The Song Before It Is Sung Read online

  Down below the bakery is making its first deliveries of the day. The bread is stacked on wooden trays to be loaded into the vans. Conrad sees the tortoise shapes, the brown carapaces, from above and he is reassured. Human life depends on small rituals and the daily bread is surely one of the most basic. No wonder the Church appropriated it. He sits among these papers, anxious that they should not miscegenate with the earlier papers that lie in disarray around the flat. I am losing my hold on order, he thinks. I am more engaged with Mendel and von Gottberg than I am here, in my own home. I must see my friends. Although they have become strangely silent. Perhaps Francine has been briefing against me. I must re-enter the physical world, as Rosamund put it.

  What happened at Pleskow, he wonders? Letters are only the outcroppings of an underwater reef. Elizabeth Partridge will tell him what Axel von Gottberg said to her that evening in the little house by the lake. But he knows already that von Gottberg joined the lawyers' association and soon after that, the Party, because he was appointed a counsellor in the Foreign Office, Information Department. With the new job he moved back to Berlin, and into a small apartment. Every morning he walked to the Information Department in Kurfürstendamm. Sometimes he was summoned to the ministry at Wilhelmstrasse. And at the same time he began to attend meetings of the Kreisau Circle, a quasi-religious opposition group which met on Helmuth James von Moltke's estate, Kreisau.

  How much of this double life did Mendel understand? Mendel, tucked up in All Souls, was fearful of what might happen to him if Hitler invaded, and was considering an escape to America. He saw clearly what Hitler was, and it frightened him. Oxford became unbearable to him: quoting Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he wrote: I feel like someone locked in a garden surrounded by eyeless statues.

  8

  A NURSE FROM a private hospital in Marylebone summons Conrad: Elizabeth Partridge, Lady Dungannon, wants to see him. He takes some time finding suitable clothes. He has neglected his wardrobe and he is conscious that his shaving has become irregular, so that he never quite completes the job. He shaves carefully although the blade is blunt - it is one of the razors in cheerful pink plastic — all women's things must be cheerful — that Francine has left behind. And he brushes his hair, trying to spread it around. Like Axel von Gottberg's, his hair is thinning alarmingly. John, his wife's lover, has thick, wiry school-prefect's hair, even though he is sixteen years older. Perhaps his wife prefers this kind of growth. What else has she been keeping from him?

  He has the impression as he hurries to the underground that Elizabeth must be dying. The nurse, to be fair, gave no indication of imminent death. He is supposed to be showing a potential buyer - WITH READY CASH - around, but he has left a note on the door saying that the key is with Tony, the baker. He asked Tony to be as quiet as he could — the machinery they use to wash the bakery is noisy — while the prospective buyer is upstairs.

  'You don't really want to sell, I'll turn 'em up full blast. I'll bang all the trays together. It'll sound like a fucking mad house.'

  'That's the idea, Tony. Good man.'

  Tony is always dusted with flour at this time of day, so that he has a ghostly appearance, not necessarily the ideal person to let in a cash buyer. Francine has implored him to tidy up, but it hasn't been possible at such short notice, although he has managed to organise the papers into drifts and has hidden the dirty dishes under the sink.

  What he wants to ask Elizabeth is exactly what happened on her visit to Germany. What had Axel said that upset her? And also, he wanted to know when she saw him last. After years of reflection, old people reorder their lives. We all do it in our way. We construct our self-image as if we are hoping for some retrospective distinction, a vision of the person we believe we are supposed to be; without being able to see a template, we carry on relentlessly, like bees obeying an order they don't understand, until death makes it all irrelevant. Why is it important to practise wilful amnesia and invent myths? Francine's mother, the professor's widow, describes their life together in implausible terms, an improbable idyll of happiness and contentment and domestic bliss. In truth he was a philanderer and caused her much pain. These old women - Liselotte, Grafin von Gottberg, and Elizabeth Partridge - are living with the memory of the man who meant most to them or gave their lives retrospective significance. And this is what Francine is accusing him of, of trying to give himself some phoney significance by attaching himself to Elya Mendel. Except, as he has told Francine — more than once — he was chosen by Mendel.

  'So you are the chosen one?'

  'I didn't say that. I simply said he chose me to edit his papers.'

  'To do what with exactly? So far, all I can see is a neurotic muddle. You're like a dog running for a stick. You have no plan.'

  'No career path. You're big on career paths, aren't you?'

  He could have said to her, Look, Francine, these papers contain some deep significance, some big issues, the man of ideas versus the man of action, the contemplative life against the active life, false ideologies, the curse of the twentieth century, or you could see them as just one thing, one human thing, a plea from an old man to me to recount fairly what happened between him and von Gottberg. Who cares, she would have said.

  For scientists what happened in the past is filed away. They don't see ideas in the same fashion. Instead they see them as building blocks, pointers to how things work. They, unlike us, live in a world of certainty, or at least in the conviction that certainty can be achieved. Although she told him once that sixty per cent of all theories posited in science magazines prove to be absolutely untrue in time.

  Now, a little floury himself - he can feel the flour when he rubs his eyes — he is on the train with the people who aren't really rushing anywhere at this time of day. Some of them seem to have only a tenuous grip on life. Every time he emerges from the flat he finds himself marvelling at people: every one with his or her own mind, own worries, own ambitions. What's the point? Why did evolution find that it was more effective to have an individual mind? Perhaps we would have been better off like tadpoles, all obeying simple rules. Perhaps we are, as the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal once wrote, on the same plane of reality as tadpoles or even plants and minerals: In these moments an insignificant creature - a dog, a rat, a beetle, a crippled apple tree, a lane winding over a hill, a moss-covered stone - mean more to me than the most beautiful, abandoned mistress of the night.

  Although, Conrad thinks, a beautiful mistress of the night could be just what he needs. He often looks at women on the underground and wonders what they would be like in bed. Would they be eager or timid or loud or quiet? Would they be concerned with their own pleasure or with their partner's? This is an important divide, he has found, and not easily judged on appearance. Elizabeth Partridge suggested to him she has had a full sex life. It's as though your life, on some measures, is validated by the amount of fucking and heartbreaking you have been involved in and also by the number of breasts and clitorises and cocks and inner thighs and mouths you have travelled intimately. The body is a terra incognita which must be explored in order for you to achieve the desired self-esteem, to complete the dots, pointillist style, of your self-image. Sex has become a sort of religious career. These old ladies, he sees - his mind always tends to speed up with the humming, rushing, whining, rattling trains - set a great deal of store by their memories, because memories are a form of immortality.

  Elizabeth Partridge has chosen her hospital on the same basis as her hotel, as a reminder of the old order. The nurses wear tasteful blue uniforms and little coronets, like napkins elaborately folded in seaside hotels. What these details signify is that the secret England is still there, unaffected by the coarsening of life outside. The receptionist is wearing a tailcoat, apparently without embarrassment.

  In her room, overhung by flowers of exquisite breeding in tall cut-glass vases, Elizabeth appears very small and mortal: the jungle is advancing to reclaim her. Her face under the cheekbones is a pale lilac, something like the
colour of a budgerigar's breast.

  He places his half a dozen tulips apologetically beside the bed.

  'Ah Conrad. Lovely flowers, thank you. Sit down, my boy.'

  'How are you?'

  'As you can see, I am alive. Or at least I think I am.'

  Her voice, however, is weaker, as though the body's decline draws on the essential substances impartially, even on something so precious as the means of speaking. Conrad's treacherous eyes fill as he remembers his father in mute agony, twisting and turning and his mouth opening and closing convulsively, as though he had something important to say before he went, but could not. He hung on for eight days in this appalling state.

  'You look wonderful,' he says.

  'My boy, the important thing to know about Axel is that he was a patriot. Germany was everything to him. When I visited Pleskow he asked me to marry him. Can you believe it? He was engaged to Fraulein Goetz, he had rejected Rosamund, and now he was asking me to marry him. I reminded him that I was married. I reminded him that he had broken Ros's heart: I told him that she was devastated by his letter, but he said that he and Ros had an enduring relationship. You must never abandon someone you once loved, he said. I was shocked, because he seemed to me to be so troubled. I didn't think his behaviour was rational. I told him it was impossible for us to marry. He would have liked me to say that I loved him.'

  'Did you love him?'

  'I did. But I couldn't throw up everything for him. I couldn't wound my cousin, and I certainly couldn't live in Germany.'

  'Were you lovers?'

  'You're a very direct young man.'

  'I'm sorry, but I feel that I have to know what happened.'

  'We were lovers. In Pleskow, even there, after what had happened. So I was a louse too. People often are in these cases, don't you find?'

  She reaches slowly for some water. Her arms are fragile, and speckled like the hen's eggs in children's books. He helps her. She drinks, a small, birdlike sip.

  'Where was I?'

  'You were saying that you loved Axel von Gottberg.'

  'He said something to me which, in fairness to Elya, I think I should tell you. He said that as soon as he wrote the infamous letter to the Manchester Guardian, he knew that he had lost Elya for good. Since then, he said he had been working to prove that he was worthy of Elya. I found it immensely touching. That night in the little house by the lake he told me at least some of what he was engaged in. It was highly dangerous. The concentration camps were filling up already. He also said to me that all he could offer me as a wife was Germanness. Strange word. But what he meant was that this was a German problem, to be solved by Germans. The Jews were not the main point, at that time. Hitler must be removed by Germans. He was sure of that. He wanted me to tell Elya, and to tell him also that he was engaged in secret opposition. We didn't know the extent of it until later, but of course Elya just thought it was his usual self-dramatisation when I told him. I think it was difficult from Oxford to understand — in fact it was hard to understand from wherever you were — what the atmosphere was like in Germany. It was terrifying. Kafkaesque. But Axel chose the heroic life, whatever his friends believed.'

  She lies still for a moment, her lips possibly forming some more words, but in the end no words emerge for a while.

  'You said you saw him again?'

  'Just before the war started, he came to England. He wanted to explain to people how to deal with Hitler: the German mentality, Versailles and all that. We met in Kent. He had seen Elya in Oxford and the Rhodes people had fixed him up with various meetings and private talks. But also his friends, the Astors and so on, had influence. He met Halifax and Chamberlain at their house in St James's Square.'

  'Why did his Oxford friends distrust him?'

  'They thought, to put it bluntly, that he was working for the Nazis. He seemed to be able to go anywhere and do whatever he liked. They found this suspicious. They also thought that he said different things to different people.'

  'Did he?'

  'I think he did. He was naive in some ways. It's clear that when it comes to us gels, he said all sorts of things. The problem, as I said, is that he wasn't able to speak freely by this stage. He had to be careful, because he was in the resistance and working for the Foreign Office at the same time. When he saw me at my little house in Kent he was distraught because he felt nobody at Oxford was taking him seriously and that none of them trusted him. It was humiliating for him. Deeply, deeply humiliating. Oxford meant so much to him. And yet they thought he was a Nazi or, at best, deluded.'

  She appears to fall asleep. For a moment he thinks she may have died, but the rose patterns on her satin dressing gown are rising and falling gently.

  'He took me to Sachsenhausen, you know. We stopped outside in his little car. The guards came out to see what we were doing, we sat for so long.'

  The room is richly scented. The heat — hospitals are always overheated — is causing these flowers to signal to summer insects. Life, even at the plant level, is a slave to attraction. The women in this story - the gels - were drawn to Axel von Gottberg, but others were deeply affected by him too. Even Roland Freisler, the prosecutor, seems drawn to him as he stands there, his hands clasped - Conrad suddenly remembers that the hands were not shackled in court - Freisler shouting at him, but at the same time impressed by his dignity, perhaps aware for a moment that his grotesque screaming and acting are shameful, coarse, so that he speaks more quietly, even conspiratorially. Axel, doomed, has a certain resignation, perhaps even a serenity, that Freisler acknowledges. And the attraction is in the fact that von Gottberg looks like a German hero. Freisler does not. Hitler does not. And this may be one of the reasons that Hitler and his friends, having killed millions without a qualm, are unhinged by these aristocrats who, if there were anything in race-science, Rassenkunde, would be on his side. Hitler is reported as saying that the aristocrats had betrayed him and he should have acted against them from the beginning. Others who knew him said Hitler was never the same again.

  'You look like him.'

  She is smiling, slightly crumpled after her absence.

  'Like Axel?'

  'Yes. You are thirty-five?'

  'Yes.'

  'Axel was thirty-five when they hanged him.'

  'I know.'

  'He was an astonishing person. Women saw it immediately. He was fervent. Are you fervent?'

  'I don't think so. Sadly.'

  'Are you successful with women? I imagine you are.'

  'I am not successful with my wife.'

  'Yes, now I remember. You said you were separated.'

  'Yes.'

  'Is it because of this, the papers Elya left you, and so on?'

  'Not really. We are very different. She's a doctor.'

  'And you?'

  'That's the problem. I can't honestly say.'

  'I may not be the person to give advice, but keep at this task. In their own way, both Elya and Axel were great men. Elya was a wonderful judge of people. The fact that he asked you to do this is an enormous compliment.'

  'Thank you.'

  'I am so glad we have met. Elya asked me before he died to speak to you. He wanted you to have my side of the story. He spoke about you.'

  'What did he say?'

  'I told you that he thought you had special qualities.'

  'Do you remember what they were?'

  'I can't. Not exactly. I don't think he said.'

  'Did he say what he wanted me to do?'

  'Nothing specific. He thought you would know.'

  He doesn't know. They are interrupted by a nurse in blue, who comes to take Elizabeth's temperature and blood pressure.

  'Lady Dungannon, you have some other visitors in the waiting room. Shall I tell them to wait a little longer?'

  'I had better go,' says Conrad. 'Goodbye, Elizabeth.'

  He kisses her lightly, his lips just brushing her budgie cheek — he feels anything more vigorous might injure her — and tears start in his
eyes. I am becoming unhinged, he thinks.

  'Goodbye, my boy. Come again tomorrow. There's more for us to discuss.'

  As he goes out he sees Elizabeth's visitors, a man in a loden overcoat and two women in country clothes, one in a green padded coat and the other in a tweed skirt, holding her Barbour over her arm. They have a weathered look as though they spend a lot of time outdoors.

  'I'm sorry if I kept you,' he says.

  'Not at all. I hope we didn't rush you.'

  'No of course not. She's just having her blood pressure done.'

  'I'm Nancy Cutforth, this is my sister Bunty Miller, and this is Esmond O'Driscoll.'

  'I'm Conrad Senior.'

  They shake hands and he feels their fragility relayed down their arms like telegraph messages.

  'Too damned hot in here,' says the man.

  'You could take your coat orf, Esmond.'

  'Jolly good idea.'

  'We're all gaga, as you can see.'

  They laugh, and he remembers what Elizabeth had said about laughter.

  'I'm on my way.'

  He walks up from Marylebone and into Regent's Park. She is going to die tonight. He feels sure of it, although he doesn't believe in any kind of presentiments. He wonders who the three elderly visitors are. They have a kind of patina, like old paintings, which people of his generation will never have. Their world may have contracted, but their values are immune from further change, although they are beleaguered. The shrinking of their circle as the years pass must be frightening. His father had no friends by the time the dementia set in; everyone had abandoned him. His father ended by the sea, raging, a sort of provincial Lear.

  He crosses the bridge into that part of the park he likes best where there are a few buildings, a college, a park-keeper's neat house, and then he goes out again through the circular rose garden. Across the football prairie he see the zoo's mountains. Once he heard a lion roaring in broad daylight, hoarse, reverberating, a challenge thrown down into nothingness. No response came back of course. It's late afternoon now. A few people are playing football. There's an all-Asian game over there: he can see small figures, perhaps Filipino or Malay. There are dogs, going about their optimistic lives, accompanied by their owners, who look less optimistic, some of them even depressed. One of Rosamund Bower's books has a scene set here in wartime, by the boating lake.