Second Violins Don't Get the Tune

The first thing you learn about the second violins is that nobody is looking at you. The conductor looks at the firsts. The audience looks at the cellos because the cellos look like they're having a lovely time. The second violins sit in the middle of all that and play the off-beats. I joined the Marlow Community Orchestra at fifty-three because my daughter said I wouldn't. That was the whole reason. She said it over Sunday lunch, "You always say you'll play again, Mum, and you never do," and I put my fork down and rang the number on the poster on Monday morning. I had played until I was nineteen. Grade seven, a school orchestra, a violin that my parents bought second-hand from a man in Reading who told them it was Czech. Then university, then work, then thirty years in which the case lived on top of the wardrobe and the strings quietly went green. The first rehearsal I got lost in bar twelve and did not find my way back until the letter C. The woman next to me, Dorota, who is Polish and about my age and plays with her chin pointed at the ceiling, leaned over in the break and said, "You count out loud. I could hear you. Don't count out loud." "Sorry." "No. It's fine. I did it for a year." She unwrapped a biscuit. "Second violins are the engine room. Nobody cares about the engine room until it stops." We were doing a Haydn symphony and a suite of film music that the brass loved and the strings tolerated. My part in the Haydn was, for pages, the same two notes back and forth. Da-da da-da da-da. I practised it in the kitchen and my husband asked if the washing machine was going. Here is what I did not expect. Around week five, in the slow movement, there is a passage where the seconds hold a single note for four bars while the firsts do something lovely above us. I had thought of it as waiting. Then one Tuesday the conductor, a tired and kind man called Geoff who teaches at the secondary school in the day, stopped us and said, "Seconds. That note. That's the floor everyone's standing on. If it wobbles they all fall over." And we played it again and I heard it. Not my note, exactly. The whole thing standing on it.

I went home and couldn't explain to anyone why I was so happy. The concert was in the church, in March, with the heating on too high. My daughter came. She sat near the back and I could see her phone light up once, twice, and then go dark and stay dark. In the slow movement I held the note and did not wobble. Dorota's bow moved with mine. Across the stand the firsts did the lovely thing and for four bars I was the floor under it. Afterwards my daughter found me in the crush by the tea urn and said, "You were in the middle. I couldn't really hear you specifically." "No," I said. "That's right. You're not supposed to." She looked at me like I had said something in Czech.