Come Dance With Me

3 Christabel Alderton

22 January 2003. Why had I brought the Erlking into the Royal Academy? Or did he find his own way there? I thought of The Cyclops and I almost threw up again. Why? I don’t know. Sometimes I get tired of being me. When I said that line from ‘Herr Oluf’ to Elias Newman I was attracted to him but at the same time I think I wanted to warn him off. Of course he wouldn’t have taken it as a warning if he hadn’t known the song. And somehow I knew he would know it. How’s that for weird? Being me is confusing, and as I’ve said, I do a lot of stupid things.

And that dialogue in the loo! I don’t know how to be with civilians any more. I’m OK with the guys in the band and my cat Stevo. He doesn’t travel with the band but he’s a rocker too. He’s a good-looking orange-and-white tom, tiger-striped. He stinks up the place a little with his spray and he’s gone for days on end and comes back looking the worse for wear but I’d never have him neutered. We understand each other. My neighbours Victor and Hal look after him when I’m away and when I get back he comes out to meet me, tail sticking up with a crook in it like an umbrella handle, and he runs up the steps ahead of me and waits at the door with his engine idling like an E-type.

The day after the Royal Academy do I was still thinking about last night’s conversation and I wanted to listen to ‘Herr Oluf’ but I couldn’t find my Hermann Prey recording of Loewe ballads. I spent a lot of time looking for it and the day was beginning to slide out from under me so I rang up HMV at Oxford Circus and they had one copy. ‘Please hold it for me,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right over.’ But when I got there I was told that although the CD had appeared on the screen it was gone before it could be put aside for me. Thinking I might go for something else I went to the Hermann Prey section and there was, you guessed it, Elias Newman.

‘Hello,’ he said, ‘this is a lot better than a phone call.’ He showed me Loewe Balladen sung by Hermann Prey. ‘Don’t tell me you were looking for this too?’

‘I was, actually.’

‘Have this one. My treat. I’ll find another somewhere.’

‘What is this, anyhow? Am I following you or are you sending mental messages to me?’

‘Relax. I guess our conversation last evening made us both think of this recording. That’s not surprising, is it?’ He had blue eyes and an air of always telling the truth. A quality that I tend to back away from because it usually causes trouble.

‘You might be a little too strange for me,’ I said. ‘You said your mother’s German. Did she sing “Herr Oluf” to you?’

‘I’ll tell you about it,’ he said. ‘Come have a coffee with me.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘If you’re hell-bent on dancing I won’t stop you.’ He paid for the Loewe and I took his arm as we left HMV. What is this? I thought as my breast made contact with his arm and I felt him being aware of it. Are we suddenly a couple? It felt good and it felt strange. Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself as we crossed the road to Coffee As You Like It. The waitresses all wear doublet and hose and the cups have Shakespeare quotations. There’s a forest of potted trees and the January daylight came through the leaves as if it didn’t know that Oxford Street was on the other side of the glass. The coffee smelled good, the crockery made a cheerful rattle, and the background voices came forward and drew back like distant surf. Very atmospheric and no dry ice although I was in black leather and looking as if I’d just crawled out of a box of Transylvanian earth and jumped on my Kawasaki. He was wearing jeans and a black polo neck and some kind of army surplus jacket but he didn’t look as if he dressed that way very often. Too respectable maybe. I had espresso, he had caffe latte. His cup said, ‘O, how full of briers is this working-day world!’

‘Maybe they’re trying to warn you about me,’ I said. I asked our waitress (the name on her badge was Rosalind), ‘Did you choose these cups?’

She shook her head. She had long fair hair and it swung across her face in a way that wasn’t wasted on Elias. ‘They take them from under the counter as they come,’ she said. ‘I don’t see them until they fill them and put them on my tray’

I watched her walk away and so did Elias. But he was also watching me. ‘What?’ he said.

‘They must hire these girls for their legs. She’s got no right to be so young and beautiful.’

‘Shit happens. You’re not young but you’re beautiful.’

‘Do me a favour, don’t insult me with crap compliments, OK?’

‘It wasn’t crap — you don’t know how you look to me but OK, no more compliments. What does your saucer say?’

‘ “Sweet are the uses of adversity, / ”’ I read ‘“Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in its head.’”

‘Tell me about your adversity,’ he said.

‘Not on the first date. How old are you, Elias?’

‘Wait a minute, I don’t know what to do on dates.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s not a date but how old are you?’

‘Sixty-two. What about you?’

‘Fifty-four. You haven’t asked my name.’

‘You’re Christabel Alderton. I knew the name but I’d never seen you. Some friends told me who you were. You’re famous.’

‘More than some, less than others. What do you do?’

‘I’m a doctor.’

‘What kind?’

‘Diabetes consultant at St Eustace.’

‘You don’t act like a doctor.’

‘That’s because I haven’t got your folder in front of me.’

‘Good — you’d find it a dead boring read.’

‘I doubt that. When I first saw you at the Royal Academy I was curious about you but I wouldn’t have taken you for a rocker.’

‘Why not? Mick Jagger’s older than I am.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of your age — it’s just that you look more like the Erlking’s daughter. Which you said you were, if you recall. Are you married?’

‘Was. You?’

‘No.’

‘Gay?’

‘Melancholy, actually. Have you got any children?’

‘No. You were going to tell me about your mother and “Herr Oluf”.’

‘My mother used to sing some of the Loewe ballads and accompany herself on the accordion. She was, is, from Worpswede which is on the Weser. There’s a place called the Teufelsmoor near the town, the Devil’s Moor. That’s where she imagined Herr Oluf riding late at night through the birches and alders and boggy places. She acted the song out and she made me see it all, the trees and the elves and the Erlking’s daughter. When she sang it she used different voices for the Erlking’s daughter and Herr Oluf. One Christmas Day she found a dead man in the Teufelsmoor.’

‘Was it Herr Oluf?’

‘No, just somebody’s house guest.’

‘Did you like hearing your mother tell you about that dead man?’

‘Yes. No one knew how he died, and mysterious deaths are always interesting.’

‘You said your mother was, then you said she is. Is she was or is she is?’

‘I don’t know. She left us when I was eleven and I haven’t heard from her since.’

‘Left you for …?’

‘A tenor in a Pittsburgh opera company. I saw him once when he came to the house. He was a little puffed-up man who looked as if he could be depended on to be undependable. I couldn’t imagine what my mother saw in him but she packed a bag, left a note and that was it.’

‘What did the note say?’

‘It said, “This is a wrong move but I must make it. Do not forgive me. That would be too much.’”

‘Singers.’

‘Singers what?’

‘I don’t know’ I was thinking about Adam Freund who’d sung me ‘Herr Oluf’ in Vienna, a guy whose lean and slightly crazy looks of course attracted me. Freund means friend and he was very friendly. He was singer and guitarist with Sayings of Confucius, our support band. We chatted a little and our pheromones got entangled and I said OK when he offered to show me the Belvedere and its paintings. I was sleeping with our lead guitarist at the time, Sid Horstmann, and he was more than a little pissed off but I wasn’t too bothered about it. After rehearsal at the Metropol Adam walked me through various streets commenting on the architecture and all the caryatids holding up shops, banks, office buildings and blocks of flats. ‘These stone women, they never quit,’ he said. ‘They’re all big and strong and they’re more reliable for holding up buildings than men are.’

My feet were beginning to hurt by the time we got to Prinz-Eugen-Strasse and started up the long hill to the palaces and gardens. In front of the Upper Belvedere there are two stone sphinxes overlooking the gardens and the Lower Belvedere. They’re larger than people-size, they have wings, very serious dignified faces and very raunchy haunches. It was a cold March day but there were a lot of people about and some of them stared at Adam when he climbed up behind one of the sphinxes and pretended to be humping her. I tried to look as if I wasn’t with him. ‘These sphinxes turn me on,’ he said as he tried to move her tail out of the way, ‘but they don’t know how to let themselves go.’

‘Maybe she’s more receptive after midnight,’ I said. We went into the galleries and saw paintings by Klimt and Knopfler and Schiele. The one that really got to me was Schiele’s Death and the Maiden. I can still see it when I close my eyes. The maiden is a big sturdy girl who looks well past her maidenhood, she might even be pregnant. She’s sprawling into Death’s arms, her eyes are open and she seems to be thinking, ‘What the hell, why not?’ Death’s right hand is clutching her left shoulder and his left hand is pressing her head against his chest. Maybe he’s kissing her hair. I think he is.

‘Come away from there,’ said Adam. ‘Don’t let him catch your eye.’

‘I don’t think he’ll come after me today,’ I said. ‘The girl in the picture is ready for him but I’m not.’

‘He’s the one who decides who’s ready,’ said Adam. When we were outside in the twilight he sang me the Schubert song ‘Death and the Maiden’, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’. ‘Pass by, ah! pass by, go, wild boneman!’ says the girl. ‘I am still young, go, dear, and do not touch me.’ His natural voice was a baritone but he sang the girl’s words in such a way that it raised the hairs on the back of my neck. She was so young, so scared, so desperate to live! Death was nothing to the stone sphinxes but they seemed to be paying close attention in the twilight.

‘Das Mädchen isn’t ready to go,’ said Adam, but der Tod has heard all that before and he means to have his way with her. ‘Give me your hand, you fair and tender creature,’ he says. ‘I am a friend and come not to punish. Be of good courage! I am not wild, you will be sleeping gently in my arms.’ He sang the Death part in a very low voice, very measured — it was like the tolling of a bell made of shadows.

It was getting colder as the sky grew dark and the lights below us made me feel colder still as we walked down the Lower Belvedere. We went on to Zu den Drei Hacken in the Stephansdom Quarter for Wiener schnitzel and beer and Marillenschnaps, then we walked to the borrowed flat where Adam was staying. I looked up at the sky and found the Plough and the North Star; as long as I can do that I feel at home wherever I am.

I like being in strangers’ places. The furniture was old and brown and highly varnished, there were a lot of books, there was a framed photograph of Louise Brooks as Lulu, there was a lamp with a red shade on the bedside table and through the windows I could see the spires of the cathedral. I was excited and nervous — I was afraid that at any moment the scene would freeze like a photograph and be taken away from me. I wanted us to be naked and safe in each other’s arms.

Adam lit a stick of sandalwood incense and stuck it in the top of a miniature skull, then he put on a Django Reinhardt LP. ‘Nuages’ was one of the tracks and we drifted with it and had more Marillenschnaps. The red-shaded lamp made a pinky glow while we took our clothes off. Adam was lean and muscular with a sharp hawk-like face, he looked as if he was made for climbing mountains and maybe falling off them. His nakedness made my heart go out to him. The music was actually saying things that words couldn’t although I did say, ‘Am I better than a sphinx?’ and Adam said, ‘You’re better than anything.’ People speak of ‘making love’ when they talk about the sexual act. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. This time I thought it was. When we finally rolled apart and lay there catching our breath he said, ‘Trees are dangerous, you know.’

I said, ‘Actually, I haven’t had any trouble with them so far.’

‘You’ve heard of the Erlkonig, the Erlking?’

‘No.’

‘His name means Alderking but he hangs out in birches also. He goes where he wants.’

‘So what about him? What’s his thing?’

‘He and his daughters, they make people dead.’

‘Right. I’m not around alders or birches very much but I’ll be careful. Thanks for the tip.’

‘My grandfather was photographing birches on the Teufelsmoor, the Devil’s Moor near Worpswede one Christmas. He was found dead among those trees.’

‘What killed him?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’ll sing you a song.’ He climbed out of bed naked, picked up a guitar, and sang ‘Herr Oluf’ and translated it for me. ‘Nobody is safe anywhere, really,’ he said.

‘I feel safe being unsafe with you,’ I said. ‘Come back to bed.’ He did and we made love some more and fell asleep and I dreamt that Death stepped out of the Egon Schiele painting and made a pass at me.

When I got back to the Inter-Continental next morning I was told that Sid was dead. He’d jumped off the tenth-storey balcony some time during the night. He’d stuck a note to the balcony railing: ‘I’m catching a ride with Anubis.’ I hadn’t had any kind of premonition or whatever it is that I sometimes get. The last time I saw him he didn’t look like a photograph. Maybe I should have felt guilty about going off with Adam but I didn’t.

We still had the gig to do. Jimmy Wicks and I took over the songs that Sid would have done. When I saw Adam that evening I felt that I’d made a choice but I didn’t want to push it. If he’d asked me to drop everything and go away with him I’d have done it. I gave him my address and telephone number in London. ‘Give me yours,’ I said, ‘so we can stay in touch.’

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ he said. ‘My wife is very jealous.’

‘Your wife,’ I said.

‘She doesn’t mind what I do when I’m touring,’ he said, ‘but she doesn’t like it when I get phone calls at home.’ I looked at him and yes, he was like a photograph.

I was thinking about that when Elias brought me back to the present. ‘Can you sing “Herr Oluf” in German?’ he said.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘just the first verse:’

Herr Oluf reitet spat und weit

zu bieten auf seine Hochzeitleut.

Herr Oluf rides late and far

to invite guests to his wedding.

Da tanzten die Elfen auf grunem Sand,

Erlkonigs Tochter reicht ihm die Hand.

There dance the elves on a green bank,

the Erlking’s daughter reaches out her hand to him.

Wilkommen, Herr Oluf, komm tanze mit mir,

zwei goldene sporen schenke ich dir.

Welcome, Herr Oluf, come dance with me,

two golden spurs I give you.

Elias answered for Herr Oluf:

Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,

denn morgen ist mein Hochzeittag.”

I may not dance, I don’t want to dance,

tomorrow is my wedding day.

‘Your voice …’ he said.

‘My voice what?’

‘It’s like my mother’s. I could see the alders and the birches, I could hear the hoof-beats splashing through the swamp.’

I didn’t say anything. Hearing that song come out of me had been strange. And the dead man his mother had found among the trees had undoubtedly been Adam’s grandfather.

‘I’m thinking about how we met,’ said Elias. ‘How is it that you’re a patron of the Royal Academy?’

‘Goth rock isn’t a for ever thing, Elias, and the people who do it don’t always stay the same year after year. Sometimes they change.’

‘Maybe their luck changes too.’

‘Why’d you say that?’

‘I don’t know, the words just came out of my mouth.’

I looked at my watch. ‘I have a rehearsal to get to.’

‘Can I come along?’

I looked at him. Sixty-two but a little like a schoolboy asking for a date. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘The sooner we get through it, the sooner we get through it.’

‘Through what, the rehearsal?’

‘Not that — this.’

‘And what would you say this is?’

‘A mistake, probably. Let’s go.’