‘On your metaphysical worthlessness trip again?’ she asked rather sharply. ‘Want to talk about it, you old spirit broker?’
‘Water under the bridge …’
‘Whatever it is,’ she said, ‘best let it go.’
It was just the phrase you had used those years before.
‘Better still,’ she continued, ‘let your self go.’
‘Taking a break from all that,’ I said, as if the solitude of my present existence could be made to look like a conscious decision.
Of course I’ve sometimes wondered if the fact that I was left with nothing at all was, frankly, my own fault. But somehow that doesn’t sound quite right. It’s perfectly true that, like Italy during the Civil War, we were yoked together by violence. The links between us forged by that night’s events had quickly made my involvement with Alice seem as if glimpsed in a department store mirror. And what was immediately true for her had come to seem the case for anyone else I might happen to meet. Nothing vicarious about it, you had been my life. Trying to do the right thing, I took the road that appeared at least to make sense for two of our lives. Yet, after all those years of making amends, all the attempts at an ordinary existence, all the second chances that you allowed, it was as if the only way either of us could truly get away from that violence was by getting away from each other; as if our relationship was to violence itself and not to the other person. There again, after ten years or so, perhaps we did get away from those haunting scenes. But the private violence was still what yoked us together. When it all appeared to be recovered from, when there was no longer the need, or apparent need, to work on it, to make amends and live up to them, then suddenly it seemed there was no longer any reason for us to stay together.
Our talking over everything and everyone began to go round and round in circles, and our conspiracy of two turned in upon itself. The petty irritations with each other’s habits, the slurping noises and forgotten bath water, just seemed to crescendo into major issues. Then it began to seem as if I were perpetually elsewhere in my mind; and the thought of taking off on the next bit of research was always asking to be acted upon. Slowly but surely, there was nothing else for it. The past was past; the present a routine; the future stared back at us, empty of purpose. Whatever it might have held, that future had come to seem no more than the time it would take for us to grow more or less gracefully old.
‘And how is Mary?’ my sister asked.
‘Getting on with her life,’ I said, repeating the set phrase for dealing with the question of your continuing existence. ‘The last time we spoke she was arranging to move the long-stay geriatric patients out of their hospital beds and into the private nursing care beds. The fees are still supposed to be paid from the National Health purse. You know what they’re saying. It’s to make more beds available for the urgent ops. They want to close the old wards with their stoves and chilly windows, just trying to fulfill the patients’ charter, shorten waiting times, keep the whole Health Service out of the red.’
The moment we decided to separate, you moved to Cornwall. It’s a part of the country you have always loved, and so you bought a cottage with the money from your half of the mortgage. Our house loan from your mother was made on the understanding that we would be getting married, which of course we duly did. After having lived together for so long there seemed no reason not to—but separating also meant having to buy you out of that part ownership, by re-mortgaging our marital home in King Alfred Terrace.
‘Glad to hear you’re still on speaking terms,’ my sister said.
‘The odd phone call, birthdays, Christmas … it’s mostly me that does the calling, and always her new chap who answers.’
‘So the break-up was amicable enough then?’ she asked and, answering her own question, ‘I mean, I’ve never heard of a painless divorce.’
The last time we parted had happened by the strangest of coincidences to be on the steep slope of Whiteladies Road in Bristol. We were pausing outside a bookshop door. With a vague sense of having done this once too often, I stood there waiting beside you, my life, and the person with whom I had shared the most decisive events in that life, for one more moment longer.
‘Please try to appreciate,’ I was foolishly saying apropos of one indebtedness or another, ‘that I’ve other responsibilities to think about now.’
It was just a few months after you had moved down to Truro and taken up that management job at the local infirmary. We had decided to meet half way, in Bristol, to exchange a few possessions, some old books and records that had got confused together. Unfortunately, over an Indian meal, we ended up bickering about the details of the settlement. The burden of the newly enlarged mortgage payments had certainly contributed, when it suddenly dawned on me that Whiteladies Road was almost exactly the spot where Alice and I had said goodbye those twenty-odd years before.
‘No, you try to appreciate’, you were saying, ‘that your “responsibilities” can be nothing to me any more.’
You turned away. You had a train to catch. On the point of calling out to you, I stood there rooted to the spot, the warring factions of sorrow and anger squaring up inside me. Then as you strode off down the slope of Whiteladies Road the sense of having done this once too often returned with no less force. The echo of your voice seemed to mingle with the absence of another’s, like a rhyme or a form for those broken attachments, now quite beyond repair—unless the bare coincidence of a raised and a choked-off voice could make amends for all that doubled loss.
Her lunch break long over, my sister stood up and, opening her purse, made to offer money for her share of the bill.
‘No, no, I’ll stand you,’ I insisted.
‘My turn next time, then,’ she said.
‘Thanks for doing this,’ I managed. ‘Oh and give my regards to Gian.’
‘My pleasure—I will,’ she said. ‘Have a good flight, and do get that book finished!’
Then she leaned across the table to offer her cheek, which received a fraternal peck, then proffered the other one too. So, in Italian style, that got kissed as well.
‘Ciao, ciao, baci, baci,’ my sister called out as she glanced back from halfway across the Piazza Duomo. ‘See you the next time you’re over! Oh and next time you really have to come and stay.’
Back under the sun umbrella, as my sister disappeared down the Metropolitana steps, I thought about ordering a second glass of wine and wondered how I might while away the rest of the afternoon. Though spring is here, to me it’s still September, I thought.
No, I couldn’t say September in the Rain has become my favourite song. But over the years happening across versions of Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s classic, I would buy and play them until, patience exhausted, you called out again to take the glimmering touch song off. Eventually I burned a CD with all the different versions, and played it in my office so as not to upset you. After we separated I did try to give up listening to the thing, but quickly relapsed, I’m afraid to admit, into what must seem like a bad case of repetition compulsion. Needless to say, after all those hearings, I had the deceptively simple words off by heart and without ever having tried to learn them. It’s such an inspired notion to make the bridge lyric rhyme on just its last word, and then only with the title phrase. So the sweet refrain leans backward and forward to touch that September in the rain.
One time a colleague at the art college, a print-maker who plays piano in a local jazz combo, tried to teach me how to vamp it in Eb. Not that I ever quite mastered the changes: the shift up from Ab6 to Cm7 in the middle-eight would always fox me, because in the verses you have to go from Ab6 to that fancy Db7. Still, those prolonged attempts and the pains in my fingers and forearms increased admiration for the subtlety with which the two composers had married words with music—and for the artistry on all the various versions I came to know and perhaps too obsessively savour.
Going back
to classes at the end of each summer vacation, I’d be strolling down King Alfred Terrace and across the park by way of the children’s playground towards the art school’s lecture rooms murmuring its lyrics. The leaves of brown came tumbling down, remember? And the park’s trees will seem to be shedding their foliage in harmony. The sun went out just like a dying ember and, just so, a cloudy autumn day might perform the lyrics, while glimpses of what happened, what was and wasn’t said, and Every word of love I heard you whisper comes drifting indistinctly yet again across my mind. Naturally enough, there’d be days like this when the infants and mums on those swings or roundabouts are scattered by an afternoon shower and the raindrops seemed to play a sweet refrain. So as I’m humming its middle-eight, or imitating the ever-so-apt variant play-out lyric on Frank Sinatra’s version, that September … that brought the pain, Alice and you, and all the others, our youthful selves among them, come hurrying back to life inside me once again.
Yes, that September … that brought the pain. Though I much prefer the timbre and backing on Dinah Washington’s rendition, she doesn’t sing that phrase. Old Blue-eyes doubtless improvised it to the sound of Nelson Riddle’s strings in some long ago Hollywood studio. And, if you want my opinion, George Shearing’s cool instrumental doesn’t sound in the least bit hurt; but the way Sinatra sings that phrase, with his characteristically syncopated pause, has come to substitute perfectly for the knots of feelings I can’t escape still caught in me from our own September in the rain. Doubtless you’ll say the point of all that listening was simply to turn the tangles of bodily discomfort into a pleasing pain, a painful pleasure, or any of my other oxymoronic emotions, like that nostalgia for Queen Square, the Italian Hospital and the times of our youth.
And so it’s there in Milan, while I look around at the Piazza Duomo in a mid-afternoon of a warm April day, look around at the pigeons and passersby, sipping at my extra glass of wine, immediately, as if the words of the song had been right all along, those glimpses start up again. There’s her suntan peeling, the white sails on the sea, a damaged attachment, accelerating Vespa, sheet and forked lightning, you there among the soft toys for souvenirs, an orthopedic shoe, Cain and Abel wrestling, the yellow marble halls … And there, in present memory, like an eternal recurrence, are such places as the Arturo Schwarz Gallery here in Milan, places to which I may never return, however strong the hankering to relive these things exactly once again. Then on this warm April day, in a city changed almost beyond recognition, it’s as if we never were here in the leaden nineteen seventies, years to which, willy-nilly, no one ever can return.
Even wanting eternally to return places too much of a burden on you and her and the others who lived those years with me, and who have their own reasons for not wanting forever to go back, love’s limits as present as ever they were: the suntan, white sails, a damaged attachment, accelerating Vespa, lightning, soft toys, and those yellow marble halls. Which is how at last I must have got round to telling myself there in Piazza Duomo, Milan, that the next time I happen to be up in London it’s probably just as well if I make a point of not getting off the Tube at Holborn, not walking round by way of Boswell Street to stand for a moment in front of the Italian Hospital yet once more, its ornate black cupola still surmounted by a crucifix, Ospedale Italiano and Supported by Voluntary Contributions picked out in faded red lettering.
September in the Rain Page 23