Swan River by David Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page A

acrobatics wearing spangly short dresses and tights like the Television Toppers.’
    He took a spoonful of peaches and ice-cream. Deborah and I both spoke at once. ‘But how did she do it? Hold the violin…’ ‘Could everybody see her bottom?’
    My mother laughed. My father ignored me and continued speaking to Deborah. ‘She held the bow between her big toe and the next one, and the violin was fastened to her other foot with a strap.’
    Deborah put her fingers in her hair and frowned. ‘I can’t imagine it.’
    â€˜Well, she stood on her hands with her knees bent and her feet above her bottom, which you could see, incidentally, although she wore silk knickers with sequins all over them,’ he turned quickly to me with a smile and back to Deborah again, ‘and somehow managed to push the bow across the strings. It was remarkable to watch.’ He took another spoonful. ‘Although, when I first saw her at home, I was small and thought nothing of it. I grew up with Rose walking about on her hands in the house, and it didn’t seem odd until I got older and my friends started wanting to come round and have a look.’
    My mother turned the pile of 78s over and Tchaikovsky came quietly from the corner of the room again. Deborah and I had second helpings of ice-cream.
    â€˜How did she actually play the notes?’ Deborah wrinkled her nose and looked at my father.
    This provoked a long discussion involving my mother as well, because my father didn’t really know the answer and my mother was the musical one. They decided between them that La Frascetti’s violin must have been tuned to four particular notes and that she had probably played the key notes in a popular tune or chorus; even my father admitted that it was unlikely that she could actually hold down the strings with her toes while standing on her hands. As far as my father could remember from the four or so times that he had seen her perform in public, she had always had musical accompaniment; certainly drum rolls and clashing cymbals at the climactic moments; on some occasions he had seen Uncle Ernest playing a xylophone and there had usually been a small orchestra in the pit at the music hall.
    My mother had a theory about black notes. She switched off Tchaikovsky and tried various old tunes on the piano to see if any contained just four of them. My father kept whistling something which he said was called ‘The Belle of New York’; my mother found this hard to play but got it eventually. It did indeed contain four black notes, and they both got very excited, convinced that these were the very notes that La Frascetti had played all those years ago. My mother played it over and over, hitting the black notes higher up the piano to simulate our long-forgotten ancestor bowing her violin with her feet, while my father drummed on a table mat with two bendy knives.
    Eventually my mother went to the kitchen, saying that she didn’t need any help with the washing-up. Deborah and I followed her, grabbed dishcloths and dried up, and my father came in to put the plates and cutlery away, before going off to the sitting room for his afternoon nap.
    Deborah and I went back up to my room. We stood up for a while, staring down at the family tree on the floor. I said, ‘You ought to put “Sis” in brackets underneath “Amelia”. That’s what they all called her.’
    â€˜Did they all call her “La Frascetti”?’ She pointed to the words.
    â€˜No, stupid. They must have called her Rose.’
    â€˜So names in brackets aren’t what people were called.’
    â€˜Well…’ This was tiresome. I was about to talk about people having two names for whatever reason, but then she giggled, knelt down and wrote the word with two ornamental brackets.
    â€˜What was she like, Sis?’
    I thought about it. Uncle George had said that she had given her husband a hard