Robyn Donald - Tiger Eyes

She shrugged. ‘I think I was born making music. When I was a toddler I sang instead of talking. My foster-parents aren’t at all musical, so it was lucky for me that Pam, my foster-mother, used to clean house for an old lady who lived not far from us. She’d been a music teacher, and I think she missed it.’

She had shown Tansy how to play, and, when she realised how fascinated the child was, had begged to be able to teach her. Pam O’Brien had refused, citing lack of money, so Miss Harding had contacted the social welfare department. Some understanding person there had thought it a wonderful idea and organised the payments.

That had been the beginning of Tansy’s double life. At home she had been the odd one out. At Miss Harding’s she learned to round her vowels, discovered a whole new set of rules to govern her behaviour, listened with tears running down her face to the great composers, been made over for the best of motives into her mentor’s image. But Tansy’s happiness there, her sense of fulfilment, her eagerness to learn and desire to copy her mentor, set up tensions that eventually led to her flight from home.

‘When I had piano lessons,’ she went on, ‘I spent most of my time trying to work out the theory rather than actually play the piano. I knew right from the start that I wanted to write music.’

Although forbidden to, she’d written at night, waiting until her older sister was asleep to work by the light of a torch. Of course, the inevitable happened; she was discovered. Angry with her for her disobedience, Pam had burned six months’ work, so from then on Tansy had become even more secretive, losing herself for hours at a time in the special world she shared with Miss Harding.

Scrawny, intense, prone to temper tantrums and obstinacy, unable to compromise, she had been difficult. Like all creative people, she thought mockingly, she had suffered for her art. And so had her foster-parents. They hadn’t been actively unkind; they had simply not understood her. Part of Pam O’Brien’s resentment was due to the fact that she couldn’t afford such lessons for her own children. It had been with a certain suppressed satisfaction that she had told Tansy one day in her fourteenth year that the old lady was dead.

After that things had gone from tense to impossible.

She and Miss Harding had spoken of her future often, a future in which university loomed large. And she might have been able to go if she’d done well at school. But she hadn’t—apart from high marks in music and maths she had barely scraped through her examinations.

Unfortunately, the understanding case worker had been made redundant, and the new one was inundated with work, and not musical.

It would be, everyone decided, a waste of money for her even to try, just as it was a waste of money to go back to school for the seventh form. So at the end of her sixth-form year her foster-mother had organised a job for her in a supermarket.

Left bereft by Miss Harding’s death, with no one to counsel her, Tansy had run as far and as fast as the pitifully small amount in her savings bank had allowed her, ending up in Wellington because it cost too much to take the ferry across the Cook Strait to the South Island.

Although after that first year she had re-established contact with the O’Briens, she no longer felt like one of them. In fact, she never had. And she certainly didn’t regret leaving; it had been the only thing to do.

‘What sort of music?’ Leo asked.

She shrugged. ‘All sorts,’ she said evasively.

‘The ballad you were singing yesterday?’

‘That was a pastiche,’ she said aggressively. ‘I lumped all the ingredients of a folksong together and came up with that. As you realised.’

‘It sounded good.’

‘Yes, of course it did. What’s the use of singing a song if it doesn’t sound good?’

‘Particularly,’ he said idly, ‘if you want people to pay for the pleasure.’

‘Especially then.’

‘Do you like busking?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s a living.’

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