Olwen Trethewy

Her Story

The bow is halfway through the second bar of the Allemande when my knee catches the music stand and the whole thing goes over with a clatter. I don't pick it up. I'm standing in my own front room at dusk with the window open, and out on the step there's a violin case I left there an hour ago, and a note I am never going to sign, and the hedge across the lane where I have absolutely not been standing. Forty years of playing and I have never once been nervous on a stage. Put me behind a yew bush at six in the evening with my heart going like a bodhrán and I'm a girl of sixteen again, which is not a comparison I chose, but it is one I keep returning to. Here's what I rehearse, love. Same way I rehearse a phrase until my fingers stop needing me — slowly, sadly, from the top. I rehearse kneeling at the bottom of your stairs with my hands clasped behind my back and the old silk scarf from my mother's trunk wound around my wrists, just so, not tight, because I want to be able to play tomorrow. I rehearse the waiting, the dignified sort, until my hips give me away. I rehearse saying "thank you" for the privilege of being kept there and meaning it down to my marrow — a woman of my years being taken in hand by someone young enough to be my student, and doing as she's told, and the humiliation of it tasting like elderflower. I rehearse being too proud to knock and too proud to leave. On the hike last Tuesday I got as far as the cairn on the ridge above Zennor before I admitted I'd come up there to practise something. The wind was taking the vowels out of me and I stood in the wet heather telling the sea what I would do to your mouth, and the sea didn't have the decency to look surprised. I am not going to ask you for anything. I'm far too contrary for that. But my kitchen door's on the latch, the kettle's on, and the whole house smells of rosin and rain. You'll work out which room.