The Cemetery in Barnes

by Gabriel Josipovici

  The line is thin, he would admit, but it is still there.

  In your head, she would say.

  That’s where it should be, he would say.

  To tell the truth, she would say, he did not much like living alone.

  I did and I didn’t, he would say.

  You didn’t but you tried to pretend that you did.

  There was no pretence about it, he would say. I did and I didn’t.

  You see, his wife would say. Stubborn.

  There are joys in solitude which one can never experience in married life.

  Perhaps, she would say. But marriage saved you from despair.

  Who’s the stubborn one? he would ask as he handed her the record he had chosen, while busying himself with the gramophone.

  I’m not stubborn, she would say. I’m right.

  Sometimes their closest neighbours, a retired civil servant and his plain buck-toothed wife, would stay to lunch and help clear away the glasses and the nuts. The wife would put on a kitchen apron, invariably choosing the yellow plastic one with See what I can do with a knife and the appropriate image emblazoned on the front, and wash up the dirty glasses while her husband helped lay the table, exchanging risqué jokes sotto voce with the mistress of the house. Whenever they visited he would make a point of bringing a bouquet of flowers, freshly picked from his garden or greenhouse, handing it to her with a flourish.

  He had first come across du Bellay in the lending library in Putney. He was acquainted from his undergraduate studies with the poetry of Wyatt and even of Ronsard, and could not re-read Shakespeare’s early poems too often, especially Venus and Adonis with its lovely line, ‘The sea hath bounds but deep desire hath none’, but as soon as he opened du Bellay’s poems that day in the Putney library he knew this was the poet for him.

  Entre les loups cruels j’erre parmy la plaine,

  Je sens venir l’hyver, de qui la froide haleine

  D’une tremblante horreur fait herrisser ma peau.

  Amidst the cruel wolves I wander, lost,

  And feel the winter come, whose icy frost

  With trembling horror makes my skin to crawl.

  Poetry was his first love, his wife would say as she poured out the drinks for their guests in the sun-filled living room of their converted farmhouse high up in the Black Mountains above Abergavenny. As for me, she would say, I had never read a poem before I met him. It was he who taught me to understand poetry and to appreciate it.

  You had other qualities, he would say.

  Perhaps, she would say, but the appreciation of poetry was not amongst them.

  Their friends were all in awe of her, but they found her laughter infectious and envied him his good fortune and the serenity of their life together.

  One does not easily get over something like that, he would say, referring to the death of his first wife. It takes time to begin to live again, time to take your place in the world again.

  They had been standing on the bank, close to the Harrods Depository, looking down at the water. Then a gust of wind had caught her straw hat and lifted it off her head. She must have slipped as she lunged for it, and the bank seemed to crumble beneath her feet. She cried out and was gone.

  He had stood for a moment, panic-stricken, wondering what he had done. He could see her blonde head bobbing about in the water beneath him, fighting the current, but the bank fell away steeply where he stood and, short of jumping in after her, there was nothing he could do. She was a much better swimmer than he and he was sure she would soon turn and swim downstream until she found a place where she could get out. And this, in time, she did.

  They did not speak as they walked home. He held her close and he could feel her shivering uncontrollably beneath her thin summer dress. I will never forget how she shivered, he said. How uncontrollably she shivered.

  In Paris the days followed each other with monotonous regularity. I have always been a creature of habit, he said. I was a creature of habit before I married and I remained one after my marriage. We do not change, he would say as his wife – his second wife – poured the drinks for their guests in the living room of their converted farmhouse in the Black Mountains. Today too I make sure I stick to my little routines.

  I make sure he sticks to his little routines, his wife would say, laughing her deep-throated laugh.

  Only when you do things automatically, he would say, is there a chance of being surprised. And what is life without surprises?

  I loved my solitude and my routine, he would say. I loved waking up in the morning and peering out of the skylight to catch my first glimpse of the dome of the Panthéon in the greyness of a Parisian winter or the bright sunshine of a Parisian spring. I loved putting on my hat and starting down the stairs of the house and then down the steps outside. I loved buying the same things in the same shops and eating the same food in the same bars and bistros, day after day. I loved coming back to my room in the evening and listening to my records. And I loved running my bath last thing at night, then getting in and letting the stains of the day flow slowly out of me into the warm water.

  Of course, he would say, there are times, with such an existence, when for no reason that you can understand, everything turns black. There are times when the order you have so carefully established seems suddenly unable to protect you from the darkness.

  That’s when it’s time to get married, his wife – his second wife – would say.

  Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t.

  No perhaps about it. No perhaps at all.

  Sometimes their closest neighbours, a retired civil servant and his wife, would stay to lunch. The wife would lay the table in gloomy silence while her husband helped their hostess wash the glasses at the sink, howling with laughter at some joke she had made. He had a strange braying laugh, which rose to a pitch, was suddenly cut short, rose again, and abruptly died.

  I wonder what the joke is, the wife would say, but he would not answer, standing as he usually did when he was alone by the plate-glass window, looking down into the valley below and across at the glorious mountains of Wales.

  Occasionally, in Paris, he would spend his evenings struggling to render the sonnets of du Bellay into English. He had read somewhere, and he agreed with the criticism, that those of du Bellay’s friend and more famous contemporary, Ronsard, could often be cut down from fourteen to ten lines without suffering unduly; du Bellay’s, never.

  Maintenant je pardonne à la doulce fureur,

  Qui m’a faict consumer le meilleur de mon aage,

  Sans tirer aultre fruict de mon ingrat ouvrage,

  Que le vain passetemps d’une si longue erreur.

  He loved the old spellings, doulce, faict, aultre, fruict, and the absolute but totally unforced regularity of the rhymes. He loved the two ‘a’s in aage, which enacts, as one sees it, and makes one feel in one’s mouth as one says it, the slow passing of the years. He loved the way a word like erreur retained its primal sense of errer, to wander, just as the word amazed, he had learned as a student, conveyed to Spenser and Milton the sense of being lost in a maze. Ronsard had the greater ease, the greater charm, but it was precisely the lack of charm, the sense of someone striving not to please or delight but rather to set things down exactly as he felt them, which moved him so in du Bellay. It seemed to him that, hidden in these little sonnets, seemingly so perfunctory, so matter-of-fact, lay the secret of life itself, if only he could find it. But when he tried to make them his own, to render them into acceptable modern English, he lost the rhymes; and then, he began to realise, he had lost everything, for it was in the tension between the strict formality of the sonnet, its metre and rhyme, and the urgent and seemingly artless content, that their mystery lay. Yet when he tried to retain the rhymes he lost the ease and simplicity of the original. More often than not he would lay down his notebook without having achieved anything and go into the little bathroom, run the bath, and return to put away the book and take the cover off the bed and put it on the armc
hair before returning to the bathroom to brush his teeth, by which time the bath would be full.

  Oblivious of his presence, she would walk ahead of him along the footbridge, as quietly and in as self-contained a manner as she always did when they were together. In the evenings he would question her about her day at the office and her return journey, or probe to see if she perhaps had an inkling that he had been following her, but she remained noncommittal, saying that nothing of note had happened, that everything was as it had always been, the tube as crowded and her final walk home as much of a relief as usual. He would apologise again for not having been at the station to meet her, but she would only shrug her shoulders and say it didn’t matter, it was more important that he get on with his work. At times like that he wanted to scream, to shake her by the shoulders and ask her what did matter to her, but he was not that kind of person, so he merely turned away and busied himself with the dishes to hide from her an emotion which he did not fully understand himself.

  Sometimes, in the early afternoons, he would wander along the towpath and find himself looking round after the loving couples who had just passed him, and sometimes after the girls walking their dogs who always seemed so carefree and yet so self-contained. He always half hoped that they too would be looking back, but when, occasionally, this happened, he was overcome by confusion and hurried on, hoping they had not noticed him.

  Sometimes the quartet rehearsed in their flat in Putney, but most often at the home of some other member of the group who lived nearer the centre of town. The quartet consisted of his wife, a school friend and her solicitor husband, and a bearded maths teacher called Frederick Aspinall. He liked to hear them at work in the living room and would sometimes, on his way to the bathroom or the kitchen, stop by the door to listen. Once, as he stood there with his ear to the door, it suddenly opened and the maths teacher, coming out in a hurry, almost banged into him.

  Frightfully sorry! he muttered. Didn’t see you there in the gloom!

  Though he had, in the course of his life, read or seen most of Shakespeare’s plays, it was the early poems, the so-called erotic epyllia, that he found himself returning to again and again as he sat high above the street in his quiet Paris flat. Venus and Adonis in particular he could not read often enough, turning the words over in his mouth as though to suck the last ounce of sweetness from them.

  She red and hot as coals of glowing fire,

  He red for shame, and frosty in desire.

  Or:

  And nuzzling in his flank the loving swine

  Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin.

  The first hour of the day was the best of all as, breakfast over, he sat down in the early morning light, drew the pile of white sheets towards him, made sure his pencil was well sharpened (he always wrote with an HB pencil, easy to erase), re-read the last sentence he had translated the day before, and plunged in. He always began a new day’s work on a new sheet, a habit he had acquired in the course of his very first professional translation. Even the dullest, the most absurd and badly written books were, for that first hour, a pleasure to translate. He felt himself flowing forward in a curious and delightful combination of concentration and relaxation in which no problem was too difficult to solve almost instantly, and he hardly ever had recourse to a dictionary.

  Towards the end of the hour, though, he would gradually start to become conscious of what he was doing. First he would become aware of the pleasure his work was affording him and the ease with which he was moving forward, and then he would find himself slowing down, chewing on his pencil a little more frequently than before, realise he was spending more and more time looking around the room than actually at work, and, finally, get up from his desk in disgust.

  Concentration is a mysterious thing, he would say. Why are some people so much better at it than others? Why is one so much more alert one day than another?

  To concentrate you have to be happy, his wife – his second wife – would say. If you’re unhappy it’s no surprise that your mind wanders.

  It depends what you mean by happy, he would say.

  Happy is happy, she would say. There are no two ways about it.

  Once he had gone up to the house in Islington where she was playing with her friends after work. He had waited behind a tree, keeping watch on the front door, and when she had finally come out, alone, had followed her to the underground station and all the way home. He often wondered whether she had seen him that day. She had looked round once or twice and, at Earl’s Court, where they had to change from the Piccadilly to the District Line, he had found himself dangerously close to her on the escalator. He had kept his head down and, outside, on the platform, had taken care to merge with the waiting crowd. He was almost certain he had got away with it but could never, in the nature of things, be sure. As ever, she gave nothing away.

  It was as he was drying himself after his bath, one foot in the eddying water and the other on the edge of the bathtub, that he saw it, a long thin scar stretching from his right knee to the top of his thigh.

  It never completely healed, he would say as he spoke of those Paris years. See, I still have it.

  You never wanted it to heal, his wife – his second wife – would say.

  How does one know what one wants? he would say, smiling as he carefully took the record from her.

  Io la Musica son, ch’ai dolci accenti

  So far tranquillo ogni turbato core.

  He had found the little volume at the end of a shelf in the local library in Putney and taken it home, not knowing what to expect. But as soon as he opened it he knew that this was the book for him. He had read it through a dozen times before he had to bring it back and he only did so after he had gone out and bought the identical book at the French Bookshop on King’s Road. After that he carried it with him everywhere, when he set out on his afternoon walks along the towpath or over the Heath or in the tube as he went to meet his wife to go to a concert.

  I do not sing, Magny, but weep my woes,

  Or rather say that weeping I them chant,

  So that by chanting them I them enchant:

  And that is why, Magny, I sing both day and night.

  It did not matter who Magny was, he lives in this poem almost as much as does the poet, a sympathetic friend to whom it is possible to write. The Regrets are full of such friends.

  Do not be surprised, Ronsard, you who are half of me,

  If France reads no more of your du Bellay.

  Do not think, Robertet, that Rome as it is now

  Is like the Rome which once so pleased you.

  Mauny, let us take a liking to bad luck,

  For how long does the good kind last?

  You never see me, Pierre, without saying

  That I should study less and make love instead.

  By talking to his absent friends, du Bellay begins to understand who he is. Without them there would have been no Regrets. Without them he would have remained mute. For you never just talk to yourself. You have to have another to talk to, even when you are alone.

  We are social beings, she would say. We need others in order to be ourselves.

  That’s true, he would say. Yet we also need solitude.

  He did not literally pull up his trousers to show them the scar, but so vivid was his description that all their friends and acquaintances were sure that at some point they had seen it.

  I was in my bath, he would say, scrubbing myself automatically as one does and feeling vaguely uneasy without quite being able to put my finger on the source of my unease, and then drying myself slowly and methodically as I always did, with my foot on the edge of the bath and my leg bent at the knee, when I saw it: a long thin line running from my right knee to the thigh, the kind of scar a cat leaves when it scratches you. I looked at it in astonishment. I didn’t know what to do.

  So you did nothing, his wife would say.

  I mean I did not know how to account for it.

  Perhaps you did not want to.
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  Perhaps.

  Perhaps perhaps perhaps, she would say mockingly. Always perhaps.

  He would look at her in admiration as she stood wiping the record before passing it to him, or handing round the drinks in the sun-filled room where they entertained their guests. When he laid it on the turntable and gently lowered the stylus everyone would stop talking.

  Ma tu, gentil cantor, s’a tuoi lamenti

  Già festi lagrimar queste campagne,

  Perch’ora al suon de la famosa cetra

  Non fai teco gioir le valli e i poggi?

  But you, gentle singer, since your laments

  Once wrung from these fields tears of sorrow,

  Why now do you not, with your renowned lyre,

  Make the hills and valleys ring with joy?

  He could not understand why she asked that particular couple to lunch and his heart sank when he found himself with the horse-faced wife who had nothing to say to him and to whom he had nothing to say. Once she cornered him by the sofa and started to complain about her husband, accusing him of cruelty, insensitivity, indifference, philandering. He tried to squirm past but she had him trapped.

  Do you think I don’t know what’s going on in that kitchen? she said. Do you think I’m so blind I can’t see what they’re up to?

  Up to? he said.

  Don’t give me that, she said.

  I’m not giving you anything, he said.

  She turned away from him with a strange snorting sound and he took the opportunity to move unobtrusively as far away from her as he could.

  He loved to talk about those distant days in Paris when he would sit down to work at seven-fifteen every morning and by eleven o’clock feel that he had earned his morning cup of coffee. On his strolls through the city he had come to know it well, the stalls on the rue Moufetard, the smart shops on the rue de Rivoli, the cemeteries and the gardens, the alleys and the arcades. Only the museums I avoided, he said. It was as if not just my mind but my body had no desire to take in the fruits of a culture on which I had once been so keen.