The Song Before It Is Sung Read online

  Oh, Elizabeth, I can't tell you how torn I feel. I love him, I am obsessed by him, yet I have a horrible, uneasy feeling. Particularly in relation to what's going on in Germany. Somehow he wants to put it right himself, or die trying. It's madness - he is only a newly qualified lawyer doing rather routine work, but he has this burning sense of duty to Germany, not this Germany, of course, but to a higher Germany, a Platonic Germany. He talked to me seriously of the 'valuations' of feudal Germany. I completely lost my temper, and he said, 'How beautiful you are when you are cross,' and I told him, weeping, that he is the most beautiful man I have ever known. Oh, Lizzie, he is unfaithful, he's mesmerising and he's also a little mad, but I love him. He's asked me to marry him. I'm sorry, darling, I am rambling. Let's meet in Cornwall, in the physical world, when I get back from here. A dunking in cold seawater will set me to rights. I'm crying as I write. I must stop.

  R x

  Conrad looks for the signs of tears on the paper, the watermarks of misery, but he can't see them.

  He reads on, letter after letter. It's dark outside but he has no idea of the time. The letters are unbearable in their accumulation of hope and ideals and of love and disillusionment. He sees in a speeded-up version a sort of historical conveyor belt that never stops producing this craziness from a deep unplumbable human well. But it's when he thinks of von Gottberg standing in front of Roland Freisler, dignified, resigned, his eyes molten from the sight of evil, that Conrad finds himself weeping softly, because this is the end of all these false hopes and ideals. It's as if it is a medieval morality play that mocks the naive traveller. He knows that he is moved on his own account, because he is just as much an item in this parade of human folly, he and Francine with their false hopes, the child they failed to produce, the success he never achieved, the warm urgent longing to live a higher life — details unspecified, of course — that they once shared, the expectation that somehow they were due fulfilment - equally unspecified -and then the loss of love, the tiredness in her skin, the bitterness in her heart. He quoted Malraux to her when she was still listening: Art is an attempt to give man a consciousness of his own hidden greatness. But she has come to regard his ability to remember quotes as a monkey trick.

  While Rosamund was suffering her agonies of doubt, over in Oxford Elya Mendel was discussing with other Oxford philosophers the meaning of theory: What do we mean when we make a theory? Are all philosophical questions purely linguistic? Is philosophy grammar? Do ethics have any rational content? No, they don't.

  Rosamund retreated to England and she and Elizabeth and some other friends, including the poet Emily Brittain, went down to Cornwall to the family house overlooking Padstow Bay, near Trevose. Back in England Rosamund felt, as she put it prosaically, that a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. They walked on the cliffs and swam where the water was deepest and most turbulent; they knew secret channels between the rocks. And Conrad sees them in those one-piece suits, sleek young women, on whom disillusion is falling like rain. Von Gottberg writes to her: the dangers to her in Germany would be great. She must know that he can never leave Germany.

  'He believes in his destiny, Lizzie. He thinks that is going to be increasingly difficult for his English friends to understand.'

  The beach under foot is pebbly. This roughness of the shingle, the eroded honeycombed rocks, the cold impersonal sea, the lighthouse at Trevose, the headlands that crouch down against the wind, the narrow paths between the stone walls are Rosamund's Heimat, she decides. And Conrad sees the myth of Englishness, which believes itself practical and down-to-earth and unshowy, can even be seen in landscape: This part of the country with its small woods and simple houses and pounding sea is more part of me than any philosophy in the world, she writes to von Gottberg.

  Mendel tells Elizabeth that von Gottberg has written to him saying that he is in love with Rosamund and that he is going to marry her and that he hopes that he, Elya, will forgive him: I wrote to him telling him that I have long since got over Rosamund but I think it is only natural to say that it makes me uneasy. Of course you must not mention this to Axel or to Rosamund. I do hope, however, that she is not going to try to make a life in Germany. This is no time for anyone, let alone someone Jewish, to be going there. As usual Axel has his head in some very thick cloud.

  Conrad wonders if Mendel was gradually, as people do, building up an intellectual case against von Gottberg, which was really a cover for sexual jealousy. It is easy to imagine the highly voluble, relentlessly cheerful and intellectual Mendel feeling that von Gottberg was a charlatan, attractive to young women - for instance, Rosamund — with his phoney-baloney spiritual and mythological tendencies, and his deep-forested Teutonic destiny. And of course his five thousand hectares, mit Schloss. Perhaps unconsciously in his gossip and in his letters, he was forming von Gottberg to his prejudices. Many people do this. Francine, for example, has made Conrad's lack of money into a moral principle: she thinks he has selfishly avoided the pursuit of money because (a) she, Francine, has a proper job and (b) because he wants to avoid responsibility. It suits her thesis to emphasise those aspects of their relationship, forgetting conveniently that he supported her - emotionally anyway - all through medical school and the hell of finding hospital jobs in the Health Service. He coached her too:

  Why do you want to work at St Thomas's Hospital, Dr Swinburne? I hope I don't sound too pretentious when I say that St Thomas's represents to me something about medicine that my late father, Professor Swinburne, was always very keen on, the idea that hospital medicine is both the latest technology and a passing-on of wisdom down the generations. I love the fact that Tommy's contains both expertise and a long and inspiring tradition. And most particularly I really want to get the best possible training. Obviously I have limited practical experience, but I do believe that St Thomas's offers this, as well as a wonderful team spirit.

  She was reluctant to learn his little speech, but he explained to her, although he was himself already out of the loop, that interviewers are not interviewing a candidate to discover her worth, but rather to see if the candidate can bring allure to their own lives and careers. What they are looking for, Francine, he proclaimed, is a stooge, a true believer. He doesn't proclaim any longer.

  Sitting in that interview, ten years ago, was his wife's lover, then a newly appointed consultant of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. If Francine's ghost-written spiel hadn't been so appealing, she might not have got the job. But he can't expect any retrospective gratitude now.

  Mendel's way of tackling the growing tensions in Europe was to look more closely at ideas and their effects. Idealists, he wrote, have produced some of the most terrible cruelties in history. Although he saw that the philosophers around him were undoubtedly right to believe that ethics had no rational basis in logic, he came to see that we must act ethically according to common sense. He also saw, as he once told Conrad, that Oxford philosophers were going down a blind alley if they believed that there was some incorrigible proposition waiting to be discovered. In the thirties, he told Conrad, academics were in the grip of this fallacy. Most philosophers in Oxford, he said, believed in a version of determinism, although of course none of them had ever met a determinist. His reading of the history of ideas offered an entirely different perspective, namely that ideas and beliefs are often in conflict, so the important question, it seemed to him, was not the truth of the ideas themselves, so much as the resolution of them, and that could only be realised by understanding human longings. Conrad remembers not only the conversation in Mendel's rooms, but also the rooms themselves, with the mullioned windows looking out towards Christopher Wren's clock, and the panelling that the years had infiltrated so richly, and the Roman head on the mantelpiece, acquired in Jerusalem, and the books and papers stacked and scattered so profligately. In his journalistic fashion, Conrad's father had loved books, but in Mendel's world books were not objects of self-congratulation - upmarket interior decoration - but living things, as alive as the souls that
produced them. In books you could find the whole history of mankind (he didn't exclude novels and poetry) a history that includes folly and heroism and idealism and cruelty; he said more than once, quoting an American poet, that books are the bees that carry the quickening pollen from one mind to another. And Conrad in his own fashion has always felt happiest surrounded by these living dead.

  Francine demanded a regular cull of books as though there was a limit to the number of books you needed at any one time. Anything over that limit, for example, books you were never likely to read again, was an indulgence. But Conrad kept them, all except for best-selling novels. Now he's sitting in his own All Souls, in a crowded room above Baiocchi's Bakery, The True Taste of Italy, in Camden Town, surrounded, his feet actually lapped by, the souls of the departed in book form, reading the letters of Elya Mendel and his friends. Each time he sees von Gottberg's beautiful handwriting he feels a jolt. Von Gottberg may have proposed marriage to her cousin, but he continues to write deeply romantic letters to Elizabeth, remembering their walks in London and Oxford, visits to her mother's house in Kent and dancing at the Café Royal; they both loved dancing. She was married at twenty-one, her husband was a friend of von Gottberg's, but he was now in Athens on a posting. It seem certain to Conrad they had been lovers once and that this continued after her marriage. He was one of those people who insisted on maintaining his friendships with lovers.

  He finds a letter from von Gottberg, mailed in Switzerland just after Kristallnacht:

  My darling Elizabeth

  I understand that you were hurt that I proposed marriage to Rosamund. But let us be practical. You are married already. Please don't think I have lost my reason in the general madness of my country, but if I can persuade Ros to come and live with me, I feel we will all three be close. On your way to Athens, please come and visit me in Berlin and I will show you Pleskow. It's so beautiful in the winter. I am going to be there for three weeks. It's becoming increasingly difficult for me to speak clearly. You know what has happened now, as Elya understood it would, and I didn't. In reality I did understand, but I was not prepared to accept it. I feel very foolish, and even humiliated. I have written to Elya from here — it is easier from here — to say how sorry I am about that letter. I still believe, perhaps I am deluded, that I can help Europe to find its true nature. (As I write this, I hear Elya laughing that amiable but deadly laugh!) Don't mention this letter to Rosamund; I know how close you are, my darling, but please respect my wish that what we have should remain intact, and sacred. Love A

  The visit to Pleskow was not a success. Whatever happened angered Elizabeth, who kept copies of her letters:

  Darling A

  As you had told me, Pleskow was utterly beautiful in the winter and your sister could not have been more friendly, although I found myself wondering if she was comparing me to anyone.

  But I can't accept your views at all, darling! You have the attitude that you are for God and Ros and I must be for God in you. Of course I shall not discuss this with R, but you seem to me to be living a double life or worse. What I said, I stand by. Obviously I understand in the broader sense that you are deeply involved, as we discussed that night in the little house by the lake. You know my feelings about that, but, darling, it's not possible for you to share this life with anyone. I assure you, I do believe our love and friendship will survive whatever happens next.

  Athens is noisy and mindless. Roddy is gloomy. I wish I were at home, in my own little house. The glory has passed from the earth. Love E

  Dawn comes. It takes Conrad some time to locate himself. It's as if he finds himself in an unfamiliar room in a foreign country, without knowing how he got there, although he has been awake all night. Beneath him the bakery is coming to life: the ovens hum and whirr and the smell of the yeast as the proven bread is taken for baking is comforting. It tells him, more clearly than the murky view from the smeared windows, where he is.

  7

  VON GOTTBERG STILL does not believe that war is inevitable. He is working in Hamburg as a prosecutor, the only job he can find as a non-member of the Party. Still he is resisting joining. He wants, nevertheless, to play a part in his country's life and has applied for a post at the Auswartiges Amt, the Foreign Office. He believes that the Nazi Party will leave the stage of history soon enough; it is just a symptom of the changes to come. Why join? One day the president of the lawyer's association calls him and explains to him that he wants to talk to him in person.

  Two days later he presents himself. The president knows his father. They walk the length of the garden of the president's office, and out along the inner ring of the Alster. Von Gottberg knows that this is not because the president wants some fresh air, as he tells his secretary, although there is plenty of that blowing in up the Elbe from the North Sea.

  'My boy, I can't endorse you for the Foreign Office, despite your father's good name. Your request was sent to me by Berlin for a reference, but my hands are tied. You are not a member of this association and that would be seen as a rejection of National Socialism.'

  'I don't reject National Socialism if that's what it is. In fact I am all in favour of both socialism and nationalism. But I can't join the Party. It's not possible for me. I have friends in other countries who would misunderstand. My aim in joining the Foreign Office is to work for our country. I don't want a war, but if I join the Party I will appear to be in the war party. I would have no credibility at all.'

  'Just join the association. Not the Party. Then I can write you a glowing reference.'

  'Mr President, you are a member of the Party, I assume?'

  'I am.'

  'Do you want a war?'

  'Of course I don't want a war. Nobody in Hamburg wants a war. But the problem we all have in every professional association, as you know, is that we have been required to swear an oath. Germany is going in one direction and you either jump on the train or you are an outcast. Can I tell you in confidence that none of us is happy? We tell ourselves we can work from the inside, we can make things better. Now, let me speak quite frankly, if you don't join the Party or our association, you will end up in a concentration camp or in exile.'

  'I will give you my answer tomorrow. And I thank you.'

  That night von Gottberg is dining with a friend from Gottingen, Dietlof Goetz. Goetz is very strong, darkly good-looking, and he loves all sports. Von Gottberg finds him wonderfully uncomplicated and honest. As they leave the restaurant -they have been eating green-eel soup — they see a commotion on the Lombardsbrücke. A man is running, pursued by three Brownshirts. Dietlof steps forward without hesitation and punches one of the Brownshirts in the face, and they block the way of the other two, who turn away reluctantly and morosely with their companion, whose nose is bleeding freely. The man who was being pursued, a Jew obviously, comes back. He removes his hat. He is a man of about fifty. He says nothing beyond thank you to Axel, but grasps his hand in his two hands briefly, and then Dietlof s, before hurrying away. He is wheezing.

  Dietlof is exhilarated as they stop at a bar for a beer.

  'We can't beat up every Brownshirt in Germany,' says Axel.

  'We must try. It is our sacred duty.'

  'What have we become, Dietlof?'

  'I am leaving. I am going to America. There is no future here.'

  'Look. Let's walk a little, I want to talk to you.'

  'One more beer. It's thirsty work beating up these animals.'

  They leave the bar. Dietlof is unconcerned that the Brownshirts might be looking for them. But Axel is nervous until they break free of the close alleyways and walk along the lake where the rigging of moored yachts is slapping and chiming against masts and spars. Goetz is in his uncle's shipping business in Hamburg, but his family home is also in Mecklenburg.

  'Dietlof, can I speak honestly to you? I know I can trust you. I have been talking to my friends in England and there is a chance we can stop the war. If everybody like you leaves, there will be no future — as you say —
for our country. Another war will be a complete disaster, again. The Nazis apparently are unable to see that the whole world will eventually be against us, including America.'

  Von Gottberg explains that there is resistance to Hitler in the Army Council and that General Beck, the supreme commander, is absolutely against any foreign adventures. There is a plan to deal with Hitler when the time is right. His friends in England are absolutely against a war too. It only requires all sides to hold their nerve.

  'Dietlof, it is our destiny, our duty, to stay in Germany and fight for the country we love. My dear friend, when I saw you punch that bastard, I felt strangely exalted. It doesn't need many of us to stand up for Germany, for what you and I would call the true Germany. But first, and this is what my work is, we must persuade our friends in England and America to allow Germany some return of pride and dignity. It they don't do that, Hitler will flourish on the people's resentment. Believe me, Dietlof, we need you. You must stay.'

  Dietlof Goetz was to say years later that Axel von Gottberg's passion, his eyes brimming, his voice quivering with emotion, made him ashamed of his plan to join his brother in New Jersey. Von Gottberg convinced him by the Alster that it was only by demonstrating to the world that there was another Germany, not seized by madness, that they could live honourably. The life of exile, he said, is a half-life.

  Later that month von Gottberg writes to Elizabeth Partridge saying that he has met a girl from Mecklenburg, who is the sister of his old university friend Dietlof Goetz, and that he is planning to marry her. He has written to Rosamund too, explaining that he hoped they would always be friends, and wishing her well. But, Elizabeth, you know that I will always love you. If you hadn't been married I believe ours would have been a match made in the heavens.