The Chilbury Ladies' Choir(11)
What a breathtaking day! My first singing lesson with the superb and masterful Prim took place at her house on Church Row at five o’clock. I have never been more excited, and arrived a whole ten minutes early, waiting for her to get back from the university.
Prim arrived on her bicycle, her cloaked body balancing precariously on the narrow frame. “You’re here early,” she chortled. “I always say that enthusiasm paves every path with a shining light.” She climbed off and leaned the bicycle against the front of the house. “Come in, and we’ll make some tea before we start.”
The small house was exactly the same size and shape as Hattie’s, except it was completely filled with extraordinary things and smelled as musty as an antique shop. In the corner, a gold elephant stood on his hind legs. On the wall above were paintings of distant mountain peaks, and the burnt oranges and reds of a desert sunset. A small table was crammed with decorated boxes of different shapes and sizes, covered with shells or brightly colored silks—peacock blue, emerald green, cerise.
“Open one,” she said, as she watched my eyes flitting over everything.
I picked up an emerald one with gold-colored cord. There was a small latch that opened it, and inside the black velvet interior was a tiny silver ring, a child’s, with a St. Christopher motif on the front.
“Was this yours?” I asked hesitantly.
“Yes,” she laughed. “It was given to me when I was a child. It came from India, where I grew up. India has always been my favorite place—the colors, the noise, the vibrancy, the people.” She pointed to a picture of a beautiful white temple on the wall beside her. “We lived close to this majestic edifice, the Taj Mahal. It’s a mausoleum built by an emperor for his wife, who died in childbirth. He visited here every day, it is said, to grieve.”
“Can you imagine loving someone so much that you create such a wonderful building?”
“Well,” she said. “It depends how rich and powerful one happens to be, I expect. Most people wouldn’t be able to afford it. But that doesn’t make one’s love any less. We can show our grief in simpler ways. Is not the beauty and power of funeral song just as great as such a palace?”
I nodded, peering into the living room that was beaming with the brightness of antiquities. “Do all of these things come from India?”
“Not at all. I traveled across Asia. There’s a mesmerizing world out there, where people live in all kinds of different ways.” She led the way into the room so that I could see. Gold gleamed from every corner: gold urns, gold statues, gold silk drapes around the windows, tiny gold miniatures as small as my thumb—an elephant, an old woman, a falcon.
“Other cultures are rather odd, don’t you think?” I said.
“No, quite the contrary. Other cultures often make me think that we’re the strange ones.” She chuckled to herself, then headed for the kitchen. “Let’s make some tea.”
As the kettle boiled, I looked around. A series of old decorated jugs sat on the windowsill, and bunches of dried herbs lined the far wall, giving off scents of rosemary, thyme, and lavender. A waist-high seagull watched us from the corner.
“Oh that’s Earnest, made of papier-maché,” she chirped. “He was one of the props for a play we put on in London years ago. He’s always here in the morning, looking hungry.”
I laughed and gave him a pat on the head.
Around the sink were a number of bottles full of liquids and powders and potions, and I leaped back. Was Prim a witch?
She saw me stare, and smiled. “Those are my medicines,” she said. “I once was very ill indeed, and I need the medicine to prevent me from getting ill again.”
I stood back, looking at her. She looked pretty normal—well, normal in a kind of witchy way. “It’s not catching, is it?”
“No, I caught it from a nasty mosquito in India, but we don’t have mosquitoes here.” She rearranged the bottles, then made the tea. “The disease is called malaria.”
“Were you terribly ill?”
“It was almost the end of me. I was about the same age as your sister, my whole life ahead of me, with plenty of music and laughter, and romance, too. There was a boy whom I was to marry.” She smiled at the distant memory of him. “He was the most beautiful creature, a butterfly collector, brilliantly clever.”
“Why didn’t you marry him?”
“He died,” she said simply. “He contracted malaria at the same time as me, and didn’t make it. We’d grown up as neighbors and then fell in love. We became ill at the same time. But the malaria ran its course and passed out of me. I was alive.”
“But brokenhearted!”
“Exactly, and ever since then I’ve felt destined to live a double life for both me and my butterfly collector, alone yet not.” She found a floral porcelain sugar bowl and milk jug. “It taught me that you have to live your own life. Don’t let anyone hold you back.”
I found myself blurting out, “I want to be a singer, but Daddy insists that I can’t. He wants me to make a good marriage, to be a good wife. But Mama tells me to take care when choosing a husband, or my life will be a misery.”
“You need to make your own path,” she said, leading the way into the back room. “Decide what you want to do, and then all you have to do is work out how to achieve it.”