Memory and Straw

by Memory

  I loved the photos she sent from Spain. Looking ever so healthy in her walking boots and shorts as she stood on the Camino Primitivo, and equally relaxed and at ease from the beach in Portugal.

  ‘I will be in Amsterdam on Sunday afternoon,’ she said. ‘Are you still able to join me for the final stage?’

  I almost sent a smiley, but decided words were better.

  ‘Yes. Time? Location?’

  ‘The Van Gogh Museum. At four.’

  We hired bikes in Amsterdam and cycled through the lowlands of Holland and Belgium.

  ‘Suits me perfectly,’ I said to Emma, ‘as a fully-paid up member of the Flat Earth Cycling Society.’

  Even then, she still beat me, cycling away ahead of me at speed whenever the fancy took her. From Brussels we got the train to Berlin, where one morning we caught the wrong bus and ended up in this beautiful little Vietnamese café. Like Grampa, we drank loose-leaf tea from a proper china pot in delicate china cups before getting the bus back to our original stop.

  ‘The best things happen by accident,’ Emma said.

  Once we got off the bus we walked in the opposite direction and wandered into one of those old second-hand bookshops where everything is accidental. It was run by a bereted lady called Hannah Raegenwelt, who told us she had escaped to freedom from the GDR by swimming the River Spree under cover of darkness. Emma found a book of Schoenberg’s writings and, standing between the stacks, read to me, ‘Everything we do not understand we take for an error.’ As we were buying it, I accidentally dropped it on the floor and broke the binding. Hannah gave us the book as a free gift.

  We went into a bar where a quartet were playing jazz. Vocals, bass, sax and piano. Now and again someone from the audience would saunter up to the mic and take over from the main vocalist. Some of the young people around us explained that it wasn’t karaoke but a form of ‘democratic improvisation’ as one young woman put it. Emma went up to the mic and sang ‘Autumn in New York’. It made us so nostalgic for something neither of us greatly cared for any more. Afterwards we went out into the park and made love under the maple trees.

  Towards midnight we walked through the Tiergarten to the Reichstag. In reality, the building was even more impressive than we’d imagined. All these famous buildings throughout the world have now been professionally lit, so that once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. Every major attraction from the Taj Mahal to Eilean Donan Castle shimmer at you in computer-timed glows of blue and red and green and white. Nevertheless, the iconic steel and glass Reichstag Dome was something special. The two materials sustained each other in perfect unity. It made you believe that transparency was everything.

  We sat in the darkened Tiergarten looking across at the illuminated Reichstag.

  Emma said, ‘Your proper work should really be this. To make a story out of glass and steel, not memory and straw. You need to deal with things as they are, not how they were.’

  ‘Even if I prefer how they were?’

  ‘Even if you prefer how they were. Nothing can be as it was. It has to be newly minted. Every day. Look at that building – redeemed for the future.’

  The following morning we caught the train to Warsaw, then south the day after to Krakow. Emma had her laptop and began her Chaplin composition. She called it ‘Glass and Steel’. She slipped a DVD into her laptop.

  ‘When was the last time you watched this?’ she asked.

  Chaplin. The Great Dictator. ‘Years ago,’ I answered.

  We watched it together as the flat Polish countryside swept by outside. I’d forgotten how funny and moving the picture was. How accurate Chaplin was with every gesture and movement and delivery. We were both in tears at the end, when Hynkel makes the great speech.

  ‘Now that’s glass and steel,’ she said. ‘Making fun of pomposity. Ridiculing fascism. Ignorance you can forgive. Stupidity you condemn.’

  We visited Auschwitz and then travelled on by bus to Slovakia and on down through Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. I liked Eastern Europe. There was less glass and steel. More concrete and dilapidated wood, and here and there through the rural areas you’d still see a lone herdsman steering goats up a hillside and men and women bent double working in the fields.

  ‘It’s why half the population are working over in Berlin and Paris and London,’ Emma said.

  We arrived in Rome from Greece on a beautiful August day. A berth on the overnight ferry from Patras to Bari, and then the early morning train north to the eternal city. I half wished Bill was with me so that he could admire the sloping vineyards we passed. I took loads of photographs to show him when I got back home. Rome itself was hot and packed with tourists, but we got a taxi to take us to our apartment. It was in an elegant building on the top floor at the back off the Piazza San Paolo alla Regola, with a wonderful view of the city. From the roof terrace you could see across to St Peter’s on one side and over towards Ostia and the Mediterranean on the other.

  The film company installed a Steinway in the apartment to help Emma compose the score. She woke at five every morning and did her ballet or yoga and then I’d join her for tea and fruit at six. She’d then open the shutters and sit at the piano and play. She insisted I listen, which was a pleasure to do. She asked me to take notes, to tell her when I thought the music ‘worked’ and when it didn’t. I protested that I was unqualified, but she said

  ‘That’s exactly why I’m asking you to listen. This is not music for critics, but for a cinema audience.’

  So I listened with my ordinary ears. Sort of like a oneman focus group.

  ‘Pompy,’ I’d say to her if I felt the music was getting too affected.

  ‘A bit more of that melody,’ I’d suggest, or ‘Maybe a bit less of that da-da-da-da, whatever it is.’

  She always finished that ‘consultation’ part of the composition by about ten am. and I was then free to go about my own business while she spent the rest of the day honing up what she’d worked on, and playing it again and again alongside various Chaplin movies which she projected on to the cinema-size screen in the viewing room. And, day by day, everything surrounding her became part of the destiny of the music. The pigeons, cooing on the window ledges. The children calling and playing in the street far below. The church bells as they pealed for matins and mid-day and vespers. The scooters and hooting cars in the Piazza. And my presence, and silence too, in the room.

  In the afternoons I walked the city. We had a hire car on permanent call from the film company and I took to driving out into the country. Not just to escape the heat and noise of the city, but to see for myself those vineyards and olive groves I promised to Bill. I got to know the Grazioni family in Casperia, who graciously agreed to show me the way they tilled and farmed the arid land that was theirs. The secret had mostly to do with irrigation, though that was just ‘la evidencia visible’ as Paolo put it. We conversed in Spanish which he spoke fluently, his mother being from Sevilla. But he had good broken English too, and when I asked him where all his knowledge came from he simply said, ‘Experience.’

  Rome is such a mythic place, so hard to leave. Who would want to depart from Raphael and Bernini and Caravaggio and Michelangelo? They made men out of marble and angels out of plaster, much as one might make music out of notes or fairies out of thin air.

  The Chaplin film was a huge success. Millions flocked to see in cinemas throughout the world, and a good portion of them purchased the disc featuring Emma’s music. It achieved everything she aimed for: melody and lyricism along with precision and clarity. Every note proved that time was fluid. After the premiere, we could hear the audience whistling and humming her theme tune as they left the theatre.

  Here in Oxfordshire the earth has been prepared for seeding. Next year will be for planting, and I have even set aside a field for harvesting straw. There’s an increasing specialist market in it for insulation and thatching. And just to balance things out, I’ve spent a good deal of time visiting the local scrapyards and architectural salvag
e centres, rescuing old school windows and sinks which I’ve reconstructed into a steel and glass dome which serves as a miniature greenhouse down by the orchard. It reminds me daily that the past is not the future.