Mathesons is one of those towns that has never quite made it. Originally it was Matheson’s Mill cutting the kaihikatea of this river valley back in the days when our butter was exported in white-pine boxes. Like many small towns it began to haemorrhage the moment the reason for its birth was finally cut out. It remains the much reduced service town of the surrounding farming area.
I am house sitting in the sort of house that I could never hope to own. A house built when money was still common here. Six bedrooms, a ballroom-sized lounge with a full-sized Chappell grand, a deep verandah spacious enough to hold a modern apartment. The house sits a little up the acclivity above North Road which ends in a gate just a few hundred metres further on. It was a road that proved too costly to maintain and the route north has long been up the far side of the valley about two kilometres from here but the North Road name persists.
I am a classically trained pianist but, like this town, I have never quite made it. Reaching the top requires more than musical ability, it takes a rock-like emotional stability and more than a little pushiness. Things that I do not have and hence my latest breakdown and me here. My former marriage also didn’t help. By breakdowns I don’t mean the sort of thing you saw in the film Shine, much less so, but it’s meant I’ve had to be content with life as a cruise-ship pianist, an up-market dining room pianist. In other words, I have made the background noise and played requests. Though, if I may say so, it is something that I have done rather well.
When I discussed my stay here with the Waldens before they left on their grand tour, they suggested that if I got bored I might like to spend some time entertaining my near neighbours and I have been doing just that. The town’s former cottage hospital is now an old-peoples home. I spend a couple of hours there most days playing whatever they ask for. They are grateful but it seems that I am nowhere near as good a pianist as Shona in their estimation. “Shona plays things the proper way.” The piano stool is actually a wide bench designed to seat piano duetists with a lift-up lid and its interior is crammed with the carefully garnered sheet music of former decades. Shona plays from that sheet music while I have long come to play by ear, automatically shoring up the melodic
SHONA page 2 line with any notes I think to be harmonically appropriate. That is apparently not good enough.
I have yet to meet this Shona although in a way I have. The old people have a need to talk and they deserve a listening ear and, for the moment, I have all the time in the world. Normally, Shona is one of their nurses, it is clear to me that they love her, but several months ago she broke her ankle, a problem that’s going to take some time to fix. They are full of Shona so I know that she is old-family in Mathesons and a personable widow of about my own age. I would very much like to meet this Shona in a way that suggests that my ’never again’ has become somewhat eroded. But will she be back on deck before the Waldens return? For that reason I pray, ‘Let the Waldens stay away please. Make sure they really enjoy themselves.’
The rest home is also a little above the valley floor as is this house and I have had Shona’s house on the far side of the valley pointed out to me, the old Jenkin’s place, she was a Jenkins. It’s too far for me to walk and anyway I wouldn’t have the cheek to turn up uninvited and unknown. And yet, in a way, I have been inside that house, it would seem, through an open window. I must explain. On my first day here I shifted my bed out onto that sheltered verandah. I love to sleep outside where possible. The night world is a happening world. Bedrooms are tombs. Here a night’s cast includes feuding pukekos, amorous frogs, restless cattle, confused roosters, a dog network shares its woes.
And on that first night, well after midnight, I heard distant piano music, Chopin’s ‘Raindrop’ Prelude, thin and ghostly, but as clear as one could wish and played rather well. The night’s chorus was quiet for the moment and the only light that I could see was in what I now know to be the Jenkin’s place, Shona’s house. But that was two kilometres away! Surely an impossibility. And yet, I have heard her since. Perhaps she has trouble sleeping.
Acoustics is a strange thing. Maybe you have seen photos of the Greek theatres at Epidaurus or Delphi or even been there. You’ll know that the stage is far distant from the top rows of seating. The players would have been almost dots and yet, although wearing masks with small mouth holes, they could apparently be heard in the top rows. Amazing!! And in this case it must be something to do
SHONA page 3 with the valley’s shape. But could it be made to work both ways? I rather doubt it and the Chappell is far too heavy to move out to the verandah. Anyway, it would be criminal to do so.
I have no idea what our Shona looks like. No photographs for me to see and my questions at the home only tell me that ‘she’s beautiful’ and by ‘beautiful’ I can tell that they mean that she is a beautiful person which is something of much greater worth than physical beauty. That makes her a rare prize.