Annabel - Kathleen Winter [120]
“You let us worry about that,” her aunt had said, and Wally remembered how her mother always said Aunt Doreen and her husband had more money between the two of them than they knew what to do with. They had accounts and investments up to their ears, Ann Michelin had said; Doreen did not even have to run that shop if she didn’t want to. She could quit the shop tomorrow and live out the rest of her days with a mouth full of caviar. Wally had not seen her aunt eat caviar and she had not seen her uncle at all. But there was a maid who came on Wednesdays. Wally had seen her in the doorway of her aunt’s bedroom changing the linen, a new blue-white sheet billowing in a breeze from the open window.
The discards from the costume bank had trimmings that needed to be kept, and to salvage them the costume mistress had given Wally a tool box containing a pearl-handled stitch ripper, some razor blades, and a pair of scissors from Finland. She had a box with partitions for buttons, silver fastenings, brass fittings, rivets, hooks and eyes, tassels and cords, and pieces of pocket or wristband or waistband embellished with needlework. These things could be reused, and so could squares of fabric from parts of the garments that were not threadbare. Wally sat on an arrow-back chair under a lamp and cut these and folded them and arranged them by colour and fabric type so they could be used in new pieces that were always being tailored downstairs. It was satisfying work and she loved the beauty of it, and at times she thought she might look in the Berklee College calendar and see what other courses they had besides singing. At those times she thought it would be good to put these hours of work to use, to let them pay for courses as the costume mistress had offered. But at other times she remembered her old resolve: if she could not study singing, she did not want to study anything.
The doctor at the Harley Street Voice Clinic had told her there was not much of a chance he could restore her voice to what it would have been had Donna Palliser not thrown shards of that glass ball. The wait between the injury and his attention had been long, he said, and even had it not been years, even if Wally had come to see him immediately, there was probably not much more he could have done than that which he offered to do now. He could perhaps restore her speaking voice, he said. He could make it stronger, and she could even sing. Perhaps she could sing in a choir, though he could not guarantee it. She could certainly sing for her own pleasure, and if she had any ear for music she would be able to sing according to the tunefulness of that ear. But as for the strength of her singing voice or anything approaching a professional solo career, he could not see that as a reasonable outcome.
“Well, I don’t want you to do anything,” Wally had told him. She did not want her aunt and uncle paying thousands of American dollars for her to sing for her own pleasure. She told her aunt this on the phone.
“But your own pleasure,” her aunt said, “is sometimes the only pleasure you have in this life. You’re over there now. You’re in England. Get the most out of it that you can.”
The doctor did the best work he could and told Wally to rest her voice for six weeks. Then, if she wanted to sing for her own pleasure, she could gently begin with voice exercises he set for her. He told her again that it was possible she could sing in a choir if she chose.
“You don’t have to have a solo voice to be in a choir,” he said. “In fact, there is something about a choir that brings together imperfections in the voices and uses them to make something new, like an infusion of different kinds of tea leaves. It can be quite beautiful.”
He had been a kind man, and Wally had felt his kindness, though he had not done what she wanted him to do and had not said what she had hoped with all her heart he would say.
29
Seed Potatoes
JACINTA BLAKE APPEARED