Music and Freedom by Zoe Morrison

Author:Zoe Morrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2016-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

In August Edward didn’t go away as planned; he worked in the house instead. I stood in the morning at the sink, listening to him moving around upstairs, pleading with him in my head to leave, then pleading with God to make him, then hearing him walk down the stairs into his study.

After several days of tiptoeing around the house doing chores, the concerto roaring, soaring and crashing in my head, I could bear it no more. I crept into the front room, pressed the soft pedal down with my left foot, and started, very quietly, to play.

‘What are you doing?’ he shouted, exploding into the room, bending over me, jabbing me with his words. ‘I need quiet, absolute quiet!’ and he slammed back into the study.

I sat on the stool, heart thudding.

Later, I started to play on the table in the kitchen, the score in front of me, my fingers pummelling the wood. He came in.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ amused, and suddenly in a much better mood (perhaps his work was going well). He poured himself a glass of milk, drank it standing up.

‘You are working very hard,’ I said.

He kept drinking, looking out the window.

‘I’ll do some practice this evening,’ I said, ‘if that won’t disturb you terribly. You’ll remember I have this concert in October.’

He jerked around, put the glass down hard on the sink.

‘I am working hard,’ he hissed, ‘because I am about to deliver a highly confidential report to the government on unemployment.’

I started to feel hot.

‘What a worthwhile piece of work,’ I stammered. ‘How is it going?’

But he had left the room.

After that he disappeared up to London again and I could practise whenever I wanted, but by this point I was dispirited, and my anxiety was stratospheric. I found it hard to eat, sleep was sporadic, my dreams frightening. I vomited once or twice thinking about the performance; sometimes I found it hard to breathe when I sat at the piano. I felt inadequate when I played, as if no matter what I did I was always failing. I always felt rushed and was no longer thoughtful about the way I approached things or expended my energy. It was as if I were drowning in the work, as if it were a huge body of water and I was struggling upwards in vain, never breaking the surface.

When Edward came back and I knew that my practice would be curtailed again, I felt terror. I had spent the day of his return in a frenzy of house-cleaning, laundry, shopping, cooking. It was evening; he was reading the paper.

‘Edward, you know that concerto I —’

‘What? What concerto?’

I gaped.

‘The Rachmaninoff you —’

‘Christ,’ rustling the paper noisily, ‘you’re not still on about that are you?’

I would not let this put me off, I would not.

‘Edward, when you asked me to do it I said that I did not think it possible in the time frame. Since then I have been practising extremely hard, in the time that I have, and I’m very sorry to say this but the answer remains the same.

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