‘Anne, I want to help you in whatever way I can. You know that to me, Duncan is almost like my own son.’
She flinched. ‘He’s Robert’s son. He is now, and he always will be.’
Charles regretted his words. But there would be time to make amends – long years in which to try and earn forgiveness.
When he went home, he opened Robert’s letter. Difficult at first to make sense of the crabbed writing – and almost as if starting in mid-sentence; the erratic script in blue ink. Letters indistinct and corrected, scored out and rewritten; hasty, urgent writing – a valediction, and a confession, and gradually the forming of a pattern, gradually everything becoming clear. After reading it twice, Charles thought of destroying it. But he decided that this would be the greatest crime of all.
It was the final chord – the final resolution. And it was a great, terrible joke which did not leave him laughing. First, he considered writing a letter to Jenny, apologizing to her for having believed that she had betrayed him. But he had never told her why he had left her so cruelly, and he could see no hope of reconciliation. His affair with Joanna – that arrogant woman with her perfect body – was a kind of purging, a wiping clean – an attempt to erase, or else to justify his sins against Jenny. He would never try to contact her. He felt he owed her this final act of kindness.
He sat himself at the piano. It was not Beethoven he chose, but Bach. There would be time yet for him to weep for Robert, and for Jenny – but now he needed to be reminded that there was still some sanity in the world. He chose the Goldberg Variations.
A work very different in character from Beethoven’s set – but another grand piece in variation form; thirty variations on a slow, gentle aria. A work of symmetry and balance. There would be time yet to regret everything, and then at last to regret no more.
Let us recall the strange story which Spitta has told, concerning the origin of Bach’s great composition. There was a nobleman called Keyserling, who was troubled by insomnia. During sleepless nights, he would ask his young harpsichordist Goldberg to sit in the next room playing soothing music. Keyserling commissioned Bach to produce a piece for Goldberg to play – and the result was that huge set (even longer than Beethoven’s). Pure, disciplined, abstract music.
Beethoven took his theme as the basis for a process of transformation – so that the final conclusion is unimaginably distant from the beginning. But in Bach, the theme is never lost – its bass line is present, unaltered, throughout the whole of the thirty variations, until at last the theme returns, and the music ends. The journey has been a miraculous process of standing still. Music for an insomniac aristocrat. Does it matter, that Spitta’s famous story is almost certainly false? And if we could discover with certainty who was the true author of the gentle aria which is the basis of those variations, then how might this affect our attitude to the music which Bach wrote?
Pure, disciplined, abstract music. There would be time yet to reflect on Robert’s words – his last words. And perhaps Anne would one day allow King to make amends, somehow.
He heard about the inquest, and the verdict satisfied him – an accident. Why subject Anne to further suffering? And then he went to Leeds, and became a schoolteacher – at first he loathed the job, but after a while he came to feel a strange sense of release. Although he returned to Cambridge most weekends, the research he tried to continue came to interest him less and less. Something was changing inside him; the children he taught were helping him to rediscover the child within himself. Life was easier now. He felt more free than he had ever done.
He looks older now – how can twenty years go by without leaving their trace? But they have treated him kindly – he still has something of his younger looks. He comes home from the university, and finds Duncan in the front room, that awkward young man, sitting on the floor with his back to the sofa, reading a book of stories by Alfredo Galli.
Charles says hello, and receives a grunt in response. He goes to the tiny spare room he calls his study, puts his briefcase on the desk, then goes back to the sitting room. Duncan has moved now; gone to his bedroom and closed the door. And although Duncan has undergone far greater physical alteration in the intervening years, there is still something in him of that four year old child with a toy train, asking when his father would return. King’s ‘rehabilitation’ served only to liberate him once and for all – Duncan’s sentence, on the other hand, has been much harder. Perhaps his moodiness is simply his mother’s inheritance. But Charles can see how every part of Duncan’s life has grown beneath the shade of unexplained tragedy. Couldn’t even stick it at university – when he left his mother in York and moved to Leeds. History, like Robert. But he couldn’t stick it. Anne didn’t want him to stay with Charles and Joanna, but it was the simplest solution – the most practical. And Charles was doing it for Duncan, not for Anne. He was doing it for Robert.
It’s April – a fine early evening in Spring. Already, a year has elapsed since that annus mirabilis, when the old order finally gave way and collapsed. Those protest marches; the students, and the workers, and the ordinary people going forward together. Now the talk is of democracy, freedom and rebuilding.
When Duncan reappears from his bedroom, King asks if his mother will be visiting him again at the weekend – but Duncan says no, not this weekend, since he’ll be going to London. He intends to go to the Office of Public Records.
‘What do you want to go there for? You don’t think they’ll have a file on you?’
‘I want to find out what happened to Dad.’
Charles asks him where he’ll stay, whether he can afford the fare – and does it have to be this weekend? Duncan says it can’t wait – already there’s talk of closing the files again, because of all the trouble it’s causing. And Charles says it might be for the best if they were closed quickly – since the past is better left alone.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘What I mean is that under the Communists we were all guilty, all of us. Everyone’s got something to hide. I did things that I’m not proud of now – and I’m sure your father was the same.’
‘Oh you’re sure are you? And who the hell do you think you are to tell me about my father?’
‘I knew him, Duncan. He was a good man. And he had his weaknesses – just like you and me.’
No point in arguing about it. Charles always knew that Duncan would have to learn the truth one day.
The sound of a key in the front door – Joanna. She calls out as she enters. ‘It’s me, darling,’ then comes in and presents her cheek for Charles to kiss. ‘Duncan, I told you I’d wash that tee-shirt if you’d leave it in the basket. Look at it – it’s appalling. Aaah, Smiley …’ the cat has appeared from somewhere, and struts towards her with its tail held stiffly in the air. ‘How is mummy’s lickle baby …?’ she bends down to tickle its chin. ‘Run off my feet at the surgery today, Charlie. And they didn’t have any chicken left – it’s lamb for supper.’
Duncan would have to find out eventually. Charles watches him go sulking back to his bedroom, while Joanna goes to the kitchen and begins to put things in the fridge. He sits down at the piano – it occurs to him to play something, but he can’t decide which piece.
Joanna calls to him from the kitchen. ‘I was watching the starlings on the way home. Have you ever noticed how they swirl around – it’s beautiful. Made me wish I had a camera with me. Though I don’t suppose it would come out.’ Sounds of cupboard doors being opened and closed, and the rustle of polythene, and Joanna calling out to him. ‘How is it that they can all fly together like that? They all decide at the same time to go one way or the other. Makes you wonder if they’ve got some kind of telepathy.’
Charles can’t decide what to play. ‘Yes, I’ve thought about that too, Joanna. I thought about it for years. In the end, I concluded that they’re simply following the air currents.’
‘Oh Charlie, you scientists are so unromantic.’
The scores of Beethov
en and Bach lie beside him on the floor. He struggles now, to come to a decision. Would it be kinder of us to tell him that it makes no difference which choice he makes?
PART FIVE
26
How easy it is, in fiction, to sweep aside two decades. The merest touch of the pen, and we see faces growing older, hair turning from black to grey. The better part of a lifetime can disappear in a literary ellipsis.
It’s nearly two years now since Eleonora left me. An insignificant lump, that was how it started. Strange, how the most trivial, unimportant looking things can go on to have such profound consequences. Perhaps if I hadn’t allowed her to pretend early on that it really couldn’t be anything to worry about. But why go through all that again?
Nearly two years since she left me, that’s all. How long it seems, since I saw her alive and healthy! And yet that day when we first met, twenty years ago, feels like yesterday – whatever it means for a memory to seem ‘like yesterday’. Difficult to say with any certainty what the sensation of remembering actually is. I know how to judge that a tree is thirty yards away, or that a stone weighs a pound or two. But how to reach the conclusion that a past event feels as if it occurred a year ago? Or twenty?
I met her on a train, not unlike the one on which I am now sitting. She was intrigued by my foreign accent – she asked me how it was that a physicist from Britain had come to be teaching English in Italy. And I told her the circumstances which had brought me here.
A colleague had sent me an invitation to a conference in Milan. It would, I knew, be a rather tedious meeting – I had already lost interest in research by then. I had finally realized that I would never be able to live up to the expectations my late father had of me. I only went because I wanted to see Italy. I remember arriving at Milan railway station, harassed and sweating in my grey suit. I had left one circus, and arrived in another. My colleague put me up for a while. I skipped the conference, outstayed my visa, and then applied for political asylum.
I had to persuade them that I was being persecuted in some way. In fact, it was not persecution from which I sought refuge, but rather from politics itself. I had come from a country where every word, deed, gesture had its place in a vast ideological vocabulary. I wanted to be able to live without constant reference to the state, that was all. The regime I had left was, it is now clear, really rather more benign than most. The English have a passion for moderation in everything – even totalitarianism. The whole thing, now that it has gone, can be seen to have been comically genteel.
I sought asylum – I have to confess it – because I liked the look of the place. It was sunny, the food was good, and the women well dressed. Easy at the time to couch my aspirations in the language of political oppression. Really, I was a refugee from drabness. From tinned peas, and rain.
We met on the train. I offered to give her lessons in English, and during my second visit to her flat in Milan, we found ourselves together on that Turkish rug. Only two English lessons – two pretended lessons.
The question of love was of no importance then or subsequently. We desired each other – in a sense which was almost abstract. And I knew at once that I would marry this woman. At the time, I didn’t even think I liked her, and yet there seemed to be an awesome inevitability about the idea of us coming together.
Yes, inevitability was how I must have thought of it at the time; I regarded Eleonora as something which had been somehow preordained. Or at any rate, I had the feeling that the time had come for me to choose the partner with whom I should share my life (I was in my early thirties) – and it was Eleonora who came and sat opposite me on the train.
Of course, nothing in life is inevitable, other than its eventual end. It was chance which had brought me to Italy, and chance which had placed Eleonora in my compartment. In those days, I still felt some residual need to argue that somehow things had all been arranged for me by some unseen power – that everything was ‘for the best’. The idea of historical inevitability is little more than this; an excuse for events rather than an explanation.
There are many who say that the mad regime in Britain from which I had escaped was itself inevitable – the experience of the thirties and the war years being irrefutable proof. The alternatives seem impossible only because they didn’t happen. It’s left to writers now to dream of all the other equally probable outcomes which history could have chosen – like that genre of novel now appearing, based on the premise that the German occupation never occurred, and that the Communists were not elected in 1947 (though even if the Germans had never invaded, the Communists would probably have been elected anyway). Such fantasies are amusing enough, with their outlandish scenarios in which monarchy and aristocracy still exist – an excuse to write fulsome descriptions of garden parties, balls and society events of a kind which lasted well into this century. And perhaps they are really not so outlandish after all – already, I hear, they are bringing back the debutantes’ ‘coming out’ ball. Where have these people been hiding for the last forty years?
The speculations of the ‘alternative history’ writers are simply a corollary to the ‘Gallian’ philosphy which I espouse so wholeheartedly. The historical events with which fate has chosen to entertain and torture us are little more than numbers on the throw of a die.
And it was Eleonora who came and sat opposite me. She became my student, my lover, and then my wife. Had I missed that train (in other words, if I had been quick enough to catch the earlier one which I was aiming for) then Eleonora would never have happened – who knows where I would now be, what I would now be doing? Not writing this, I’m certain. What, I wonder, would my father have made of the meandering course which my life has taken – so unlike the confident torrent of achievement with which he preceded me?
Why do I mention my father again? Because I broke off from writing to go to the toilet, and as I pulled up the zipper … but I think I told you that story a while ago. You will have noticed by now, that I have an unendearing habit of repeating myself. It used to irritate my father considerably – he would stop me in mid-flow: ‘Yes, you’ve told me already.’ And I would fall silent.
When I was young, he would take me out for walks – and I would always be asking him questions. Once I asked him what light was made of, and he said it was made of waves, like the sea. So that I wondered why light didn’t make your eye wet. But then I asked him again another time, and he told me he’d heard something about light being made of lots of particles – and so in order to settle the matter, he presented me a few days later with a book about physics, which told me that light was made neither of waves nor of particles, but could be regarded as consisting of either, depending on how you looked at it. Which made physics seem like the sort of subject I would enjoy. And it told me that the speed of light through space would always appear the same to you – no matter how fast you travelled – so that a beam of light is something with which you can never catch up. In my life, my father was like a beam of light. He illuminated so many things for me, and yet they were to remain forever beyond my reach.
It was he who made me learn the piano – I think he dreamed of me becoming a great concert pianist, but I never came up to the standard he would have liked. He would listen to me practise – once I had become quite good. He would wait in silence as the notes flowed out. Then I would play a false one, and I would hear him grunt in dissatisfaction. Years later, I played for Eleonora. I chose an easy piece, and gave it the sort of concentration you’d apply to a cliff face which you were hanging from by your fingernails. And halfway through, I lost my grip for a bar or two. ‘That was nice,’ she said when I finished. ‘Shame about the mistakes.’
I knew from the start that we would be married. I admired her – even on the train, when we first met, I was filled with admiration for her coolness, so elegant and controlled. If I had been born a woman, I would have wanted to be like her.
And I grew to love her – it surprised me, the warmth I came to feel for this chilly creature. In
itially I loved her as I might love a piece of music. Later, it was more like the feeling one would have towards a blood relative – a loyalty, and the sense of comfort which comes with familiarity. Now I miss her terribly. An insignificant lump – that was how it started.
But I was talking about my father. Once he knew that I would never be a brilliant pianist, he set his hopes on my ability in maths and science. When I went to university to study physics, it was taken for granted that I would do well, and go on to do a Ph.D. It was only once I had got past even that hurdle, and was beginning to do my own research, that I realized that I had been propelled along a course that I had never really wanted. I was not very good at research – which is all about following the literature, and making academic contacts, and keeping abreast of all the latest developments. I knew now why light is both a wave and a particle – and I didn’t really care to know any more than that. My imagination had been filled to the brim with all the ideas I had been packing into it over the years. I didn’t want to learn anything more. I tried to tell my father that I was thinking of changing my career, but I could never find the courage to come straight out with it. I knew that unless I could fulfil all his expectations of me, then I would have failed. And so I failed.
I was in my mid-twenties when he died – only beginning to get to know him. Just as well, perhaps, that he didn’t live to see how things turned out. Not only in my life, but the state of things generally. He was an ardent socialist – current events would have been such a disappointment to him. It’s easy to forget that the system which we all now despise so much was begun by idealists, dreamers – people who believed in freedom from exploitation, and the right to a decent standard of living. How can I wholeheartedly despise a system of which he was such a committed supporter?
Music, in a Foreign Language Page 19