Chaconne. Diana BlackwoodЧитать онлайн книгу.
forfeiting the camaraderie of French students, of people other than Julien and his circle, but nothing these unhallowed halls might contribute to comparative literature could be more important to her than her lungs.
She scarcely noticed her surroundings as she set off along Rue Monge in the direction of the Seine, turning into a back street at the first opportunity. Comfort was at hand, however, in the form of a fantasy more enthralling than any romantic or erotic reverie: the Desert Island Discs interview. She told the imaginary interviewer, with a twinkle in her voice, how she had chosen her lungs over comparative literature. Might he say, on behalf of her legions of fans, that it was a jolly good thing that she did! In the Desert Island Discs daydream she is a famous mezzosoprano, in demand all over Europe for her interpretations of early music. Despite her fame, however, she has never stopped performing with her original Baroque group, the Instruments of Joy. Prague, Budapest, East Berlin: they adore her behind the Iron Curtain. She has even given a recital of Handel and Purcell arias to Soviet submariners in Vladivostok. The BBC interviewer describes her as an emissary for the unifying power of music. She lives somewhere in the French countryside – today she made it Burgundy – with Julien, who writes books and runs the local communist cell (just to keep his hand in with praxis and to annoy the mayor) and lectures occasionally to the locals on the joys of philosophical enquiry. One of the spare rooms, with a view across the vineyards to the wooded hills, is kept ready for Ruth. Eleanor didn’t know if Julien had ever given much thought to artisanat – he seemed mostly interested in factories – but as a local grande dame she does her bit to keep the village’s traditional skills alive. Her well-paid gardener grows vegetable offerings in a medieval jardin potager; her vines produce superb wine. Children, however, have not yet entered this valley of delight. Ruth had once confessed that she didn’t care what some feminists thought: if she had a baby, she would never want to leave it. What mammal would? Eleanor had sheepishly agreed.
The best part of Desert Island Discs was not the country house, which sometimes gave rise to a queasiness such as had come over her a few days earlier when she had looked too long in shop windows at beautiful clothes that she could never hope to buy. The best part, always, was roaming the musical centuries, sifting and selecting songs, movements, performances, according to her mood. What an embarrassment of riches was the European art music tradition, she would remind her radio audience. The tonal system alone was surely one of the great monuments of Western civilisation, an edifice of collective cultural genius! The embodied Eleanor, the young woman who was feeling the city percussively through her feet, negotiating bollards and dog turds, wearing jeans and carrying a basket of groceries, knew that she had much music yet to discover. As she evolved, so would her musical preferences. Like music itself, the Desert Island Discs fantasy was a companion for life.
“It’s chastening to remember, in the context of cultural and intellectual fashion,” she told the interviewer as her body carried her past the Collège de France, “that Beethoven did not know of the unpublished St Matthew Passion or the Mass in B Minor. One can only imagine how such works might have enriched him. It was, of course, a composer of Jewish origin who resurrected the St Matthew, on the 11th of March, 1829 …” By the time she arrived at the dark-green front door of her building, she had almost decided that she would choose an aria from the St Matthew instead of a great choral passage from the Mass. Ah, but which one?
From behind the spoiled American’s door came the strains of Indian classical music. Perhaps Julien had mistaken oddity for self-indulgence. What did he know of individual Americans, anyway? His disdain was the standard left-wing prejudice, nothing more. Unless Eleanor’s neighbour was a CIA agent in Paris to keep an eye on people such as Julien – and the man would hardly blow his cover by announcing it – or he worked for the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund – and he would not be living in the shabbiest building in Rue Dauphine if that were so – she was not going to hold all the trespasses of the United States against him. He was far more likely to be the apologetic kind of American, in awe of European culture. If she felt better after lunch, she might even pay him a visit.
She turned on the radio in her room – the program was Woman’s Hour, with its simpering signature tune – and unpacked her groceries. She longed to sink into a hot bath but had to settle for standing in a washing-up basin while she grappled with the plastic hand-held shower attachment. It had seemed like such a smart idea, but the object was hostile, intent on thwarting her. Time and again the cup that fitted over the hot tap would bulge and then burst off, whereupon she would curse it and quickly turn off the other tap before she was doused with cold water. In the end she resorted to the saucepan, which at least was not temperamental. As much water fell outside the basin as in, and she spent several naked minutes mopping it up.
She dressed in a skirt and a lambswool cardigan so as not to feel like a student, and then made herself a lunch of bread and goat’s cheese and salad. When she dropped the woody ends and outer leaves of the endives into the garbage bin – when they didn’t land in the scrap bucket for Ruth’s compost heap or Mavis’s chooks, to be returned, one way or another, to the earth – she felt a pang, as if she had wilfully severed a connection. The cramps had eased now and made way for fretful thought: even as a gap in the future, comparative literature was a problem. She would not mention to Julien that she had abandoned it unless he asked, and even then she wouldn’t tell him about the guard outside the lavatories and the special claims of her lungs but would simply say … She would think of something when the time came. It was Thursday. On Saturday Julien was taking her to Normandy for the weekend. In the hotel at Honfleur she would have his warm body next to hers. She just had to live with herself until then.
“Ah, an Anglophone! Come in, come in. Would you like some coffee? I was just having breakfast. I keep unusual hours, you see – bed at four or five a.m., up at lunchtime. Oh, and would you mind taking your shoes off? It’s just that I spend a lot of time on the floor meditating.”
The name of Eleanor’s American neighbour was Roland, and he was from Columbus, Ohio. He said ‘Columbus, Ohio’ as if it were some kind of cosmic joke, like Wollongong. Roland was pale and slightly stooped in the way of tall men who are not sturdily built. He was dressed all in black, but the black of his shirt was of a less intense order of blackness than his trousers. The effect was ascetic: he looked as if he had never played mud pies. His fair hair was long and combed off his face like Liszt’s, but his hands were unremarkable.
Eleanor was prickling with Parisian envy, which masked any uneasiness she might have felt at being in the home of a man she did not know. Roland had a proper flat with a parquet floor and a Tibetan rug, a kitchen alcove, a separate bedroom, a WC with brass letters on the door and another room that had to be a bathroom. She knew – she just knew – that in that bathroom was an actual bath. The main room was large enough to contain not just a sofa and table and chairs but a desk, which, despite the dictionaries and Olivetti electric typewriter, had about it a tidy lack of urgency. She caught a whiff of family money along with the incense. The walls were lined with books, in English and French, on religion and esotericism. He had translated some of the French titles himself, for he made his living as a freelance translator. But his true work, his vocation – Eleanor had never heard anyone talk so earnestly about vocation – was the study of the connections among the mystical traditions, which called for experiments in quietism and occasional retreats to an ashram or monastery.
The most American thing about Roland was his coffee machine, which he called a dripolator. He tipped the remnants of the coffee into the sink, filled the water cavity, replaced the old paper filter and put fresh grounds into the new one. She watched him padding to and fro in his leather slippers and noticed that he had flat feet. At Dartmoor Street Ruth had made tea for her countless times, and she for Ruth; life would have been unthinkable without the rituals of tea and conversation. Perhaps solitude had opened Eleanor’s eyes, for this ordinary act of making coffee for another human being felt like a sacred gesture across separateness. Supposing the African who lived upstairs had no one in his life to make coffee for him? She turned quickly from so forlorn a thought. Under the table she wiggled her toes and flexed and pointed her green-stockinged feet. She had stopped resenting Roland for having such a nice flat, and now she wanted to give him something in return for his kindness. Leaving out any reference to her period and her