This \u2018memoir\u2019 describes the weekend before I actually went to Jamaica Plains in Boston and had my informative sessions with Charles, through Kurt Leland.\u00a0 Ronald and I had crossed from Boston by ferry to Hull where early March was in-between seasons and too early for tourists.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The guest house was at the seaside, and heavy mist was rolling in towards the rambling house behind the dunes.<\/p>\n
She is a creative and eclectic person\u00a0 and has made an \u2018installation\u2019 out of each room in the guest house.\u00a0 There was plenty of kitsch around including a leopard-skin- covered billiard table, and a mixture of family memories framed on the walls.\u00a0 I find myself wondering if they are hers or belong to other families which she found in brocantes<\/em>, where she liked the frames or the fading sepia tones or the faces.\u00a0 I feel it is the latter.<\/p>\n Pam reminds me of a bird, fragile and vulnerable.\u00a0 She lives alone and appears a bit distracted.\u00a0 She is pretty.\u00a0 I find her looking sideways at Ronald in a particular way, recognisable to me.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n We have different reasons, Ronald and I, as we usually do, so I let him reply first.\u00a0 He explains simply about the meetings he will have in New York concerning the promotion of the Geneva Declaration.\u00a0 He is patient with pretty American women.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n \u2018What happens when you play\u2019?\u00a0 she asks, ‘There is an old piano down the corridor\u2019.\u00a0 We have had several glasses of wine over dinner, \u2018Sometimes, something rather powerful,\u2019 I reply.\u00a0 She leads us with a candle past rows of photographs and portraits of other people\u2019s families to the room where an old grand piano stands in the corner.<\/p>\n The scene:<\/p>\n I am seated at the piano in the small music room.\u00a0 Not much light, except from the candles.\u00a0 The brown antique piano has clearly not been tuned or played for ages.\u00a0 The first notes sound like a honky-tonk piano.\u00a0 It will need to breathe.\u00a0 Ronald is seated behind me next to Pam on a black leather couch.\u00a0 I start to play, gently at first, feeling the tension.\u00a0 The music begins to reflect and express something in the air.\u00a0 I feel myself going into my zone and the music is welling up.\u00a0 I play and play \u2013 with passion, oblivious of the pair on the couch.\u00a0 But then I become conscious of Ronald getting up and starting to move around the room, behind his small video camera.\u00a0 He is a good cameraman and knows what he is doing.\u00a0 He is capturing the atmosphere, the music and these moments with me.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The following is \u2018the scene from another perspective\u2019 \u2013 Pam\u2019s.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n 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?\u00a0 Who are they?\u00a0 A woman and a man, attractive \u2013 very.\u00a0 And I realise I have been hosting mediocre men in recent months\u00a0 on my pool table, in my bed, in my confidences.\u00a0 It feels somehow tacky.\u00a0 I am sensing something more, between these two.\u00a0 Something precious I have not experienced.\u00a0 I am disappointed.<\/p>\n And at the meal this evening, they talked and shared and laughed in complicity and I learnt that she, the pianist, is celibate!\u00a0 How can she be? With this desirable man?\u00a0 Why is she celibate?\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to believe.\u00a0 Because, when she played my old piano, it was as if she was making love to it.\u00a0 The piano has never been played on or responded like that.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 I can feel it.\u00a0 The male in him is seated beside me, responding to my attractive feminine. I am exuding it and can feel us communicating.\u00a0 And her music is expressing this desire, which I am feeling acutely.\u00a0 Surely, he feels this?<\/p>\n Yet, now he suddenly gets up and focuses all his attention on her with a small camera.\u00a0 He is covering her movements at the piano, her back to us moving in and out, and into the piano.\u00a0 It is very compelling to watch.\u00a0 I am amazed at how his attention shifted from our seduction… my seduction…to examine her through the lens.\u00a0 His breathing is palpable.<\/p>\n What am I witnessing?\u00a0 It\u2019s as if she is making love to him through the piano and he is making love to her through the lens of his camera!\u00a0 And at the end of this scene on the video, I am merely a shadowy presence in the background.\u00a0 it\u2019s all about her hands and the music.[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n But at dinner he said he is not celibate!\u00a0 What will happen tonight when they climb into the four poster bed in the room I\u2019ve settled them in?<\/p>\n I will lie awake, listening, for his footsteps… all night.<\/p>\n