The girl sitting at a piano was such a potent cultural theme that it was often caricatured. In 1880, the French illustrator and cartoonist Draner drew a woman playing the piano with her right hand, while stirring a pot on the stove with her left.16 The truth of this visual joke was that most girl pianists in the late nineteenth century were not budding minor aristocrats like Cecilia, but daughters of the working class like my grandmother Alice, who was born in Glasgow in 1895—girls who grew up knowing how to play the wooden spoons as well as the piano.
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WHEN SHE SMILED, MY GRANDMOTHER REVEALED a perfect set of false teeth the colour of old piano keys. But she deployed her smile unexpectedly, as an assassin might a concealed weapon. She lived at a place known as One Tree Point, on what in the late 1970s constituted the south-western fringe of Sydney. I dreaded having to visit her. Our epic journeys from Hunters Hill took place on the occasional Sundays when my father made us pancakes for breakfast, as if the sugar sprinkles would sweeten the lemon juice of that long car trip, and longer visit, still ahead.
I glanced at my mother across the kitchen table to read her face. She always sat in the same position, the north to my south. To be geographically accurate it was the other way around, but my sense of direction was then as undeveloped as the rest of me. From the way my mother briefly pressed her eyes closed and remained tight-lipped, I knew that she didn’t want to go either. Of my mother’s silence I heard every note.
After what felt like two hours we parked outside my grandmother’s self-contained cottage, one in a row of identical blood-red brick dwellings. It wasn’t far from the Padstow water tower, which looked like a UFO that had been covered in concrete to hide the bleeding obvious. My grandmother’s relocation from Yeoval, a small town in the central-west of New South Wales, had not been by choice. My younger brother and I clambered out of my father’s car. Arriving meant we were closer to the halfway point of our round trip.
Alice Lloyd opened her front door and stepped onto the tiny concrete landing. Despite her scuffed house slippers and her flesh-coloured pantyhose, thick enough to floss with, she effected a regal air. She waited for us to ascend the four steps to greet her, with the solemnity of Queen Elizabeth standing on the terrace at Buckingham Palace.
‘Go on, say hello,’ Dad said, urging me along the path towards her. At the car my brother clung like static to my mother’s skirt.
On the landing I stood on tiptoe to give the old lady a kiss. When she brushed her lips against my cheek they didn’t purse together or make any sound. Her greyish-white whiskers tickled as I inhaled the tobacco on her clothes. Instead of a hug she gripped my shoulder with one hand so that I could feel each bony finger. She scared the hell out of me, but I had no choice but to follow her inside, where the kettle was invariably on.
By the time the rest of my family joined us, a pot of tea ensconced inside a crocheted cosy sat on the kitchen table like a caffeinated Trojan horse. ‘I’ll be Mother,’ Alice said, standing to pour the strong black tea into floral-patterned china cups.
As Alice handed them out, each cup trembling slightly in its matching saucer, my eyes locked on her stained fingertips. Dad had explained that their dull mustard-yellow tinge was because she rolled her own cigarettes, but I didn’t understand why you would waste time rolling cigarettes if your aim was to smoke them.
‘Tell Granny your news,’ Dad prompted.
Embarrassed, I said, ‘I started learning the piano.’ There was no piano inside her cottage, even though Dad was always telling me how his mother had taught piano when he was a child. And I knew my father was adopted, so it wasn’t as if I was carrying on a family tradition by learning to play. But I could hardly bear to disappoint my parents. They had been married for eleven years before I showed up. From the moment of my late arrival, my job was to be agreeable at all times.
‘The pianner?’ Granny’s bushy white eyebrows shot up above her thick glasses. ‘That’s good,’ she said, firing off an unexpected smile. She took a sip of tea and sucked at her false teeth. ‘You know, the most important thing is to practise.’
A ticking wall clock punctuated the uncomfortable quiet that descended. Economy was a defining principle of conversation around the dinner table at home, and I understood there would be nothing further now. My father smiled at me and gave my leg a reassuring pat. He was disappointed, but perhaps not surprised. Neither he nor his sister, my aunt Charlotte, could play the piano. Their mother had taught other people’s children, but not her own.
When Alice died eighteen months later, in the winter of 1978, Dad took us on a long road trip to Yeoval. Those approaching via the Great Western Highway encountered a sign that announced the entrance to ‘The Greatest Little Town in the West’. Even then I regarded the claim with scepticism. The giveaways were the bullet holes riddling the metal placard and the absence of people. Long tufts of sun-bleached grass waved from lonely crossroads. Dilapidated wooden fences enclosed paddocks of wheat. The doors of a miniature weatherboard church were padlocked in a gesture more hopeful than defensive, with the most recent estimate of Yeoval’s population a tiny 293. The town resembled the abandoned set of a B-grade
