The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler Read online

  He understands that I bought some music at the Magnum Music Store this afternoon. I nod. He tells me that it was sold to me in error and that it should be returned. I ask him to explain, but he simply repeats what he has just said and insists that I give it to him. I ask him to name the music to which he is referring. He says that it is the music that I bought at Magnum. I ask him what he means when he says it was sold to me in error. He will not explain but demands that I return it. The conversation continues in this way for some minutes, going round in circles, getting nowhere. The man is relentless: he does not tire, but I do. I shut the door in his face.

  I am half expecting him to ring the doorbell again, but he does not. I go back to the living room where the CD player is and I draw the curtains. As I do so, I notice that the man is still there, not outside my front door, but in the street facing me as I stand at the living room window. I block him out with the curtains and return to my music. I am tired of the storms of the first movement so I switch to the second: ‘2nd Movement Adagio Maestoso, Sehr Langsam.’ It is indeed sehr langsam, very slow, an orgy of sorrow, with wailing strings and heavy brass plodding along to an insistent pulse on the timpani. I sit down to listen. It is compelling in its monotonous way. The stifling warmth of self-pity engulfs me. I mourn my lost aspirations, to travel, to be a ‘writer’, rather than a mere academic. I mourn the sterile tedium that has overtaken my marriage. There is a self-indulgent tear or two on my cheek as I drift into a doze.

  The doorbell arouses me. I turn off the music, then go to the window and look through the curtains to see if it is the man in the overcoat, but he has gone. Instead, in the dimness, I can make out two men in uniform. I go to the door and when I open it to them they ask to come in. They are policemen and I am suddenly afraid.

  It is my wife they have come to see me about: she has had an accident in the car. They offer to take me to the hospital and on the way they tell me she is dead. Her car was hit sideways on by a lorry at a crossing. They say she had gone through a red light. How unlike her. I see her at the hospital, barely recognisable. I return home where the hours are full of dullness and weeping. Once, during some unslept moment of the night, I look out of my window and think I see the man in the overcoat in the street below.

  In the morning the police are here again. They want to question me, purely routine you understand, because our car has been examined and there is a possibility that the brakes have been tampered with. This makes no sense at all. Who would want to kill me or my wife? We are utterly harmless and unimportant people. Even my theories about the Metaphysical Poets have aroused no controversy, not even very much interest to be honest. They ask me, purely routine you understand, where I was yesterday afternoon between two and five. I tell them about the London Library and about being in Magnum Music, though I don’t tell them what I bought there. They seem satisfied. When they have gone I have nothing better to do, so I play the third movement of the first symphony. It is not the usual Scherzo. After all Scherzo means a joke and one cannot imagine Hitler making many of those. It is designated: Marsch—Tempo, and that is what it is, a march. It is stirring, defiant and rather relentless. The tune, and there is an identifiable one this time, reminds me of something I have heard before. Is it the third movement of Raff’s Lenore symphony? Well, it takes me out of myself and I start to march up and down in the sitting room in time with the music. Then I stop. Good God, my wife has just been killed and I am marching up and down my sitting room to a piece of music written by Adolf Hitler. I must get out of the house.

  It is early afternoon, and I have not eaten, so I go and have something at The Engineer in Gloucester Avenue. From there you can walk across the road, down some steps and on to the towpath beside the Regent’s Canal. I call it ‘the dull canal’ after that line in Eliot’s The Waste Land, but it suits my mood, as does the sky which is grey and threatening rain once more. I walk for miles along the canal. Sometimes I find myself humming that wretched march and walking in step to it, but when I do I stop and try to shove the thing out of my mind.

  Towards evening, after miles of wandering along the towpath, I am about to pass under yet another cast iron footbridge when I can just see that something strange and black is wriggling under it, dangling over the water. Whatever it is, it is on the other side of the bridge to me, so I go under it, turn round and look back.

  What I have seen from the other side of the bridge are two feet encased in black boots. Their struggle belongs to a man with a hairless head and a long black overcoat who is hanging on to the balustrade of the bridge. No sound comes from him, but it is clear that he needs help, or he will fall into the oily waters below. It looks too as if he is attached to the bridge by a rope and that the rope may be round his neck.

  There are steps up from the tow path which give access to the bridge, so I climb them. I look around, but there is no-one about to help me. I reach the point where the man is hanging from the bridge. One bone-white hand is gripping the balustrade. I take hold of his arm and the hand relinquishes the balustrade to grip my arm in turn. It is a strong grip and almost pulls me over the bridge. I look down and see the top of the man’s grey, hairless head. Then the head tilts upward so that now I can see the face. A pair of remorseless eyes lock on to mine, their hold as fierce as the grip of his hand on my arm. He has a noose around his neck, but the rope has slipped so that the end of it now trails in the water. I try to pull him up, the effort nearly wrenching my arm out of its socket. His mouth opens and he grins, revealing a set of irregular teeth, green and yellow, like the lichen covered menhirs of a primitive stone circle. His breath, smelling of rotted vegetation, comes in irregular, rasping gulps and exhalations, but he says nothing.

  A wordless wrestle with the man’s dead weight continues for several minutes until at last he is hauled over the side of the bridge and we sit there panting together for the same length of time that it took me to rescue him. At my suggestion we find a café and sit down over two cups of sweet, watery tea. We talk.

  Or rather he talks and I listen. He does not answer my questions, but he has much to say about himself, though in many ways it is curiously vague. He says he is an artist, a musician of sorts, I think, but also a painter, and his enormous gifts have been unrecognised. An idiot world has failed to acknowledge his genius. He seems to blame and hate everyone for this, and I find myself compelled to take on some of the responsibility for his misery. He talks much about the soul of an artist and how a work of art may embody it. It is all very high-flown and pretentious; a little old-fashioned too, I think. I begin to be tired and horribly bored.

  Then he starts to talk about how something has been taken from him and that he will be lost until it is returned. He says that every artist is like Faust. Faust sold his soul to the Devil for wisdom, for money, for a woman; but the artist, he sells his soul to his own Art for the sake of fame and glory, and if that fame and glory is not granted to him then his soul has been given away for nothing. As far as I can understand his drift, I think this is rubbish, but I do not say so. By this time I am so bored and exhausted that I am close to falling asleep where I sit. I am just about to do so when he grips my arm and begins to talk urgently about wanting something back, something apparently that I have.

  Then I notice—how could I have failed to notice before?—that I know this man; his eyes are familiar, those bloated, poached egg eyes, the grey, hairless face, the heavy, damp overcoat. I wrench my arm away. I tell him to go to hell. I run out of the café. Some time later I find a taxi and go home. I want to sleep. I must now sleep.

  But sleep is denied me, because the police are waiting for me when I get home. They want to question me further. It is about the death of my wife. Apparently someone was seen yesterday afternoon tampering with her car, and they want to check again, purely routine you understand, on my movements that day. I tell them once more about the London Library and Magnum Music. Well, they haven’t fully checked with the London Library, but there is a slight problem with Ma
gnum Music. You see, the official opening of Magnum Music was today, and yesterday it was not open to the public, so I could not have been in Magnum Music at the time that I said I was. I ask if I am being charged with anything, but the police say no, they are just pursuing their inquiries. They suggest that I keep in touch with them, keep them informed of my movements.

  I cannot stay here. They cannot keep me. Events have been too much for me, so I must move. I cannot sleep here tonight in case the man in the heavy overcoat returns and rings the bell, and drives me mad with his rubbish about Art and the Soul.

  As soon as I know the police are out of the way I set off. I put a few things in a plastic bag, not much, but for some reason I have to take the boxed set of symphonies with me. I carry it like a talisman, and because I have paid for it dearly I will not let it go. I am not quite sure where I am going, but I need to see other people, some sort of life, so I head south towards the heart of London. I have been walking for little over half an hour when it begins to rain.

  The wet pavements reflect the pinchbeck gold of the street lamps. There is a sick feeling at the back of my neck. I must sleep. I must find somewhere dry where I can hide for a while because I cannot return to my house. Now I am near King’s Cross. The rain falls on. I find a hotel, one of those wretched hotels that are to be found near King’s Cross, frequented by pushers and prostitutes, whose foyers look like entrances to the Underworld. Two letters from the orange neon sign over the door do not light up, so that in the dark it reads H EL. Nevertheless I go in. The only room available is at the front, overlooking a main road. The grinding sound of traffic penetrates through the window, the yellow street lights shine through the thin curtains. The candlewick bedspread is lemon yellow. The walls are the colour of nicotine stains. I switch on an electric heater. I undress and attempt to dry myself.

  On the dressing table I lay my one significant possession, the boxed set of THE COMPLETE SYMPHONIES OF ADOLF HITLER.

  And now, just now, the telephone in my room is ringing. I pick up the phone: it is Reception. There is a gentleman downstairs who wishes to come up and speak to me: something about wanting his music back.

  I can’t let him up because I know what he will do. In that heavy old overcoat of his, he will sit down in my room, and fill it with the smell of damp streets. He will fix me with those gloomy poached egg eyes, and, in that voice like scratched fog, he will talk and talk and talk. He will ply me with self-pity, with his shallow, pretentious views on Art and Music.

  He will bore me to death.

  LAPLAND NIGHTS

  As almost everyone knows the acronym OPEN stands for Old People’s Exchange Network; and, as everyone—or almost everyone—agrees, it is a brilliant idea. Jane Capel certainly thought so when she first paid a visit to the OPEN offices in Panton Street one July afternoon.

  The increasing longevity of the population means that many elderly people are living in the care of their offspring who are themselves approaching old age. When money is scarce and the old people in question require much looking after, this can put a great strain on their carers. Help from Social Services is also stretched. Carers have to find a cheap way of obtaining respite from their onerous and often dispiriting duties.

  The idea of OPEN is a simple one, and operates on the same principle as that of exchange students. An old person would come to stay with a carer and their old person for two or three weeks and then that carer would send their old person to stay with their guest’s carer for the same amount of time. In that way each carer would be granted a time of respite. OPEN, being a registered charity, and receiving some funding from the Government and the Lottery, only charged a nominal registration fee for its work as an agency. Jane Capel saw an article about it in her Daily Telegraph and decided to try out the enterprise.

  Jane was sixty-three and lived on a street of semi-detached houses in an outer London suburb called Westwood. She was a widow, her husband, an art teacher and would-be painter, having died of drink and disappointment some years back. Her eighty-nine year old mother had been living with her for three years. She had been independent until visited by dementia and Parkinson’s disease which rendered her frightened and lonely. A Home was out of the question: Jane could not afford it; her mother, with every fibre of her fading faculties, would not contemplate it.

  Jane had a younger brother, Tony, but he was unwilling—or, as he liked to put it, ‘unable’—to shoulder much of the responsibility. Tony, an investment banker, was married with two children, and the idea of Mother living with them was unfortunately out of the question. As he explained to Jane over the phone, his wife Fiona had ‘never got on with Mother’. (‘Did anyone?’ thought Jane, but she said nothing.) Even when Jane suggested that they take on Mother for a couple of weeks while she went on holiday, this proved too difficult. Melissa, the daughter, was just coming up to her GCSEs, and their son Charles was about to take his Common Entrance Exam for Eton. As Tony explained: ‘the children have to come first.’ Was there an implication that Jane, whose marriage had been childless, did not fully understand the priorities of family life? The possibility of Eton was also a reason why Tony could not offer Jane any financial assistance at that moment, but he was always very generous with his advice.

  Tony said: ‘What you ought to do’—a favourite phrase of his—‘is get on to Social Services and tell them . . .’ At that point Jane stopped listening. It was no use telling Tony, who knew just about everything anyway, that she had spent the last three years ‘getting on’ to Social Services with very meagre results: a wheelchair, a Zimmer frame, and a bossy woman who helped bathe her mother once a week.

  This might have been the point at which she gave way to self-pity, but Jane hated self-pity in herself as much as in others. She had experienced its ugly consequences with her husband Jack, so she would not give in. She looked around for other ways of alleviating her condition and found OPEN.

  **

  The offices of OPEN in Panton Street were discreetly grand, as befitted its well-connected founder, Martha Wentworth-Farrow. Apparently Mrs Wentworth-Farrow liked to interview all her clients herself, so Jane was feeling nervous as she waited in the outer office. She cursed herself for not having brought anything to read and tried to find interest in her surroundings. On the wall of the outer office, above the receptionist’s desk, was a framed and illuminated text elaborately inscribed on vellum. It read:

  An Old Age serene and bright

  And lovely as a Lapland night

  Jane recognised the quotation from Wordsworth and wondered whether the poet had ever had to cope with elderly parents, or indeed whether he had visited Lapland. She doubted it. One day though, she thought, ‘when it is all over’ (her pleasant euphemism for the death of her mother), she would spend time reading Wordsworth. She might even visit Lapland.

  ‘Mrs Wentworth-Farrow will see you now,’ said the receptionist.

  The room Jane entered was panelled except for an end wall which was lined with books. It had the look of an old-fashioned solicitor’s office and was evidently calculated to impress. Behind a fine old mahogany desk sat the founder of OPEN who graciously invited Jane to sit opposite her.

  Mrs Wentworth-Farrow, a tall, smartly dressed woman with well-ordered features, exuded the slightly condescending sympathy of a privileged do-gooder. Jane tried not to waste time hating her because, she reasoned, it was after all better to do good with your privilege, however condescendingly, than to do bad. She was certainly a clever and forceful woman because, by the end of the interview, Jane had told Mrs Wentworth-Farrow far more than she had expected to about her marriage, her exasperating younger brother, relations with her mother. For some moments after their conversation had finished Mrs Wentworth-Farrow wrote in a ledger; then she laid down her pen, looked up and smiled at Jane as she leaned back in her chair.

  ‘Well, Mrs Capel—may I call you Jane?’ Jane nodded. ‘Oh, and you must call me Martha, of course. You are just the sort of person we want to help.’ It
was an ambiguous sentence, but Jane smiled hopefully. ‘Your mother does sound quite a handful, so we’re going to find it rather difficult to get hold of someone to “team you up with”, as we say.’ Jane had had a feeling that teams would come into the conversation at some point. Martha had the look of a former hockey captain and head girl. ‘I wonder . . .’ Martha tapped her teeth with her fountain pen, then typed something into her computer, after which she frowned at the screen for a few seconds and turned to Jane. ‘Would you be prepared to take on a couple?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘There’s a Mrs von Hohenheim. Lives down in Wiltshire. Widow like you; interesting woman. She has two parents, in their early nineties, believe it or not, but still quite hale, I understand. A Major and Mrs Strellbrigg. I realise that it’s something of a challenge, but—’

  ‘No. No,’ said Jane who wanted to cut Martha off before she said something to the effect that beggars could not be choosers.

  So it was agreed. Letters were exchanged and within a month, Jane was driving her mother down to Wiltshire to stay with Mrs von Hohenheim and the Strellbriggs for three weeks.

  **

  They lived in a large bungalow at a place called Lockington Magna on the outskirts of Savernake Forest. Mrs von Hohenheim was a big bony woman who wore a tartan skirt and bright red lipstick. Jane was slightly disconcerted by her because she could not quite shake off the impression that she was a man dressed up as a woman, but Mrs von Hohenheim was effusively welcoming. Jane watched closely to see how her mother reacted because, though her mental faculties were impaired, her capacity for registering complaint was as sound as ever. Her mother seemed fascinated by her new hostess, but not afraid. Mrs von Hohenheim was voluble without being in any way informative about herself or her situation. She had a slight accent—German or Netherlandish at a guess—and a hooting falsetto voice. She ushered them into the sitting room to meet her parents.