The Cello

Propped on the mantelpiece, the innocent white face of the folded note betrayed little of the viciously trite message it enclosed:

Char,
I’m really sorry to do it like this but…

The words flew off the page like daggers and she doubled over as if she’d taken a kick to the gut. Later, she ricocheted around the flat like a pinball, bouncing off the newly formed spaces, sharp painful angles where she least expected them. The CD rack gave her a mockingly toothy grin, the gaps which had held Richard’s compact discs as apparent as black piano keys. In the bedroom the wardrobe door swung open with a xylophonic chorus of jangling hangers. Like the chalk outline around a dead body, a fairy ring of dust on the dressing table preserved the exact location of his “special occasion” aftershave.


It had been one week, four days, eighteen hours and seventeen minutes since Charlotte had drawn herself up straight and carefully, deliberately, refolded the note before placing it back where he had left it. She thought that she should get a cat. That was what abandoned women did, wasn’t it? She would start a cat collection, grow bristles on her chin, let her blood distil to vinegar.

Instead she found herself staring through the window of a music shop, pulse quickening. The cello was simply exquisite, all elaborate curlicues and drippingly glossy wood. Fantastically frivolous yet comfortingly stern. She loved it. She bought it.



For a fortnight Charlotte felt the heavy reproachful glare of the cello, glowering at her every time she opened what was now referred to as “the spare wardrobe”. It derided her musical naiveté, the symmetrical “f” holes smirking at her whilst the strings bared their teeth. Swallowing her pride, she flicked through the Yellow Pages, stuck a pin in the page and booked her first lesson.


Though barely five feet tall (and almost as wide) Mr Feuermann had an assured presence which both intimidated and reassured Charlotte. He carried a cane, elaborately carved and with an ivory tip, which Charlotte innocently assumed would be used to beat out time on the floor. She learned the hard way that it was more regularly employed to deliver a smart rap on her knees, shoulders, elbows or any other body part which wandered from the correct alignment.


“Remember, Czarlot,” (Mr Feuermann always pronounced her name in such a way as to make her feel like a Russian courtesan), “Remember that we hold the bow with the hand like the duck. See!” He made a “quacking” gesture with his hand which almost made Charlotte laugh, although a sharp pain across the back of her hand, a flashback to last week’s lesson, reminded her that Mr Feuermann did not find humour in a sloppy bow technique. She gritted her teeth and adjusted her bow hold.



Shamed by her seeming inability to grasp even the basics, finding that even children’s pieces such as “Parachuting Elephants” were beyond her extremely limited ability, Charlotte resolved, weekly, that she would tell Mr Feuermann that she would not be needing to book another lesson. And every time she opened her mouth to do so she caught sight of Richard’s dusty note and bit her tongue hard, blurring her eyes with tears.


The weeks passed, each lesson punctuated by a series of minor victories and an equal number of grating errors. But, note by note, bar by bar, Charlotte found that the ache in her heart was diminishing in direct proportion to the ache in her arms and back, and instead of lying awake at night reciting and analysing every word of Richard’s note and their last conversations, she found herself engrossed in a visualised mastery of the tricky shift from G to E in “The Doll’s Waltz”.



“No, no, NO! Dolce, not forte! Elbows high like eagles and the bow must flow like water. Again!”
“I’m trying but I can’t get it. It’s too hard and I can’t do it…”
“Oh ho! Too hard, too hard is it? Tell me, Czarlot, is there a thing that is worth doing that is not hard? Why must we always choose that which is easiest? Is it easy to pour your soul into the violoncello? Is it easy to be passionate and yet controlled? No, it is not easy. But if it is easy that you are looking for, we should put this violoncello back into a cupboard and…”

She looked at the note on the mantelpiece, curling at the edges, and it looked back at her with such impudence that she immediately raised her bow and played “Happy Katia” once through with perfect phrasing.



The spaces in the CD rack filled up gradually, exotic names that swirled the brain like vodka: Dvorak, Janacek, Schumman. And the “spare” wardrobe had been disposed of, usurped by the triumvirate of her cello, her music stand and her chair.



“I think, Czarlot, that we will make a cellist of you yet. Not one of the greats, no. But one of the quite-goods. You have the technique, almost, but you have not the passion. It will come… we hope.”

He smiled. Charlotte smiled back. In the last few weeks her progression had been astounding. She played every spare minute that she had, and not just the weekly set pieces and exercises. As soon as she was through the door she rushed to her cello (which always seemed so much more pleased to see her than she liked to imagine that cat she didn’t buy would be) and she would play for hours, oblivious to hunger and exhaustion. Barefoot, eyes closed in rapture, hair swinging loose, she would lose herself in the bittersweet chocolatey notes that spiralled out from her bow.




Four months, two weeks, five days, six hours and thirty-three minutes since she had drawn herself up straight and carefully, deliberately, refolded the note and placed it back on the mantelpiece a sleepless Charlotte gazed through the semi-darkness of the bedroom at the cello. Richard had called less than an hour ago and the sound of his voice, both strange and familiar, had set her head ringing like a bell. His voice was thick with drink, he seemed to be asking if he could come round “to see if she was alright”, followed by something slurry about having missed her. She thought she caught the word “mistake” but couldn’t be sure. Her voice caught in her oesophagus, she was grasping for breath, but she was spared the ordeal of speaking. Richard’s drunkenness caused him to cut her off, and, neither wanting or waiting to see if he would call back, she had replaced the receiver, unplugged the phone at the wall, and lain back on the bed.


The cello was glowing in the light from the streetlamp outside the bedroom widow, the glossy lacquer flaming in the sodium glow. She was still dizzy from Richard’s call. The pizzicato of “Raindrops” was beating a rhythm at the base of her throat and her breath came in short sharp semi quavers. Her thumbnail plucked the C, and the deep bassy tone vibrated through the floor boards and up through her feet like electricity.

From somewhere she heard Mr Feuermann:
“You must become one with your violoncello; as you take it between your legs you must also take it into your heart, just as you would a man. Let the strings vibrate through your soul and let the music pour from you with passion. Forget the rules, play from the inside.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, the cello imprisoned by her thighs, the arc of her right arm swept faster and faster as she played, the fleshy pads of her fingers dancing across the slender neck. Low moans curled from the bow like pipe smoke, tobacco-brown honeyed tones wrapped around her like mink. When she finally slept she lay the cello down next to her, coiled against its side.



In the morning she took Richard’s note from the mantelpiece and burnt it in the bathroom basin.