Cockfosters

by Helen Simpson

  Onstage the scene is dark and confusing: is it a salt mine, perhaps, or a mountain cave? Various men cavort and bellow, backed up by the tense excited swarming of violins, the blare of horns.

  This is like swimming (she thinks), or like when you’re surfing pleasurably on the sea of sleep, lucidly dreaming, at that point of not being quite ready to wake up. Or a bit like being at the cinema, the waking dream element. A novel demands five hours plus from your life and that’s quite cheeky – more than a film or a play – but you can take it at your own pace. Whereas Wagner makes you all sit in the dark together then turns the key on you.

  He must have been madly egocentric, an insane bully, to insist on such vast tracts of time from his audience. What an enormous act of ego, to expect people to put aside the best part of a week of their lives for this cumulative event! He’s managed it though, hasn’t he. He’s dead but here we all are sitting in the dark locked at his behest into this whatever-it-is.

  It is over at last. The curtain calls have been lengthy and the applause ecstatic but in the end the lights have come on. Tracey stretches and rubs her face, refreshed after her long swim in this unaccustomed sea. Adam has hated it though.

  ‘Bellowing, bullying,’ he says. ‘Balls-achingly boring. Just like Dad.’

  In the minibus on the way back to the hotel there is a flurry of talk. Tracey closes her eyes and listens to it with Adam glowering at her side like a thundercloud.

  ‘What on earth was going on in the scene with the helmet?’

  ‘It turned the dwarf into a toad, not that you got to see that bit.’

  ‘Oh. Right. No, not entirely clear.’

  ‘I think Loki’s supposed to be Bismarck, rather confusingly.’

  ‘But what was it about? What was the plot?’

  ‘It’s about what happens if you don’t pay your builders on time.’

  ‘What builders?’

  ‘The ones on stilts.’

  ‘The ones that kidnapped the girl?’

  ‘Freia. Yes. Eternal youth.’

  ‘Eternal youth! I could do with some of that.’

  ‘Couldn’t we all.’

  This makes Tracey smile and she opens her eyes.

  ‘Hard to know what’s going on without surtitles,’ says Trevor, the most genial of the voices. ‘If you don’t know the story.’

  ‘Yes, I do wish Culture Vultures had given us the translation in with their notes,’ says Tracey.

  ‘Good notes otherwise,’ says Clive. ‘Decent little potted history of Germany and a vocabulary list of sorts.’

  ‘Rather eccentric,’ says Howard. ‘Those notes smell of some half-mad underpaid postgrad to me.’

  ‘Smart-arse,’ mutters Adam in Tracey’s ear.

  ‘Earwig!’ says Trevor. ‘What was this earwig they kept singing about?’

  ‘Yes, ewig,’ says Tracey, ‘I noticed that too. I’m going to google it when my phone’s charged.’

  ‘Ewig is eternal,’ says Olive unexpectedly.

  ‘You speak German?’ asks Trevor. ‘Good woman! You’ll be useful to have around.’

  ‘Not much German, I’m afraid,’ says Olive. ‘I’ve forgotten most of it by now. I lived in Lübeck for a while, back in the mists of time.’

  ‘I was jotting down words in the dark,’ says Tracey. ‘On my programme. Words that kept cropping up. Here they are. Zorne, Zwange, Zeit. They seemed to come in clusters, several words all beginning with the same letter. Zauber!’

  ‘Zauber is magic,’ says Pauline. ‘I know that from The Magic Flute.’

  ‘Vertrag, Verrat, Versprechen,’ continues Tracey.

  ‘Yes,’ says Howard. ‘It’s full of alliteration, his libretto.’

  ‘Alliteration,’ says Trevor. ‘Hale and hearty. Forgive and forget!’

  ‘Vergeben und vergessen,’ says Olive.

  Back at the hotel Tracey lets Adam go on ahead while she waits at reception for the return of their passports. Trevor is there too.

  ‘Personally,’ he says, once they have them, limping along the corridor towards the lift with her, ‘I think Wagner single-handedly ruined good opera. Verdi’s the man! Wagner’s a curse – ghastly fellow, morbid, hysterical, wallowing in death and disaster.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Tracey. ‘So you can’t be looking forward to—?’

  ‘Denise loves Wagner,’ says Trevor. ‘And I love Denise, so let’s keep that little secret to ourselves. But certainly it proves how much I love her, doesn’t it, that I’m ready to spend a week of my life, at my advanced age, on Hitler’s favourite composer, horned helmets and all.’

  ‘Impressive!’ says Tracey.

  He is a skilled old flirt too, she notices.

  ‘Look at us!’ she says, standing beside Adam in front of the bathroom mirror. ‘We’re like one of those paintings: the Triumph of Hope over Experience. Or should that be the other way round?’

  ‘Oh, very funny,’ he says. ‘Ha ha.’

  She grimaces at their reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Over fifty and you’re into the Land of the Uglies. It’s like arriving at a fancy-dress ball, isn’t it, where they make you put on a pair of comedy glasses and a fright wig.’

  ‘Did you get the passports?’ he says.

  ‘Yes. Trevor was there as well. I like him. He’s not too keen on Wagner either.’

  ‘It’s a gigantic case of the emperor’s new clothes, that’s why.’

  ‘Adam, why not give it a go?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because! Why not!’

  ‘That’s not a reason.’

  ‘Oh my love, you are your own worst enemy.’ He is almost asleep. It’s no good, she must speak.

  ‘I want to forget, but it’s still there,’ she murmurs into his shoulder.

  He groans.

  ‘Not this again.’

  ‘Please help me.’

  ‘Water under the bridge.’

  ‘I know but it won’t go.’

  ‘Look, Tracey, I have certain areas where I just tend to think “trouble” and put them in a locked drawer and leave them alone.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t like turning things over.’

  ‘Neither do I but my mind keeps on doing it anyway.’

  ‘Let’s get some sleep.’

  ‘I’ve never talked to anyone except to you; and you can block your ears to me.’

  ‘It’s after midnight, Tracey. Oh don’t cry, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  They are quiet for a while.

  ‘Our love,’ she murmurs. ‘That’s what I couldn’t understand you sacrificing and seeming not to notice. It seemed so strong to me.’

  ‘It still is!’ he says. ‘Go to sleep.’

  In the night Tracey wakes and stares into the dark. The tormentors are ready for her. I’ve been living as though my life wasn’t important, she thinks with night-time clarity. Now that the boys are older, now that they are in the outside world, it changes all the conditions. She resigns herself to the fact that she will not be able to fall back asleep, not for a while at least. Malaria is like this, isn’t it; you think it’s gone then it comes back again. Once it’s in the bloodstream you can’t get rid of it.

  Enough, she says to herself, climbing noiselessly out of bed and reaching for the notes and her bag. She goes to the bathroom, softly closes the door and turns on the shaving light instead of the main one so that the extractor fan won’t wake him. Good, it’s strong enough to read by. She closes the lid to make a nocturnal chair, and turns to her Kindle; within seconds she has it downloading a translation of the Ring cycle’s libretto. Next she starts browsing the notes.

  INFORMATION: There are eighty-three opera houses in Germany; the cities and regions have much more power than in the UK over their own budgets and they do the bulk of the funding. There is very high musical quality even in smallish houses and because there are so many of them many more people can go and enjoy the opera. Also the ticket prices
are nowhere near as high as ours.

  QUOTATION: ‘Wagner’s art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-critique of the German character that could possibly be imagined; as such it is calculated to make German culture interesting even to the most doltish foreigner.’ From The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner by Thomas Mann, 1933.

  ODD FACTS: Wagner wore glasses all the time, only removing them when he had his photograph taken. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who abdicated three days before the end of the First World War, had his car horn tuned to the thunder motif from Wagner’s Ring cycle.

  VOCABULARY: Hoch in der Luft – high in the air; hoch in den Siebzigern – in one’s late seventies. Bildung – the lifelong process of education and self-cultivation; Stolperstein – stumbling block. Leitmotiv – in the musical drama of Wagner and his imitators, a theme associated throughout the work with a particular person, situation, or sentiment; a recurring theme. Traulich und treu – tender and true; der feindliche Freund – frenemy; in wildem Leiden – in bitter sorrow; heilige Ehre – sacred honour.

  She takes her holiday notebook and copies out this new vocabulary, then turns to her phone and starts to google the recurring words she had jotted down from that night’s surtitles onto her programme. Yes, ewig is eternal, as Olive said, and Ehre is honour and Eid is oath or marriage contract. Vertrag is contract or agreement, Versprechen is promise and Verrat is betrayal. Verraten und verkauft, the translation service further volunteers, is ‘well and truly sunk’. She sits there for the best part of the next hour, resigned to wakefulness, reading and copying German vocabulary into her notebook.

  MITTWOCH/WEDNESDAY

  They are among the first of the group to assemble in the hotel lobby, Olive and Pauline and Tracey, in readiness for the coach tour.

  Breakfast had been full of trombone-like nose-blowing from the older men along with the odd percussive sneeze. When Adam had helped himself to a bowlful of what looked like good honest muesli from the buffet table, the depth of his chagrin on finding the dark bits were chocolate rather than raisins had been worryingly disproportionate. Was this her future, Tracey had wondered aloud back in their room: hair-trigger breakfasts with an angry old man? If so she would be bailing out sooner rather than later. Having thus provoked a brief but savage exchange from which she had come off worse, it is with some relief that she has dried her eyes and left him fuming in their room checking his emails.

  ‘Hello, my dear,’ says Olive. ‘We were just talking about the voluminous notes with which we have been provided, and how we haven’t yet found time to read them.’

  ‘I know, I only started reading them last night,’ says Tracey. ‘I never knew there were eighty-three opera houses in Germany!’

  ‘That many?’ says Pauline. ‘They can’t be much good if there are so many of them.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s the case,’ says Olive. ‘I have a dear friend in Magdeburg and whenever I’ve visited her I’ve been to the most wonderful things. A stunning Idomeneo last time.’

  ‘Oh well, it’s all new to me,’ says Pauline. ‘Since I retired. I always used to think opera was just for snobs but when they started those screenings live from the Met, then other opera houses and theatres too, I got hooked. That’s where I saw the Ring the first time round, at my local cinema in Wrexham.’

  The lift disgorges Clive and Howard. Clive acknowledges them with a smile while Howard takes out his phone and starts to check it.

  ‘Adam’s father was mad on Wagner,’ says Tracey. ‘He had to leave school at fourteen during the war but one of his old teachers kept in touch and used to lend him books and records. That was how he picked up the Wagner bug; he was obsessed.’

  ‘A not uncommon story at the time,’ says Olive, nodding.

  ‘Something of a golden age for autodidacts after the war too,’ says Clive, who has been listening. ‘Myself included. No music in the house when I was growing up, not even a radio, then I discovered the Proms! I went every week in summer for next to nothing; the Albert Hall was my second home.’

  ‘Ah yes, the Proms. And the Old Vic,’ sighs Olive. ‘Gielgud for a shilling! What a wonderful woman Lilian Baylis was.’

  ‘Up in the gods at Covent Garden for half a crown,’ says Clive, glancing over at Howard. ‘Meat and drink to us at twenty.’

  Ah, that’s where they met, Tracey realises, all that time ago: up in the gods.

  When everyone has arrived they go outside to where the coach is waiting.

  ‘Sorry,’ whispers Adam in Tracey’s ear as they wait for the others to get on first.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispers back, sliding two fingers between his shirt buttons to the warmth of his stomach beneath.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ says Adam. ‘That chocomuesli at breakfast was a disgrace.’

  ‘It’s important to make the most of these lunches as we won’t be getting any dinner,’ says Howard, forking in a mouthful of buttery Kartoffelbrei.

  ‘Yes, they must do double duty,’ says Clive at his side, busily sawing away at his pork chop. ‘Good job they’re included!’

  The group is at lunch after a long morning’s coach tour of Berlin.

  Why on earth had anyone thought it a good idea to do that to Berlin after the war, Tracey wants to ask. Berlin was Prussia’s capital, wasn’t it, and Prussia had been behind both world wars. What was Bonn, then? But really, why had Berlin needed to be circumscribed, quartered and reduced to a nervous breakdown after the war, and kept that way in a permanent state of psychosis for all those years? It’s way over in the East so why had the West kept a toehold here at all? Embarrassed at her own confusion, she knows she is not atypical of her generation in being reluctant to give a backwards glance to the waste and wastedness, the wastefulness of war. Their parents, still below fighting age in 1945, had been the opposite of nostalgic and their grandparents had never wanted to talk about it. Yes, you had to pull your legs out of the mud somehow and climb free if you wanted any future to happen to you.

  ‘I read that book on Berlin in 1945 before we came out here,’ Trevor says. ‘What’s the writer’s name? It’ll come to me. Good book but depressing. Terrible what happened to the women.’

  ‘Trevor,’ says his wife Denise. ‘We’re eating.’

  ‘And certain things are only coming out now, all this time on,’ he continues, shaking his head.

  ‘Torsten liked the sound of his own voice, didn’t he,’ says Pauline.

  ‘I’d had enough of him by the end of it,’ says Adam.

  ‘I must say I felt the same,’ says Olive. ‘Rather a hammy performance.’

  ‘Berlin has also a bad side and I want to tell you this,’ intones Clive with a theatrical lift of the eyebrow. ‘And as you know we are now governed by a woman. The Queen of Europe. You can have her. Or should we send her to New Zealand?’

  Everybody is laughing; Clive has caught Torsten’s tone and words with some accuracy.

  ‘Repetitive too,’ says Adam. ‘Should we remember, should we forget, he played that number at least half a dozen times.’

  ‘They’ve been going in for atonement in a big way recently,’ says Howard.

  ‘The sins of the fathers,’ says Clive.

  ‘They’re in overdrive if anything,’ continues Howard. ‘They’ve grown so keen on fessing up that they’ve started in now on their colonial sins in a way that puts the rest of us to shame. They’re streets ahead of us there!’

  ‘Yes, it was interesting what Torsten had to say about the new Humboldt museum,’ says Olive.

  ‘Whereas I thought Checkpoint Charlie was very disappointing,’ says Pauline. ‘Russian dolls, Russian hats; hot dogs in the drizzle.’

  ‘Good to see that bit of the Wall though, wasn’t it,’ says Trevor. ‘Extraordinary! All those years then the Cold War melted away overnight.’

  ‘There’s a bit of a chill in the air again now,’ says Clive.

  ‘More like a hard frost!’ says Adam.

  Tracey notices that he seems happier
, and helps herself to a second glass of wine.

  ‘It’s so weird that Germany wasn’t even one country until about a hundred years ago!’ she says to Clive on her left. ‘Like Italy. I was reading the notes last night. All very confusing. The Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, the Schleswig-Holstein question.’

  ‘Ah yes, the Schleswig-Holstein question,’ says Clive.

  ‘Our pick ’n mix system of teaching history doesn’t really work, does it,’ says Tracey. ‘Everyone does the Tudors and the Nazis but not much else and there’s no before and after.’

  ‘Very true,’ says Clive. ‘Chronology’s gone out of the window.’

  She sips her wine and senses ideas and feelings jostling for room inside her head. She is remembering a recent television programme on what had happened in Germany after the war; the misery, the shame, the cruelty… The orphaned infant children of Nazis and others living wild in the forests, like a horrible Grimms’ fairy tale; the dogged attempts to sort through the rubble and build replicas of what had been before, as if that could restore the past in some way.

  ‘We’re so lucky, aren’t we. But it makes me feel …’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I feel incredibly lucky to have reached my age and not to have had to live through a war.’

  ‘All that misery, though,’ says Tracey, putting her wineglass to her hot face to cool it. ‘Catastrophic. It makes me feel ashamed of having feelings at all … How dare we feel happy or sad! What do our puny little sorrows matter set against that? Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Clive, pouring her a glass of water. ‘But they do.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Of course. Your own life continues to be important to you. It’s all you’ve got!’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘This one’s got two intervals,’ says Tracey. ‘Good.’

  ‘It’s also a lot longer,’ says Adam.