I already knew that she had got into the Royal College of Music ‘at the tender age of sixteen’ because, according to my mother, she would have whispered it over my crib. As such, it had never struck me as extraordinary. I had never thought about how she had managed it with a depressed seaside mother and a pointless father and no money. And, I realised, picking the music up and turning through the pages, astonished by the concentration of notes, that I had no memory of ever hearing her play. The grand piano in the formal living room I only thought of as something not to put drinks or anything else wet on.
While I was standing there, the door opened half way and Winsome edged in with a tray. She was wearing an apron, wet with dishwater. I put the music down and apologised but as soon as she recognised what I had been holding, she looked delighted. I told her I had never seen such complicated music. She said it was just a bit of old Bach but seemed reluctant to turn the conversation to the topic of the tray and what was on it, only doing so once it became clear that I did not have anything else to say.
I went back to the sofa and sat down. It was, in her description, a little bit of leftovers but once she had set the tray in my lap, I saw it was an entire Christmas lunch in miniature, arranged on an entrée plate, a linen napkin in a silver ring beside it, and a crystal glass of fizzy grape juice. My eyes filled with tears. Immediately, Winsome said I was under no obligation to eat it if I didn’t feel like it. Since the summer, the sight of food had been unbearable to me but it was not why I could only stare at it. It was the care in my aunt’s arrangement, the still-life beauty of it and, as I think about it now, the sense of safety that my brain construed from the child-sized portions.
My aunt said alright, well – perhaps she’d pop back later – and went to go.
As she got to the door, I heard myself say, ‘Stay.’
Winsome wasn’t my mother, but she was maternal – expressly not my mother – and I didn’t want her to leave. She asked if there was something else I needed.
I said no, slowly, while trying to invent an alternative reason that would prevent her from going. ‘I was just wondering – before you came in, I was thinking about you getting into college. I was wondering who helped you.’
She said, ‘No one helped me!’ and charged softly back into the room after I picked up the tiny fork and speared a small potato and asked her how she did it in that case. Sitting in the space I tried to smooth out for her, Winsome began her story, undistracted by the fact that I was now eating the potato exactly the way her children weren’t allowed to, off the end of the fork as if it was an ice cream.
She said, she had taught herself to play on a piano in her school hall. Somebody had written the names of the notes in pencil on the keys and by the time she was twelve, she had finished all the grade books in the library and started sending away for sheet music. The Royal College of Music and its address on Prince Consort Road, London SW, was always printed on the back and she became, over time, desperate to see the place her music came from. At fifteen, she went to London on her own, intending only to stand in front of the building until her return train. But the sight of the students coming in and out, dressed in black, carrying instrument cases, made her jealous to the point of feeling sick and, somehow, she roused herself to go inside and ask the person on the front desk if anyone could apply. She was given a form, which she filled out at home that night, in pencil before pen and, two weeks later, she received an invitation to audition.
I interrupted and asked how she could prove what level she was, if she hadn’t done any exams.
My aunt closed her eyes, lifted her chin, took a deep breath and said as her eyes sprung open, ‘I lied.’ Her exhale was glorious.
On the day, she played flawlessly. But afterwards the examiners asked her to produce her certificates and she confessed. ‘Anticipating arrest, but,’ Winsome said, ‘they gave me a place on the spot, as soon as they discovered I had never had a lesson.’ She brought her hands together and placed them one over the other in her lap.
I put my fork down. ‘If I came out, would you play something?’
She said she was far too rusty, but was instantly on her feet and whisking the tray off my lap.
I got up and asked her if she needed the music on the desk. My aunt laughed and ushered me out.
*
From where she told me to sit, I watched her open the lid of the piano, adjust the stool, then lift her hands, soft wrists rising before her fingers, and hover them there for some seconds before letting them fall onto the keys. From the first devastating bar of whatever it was she was playing, the others began drifting into the room one by one, even the boys, even my mother.