The Song Before It Is Sung (5 page)

When he looked at Francine she was ticking the list frantically and he saw with an upwelling of sympathy that rose like a
tidal bore from within him, starting somewhere at the bottom of his torso, that her face was blotched now: the colour had
escaped from the neck. All her composure was in that moment gone. She was a frightened woman, young but not very young, and
she was exhausted by her work, by his intransigence, by her childlessness, by the realisation that life is full of disappointments.
He put his arm around her now, brushing away her muted protest. He kissed her and she was trembling and he was shaking too,
because there was something exciting about taking back, even for a short time, his sexual property, that another man had used.

Afterwards they lay together silently, their skins damp. For both of them what had happened was shocking, although of course
they had made love thousands of times before. How strange then, he thought, how perverse, that this love-making should seem
illicit.

His father loved a singer called Tim Hardin. He had a vinyl recording of his songs which he played endlessly and would sing
in the bath. Now the words come to Conrad unbidden, and he sings:

'Tim Hardin?'

'Tim Hardin.'

'Conrad, I'm glad we did this. But it'll never happen again.'

'Do you still love me, Conrad?'

The bakery smells that rose up from below were strong now, coming in gusts. Their possessions, arranged as if in a charity
shop, seemed to him utterly worthless, without purpose or substance. He could hear his father, singing quite tunefully in
the bath. Two thirty-five-year-olds were lying semi-naked in the Camden afternoon, which intruded weakly through the dirty
panes.

'Fran, even gannets mate for life.'

'Oh shit. I'll sort out all our things and make sure it's fair. I owe you that.'

She seemed to be eager to go. Perhaps John was waiting somewhere to hear how her encounter with the erratic one had gone.
He watched her get dressed again. She usually goes into the hospital in jeans and changes into her blue scrubs there. In future
John will be sharing this intimate knowledge of her, how she pulls on her jeans and leans slightly forward to do up the top
button and how she passes both her hands through her hair, and then leans forward again to shake it for a moment, before raking
it back. What do these little things mean? He couldn't believe this would never happen again.

His intimacy with Francine, whose buttocks, he noticed, were beginning, ever so slightly, to droop, would be relegated, like
his father's singing, to a different and more treacherous intimacy, the realm of memory where almost anything goes.

MENDEL WAS ELECTED a fellow of All Souls in the autumn after he returned from Jerusalem. In those days Englishness had a sort
of radiance and Mendel's parents could not help basking in it, explaining to their relatives and friends that a fellowship
of All Souls was the highest honour in the English academic world. Their son Elya's triumph had allowed them to feel that
they were sitting in the box-seat, as the saying went. Actually their son was also an immigrant, six years old when his family
arrived in Britain by steamer, but the children shake off the whiff of the old country very quickly even as it clings to the
parents like some faintly noxious gas, for ever.

By the time Conrad met him, Mendel was that necessary figure, the publicly acknowledged wise man, known not just in Oxford
but in the wider world. A few of these people spring up in every generation. So, reading the letters, Conrad was surprised
and touched by Mendel's pride in his election to All Souls. We tend to think that well-known people were always celebrated.

Conrad visited Mendel once in All Souls, for lunch. It was 1991. He remembers the elderly college servant — a dying breed,
said Mendel, and this one was clearly moribund - serving the oxtail soup with his thumb dangerously close to the brown Plim-soll
line.

'Often he doesn't notice when his thumb goes in,' said Mendel. 'That's probably why the soup is served cool, for health-and-safety
reasons.'

'They're always surprised, I hope pleasantly, to find I am still alive.'

These brainy folks seemed to be physically tortured by their intelligence, stooped, contorted, with out-of-control hair and
clothes that ranged blithely between the resolutely tweedy and the hopelessly ill-assorted, as though great minds were unable
to take in the merely cosmetic.

And now Conrad sees that those early days in All Souls, when Mendel was in love with Rosamund, had been wonderfully happy,
the freedom to read and write and the encouragement to live the life of the mind unreservedly. In his own way, Conrad has
been trying to do this for ten or more years, without much to show for it. And it is this aspect of the life of the mind,
the snub to the free market and its bogus laws, which Francine resents most: where's the vaccine, where's the best-seller,
where's the academic tenure? What's the product of this free-range thinking?

Rosamund and her cousin Elizabeth, who had become even more bored in Jerusalem, were making a visit to Germany and were proposing
to see von Gottberg. Rosamund wanted Mendel to patch up his relations with Axel.

'He's very hurt, Elizabeth says. Please write to him, Elya.'

'Elizabeth says he is trying to avoid joining the Party.'

'The only way to avoid that is to emigrate.'

'You are a hard man. And I thought you were soft.'

'I have surprised myself. Perhaps I was reacting as a Jew. But Axel must have known exactly what laws were passed. When we
were in Jerusalem we met German Jews arriving in their thousands. What were they fleeing? A few cartoons showing them heavily
bearded? No, loss of property, loss of jobs, loss of life. What he wrote was that the only hardship the Jews were suffering
was because of "aid" for German Jews from abroad. And he cited the storm troopers as witnesses of their excellent good treatment
at the hands of the authorities. Do you know what angered me most? It was the idea that Jews should be grateful under the
circumstances. Only the wilfully blind cannot see. Anyway, now you and Elizabeth can see for yourselves. But in my mind Axel
has passed from the grey world to the black-and-white. Books have been burned. Jewish shops have been expropriated. Axel knows
these things. His idiotic letter is not in keeping with his beliefs and character, or if it is, he has deceived me and all
of us.'

There is reference to a letter from von Gottberg, trying to explain himself, but Mendel dismisses it: 'He always takes refuge
in generalities: "Europe must see that the true spirit of the German people is being subverted." Et cetera, et cetera.'

'Still, Elya, write to him. He loves you.'

'I will write to him, for your sake.'

Conrad wonders if it is possible to read this letter as von Gottberg read it. They could both see that Europe's dark prejudices
were surfacing in Germany, but neither of them could have any idea of the horrors to come, because, given the stock of available
human experience, they were unimaginable.

Later there is a letter from Elizabeth saying that Rosamund has decided to return to Germany to oppose the rise of Nazism.
She will be sending reports back to the newspapers; her uncle is a proprietor. But there is no mention of Rosamund's feelings
for Mendel. He writes that he consoles himself with the knowledge that he was made for the contemplative life.

Conrad is sitting in the flat, now on the market. Without Francine's presence, he has noticed, it is deteriorating. He is
unable to control the remains of meals and dirty plates and crumpled bedclothes. He seems to cause seismic upheavals with
simple acts like opening a jar of coffee or looking for a book. Mendel's papers, which he is trying to put in some order,
are resisting, faithful to their progenitor's spirit; he was famously disorganised. The collected letters of E.A. Mendel are
far from collected. In fact they may be more dispersed than when he took delivery of them two and a half years ago. Many times
he has been warned - Francine has warned him - that they should be kept in safe storage. For the moment they are still in
hundreds of books and loose files of papers and seventeen cardboard boxes in what used to be his study but which has now become
an all-purpose room containing items of clothing, plates, books, newspapers and socks. He hadn't realised until Francine moved
out just how much stuff came through the letterbox every day. With her fear of chaos, she must have been up at dawn clearing
up. Or clearing up when she came in from a hard day in the hospital. He feels retrospective guilt. New pizza-delivery services
are multiplying, and working drivers with their own vans offer to move his possessions. Sometimes he looks at these flyers
and marvels at the grammar and spelling. Utility companies and phone suppliers and holiday companies are offering deals. Often
they come with mission statements. He understands that they are for mom and apple pie of course, but why are they issuing
these quasi-philosophical statements which can't possibly mean anything? If it is true that language corresponds to some fundamental
order in the brain, these folk are in serious trouble. A company that is offering to deliver salt for his water-softener (he
doesn't have one, as far as he knows) describes itself as 'caring'. Caring salt. Or perhaps the proprietors are generally
caring people and they want it to be known. He spends far too much time reading these bits of paper.

Am I heartbroken, like Mendel, he asks himself?

He hasn't spoken to Francine for ten days or so. She last rang to say that the agent was a little concerned about the state
of the flat. It wasn't presenting well. Could he tidy up? He promised to give it a bash, but so far the moment has not presented
itself. Although he is not actually discouraging interest in the flat, he likes the status quo. The bakery smells soothe him
and he is able to apply himself to Mendel's papers, trying to understand what happened all those years ago.

Sometimes he goes out to meet friends. They appear to feel sorry for him, as though he has lost something. Nobody takes account
of what Francine may have lost. He sees clearly his diminished status through his friends' eyes. The truth is, he is not heartbroken.
He is beginning to feel liberated, freed of the awareness of Francine's disapproval. Although he must get someone to clean
up, so that she won't have fresh grievances: in this way he is not yet entirely liberated. He remembers his friend Osric saying
at first that his divorce was wonderful: he was able to eat scrambled egg in bed at three in the morning while watching women's
tennis if he wanted to. Later he admitted to being lonely.

He imagines Mendel in his rooms at All Souls, properly heartbroken, first love turned to ashes, and, jumping forward, he sees
von Gottberg in front of Roland Freisler at the People's Court, as though, somehow, there is a connection. This scene of von
Gottberg being accused by Freisler of the perfect preparation for a traitor, loitering in Cafés in the Kurfürstendamm after
going to Oxford, an English university, on an English scholarship, haunts him. He thinks about it every day. He replays it,
as if the film is inside his brain, right in his being. If Freisler had known his history a little better he would have realised
that Cecil Rhodes's tendencies were closer to Nietzsche's than anything currently popular at Oxford. Rhodes truly believed
in the Ubermensch and the world spirit. But Oxford, to some people, is even now a provocation.

It occurs to him, in this flat above Baiocchi's Bakery, The True Taste of Italy, that he is living more fully in Mendel's
life — All Souls and Oxford are very real to him — and more fully in von Gottberg's life - sometimes when he wakes in the
night he believes that he was present at the People's Court - than in his own. It is a strange but comforting feeling that
the outside world is becoming less substantial to him. Perhaps I am beginning to understand what it is to live someone else's
life. And possibly, he thinks, this is what Mendel had in mind for me, that I should apply this understanding to his life
and give it its final shape. And this is perhaps what novelists do. The reality they create is just as valid as any other.
Or more so. This is the sort of talk -although of course he is talking only to himself — that drives Francine mad. If she
were here he would not have been able to resist trying it out on her. His mind is moving very lightly so that he thinks that
appearance and reality and false consciousness and dualism are just fancy terms for the idea that the world is imaginatively
constructed.

And now Conrad decides to clean the place up. He has the idea that if he cleans up he will possibly be better able to order
Mendel's papers and so to determine their meaning, which needs panning out. When this meaning is discovered, he thinks, it
will be nothing more than a few gleaming specks. His mind, moving a little too fast, like a man running down a mountain, skips
to the Klondike and men in shabby clothes standing in icy streams staring hopefully at sieves.

He has no plastic bags, but the bakers below give him some used flour bags and offer him the use of their dumpster. He buys
a freshly baked ciabatta, lightly dusted with flour, and takes it upstairs with the bags. As he cleans he leaves a light talc
everywhere. He wonders how he could have used so many toilet rolls in so short a time. He carries the stuff downstairs; Tony
Baiocchi and one of his sons, who wears a diamond ear stud, help him throw the flour bags into the dumpster.

'Where's your lovely missus the doctor, then? We ain't seen her for a little while.'

'We've split up, Tony.'

'That's a crying shame. She's a lovely gel. I thought you was perfect together.'