My Tango With Barbara Strozzi (3 page)

‘Give me your phone number,’ she said.

I wrote it down on the back of a handbill from the tango class and gave it to her. ‘Are you going to give me yours?’ I said.

She wrote it on the same handbill, tore off that piece and gave it to me. ‘Not too soon,’ she said, ‘OK?’ And I
thought that was the end of it for now but as she turned to go inside she paused and turned back to me again. ‘Would you like to come in for a coffee?’ she said.

‘What
is
this?’ I said. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’

She didn’t blush but she shook her head the way one does when baffled. ‘Nothing is simple for me,’ she said.

‘That makes two of us. When I sit down for the coffee, will you pull the chair away or what?’

‘I promise not to pull the chair away.’ She opened the door. ‘Are you going to come in?’

I went in cautiously. There was a smell of rug shampoo. She switched on a light and the flat sprang into view not looking like her. ‘This flat belongs to a friend,’ she said as she hung our coats on a clothestree by the door.

‘Man or woman?’

‘Woman,’ she said as I followed her into the kitchen. The light was hard, the walls were blue, there was a framed photograph of Sir Cliff Richard. There was a framed print of Jesus with his Sacred Heart exposed. There was a cutesy spice rack, there were smiley magnets on the fridge door.

‘Why Cliff Richard?’ I said.

‘Hilary’s doing an Alpha course because he recommended it on the website,’ said Bertha. ‘This is her kitchen. We’ve been flatmates for more than a year but I don’t put anything of mine on the walls except in my room.’

‘You moved here when you broke up with somebody?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you with anyone now?’

‘No. Are you?’

‘No. I was divorced six months ago.’

‘Your idea or hers?’

‘Hers. She said I was a failure. What about
your
somebody?’

There was a pause while she spooned instant coffee into two mugs, filled the kettle and turned on the gas. I wasn’t sure if she’d answer me.

‘I left him,’ she said. ‘We’re still married.’ Her face now seemed very vulnerable. She took off the velvet jacket and I saw purple bruises symmetrically on both arms as if she had been held and shaken.

‘I guess he’s more than five nine,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Those bruises,’ I said, ‘are less than a month old.’

She nodded again and crossed her arms to cover them.

‘Have you seen
The Rainmaker
?’ I said.

‘No. Why?’

‘In this film a husband’s beatings put his wife into hospital. Her name is Kelly. She falls in love with a lawyer called Rudy. When the husband discovers them together he goes for Rudy with a baseball bat. Rudy gets the better of him and beats him half to death. Then Kelly takes the bat and says to Rudy, “Stop! Give me
the bat. You were not here tonight. Go!” When he’s gone she finishes the job but she beats a murder rap because it was self-defence and no jury would convict her.’

‘What happened then?’ said Bertha.

‘Rudy and the widow go off together and start a new life.’

Bertha poured the coffee and we sat down at the kitchen table while Jesus watched with a shit-happens look on his face. ‘Do you think they could?’ she said.

‘Start a new life?’ I could feel Pluto going over my Sagittarian ascendant. Where to?

‘Yes,’ said Bertha. Her face was soft and she was looking at me as if I might be five foot eight. What a sweet face.

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘That husband got what was coming to him. Their consciences would be perfectly clear. You ever think of a baseball-bat sort of solution for your problem?’

‘Not with a bat.’

‘So you
have
thought of it. How would you do it?’

‘I
wouldn’t
do it. People have fantasies about all kinds of things. How did we get into this anyhow?’

‘Your bruises.’

She put on the velvet jacket again. ‘Now it’s colder in here. Let’s take our coffee to my room.’

We went through the sitting room quickly. There was a painting on black velvet of a Spanish dancer. The last time I saw a painting on black velvet was in my
grandmother’s house in Philadelphia. There was a little shelf of paperbacks; I saw the names of Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland. There was a book on the coffee table,
The God That Changes Lives
. There was a little shelf of little glass animals. ‘Are you good friends with Hilary?’ I said.

‘We get on well enough but we don’t have much to do with each other. Here’s my room.’

The first thing I noticed was a poster of the painting called
Hope
, a young woman in clinging garments sitting on half a globe with her left ankle tucked under her right leg. Her eyes are half-closed as she leans her head against the lyre that she strokes with her right hand. There’s a dreamy smile on her face – she looks as if she’s stoned out of her mind. I don’t know who painted that picture. Where do I remember it from? Was it hanging on a schoolroom wall? Not at the front with George Washington but perhaps in a lesser position at the back. ‘Our father who art in heaven,’ we said in the morning, ‘Hallowed be thy name.’ And so on while the planets seen or unseen moved above us. We pledged allegiance to the flag and we sang ‘Long, Long Ago’ and ‘The Little Brown Church in the Vale’ and other primary-school standards and then we started our lessons.

‘Are you hopeful?’ I said.

‘I hope that nothing bad is coming my way. What about you?’

‘I hope I’ll get an idea for a new novel. Do you think he’s coming your way?’

‘Who?’ said Bertha.

‘Who else? The bruiser, your husband.’

‘He knows where I am but I don’t think he’ll come here. He only gets physical when there aren’t any witnesses. If he sees me when there are he doesn’t even raise his voice to me. The bruises are from a couple of weeks ago when he caught me in a dark side street with no one about. He gave me a shaking but I got away from him.’

‘It’s only a matter of time though, isn’t it?’

‘Everything’s a matter of time.’ She went to the CD player and put on Marianne Faithfull with the song from the ending of
The Girl on the Bridge:

Who will take your dreams away
Takes your soul another day …

Slow and mournful, the words hung in the air between us.

‘Not really a happy song,’ I said.

‘The dreams I have, I’d be glad for them to be taken away,’ said Bertha. She stopped the recording.

More and more I was feeling that she wanted something from me. What brings people together at a particular place and time? ‘How did you find out about the crypt at St James’s?’ I said.

‘Girl I know told me about it. Something else – when I heard the name of the church I got a picture in my mind.’

‘Of what?’

‘A yahoo ad on a wall with the word FOUND. I took that as a sign.’

‘Which it is. On the wall at Farringdon.’

‘You know what I mean – I took it as a sign that I’d found the right place.’

‘The right place for what?’

‘Something more than a tango lesson.’

I was watching her face for any indication that I might be that something. Maybe the hint of the beginning of a smile. ‘Don’t ask too many questions,’ she said. ‘It’s unlucky. You were going to explain why this night was different from other nights for you.’

‘I came to St James’s looking for Barbara Strozzi,’ I said.

She gave me a hard look. ‘Who’s Barbara Strozzi?’

I told her all there was to tell, including my sensing of Strozzi’s presence in the Underground and at the Clerkenwell church. ‘Does that sound crazy to you?’

‘Yes, but crazy is OK sometimes – you have to trust what pulls you. If you want to go where it’s pulling you.’

All during this conversation I could feel the fragile architecture of trust and comradeship building up between us. The wrong word, the wrong move, would make it collapse like a house of cards. I drank my coffee and looked at
Hope
. ‘Shall I say more about Barbara Strozzi?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘When I saw you I saw Barbara Strozzi in you. Her music brought me to the tango but seeing you took me back to her music, her
cantate
and
lamentate
.’

‘You’re a pretty weird guy, aren’t you.’

‘Yes, you might as well know that right from the start.’

She looked at me for a while as if she was deciding whether to go along with the weirdness or back away from it. I could see myself coming up full-screen and then minimising in her eyes as she clicked her mental mouse. ‘I’ll have to listen to her music some time,’ she said.

‘How about now?’ I said.

‘You came prepared.’

‘I have my little CD player and a Strozzi disc with me because I thought I might listen to it in the train.’ The disc was
Diporti di Euterpe
, with Emanuela Galli, Ensemble Galilei and Paul Beier. I ejected Marianne Faithfull and inserted Strozzi.

Bertha was looking at the CD brochure with the lyrics which also had a black-and-white reproduction of the Strozzi portrait in the Royal Academy exhibition. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there
is
a resemblance. Mostly it’s the look on her face. I see that same look every day in the mirror.’

‘Here she comes,’ I said. The first track was ‘
Tradimento
.’ ‘Betrayal’. Bertha said nothing for a few moments as Galli’s voice spun into the room over the baroque guitars backing it. Then, ‘That certainly sounds
like another time and place. I don’t quite see how you found your way from this to tango music.’ She picked up the translation. ‘Cupid and Hope want to take me prisoner …’ she read out. She stood shaking her head as she turned towards me. ‘Cupid,’ she said. ‘Hope. Betrayal.’

I took her by both bruised arms and pulled her to me and kissed her. She kept her mouth closed for a moment, then opened it as we pressed against each other. She tasted like peaches and cream, like summer and sunshine, like hope. Thank you, I said to the wheeling stars and unseen planets high above us in the night.

That was as far as it went that night. We didn’t end up in bed. When I left her I spun out into the North End Road where the street lamps glowed like fire balloons. A 28 bus trundled by as shiny and sweetly red as a toffee apple. Scatterings of Saturday-night shouted and screamed in random decibels that spiralled into the darkness above the illuminations of Ryman, Fish and Chips, and Cancer Research UK. Brightness pervaded the North End Road all the way to the night lights in Waitrose. At the roundabout I crossed to the Fulham Road which was awash with buses, cars, taxis, litter and louts of all classes. Turned into Barclay Road at Domino’s Pizza and made my way to the west side of Eel Brook Common, Basuto Road and home, descending through levels of unlight and quiet to ordinary reality where I was uncertain of her kiss that still lingered on my tongue.

My flat looked different now; it seemed pleased with what I was bringing to it. I poured myself a Glenfiddich, said, ‘Here’s looking at you,’ and sat down to try to remember Bertha’s face. I could hear her voice but her face wouldn’t come.

Nicely warmed by the whisky, I got
Maps of the Heavens
off the shelf where it lay – it’s too tall to stand up – and turned to Albrecht Dürer’s marvellous sixteenth-century woodcut of the northern celestial hemisphere. There was Sagittarius the centaur aiming his arrow at Scorpio; I could feel the vibration of his bowstring but I couldn’t find Pluto; maybe he was busy in the underworld. That’s how it is – you can’t always see what’s going on.

I dialled Bertha. ‘What?’ she said.

‘It’s me,’ I said. I noticed that I had put my hand on my heart.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Would you tell me your birth date, time of birth, and place of birth? I want to ask my astrologer to do your horoscope.’

‘You have a personal astrologer?’

‘The same as I have a GP and a dentist,’ I said. ‘I’m not her only client.’

‘You want my horoscope because …?’

‘Because whatever this is we’re in, we’re in it together so it’s a good idea to know how the stars and planets are for both of us. Don’t you think?’

There was a pause at her end. Then, ‘I don’t want to know too much.’

‘Because it would …?’

‘Get in the way of whatever I might be doing. I’d fall down stairs, slip on banana skins, get run over by buses, walk into plate-glass doors – that kind of thing.’

‘How about if I get your horoscope and don’t tell you anything, keep it all to myself?’

‘Then I’d catch you looking at me in a certain way and I’d think, oh shit, what has he found out about my stars? No, it’s a bad idea.’

‘OK. When can I see you again?’

‘You’re not tired of me yet? I’m a lot of trouble.’

‘It’s a lot of trouble
not
seeing you.’

‘I think we both need a little time to settle down. Can you phone me Thursday?’

‘OK, Thursday.’

‘And when you phone, call me Barbara – that way I’ll always know it’s you.’

‘Barbara.’

‘Yes, Phil.’

‘Till Thursday, then, Barbara.’

‘Till Thursday, Phil.’

We rang off and I poured myself another drink. The phone rang.

‘Barbara?’ I said.

‘I was born on 17 August 1967,’ she said. ‘In Exeter. At quarter to nine in the morning.’

‘You changed your mind about horoscopes!’

‘Yes, I’m tired of being afraid of everything. Show it
to me when you get it, I want to know all there is to know.’

I e-mailed her details to Catriona. Then I went online and ordered a personalised baseball bat from the Louisville Slugger gift shop in Louisville, Kentucky. The Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, so this bat would have the Red Sox logo plus the engraving, in three lines:

GENUINE
Barbara Strozzi
LOUISVILLE SLUGGER

It would take a couple of weeks to get here.

While waiting for the bat to arrive I’d be seeing Bertha (Bertha/Barbara) whenever possible, teaching my classes, and cruising for Page One. Until now I’d always put events of my own life into my novels. This time I wasn’t going to do that; whatever was happening with Bertha/Barbara and me would be kept separate from my writing.