together working a shoal of kingfish, most likely. We were heading for the open Pacific. She was humming a melody now, which Elgar wrote for the fourth of the Sea Pictures, under the words
It lures me, lures me on to go
And see the land where corals lie
which somehow put her better in mind of her task. ‘There’s holes in the wind, isn’t there? I don’t mean it blows then doesn’t blow, I mean holes in the wind.’ Indeed holes happen in the wind, in precisely the way she meant it. ‘And the wind changes its weight,’ she said, and she was quite right, gusts of identical speed may be much different in the way the boat feels them, a phenomenon I can account for only by variance of temperature and density. I know skippers who took a long time at sea to find an understanding of this.
Short of the headland we turned south, for home. The sun was cold and low. A seaplane landed its sightseers near the sand-spit at Palm Beach. The breeze was fading, so she spun the wheel this way and that, but we lay where we were. The water around us was slick and still. Keith broke out a bottle of wine from the locker, but she’d caught sight of a yacht which had a breeze of its own. I told her we’d have to wait awhile, which didn’t appease her for a moment. ‘If I was any bloody good as a captain, I’d have found us a breeze of our own,’ she said.
We made the wharf before dusk, and she seemed wearied but happy. Keith was concerned she might have overdone things, but by way of a trade-off of interests he said, ‘I suppose you’ll sing the Elgar now better than ever.’ She was already considered the best exponent of Sea Pictures, anyway since they were first presented by Clara Butt, with Elgar, in 1899, but more likely the finest of all time. She looked at Keith to see if he might be joshing. Slowly she said, ‘I don’t think that’s so daft.”
FULL CIRCLE, her account of her last year in opera theatre, was fresh in the bookstores then. In it she wrote of herself: ‘All that I am I owe to music. All that I will be, whatever it is, I shall also owe to music…’
Of her passionate Orpheo, and the way she plays him, she says: ‘Here I am as Orpheo, trying to find a part of myself, Euridice, who is lost to me. We all know what that means.’
HER CONCERTS IN SYDNEY were booked solid weeks before, so I spent that evening of her last appearance sitting alone on a balcony watching dories trawling nets for prawn between the islands of the harbour, listening to her performance broadcast, live, on ABC radio.
The works included Elgar’s Sea Pictures and, as the time came it seemed she took especial pause for composure, before some small gesture of assent allowed the conductor to tap the music stand, poise the strings and the clarinets, and begin the soft phrases of a gathering tide. The voice enters in the third bar, and from that moment it was clear she was in thrall. Not all the poetry in this cycle is very good, but the voice made it splendid, in squall defiant, in calm serene, phrases backed and filled before they were fully aloft, and launching her words to us, whole, in this tricky and inconstant air, seemed to require all the concentration she could find in herself.
When it was finished the audience hushed. I imagined Keith somewhere in a front row, a tear running his cheek, as happens whenever she excels beyond some previous mark, watching her make her bow under the sudden thunderhead of applause, she aflush and trembling, grateful to the being, whatever it is, who could now find her anytime, wherever she is.
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