10
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Posted at: 23.49 on Monday, February 11
Status: public
Mood: raw
Listen to the colours. Maybe you remember the phrase. Glib coming from the mouth of an adult, it must have seemed unbearably poignant from that of a five-year-old blind girl. In any case, it did the trick. Listen to the colours. All unknowing, Emily White had opened up a box of magic words, and was drunk with their power and her own, issuing commands like a diminutive general, commands which Catherine and Feather — and later, of course, Dr Peacock — obeyed with unquestioning delight.
‘What do you see?’
Diminished chord of F minor. The magic words unfurl like wrapping-paper, every one.
‘Pink. Blue. Green. Violet. So pretty.’
Her mother claps her hands in delight. ‘More, Emily. Tell me more.’
A chord of F major.
‘Red. Orange. Ma-gen-ta. Black.’
It was like an awakening. The infernal power she had discovered in herself had blossomed in an astonishing way, and music was suddenly a part of her curriculum. The piano was brought out of the spare room and re-tuned; her father’s secret lessons became official, and Emily was allowed to practise whenever she liked, even when Catherine was working. Then came the local newspapers, and the letters and gifts came pouring in.
The story had plenty of potential. In fact, it had all the ingredients. A Christmas miracle; a photogenic blind girl; music; art; some man-in-the-street science, courtesy of Dr Peacock, and a lot of controversy from the art world that kept the papers wondering on and off for the next three years or so, caught up in speculation. The TV eventually caught on to it; so did the Press. There was even a single — a Top Ten hit — by a rock band whose name I forget. The song was later used in the Hollywood film — an adaptation of the book — starring Robert Redford as Dr Peacock and a young Natalie Portman as the blind girl who sees music.
At first Emily took it for granted. After all, she was very young, and had no basis for comparison. And she was very happy — she listened to music all day long; she studied what she loved most, and everyone was pleased with her.
Over the next twelve months or so Emily attended a number of concerts, as well as performances of The Magic Flute, the Messiah and Swan Lake. She went to her father’s school several times, so that she could get to know the instruments by feel.
Flutes, with their slender bodies and intricate keys; pot-bellied cellos and double basses; French horns and tubas like big school canteen-jugs of sound; narrow-waisted violins; icicle bells; fat drums and flat drums; splash cymbals and crash cymbals; triangles and timpani and trumpets and tambourines.
Sometimes her father would play for her. He was different when Catherine was not there: he told jokes; he was exuberant, dancing Emily round and round to the music, making her dizzy with laughter. He would have liked to have been a professional musician: clarinet, and not piano, had been his preferred instrument, but there was little call for a classically trained clarinet player with a lurking passion for Acker Bilk, and his small ambitions had gone unvoiced and unnoticed.
But there was another side to Catherine’s conversion. It took Emily months to discover it; longer still to understand. This is where my memories lose all cohesion; reality merges with myth so that I cannot trust myself to be either accurate or truthful. Only the facts speak for themselves; and even they have been so much disputed, queried, misreported, misread that only scraps remain of anything that might show me how it really was.
The facts, then. You must know the tale. In the audience that evening, sitting three rows from the front, at the end, was a man called Graham Peacock. Sixty-seven years old; a well-known local personality; a noted gourmet; a likeable eccentric; a generous patron of the arts. That evening in December, during a recital of Christmas songs in St Oswald’s Chapel, Dr Peacock found himself party to an incident that was to change his life.
A small girl — the child of a friend of his — had suffered a kind of panic attack. Her mother began to carry her out, and in the scuffle that ensued — the child struggling valiantly to stay, the mother trying with equal fortitude to remove her — he heard the child speak a phrase that struck at him like a revelation.
Listen to the colours.
At the time Emily barely understood the significance of what she had said. But Dr Peacock’s interest left her mother in a state of near-euphoria; at home, Feather opened a bottle of champagne, and even Daddy seemed pleased, though that might just have been because of the change in Catherine. Nevertheless he did not approve; later, when the thing had begun, his was the only dissenting voice.
Needless to say, no one listened. The very next day little Emily was summoned to the Fireplace House, where every possible test was run to confirm her special talents.
Synaesthesia [writes Dr Peacock in his paper ‘Aspects of Modularity’] is a rare condition where two — or sometimes more — of the five ‘normal’ senses are apparently fused together. This seems to be related to the concept of modularity. Each of the sensory systems has a corresponding area, or module, of the brain. While there are normal interactions between modules (such as using vision to detect movement), the current understanding of human perception cannot account for the stimulation of one module inducing brain activity in a different module. However, in a synaesthete, this is precisely the case.In short, a synaesthete may experience any or all of the following: shape as taste, touch as scent, sound or taste as colour.
All this was new to Emily, if not to Feather and Catherine. But she understood the idea — they all knew about Boy X, after all — and from what she’d heard of his special gift, it was not too far removed from the word associations and art lessons and colour therapies she had learnt from her mother. She was five and a half at the time; eager to please; even more so to perform.
The arrangement was simple. In the mornings Emily would go to Dr Peacock’s house for her music lesson and her other subjects; and in the afternoons she would play the piano, listen to records, and paint. That was her only duty, and as she was allowed to listen to music as she performed it, it was no great burden. Sometimes Dr Peacock would ask her questions, and record what she said.
Emily, listen. What do you see?
A single note picked out on the clunky old piano in the Fireplace House. G is indigo, almost black. A simple triad takes it further; then a chord — G minor, with a diminished seventh in the bass — resolves in a velvety violet caress.
He marks the result in his notebook.
Very good, Emily. That’s my good girl.
Next comes a series of soft chords; C sharp minor; D diminished; E flat minor seventh. Emily points out the colours, marked in Braille on the paintbox.
To Emily it feels almost like playing an instrument, her hands on the little coloured keys; and Dr Peacock notes it down in his scratchy little notepad, and then there is tea by the fireplace, with Dr Peacock’s Jack Russell, Patch II, snuffling hopefully after biscuits, tickling Emily’s hands, making her laugh. Dr Peacock speaks to his dog as if he, too, is an elderly academic; which makes Emily laugh even more, and which soon becomes part of their lessons together.