Uncle Rudolf

by Paul Bailey

  De Reszke had been influenced in his conception by the actor Tommaso Salvini, whom he had seen in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

  —It is instructive to study actors. They are often more musical than singers. If they do not respect the language, they are booed and hissed off the stage. They have no beautiful noises to hide behind.

  De Reszke got up from his chair, stubbed out his cigar and picked up a cushion. He looked down at the carpet, to which he pointed:

  —That is my Desdemona. Is she breathing? I have robbed her of life with this pillow. Or have I? Let me look closer.

  He was speaking, as always, in French, but now – now that he was Otello – he was singing and speaking, the two conjoined, in Italian:

  …e stanca, e muta, e bella

  —Oh, Andrew, his voice was eerie, full of horror and wonder. Horror at what he, Otello, had done, and wonder at the thought of her spirit floating away from him. He invested so much feeling in those nine syllables – ‘e stanca, e muta, e bella’. No, I can’t do it. I can’t match him. Why should I pretend to? And this carpet is no Desdemona, either.

  I was serenaded to sleep by my newly-met uncle on the night of 23 February, 1937, with one of the folk songs Brahms wrote for the children of Clara Schumann, the woman who could not reciprocate the idolatrous love he felt for her. It is called ‘The Guardian Angel’, though I did not know it then. I can’t say that my ears were immediately ravished – that ravishment was to happen at Christmas, when Uncle Rudolf summoned up a whole host of angels, wafting Jephtha’s daughter, Iphis, to the skies – but they were pleased enough to want him to sing to me again. And, with time, I came to understand that the music he sang and played to me on the piano, or made me listen to on his gramophone, was not the music with which he was associated by his admirers. That music, tuneful as it was, and insidiously easy to remember – as he once observed scathingly – had to be cast aside, and for reasons that weren’t entirely musical. One of those reasons, certainly the most pitiful, was the fate of my parents, which I would not learn about until I was eighteen, on the evening of the two medicinal brandies. He came to believe that operetta, frivolous as it was, grew out of the culture that killed them, and that it was his duty to protect me from it. And when he bade farewell to the ‘sinister nonsense’ in December 1945, it was in the cause of the survivors of millions of Debt Collector’s daughters and sons who had perished. He sang ‘Goodnight, Vienna’ with a contempt that was blissful to him, for it was in that city of cream cakes and Nazis that he had made the reputation he scorned. There would be no more Cossacks, no more Hussars, no more roguish brigands and gypsies unaware of the royal blood in their youthful veins. He was the same age as the century, and he wanted no more of operetta. He was greeted with sustained cheering, and he took a dozen bows as the result of that contemptuous encore, but when we were back in Nightingale Mansions he said:

  —That was the best enema ever, my darling. I’ve cleared the shit out of my system. I feel lighter already.

  I think, if I am honest, that I was disappointed by his decision to retire. I had loved the hours in his dressing room or by the side of the stage when his lucky mascot brought him the ill luck he craved. Young as I was, I sensed that he could not renew his career in serious opera, judging by the conversations I overheard, or to which I was party, with his agent or with the managers of houses in both London and Paris. He was now too old to take on Ferrando and Don Ottavio and he lacked the experience to tackle the weightier roles in the tenor repertoire. He pleaded for an opportunity to prove himself. He had been the prize pupil of Jean de Reszke; and Georges Enesco, who was still alive, would vouch for the true nature of his talent, if contacted. But the master had died in 1925, and Enesco had heard him sing in the Bucharest Conservatoire as long ago as 1918. The dates told his sad story. They were like insurmountable boulders on his path.

  Our trip to Besançon – our pilgrimage, rather, for such it turned out to be – was Uncle Rudolf’s most astute gift to his darling nephew, coming so soon as it did upon the grief his revelations had released. It was his sweet purpose to have me sit for the hour or so of Lipatti’s recital and be educated in the finer aspects of the human spirit. It was a more than musical offering I received that September afternoon – it was a lesson in self-abnegation and self-transcendence. My uncle and I were speechless for hours afterwards, his only words being those to a barman when he ordered a bottle of claret.

  We were on the point of leaving the following morning when we noticed Lipatti signing programmes for a small group of people, some of them musicians. My uncle joined the group, pulling me along with him. I was embarrassed to be in such a presence, but the grip on my wrist was firm.

  —I do not require your autograph, my uncle said in French. I want to thank you, that is all. My nephew wishes to thank you also.

  —Thank you very much, I said, reddening as he took my hand and shook it.

  —Thank you both for thanking me. You are gracious.

  I met my future wife, my wife of a year and a bit, when she came to play with me in the garden behind my uncle’s country house. We were twelve years old. Three years later, we were still friendly, though we didn’t indulge in those games of bodily exploration that children who are mutually attracted are supposed to indulge in. We kept our physical distance.

  It was Uncle Rudolf whose arms she rushed into, whose face she covered with kisses. These shows of affection did not surprise me. It was safe for a girl of her age to flirt with a man in his forties – safer by far, it was assumed, than if she had flirted with me. I can’t remember, now, what we had in common, if anything. Oh yes, I recall that, under my uncle’s expert tuition, we became adept at tennis. We once played mixed doubles against her parents, whom we beat in straight sets. That day, at least, we were as one. We allowed ourselves a winners’ embrace.

  I am being cynical. We were pleasantly disposed to one another. We were constantly reminded of our attractiveness, to the extent that we began to accept that it was our destiny, nothing less, to marry. Even my uncle, who deplored Mary’s complete lack of interest in music, shared the general view in the Sussex society we moved in that it would be a shame if such an attractive couple didn’t tie the marriage knot. Mary must have been conscious of the fact that she was suppressing her true feelings, especially when the American financier, Joshua Harris, came to stay with her family in the summer of 1950. The innocents were engaged by then. I now remember that Mary wasn’t remotely disconcerted or upset when Uncle Rudolf requested that he ‘borrow’ me for a week’s trip to France in September.

  —I can spare him for a week, Mr Rudolf. After all, I shall be spending a lifetime with him.

  Joshua Harris returned to England the following June, and sat at the back of the village church to watch us being married. At the wedding feast, for which my uncle supplied the champagne, Mary’s father amused the guests when, in the course of his speech, looking at the bride and groom, he quipped:

  —You two are rivals in prettiness. I trust you know which one of you is which.

  Prophetic words, indeed. The joke induced both laughter and applause. I was accustomed to having my eyelashes envied by women and commented on by men, but only Uncle Rudolf had said I was beautiful. ‘Prettiness’ was new to me. ‘They make a pretty couple’ became the alternative to ‘They make a handsome couple’ after Colonel Spragge’s address.

  We took our honeymoon in Rome, where we were surprised and delighted to see farmers selling their livestock in Piazza di Spagna. The first thing we heard as we made for the Spanish Steps was the bleating of sheep. We laughed, imagining such a spectacle in Trafalgar Square or Piccadilly Circus. I was alone when I visited the house in which Keats died, Mary considering my wish to pay homage to my favourite poet ‘morbid’. We strolled happily through the ruins of the Forum, but Mary had no desire to accompany me to the Colosseum. The thought of gladiators slaughtering, or being slaughtered by, wild beasts repelled her. This future lover of a man on the verge of
old age had no interest in, or curiosity about, human history.

  My uncle had arranged for us to be put up in the Hotel Excelsior, and it was there that Billy was conceived, in the very lap of luxury. Mary was patient with her fumbling, sexually immature husband, whom she astonished with her skilfulness in rendering what was flaccid halfway forceful. On the third day, I rose again, thanks to her exertions.

  We lived in London, in a service flat in Westminster, not far from the Catholic cathedral. It was there that Mary had her clandestine meetings with the adoring Joshua while I was working as my uncle’s secretary and bookkeeper in Nightingale Mansions. They were, I was to be told by Billy, particularly fond of evensong on Wednesday afternoons, when they held hands to the accompaniment of Palestrina or William Byrd, neither of whom Mary would have appreciated. Their romance flowered to that unheard music. They could pretend, as they joined the congregation, they were already united.

  How old was Billy when she deserted me? Three months? Four? Somewhere between, I suppose, since she absented herself from our jogtrotting marriage in mid-July 1952. I think I was offended more than hurt, for I quickly realized it was my son I missed in the days following her departure. I came to realize, too, during the profound and menacing silence she maintained for two years or more, that it was Billy I wanted to hold and kiss, not Mary. She could remain wherever she was, I decided. It was his safety, his welfare, that preoccupied me through many months of anguished speculation.

  Colonel Spragge’s splenetic outbursts against the scheming philanderer with one foot in the grave who had stolen his daughter from under the family’s nose were recorded verbatim in the newspapers. He would horsewhip the bounder (delightful word) within an inch of his dirty old man’s life. The ‘bravely smiling’ cuckold said nothing, as did Cicely Spragge, a taciturn adjunct to her voluble spouse, and as did Uncle Rudolf, who – being famous – was asked the most questions by the press.

  The colonel called on my uncle at Nightingale Mansions. Their conversation – or, to be precise, Colonel Spragge’s scarcely interrupted monologue – had hardly progressed beyond insults before he was shown the door and advised not to come back. From Mayfair he proceeded to Westminster. His persistent ringing of the doorbell alerted me to the undoubted fact that an argument was in the offing. Something much more unsettling was to occur.

  —Come in, I said. May I fix you a drink?

  —There’s no drink strong enough to calm me down. No, you can’t fix me a drink. What you can do for me is explain what kind of man it is who can lose his wife to a liver-spotted Yid who’s older than her father.

  —You are referring to me?

  —Who else?

  I was incapable of giving him an answer. He fumed, loudly.

  —You couldn’t satisfy her down there, is that it?

  —I gave her a son.

  —Wonder of wonders. Stop fluttering those pretty eyelashes and tell me the truth.

  —What truth?

  —The truth about your failure as a husband.

  —She loves Mr Harris, or his money. She doesn’t love me, that’s clear.

  —Why should she love a man who can’t fulfil his natural duty?

  I suggested, with great restraint, that he seek out Mr Harris, horsewhip him as threatened, bring his daughter to her senses as promised, and to leave me to take stock of my myriad inadequacies in private. I wondered, politely, why he was so obsessed with my eyelashes, which were nature’s doing, not mine, and invited him to accept a calming drink.

  —You speak the fancy English of a foreigner. Everything’s foreign about you, including your disgusting prettiness. You don’t even look like a man.

  I wished him goodnight, and a safe and pleasant journey back to the country. I hoped he would have the courtesy to pay my respects to Mrs Spragge, whom I had been pleased to call my mother-in-law.

  Here I am on a February morning, being lifted from my bed by Tata, who is smiling down on me. It is dark outside. A candle is burning faintly in a corner of the room.

  —Is Mama home? I ask, as I had asked the day before, and the day before that.

  —Not yet, my dear one. She will be home when you come back from your wonderful holiday with Uncle Rudi. I think you must call him Uncle Rudolf, now that he is a famous singer.

  —I want to wait here for Mamica.

  —I know you do. But your uncle has written to me saying that he really must see his one and only nephew, and he would be very unhappy, Andrei, very unhappy, if you did not go.

  —Show me the funny picture again, Tata.

  He takes from his pocket the photograph he will give the guard in Paris. I ask Tata if my uncle Rudi or Rudolf always has rings in his ears and a sword in his belt.

  —No, no. He is playing a part, Andrei. On a stage. In a theatre. You will visit a theatre in London, I promise. That will be exciting for you.

  —Are you coming to London, Tata? I ask, hoping that his answer will be different from the one I heard yesterday.

  —I told you, Andrei. I have business in Paris. Important business, my sweet one. You will feel very grown-up, having a holiday without me.

  —And Mama.

  —And Mama, yes. And Mama. My brother is a kind man, as I must have told you a hundred times. You will be safe with him.

  —I am safe here, Tata.

  —I can hear Mircea’s horse. Listen. Clip clop, clip clop. You have five minutes to do what you need to do. And then we must wash and dress you and get you ready.

  He lowers me to the floor.

  —Be quick, he says. Be as fast as you can. Hurry, hurry, lazybones. We have a train to catch, remember.

  We are in the hallway. A thought comes to me, which I say out loud.

  —Mama has left her icon behind, Tata. She took it with her when she went away last time.

  —Did she?

  —Yes, Tata. She has to pray to the Virgin every day. You know she has to.

  He is lost for words, or lies. He tells me to hurry or we shall be late and then I will miss my holiday with Uncle Rudolf. And what a pity that would be.

  —Mama’s faith will come to her aid, Andrei. My mother’s helpful faith. My father’s business in Paris. The beginning of the end of the old words.

  In 1955, my uncle left Nightingale Mansions and sold his Elizabethan manor. He was through, he said, with the grand way of life. Now that it was certain that he would never sing in public again, he wanted to live modestly, anonymously. He moved, and I moved with him, to a house in west London, with a view of the Thames.

  —Not quite the Mediterranean, but it will do as second best.

  Even though he had retired, there was enough work to occupy his secretary and bookkeeper. There were royalty statements from the record company that had once had him under exclusive contract; fan letters to answer and have him, reluctantly, sign; requests to make appearances on radio and television light entertainment programmes which had to be refused without his ever knowing about them; journalists and impresarios to keep at bay. These last were especially difficult to fend off, because they were the most insistent in their demands to interest Mr Peterson in touring revivals of The Gypsy Baron and The Desert Song.

  Uncle Rudolf came into my office while I was explaining to a brash theatrical manager, in tones of willed calmness, that the great star of operetta had chosen to become a recluse. Yes, I repeated, a recluse. Like a monk. He had cut himself off from his past and almost everything associated with it.

  —Tell him, Andrew, that I am absorbed these days in the works of Béla Bartók.

  And this was true. He was completely absorbed. Bartók’s place in his musical re-education, as he called it, was paramount, for here was the one composer who sent him back in memory to a childhood of folk song and gypsy music in a country that had yet to turn bestial. He even recognized some of the tunes Bartók had picked up and notated on his travels through Hungary and Romania in 1916. He talked of the tilinca, a stringed instrument the shepherds played, and said the sou
nd of Bartók reminded him of yet other sounds – of insects, birds, horses, cattle. This was the natural world he was born into and revelled in as a boy, along with Roman and their fellow scamps, before his life was taken over by, and with, the worst kind of artifice. While I sat at my desk upstairs, dealing with the remnants of his career, I would often stop and listen to him coming to somewhat uncertain grips with the complexities of Mikrokosmos on the grand piano below. On calmer days, he would be content with the early pieces such as the Fourteen Bagatelles or the Three Burlesques or, most poignant of all, the Two Romanian Dances of 1910, the year in which he first discovered that God had presented him with the voice of an angel.

  If he wept, he said, I was not to attempt to comfort him. He had a handkerchief at the ready. Any tears he shed would be those of happy reminiscence. I was not to be alarmed or upset. I was to leave him with his thoughts.

  How could I leave him to his thoughts when they so often impinged on my own? I was the contented prisoner of his melancholy, I realize now, and in no manner prepared to escape from it. The prison’s alarm system would not, could not, go off. The guards and warders had been freed to take a permanent holiday.

  I was the diligent Andrew by day, studying hard to impress his uncle and the teachers who afforded him special attention, but at night, invariably, I was the terrified Andrei, chasing after his uncatchable parents. The two seldom merged, but on one occasion, during a rehearsal of The Winter’s Tale on the stage in the school hall, Andrew, unable to say the lines

  …When you do dance, I wish you

  A wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do

  Nothing but that; move still, still so,

  And own no other function…

  without faltering over ‘A wave o’ th’ sea’, because of the missing ‘f’ and ‘e’, became, in a frustrated instant, the boy in the snow, blinded by whiteness. It was the old words he heard himself spluttering, to the amazement of his dusky Perdita and the concern of Mr Harper, who was producing the play.