Levels of Life (6 page)

‘You must understand this,’ she went on. ‘I shall never marry. I promise you that. I shall always be, as you put it, a balloonatic. I shall never take that heavier-than-air machine with anyone. What can I do? You must not be angry with me. You must think of me as an incomplete person.’

He summoned up one last attempt. ‘Madame Sarah, we are all of us incomplete. I am just as incomplete as you. That is why we seek another person. For completion. And I too have never thought I would marry. Not because it is the conventional thing to do. But because I previously did not have the courage. Marriage is a greater danger than a pack of infidels with spears, if you want my opinion. Do not be afraid, Madame Sarah. Do not let your actions be governed by your fears. That is what my first commanding officer used to tell me.’

‘It is not fear, Capitaine Fred,’ she said gently. ‘It is self-knowledge. And do not be angry with me.’

‘I am not angry. You have a manner which quite disarms anger. If I appear angry, it is because I am angry with the universe that has made you, that has made us, so that this … so that this is how …’

‘Capitaine Fred. It is late, and we are both tired. Come to my dressing room tomorrow and perhaps you will understand.’

(In parenthesis, another love story. In 1893 – the same year he visits Nadar and his aphasiac wife in the Forest of Sénart – Edmond de Goncourt dines with Sarah Bernhardt before a read-through of his play
La Faustin
. She is still out at rehearsal when he arrives, and he is shown into the studio where she receives her guests. His aesthete’s eye chillingly evaluates the tumultuous decor. He finds it a terrible mishmash of medieval sideboards and marquetry cabinets, Chilean figurines and primitive musical instruments, and ‘flashy wog objets d’art’. The only sign of authentic personal taste is an array of polar-bear skins in the corner where Bernhardt (who often, as this evening, dresses in white) likes to hold court. Amid such artistic rag-and-bonery, Goncourt also notices a small but intense emotional drama. In the middle of the studio is a cage containing a tiny monkey and a parrot with an enormous bill. The monkey is a whirr of motion, zipping around on the trapeze, and constantly tormenting the parrot, pulling out its feathers and ‘martyrising’ it. And though the parrot could easily cut the monkey in half with its beak, it does nothing but utter plaintive, heart-rending cries. Goncourt feels sorry for the poor parrot, and comments on the dreadful life it is forced to endure. Whereupon it is explained to him that bird and beast had once been separated, but that the parrot had almost died of grief. It only recovered after being put back into the cage with its tormentor.)

He sent flowers ahead. He watched her impersonate Adrienne Lecouvreur, that actress of a previous century, poisoned by a love rival. He went to her dressing room. She was charming. There were the usual faces. They spoke in the usual way, muttered the usual opinions. He sat with Mme Guérard, discreetly quizzing her, trying to find some new tactic, some hidden fulcrum … when there was a slight hush, and he looked up. He saw her on the arm of a stunted little Frenchman with a monkey face and a stupid cane.

‘Goodnight, gentlemen.’

In reply, there was a murmur of complicit unsurprise, exactly as there had been on his own first evening with her. She looked across at him and nodded, then calmly switched her gaze. Mme Guérard rose and bade him goodnight. He watched Madame Sarah depart. He had been given his answer. The water was freezing and he had not so much as a cork overjacket to protect him.

No, he was not angry. And the dressing-room dandies at least had the good breeding not to draw attention to what had happened, nor to imply that something similar – no, precisely the same – had befallen them on previous occasions. They offered him more champagne and asked politely about
le Prince de Galles
. They kept their propriety and respected his. In this, at least, he could not fault them.

But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behaviour rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lover into a dear friend. He was uninterested in that transition. Nor would he club together with others of the same status to buy her some new exotic gift – a snow leopard, perhaps. And he was not angry. But, before the pain set in, he had the time to be rueful. He had laid everything out, the best of himself, and it had not been enough. He had considered himself a bohemian, but she had proved too bohemian for him. And he had failed to understand her explanation of herself.

The pain was to last several years. He eased it by travelling and skirmishing. He never talked about it. If someone enquired into his black mood, he would reply that the melancholy of the padge-owl was afflicting him. The enquirer would understand, and ask no more.

Had he been naive, or overambitious? Both, probably. In life, you might be a bohemian and an adventurer, but you also sought a pattern, an arrangement to help you through, even if – even as – you kicked against it. Army regulations gave you this. But elsewhere: how could a man tell which was a true pattern and which a false? This was one question which pursued him. Here was another: had she been on the level? Had she been natural, or feigning naturalness? Constantly he went back over the evidence of his memories. She had said that she always kept her promises – unless she didn’t mean to keep them in the first place. Had she made him false promises? None that he could pin down. Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination – the prompter’s voice at his ear – which had added the words ‘for ever’. He hadn’t asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.

And now he realised that if he had asked her, she would have replied, ‘I shall love you for as long as I shall love you.’ What lover could ask for more? And the prompter’s voice would again have whispered, ‘Which means for ever.’ Such was the measure of a man’s vanity. Was their love, then, merely the construction of his fancy? That he could not, did not believe. He had loved her as much as he was able for three months, and she had done the same; it was just that her love had a timing switch built into it. Nor would it have helped to ask about her previous lovers, and how long they had lasted. Because their very failure, their impermanence, would only have seemed to promise his success: that is what every lover believes.

No, Fred Burnaby concluded, she had been on the level. It was he who had deceived himself. But if being on the level didn’t shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.

He never tried to make contact with Madame Sarah again. When she came to London he found reason to be out of town. After a while he became able to read of her latest triumph with a steady eye. Mostly, he could go back over the whole business like a rational man, to remember it as something that had happened, that was nobody’s fault, that had not involved cruelty, merely misunderstanding. But he could not always hold on to such calmness and such explanations. And then he saw himself as the stupidest of animals. He felt like that boa constrictor which had taken upon itself to start eating sofa cushions, until it had been shot dead by Madame Sarah’s own hand. Shot dead, that was how he felt.

But he was to marry, at the advanced age of thirty-seven. She was Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitsed, daughter of an Irish baronet. Yet if he sought, or expected, a pattern, it was again denied him. After the wedding, the bride went down with consumption, and their North African honeymoon was relocated to a Swiss sanatorium. Eleven months later, Elizabeth presented Fred with a son, but was confined to the High Alps for much of her life. Captain Fred, now Major Fred, and subsequently Colonel Fred, returned to travelling and skirmishing.

Also, to his passion for ballooning. In 1882, he took off from the Dover Gasworks, bound for France. Marooned above the Channel, he thought inevitably of Madame Sarah. He was making the flight he had always promised himself, but now it was not, as she had flirtatiously proposed, towards her. Though he had never spoken to anyone of their liaison, a few suspected it, and occasionally – after a game of cards at Pratt’s, followed by a late supper of bacon and eggs and beer – some allusion was nudgingly attempted. But he never rose to the bait. Now, suspended, he heard only her voice in his ear.
Mon cher
Capitaine Fred. It still cut him, after all these years. Impetuously, he lit a cigar. It was a foolish gesture, but at that moment his entire life could explode, for all he cared. His mind drifted back to the rue Fortuny, to her eyes of transparent blue, her hair like a burning bush; to her great cane bed. Then he came to his senses, tossed the half-smoked cigar into the sea, threw out some ballast and sought the higher altitudes, hoping to catch a northerly breeze.

When he landed near the Château de Montigny, the French were as hospitable as he had always found them. They did not even mind his raillery about the superiority of the British political system. They merely fed him some more, and urged him to smoke another cigar in the far safer conditions of their fireside.

On his return to England, he sat down and wrote a book. His flight had taken place on the 23rd of March.
A Ride Across the Channel and Other Adventures In The Air
was published by Samson, Low thirteen days later, on the 5th of April.

On the previous day, the 4th of April 1882, Sarah Bernhardt had married Aristides Damal, a Greek diplomat turned actor, a famously vain and insolent womaniser (also spendthrift, gambler and morphine addict). Since he was Greek Orthodox, and she a Jewish Roman Catholic, the easiest place for them to be married quickly was London: at the Protestant church of St Andrew’s, Wells Street. Whether she was able to buy a copy of Fred Burnaby’s book to read on her honeymoon is not known. The marriage was a disaster.

Three years later, having illicitly joined Lord Wolseley’s expedition to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, Burnaby was killed at the Battle of Abu Klea by a spear-thrust to the neck from one of the Mahdi’s soldiers.

Mrs Burnaby was to marry again; she also established herself as a prolific authoress. Ten years after her first husband’s death, she published a manual, now long unavailable, called
Hints on Snow Photography
.

THE LOSS OF DEPTH

You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

After the Battle of Abu Klea there were ‘immense hordes of dead Arabs’, who were ‘by necessity, left unburied’. But not unexamined. Each had a leather band round one arm containing a prayer composed by the Mahdi, who promised his soldiers that it would turn British bullets to water. Love gives us a similar feeling of faith and invincibility. And sometimes, perhaps often, it works. We dodge between bullets as Sarah Bernhardt claimed to dodge between raindrops. But there is always the sudden spear-thrust to the neck. Because every love story is a potential grief story.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still – at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) – it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

We were together for thirty years. I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart. And though she hated the idea of growing old – in her twenties, she thought she would never live past forty – I happily looked forward to our continuing life together: to things becoming slower and calmer, to collaborative recollection. I could imagine myself taking care of her; I could even – though I didn’t – have imagined myself, like Nadar, easing the hair from her aphasiac temples, learning the part of the tender nurse (and the fact that she might have hated such dependency is irrelevant). Instead, from a summer to an autumn, there was anxiety, alarm, fear, terror. It was thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death. I tried never to look away, always to face it; and a kind of crazy lucidity resulted. Most evenings, as I left the hospital, I would find myself staring resentfully at people on buses merely going home at the end of their day. How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?

We are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern. And as E. M. Forster put it, ‘One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another.’ So grief in turn becomes unimaginable: not just its length and depth, but its tone and texture, its deceptions and false dawns, its recidivism. Also, its initial shock: you have suddenly come down in the freezing German Ocean, equipped only with an absurd cork overjacket that is supposed to keep you alive.