Trio Read online

  Food, brought by willing guests, was arranged on two trestle tables in the long back room. The pupils, each one earnest, concentrated wholly on the pieces they were presenting. Celia looked over at James who was surveying with ill-disguised pleasure the grave young faces, making music. How endearing it was that people, when absorbed in happiness, could appear so grave.

  But the star for some years was Jeremy, a dear boy, in James’s terms, almost like a son. Jeremy was giving them Rhapsody in Blue, the big party piece, with what you’d call good attack, but at just the right tempo, Celia noted. Jeremy’s version had nothing aggressive about it; he liltingly, lovingly gave himself to the virtuosic piece, without undue flourish, just as James had taught him, with all his cleverness and sincerity, face working a little with the excitement of it but fingers and feet dealing beautifully with the technique, the pedalling assured, getting that New York brashness and boldness, feeling its jangling and bouncing rhythms, the sweet melodic line conquering every nerve in the room.

  They had heard Jeremy playing before, from their house. James had spoken of him in a restrained way that somehow spelled deep pride. The young man was spent at the end of it and James nodded, satisfied enough; he’d tell Jeremy later not to put on the agony to that extent, to save his guns for the right moment which was in bar 145 not 134. One could see however, certainly Celia could, that the little maestro was well pleased with his boy – a dream of a boy – he told her he’d thought, when the 11-year-old first came to him for lessons. ‘You’re lucky if you get one like that in a lifetime of teaching,’ he had told the journalist at the eisteddfod who had asked him about talented young players. Everyone knew this was one protégé who would go far.

  The idea that year was for all guests to have observed the 48-hour fast for the famine in Africa. Celia, Marcia and Mickey had gone without food as directed (Mickey at least wisely said that he had). All were asked to contribute a hefty donation towards the famine. James made a speech with more than an edge of remonstrance to his voice, just letting them know that he knew they hadn’t all kept the fast. They pleaded workload and strength needed, though they were relieved to give their money generously, which in James’s view had after all been easily acquired, in the universal scheme of things. ‘There’s not one person here who is not extremely well off compared with the people this money is going to,’ he told them, indeed almost told them off, so that there was a slight shuffle among the listeners.

  Celia was looking at him, pleased and confounded, because her impression of James up to now was that his self-absorption was absolute. When she had recently wanted to enlist his help for a good cause she had the clear impression that he never did anything for anyone, by way of even a disinterested courtesy. Perhaps it was something to do with his fear of imminent old age and decrepitude, the fact that he just didn’t care anymore what others thought of him. Celia had asked him to play the piano at a centre for the aged where she knew someone, and he was shaking his head before she’d even finished the question, saying: ‘No, no, not those old bastards.’ Waving his hand in the air, distaste jumping all over him. At an earlier time in his life, to be fair, he would have given untold hours of his time to those students who showed promise. Was it a form of selective patronage – entrusting one’s effort with the beautiful and talented – those on whom your attention wouldn’t be lost or who wouldn’t squander the investment? Celia sipped her wine and stared at the carpet during the music break and considered that, on a political scale, James would put himself to some trouble for the less fortunate. That’s what they were all doing here. But on a personal level he couldn’t get involved. Unlike herself; she made friends for a time with people she had no common ground with at all, then didn’t know how to extricate herself.

  But here they were singing one final song together before supper, with mouths twitching, because James was such a card, banging his little frying pan and conducting with the spoon. Celia looked across at Mickey, over there with the tenors, and he winked back.

  ‘An enchantment,’ Marcia said to James on the way out, giving him a peck on the cheek. ‘Come to us soon.’ The elderly chap looked his age as he nodded and waited for them to leave.

  On a warm evening, as it was beginning to grow dark, not long after the Christmas party, Celia heard a commotion outside. Jeremy had had a lesson but though he was performing well, in James’s mind he wasn’t grasping the philosophical development in the piece at all. The teacher raised his voice and words like rubbish could be heard. For the first time ever, the boy stood up from the piano stool, quietly gathered his music and strode out of the room.

  He stumbled, losing his footing at the step up to the gate (Celia was peeping), and made his way, face burning, out of James’s front garden. James ran after the tall graceful boy on his short legs, shaking his fist. He could have been in an old-time melodrama.

  ‘You don’t walk out on me. You’re hopeless! What are you on? What are you doing with your talent? You’ll never amount to anything!’ the music teacher bawled after him. The boy went on walking without looking back.

  Celia knew the pattern. When James was on a wave of some imagined slight, all reason flew out the window and he would rant like this. It spilled into his art, this lack of restraint; more than once she’d seen it in his performances, an excitability that gave way to an erratic tempo. He was the clever child who had been given that extra indulgence which gave way to an exhibitionism he couldn’t sustain. The seeds of his artistic shortcomings were sown in early life. That was Celia’s theory.

  Dismayed now, she let James see her at her front gate, witnessing the spectacle. Finally he stood still in the road and Celia walked over to him and took his arm, as if he were ill. He looked at her in amazement and said: ‘Do you think he’ll come back?’

  One night the three of them set off from their Daglish house, Mickey in good trousers and a coat, Celia and Marcia in their finery, to attend the opera. It was a first night no less, and they were to hear Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. They often all went out together, tarted up as Mickey said. No one in the street appeared to take any notice, even in Perth. Weren’t they members of the airy-fairy, arty-farties around town?

  The faithfully restored Edwardian theatre was abuzz with anticipation. So much to hope for, yet from the moment they filed in to their seats happily, as Marcia said later, the entire evening’s music operated under Murphy’s Law. The plot, the very setting, were destined for it. An understudy had taken over the main role because the prima donna had called in with a sore throat, and this woman couldn’t quite manage the Russian language, given such short notice, though she did her valiant best. The audience was kind and Marcia clapped harder than anyone else. However there were missed cues and the main soprano could have been better served by the rest of the cast. Nevertheless she rallied and it began to come together in Act II. The chorus got it right.

  But it was the animals in Act IV, which the director had turned into a farmyard scene, who were the stars. Subversive chooks took their cue from an invisible force. The main hen, herself a diva, took it upon herself to waddle downstage and look over the edge of the footlights. Someone in the front row sniggered. She then flew to the tip of the principal bassoonist’s instrument and spread her wings, fanning herself. It was true the air was close in the theatre that evening. Another audience member laughed outright. The bassoonist, furious, muttered threats to the bird. But seeing her friend’s example, a pretty young bantam also flew into the pit and eyeballed the chief percussionist who scowled at her, whilst covering two of the drums he was barely able to encompass, with a protective embrace. The bird, wishing neither to be upstaged nor outshone by a likely drum roll, took off and landed on the wretched man’s arm, still gazing at him. The chief tenor, on stage, looked on in horror as the horse, excited, straddled a bale of hay, eyes heavy-lidded as in lust, and defecated in ecstasy. The male part of the chorus, aghast, manfully carried on singing with sidelong glances towards the music pit, though by now what m
ight happen was anybody’s guess.

  Celia was rocking backwards and forwards with unleashed guffaws, Mickey was holding his sides and moaning while Marcia was emitting little half-stifled ripples of ah-ah-ahhhh in between muttering ‘Oh dear, oh God, oh no …’ The whole audience was moving about in their seats, torn between the comic and the tragic. The orchestra players (it was revealed later) in front of their puce-faced conductor who was streaming with sweat and making grimaces at staff backstage, were by now handing a note around from one section to another, the woodwinds, brass, cellos in turn falling apart when they read the question on the piece of paper – Where the fuck are we?

  Only by the end of the opera was peace restored, the work ending on a high note, so to speak. There were masses of flowers all around, much bowing to a standing ovation. How the audience cheered the plucky cast. Mickey yelled bravo! And Celia put two fingers to her teeth and whistled hard. The conductor managed a smile, shaking his head, arms outstretched in resignation.

  The trio stumbled out of the theatre gasping, like everyone else.

  ‘Best night at the opera I’ve ever had!’ said Mickey. ‘And to think I didn’t even want to go. Does this not call for champagne?’

  ‘I’m already worried about tomorrow night,’ said Marcia. ‘The union will be onto it, what do you think? Have nets to cover the orchestra?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Mickey. ‘Give the hens their marching orders. They started it.’

  ‘But what a great night,’ sang Celia.

  Once home they drank to each other’s good health and recounted former blunders and catastrophes that had happened to them, in London and here.

  There was the night in Perth, Celia recounted, under the stars in the open-air theatre, when the peacocks started barking or honking, whatever it is they do, in the middle of The Marriage of Figaro. A clever cast incorporated the din into the act. You can do that in comic opera, said Mickey. It wouldn’t have gone down well in Otello. And there was the matinée performance of a comedian which was stopped when a man in the second row, pronounced dead (but was not), had to be carried out in a great furore on a stretcher.

  It had been a five-year migration back to Australia for Celia. The trio had made their move to Perth at a time when Celia was longing for warmth.

  She believed that the things that initially delight us can end up irritating us beyond measure. What initially gave Mickey more pleasure than anything about Australia, he said, was discovering the place names around them:

  ‘Mukinbudin!’ he called out one day, reading the paper. ‘Shall we take a little trip to Mukinbudin. Or do we want to go to the cinema Innaloo, girls?’

  ‘In a loo?’ asked Marcia, frowning, a script in her hand.

  ‘Innaloo is just a few miles away,’ said Celia, adjusting her reading glasses as she took up a sketch book.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Mickey, ‘Here’s a woman who’s just had triplets in Poowong.’

  ‘I’m reliably told my father’s family came from a place in Victoria called Tittybong,’ replied Celia. ‘But Mickey I don’t know why you find place names so amusing in Australia; there are spots in the British Isles with bizarre names, such as Ballygally, or … Smite.’

  ‘Tolpuddle,’ said Marcia helpfully.

  ‘Or Effingham, in Surrey,’ added Mickey. ‘Effing’im!’

  But here they were on the other side of the planet, the years skipping along. In the kitchen, the long hot summer reminding them of a play of the same name, it was a Saturday afternoon. All was leisurely and easy as it can only be in that unhurried part of Australia, a place where the most that people got riled about, said Mickey, was whether they were expected to ration the water they put on their gardens. Marcia had put aside the script and started to read a recipe book, Celia chipped in with cooking thoughts as she began to sketch her friends.

  James arrived at the back door for once, on the spur of the moment. He was in need of adult conversation after his morning of teaching, he said.

  ‘Ah, you’ve come to the right place, matey,’ said Mickey. ‘Sit ye doon!’ and went to the fridge for a couple of stubbies while James settled himself companionably at the table.

  ‘I’ll have a glass, please Mickey,’ said James, palm on chest, giving a little rub. ‘I can’t bear to drink beer, or anything else out of a bottle.’

  ‘Right you are, sir,’ said Mickey, happily pouring.

  Marcia asked James, knowing how he loved the theatre, whether he had been to see Equus. James, who preferred the plays of Tennessee Williams, said no, he wasn’t keen on Peter Shaffer and started belligerently telling Mickey – though Mickey wasn’t contradicting him – that it was clear to him when he first saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that Paul Newman was gay.

  ‘Paul Newman? Noooo!’ interrupted Celia.

  ‘Not Newman, the character,’ said James, becoming reasonable again. ‘I realized that he didn’t want to go to bed with Liz Taylor immediately. And it wasn’t on account of his accident.’

  ‘I would have gone to bed with Liz without a moment’s hesitation,’ said Celia.

  ‘Ah-ah-ah,’ laughed Marcia. ‘Oh, is Eggs Benedict as easy as this?’

  ‘Homosexuality wasn’t so much the point,’ said Mickey, stretching his legs, becoming expansive, ‘as Williams’s ideas on self love – the old amour-propre that La Rochefoucauld was always on about.’

  ‘Rochefoucauld?’ said James, lost for a moment, touching his breast with a questioning palm.

  ‘Or I could do a Hollandaise sauce; we’ve got some croûtons.’

  ‘Make them for us tomorrow morning, Marse!’

  ‘Well he reckoned that we are only capable of loving ourselves, even when we think we’re in love with someone else,’ said Mickey.

  ‘Self interest was at the heart of it,’ said Marcia. ‘Have we got any eggs?’

  ‘Just hold it there a sec,’ said Celia; ‘I’ve nearly got you.’

  ‘He thought that the pleasure was all in the loving; that we’re happier in passion itself rather than the object of our …’ continued Mickey.

  But James was getting agitated. ‘Well what about The Glass Menagerie?’ he cried, putting down his beer.

  ‘The trouble with that idea,’ said Celia, frowning at her sketch pad, worrying at the anarchy they so frequently descended into, ‘is that La Rochefoucauld …’

  ‘Good Christ, is that the time?’ said Mickey.

  ‘Your matinée!’ said Marcia, looking up swiftly.

  ‘I’m off,’ looking for his cigarettes. ‘I’ve got ten minutes only,’ he said, before remembering that he didn’t drive.

  ‘Oh damn, my car’s on empty,’ said Celia. ‘I’ll fill up on the way if you can just let me wash my hands.’

  But James, so ready to plunge them into conversational chaos, rose to the occasion. ‘I’ve got my car outside, Mickey,’ he said. ‘Full of petrol. Come on.’ Mickey said thank you, scarcely missing a beat, and Celia silently congratulated him because they all knew full well that a drive with James was a leap into the unknown.

  The two men departed, Mickey throwing a comical look over his shoulder at the girls, James looking businesslike with his keys and Celia calling out: ‘Good on you, James,’ as the door slammed.

  ‘Dear James,’ said Marcia in the new quiet. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, darling?’

  Out on the road – and for Mickey it was as if he were sailing head to wind on the main with mad Captain Bligh at the helm – the director-turned-actor for this season gave directions. For a non-driver he always knew exactly where he was. ‘It’s so simple here to be well-oriented with the sun up there giving us perfect navigation. Sure there’s no excuse for getting lost!’ He’d wanted to tell James about this production, but James was busy telling Mickey about a show he’d seen in the West End in 1946 when you’d have thought the English were too exhausted to think about the stage. All the time he was talking he jerked at the steering wheel continually, with tightly held fists, veering towards the left lane. S
unk low into the driver’s seat he rattled on and peered through the spokes: ‘Is this still Hay Street? Yes,’ he grunted, passing a van with a flamboyant swing of his arms. Mickey wondered if it was worth sending up a little prayer; would they remember him up there?

  ‘You drive with great panache, James. But a little faster please matey.’ James had by now switched to Eugene O’Neill – how he loved the Americans – and in his concentration on the dramatist had almost come to a pensive halt; it was not so much a monologue as a soliloquy, Mickey noticed, for James was talking more to himself than to his companion, and happily unaware of the fierce traffic warden holding up her hand to stop the traffic altogether, for a disabled person in his wheelchair to cross.

  A look of incredulity passed over the features of the warden as the car, apparently driving itself but with a passenger, tootled along Hay Street in the very teeth of her command.

  But within minutes, or was it hours, Mickey was delivered to his destination and as he hurriedly alighted, expressing his thanks, he didn’t notice that the car was parked much further from the kerb than was normal or legal, and he missed his step, stumbling into the small crowd immediately outside the theatre.

  ‘Break a leg!’ cried James, all mischief now, swinging out into the traffic again with his usual zest.

  It might all have continued for years like that in Perth, their having a good time. Celia in this relaxed ambiance appeared released from tough spinsterhood, Marcia was seldom out of work, Mickey found that it was pleasant to sleep on the soft white sands at the beach most days, punctuated with small bouts of work, and weekends saw them often picnicking with James or accompanying him to art shows or recitals. Kookaburras laughed uproariously at their lives outside the windows hawhaw-haw-haah-haah-haah, and the pungent smell of gum trees pervaded the air in that street in Daglish. To be sure another bonzer day in paradise, Mickey said.

  Celia never did quite understand Mickey’s place in Australia, his fitting in, before he’d known that it wasn’t for him. He’d seemed to become a part of the easy camaraderie, yet the day-to-day living was having a soporific effect on him. And he was drinking more. She thought he missed the pull of the London theatre, and not only the West End but the plethora of regional shows. He had always revelled in the awful weather and questionable food for the sake of the odd, mad, lovable people you meet in England, he said.