The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir. Jennifer Ryan
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my eyes flitting over everything.
I picked up an emerald one with gold-coloured cord. There was a small latch that opened it, and inside the black velvet interior was a tiny silver ring, a child’s, with a St Christopher motif on the front.
‘Was this yours?’ I asked hesitantly.
‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘It was given to me when I was a child. It came from India, where I grew up. India has always been my favourite place – the colours, the noise, the vibrancy, the people.’ She pointed to a picture of a beautiful white temple on the wall beside her. ‘We lived close to this majestic edifice, the Taj Mahal. It’s a mausoleum built by an emperor for his wife, who died in childbirth. He visited here every day, it is said, to grieve.’
‘Can you imagine loving someone so much that you create such a wonderful building?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It depends how rich and powerful one happens to be, I expect. Most people wouldn’t be able to afford it. But that doesn’t make one’s love any less. We can show our grief in simpler ways. Is not the beauty and power of funeral song just as great as such a palace?’
I nodded, peering into the sitting room that was beaming with the brightness of antiquities. ‘Do all of these things come from India?’
‘Not at all. I travelled across Asia. There’s a mesmerising world out there, where people live in all kinds of different ways.’ She led the way into the room so that I could see. Gold gleamed from every corner: gold urns, gold statues, gold silk drapes around the windows, tiny gold miniatures as small as my thumb – an elephant, an old woman, a falcon.
‘Other cultures are rather odd, don’t you think?’ I said.
‘No, quite the contrary. Other cultures often make me think that we’re the strange ones.’ She chuckled to herself, then headed for the kitchen. ‘Let’s make some tea.’
As the kettle boiled, I looked around. A series of old decorated jugs sat on the windowsill, and bunches of dried herbs lined the far wall, giving off scents of rosemary, thyme, and lavender. A waist-high seagull watched us from the corner.
‘Oh that’s Earnest, made of papier-mâché,’ she chirped. ‘He was one of the props for a play we put on in London years ago. He’s always here in the morning, looking hungry.’
I laughed and gave him a pat on the head.
Around the sink were a number of bottles full of liquids and powders and potions, and I leapt back. Was Prim a witch?
She saw me stare, and smiled. ‘Those are my medicines,’ she said. ‘I once was very ill indeed, and I need the medicine to prevent me from getting ill again.’
I stood back, looking at her. She looked pretty normal – well, normal in a kind of witchy way. ‘It’s not catching, is it?’
‘No, I caught it from a nasty mosquito in India, but we don’t have mosquitoes here.’ She rearranged the bottles, then made the tea. ‘The disease is called malaria.’
‘Were you terribly ill?’
‘It was almost the end of me. I was about the same age as your sister, my whole life ahead of me, with plenty of music and laughter, and romance too. There was a boy whom I was to marry.’ She smiled at the distant memory of him. ‘He was the most beautiful creature, a butterfly collector, brilliantly clever.’
‘Why didn’t you marry him?’
‘He died,’ she said simply. ‘He contracted malaria at the same time as me, and didn’t make it. We’d grown up as neighbours and then fell in love. We became ill at the same time. But the malaria ran its course and passed out of me. I was alive.’
‘But brokenhearted!’
‘Exactly, and ever since then I’ve felt destined to live a double life for both me and my butterfly collector, alone yet not.’ She found a floral porcelain sugar bowl and milk jug. ‘It taught me that you have to live your own life. Don’t let anyone hold you back.’
I found myself blurting out, ‘I want to be a singer, but Daddy insists that I can’t. He wants me to make a good marriage, to be a good wife. But Mama tells me to take care when choosing a husband, or my life will be a misery.’
‘You need to make your own path,’ she said, leading the way into the back room. ‘Decide what you want to do, and then all you have to do is work out how to achieve it.’
The room was full of musical instruments. There was a huge harp, an upright piano, a harpsichord, a stand with a clarinet, and a silver piccolo lying across the table like a fairy had just flown off after doing a spot of practice.
Prim perched the tray on a tiny round table and pulled over the piano seat, gesturing for me to sit on the harpsichord chair.
‘Is that why you never married? Do you still love the butterfly collector?’
‘I don’t know.’ She smiled, pouring out the tea. ‘Sometimes we do things without fully understanding. You shouldn’t try to know everything, Kitty. Often it’s beyond our comprehension.’ She put the teapot back on the tray. ‘Now before we start, I want you to sing me a note, as clearly as you can.’
I sang a long, high ‘laaaa’.
‘Beautiful,’ she said, picking up the cup and saucer again and handing it over to me. ‘Did you think about that too much before singing?’
‘No,’ I said, sipping the hot tea.
‘Sometimes the magic of life is beyond thought. It’s the sparkle of intuition, of bringing your own personal energy into your music.’
‘But don’t I need to worry about singing the right words to the right notes?’
‘The most important part of singing is the feeling.’ She leant forward. ‘Remember, Kitty. I have faith in you.’
That afternoon we sang ‘Ave verum corpus’ by Mozart, my favourite composer. I sang better and stronger than I ever have before.
‘There is a tragic tale about Mozart,’ she told me. ‘He wrote his Requiem, one of the saddest funereal pieces ever written, as he himself was dying, telling his wife, “I fear I am writing a requiem for myself.” On the eve of his death, he and some friends sang it together, and it was at the most poignant song of his Requiem, the ‘Lacrimosa’, that he let the papers drop and began to weep for his very own death. He died in the early morning. Can you imagine writing your own death music?’
I gasped. ‘That’s dreadful. Do you think the music made him die?’
‘Perhaps it was that he knew deep down inside that he was dying, and put that fear into the music.’ She looked back at the ‘Ave verum corpus’. ‘Why don’t you try this again, just like before, only this time, think about Mozart writing for his own death. Put your heart into it.’
She began the introduction, and I felt the sound of my voice come from deep inside, and I found myself thinking of the fear you must feel before you die.
A strange elation came over me when I’d finished, like I was a pure white dove’s feather being whooshed up into the air by the lightness of the breeze. And later, as I wandered home, I drew a deep breath of the crisp spring air, and I felt suddenly jubilant to be alive.
Letter from Miss Edwina Paltry to her sister, Clara
3 Church Row
Chilbury
Kent