Russell Hoban - My Tango With Barbara Strozzi

‘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.

Max Lesser has some time ago described Diamond Heart [See Her Name Was Lola , Bloomsbury, 2003] and with his permission we borrow from it for the present narrative. ‘Diamond Heart,’ says the brochure, ‘is not a retreat. It is a centre of dynamic calm in which mind and spirit gather energy for the next forward move. On offer are Yoga, Tai Chi, Feng Shui, and Zen disciplines including meditation, gardening, flower arrangement, archery, snooker, and poker. Vegetarian, Kosher, and Halal cuisine. Acupuncture, Reflexology, Aromatherapy, and homeopathic medicine. Tuition in classical Indian music with Hariprasad and Indira Khan. This year we have added writing courses which will be tutored by established novelists, playwrights and poets.’

Diamond Heart has given a new lease of life to the defunct herring port of Port Mackie on the Firth of Moray. The harbour is almost empty, stretching out its arms to the past. The tide comes in, goes out around Kirsty’s Knowe, Teeny Titties and Deil’s Hurdies. The wind sighs in the grasses. The pebbles rattle in the tidewash, the sea-shapen rocks abide. There are plenty of gulls, shags, and cormorants but no herring. Port Mackie now buzzes with new businesses supplying goods and services to Diamond Heart.