She stood on the pavement, watching, at a loss what to do as Nino conducted the traffic, airily tickling one driver with an index finger to brighten his rhythm, then patting another to slow her to an andante. Barbara began waving to him, trying to bring him over out of the melée, but he was alight with excitement as he turned this way and that, now sweeping his arm over the cars on the downhill run, now chivvying the other stream that was grinding up the incline.
That stretch of the rise to Highgate is a bad boy’s dare to cross, a death sentence for the elderly: a bus route and a thoroughfare for heavy freight, with residents’ cars parked on both sides, and she saw that Nino was beginning to lurch and twist as drivers started to hoot at him, leaning out of their windows and shouting. He paid no heed to them and did not seem to notice Barbara either as she tried to get his attention but dared not step out through the angry traffic jam. Flecks of sweat and spittle flew around him; his gestures were choppy and loose, windmilling with clownish heaviness. But he plunged on, his eyes half-closed, his sparse hair, a tangerine glow, awry.
The drivers could have responded with a foot on the accelerator, wipers sawing, tootles and blasts, dips and swells of their radios as if playing a piece by Steve Reich. But she realised that the trouble, which had begun to show at school towards the end of Nino’s time there, the garbled words, erratic timekeeping, and sudden blanks, now had him in its grip, and the mood in the road was turning ugly.
She was staff at a former Direct Grant school that had become an Independent, but Nino had been a supply teacher only; he’d come in now and then to give music lessons – piano, chiefly, but he’d also stand in as choirmaster and conductor. At work he’d been a bit of a know-all, but a ‘good citizen’, as the phrase went, who’d take on any task he could manage – and show grace in doing so. At rehearsals of the school orchestra, Nino would treat the tone-deaf player on the triangle with as much courtesy as the first violins. But because he didn’t have papers or formal qualifications, the school had never given him a secure position. All had been lost, he said, in the many upheavals in his life.
When the cars eventually halted long enough for Barbara to make her way to him and fetch him to the safety of the pavement, he didn’t know who she was. He was stained, and she smelled the staleness off him; he’d painted in his eyebrows crookedly. His shirt stuck to his chest in dark patches; the tangerine showed white at the roots against his henna’ed, flaking scalp. Nino, the immaculately manicured musician, who wore a signet ring of carnelian engraved with his name in Arabic script and brushed his suits carefully (they’d been made by a tailor in Alexandria – his name was inked on the inside of the breast pocket he had once turned out for Barbara to read), was dandified in an old-fashioned way, and she knew he would be ashamed if he knew the state he was in.
She coaxed him back to the house where he occupied the top flat, which, he always sighed, was sad for his cat, sitting in the upstairs window gazing at birds in flight or in the trees. In earlier days the two of them had often talked together there during break, once they’d discovered in the staff room that they were such close neighbours. Both her children were grown and Desmond, her husband, didn’t miss her unless she was very late back. So she’d dawdle behind with Nino, drinking Turkish coffee like toffee in thimbles while he played her old LPs until she began to think crackle was part of the music, like the flaws enhancing a master’s ceramics. She heard how he’d grown up among the long-rooted Italian-Jewish community in Egypt after his parents emigrated with his sister and himself, then a tiny baby, from Ancona in 1935 to avoid the Fascists. ‘They could sense it coming,’ he said, ‘like dogs howling long before the earthquake gives its first rumble.’ And he jerked his head back and howled, but in a throaty hiss; then brought his face close to hers and grimaced. That was when Barbara first glimpsed the disorder that was already breaking up his mind.
The family settled among other Italians in Cleopatra, a suburb of Alexandria. ‘But it wasn’t anything like the name suggests – it was a poor suburb. It was a “sink estate”.’ Nino laughed. ‘The women left to become nannies for the families of the rich in Cairo. Nannies, and sometimes, Pappa’s … well, you know what – his trick.’
Nino’s English was pretty fluent, but he picked up the odd incongruous word or turn of phrase from his pupils. Nino looked Italian and moved his body like an Italian, as if his feet and hands were small and light, though in fact he had pianist’s hands with strongly developed muscular pads to the thumb and on the palm. He’d first come to England in the wake of Suez. ‘Foreigners’ businesses were gradually closed down, one by one, and my father had a small draper’s shop near the centre of Alexandria – but all assets were being frozen, property seized, no matter how small. We weren’t posh – no way. But it made no difference.’
The evening Barbara found him conducting the traffic, she left him at the door. She made some excuse about not going in. He turned his face to hers, full square, and she quailed from the blind milkiness in his blue eyes threaded with red. But then something clicked and came into shape behind them and he mouthed her name, ‘Barbara, Barbara May,’ slowly, and then added, ‘teaches the girls and boys about Dido and Aeneas …’ His look fell slowly to her lips, and he sang almost soundlessly the thin line of a melody she did not know. Barbara shivered; it reminded her of the time she’d met a parrot, and the bird’s black tongue played between the two hooked nebs of its beak and pecked at her coquettishly. Her hand flew to her own mouth to cover it, and she turned and almost broke into a run.
Nino alluded to a wife in the past and mentioned children, but Barbara had assumed they were all long behind him, part of a world of custom and opinion when protestations of heterosexuality were necessary to survival.
After Nino died, a note arrived from someone who identified herself without further explanation as his daughter, Bila. Written on a scrap of paper, the note said simply:
Dear Barbara May,
I found your name on a list my father left, distributing his effects. He specifically wanted you to have the enclosed.
‘Enjoy!
Yours with good wishes,
Bila, née Sanvitale
The envelope had arrived by hand. There was no return address. Bila must have been clearing his flat. Had she rung the doorbell? Barbara wouldn’t know, and anyhow, she’d probably been at work.
Inside, there was a plain brown folder with a single phrase pencilled on the cover:
Elissa – Cairo, 1950
Holding the folder in her hands, she had a flash: she’d been talking to Nino, grizzling in the staff room about teaching Virgil to sixteen-year-olds, when Nino said, ‘Try playing them Dido and Aeneas, that last lament, with the great, incomparable Flagstad – Kirsten Flagstad. Surely then, Barbara, even the hardest of hard nuts will begin to …’ – his hand passed over his heart – ‘to feel. To feel something happening inside. They act tough, but they’re not that tough.’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’
When Barbara first taught Virgil, the class used to snigger and even blush at the cataract of Dido’s passion and then her fury. Now the intensity of her love made them snort. They laughed in disbelief that she felt she had to kill herself. Brutally, they wanted her to turn on her lover, kill him instead.
‘When she sings “Remember me, but ah! forget my fate”, Dido is right, you know,’ she’d said. ‘She doesn’t want anyone to suffer afterwards on her account. She’s thinking of us.’
‘No, no,’ cried Nino, and when he became excited his Italian tones came back more pronouncedly. ‘We must forget all that. None of it happened like that – it’s all due to that dreadful Roman collaborator! It’s all Virgil’s invention.’
Barbara was discomfited; he was showing how much he knew, and about her subject. Stiffly, she interrupted him: ‘Dido says that because she’s ashamed. She’s disgraced in the eyes of society and of her world. She isn�
��t really married at all. It’s an old story – she’s been tricked like a silly goose of a girl. That’s what she wants us to forget.’
‘But nothing in it is true. Not a word of it. Roman slanders. Official lies. Politics. Piety –’
‘Stories and poems don’t have to be true!’ Barbara was now sure of her ground. ‘In fact, they’d be very dull if they followed history – so, good for Virgil, if he did make up such a terrific, tragic love affair!’
‘“I think you’ll recognise this –”,’ Nino replied. ‘That’s what a storyteller always says to capture the audience. And Virgil brings off this great stroke of recognition because his Dido suffers what everyone longs to suffer: extreme passion! It’s an ideal state, to love more than one’s loved in return. Ah! to be sedotta e abbandonata … of course it is.’ He laughed, quietly, and went on, ‘But you can push a story in other directions – ones that are less frenzied. Towards ordinary moments of love and satisfaction and happiness. The big epic poets don’t bother with those. They like Dido dead or dying. Widow Dido. Dead as a Dodo Dido. Virgil loves making us watch her throw herself into the flames.’
‘That’s unfair! We’re on her side,’ Barbara protested. ‘Virgil doesn’t admire Aeneas for abandoning her the way he does. He can’t help making us feel a kind of … contempt for his hero, that perfect specimen of the repressed English public schoolboy, compelled by duty, out of touch with his feelings.’
‘Virgil had Egypt in mind,’ Nino had also said in the course of that conversation, making a sour face as he tasted the cafeteria coffee they were having together in the lunch break at school. ‘Dido is an Oriental queen, she is Elissa, the exiled Queen of Tyre, and you know Oriental queens are bad news.’
Before the close of that conversation, Barbara had wanted to get away, but Nino laid his hand on hers: ‘One day,’ he said, ‘we’ll talk about Elissa, the true Dido, before Virgil got to her.’
She didn’t pull her hand away, though she was uneasily aware of its pressure.
In spite of her irritation, Barbara tried out Nino’s idea in her class: she turned on the overhead projector, and an image of Elizabeth Taylor floated on the screen, her eyebrows in arcs like swallows’ wings, her eyes like birds with eyeliner tails; she was supreme in the cobra diadem.
Nino had said, ‘There’s another story, you know.’
‘Look through Dido,’ she told her class. ‘And what do you see? Cleopatra.’
There were some letters in the folder, still in their envelopes lined with blue tissue paper and addressed in a hesitant hand with curly capitals and lots of loops, the script of someone who does not write very much. The stamps were Egyptian. She held the bundle close to her nose, expecting the perfume of an expensive milieu, jasmine and Turkish cigarettes, but London damp from Nino’s cupboard had overlaid them with a mushroomy bloom. Underneath it were some sheets of a text, a carbon copy of something composed on an old typewriter, and several closely written pages of a score.
The first letter was signed in clear letters Banou Zafarin; it was dated 25 March 1949, and was written in French. King Farouk was going to turn thirty the following year, and she was answering the cher maitre’s interesting offer to compose a piece to celebrate the birthday. She was polite but eager; she expressed nostalgia for the days when Aida was created for the opening of the Suez Canal, when the Khedivial Opera House greeted the haut ton who flowed to Cairo as the guests of Mohammed Ali, no expenses spared. Mme Zafarin was recently widowed, it turned out, and her husband’s brother, who was now her guardian, had a position of some influence at court – hence the indirect approach Nino was attempting.
As the correspondence grew, she talked more often of her two daughters, Amina and Zubayda, whom Nino was teaching, and of her husband, who had been very musical, and how she herself loved to play. She began to confide: Abdel, her beau-frère, did not share the qualities of her own beloved husband.
On the face of it, the correspondence stayed formal and reticent. Each letter from Mme Zafarin began, without variation, ‘Cher maître’ and never progressed to ‘Nino’ or even ‘M. Sanvitale’; but the phrase began to acquire a skittish, ironic tone, as if it were becoming a pet name between them. Yet, beneath the courtly phrasing and necessary decorum, Barbara could sense excitement rising: the rhythm of their sending (the first twelve letters arriving in as many days) conveyed how Banou Zafarin was glimpsing the chance of something igniting. Her writing became more rapid and fluid as her hopes grew that Nino’s plan would lift the stultifying round of ladies’ lunches and wealthy widows’ charity dos.
In her tentative hand, Mme Banou Zafarin informed the cher maitre, Nino, that his idea had been received with interest at the Palace and the beau-frère would soon be raising it with their splendid young ruler.
Barbara had agreed with Nino that they would have another Dido-Cleopatra conversation, another time. But that time had never come. Rumours about his forgetfulness grew, his air of worn-out cosmopolitanism became a reproach, as if he were posted at the school gates, begging. There were stains on his forlorn tie. An inspector recommended restructuring, and Nino’s arrangement, such as it was, wasn’t renewed.
ii
Barbara smoothed the onionskin, brittle with age. She began to read:
Elissa, or The Triumph of Africa
Lyric drama in six tableaux
dramatis personae
Elissa, queen of TyreMlle Amina Zafarin (soprano)
Sychaeus, her husband,to follow (mezzo-soprano)
a priest
Pygmalion, her brotherMlle. Zubayda Zafarin (mezzo-soprano)
Iarbas, king of Mauritania,to follow (mezzo-soprano)
suitor for Elissa’s handto follow (mezzo-soprano)
Assassins; Tyrians; Chorus of the schools
Mauritanians; Carthaginians;of Cairo and Alexandria
virgins and nymphs; courtiers
and attendants etc etc
The story so far:
In Tyre, principal city of the ocean-going Phoenicians, one of the richest kingdoms in the ancient world, and originator of the alphabet, the king is dying. Elissa is his heir, but her brother Pygmalion is enraged and plots to take the throne.
(Aria, here, for a mezzo, and your younger daughter, Madame, has a very pleasing, rather deeper timbre than her sister.)
‘The historical Elissa is not a woman who gives up in despair or shame. She is a strategist, the founder of a nation, a North African nation. Bref, a new woman.
Barbara turned the pages of the score, following the scenes: the murder of Sychaeus in the temple of Hercules as he was making a sacrifice to the gods, by assassins hired by Elissa’s own brother.
It was a hugely ambitious, sprawling work, Barbara could see, filled with passionate laments (‘Darkest of destinies’, C minor) and, after Elissa has escaped and set sail for Carthage, a rousing chorale (‘Africa! Africa! The future of our people!’)
The passage was marked in the margin:
– C’est très bien! J’aime beaucoup!
At one juncture, when Elissa, en route to her new city, cheerfully takes on a shipload of sailors’ sweethearts to populate Carthage, Mme Zafarin became quite bothered:
‘Come, come, cher maître, you must be joking!’
She proposed instead that the young girls play peris and nymphs:
‘This would be much more appropriate for jeunes filles bien élevées, and besides the costumes will be much more attractive.’
The whole gigantic work came to a grand finale with the marriage of Elissa to the king of Mauritania, and a wedding march (allegro vivace, D major).
iii
So: no Aeneas, and a school production, with the principal roles given to the daughters of Mme Zafarin, Nino’s correspondent.
Barbara explained to her husband, when he came in that evening, that unaccountably she, who cou
ldn’t play the piano or sing a note, had been left a score by a colleague who had died that year. She added that he was ‘That Egyptian – with the carrotty dyed hair – you remember him, don’t you?’
Desmond looked vague, but when Barbara frowned, he said, ‘Ah, yes, indeed I do. Left you something, did he? How very nice.’
‘Can’t think why,’ said Barbara, fighting impatience. Nino’s bare-faced flattery of the fat Egyptian monarch was pretty sickening, she thought, but even so, had there ever been a smidgeon of a chance that Nino could have brought off this vast work he was planning?
‘Cher maitre’, wrote Mme Zafarin. ‘Thank you for the score, which I have received safely. I have begun to play. The music is agreeable but …’ She needed a fellow player, she wrote, as Nino had composed the piano medley for four hands and so far, even under his tuition, her daughters were not quite up to it.
Barbara looked again at the music in the folder – and there it was, another pair of hands was involved. The piece was a duet for four hands, with Nino the teacher taking the harder part, the student at his side on his right the less demanding music.
She thought back to the times Nino had invited her in, charmed her at his table with his records, his conversation, his wine, his coffee. Had she missed something? But then she paused – she was a woman who did not like to imagine things.
‘The idea of taking a picnic in the desert during the interval before the last act begins is very tempting,’ wrote Mme Zafarin. ‘We should see whether His Royal Highness’s birthday coincides with the full moon. However I do not think, Monsieur, that you should place so much emphasis on what you term “the glorious history of feminine influence and female power in this northern part of Africa”. After all, we shall be celebrating the King’s birthday, not his sisters’!’
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