A Brief Encounter
The acceptance that I’ll never play piano well has dawned and the love has gone. Last week I gave up my lessons and now I’m fretting. I feel adrift and I’m still trying to make sense of it . . .
A lifelong desire to play piano began way back. Maybe it was the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff in the original film with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, like some strange echo from pre-birth. Maybe it was David Lean’s amazing direction, those long poetic spaces between words that allowed the music to surge, and lift you to a place where it was only ever about the music. Whatever, that sense of an absence has lingered throughout my life. Then, years later I touched Chopin’s piano in a museum on the island of Majorca and the absence rekindled.
When I left work, friends gifted me piano lessons. The first step was to buy a piano. I went to Paisley – hiked up three levels of an old warehouse, each floor stacked to the moon with second-hand pianos, from rickety old uprights to huge concert-class Steinways, black-lacquered and mirror shiny. The scent of wood and beeswax hung in the air. It was like stepping into a cool, silent forest on a hot summer’s day. I suspected that unearthing the piano for me would be like hunting for a unicorn. The quest began. I lifted lids and tinkled a few keys. I tried every one. By level 2 I could still hear the tone and clarity of sound from a twenty five year old English-built Kemble far below on level 1, the 2nd piano I’d tried. Her voice was caught deep inside the spiral of my ear, and with each subsequent plonk on a piano’s keys, the balance of air would shift and it was her beautiful echo that rose to the surface. I kept going to level 3. Now I know, that like writers, every piano has its own unique voice. Three weeks later I brought her home.
From day one she graced the room with a new kind of elegance. Even now lifting the lid, touching the cool smoothness of her keys makes me happy. At first the cats would race from the room in horror as soon as the lid was lifted. But I accepted that I had to learn. I couldn’t even read music, but that would come with time – wouldn’t it? I’m a firm believer that if your desire to master something is strong enough, you’ll make it happen. It’s just about ‘faith.’ Yet, four years on, I’m overcome by a fugue, in a non-musical sense. Pianos now appear in my nightmares where I’m trying to play a simple piece and my useless fingers don’t work. The notes are sharp and discordant. My neighbours throw open their windows into the darkness to add their voices to the crescendo of wailing. I lie breathless and try to calm myself by chanting beautiful Italian words – largo, andante, allegro, ritardando . . . until I fall again into mindless sleep. Still, the hours leading up to my weekly piano lesson increasingly leave me feeling over-strung. Enough!
Last night before I switched off the hall light, I peeped through the glass door to the room where she sleeps. Moonlight rested on her mahogany form and she looked just like she always does, a listening friend waiting patiently for me; a friend who accepts that I have my flaws and suffers me just the same. Did you know that the word ‘piano’ is expressed as ‘two people whispering quietly’? So I smiled at her and said ‘goodnight.’ It’s a start. Maybe one day I’ll recite the final lines of Brief Encounter to her, ‘You’ve been a long way away. Thank you for coming back to me.’
She, will likely reply, ‘I never left.’