Chapters (40)
- Cover
- About the Author
- PENGUIN BOOKS
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- THE BEGINNING
The next day, instead of going to a film in the late morning, she cycled into Camden and bought herself a violin with the money she had been putting aside for their summer holiday. She had learnt violin for one year when she was thirteen and then given up in despair at how the sound she imagined was so far from the sound that she made – but now every time she went to the cinema she passed a busker with dreadlocks and dreamy, stoned eyes who played things like ‘Scarborough Fair’ and ‘A Minstrel Boy’ and she had been overtaken by the desire to make that kind of plangent music herself, music like a voice singing.
The violin had a hairline crack on its side, which was why it was cheaper than most of the others lining the shelves of the shop, but otherwise she thought it looked beautiful, with its blonde, grainy wood, its dull black pegs and its curves like a woman’s body. The smell of rosin, the snug green felt that lined the case, released in her such childhood memories that for a moment she could almost believe herself back in the classroom, waiting for Ms Abney to ask her to play a scale. She plucked a string and felt its muted twang quiver under her finger. Upstairs, a man was trying out a cello; liquid amber notes climbed up and down the scales and then he broke into a fragment of melody.
‘This is just for me,’ she said aloud to herself, as she wrote out the cheque, trying not to think of her bank account.
She bought some sheet music for absolute beginners and a shiny amber disc of rosin wrapped in a soft scrap of cloth, and left the shop with a sense of excitement. Just carrying the case made her feel that something had changed about her life. Like a window opening. Like the fog lifting off hill tops and a sudden view unfurling. She imagined herself standing in the centre of a room – not one of the rooms in their own house, which were all cramped and cluttered, but a long, airy space with honey-coloured boards, white walls and quiet – and lifting the violin under her chin, drawing the bow softly along a string, hearing the note expand and feeling the bars of sunlight settling in her hair.
