Betty looks into the tea leaves. She\u2019s wearing thick woolen purple tights with a tweed skirt. Pip and Bobo, her Yorkshire Terriers sit at her feet. We\u2019re on the low sofas beside the fireplace. \u2018What can you see?\u2019, I ask her, but the leaves aren\u2019t clear. There\u2019s a gilt mirror to our left that looks across the room to her oil paintings, streetscapes, broad brush, bold; Betty has painted the trees in the colours of autumn.<\/p>\n
Betty had met her mother\u2019s ghost on the stairs before they\u2019d known she was ill. She knew the moment her sister\u2019s fianc\u00e9 was killed during the war. \u2018Don\u2019t talk about him anymore,\u2019 she\u2019d said when her sister told her about the nylon stockings he\u2019d promised to bring. \u2018Don\u2019t talk about him, he\u2019s not coming back,\u2019 she said, and a week later they received the telegram. Betty had seen the plane falling in the teacup.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t remember what she looked like, and though she can\u2019t have been much older than mid-fifties, she speaks (in my memory) like a kind of Miss Marple. \u2018A man without a button on his jacket came over and asked if he could drive me home. A cold feeling came over me,\u2019 she says, \u2018and I thought, there\u2019s the man I\u2019m going to marry\u2019. She had been offered a place at the Conservatoire de Paris, but war broke out in 1939 and she stayed in Ireland. Sam was as plain speaking as she was polished. He used to say, \u2018There\u2019s Betty ma wife, Betty ma sister, Betty ma sicitary, A\u2019m up to ma arse in Bettys.\u2019 When he bought the house next to my parents, he said he\u2019d put a face at every window, but they never had children. \u2018Sam, Darling, you\u2019ll drop it,\u2019 Betty would say when she\u2019d find him next door, a cigar and a whiskey in his hand, and me, six months old dandling on his knee.<\/p>\n
As soon as I was old enough to read I went next door for piano lessons. The Steinway baby grand sat at the back of the drawing room. It had a beautiful, deep tone, but that piano knew I hadn\u2019t practiced as my fingers grappled for the keys. Betty would sit at the edge of her armchair, the smell of coffee rising from the teacup in her hand, a piece of my mother\u2019s shortbread in the saucer. By the time we had made it as far as Moli\u00e8re and Maupassant in school I still couldn\u2019t sight read, and when we came to a new piece I\u2019d ask her to play it first, as if it was an audition. Every week, after I\u2019d finished playing, she\u2019d set down the cup, lift a pencil from the edge of the keys, and mark up the music sheet. In my memory there is something of the sacrament about the ritual of those afternoons, the shortbread, the silence, the short musical refrains, the call and response.<\/p>\n
As a child I used to sit there, listening to my mother talking to my mother, mesmerised by the tick of the clock, the rhythm of adults talking when they forgot you were in the room. There were names I never knew mentioned in passing, \u2018Of course that was a disastrous<\/em> marriage,\u2019 she\u2019d say quietly, \u2018a most <\/em>unsuitable alliance.\u2019 There was a world of possibility in the white spaces of those stories.<\/p>\n \u2018Lay your flowers on the path of life, and not on the grave,\u2019 Betty used say, but after she died I\u2019d taken to cycling out to Broughshane, the village where Sam had grown up, the village that lay at the foot of Slemish, where according to legend, St Patrick had tended the sheep. I\u2019d park the bike across from the nursery school and walk through the graveyard. I\u2019d stand at Sam\u2019s family plot, and think of Betty. A few years later my mother and I called in on our way to the coast to say a prayer. I\u2019d been standing at the wrong grave.<\/p>\n I begin to practice scales late at night, headphones on, so as not to disturb the neighbours. There is something meditative about the repetitive motion. I\u2019ve gone back to piano lessons. My teacher, Amelia, is Russian. \u2018Yes<\/em>, but not so boring<\/em>,\u2019 she says, and her voice has the cadence of music. I have forced myself to sight read, but I can see grammar instead of language and when I play it sounds like I\u2019m proof reading. Amelia marks up the scales and I pore over them late at night. There is a kind of scholarly satisfaction to reading the notes marked against the five lines of the music, as though I\u2019m trying to locate memory on a grid reference.<\/p>\n Once you collected ten stars you got a book token, but those books are long since gone; the music and the piano given away to a younger cousin. I remember Betty suggesting diplomatically that we leave the exam pieces so I could work on my repertoire, and I started playing jazz after that. As I practice, I remember how it felt to sit with a straight back on the stool. I need the music in front of me as a comfort, but I\u2019m not really reading it. How do you remember a sound?<\/p>\n As I read Amelia\u2019s notes the quavers look like exclamation marks. \u2018Don\u2019t force them,\u2019 she writes, \u2018but fade away\u2019. I can hear her Russian accent as I read. \u2018L h should be light, short (independent),\u2019 she writes, \u2018play l h detached\u2019. She writes \u2018RISK\u2019 then \u2018Empahsize E\u2019. \u2018Work on 11-14, go slowly and remember all things.\u2019 In the next entry she writes, \u2018speed up sections, very good, speed up\u2019, and there\u2019s an explanation of a grace note, which seems to be an invisible note; something about an absence or a presence. By the next month she has added \u2018Theory Guide. Metronome.\u2019 The entry continues, perhaps as an encouragement, \u2018RH plays all note short \u2013 feel like one of the rock band (cool).\u2019 As I read the notes they feel like coded messages, as though I\u2019m translating from another language. She has marked 8 X as if she\u2019s signing off with a kiss and it reads like \u2018Rx\u2019 the medical reference for treatment prescribed, which I\u2019d read in countless medical records as a medico legal lawyer. Then she writes \u2018hold LH, pedal exercises\u2019 and by this stage this whole business reminds me of learning to drive, keeping your back straight, your foot within easy reach of the brake, constantly checking the mirror. It feels awkward learning as an adult. The notes feel like archival material, as though Amelia\u2019s notes could take me back to Betty. Then on the last page, she writes \u2018peters out\u2019, then she goes on maternity leave and I move away to take up a place on the MA programme at UEA, and the music is left again.<\/p>\n An antique dealer from home buys two of Betty\u2019s paintings. I phone him from the train to Norwich. \u2018I\u2019ve had a lot of interest in the smaller one, the landscape, and the other is worth a fortune for the frame alone,\u2019 he says. It seems in poor taste to negotiate. He knows Betty was my neighbour; he can tell I want something bearing her fingerprints. \u2018I\u2019ll take them,\u2019 I say. I give him my credit card details. When they arrive, the smaller one is not what I expected. It\u2019s a clich\u00e9d landscape, with Slemish in the background. I regret buying it, and I\u2019m ashamed of my reaction. The larger picture, though, is just as I remember it. It\u2019s a huge, bold, confident still life of dahlias in outlandish strokes as broad as calligraphy. It yells out from the canvass. It hangs in my apartment like a family portrait. Some of my friends are buying back pension years so they can retire earlier; I am buying back my past.<\/p>\n I find a phone number for Betty\u2019s sister. She must be almost ninety at this stage, I think. I ring for weeks and eventually I get through. \u2018I was wondering if it would be possible to come and visit,\u2019 I ask. She is polite but firm, \u2018I\u2019m staying with my brother, you see, so it wouldn\u2019t suit terribly well.\u2019 When I say I wish I had some more of Betty\u2019s work, she says, \u2018It\u2019s not mine to sell, you see,\u2019 but it doesn\u2019t matter a bit. She sounds exactly like Betty. I have just telephoned my childhood.<\/p>\n There are drawers full of photos at home; snowmen wearing our hats and gloves, my sister hugging the dog, or one of us standing in the knee length First Communion dress crocheted by my grandmother. We a don\u2019t have single photo of Betty. I\u2019m tracking her down, like a biographer. Odd things come back to me, a letter my parents received from another neighbour when they moved away, saying, \u2018We will miss your quiet presence on the road\u2019.<\/p>\n \u2018Go on through,\u2019 says the agent as he grapples with the keys and bends down to lift the fliers and two-for-one pizza offers. Betty\u2019s house has come on the market. My mother and I head straight for the drawing room. The marble fireplace is still there, but the gilt mirror has gone, and the room seems so ordinary without it. The walls look so much smaller without her oil paintings. The room looks nothing like itself. There\u2019s an artificial Christmas tree perched on top of cardboard boxes where the piano used to stand. It\u2019s midsummer.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not entirely sure what I\u2019m expecting to find. It\u2019s as though I am excavating for fragments of the past. I go from room to room taking photos as though it\u2019s a crime scene. It feels like we\u2019re archaeologists, my mother and I, digging for shards of china, seeking proof that those teacups once existed.<\/p>\n Looking back, you\u2019d have to say they weren\u2019t the cheeriest of years. No matter how sheltered you were, you couldn\u2019t turn on the TV without hearing about a hunger strike death, \u2018ten men dead\u2019 or another IRA atrocity. You couldn\u2019t talk to friends without tiptoeing around their religion. I think Betty was Church of Ireland, but she didn\u2019t make a song and dance about it. Betty\u2019s drawing room was the only place anyone ever talked about religion as if it was as natural (or as unimportant) as the weather. It was a retreat from the red \u2018Brits Out\u2019 or \u2018No Pope Here\u2019 graffiti slapped across forearms and splashed over murals across the town. Betty seemed to offer safe passage through the invisible geography of the Troubles.<\/p>\n I wander out to the hallway and I stand at foot of the stairs. It never occurred to me that she must have been lonely, living in this house after Sam died; she certainly showed no signs of it. \u2018I was so delighted after the day\u2019s painting,\u2019 she told my mother, \u2018I just hugged the bannister\u2019.<\/p>\n Coloured light streams through the stained glass windows on the return. I am thirty years younger. Music wafts out from under the door. Betty\u2019s eyes will light up when she sees me. She\u2019ll pick up her saucer, I\u2019ll sit down and arrange my fingers around middle C. Betty\u2019s encouraging tones will drift after the music, \u2018That was marvelous. I think you\u2019re ready for the next grade.\u2019 I\u2019ll lift my fingers from the keyboard and swing myself round so that I\u2019m sitting sidesaddle, and ask how she\u2019s been doing.<\/p>\n My mother and I go on through to the kitchen, past the table where Betty\u2019s oil paintings used to dry. We continue out to the garden, past the black stone wall that bordered our garden, past the headstones erected for Pip and Bobo, and we remember the day she buried Pip (or was it Bobo?). She was so convinced the dog had stirred that she had to call the vet to confirm he was dead. We keep going right down to the end, where my sister and I used to play: the secret garden. It is dangerous underfoot, a bit like a graveyard where the ground gives way. \u2018Be careful,\u2019 my mother says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Betty looks into the tea leaves. She\u2019s wearing thick woolen purple tights with a tweed skirt. Pip and Bobo, her Yorkshire Terriers sit at her feet. We\u2019re on the low sofas beside the fireplace. \u2018What can you see?\u2019, I ask her, but the leaves aren\u2019t clear. There\u2019s a gilt mirror to our left that looks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":233,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[346,348],"tags":[350],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n