Girls at the Piano

harnessed in this notation system since earliest childhood. Those five lines have been controlling her ever since she first began to think. She mustn’t think of anything but those five black lines. This grid system, together with her mother, has hamstrung her in an untearable net of directions, directives, precise commandments, like a rosy ham on a butcher’s hook. This provides security, and security creates fear of uncertainty. Erika is afraid that everything will remain as it is, and she is afraid that someday something could change.

Fearful of change, and terrified of things staying the same: that was me all over.

I looked at Richard. ‘Do you have an idea for how else we could notate music?’ I said. I wasn’t being facetious—part of me wondered if he had something of what was then called the idiot savant about him. Perhaps the peculiar wiring of his brain facilitated musical insights unavailable to those of us limited by more conventional neural pathways. If anyone could devise an alternative system, maybe it was him.

‘Not yet,’ he said, with no trace of irony.

Before I could embarrass myself further, Richard had two mini-fits in quick succession. ‘Let’s leave it for today,’ I said when he came to, relieved for an excuse to conclude the lesson.

I sent him back across the street with two pieces of homework: the first, to spend five minutes each day placing his right thumb on Middle C and stepping higher, note by note, using each finger of the right hand so as to familiarise himself with C, D, E, F and G; the second, to devise a new system of music notation. From behind the glass-panelled front door I watched him trudge up our short driveway to street level, cross the street and lean into the much steeper incline of the driveway to his home, which towered over ours. I’m not sure how his head felt, but mine was spinning.

Glancing out the kitchen window a few days later, I was astonished to spy Moby Dick through the floor-to-ceiling glass of Richard’s living room window. An enormous white grand piano sat becalmed on what I knew to be an ocean of thick pea-green carpet, its gleaming lid open in full sail. I had worried that Richard’s first lesson with me would also prove to be his last. Now, witnessing his parents’ extravagance, I knew my fears were unfounded.

I would never be a piano teacher.

23

ALICE’S LETTER FROM THE ADMIRALTY OFFICE, dated 5 March 1918, was exactly six months after her wedding. The letter informed Alice that her application for the Navy Separation Allowance had been rejected. The allowance consisted of a portion of a soldier’s pay, matched by the government, to provide for the dependents of those on active duty.

It’s not clear to me when Alice submitted her application. The Christmas season is hectic for a choirmistress in any year, but in late 1917 Alice would have had to rehearse two concert programs with choral parts she amended herself to counteract the imbalance in her two choirs. With the war still raging, she would have been missing—for a second year—most of her tenors, and was probably too heavy in the bass section, with more older men filling in the gaps of the younger ones away in service. Perhaps Alice waited until the new year to apply. Perhaps she hoped that she wouldn’t need it by then.

The letter declining her application, part of a bundle of correspondence my aunt Charlotte has kept for decades, contained an explanation, but it made no sense.

Madam,

With reference to your application for the grant of Navy separation allowance in respect of John Henry Edwards, Stoker Petty Officer 305849, I have to inform you that as it is reported that the man was already married and had a wife living when he went through a form of marriage with you in September last, it is regretted that you are not eligible for an allowance.

Your Certificate of Marriage is returned herewith.

Alice knew he’d been married. John had sat across from her at dinner and told her whole family the story. Ann had died in childbirth. The letter’s wording was ugly, but clearly there had been an administrative error.

James Taylor determined to get to the bottom of this bureaucratic puzzle for his daughter’s sake. Having expected that Alice would soon no longer represent a financial burden to him, James must have been outraged both for moral and financial reasons, and impatient for an answer. He sought the advice of George Bradley, a local solicitor.

The next six months unfolded between the pages of Mr Bradley’s correspondence with the Admiralty. At first, the office would provide no new information regarding their decision to decline Alice’s claim for support. They repeated their policy of not divulging additional details.

Admiralty,

10^th July 1918

Sir/

In reply to your letter of the 15^th ultimo, relative to the wife of John Henry Edwards, Stoker, Petty Officer, 305849, I have to inform you that it is regretted that the information asked for cannot be furnished.

I have to add that all the circumstances were fully investigated in connection with the claim to Navy Separation Allowance received from this Petty Officer’s present Allottee, and that the Department is satisfied that the facts are as represented in the letter addressed to her on the 5^th March last.

I am, Sir,

Your obedient Servant,

(sgd) Frank Porter,

pr Accountant-General of the Navy.

But Mr Bradley, who would not take no for an answer, wrote again to the Admiralty. This time he set out in greater detail the circumstances in which Alice May Morrison Edwards, née Taylor, found herself in the summer of 1918.

Let’s put ourselves in Alice’s shoes as she greets John Henry Edwards, the man she married last September at the church she grew up in, as he returns to Glasgow for a conjugal visit. It’s not clear exactly when he arrived, though from the correspondence I conclude it must have been in early summer. Did she greet him at the docks, or wait impatiently at home? Had she