The Charming Quirks of Others

“But of course music should do that,” she said. “I’m never dry-eyed when I hear ‘Soave sia il vento.’ I can’t help myself.”

“Mimi’s death did it for me,” said Jamie. “I first saw Boheme when I was thirteen. We went to the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, with the school, and her death scene had me in floods. I didn’t want the other boys to see, and so I looked down at the floor, which meant that I really didn’t see much of her actual demise. But I think the others noticed and one of them kicked me on the shin.”

“Boys,” said Isabel. They were always hitting each other, kicking things; that lay ahead with Charlie, who was gentle, like his father, but who would no doubt go through the phase of testing the fragility of the world. Yesterday he had thrown a toy wooden train at a door and been thrilled by the experience; there would be more to come.

Jamie inclined his head in agreement. “Yes, boys. But then years later I saw Boheme done in a modern setting—an artist’s warehouse in New York rather than a garret in Paris. Everything on the stage was very minimalist: acres of white, even minimalist white, if that’s a colour. Mimi was still dying of consumption, though, and it suddenly occurred to me that there was a real problem here. If it was meant to be contemporary New York, then Mimi wouldn’t have died. She would have been given antibiotics …”

Isabel burst out laughing. “I’m not sure that antibiotics help opera,” she said. “They could change so much.”

“And they would have meant so much more Mozart,” mused Jamie, for whom the death of Mozart had been the big tragedy. He had once said to Isabel: “Mozart’s dying so young, Isabel: was that, do you think, a bigger loss for the world than the wiping out of the dinosaurs?” She had been about to say “A silly question, Jamie,” but had realised that it was not so silly at all; in fact it was profound, whichever way one looked at it. Was a refined statement of truth and beauty—some great artistic creation, perhaps—better in its essence than a destructive and brutish life-form? Better for whom? And if the dinosaurs had continued to exist, would we—or Mozart—have come into existence? Perhaps we had progressed enough in our understanding of the world to abandon our claims to being that special. If the choice were between dinosaurs and Homo sapiens, then did it really matter one way or the other, except to the species involved? Ultimately, of course, if we were the ones passing the judgement, then it was infinitely better that it was people rather than dinosaurs. But that was a conclusion simply begging for objections because it meant that we could despoil the world at will, as long as we judged what we did to be in our best interests. The dinosaurs had gone: next might be the tigers, if we wanted their forests or if we thought that they might eat a few too many of us; or the whales, if we wanted to eat them, or make them into watch oil or some other product. No, the moment one began to deny any value other than that conferred by humans, the moral game was up. There could be no morality beyond the limited world of what we did to each other.

But now Jamie continued: “Just think, if Mozart had been given another thirty-five years. Just imagine.”

Isabel wondered whether the composer had said everything he wanted to say by the time he died, as had happened with Auden, who had said less and less in his later years, and much of it rather cantankerous. Perhaps there was a time for an artist to die, or at least to become silent, before he said something that contradicted everything he had said before. She had thought this recently when a distinguished philosopher—a long-professed atheist—began in his final years to write articles that took a different view. Those who had applauded his earlier works were dismayed and put the change of view down to senility. She had mentioned this to Jamie—read it out from a letter published in the newspaper—and he had said, “Yes, but he still believed what he said when he wrote those articles. He may have been losing the place, but he still believed what he said.”

“Undoubtedly. But the belief might have been based on a physical change in the brain.”

Jamie looked unimpressed. “But still his brain.”

“His brain at … whatever age he was. Let’s say eighty-something.”

“But a man aged twenty is the same person as the same man at eighty-something, isn’t he?”

She said that the answer to this was yes and no. “The same physical person, yes, but we can be quite different persons in other respects.” She looked at him thoughtfully. How would he change? she wondered. “And perhaps we shouldn’t judge people in the same way throughout their lifetimes. We can become different people, don’t you think?”

He looked doubtful, and so she carried on: “All we need to do is to make it clear that we’re talking about people at a particular point in their lives. Look at those people who were communists in the thirties and then changed their minds when they saw what communism could do. What do we say of them when we sum them up at the end of their lives? That they were communists? That they condoned the Gulag?”

Jamie shook his head. “No. We look at what they became. That’s their …” He paused, searching for the right expression.

“Their final position?”

“Yes. That’s what counts.”

She considered this charitable—and she approved of that. There was not enough charity. There was plenty of readiness to blame and to punish; there was never enough generosity of spirit.

She thought: We do not need to look for reasons for love—it is simply there; it comes upon us without invitation, without reason sometimes; it surprises us when we are least expecting it, when we think that our hearts are closed or that we are not ready, or we imagine it will never happen to us because it has not happened before. But if I were to ask myself why I love you, or perhaps try to find what is the main cause of my being in love with you, perhaps it is because you are generous of spirit. It is not because you are beautiful; not because I see perfection in your features, in your smile, in your litheness—all of which I do, of course I do, and have done since the moment I first met you. It is because you are generous in spirit; and may I be like that; may I become like you—which unrealistic wish, to become the other, is such a true and revealing symptom of love, its most obvious clue, its unmistakable calling card.

THE ENERGETIC SUBSTITUTION of one task for another, more awkward task may make one forget for a while, but only for a while. Isabel knew that, and even as she buried herself over the next few days in performing the admittedly pressing work of putting the Review to bed—delicious term, she thought—at the back of her mind was the knowledge that there were other things she should be doing: thinking of how to deal with Professor Lettuce and his unsolicited review; speaking to Prue; finding out more about the candidates for the principal’s post; and, of course, getting married. That made her smile; an impending marriage should occupy one’s mind almost entirely, but here she was merely adding it to a list of things to do. There were people, she knew, who simply never got round to getting married; they might have decided to marry, but for some reason the timing might never seem quite right, or sheer inertia might take over. She had read of one engagement in the Highlands of Scotland that had lasted for twenty-eight years before the couple got round to holding a wedding. The groom had bought a wedding suit that had remained in the cupboard during all that time, as had the bride’s dress; the spread of middle age had made both too small.