Levels of Life (9 page)

I went to a London cinema for a direct broadcast from New York of Gluck’s
Orfeo ed Euridice
. Beforehand, I did my homework, listening through to the piece, libretto in hand. And I thought: this can’t possibly work. A man’s wife dies, and his lamentation so moves the gods that they grant him permission to go down into the Underworld, find her, and bring her back. One condition, however, is applied: he must not look her in the face until they are back on earth, or she will be lost to him for ever. Whereupon, as he is leading her out of the Underworld, she persuades him to look back at her; whereupon she dies; whereupon he laments her again, even more affectingly, and draws his sword to commit suicide; whereupon the God of Love, disarmed by this display of uxoriousness, restores Euridice to life. Oh, come off it,
really
. It wasn’t the presence or the actions of the gods – those I could easily credit; it was the fact that no one in his senses would turn and look at Euridice, knowing what the consequence would be. And if that wasn’t enough, the role of Orfeo, originally a castrato or countertenor but nowadays a trouser role, was to be taken in this production by a bulky contralto. Yet I had quite underestimated
Orfeo
, the opera most immaculately targeted at the griefstruck; and in that cinema the miraculous trickery of art happened again.
Of course
Orfeo would turn to look at the pleading Euridice – how could he not? Because, while ‘no one in his senses’ would do so, he is quite out of his senses with love and grief and hope. You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circumstances. How could
anyone
hold to their vow with Euridice’s voice at their back?

The gods impose terms and conditions on Orfeo when he goes down into the Underworld; he must agree to the deal. Death often brings out the bargainer in us. How many times have you read in books, or seen in films, or heard in the general narrative of life, about someone promising God – or whoever might be Up There – to behave in such-and-such a way if only He will spare them, or the one they love, or both of them? When it came to my turn – in those dread-filled thirty-seven days – I was never tempted to bargain because there was and is no one in my cosmos to bargain with. Would I give all my books for her life? Would I give my own life for hers? Facile to say yes: such questions were rhetorical, hypothetical, operatic. ‘Why?’ the child asks, ‘
why?
’ The unyielding parent answers simply, ‘Because.’ So, as I drove towards that railway bridge, I would doggedly repeat, ‘It’s just the universe doing its stuff.’ I said it to avoid being led astray by vain hopes and meaningless diversions.

I told one of the few Christians I know that she was seriously ill. He replied that he would pray for her. I didn’t object, but shockingly soon found myself informing him, not without bitterness, that his god didn’t seem to have been very effective. He replied, ‘Have you ever considered that she might have suffered more?’ Ah, I thought, so that’s the best your pale Galilean and his dad can do.

And that bridge I passed under was in the meantime coming to represent more than just a bridge. It had been built to carry the Eurostar into its new London terminus at St Pancras. The switch from Waterloo was more convenient, and I had often imagined us going on it together, to Paris, Brussels and beyond. But somehow, we never did, and now never would. And so this unoffending bridge came to stand for part of our lost future, for all the spurts and segments and divagations of life that we would now never share; but also for things undone in the past – for promises unkept, for carelessness and unkindness, times of falling short. I came to hate and fear that bridge, though never changed my route.

A year or so later, I saw
Orfeo
again, this time live, and in modern dress. The production began, atypically, by staging the death of Euridice. There is a cocktail party; all are having fun; we deduce that she is the cynosure in the red frock. Suddenly, she collapses to the floor. The guests surround her, Orfeo kneels to attend her, but she is losing height, fatally, falling slowly through a trapdoor in the boards. He clutches at her, trying to hold her back, but she slips away, out of his fingers and out of her frock, so that he is left on stage grasping just a swathe of emptied cloth.

In modern dress, the opera still worked its magic trick. And yet, in modern dress ourselves, we cannot be Orfeo, or Euridice. We have lost the old metaphors, and must find new ones. We can’t go down as he went down. So we must go down in a different way, bring her back in a different way. We can still go down in dreams. And we can go down in memory.

At first, improbably (but then where has probability gone in all of this?), dreams are more reliable, more secure, than memory. In dreams she arrives looking and acting very like herself. I always know it is her – she is calm, and amused, and happy, and sexy, and so, as a result, am I. The dream falls swiftly and regularly into a pattern. We are together, she is clearly in good health, so I think – or rather, since this is a dream, I know – that either she has been misdiagnosed, or she has made a miraculous recovery, or (at the very least) that death has somehow been postponed for several years and our life together can continue. This illusion lasts for a while. But then I think – or rather, since this is a dream, I know – that I must be inside a dream because, actually, she is dead. I wake happy at having had the illusion, yet dismayed at how truth has ended it; so I never try to re-enter that dream again.

Some nights, after turning out the light, I remind her that she hasn’t been in my dreams recently, and often she responds by coming to me (or rather, ‘she’ ‘responds’ by coming – I never think for a moment that all this is other than self-generated). Sometimes in these dreams we kiss; always there is a kind of laughing lightness to the scenario. She never reproaches or rebukes me, or makes me feel guilty or neglectful (though since I regard these dreams as self-generated, then I must also regard them as self-serving, even self-satisfied). Perhaps the dreams are as they are because there is enough regret and self-reproach in real, lived time. But they are always a source of comfort.

The more so because when I seek to go down in memory, I fail. For a long time I cannot remember back before the start of the year in which she died. All I can do is January to October: three weeks in Chile and Argentina, with my sixty-second birthday spent in a high forest of monkey-puzzle trees, full of cavorting Magellanic woodpeckers. Then normal life again, before a walking holiday in Sicily, and some of our last joint memories: giant fennel and a hillside of wild flowers, an Antonello da Messina and a stuffed porcupine, a fishing town filled with the putt-putt celebrants of World Vespa Weekend. But then, on our return, apprehension, rising fear, the sudden crash. I remember every detail of her decline, her time in hospital, return home, dying, burial. But I cannot get back beyond that January; my memory seems burnt away. A widowed colleague of hers assures me that this is not unusual, that my memories will return, but there are few certainties left in my life, and nothing follows a pattern, so I am sceptical. Why should anything happen when everything has happened? And so it feels as if she is slipping away from me a second time: first I lose her in the present, then I lose her in the past. Memory – the mind’s photographic archive – is failing.

And this is where the Silent Ones cause further offence. They do not understand (how could they?) that they have a new function in your life. You need your friends not just as friends, but also as corroborators. The chief witness to what has been your life is now silenced, and retrospective doubt is inevitable. So you need them to tell you, however glancingly, however unintendingly, that what you once were – the two of you – was seen. Not just known from within but seen from without: witnessed, corroborated, and remembered with an accuracy of which you are yourself currently incapable.

Though I remember, sharply, last things. The last book she read. The last play (and film, and concert, and opera, and art exhibition) that we went to together. The last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought. The last weekend away. The last bed we slept in that wasn’t ours. The last this, the last that. The last piece of my writing that made her laugh. The last words she wrote herself; the last time she signed her name. The last piece of music I played her when she came home. Her last complete sentence. Her last spoken word.

In 1960, an American friend of ours, then a young writer in London, found herself, after lunch at the Travellers’ Club, sharing a taxi home with Ivy Compton-Burnett. At first Compton-Burnett talked to our friend, in a normal conversational tone, about the club, their host, the food, and so on. Then, with a marginal shift of the head, but absolutely no shift of tone, she started talking to Margaret Jourdain, her companion of thirty years. The fact that Jourdain, far from being in the cab with them, had been dead since 1951 made no difference. That was who she wanted to talk to, and did so for the rest of the journey back to South Kensington.

This strikes me as quite normal. We are not surprised when children have imaginary friends. Why be surprised when adults have them too? Except that these friends are real as well.

Bonnard used to paint his model/mistress/wife Marthe as a young woman naked in the bath. He painted her like this when she was no longer young. He continued to paint her like this after she was dead. An art critic, reviewing a Bonnard show in London some ten or fifteen years ago, called this ‘morbid’. Even at the time it struck me as the opposite, and entirely normal.

Ivy Compton-Burnett missed Margaret Jourdain with ‘palpable, angry vehemence’. To one friend she wrote, ‘I wish you had met her, and so met more of me.’ After being made a Dame of the British Empire, she wrote: ‘The one I miss most, Margaret Jourdain, has now been dead sixteen years, and I still have to tell her things … I am not fully a Dame, as she does not know about it.’ This is true, and defines the lostness of the griefstruck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one ‘knows’. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself), yet you continue. And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.

As a former lexicographer, I am a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist. English always has been in a state of flux; there was no golden age when words and meanings matched, and the language stood firm and grand like mortarless walls: words are born, live, decay and die – it’s just the linguistic universe doing its stuff. However, as a writer, and as a normally prejudiced English-speaking citizen, I can growl and moan with the best of them: for example, when people think ‘decimate’ means ‘massacre’, or weaken the usefully separate meaning of ‘disinterested’. Nowadays, as with ‘to pass’ and ‘losing one’s wife to cancer’, I bridle at the misuse of the adjective ‘uxorious’. If we don’t look out, it will come to describe ‘a man who has many wives’, or even (that dubious phrase) ‘a lover of women’. It doesn’t mean this. It describes – and always will, whatever future dictionaries may permit – a man who loves his wife. A man like Odilon Redon, who for thirty years adored and painted his wife, Camille Falte. In 1869, he wrote:

You can tell the nature of a man from his companion or his wife. Every woman explains the man by whom she is loved, and vice versa: he explains her character. It is rare for an observer not to find between them a host of intimate and delicate connections. I believe that the greatest happiness will always result from the greatest harmony.

He wrote this not as a complacent husband, but as a solitary observer, nine years before he even met Camille. They married in 1880. Eighteen years later, looking back, he reflected:

I am convinced that the
Yes
I uttered on our wedding day was an expression of the most complete and the most unambiguous certainty that I have ever felt. A certainty more absolute than any I have felt about my vocation.

Ford Madox Ford said, ‘You marry to continue the conversation.’ Why allow death to interrupt it? The critic H. L. Mencken was married to his wife Sara for a period of four years and nine months. Then she died. Five years into widowerhood, he wrote:

It is a literal fact that I still think of Sara every day of my life and almost every hour of the day. Whenever I see anything she would have liked I find myself saying I’ll buy it and take it to her, and I am always thinking of things to tell her.

This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

So I talk to her constantly. This feels as normal as it is necessary. I comment on what I am doing (or have done in the course of the day); I point out things to her while driving; I articulate her responses. I keep alive our lost private language. I tease her and she teases me back; we know the lines by heart. Her voice calms me and gives me courage. I look across at a small photograph on my desk in which she wears a slightly quizzical expression, and answer her quizzing, whatever it might be about. Banal domestic issues are lightened by a brief discussion: she confirms that the bath mat is a disgrace and should be thrown away. Outsiders might find this an eccentric, or ‘morbid’, or self-deceiving, habit; but outsiders are by definition those who have not known grief. I externalise her easily and naturally because by now I have internalised her. The paradox of grief: if I have survived what is now four years of her absence, it is because I have had four years of her presence. And her active continuance disproves what I earlier pessimistically asserted. Grief can, after all, in some ways, turn out to be a moral space.