My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

1 Phil Ockerman

When she told me that her name was Bertha Strunk I said, ‘Is Bertha’s trunk anything like Pandora’s box?’

‘That isn’t something you can find out in five minutes,’ she said. This was at the Saturday evening tango class for beginners in the crypt of St James’s Church, Clerkenwell.

Why the tango? Are you sitting comfortably? It began with Mimi, my ex-wife, coming round with some things that I’d left at the house. ‘Your latest effort got terrible reviews,’ she said by way of greeting.

‘The Irish Times and the Jewish Chronicle liked it,’ I countered.

‘I think you may be running out of ideas,’ she said.

I backed away from her and made a cross with my fingers. ‘Don’t say that!’

‘It happens,’ she continued. ‘Hope of a Tree does not develop organically from its original impulse; it’s a put-together thing trying to pass itself off as a novel. I have to go now. See you.’

‘Please,’ I said, ‘be a stranger.’

When she left I had an awful dropped feeling in the pit of my stomach because I knew she was right. Altogether it was a delicate time for me; even before her visit I’d been uneasy about Pluto coming over my Sagittarian ascendant. ‘This a major mega astrological event,’ says Catriona, my astrologer. ‘Your quest for a new theme could take a long time, with retrogradation and the slow moving of the outer planet. Euphemisms such as transformations, deaths and resurrections of the spirit and cleansing with reference to depth psychology are often used in connection with this; also crisis, power struggles etc. Definitely a time for the shedding of habits, feelings, emotions or whatever which have lost their vitality or relevance.’ Thanks very much, Catriona. Most of my habits, feelings, emotions or whatever, probably all of them, have lost their vitality or relevance. ‘Your Pluto is in house (8th) area which is its own, death, loss of individual etc.,’ she goes on but I didn’t.

I couldn’t face the word machine and it was too early in the day to get drunk, so I went to the Royal Academy to look at the Face the Music exhibition: portraits of composers from all places and periods. Looking at various faces of those long dead I wondered how they’d feel about what’s happened to some of their music. Here’s Mozart, apparently without a care in the world. His Piano Concerto 21 was taken over by the film Elvira Madigan, the story of two doomed (by their own idiocy) young lovers, and will forever be associated with them by people ignorant even of the composer’s name. The slow movement must by now be his most widely recognised composition. I’d recently acquired the DVD of the film and I sat patiently through it. Unmoved. Films go out of date like bacon on the supermarket shelf. I doubt very much that Elvira Madigan would win prizes if released this year even though Pia Degermark has (as film critic Roger Ebert has noted) beautiful calves.

Tchaikovsky now, magisterially bearded but looking doubtful — whatever his sins he didn’t deserve what Ken Russell did to him with The Music Lovers. Did Russell hate the composer or what? Not that the film has much to do with Tchaikovsky, von Meck and the other famous names under which the actors perform as directed. The film is some kind of a lunatic thing with a life of its own that has little to do with any reality, not even Ken Russell’s, whatever that may be. Pyotr Ilyich has suffered other indignities as well: some years ago his Romeo and Juliet Overture was mawkished into ‘Our Love’ and ‘The Story of a Starry Night’ and sung by various and sundry.

Vivaldi! He looks frail but he very aggressively put me on hold and kept me there while I trudged through as much of Le Quatro Stagioni as I could remember. Vivaldi, at a switchboard near you for how many more seasons?

So many names, so many faces, so much music! But wait, who’s this? What does the card say? Barbara Strozzi, the seventeenth-century Venetian singer and composer who was known as La Virtuosissima Cantatrice. What a woman!

Not a beauty but she had a slightly sluttish look that was irresistible. Her eyes, so languorous, so not caring, so haunting after three centuries and more! She leans back in her chair, her blouse well off her shoulders, her bodice lowered to expose her breasts, her left hand grasping the neck of a viola da gamba. Barbara Strozzi! Dead for so many years but she reached out of the frame and clasped me to her opulent bosom and opened her mouth to my tongue. OK, it was all in my mind but so is everything else. Perhaps I fainted, I don’t know. I didn’t fall down but it was a Road-to-Damascus kind of thing. A girl of twelve or thirteen and her mother approached as I stood there. ‘That man has an erection,’ said the girl.

‘Nonsense,’ said the mother as they moved on. ‘It’s probably his iPod.’

I didn’t want to see any more pictures so I left. When I got home I dug around in my CD stacks until I found my Barbara Strozzi discs. The tracks were mostly lamentate, lamentations. I played some of them but they didn’t give me the Strozzi I’d seen in the portrait; they all had a downward spiral of sadness. OK, life is sad but the look in Barbara Strozzi’s eyes had a whole lot more than sadness in it. I wanted other music for her. What kind of music?

When I think of Venice I think of Francesco Guardi. There is a page of his macchiete in The Glory of Venice catalogue from the Royal Academy. These quick sketches done in brown ink, almost calligraphy, show gaggles of men and women like brown leaves hurried on by the winds of time. Guardi’s gondoliers, workmen and pedestrians in the oil paintings such as The Giudecca with the Zitelle are also full of movement, but of a stagey sort, as if they might be in an opera. It is particularly evident in pictures where chiaroscuro is exaggerated that Guardi is a precursor of Daumier: he paints gestures and peoples them, all of his figures moving through time. The buildings too, though solid and full of detail, are in motion through time. Sometimes this motion is slowed down, as in the wonderful Capriccio with an Arch in Ruin. Here Guardi’s imagination is measured and reflective: even the dogs pause for thought and the boatmen are in no hurry. Although Barbara Strozzi was painted by Bernardo Strozzi (whose illegitimate daughter she probably was) there was something of a Guardi capriccio in the look she turned upon me through the transparent centuries. There was music in that look — not her own lamentate but something more coarse and sexual and a rhythm of controlled passion. I don’t know the dances of Guardi’s time and Strozzi’s, but for me the music and the dance became tango.

I looked at her portrait in the catalogue again and words came to me, from where I couldn’t remember: ‘I faced up to life and … what?’ My hand went to the CD stacks and came up with Tita Merello, Arrabalera. The little brochure quoted her as saying, ‘I faced up to life and it left its mark on me.’ It sounds better in Spanish: ‘Le di la cara a la vida y me la dejo marcada.’ I put the disc in the player and went to track 12, ‘El Choclo’. Her voice! It wound itself around me like the tanguera that she was, like her body touching mine and leaning away, her leg gripping my waist and releasing in the skirmishing of the dance. Barbara Merello, Tita Strozzi!

So there it was: it was time for me to learn the tango if I wanted to follow the Barbara Strozzi thing wherever it might take me. A little googling brought me to Totaltango on the Internet and I sent away for Dancing Tango, a beginner’s course by Christine Denniston on CD-ROM, with animations and video clips.

From the text of the CD I learned that at the end of the nineteenth century in Buenos Aires, a city with a huge influx of men from Spain, the best chance for a man to get his arms around a woman other than a prostitute was to learn the tango. The men attended practicas in which the learners danced with experienced men and with each other, alternately taking the part of the follower and that of the leader. They had to be able to dance as women before they could become good enough leaders to make a woman want to dance with them. When they were ready for their first time out their instructor would take them to a milonga where he would ask a woman friend to dance with the novice. I imagined the music snaking through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, sweat and pheromones as the women assessed the men whose hands were upon them. If the novice tanguero wasn’t good enough he would have to go back to the practicas for months more of practice, patience and frustration.

I was struck by the psychology of the tango, that by learning the woman’s role as follower the man could develop the empathy that would give a woman the confidence to be led by him in a dance in which nothing is set and there are no words. Reflecting on my marriage I thought it might have worked out better if I had been able to empathise with Mimi more than I had. I tried to imagine us learning the tango together but it would have brought out the worst in both of us very quickly.

The contents of the CD were almost poetic, with such titles as ‘The Hunger of the Soul for Contact with Another Soul’. After a while I reached ‘Before the Embrace’ and from there I went to ‘The Hold’ with its overhead diagram of two upper bodies heart to heart. I thought of myself and Barbara Strozzi, bosoms touching, heart to heart. Then came the animated footsteps forward and back, this way and that, giving me the eerie sensation of looking up through a glass floor at disembodied feet. The video showed the legs and feet of leader and follower, going through their steps as often as I clicked on rewind. It was difficult to practise the steps while sitting at the computer and watching the monitor screen so I sent away for a set of three CDs in which Christy Cote and and George Garcia, appearing full-length, would show me how to dance the Argentine tango. It was a treat to watch them: Christy, smiling all the time, and George, smiling less, made everything wonderfully clear, and I did the lessons in front of the TV with the remote control in hand to repeat and pause the action as necessary as they took me through the Embrace, the Basico, the Cambio de Peso en el Lugar, the Paso al Costado, the Cadencia, the Caminada, and so on down the line. That was all very well as far as it went but doing it alone was not giving me much satisfaction. I was learning the names of the steps and how they looked when danced by professionals but I knew I wasn’t actually going to be learning tango until I had a partner to embrace.

So it was that on a Saturday evening in May I found myself on a Circle Line train watching the stops unreel towards Farringdon. The carriage was full of young people and vernal expectation but I am a November sort of person, and I thought of the big rain that always comes in November to leave the trees black and bare next morning and the ground covered with brown leaves. I’m only forty but I’ve got November inside me with grey skies, rain, brown leaves and bare black trees.

The Circle Line is some kind of metaphor: from South Kensington you can get to Farringdon eastbound via Victoria and Embankment on the lower part of the loop or you can do it westbound via Paddington and King’s Cross on the upper part of the loop. I took it eastbound.

My Underground book was The Dybbuk, a play by S. Ansky. In it Leah says, ‘If one of us dies before his time, his soul returns to the world to complete its span, to do the things left undone and experience the happiness and griefs he would have known.’ Barbara Strozzi died at fifty-eight in Padua in 1677. Had she left things undone, had she had enough happiness and griefs? In Google I found a Barbara Strozzi site where I learned that, although some have theorised that she was a courtesan, this, despite the look of the portrait, seems unlikely. She had four children, three of them with Giovanni Paolo Vidman. They never married but he provided dowries for two of their daughters to enter a convent and an inheritance for one son; the other became a monk. Barbara Strozzi left a body of work that is widely performed by recording artists but I have never seen notices for a live concert. She never gained the patronage she hoped for. And yet! such is the aura of this woman that something of her travelled with me on the Circle Line.

At Victoria three young women got on the train and began to speak Swedish to one another. One of them, a blonde with long straight hair, was a beauty; she couldn’t help knowing it and her awareness of it showed in the beautiful way she turned to speak to her companions or inclined her head to listen. They got off the train at Westminster, the beauty leaving a phantom self behind.

I was going to EC1, to St James’s Church, Clerkenwell. I’d never been to that part of town before, it seemed remote and dangerous. Might I fall off the edge of the world? Might there be wyverns, cockatrices, anthropophagi, muggers? Was it wise to go there with Pluto coming over my Sagittarian ascendant?

From Liverpool Street onward I was alone in the carriage. Why was no one else going where I was going? Moorgate appeared, Barbican, then there was Farringdon. The station, which was also a main line station, was glass-roofed, like the old Fulham Broadway. Through the glass came dimnesses of yellow light. I looked for a sign of some kind, a favouring omen however modest. FOUND, said a Yahoo ad on the wall opposite. OK, I could work with that.

Outside the station stood a newsvendor at his kiosk. OCKERMAN UNDER INVESTIGATION was the headline on display. I’m used to this; I looked away, then looked again and the word was DONORS. Clerkenwell was full of darkness; the street lamps did what they could but were overwhelmed. Behind the newsvendor, on the opposite side of the street, a cluster of lights and colour offered FOOD & WINE, also Fruit & Veg, which were arrayed under little canopies out on the pavement. To the right was the Bagel Factory: The American Original. To the left, a doorway called Chariots displayed a telephone number and was evidently a minicab stand. Four young men stood waiting there as when the curtain goes up on the first act of a play. I was in Cowcross Street but there were no cows crossing.

Going left, I reached the corner of Turnmill Street. golden gleamings in the dark. Next to it as I entered Turnmill was Pret A Manger with sushi and espresso, then Ember, looking warm and with a large menu on the pavement.

Leaving the zone of conviviality I was on the left-hand side of the street. Below me on my left was the long shape of the main-line station showing dim blind lights as I was swallowed up in the visible darkness. ‘The moon’s my constant Mistrisse,’ I sang tunelessly to the colours in my mind,

And the lowlie owle my morrowe,

The flaming Drake and the Nightcrowe make

Mee musicke to my sorrowe.

There was no moon.

Turnmill Street was tumultuous with silence, as if only a moment ago there had been voices, laughter and music not of this time. On the opposite side was Benjamin Street but I saw no left-handed slingers. Turk’s Head Yard was knot a problem. Brown leaves always. Slightly downhill on Turnmill became slightly uphill as I neared Clerkenwell Road. Turned right into Clerkenwell Road, then crossed into Clerkenwell Close where the Crown Tavern beckoned but I carried on and around a dark corner and there was St James’s Church, high above the rest of London, its spire aimed at the night sky where planets were approaching new alignments.

Over the road the Three Kings pub glowed cosily. The church was dark; the iron gates on the steps were open. Barbara Strozzi had been with me in the Underground and she was with me even more strongly now. The air is full of all kinds of signals, from the ghostly voices and laughter in Turnmill Street to the more powerful Strozzi presence; the people may be gone but some essence of them remains to travel where it will, unfettered by limitations of time and space. Certainly it’s a long time and a long way from Strozzi’s Venice to London, but if Venice can reach London by short wave and satellite, why shouldn’t the Barbara Strozzi signal also bounce off the ionosphere and the atmosphere to get here?

I went a little way up the main stairs, then down the well-lit steps to the crypt. The door stood open, brightness inside. Please, I said to myself, let it happen. What? I didn’t know. A smiling Japanese woman was sitting at a table collecting the admission fee. I paid my eight pounds and crossed the floor to where there were tables and chairs.

The crypt looked festive. The vaulted brick ceiling was partly yellow and partly red in the lighting from below. Other lights were garlanded around the walls and a large round clock hung over the centre of the dance floor. There was a table for tea, coffee, biscuits and soft drinks, with a price list and a tin for collecting coins. The place was gradually filling up with people, a murmur of voices and a quiet party atmosphere. I bought myself a tea and a couple of biscuits, sat down at a table and looked around.

I saw a woman bringing a cup of tea or coffee to a nearby table; she was about five foot nine, very well setup, and of a commanding presence. Early, maybe midthirties I thought. Black T-shirt under a green velvet jacket, short denim skirt, purple tights, black boots, exemplary legs. Before sitting down she stared directly at me. What are you looking at? said her eyes. A long oval face with a sullen mouth and an up-yours expression. But attractive, a face that pulled the eye. Dark hair piled up in a way that was defiantly out of date. A Barbara Strozzi, yes, a Barbara Strozzi kind of look. I didn’t get where I am today by refraining from making a fool of myself, so I went over to her and said, ‘Hi.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Now what?’

‘You sound suspicious,’ I said.

‘I am. That’s what happens after a certain number of Saturday nights.’

‘Should I try again on Monday?’

‘Give up easily, do you?’

‘Not ordinarily but I’m full of uncertainty; tonight isn’t like other nights.’

‘What, is it Passover or something?’

‘I’ll explain later. I’m Phil Ockerman.’

‘Bertha Strunk.’

‘Is Bertha’s trunk anything like Pandora’s box?’

‘That isn’t something you can find out in five minutes.’

‘I’ve got all the time in the world.’

‘People say that but you never really do know how much time you have. Anyhow, Phil, it takes two to tango.’

‘Well, Bertha, that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?’ My desire was inflamed by her use of my name.

She reached for the book that was sticking out of my pocket. ‘What’s a dybbuk?’ she said. She pronounced it correctly.

‘A dybbuk,’ I said, ‘is the soul of a dead person that, “finding neither rest nor harbour”, enters the body of a living person and takes control.’

‘Why?’

‘Various kinds of unfinished business. In this play it was love.’

She gave me a serious look. ‘Do you believe in dybbuks?’

‘I believe more things all the time, so right now I’d say that I do believe in dybbuks. Do you?’

‘I’ll have to wait and see.’

The room was filling up, there were at least fifty people here by now, young, middle-aged and old in all shapes and sizes. In a few minutes the class would start but I didn’t want our conversation to stop. ‘Bertha,’ I said, ‘what kind of work do you do?’

‘I paint artificial eyes.’

‘You do paintings of them?’

‘No, I paint the actual plastic eye that goes into the eye socket.’

‘Unusual occupation. How did you get into it?’

‘I had a friend who lost an eye and the making of his artificial eye got me interested in that kind of work.’

I imagined a man with his real eye looking to the left or right and his artificial one looking straight ahead and I asked Bertha about that.

‘Both eyes move together,’ she said. ‘The artificial one is attached to the muscles of the eye socket. That’s enough about me for now. What about you? What do you do?’

‘I’m a writer.’

‘What do you write?’

‘Novels.’

‘What’s the most recent one?’

‘Hope of a Tree, just out two months ago.’

‘It’s not one I’ve heard of.’

‘What’s the last thing you’ve read?’

‘The Da Vinci Code.’

‘Sorry I asked.’

‘Actually the writing wasn’t very good.’

‘Thanks, it’s kind of you to say so.’

‘Do you make a living with your novels?’

‘No, I have to teach as well.’

She nodded as if she hadn’t expected me to be a commercial success. Was my unsuccessfulness so apparent?

‘Why do you want to learn the tango?’ she asked with her head a little to one side.

‘I came here looking for someone.’

Again she nodded. ‘Who?’

‘That’s a long story.’

‘I haven’t got all the time in the world but I’ll listen if you want to tell me about it.’ Was she just being polite?

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ I said. ‘It could be that we have a lot to talk about.’

‘Maybe.’ With a half-smile.

By now people were making their way to the dance floor for the beginners’ class. Michiko Okasaki, the woman who’d been taking the money at the door, and her partner Paul Lange now came to the centre of the floor to start the lesson. She was short, he was tall. All of us beginners stood around them while they demonstrated and explained the embrace, which they called the hold. Next they showed us how the leader walks forward and the follower walks backwards. We learners, without music, took our partners and tried this.

Feeling for the first time Bertha’s right hand in my left and the warmth and solidity of her body under my right I could hardly believe what was happening: I was leading this woman and she was following me. Then she led and I followed, meeting her eyes with mine.

There was a CD player on a table in a corner of the floor, and Paul Lange went to it and started ‘La Cumparsita’. It was the same recording I had at home, Juan D’Arienzo y su Orquesta Tipica. Surely a sign, surely a good omen, that? The lesson continued with music and moved on to side steps for which we briefly exchanged partners. Instead of holding Bertha I had a chic executive type and we both smiled but I was relieved when I was holding Bertha again for steps outside the partner. The teaching was marvellous, everything was made so easy that I thought I might eventually be capable of real tango dancing. I tried to take my mind back to Barbara Strozzi but all I could think of was Bertha; it was as if an electric current connected the centre of me to the centre of her. As each step was shown us we learners stood and watched and while watching I still held Bertha’s hand.

‘You’ve still got my hand,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said, but I didn’t let go and she smiled. High above us the spire aimed itself at the night sky and the restless planets; in the church we stepped forward and back. Under us flowed unseen springs and rivers. I sent my thoughts to Bertha without speaking. I squeezed her hand and she sqeezed back.

We left at the end of the beginners’ class. When we turned into Turnmill Street we looked down towards Cowcross. High up we were, looking down on distant lights: a moment that is still with me, flickering always in the changing colours of my mind. We didn’t speak at all but there was no ghostly silence this time; there were the voices of other pedestrians and the sound of taxis passing us as we came down came down Turnmill. There was a hotdog vendor at the corner by the station. The smell became an unforgettable tune, ‘When My Hot Dog Smiles at Me’ or whatever, and we hungered for the rolls, the mustard, and the steaming sausages on the cart. ‘Bon appetit,’ said the hot-dog man and we ate them standing on the pavement like two detectives in a cop film.

Bertha lived in Fulham, in the North End Road. My flat was also in Fulham, in Basuto Road, so we both took the Circle Line westbound. We sat down and looked at each other for a few moments as the train left Farringdon. I was expecting the usual exchange of personal histories and provenances, but no: ‘How tall are you?’ said Bertha.

‘How tall am I?’ I said, sitting up straighter.

‘That’s what I said,’ said Bertha.

‘Five seven,’ I said, stretching my neck.

‘I’m five nine,’ said Bertha.

‘So do you want to throw me back or what?’

‘I don’t know — I’m kind of old-fashioned,’ she said after a pause.

‘Meaning?’

She blushed, half-shrugged, half-smiled, looked apologetic. ‘I want a man who can protect me.’

It was my turn to blush. ‘Should I forget tango and take up karate?’

She didn’t laugh. ‘I’ll have to think about this,’ she said.

‘I’m really confused, Bertha.’

‘Me too.’

‘I thought there was something happening between us.’

Again the apologetic look, the half-shrug and a little shake of the head. ‘Yes and no,’ she said.

‘Is there some particular thing or person you want protection from?’

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ she said. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Pennsylvania,’ I said lamely. As we travelled west the metaphor of the Circle Line was closing its loop and I felt myself on the outside looking in. She was from Exeter and we pushed these and other counters towards each other while long silences sprang up like brambles. At Paddington we sat saying nothing and looking at the people waiting on the opposite platform until a Wimbledon train arrived. We sat among Saturday-night faces and voices until Fulham Broadway appeared and we got out. I walked her to the North End Road which was full of Saturday-night noise, people, and rubbish. She opened her street door and I followed her up a flight of stairs to her flat. At her door I didn’t feel free to kiss her or even take her hand; by then the colours had gone out of the night and everything was like a not-very-good print of a black-and-white film. I just stood there and waited for her to say something. Only a little while ago I had held her, felt the weight and warmth of her body under my hands!

‘Give me your phone number,’ she said.

I wrote it down on the back of a handbill from the tango class and gave it to her. ‘Are you going to give me yours?’ I said.

She wrote it on the same handbill, tore off that piece and gave it to me. ‘Not too soon,’ she said, ‘OK?’ And I thought that was the end of it for now but as she turned to go inside she paused and turned back to me again. ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ she said.

‘What is this?’ I said. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’

She didn’t blush but she shook her head the way one does when baffled. ‘Nothing is simple for me,’ she said.

‘That makes two of us. When I sit down for the coffee, will you pull the chair away or what?’

‘I promise not to pull the chair away.’ She opened the door. ‘Are you going to come in?’

I went in cautiously. There was a smell of rug shampoo. She switched on a light and the flat sprang into view not looking like her. ‘This flat belongs to a friend,’ she said as she hung our coats on a clothestree by the door.

‘Man or woman?’

‘Woman,’ she said as I followed her into the kitchen. The light was hard, the walls were blue, there was a framed photograph of Sir Cliff Richard. There was a framed print of Jesus with his Sacred Heart exposed. There was a cutesy spice rack, there were smiley magnets on the fridge door.

‘Why Cliff Richard?’ I said.

‘Hilary’s doing an Alpha course because he recommended it on the website,’ said Bertha. ‘This is her kitchen. We’ve been flatmates for more than a year but I don’t put anything of mine on the walls except in my room.’

‘You moved here when you broke up with somebody?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you with anyone now?’

‘No. Are you?’

‘No. I was divorced six months ago.’

‘Your idea or hers?’

‘Hers. She said I was a failure. What about your somebody?’

There was a pause while she spooned instant coffee into two mugs, filled the kettle and turned on the gas. I wasn’t sure if she’d answer me.

‘I left him,’ she said. ‘We’re still married.’ Her face now seemed very vulnerable. She took off the velvet jacket and I saw purple bruises symmetrically on both arms as if she had been held and shaken.

‘I guess he’s more than five nine,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Those bruises,’ I said, ‘are less than a month old.’

She nodded again and crossed her arms to cover them.

‘Have you seen The Rainmaker?’ I said.

‘No. Why?’

‘In this film a husband’s beatings put his wife into hospital. Her name is Kelly. She falls in love with a lawyer called Rudy. When the husband discovers them together he goes for Rudy with a baseball bat. Rudy gets the better of him and beats him half to death. Then Kelly takes the bat and says to Rudy, “Stop! Give me the bat. You were not here tonight. Go!” When he’s gone she finishes the job but she beats a murder rap because it was self-defence and no jury would convict her.’

‘What happened then?’ said Bertha.

‘Rudy and the widow go off together and start a new life.’

Bertha poured the coffee and we sat down at the kitchen table while Jesus watched with a shit-happens look on his face. ‘Do you think they could?’ she said.

‘Start a new life?’ I could feel Pluto going over my Sagittarian ascendant. Where to?

‘Yes,’ said Bertha. Her face was soft and she was looking at me as if I might be five foot eight. What a sweet face.

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘That husband got what was coming to him. Their consciences would be perfectly clear. You ever think of a baseball-bat sort of solution for your problem?’

‘Not with a bat.’

‘So you have thought of it. How would you do it?’

‘I wouldn’t do it. People have fantasies about all kinds of things. How did we get into this anyhow?’

‘Your bruises.’

She put on the velvet jacket again. ‘Now it’s colder in here. Let’s take our coffee to my room.’

We went through the sitting room quickly. There was a painting on black velvet of a Spanish dancer. The last time I saw a painting on black velvet was in my grandmother’s house in Philadelphia. There was a little shelf of paperbacks; I saw the names of Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland. There was a book on the coffee table, The God That Changes Lives. There was a little shelf of little glass animals. ‘Are you good friends with Hilary?’ I said.

‘We get on well enough but we don’t have much to do with each other. Here’s my room.’

The first thing I noticed was a poster of the painting called Hope, a young woman in clinging garments sitting on half a globe with her left ankle tucked under her right leg. Her eyes are half-closed as she leans her head against the lyre that she strokes with her right hand. There’s a dreamy smile on her face — she looks as if she’s stoned out of her mind. I don’t know who painted that picture. Where do I remember it from? Was it hanging on a schoolroom wall? Not at the front with George Washington but perhaps in a lesser position at the back. ‘Our father who art in heaven,’ we said in the morning, ‘Hallowed be thy name.’ And so on while the planets seen or unseen moved above us. We pledged allegiance to the flag and we sang ‘Long, Long Ago’ and ‘The Little Brown Church in the Vale’ and other primary-school standards and then we started our lessons.

‘Are you hopeful?’ I said.

‘I hope that nothing bad is coming my way. What about you?’

‘I hope I’ll get an idea for a new novel. Do you think he’s coming your way?’

‘Who?’ said Bertha.

‘Who else? The bruiser, your husband.’

‘He knows where I am but I don’t think he’ll come here. He only gets physical when there aren’t any witnesses. If he sees me when there are he doesn’t even raise his voice to me. The bruises are from a couple of weeks ago when he caught me in a dark side street with no one about. He gave me a shaking but I got away from him.’

‘It’s only a matter of time though, isn’t it?’

‘Everything’s a matter of time.’ She went to the CD player and put on Marianne Faithfull with the song from the ending of The Girl on the Bridge:

Who will take your dreams away

Takes your soul another day …

Slow and mournful, the words hung in the air between us.

‘Not really a happy song,’ I said.

‘The dreams I have, I’d be glad for them to be taken away,’ said Bertha. She stopped the recording.

More and more I was feeling that she wanted something from me. What brings people together at a particular place and time? ‘How did you find out about the crypt at St James’s?’ I said.

‘Girl I know told me about it. Something else — when I heard the name of the church I got a picture in my mind.’

‘Of what?’

‘A yahoo ad on a wall with the word FOUND. I took that as a sign.’

‘Which it is. On the wall at Farringdon.’

‘You know what I mean — I took it as a sign that I’d found the right place.’

‘The right place for what?’

‘Something more than a tango lesson.’

I was watching her face for any indication that I might be that something. Maybe the hint of the beginning of a smile. ‘Don’t ask too many questions,’ she said. ‘It’s unlucky. You were going to explain why this night was different from other nights for you.’

‘I came to St James’s looking for Barbara Strozzi,’ I said.

She gave me a hard look. ‘Who’s Barbara Strozzi?’

I told her all there was to tell, including my sensing of Strozzi’s presence in the Underground and at the Clerkenwell church. ‘Does that sound crazy to you?’

‘Yes, but crazy is OK sometimes — you have to trust what pulls you. If you want to go where it’s pulling you.’

All during this conversation I could feel the fragile architecture of trust and comradeship building up between us. The wrong word, the wrong move, would make it collapse like a house of cards. I drank my coffee and looked at Hope. ‘Shall I say more about Barbara Strozzi?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘When I saw you I saw Barbara Strozzi in you. Her music brought me to the tango but seeing you took me back to her music, her cantate and lamentate.’

‘You’re a pretty weird guy, aren’t you.’

‘Yes, you might as well know that right from the start.’

She looked at me for a while as if she was deciding whether to go along with the weirdness or back away from it. I could see myself coming up full-screen and then minimising in her eyes as she clicked her mental mouse. ‘I’ll have to listen to her music some time,’ she said.

‘How about now?’ I said.

‘You came prepared.’

‘I have my little CD player and a Strozzi disc with me because I thought I might listen to it in the train.’ The disc was Diporti di Euterpe, with Emanuela Galli, Ensemble Galilei and Paul Beier. I ejected Marianne Faithfull and inserted Strozzi.

Bertha was looking at the CD brochure with the lyrics which also had a black-and-white reproduction of the Strozzi portrait in the Royal Academy exhibition. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there is a resemblance. Mostly it’s the look on her face. I see that same look every day in the mirror.’

‘Here she comes,’ I said. The first track was ‘Tradimento.’ ‘Betrayal’. Bertha said nothing for a few moments as Galli’s voice spun into the room over the baroque guitars backing it. Then, ‘That certainly sounds like another time and place. I don’t quite see how you found your way from this to tango music.’ She picked up the translation. ‘Cupid and Hope want to take me prisoner …’ she read out. She stood shaking her head as she turned towards me. ‘Cupid,’ she said. ‘Hope. Betrayal.’

I took her by both bruised arms and pulled her to me and kissed her. She kept her mouth closed for a moment, then opened it as we pressed against each other. She tasted like peaches and cream, like summer and sunshine, like hope. Thank you, I said to the wheeling stars and unseen planets high above us in the night.

That was as far as it went that night. We didn’t end up in bed. When I left her I spun out into the North End Road where the street lamps glowed like fire balloons. A 28 bus trundled by as shiny and sweetly red as a toffee apple. Scatterings of Saturday-night shouted and screamed in random decibels that spiralled into the darkness above the illuminations of Ryman, Fish and Chips, and Cancer Research UK. Brightness pervaded the North End Road all the way to the night lights in Waitrose. At the roundabout I crossed to the Fulham Road which was awash with buses, cars, taxis, litter and louts of all classes. Turned into Barclay Road at Domino’s Pizza and made my way to the west side of Eel Brook Common, Basuto Road and home, descending through levels of unlight and quiet to ordinary reality where I was uncertain of her kiss that still lingered on my tongue.

My flat looked different now; it seemed pleased with what I was bringing to it. I poured myself a Glenfiddich, said, ‘Here’s looking at you,’ and sat down to try to remember Bertha’s face. I could hear her voice but her face wouldn’t come.

Nicely warmed by the whisky, I got Maps of the Heavens off the shelf where it lay — it’s too tall to stand up — and turned to Albrecht Dürer’s marvellous sixteenth-century woodcut of the northern celestial hemisphere. There was Sagittarius the centaur aiming his arrow at Scorpio; I could feel the vibration of his bowstring but I couldn’t find Pluto; maybe he was busy in the underworld. That’s how it is — you can’t always see what’s going on.

I dialled Bertha. ‘What?’ she said.

‘It’s me,’ I said. I noticed that I had put my hand on my heart.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Would you tell me your birth date, time of birth, and place of birth? I want to ask my astrologer to do your horoscope.’

‘You have a personal astrologer?’

‘The same as I have a GP and a dentist,’ I said. ‘I’m not her only client.’

‘You want my horoscope because …?’

‘Because whatever this is we’re in, we’re in it together so it’s a good idea to know how the stars and planets are for both of us. Don’t you think?’

There was a pause at her end. Then, ‘I don’t want to know too much.’

‘Because it would …?’

‘Get in the way of whatever I might be doing. I’d fall down stairs, slip on banana skins, get run over by buses, walk into plate-glass doors — that kind of thing.’

‘How about if I get your horoscope and don’t tell you anything, keep it all to myself?’

‘Then I’d catch you looking at me in a certain way and I’d think, oh shit, what has he found out about my stars? No, it’s a bad idea.’

‘OK. When can I see you again?’

‘You’re not tired of me yet? I’m a lot of trouble.’

‘It’s a lot of trouble not seeing you.’

‘I think we both need a little time to settle down. Can you phone me Thursday?’

‘OK, Thursday.’

‘And when you phone, call me Barbara — that way I’ll always know it’s you.’

‘Barbara.’

‘Yes, Phil.’

‘Till Thursday, then, Barbara.’

‘Till Thursday, Phil.’

We rang off and I poured myself another drink. The phone rang.

‘Barbara?’ I said.

‘I was born on 17 August 1967,’ she said. ‘In Exeter. At quarter to nine in the morning.’

‘You changed your mind about horoscopes!’

‘Yes, I’m tired of being afraid of everything. Show it to me when you get it, I want to know all there is to know.’

I e-mailed her details to Catriona. Then I went online and ordered a personalised baseball bat from the Louisville Slugger gift shop in Louisville, Kentucky. The Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, so this bat would have the Red Sox logo plus the engraving, in three lines:

GENUINE

Barbara Strozzi

LOUISVILLE SLUGGER

It would take a couple of weeks to get here.

While waiting for the bat to arrive I’d be seeing Bertha (Bertha/Barbara) whenever possible, teaching my classes, and cruising for Page One. Until now I’d always put events of my own life into my novels. This time I wasn’t going to do that; whatever was happening with Bertha/Barbara and me would be kept separate from my writing.