If Music Be The Food Of Love...

Usually, by the time one approaches the second glass of Merlot, one has a sense of how well things are going – by which is meant how likely it is that the current interview will lead to subsequent intercourse (verbal) and – after the appropriate Bacchanalian delights – further debauchery.

Sometimes the first mouthful suffices as a touchstone. Take, for instance, the interminable hour I once spent with one Ingrid Bigglestone – whose root canal conversation was instantly recognisable as belonging to that class of teeth-pulling labour not even a decent vintage can lubricate. This is how the the second minute went (the first having been spent on the usual, polite introductions, the ordering of drink and the instant recognition – on my part at least – that the friend to whom I owed the introduction, thought I would hit it off with someone the polar opposite of Ingrid Bergman):

Me: So, what do you enjoy doing when you’re not [insert job which I forget]

Her: Goin’ aat [out]

Me: Ah, to the theatre?

Her: Na. I don’t like plays. All them words.

Me: Ah, the cinema?

Her: Na.

Me: Or a concert?

Her: Don’t like live music.

Me: No? That’s a pity. You don’t agree with Shakespeare, then, that, “The man who hath no music in his soul – ”

Her: (interrupting) Who?

Me: “The man” – or woman, I suppo–

Her: No, Shake-who?

Me: (thinking, for a moment, she is pulling my leg but judging, from her look of incredulity and the stupefying –albeit bright green – eyes with which she is staring at me, that she is earnest) So where do you go?

Her: Y’know, aat (with an emphasis on the vowel).

I think, to give the woman her due, she also intuited our incompatibility from the outset but both of us were too polite (or too sober) to knock back our drink and go our separate ways immediately. I’m sure the remaining fifty-six minutes were equally sanguine for her.

On the other hand, there are those with whom one instantly clicks: words and wine flow in equal measure and one finds oneself fumbling about with each other after last orders – as, for instance, with Sophie: She passed the Litmus test all right when, having suggested we play Scrabble in the country pub we had chosen for our rendezvous, far from turning her nose up at my four-letter Anglo-Saxon on a triple word score, took it as an invitation to compete for the most profane offerings which her tile draw (and orthography) would permit.

The morning, however, painted her in a different light. Jocund she was; fair she was not. Not that I consider myself particularly easy on the eye but laughter, whilst being the best medicine, is not, in my book, the best aphrodisiac. (I blamed the cocktails).

Then, there are the truly rare occasions where one is not only oblivious to the progress of the evening but it doesn’t cross one’s mind to think of it in such transactional terms. Such was the case with my first date with Julia:

Perhaps this is because it wasn’t, officially, a date. We had just finished rehearsal and I suggested having a drink. Or, perhaps, it was she who made the suggestion – I can’t recall.

Neither can I recall the name of the establishment, the weather, or any other particulars about that evening except the taste of her words in my mouth, full bodied and sweet; her lips being slowly stained by the Merlot which dripped down her glass as she twirled its stem on the wooden table (yes, that detail I do recall) and brushed her finger behind her left ear as she corrected my quotation:

“’A mad, fantastical duke of dark corners,’ isn’t it?”

I thought for a moment: “Yes.”

My heart quickened. I am sure that the hostelry was quite busy but, just as one is able to drown out the general cacophony of (let’s be honest) the brass section (and, in particular, the trumpets) when tuning up, so the general hubbub became a mere impression. The faces of strangers blurred as if Monet were dabbing them with his brush. I thought ahead to our concert, the week after, and back to this evening’s rehearsal and saw them as the scenery to this better symphony being played out in bread and wine (but we had forgotten the bread). I wanted to touch her hand, but didn’t.

As I leaned forward to drink in the luminescence of her speech, her eyes blazed as she turned from Shakespeare to our Rachmaninoff.

“Roland called it, ‘musical porn’ earlier,” I said.

“Why?”

“Perhaps he meant it was sort of over the top? Lusciously extravagant but not how melodies really work?”

“Perhaps you’re giving him more credit for his conceit than he’s worth,” said Julia, putting her glass to her lips.

“What’s your favourite part?”

We disagreed and passed on to poetry.

I think that is how I would best characterise the whole evening – and that is, perhaps, what marks it out from all other first dates in memory: the usual self-evaluation, the anticipation of what might come next (or the drudgery that begs for an immediate denouement) was missing: I was so wholly in the moment I had no regard for narrative. I cannot really tell you in what order we spoke about things – what I have just related well may have been in the wrong order. It didn’t seem to matter:

She told me an anecdote about Sylvia Plath (or, rather, Ted Hughes. Her father was acquainted with the poet and once, as a young girl, she put her foot in her mouth by asking, in front of the poor chap, whether that oven was the very one that ‘Auntie Sylvia’ had put her head in?)

And that was it: the evening was a poem.

As we walked back to her college – I felt at once the model of sobriety, and the serf of intoxication. We had been abstemious on the wine front (not more than two, and maybe not even that, each) but my blood was thick with a nectar which made me far drunker than I had been that night last month at my own college bop.

That was before I had met Julia.

Our meeting was as improbable as the coupling of an American scholar and gruff, English poet – our meeting. She and I were reading for different subjects, in colleges far across town. Roland was a chum from a national orchestras I had led, and up at Christ’s – so there was no natural connection except the conspiracy of felicity which sat Julia as my desk partner, leading the second violins under Roly’s baton.

Julia was the superior player – I knew that, and revelled in it. I’ve always been a pretty decent orchestral violinist but I lack technique and my vibrato has never been my forte (if you’ll excuse the pun).

Julia’s lithe fingers caressed the neck of her instrument with the ease of familiar master. Throughout the past five (six? I don’t suppose the number really matters) rehearsals, I had looked less often at the conductor, and more at her wrists and her neck – where her chinrest left a faint love bite.

As imperceptibly as the crescendo in the second movement comes – poco a poco –; or the senses are clouded by each sip of crisp wine, I felt myself wishing my lips to be that chinrest.

We had returned to her rooms. Yes, she had rooms – plural – (privilege of a music scholar) with an old, brown upright against one wall. She showed me some compositions she was working on and then disappeared into the bedroom.

“You know, your ex and I have something in common,” she called out, as I traced one of her melodies out on the keys. (We must have talked about our ex-partners, though I don’t recall sharing such intimate details).

I couldn’t guess and I felt myself blush when she told me she was referring to her bra size.

Perhaps it was this that made me think this evening of poetry was, in fact, a date. She returned to the study/living area in a casual, grey, top and poured us drinks.

We played some violin together; we ate pizza; we watched an Audrey Hepburn film: at first, she, sat on the chair, and then, piano stool; I joined, behind her – gently touching.

In the second movement of the symphony we were performing, there is a section where the entire orchestra diminuendos to a general pause before the cymbals crash and we come back in, subito forte. Even when my eyes are fixed on the conductor, it knocks me for six every time.

It was like that: one moment it seemed we were about to embrace in love; the next, I was in a taxi, back to my own college.

After that – as Plath and Hughes had, in the same city, decades before – we corresponded in verse. The concert came and went – successfully enough – and the dark, Caravaggio backdrops of college friends, supervision essays and quotidian tasks had become brilliant. If I had read Plath I would have repeated, “I am, I am, I am” in Cartesian affirmation.

As it was, I had not; the references in my poetic epistles were somewhat limited.

(I was only 21).

Since my discovery of wine clubs in recent years (my membership whereof correlates with my current cash flow – concomitantly more and less ready now I have a footing on the middle rungs of my chosen profession but with wife and child to consider (the former being a co-conspirator in my support of England’s sommeliers; the latter having, as yet, no concept of economics)) I have come to understand that some wines are meant to be drunk straight away and others, mature.

Much like Wodehouse’s teetotaller Motty, who lets himself loose on the good stuff once liberated from his draconian mother, I had quaffed the proverbial wine wholesale – mistaking a Port which ought to have been left to mature and be sipped, for a Beaujolais Nouveau. That is to say, that I had allowed myself to be swept up in the intense poetry and suffocated Julia with a flood of emotion.

It was, perhaps, as Roly had suggested about the third movement.

I was not to understand this for some years.

Julia and I had met a few days after the night described, in a wine bar in town. I remember an apology for the subito forte exit. I remember her saying she thought she might have kissed me and that might have led to other things (yes, rather!) but that falling in love was not, perhaps, sensible. (Her mode of expression was more musical).

The cork had been put in the bottle. The movement had come to an end. There would be no applause (as all educated audiences should very well know).

The fourth movement came via email, some half decade later. As yet, I was still to meet my wife, and had dined out on regaling my friends with the exaggerated details of disastrous dates (of which Ingrid Bigglestone was a favourite). In a fit of effusion, I wrote Julia a poem. Her reply felt like the col legno part of the second movement: woody and brittle, as a prelude to to the most sonorous and consonant melody. Intensity suffocates. (Received and understood. Bugger).

I should have read The Bell Jar. Perhaps, then, I should have understood that, “if you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

And yet, as I think back to that first date, by which I came to measure all subsequent dates, and by which I recognised that with my (now) wife as the fulfilment of that aperitif, or dress rehearsal with Julia (as Sebastian is the forerunner to Charles' own Julia?) I smile. If I could time travel I do not think I would have it any other way.

Sometimes, one glass of wine is just right. Sometimes, the audience should not demand an encore.