He was discharged from the army after the battle of Amiens, where he’d been hit by a shell on a Frenchman’s pockmarked dairy field. He left his leg beside a creek that looked like it would have been good for brook trout. What happened to brook trout during a war? he wondered from a hospital bed to pass the time. They sent him back home to Dover, England. His aunt had passed while he was at the Front, so now he returned to an empty cottage by the coast.
The quiet of the cottage wears on his nerves, as does the drone of fighter planes patrolling high above the cliffs of Dover at night. He tries to labor in the vegetable garden outside, but the lack of leg leaves him off-kilter. He waits by the fence for someone to come by, a chance to say hello. Scarved old ladies on their way to market. Trucks loaded with bleating sheep. After a while, a young woman comes by on her bicycle and smiles to him. He watches for her each morning but sees her only on Tuesdays, pedaling by with a violin case strung over her shoulder. He finds excuses to be by the fence, and one morning he asks her name and about the violin case.
“It’s actually a viola. Slightly bigger than a violin, a deeper sound.”
“They’re all just fiddles to me,” he jokes. “Would you play for me sometime?”
“I can’t,” she shakes her head. “It wouldn’t be proper.”
“Bollocks with proper. During these times?”
“Precisely during these times,” she says. She pulls her wrap around her shoulders, gives him a nod good-day and pedals away.
Maybe she feels as though she behaved too harshly to the maimed solider, for the next week she stops along the fence to play some notes for him, still sitting on her bicycle seat. She plays again the next week from within the garden gate, and she eventually joins him inside for tea in his aunt’s parlor. Their Tuesdays form a regular pattern where Chelsea joins him for a cup of tea and to play for him the latest pieces that she has been practicing. Also in the parlor is an old upright piano that has fallen out of tune. He says he could get a boy to come tune it if she would play. She says she can’t play, so there’s no use.
He almost loves watching her preparations as much as he loves the sound of the viola. He gazes on the curves and rich colors of the varnished wood so delicate that it could easily crush beneath his hands, but its beauty is such that he is compelled to corral his strength. He cannot refrain from running his fingertips along the grain. Its bridge is crooked, years of tension bending it forward. Rosin on the bow. The body cupped below her chin, then the stroking of the bow across the strings. Vibration deep in her belly. The moan of diminished F sharp, the cry of high C, the wavering vibrato along her neck.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
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