Read The Song Before It Is Sung Online
Authors: Justin Cartwright
'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.
When he gets home he finds messages from Francine. She is angry: the agent said that the flat was a mess. The client - the
cash buyer - spent exactly one minute looking at the place. The chaos appalled her. And the noise from below was terrible.
She's sending in industrial cleaners in the morning, and whatever they find lying about will be thrown out.
He feels at a great distance from Francine. Her complaints don't touch him at all. After nine years, he's free. Is he attractive
to women, as Elizabeth Partridge put it? He hopes he is. Francine is on duty. He leaves a message apologising, explaining
the urgency, and starts to pack his papers as neatly as he can. His loyalties are now directed entirely towards Mendel and
von Gottberg. He has no more duties here. He is completely free to explore his human potential, to tell this story.
In the night Elizabeth Partridge dies and the circle closes.
What Elya Mendel wanted, he sees, was that he should collect all these conversations and letters and memories, and turn them
into something coherent, a narrative.
5 MARCH 1939, OXFORD
OXFORD THE ENCHANTED: Axel, Count von Gottberg walks down the cobbles of Magpie Lane. He walks around the familiar and beloved
place as though he is trying to feel its topography under his shoes. He passes through the gate on to Christ Church Meadow.
Small boys in bright scarlet from Magdalen College School are playing rugby, tiny figures on the vast green sea. As he gets
closer he sees how white their legs are, and how fragile, barely able to carry them into a run. They have curious blue patterns
on them, as though their pale white skin is showing the veins beneath. A whistle blows and they stop and gather around the
master in charge, who is wearing a cricket sweater and baggy trousers. Across the meadow, where dun cows are grazing or lying
down, he can see the river and on it, between the burgeoning trees, boats passing, some in a leisurely Ratty-and-Mole way,
others with sculls flashing in the weak sunlight. The English have a special relationship with water. He walks right down
to the river and then along past the pouter-pigeon college barges. Looking back to the colleges he sees a Renaissance city
- spirit and history in local stone. This stone is a pale russet, the colour of the old apple varieties his grandfather had
collected at Pleskow, Gravenstein and Cox's Pippin and Egremont. He feels a kind of ache, which in reality is for his youth,
and the girls he has known and the carefree years, but also a heaviness about what is to come. Even now he could choose to
stay here and pick up the easy friendships. He could leave his homeland for the life of an emigre, to be treated with politeness
and condescension.
He loves the landscape because he was happy here. There are places he has been, Hamburg is one of them, which he knows to
be beautiful, but which have no pull on his heart. Other places quicken the spirit because of what they evoke: they for ever
speak of blitheness, a state of happiness he can't hope to feel again. Elizabeth said Pleskow is the only place in Germany
where the madness has not yet struck. And Pleskow is the landscape to which his heart is given, and Pleskow is in Germany.
His family has lived there for six hundred years, which is longer than most of these colleges have been standing. His English
friends don't understand this deep allegiance. It's spiritual and they reject the notion of spirit, but spirit is after all
only the word that describes what is inalienably human.
He walks in a large arc towards the Botanical Gardens and Magdalen. The punts are drawn up beside the bank, forming a wooden
platform extending right into the current, like a Roman military bridge. He strides along Addison's Walk. The fritillaries
are not yet out and the water behind is like ale. He and Elya walked here. Their differences were all in the pleasurable inconsequential
world of philosophy then. And now? He remembers Elya in Jerusalem, so happy after his first sexual experience with Rosamund.
Transfigured. Elya on the one hand ancient in his understanding, on the other a plump eager boy in love. A Jewish boy. Unmistakably.
Now we Germans have created a cordon sanitaire around the word
Jew.
As if Jew is something like bacillus. Just as he, Axel, cannot use the word Jew any longer without shame, Elya cannot speak
of Germany or Germans without contempt. But there is a secret Germany. One lunatic cannot destroy that in a few years. This
Germany that Holderlin and George describe as
Geheimes Deutschland
is a Germany of the mind.
The fable of blood and desire, a fable of fire and radiance:
The pageantry of our emperors, the roaring of our warriors.
It is the longing for something nobler, which nobody here can understand. He swings back down through the Parks where the
narcissi and daffodils are taking over from the crocuses. When he first came to Oxford eight years ago, he remembers his astonishment
that spring at the thousands of bright, undaunted flowers breaking out of the damp, cold soil. Gardening is perhaps the art
in which the English have most excelled. It suits their temperament, something to be quietly proud of, and something very
private. Every college has a garden. Even now as he passes Rhodes House he sees the border, piled with compost, the rhubarb-coloured
stalks of peonies already shining between the pale-yellow and white narcissi. On the other side of the road through the gates
that will never open until there is a Stuart on the throne again - one of those much-loved Oxford whimsies, like the fact
that the time at Christ Church is always set five minutes later than Greenwich Mean Time — he sees one of the most beautiful
borders in Oxford, which extends a hundred yards or so to a bust of Cardinal Newman. He walks past Blackwell's to Balliol.
The porter, Jimmy Tibbs, greets him as if he has never been away: 'Good morning Mr von Gottberg. Keeping well, sir?' He leaves
a note for the Master, confirming that he has arrived safely and has arranged for his bags to be picked up at the station.
He wonders if Tibbs sees him as an enemy yet. He walks back — it is nearly time - past the Easter Island Roman heads, through
the courtyard of the Bodleian Library out to Radcliffe Square beyond. The Square, grouped around the Radcliffe Camera, the
most extravagant building in Oxford, and contained by St Mary's Church and Brasenose College to the west and south and the
Library and All Souls on the other two sides, seems to him to be the heart and the soul of Oxford. As cyclists come by in
the thickening light, he hears snatches of laughter and conversation. He looks for girls who might be the girls he knew, as
if by wishing it he could cause them to appear as they were. Yes, we are for ever tied to the place where we were young and
happy.
He enters the lodge and asks for Mr Mendel. 'You're expected. Mr Mendel's rooms are in the great quad, staircase four, sir.'
He emerges facing Wren's sundial on the Codrington Library. He finds the staircase. It is one floor up; his feet ring on the
stone. He knocks. 'Come in.' There is Elya, standing by the fireplace in which a coal fire is burning. He has a book in one
hand.
'Axel. Welcome to my little house in the woods.'
Elya is wearing a grey three-piece suit, which is bulging in the middle slightly. His face, however, has lost something of
its boyish roundness. Axel seizes him by the shoulders and kisses him twice. Three years have passed since they were together
in the same room.
'Lovely rooms, Elya. God, I envy you.'
The main room is panelled, a sitting room full of books and broken-backed armchairs and a table covered in periodicals and
papers and on the mantelpiece, among other mementos, is the Roman head Elya bought in Jerusalem. Through a door he sees a
bedroom with a candlewick bedcover and lopsided wooden light stands.
'Axel, it's marvellous to see you. A miracle. Oxford has been a mausoleum without you. I've got a bottle up from the cellar.
Would you like a glass? It's the college's special reserve. Claret.'
Even as he says
claret,
he gives it a little ironic emphasis, to suggest that Jews don't really drink claret.
They sink into the swayed armchairs, their feet upturned towards the fire. They lie back. Elya is less elegant, being shorter
and plumper, but right at home, ready to talk. He's always ready to talk. He tells Axel what has happened in Oxford: who has
been elected to the post of Professor of History, what has happened in the parliamentary elections, who put up as a Mosleyite
and the strange mood in Oxford, knowing that war is coming.
'Is it coming, Axel?'
'I hope not. I'm trying to stop it.'
'All by yourself?'
He asks the question without malice, but with a certain amusement.
'No, obviously not all by myself. Can I clear up one thing with you first? It's been on my mind. Are you still angry with
me about Ros?'
'Axel, I am deeply grateful that I knew Ros, but that was years ago now. And as I wrote to you after you took my advice, I
am very pleased that you are not going to marry her. I didn't think it would have been fair. Can we leave it at that, my dear
friend?'
'Thank you, Elya. Elizabeth accused me of being a womaniser, but I hate to see it in that way. Ros will always be dear to
me and to you, I am sure. And your letter was fair and true: I should never have asked her to marry me. As you said, it was
selfish and dangerous. How's my English, by the way? It's been worrying me that I haven't been speaking it much. As you can
imagine.'
'Your accent has always been better than that of almost anybody we know. Mine is ridiculous, a sort of emigre Wurlitzer. I
sometimes think, Axel, that speaking such
echt
English has caused people to misunderstand you. They can't believe that you are really, deep down, where it matters, German.
But you are.'
'For better or for worse. When we were in Jerusalem you told me that deep down -
au fond -
you were Jewish. Although an atheist. I think it's the same thing. When you say I am obsessed with spirit and such other woolly
notions, what is one's identity? What's the difference? You have in your cultural memory, from your family, from your religion,
an instinctive Jewishness. I have an instinctive German-ness.'
They are off.
'Axel, one thing has changed. The German instinct is now to obliterate those they see as lesser people. Do you know what one
of my colleagues said to one of your chaps who was advocating more colonies for Germany at a meeting the other night? "We
Jews and the other coloured people beg to differ."
Wirjuden und die anderen Farbigen denken anders.
You must be careful Axel, how you make your case. The mood has changed. People here are saying the Nazis are bastards and
we want to crush them to dust, and that is how they think now. Don't rely on the old college scarf. Your people have changed
everything. They are trying to take over the world in the name of Geman-ness as you call it. German-ness has some prior claim
to life.'
'There's another Germany, Elya.'
'This isn't the
Geheimes Deutschland,
I hope?'
'It is in part. Yes, but, Elya, there are people of influence even in the Army Council who plan to get rid of Hitler.'
He is conscious of whispering now. Mendel pours the claret. The bottle is dusty.
'Elya, I want to tell you something: I will not be able to talk to you freely again. Even in the meetings I am having in London,
it will be difficult. I am not sure if people here realise the sheer madness of life in Germany. But, Elya, I can only go
on if you tell me that whatever happens you trust me, however it looks. If you can, I particularly want you to put in a word
for me with Michael Hamburger. I'm going to New York in two weeks' time to address a conference, and I want to go down to
Washington to tell Michael the details of the opposition in Germany, and to ask him to give us some help. Can you do that?'
'I will write to Michael and ask him to see you, of course.'
'Thank you.'
'But you must understand, Axel, that things have changed. It's no longer about some high-minded chaps getting together to
sort things out. You in Berlin, you the opposition, chatting about how awful Hitler is while thousands of Jews must emigrate
and others are imprisoned and Germany grabs the lost lands, how does that look? It's not easy for us to understand, dear friend.
What you see is the task of saving Germany. What I see is somewhat different. I see the end of mankind. There is no halfway
with this creature.'
'Elya, the only way to stop him is to allow the German people their dignity. He's offering them that, but his way will lead
to destruction, utter destruction.'
'What are we supposed to offer? A few more Jews, a few Slavs, a few small countries? There may be some people in Whitehall
who still want to deal, but these are the people who haven't read
Mein Kampf.
You don't seem to understand: the Sudetenland was the end. You will risk your reputation by talking to these people.'
'Germans are not a flock of sheep. Everything has a cause. Germany felt trapped, humiliated until this lunatic offered them
a way out. But there is another Germany, Elya, which only needs encouragement. You are going to sneer, but there is a decent,
a noble Germany.'
Outside clocks strike all over Oxford. Axel jumps up and runs to the window.
'I wanted to marry Rosamund, but you were right: it was not possible to bring her to Germany. I am getting married in September
and I would love you to come to the wedding. It will be in the parish church at Pleskow. Her name is Liselotte Goetz.'
'I don't think I will be able to come. I'm congenitally timid. But please, let me offer you my warmest congratulations.'
Axel stares out of the window where the gas lights are soft, blurred by the damp mist that has come in.
'I will never see Oxford again.'
'Stay the night. You can sleep on the sofa.'
'I've left my stuff at Balliol, but I'll bring my pyjamas. We can continue to talk, I hope.'
'Of course. You look tired, tired to the marrow, Axel. Are you in danger?'
'We all are.'
He wonders if Elya really understands what is at stake. Dear Elya, who, for all his intelligence, loves gossip and friendship
and comfort. Now, above all, he wants Elya to trust him.
'When I come back from my Balliol dinner will you tell me, absolutely frankly, where we stand?'
'What do you mean, Axel?'
'I mean can our friendship survive? Do I have reserves of trust to draw on, whatever happens?'
'When you come back from dinner we shall talk. Axel, I'm concerned. Why do you say you won't see Oxford again?'
'I have that feeling. In reality, it's more than a feeling, it's a certainty. As I walked here, round the Meadow and so further,
I knew it. I don't think the world as we know it will survive what's coming unless we can stop it. Never mind Hitler for the
moment, the East is gathering itself. A new barbarism is coming. If we can't persuade the German people that they can
get
what they need without Hitler, he will lead them into the jaws of the Russians. We have to keep peace in the West. But I must
go. Nobody keeps the Master of Balliol waiting.'