Fourth love

The first time I saw him, he made me cry my eyes out and we hadn’t even spoken. Requiem for Guitar, Flute and Drum did that to everyone with an ounce of soul for music in them. Wendy, probably the best friend I had ever had at that point had gotten tickets by virtue of having done her degree in music alongside Ben. He and Ellie had written it during the last eighteen months of His girlfriend Karen’s life, before she died of cancer, the same cancer that had claimed her sister some eight or nine years earlier. The sister Tracey, who had also been his girlfriend. This was its second performance, the first having been at Karen’s funeral.

This, our first actual chance to speak to each other was at a bereavement group our respective therapists had suggested we attend. Anyone in the music business, especially the classical side knew who Benjamin Wilson was. Tracey’s song and since then several other pieces, mostly but not exclusively tear jerkers like the requiem and all, even the evocative piece he wrote for his daughters filled with emotion. If he were to start writing for films, he would be rich beyond dreams.

I should say why I was attending the group. Even now it is easier to talk about every other member’s issues but you need to know to understand. When I was seventeen, my parents tried to trick me and my fifteen year old sister into going to India for an arranged marriage. I found out and managed to avoid it. My sister did not and when she ran away and found someone to shelter her, they were both murdered in a so called honour killing. The boy who sheltered her was not even sleeping with her! It was at that point that I knew I needed to divorce my parents and I then threw myself into my music and dance. Six and a half years later I was the youngest Music Fellow of any college in Cambridge and teaching, Flute, Shakuhachi and still even now somewhat against my culture, Sitar. The dance modes were Indian classical and North African Dance, the type practised just among women rather than the Arabic style which is more for men’s entertainment.

It didn’t work, I still had nightmares, still didn’t call anyone a friend even if quite a few felt I was a friend. It took me a long time to admit I needed help but eventually I did. After a year, I had made progress but my therapist, said,

“Uvini, you have done brilliantly but the real work is not in one to one work but with others and I think you need a group with others who have experienced losses, to move forward. All will have dealt with them in different ways. Try not to judge. All will have done the best they can given the skill set they gained from their parenting and other experiences. Also it isn’t a ban but relationships with group members outside of the group are discouraged.”

I laughed. My trust in men was zilch, zero or even less and I wasn’t interested sexually in women so that wasn’t going to happen was it?

I reminded my therapist of this and in a strange double message she replied,

“You never know. Keep an open mind on all things.”

And so, two musicians, sitting opposite each other in the group, each recognising the other made eye contact. They were eyes I could drown in, drown in their grey blue depth of compassion, of humour, of humanity. Knowing his history, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had thoughts of fear, what if he got involved with yet another person who was going to die on him? For myself, for the first time in my life, there was another human being I wanted to get closer to. Of course my rational brain told me that this was nonsense. I couldn’t know anything real about him as a person from just a look. Could I?

In the group, we all told our stories. One woman had seen her daughter killed before her ex shot himself, I think altogether there were three who had lost loved ones to cancer including Benjamin. I found it hard to believe that so many people could have had such dreadful experiences. I lived in England now, not Sri Lanka where I was born and while I hadn’t felt unsafe living there I knew there were places that were not safe to go after dark for a woman or even a man some of them.

I was brought up short when one of the two therapists running the group asked,

“What in your life has helped you survive, what has made life bearable enough that you are still here.”

A lot struggled to answer this and needed a lot of help either from the therapists or from other group members. For myself, the answer was easy, my music. I didn’t have anything else apart from that. Ben had one of the longest lists of all, music obviously, his daughters and their mothers, his sister and parents, meditation, his karate sensei and his own training as a therapist. I remembered seeing him perform and how I was convinced the two women he was performing with were his lovers as well as each other’s. Had Wendy been keeping secrets from me?

I began to wonder why he needed the group until I remembered how he had lost three partners/lovers in just a few years and had really believed that Karen was going to survive up until the last year. There was something solid about him, the other two men in the group, it felt like the slightest push they would fall over be that push physical or psychological. Months later I wondered if he had been asked to be in the group as much for his ability to help others as for his own needs.

When he responded to another group member, it always felt as if it came straight from his heart. At one point, we were asked to break into pairs and to each tell the other what our response was to our partner’s story. I told him how I knew about Karen as I had seen the performance of their Requiem having been invited to go with Wendy. I told him how I had cried, how I had left the concert sobbing, not knowing whether it was for the loss of my sister, the betrayal of us both by my parents or for Karen whom I had never met. It had taken me over a day to recover.

Then it was time to swap over. I remember almost every word he said.

“Uvini.” He pronounced it correctly first time. “What made me cry hearing your story was how the people who should have been protecting you, loving you and looking out for your interests, abandoned their responsibility for you, betrayed you and decided that you and your sister marrying into socially important families was more important than your own happiness. It is the betrayal even more than the killing of your sister by the family she was forced to marry into that is really painful. If you can’t trust your own mother and father how can you trust anyone else?” He laughed at himself,

“I don’t mean to sound like a therapist but having trained as one, it is a part of who I am. I don’t know now which insights I get are down to my training and which are just part of who I was anyway.”

And that was it, four hours after meeting Benjamin Wilson, I found myself trusting a man for the first time in my life. I found myself looking forward to the next group in two weeks time.

I found myself listening and paying attention to how he responded to others in the group as well, if he was upset, he allowed himself to show it, something I really struggled with except for when Wendy took me to the concert. She didn’t know then about my background, about the only people who did then were the police, social services and my therapist. Now added to that list were a room full of people, one of whom having only just met me understood me better than I did myself. I didn’t get paired with him the second week but still found time to talk over coffee where I discovered he had heard me play the shakuhachi at a concert in Cambridge about six months earlier.

“And?” Somehow his opinion of my playing was important to me.

“You play brilliantly, I loved the sound you produce with it, the timbre. This is not a criticism but an observation. It feels to me like you use your music to protect you, it is a barrier between your emotions and those listening to you. It is something I can’t do, when I play, my emotions fill the music, they take over and dictate how I play. My music tells my emotions far more eloquently than I can do with words. If you could learn to play without the barrier I think you could be an even better performer, especially if you retained the ability to do both.”

“The thought of that scares me even , more than the idea of going to the village where my sister was killed. I can’t imagine letting everything out the way you do. “

“You remind me of how scared I am of ever having another relationship, how scared I was when Karen asked me to support her the way I had done Tracey and yet, I don’t regret any of what I did, despite the pain. I am just so so scared of doing it again. I feel like I would be living in fear every second of it happening a fourth time.”

Bernadette, one of the two therapists then asked us to come back into the group and then to say what we had been talking about during the break. This ranged from the weather, the woman whose daughter had been killed in front of her wishing her ex had not killed himself so she could do it to him and of course Benjamin’s conversation with myself.

“Why don’t you both bring your instruments with you next time?” Ben was more than happy to do so, after all, mixing music with therapy was how he made part of his living. – Actually I discovered later, he made far more money from royalties and the therapy was more something he wanted to give back to society than for the money. I on the other hand was not at all sure that I wanted to mix emotions with my music. I had always kept a wall between the two in the past until the Requiem had driven a ten ton truck through that wall. At least with regards to my listening to music, now Ben was threatening to do the same with regards to my playing.

Back at home I took out my shakuhachi and practised. Somehow the judgement of Benjamin Wilson and the group as well but mostly Ben I reluctantly admitted to myself mattered more than that of those who paid to listen to me in concert halls. I recalled the melody from the De profundis in the mass and found myself thinking the words at the same time,

“Out of the depths I have cried to Thee O Lord! Lord, hear my voice. Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.

If Thou, O Lord! wilt mark iniquities: Lord, who shall stand it? For with Thee there is mercy: and by reason of Thy law I have waited on Thee, O Lord!

My soul hath relied on His word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord. From the morning watch even until night:

let Israel hope in the Lord. For with the Lord there is mercy; and with Him plentiful Redemption. And He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.

Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord! And let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace.

Amen.”

Not that I believed in God but somehow the psalmist’s words spoke to me across the years and as I played, tears rolled down my face. Make that a sixty ton truck or maybe a train.

I will never know how but I did get through my teaching duties, lectures and a couple of seminars in the two weeks till the next group but I don’t remember much of them. At the end of the hear though, one of my students came up to me and pinpointed his seminar the second half of the fortnight as one that helped him really understand the music. (One Bach’s pieces from the Well Tempered Clavier.)

I was nearly late for the group, (by my own standards I was late. I always arrive at least half an hour before I have to play anywhere.) but in reality I had almost ten minutes to spare which given the vagaries of public transport meant I could easily have been late. We talked about our time since the last group and I eventually was able to get the words out to talk about my playing and its effect on me.

“Why don’t you play it again now?” asked John, one of the two insubstantial figures in the group. I was shocked. This was the first time he had spoken without being addressed by someone else first. I felt trapped but reluctantly took my instrument from its case and started playing.”

I didn’t notice but later found everyone including the therapists had been in tears and when Ben had taken out his guitar, a thing of beauty carved from a single piece of wood, this only increased. About ten minutes after he joined me, I noticed a difference in his guitar playing. The notes had become more soothing, stroking, comforting and I felt my whole body relax and my own playing changed too. There was brightness and optimism as I began to feel change was possible. I felt almost seduced into changing. Our playing was not yet making love but it was not far away and if we were to play together much more, I was pretty sure it would be.

When we finished, I was able to look at the faces around me. There was not the despair in the room that our previous gatherings had had. I could see that all had been crying but that all looked brighter and more ready to face the future. What I was not ready for was the applause, it was more than just polite by a long way. Finally, I made myself look at Ben. He was smiling at me, smiling with a joy I had not seen to date. I felt sure that if he wanted to he could have seduced a chain of women into his bed with his playing. I remembered his talking about the fear he experienced after killing someone in self defence, his fear of his own power and I felt a little of that. Is that what playing from the heart would mean for me?

Things moved quickly after that, almost every session I would hear of achievements different group members had made and by the end of our tenth meeting, the therapists felt we would not need to continue after the summer break which would be after two more sessions. How would I cope without the group? I asked myself that question more than once and eventually admitted to myself that perhaps the real question was, how would I cope without Ben? Ben whom I would have spent a total of forty-eight hours with, or a bit more as we were both always early. Forty-eight very intense hours to be sure but still not very long.

By the end of the last group, I knew I had a choice. I could carry on with my life, richer for the experience but in many ways more uncertain and I had a lot more in my emotional kit bag to cope with things. I could approach Ben and ask if we could see how things would progress together. That thought scared me, I had never had a boy or girlfriend. How did I go about that? I was no longer the Ice Queen as I discovered some called me during my student days. Probably some of my own students still called me that.

I had seen over the weeks that Ben got a lot of attention from the women in the group, mostly from those who had been treated badly by men in the past. There had been a lot of anti-men sentiment in the first three meetings. Ben’s answer had been,

“You are right. Many men are privileged and behave badly. I hope you won’t write all of us off because of that.” The other two men tended to become defensive which just wound us women up more.

The one thing that gave me an edge was our having played music together. The rest almost seemed to assume we were going to get it on at some point and sure enough just before the eleventh of our twelve meetings Ben asked me if I would play at his summer concert.

Would I? How many years had I been asking Wendy to get me in to it for? Of course that was before Ben drove a train through my emotional wall. Needless to say I accepted. I didn’t tell Wendy but spent most of my free time with Ben practising. Allowing more and more of myself to flow into the music rather than constantly striving for technical perfection. It was a bumpy journey as I allowed anger, frustration, sadness, grief, and eventually peace, joy and happiness full expression.

Two days before the concert, in the clearing where it was to take place, we played the De Profundis together. The beauty was poignant and there was silence from the other musicians present which was only interrupted by a call of,

“You fucking tart!” This from a voice I knew all too well. I was shocked. Why was Wendy saying this to me, the only virgin musician at our level I knew. It was only when the laughter stopped and Ben spoke that I belatedly found out it wasn’t aimed at myself.

“And nice to see you too Wendy. Don’t you think it is time you learned a new greeting for me?”

“That will be when you don’t have a new musical partner since last time I saw you. It is good to see you looking better in yourself though and tart though you are, Uvini is looking good too. Don’t trust him though, especially around other musicians.” I found my voice,

“Do I detect a touch of jealousy Wendy?” I was joking but her face told me I had hit a nerve. I didn’t know if she had an unrequited love for him or it was just a musical thing. I surprised myself with how much I had changed over the past few months and asked her, “Play with us.”

And she did. Twenty minutes later, and I knew her better than I had in all the years we had known each other. We all learned more about the others in that time and more than anything it was an exercise in trust. Each one of us trusted the others not to do anything to wrong them. At the end Ellie came and looked at both Ben and I, making eye contact for many seconds before uttering a line I was to learn was even older than Wendy’s, “You Tart!”

“If you hurt her in any way, I will Kill you.” and seconds later, “If you hurt Ben I will kill you.”

Ben was laughing as he asked,

“Any more oldies anyone needs to get out of the way?”

“Only one.” Ellie shouted so all could hear. “Time for skinny dipping before we go back and eat.”

This was the biggest challenge yet to me, not just my lack of experience with boys. What if Ben got an erection? Would I feel even worse if he didn’t? What would he think of my body? I didn’t shave my pits or trim my pubes. What would the women think of my body and of course the real biggie. I may have rejected a lot of the values from my parents but the idea of being naked among a group of people I hardly new and including a man would have made my parents self combust on the spot.

The image of them doing just that was what I needed to spur me on to break that taboo. I stripped off and Ben almost immediately complimented me on how beautiful and sexy I looked. I was surprised, I hadn’t cottoned on to just how sculpted a physique he had,

“You look pretty good yourself you know. Thank you for inviting me in to your family.”

“Thank you for coming. You are right, these people are all family to me, as important as my parents and sister though in different ways.”

He pulled me towards his self for a kiss and I found myself returning it with a passion I didn’t know existed.

It was Emma who interrupted after a while,

“If we decide to expand our brood of musicians, could we borrow him once or twice?”

And I didn’t feel threatened in the slightest. I found myself looking forward to meeting his two daughters along with the rest of his family. I had no doubt that we would continue to make beautiful music together.

And yes, he did get an erection and I was more than happy with it!