to her house anymore, and told me nothing about what she and Matthew did at weekends, I concluded that beside attending the occasional party they did nothing but have sex. In the words of ‘Jerusalem’, they had built their own green and pleasant land, in which his sword did everything in her hand but sleep. Leaving me with the ceaseless mental fight, a struggle that was both endless and already lost.
It wasn’t so long ago that Joanna and I had made each other laugh so hard that tears ran down our cheeks and we gasped for breath. When we swooned over Paul Weller and spent weekend afternoons repetitively playing his Style Council albums. When we watched crude Mel Brooks movies and invented sexual fantasies for our prim grey-haired English teacher Miss Anderson, whom we were convinced was still a virgin like we were.
Like I was.
Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was the girl after my own broken heart: ‘She spent whole hours at the pianoforte alternately singing and crying; her voice often totally suspended by her tears.’ When she wasn’t miserable at the piano, Marianne was miserable with a book in her hand: ‘In books too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present was certain of giving.’ At home the piano was the perfect location for me to
