The Song Before It Is Sung (6 page)

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.

'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.'

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.

'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.'

'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.

'How long did Rosamund stay in Germany?'

'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?'