Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

She always became more girlish when she played; even then I noticed the shy hesitant smile when she made the odd mistake. I was five then, standing in the doorway of the study in a manner, Dearbhla told me afterwards, of a child self-consciously trying to be “cute.” I have no idea whether Dearbhla told me this out of malice — whether she already detected a resentment I could find no words to express — or because she was genuinely amused. Anyway, she was not there to witness it firsthand. By the time she was there on a regular basis, my mother and her orange kaftans and hair tied back with a grubby chenille ribbon had gone, gone forever.

My mother had few pieces in her repertoire but since I, at the age of five, was her primary listener, it should not have mattered too much. Yet I recall, in flashes, how her head would jerk upwards when my father pushed the creaking gate of our little garden open. The look of strained hope that crossed her face as she pushed the open window full out and started a few bars of the same piece. She started in medias res, I believe, to fool my father into thinking that she had been playing on for hours, unaware of his presence, in some sort of creative trance. I don’t believe he fell for it. He would come to the door and wink at me as she fingered the keys like alien objects, her eyes self-consciously shut.

It was always the same piece, Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, and she was never able to get all the way through without making a mistake. To me now, that seems absurd; unlike Dearbhla, I never had a great talent for music, but even I could pick my way through something of that level with no great difficulty. But my mother’s mistakes were always so small — a missed note when it unexpectedly changed to F minor on the second repetition, an E instead of a D in the bass — that somehow I could always hear the soft chords transcending the little awkwardnesses. I remember (this must have been earlier, I must have been even younger then) hearing the muffled ripple of bass and right-hand chords through the timber of the shivering piano as I curled myself into a ball at my mother’s feet. I nearly fell asleep with my cheek touching the cold bronze of the una corda pedal, spittle drooling down my cheek. The evening sun was coming through the two-paned window, shafts of it warming the wood, and warming my mother’s orange kaftan and warming the pale brown carpet where I lay my head. The soft pedal remained cold, unmoving. I don’t know how long I lay there until I was picked up and brought to bed. It seemed like infinity, but then again this happened long ago, before I learned to measure time, each begrudging second, hour, and year of it.

She never quite got it right. Each rendition was a diamond with a different flaw. I didn’t mind. Like an idiot savant, I craved routine. The routine of sun falling on my mother and the Gymnopédie, the routine of drizzle soaking the unmown grass in our front garden and the Gymnopédie, the dying elm shedding its last leaves as the Dutch beetle gnawed away at it from the inside — and the Gymnopédie—

“I’ll get it,” my mother would call out, “I will, you’ll see.” Then she would fling her head back and laugh, and the light would catch the fine hairs on her neck, her neck that was able to arch so elegantly and make my father catch his breath. Dearbhla says I don’t remember properly, after all I was very young and children idealise things a lot, don’t they? But then again, rare things are easy to recall by virtue of their rareness — and happy memories of my childhood are rare indeed.