Cockfosters

by Helen Simpson

  ‘And as for pensions …’ says Adam.

  ‘Adam,’ says Tracey.

  ‘When I retired at sixty I was advised to plan for ten thousand days,’ says Pauline. ‘Part of the retirement pep talk they gave us.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ says Howard keenly, starting to do the sums.

  ‘It’s going to be more like seventy for us,’ says Adam. ‘If then. Pensions have turned into a disaster area.’

  ‘I was reading something yesterday,’ says Tracey hastily, ‘when you were all in Potsdam and Wannsee, and it said the First World War lasted fifteen hundred days.’

  ‘Eighty-seven,’ says Howard to Clive, pursing his mouth.

  ‘This is one of the best kofta I’ve ever eaten,’ says Trevor. ‘Now, Götterdämmerung! What does it actually mean?’

  ‘The twilight of the gods,’ says Olive.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ says Tracey, reaching for her notebook. ‘Dämmerung is twilight!’

  ‘A somewhat ominous reputation, this one,’ says Clive.

  ‘Yes,’ says Howard. ‘It trails a strong whiff of Eau de Bunker.’

  ‘Though surely a lot of that’s down to bad luck,’ says Pauline. ‘Like “Nessun Dorma” and the World Cup.’

  ‘Just one Cornetto,’ warbles Clive.

  ‘But then all sorts of goodies were claimed in the name of the Third Reich,’ says Howard, steamrollering over them. ‘The glory that was Greece, the Brandenburg Gate modelled on the entrance to the Acropolis, they took all that on wholesale. The Olympian master race.’

  ‘Oak trees,’ says Clive, ‘forests. The Wandervogel youth movement.’

  ‘The what?’ says Adam.

  ‘Rambling,’ says Clive. ‘The Nazis were very ecologically minded.’

  ‘I thought the oak tree was old England,’ says Adam.

  ‘No, no, the Germans got there long before us,’ says Howard.

  ‘Are you sure?’ says Adam, frowning.

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make oak trees bad,’ says Tracey. ‘Just because Hitler liked them. Or the Acropolis.’

  ‘Or, by that logic, Wagner,’ says Howard.

  As the coffee stage arrives, Tracey asks to swap with Clive so that she can sit between Olive and Pauline.

  ‘Hello, my dear,’ says Olive. ‘So where did you get to yesterday while we were visiting Potsdam?’

  ‘And Wannsee,’ says Pauline, shaking her head. ‘Grim.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’d had enough of Torsten so I skived off,’ says Tracey. ‘Though I’m very glad I did, as it happens.’

  She tells them how she had wandered off Ku’damm down the Fasanenstrasse and stumbled by chance into the Käthe Kollwitz Museum.

  ‘Käthe Kollwitz?’ says Pauline. ‘That name’s familiar though I don’t know why. I think I noticed her name in the notes, that must be how I know it.’

  She extracts the notes from her bag and starts searching through.

  ‘A great artist,’ says Olive.

  ‘I know!’ says Tracey. ‘I know now, anyway. I’d barely heard of her before, I only knew her from a couple of lithographs and I thought I was keen on art.’

  She thinks back on what she saw and wonders how she is going to express any of it to them. Nothing had prepared her for this house; she had wandered in a trance through rooms of tender terrifying lithographs and woodcuts showing Death bringing comfort to starvelings, Death seizing a group of children, portraits of hungry children and desperate widows, women holding sleeping children, dead children, and scenes of lamentation. She had found herself knocked breathless by the angry power and honesty of these pictures, by their furious mother-love and strength.

  ‘Things she said,’ she continues. ‘I copied them into my notebook from the captions. Here. “I have never done any work cold. I have always worked with my blood.” When she was fifty and famous she took on the Kaiser and publicly denounced the war – here we are, “We were betrayed then, at the beginning … Peter and millions, many millions of other boys. All betrayed.” Verraten. How brave to write that in the papers in 1917! Why is she not more famous outside Germany?’

  ‘Seedcorn must not be ground,’ says Olive, somewhat obscurely. ‘And of course she went through the Second World War too. A thorn in Hitler’s flesh. She died two weeks before it ended.’

  ‘Käthe Kollwitz,’ reads Pauline from the notes. ‘Here we are: Berlin’s guardhouse memorial to the “victims of war and tyranny”, da da da, both the Communists and the West tried and failed to claim her as their own. Lost a son in first war, a grandson in second war, both named Peter. Her massive bronze pieta of mother and dead adult son lies above the remains of an unknown German soldier and an unknown resistance fighter in soil from nine European battlefields and five concentration camps.’

  ‘From her last diary,’ says Tracey. ‘“One day, a new ideal will arise, and there will be an end to all wars. I die convinced of this.”’

  ‘I wish I could,’ says Olive.

  ‘Yes, a double espresso please,’ says Pauline to the waiter now taking their orders.

  ‘Schwarzen Kaffee, bitte,’ says Olive.

  ‘We’ll be needing caffeine if we’re going to last,’ says Pauline. ‘We get on the minibus at three fifteen and we’re picked up again at ten.’

  ‘But, Olive, what I really meant to ask you about was that thing you mentioned,’ says Tracey. ‘The Eternal Feminine. Before I got side-tracked.’

  ‘Das ewig Weibliche,’ says Olive. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it? What does it mean?’

  ‘Redemption,’ says Pauline witheringly. ‘Compassion. I’m willing to put money on it! It makes me so mad, the way we’re always fobbed off like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Olive.

  They are in the back row of their box, for the last time, shoulder to shoulder.

  ‘Have I got the gist?’ asks Adam, while Tracey clicks through the Kindle’s pages. ‘Siegfried does the dirty on Brünnhilde but it’s not his fault because his drink was spiked?’

  ‘I think that’s it. Blutsbrüderschaft. Blood brotherhood. Yes. Here we are. Gram und Grimm. Hoy ho, hoy ho, hoho!’

  ‘And this new villain Hagen,’ complains Adam. ‘It’s a bit late in the day to be introducing extra characters!’

  ‘Though it’s still mainly Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Here she is: Verrat! Verrat! Wie noch nie er gerächt! Treachery, treachery, needing unprecedented revenge!’

  ‘And the magic helmet making him look like the other one – how on earth are we going to follow all that?’

  ‘Close your eyes during those bits, that’s what I do. Listening to the music like that, it’s like dreaming.’

  Dreams, she thinks as the lights go down; unrealistic rubbish (in terms of story) except for the emotion. And here comes this music again, the music of transition; shifting, always changing. She moves her shoulders and relaxes back into her seat. Over five hours, this last one; nearly six if you counted the intervals. It does have a cumulative effect, though. How familiar it is to her now, after swimming in it all week; familiar and new.

  Repetition with variation, she thinks; the same but different. That elderly couple at the airport had understood it, forging a new inner world together via shared adventure. You didn’t need to go that far, though; anywhere new would do as long as it was new to you both. And how is it that even though we sit at the end of the Atlantic storm track, one day of sun leaves us convinced that summer’s here? That’s why we still make resolutions and think of new ways to approach life after all this time: because we’re human and we need to be reminded and encouraged and refreshed. Again and again. Right to the end.

  Do you want to get old? (she asks herself). Well, yes. I’ve grown increasingly attached to my life and friends and loves as time has gone on. I want to see what happens next. When young, you’re not tied in in the same way; you’re not yet rooted. Remember the baby’s first three months of fragile hold before they’re quite in the world? Eve
n up to thirty or so the death of a parent can blight the not-quite-rooted young. I remember saying to my mother, laughing, ‘It’s all right, you can go now. I hope you don’t. But I’m fine on my own, I’m grown up now.’

  Wehe! Wehe! Waffen durchs Land! Horns are sounding and there is a lot of running around on stage along with the waving of spears and swords. She glances at Adam and sees how absorbed he is; over the course of these four long nights in her company the colour and information and weave of the music have persuaded him. Olive had that day described to her how she had struggled with the language during her brief married spell in Germany, making fruitless painful efforts to pierce the wall of impenetrable sound in which she had recognised only the occasional word; and then how, not gradually but all at once, she had realised she could understand what people were saying. It had been like tuning in to an elusive radio station, she said. And that’s how it’s been this week with the music, Tracey thinks; even Adam has got his ear in, which is quite something considering his Wotan complex.

  Olive had assumed a hooded look when questioned by Tracey and Pauline about her time in Germany. ‘Never live with a depressive, they suck your life away,’ she had said, adding that in her view marriage was what you could put up with but now she had many dear friends. It was all that time ago in Lübeck too that she had discovered opera – ‘I found it was where I could do my violent living, my antisocial living,’ she’d told them. ‘It’s saved me a great deal of real-life mayhem like that.’

  ‘And that’s obviously the way your dad used it,’ Tracey had said to Adam, repeating this last remark to him. ‘He might have been a lot worse without it.’

  Look at Brünnhilde! She’s just given her husband’s secret away to the villain! Now he’s had it. Tracey thinks: but wasn’t she supposed to be the redemptive power in all this? How is that redemptive? Burning with hurt and rage she betrays him. It’s murderous, her betrayal. Verrat! Verrat!

  She lapses back into drowsing again, abandoning the attempt to follow the confusion onstage. Lying beached on Adam’s shoulder last night, aware of the barrel of his ribs rising and falling with his breath, half asleep, she had seen in this liminal state which hovered at the border of sense how there are between life partners sliding layers of history, tectonic plates of it shifting over the decades together. Verrat, how could there not be verrat in all that time, with two separate temperaments side by side and often wanting different things; experiencing disparate degrees of satisfaction with whatever they are together living through to the point of sometimes withdrawing, almost bailing out, for long stretches of distance. The hurt, the very imprint of betrayal, its cause all but forgotten now, phoenix-like revives and burns, flares up again. What happens is neither progress nor its opposite but a cycling round again through the emotions; not cloudless, never cloudless except for simpletons or deniers. And, in the middle of all this, claiming some sort of essential freedom while remaining loyal – how hard was that?

  ‘Gallingly slow these days, I’m afraid,’ smiles Trevor, seeing Tracey on the stairs at the second interval.

  She returns his smile and slows to his snail pace. Where is Denise?

  ‘I find I need to touch a wall or rail now or I keep veering off,’ he continues. ‘There goes Olive, beetling along, beating me to it every time and I happen to know she’s a couple of years older than me.’

  ‘How are you finding this one?’ asks Tracey.

  ‘Well of course it’s rather magnificent. But between you and me I’m still finding it a bit … screechy.’

  ‘Is Denise enjoying it though?’

  ‘She seems to be as far as I can tell. You may have noticed she’s been rather silent this trip, and again between you and me, she’s got to start chemo straight away when we get back.’

  ‘Oh dear. I didn’t know.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t want to talk about it. She skipped through a knee replacement recently with flying colours. But she’s also had lupus for several years now, rather debilitating, and she’s ten years younger than me so of course it all seems a bit unfair.’

  ‘Yes. Though fair doesn’t come into it, really, does it. That’s up to the Norns.’

  ‘The Norns?’

  ‘Those three at the start tonight.’

  ‘The ones with the knitting?’

  ‘Yes, the three Fates.’

  ‘That’s what they were! I wondered what all that was supposed to be about.’

  ‘The past, the present and the future.’

  ‘Ah yes. I see. So fingers crossed for us they don’t drop a stitch, eh?’

  ‘Yes!’

  When you’re in good health it’s like living in a time of peace (thinks Tracey as the lights dim for the last time); you don’t notice it, you don’t think about it, you take it for granted. And happiness is when you’re not aware of your health; it’s when you can think outside yourself. No wonder Denise has been so silent.

  She senses how a chronic illness can take the shine off each new day in advance, how it may – if not treated in time with distraction tactics – lead to cool thoughts of ending it. Which is of course one way to ameliorate the idea of self-obliteration, though not one you’d necessarily choose. No.

  The three big Rhinemaidens are back on stage with their lovely music, something of a relief after Hagen’s dark bass hoi-ho-ing. This is the last act of all and everything must be decided.

  At this late stage in her life she could no longer sit indoors and watch television, Pauline had told Tracey after lunch that day, which was pretty much all she’d been fit for round the edges during forty-odd years of work and family life; no, she wanted now to explore what she hadn’t had time or freedom for in the past. She had also confided in Tracey that there was someone on her art course she could not stop thinking about and how she was thinking of leaving her husband for this person. ‘As long as I’m alive I’m a work in progress,’ Pauline had declared. ‘The way I see it, I’m alive until I’m dead.’

  Now onstage they are building a bonfire and it is quite obvious where things are leading. Brünnhilde is looking exalted as she sings of her impending immolation. It’s grandiloquent and babyish at the same time (thinks Tracey), this desire to see it all go up in flames! The urge to take everyone down with you, not being willing that anything survive unscathed after your own death – this is the titanic selfishness which Wagner is obviously recommending. But this hysterical desire for perfection in death where no change is possible: it’s all a big fat lie. You have to live with the past whatever action you decide on, and also history can change. If you can’t for now agree a version of what happened though, you can’t go forward either together or separately. And it’s sinister, it’s anti-human, the desire for absolute control over the story.

  Here’s Brünnhilde doing the decent thing though; all done and dusted, nothing left to chance. The confusion onstage doesn’t make this entirely clear. Adam is looking baffled. ‘Suttee,’ she whispers in his ear, and he turns and raises his eyebrows at her in surprise. So incontrovertibly thrilling is the music, however, that by the end they find themselves convinced.

  They are all quite elated tonight on the minibus back to the hotel; there is a feeling that they have seen through some great enterprise together. Also, time has become finite again as they are going home tomorrow. Tracey closes her eyes and lets the talk go on without her, leaning on Adam who has his arm over her shoulders.

  ‘Why were they waving that big sheet across the stage at the end?’

  ‘I think it was supposed to be the Rhine breaking its banks.’

  ‘That must have been the climate change bit. Flood and fire.’

  ‘Not sure what the moral is though, now that it’s come to an end.’

  ‘Mind your back?’

  ‘I liked the bit where his dead hand lifted.’

  ‘I missed that! Siegfried, you mean?’

  ‘On his pyre, yes. Or was it his bier.’

  Opening her eyes, Tracey reaches for her Kindle.
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br />   ‘His last words!’ she says. ‘Do you know what his last words were? Seriously creepy. Look, here they are: Süsses Vergehen, seliges Grauen – To die is sweet; to shudder is enchanting.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Pauline, grimacing.

  ‘And I don’t see how Brünnhilde can be the heroine,’ says Tracey, ‘if she ordered a hitman. Olive, she had Siegfried murdered!’

  ‘At the end,’ says Olive, ‘she’s supposed to get on her horse and ride bareback into the flames. Not long after I was born there was a production in New York where Brünnhilde was played by a great singer who was also a great horsewoman, the Australian Marjorie Lawrence. She rode a real horse right onto the stage and into the fire. It was the sensation of the season.’

  ‘What happened after that, right at the end?’ says Adam. ‘By the way. Something was definitely going on but it was out of our sightline.’

  ‘Valhalla went up in flames.’

  ‘Here it is,’ says Tracey, reading from her Kindle. ‘Bright flames set light to the hall of the gods. When the gods are completely hidden from view by the flames the curtain falls.’

  ‘We were on the wrong side,’ says Adam, aggrieved. ‘It was out of sight where we were sitting. Just a faint glow!’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ says Pauline. ‘Half the opera house couldn’t see it.’

  ‘We got a good view from our side,’ says Trevor. ‘Whoosh!’

  ‘Like the ending of Jane Eyre,’ says Tracey, ‘Thornhill on fire. And Manderley of course! Rebecca.’

  ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,’ says Denise unexpectedly.

  The women laugh gently together.

  ‘I can’t think about that now … I’ll think about it tomorrow,’ says Pauline in a southern drawl. ‘After all … tomorrow is another day.’

  The men look baffled.

  ‘Reader, I married him,’ says Denise, taking Trevor’s hand.

  He beams at her.

  ‘I didn’t exactly like it,’ says Tracey. ‘That seems the wrong word altogether. But I did think it was tremendous.’