December 1996. Three days after his first appearance at the Coliseum Shop Max turns up again. This time he doesn’t embarrass Lola and his visit is very brief. There’ll be a performance of a new arrangement of Die Winterreise at Queen Elizabeth Hall in January. Would she like to go with him? She would. While pretending to help him look for a recording she gives him her last name and they exchange phone numbers. His mind spins like a prayer wheel, saying ‘Lola Bessington’ all the way home.
Over Christmas and New Year Max drinks more than his usual quota. He watches war films on TV in which the Germans speak heavily accented English and the Allied soldiers speak German like natives while infiltrating the enemy. He also draws heavily on the resources of Blockbuster. He works every day, trying for a new story in his children’s series about a hedgehog called Charlotte Prickles.
January 1997. On the appointed evening Max meets Lola at the shop at half-past six and they walk to the Embankment and over the Hungerford Bridge to the South Bank. On the bridge they both give money to the homeless and feel guilty because they feel so good. Halfway across, Lola turns to look up at Ursa Major low in the sky over Charing Cross Station. She knows the names of the seven stars of that constellation but on the first date she’s not ready to say them for Max who is also looking up. To him Ursa Major is the Big Dipper and the dipper is upright. ‘Nothing has spilt out yet,’ he says.
Lola smiles and says nothing. She feels good about Max. She likes being with him, and his choice of Die Winterreise was a good one. Comfortably sheltered in Belgravia and cherished by Daddy, Mummy, and Basil, she feels herself to be all alone, a solitary wayfarer on a journey to nowhere, past barking dogs and windows warm in the cold night.
‘What made you decide on Schubert for tonight?’ she asks Max.
‘The man in Die Winterreise says that he came as a stranger and he goes as a stranger,’ says Max. ‘That’s how I’ve always felt.’
‘Me too,’ says Lola. ‘Do you know anything about this performance?’
‘It’s the first time in London and it’s billed as some kind of synthesis with orchestra and tenor. The composer is Hans Zender, the tenor is Christoph Pregardien, and the orchestra is the Klangforum Wien under Sylvain Gambreling. I haven’t heard of any of them before.’
They give money again at the South Bank end of the bridge and have time for coffee in the Queen Elizabeth Hall cafeteria. Max and Lola both look around at the other people, smug in the knowledge that they’re on the inside of something that everybody else is on the outside of. The other coffee-drinkers look as if they mostly read the Guardian and the Independent and quite a few of them seem to know each other.
Once inside, Max and Lola settle comfortably into their seats and wait for the Schubert to happen. Accustomed to this song cycle performed by two men and one piano, both of them are slightly startled by the sight of instrumentalists. ‘It’ll be Die Winterreise, but not as we know it,’ says Max.
‘I tend to be a traditionalist,’ says Lola, ‘but I’m always interested in new approaches.’
Sylvain Gambreling appears, waves his musicians to their feet. He and they bow together and are applauded. Christoph Pregardien takes the stage, bows, is applauded, the orchestra tunes up, and they’re off. Some of the musicians are active with their instruments but whatever they’re doing is almost inaudible. Pregardien isn’t opening his mouth. Very, very gradually one hears something like the beating of a heart coming closer, closer. Is that the melody of the first song, ‘Gute Nacht,’ sneaking in behind that heartbeat, like the voice of the singer trying to find him?
Louder now, with strings, percussion, brass, woodwinds, the heartbeat, footsteps perhaps, now near, now far. Loud, loud suddenly, a summons from the horns. Max’s and Lola’s hands find each other. Is there, they wonder, a madness that we inhabit and call reality? Is this music letting it in? Was this always in Schubert, waiting to be called up? When will the singer be heard? Now at last, gently with strings the melody of ‘Gute Nacht’, and now the voice of Christoph Pregardien: ‘Fremd bin ich eingezogen, Fremd zieh ich wieder aus’; ‘A stranger I came, a stranger I go again’. That voice! Pure, ingenuous, going straight to the heart more than Fischer-Dieskau, more than any other tenor that Max and Lola have ever heard. Tears are running down Lola’s face, Max’s also. He squeezes her hand, she squeezes back.