by James Wood
We went round the corner to a pub on the Tottenham Court Road. It was almost empty. In a wooden corner, a young man was duelling with a bleating machine; he stood with his legs apart like a belligerent midshipman and said “Fffuck!” every so often. The barman vaguely wiped the table before we sat down with our drinks. My hands shook as I held my glass.
Roger and Jane talked about musicians, some of whom were famous enough for me to have heard of them, though Roger would insist on his nicknames: a famous conductor was introduced as “Doris Godunov” (deliberately pronounced “goodenough”), and then repeatedly called “Doris.” Others were friends and colleagues, teachers at Trinity or the Guildhall, organists, young conductors, pianists making their first recordings. I was struck by the viciousness with which Jane discussed some of these pianists. I would discover that her reputation in the music world, indeed the whole question of her musical talent, was a painful matter. I’ve grown familiar, over the years, with her appeals for reassurance and her bitter complaints about other players. She used to sit on the floor next to a loudspeaker—her habitual position for listening to music—and say, “I’m just as good as she is,” or “What’s so great about this chap? Very ordinary digital technique.” Her usual dismissal of a competitor was: “Nothing much to write home about!” With her fists clenched and her eyes closed, she sat furiously, and her tassel of hair moved from left to right in an angry shiver. “Why don’t these people”—usually a critic or music administrator—“give me more respect?”
Music brought Jane and me together, but perhaps it, along with the Ph.D., drove us apart in the end. Jane once told me that talking to someone else who “really understands music” made her feel as if she had met someone of the same religious faith. She didn’t mean me; I was a pagan, unable to pray with her. But it was lovely to touch the hem of that faith, to approach her single passion. In those early weeks, after meeting her with Roger, it was very exciting to watch this passion, and to wonder about its force if it were ever shared between me and music.
And that is what happened. When Jane realized my intentions, she responded to me as she treated her music, with ferocious seriousness and daily devotion. My own love suddenly seemed feeble in return, secondary. It was she who phoned me many times a day, her voice made small, made junior, by the plastic receiver; she who left notes under the door at my dirty room in Bloomsbury. She was, in those days, superbly tolerant of precisely those characteristics which would later frustrate her. She seemed to be amused by the squalor of my Bloomsbury room, in a flat I shared with a very neat Indian scientist who pencilled his initials on his eggs so that I wouldn’t steal them. She used to tease me for my musical incompetence. And I happily failed four of her five tests of musical ability. These were, in ascending order of difficulty: Could I recognize a piece of music a week after I had first heard it? Could I recognize what century a piece belonged to? Could I sing, without losing the note, a simple tune, such as a hymn? Could I sing, without losing the note, a more complex tune, such as the viola’s opening theme in Bartok’s Concerto, or the violin’s in Glazunov’s, or a difficult Beatles song like “The Fool on the Hill”? (She loves the Beatles.) Finally, could I sing the bass part to a simple tune, such as the National Anthem? I passed only the first test. I recognized a passage from Rosenkavalier when she played it to me a week after taking me to hear it at the Coliseum, because a fat man next to me had shaken with tears during the passage, and had made the whole row of seats move slightly, in sympathy.
I have always been afraid of her tremendous moods, of the abysses into which she can fall, especially when she used to blame herself for not being a good enough pianist and threatened to close the piano lid on her fingers. Perplexed by her uncertainties, and lacking the necessary expertise, I tended to assert that she was as good as any of the great pianists.
“As good as Schnabel? Pollini? Richter?” (Richter is one of her favourites.)
“Well, I don’t really know what they are like.”
“Then don’t say foolish things!”
“But tell me, then, my sweet, what is it about these pianists that you lack?”
“It’s impossible. You wouldn’t understand. First of all, they are inhuman. Kempf could do the Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues in different keys. Transposing fugues at will! ‘Oh, today I’ll do it in F-sharp minor, just for kicks’ … And he could do that at the age of twelve, did it when he was examined for his place at the conservatory, a little boy, dressed probably in shorts, I should think.”
“You mean they don’t make mistakes?”
“Oh, no, they make mistakes. Well most of them, except Michelangeli and Brendel. They make mistakes, even Schnabel made mistakes. That’s the terrible thing: they are human, too. If you ask me what makes a certain pianist great, I can’t say. Sometimes it’s as simple as applying all ten fingers with equal pressure and command on the keyboard. Pollini has that. There are generally one or two fingers that are laggards—”
“Runts of the litter.” I often provide metaphors for Jane. It is a bad Bunting habit, learned from both my father and mother.
“Exactly. Well, in his case—”
“All his fingers are firstborns.”
“You could put it like that. Listen to this.” And she would jump up and open her cabinet, where her hundreds of records were tightly packed in big metal racks. And she would play me Schnabel and Richter and Rubinstein and Rachmaninoff, and so on. All the greats, I suppose. It was quite an education.
I generally become solemn when listening to music, partly because that is what I think is demanded of me. But Jane was more often brisk than solemn, swiftly appraising the quality of the performance. She would cry out “Mistake!” and then try to get me to hear it, but I was a poor witness. “There! There! Can’t you hear how he’s late with that E–flat?” And she tried to get me to hear faults in intonation. “Most singers are slightly flat, just slightly, but you’re not going to be able to tell, I’m afraid. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and of course Ringo, all sing flat.”
Jane so often became downcast that I quickly took it upon myself to make her laugh, to lift her out of the realm of adult responsibility, to be the lover—and then, with less controllable results, the husband—who provided her with what she lacked. This made us happy for quite a long time. From that first, ecstatic year, I see vividly the moment I decided that Jane had to have a new concert dress. We were sitting in the Islington flat, London beneath and beyond us. She mentioned a forthcoming concert and I told her that she looked fabulous in everything except what she wore on stage. Why not get something black and slinky, instead of blue and puffy? Jane responded with laughter. Then she became serious.
“It’s very important, darling,” she said, “if you are a woman in classical music, not to get a reputation for frivolity and lack of seriousness. Look how all the record companies are marketing these new attractive female violinists. And sometimes pianists, too. These baby dolls have two years in the sunlight, and then they completely disappear.”
“So you’re saying to me that it is advantageous in the world of classical music to look dowdy.”
“Oh, Tommy, that’s a mite brutal of you.”
“Well, you said it.”
“Yes, it may be advantageous … particularly … no, I won’t say it.” She had a tiny smile.
“Go on.”
“No, I won’t say it.”
“I know what it is. Particularly if you are an attractive woman, this being completely unusual in the classical music world.”
“Quite attractive,” said Jane shyly.
“Extremely attractive, I think.”
But I wasn’t going to listen to Jane’s objections, and I forced her to look for another dress. I said that it should be beautiful and very expensive, and that buying such things was a proper exercise of what Saint Augustine calls “the imperial will,” which made her laugh. We went to Chelsea, which I know well because of my time with Uncle Karl, and I marched a reluctant but
giddily amused Jane from boutique to boutique, until we found a long Valentino dress in grey silk barely embossed with tiny lozenges of white. Jane, of course, was horrified by the price, and refused even to consider buying it. I played along with her. But the next day I borrowed some money from Uncle Karl (who lives just around the corner) and went to the shop on my own and bought the lovely, airy, silky distraction. Jane has worn it ever since, and her career, at least, has not suffered.
5
THAT FEELS A LONG TIME AGO, NOW. Jane and I have been separated since our terrible argument last Christmas. Then, in May, at Father’s funeral, she led me to believe that there was some hope. I remember very clearly her words: “I want you to prove to me over the next few months that you can be honest with me, honest about absolutely everything, from the highest matter to the lowest.” But she has not kept her side of the bargain, because she never phones me or sees me. So I have good days and bad days. This week I have been in despair. I can’t work on the Ph.D.; I can’t seem even to work on the BAG. Empty days. Generally, I go to bed with the best intentions, and I am optimistic that something will work itself out. At night, I sit in bed surrounded by many books as if by a flotsammed sea: I believe in stocking the unconscious for its nightly winter. But nothing is right after that. First, because it is September and still quite hot, I must have the bedroom window open, and insects come in. And I have to kill them. I cannot sleep with an insect nearby; I have a phobia that it will land on my face as I sleep. As soon as it announces itself I leap from my bed. I have spent a good deal of the nights this summer squashing insects against the wall: mosquitoes fluffing along the walls with dizzy legs, flies with their cloudy wings and that disgusting way in which they stick to the wall and cudgel their front legs at me, beetles as greasy and shiny as coffee beans, and wasps, many many wasps, so menacing and yet so oddly slow and easy to kill. All of them must be exterminated.
And then I find that I can’t sleep, and the “neutralizing” technique which has helped my insomnia in the past proves useless at the moment. The traffic is only really silent in the early morning. Didn’t Heine say that Germany kept him awake? Well, London keeps me awake all right. So I abandon sleep and get up early. “Man’s first duty on rising—to blush for himself,” says a favourite philosopher of mine. I don’t blush; I look at my dark morning beard in the mirror of the mouldy bathroom and smile because of something silly Max said to me when we were both seventeen and first beginning to shave. Max told me then, in a voice as masculine as possible, that sometimes he shaved “three times in one session,” even if it made the skin sore, because this chased the stubble away for three times as long.
I look out of the window at the Finchley Road. At dawn it is finally quiet, for about an hour. A kind of grey caul hangs over the buildings. Far away, I can hear the distant glamour of London’s constant noise, the soft, dashing, marine thunder. Soon Mr. Rowan will come, with his shuttlecock of many keys, to open up downstairs; and then Theo will arrive at the Olympus, the Greek café opposite. The day is starting—but to what end? For what? I light a cigarette, get my coffee from the catarrhal machine, and look at the shelves in the hope that somewhere is the book that might redeem my life. Perhaps it will be Spinoza the heretic, or Leibniz the justifier, or Hume the sceptic, or Schopenhauer the true Freudian, or simply Plato the first? And then I get out the papers of my Ph.D … .
Today was typical. I spent an hour reading some of my favourite Psalms, went back to bed to sleep, got up again, spent another hour looking vaguely at my books while wondering if Jane might phone. Then I had to collect my dole cheque; the office is a good way up the Finchley Road. After that it was lunchtime, and I dropped into the Olympus to eat, and to say hello to Theo, the waiter there. I love to ask him, with the seasoned privilege of the regular, “What’s good today?” even though the menu never changes. Theo’s thick, unruly eyebrows are like bunches of tobacco. He and I agree about religion. He hates Greece, hates the Orthodox Church.
“All those icons make me feel I’m being watched,” he complained to me today.
“Well, that’s the point, you are being watched.”
“Yeah, that is just what I say.”
Theo deliberately encourages new patrons into arguments about the Elgin Marbles, so that he can surprise them by arguing for their retention in the British Museum. “Leave them where the air is good and they have a hundredpercent experts who know what to do! Athens air is like this café, for crazy’s sake.”
After lunch I went for a long walk down Adelaide Road, through the curling backstreets to Primrose Hill, where there are little squares that suddenly appear, holidays from the city. Right now, because it is the end of summer, the pavements are clingy with mashed blossom. The trees made me think of Sundershall, which is so much in my mind at present. Sundershall is surrounded by a theatre of hills, and one of these hills is covered with trees, the most beautiful trees. In winter, they are rather terrifying: when their branches are bare and gnarled, they look inverted, as if their own roots are waving in the air. In summer, they exuberate into green, each leaf a delegate sent out by life, and the English oaks swell so that their broad stems seem only pedestals to the caught heaviness above them …
6
IT WAS SEPTEMBER 18TH, a year ago exactly, that my mother phoned me to say that Father appeared to have had a small heart attack. He was being monitored in the county hospital in Durham, a place, believe me, no one would want to die in. Peter Bunting inherited his father’s bad heart; my grandfather, whom I never met, a headmaster in Kent, collapsed in his mid-fifties while saying grace in the panelled school dining room. Peter, like his father a grand smoker, was doing much better: he was seventy, still at work, and had announced that he wanted to die “in harness.” There had been a daily rattle of blood-pressure pills which fascinated me when I was small—Father shaking out four capsules onto his hand and grimacing with a kind of odd gloat of the neck as the pills went down. Yet to me he was always the very example of energy and vivacity. One of the religious thinkers I like to read—when I am supposed to be working on my Ph.D.—says that baldness is merely the body’s early preparation for death. But Father, who was very bald, seemed not involuntarily so; rather, it seemed that an excess of vigorous energy had willfully banished his hair to the margins of his head, as if throwing off a lazy cap. His big brow (on a small head) seemed to enjoy its clear freedom. Whenever I now picture my late father, I see first not his eyes but that bald, clear, strong head, with its little semicircle of demoted hair at the back, a grey nest of remnants. He fought with distinction in the Second World War, though only a young man in his early twenties. Surely he enlisted because he had too much energy; he could have avoided fighting if he had wanted to. And surely he decided to become a priest in 1959 because he had too much energy to be trapped in university life.
Of course, once my mother gave me the news I went home as soon as I could, with the usual mixture of desire and despair. I was keen to see my parents again, and eager to walk in the remembered countryside. But I had taken so long to accomplish anything that I seemed now only to disappoint them. All our conversation was shadowed by their anxiety about my future. I grew to dread the inevitable query: “How is the Ph.D. coming on?” Even my evasive, difficult, vain father could not hide his worries. Jane seemed delighted that I was leaving; I felt she was struggling to appear concerned. And so I went. How vividly I see that journey northwards in my mind. Four hours by train from King’s Cross. Families of fields to pass through at great speed. The station at Durham. Always quiet. Baskets of red and yellow municipal flowers on metal chains, offerings from the ceiling itself. When I arrived I saw the owner of the ugly little sweet stall, which has been there as long as I can remember, eating one of his own chocolate bars and reading a tabloid newspaper in a pompous way; he had halfmoon glasses on and looked up every so often, probably to display his studiousness. The train pulled away, and in the new silence I could hear somewhere a transistor radio’s plastic sizzle
.
Yes, I can see it all, all again. The many roofs, and the brown life of the river, and the grey cathedral which stands over the town watching it, and its two enormous towers, each of them showing a dark, louvred belfry—when I was a boy I used to think of those belfries as God’s lungs. Two of the saints of the early English Church are buried in that cathedral. Over the centuries the authorities dug the poor fellows up, to prove that they had miraculously never decomposed, or to heal supplicants. Given the use they demanded of them above ground, why did that crowd ever bother to bury saints in the first place? My father used to joke that if all the limbs of Saint Francis of Assisi claimed by believers as relics were really limbs, he would have been a millipede. And below the cathedral, there is the grey main street, the cloudy café owned by the Italian family called Bimbi, the old cinema whose carpets were always moist, the bookshop run by the humourless man who left his wife for a man, and the Student Union building, looking like a restaurant kitchen, the many fliers and hurried posters pinned to its punished green door like patrons’ orders.
People were walking along that main street: northerners, pale, generally reticent. The regular daily exchange between acquaintances is a wary glance, and a swift, simultaneous “Okay?—the word being both question and its own answer. It always rains a great deal, and then the grey streets and grey bridges stream with greyness, and the ladies of the town emerge wearing curious transparent plastic head-scarves, as if they are cultivating their hair in little hothouses.
