Atlantic Shift by Emily Barr

Author:Emily Barr
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780755381647
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2010-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

chapter fourteen

The next day

I spend the morning taking my hangover out on my cello. I bash my way through every scale - major, minor and chromatic - and every arpeggio. I work my way through dull studies that I normally ignore in favour of the more interesting pieces from the repertoire. I play notes, mechanically, to improve my technique. I do bowing exercises, and repeat them over and over again. I use the whole bow and half a bow, play staccato and legato, with slurred and detached bowing. I dread to think what it’s like for poor Sonia, who is attempting to mark a pile of essays, to have to listen to this turgid rubbish. This is the way I should practise every day. I don’t think I could bear to be this aggressive to my poor instrument more than once in a blue moon.

I am sitting on Howard’s work chair, in the room I have now almost completely colonised. He doesn’t use his study any more. He works, when he has to, at the kitchen table, like a schoolboy doing his homework. Howard’s study is now called ‘Evie’s room’. My clothes hang from shelves in his bookcases, obscuring his library. My toiletries occupy every space on his desk. All his stationery has been shoved into a drawer. I have taken up residence here, but I know I can’t stay long.

I am doing this intense practice partly to fill my mind with the mechanics of my trade, but also because when I picked the cello up this morning, I was terrifyingly bad. I was, in fact, atrocious. I didn’t practise yesterday, or the day before, and only briefly the day before that. On the day I arrived, I bashed out a quick rendition of ‘The Swan’, which is taking the place in my repertoire previously occupied by the Bach suite. That was for Sonia’s AA friends, who were having a Virgin Mary party.

I have neglected the instrument lately, and that is the one thing I cannot afford to do. If the cello goes, my livelihood goes with it. I am nothing without it. I would have to get a job, and I am not qualified to do anything. I have a first-class music degree from nine years ago. The only thing you can do with that, apart from music, is teach. I would be a diabolical teacher. I know I could never concentrate on my pupils. I would want to show off to them, all the time.

Until the Easter of the final year of my degree, I assumed that teaching was my destiny. I didn’t particularly want to do it, but I wanted to keep playing, and couldn’t see any other way. About half the people on my course were thinking the same thing. There must be a lot of terrible music teachers about, for this reason, and I would have been one of them. Then something happened that almost made me believe in God. I haven’t had a proper job since then.

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