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Authors: Sonia Orchard
Tags: Fiction
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put my right hand on the keys and play the first note. Then he asked me to play the first two notes, then the first three, and so on. Any problem in a passage of music, he said, can be broken down to a problem between two notes.
He told me that Cortot, the brilliant Chopin pianist, was asked what was the most difficult thing about piano playing. Cortot thought for a moment and then answered, ‘Getting from one note to the next.’ Noël said that one time Cortot was practising at the Academy for a concert, sitting at a piano, slowly playing two notes over and over. After some time a teacher in a neighbouring room charged in and was about to hurl abuse at this infantile annoyance when he saw the magnificent Cortot sitting intently at the piano, rolling his fingers back and forth over the notes like a child.
That was the way Noël presented the world to me: he would break it all down and explain in the simplest terms the inevitability of the fall of the ancient Egyptian empire, the process by which a virus replicates itself in the human body, why cooked onions taste so sweet.
I watched the way he leapt to the piano when he thought of a piece of music he wished to learn, approaching it with childlike gusto. Noël didn’t believe that anything could be too difficult or incomprehensible once reduced to its most elemental parts. ‘A flower is simply made from atoms,’ he told me once. ‘This music—it’s just notes, nothing more.’ Then he smiled and shrugged, as if it were all so perfectly simple, placed his hands on my shoulders, drew me in close and kissed me.
That’s what Noël believed and that’s what I believed too when I was with him. That when I played the piano I could create something wonderful like a flower, atom by atom, note by note.
He was a difficult man to pin down. He stayed in Sussex with the Eckersleys most of the week, practising from early in the morning until midday, and one knew never to ring him during this time. Then in the afternoon he’d be off visiting Michael Tippett or another local musician, or heading into London to see his agent, and to rehearse or arrange scores with conductors. So I never knew where he might be at any time or when I might see him. Besides, he seemed to prefer to turn up unannounced; I’d answer a knock at my door to see him standing there with an ardent gaze as if he’d been dying to see me all day. He enjoyed the element of surprise, often bearing some object of great interest—a Stravinsky record he’d had on order for months that had only just arrived, or the latest issue of Nature that contained some fascinating article that he wished to share. He was also very fond of food (he once played me his ‘first composition’, which he’d written when he was five, a rollicking number about going to the corner shop to buy some cheese sticks, the piece ending with an exuberant glissando as the cheese slides down his throat) and would often pull from his bag a jar of his aunt’s homemade green-tomato relish sent over from Australia, half a dozen eggs from a neighbour in Renby Grange, or some other delicacy that hadn’t been seen in the high street since before the war.
One time he walked in swinging a string bag, grinning like a schoolboy, reached inside, then presented a package wrapped in butcher’s paper. ‘Chicken,’ he said with a nod, as if I’d dared him to front up with such a meal.
‘For dinner?’ I hadn’t eaten chicken since I was a child. The first few Christmases after the war began my aunt would mould a pound of mince into the shape of a bird and roast it. After that she tired of the effort involved and started cooking it in a tin, no different from a regular meatloaf. But if it came with apple sauce and arrived any time around Christmas, we called it false goose, nonetheless.
‘Well, unless you’d like to keep it as a pet. Though I don’t suppose it’s laid any eggs for some time,’ and dropped the package into my hands.
‘Where on
He told me that Cortot, the brilliant Chopin pianist, was asked what was the most difficult thing about piano playing. Cortot thought for a moment and then answered, ‘Getting from one note to the next.’ Noël said that one time Cortot was practising at the Academy for a concert, sitting at a piano, slowly playing two notes over and over. After some time a teacher in a neighbouring room charged in and was about to hurl abuse at this infantile annoyance when he saw the magnificent Cortot sitting intently at the piano, rolling his fingers back and forth over the notes like a child.
That was the way Noël presented the world to me: he would break it all down and explain in the simplest terms the inevitability of the fall of the ancient Egyptian empire, the process by which a virus replicates itself in the human body, why cooked onions taste so sweet.
I watched the way he leapt to the piano when he thought of a piece of music he wished to learn, approaching it with childlike gusto. Noël didn’t believe that anything could be too difficult or incomprehensible once reduced to its most elemental parts. ‘A flower is simply made from atoms,’ he told me once. ‘This music—it’s just notes, nothing more.’ Then he smiled and shrugged, as if it were all so perfectly simple, placed his hands on my shoulders, drew me in close and kissed me.
That’s what Noël believed and that’s what I believed too when I was with him. That when I played the piano I could create something wonderful like a flower, atom by atom, note by note.
He was a difficult man to pin down. He stayed in Sussex with the Eckersleys most of the week, practising from early in the morning until midday, and one knew never to ring him during this time. Then in the afternoon he’d be off visiting Michael Tippett or another local musician, or heading into London to see his agent, and to rehearse or arrange scores with conductors. So I never knew where he might be at any time or when I might see him. Besides, he seemed to prefer to turn up unannounced; I’d answer a knock at my door to see him standing there with an ardent gaze as if he’d been dying to see me all day. He enjoyed the element of surprise, often bearing some object of great interest—a Stravinsky record he’d had on order for months that had only just arrived, or the latest issue of Nature that contained some fascinating article that he wished to share. He was also very fond of food (he once played me his ‘first composition’, which he’d written when he was five, a rollicking number about going to the corner shop to buy some cheese sticks, the piece ending with an exuberant glissando as the cheese slides down his throat) and would often pull from his bag a jar of his aunt’s homemade green-tomato relish sent over from Australia, half a dozen eggs from a neighbour in Renby Grange, or some other delicacy that hadn’t been seen in the high street since before the war.
One time he walked in swinging a string bag, grinning like a schoolboy, reached inside, then presented a package wrapped in butcher’s paper. ‘Chicken,’ he said with a nod, as if I’d dared him to front up with such a meal.
‘For dinner?’ I hadn’t eaten chicken since I was a child. The first few Christmases after the war began my aunt would mould a pound of mince into the shape of a bird and roast it. After that she tired of the effort involved and started cooking it in a tin, no different from a regular meatloaf. But if it came with apple sauce and arrived any time around Christmas, we called it false goose, nonetheless.
‘Well, unless you’d like to keep it as a pet. Though I don’t suppose it’s laid any eggs for some time,’ and dropped the package into my hands.
‘Where on
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