Maestro

‘The boy is too given to self-satisfaction. The self-satisfied go no further.’

My mother tried to tease him. ‘But surely you must be just a little bit pleased?’

‘Am I pleased,’ Keller asked, ‘because it is Friday? Because it is eight o’clock? Exams are a technical hurdle only. A chronological hurdle: a ticking of the clock. A sign that time is passing.’

‘And to think she was a Wagner specialist,’ my father said. The irony had not escaped him.

‘I can’t believe,’ my mother murmured, ‘that a nation could murder so many of its musicians.’

‘You think the murder of musicians is more serious than the murder of the tone-deaf?’

‘Of course I didn’t mean that. I meant what a waste, what a loss to the world, a squandering of all that training ...’

As always, however, he was relentless: ‘You mean: the more training you have, the worse the crime?’

‘It just seems so terrible. We know the numbers of dead, the cold figures. But a particular story—a victim sang opera, a victim played the violin—makes it somehow more ... real, able to be imagined. Like seeing those gold fillings in the newsreels.’

‘Medicine in Adelaide looks interesting,’ my father might suggest, thumbing through.

‘Anything but medicine.’ My mother had her own ideas. ‘Law in Melbourne? Rosie will be in Melbourne. And you could take Music as an extra.’

‘Languages perhaps. You enjoy languages, Paul.’

Suggestions were handed back and forth between them, new arguments and rationalisations produced, positions swapped. And through all the talk one thing rapidly emerged, unsaid: they no longer felt they had a concert pianist on their hands. A music teacher, perhaps ... but not a performer. I had managed only a distant third place in Adelaide, and their disappointment was clear to me—even, or perhaps especially, when they pretended otherwise.