A Darker Music (12 page)

‘I’ll be going over to see Gloria later,’ she said. Clio looked at her without expression. ‘I need to ask her about cooking for the shearers. They’ll be starting on Monday week and I’ll need to organise supplies.’

‘Why do you want to consult Gloria? I’ve done that job a hundred times.’

Mary was surprised. ‘Please tell me, then. I’ve never done it before.’

Clio sat up, turning carefully to adjust her pillows. ‘Give them plenty of meat. Roasts for dinner, leftovers in sandwiches for morning smoko. Pudding for dinner. Cakes for afternoon smoko.’

‘That’s all there is to it?’

‘Not quite. They start at seven so they’re hungry by morning smoko, and they like something substantial and preferably hot. Toasted sandwiches, hot scones …’

‘How about pizza?’

Clio gave the question a moment’s consideration. ‘That would probably be okay. Dinner’s sharp at twelve, afternoon smoko at three and they knock off at five. You must never be late. They get paid per sheep, and if they have to wait about for their meal it costs them money.’

Mary was taking all this in.

‘As for supplies, you’ll have to order in more meat, especially beef — get a hindquarter. Potatoes: they go through plenty of those. A mountain of sliced sandwich loaves, preferably white — yes, I know — and margarine, ice-cream, jelly crystals. You can get things from the baker — sweet buns and so on, don’t try to do it all yourself. If you’re not sure, ask Pauline at the Co-op. If you need to you can always send Martin in to pick up anything extra, but I always tried not to do that.’ She did manage a small smile this time. ‘It shatters the illusion of omnipotence.’

‘Thank you for that, Clio. I can see I didn’t need Gloria after all.’

‘And never, ever, give them curried egg sandwiches!’

Mary hesitated in the doorway. ‘What?’

‘Nothing that gives them wind. They’re bending over all day.’

T
HE WEATHER DIDN’T IMPROVE,
and so Mary decided it would be a good time to get ahead with Ellen’s diaries, before Paul came home tomorrow. She flipped through one of them. Much of it concerned people she knew nothing about, and she skimmed through those passages. There was a bit about Ellen’s plans to breed the fine-wool Merinos, but it didn’t add significantly to what she’d already learnt from Cec. Ellen had bought something called Saxon-blood sheep from some place in Tasmania to start her breeding programme.

There was a knock at the back door. Mary marked the place and closed the book. Gloria was standing on the step, shaking raindrops from her umbrella.

‘Oh, hi,’ Mary said. ‘Come in out of the cold.’

Gloria stood for a second in the doorway, looking around the room. ‘That’s more like it, Mary. Looks real nice.’

‘It wasn’t when I came.’

‘No, it was a mess. Gay would’ve cleaned it up if His Lordship’d been willing to pay her, but …’ She shrugged. ‘Before she got sick, the Missus always kept it spick and span.’

‘I was wondering how Paul and Martin managed to eat, before I came.’

‘Good question. I did the odd roast for them, but I think they went to the Eticup pub most nights or the roadhouse. There was plenty of food in the freezers, but I don’t think they touched it. Paul likes being waited on. Anyway’ — she advanced into the room — ‘according to the radio there’s been snow on the Stirlings.’

‘Clio said there might be. Cuppa?’

‘Just had one, thanks. I just popped over to let you know Gayleen’ll be back at school Monday, in case you want her for anything.’

‘Thanks. Is that good?’

‘Bloody marvellous. Gets her away from that loser Jamie. At least the boys at school are still at school.’

‘Is Jamie a problem?’ Mary still hadn’t sighted the boy.

‘There’s nothing really wrong with Jamie. He’s a decent enough lad, but I don’t want her rushing into marriage. She ought to get a good job and travel a bit before she settles down. See a bit of the world. She’s way too young. So’s Jamie, for that matter.’

‘But the hormones are a problem?’

‘Too bloody right they are.’

Mary fetched the pastry she’d made earlier out of the refrigerator and set to work rolling it out.

‘What’s that going to be?’ Gloria asked.

‘Quiche Lorraine. With chicken soup made from Garth’s CFA hens.’

C
LIO FINISHED THE SOUP
with good appetite but only picked at the quiche. Mary was disappointed. ‘It was very nice,’ Clio explained. ‘I wasn’t hungry.’

Mary nodded, appeased. ‘Then let’s hope the chicken soup works its traditional magic.’

Clio looked limp and pale against her pillows. ‘Would you like some music? I could get it for you.’ Clio observed her with those great eyes, shadowed with tiredness. ‘No. I’ll just have a sleep.’

Mary pulled the curtains over the french doors. The fabric was too flimsy to deaden the sound of the wind and rain, but the visual barrier made the room seem cosier. Clio closed her eyes, and Mary took the tray and went softly out of the room.

With the clean-up finished, and the morning’s washing draped to dry over the stove and clothes horse, Mary went into Ellen’s room to play the piano. She might as well use the time while she could.

C
LIO DRIFTED IN
and out of wakefulness. Without the strength — or the fortitude — to work her way through the exercises they’d given her, she was never physically tired, but there was a weariness of the spirit that lay on her like a leaden weight. Then there was the pain. That hadn’t gone away like they’d told her it would. She knew it was stupid to hold out against using the stronger tablets, but taking them seemed like admitting defeat.

She’d been home for nearly two weeks now. She was marking off the days in the little gold diary that she took with her wherever she went, in the same way that Paul and Martin carried their mobile phones. The two weeks had seemed like a lifetime — and no time at all. Thank God for Mary: without her she’d have starved to death, here in this room alone.

She could hear music again, coming through the wild weather. The memory of walking across the Domain to the Conservatorium through the buffeting wind and rain gusting off the harbour was suddenly vivid, the wind scouring through the canyons of the city, the icy rain getting through her brown raincoat despite its buttons and straps, dripping down her neck. Once through the gates into the Botanical Gardens, it was slightly better, the edge of the wind softened by the trees. There were fewer people about, and they weren’t travelling with the same blind haste. The beat of the traffic was muted, too, and as she came close to the old building she could hear its own peculiar symphony: a soprano singing scales, a snatch of Grieg’s piano concerto, a cellist, and someone wailing on a clarinet; a wall of sounds that circled the enchanted castle like a palisade.

Once inside the front door, the symphony faded to a moment of silence, a pause between movements. Then, as she walked down the narrow corridor past the teaching studios, she heard the music again. Passing each door brought a distinct burst of sound, a mosaic of music.

When her family had learnt from the lawyer in Italy that Papa’s great-uncle had left them an old viola, they’d been bemused. Clio’s mother was the musician in the family, singing beautifully, it seemed to them all, and playing the piano well enough to accompany herself. Penny was being subjected to piano lessons that she claimed to hate. She’d inherited Bronwen’s talent for singing, but Clio had a voice like a bullfrog’s.

But when she first beheld the viola, gleaming like a chestnut in its bed of faded blue velvet, she fell in love. Papa allowed her to pick up the precious instrument. She held it under her chin the way she’d seen musicians do on television, and touched the bow to the strings, drawing it down, expecting her ears to fill with the sound as if the instrument had been waiting for just this moment, like Sleeping Beauty waiting for the kiss of her prince. But there was nothing, and her eyes filled with tears. Papa took the viola out of her hands and laid it back in its case, closing the lid and using his thumbs to secure the worn brass catches.

He was planning to sell it. It wasn’t a Stradivarius or anything like that, just an ordinary old viola, but it would still be worth real money. Clio cried and cried, until in the end he agreed to pay for one term’s lessons, enough for her to learn at least how to hold it and tune it.

Much later, he confessed that he’d been certain that she’d get sick of it in no time, and he’d quietly sell the instrument. But he’d been wrong.

When it became obvious that Clio wasn’t going to give it up, and was even thinking about going to the Conservatorium to learn to be a proper musician, her father did his best to talk her out of it. ‘If you must learn, at least study the violin. Or the cello. Nobody plays the viola. It’s dull.’

But she’d never wanted to play the violin. The viola made a sound far richer. The resonance filled her head and her heart with joy. She never cared for the cello, either. What she had was a viola, as long as her father would let her keep it.

By the time her mother died, Papa had given up all idea of selling her viola: perhaps he thought that taking away another thing — the other thing — that Clio loved would have seemed too cruel.

And so she’d learnt and practised, and in due course been accepted as a student at the Conservatorium of Music.

Those years were magic. The days were never long enough for all the study and practice she longed to do. She was living and breathing music, no longer limited to just two lessons a week and only as much solitary practice as she could fit in with school work. Now, the viola was no longer just an extension of her body but an integral part of it, of her, of her soul. With the viola, she could at last hear her own voice. A darker voice, they said, than the violin or cello, and that was fine, because she was a dark woman.

Then Tallis had come, and she’d fallen in love all over again.

Tallis Elkins was a professional violist with an international reputation, and she was lucky enough to have him as one of her teachers.

Tallis was tall — taller than she was — and fair and angular, and rather plain until he played, when he seemed to take flight, fuelled by the music, his body possessed by the sounds he was making. She’d listened, entranced, as he’d coaxed tones from his instrument that she’d never imagined.

Up till then, Clio’s ambition had reached no further than a place in one of the local orchestras, but in his first term Tallis formed a string quartet, with a changing group of senior students, and thus opened a door into the lavish sounds of the baroque composers, and Mozart and Schubert. He called the group the Tartini Quartet and set about creating a repertoire that would stretch them all. For Clio, it was the challenge to reach for a standard she’d scarcely believed possible, but the pleasure of making music on this intimate scale was compelling.

To spread the lessons among as many of the students as possible, Tallis often sat back and gave the viola part to one of them. He taught them Mozart’s string quintets, with two violas, and the wonderful Schubert C-major quintet that had two cellos but only one viola to take the middle road and hold the rest together. There was so much to learn, all of it full of wonder and delight.

The experience of playing in the group had been a revelation, too: a closeness that was like love between the four or five of them that made it possible to anticipate each other’s moves, cover up one another’s mistakes, all without missing a beat. It was an abstract love, though, belonging only to the making of the music.

Whether he was playing or just overseeing, Tallis was their leader. His interpretation of the music seemed intuitive and flawless, his mastery of them all complete.

Lying there, so long afterwards, Clio was overcome by a feeling of loss so devastating that her body tightened with a spasm and she rolled over in bed, ignoring the pain in her side, and buried her face in the pillow, letting its softness absorb the sound of her weeping.

12

O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING, THE RAIN WAS STILL FALLING
. Paul and Martin arrived back in time for dinner. Mary gathered up the clothes they’d worn in Perth and washed them, festooning the kitchen with them afterwards. She could see Paul didn’t like the kitchen looking like a Chinese laundry, but this rain could last for weeks; if she waited for it to clear, nothing would ever get dry. If Paul didn’t like it, he could invest in a tumble dryer.

The rain did persist through the week, but it didn’t keep Paul from his midweek golf.

‘A bit of rain never hurt anybody,’ he said.

‘And it doesn’t rain at the nineteenth hole,’ Martin added.

With Paul gone, Mary hoped to get a conversation going with Martin. She’d forgiven him for his lack of manners on her first day, putting it down to his youth, while conceding that his redemption might have something to do with his healthy appetite for her cooking. Today she’d made a steak-and-vegetable pie that she knew he’d like, and he was waiting at his place while she served it.

‘Why don’t you have yours now?’ he said.

‘Your father’s never asked me.’

‘Well, he’s not here, and I’m asking you. I hate eating by myself.’

Mary dished up her own portion and sat down opposite him. ‘Is your fiancée a good cook? I’ve forgotten her name.’

‘Alyssa.’ Martin flushed. ‘Her name’s Alyssa. Isn’t that a great name?’

‘Yes, it’s lovely.’ Alice, she mused; sweet alyssum. ‘But can she cook?’

Martin was silent for a moment then gave her a rueful grin. ‘Damned if I know. She can make toast all right, and coffee. We always go out or get takeaway.’

‘Do you stay with Alyssa when you go up to Perth?’

‘Dad’s got a unit in Crawley. She comes and stays with me there.’

‘She must get on well with your father, then.’ Mary tested the quality of the pastry crust and judged it acceptable. ‘Just as well, if she’s going to be living here when you’re married.’

‘We don’t see much of Dad. He drops me off at the unit then picks me up on the Monday morning. He stays with —’ Martin looked slightly embarrassed, then went on. ‘Dad stays with friends. Can I have more pie?’