“The first thing I remember clearly is my mother’s singing. She always sang, whether she was happy or sad. She could sing classical music quite well, and play the piano, but it was the Greek folk tunes I remember best. Those she always sang when she was sad. I remember her telling me—much later in life—of that standing on a distant hillside and seeing the ochre dust float slowly up into the azure sky. When the news about her parents came, she was filled with a black hatred of Greece. She wanted to leave it then, never to return. Like so many Greeks. And like so many Greeks she never accepted her exile. That is the cost of being born in the most beautiful and the most cruel country in the world.
“My mother sang—and music was the most important thing in my life, from as far back as I can remember. I was something of a child prodigy. I gave my first concert at the age of nine, and people were very kind. But I was a bad pupil at all the other subjects at school. I was not stupid, but I was very lazy. I knew only one obligation: to play the piano well. Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical. And I was never accomplished at that.
“I was fortunate, I had a very remarkable music teacher—Charles Victor Bruneau. He had many of the traditional faults of his kind. Vain of his methods and vain of his pupils. A sarcastic agony if one was not talented, and a painstaking angel if one was. But he was a very learned man musicologically. In those days that meant he was rarissima avis. Most executants then wanted only to express themselves. And so they developed accomplishments like enormous velocity and great skill at expressive rubato. No one today plays like that. Or could play like it, even if they wanted to. The Rosenthals and Godowskys are gone forever. But Bruneau was far in advance of his time and there are still many Haydn and Mozart sonatas I can hear only as he played them.
“However, his most remarkable acquirement—I speak of before 1914—was the then almost unknown one of being as good a harpsichordist as a pianist. I first came under him at a period in his life when he was abandoning the piano. You know the harpsichord requires a very different finger technique from the piano. It is not easy to change. He dreamed of a school of harpsichord players who were trained as early as possible as pure harpsichordists. And not, as he used to say, des pianistes en costume de bal masqué.
“When I was fifteen, I had what we would call today a nervous breakdown. Bruneau had been driving me too hard. I never had the least interest in games. I was a day boy, I had permission to concentrate on music. I never made any real friends at school. Perhaps because I was taken for a Jew. But the doctor said that when I recovered I would have to practice less and go out more often. I made a face. My father came back one day with an expensive book on birds. I could hardly tell the commonest birds apart, had never thought of doing so. But my father’s was an inspired guess. Lying in bed, looking at the stiff poses in the pictures, I began to want to see the living reality—and the only reality to begin with for me was the singing that I heard through my sickroom window. I came to birds through sound. Suddenly even the chirping of sparrows seemed mysterious. And the singing of birds I had heard a thousand times, thrushes, blackbirds in our garden, I heard as if I had never heard them before. Later in my life—ça sera pour un autre jour—birds led me into a very unusual experience.
“You see the child I was. Lazy, lonely, yes, very lonely. What is that word? A sissy. Talented in music, and in nothing else. And I was an only child, spoilt by my parents. As I entered my fourth luster, it became evident that I was not going to fulfill my early promise. Bruneau saw it first, and then I did. Though we tacitly agreed not to tell my parents, it was difficult for me to accept. Sixteen is a bad age at which to know one will never be a genius. But by then I was in love.
“I first saw Lily when she was fourteen, and I was a year older, soon after my breakdown. We lived in St. John’s Wood. In one of those small white mansions for successful merchants. You know them? A semi-circular drive. A portico. At the back was a long garden, at the end of it a little orchard, some six or seven overgrown apple and pear trees. Unkempt, but very green. Ombreux. I had a private ‘house’ under a lime tree. One day—June, a noble blue day, burning, clear, as they are here in Greece—I was reading a life of Chopin. I remember that exactly. You know at my age you recall the first twenty years far better than the second—or the third. I was reading and no doubt seeing myself as Chopin, and I had my new book on birds beside me. It is 1910.
“Suddenly I hear a noise on the other side of the brick wall which separates the garden of the next house from ours. This house is empty, so I am surprised. And then… a head appears. Cautiously. Like a mouse. It is the head of a young girl. I am half hidden in my bower, I am the last thing she sees, so I have time to examine her. Her head is in sunshine, a mass of pale blonde hair that falls behind her and out of sight. The sun is to the south, so that it is caught in her hair, in a cloud of light. I see her shadowed face, her dark eyes and her small half-opened inquisitive mouth. She is grave, timid, yet determined to be daring. She sees me. She stares at me for a moment in her shocked haze of light. She seems more erect, like a bird. I stand up in the entrance of my bower, still in shadow. We do not speak or smile. All the unspoken mysteries of puberty tremble in the air. I do not know why I cannot speak… and then a voice called. Li-ly! Li-ly!
“The spell was broken. And all my past was broken, too. Do you know that image from Seferis—’The broken pomegranate is full of stars’? It was like that. She disappeared, I sat down again, but to read was impossible. I went to the wall near the house, and heard a man’s voice, and silver female voices that faded through a door.
“I was in a morbid state. But that first meeting, that mysterious… how shall I say, message from her light, from her light to my shadow, haunted me for weeks.
“Her parents moved into the house next door. I met Lily face to face. And there was some bridge between us. It was not all my imagination, this something came from her as well as from me—a joint umbilical cord, something we dared not speak of, of course, yet which we both knew was there.
“She was very like me in many ordinary ways. She too had few friends in London. And the final touch to this fairy story was that she too was musical. Not very strikingly gifted, but musical. Her father was a peculiar man, Irish, with private means, and with a passion for music. He played the flute very well. Of course he had to meet Bruneau, who sometimes came to our house, and through Bruneau he met Dolmetsch, who interested him in the recorder. Another forgotten instrument in those days. I remember so well Lily playing her first solo on a flat-sounding descant recorder made by Dolmetsch and bought for her by her father.
“Our two families grew very close. I accompanied Lily, we sometimes played duets, sometimes her father would join us, sometimes the two mothers would sing. We discovered a whole new continent of music. The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Arbeau, Frescobaldi, Froberger—in those years people suddenly realized that there had been music before 1700.”
He paused. I wanted to light a cigarette, but more than that I wanted not to distract him, his reaching back. So I held the cigarette between my fingers, and waited.
“Lily. She had, yes, I suppose a Botticelli beauty, long fair hair, gray-violet eyes. But that makes her sound too pale, too Pre-Raphaelite. She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naïvety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress. I make her sound too colorless to you. Of course, in those days, what we young men looked for was not so much the body as the soul. Lily was a very pretty girl. But it was her soul that was sans pareil.