A Weekend in Hull
This ‘memoir’ describes the weekend before I actually went to Jamaica Plains in Boston and had my informative sessions with Charles, through Kurt Leland. Ronald and I had crossed from Boston by ferry to Hull where early March was in-between seasons and too early for tourists. The weather was blustery and the salt air invigorating as we were collected at the little harbour by Pam, our attractive host and guest house owner. The guest house was at the seaside, and heavy mist was rolling in towards the rambling house behind the dunes.
She is a creative and eclectic person and has made an ‘installation’ out of each room in the guest house. There was plenty of kitsch around including a leopard-skin- covered billiard table, and a mixture of family memories framed on the walls. I find myself wondering if they are hers or belong to other families which she found in brocantes, where she liked the frames or the fading sepia tones or the faces. I feel it is the latter.
Pam reminds me of a bird, fragile and vulnerable. She lives alone and appears a bit distracted. She is pretty. I find her looking sideways at Ronald in a particular way, recognisable to me. That evening over dinner she is curious, posing questions about our lives, where we come from and what has brought us to Hull at this time of year when the weather is so grim.
We have different reasons, Ronald and I, as we usually do, so I let him reply first. He explains simply about the meetings he will have in New York concerning the promotion of the Geneva Declaration. He is patient with pretty American women. I reply simply that I am hoping for some clarity around my music and will be meeting someone in Boston the following week who might throw some light on it.
‘What happens when you play’? she asks, ‘There is an old piano down the corridor’. We have had several glasses of wine over dinner, ‘Sometimes, something rather powerful,’ I reply. She leads us with a candle past rows of photographs and portraits of other people’s families to the room where an old grand piano stands in the corner.
The scene:
I am seated at the piano in the small music room. Not much light, except from the candles. The brown antique piano has clearly not been tuned or played for ages. The first notes sound like a honky-tonk piano. It will need to breathe. Ronald is seated behind me next to Pam on a black leather couch. I start to play, gently at first, feeling the tension. The music begins to reflect and express something in the air. I feel myself going into my zone and the music is welling up. I play and play – with passion, oblivious of the pair on the couch. But then I become conscious of Ronald getting up and starting to move around the room, behind his small video camera. He is a good cameraman and knows what he is doing. He is capturing the atmosphere, the music and these moments with me. I feel his closeness and hear his breathing as he focuses and zooms in on my hands and fingers on the keys and then zooms out taking in the scene and setting.
***
The following is ‘the scene from another perspective’ – Pam’s.[1]
Who are these people in my house? Come into my life for a weekend? Come from across the seas, filling my empty house and life with passion, music, affection, interest, stories of other lives and places? Who are they? A woman and a man, attractive – very. And I realise I have been hosting mediocre men in recent months on my pool table, in my bed, in my confidences. It feels somehow tacky. I am sensing something more, between these two. Something precious I have not experienced. I am disappointed.
And at the meal this evening, they talked and shared and laughed in complicity and I learnt that she, the pianist, is celibate! How can she be? With this desirable man? Why is she celibate? It’s hard to believe. Because, when she played my old piano, it was as if she was making love to it. The piano has never been played on or responded like that.
And then there is R, her husband of over 20 years, enigmatic, but honest and frank. He has been totally clear that his feelings for her reflect something beyond the physical. I can feel it. The male in him is seated beside me, responding to my attractive feminine. I am exuding it and can feel us communicating. And her music is expressing this desire, which I am feeling acutely. Surely, he feels this?
Yet, now he suddenly gets up and focuses all his attention on her with a small camera. He is covering her movements at the piano, her back to us moving in and out, and into the piano. It is very compelling to watch. I am amazed at how his attention shifted from our seduction… my seduction…to examine her through the lens. His breathing is palpable.
What am I witnessing? It’s as if she is making love to him through the piano and he is making love to her through the lens of his camera! And at the end of this scene on the video, I am merely a shadowy presence in the background. it’s all about her hands and the music.[2]
But at dinner he said he is not celibate! What will happen tonight when they climb into the four poster bed in the room I’ve settled them in?
I will lie awake, listening, for his footsteps… all night.
[1] Rewriting a scene from another’s perspective was an exercise during the writing workshop in the last week
of May. I am including it here for interest.
[2] The short evocative video which Ronald made during this evening in Hull is titled “Tuning a piano”.