The interview is for an arts magazine that probably only has two dozen subscribers around Adelaide’s own age, and Adelaideisn’t even one of them. Perhaps that’s a little strange, her being an artist – as any successful musician is – and not interested in the arts per se. Or maybe she’s just tired of them. Tired of that world of patrons with no talent paying to spend time with artists who would rather be anywhere than at a function right before they perform on opening night. Tired of contracts that might not be renewed, and artistic directors who wanted to be first violin and never made it yet thought that meant they understood everything about life as a performer.
She cannot say any of this to Susie Double-Barrelled. That’s because Susie DB is no doubt in thrall to the idea that playing in a symphony orchestra must be the pinnacle achievement of one’s life. Adelaide has met many people like that, and she knows not to ruin things for them. It’s nicer to let people have their dreams.
Besides, she definitely can’t tell Susie the truth: that the pinnacle achievement of her life was looking into the eyes of her newborn son, right before he was taken from her forever. That love she felt for him – she has chased it all over the world and never found it again.
Susie puts a tape recorder on the coffee table that sits between them.
‘I hope you don’t mind me recording,’ she says. ‘My shorthand isawful. This is the best way to ensure I quote you correctly.’
Adelaide had offered tea or coffee or water when Susie arrived but the reporter had demurred. Now Adelaide can see it’s because she has her hands full trying to start the interview: checking the tape recorder is working, checking it again, pulling out a notepad and two pencils – ‘In case one breaks!’ beam beam – and moving her handbag three times. A nervous sort, as Daphne might say.
Once the interview starts, however, it flows quite well. Susie asks about Adelaide’s upbringing, and how she came to play cello.
Adelaide mentions that her brother, Louis, played it first and didn’t stick with it, but her parents had gone to the expense ofbuying him an instrument and didn’t want it to go to waste, so they suggested Adelaide take it up.
As a tall child, the cello felt natural to her. A violin was puny. A viola not much better. Brass instruments weren’t offered. Piano was fine: she learnt it, as did every girl she knew, but that was the reason she didn’t pursue it – she wasn’t going to be as good as some of the other girls. She wanted to be good at something, and it turned out that something was the cello.
‘And your brother, where is he?’ says smiling Susie.
‘In Mosman. He never left.’
‘How lovely! And do you have any old chums who are still here?’
Adelaide hesitates. It feels like a wicked lie to not mention Daphne, but she isn’t sure if Daphne will want to have her name in an arts magazine.
‘Some,’ she says, although there isn’t more than one. ‘We catch up from time to time.’
Susie drops her head to one side. ‘But things change, don’t they?’ She nods slowly. ‘When you become a big success?’
If that’s where Susie wants to take this interview, Adelaide is not going to let her. Yes, some people were jealous and behaved strangely, but that happened everywhere, not just in Sydney.
‘I think it’s more the case that I was a very slack correspondent,’ she says. ‘And being so far away for so long didn’t help.’
Now the head tilts in the other direction. ‘And you’ve never married.’
It’s a statement, not a question, and it’s accompanied by more slow nods, as if Susie is trying to understand how this tragic thing came to pass.
‘No.’ Adelaide has no interest in telling a stranger the story.
‘Men were threatened by your success.’ Nod nod.
Adelaide wants to tell her that her head will snap off if she keeps doing it.
It’s not as if the subject of marriage hasn’t been broached before. However, they couldn’t all be Joan Sutherland finding adashing Richard Bonynge in the world of international orchestra and opera. There weren’t many men in that arena, Adelaide had discovered, who wanted a woman who was also in it. Not that she was looking for such a man. She had been looking for no man at all. No woman either. Her punishment for all that had happened was, she felt, to be alone.
There was a husband, once. A German violinist. Their marriage didn’t survive her move to Budapest to take up a new position and his decision to remain in Vienna where they had both been working. It was for the best, Daphne told her in a letter. If her husband wasn’t prepared to make the same accommodations for her that Adelaide had made for him – which was what Vienna had been – he wasn’t the right husband for her. And no one else had been after that.
That isn’t the story Susie wants to hear, though, Adelaide is sure. She wants Adelaide to say that she has sacrificed love for art, and that she now has her regrets but it’s too late.
ILOST MYHEART TOBACH AND CAN’T GET IT BACK! That may be the headline Susie is going for. She wouldn’t be the first. But Adelaide is ready for this line of enquiry.
‘I have no idea,’ she says, smiling thinly. ‘I didn’t ask them. Mainly I just left them behind when I moved from city to city and didn’t tell them my new address.’
Susie looks as shocked as Adelaide had hoped. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well.’
‘Who are your favourite composers?’ Adelaide asks. It’s a tactic she has used before to redirect a journalist.
There follows an exchange about Liszt and Brahms and Satie which Adelaide moderately enjoys, and by the time Susie Double-Barrelled is ready to leave she seems positively giddy.