Diva

It wasn’t heartbreak that brought her to my door that night, but rather a sense of grief for pain inflicted, a search for contrition and ease of the soul.  Words had been spoken, intemperately but without malice, formulated to a context misunderstood across unknown frontiers, and had caused pain.  As many words inevitably do.  She is a kind soul, really.

My door and wine rack are always open to her and I’m glad she knows that because safe havens are important, for the friends that seek safe anchorage as well as for me.  I had been spending too much time looking out to sea for another ship, that one, the one you wait to come in, one that had to find port under its own sail, and I had lost a sense of mending my own nets.  I opened the door for her, opened the bottle, and laid out the nets.

It was still warm and dry, so we sat outside on my terrace, in what by day is a riot of green and other colours, weeds, pots and snail shells, but after sunset becomes a night garden.  The air was light and smelled of damp earth from an early evening’s watering, combined with cigarette smoke and the whiff of whiskey we poured to oil her grief and mine.  Light spilled out from the living room, sorry tales punctuated by throwing the ball for a dog happy for the unusual play so late at night.  The bells of the village church chimed down the hours into morning, but we didn’t hear them.

Her story is important only to her and me, and is not, in any case, of great interest outside the confessional of the friend.  But there came a moment, when the wheels had been well greased, when I asked her what she knew of opera.  I hasten to add that I am no great expert here and may not even be classified as a fan.  But I told her the story of my brother-in-law who, on a youth’s trip to Italy, witnessed (La Bohème?  La Traviata?) at the Roman amphitheatre in Verona and fell hard for opera that night.  This fired her imagination.  And drunken pedantry in me.

I don’t know anything about opera, she said.

And so with wide open windows and no upstairs neighbours, I gave her at high volume the Top 40 introduction to what little I know: the exquisite male duet from the first act of ‘The Pearl Fishers’ by Bizet, the Flower Duet from Lakmé, by Delibes, and that old opera karaoke standard, ‘Nessun Dorma’. 

But it was the love and death thralls of Violetta in ‘La Traviata’ that captured her, and for a few moments at least that summer night, dissolved the nets and let her swim free in the pleasure of music and voice, and put aside, at least for a bit, the yoke of the confessional.  She freed herself on another woman’s love and grief.

When the last of the whiskey was downed she said, ‘I want you to take me to the opera, Bri, I want you to take me to La Traviata.’

‘The next time it comes to Covent Garden’, I said, ‘we’ll go over to London and do it proper.’

And we’ll go for a drink after, I said to myself.  But not to the Nag’s Head.  I walked in there once and drank with the ghosts of Maugham, Isherwood, Auden and one other.  But I won’t go back there again till that ship on the horizon makes port.

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