The Bat Tattoo

19 Sarah Varley

Sometimes little good things happen, like a break in heavy grey clouds and a bit of blue sky shining through; I read in The Times the other day that a secret buyer had acquired all of Maria Callas’s underwear that was being auctioned in Paris and vowed to burn it to save her ‘dignity and honour’: definitely a bit of blue sky, that.

There’s been a lot of rain lately and I’m surprised at how often I find myself on the banks of the Euphrates; that’s an operatic allusion, and I can’t do many of those because I know very little about opera. Giles and I used to go to the ENO sometimes but I hadn’t been for years when Linda gave me a ticket for Nabucco; she was going to visit a daughter who was ill and she wouldn’t take any money for the ticket. I’ll get to the Euphrates shortly.

I wanted to give myself time for a leisurely coffee before the seven-thirty start of the opera, so I left the house at quarter-past six. It was warm for December and raining. The houses and shops were aggressive with Christmas illumination and decorations; the lamps on Parsons Green and the two lantern-like telephone boxes, the figures in ones and twos moving into and out of the lamplight all heightened the singleness of my footsteps. The platform at the top of the station stairs was bustling and festive with people coming and going with shopping bags, and the houses and flats they were coming from or going to were made cosy in my imagination because of the rain all around us.

When I changed to the Piccadilly Line at Earls Court the early evening crush wasn’t too bad and I found a seat, took Middlemarch out of my bag — I’d first read it years ago — and settled down comfortably with it. I couldn’t help shaking my head and smiling at Mrs Cadwallader’s remark on page 537 of my Penguin edition: ‘“We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.”’ After a few moments I stopped smiling. I don’t care about calling things by the same names as other people but I was wondering whether I’d always called things by the names that were true for me: what I had with Giles, for example. We’d gone to the opera, to concerts, to films; we’d done what lovers do and I’d chosen him as a life partner. He turned out to be a non-finisher, a faller-by-the-wayside. Had I wanted someone I could work on and improve? Was I a faller-by-the-wayside-saver?

Going up the escalator at Leicester Square I passed a young couple kissing on the down escalator and I remembered when Giles and I had done that on that same moving stairs.

VAUXHALL WORKERS’ SHOCK AT CLOSURE, said the Evening Standard headline as I came out of the station. Over the road Leicester Square presented itself as Hell in modern dress, swarming and throbbing, its noise made visible in neon and glittering lights. BEST COMEDY, flaunted the sign under the marquee of Wyndham’s Theatre on this side of Charing Cross Road. RICHLY PERCEPTIVE, SPARKLING, boasted the critical quotes hanging there. ‘Big Issue,’ said a vendor.

Although I always exert myself to keep sane I’m not always sure that I’m calling things by the same names I used to call them by. GABY’S DELI in glittering metallic letters over the yellow awning — was that the name when Giles and I had hot salt-beef sandwiches there? Est. 1965, so only the sign was new. The tastes came back to me of the too-muchness of salt beef, mustard, rye bread, beer, and the simple pleasure of gluttony. No one had ever heard of mad cows back then.

Is it a sign of growing old, I wonder, when the faces coming towards you in the street are full of stories that you don’t want to know? Here now were Cecil Court and Lipman & Sons Formal Wear, reassuringly itself and staunch through the years with correct attire for morning and evening. As I walked through the rain towards St Martin’s Lane in the lamplit and quickstepping darkness the shops on both sides held out their racks and windows to me, entreating me to buy old books, rare books, prints and maps, antiques old and new, ephemera, esoterica, and works on the occult. Stuart and Watkins! No, now they were just Watkins Books. Had they always had ibis-headed Thoth on their signboard? That’s where I bought my copy of I Ching and Giles bought his Tarot cards. Living with Zen was currently being featured in their windows. It was always difficult for me to walk past the maps at Edward Storey’s Ltd without buying one; I can’t help feeling there’s a place they want to show me but I’ve never taken the chance for fear of falling off the edge of my world. There were prints as well, and the people bent over them assumed, as always, the postures in which Daumier painted print-browsers. I suppose the postures for every action are always there and successive generations fall into them.

This rainy evening in Cecil Court seemed always to have been there with its pavement glistening under the many footsteps; even when the sun is shining Cecil Court is a reservoir of yesterdays, a pool of grey light in which moments long gone surface like carp rising to be fed.

St Martin’s Lane, of course, was all go, with a posh new anonymous hotel and CAFÉ ST MARTIN’S PIZZA confronting me when I left Cecil Court and crossed through the taxis to the English National Opera side. Linda had recommended Aroma coffee so I wove through the pedestrian traffic until I saw it just before the ENO.

The place was crowded but I found a seat at one of the little tables and the coffee was very good indeed. Some of the people there were clearly bound for Nabucco; a few even had programmes. Most of the ENO opera-goers don’t dress up as much as the punters at the Royal Opera House; I remember from the past that they tend to laugh very loudly at the feeblest joke or any naughty word and to shout ‘Bravo!’ as much as possible, even to the women. At the table next to mine there was a couple talking about Nabucco. The woman was a handsome lady in her fifties with hennaed hair; the man was in his seventies, short and bearded, with spectacles; they had a married air.

‘This is a David Pountney production,’ said the man. He had an American accent.

‘I know,’ said the woman. ‘There’ll probably be trench coats.’ Very slight German accent.

‘What do you think,’ he said, ‘Berlin or Moscow in the thirties? Beijing in the eighties?’

‘Whatever. Plus lots of children in smaller trench coats. Have you looked it up in the opera book?’

‘No. I’ve heard the chorus of the Hebrew slaves at one time and another but that’s all I know about Nabucco. I was just now trying to remember which Orpheus had the naked dancers standing on rocks and turning around slowly.’

‘Not the Monteverdi; that was the one with the twitchers.’

‘I know that. Was it Gluck? Orpheus and Eurydice?’

‘That’s the one. I don’t think you’ll get any naked dancers tonight.’

‘You win some, you lose some. Read any reviews?’

She looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, and I think somebody loved it and somebody hated it but I don’t remember who said what. Any idea what time it’s over?’

‘The brochure said five past ten, so figure it’s always a little later plus curtain calls — we might get out of there by ten-twenty, and with luck we’ll be home before eleven-thirty. I’m looking forward to the herring salad.’

‘Me too. Have you finished your coffee?’

‘Yes, let’s go so there’s time for the loo before we take our seats.’

They got up, took their shoulder bags, and made for the door. He was in jeans, large autonomous-looking black boots, black polo-neck, blue crocheted waistcoat, a scruffy green anorak, and one of those little tweed hats old duffers wear; she was taller than he and more elegant in a beaded fifties cardigan, a narrow snakeskin-patterned coat, a long black skirt, and black boots. I wondered what their life was like. He was not an impressive figure but despite his age he didn’t seem retired. How did they get together? When I see a good-looking woman with a much older man I tend to assume that money or fame must have been the attraction. Why do any two people get together? What about Giles and me? I still remember that he looked at me the way a man who knows horses looks at a horse; and how did I see him? As a man who needed to be improved by me. Oh dear.

The scaffolding on the outside of the Coliseum darkened the entrance and made it seem a place where a password might be required; the lobby was thick with people queueing for tickets while others went inside. At the Jubilee Market and other venues I find crowds invigorating but elsewhere they make me uncomfortable. Not reasonable of me but there it is. I bought a programme and made my way past various knees to the centre of the first row of stalls, seat A15; Linda is very short and doesn’t like to sit behind people who block her view.

The interior of the Coliseum was in the grip of scaffolding that seemed to have paused in the act of consuming the place. There were elevated walkways on both sides and behind me, with ladders and planking for ascents and descents, entrances and exits. There was a platform over the left side of the orchestra pit with chairs and music stands on it. The curtain was painted to resemble a torn scroll with Hebrew lettering. The house was filling up rapidly with the usual sound of a swarming audience: people with tickets on the right started from the far left and worked their way east past all the knees, handbags, umbrellas, canes and coats between them and their seats, while those with seats on the left started from the far right and worked their way west.

Having squashed my coat and hat under the seat I opened my programme at random and found Psalm 137 staring me in the face:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying: Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

There were tears rolling down my face. I dug a tissue out of my bag and wiped my eyes and blew my nose. Years ago when I read straight through the Old Testament and the New I did all of the psalms at one go, since when I’ve looked at a few now and then, but the only one that sticks in my mind is 137. It isn’t associated with any person, place, or event in my past — it’s just that it gets to me in various ways at various times; there is a kind of spell in those words. ‘By the rivers of Babylon …’ Yes! Who has not been captive in some kind of Babylon and hanged his or her harp on a willow, unable to sing in a strange land? The psalm begins with lyrical lamentation and ends with a bloodthirsty cry for vengeance; the exiles so full of pity for themselves have none for the infants of Babylon whose brains they hope will be spattered on the stones. And yet! And yet words have an amoral power: put certain ones together in a particular way and people will weep or dance or pick up a paving stone or a gun or whatever comes to hand.

When had my Zion been? I saw afternoon sun slanting on the grasses of Maiden Castle; there were sheep safely grazing; the grasses stirred in the winds of the long past and the footfalls of ghosts. ‘These Iron Age earthworks,’ Giles had explained, ‘were made to conform to the shape of the hills they were on, to make use of the earth forces. Speaking of which, in the aerial photographs, the system of ramparts and ditches in the eastern entrance remind me of a vagina.’ ‘So many things do,’ I said. The sun was behind him, and his wind-ruffled hair had a golden penumbra.

‘Nebuchadnezzar,’ said an American accent to my left. It was the man from Aroma. ‘Nabucco is the Italian version.’

‘You needn’t shout,’ said his wife, ‘I can hear you quite well. Nebuchadnezzar had the feet of clay?’

‘The idol he dreamt of,’ said the man as the lights dimmed. The curtain had gone up without my noticing and there were musicians on the platform over the orchestra pit and other musicians on the stage, not exactly trench-coated but in grotty combinations of outdoor wear and military surplus. The conductor had forgone the usual spotlit entrance and was onstage in his shirtsleeves conducting the overture. Were there already other people onstage? I can’t remember — the whole thing had taken me unawares and I hadn’t even looked at the cast or the synopsis in my programme. The overture was a take-charge affair that affectingly foreshadowed, from mood to mood, what was to follow; as it went on I was startled to realise that I knew the part I was hearing: it was an instrumental version of the chorus of the Hebrew slaves. I suppose it’s one of those things that everyone knows without necessarily knowing what opera it’s from.

Now I could see that the elevated walkways went across the back of the stage as well, continuous with the ones on both sides and behind me. There was a great deal of traffic on these, and when both Hebrews and Babylonians were in military garb I couldn’t always tell which soldiers I was seeing. The staging was adapted to the exigencies of the refurbishment and had a rather startled ad hoc look that added to the excitement of what was definitely a rouser — a very dynamic production with a soprano, Lauren Flanigan, who seemed a whole risorgimento in herself. Part of my pleasure in her performance was a response to her own keen enjoyment of the role of Abigaille, who turned out not to be Nabucco’s daughter; when Nabucco goes mad she usurps the throne and arranges the execution of the real daughter, Fenena, a mezzo who has a Hebrew boyfriend. Nabucco, however, reclaims his sanity and his kingdom, renounces Baal, and saves Fenena and the Hebrews. Abigaille then does the decent thing and takes poison in the very best operatic tradition. This of course is not a complete or coherent synopsis. I was not equally attentive to all the principals and events — my interest was mainly in Abigaille and Fenena. Anne Mason was a spirited and touching Fenena, and I was greatly relieved when she was rescued by the newly converted Nabucco. I found the whole production highly satisfying, but for me the main event was the famous chorus of the Hebrew slaves in Scene Two, Part Three, The Banks of the Euphrates; we had arrived at the rivers of Babylon and I broke out in goosepimples.

Since then I’ve bought a recording of Nabucco sung in Italian, and I’ve been listening to that chorus as Verdi heard it. ‘Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate …’ it begins, [Fly, thought, on wings of gold …] and goes along quietly with the spirit building in it until it swells into ‘Oh, mia patria si bella e perduta!’ [Oh, my country so lovely and lost!]. By the time it reaches ‘Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati, perche muta dal salice pendi?’ [Golden harp of the prophetic seers, why dost thou hang mute upon the willow?] I’m ready to grab Giles’s cricket bat and head for the nearest ramparts. Small wonder that it became emblematic of the spirit of the risorgimento and was sung spontaneously by the crowds following Verdi’s funeral procession through the streets of Milan.

That was the music in my head when I left the Coliseum, and with it came Psalm 137 and my remembered Zion. The rain had stopped, and after I crossed St Martin’s Lane in the intervals between taxis and was once more in the darkness of Cecil Court I saw again the afternoon sunlight on the wind-stirred grasses of Maiden Castle. How shall I sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? I thought. But then, really, that’s what life is, isn’t it: a strange land.