‘The body doesn’t really work like that of course,’ says Trevor, taking a slurp of his wine.
‘Constipation,’ says Olive. ‘Another word you don’t hear any more.’
‘Though when something does go wrong with the digestion,’ says Trevor, ‘it can be quite hard to spot exactly what’s the problem. Speaking as an ex-medic.’
‘I’m always convinced indigestion is a heart attack,’ says Howard through a mouthful of beef.
‘You bolt your food,’ murmurs Clive, shaking his head.
‘When mine went wrong last year,’ says Trevor, ‘I was pretty sure I knew what it was. From the symptoms, though, there was something else it might have been too and they wanted me to have tests to eliminate that possibility first. Which I did. And, as I thought, it wasn’t that.’
He pauses to help himself to mustard before continuing his story.
‘Then they said, “We’ll open you up and have a look.” Which they did. And indeed it was what I’d said it would be – a gangrenous intestine.’
‘That sounds bad,’ says Tracey politely.
‘In the event it was fine, they caught it in time and removed a great stretch of my gut. But you’re right, it could have been very nasty.’
There is a pause while they all digest this. Adam puts down his knife and fork and looks out of the window towards the TV Tower.
‘Impressive, I thought,’ says Pauline, changing the subject. ‘The way they’ve preserved that Russian graffiti – and left it on display there for all to see. It’s not exactly complimentary.’
‘Hitler Kaputt was the only one that nice girl could bring herself to translate for us,’ says Olive. ‘She hadn’t bargained with the notes!’
And indeed the notes had provided full translations of the various obscenities in Cyrillic script.
‘I must say I was very struck by the glass dome,’ says Clive. ‘I hadn’t realised that anyone at all can walk up there and watch the MPs debating in the chamber below.’
‘Good old Norman,’ says Adam. ‘It takes a Brit.’
‘Yesterday on the bus tour,’ says Tracey, ‘did you notice as we drove past the British Embassy that it was surrounded by massive stone blocks? Just like the American Embassy in Berkeley Square. We’re obviously the ones seen as warmongers now.’
‘Yes,’ says Olive.
As their plates are cleared to make room for Black Forest gateau, the talk turns to tonight’s opera.
‘It was Wagner’s own favourite from the Ring,’ says Howard, getting into his schoolmasterly stride. ‘It’s the most obviously fascist of the four. The blond hero who is simply a superior being. Though the fact that fascism didn’t exist when Wagner composed it counts for something. And it does all go wrong.’
‘This big blond hero business,’ says Pauline briskly, ‘it’s more Scandinavian than Germanic, surely. Wagner was small and dark, wasn’t he?’
‘Like Hitler,’ says Adam.
‘The Nazi ethnologists did in fact have Wagner down as Nordic-Dinaric,’ says Howard. ‘The Dinaric bit from the Balkans. And certainly he comes across as more Celtic than Teutonic. As for Hitler, he adored the Ring; he carried the manuscript of the music around with him everywhere.’
‘Was Wagner your special subject on Mastermind?’ asks Adam.
Howard ignores him.
‘Did you see that film about Hitler?’ asks Trevor. ‘Very good, I thought.’
‘Rather a lot of films about Hitler,’ says Adam.
‘You’re right,’ sighs Trevor. ‘Let me think. I mean the one where he’s in his bunker. The name will come to me. Eventually.’
‘The one with Goebbels and his wife and they kill all the children?’ says Pauline. ‘Downfall, do you mean?’
‘That’s the one!’ says Trevor, beaming with pleasure.
‘Der Untergang,’ says Olive.
‘Cyanide pills,’ says Clive. ‘Now there’s an opening for an entrepreneur. Someone would stand to make a fortune if they could find a way to sell them online. There’s a big market there for something quick and easy, rather than having to go to Zurich.’
‘Not sure how easy cyanide is,’ says Trevor. ‘No. North Sea gas, now, that used to be relatively straightforward; head down and off you went. But that option disappeared long ago.’
‘It’s clearly a good idea to have something up your sleeve,’ says Olive.
‘Downfall,’ Howard says. ‘The film, I remember thinking, they’ll use Götterdämmerung for the music. Bound to. But no! Not a bit of it! They took that great English hymn to suicide instead, Dido’s Lament!’
‘Remember me!’ Clive sings out in a reedy voice. ‘Remember me!’
‘So what have you got up your sleeve, then, Olive?’ asks Trevor.
‘Well I have heard the water from a vase of foxgloves is very effective’ – Olive smiles – ‘so I make sure to keep my garden well stocked.’
‘Aha!’ says Trevor. ‘Digitalis!’
‘What?’ says Adam.
‘Shhh,’ says Tracey.
They are deep into the third opera and Tracey marvels at the casual violence of this light-hearted lunkhead Siegfried. He is recognisably Viking in his boisterous brutality, isn’t he, and as Howard has now told them more than once, Wagner’s main source material was from the Old Icelandic. So much for the deep stories of Germany. Adam is awake, though, and seems not to be hating this one.
The Eternal Masculine, she thinks, remembering Olive’s phrase from the night before. Siegfried is bold and fearless. That’s what makes him the hero, the strong man. And even now the strong-man myth holds sway.
This Wagnerian urge to idolise and hero-worship is actively harmful, she thinks; I know that, I’ve always known it. Wotan may be king of the gods but he’s a bad-tempered depressive as well. Siegfried is strong and handsome but he’s a blithering idiot too. Shun shamans! Once I’d grown up (she thinks) and learned to live with the idea that strong emotions can also be ambivalent, I was laughing. And crying. Not everyone has a simple nature.
So (she wonders), are clear-sightedness and the state of being in love mutually exclusive? Because when you fall in love, that transformative state which is like music, then there has to have been idealisation. A degree of distance. Not falsification, but not the whole truth either. Not at the start; no.
Here comes the blame-laying Wanderer in his floppy hat, spreading doom and gloom. Her memory reels back to the conversation she and Pauline had had that day in the Reichstag; sotto voce, she recalls, as such conversations between women on this subject usually are, rather than out in the open, to avoid being shot down in flames.
‘Blame-laying,’ she had said to Pauline. ‘Establishing who’s in the wrong.’
Adam had missed their guidebook and, fulminating against Tracey, had left them together while he ran off to look for it at the table where they had all just eaten.
‘Something comes unstuck that’s not my fault and I know I’ll have to fight like a demon if I’m not to get the blame every time.’
‘My sons do it too,’ says Pauline. ‘It’s not just him. It drives me insane.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I shout at them, “And? So?”’
‘How?’
‘Meaning, fine: you’ve established where the blame lies, but so what? The real question is, what are we going to do about it? But they’re less interested in that, they’re far more interested in blame-laying. Whose fault it is. All that.’
‘Yes!’
It emerged that they both had two sons. Pauline spent much time visiting hers and their children, and getting blamed for things; children are always angry at their parents for something or other, she had said with a shrug.
‘Are yours competitive?’ Tracey had asked. ‘With each other? Mine are.’
‘Mine don’t even speak to each other, they’re so competitive! They’re grown men, married, with mortgages, but that doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. One runs a marathon one year, then
the other one finds out and signs up for two marathons the following year. And now they’ve both signed up for this ludicrous Ironman challenge.’
‘Ironman?’
‘You wait, that’ll be next. It’s a two-mile swim followed by a hundred-mile bike ride followed by a twenty-six-mile run, in that order, without a break.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘It’s the latest thing to add to your CV apparently. Gives you that extra edge.’
Siegfried would have breezed through the Ironman challenge, him and his sword which he has, of course, forged himself. And now he’s killed the dragon with it.
‘That took a while,’ says Adam, appearing at her side during the second interval with the drinks. ‘Lots of Brits in the queue. The woman next to me told me she was in a coach party from Colchester, forty of them, they’d bought their tickets online in a block booking and they’re going on for a meal afterwards. She said this is their seventh Ring cycle!’
‘They must set out to bag them like Munros,’ says Tracey.
‘Addictive, even I can see that now,’ says Adam. ‘This music, listening to it here with you, it’s quite different from being blasted with it by Dad. It’s very rousing. Quite a lot of the time in the wrong way, though, it feels like.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘In the Nuremberg rallies way, I suppose.’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘I like sitting beside you. Being with you.’
‘Yes?’ she says.
‘Yes. But let’s get back to the Kindle, Tracey. OK. Siegfried argues with the Wanderer, that’s his father in disguise, isn’t it. And he chops his spear with his sword.’
‘There’s the bell; skip to the end,’ says Tracey, leaping ahead. ‘Siegfried kisses Brünnhilde awake. Song to the sun, the radiant day. Love at first sight, la la la. But then she worries. For two, three, four pages about losing her independence, her armour.’
‘You were like that. Remember?’
‘With reason,’ says Tracey. It felt like you were going to be giving up a lot more than the man, she remembers, getting married. The world, in some sense, as well as your freedom. You had to be able to trust him as a friend. Or was that just my generation of women?
‘There’s the bell, we’ve got to go,’ says Adam, gulping down his wine.
‘Last lines,’ says Tracey, her eyes on the Kindle as they hurry back up the stairs. ‘Leuchtende Liebe,/ lachender Tod.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Radiant love, laughing death. That’s what they both swear to each other.’
‘Laughing death?’ says Adam. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Shhh,’ says Tracey. ‘It’s starting.’
Tracey dreams and drowses inside the music, rocked along in its turbulent reverie. Time to move on (she thinks); fine, but if you have done harm it is indelibly part of your history from then on. If you’re interested in being truthful. It just is. Sometimes sitting on a bus could be like this, couldn’t it; the noisy chugging and purring, stopping and starting, like moving along inside a giant tea-kettle, slow progress, the lack of end in sight, your fellow passengers sitting alone in their private fastnesses, bags on laps, but also companionable by virtue of simply being there.
If you listened to this on your own, as Adam’s father had done, you would be taken through a huge emotional experience with none of the usual human real-life fallout. You’d be able to avoid thinking about damage, you’d be able to concentrate on the quality of your own emotional experience without being selfish or mean to anyone else. It really could be all about you!
‘He stuck it out for whatever reason,’ she had said to Adam that day about his father. ‘He didn’t leave.’
‘So what. He got no joy from us. It all had to be about him or it didn’t count.’
‘I know. That’s sad.’
First her parents, then Adam’s. It was like that party game where the ones who are touched on the shoulder must sit down silent, inactive, out of it. She thinks of children alone in their beds, breathing like the sea.
Ewig again, they are singing, and again: Trevor’s earwig; eternal, everlasting. She thinks: we seem to stay the same, or reasonably like ourselves, for years and years and years. But time is marching on, or up and down, or round and round; whatever. How to meet death, that was what you had to think about once you were no longer a child – first the deaths of others, then your own. Yes, bear it in mind; but the real skill was not to let it dominate your thoughts. These strange meanderings (she observes), this lofty abstract afflatus, they’re a direct result of contact with this music, aren’t they; its elephantiasis is obviously catching.
Trevor had been telling her that day how much he enjoyed his life. ‘I’ve got enough money,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve got my health, I’ve still got my marbles, and it’s wonderful now to have enough time in which to do the things I enjoy.’ Trevor and Olive are to be admired, the spirited old travellers. Over eighty and you’re in another country, living in the court of a despot, hoping to escape notice for as long as possible though you know that sooner rather than later you’re for the chop.
The way this music catches at you again and again with certain chords and phrases repeated ringingly is part of its power, signature phrases which cycle round again and again like the emotions. Tears had sprung to Olive’s eyes that day when questioned about her time as an infant evacuee during the war. And is it ever possible (Tracey wonders) to detach emotions and send the painful ones back into the slipstream of wither and fade? They don’t seem subject to the usual rules; they don’t acknowledge time.
This music is loudly physical (she thinks), repetitive, and it vibrates through your whole body, the blare of the horns, the roll of the drums. It creeps in and enlarges itself, feeding on itself. It alters your heartbeat!
She takes Adam’s hand and they are palm to palm, fingers laced and straight and moving slightly to the music. Now she slips one shoe off and slides the sole of her unshod foot along his shin, moves the arch of her foot up from his ankle and round to his calf. In their box, safe in the back row, he takes her warm hand, both of them shifting slightly, smiling politely, conscious of each other and of those in front of them. She thinks of the night to come. All she has to do is touch his skin, touch it softly and with imagination; all she has to do is use her fingertips softly and sensitively …
It is quiet tonight on the minibus back to the hotel; they are tired, the members of this little group, and some of them have their eyes shut.
‘I know we were complaining about the lack of surtitles,’ says Pauline to no one in particular, ‘but I’m rather glad of it now. I already know enough of the story from seeing it in the cinema so I’m not bothered about it. This time round I find I’m listening to the music undistracted. And it’s amazing.’
Tracey takes out her notebook. Ausgang/exit; Stuhlgang/bowel movement; Untergang/downfall: these she has added to her vocabulary list today. From the Kindle she now copies out the lines which had appealed to her at the beginning of the last act: Mein Schlaf ist Träumen,/ mein Träumen Sinnen,/ Mein Sinnen Walten des Wissens. My sleep is dreaming,/ my dreams are thoughts,/my thoughts master wisdom.
‘We used to have vocabulary books at school,’ says Clive. ‘Ten words a day. French rather than German, though. Jusqu’au bout. Une crise de nerfs. Very useful.’
‘It’s supposed to be good for the memory, isn’t it,’ says Trevor beside her, ‘learning a new language. Though I do the crossword instead.’
‘I can’t do crosswords,’ says Tracey. ‘I wish I could.’
‘I must let it go. I know that,’ says Tracey.
‘Yes!’
‘I will but I need something first. From you.’
‘Revenge? Is that it?’
‘No. I don’t want that.’
‘What then? Reparation?’
‘No. Not that either. Recognition? Yes! Recognition. Say you understand what you’ve done and chose to do it even though you love me and knew it would hurt m
e.’
‘Ah, that’s a bit hard. I just did what I wanted and I didn’t think about uncomfortable things.’
‘Please. No need for remorse. But there must be recognition.’
‘You want to be the one who’s in the right. OK. I’ll give you that. You can have that.’
‘No! I don’t care about that either. No, it’s so I know what happened, so I know something more about you and we can carry on from there.’
‘I don’t want you to know that about me.’
‘Well, tough.’
‘Let’s change the subject,’ says Adam, and kisses her with such energy and persistence that she cannot say anything else.
In long married life, reflects Tracey later, before she falls asleep, foreplay is not so much a formality as a formalised, stylised process, elegant in its gestures. It is in that way like a traditional dance worn to a fine edge, new heights, by centuries of repetition. And there is always the possibility of surprise, of some movement or sensation quite new, not experienced before.
SAMSTAG/SATURDAY
‘Of course we’re all living longer,’ says Adam. ‘That’s the problem.’
‘Quite a nice problem though,’ says Trevor. ‘When you get to a certain age.’
Tracey smiles across at him, and he winks back. The group is having lunch in a Turkish kebab house before the final stretch of this operatic marathon.
‘I had my seventy-fourth birthday last week,’ announces Howard. ‘And I did one of those online quizzes that tell you how long you’ve got. They get better, the odds, the older you get. It’s because of the people who’ve dropped off already on the way. So actually at seventy-four you’ve got more chance of living to a hundred than you had at sixty!’
‘I don’t see how that works,’ says Adam.
‘The first time I did it I was somewhat economical with the truth when it came to entering alcohol amounts,’ continues Howard, ignoring him and taking a swig of wine. ‘And I came out at ninety-seven. Then I went back and filled it in more truthfully and I still came out at ninety-five!’
‘Adam’s right though,’ says Trevor. ‘The health service is in a terrible pickle. Because not only are we living longer, hurrah, but the treatments available are so much more effective and of course so much more expensive than they were twenty, thirty years ago …’
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