The Song Before It Is Sung (4 page)

She comes out in a bathrobe with a white towel around her head.

'Elya, I wonder, are you the sort of man who needs a woman to ask him a direct question? I think you are, so let me ask it:
would you like to make love to me?'

At twenty-four, he is finally naked with a woman. Their lovemaking is not awkward, as he had feared his first sexual experience
would be. She anticipates his uncertainties.

'Oh Elya, you are so beautiful.'

He knows he is not beautiful, but he finds her tone and the way she speaks to him intoxicatingly strange, as though she is
from another place, one where he has never been, one which has its own language. He finds as they make love that he has passed
through into a world that was always there, but behind a screen, indicated to him only by rodent scratching or the calls of
small, unseen nocturnal animals.

When he comes, far too quickly of course, he weeps with joy as she breathes Tom Collins into his ear.

'You probably thought I was providing cover for Elizabeth.'

And the idea that she has set out to seduce him makes him feel doubly esteemed. They lie in bed and eat green-and-mother-of-pearl
pistachios as the softening sun leaves the ancient walls in shadow, but lingeringly embraces the Dome of the Rock, the Mosque
of Omar, like a favourite child before sleep.

He wonders if she feels the same sense of being blessed as he has next to her. She can't, but still he feels that he has never
been happier and that this moment has somehow resolved — perhaps as Axel's thesis and antithesis is resolved — many of the
contradictions in his life.

'Now read on, Elya.'

'Do you believe that?' Mendel asks her.

'I don't think I'm talking about sexual innocence. More that we should not be under any illusions.'

'As Joseph Butler said, things are what they are. Why should we wish to be deceived?'

'Exactly. Whoever Joseph Butler is, or was.'

He knows that they will make love again soon and he feels that he is living in a moment that can never return. He reads:

'Do you have feelings, Elya?'

'I do.'

'Do you have feelings for me?'

'That's a strange question under the circumstances.'

'You wept, but perhaps you wept because you had lost your innocence. We hanker after innocence.'

He puts the book down and turns to look at her. He is still wearing his glasses, which he fears loom rather large now that
he is naked.

'I have the most extraordinary feelings for you. Quite astonishing, even frightening. I feel blessed.'

He can't get over the fact that he is lying next to this young woman, that her breasts are now touching his chest, that he
met her only yesterday, that she says he is beautiful.

'Were you very hurt?' he asks.

'I was terribly hurt. Rationally I knew he was highly unsuitable, but that didn't stop me loving him. Do you think women sometimes
embrace hurt?'

'I don't know enough about women, to tell the truth. So far I've always been considered rather safe in a taxi.'

'No longer, Elya. Those days are behind you.'

She slides on top of him: it is almost unbearably sensual to feel her body on his. She sits up, astride him. She utters tiny
shrieks and her eyes seem to cloud over. He feels exalted although he has a nagging sense that his life and his emotions have
been too quickly and easily subverted.

'Elya was reading my book. Sorry we're late.'

Axel is leaning back on his seat, in a lordly way, at his ease.

'They are cousins, you know,' he says.

Elya wonders if he imagines that this is drawing them closer. He sees that Elizabeth and Axel and Rosamund are complicit.
Perhaps they think it is amusing that he should be drawn into this menage. All the things he had never experienced, until
an hour ago - Rosamund wiping herself with a hotel towel, dressing again with such insouciance, dabbing scent behind her ears
and hooking up her brassiere deftly and re-attaching her stockings — these things to them are routine. He feels hurt, as if
he is being patronised, but as he has never been able to strike an attitude for long he soon gives in to this warm, physical
well-being, while still going over the precious details, both the magical and the practical, of their love-making. At the
end of the lounge an Egyptian band starts to play 'Happy Feet', and Rosamund immediately jumps up and leads Axel on to the
dance floor.

'Are your feet happy?' Elizabeth asks him. She looks at him in that over-the-shoulder fashion; her lips are deep red and shiny.

'Cheering up.'

'Shall we give it a whirl?'

'I don't really dance, I must warn you.'

'Just hop about enthusiastically. That's the secret.'

The band gives the song a certain Middle Eastern plangency; he doesn't care how foolish he looks as he tries to follow Elizabeth.
She holds him quite firmly; of course he has danced before, but now he too is in on the secret: dancing is a sort of surrender
to the sensual, to the clear message that music is life, and life is love and sex and longing, strangely and incomprehensibly
distilled. And he sees that there are various forms of understanding that are not susceptible to strict logic, but which still
have very real effects.

An army officer cuts in and he finds himself dancing with the officer's wife. She is bright and cheerful, like the small birds
in cages attached to the walls in the Old City, incessantly flitting and chirping dutifully.

'Lovely girl, Elizabeth. And what do you do?'

'I teach at Oxford.'

'Oh gosh, you must be jolly clever.'

'Not really. I am like a monkey, I learn tricks easily. Are you enjoying living here?'

'Nobody likes us, not the Arabs and certainly not the Jews, which makes life a little trying.'

'Yes, I have relatives here who seem to think it's all my fault.'

Jolly argumentative, aren't they, don't you find? They argue like billy-oh about almost anything.'

'Gosh, jolly interesting. Actually, I try to keep out of politics. Richard says it's best.'

'I'm sure he's right.'

'I know that Hitler is being beastly to the Jews, but Richard thinks that Hitler is right about the communists. They're the
real problem, he says.'

Later the four of them leave the hotel and go off to a house in the Old City and smoke hashish. It's almost dawn when Elizabeth
and Rosamund leave to go home. Roddy will be waiting. Axel hugs Mendel briefly and says, 'Lovely, lovely girls.'

When Elya lies on his bed again, he can smell Rosamund's perfume faintly and, he imagines, the more mysterious scents of her
body. He thinks of his mother at home in Hampstead sewing intently as his father reads the newspaper.

She would be happy: she thinks her own life is too ordered.

'Don't give me the philosophical stuff. I know it's painful for you, but I love John. You have to accept that. You and I are
not suited. You think running off to Jerusalem — how did you put it? - to get closer to Mendel and his German pal is somehow
important. It is so damned airy-fairy. For nearly ten years you have been telling me your ideas. None of them, not one single
one, has come to anything.'

'That is not totally accurate.'

But before she could develop the aggrieved lobster-thermidor colouring, he added, 'At least from where I am standing — admittedly
the non-scientific vantage point — I would have to say that there has been some bad luck and some near misses. But yes, in
material terms you are right, although you seem to conveniently ignore the fact that ideas have value in their own right.
And - no, wait a second — also I accept that you believe you love John. Love is, after all, even for the people who understand
the ins and outs of biology - no innuendo intended - an irrational, even subjective matter.'

'Conrad, in case you have forgotten, we are here to discuss which of our possessions you are going to have and which I am
going to have. I have made a list and I have checked the things that are unmistakably yours or unmistakably mine. After that
I propose that we have a choice each, one after the other until we get to the end of the list.'

When he looked at the list, there were items on her side that seemed far from indisputably hers. For example, any wedding
presents that originated on her side of the family were treated as hers alone.

'I don't remember your mother saying that the Boda Glass was yours. The tag read, as far as I can remember, "For Franny and
Conrad, from Mummy". I remember distinctly feeling a little queasy about the "Mummy"!'

'Look, she gave them to me. She is my mother and she never liked you. You've had six years of use and broken about one in
three of them anyway.'

'Oh Jesus. I'm on call tonight. I can't spend the whole afternoon discussing every item.'

From the bakery below, the smell of yeast fermenting was strong and pleasant. The bakery smells, the hints of artisanal life,
are what he likes most about the flat.

'I tell you what, I'll have the bed. Presumably you have one that works well for you?'

'Oh my. I see the way this is going. You can have the bed. I'll have the desk my father gave us.'

'Are you interested in what I did in Jerusalem?'

'Not especially. I find your aimless journeys and impulses depressing. Also I know that you have no money.'

'Not exactly aimless. But still, OK, let's keep within the world of objects. Things. As you so rightly say, we are not here
to divide up our ideas, our loyalties or our finer feelings. Just the fucking bits and pieces. And talking of money, when
are we selling the flat?'

'Which I mostly paid for.'

'I think you will find it is in our joint names. Anyway, you and John between you already have enough for a little hidey-hole
in Whitechapel, it seems.'

'You are such a bastard. I don't want to talk about John. I don't want to cause unnecessary distress.'

'Only necessary distress. You know what I found in Jerusalem? I found that you were never meant to allow possessions to take
the place of ideals.'

'Luckily for you, that's never likely to be your problem.'

'You looked beautiful on our wedding day.'

'Why did you say that? Why now?'

'I said it because you had serenity then. Now all you think about is your work and - what you said, your words - your career
path. Before we go back to looking at the crockery and debating ownership of the Dyson, what is a career path? To me it seems
like planning your own funeral fifty years in advance. All the way to the grave. No thanks, I don't want a career path, I
want to follow, in my aimless and depressing way, the life that interests me. How do I know what will interest me in ten years'
time? In ten years' time I might want to farm coconuts in Mozambique or learn Sanskrit, or fuck pigs, I don't know. But I
just don't want a career path.'

Is he trying to get close to Mendel? Did he really say that? One of Mendel's favourite themes was the impossibility of knowing
another mind. Take Francine's mind. He finds it astonishing that for all these years he believed he knew her mind quite well.
He thought he understood her tastes, her determination to understand how things worked, her anxieties about disorder, and
still he thought that deep down she loved him, but somehow it seems her face, with its almost-too-strong nose and her widely
spaced eyes and distinctly ribbed lips — the top lip protrudes slightly — has fooled him all this time. It suggested a kind
of softness; he could never have guessed that she would dispose of him so decisively. He imagined that they had exchanged
enough of their human essences to become in some way one person. He had often lain in bed — the bed he had just been granted
- and thought about the minute sloughing-off of skin, the exchange of air as they lay close. He had adapted himself happily
to her night habits. (She sometimes appears to be awake, with her eyes wide open and her teeth grinding lightly.) And not
to forget in this round-up the semen rushing eagerly on its short, Darwinian sprint, the bed-sheets made not grubby by the
spillage, but intimate, even numinous; how she would eat breakfast standing up, unaware that he saw her absolute belief that
she was going to be late as endearingly irrational. And all this she has ignored, because John's claims to intimacy are stronger
than his.

If he doesn't know her mind, how can he know Mendel's? We see through a glass darkly, von Gottberg's wife, Liselotte, had
written to Conrad of her experiences. But this idea of darkness, he thinks, is romantic, a mistake, because it suggests that
we are moving towards light, that we must look closely for the truth, that there is some end in view - religious or personal
or historical or philosophical. He remembers so well that the last time he saw Mendel, breathing air and oxygen through a
plastic tube, he said with his faintly ironic smile, 'Life has no meaning. I rejoice in that. Things are what they are. There
is no more.'

Mendel had written that to him the history of ideas was often more interesting than the ideas themselves: what he meant -Conrad
believes — is that the search for meaning is more revealing than the nostrums, the prescriptions, the ideologies, concocted
in the name of this search. But still he is far from clear about what Mendel had in mind for him. Maybe all he had in mind
— surely plenty — was an extended tutorial in how to live your life. Francine intended something similar, if a little more
practical.

'Conrad,' she said, 'I know you don't really care, but can we get this sorted? Once and for all? And fairly? You have a talent
for putting off very simple matters. In fact you find them almost intolerable.'

'I do.'

'It's a kind of resistance to reality.'

'Oh thanks for that. And I thought I was just lazy. That's the scientific mind for you.'

'I was being polite.'

'I was thinking about how you could possibly have sex with John.'

'Shall we stick to the programme?'

'That's another thing I find difficult.'

For no good reason he debated her every choice, the wedding photographs, the used chequebooks, the Dualit toaster, the curtains
he had never liked. He made a stand over the books and his demands were mostly met, because he had, somehow, a moral lien
over them, although not of course over the medical textbooks. In idle moments — plenty of those in the last nine years — he
has looked through them. It is amazing to him what these doctors know. She thinks it is a matter of pride with him to decline
all opportunities of practical knowledge, but the truth is that when he looks at these textbooks he sees mountains of facts
- even protein molecules require pages of explanations and tricky little diagrams - mountains that he could never have scaled.

And now, in this wrangle, Conrad saw what he already knew, that there was no hope of recovering what he and Francine had lost.

'Fran, take whatever you want. And we'll sell the flat whenever you are ready. Or you can buy me out. You decide how much
it's worth. I don't care.'

This insouciance upset her more than the wrangling. Maybe she thought it was a ploy. Her throat was colouring and her tired,
tired eyes, flecked with late-night blood spots, looked at him for the first time today.

'What's the matter with you? Why are you doing this to me? You know we were going nowhere.'

'Going nowhere. It's a common but untrue belief that life is a journey.'

'Please, Conrad. Please, please, spare me, spare us, this hell.'

'You take whatever you want. And pay me out when you can. I mean it.'

She started to cry, but resisted his attempt to put an arm around her.

'No, Conrad. I've made up my mind. Conrad, you are an extraordinary person, wonderful really and I loved you. But you have,
I don't know, a kind of contempt for me and the world I live in which has hurt me terribly.'

'I don't have a contempt for you. Not at all, I admire you. It's almost unbelievable to me what you do and what you know.'

'Yes, unbelievable is the word. But you are engaged, in your estimation anyway, in the higher pursuits.'

'That's just not true. But you know, you are what you are. You once said to me, "Who asked you?" and the answer is nobody.
Nobody asked me. But it's in my nature. And, by the way, the contempt is largely from your side, from the practical side of
life, towards the airy-fairy, represented by me. I never wanted to hurt you. Never.'

'You see where we've got to? It's hopeless.'

'Do you love John?'

'Yes. I love John.'

'Do you know what Axel von Gottberg's brother called him on the day he was hanged by Hitler? He called him an outcast dog.'

'Am I supposed to see a connection?'

'No. But to me it suggests that desperate people will do or say anything. Are you desperate?'