Foreigners, Drunks and Babies Read online

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, why then are they so unrelated to the phrases you were given?’

  ‘I didn’t think they had to be.’

  ‘Of course they do, John, and if you sit the Grade they won’t only be looking for mechanical accuracy, but considering the answers for their melodic qualities too, as you very well know.’

  Miss Austin sets some more theory exercises for homework, and continues by asking the dreaded question. ‘How have you managed with the pieces we looked at last week?’

  This, as you also well know, is the invitation to play them. You place your music bag against the side of the piano, and, taking out ‘Home, home on the range’ as instructed, secure it to the music stand with the swivelling brass pins and think of D major.

  Cupping your hands over the keys as if you were holding an orange upside down, just as you’ve been shown, you strike the opening chords in the treble and bass, then follow them too rapidly with the tune over the rest of the opening bar, so that there is what seems an interminable pause as your fingers in the left hand search among the remoter black notes for the sharps.

  Striking the chord at the next bar’s opening, the harsh dissonance produces an audible sigh from Miss Austin and the correction: ‘C sharp!’

  ‘Sorry,’ you say, and glance back up at the score. ‘Oh, yes.’

  You try the chord again with better results; then there’s another ringing silence; and so it continues into the next bar, where, like a show-jumper’s horse refusing the fences, your hands lose you time at each co-ordination of the one with the other, your fingers and eyes desperately scanning the unfamiliar music for directions.

  After the cowboy song, Miss Austin asks you to execute ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer’.

  Now she’s setting the metronome on you. As the mechanism swings the weighted rod ticking back and forth, you begin to panic and sweat. Your hands dither rapidly over the notes; no time to correct the discords now, you crash to the end of the tune.

  But then the peace is quickly broken into by Miss Austin saying, ‘So just how much practice have you done this week?’

  You’re running over in your mind the much-practised answers to this expected question, when you feel your nose begin to run, and sniff.

  ‘Very well,’ says your music teacher, ‘let’s try the piece we’ve been looking at in the Grade One score.’

  You feel your limbs ungainly and sticky as you reach over the side of the piano stool and into your music bag. The scores rearranged and turned down at the right page, you set off into the most rudimentary classical piece set by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music for that year.

  With the prospect of an exam in mind you can focus your efforts that bit more, and have actually played this piece two or three times. There are shorter pauses for note-finding, much less discord; but as your eyes and hands make their uncertain way along the staves and keys you feel your nose running again, and your sniffs begin to divide the music with almost the regularity of bar lines. Sometimes you have to sniff during rests, and the noise seems to fill the Austins’ sitting room with a resonance and pitch more offensive than any discord on her pianoforte.

  ‘Stop!’ Miss Austin calls. ‘Please, John, please, before you go any further, will you blow your nose?’

  But you know there’s no point feeling in your trouser pockets, for there is no handkerchief there.

  ‘Don’t you have a handkerchief?’ Miss Austin asks, after you’ve sat motionless a moment.

  Hot to the roots of your hair, you sheepishly shake your head, at which Miss Austin finds a square of thin white cloth from the sideboard and hands it to you.

  ‘Now don’t ever come to one of my lessons without a handkerchief again.’

  You blow your nose with a brass-instrument sound.

  ‘I don’t know … I just don’t know,’ Miss Austin is repeating to herself. ‘I’ve tried everything with you, John. I’ve given you good tunes to play, instead of the scales and exercises my other pupils manage perfectly well with, but still you don’t try. You don’t want to learn to play the piano, do you?’

  There is no answer, and Miss Austin needs no reply.

  ‘You know your parents want you to learn; I’ve spoken to them about you, about how you just don’t practise enough, don’t take the instrument seriously. You’re wasting your time, and you’re wasting mine. I’ve listened to this shambles week after week, John. Haven’t you ever thought how much money your parents have spent on your lessons? If you don’t practise there’s absolutely no point coming at all. It’s a waste of your father’s good money.’

  Miss Austin is speechless: she has no more to say. And you can make no answer, it’s true. So Miss Austin relents once again, as she’s done so many times before.

  ‘I won’t set you any new pieces,’ she says, more calmly now, ‘but don’t come back next week without preparing those you can’t play, properly, mind.’

  You nod, conscious that there’s little else left to endure.

  Her next pupil hasn’t arrived yet, but Miss Austin shows you to the door. At the threshold you catch a gust of cold wind from the darkened street. It’s a relief to be out into the air as the door shuts behind you. The phlegm’s in your nostrils again, and you loudly sniff as you cross the road – smiling, unabashed.

  ‘Dad, would it be possible for me to give up the piano?’ you ask before leaving for school one morning.

  ‘Haven’t we had this out already?’

  ‘But Dad, I just don’t seem to be improving at all.’

  ‘And we know why that is, don’t we?’ he comes back.

  ‘But I’ve no ear for music, Dad.’

  ‘You know that isn’t true, John; you may not have perfect pitch, like Andrew, but it’s perfectly good enough.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be a saving if I gave it up though?’

  ‘No, it would be a waste of the money we’ve already spent on your lessons so far.’

  ‘Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to learn to play the piano, anyway,’ you find yourself saying in a sulky, lowered tone.

  ‘Put that pet lip away, John, dear,’ your mum says.

  ‘Nobody asked me when I was a boy if I wanted to learn the piano,’ your dad continues, ‘and I regret it now. I always will. And you will too if you don’t take the opportunity that’s offered you. Practise more. You’ll enjoy it more. And no more buts.’

  ‘But Dad, you’re always going on about how you’d like to have learnt, so why don’t you?’

  ‘Well,’ Dad says, and pauses, ‘it’s very much more difficult to learn when you’re my age. Your fingers have grown stiff. It’s too late for me now, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And I’m afraid you’ll be late too, if you don’t get a move on,’ Mum says, rising from the breakfast table. ‘Do you want another piece of toast, Bob?’

  ‘No,’ says your dad abruptly.

  Your mum gets up and begins to pile the empty breakfast plates on a large wooden tray.

  ‘So what’s got into you today?’ she mumbles as her husband leaves the room.

  It seems, however, that it isn’t too late for your dad. Encouraged by your mum and the friends with whom they perform madrigals, he becomes the third member of the family to have music lessons with Miss Austin.

  He practises more than you boys, finding more time from much less to spare. Where you play with a lazy hammering style, indicating, if further indication were needed, a resistance that overrides your formal submission to the routine, your dad sits at the piano with a purposeful upright posture. He exercises his fingers, and holds them carefully over the keys like a cub reporter learning to touch type. He makes steady progress over time, and seems pleased.

  Each Thursday evening, a little before seven o’clock, he leaves the vicarage and walks down St Catherine’s Street, stepping out firmly in the gathering dusk over the cobbles that have detached themselves from the crumbling road. He turns down the flights of steps and quickens his pace, though ca
reful not to slip or fall.

  As he passes Albert Hughes’s old house, likely your dad will remember the Sunday morning he knocked on its front door immediately after early communion, when, for the first time in his years at St Catherine’s, Albert hadn’t been in his usual pew. Receiving no answer on repeatedly clattering the knocker in the sleeping street, and kneeling down to peer through the letterbox, he’ll have seen that pure white head of hair resting at the foot of the stairs. Albert Hughes had died instantly of a heart attack, at the top, and tumbled down, so that when your dad climbed over the yard wall and broke in through the scullery window he found Albert’s face fixed by rigor mortis in the squashed and flattened shape of someone asleep on a very hard surface, a shape it had never had in life, with cold blue bruising and a broken nose whose pain the people’s warden of the parish had never felt.

  Your dad’s not the kind of vicar who likes to wear his clerical collar at all times. Of course he believes he has a calling. But there are some clergymen, he says, smiling, who even wear their dog collars in bed. At weekends and on holidays he prefers striped shirts, loose jackets, slacks, hand-knitted pullovers, and in winter a Russian-style fur hat and a Ganex mac. During the war and on into the fifties he smoked, but about the time Go with Labour posters appeared around the parish, he had taken to a pipe.

  One summer afternoon, in search of some Mild Virginia when on holiday on the Isle of Wight, your dad had wandered into a tiny tobacconist’s. You followed him some way behind, standing apart from your dad and looking round for the war comics. There weren’t any. This was the wrong kind of shop.

  When you entered, a curious hush had fallen on the empty premises, and then there’s a whispering between the old couple behind the counter.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ you hear the lady say.

  ‘Mr Wilson, it’s an honour to meet you. You’re here on holiday? You deserve it, the job you’re doing …’

  Your dad looks puzzled; then his face assumes a genial smile. You hear your father apologize for not being the great man who the tobacconists imagined had deigned to enter their humble premises. Your dad buys an extra packet of pipe cleaners, as if in compensation.

  ‘They need new glasses,’ Dad says, as you walk back towards the caravan site. ‘They thought I was the prime minister, of all things.’

  It was not the only thing you learned about your dad on that holiday. As the family toured the countryside thereabouts, your mum had grown restless and somehow irritated.

  ‘Your dad’s enjoying revisiting his past,’ she says one afternoon.

  Lance-bombardier Jones, as he then was, had been stationed in an observation post at The Needles during the Battle of Britain. He was attached to a coastal battery.

  ‘Your dad had some floosie here,’ says Mum, as if jealous of her husband’s life before she knew him. ‘What was she called, Bob – Gillian or Glynis or Susan, was it?’

  ‘Hilary.’

  You glance up towards the front passenger seat and see your mother take off her glasses to wipe some perspiration from her nose and eyes. Gazing at the back of her head, you’re suddenly aware that she might have been someone else. Well, if she had been, so would you, wouldn’t you?

  ‘What happened, Dad? Where is she now?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ your dad says. ‘I was posted to Scotland. I never saw her again.’

  It rained almost every day of the two weeks you spent in that caravan, perched on a cliff above the chines and beaches beyond Freshwater. The rhythmic beating of the heavy droplets on the metal roof had driven the family to distraction. You and Andrew would grow restless after playing hand after hand of cards with Mum, then wrestle with each other for something to do.

  ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might,’ you begin to sing. ‘Lay hold on life and it shall be …’

  Your dad’s twenty-minute sermon at an end, the congregation getting to their feet, Mr Coleman would strike the first few organ chords. Your mum would be standing between you two boys. You find the page and, just as the hymn is about to begin, glance up at your dad in black cassock and white surplice. Your dad seems to smile, as if at peace in his mind.

  There in the caravan those struggles between you and Andrew would spill the fifty-two cards all over the floor. Dad’s reading a book called Honest to God.

  ‘Give it a rest, boys, will you?’ he asks, the first in a crescendo-ing series of requests and imperatives. Then, nothing prevailing, he would lay hold on life by the scruff of the neck and crown the pair of you.

  But now, as he descends the shadowy steps, your dad’s hands are casually thrust into his sports jacket, some papers tucked under his arm. He’s wearing an Aran sweater and mauve rowing scarf. Reaching the bottom of Burkett Bank and crossing the larger of the two main roads, he might be seen to knock at one of the black front doors on the far side, down from the haulage contractors, the dental technicians, and the handicapped people’s workshop. There might still be enough light remaining to catch a glimpse of the young redheaded Catholic girl who lives there. She is opening the door and inviting him in.

  Under the amber streetlamps, returning by the same route an hour or so later, your dad seems much younger than his forty-something years. His hair is dark and wavy, receding at the temples, and greying a little above the ears – which some of the ladies of the parish say makes the vicar look rather distinguished. He is slight of build, but beginning to put on weight. His eyes are large and blue, deep-set; he has a small, soft mouth; and, as more often than not with the clergy these days, he’s clean-shaven.

  His views tend towards the liberal wing of the Church of England, as any of his parishioners will tell you. He’s offered houseroom in his vast vicarage to unmarried girls who’ve got themselves in trouble and been turned out by their families. He’s the chaplain of an institution that takes scores of them in until the little mites have been born and orphaned off. He mocks with his tone of voice those who hate the sin but love the sinner. He can talk for twenty minutes at a time about the differences between two words in the original language of the Bible for love, which is a problem, he says, because though they mean different things, unlike the Greeks, we only have the one word for love, which is ‘love’. He has given sermons on Mary Magdalene anointing the feet of the Saviour with her precious ointment. And once he went so far as to tell his congregation that the most important story in the Bible is the one about the woman taken in adultery. He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.

  One evening, a few months later, Jack Halsey, the vicar’s warden at St Catherine’s, opens the vestry door and steps inside. He has emerged from the semi-darkness of the aisle, lit only by moonlight casting faint traces of the stained glass saints onto the trodden-smooth stone that lies unevenly where mining subsidence had disturbed the church foundations. Jack blinks as he enters the glare of an electric light bulb’s aureole.

  Your dad’s sitting at his desk, with his back to the vestry door, busy filling in the details of engaged couples on a heap of marriage certificates. Above his head two tall Norman-style Victorian windows have been slotted into the wall; but the clarity of the sky tonight is concealed by the dust that forms a skein over the small glass panes, and the iron mesh on the outside of the windows, there to thwart the vandals.

  As his eyes adjust to the vestry light, Jack Halsey takes in the familiar musty surroundings in which his vicar is inscribing Christian names, surnames, professions, and parishes. On the walls above him, photographs of vicars since 1843 look on impassively as the present incumbent scribes on in their midst. The changing styles of clerical facial attitude are there displayed, or perhaps the photographer’s art, which can readily be identified in their frames hung side by side on the dark brown painted stonework.

  A resolute formality, whiskers or a beard, and a very fixed look have given way steadily to the slight warmth and even the ready smile of more recent men. The tints of the photographs have shifted from a faded smoky sepia, through watery greys
, to the strong blacks, differentiated greys and whites in the portrait of Canon Abrahams, the previous incumbent, and there, smaller, a photograph in muted colour with Robert Jones 1962— inscribed beneath it.

  Beside these mementoes of occupancy there is a print of Durer’s silverpoint ‘Hands clasped in prayer’ and a soft-focus painting of a woman’s profile. She is clad in a red hood.

  ‘Hello, vicar.’

  Jack Halsey announces himself in a lowered tone, conscious that his presence might startle the vicar, who has not looked up from his clerical duties.

  ‘Hello, Jack,’ echoes your dad without turning his head. ‘I must get these finished before Saturday.’

  Jack and his wife Eileen get on well with the vicar’s family; their sons, David and Ian, are in the same classes as you and Andrew at St Catherine’s Church of England School. The four of you play out together. Jack and your dad have their differences, it’s true, but Eileen’s husband has agreed it’s a good thing for her to take up teaching again now the boys are old enough to be left, and she’s wanted to so very much.

  ‘Can I have a word with you, Bob?’

  ‘Indeed you can.’

  Your dad abandons his writing for the moment and turns his chair around to face his warden, who is standing a little uncomfortably in the dark of the doorway. Jack sits down in an adjacent chair after shutting the vestry door.

  ‘I’ve had the estimates from Rushworth’s,’ the vicar’s warden begins, ‘and it seems the organ pipes alone will set us back somewhere in the region of a thousand pounds.’

  ‘Yes,’ your dad says, ‘it needs doing though. The tone’s distorted by the dirt, a hundred years of it I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘We’ll meet it,’ Jack says. ‘The matter can be brought up at the next Parish Council meeting. Free-will offering won’t be enough, though; we’ll need a fellowship drive.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll suggest we employ a professional fund-raiser.’

  ‘You should that, vicar.’