The Cemetery in Barnes

by Gabriel Josipovici

  The farmhouse had been built in the eighteenth century, but like all such houses its traditional style made it difficult to date with accuracy. Its previous occupants had modernised it and installed the plate-glass window which now took up almost the whole of one wall of the living room and looked out over the valley to the mountains beyond. It was not unusual for them to have ten or fifteen people in for drinks on a Sunday morning or, occasionally, on a Saturday evening – local solicitors and schoolteachers, retired civil servants, London barristers and Oxford dons with holiday cottages in the vicinity. In the summer the curtains were never drawn and they would watch together as the last rays of the sun slowly withdrew from the peaceful valley.

  The first hour of work, he would say, between seven and eight-fifteen, always gave him the greatest pleasure. Even the most convoluted sentences fell effortlessly into English forms and rhythms, and he would be conscious not so much of the meaning of the words he was translating as of himself as a kind of smoothly functioning machine, rejoicing quietly in his own ability to find the optimum solution to the problems raised by the inevitable lack of synchronicity between any two languages and cultures.

  The only periods of anxiety, he recalled, came when he found himself within sight of the end of one book without the contract for the next one finalised. But he was so good at his job, worked so fast and to such good effect, that this rarely occurred. Usually, by the time he was done and ready to send off the typescript, the fruit of his labour of the previous months, another book was already lying on his desk, shiny and new, ready to be opened at the first page.

  He made no plans, was happy to take each day as it came. There are times in life, he would say, when it’s an achievement to get through the day.

  And the steps helped. Climbing out of the rue Saint-Julien, descending from the rue Lucrèce. That was why he always made a point of leaving and returning to the flat in the same manner. Sixty-seven steps, he would say. He had got to know them well, could, after a while, have gone up or down them blindfold. As he reached the top he could feel his little studio flat bending down to meet him, could already see himself putting away his few groceries, filling the kettle, watching as it came to the boil, or listening to Monteverdi as he lolled in his bath – a surprising luxury in the Paris of those years and one of the reasons he had been so eager to take the flat.

  Io la Musica son, ch’ai dolce accenti

  So far tranquillo ogni turbato core.

  The bathroom had no window and the ventilator did not work. The ancient bath with its clawed feet took up most of the space. All very different from the bathroom of the flat in Putney, with its boxed bath and large window looking out over the long narrow garden, where he had lived with his first wife, a trainee solicitor and amateur violinist. When he lowered himself slowly into the hot water before going to bed and the steam billowed back from the low ceiling, he felt remarkably peaceful. It was more than the simple satisfaction of having made it through another day. It was something positive, an indefinable element that made his heart stir. Lying back in the soapy water, with the strains of Orfeo coming through the half-open door –

  Et or di nobil ira et or d’amore

  Poss’infiamar le più gelate menti –

  he would close his eyes and drift off, not exactly to sleep, but certainly into a state very different from that of every day.

  In Putney he had often walked to the Underground station to wait for his wife as she came home from work. If the weather was fine they would meet at Putney Bridge Station and then walk back, hand in hand, across the footbridge, down into Deodar Road, and then, after a detour through the small and friendly Wandsworth Park, more continental than English with its neat lawns and great avenue of plane trees parallel to the river, up Oxford Street, across the Upper Richmond Road and so to Carlton Drive. Sometimes, as they crossed the footbridge, ducks would be flying overhead in arrow formation, squawking loudly, and once they had been fortunate enough to be on the bridge as nine swans, their wings beating the air with the sound of thunder, raced past so low overhead that he felt he had only to reach out a hand to touch their trailing feet.

  The sound they made has never left me, he would say. I can hear it to this day.

  Nature has always moved him, his wife – his second wife – would say.

  This is the only world we have, he would say. We need to recognise how extraordinary it is.

  You see what I mean, his wife would say.

  The living room of the converted farmhouse in Wales which they had recently bought faced south over a broad valley, and on summer evenings the sun would slant across the room and the visitors would crowd round the plate-glass window and exclaim over the view.

  It’s not our doing, his wife – his second wife – would say. The people we bought it from did most of the alterations. Actually, she would say, it’s completely spoiled the symmetry of the façade. These old houses were never meant to have windows this size. I sometimes wonder, she would say, whether we should replace it with something closer to the original.

  However, everyone always assured her that the window was a wonderful improvement, that if there was a view to be seen it was only right to allow it to be seen.

  Oh, I like it all right, she would say. I think it’s simply fabulous, actually. But he feels it destroys the character of the house. That’s what comes of having a husband with taste. I’ve never had taste, she would say. It would be funny if I started having it now.

  You had other qualities, he would say, smiling.

  They never called each other by name. For her he was always he and for him she was always she. Friends of theirs wondered if they used the same formula when they were alone, but no one really knew them well enough to ask.

  The flat in Putney where he lived with his first wife gave onto a long, thin garden at the end of which ran the Underground line, no longer ‘under’, of course, by this time. From the garden one could look up to the East Putney station platform and on rainy days he would walk round to the entrance and wait for her. Sometimes they would arrange to meet at the Queen Elizabeth Hall or at St John’s, Smith Square, where they would have a bite to eat in the crypt café before attending a concert.

  The revival of early music, he would say as he stood in the middle of the big living room in the Black Mountains above Abergavenny which he and his wife – his second wife – had recently bought, should not be seen as a merely antiquarian gesture. It stems from a profound revolution in our understanding of the nature of Western music. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is no longer the ideal to which all music must aspire, as it was for many composers and concert-goers in the nineteenth century and still is for the public at large. In fact, he would say, the Ninth Symphony is recognised by all true music-lovers as something of an aberration, the culmination of a trend which, seen from our perspective in the second half of the twentieth century, looks more and more like a cul de sac.

  Few could follow him when he began to speak in this vein, but all felt somehow pleased and flattered to be addressed in such a way. And it would, they knew, inevitably draw a riposte from her.

  She did not disappoint. The only classical music I knew before I met him, she said, was hits from Carmen and La Bohème. He taught me to appreciate the Baroque and the Renaissance.

  You had other qualities, he would say.

  Perhaps I did, she would respond, but an appreciation of classical music was not one of them.

  Friends who had known him in the old days often commented on the uncanny similarity between his two wives, all the more remarkable because, apart from the hair, they did not physically resemble each other at all.

  Not many of their neighbours or acquaintances shared his passion for early music. All, however, were ready to listen. Because his wife – his second wife – knew how to make them comfortable and welcome, it was a pleasure to sit there in the old converted farmhouse in the mountains, sipping good wine and looking out over the rolling hills and valleys spreading out below them
. Most of the time he talked about his life in Paris.

  Paris too, he said, was changing. Soon the old village atmosphere would be gone and it would only be another splendid capital, a magnet for tourists and a playground for the rich and childless. Mind you, he would say, people have been saying that about Paris for over a century and Paris is still a delight, an anomaly among the major cities of the world. They said so when Haussmann tore down huge swathes of the right bank to drive his giant boulevards through it, down which troops would be able to march at the double and quell any new Commune, and they said it again after France began to relinquish its colonies, when the influx of Vietnamese and Algerians seemed to threaten forever its uniquely French character. And they will go on saying it for a long time to come. But Paris will survive.

  It was not, however, only the quaint old Paris whose streets he walked during those solitary years after the death of his first wife. Sometimes he took a bus to the poverty-stricken Northern or Eastern suburbs, or found solace traipsing through the anonymous streets round the Porte d’Italie and the Porte d’Orleans. What you need at certain periods in life, he would say, is simply the feeling that things are going on all around you, that people are busy with their lives, that there is a world out there which exists and of which you will never know anything. I don’t know why, he would say, but such knowledge is a great balm for the troubled spirit.

  If, for some reason – rain, cold, sheer laziness – he did not take his afternoon walk, he found it difficult to sleep at night. Fragments of Orfeo would float into his head, or verses from the Regrets of du Bellay, which he had picked up second-hand in one of the little stalls that line the quais and which, in his more ambitious moments, he had even tried translating for his own amusement:

  La Muse ainsi me fait sur ce rivage,

  Où je languis banny de ma maison,

  Passer l’ennuy de la triste saison

  Seule compagne à mon si long voyage.

  Or:

  On dit qu’Achille en remaschant son ire

  De tels plaisirs souloit s’entretenir

  Pour addoulcir le triste souvenir

  De sa maistresse, aux fredons de sa lyre.

  Or:

  De quelque mal un chacun se lamente,

  Mais les moyens de plaindre son divers:

  J’ay, quant a moy, choisi celuy des vers

  Pour desaigrir l’ennuy qui me tormente.

  Though he was tempted to get out of bed and sit down at his desk to try and see if such lines would go into English pentameters (‘Thus does the Muse upon this alien shore / Where I am stuck, an exile from my home…’?), he resisted the temptation and kept his eyes shut tight, trying to count sheep jumping over fences or even the specific lambs he and his wife – his first wife – had once seen in a sloping field, running and butting each other in sheer high spirits, as they were on their way back by train from a brief holiday in Snowdonia. But the lines would not let him go (‘They say Achilles, chewing on his ire, / Would strive to take his pleasure in such toys, / Sweetening the memory of the joys / His girl provided, by playing on his lyre.’?)

  She finished work at five and he knew that if he set off from the house at a quarter past he would not have long to wait at Putney Bridge Station. That was when the days were fine and she did not go directly from her office in Holborn to a friend’s house to rehearse. She had been an excellent amateur violinist and it was a great sadness to her that he could not play with her. But he had never had a chance to learn an instrument and she assured him she would not have him other than he was.

  Sometimes he started a little earlier and stopped at the public library in Disraeli Road to change a book, or he made a detour via the Upper Richmond Road to see what was showing at the local fleapit, and if the film was of interest he would drop in to see it the following afternoon. They would not speak or even kiss, just hold hands and stroll back over the footbridge; and sometimes, as they walked, she would shut her eyes and let him lead her.

  He felt at times as if he did not understand her at all. She was there and yet she was not there. He held her and yet he did not hold her. As they walked, hand in hand, he sometimes felt as if he was walking with a stranger.

  To supplement the meagre income his translation brought him he tried giving English lessons. Someone at his wife’s office gave her the phone number of a family looking for a tutor for their daughter. They were wealthy Greeks, shipping millionaires, who lived in Harley Street. A servant brought in coffee and baklava and the mother explained what he would have to do. My Lula is a highly intelligent girl, she said. We want her to go to university. But she finds studying difficult. It’s understandable at her age. I was just the same. I want someone to stimulate her interest in English literature.

  He said he would do his best and sized up Lula, a languid flower reclining on the sofa next to her mother. She gazed back at him without interest.

  Emily Dickinson was on the A-level syllabus, so he thought, when he came round a week later to take up his duties, that they might start there.

  Let’s have a look at ‘A narrow fellow in the grass’, he said.

  He waited but the girl did not react. She sat opposite him at the table, head bowed.

  Have you got the book? he asked.

  Yes, she said.

  Where is it?

  Upstairs.

  I asked you to have it to hand.

  With a sigh she got up, left the room and returned a few minutes later with the book.

  She sat down opposite him with another sigh.

  Go on, he said. Open it.

  With what seemed like a huge effort she opened the book.

  Have you got it?

  She shook her head.

  Look at the back, he said. Find it in the index of first lines.

  He waited, his own copy open in front of him.

  Well? he said. Found it?

  Yes.

  Read it then.

  She stared down at the book.

  Out loud, he said.

  He waited.

  Go on, he said.

  No, she said after a while. You read it. I can’t.

  Yes you can. Go on.

  He waited.

  Finally he said: All right. I will.

  He pulled the book to him and read:

  A narrow fellow in the grass

  Occasionally rides –

  You may have met Him – did you not

  His notice sudden is.

  What, he asked, is the narrow fellow?

  She sat staring down at her book.

  Well, he said. Go on.

  I don’t know.

  Have a guess.

  He waited.

  A narrow fellow in the grass? he prompted.

  She turned her soulful eyes on him.

  What is narrow?

  Like this.

  And fellow?

  A man.

  OK. A male something, like this, in the grass.

  She was silent, eyes down.

  Lula, he said. We’re not going to get very far if you go on like this.

  She did not move.

  Lula, he said.

  She raised her head and looked at him.

  Well? he said.

  It bores me, she said.

  Do you want to pass your exams?

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  What do you want to do with your life?

  I don’t know.

  Then there’s not much I can do for you, is there?

  She turned her great eyes on him once again.

  OK, he said. That will be all for today.

  All?

  Yes.

  In the salon the mother waited for him.

  Well? she said.

  I can’t do it, he said. She has no wish to learn.

  But she must go to university.

  He shrugged.

  You know what girls are like at her age, she said.

  He waited.

  Very well, she said. How much do I owe
you?

  His next pupil was the small and fiery daughter of a banker in Hampstead.

  Where did you study? she asked him.

  Oxford, he said.

  Which college?

  He told her.

  Did you like it?

  It was all right.

  I’m going to Cambridge. They make you think in Cambridge, in Oxford they only make you read books.

  Who told you that?

  My English teacher.

  And how does he know?

  He went to Cambridge.

  But not to Oxford.

  He’s an excellent teacher. I trust his judgement.

  I don’t quite understand why your father hired me, he said. You seem to know exactly what you want to do and to be perfectly able to do it by yourself.

  He is convinced that the more money he spends on my education the better the results.

  And you don’t agree with him.

  I’m a Marxist.

  What does that mean?

  You want me to explain?

  I thought I was supposed to help you with your English? he said.

  Everything’s connected, she said.

  Then I suppose you’d better.

  It was only in Paris, he said, that he began to listen to music properly. Of course he had once lived with a musician and even been to concerts with her. But he was not encouraged to listen to her and her friends practising since, as she pointed out, quartet playing is something done among friends and for its own sake, and the whole atmosphere would be altered if someone not actually involved in making music were to sit there listening without taking part. Thus the kind of concentrated attention he now began to give to music, evening after evening, sitting with his eyes closed in the rocking chair, was for him something entirely new:

  Tu se’morta, mia vita, ed io respiro?

  Tu se’ da me partita

  Per mai più not tornare, ed io rimango?

  No…

  You are dead, my life, and I breathe on?

  You have left me

  Never to return, while I remain?