Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (10 page)

Giselle

What is it about the phrase ‘Austrian legend of Slavic origin' that makes one want to slit one's wrists? Maybe it doesn't make you want to slit yours, in which case I'm the one with the problem. I hope it's not that I'm anti-Austrian or Slavophobic. I think it's the word ‘legend' that gets under my skin, and then the word ‘origin'. Something to do with superstitions mouldering in rural antiquity, and my wanting them to stay there.

But let me contextualise. My wife had proposed going to see
Giselle
at Covent Garden. The deal is that she'll come with me to opera if I go with her to ballet. I'd agreed to
Giselle
on the safe assumption that as she didn't have tickets on the day, she wouldn't have them on the night. Maybe one ticket would materialise if she beat the returns queue, but not two. Whereupon I would do the noble husbandly thing, sacrifice my pleasure to hers, and let her go on her own. If that meant I had to stay home, drink a bottle of Barolo and watch Chelsea play Barcelona on television, well, such are the deprivations a man who loves his wife must occasionally accept. But blow me if she didn't come back with a pair of tickets, centre stalls, row J – best seats in the house for people our height. I could barely, as you might imagine, contain my joy.

Now you can go to the ballet not having a clue what's going on and stay that way until the final curtain call when you applaud like a man who's just been rescued by a helicopter after twenty days at sea, or you can mug up on the story. Something made me mug up on the story. Maybe if I grasped the plot, I thought, I would understand why my wife would be sitting with tears streaming down her face.

‘In the quaint little villages snuggling amidst the romantic forests of the Rhineland,' I read, ‘many strange, mystic legends of ghostly visitants . . .' And that was when I wanted to slit my wrists.

I have mugged up on ballet stories before but I had forgotten how much more plot there is in a ballet than you'd imagine there'd be need for. Girl in acres of white tulle meets boy in what my Yiddish-speaking grandparents used to call long
gatkes
, falls in love, gets jilted, turns into a swan and dies. That ought to cover it but never does. Even in synopsis,
Giselle
is more complicated than
Twin Peaks
and
Saved
run together. Giselle falls for Loys who is actually Count Albrecht; her previous lover Hilarion does a lot of spying on her behind trees; Berthe, Giselle's mother, warns her against Loys on grounds which I assumed would become clear in time – so far so good. But then comes the moment when you know you are lost and are going to be lost forever – ‘Wilfrid, Albrecht's squire, secretly warns him that a hunting-party is approaching, led by the Duke of Courland and the Countess Bathilde, Albrecht's future wife.'

It's that unexpected arrival of a duke leading a hunting party that dashes me every time. Not just in ballet, in opera and in drama too. It's an invariable law of the performing arts: there's always one duke more than your comprehension can cope with.

Still, even to have got this far in my researches meant that I'd have some idea what was going on when I was sitting in row J. At least for the first twenty minutes. But no. No amount of preparation can prepare you for the miming if you have no instinct for it. And I am a dumb-show illiterate. Part of this is wilful. I don't want to watch lovers fall in love in silence. For me, the better part of love is language and if lovers are not talking I can't connect with them. How they manage to connect with each other without words is beyond me. No words, no jokes, and since when did a woman fall in love with a man who didn't make her laugh? All right, there's the sight of him leaping in his
gatkes
. And there's the sight of her with flowers in her hair, balancing on one toe. But after the leaping and the balancing, where does the relationship go? Which might be precisely what Giselle's mother was getting at.

Then again it might not. This is the other problem I have with miming: I am blind to its semiotics. As in ballet, so in life – I am unable to read the signs. In my susceptible years I could not approach a woman who had not signalled her unequivocal interest in me first. The sign I was waiting for was a crooked finger, the nail painted vermilion, beckoning me to the darkest corner of the room. To be certain I was reading the signal correctly I needed the owner of the finger to be wearing a concupiscent smile. And, ideally, little else. Only an undressed, lewdly grinning woman crooking a finger at me would do it. Any gesture less definite I read as cold indifference. Will you therefore be surprised, reader, to learn that I spent my susceptible years alone?

And now here I am trying to understand why Berthe makes a basket shape with her arms, holds it over her daughter's head, then spills it at her feet. In the interval I venture an interpretation to my wife. Loys, aka Albrecht, is too high and mighty for Giselle, who is just a country girl, and when push comes to shove, for all his attentive leaping he won't bring home the bacon. But this is wide of the mark. What Berthe is actually warning is that there's an Austrian legend of Slavic origin that tells of jilted brides turning into troubled spirits known as Wilis – a fate awaiting Giselle if she goes on crooking her finger at Loys. And this my wife intuits from a woman miming a basket.

And now guess what? I am spellbound. The Wilis materialise from their graves in a gauzy mist, their morbid ethereality, their frustrated vitality, somehow perfectly suited to the unnatural way ballet dancers move their limbs. That I am not slitting my wrists is due in part to a wonderful ballerina called Tamara Rojo, but it's also the power of the metaphor, the exquisite madness of erotic love, the everything and the nothing of our bodies, which I suppose ballet can speak of as nothing else can. Whatever the explanation, I too have tears streaming down my cheeks when the tormented spirit of Giselle, appeased at last, vanishes forever into her silent tomb. Ah, reader, reader, these Slavic legends.

Holiday Reading

Will somebody please explain to me what ‘holiday reading' is? I'm not asking for recommendations. I want to know what's meant by it. Is it a specific genre, like the misery memoir, only presumably the very opposite to the misery memoir? Is it determined by congenial subject: a happy-ending romance cooled by summer breezes? Or by congenial place: a grown-up version – though not too much of a grown-up version – of
Five Go Doolally in Dorset?
Is holiday reading about holidays, or is it a promise that nothing will be demanded of the person reading it that will take his/her mind from a holiday which anyone would think, given the spirit in which lists of holiday reading are compiled, is invariably a thing of sunshine, lovingness and bliss.

But that's not a truth about most holidays, is it? Aren't holidays essentially opportunities to break up with the people we thought we loved? Don't we realise how much we hate our children on holidays or, if we're the children, how much we hate our parents? There are photographs in my mother's possession which attest to the living hell I made of every family holiday. In snap after snap, there are my mother and father making the best of the lousy weather and the appalling food – we're talking the 1950s when the sun never shone and all we ate was peas – and there I am with the same long face, not wanting to be there but then again not wanting to have been left behind. That's me bawling in Blackpool; that's me moping in Morecambe; that one's taken the time I sulked myself into the measles, chickenpox, whooping cough and, very nearly, had I got my way, malaria in Anglesey.

And why? That's easy to answer. Sex. I needed sex. I might have been no more than seven or eight with not the slightest idea of what sex comprised but I needed it. Holidays do this. They heat your blood and turn your head. I saw men strolling down the promenade hand in hand with their girlfriends and I longed for a girlfriend of my own. To be honest, what I think I longed for even more than a girlfriend was a mistress. I'd heard the word, formed a dim conception of what it meant, imagined kissing had something to do with it, and hankered for one of my own. That's me at Middleton Towers Holiday Camp stamping my foot and shouting, ‘I want a mistress.'

Nothing I've observed of other people on holiday leads me to believe they have a better time of it than I did. I used to help run a craft centre in a clapped-out water mill in Cornwall. The usual thing – a Delabole slate etcher specialising in hunchbacked blue tits, a reclusive woodturner who wouldn't turn if anyone was watching, two tattooed jewellers of indeterminate sex who squabbled in front of the public, a glass-blower who was the subject of predictable ribaldry, about which she could hardly complain as she would get pissed blind on hot days and take her top off regardless of the families streaming through. Awful glass she blew, but nice breasts, as I recall. Had I encountered her when I was seven or eight I'd have screamed the place down until my parents persuaded her to be my mistress for the afternoon.

Working here, whatever its attractions, taught me how horrible holidays for the majority of families are, even if they aren't cursed with a boy-pervert like me. Because it's on holiday that couples get to reacquaint themselves with one another and discover how little there is left to like or talk about. Parents who have been working hard all year and have barely seen their offspring now wish they didn't have to see them at all and can't wait for work to begin again. Through the craft centre these poor souls would troop in their dripping wet cagoules, pushing prams, squabbling, skint, each one's idea of a good time clashing with the other's – not that there was a good time on offer for any of them – like the damned in Dante's
Inferno
.

You take my point. Shouldn't that be what they're reading when they come on holiday – Dante's
Inferno
? There's powerful stuff on cruelty to children in
The Brothers Karamazov
.
Death in Venice
is good on art and fatal sexual obsession on the Lido, and you could always skip the art and get quickly to the fatal Lido bit. Wouldn't that make ideal beach reading, whatever beach reading is?

Help me here. What's a beach book? I assume it's similar to a holiday book but with the specific requirement of being sand-proof, water-repellent, and not so heavy in physical form or emotional content as to spill you out of your deckchair the minute you open it. Explain it to me: why would you want to read on something as uncomfortable as a deckchair on something as unconducive to concentration as a beach? All those distractions, all those echoing shrieks, people jet-skiing and paragliding, babies crying, children drowning – unless it's a lonely beach, but then you'd want to walk along it, wouldn't you, hand in hand with your mistress with whom you might indeed want to share a book later on in your hotel room, when the moon's up, but it wouldn't be anything on the routine holiday reading lists: it would be
Antony and Cleopatra
,
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
,
Lady Chatterley's Lover
or, if you're ready for a little intimate abstraction,
L'érotisme
by Georges Bataille.

Holiday reading, beach reading, summer reading – what next? Winter equinox reading, midweek reading, Sunday reading, middle-aged reading, deathbed reading? Books to read when you're wearing a frock as opposed to books to read when you're wearing jeans. Books that go with your trainers. Books to read on clifftops, books to read while you're snowboarding, books to read while you're fighting in Afghanistan.

According to his wife, the critic F. R. Leavis took
Othello
and that other great work of sexual jealousy,
The Kreutzer Sonata
, away on their honeymoon. We laughed, we students of Leavis, when we heard that. But we laughed with a sneaking regard. It was an example to us all. Stay serious. Serious is more fun than not serious. And if you want a holiday from serious, try being more serious still. The dichotomy between great works of literature and the books we ‘secretly' enjoy is a false one. Trashy novels are less enjoyable to read than good ones. The greater the book the more pleasure it gives. Holidays are hideous enough already: why make them even worse with dross?

Pity the Poor Porkers and Damn the Swine that Gave them Fever

Nothing illustrates the sadness of mute creation more poignantly than the life and tragic death of sow number 847Y, on whom the recent outbreak of swine fever has been blamed. Even before the story unfolds, it is bleak. We know that pigs are intelligent. There are allusions in Shakespeare to a pig at whom the Elizabethans marvelled on account of its numeracy, easy social graces and low opinion of the plays of Christopher Marlowe. Is it not a cruelty, then, that a sentient being with more skills and better taste than most graduates from our universities should be deprived of the dignity of a name and sent to meet its maker known only as 847Y?

Then there is the village where 847Y was raised and perished. Quidenham, in Norfolk. I am not aware that I have ever been to Quidenham, so what I am about to say is not personal. Like everybody else, I love place names that have a Q in them. The Quantocks, in Somerset. Qingcheng, in China. Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala. Qs are cute. And exotic.
Exotique!
But is there not something Latinately and legalistically indeterminate about Quidenham? It sounds as though it means ‘that which a thing just happens to be'. It seems to imply blind chance, mere nameless accidentality, moral no less than geographic arbitrariness. In the village of That Which a Thing Just Happens to Be lived a pig called 847Y . . . Heartbreaking.