Read The Song Before It Is Sung Online
Authors: Justin Cartwright
The Song Before It Is Sung (7 page)
Conrad sees that Elizabeth is becoming tired and agitated.
'I must go now and rest,' she says.
'Can I see you again?'
'If I live through tomorrow's op, I would love to see you. Come and stay with us in Ireland.'
'I would love to.'
'How old are you, Conrad?'
I 'm thirty-five.'
'Just the age Axel was when he died. My son is sixty-one. Astonishing. Now take the letters and remember what I said about
your obligation to Elya.'
As he walks along Basil Street towards the underground with his precious parcel in his tennis bag, he marvels that out here
on the street life is so different, as though he has stepped through the scenery, like the evanescent porter. And this too,
he thinks, is English life, a series of cameos or farces played out in separate rooms. Elizabeth conducts herself as someone
who is on a stage, surrounded by bit-part players like the porter, the Dogberry of this scene. That self-assurance of the
English upper-classes, the belief, as Cecil Rhodes put it, that if you asked any man what nationality he would prefer to be,
ninety-nine out of a hundred would tell you they would prefer to be born an Englishman -that assurance lives on long beyond
any possible verification. And it was this confidence that the benefits of an exposure to Englishness - an inoculation of
Englishness, as a Master of Balliol once described it - would benefit everybody, that led Rhodes to include Germans among
his candidates. And it is by this strange philosophical route that Axel von Gottberg came to Oxford.
When he gets home Conrad delays opening the folder and spends some time examining the cover on which Elizabeth has written
in bold, lost, copperplate:
My correspondence with Elya Mendel and Count Axel von Gottberg and my cousin, Rosamund Bower, and other papers. Dungannon
House, Ireland.
When he eventually opens the folder after making coffee, and checking his emails twice, the sight of the letters, the paper
alone, with the intimate and confessional quality of handwriting, has a powerful effect on Conrad. As he starts to read the
letters, he discovers that they are full of promises and new starts and partings. As he knows, the pain of parting can itself
be a pleasure. It should be no surprise that sixty years ago people had the same feelings as he does, but it is. The effect
is unexpected: Elizabeth Partridge has brought him closer to them all, as though he has been introduced to friends of a close
friend. And in a way he has been. But still he finds himself unsettled: Elizabeth is ninety-three, but her lover - who was
also her cousin's lover -is for ever thirty-five. There are pictures of people at a certain age that freeze them in time —
he thinks of movie stars and sportsmen and revolutionaries — and this has happened to von Gottberg: he remains for ever young.
Early death also confers certain mythological qualities, and he wonders whether Mendel resented this as the years went by.
All three of the others are very aware of Mendel, as if his example, his deep-mined wisdom, reproaches them explicitly. It
is a burden to them, it seems, trying to live up to the standards of their friend. Von Gottberg suggests that it will be difficult
to write frankly after he returns to Germany. Conrad has seen this clear suggestion in other letters; Mendel has perhaps underestimated
his friend's difficulties in Nazi Germany, because he sees basic principles so starkly. One of von Gottberg's letters asks
if he has friends left in England and in almost every letter he tries to envisage a new European understanding; he is alarmed
by the gulf that he thinks is opening up between Germany and England. He is longing to see Rosamund again, as though he has
great faith in his ability to explain to her how it can all be fixed. He arranges to meet her at Tempelhof, from where they
will drive to the family home. His mother is dying to meet her. Absurdly, Conrad feels nervous about her reception.
PRAGUE
I OCTOBER 1938
Darling Lizzie
He looks different in Germany. Of course he is at home. At first we found it difficult to speak. I don't know why. Six months
have gone by and in that time so much has changed, not just for us, but for our countries. An awkwardness had sprung up. I
can see that what Axel fears most is that we will all be separated. He believes, however, that Hitler and his awful supporters
are the product of history. What he means is that we created the problem at Versailles, and Hitler has simply used the situation.
The German people — according to Axel
-
don't want Hitler or war. I must say to the visitor like me they seem to be longing for war and they appear to adore Hitler.
But I am getting ahead of my story, dear cousin.
We stayed the first night in Charlottenburg, which is enchanting.
Axel is well known in every Café and bar, suspiciously so in my opinion; his favourite is the Romanisches Café, where the
avant-garde meet. Anyway, by the time we had a few cocktails and fried calfs liver - essential Berlin food, said Axel - we
were quite relaxed. In the morning we visited the Schloss, of course, the usual over-egged gilt and rococo. From Berlin we
drove north to the countryside. This is Axel's
Heimat.
His father was one of the Kaiser's trusted ministers and the family have lived here for six hundred years. Axel feels very
deeply for his
Land,
and I can see now why he felt he could not
abandon his home and his family for a life in Oxford, although Elya thinks if he hadn't got a second he would have stayed
on. We stopped a few times in small villages, sleepy villages. Some of the names of towns and villages sound Polish to me,
and in fact we were not far from East Prussia. Axel is very good-looking, as we know, but at home he has something princely
about him. The peasants who served us (emancipated 1807) seemed thrilled by his voice and his looks. It helps that he's a
least a foot taller than anyone else, of course. You know how intensely Axel can engage you with those hazel eyes? We novelists
often prattle about eyes, probably because it's so easy, but Axel's eyes have more depth than anyone's I have ever met. We
stopped by a cornfield streaked and splashed with blue cornflowers and red poppies and he kissed me there, as though it had
special meaning. He said he loved me and that not a day has gone by without his thinking about me. What's a girl to do? Strange,
considering it was he who encouraged me with Elya. Dear Elya. I hope he has forgiven me.
Soon we were approaching the family pile, via the Gottbergerwald, a huge forest which has been in the family since the fourteenth
century, or thereabouts. The house emerges as you approach and then disappears again. Axel was so pleased to be showing me
his demesne. It's a Palladian house, built in about 1850 in reality, on the site of the original manor house. We approached
it down an avenue lined with oaks and enormous medieval barns. He stopped the car on the last hill so that we could gaze down
the avenue at the house and the lake behind. The servants were lined up to greet us and I wished I had more luggage to occupy
them. Inside, Axel's mother, the
Grafin,
sat in a drawing room overlooking the lake. She speaks almost perfect English, as good as Axel's, and she welcomed me warmly.
She's a very grand lady.
Axel's father is unwell and he has been recuperating somewhere, I think in their other house over the Elbe, so I did not meet
him. Axel admires him very much, although he thinks he belongs not to the previous generation but to the one before that.
Later Axel's older sister arrived; the coachman had gone to get her at another house
—
I am not sure if it is one of theirs — where she had been painting. She was married and lived in London for a while. She is
a wonderful painter and wears elaborately printed dresses in a bohemian style that only a very few can carry off. She was
wearing a hat with ostrich feathers.
That night we ate in the grand dining room and Axel and his sister were delightful. Her name is Adelheid, although they call
her Adi, and she is about to marry the richest man in the whole of Mecklenburg.
It will be possible to walk from the Baltic to Berlin without leaving their joint
Heimat.
(I may be exaggerating just a little.) In the morning we went riding in the forest where Axel and his sisters had run half-wild
most summers. He took me to a lake hidden deep in the trees, which he said was their secret place as children. When we came
back his mother was very grave: she said that the Brownshirts had destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues
in the night. The police and the army did not intervene. The realisation that a gang of thugs is in charge of the country
is terrifying. Axel, in his usual way, spoke soothingly of historical forces and the coming of the new order of labour, which
is disguised by these upheavals. I wonder. But anyway, he has not joined the Party, a fact which is making life very difficult
for him, his sister told me, although he denies it.
That night we argued as we used to, but now there was something desperate about it: Jews have been murdered, scores settled
as if the days of the Teutonic Order are coming back. And yet here we were in the grand house, with Axel saying that the English
are suffering for their dried-up rationalism, which fails entirely to understand that we are on earth in a context. As Elya
says, Hegel is never far from his thoughts. Not, of course, that I have read Hegel, but the general idea seems to be that
everything has a purpose and that all conflicts lead inevitably to a resolution. Axel says that Hitler must be given some
rope so that he can hang himself. He says, when his mother is not present, that there are plans in the High Command to stop
him if he invades Czechoslovakia. As we sat and talked it all seemed very remote, yet Berlin is only a few hours' drive away.
You know in your bones that terrible dark days lie ahead, but Axel retreats into metaphor:
Germany will find her rightful place in the new Europe that is emerging; these upheavals are a sign of the emergence of new
forces, benign forces. (I'm repeating myself, but then so does he.) I have the impression that Axel has had affairs with many
women in Germany as well as the ones we know about in England. It's as though he feels he needs to help women in the only
way he can. You know when I wrote in
Shadows at Dusk,
'He can't get on with women, so he gets off with them' — well, there is something of Axel in that. The next day we went back
to Berlin. He is keen to introduce me to all his friends, even the women who I just know he has been to bed with. He seeks
out Jews too, and seems fascinated by the fact that Mummy is Jewish. He said to me at the home of one of his friends, 'I am
not a womaniser.' What he meant, I think, is that he has some sort of higher capacity for understanding: in life, as in women.
I love him, although I can see that this cannot end well. Already we have to talk in code in public. In Berlin he is worried
about his landlady and about neighbours. One night at three in the morning he sent me away to a hotel. I was shocked, but
he said that it had to be done, no more explanations. We drove out to visit one of his clients in a Jewish area and the house
was daubed with a huge five-pointed star and
Juden heraus.
It
was so shocking, so nearly unbelievable, that I couldn't see how Axel could stay one more day. I waited for him in the car,
but again he told me it was a phase, an historical phase. I'm shocked, I am as much shocked by the fact as by his blindness.
But he is very sensitive to feelings and the next day we drove to an old inn deep in the countryside, a lovely place which
is adorned by a huge gilded bunch of grapes over the ancient doors, and we dined by candlelight on Sauerbraten and a plum
tart. I think he was keen to show me a more tranquil Germany.
Oh, Elizabeth, I can't tell you how torn I feel. I love him, I am obsessed by him, yet I have a horrible, uneasy feeling.
Particularly in relation to what's going on in Germany. Somehow he wants to put it right himself, or die trying. It's madness
- he is only a newly qualified lawyer doing rather routine work, but he has this burning sense of duty to Germany, not this
Germany, of course, but to a higher Germany, a Platonic Germany. He talked to me seriously of the 'valuations' of feudal Germany.
I completely lost my temper, and he said, 'How beautiful you are when you are cross,' and I told him, weeping, that he is
the most beautiful man I have ever known. Oh, Lizzie, he is unfaithful, he's mesmerising and he's also a little mad, but I
love him. He's asked me to marry him. I'm sorry, darling, I am rambling.
Let's meet in Cornwall, in the physical world, when I get back from here. A dunking in cold seawater will set me to rights.
I'm crying as I write. I must stop.
R x
Conrad looks for the signs of tears on the paper, the watermarks of misery, but he can't see them.
He reads on, letter after letter. It's dark outside but he has no idea of the time. The letters are unbearable in their accumulation
of hope and ideals and of love and disillusionment. He sees in a speeded-up version a sort of historical conveyor belt that
never stops producing this craziness from a deep unplumbable human well. But it's when he thinks of von Gottberg standing
in front of Roland Freisler, dignified, resigned, his eyes molten from the sight of evil, that Conrad finds himself weeping
softly, because this is the end of all these false hopes and ideals. It's as if it is a medieval morality play that mocks
the naive traveller. He knows that he is moved on his own account, because he is just as much an item in this parade of human
folly, he and Francine with their false hopes, the child they failed to produce, the success he never achieved, the warm urgent
longing to live a higher life — details unspecified, of course — that they once shared, the expectation that somehow they
were due fulfilment - equally unspecified -and then the loss of love, the tiredness in her skin, the bitterness in her heart.
He quoted Malraux to her when she was still listening:
Art is an attempt to give man a consciousness of his own hidden greatness.
But she has come to regard his ability to remember quotes as a monkey trick.
While Rosamund was suffering her agonies of doubt, over in Oxford Elya Mendel was discussing with other Oxford philosophers
the meaning of theory: What do we mean when we make a theory? Are all philosophical questions purely linguistic? Is philosophy
grammar? Do ethics have any rational content? No, they don't.
Rosamund retreated to England and she and Elizabeth and some other friends, including the poet Emily Brittain, went down to
Cornwall to the family house overlooking Padstow Bay, near Trevose. Back in England Rosamund felt, as she put it prosaically,
that a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. They walked on the cliffs and swam where the water was deepest and most
turbulent; they knew secret channels between the rocks. And Conrad sees them in those one-piece suits, sleek young women,
on whom disillusion is falling like rain. Von Gottberg writes to her: the dangers to her in Germany would be great. She must
know that he can never leave Germany.
'He believes in his destiny, Lizzie. He thinks that is going to be increasingly difficult for his English friends to understand.'
The beach under foot is pebbly. This roughness of the shingle, the eroded honeycombed rocks, the cold impersonal sea, the
lighthouse at Trevose, the headlands that crouch down against the wind, the narrow paths between the stone walls are Rosamund's
Heimat,
she decides. And Conrad sees the myth of Englishness, which believes itself practical and down-to-earth and unshowy, can even
be seen in landscape:
This part of the country with its small woods and simple houses and pounding sea is more part of me than any philosophy in
the world,
she writes to von Gottberg.
Mendel tells Elizabeth that von Gottberg has written to him saying that he is in love with Rosamund and that he is going to
marry her and that he hopes that he, Elya, will forgive him:
I
wrote to him telling him that I have long since got over Rosamund but I think it is only natural to say that it makes me uneasy.
Of course you must not mention this to Axel or to Rosamund. I do hope, however, that she is not going to try to make a life
in Germany. This is no time for anyone, let alone someone Jewish, to be going there. As usual Axel has his head in some very
thick cloud.
Conrad wonders if Mendel was gradually, as people do, building up an intellectual case against von Gottberg, which was really
a cover for sexual jealousy. It is easy to imagine the highly voluble, relentlessly cheerful and intellectual Mendel feeling
that von Gottberg was a charlatan, attractive to young women - for instance, Rosamund — with his phoney-baloney spiritual
and mythological tendencies, and his deep-forested Teutonic destiny. And of course his five thousand hectares,
mit Schloss.
Perhaps unconsciously in his gossip and in his letters, he was forming von Gottberg to his prejudices. Many people do this.
Francine, for example, has made Conrad's lack of money into a moral principle: she thinks he has selfishly avoided the pursuit
of money because (a) she, Francine, has a proper job and (b) because he wants to avoid responsibility. It suits her thesis
to emphasise those aspects of their relationship, forgetting conveniently that he supported her - emotionally anyway - all
through medical school and the hell of finding hospital jobs in the Health Service. He coached her too:
Why do you want to work at St Thomas's Hospital, Dr Swinburne? I hope I don't sound too pretentious when I say that St Thomas's
represents to me something about medicine that my late father, Professor Swinburne, was always very keen on, the idea that
hospital medicine is both the latest technology and a passing-on of wisdom down the generations. I love the fact that Tommy's
contains both expertise and a long and inspiring tradition. And most particularly I really want to
get
the best possible training. Obviously I have limited practical experience, but I do believe that St Thomas's offers this,
as well as a wonderful team spirit.