Free Ransacking Paris by Patti Miller Page B

already. The choirmaster arrived, a slender, grey-haired man in a linen shirt, well groomed, with a leather case under his arm. He put it down and looked around the group, nodded at me and said, ‘ Bonjour .’
    â€˜ Bonjour .’ I nodded back, suddenly sure he knew I was from the backblocks without a note of music in me. He talked to the group for a few minutes about term dates and a performance, and then the warm-up began. The choirmaster stretched and wobbled his face, pursed his lips, rubbed his face and we all followed suit. I could do this, it was just like my choir in the Mountains.
    Next were the vocalisations. ‘Ee ee ee oo oo oo ah ah ah.’ Up and down the scales he went. Powerful tenor and soprano and alto voices burst out around me, producing and projecting the notes in full bel canto mode. They had proper voices! This wasn’t a Blue Mountains community choir with a motley collection of people who liked singing. What on earth was I thinking? My squeaky little voice trembled in shock.
    I looked around surreptitiously – perhaps I could slip out. But I was in the middle of a knot of people and couldn’t have walked out without excusing myself several times. A deep breath. I tried to follow the notes in a low voice. The woman next to me looked over. She already knew I was a pretender.
    The choirmaster opened his leather case and sheets of music were handed out. There was excited conversation. Someone’s Requiem . I couldn’t read the music so I looked at the words, trying to make them save me. The group reshuffled into parts. I looked at one woman and raised my eyebrows. ‘Soprano,’ she said. I stood next to her. My voice had slightly more high notes than low.
    The choirmaster tapped with his baton on a stand that had been produced from his case. I breathed out. He will sing the parts and I will copy him the way I did in my choir back home. Then he counted, un, deux, trois, quatre , flicked with his baton and without one note from him, the choir burst into powerful song. Voices soared out around the hall, rising, floating on notes and descending with enormous grace, sopranos as pure as bells, dark honey altos, rich tenors and basses. I tried for a couple of lines – I have to give myself some credit for pointless courage – my voice squeaking more and more with embarrassment until I gave up and simply mouthed the words. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more out of my depth in my life. I mouthed the words for the next two hours until I could safely slip back down the stairs and into the warm September evening.
    If I had been with someone I would have burst out laughing. It was absurd, stupidly naive. Just the kind of thing a country bumpkin would do. We could have laughed immoderately and then had a glass of wine in the Café des Philosophes nearby and not care that we were talking loudly in English. But I was on my own, so I slunk home, my face still burning. I wasn’t Socrates enjoying being the fool at all, just a middle-aged woman hauling the burden of wanting to be good at everything.
    â€˜How was it?’ asked Anthony. He has a good voice, not trained but he could sing anything in tune, even songs he last heard when he was a child.
    â€˜Terrible,’ I said. ‘They can sing.’
    â€˜Well, they are in a choir.’
    I made myself a cup of tea and sat in the shadowy courtyard. The evening pooled around me, different from the deep darkness of the evenings in the Mountains, but still returning memories as evenings will. I thought of Dina singing to Theo, and performing in a country rock band, although that was before I met her. It was a long way from requiems, but then, maybe not. Her songs wailed of loss and longing, of grieving for people who are gone; times that have vanished. I glanced down and saw the beginnings of wrinkles on my arms, a faint terrain of cracks. It looked like a new geography on my body. I’d always found