17
IF I’D KNOWN THAT JANE AUSTEN had been a serious piano student as a teenager then perhaps I would have tried harder to enjoy Emma, which, to my profound irritation, was required reading for our final year of high school.
Although Austen was a much more accomplished musician than her creation Emma Woodhouse, she was not nearly as impressive at the keyboard as her most accomplished pianist, the enigmatic Jane Fairfax. Dedicated to her piano studies, Jane Fairfax was modest about her musicianship, and isolated by her beauty and talent. Though she always struck me as a significantly more intriguing character than Emma, in class I said nothing, by now superbly trained in the art of withholding a dissenting thought. In Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, the isolated but privileged Rachel Vinrace confesses her distaste for Jane Austen to a horrified Clarissa Dalloway: ‘She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait.’ I couldn’t have agreed more. I held so many such thoughts that I felt it essential to share none of them. Listening to the incessant torrent of contrariness in my head made it all but impossible for me to hear anything else clearly.
I failed utterly to see what enchanted my peers about Emma Woodhouse. I thought she was a self-satisfied know-it-all, a spoiled daddy’s girl held in undeserved high esteem by a tiny claustrophobic community, and who gets everything she wants. Blind to the parallels between my own privileged existence and that of Austen’s heroine, I dismissed Emma as romantic pap. I choked on the limited options available to women in the first years of the nineteenth century, confused as to why we were reading about them in the latter decades of the twentieth.
Of all the things that bored me about the novel, what bothered me most was its obsession with marriage. The girls in my English class who had swooned over Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice the year before were now gaga about Mr Knightley. Why were sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls in the late 1980s fantasising about marriage to a wealthy landowner, or to anyone? Marriage seemed to be the answer to almost any question the inhabitants of Austen’s novels could think of.
I was enormously relieved to discover, years later, that Ralph Waldo Emerson shared my concerns about Austen’s primary subject in his private notebook from the summer of 1861: ‘Never was life so pinched & narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, “Persuasion”, and “Pride & Prejudice”, is marriageableness; all that interests any character introduced is still this one, has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming?…Suicide is more respectable.’
Outside my classroom, a ferocious pairing-off was taking place that had nothing at all to do with wedlock. At North Sydney train station, the girls’ school girls looked at the boys’ school boys looking at them. I would glance up from the novel I was reading to observe them through the windows of the bus, which I had ridden alone from Circular Quay in order to avoid social persecution. The girls boarded the bus squealing over seismic social developments that had just taken place on the train or the station platform, chewing gum to offset the cigarette smoke, their chins bright with pash-rash.
I couldn’t wait to be rid of the lot of them. Looking down my nose at everybody else was a paltry substitute for self-esteem. I dreamed of the University of Sydney, where I imagined that interesting men who wanted to discuss books and music roamed the campus like bison on the prairie. Before that day came, I could fantasise about Vince Jones and his band of musical men.
I hurried down the steps to the Basement with my oldest friend, Daniela, hoping no one had observed us getting out of my father’s car. We were sixteen going on twenty-three—or at least, that’s how I liked to think of us. For some reason I regarded twenty-three as a magical age by which I would not only look my best but also have this growing-up thing all figured out and confidently be pursuing my highly successful adult life.
Because my father had dropped us off for tonight’s gig, Daniela’s dad would be picking us up. At 11 p.m. On a Sunday night. In the era before mobile phones, our suggested pick-up times were estimates at best. It took a few concerts before we understood that jazz clubs operated on a schedule that bore little relation to the advertised performance times, and none whatsoever to the needs of an overprotective parent.
We had come to the Basement to see Vince Jones: trumpet player, singer and composer. As teenagers, our musical tastes were more mature than the rest of us, as though we were baby giraffes whose long legs had to wait for the rest of their bodies to catch up. Admittedly, Daniela was the one with long legs; my emerging shape was closer to that of a double bass. Make that a cello.
It was so early in the evening that no one stood at the door collecting entry fees or looking out for horribly underage jazz fans. Once inside, we ordered Tia Marias with milk from bartenders who were kind enough not to laugh, and scoured the cosy venue for a seat with a view of the stage. Depending on how early we arrived at these gigs, we scored a bar stool each, one stool that we shared, or a dark corner of beer-stained carpet near the toilets, where we shifted our weight from one leg to the other while we waited up to two hours for the band to come on stage. When our Tia Maria budget was blown, we sipped water. Inside the Basement, H2O existed only in pricey sealed plastic bottles like a harbinger of the environmental future.
Vince Jones came to Sydney every three months or so, bringing with him several musicians who
