24 Concordia

One of Mama’s biggest failings is her basic insecurity. People who seem to know more, or lay down the law about anything they do happen to know, are considered by Mama to be awesome, especially if they are also well to do. How Aunt Aggie’s Uncle Joe came to be wealthier than all the others is a skeleton in her family cupboard and a constant annoyance to her.

According to Mama - and I have absolutely no evidence to go on - Joe was their mother’s favourite son. He took over the running of the farm after his father’s death. According to Mama he systematically ‘reorganised’ the paperwork so that he got the lion’s share of the property inheritance on her death. All of a sudden there were innumerable legally binding contracts signed by my grandmother, making over large and valuable chunks of property to him. I don’t think there was even an attempt to investigate these circumstances at the time, probably because there would have been no way of proving anything. Mama says he smuggled the contracts in underneath other papers that were to be signed, and Mama’s mother’s eyesight was not good, so she didn’t see what she was actually signing. Mama’s brother was nothing if not thorough.

Incidents like the one with my teeth don’t stop Mama from keeping up sporadic but distant contact with Auntie Aggie, maybe because the devil you know is still better than the devil you don’t.

But I don’t understand why she ever purported to respect her opinion. Even I can see that Auntie Aggie’s technique includes knowingly advising people to make wrong decisions.

Mama’s self-confidence must have been at rock bottom the day she allowed Aunt Aggie to have a go at my piano teacher, Mr Cranwell.

"You shouldn’t send her there," she tells Mama in sly, malicious tones. "I’ve heard rumours about him."

I am sent out of the room so that I can’t hear the details of these rumours, which I’m sure are untrue, but sure enough, I am instantly removed from Mr Cranwell’s class, and sent to the teacher Nan goes to, a woman named Celia Cross, who lives quite near them, but a bus-ride away for me in the opposite direction from Mr Cranwell.

Miss Cross, a spinster of indefinable age, was a moving-picture pianist in her youth, which suggests that she was at least pensionable, though she didn’t look it. Despite my desperation at not being allowed to go to Mr Cranwell again, I am prepared to make the best of things because I am quite intrigued to meet her.

Miss Cross doesn’t really suit her name. She is a jovial, likeable woman who lives in a suburban semi in a crescent on a hump looking over the main road, probably paid for by the proceeds of her ’film’ career. She has an elderly upright piano complete with candelabras and inlaid ivory flowers. The ancient yellow ivories rattle like typewriter keys when you press them and you have to work like an ox to get them to play for you at all. The piano is on high wheels though there is certainly nowhere to wheel it to in that cramped front room of hers, and she has to wind the piano stool up and down according to the height of her pupils. She herself stands behind you to correct things, and her heavily ringed fingers are as wide as the keys. Her personal decoration also includes a number of bangles, so there is a considerable amount of percussive accompaniment to her demonstrations.

When I have played my audition piece, a Scarlatti sonata, if I remember rightly, managing without the pedals because all of a sudden my legs are so short that I can’t put that much weight on my feet and keep my hands going at the same time, Miss Cross snatches the music from the stand and takes a long hard look at it.

"Why don’t you play something more entertaining?" she asks, and reaches out to a pile of ragged sheet music. She selects an old-fashioned waltz and jams it tightly behind the clips on the stand. Then she pushes me unceremoniously from the stool, winds it down, flops down onto it and gives her personal choice of music an airing. She sways and rolls her way through it, arching her right arm whenever it can leave the keys, and doubling the bass so that the uneven tuning becomes really excruciating. She doesn’t seem to hear the lack of tuning, though. She’s used to it. But I’m not. Our piano at home is tuned twice a year to a philharmonic 440 and Mama can hear exactly when it’s getting off a bit. Mr Cranwell had a baby grand, which was always perfectly in tune because he tuned it himself. Miss Cross plays at a mercilessly loud volume regardless of what the music says. The waltz ends abruptly, because she doesn’t slow down the conventional way – probably a relic from her cinematographic cliff-hanging days.

Barely turning her head she says "Like that!" and ends her performance with a sweeping arpeggio dragged with fingernails up and down the keys, followed by a tremolo accompanied by the extra loud rattle of her bracelets.

I can vividly picture her chasing Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy across the cinema screen. I have to admit that her playing is impressive.

She winds the piano stool up and pats it for me to sit down again.

"Never rest your hands anywhere," she advised me. "You have to keep your weight balanced."

I don’t understand that. I am average size for my age, even if she isn’t, and I have no intention of flapping my arms around. If she wants to teach me how to arch my arms like she does, she’s in for a surprise.

But I play the waltz for her. She turns pages for me to sight-read, and I end up playing everything which comes later in the book. My sight-reading for Mr Huxley stands me in good stead.

When I have finished, she is silent for a while. Then she says "What are you doing here girl? You play well enough for me."

She can’t be serious, but she is a bit speechless, I admit.

"Mama won’t let me go to Mr Cranwell anymore," I explain, tears of self-pity in my eyes.

"What a shame," she sympathizes. "Did he teach you to sight-read?"

"Oh, no," I said. "That’s Mr Huxley’s fault, and he’s dead."

I tell her about the misery of those early piano lessons with their constant threat of corporal punishment, and Mr Huxley’s sister stalking around outside the shack, and the pipe organ you could hear wheezing asthmatically from down the road as Mr Huxley gave his daily impression of Albert Schweitzer. Somehow, the sight-reading has become a habit, and I now spend all my pocket money on sheet music, because we have long since run out of stuff at home and the public library has very little to offer.

"So Mr Huxley is dead and Mr Cranwell only teaches classical music," I explain.

"Well, I like classical music, too," Miss Cross says. "I’ll lend you another nice book of waltzes to be going on with."

And so my first lesson with Miss Cross isn’t half the ordeal I expected it to be, and if Mama is astonished at my account of Miss Cross’s lesson, she doesn’t let on.

For the next few months I duly travel there every week and strum out her waltzes and polkas on the rattling instrument while she frolics around behind me in time to the music. She maintains that if she has to falter it means that I am not playing rhythmically. I suppose that is true, and I fervently hope she won’t falter in my direction because she would flatten me. I avoid rhythmic faux pas and my playing improves in leaps and bounds, though that is not what Aunt Aggie had in mind.