It was hot in the choir stalls. Red-faced in their white smocks, the choristers sang like angels. St Oswald’s takes its choir seriously: the boys are drilled in obedience. Like soldiers, they are trained to stand and keep their position for hours on end. No one complains. No one dares. Sing your hearts out, boys, and smile! bugles the choirmaster during rehearsals. This is for God and St Oswald’s. I don’t want to see a single boy letting down the team.
But now Ben Winter was looking pale. Perhaps the heat; the incense; perhaps the strain of keeping that smile. Remember, he was delicate; Ma always said so. More sensitive than the other two; more prone to illness and accidents –
The angel voices rose again, sweeping towards the crescendo.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow –
And that was when it happened. Almost in slow motion; a thud: a movement in the front row; a pale-faced boy collapsing unseen on to the floor of the chapel; striking his head on the side of a pew, a blow that would require four stitches to mend, a crescent moon on his forehead.
Why did no one notice him? Why was Ben so wholly eclipsed? No one saw him – not even Ma – for just as he fell, a little blind girl in the crowd suffered a kind of panic attack, and all eyes turned to Emily White, Emily in the rose-coloured dress, flailing her arms and shouting out: Please. I want to stay. I want to –
Listen to the colours.
Post comment:
Albertine: Nice comeback, blueeyedboy.
blueeyedboy: Glad you liked it, Albertine.
Albertine: Well, liked is maybe not the word –
blueeyedboy: Nice comeback, Albertine . . .
10
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:
[email protected] Posted at: 23.49 on Monday, February 11
Status: public
Mood: raw
Listen to the colours. Maybe you remember the phrase. Glib coming from the mouth of an adult, it must have seemed unbearably poignant from that of a five-year-old blind girl. In any case, it did the trick. Listen to the colours. All unknowing, Emily White had opened up a box of magic words, and was drunk with their power and her own, issuing commands like a diminutive general, commands which Catherine and Feather – and later, of course, Dr Peacock – obeyed with unquestioning delight.
‘What do you see?’
Diminished chord of F minor. The magic words unfurl like wrapping-paper, every one.
‘Pink. Blue. Green. Violet. So pretty.’
Her mother claps her hands in delight. ‘More, Emily. Tell me more.’
A chord of F major.
‘Red. Orange. Ma-gen-ta. Black.’
It was like an awakening. The infernal power she had discovered in herself had blossomed in an astonishing way, and music was suddenly a part of her curriculum. The piano was brought out of the spare room and re-tuned; her father’s secret lessons became official, and Emily was allowed to practise whenever she liked, even when Catherine was working. Then came the local newspapers, and the letters and gifts came pouring in.
The story had plenty of potential. In fact, it had all the ingredients. A Christmas miracle; a photogenic blind girl; music; art; some man-in-the-street science, courtesy of Dr Peacock, and a lot of controversy from the art world that kept the papers wondering on and off for the next three years or so, caught up in speculation. The TV eventually caught on to it; so did the Press. There was even a single – a Top Ten hit – by a rock band whose name I forget. The song was later used in the Hollywood film – an adaptation of the book – starring Robert Redford as Dr Peacock and a young Natalie Portman as the blind girl who sees music.
At first Emily took it for granted. After all, she was very young, and had no basis for comparison. And she was very happy – she listened to music all day long; she studied what she loved most, and everyone was pleased with her.
Over the next twelve months or so Emily attended a number of concerts, as well as performances of The Magic Flute, the Messiah and Swan Lake. She went to her father’s school several times, so that she could get to know the instruments by feel.
Flutes, with their slender bodies and intricate keys; pot-bellied cellos and double basses; French horns and tubas like big school canteen-jugs of sound; narrow-waisted violins; icicle bells; fat drums and flat drums; splash cymbals and crash cymbals; triangles and timpani and trumpets and tambourines.
Sometimes her father would play for her. He was different when Catherine was not there: he told jokes; he was exuberant, dancing Emily round and round to the music, making her dizzy with laughter. He would have liked to have been a professional musician: clarinet, and not piano, had been his preferred instrument, but there was little call for a classically trained clarinet player with a lurking passion for Acker Bilk, and his small ambitions had gone unvoiced and unnoticed.
But there was another side to Catherine’s conversion. It took Emily months to discover it; longer still to understand. This is where my memories lose all cohesion; reality merges with myth so that I cannot trust myself to be either accurate or truthful. Only the facts speak for themselves; and even they have been so much disputed, queried, misreported, misread that only scraps remain of anything that might show me how it really was.
The facts, then. You must know the tale. In the audience that evening, sitting three rows from the front, at the end, was a man called Graham Peacock. Sixty-seven years old; a well-known local personality; a noted gourmet; a likeable eccentric; a generous patron of the arts. That evening in December, during a recital of Christmas songs in St Oswald’s Chapel, Dr Peacock found himself party to an incident that was to change his life.
A small girl – the child of a friend of his – had suffered a kind of panic attack. Her mother began to carry her out, and in the scuffle that ensued – the child struggling valiantly to stay, the mother trying with equal fortitude to remove her – he heard the child speak a phrase that struck at him like a revelation.
Listen to the colours.
At the time Emily barely understood the significance of what she had said. But Dr Peacock’s interest left her mother in a state of near-euphoria; at home, Feather opened a bottle of champagne, and even Daddy seemed pleased, though that might just have been because of the change in Catherine. Nevertheless he did not approve; later, when the thing had begun, his was the only dissenting voice.
Needless to say, no one listened. The very next day little Emily was summoned to the Fireplace House, where every possible test was run to confirm her special talents.
Synaesthesia [writes Dr Peacock in his paper ‘Aspects of Modularity’] is a rare condition where two – or sometimes more – of the five ‘normal’ senses are apparently fused together. This seems to be related to the concept of modularity. Each of the sensory systems has a corresponding area, or module, of the brain. While there are normal interactions between modules (such as using vision to detect movement), the current understanding of human perception cannot account for the stimulation of one module inducing brain activity in a different module. However, in a synaesthete, this is precisely the case.
In short, a synaesthete may experience any or all of the following: shape as taste, touch as scent, sound or taste as colour.
All this was new to Emily, if not to Feather and Catherine. But she understood the idea – they all knew about Boy X, after all – and from what she’d heard of his special gift, it was not too far removed from the word associations and art lessons and colour therapies she had learnt from her mother. She was five and a half at the time; eager to please; even more so to perform.
The arrangement was simple. In the mornings Emily would go to Dr Peacock’s house for her music lesson and her other subjects; and in the afternoons she would play the piano, listen to records, and paint. That was her only duty, and as she was allowed to listen to music as she performed it, it was no great burden. Sometimes Dr Peacock would ask her questions, and record what she said.
Emily, listen. What do you see?
A single note picked out on the clunky old piano in the Fireplace House. G is indigo, almost black. A simple triad takes it further; then a chord – G minor, with a diminished seventh in the bass – resolves in a velvety violet caress.
He marks the result in his notebook.
Very good, Emily. That’s my good girl.
Next comes a series of soft chords; C sharp minor; D diminished; E flat minor seventh. Emily points out the colours, marked in Braille on the paintbox.
To Emily it feels almost like playing an instrument, her hands on the little coloured keys; and Dr Peacock notes it down in his scratchy little notepad, and then there is tea by the fireplace, with Dr Peacock’s Jack Russell, Patch II, snuffling hopefully after biscuits, tickling Emily’s hands, making her laugh. Dr Peacock speaks to his dog as if he, too, is an elderly academic; which makes Emily laugh even more, and which soon becomes part of their lessons together.
‘Patch II would like to enquire,’ he says in his bassoony voice, ‘whether today Miss White feels inclined to peruse my collection of recorded sounds—’
Emily giggles. ‘You mean listen to records?’
‘My furry colleague would appreciate it.’
On cue, Patch II barks.
Emily laughs. ‘OK,’ she says.
Over the thirty months that followed, Dr Peacock became an increasingly large part of all their lives. Catherine was deliriously happy; Emily was an apt pupil, spending three or four hours at the piano every day, and suddenly there was a much-needed focus to all of their lives. I doubt Patrick White could have stopped it, anyway, even if he had wanted to; after all, he too had a stake in the affair. He, too, wanted to believe.
Emily never asked herself why Dr Peacock was so generous. To her he was simply a kind and funny man who spoke in long and ponderous phrases and who never came to see them without bringing some gift of flowers, wine, books. On Emily’s sixth birthday he gave her a new piano to replace the old, battered one on which she had learnt; throughout the year there were concert tickets, pastels, paints, easels, canvas, sweets and toys.
And music, of course. Always music. Even now that hurts most of all. To think of a time when Emily could play every day for as long as she liked, when every day was a fanfare, and Mozart, Mahler, Chopin, even Berlioz would line up like suitors for her favour, to be chosen or discarded at whim . . .
‘Now, Emily. Listen to the music. Tell me what you hear.’
That was Mendelssohn, Lieder ohne Worte, Opus 19, Number 2, in A minor. The left-hand part is difficult to master, with its tight blocks of semi-quavers, but Emily has been practising, and now it’s almost perfect. Dr Peacock is pleased. Her mother, too.
‘Blue. Quite a dark blue.’
‘Show me.’
She has a new paintbox now, sixty-four colours arranged like a chessboard, almost as broad as the desk-top. She cannot see them, but knows them by heart; arranged in order of brightness and tone. F is violet; G is indigo; A is blue; B is green; C is yellow; D is orange; E is red. Sharps are lighter; flats darker. Instruments, too, have their own colours within the orchestral palette: the woodwind section is often green or blue; the strings, brown and orange; the brass, red and yellow.
She picks up her thick brush and daubs it in the paint. She is using watercolours today, and the scent is chalky and grannyish, like Parma violets. Dr Peacock stands to one side, Patch II curled up at his feet. Catherine and Feather stand on the opposite side, ready to pass Emily anything she may need. A sponge; a brush; a smaller brush, a sachet of glitter powder.
The Andante is a leisurely abstract, like a day at the seaside. She dabbles her fingers in the paint and strokes them across the smooth untreated paper so that it contracts into ridges, like shallow-water sand, and the paint melts and slides into the gullies her fingers have left. Dr Peacock is pleased; she can hear the smile in his bassoony voice, although much of what he says is incomprehensible to her, swept aside by the lovely music.
Sometimes, other children come by. She remembers a boy, rather older than she is, who is shy, and stammers, and doesn’t talk much, but sits on the sofa and reads. In the parlour there are sofas and chairs, a window seat and (her favourite) a swing, suspended from the ceiling on two stout ropes. The room is so large that Emily can swing as high as she likes without hitting anything; besides, everyone knows to keep out of her way, and there are no collisions.
Some days she does not paint at all; instead she sits on her swing in the Fireplace House and listens to sounds. Dr Peacock calls it the Sound Association Game, and if Emily works hard, he says, there will be a present at the end. All she has to do is sit on the swing, listen to the records and tell him the colours she can see. Some are easy – she already has them sorted in her mind like buttons in a box – others not. But she likes Dr Peacock’s sound machines, and the records, especially the old ones, with their long-dead voices and wind-up scratchy gramophone strings.
Sometimes there is no music at all, but just a series of sound effects, and these are hardest of all. But Emily still tries her best to satisfy Dr Peacock, who writes down everything she says in a series of cloth-backed notebooks, sometimes with such force that his pencil goes through the paper.
‘Listen, Emily. What do you see?’
The sound of a thousand Westerns; a gun fires, a bullet ricochets against a canyon wall; Gunsmoke; Bonfire Night and charred potatoes. ‘Red.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Madder red. With a trail of crimson.’
‘Good, Emily. Very good.’
It’s really very easy; all she has to do is let her mind go. A penny dropped; a man whistling off-key; a single thrush; a door-knocker; the sound of one hand clapping. She goes home with her pockets crammed with sweets. Dr Peacock clack-clacks up his findings every night on a typewriter with a Donald Duck voice. His papers have names like ‘Induced Synaesthesia’, ‘The Colour Complex’ and ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’. His words are like the gas the dentist gives her when he has to drill a tooth; she slides away under its shivery caress, and all the perfumes of the Orient cannot save her.
Post comment:
blueeyedboy: Oh, yes!
Albertine: You mean you want more?
blueeyedboy: If you can bear it, then so can I . . .
11
You are viewing the webjournal of Albertine posting on:
[email protected] Posted at: 01.45 on Tuesday, February 12
Status: public
Mood: culpable
Most of this, of course, is speculation. Those memories are not mine; they belong to Emily White. As if Emily could be a reliable witness to anything. And yet her voice – her plaintive treble – calls to me from over the years. Help me, please! I’m still alive! You people buried me alive!
‘Red. Dark red. Oxblood, with purple streaks.’
Chopin’s Nocturne Number 2 in E flat major. She has a good ear for music, and at six years old she can already pick out most of the chords, although the fretful double-rows of chromatics are still beyond the skill of her stubby fingers. This does not trouble Dr Peacock. He is far more interested in her painting skills than in any musical talent.
According to Catherine, he has already framed and hung half a dozen of Emily’s canvases on the walls of the Fireplace House – including her Toreador; her Goldberg Variations; and (her mother’s favourite) her Nocturne in Violet Ochre.
‘There’s so much energy in them,’ says Catherine, in a trembling voice. ‘So much experience. It’s almost mystic. The way you take the colours from the music and bring them on to the canvas – do you know, Emily? I envy you. I wish I could see what you see now.’
No child could fail to be flattered by such praise. Her paintings make people happy; they earn her rewards from Dr Peacock and the approval of his many friends. She understands that he is planning another book, much of it based on his recent findings.
She knows that she is not the only person he has befriended in his search
for synaesthetes. In his book Beyond Sense, he explains, he has already written at length about the case of a teenage boy, referred to throughout simply as Boy X, who appeared to exhibit signs of olfactory-gustatory acquired synaesthesia.
‘What does that mean?’ Emily says.
‘He experienced things in a special way. Or, at least, he said he could. Now concentrate on the notes, please—’
‘What kind of things did he see?’ she says.
‘I don’t think he saw anything.’
Until Emily’s appearance on the scene, Boy X had been Dr Peacock’s pet project. But between a young blind prodigy who can hear colours (and paint them), and a teenage boy with an affinity to smells, there could be no real competition. Besides, the boy was a freeloader, said Catherine; willing to fabricate any number of phoney symptoms to gain attention. The mother was even worse, she said; any fool could see that she’d put her son up to it in the hope of getting her hands on Dr Peacock’s money.
‘You’re too trusting, Gray,’ she said. ‘Anyone else would have spotted them a mile off. They saw you coming, dear. They had you fooled.’
‘But my tests clearly show that the boy responds—’
‘The boy responds to money, Gray. And so does his mother. A few quid here, a tenner there. It all builds up, and before you know it—’
‘But Cathy – she works on the market, for God’s sake – she’s got three kids, the father’s nowhere to be seen. She needs someone—’
‘So what? So do half the mothers on the estate. Are you going to pay this boy for the rest of his life?’
Under pressure, Dr Peacock admitted that he had already contributed to the boy’s school fees, plus a thousand pounds into a trust fund – For college, Cathy, the lad’s quite bright –
Catherine White was furious. It wasn’t her money, but she resented it as much as if it had been stolen from her own pocket. Besides, it was almost cruel, she said, to have led the boy to expect so much. He’d probably have been happy enough, if no one had tried to give him ideas. But Dr Peacock had encouraged him, had made him into a malcontent.