Remember Me (8 page)

They went to the theatre, therefore, quite often. On this particular occasion the performance was just some such comedy of French manners as they would both be living soon. It was like dropping in for a visit at his own future household. The play was familiar. Only
occasionally
did he notice the lines. In a box nearby he could see Uncle Max, Aunt Ludovica, and Sophie. Sisi,
fortunately
, had taken her laughter back to Vienna with her. He smiled inwardly.

No doubt Aunt Ludovica expected him to be difficult, and so to surprise her he decided not to be. He made a visit to their box. He took care to stand well to the front, like an angel lowering a thermometer down into the pit to test the temperature of hell. It was altogether
favourable
. He turned to smile at Sophie, and saw to his
displeasure
that her face had a puzzled, faintly frightened look. No doubt this was reality to her.

But as men and women have different illusions, so do they have a different reality. Sophie sat primly on her chair. She did not like to be exhibited. She wanted warmth and could not seem to feel it. She shrank into herself.

Ludwig watched without approval. “Smile,” he whispered, smiling beautifully. He thought she was very stupid, but perhaps that was just as well. She had worn a dress that did not go with his uniform, which was silly of her, since the whole meeting had so clearly been planned in advance. He stared at her until she smiled. Unexpectedly, the smile became spontaneous, and he wondered what had gone on in her mind. Perhaps she also liked applause. Aware that they were being watched, he began to talk to her, his thoughts elsewhere. It did not matter what he said, so long as they should appear affable and intimate. He saw with relief that that was the sort of thing she understood. She talked easily, from the front of her mouth, as disinterested and well-brought-up girls were taught to do.

In private no doubt she would prove a bore. But then he would seldom have to see her in private. Queen she should be. She was qualified for that. But there the
matter
should end. He became impatient.

When the party separated to go their separate ways, he sighed with relief. Few actors go to the greenroom after the performance. They prefer the privacy of their
dressing
-rooms. And that was as it should be.

He had not counted on having to see so much of her. He found the engagement extended to private as well as to public occasions. It disturbed him. He had always seen lives from the front. Married lives he had seen only in their public appearance. He had not realized they had a private dimension as well. Sophie and Aunt Ludovica began to take up more and more of his day. And though he longed for company, it was not for any particular company he longed, but for an ideal. He began to look at Sophie speculatively. For somewhere under all those clothes there was a woman. No congress of statues would
give them the child the family and the public alike would soon be clamouring for.

Applause was pleasant, but it had a drawback. Like a fire, it had to be fed, otherwise it guttered out. He tired of the public occasions at which they both had to appear, and when he could, he fled away from them. It was enough that Sophie had what she wanted. Now she was certain of her ambition, she could be left to herself.

But even when he was alone, he could not avoid the preparations for the wedding. It was as though they were building a scaffold around him.

He had had to approve the drawings for the state
wedding
coach. It was being built now. It cost more than would have ten operas by Wagner, but nobody grudged the money. There was a lesson, also, in that. A golden burst of angels held the royal crown above the roof. It was like the specimen cage in which some rare bird was carried sorrowing away from its native element into
captivity
. He did not like the look of it.

Below him, morning and night, he could hear the
carpenters
fitting up a suite of rooms for Sophie. They were carving them out of the apartments in which his father had died. Dynasties are inexorable. Now the carpenters were installing a staircase from his own rooms down to hers, a narrow corkscrew stair. The idea filled him with panic. He thought that if she ever came up those stairs, something would die in him. He heartily wished that stairs might be built to twist only one way. Twist them the other way, and she would suck the soul out of him like a cork from a bottle. Let her be Queen and nothing else. Women demanded too much. She could never share his dreams, and if she learned that, she would destroy them. Soon she would leave no part of his life untouched, and his existence would silt up with marriage as would a
river, until his spirit could no longer find a passage to the sea.

He had written Wagner all about it, and Wagner seemed to approve. He took some comfort from that. She must meet Wagner. Only if they got along together, could he be sure that she would play her appointed role successfully. She was a woman and Cosima von Bülow was a woman. Perhaps the two of them, having each other, would leave Wagner to him.

From below him came the sound of the carpenters. They had finished the risers. Now they were laying the treads, standing on the finished stairs, as they worked on the unfinished ones. If he had cared to do so, he could have looked down that hole between the walls to see the stairs mounting up towards him. He did not care to do so.

He thought suddenly of Aunt Ludovica. It made him shudder. After the marriage she would ask Sophie
questions
about what they did together. Women always did. He could already hear what they would say.

At that point a footman brought in a package and laid it on the table before him. Hastily he opened it. Inside were three photographs, mounted on stiff grey board, heavy and gilt, with rounded corners, and a small box of
cartes-de-visite
copies. He put the top photograph on the table and stared at it, as though studying his future.

It was their engagement photograph. He looked not at Sophie, but at himself, trying to trap in the features of that stranger something he could recognize. We cannot possibly be what other people see in us. It is something we refuse, and rightly, to believe. The camera
photographs
something that has nothing to do with our real nature at all.

In this photograph his head seemed to float above his
body. He was detached. Sophie seemed as little interested in him as she was in the moon. She held on to his body and gazed directly into the camera. Her touch on his arm was light, and yet she seemed to drag his body down. She seemed like a well-bred vampire in a romantic story, but the story was her own, not his. Her right forefinger pointed down towards the ground. His face was free of her, but his body, she seemed to say, would never be free. They had only the protection of their clothes
between
them.

It was, in many ways, a successful photograph. He sent her a copy at once. It was more successful, he thought, than perhaps she would know. For like conjurers, women can successfully exert their charms only on those who do not know how the trick is done. As a trip backstage can ruin the ballet forever, so does a touch of feline insight protect a man from the stratagems of women. In the picture he and Sophie looked like members of two
different
species. She was the huntress, not he. Her body was more real than she was. Beneath the demure white morning dress, her body twisted like that of the Lamia of Corinth, once the latter’s nature had been revealed. Rather than face her as she was, he was eager to introduce her to Wagner, for he could accept her only by turning her into a character in one of the Master’s operas.

He was nervous about Wagner. Wagner had gone, but Wagner as an artistic dream remained. Wagner was an ideal. Women hate ideas. Their only defence is to engulf the creative impulse and divert it into the making of children. And if he could not keep his ideals as those were expressed in Wagner, then nothing was worth keeping.

He began to be terribly afraid. Events rushed by him too quickly. He could snatch at only one or two of them.
The family had moved Sophie in to town, into the house of Duke Max. It was too close. It meant that he had to pay her visits there, almost daily.

They were to be married in August. It was already March. He could feel himself being sucked under. He did not know what to do.

In the hall of Duke Max’s town house were two busts at the foot of the main staircase. One was of Sisi, the Empress Elizabeth. The other was of himself. Sophie certainly resembled her sister, and yet she was not of that litter. She was a kitten too young to scratch. He felt great pity for her. None of this was her fault. If they had not given her claws, he would marry her yet.

Ascending the stairs, he paused on that “yet”. After all, nothing in his life was inevitable. It occurred to him only with his hand on the balustrade, that if he had to do so, he could always draw away from her at the last
moment
. At least he thought he could. More cheerfully, he went on up the stairs, bearing in his hand the gift he had brought her.

He found her alone in a drawing-room upstairs. She turned to look at him, but did not speak. She was posed neatly against a window, and the sight pleased him. In women he liked only the artificial. If she were always to be artificial, then he might be able to go through with it. She was like a rose. She had the same fresh, guileless, new-cut quality. He moved so often in a cloud of chypre that sometimes he forgot how some people had no smell at all, as though being newly scrubbed had an aura of its own. Some smells were sounds. Chypre had the heavy, wooden odour of Wagner, but Sophie was like a
powder-dusted
baby fresh from the bath, in a Mozart world of popularity. She was a toy. Her jerky little movements of pleasure and delight had been contrived for her at birth,
and were innocent of personal artifice, for they were the ancestral strings of rank.

He paused in the doorway. She made a little smile, and it was a gesture of hers slightly to drop her left shoulder when she did so. It was almost her only gesture. Soon it would be May, and he wondered what a May in this world of hers would be like. He could not talk to her, as he had talked to Wagner, or even to Paul. That sort of enthusiastic ease is unisexual, not bisexual. She had no conversation. It would drive him mad to invent
something
to do for them both, day after day. The sort of silence between them was the kind that comes at the end of a love affair, not at the beginning of one.

He had brought her a portrait of Maria Stuart on porcelain. He had thought that he should bring her something that meant something to him, but not
anything
that meant too much. He wanted to see if she felt about Maria Stuart as he did, for Maria Stuart was one of the martyr queens.

Sophie was not interested in martyr queens. She only said it was pretty but much too large to make into a brooch. Her voice was as irritating as the bell at Mass, always tinkling away when you were thinking of
something
else.

She did not understand; and that, unconsciously, must have been the moment when he began to back away.

He glanced at the miniature, longing to put it back in his pocket. Profane people should not be allowed to look at sacred things. Sophie had no more intelligence than the small dogs who surrounded her, and who were no doubt chosen to match her muffs. It was as though he had given a piece of himself away. She would never give it back. It did not matter to her what it was, but it did matter that it was a gift. In the mind of a fiancée, tribute
bulks as large as ever it did to the consciousness of any emperor.

He could not stay in the same room with her any longer. He left abruptly. That night, from Berg, he tried to write her a letter. He tried to explain what Maria Stuart meant. She read slowly: perhaps she would understand. He felt a dreadful sense of loss.

There was a strong gale outside that night. The wind whipped the waves of the lake. It was good to get away from the small world of Munich to the big world of the elements. Unfortunately it only made the marital world ahead of him the smaller. The world dashed around his tower. Suddenly he felt himself transported to Scotland. Maria Stuart and all his dream friends stood on the hard rock shore of that impossible country of the mind. Bavaria is higher up. Scotland is farther to the north. But the land of each is holy, for it is figured forth as the faith of its people. The vast landscapes of Scotland are one of the noblest ideas of Man. They extend into the absolute.

He had retreated to fantasy. The waters of Berg
became
the waters of some loch. Far off, across the water, at Possenhofen, a boat put out from a dock for the last time. It carried away Maria Stuart, from the heroine she might have been, to a French world of casuistry.

He thought he understood Scotland very well. It was an immense tilted landscape where despair was not a pejorative emotion, but a cloaked companion on an
endless
voyage. In the distance, as it must always sound, he heard the thin and subtle music of the Skye Boat Song. Whether a song of arrival or of departure, it was one of the great laments. The Scots are ennobled by loss. Only the cry,
Great
Pan
is
dead,
echoing across the tideless sea, rang down the mind in the same way.

He could never take Sophie with him into the world of
the ideal. Look though he would through the shadows of the gale and the whip of the sea mist, he could not see her figure there. Nor would she ever allow him to take that voyage alone.

The wind drew chains around the tower. Maria Stuart left Scotland for the last time. And far ahead of her, as she travelled down into England, far in the distance of the future, came the wavering notes of another coronach.

It did not matter. Just for that hour, while the candle guttered beside him and the wind rattled round the tower, he was secure once more in something larger than himself. Alone, like Macbeth, he sat to consult the shadows of enormous kings.