‘I’m from Mull,’ she said. ‘Originally. We moved to the mainland when I was quite small, though. Haven’t been back to the island in years.’
I took a breath and said, ‘Look — maybe we should get together and do some songs some time.’ These words sounded tacky even as I spoke them. ‘I could accompany you.’
‘I think your friends are getting impatient,’ said Karla.
I followed her gaze and saw that they were all staring at us. Harry made a ‘come here’ gesture with his eyes. I went over to join them and Karla started serving another customer.
Chester said, ‘Do you think you can spare us some of your time, or are you too busy chatting up women?’
‘I was only getting myself a drink.’
‘We’ve got some serious talking to do,’ said Martin. He was the only person in the pub that afternoon to be wearing a tie.
‘What about?’
‘The band.’
‘There seems to be a general consensus,’ said Harry, ‘that we’ve got ourselves into a bit of a rut.’
The whole business of sitting around a table and discussing something so trivial seemed suddenly ludicrous. There was an upright piano standing against one of the walls and I was seized by a powerful urge to go over and play something on it, just to get away from them all. But I stayed where I was.
‘Chester’s been saying,’ Harry continued, ‘that we need to do two things. One, we need to break on to vinyl. We’ve got to get a record company interested, so it’s essential that we record a good demo on Tuesday.’
‘Fine,’ I said, yawning. I was thinking of how nice it would be to accompany Karla on a version of ‘My Funny Valentine’, leaving her to take care of the tune while I filled it out with rich harmonies, constantly surprising and pleasing her with unexpected changes and variations.
‘Two,’ said Harry, ‘we’ve got to improve our stage act. The reason the audience was so aggressive last time is that we didn’t have any authority. We didn’t impose ourselves on them.’
‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘The problem with last time was that we were playing to a crowd of psychos and drillerkillers. Hitler would have had trouble establishing authority with that lot.’
‘All Harry’s trying to say,’ said Chester, ‘is that you’ve got to think harder about how you present yourselves.’
There was a pause.
‘And what does that mean, exactly?’ I asked.
‘Harry and I have been thinking,’ said Martin, ‘and we think you ought to stand up on stage.’
‘What?’
‘That stool you sit on when you’re playing the keyboard,’ said Harry. ‘It’s got to go.’
‘I don’t believe this,’ I said. ‘Our audience consists of the London branch of the Myra Hindley fan club and you think they’re going to be stunned into submission by the sight of me getting up from my chair?’
‘We’re not just talking about last time. It’s a question of the whole… concept of the band.’
‘It’s about attitude,’ said Martin, ‘and dynamics.’
‘Well forgive my naivety,’ I said, ‘but I always thought it was about music.’
‘The music’s fine,’ said Martin. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the music. We’re talking eye-levels here.’
‘If I stand up, I can’t use my pedals.’
‘We both stand up,’ said Harry, ‘and we manage to use our pedals.’
‘I’m sorry, this is just incredible to me. I mean, next you’re going to be asking me to wear one of those keyboards around my neck, like I was selling ice-cream.’
‘We just want you to stand up, that’s all.’
‘You think Vladimir Ashkenazy has to stand up when he’s playing the Moonlight Sonata? To establish his authority?’
‘That’s different,’ said Jake. ‘A classical pianist establishes authority through a set of quite distinctive signs, such as the suit he wears, and the way he walks on to the stage and sits down. It’s a question of semiotics.’
‘Whose side are you on?’ I asked.
‘Yours, actually.’
The others looked at him in surprise.
‘I think Bill should carry on sitting down. Otherwise it upsets the balance. At the moment we’ve got two people standing up and two people sitting down. That communicates poise, and equilibrium.’
‘Fuck equilibrium,’ said Martin. ‘Think feet and inches.’
I stood up.
‘This is completely ridiculous.’
‘William, will you for God’s sake sit down!’ shouted Harry.
‘I thought you wanted me to stand up.’
‘I want you to stand up now and sit down on stage. I mean, I want you to sit down now and stand up on stage!’
‘Cool it boys, will you?’ said Chester. ‘There’s no point in losing our tempers.’
‘Why don’t you just get yourselves a taller keyboard player and be done with it?’
‘We’re not getting personal about this, Bill. We value your contribution to the band. You know that.’
I sighed. ‘Does anybody want another drink?’
It turned out that everybody wanted another drink, except me: I had only asked because I wanted to go up to the bar and talk to Karla again. I wasn’t even able to do that, because Chester and Harry insisted on sharing the next round. While they were away, rather than talking to the other two, I sat down at the piano. Much to my surprise, it was unlocked. There was no jukebox in the pub and the level of conversation was high enough for me to be able to play softly without anybody noticing.
I played through the first eight bars of ‘Tower Hill’ twice, and my finger rested on the last note, the high E flat. I still hadn’t managed to get any further. But now some part of me remembered a harmony I had heard once — a minor seventh chord, with the melody starting a fourth above the root. In which case, E flat would give… B flat minor seven. I tried it. It sounded nice. A melodic figure came quite readily:
Harmonizing this was easy. All it needed in the second half of the bar was to flatten the fifth. It never ceases to delight me that you can alter a chord by just one semitone and produce a completely different effect like that. This figure would come to rest, of course, on a C natural, with an A flat major seven being held for the whole bar. That C natural also gave me the clue for the next development — a repeat of the previous two bars, only a minor third lower, and with a C seven substituted for the second chord. The pattern of the melody stayed broadly the same, too, so that the whole four-bar sequence now played like this:
I was beginning to feel pleased with this piece — not because it was in any way original, or because it was anything special technically, but because it was coming to express my feelings towards Madeline very clearly. I wondered if I should play it to her when it was finished, and explain that it was written with her in mind. Perhaps then she would understand the dissatisfactions I felt, the frustration and the longing to get closer.
But it was a long time since I had played the piano to Madeline. After our first meeting, when it had been music which brought us together, I had assumed that it would always be like that — that it would always be an area of shared understanding between us. As it turned out, I was being naive. When I started playing the piano at Mrs Gordon’s house, the first time that Madeline allowed me to visit her there, she came running into the room and told me to stop in case it woke the old lady up. It was a lovely old Bechstein grand, too.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Didn’t you like what I was playing?’
‘She’s asleep. You’ll wake her.’
It was early evening: the beginning of the end of a bright summer’s day. I had come straight over from the record shop and the smell of the City was just starting to wash off. I couldn’t believe my luck, to be spending the evening in such a nice part of town, with such a lovely woman, in such a beautiful house. There were huge oil paintings on the walls in every room — family portraits, Madeline told me — and heavy red velvet curtains and Regency furniture, and splendid marble fireplaces topped with gilt-framed mirrors. I had seen nothing like it since the days when my parents used to take me around stately homes.