There was all that.
Finally, there was the possibility that my brain had been turned to mush by listening to popular music for so long. They used to talk about rock ’n’ roll damaging the mind, and it turns out there may have been some truth to it. If pornography can change the physical structure of the brain, why not music? I had spent months—years—in my room with my playlist going non-stop. Most of those songs were three-to-four-minute paeans to love: love experienced, love lost and love remembered. Candles burning, candles in the wind and rain, candles sat before.
My brain had been well and truly washed when it came to love.
I had the headphones on. Dylan plays an intro, a little noodling on the piano. Then he sings, the voice familiar but more emotional than I was accustomed to, declaring that it’s in his nature to take chances, submitting to the pull of the past, committing to the journey, all in a torrent of passion and imagery.
By the end of the second verse, I was completely undone. I could say I was moved, shaken, overcome, but that would not do justice to how I was feeling. Undone was the perfect word. What had I been doing for twenty years? What did I do now?
I emailed Angelina and told her it was over with Claire.
21
As a database designer whose daily work relies on making objective decisions, as a pianist who understands both the power and limits of music, and as a certified Myers-Briggs T-for-thinking personality, I need to make it clear that I did not leave a twenty-year relationship because of a song.
Yes, listening to ‘Angelina’ for the first time was a profound experience, but you should not rush to download it in the hope of having the same response. Once, I asked a bunch of friends and colleagues to nominate their favourite songs, and I put together a mix tape of their selections. It was utterly pedestrian, and not because I had more sophisticated taste. I was not making the connections that they were and the songs didn’t resonate.
American Songwriter magazine rates ‘Angelina’ No. 28 in Dylan’s extensive oeuvre, so I can at least claim it as a songwriters’ song. But he left it off a mediocre album in 1981 and, though he’s toured almost non-stop since that time, he has never performed it live. I would like to think it’s because the song is too personal but my head tells me the opposite. Wikipedia opines that it ‘makes for a pleasant listen’.
That was broadly what I thought in the light of the morning, with the candle out and my rational hat on. The music did not make the decision for me, but it took me to a place where I could access the emotional dimension that Mandy’s shrink had talked about.
My emotional life was all about Angelina, and had been for a while, certainly since the Skype call, and arguably as long as I had been listening to music with her in my mind. I was letting both Claire and myself down by continuing the relationship. It might still be within my power to save it, but there was not enough left to save.
I probably should not have sent the email to Angelina. It was more about locking in my decision than asking anything of her, and she could well feel that I had transgressed the boundaries that we had set for ourselves. I was not setting off in pursuit of her, but of what she represented. At forty-nine, I was looking to live the part of my life that currently existed only in song.
I moved out, which is to say I packed a bag, worked a half-day in London and took the train to Manchester. There was no question about who should stay and who should go. The house had been left to Claire by her mother. Perhaps, after the time we had been together, I had some legal claim, but I would not be pursuing it. The piano could wait. Elvis would have to hang on a bit longer for his evening meals.
I was on a mutual two-week-notice arrangement at work and I let them know that I would be finishing up. I was not going to commute from my mother’s place outside Manchester, even a couple of days a week. It really didn’t matter anymore.
Before leaving the house, I spent a long time writing Claire a note in my rusty handwriting.
Dear Claire
I really am sorry. There’s nothing between me and Sheilagh – that’s who you saw me with; she and Chad have broken up—but everything you said was fair. We’ve been drifting apart for a while, and I was holding on to the idea that you might stay in the UK. It seems that last night just brought forward something that we were heading for anyway.
You’ve been busy with work, but I haven’t stepped up, and you must have interpreted my unwillingness to move to the US as a lack of support. Fairly so. You deserve more than I’ve been giving.
I spent a while thinking about whether I should say more. I did not want to hurt Claire for no reason, but I also didn’t want her to assume an unfair share of the blame. She deserved to know what had been going on, to make sense of what she had been seeing.
There is something else. A couple of months ago I reconnected with someone from the (distant) past, and it brought up a lot of stuff that I didn’t resolve properly at the time. So, even at this advanced age, I need to sort myself out.
Thanks for everything you’ve done for me and us. We had a lot of good times and I will remember all of them. And good luck with the sale.
I hope we can stay friends and in touch—just call if you need help with anything. We can sort the practicalities out once the pressure’s off with the company sale.
Love,
Adam
I read it through again and saw what was missing. Friends, I’d written. No mention of love, past or present, except in the valediction. When had I last told her I loved her? Writing I love you now would feel forced and disingenuous, and she would read it that way. I could hardly write I once loved you.
I left the letter and my keys on top of the piano, our place for message exchange. There was something there already. Not a note but a business card, from a piano tuner.
I played an F sharp and felt the chord go through me. Keyboards are all right, but there is something special about a good acoustic piano, and it had been a long time since this one had sounded right. I sat on the stool and played the first two lines of ‘Angelina’. It was an easy tune, but I could not remember the words.
Trains are one of the great symbols of popular song, but there was no romance on the 9.30 a.m. to Liverpool Street or, later that day, the commuter-packed 6.30 p.m. to Manchester. It was on the trip to my mother’s that what I had done began to sink in, bringing with it an overwhelming feeling of emptiness.
I had walked away from my best friend, my home, my life, and surely hurt Claire in the process—Claire, who must have taken time out from her job, presumably while I was working in London or visiting my mother, to get the piano tuner in. It was something I could easily have done while I was between contracts or working from home if I had not wanted an excuse to avoid playing it for her. She had been making an effort, thinking things were changing for the better, and I had let her down. For what? A romantic daydream that had no roots in anything or anyone.
Angelina was a fantasy, given substance only in our puerile once-a-week exchanges that she had probably initiated to fill a small hole in an otherwise happy marriage. I had no way of translating my longing for something more into anything concrete, like a plan for the next day or next week or the rest of my suddenly barren life.
22
My mother was, as always, pleased to see me. The feeling was not entirely reciprocated.
The modern (and when I say modern, I mean post-1900) approach to counselling is based on listening and occasional interpretations and suggestions, allowing the patient, over an extended period, to gain an understanding of his problems and to devise ways of dealing with them. My mother came from an older tradition of personal observations and advice, repeated until the patient conceded defeat. In my mother’s case, the beating over the head was combined with razor-sharp insight.
‘You never did get over that married woman in Australia, did you?’
‘Potatoes are good. How do you get them so brown?’
‘Kylie. That was her name, wasn’t it?’
The misunderstanding was the result of a flippant remark back in 1990. Kylie was then the archetypal Australian name, and I had never bothered to correct my mother. Her lectures were easier to take with Angelina’s name left out of them.
She didn’t wait for confirmation. ‘She’s done you a lot of harm. She should have been ashamed of herself, carrying on with a young man. An innocent traveller.’
‘Mum, I was twenty-six. I was older than she was.’
‘She was married. When my mother married my father, she knew he was off to the war, and let me tell you those American servicemen would have been all over her. She was a very attractive woman when she was young. You’ve seen the photos?’
‘No,’ I lied.
‘Of course you have.’
‘Don’t know, Mum—it’s been a long time.’
My mother went to get the photos. Whenever she needed an exemplar of marriage, she cited her parents. She and Dad had not done so well. Dad had an ego the size of a baby grand. He was a natty dresser, a lover of music of all kinds and a womaniser. He knew everyone in the Manchester music scene—the Bee Gees, the Hollies, the Smiths in their early days—and had a million stories. I would wager he went to the Judas concert at the Free Trade Hall, whatever he told my mother.
Even as a teenager I knew he was playing around. He drank, too, another habit I inherited. I managed to avoid the smoking that gave him lung cancer, but my mother can take the credit for that. My father was only a peripheral part of my life by the time he checked out.
I had three definitive moments with him, all tied to the piano. It was hard to imagine how a definitive moment with my dad could be tied to anything else.
When I was a kid, learning the instrument the old, hard, classical way, he came up while I was practising.
‘Not much fun, is it?’ he said.
‘You’re the one making me do it.’
‘Tell me a song you like. “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”?’
‘Dad! I’m seven.’
‘It’s a good tune at any age. But you choose.’
‘The cherry cola song.’ It was playing constantly on the radio at the time.
He shook his head. ‘Don’t know it.’
‘Yes, you do.’ I hummed a few bars.
‘You want to learn “Lola”? It’s a lot harder than “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”.’
I nodded.
‘Your mam won’t thank me for this.’ Dad played the first notes of the chorus with his right hand. ‘Now you do it.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Start anywhere you like. Play any note.’
I played an A sharp, of course. In our family the B flat was always referred to by its alternative name, and sometimes as the Adam. Mum and Dad had their notes too, though it was of no interest to my mother.
At Freddie Sharp’s funeral, I played ‘No Regrets’, the song he had requested, in F sharp. Loudly, on the black keys. He had surely expected the recorded version, rather than the irony of his deserted son singing it. I did it in the original French—‘Non, Je ne Regrette Rien’—which hardly anyone there would have understood. That was the night I decided to go to Australia.
Dad sang Lo. And then La. ‘Play the second note.’
‘I don’t know which one it is.’
‘You’ve only eighty-eight choices, lad. It won’t be far away. Seldom is.’
It took me two or three tries to find that it was the A sharp again, and then I found the third note. It got easier quickly and gave me a satisfying sense of achievement.
‘You can do that instead of lessons, if you want. I’ll show you what to do with your left hand once you get the hang of it. Starting on any key I choose.’
‘I don’t have to do lessons?’
‘It’ll save your mam and me wasting our money. But you don’t get owt for nowt.’
I knew that good things came with conditions.
‘You have to practise every day. Twenty minutes. That’s all. If you can’t find a piano, you can sing.’
‘For how long?’
‘I told you. Twenty minutes. It’ll go as slow as a wet weekend some days; other times it’ll fly and you’ll want to do more. And you’d be silly not to.’
‘I meant, when can I stop?’
‘Never. Never ever. But no lessons. That’s the deal.’
That deal would ensure that I got plenty of practice and developed a good ear, but never learned to read music. If you can’t play the dots, you can forget about being a professional pianist.
A few days later, Dad bought me the single of ‘Lola’, my first record.
It must have taken me two or three months to learn to play—and sing—the Kinks’ ode to gender ambiguity in eleven keys. Twenty or more minutes a day that my mother had to listen to her seven-year-old son singing about being picked up in a Soho club by a woman who talked like a man. She kept her thoughts to herself, or at least from me.
When I had it down, Dad showed me the chords to play with my left hand—to begin with, just once at the beginning of each phrase, as I would do twenty years later to accompany Angelina singing ‘Angel of the Morning’.
‘Feel good?’ he said.
It did. I was just listening to a basic harmony, but the sound of a note against a chord touches something fundamental in us, more so when you play it yourself. My dad had chosen his words well. It didn’t just sound good, it felt good.
‘That’s why you want to play music,’ he said. ‘That’s the thing to remember.’
I remembered it. Some musicians lose their love of music, particularly popular music, or it loses its power to move them. They are like comedians who understand how jokes are constructed or magicians who know, literally, how the trick is done. Music never lost its power for me, though I moved from playing to listening.
The third moment with Dad was when I was twenty-five, a few months before he joined the heavenly choir. I was playing in a bar in London—Soho, in fact. He walked up to the piano and it took me a moment to realise who he was. He had lost a lot of weight and his face was grey. He was still impeccably dressed.
He smiled and said, as though he didn’t know me, ‘Can you play “For Once in My Life” for me?’
I was more than familiar with this song, a favourite of his that I liked to think had a connection to better times with my mother. I just played it, without singing, concentrating on getting it right. I had always been in awe of my father’s musicianship.
When I had finished, Dad said, ‘Play the first few bars again.’
There is an augmented fifth on life: a four-note chord if you add the seventh. An easy piano or guitar book would write it as a straight G major. But the melody note is a B, a third, and the sharp note in the accompaniment adds a bit of contrast and edge. It was a touch that probably only the singer would notice in a noisy bar.
I played it again, with the seventh, and Dad watched and said, ‘Bugger me, lad, you’ve listened. You played it properly. I’ve always faked it.’
He put a twenty in my tips jar and said, ‘You’ll be all right.’ Then he moved so he was standing behind me and said, ‘Do you remember “Lola”?’
I sang ‘Lola’, and by the time I was finished, he had gone. That was the last time I saw him.
A day that had started with moving out of a twenty-year relationship, continued with quitting my job and ended with moving in with my mother was always going to be tough. Claire had left a message on my phone: I wasn’t asking you to leave; I’m sorry I misjudged the situation with Sheilagh and didn’t give you a chance to speak; call me when you’re ready to talk. It was kind, but it changed nothing.
Angelina had also replied, and gave no indication that I had been out of line with my message about leaving Claire. How was I feeling? Did I have somewhere to live? If our recent contact had anything to do with the break-up, she would swear there had been nothing of substance. It had never been her intention to come between Claire and me, just as she hoped I did not want to disrupt her marriage.
I sent a brief and rather formal reply, thanking her for the concern and assuring her that she was not responsible for my actions, that Claire and I had been contemplating going our separate ways for some time, and that I had never harboured any illusions about a relationship with her.
I had cause to revise my thinking after my mother went to bed. An email from Angelina, sent just after 7 a.m. her time.
To:
[email protected] CC:
[email protected] Hi Adam
I don’t know what your work and accommodation situation is, but Charlie and I are heading off on Friday to our place in France (Burgundy), arriving Saturday. We’ll be there for a week then going on to Milano. It would be great to see you after all these years, and you’d be welcome to stay for the full week and beyond if you wanted to. If you can get to Lyon or Macon we can pick you up from Sunday morning onwards.
Hope things are working out for you.
Kind regards
Angelina
Milano, not Milan. And Charlie Acheson not Charlie Brown. What did he think, or know? Not everything, because he was not copied in on the second email.
Dooglas
PLEASE come. I’d love to see you.
Love
Angel
I slept on it, but in the morning I had a decision to make. There was the practical problem of work: I was still committed to two weeks on the London job. Whether or not I accepted Angelina’s invitation, I needed to put in some face time, so I took the bus to the station and boarded the early express to London. It was mid-afternoon in Melbourne. I emailed Angelina from my phone:
Do you have a broadband internet connection in France?
I thought it unlikely, but decided that if the answer was yes, I would go.
It’s France, not Albania. Are you really coming?