When my hands finally came to a stop I paused over the keys to emphasise that both performer and audience had reached the end of the sorry saga. I stood up to rapturous applause in which I heard the vibrato of relief.
After the concert, by the trestle tables laden with self-serve tea and coffee and Arnott’s Assorted biscuits, I smiled and shrugged at a succession of well-meaning people as they congratulated me on my death-defying performance. I responded on autopilot to the whos, hows, whys and whats from old women and older men. Why was Rotarianese so easy for me to speak, I wondered, when I struggled to talk about anything interesting with most girls my age? Because of my intensive piano study and furtive improvisations I often felt older than my peers, but I was too young to be so comfortable with the people who surrounded me now, who really were old. At fifteen I still hadn’t had a period or a boyfriend. Old could wait.
16
IN THE SUMMER OF 1917, THE light of Glasgow blinked weakly through the long days, as if even the sun were drained from the years of war. People ground down by fear and loss hungered for beauty, for a reminder that it was sometimes possible still to enjoy life. And so they turned out in their hundreds to hear again the familiar soprano voice that belonged to one of their own.
The audience at Windsor Halls Church was three times the size of that at any of Alice May Morrison Taylor’s recent concerts. Tonight the crowd included the soloist’s parents, whose enthusiasm for their daughter’s musicianship had dimmed in proportion to her growing public profile and critical regard. Nevertheless Mr and Mrs Taylor were proud to attend Alice’s recital this evening in the company of their son Vincent, home for a few weeks while HMS Mameluke underwent repairs in the nearby docks.
Singing in public, Alice still felt alive in a way that she did nowhere else. On stage she was in control of her voice, she knew her repertoire, and she felt prepared. She welcomed the jolts of anxiety that arrived before each performance as a reminder that singing for others was what she loved best. It was the one time in her life when she was the centre of attention. And while she avoided standing out from the crowd when she was among them, Alice felt completely at home on stage with all eyes trained upon her. There really was nothing like the presence of an audience.
Every time she walked onto a stage and stood silently while the polite welcome applause faded, Alice felt an almost erotic charge. The warm embrace of the spotlight. The undivided attention of strangers. The exquisite quiet just before the conductor lifted his baton, or her accompanist’s fingers touched the keyboard. Alice had grown up in an endless river of noise: her brothers’ scrabbling play inside the house, the clatter of cutlery and the percussion of pots and pans, and her father’s voice booming like a tuba from one end of the narrow tenement to the other. The 502 tram and horse-drawn carts rattling along Dumbarton Road, the distant toll of church bells, the piercing shrieks of trains. And the occasional bellowing of new ships from the Clyde as they departed for the shores of a war that seemed it would never end.
Some members of the audience, surveying the soprano’s modest home-made silk gown of pale grey—and not for the first time—might have wished she had found for herself a nice young man by now. But even had she been able to show off a waist and a charming smile, luck would still have been against her. Outside the measures of a music score, Alice’s timing was poor. So many of those eligible for the role of husband were either playing their part in the North Sea or casualties of battle. The lists of the dead and wounded of Partick parish weren’t long, but Alice knew some names well. Charlie Morrison, a childhood friend of her brother-in-law Richard. Jim, the older brother of Caroline Ridley, whom she knew from Stewartville school. The son of Robert Ritchie, the local butcher who hadn’t uttered a word since the telegram arrived. The healthy men of fighting age who weren’t away were either excused from service or busy building war ships down on the docks. And if there was one type of man Alice was not interested in, it was a man who had anything to do with ships.
At times, when the very air of Partick parish felt thick with grief, Alice had allowed herself to wonder what use it was to sing. She found it difficult to reconcile the words of worship her choir sang for the god who had allowed this war to begin—and who had let it continue for years—with the beauty and symmetry of the melodies and harmonies that supported them. A musical work had a beginning, a middle and an end. But not this war.
On stage, though, Alice found it easy to imagine herself in a different time and place. Covent Garden. Royal Albert Hall. The Paris Opera. Instead of selected highlights, performing a full production of Theodora to a musically knowledgeable and adoring audience. Despite Alice never having been someone’s sweetheart, the role of Theodora, the Christian martyr and lover of Didymus, had become her signature.
The respectful silence that dropped like a curtain when she opened her mouth was almost palpable. She imagined velvet draped around her, instead of the gown that she had sewn herself from a bolt of her former employer Mrs Rankin’s cheapest silk. In the warmth of the Windsor Halls spotlights, with the electric current running between her and the attentive bodies in their seats, while she sang passionately of love and enforced separations, it was easy for Alice to forget
