‘I am very sorry,’ Alice added for want of what, she realised, she really wanted to say. That her empathy was as bottomless as the ocean for this man who had known loss of an order she could hardly fathom, and that she felt petty for the small aggravations she nurtured. She stood to clear the plates, not just because she felt more secure when she was in motion, but also because her action signalled to Mr Edwards that she believed that life unfolds in small moments like this one, and that feeling for another person—much like the revelation of a new piece of music—was a matter of gradual understanding and restraint. To be working as a choirmistress and performing regularly, with a home to return to and people to love—these things suddenly appeared precious and fragile to her.
Mr Edwards pushed back his chair and stood too. ‘Please, Miss Taylor, let me help you,’ he said.
19
IN THE HUMID CONFINEMENT OF THE English Lit tutorial room, other first-year undergrads waxed lyrical about the Renaissance love poetry of Thomas Wyatt while I clung like mould to my vinyl chair. Our poodle-haired tutor smiled encouragement at his most frequent contributor, Jeremy, who needed no encouragement to start talking or, once he was underway, to continue.
‘It’s fascinating to imagine Wyatt writing these poems while travelling as an ambassador for Henry the Eighth,’ Jeremy said. He must have been paying attention during the interminable lectures by the dour Professor Johnson, whose ghostly intonation could lull the worst insomniac into a restful nap.
Jeremy wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I’d pictured the men I would meet on the University of Sydney campus. Although he was still a teenager, he dressed like a middle-aged academic in cardigans and spotless cream-coloured loafers. Not only had he read and understood every work set for tutorial discussion, but he had also conceived an opinion about it that he could express without hesitation in front of others. Jeremy spoke in complete sentences with the low volume and even tone of a guided meditation. His Shakespeare essay—composed entirely in iambic pentameter—had made him an instant star of the English department.
‘Extraordinary, to think Wyatt was translating Petrarch and writing the first sonnets in English,’ Jeremy said.
Extraordinary, I thought, to be able to think of anything to contribute to the conversation.
The tutor turned to the three or four of us who sat in stunned silence every week. ‘Does anyone else have something to say about Wyatt?’ The class understood his question to be rhetorical. I had nothing to share with the room but carbon dioxide.
Sitting in the tutorials or among hundreds of strangers in the cavernous lecture halls of the Wallace Theatre and the Merewether Building, I felt as useless and invisible as the first-year Arts student that I was. Considering myself a refugee from high school, I had assumed I was immigrating to a country where I at least spoke the language. I hadn’t anticipated an environment in which I would feel perpetually stupid, and have nothing to say and no language in which to articulate it. I had no lofty professional goal, no specific social justice cause burning inside my middle-class breast. All I had brought with me to classes was a generic passionate intensity and a fantasy about writing books and plays.
I was still studying the piano and working toward my diploma—the culmination of all those years of exams at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. I had locked myself to the piano stool for years, the key in my own hand. Now, aimlessly drifting about the campus, I was no longer chained to the instrument but still preferred not to stray far from it.
In Anton Chekhov’s 1898 story ‘Ionitch’, pianist Ekaterina Ivanovna meets up with her former suitor on her return to her home village after years of intensive training at the Moscow Conservatory. Ekaterina, whose nickname is Kitten, had rejected Ionitch’s marriage proposal because she loved music ‘frantically’ and wanted to be an artist. Back home again, she is more circumspect. ‘I was such a queer girl then,’ she confesses to Ionitch, who has long stopped thinking of her. ‘I imagined myself such a great pianist. Nowadays all young ladies play the piano, and I played, too, like everybody else, and there was nothing special about me.’
On the university campus, the specialist knowledge I’d gained through twelve years of serious piano study was redundant. I was like Ekaterina returning to her village, only in my case the village was neither a familiar environment nor the utopia I had impatiently craved throughout high school. When Ekaterina arrives in her village she discovers, like many a passionate traveller has done, that while she may have changed, everything else has not. My experience was the opposite of Kitten’s: I hadn’t changed at all, I had in fact gone nowhere, yet everything around me was different, foreign, frightening. Away from my piano, I was a useless nobody, aimless as the lost Kitten.
When a job came up at Mrs Dalton’s ballet school in Hunters Hill, I leapt. It was at this school, although inside a different church hall, that I had fumbled a year’s worth of jazz ballet steps as an uncoordinated six-year-old. Twelve years later, like Kitten returning to her Russian village, I was going back to dance classes—minus the leotard. Everything else remained unchanged. The elegant and reed-thin Mrs Dalton, who had struck fear into my tubby torso, was still teaching, still elegant, and only marginally less thin.
Twice a week for three hours I accompanied classes of girls while they learned to plié and pirouette, a dream part-time job that required no preparation. On campus I might have been clueless about Renaissance poetry, but I could still play a new piece at first sight. All I had to do was quickly identify appropriate music from the books piled on
