My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

8 Barbara Strunk

I was going to phone Phil before I left for work but then I didn’t; it was one of those times when I wasn’t exactly depressed but I was anxious and scared and sad: I didn’t know where I was with Phil and I didn’t know where I was in myself. Is the world real? I wondered. What is this that’s looking out of my eyes? ‘Never mind,’ I heard myself say. ‘Time to go to work.’

As always, I took the District Line to Notting Hill Gate where I changed to the Central Line. When I came out at Oxford Circus the ordinary rhythm of a July Thursday seemed to have been disrupted. Some people were walking quickly and looking anxious; others stood in little knots and talked with many gestures. Listening to them I learned that there had been bombs in the Underground. I tried to ring Phil on my mobile but the network had been shut down.

When I got to the Lichtheim brothers they had the radio on with all the details: three bombs in the Underground and one in a bus; many dead and injured and the Underground system was now shut down. I phoned Phil on the landline and got his answering machine. ‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘Call me at work!’ then I thought that he might be out doing one of his workshops and not near a phone. Maybe in a tube train.

I was enraged by the bombings. I flung my arm out as if to push away this intrusion; how dared they do this to my London! Then as details kept pouring in my mind filled with the screams of the wounded and the panic of those climbing over bodies to walk the tracks in darkness. And more dead and injured in the double-decker bus that stood in the sunlight by Russell Square with its top blown off. My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t do anything with artificial eyes so Karl told me to go home. The sunny day was a mockery and the ordinariness of a London Thursday was gone. It was as if London was an anthill that had been kicked by a giant foot; there was nothing gigantic about the bombers, they were just creeps with evil minds. It was Terror that was the giant: Here I am, it said. I have always been here but now you will pay attention.

It was too early in the day for drinking but I badly wanted a drink. I headed for The Blue Posts knowing they’d be closed but hoping for sanctuary from the weirdness of the day. When I got there I found Grace Kowalski looking at the closed doors and shaking her head. ‘I know it’s too early,’ she said, ‘but I feel like drinking and I don’t want to do it alone.’

‘Bombers evidently can’t disturb the British licensing laws,’ I said.

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Come up to my place and we’ll do early drinking not alone.’

The baseball bat in its velvet sheath was slung from her shoulder as before. ‘I see that Irv is with you,’ I said.

‘Always.’

‘I hope some day to hear Irv’s history.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Grace. ‘It’s a matter of how much disbelief you can suspend. Do you work out?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Suspending enough disbelief to believe Irv’s history would be roughly equivalent to pressing four hundred pounds.’

‘Maybe I could suspend a little each day and gradually work my way up to the full whack.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Grace. The shop was closed; we went up the stairs to the studio. The place smelled of soldering and unknown chemicals. On the workbench were coils of brass and silver wire, various small pliers and cutters, and boxes filled with bits of coloured glass. In the vice was an unfinished angel brooch, brilliantly bejewelled. On the workbench lay a goat done in yellow, orange and brown glass. It was a longhaired goat like the one in the William Holman Hunt painting.

‘Scapegoat?’ I said.

‘Right,’ said Grace.

‘Odd thing for someone to wear.’

‘I have odd customers.’

‘There’s a verse in Leviticus that tells how Aaron put all the iniquities and sins of the children of Israel on the head of the goat and drove it out into the wilderness.’

‘To Azazel,’ said Grace, ‘the demon of the desert.’

‘So who’s ordered this goat?’

‘I’m not at liberty to say. But there are a lot of deserts about, and where there’s a desert you’ll find Azazel. Drink is next on the programme: all I have is vodka.’

‘Didn’t you say that the ravages of time had forced you to switch to beer?’

‘I lied,’ she said. She went to the fridge and took a bottle of Stolichnaya from the freezer. She poured two glasses and we clinked. ‘Here’s looking at you,’ said Grace.

‘Here’s looking right back.’ The cold vodka went down my neck beautifully, and after the third glass it seemed the icy blast of pure reason. ‘Your bat’s named after one some,’ I said. ‘Someone.’

Grace nodded. ‘Irv Goodman. Fell in love too late.’

‘With you?’

‘With me. He was eighty-three.’

‘Ah.’

‘We were both in the nick and he got pneumonia and died a week after they let us go.’

‘I’m sorry. Why were you in the nick?’

‘DI Hunter didn’t believe what we told him and he was pissed off so he locked us up.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘You wouldn’t believe it either.’

‘Anything to do with vumpires, ampires?’

‘Maybe, but not the usual kind — there’s a batrachian elephant, element.’

‘What’s a batrachian elephant?’

‘Frogs and toads. Am I making myself queer?’

‘Transparently but can leave it for another time. Now think I’ll go home and have little lie-down.’

Getting home wasn’t easy — the Underground was shut down and taxis were not to be had. I walked for a long time and then stood by the curb looking hopeful and was finally picked up by a man on a red Yamaha who lived in Hammersmith and chivalrously dropped me at my door.

I got there just in time for a throw-up before the lie-down. Up came breakfast and vodka, the bombs in the Underground and bus, the dead and the injured, my morning sadness and everything else.

I slept until almost five, realised I didn’t know if Phil was all right, and rang him up. I got his answering machine and left a message for him to phone me. Then I made a coffee and waited for the phone to ring. After the third cup it rang. ‘Barbara,’ said Phil, ‘are you all right?’

‘I’m OK. I was nowhere near any explosions. What about you?’

‘I’m OK. It’s a surreal kind of day and I haven’t really taken it in yet. I’m at Euston, about to leave for Scotland.’

‘How come?’

‘I’m tutoring a writing course at Diamond Heart — it’s near Port Malkie on the Moray Firth. I didn’t know about it until this morning — the guy who was scheduled to do it is off sick so they called me.’

‘How long will you be gone?’

‘A week — it’s a residential thing. The course I’m taking over is “The Search for Page One”.’

‘I hope you find it. How is it with all those people living together up there?’

‘It’s about what you’d expect — people talk bollocks, get laid, and do a little writing that I have to read and help them with.’

‘Do the women tend to need a lot of help?’

‘Depends on the tutor. Ken Hackett who was meant to do the course is a good-looking guy with a high scoring average.’

‘What about you?’

‘This time I’ll confine my tutoring to talking bollocks. But no sex.’

‘You’re giving it up for Yom Kippur?’

‘I don’t want to weaken the connection.’

‘What connection is that?’

‘The one between you and me.’

Pause.

‘Barbara?’

‘I’m here. I was letting your words linger in my ear.’

‘Ah, that’s nice. I have to go now, I’ll phone you when I get there.’

‘Don’t phone — I’d like a week where we can walk around in each other’s minds and listen to each other without telephones.’

‘OK. If I say anything good, write it down. I’m off, see you in a week.’

‘See you.’

I was thinking about that connection between us, wondering if it was like the string between two tin-can telephones. I sat there with my finger in my navel for a while, then I went into the kitchen to make some coffee.

Hilary was sitting there with a cup of tea and her Bible. ‘How was your day?’ I said. She’s an estate agent with Vanston here in Fulham.

‘“And I looked,”’ she said, ‘“and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” We closed early but some of the staff probably aren’t home yet. There’s an Alpha meeting tonight and I expect I’ll be back later than usual.’

Her Bible remained on the kitchen table after she left, still open at Revelation 6. Hilary likes to do that, leave the open book where my eye might be caught by the Word of God. I’m impervious to it.

Back at work the next day I was wondering where the stars and planets stood with yesterday’s bombings. The Times had star maps every month and the constellations drawn in white lines and dots on the black circle of July’s night sky certainly seemed to be telling us something. Mercury and Venus were low in the northwest but there was nothing that interested me in the rest of the text.

At the studio I googled around and found The Visual Astrology Newsletter. ‘Nergal claims the empty sky…’ was the first thing it said. I liked the sound of that so I read on. ‘The sky has never stopped talking; rather we have stopped listening,’ said Bernadette Brady, the writer of the newsletter. Using ‘concepts discussed by the Chaldean priests of over 2,500 years ago’ she claimed clear predictions of the death of the pope and London’s successful Olympics bid.

Nergal is Mars, said Brady. She was into the astrological explanation of the bombings when I was sidetracked by that name. Where had I heard it before? I googled for it and found a website by Lishtar. In the Mesopotamian Underworld Ereshkigal is ‘the inflexible goddess of the Land of No Return …’ Such splendid names! And Nergal is ‘the stubborn god of War and Pestilences’. I’d heard of those two in one of Brian’s lectures and they’d just been names you hear in a lecture but now they grew big and pushed astrology to one side. ‘Aha!’ I said as it came to me that Ereshkigal and Nergal both lived in me and the two of them lived in Phil also and that’s why nothing was simple.

On Saturday I craved the melancholy sunlight of Claude’s paintings so I went to the National Gallery. I was stood in front of The Embarkation of Saint Ursula, taking in the sadness and goodbyeness of it, the blueness and farawayness of the Claudian waves that were like rollers cranked by stagehands, and remembering what Brian had said in another of his slide lectures. ‘She took eleven thousand Christian virgins with her on a pilgrimage to Rome and on the way back they were all slaughtered by the Huns. I call that a terrible waste of virginity.

‘This subject was painted in the fourteenth century by Tommaso da Modena; in the fifteenth by Vittore Carpaccio and Hans Memling; and in the seventeenth by Claude. Tommaso gives us a William Morris sort of thing; Carpaccio offers a workmanlike and completely prosaic job with pretty costumes; Memling’s version is compact and tidy with pleasantly chunky ships and people cleverly fitted into the space. But only in Claude do we find the great sadness of doomed innocence. The colours and the atmosphere are elegaic; the ships are ships of dreams; the virgins already have a sacrificial look. This picture says it all — the innocence of mortal life embarking always on its deathward voyage.’

‘This world is not a safe place for virgins, is it?’ said the woman who had joined me and Claude. It was Mimi, Phil’s ex.

‘It’s not safe for anyone,’ I said. She was wearing the brooch that I’d seen on Grace Kowalski’s workbench. ‘What’s that in aid of?’ I asked.

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘It’s a scapegoat.’

‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘My ID.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Doesn’t Phil blame me for his failure?’

‘Is he a failure?’

‘Did you ever finish Hope of a Tree?

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Well done you! What’s your opinion of it?’

‘It’s not the most exciting thing I’ve ever read but that doesn’t make Phil a failure. In any case, whatever he is, he’s out of your life now and you can move oh.’

‘Nobody you’ve been married to for twelve years is ever completely out of your life,’ she said. A wistful note there?

‘And now you want him back?’

‘No, but I can’t help wondering how he’s doing under new management. Would you say that you inspire him?’

‘I don’t manage him, and the rest is none of your business. Whether you’re being a dog in the manger or a bitch in heat I’d be delighted if we could agree not to be friends and if you could just bugger off.’

After she’d gone I found myself thinking Brian thoughts. Remembering the times we’d had, the things we’d done. He’d asked me if I could do better and I’d said that maybe I already had. Still, when he wasn’t in courtship mode he was very easy to be with and I didn’t have to break my head trying to work out what we were to each other. Simple is what everybody wants but very few of us get.