Virginia Lloyd - Girls at the Piano

I felt pulled toward my grandmother by what little I knew and an urgent desire to find other parallels between our experiences as musical girls. I wanted to explore how our experiences reflected those of other girls drawn from the pages of history and fiction who had sat at the piano over the course of its history. I came to believe that setting aside Alices mask of old age might help me to understand my own voyage around the pianoand help me to find my way back.

Staring into the pianos black mirror was like seeing into the future, glimpsing the girl I would become, the girl who could play the piano and understand the world around her through her fingertips, and let her hands speak for her when she could not.

First published in 2018

Copyright Virginia Lloyd 2018

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ISBN 978 1 76029 777 0

eISBN 978 1 76063 586 2

Internal design by Romina Panetta

Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

Cover design: Romina Panetta

Cover illustration: Loui Jover, Her Sonata, courtesy Saatchi Art

for Nate

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that weI mean all human beingsare connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past

YOURE GOING TO HAVE TWO CHILDREN, a boy and a girl, the clairvoyant told my mother Pamela, when she was thirty-five and desperate for a baby. In Hunters Hill, a kind of Stepford-upon-Sydney, childlessness was next to godlessness. Especially after a decade of marriage.

It might have been 1968, but there were no outward signs of revolution or even social unrest in the leafy peninsula where the Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers flow into Sydney Harbour. All that awkward business was in the 1840s, when convicts escaping from nearby Cockatoo Island swam to shore and hid in the densely forested finger of land known as Moocooboola, or meeting of waters, to its original inhabitants. Despite the pill and the war in Vietnam, Hunters Hill was the peninsula that time forgot. John hunted and gathered, while Pam cooked and cleaned. When she wasnt doing either of those things, my mother attended meetings of the local chapter of the Young Wives club. One hundred years after the publication of Louisa May Alcotts Good Wives, these young married women were the living sequel to Little Women. But young is a more forgiving adjective for a wife than good. In real life, the one mistake a good wife could not make was that she be infertile. In desperation, Pamela followed the recommendation of her hairdresser, whom she consulted more regularly than any priest, and made an appointment with a clairvoyant.

I dont want you to speak, the clairvoyant said when she opened the door to her apartment, decked out in a flowing white caftan. Thats how I do business. I dont want you to give me any information whatsoever.

She ushered Pamela inside and they sat down across from each other at a square wooden table in an otherwise sparse room. Natural light seeped through drawn curtains.

You have no children, the clairvoyant announced, as if it were news to the good wife sitting across from her. Dont worry about it, dear, youre going to have two.

Pamelas eyes widened. She couldnt see how that would happen. None of her doctors had ever spoken with confidence about her chances of conceiving.

Youre going to have the girl first, then the boy three years later, the clairvoyant continued.

Enchanted by the authority of her prediction, my mother never imagined its every detail would come true. More than forty years later, though she struggles to remember what she did yesterday, my mother recalls the prescient womans exact words.

Theres one other thing you should know, she added, with a performers gift of timing. Your daughter is going to be very musical.

DO YOU STILL PLAY THE PIANO?

At my twentieth high school reunion, it was the only question anyone had for me. Nobody cared whether I was married or divorced, gay or straight; when I had left my home town of Sydney, or for how long I had lived in New York. The reunion coincided with a trip home, and curiosity about my former classmates got the better of me. Id had no contact with the vast majority of them since leaving school.

The truth was that I had been widowed more than three years earlier when my husband John died of cancer. I had moved to New York to try to figure out what to do with myself, and I still didnt have a clue. This wasnt the sort of self-portrait you could sketch after a quick hello and a youre looking well, even if you wanted to. Most peopleand especially those at a high school reunionwant executive summaries and concise answers. Unanswerable questions and existential dilemmas are anathema to the high school reunion, which relies on pithy anecdotes, funny stories and bad news of former classmates relayed with a dash of schadenfreude. Stories are everything at the school reunion, except when youve got the wrong kind to tell. Mine wasnt the sort of tale anyone wanted to hear, certainly not over a glass of bubbly and a tour of the schools new science and technology wing. Or perhaps they would love to hear about it, but from someone elseotherwise it would be too much like looking directly at the sun.

I felt pathetic at the preparations I had made to come face to brave face with other faces in their late thirties. Id carefully applied concealer, which usually lay dormant in the cupboard under the bathroom sink. Id put on a pair of particularly high heels to optimise the length of my legs, which after all these years I still wished were longer. Why I cared what these women thought about the length of my legs is beyond me. Id been worried that I would be more wrinkled than my peers, or the only one without a ring on my wedding finger. And appalled at myself for having those thoughts.

My former classmates and I agreed on the balminess of the October evening, how fabulous we all looked, and how we really were old girls now. The regrettable terminology of alumnae put me in mind of livestock trussed up for display. After twenty years, the dynamic remained unchanged: we were still women dressing up for each other.