Marianne Dashwood’s thoughts as she cried, played and read were purer than mine. The idea of sex fascinated and revolted me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The third verse of ‘Jerusalem’ was teeming with phallic references: a bow of burning gold, arrows of desire—even a spear, for goodness’ sake. It was amazing that Miss Jackson allowed us to sing the hymn at all. Did Joanna and Matthew do it in bed? Did they lie under the sheet or on top of the duvet? On a couch with an old towel laid down first, or in a secluded park under a blanket and a hollowed-out tree? When they kissed, how did they breathe? Wasn’t she afraid of becoming pregnant? How would you even put on a condom? Maybe she was on the pill. But how did she get to the doctor without her mother knowing? Did Matthew’s thingy stand up straight or stick out? Did she kiss it? If she did, didn’t it smell? How did they clean up all the goo that must go everywhere? In Dolly magazine I’d read references to a mysterious ‘wet patch’. It sounded disgusting.
After four verses, ‘Jerusalem’ finally came to an end. ‘Thank you, Victoria,’ Miss Jackson said. I should have been pleased at her mistaking me for someone else, yet again, but as much as I longed to disappear at the piano, I depended on it as the one thing that helped me to stand out. Our principal’s misattributed gratitude was as reliable as her admonitions against eating in public and applauding in church, activities that she considered equally vulgar. Just as well she wasn’t a mind-reader—she’d have had a conniption at my filthy imaginings.
In November 1838, after hearing an oratorio performed by the Choral Union in Coventry, George Eliot described her complicated feelings about being an accomplished musician in a letter to her dear friend and former teacher, the evangelical Miss Lewis. ‘It would not cost me any regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict worship,’ she began piously, though she immediately qualified her enjoyment: ‘nor can I think a pleasure that involves the devotion of all the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an expertness in so useless (at least in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred) an accomplishment, can be quite pure or elevating in its tendency’. A very wordy way of saying that to give pleasure by performing music is an accomplishment that takes god-like dedication and skill, but is pointless. That’s nothing if not ambivalent.
In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Elliot finds solitude and privacy at the piano while she accompanies others dancing (including Captain Wentworth, whose engagement she had broken off eight years earlier), ‘and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing in return but to be unobserved’. To be useful, and to be left alone: I suspect that was the true goal of my high school music career. This is where George Eliot got the wrong end of the stick about performing for an audience: it isn’t an appeal for attention, but rather a defensive strategy in which your instrument functions as an effective tool of border protection. The piano in fact affords you great privacy. At the piano you do not have to engage in conversation. You do not have to risk saying the wrong thing. You sit at your instrument for a reason; you are there for active purpose. Not to be looked at per se, as if you were posing awkwardly for your portrait.
Despite her rejection of me, I still believed reviving Joanna’s friendship to be a worthy goal. In his Letters to a Young Lady, Czerny wrote: ‘There is no higher satisfaction than in being able to distinguish one’s self before a large company, and in receiving an honourable acknowledgement of one’s diligence and talent.’ But Czerny was wrong. I had received a bucketload of honourable acknowledgement, but as far as I was concerned the higher satisfaction would be to have Joanna’s friendship again. And maybe a boyfriend.
14
IN MARCH 1914, ALICE MAY MORRISON Taylor won a First Class Certificate of Merit at the annual competition of the Scottish National Song Society, held in Glasgow. According to her certificate, she scored 90 out of a possible 100 for ‘quality, expression, time and tune, general affect, voice, expression, and general conception’. In her first outing at the competition the previous year, she had scored a mere 85. The quality of her singing made her eligible for the National Sangschaw, the competitive pinnacle of Scottish music, poetry and song; she came home with one gold and one silver medal.
Who can say what Alice’s parents made of her exemplary musicianship. But after repeated success in competition, and regular performances around Glasgow, she must have allowed herself to dare hope for something more than a job in Mrs Rankin’s haberdashery. She must by then have come to think of herself as a musician, feeling confident in her skills and expertise, and their usefulness to church choirs in her home town. Surely she would have aspired to a professional life in music. How else to explain the existence of this letter, written by her teacher, Frederick Hervey, dated 19 May 1914:
This letter certifies that Alice May Morrison Taylor has studied singing with me for the past two years, gaining first class
