Chapter Four
Bach’s cello suites are part of Adelaide’s usual routine.
Warm up with scales, even though she doesn’t really need to, then a concerto or two or three.
They’re so familiar to her now she doesn’t need sheet music and that’s just as well, for she couldn’t find it if she did.
When she moved back to Australia she left some things behind in London, including sheet music she hadn’t glanced at for years.
Perhaps that was reckless – now that she’s begun her eighth decade, there’s a decent chance she will begin to lose her marbles and it might have been wise to keep the marbles close to hand just in case. It’s done now, though.
The light into her sitting room is soft and reassuring. Not the bright light of winter or the often punishing light of summer. It’s spring in Sydney and she’s missed it all these years of being abroad.
In the last few years of her career Adelaide played in chamber orchestras, the rough and tumble of full-sized companies too much for her ageing sensibilities.
Then even that work started to be offered to her less and less.
Retirement was inevitable, of course, and when she looks back she can see that it crept up on her.
At the time, however, it felt sudden. She was irrelevant in the world she had built around her talent and work ethic.
Sudden too was her feeling that she belonged at home.
She’d left Australia decades before and thought the country too provincial to hold her ever again.
Yet there she was, dreaming of the Sydney light and missing the harbourside suburb she grew up in.
So back she came, to the country that had transformed itself in her absence.
To the city that had always been a sparkling jewel with its harbour and the foreshore covered in trees, and which had added tall buildings glinting in that light she missed.
The Opera House too had been built while she was abroad, and sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she’d just stayed: would the Sydney Opera House have been her workplace?
She would have loved that. Loved to have taken the ferry across the harbour and stepped inside that singular building each day.
Life is not for wondering, though – it’s for doing.
Wondering is wandering, her father used to say, and he didn’t have time for either.
He had to work too hard to look after them all, guarding his cash when the Great Depression came, living frugally as most others did but never out of work, luckily.
With her pot of tea by her side, and some Brahms on the stereo, Adelaide knows she should feel content, yet … has she ever? Does she deserve to?
The telephone rings and she picks it up quickly because it too is next to her.
‘Hello?’
‘Addy.’
Only one person calls her that.
‘Daph,’ she replies.
‘How’s tricks?’
Adelaide sighs, wanting to have something interesting to tell her lifelong friend. ‘Not so tricksy,’ she says.
‘Bored, are we?’
‘I could be less bored, yes.’
‘Grand. I have something that may help with that.’
‘Oh?’
There’s silence for a few seconds.
‘I know you don’t care about clothes,’ Daphne says.
‘That’s not true.’ Adelaide cares about the clothes she wears on her person, just not the clothes anyone else wears.
‘It’s somewhat true.’
Adelaide’s silence is the only sign of affirmation she will give.
‘I need a volunteer at the frock shop.’
‘Right.’ Adelaide is stalling, trying to come up with an excuse to –
‘Stop thinking of excuses,’ Daphne says, sounding amused. ‘It’s not as if you don’t have the time.’
This is an inescapable fact: Adelaide has had nothing but time since she moved back to Sydney, and there are only so many novels she can read, crosswords she can do and concerts she can go to at the Presbyterian Church.
She sighs again, more for effect than anything. ‘What would I have to do?’
‘The till,’ Daphne says. ‘And the occasional bit of sorting and putting things away.’
‘No fashion advice?’
There’s a noise that sounds like guffawing. ‘I’ll keep that job for myself,’ Daphne says. ‘You know I enjoy it.’
‘I do.’
‘How about Wednesdays – eleven to four?’
Today is Monday. Two days in which to prepare herself for something she’s never done before: retail work.
‘Fine.’
‘Fine, then. All right – see you Wednesday at eleven?’
‘Yes. Cheerio.’
‘Toodle-oo.’
As the call ends Adelaide wonders how she will get up the hill to where the shop is.
The tram used to run almost to the reserve opposite her house, making its perilous way down the hill to the beach.
She never needed it because she used to walk everywhere in this suburb, but she wishes it was there now, because walking up the incline of Raglan Street to Mosman Junction is beyond her aged legs.
She could drive, but it seems wasteful when it’s less than a kilometre away.
Something she can think about between now and Wednesday. Although not much today, as she has a reporter coming to speak to her.
At two o’clock the woman rings the doorbell. Susie, her name is. Susie Something-double-barrelled. Adelaide really should know but she only wrote down Susie and the date and time of the interview.
‘It’s a lovely home,’ the reporter says as she glances around the sitting room after Adelaide ushers her in.
‘Thank you,’ Adelaide says, and gestures to the couch.
‘I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me,’ Susie says.
She’s a sturdy-looking woman of the variety who favours a turtleneck in winter and a cowl neck in summer.
Strong-looking hands – probably a pianist. There must be some musical interest there, after all, for her to want to interview Adelaide.
‘All I have is time,’ Adelaide says lightly. ‘I’m surprised you wish to talk to me, though, considering I’m retired.’
‘Well, it’s just so special to have someone as esteemed as you back in Australia!’ Susie beams. ‘I said to the editor, “She’s a national treasure! We must have her in the magazine!”’ More beaming. ‘So here I am.’
The interview is for an arts magazine that probably only has two dozen subscribers around Adelaide’s own age, and Adelaide isn’t even one of them.
Perhaps that’s a little strange, her being an artist – as any successful musician is – and not interested in the arts per se.
Or maybe she’s just tired of them. Tired of that world of patrons with no talent paying to spend time with artists who would rather be anywhere than at a function right before they perform on opening night.
Tired of contracts that might not be renewed, and artistic directors who wanted to be first violin and never made it yet thought that meant they understood everything about life as a performer.
She cannot say any of this to Susie Double-Barrelled.
That’s because Susie DB is no doubt in thrall to the idea that playing in a symphony orchestra must be the pinnacle achievement of one’s life.
Adelaide has met many people like that, and she knows not to ruin things for them.
It’s nicer to let people have their dreams.
Besides, she definitely can’t tell Susie the truth: that the pinnacle achievement of her life was looking into the eyes of her newborn son, right before he was taken from her forever. That love she felt for him – she has chased it all over the world and never found it again.
Susie puts a tape recorder on the coffee table that sits between them.
‘I hope you don’t mind me recording,’ she says. ‘My shorthand is awful. This is the best way to ensure I quote you correctly.’
Adelaide had offered tea or coffee or water when Susie arrived but the reporter had demurred.
Now Adelaide can see it’s because she has her hands full trying to start the interview: checking the tape recorder is working, checking it again, pulling out a notepad and two pencils – ‘In case one breaks!’ beam beam – and moving her handbag three times. A nervous sort, as Daphne might say.
Once the interview starts, however, it flows quite well. Susie asks about Adelaide’s upbringing, and how she came to play cello.
Adelaide mentions that her brother, Louis, played it first and didn’t stick with it, but her parents had gone to the expense of buying him an instrument and didn’t want it to go to waste, so they suggested Adelaide take it up.
As a tall child, the cello felt natural to her.
A violin was puny. A viola not much better.
Brass instruments weren’t offered. Piano was fine: she learnt it, as did every girl she knew, but that was the reason she didn’t pursue it – she wasn’t going to be as good as some of the other girls.
She wanted to be good at something, and it turned out that something was the cello.
‘And your brother, where is he?’ says smiling Susie.
‘In Mosman. He never left.’
‘How lovely! And do you have any old chums who are still here?’
Adelaide hesitates. It feels like a wicked lie to not mention Daphne, but she isn’t sure if Daphne will want to have her name in an arts magazine.
‘Some,’ she says, although there isn’t more than one. ‘We catch up from time to time.’
Susie drops her head to one side. ‘But things change, don’t they?’ She nods slowly. ‘When you become a big success?’
If that’s where Susie wants to take this interview, Adelaide is not going to let her. Yes, some people were jealous and behaved strangely, but that happened everywhere, not just in Sydney.
‘I think it’s more the case that I was a very slack correspondent,’ she says. ‘And being so far away for so long didn’t help.’
Now the head tilts in the other direction. ‘And you’ve never married.’
It’s a statement, not a question, and it’s accompanied by more slow nods, as if Susie is trying to understand how this tragic thing came to pass.
‘No.’ Adelaide has no interest in telling a stranger the story.
‘Men were threatened by your success.’ Nod nod.
Adelaide wants to tell her that her head will snap off if she keeps doing it.
It’s not as if the subject of marriage hasn’t been broached before.
However, they couldn’t all be Joan Sutherland finding a dashing Richard Bonynge in the world of international orchestra and opera.
There weren’t many men in that arena, Adelaide had discovered, who wanted a woman who was also in it.
Not that she was looking for such a man.
She had been looking for no man at all. No woman either.
Her punishment for all that had happened was, she felt, to be alone.
There was a husband, once. A German violinist. Their marriage didn’t survive her move to Budapest to take up a new position and his decision to remain in Vienna where they had both been working.
It was for the best, Daphne told her in a letter.
If her husband wasn’t prepared to make the same accommodations for her that Adelaide had made for him – which was what Vienna had been – he wasn’t the right husband for her. And no one else had been after that.
That isn’t the story Susie wants to hear, though, Adelaide is sure. She wants Adelaide to say that she has sacrificed love for art, and that she now has her regrets but it’s too late.
I LOST MY HEART TO BACH AND CAN’T GET IT BACK! That may be the headline Susie is going for. She wouldn’t be the first. But Adelaide is ready for this line of enquiry.
‘I have no idea,’ she says, smiling thinly. ‘I didn’t ask them. Mainly I just left them behind when I moved from city to city and didn’t tell them my new address.’
Susie looks as shocked as Adelaide had hoped. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well.’
‘Who are your favourite composers?’ Adelaide asks. It’s a tactic she has used before to redirect a journalist.
There follows an exchange about Liszt and Brahms and Satie which Adelaide moderately enjoys, and by the time Susie Double-Barrelled is ready to leave she seems positively giddy.
‘What a fabulous chat,’ she says, squeezing Adelaide’s hand in farewell before walking slowly back down the uneven steps to the street, handbag flapping at her side.
‘Toodle-oo,’ Adelaide calls, then resists the urge to slam the door shut.
That will be, she decides, the last interview she ever gives in her life. She rewards herself for surviving it by putting on her favourite recording of ‘Clair de Lune’ and making a pot of tea. It’s the only remedy for assault-by-journalist.