The Song Before It Is Sung Read online

  When Elizabeth and Rosamund return from Germany, Rosamund writes to Mendel to break off their relationship. Mendel is heartbroken, but grateful, so he tells friends, for the happiness she has given him. He is, of course, primarily grateful for the sexual experience, previously a mystery to him. He cherishes it and husbands it.

  Conrad wonders what happened in Germany. There is no sign in Mendel's papers that Rosamund met anybody else and her novel, when it was published early the following year, was apparently a minor success, thought by The Times to display 'an amusing, if rather shallow understanding of the surface aspect of our times'. Mendel kept the cutting alongside her letters. He wrote: Nothing has changed. In my present mood I am happy with this situation. I see ahead of me a long, enclosed tunnel of work.

  Later there is a letter from Elizabeth saying that Rosamund has decided to return to Germany to oppose the rise of Nazism. She will be sending reports back to the newspapers; her uncle is a proprietor. But there is no mention of Rosamund's feelings for Mendel. He writes that he consoles himself with the knowledge that he was made for the contemplative life.

  Conrad is sitting in the flat, now on the market. Without Francine's presence, he has noticed, it is deteriorating. He is unable to control the remains of meals and dirty plates and crumpled bedclothes. He seems to cause seismic upheavals with simple acts like opening a jar of coffee or looking for a book. Mendel's papers, which he is trying to put in some order, are resisting, faithful to their progenitor's spirit; he was famously disorganised. The collected letters of E.A. Mendel are far from collected. In fact they may be more dispersed than when he took delivery of them two and a half years ago. Many times he has been warned - Francine has warned him - that they should be kept in safe storage. For the moment they are still in hundreds of books and loose files of papers and seventeen cardboard boxes in what used to be his study but which has now become an all-purpose room containing items of clothing, plates, books, newspapers and socks. He hadn't realised until Francine moved out just how much stuff came through the letterbox every day. With her fear of chaos, she must have been up at dawn clearing up. Or clearing up when she came in from a hard day in the hospital. He feels retrospective guilt. New pizza-delivery services are multiplying, and working drivers with their own vans offer to move his possessions. Sometimes he looks at these flyers and marvels at the grammar and spelling. Utility companies and phone suppliers and holiday companies are offering deals. Often they come with mission statements. He understands that they are for mom and apple pie of course, but why are they issuing these quasi-philosophical statements which can't possibly mean anything? If it is true that language corresponds to some fundamental order in the brain, these folk are in serious trouble. A company that is offering to deliver salt for his water-softener (he doesn't have one, as far as he knows) describes itself as 'caring'. Caring salt. Or perhaps the proprietors are generally caring people and they want it to be known. He spends far too much time reading these bits of paper.

  Am I heartbroken, like Mendel, he asks himself?

  He hasn't spoken to Francine for ten days or so. She last rang to say that the agent was a little concerned about the state of the flat. It wasn't presenting well. Could he tidy up? He promised to give it a bash, but so far the moment has not presented itself. Although he is not actually discouraging interest in the flat, he likes the status quo. The bakery smells soothe him and he is able to apply himself to Mendel's papers, trying to understand what happened all those years ago.

  Sometimes he goes out to meet friends. They appear to feel sorry for him, as though he has lost something. Nobody takes account of what Francine may have lost. He sees clearly his diminished status through his friends' eyes. The truth is, he is not heartbroken. He is beginning to feel liberated, freed of the awareness of Francine's disapproval. Although he must get someone to clean up, so that she won't have fresh grievances: in this way he is not yet entirely liberated. He remembers his friend Osric saying at first that his divorce was wonderful: he was able to eat scrambled egg in bed at three in the morning while watching women's tennis if he wanted to. Later he admitted to being lonely.

  He imagines Mendel in his rooms at All Souls, properly heartbroken, first love turned to ashes, and, jumping forward, he sees von Gottberg in front of Roland Freisler at the People's Court, as though, somehow, there is a connection. This scene of von Gottberg being accused by Freisler of the perfect preparation for a traitor, loitering in Cafés in the Kurfürstendamm after going to Oxford, an English university, on an English scholarship, haunts him. He thinks about it every day. He replays it, as if the film is inside his brain, right in his being. If Freisler had known his history a little better he would have realised that Cecil Rhodes's tendencies were closer to Nietzsche's than anything currently popular at Oxford. Rhodes truly believed in the Ubermensch and the world spirit. But Oxford, to some people, is even now a provocation.

  It occurs to him, in this flat above Baiocchi's Bakery, The True Taste of Italy, that he is living more fully in Mendel's life — All Souls and Oxford are very real to him — and more fully in von Gottberg's life - sometimes when he wakes in the night he believes that he was present at the People's Court - than in his own. It is a strange but comforting feeling that the outside world is becoming less substantial to him. Perhaps I am beginning to understand what it is to live someone else's life. And possibly, he thinks, this is what Mendel had in mind for me, that I should apply this understanding to his life and give it its final shape. And this is perhaps what novelists do. The reality they create is just as valid as any other. Or more so. This is the sort of talk -although of course he is talking only to himself — that drives Francine mad. If she were here he would not have been able to resist trying it out on her. His mind is moving very lightly so that he thinks that appearance and reality and false consciousness and dualism are just fancy terms for the idea that the world is imaginatively constructed.

  And now Conrad decides to clean the place up. He has the idea that if he cleans up he will possibly be better able to order Mendel's papers and so to determine their meaning, which needs panning out. When this meaning is discovered, he thinks, it will be nothing more than a few gleaming specks. His mind, moving a little too fast, like a man running down a mountain, skips to the Klondike and men in shabby clothes standing in icy streams staring hopefully at sieves.

  He has no plastic bags, but the bakers below give him some used flour bags and offer him the use of their dumpster. He buys a freshly baked ciabatta, lightly dusted with flour, and takes it upstairs with the bags. As he cleans he leaves a light talc everywhere. He wonders how he could have used so many toilet rolls in so short a time. He carries the stuff downstairs; Tony Baiocchi and one of his sons, who wears a diamond ear stud, help him throw the flour bags into the dumpster.

  'Where's your lovely missus the doctor, then? We ain't seen her for a little while.'

  'We've split up, Tony.'

  'That's a crying shame. She's a lovely gel. I thought you was perfect together.'

  Upstairs he takes a look at himself in the bathroom mirror. He wonders if he is looking haggard and eccentric, but actually he quite likes the way he looks, a little dishevelled, but interesting; small pouches have formed under his eyes. He has not taken much note recently of the time; he feels no need to go to bed at any particular hour, or to get up if he doesn't feel like it. This irregularity has led to these eye-pouches. Perfect together. They were never perfect together. But he sees again the sense that other people have that Francine is something special, a lovely gel, who lent him some lustre. The world doesn't give much value to high-minded thinking.

  Successfully completing manual tasks always leaves him invigorated and he sits down among the cardboard boxes with renewed purpose. Just then the phone rings and he hears a woman's voice, clear but delivered at elderly registers.

  'I would like to speak to Mr Senior.'

  'Yes, that's me.'

  'You won't know who I am, but I am Elizabeth
Partridge. The novelist, Rosamund Bower, was my cousin.'

  'Good God. Sorry. Apologies.'

  'You probably imagined I was dead.'

  'No, no, not at all, I just had no idea what had happened to you. Although of course I knew that Miss Bower died in 1984. And I have some of your letters.'

  'Yes, I know that Elya Mendel gave you many of his papers. I have some of his letters as well as some letters from Axel von Gottberg, and I wondered if you would like to have them. Elya suggested it before he died.'

  'Jesus Christ. Sorry again. Yes, please, I would love to see them.'

  'I'm in Ireland, but I will be in London next week for an operation.'

  She speaks, as clearly and as harshly as a bell, with the authority of someone who has been around servants and dogs and horses all her life.

  'Did Mr Mendel write to you often?'

  'Oh yes. He certainly did. We were terribly close, particularly after Rosamund chucked him. Axel wrote to me often. I also have some of Rosamund's letters from Axel. Are you married?'

  'I am, but it's not going well. She's gone.'

  'It's a mistake to think of marriage as the final solution. Your voice is slightly odd. I hear that's how the young speak today. Is that what's called Estuary English?'

  'Probably. I hope your operation is not serious.'

  'At my age everything is serious. But this is just plumbing. Do you know, I never took it seriously when people said growing old is awful. But the truth is that it is awful. Things conk out.'

  'I've got a lot of questions for you.'

  'I'll do my best. Fortunately, my brain seems to be holding up surprisingly well.'

  'How many letters do you have?'

  'At least a hundred.'

  'Good God.'

  'You seem to have a rather limited vocabulary. In those days one wrote. Goodbye.'

  'When are we going to meet?'

  'I will telephone you when I arrive at Basil Street.'

  He thinks when she has gone that she probably slept with von Gottberg. He finds it quite shocking, even thrilling, that someone who knew them both so well is still alive. From her letters, he has come to know her, but it never occurred to him that she would still be alive. She must be ninety-two or -three at least. He tears at the ciabatta with his hands and eats it excitedly. The room is pleasantly farinaceous. He has spoken to someone who slept with von Gottberg. He is stuffing the bread into his mouth. He is easily excited. His mother used to say that he was highly strung. Von Gottberg was highly strung; his hands would grasp and furl and unfurl when he was excited by ideas. In the face of enormous danger, mortal danger, he would become calm and detached. At his trial, after being tortured for days by the Gestapo in Albrechtstrasse, with only the sure prospect of death, he was calm. A few months later, when Helmuth James von Moltke was sentenced to death, he welcomed Freisler's remark that the Church and the Nazis demanded the same thing, the whole man. He would be hanged — von Moltke rejoiced — for his thoughts.

  And this is something Mendel must have understood, that a deep belief, however irrational its origin, can be the source of strength and unimaginable courage. Perhaps the only source of strength.

  5

  WHEN ELIZABETH PARTRIDGE calls him a few days later she asks him to come at tea-time, which he takes to mean four o'clock. He emerges from the underground at Knightsbridge and walks down Basil Street to her club. It is a place that accommodates members, mostly women, up from the country, women who don't want to be startled in any way by the new realities of London. So he imagines; he always, constantly, unstoppably, makes these judgements. The brass doorplate has been polished for so many years that the inscription, 'London and Counties Club', is as indistinct as the epitaph on an ancient tomb. He rings the bell and a porter in a faded dark-maroon uniform -the colour of an old apple variety - trimmed at the cuffs and lapels with gold thread that has lost its lustre, opens the door and, limping, leads him to the reception desk where he presses his hand down on the burnished brass bell which produces one exhausted ping.

  'She won't be long,' says the porter, who opens a small panelled door and passes through it. He appears, when the door shuts, to have vanished behind a large vase of delphiniums.

  Everything in the place is faded. Even the delphiniums are of a washed-out blue. It's an effect decorators often strive for, the gentle deterioration of fabric and carpet and paint, the suggestion that here at least there will be no absurd — vulgar — newness. Even the lift with its concertina doors and brass buttons and mahogany interior is perfect. Conrad likes it. He likes strange things: there is no pattern to his tastes, another aspect of his life that upsets Francine, who finds whimsy self-indulgent. But what he likes is the confidence demonstrated by the committee, or whoever the presiding genius of the place is, that in this corner of Knightsbridge at least there is only one possible style appropriate for its members. It's akin to the belief that God took time out to endorse the Anglican church - its rituals, its tasteful hymns, its worn-out kneelers, its flowers, its surplices, its holy innocence - with his special approval. We are all God's children of course, but Anglicans are his favourites, because of their demeanour.

  He is inspecting a thickly varnished oil painting of a horse in a landscape, when he is called.

  'Are you here to meet someone, sir?'

  He turns to see a cheerful young woman in a heavily threaded violet suit. The threads are on the outside, in a fine arachnid web, as if hovering above the material itself.

  'Yes, I am here to see Elizabeth Partridge.'

  'Ah, Lady Dungannon. She is expecting you. Please go through to the lounge and I will tell her ladyship that you have arrived. Would you like tea?'

  'Oh, yes, please.'

  'Ordinary tea, or herbal?'

  'No, no, not herbal. Ordinary tea. Builders' tea, please.'

  He imagines that 'builders' tea' is the sort of phrase that plays well here. He waits in the lounge, where the brass clock on the wall ticks loudly. The lounge looks on to a small courtyard. Elizabeth Partridge, he has discovered, was married to an Irish peer who died nearly thirty years ago. He tries in the loud silence to imagine what it is like to be as old as she is, to have witnessed so much, the parade of ideas, absurd fashions, hopeful politicians, corrupt regimes, dictators, murderers, sexual encounters, musical styles, marriages, bereavement and above all the restless, insatiable appetite for happiness, for explanations, for fulfilment and also for art and beauty and music. Every generation uses and transforms what has gone before. As Eliot said - approximately — every generation takes what it needs from art. If you live for ninety years, you must lose faith in human judgement, so fickle, so self-regarding, so dangerous.

  He hears the lift lurching and coughing upwards. The doors open somewhere above and close clumsily and noisily. There is a moment of indecisive whirring as if it is gathering its elderly senses, and then it jolts into action again. The doors open and he can hear the porter making polite encouraging noises to someone. The young woman's voice now joins in.

  Into the lounge comes Elizabeth Partridge in a wheelchair, pushed by the porter. She sits in the chair with dignity, although age has cramped her so that she is curled, rolled, almost into a cochlear posture. The porter wheels her into place and helps her into a florally abundant armchair. Her face, heavily made up, has a mummified look, the porcelain appearance of time stopped, a broken clock, so that she can never get older and, with her carefully arranged woman-aviator's hair, will go to her grave in exactly this state. He thinks of her in the Kidron Valley, when she and von Gottberg were certainly having an affair, and he tries to imagine her tilting her head to look at him over her shoulder from under a large hat, her hair in shiny waves partly obscuring the view.

  'Ah, hello,' she says. 'You must be young Master Senior. Pass me the bag, Miss Trentham. Is the tea coming?'

  'Tea is on its way, Lady Dungannon.'

  'Sit down, my boy. Sit down. It's not a cocktail party, more's the pity.'

&n
bsp; She laughs and her laugh is so high and girlish that he is instantly charmed. As a small boy he liked older people, although his Aunt Dorothy with the bristly moles on her cheek repelled him when she kissed him.

  'Why, Conrad, did Elya choose you to be his biographer?'

  'He doesn't actually say biographer anywhere. I think he just wanted me to have his papers and look after them.'

  'Thank you,' she says to the young woman. 'We will be talking for a while. Did you say tea is on its way?'

  'Yes, it is, Lady Dungannon.'

  'Jolly good. In this folder I have all the letters from Elya and from Axel, as well as some other bits and pieces. But before I give them to you, I want to ask you to do one thing. I feel I can ask at my age.'

  She reaches across and places her hand on his wrist. It rests there with an avian lightness for a moment.

  'Yes.'

  'I want you to remember that Elya trusted you. He told me just before he died that you have some sensitivity.'

  Conrad feels that dangerous surge of childish gratification rising up in him.

  'To be honest, I don't know why he said that.'

  'He was an excellent judge of character.'

  The porter brings the tea. There is a long pause, some sighs, some clattering of bone china as he unloads his tray. Here, it is still a mark of civilisation to cut sandwiches very thin and to stack them in neat triangles. In the outside world people fill sandwiches and baguettes and bagels to bursting, but that is not the way here: watercress, cucumber and Cheddar are strictly confined. The tea comes in a pot with a matching jug of hot water and a strainer.

  'Would you pour, Conrad? My hands are a little shaky.'

  The ritual - perhaps it's the point of all rituals — draws them into a complicity. On her forehead he sees the thin indelible pencil mark of a blue vein, threatening to emerge from under her pale skin, which is only lightly coated on to the bones of her face.