The Song Before It Is Sung (9 page)

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.

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.'

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.'

'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.'