He must have stood there for at least half an hour, watching, trying to peer through the foliage to the nests and the young inside them (if you looked carefully you could indeed see both) before finally resuming his walk.
In Paris there was the Ile des Cygnes, Swan Island, but that was an altogether staider affair, in keeping with the formal gardens and general air of symmetry which made parts of the city so elegant and so depressing at the same time.
I saw at once that he was lonely, his wife – his second wife – would say, and I decided then and there to save him from himself.
I was not lonely, I was alone, he would respond. There is a difference.
Not such a big one as all that, she would say.
Besides, he would say, one does not need to be alone to be lonely.
I did not say you did.
True, but you might have been thought to be saying that.
He will never cease putting words into my mouth, she would say. While into his I only put good food.
That’s true, he would say. With you I have grown fat and contented.
In your mind.
How can one be contented if not in one’s mind?
But fat?
Fat too.
Fat too? she would say, incredulous. You think one can be fat in one’s mind and thin in one’s body?
I do.
Then you are even crazier than I thought.
He had never imagined, when he was living in Paris after the death of his first wife, that he would ever marry again. But life had other ideas.
They all have big plans till my fist comes into contact with their bodies, as the boxer said, she would say.
What boxer?
Some boxer. What does it matter what boxer?
You pride yourself on being the fist life wields?
Yes I do, she would respond. I do pride myself.
There comes a point when you must put everything behind you and start afresh. In his little flat above the Panthéon, he said, he had found a kind of peace.
As he sauntered through Paris on those summer afternoons he sometimes thought: We live in the forests of our dreams and our desires.
The words comforted him. He would go down to the river, find a quiet spot and open his battered copy of the Regrets.
Paschal, je ne veulx point Jupiter assommer,
Ny, comme fit Vulcan, luy rompre la cervelle…
Je ne veulx deguiser ma simple poësie
Sous le masque emprunté d’une fable moisie,
Ny souiller un beau nom de monstres tant hideux:
Mais suivant, comme toy, la veritable histoire,
D’un vers non fabuleux je veulx chanter sa gloire
A nous, à noz enfans, et ceulx qui naistront d’eulx.
Paschal, I have no wish to knock Jupiter out,
Nor, like Vulcan, to split his head in two …
I have no wish to dress up my verse
In the false guise of worn-out myths,
Nor to sully the good name of those monsters of legend.
Instead, like you, I wish to convey the true story,
In simple style to sing her glory,
For us, our children and the children of our children.
That is indeed what he would have liked to do, but when he tried to render du Bellay’s strange and compelling mixture of formality and directness, let alone to replicate the rhythm and rhyme that never seemed to be sought but always to be somehow already there, it proved beyond him. So it would remain, he felt, for the rest of his life.
Yet the little volume continued both to haunt and to comfort him. He recalled how, having discovered it in the local lending library in Disraeli Road in Putney, he had gone on renewing it month after month until one day the librarian said, as she was about to stamp it for the umpteenth time: Are there no other books you want?
He had not expected to be challenged. He had not expected to be noticed. He gazed at her in alarm. I’m a slow reader in French, he said.
Especially that French, the librarian said, glancing through the book, then stamped it and handed it back to him, looking him full in the face.
He hurried out with it but decided then and there to buy his own copy, though the times were hard and he had to make do with very little. But he didn’t like the thought of someone knowing about his private life. Knowing even what books he treasured.
On some Sundays in Paris he would walk across the city to Montmartre and up to the basilica and the tatty, overcrowded Place du Tertre, and then go down the long, straight road leading north to the Porte de Clingancourt and the old flea market there. On other afternoons he would take the metro to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. He liked to track down the tombs of artists he admired, and on one afternoon alone he found those of La Fontaine, Proust, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and the mime Marcel Marceau as well as of Seurat, the great and mysterious disciple of the Impressionists who died so tragically young.
He always had a morbid streak, his wife – his second wife – would say. He was always haunting cemeteries.
Not at all, he would say. I merely wanted to pay homage to the artists I admired.
You can pay homage by reading their books, she would respond. Not by going and sobbing on their graves.
I did not sob, he would say. I gazed.
It’s the same thing.
I beg to differ.
Then beg.
They could be seen arguing endlessly in the aisles of the local supermarket, blocking the way to mothers with toddlers and visiting families stocking their holiday homes for the week of their stay.
You do not know what you are talking about, he would be saying to her, and she would be answering, No, it is you who does not know what you are talking about. I beg to differ. Then beg.
He did not remember exactly how it happened. The bank of the river seemed suddenly to give and before he could grab her she was gone. For a moment he thought of jumping in after her but she was a far better swimmer than he, so he ran along the bank beside her, looking for a place where she might be able to climb out.
It was a warm afternoon but she was shivering as she walked beside him, her thin dress sodden and clinging to her. I’ll make you a hot grog when we get home, he said. I don’t want a hot grog, she said, I want to have a bath and get into some warm clothes. You do that and I’ll make you a hot grog for when you get out, he said, but she didn’t answer.
It was only after she came out of the bath that she began to cough. She coughed all night and all the next day. He called the doctor, who did not seem unduly worried, prescribed antibiotics and a week off work. But the week went by and the cough did not subside.
In Paris he used to carry Shakespeare’s poems around with him and dip into them as he waited for the bus or sipped a coffee in one of his haunts, behind the Odeon or – perhaps his favourite – Le Fumoir in the rue de l’Amiral next to the Louvre.
Had I been toothed like him, I must confess,
With kissing him I should have killed him first.
Or:
No, lady, no; my heart longs not to groan,
But soundly sleeps while now it sleeps alone.
It seemed that, even in an apprentice poem like Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare had the words for every feeling and every situation. But why? How does the gift fall upon one man and not upon another?
I was never without that book, he would say. Once I had found it I could not let it go.
His head was always buried in a book, his wife – his second wife – would say. He had difficulty lifting it up to look at the world.
That is an exaggeration, he would say, and you know it.
He would have developed premature curvature of the spine if I had not come along, she would explain.
Another exaggeration, he would say.
He would have ended up completely bent in two.
Listen to her.
I would have had to lie down on the floor to talk to him.
We would have lain down together.
He could not believe his good fortune, he said, the way his life had panned out. Sometimes he felt it was almost too good to be true, and then he imagined a fire ripping through the farmhouse with its many wooden beams, destroying in an instant everything he had. He would stand in the garden watching the firemen struggling with the blaze, the flames rising up into the night sky, and the sound of cracking wood mingling with the acrid smell of smoke and the hiss of the water. He would watch as they carried out her body and hurried it into a waiting ambulance, and then turn to see the high roof finally caving in.
He thought of many things as he walked along the towpath past the famous Harrods Depository and up to Hammersmith Bridge in the hour he allowed himself after lunch, before he returned to the translation that was awaiting him. Sometimes he dropped in to the local fleapit and watched a Truffaut or a Bergman film. There never seemed to be more than half a dozen people there in the afternoon, many of them apparently asleep. He particularly liked coming out again into the open air to find the world exactly as he had left it, as though in his two hours’ communion with the silver screen he had, unnoticed, been through more than a normal lifetime’s experiences.
In Paris, though there were cinemas all around him, showing every conceivable film from ten in the morning till two the following morning, he found he had lost the desire to go. The thought of sitting in a darkened auditorium and watching a drama which had nothing to do with him unfold on the flickering screen had grown repulsive. Music, not moving images, was what he now craved.
Qual occulto poter di questi orrori,
Da questi amati orrori
Mal mio grado mi tragge e mi condusce
A l’odiosa luce?
What occult power among these horrors,
drags me against my will
from these horrors I love and leads me
to the loathsome light?
A l’odiosa luce. He knew what that meant, to want to live in darkness forever, never to have to get up, never to have to draw the curtains and see the light of day. L’odiosa luce.
He had always felt that the final act of Orfeo was a collective failure of nerve. Orpheus is drawn up into heaven by Apollo, the two of them singing for all they are worth.
Saliam cantando al Cielo
Dove ha virtù verace
Degno premio di sé, diletto e pace.
Let us singing rise to Heaven
where true virtue
has its due reward – joy and peace.
Is that not an insult to all that has preceded it? he asked. The court of Mantua may have wanted this, he said, but no one listening to the opera today could possibly accept it. Orfeo, he said, dealt with the death of social and heavenly harmony and with the birth of the solo voice, lamenting its own emergence and the end of millennia of choric chant. It heralds the public acknowledgement of the demise of plainsong and all it had stood for, he said, the community of Christian souls affirming their common faith through communal chanting, and of the birth of the individual, isolated, lost, inconsolable, yet able in despair to sing in a way that had never been heard before and that brought tears to the eyes of the listeners and made them feel they were in touch with their deepest selves. Such song, he said, heralds the birth of bel canto and of the dying diva’s lament. In Orpheus, he said, the soulful crooner finds his voice and after him the pop star.
Though few could follow him when he took off like this they would listen to him in rapt attention, enjoying his erudition and his passion. Afterwards a few friends would stay to a simple lunch, the local doctor and his highborn Indian wife, a retired civil servant and his horse-faced wife, an Oxford classicist who refused ever to talk about his work and who, when asked what his field was, would reply that fields were for donkeys.
Once, when the only guests were the civil servant and his wife, she cornered him between the sofa and the bookcase. Look at them! she hissed. It’s disgusting!
What is? he asked.
The way they carry on.
I’m sorry?
Anyone can see what’s going on.
I’m afraid I don’t follow you, he said.
You know, she said, looking him full in the face, that’s exactly what it is: you are afraid.
He tried to move away but she followed and pinned him to the bookcase.
Do something about it! she hissed. You understand?
Please, he said.
Because if you don’t I will.
Standing in the frozen garden he watched the flames rise into the night sky and listened to the roar of the fire as it devoured the wooden beams, mingled with the hiss of the ineffectual jets of water the firemen were still pumping into the rapidly disintegrating building.
We thought that was the end of our dream, his wife – his second wife – would say. But it’s amazing how much of the damage proved to be superficial.
I’m a survivor, she would say. Nobody can deny that I’m a survivor. You wouldn’t believe the number of times in my life that everything seemed at an end and yet I always pulled through.
You always pull through, he would echo.
He knows me well, she would say. I always do.
Yes. You always do.
Sometimes he would walk across the Luxembourg Gardens to the Montparnasse cemetery where Baudelaire is buried, and sit there on a bench among the tombstones, thinking of nothing.
I seem to have passed my life finding places where I could sit and simply think of nothing, he would say. In Putney there was a bench on the towpath where the river curves between Hammersmith Bridge and Barnes. In Paris, the cemetery of Montparnasse in particular. Besides Baudelaire, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are buried there, in the same tomb, as well as Robert Desnos, the marvellous poet murdered by the Nazis, and many of those foreign artists who made Paris their home in the first part of the twentieth century: Tristan Tzara, his fellow Romanian Constantin Brâncuși, Soutine, Zadkine, the South Americans César Vallejo and Julio Cortázar, and many others, including André Citroën, the manufacturer of France’s best-loved car. Unlike the Père Lachaise cemetery in the northeast of the city, with its weird baroque monuments, and unlike the largely treeless cemetery of Montmartre in the north, this cemetery in the south exudes a sense of peace and serenity. He would not bother to take a book with him when he set off there, he said, because he knew what he would do when he arrived: find his favourite bench, sit staring out into space, and let his mind go blank.
He sometimes talked about his early days in Putney in the south west of London. Putney, in those days, he would say, still had the feeling of post-war austerity. At the corner of the High Street and the Upper Richmond Road, and next to the Rotary Club, stood the Kardomah Café, which served the warm and watery brew that in those days passed for coffee in Britain. It always seemed to be empty and one could sit by the window and gaze out at the drab and busy High Street which had once been a portion of the road that led from London to Portsmouth and which still had a surprising number of double-decker buses trundling up and down from the Heath to the Bridge and, from there, by diverse routes, to central London and all points north and east.
One day, seeing a young woman seated at another window, he ventured to go up to her and ask if he could sit down.
She looked up, surprised. Do I know you? she asked.
I don’t think so, he said.
She made a gesture towards the rest of the room. There are lots of empty tables, she said.
He stood there, feeling foolish but determined not to back off.
She motioned him to a chair. Sit down, she said.
I haven’t seen you here before, he said.
I haven’t seen you.
True, he conceded.
She waited, looking out of the window.
I come here a great deal, he said. I like the fact that it’s so empty.
She had pale blonde hair and a dimple in her right cheek. She turned to face him. Why aren’t you working? she asked.
I work at home.
He waited for her to ask him what he did but she was silent, so he ventured the information himself: I translate, he said.
She looked at him. He bent over his coffee.
Since she said nothing he looked up and asked: Do you live here?
Uh-huh.
And what do you do?
This and that.
Meaning?
Oh…
Do you walk? he asked her.
Walk?
I mean do you like walking?
Uh-huh.
Do you ever walk to Kew?
I’ve done it, she said.
Would you like to do it with me?
She shrugged her shoulders.
What about the day after tomorrow?
All right.
They had agreed to meet at two in front of the church by the bridge. Having initiated it, however, he found himself wondering why he had done so. And when the time came he found himself sitting at the back of a café in the High Street with a view of the church. From there he watched her arrive, stand there, look at her watch, look around her, walk to the corner of the church and back, look round once more, look again at her watch, and walk away.
A few days later he caught sight of her in the High Street. He quickened his step to catch up with her, then slowed again and followed her as she turned down Lacy Road. Here the crowds thinned and he held back, afraid she would turn round and see him. But she seemed lost in her own thoughts and uninterested in anything around her. She turned again down a side street and he was afraid he had lost her. He quickened his pace and when he reached a corner there she was, some sixty feet ahead of him. He slowed again and let her gain a little distance, for now they were the only two people in the quiet suburban street, but he need not have worried, for she had climbed the stairs to the door of one of the small Victorian terraced houses that lined the street and was inserting a key into the lock of a blue door. From a distance he watched the door open and then close again. He became aware of the silence lying upon the street.
The Cemetery in Barnes Page 6