The final instructions
were written into the dress-maker’s notebook, written, in fact, in The
Violinist’s own hand (a strangely petite hand-writing for a woman with the
handshake of a snake wrangler):
Pinch waist further (to
emphasise bosom);
Gold piping for collar
Her client was so eminent
(a world-class musician) that the dress-maker couldn’t think of her as ‘Lucia’,
even though the violinist had been in her little town-house almost every day
for a fitting. In the dress-maker’s mind, and in her notebook, Lucia was
always, and only, ‘The Violinist’.
The dress-maker slid her
glasses from the top of her straight black hair, down onto her nose and began
her final task – that of inserting a strip of gold cloth so that it would stand
up around the violinist’s throat (and ‘hide the wrinkles’). By then it was 10:00 pm and after a day of hard work with the difficult materials a
relief to be finally approaching the end.
The jacket, designed in
person by The Violinist, was in the close-fitting style of a cheongsam, but
with long diaphanous sleeves (in black) and made in cloth steeped in the deep
purples and reds of a Roma wedding dress. It was the most wonderful thing the
dress-maker had ever made. And it was cut from materials that beautifully
clasped The Violinist’s splendid bosom and the extrados of her hips. And when
the violinist’s body began throwing itself into the drama of a Beethoven
concerto or Villa-Lobos concert piece, the jacket would move effortlessly with
her, like a muscle.
The dress-maker, who had
always adored the violin, (the most intimate of instruments), felt doubly privileged
to sew such a garment for such a woman – the beautiful, imperious and talented
Lucia Garza. This jacket was her contribution to the great musician’s first Brisbane appearance, which would happen the following night. And she
planned to be there with her young daughter, another musical prodigy already
learning from the former teacher of Lucia herself.
The clock ticked, and the
radio broadcast a concert from Elder Hall in Adelaide , a piano concerto. The
dress-maker hadn’t caught the beginning. It sounded Russian: Rachmaninov,
Prokofiev, someone like that. Just as the final movement reached its crescendo,
and the dress-maker drew a thread threw the last stitch of the collar, and
leaned to bite it above the knot (a superstition she had, like putting a horseshoe
in the house for good luck) she heard the slam of a car door and then the rapid
knock of high heels as they mounted the paving towards her town-house.
‘Hallo, hallo, are you
awake?’
It was Lucia, apparently
unable to wait until the morning and the time she had set down to collect her
jacket.
‘I can’t wait to see it,’
she said, brushing past and into the front room where the sewing-machine
reigned over the whole lower part of the house.
On a dress-maker’s bust,
adjusted to The Violinist’s proportions, the jacket sat, splendidly illuminated
under a downlight. Its extravagant colours gleamed, the gold collar glowing
with a particular vigour.
‘What’s this?’ The
Violinist said, flicking the collar at the base of the throat. ‘It’s gold!’
Her eyes, drawn in with
black eyeshadow, and ‘Noir’ artliner, and a heavy coating of hypnose mascara,
flashed mercurially. Her glossy lips trembled like dew on a ‘Garza’ rose (named
after her of course). The Violinist seemed angry.
‘The gold piping you
requested,’ the dress-maker said.
She went to pick up her
notebook with its instructions.
‘That is not what I
ordered,’ The Violinist stormed. ‘Don’t you know how to listen?’
The dress-maker opened
her book to protest. There it was in The Violinist’s own writing – gold piping for collar.
‘But..’ the dress-maker
said.
‘I don’t want excuses,’
The Violinist said. ‘It must be emerald. Emerald, do you understand?’
She turned to the
dress-maker’s table where the remains of cloth lay. Beneath the gypsy reds and
purples was a small swathe of emerald silk.
‘It’s this!’ The
Violinist said, picking it up. ‘This is what I want.’
And she turned back to
the front door, her Caro Poivre clouding the enclosed space. The dress-maker
sneezed. She had an allergy to scent.
‘Tomorrow at nine,’ The Violinist
said. ‘As we agreed.’
So the dress-maker sat up
very late, unpicking and re-stitching the fine collar of The Violinist’s
jacket. She cut into the emerald silk on the bias, creating a fine soft piping
for the collar, and as she sewed, her heart was black. This perfect jacket
didn’t belong to such a woman. It was a jacket which embodied the great skills
of the dress-maker, skills she’d learned from her mother, not to mention
understanding because of her own perfect eye for line.
‘Woman like that,’ the
dress-maker muttered, ‘doesn’t deserve artistry like mine.’
On and on she stitched
and the clock ticked and the radio was now playing Duke Ellington (‘Lady be
good’).
She reached into a
cobras’s basket and took out a number of scraps of material, feeling the
thickness between finger and thumb and rustling each piece against her ear. The
basket had been her mother’s gift to her.
‘This is where you keep
your most precious materials,’ her mother said, before closing her eyes for the
last time.
The dress-maker selected
a particular scrap, cut it in two and tucked a piece each side of the collar,
where a violin might rest.
‘Only a small piece,’ she
thought, stitching the collar carefully back together, pricking her finger as
she stitched so that a tiny droplet of blood soaked into the inserted cloth.
And when she had tied off the last bit of thread she cut it clean with her
scissors. After that she toggled the jacket onto its dress-maker’s dummy before
finally going to bed.
The following night the
dress-maker and her daughter had box seats courtesy of the shared violin
teacher. Naturally they were both wore black silk, in dresses run up from
remnants the dress-maker had found at Spotlight. She couldn’t afford not to buy
remnants. The two sat above the Concert Hall stage in Box A, presiding like the
vestal virgins at a Roman Scissore (a name which meant fighting with short
swords – and a name the dress-maker enjoyed knowing).
The orchestra arrived and
took their seats, filling the allocated places for the violins and violas and
cellos and double basses; then the brass instruments lined up at the back, and
behind them the tympani. Finally the conductor arrived, bowed to the audience
in his ring-master’s pants and comical tails. And after a sufficient minute
Lucia strode out, carrying her precious violin and bow in her right hand, using
her left to test her heavy black chignon in a languorous gesture she knew
enhanced the handsome curves of her breast.
‘The jacket,’ the
dress-maker’s daughter whispered. ‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’
‘Indeed,’ the dress-maker
agreed. ‘Very striking.’
Everything about the
jacket, its perfect cut, and the rich colours and the fine stitching, and the
splendid way it encased the body of its wearer, made her proud. There wasn’t a
thing to be said against her sewing when the right person wore her clothes.
The conductor tapped his
baton, raised his two hands, and the music began. It was the Bruch Violin
concerto (G minor, op 26), an old favourite loved by audiences everywhere and
something of a signature piece for Lucia Garza. She swung her bow into the
opening movement, and the jacket moved with her, tight as a glove. The powerful
singing of the violin reached out to grab the audience. The dress-maker’s
daughter was thrilled. She took her mother’s hand and squeezed it.
‘I want to be like her
Mummy,’ she said. ‘Like Lucia.’
And her mother whispered
back.
‘You will be better,’ she
said.
The adagio movement arrived, and feeling safe
in the hands of La Garza the audience relaxed into its reflective beauty. But
the violinist herself seemed anything but relaxed. As soon as the gentle
opening bars began her bowing lost its fluidity. Her arm was ungainly, and she
seemed anxious, constantly shifting the violin slightly against her chin. A
whispering sound followed her quiet bow, and only amplified in the perfect
acoustics of the auditorium. For the audience, accustomed to the vagaries of
great soloists, it seemed the violinist was talking to herself. But her lips
were pursed, her brilliant red lipstick pouting and savage under the shiny
stage light, and the audible whispers went on. Eventually the great violinist
stopped mid-phrase.
‘What the fuck is that?’
she said, turning towards the conductor.
The orchestra having
straggled on for a few bars, caught a contemptuous gaze from Lucia. In seconds
every instrument was silent.
‘Someone in the orchestra
is whispering,’ she said. ‘And just as I approach the most climactic moment.’
She turned on the tympani
(notoriously bored in the back row with nothing to do in the slow movements).
No-one looked at her. After a minute of total silence Lucia picked up her
instrument, adjusted her chin-rest and began again, exactly where she had left
off, and the conductor was forced to scramble the musicians into place to catch
up. Then the whispering began again.
‘That’s it,’ Lucia said.
She stopped and bowed towards the audience. ‘I am sorry but I cannot play on
when there is this dreadful noise.’
And she stalked off
leaving the orchestra to put together an ad hoc evening of Bartok folk dances,
in case the audience might want its money back. As she left the building Lucia
encountered a lone fan, a small frizzy haired woman of nondescript appearance,
waiting patiently with her programme.
‘Can you write ‘For
Evelyn’’, she said, handing over the glossy brochure.
‘You are Evelyn?’ Lucia
asked. She scribbled as she talked.
Yes,’ the woman said,
‘after my mother. She was a great fan of yours.’
‘She wouldn’t have
thought so much of me here,’ Lucia said. ‘In this hick bloody town.’
‘Oh she would have,’
Evelyn said. ‘You were wonderful.’
She hadn’t bothered
staying for the folk dances, they weren’t her ‘thing’.
Lucia took off her
jacket.
‘An insect of a woman has
done something,’ she said, shedding the jacket like a skin. ‘Call me a cab would
you.’
And Evelyn leapt out into
the traffic and whistled up a taxi (something she had never done in her life
before).
Lucia handed her
the jacket.
‘Have it,’ she said. ‘It
might suit you better.’
It was a cool night, and
Evelyn tried the jacket on as soon as Lucia was out of sight. The jacket
smelled of armpit sweat and Caro Poivre and it fitted Evelyn like a glove.
Evelyn was not really so
fond of the violin, it was something she’d pretended to please her mother (now
gone to a better place). Her real love was for the human voice, in particular
the thrilling depths of a great mezzo-soprano. Sometimes her skin prickled with
pleasure at the sorrows of these tragic women. Lucia Garza, while not a mezzo,
had many of the qualities that attracted Evelyn to them – her dramatic marital
history, the affair with a mob boss, and the neglect of her various children.
Her life had all the makings of grand opera, a musical form beloved of Evelyn.
She herself enjoyed an
uninteresting personality and a life sadly bereft of drama. She paid half her
wage into a Defined Benefits Fund and lived underneath her own house in a
garden flat. The main house was rented out to an accountant. When she came home
at night from work (data entry for a government department) her cats accompanied
her to the kitchen, demanding ever more expensive morsels of endangered fish.
During the day they lay in the sunny spots of her front room and purred.
Apart from music, Evelyn
loved auctions. Most weekends she went to at least one, and followed that with
a late lunch in a favoured West End bistro. She collected early 78s, having an adoration for
German lieder. Every Friday she bought the Courier Mail so she could decide
where she would go the next day. That week the most promising was an auction in
Paddington. It started at 11a.m. The list broadly declared ‘Opera singers – early 20th’.
That could mean Pelagie Andriessen, she thought, a mezzo of rare and beautiful
depth. Evelyn ‘collected’ her whenever she could. And it would be a
chance to wear her new jacket.
The selling started right
on time. Besides the 78s there were dolls, militaria, movie posters, china –
all the usual things. Evelyn had looked around beforehand, but there wasn’t
much there that interested her. The ‘Singers – early 20th’ turned out
to be yet more Nellie Melba. But she stayed anyway to enjoy the drama of the
auction. Then a couple of violins were brought in. Evelyn hadn’t noticed there
were instruments for sale, not that she was looking for any. But she did admire
the line of a good violin.
The room was crowded and
hot and the noise of hundreds of people filled the space like a balloon. Her
neck nagged to be scratched. In the crush of people it was hard to move. The
auctioneer stood at his podium, holding a violin and bow.
‘Violin.’ His voice was
miked. ‘Circa 1900, Soliani type in appearance.’
Evelyn paid little
attention, being far more interested in the people around her, than in the
instrument on sale.
‘One hundred dollars,’
the auctioneer called. ‘Let’s get started. Hundred and five, hundred and five,
who’ll give me a hundred and five?’
Heads swivelled from side
to side. They were like spectators at a tennis match, following the movement of
the bids from one part of the room to another. But the bidding was slow. It
didn’t seem there was much call for old violins, in spite of the auctioneer’s
description of it as coming with an especially handsome scroll, and tail piece.
Evelyn jutted her chin forward, and stretched the collar of her jacket, trying
to calm her ferocious itch.
‘Hundred and eighty
dollars,’ the auctioneer said, pointing his hammer at her. ‘Hundred and eighty
five, hundred and eighty five, who’ll give me a hundred and eighty five?’
And as no-one offered any
further amount Evelyn found herself in possession of a violin of unknown make
and quality and relieved of one hundred and eighty dollars.
She took the bus to West End , the violin case wedged
between her knees. The bus was crowded. All around were voices and laughter,
friends gossiping, lovers making plans for the evening. Usually people ignored
Evelyn but not this time.
‘I love your jacket,’ the
girl next to her said. ‘Did you make it?’
And Evelyn embarked on
the strange story, of how an international musician had given it to her.
‘Now I’ve wound up with a
violin as well,’ she said, pointing to the case.
Evelyn had noticed when
she got onto the bus that people looked at her. It was because of the jacket.
Now she realized people were listening as well.
‘Who knows?’ she said
airily to her new friend. ‘Jessye Norman will be here next week. Perhaps she
will give me one of her turbans.’
And they both laughed.
La Norman , as Evelyn thought of
her, although always described as a soprano, had a voice Evelyn recognised as
that rare thing a ‘Falcon’, that is a soprano voice with a sound closer to that
of the tragic depths of the mezzo.
‘I don’t care if I starve
for a month,’ she said loudly to her audience, ‘when Jessye Norman sings ‘When
I am laid in earth’ I will be there with her.’
An appreciative titter
came from the seat behind.
The Concert Hall
auditorium was packed on the night, and when Evelyn got to her not very good
seat (Row G, Seat 2, far left) there’d been a mix-up. Someone else was already there.
Then she did something she had never done in her life before. In full view she
stood her ground and created a scene, her brilliant jacket pulsing with
righteous anger.
‘I am not leaving until I
am given a seat,’ she said loudly to the usher. ‘You’ll have to call the
police.’
‘Madame, Madame,’ the usher
said. ‘No need for such a display.’
And she was taken
upstairs to the entrance of Box A and seated next to a small black-haired woman,
who instantly began to sneeze.
‘You must excuse me,’ she
said. ‘But I have an allergy to perfume.’
And she held an
embroidered muslin handkerchief to her nose.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Evelyn
said.
She should have had the
jacket cleaned of course, but the lingering scent of Lucia Garza was so
seductive.
‘A beautiful jacket,’ the
woman said putting out a hand to touch the sleeve.
‘Yes,’ Evelyn agreed, and
she told the story of how she’d acquired it.
‘That was good luck
wasn’t it?’ the woman said, turning back to the child beside her. They were so
alike it was clear they were mother and daughter.
‘My daughter, Elise,’ she
said, introducing the little girl.
Evelyn was fascinated by
the two, with their heavy black hair, and deep black eyes and pale pale skin.
‘I’m Evelyn,’ she said to
Elise and they shook hands.
She leaned forward.
‘I had to make a bit of a
fuss downstairs,’ she whispered to the child. ‘They’d given my seat to someone
else.’
The mother smiled.
‘It was your destiny,’
she said. ‘To come and sit with us.’
Then she explained that it
was she who had made the exquisite jacket.
‘You sew for Lucia
Garza?’ Evelyn was impressed.
‘Not any more,’ the woman
said. ‘A barbarous creature.'
She refused to speak The
Violinist’s name. Evelyn waited, but there was nothing further.
'Elise will be a great
violinist one day,' her mother said. 'Better than anyone you’ve ever heard.'
Evelyn smiled at the
little girl, with her ankle socks and the hairpin holding her black hair in
place. Was that a jewel in her hair or the glorious iridescence of a lacquered Christmas
beetle?
‘I bought a violin last
week,' she said. ‘Purely by accident.'
And she explained about
the auction, and the way the violin had become hers because of an itch..
'Do you know of anyone
who could buy it?’ she said.
Right away the
dress-maker said it would be perfect for Elise.
‘I think the man said a
Soliani,’ Evelyn said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about violins.’
She remembered how her
itch had stopped the minute she took possession of it.
‘You have it,’ Evelyn
said to the child. ‘Your mother has made this beautiful jacket, apparently for
me. So that would be fair exchange.’
Jessye Norman walked on stage
at this point, in a drifting gown of irridescent blue silk, and with a high
black turban on her head. Her voice rang out into the auditorium each note a
perfect construction of pitch and timbre. The audience was soon in lost the
wonder of the ‘Four Last Songs’ (Strauss).
‘Incredible,’ Evelyn
whispered, her voice swamped by the storm of clapping. She was almost in tears,
never having sat so close to the stage before, and being able to observe the
majestic emotion of the singer’s face. All she could think was: I could die now, and I’d be happy.
Because of the
intermittent rain that night the dress-maker offered to drive Evelyn home. It
turned out they lived near to one another. The little white Suzuki with all its
windows up, soon filled with Lucia Garza’s scent and the dress-maker began to
sneeze.
‘Off to the dry-cleaners
tomorrow,’ Evelyn said apologetically.
The dress-maker kept her
eyes ahead on the road where oil swirled in puddles, making patterns of purple
and gold, shot through with the flashing reds and greens of reflected traffic
lights. Dry-cleaning would remove everything; there would be no trace of the
blood and sweat that had gone into the jacket’s creation. She pulled up close
to the garden gate for Evelyn, since the rain had started again.
‘You’ll bring the violin
tomorrow?’ she said as Evelyn got out.
‘Yes,’ Evelyn said.
She put up her umbrella,
to run inside, where her cats waited by the door.
‘Will my violin be as
good as Miss Garza’s?’ the little girl said, once they’d got home and her
mother was putting her to bed.
‘It will be better,’ her
mother said.
Most likely it was a
Liandro Bisiach, she thought to herself. That was the type The Violinist was
known to play. They were often mistaken for Soliani replicas. In her opinion
the Bisiach sound was much better. She opened her daughter’s favourite book of
fairy-tales and began to read.
‘Once upon a time,’ she
said. ‘There was a little girl in need of a violin.’