Miss Doreen D'Souza

Miss Doreen D'Souza was raised in a tall narrow house behind Our Lady of Mercy, the youngest of four, in a family where music was considered as necessary as good manners and rather harder to teach. Her mother played the piano indifferently and insisted, with the fervour of the self-taught, that all four children learn it properly, which meant an hour of scales every evening before homework and a teacher who rapped knuckles for a wandering thumb.

Doreen was the only one of the four who took to it without a fight. By fourteen she was playing the offertory hymn on Sundays when the regular organist had a cold; by twenty she had the position permanently, a fact the parish considered so obviously correct that nobody thought to make a formal announcement of it. She has now played that organ, with only a handful of Sundays missed for illness, for thirty years.

Her two brothers left in the 1980s, one for Perth and one for Toronto, in the general emigration that emptied half the pews of the community over that decade, and they built there the ordinary good lives that such emigrations produce — houses with lawns, photographs at Christmas, a calendar sent home each January with a view of somewhere very clean. Doreen stayed, because their mother's health required someone to stay, and the arithmetic of who that someone would be was never much discussed in the family; it simply resolved itself, over eleven years, in Doreen's direction.

She teaches piano now on Tuesday and Friday afternoons in the front room of the same tall house, to a rotating population of children sent by mothers who remember, fondly or otherwise, being sent themselves. The upright piano is older than most of her students, its high notes a little sharp in the monsoon, and the room smells of the same lavender talcum her own mother used to wear, a smell that has, over three decades, become inseparable from the sound of a C major scale played correctly for the first time.

She keeps her sheet music filed in strict date order in a cabinet by the window, hymns for the coming month practised a full week ahead in case, she says, her hands should ever disagree with her — a sentence her students find slightly mysterious and her contemporaries at the church understand rather too well, at an age when hands begin, occasionally, to have opinions of their own.

There is a story, told more by former students than by Doreen herself, of a recital in 1979 at which a boy from a rival school forgot his piece entirely halfway through, and Doreen, seated in the front row as accompanist, played the missing bars from memory under her breath until he found his place again, so quietly that the audience never noticed a substitution had occurred at all.

The congregation at Our Lady of Mercy has thinned considerably since her girlhood — the emigrations continued long after her brothers left, and the ten o'clock Mass that once required extra chairs in the side aisle now leaves whole pews empty — but she still plays the postlude in full, every Sunday, to whoever remains in the building, occasionally to almost no one at all, with the same attention to phrasing she would give a packed hall.

She has never married, a fact remarked upon less often now than it was twenty years ago, and she answers questions about it, when they come, with a brief pleasant word about being very busy with her students, before returning, without any evident effort, to whatever piece of Bach or Fauré happens to be open on the stand.

It is generally agreed in the parish that nobody plays a funeral quite like Miss D'Souza, that she can find, in even the plainest hymn, a way of making the last verse sound like something worth having lived for, and that this, whatever else may or may not be said of a life, is not nothing.