Milly Byrd’s first music lesson was almost her last. Her father had been assured that nuns were the best teachers and now she stood at the door of St Mary of the Angels convent with her music satchel with gold initials in her hand, waiting to be conducted into the presence of the Mother Superior.
“It doesn’t matter that you are a Protestant,” her father had told her. He thought the question would not arise and, if it did, a blank look might be the best response. Milly herself felt she had enough to cope with, climbing two flights of stairs behind a girl with a cardigan over her head. Outside Mother’s door she took a deep breath and knocked gently. There was silence, then a deep voice called, “Enter”.
There would be other music exams and other teachers in future but to cross the dark polished floor to the grand piano was as fearsome as walking on a lake. Her footsteps clattered and she thought she might fall. From the piano stool rose Mother Euphrosyne, face enclosed like a keyhole, with heavy beads at her waist. Milly looked into a pair of dark eyes and an expression she could not fathom. On top of the piano sat a metronome.
“I don’t think I can go back,” Milly said to her father that evening. It wasn’t anything that had been said but what was expected. Every minute was to be profitably used, practice and theory would go hand in hand, there would be no excuses. Milly had imagined her baby brother’s teething and that she sometimes walked him up and down to give her mother a break might excuse a faltering scale in C major. Before her hour was up she had her practice written down in a little notebook and a piece of music, ‘Clair du Lune’ by Debussy, cowered in her music case.
At the end of the term Mother Euphrosyne informed Milly that a selected few of her pupils would be taking part in a recital at the local radio station; a duet was proposed. By now Milly’s back was ramrod straight and her fingers curled over the keys like peonies. The black keys were so different to the white; they were moral and severe. Her fingers slid down black cliffs onto snow; the lowest and highest notes were in purdah, emitting sounds like growls and bells. She sat beside a spotty boy with glasses as they stumbled through ‘The Turkish March’. The metronome clicked and swung in 4/4 time. There was mention of exams.
Theory class was held on the top floor of the convent and another nun supervised. Sister Philomena was the opposite of Mother Euphrosyne. Quite often she left the room and some of the class made paper darts with manuscript paper or amused themselves by drawing moustaches on treble clefs. The room overlooked a courtyard and on one occasion Sister, who was short-sighted, mistook a greying mop for the convent cat and rushed downstairs. One afternoon she led them through the kitchen and gave then iced buns. At home her father watched while Milly played arpeggios. When visitors came she played ‘Für Elise’.
The piano Milly’s parents had bought made up in appearance for what it lacked in pedigree. It had a wooden instead of an iron frame but its case was maple and it was French polished. Mother Euphrosyne’s grand piano was a Bösendorfer and its keys had been broken in by decades of students. After three years when Milly’s piano was advertised for sale her mother put on an afternoon dress, dabbed perfume behind her ears, and charmed the first buyers who came. “She’s not really musical,” Milly had overheard her parents say and she wondered if they considered it a waste of money. Something else would be tried: tap dancing, the highland fling, amateur dramatics. Only Milly, pounding away at ‘Rustle of Spring’ for the nth time could know what she had learnt.
Came the day when the lessons with Mother Euphrosyne ceased. Shyly Milly produced her autograph book with different coloured pages: pale blue and green, daffodil yellow, and offered it to her. She had the book ribbon ready on a pale mauve page. The messages up to this point hovered between the overblown, decorated with love hearts, and the wise old owlish. Mother Euphrosyne took the book and regarded Milly seriously for a moment. “I don’t usually sign autograph books for Protestants,” she said. It was a matter of doctrine, not censure, and Milly, who had grown up considerably, was not offended. She felt it would be the gem of her collection. Stepping to a side table and seating herself Mother had written her last instruction: The Secret of Success: Work, Work, Work. Sister’
“Thank you,” Milly said, taking it back without reading it. Something private had passed between them. At home she put the autograph book in her handkerchief drawer. She decided there would be no more autographs; if anyone asked she would say the book was lost. Yet those harsh and bitter, yet somehow hopeful, words would stay with her forever.
At her co-ed high school Milly crosses a quad towards the music studios. A corridor divides clarinets and violins, the occasional viola or cello, but mainly room after room of pianos whose competing notes can be heard as well as the music teachers’ instructions when a door is opened and a flushed-faced pupil emerges. As well as lessons there are Music Appreciation classes during which most of the students use as a chance to sleep. They close their eyes to Brahms and Mozart, rousing choruses of Wagner and Puccini as they loll back on wooden chairs and pass notes between the rows. Once there was Haydn’s ‘Surprise Symphony’, expressing irritation. Haydn was sick of an inattentive audience, the teacher explains but doesn’t draw comparisons. A few students sit up straighter. At the term’s end they will sing ‘The Chorus of Hebrew Slaves’. What relevance does this have, Milly thinks. She still carries her old music satchel but now it contains a homework notebook, a Mars bar and an uneaten snack from lunch.
Music and the work it requires will not be for Milly. She will find Mother Euphrosyne’s work elsewhere. But she will take from it something more than a surrounding, more than an atmosphere. It is as though music has unleashed in her the image of Mother herself. Severe and yet not unbending – she remembers the fierce scratch of the pen and a few little spatters of black ink on the page as the words were written, an attentiveness like the metronome that she never befriended. Once in a school house competition she and a fellow duettist had spectacularly bombed while playing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, undone by their overconfidence. They had stumbled off stage, hanging their heads.
The girl with the cardigan over her head was in the church when Milly entered. She thought of taking off her school blazer and then decided against it. Mother Euphrosyne was indisposed, she was told, and her lesson was postponed. Perhaps she would like to visit the church while she waited for her bus? The church was very dark. A few elderly women were kneeling in the front pews, murmuring their prayers; a few schoolgirls near the back. A woman with a bucketful of flowers walked down the aisle and bowed as she approached the altar. “Mumbo jumbo”, her father said, after he attended a Catholic funeral but he had admired a handsome priest with a fine singing voice. After a while the darkness cleared and Milly could make out paintings in a row and expressions on statues. In the foyer she looked at a statue of St Joseph and his child, both white as marzipan under layers of paint. St Joseph held a chisel in his hand and she remembered Mother Euphrosyne’s gesture when signifying an error.
When the piano was taken away Milly did not attempt to explain to her parents that she had gained something. She knew they were expecting some kind of proficiency, like Elizabeth Bennet’s sister Mary who would seat herself at the keyboard at every opportunity. Even the stoicism of Anne Elliot crying not to cry while Captain Wentworth danced reels with the Musgrove sisters. She seemed to get lost in a dream state between individual notes and phrases. She was like a concert pianist who swoons over the keys and lifts his hands as if they have been dipped in water. Instead she listened to more and more music and once when the Music Appreciation class was over she had asked the teacher if she could listen again to a Chopin mazurka.
The piano, the metronome. They were only tools. There was a gap in the sitting room when the piano was taken away but it was soon filled by a chair. But Mother Euphrosyne, approached across that echoing and lake-like floor, was something more. The performance at the radio station: Milly and two other students, played their pieces without fumbling but Mother offered no words of praise. She sat beside them as usual at the next lesson, composed and alert. She set the metronome. Work work work. Already Milly had silently vowed that she would.
She began to buy records: Enesco’s ‘Romanian Rhapsody no 1’; Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Each payday at the City Council she added to her collection. She debated which version of Beethoven’s Ninth was the best. A young man at the HMV store befriended her and made suggestions. She joined a Chamber Music Society and learnt to like string quartets. She thought her favourite instrument was the cello. The other girls in the flat left her collection alone.
One afternoon she climbed the hill to St Mary of the Angels convent. Her boyfriend was a Catholic and she might take instruction in the faith. She asked at the presbytery office for news of Mother Euphrosyne and was told she had died the previous year.
“Were you a pupil?” the woman asked and Milly admitted she had been, for a few years.
“Not a star pupil,” Milly said. “Far from it.”
“I can’t imagine her ever having a failure,” the woman said. “The roll call of her pupils…”
Milly walked down the hill again. Not a failure, she said to herself. Work work work. She just had to decide what to do with it.
