The Song Before It Is Sung Read online

  'Yes, so you mustn't use his papers or the letters I am going to give you to make a fast buck.'

  'No, no, of course not.'

  Actually he is stunned both by the — justified — suspicion and by the phrase.

  'No. You must not. The point about Elya is that his life's work was the understanding of human aims. As a matter of fact I think human longings is a better phrase. He believed that we make the best of the life we are given. All those years ago in Jerusalem, I asked him what he did — I had no idea he was an Oxford don - and he said he believed that human beings spent a lot of time deceiving themselves. He was thinking about why this should be the case, d'you follow me? What he couldn't decide then was whether this is a necessary human characteristic. Axel, of course, believed in Hegel, who Elya thought wrote absolute balls.'

  'You were very close to Axel, weren't you?'

  'I was. I loved him. But so did my cousin, Rosamund. She left Elya and followed him to Germany, but it didn't work. No, she slept with Elya because she wanted to prove to Axel that she would do anything for him. It was his idea that she help Elya lose his virginity. She never really loved Elya, unfortunately. However much you admire someone, you can't force the body to fall in love, don't you agree? Rosamund loved Axel, and she took up with a friend of his, just to stay in Germany. You're probably shocked. People of your age think sex was invented in 1963, as Larkin said. It wasn't, believe me.'

  She laughs again quite suddenly, improbably loudly considering the diminished sounding box from which the laughter emerges.

  'Did he know about Rosamund and Axel?'

  'Elya? Yes. You must read the letters.'

  'And Axel von Gottberg? Elya Mendel always writes about his charm, but deep down he never trusted him after his letter to the Manchester Guardian!

  'No, that is true. Elya never trusted him after that letter, but also he never trusted him after Rosamund. What's odd, of course, is that people like us - Axel, Rosamund, Elya and me - were just young people in strange times. I'm not saying we were ordinary, far from it, but the times were extraordinary. And knowing Axel changed us all in different ways. The only advantage of growing old is that you see things from differing perspectives. Young people think they have made the world.'

  Axel von Gottberg has reached out from the grave to change Conrad's life too, although he is not yet sure exactly how.

  'Let's have a cocktail now. Will you order? I would ring the bell, but life is too short to wait for Alf.'

  'I'll go and order. What would you like?'

  'I'll have a Tom Collins. I gave Alf Lionel's recipe years ago. Lionel Wray, Elya's friend, notorious sodomite. Or so he pretended.'

  He finds the young woman and gives her the order for two Tom Collins.

  When he comes back Elizabeth is powdering her nose, looking into a small compact and moistening her lips.

  'He was very good-looking, you know.'

  'Who?'

  'Axel. He had enormous charm and sex appeal. Elya had charm, but it didn't really have a sexual content. Women liked him and confided in him but he was often treated, I think it's fair to say, as what people these days call a walker. Although some of his students fell for him utterly. One young woman, he brought her to stay when we came back to England, to Sussex, was desperate to marry him. He asked me in the kitchen what I thought. She was talking to my husband, my first husband Roddy, who was killed in 1942, and I said, "Don't touch her with a bargepole." "Bit late for that," he said. "I mean don't marry her, she's away with the fairies, daft as a brush." "Yes, but she's very good in bed," he said. "Honestly, Elya, what kind of talk is that from a fellow of All Souls?" And he laughed. He had a wonderful liquid laugh, like a big warbling bird. But you know how he laughed, I am sure. Actually we all laughed like hyenas. I think it was a fashion.'

  Conrad has an image of those dogs, Boston terriers, that barked at the circus to produce music. He remembers Mendel's laugh: it rose, it bubbled from a cleft in the rocks, from the Kidron Valley, distilled in Jewish time, from a biblical age of innocence.

  The porter is cast specifically to lend verisimilitude to this scene. He appears with two tall cocktail glasses, each topped with a maraschino cherry and a slice of orange. He places the glasses beside them on little round paper mats and then attempts a sort of respectful, unobtrusive exit, which stops the conversation.

  'Don't mind me, your ladyship, I shall be returning shortly with some mixed nuts.'

  Nobody has spoken like this since 1953.

  'Jolly good, Alf,' says Elizabeth.

  Conrad wonders if it is possible to order your life so that you are surrounded and attended only by people called Alf who have been sealed from the world as it is. If you have money, it may be possible. He wonders, too, if there comes a time when you wish for stasis and are unwilling to take on board any new information. That seemed to have happened to his father; he wasn't prepared to take on a new world, because he believed it would be just as deluded as the one it was replacing.

  'Chin, chin,' Elizabeth says, raising her glass. 'Do you know, Axel, as a good Prussian, always bowed his head slightly when he said cheers or prosit. Elya noticed it. He said it was a sort of submission to higher powers. You couldn't say prosit without, as Elya put it, an acknowledgement of higher meaning if you were Prussian. Higher meaning was exactly what Elya spent his life trying to debunk.'

  'How long did Rosamund stay in Germany?'

  'After Axel called off their engagement, she went back to Germany and lived with a German for a year, and even wore the Herrenhut mit Schmuckband, that funny little trilby hat with a ribbon, for a while, but she came back here just before the war started. Her man joined the Party - he was called Strelitz - and remained a true believer to the end. He was killed in 1945. What she really wanted was Axel. Axel visited her, and me, on his trips to London to try to stop the war. That was in April and May 1939. A year later Ros married an Englishman. Five years later Axel was dead, hanged. It was too awful. We were so young.'

  'I've seen the film of the trial.'

  'Is it terrible?'

  'He is oddly serene. Ready to die.'

  'He was horribly tortured. Fingernails torn out, and God knows what else.'

  'Did Elya ever talk about that?'

  'No. He couldn't bear to hear about torture or pain. He was a coward himself, by his own admission.'

  'Did he ever say he felt guilty about undermining Axel's reputation with the authorities, here and in America?'

  'He was accused of it. But he said any criticism he had of Axel was of his fondness for putting himself in the middle of any intrigue that was going. And of course his patriotism. Patriotism was a very dirty word in Oxford. What's the phrase, the last refuge of the scoundrel? He felt that Axel's attitude was my country, right or wrong. What Elya realised very early on was that Hitler was not like anybody who had gone before. He had read Mein Kampf. But no, I don't think he ever believed that he had been responsible for Axel's death in any way. Axel put himself in danger from the beginning, by joining the German Foreign Office and playing a double game. He went all over the place telling people about the resistance. It was surprising he wasn't arrested long before July 1944.'

  Conrad sees that Elizabeth is becoming tired and agitated.

  'I must go now and rest,' she says.

  'Can I see you again?'

  'If I live through tomorrow's op, I would love to see you. Come and stay with us in Ireland.'

  'I would love to.'

  'How old are you, Conrad?'

  I 'm thirty-five.'

  'Just the age Axel was when he died. My son is sixty-one. Astonishing. Now take the letters and remember what I said about your obligation to Elya.'

  As he walks along Basil Street towards the underground with his precious parcel in his tennis bag, he marvels that out here on the street life is so different, as though he has stepped through the scenery, like the evanescent porter. And this too, he thinks, is English life, a series of cameos or farces
played out in separate rooms. Elizabeth conducts herself as someone who is on a stage, surrounded by bit-part players like the porter, the Dogberry of this scene. That self-assurance of the English upper-classes, the belief, as Cecil Rhodes put it, that if you asked any man what nationality he would prefer to be, ninety-nine out of a hundred would tell you they would prefer to be born an Englishman -that assurance lives on long beyond any possible verification. And it was this confidence that the benefits of an exposure to Englishness - an inoculation of Englishness, as a Master of Balliol once described it - would benefit everybody, that led Rhodes to include Germans among his candidates. And it is by this strange philosophical route that Axel von Gottberg came to Oxford.

  When he gets home Conrad delays opening the folder and spends some time examining the cover on which Elizabeth has written in bold, lost, copperplate: My correspondence with Elya Mendel and Count Axel von Gottberg and my cousin, Rosamund Bower, and other papers. Dungannon House, Ireland.

  When he eventually opens the folder after making coffee, and checking his emails twice, the sight of the letters, the paper alone, with the intimate and confessional quality of handwriting, has a powerful effect on Conrad. As he starts to read the letters, he discovers that they are full of promises and new starts and partings. As he knows, the pain of parting can itself be a pleasure. It should be no surprise that sixty years ago people had the same feelings as he does, but it is. The effect is unexpected: Elizabeth Partridge has brought him closer to them all, as though he has been introduced to friends of a close friend. And in a way he has been. But still he finds himself unsettled: Elizabeth is ninety-three, but her lover - who was also her cousin's lover -is for ever thirty-five. There are pictures of people at a certain age that freeze them in time — he thinks of movie stars and sportsmen and revolutionaries — and this has happened to von Gottberg: he remains for ever young. Early death also confers certain mythological qualities, and he wonders whether Mendel resented this as the years went by.

  All three of the others are very aware of Mendel, as if his example, his deep-mined wisdom, reproaches them explicitly. It is a burden to them, it seems, trying to live up to the standards of their friend. Von Gottberg suggests that it will be difficult to write frankly after he returns to Germany. Conrad has seen this clear suggestion in other letters; Mendel has perhaps underestimated his friend's difficulties in Nazi Germany, because he sees basic principles so starkly. One of von Gottberg's letters asks if he has friends left in England and in almost every letter he tries to envisage a new European understanding; he is alarmed by the gulf that he thinks is opening up between Germany and England. He is longing to see Rosamund again, as though he has great faith in his ability to explain to her how it can all be fixed. He arranges to meet her at Tempelhof, from where they will drive to the family home. His mother is dying to meet her. Absurdly, Conrad feels nervous about her reception.

  6

  PRAGUE

  I OCTOBER 1938

  Darling Lizzie

  He looks different in Germany. Of course he is at home. At first we found it difficult to speak. I don't know why. Six months have gone by and in that time so much has changed, not just for us, but for our countries. An awkwardness had sprung up. I can see that what Axel fears most is that we will all be separated. He believes, however, that Hitler and his awful supporters are the product of history. What he means is that we created the problem at Versailles, and Hitler has simply used the situation. The German people — according to Axel - don't want Hitler or war. I must say to the visitor like me they seem to be longing for war and they appear to adore Hitler. But I am getting ahead of my story, dear cousin.

  We stayed the first night in Charlottenburg, which is enchanting. Axel is well known in every Café and bar, suspiciously so in my opinion; his favourite is the Romanisches Café, where the avant-garde meet. Anyway, by the time we had a few cocktails and fried calfs liver - essential Berlin food, said Axel - we were quite relaxed. In the morning we visited the Schloss, of course, the usual over-egged gilt and rococo. From Berlin we drove north to the countryside. This is Axel's Heimat. His father was one of the Kaiser's trusted ministers and the family have lived here for six hundred years. Axel feels very deeply for his Land, and I can see now why he felt he could not abandon his home and his family for a life in Oxford, although Elya thinks if he hadn't got a second he would have stayed on. We stopped a few times in small villages, sleepy villages. Some of the names of towns and villages sound Polish to me, and in fact we were not far from East Prussia. Axel is very good-looking, as we know, but at home he has something princely about him. The peasants who served us (emancipated 1807) seemed thrilled by his voice and his looks. It helps that he's a least a foot taller than anyone else, of course. You know how intensely Axel can engage you with those hazel eyes? We novelists often prattle about eyes, probably because it's so easy, but Axel's eyes have more depth than anyone's I have ever met. We stopped by a cornfield streaked and splashed with blue cornflowers and red poppies and he kissed me there, as though it had special meaning. He said he loved me and that not a day has gone by without his thinking about me. What's a girl to do? Strange, considering it was he who encouraged me with Elya. Dear Elya. I hope he has forgiven me.

  Soon we were approaching the family pile, via the Gottbergerwald, a huge forest which has been in the family since the fourteenth century, or thereabouts. The house emerges as you approach and then disappears again. Axel was so pleased to be showing me his demesne. It's a Palladian house, built in about 1850 in reality, on the site of the original manor house. We approached it down an avenue lined with oaks and enormous medieval barns. He stopped the car on the last hill so that we could gaze down the avenue at the house and the lake behind. The servants were lined up to greet us and I wished I had more luggage to occupy them. Inside, Axel's mother, the Grafin, sat in a drawing room overlooking the lake. She speaks almost perfect English, as good as Axel's, and she welcomed me warmly. She's a very grand lady. Axel's father is unwell and he has been recuperating somewhere, I think in their other house over the Elbe, so I did not meet him. Axel admires him very much, although he thinks he belongs not to the previous generation but to the one before that. Later Axel's older sister arrived; the coachman had gone to get her at another house — I am not sure if it is one of theirs — where she had been painting. She was married and lived in London for a while. She is a wonderful painter and wears elaborately printed dresses in a bohemian style that only a very few can carry off. She was wearing a hat with ostrich feathers. That night we ate in the grand dining room and Axel and his sister were delightful. Her name is Adelheid, although they call her Adi, and she is about to marry the richest man in the whole of Mecklenburg. It will be possible to walk from the Baltic to Berlin without leaving their joint Heimat. (I may be exaggerating just a little.) In the morning we went riding in the forest where Axel and his sisters had run half-wild most summers. He took me to a lake hidden deep in the trees, which he said was their secret place as children. When we came back his mother was very grave: she said that the Brownshirts had destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues in the night. The police and the army did not intervene. The realisation that a gang of thugs is in charge of the country is terrifying. Axel, in his usual way, spoke soothingly of historical forces and the coming of the new order of labour, which is disguised by these upheavals. I wonder. But anyway, he has not joined the Party, a fact which is making life very difficult for him, his sister told me, although he denies it.

  That night we argued as we used to, but now there was something desperate about it: Jews have been murdered, scores settled as if the days of the Teutonic Order are coming back. And yet here we were in the grand house, with Axel saying that the English are suffering for their dried-up rationalism, which fails entirely to understand that we are on earth in a context. As Elya says, Hegel is never far from his thoughts. Not, of course, that I have read Hegel, but the general idea seems to be that everything has a purpose and
that all conflicts lead inevitably to a resolution. Axel says that Hitler must be given some rope so that he can hang himself. He says, when his mother is not present, that there are plans in the High Command to stop him if he invades Czechoslovakia. As we sat and talked it all seemed very remote, yet Berlin is only a few hours' drive away. You know in your bones that terrible dark days lie ahead, but Axel retreats into metaphor: Germany will find her rightful place in the new Europe that is emerging; these upheavals are a sign of the emergence of new forces, benign forces. (I'm repeating myself, but then so does he.) I have the impression that Axel has had affairs with many women in Germany as well as the ones we know about in England. It's as though he feels he needs to help women in the only way he can. You know when I wrote in Shadows at Dusk, 'He can't get on with women, so he gets off with them' — well, there is something of Axel in that. The next day we went back to Berlin. He is keen to introduce me to all his friends, even the women who I just know he has been to bed with. He seeks out Jews too, and seems fascinated by the fact that Mummy is Jewish. He said to me at the home of one of his friends, 'I am not a womaniser.' What he meant, I think, is that he has some sort of higher capacity for understanding: in life, as in women. I love him, although I can see that this cannot end well. Already we have to talk in code in public. In Berlin he is worried about his landlady and about neighbours. One night at three in the morning he sent me away to a hotel. I was shocked, but he said that it had to be done, no more explanations. We drove out to visit one of his clients in a Jewish area and the house was daubed with a huge five-pointed star and Juden heraus. It was so shocking, so nearly unbelievable, that I couldn't see how Axel could stay one more day. I waited for him in the car, but again he told me it was a phase, an historical phase. I'm shocked, I am as much shocked by the fact as by his blindness. But he is very sensitive to feelings and the next day we drove to an old inn deep in the countryside, a lovely place which is adorned by a huge gilded bunch of grapes over the ancient doors, and we dined by candlelight on Sauerbraten and a plum tart. I think he was keen to show me a more tranquil Germany.