Being Othered

It’s a strange feeling, being put beyond the pale.  Being made to feel that you are simply not part of the mental world inhabited by the person talking to you, or over or around you.   

It is what a black person must feel, for instance, when they read in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings about the alien forces pitted against the heroes of Middle-Earth on the field of battle: they include ‘from Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.’  I’m not sure what colour Tolkien expected black men’s eyes and tongues to be, or in what particular respect they were troll-like … he didn’t say; but such writing was indefensible by his own standards.  As a staunch Catholic he was a universalist by definition.  If you had asked him whether he thought black people were as much human as white people, or that their lives and souls were as valuable, the answer would have been an instant and indignant yes … as far as his conscious values went.  But on the page of his imagination, a black man stood for all that was disturbing, grotesque, Not Of Our World.  If it had crossed his mind that black people would be part of the readership of his book, he could not possibly have written this passage.  And I can only imagine the crushing, enraging sense of excision that a black fan of fantasy fiction would get on reading it.

I can imagine it slightly better, however, when I am in a company of exactly my own sort of people – mostly white, middle-class, comfortable, with higher degrees – and Brexit comes up.  Or even doesn’t come up, but is brought up in the little digs and asides here and there that assure the assembled company that it is like-minded, on the same respectable page.  One of my dearest friends, the last time we were part of the same gathering, found not just one but two occasions to get in a crack about ‘irrational Brexit voters’, to general approval.  If he knew I was one, would he be mortified and apologetic?  Or would he reconsider our friendship?  I don’t want either to happen … so I keep my discomfort to myself.  A Brexiter at our dinner table?  A chimaera, a troll.  Not so much excluded, as assumed not really to exist. 

It was entirely understandable that the result of the 2016 referendum was a shock and that people like my academic colleagues – whose jobs involve the juggling of many variables in planning, funding and recruitment and were going to be complicated by the fall-out for years to come – should have been exasperated by it.  But exasperation is not the same thing as hysteria.  Why the decision to go ‘full outrage’ on Brexit, and to keep the outrage up as months stretched into years?  Why make out that anyone who voted Leave was not just someone with a different opinion and perhaps mistaken, but either incorrigibly stupid or irredeemably evil? 

Unfortunately the decision seems to have been taken as soon as the referendum campaign started, if not before.  It began as an easy vote-winning strategy – to run a negative campaign by focusing on off-colour slogans and xenophobic remarks from UKIP, which had forced the referendum but was far from owning the market in Euroscepticism.  However, when this strategy failed to win votes, it could only confirm the Remainers in believing ever more extreme versions of their own propaganda.  If they exhorted the electorate to vote Remain or be bigoted, backward-looking idiots, and the electorate voted Leave, then the electorate must be bigoted, backward-looking idiots.  Q. E. D.  But the deduction is only as good as the premise.

It is a premise that leading Remainers are still locked into.  Have they learned by experience that you don’t persuade people to your side by labelling them evil or stupid?   Have they, since the referendum, made any attempt to sweeten their continued attempts to reverse or water down the referendum result, by telling Leave voters that they have heard their voice, understand their concerns, believe that these concerns could be addressed while remaining within the EU?  They have not.  Louder and louder, shriller and shriller, often accompanied by playground obscenity (‘Brexshitters’ to one regular in the 'Times' comments), the insults have continued to fly – and when Leavers lose their patience and retaliate in kind, this is taken to prove that the Remain side are the innocent victims in a dastardly coup, a ‘takeover’ of ‘their’ country.

Leavers are ‘other’.  They are not like us.  They are senile, under-educated, lower-class.  And they don’t read our newspapers or watch our programmes or look at our posts on Facebook, in fact they obviously can’t read or understand anything much at all, so they can be safely disregarded.  But hang on.  Even if those assumptions are correct, look at the social consequences, Remainers.  That’s the man who patiently taught you to drive, whom you are assuming is unable to form a valid political opinion of his own.  That’s the plumber whom you always get back because he is reliable and efficient, whom you are dismissing as a racist bigot.  That’s the dinner lady who always has a smile for your children, whose vote you are saying should count for less than a teenager’s.  They aren’t blind or deaf.  They notice, all right.  If you people are so educated and statesmanlike, do you really think that it is helping the country’s future social cohesion to go on in this way?

What is frightening is the near-glee with which Remainers are ready to tear up the social contract, to completely disavow any sense of solidarity with the half of the population who voted Leave, much less any sense of responsibility for these people and what they think and are.  But you – well-educated centrists, members of both mainstream, pro-EU political parties – you are responsible.  For decades, you have made the decisions that these terrible people lived under.  You educated them, you made the TV programmes they saw, you decided what their tax money was going to be spent on, you regulated their workplaces, their towns, their families.  If they now reject your advice in the first unmediated, single-issue political decision they have been allowed for years, mightn’t that be just a tiny bit down to you?  Is the working class that only yesterday you were loudly championing, excusing all its delinquencies, now to be petulantly written off, in the manner of some Victorian mother disappointed in her black sheep son, screaming ‘THE UNGRATEFUL BRUTE!  AFTER ALL I DID FOR HIM!  HE NEVER WAS ANY GOOD!  HE’LL NEVER DARKEN MY DOORS AGAIN!’  The suddenness and completeness with which Remainers have disowned the ‘information-poor’ classes since the referendum suggests that they were only waiting for a pretext to detach themselves completely from what had been ‘their’ nation and identify instead with an ‘emancipated’ international community.  Not since the twelfth century, when a Francophone ruling class ranged across Europe and beyond, treating the cloddish peasants who worked their estates with amused disdain, has there been such an overt rejection of the values of the ‘backward’ and local by the ‘forward-looking’ and fashionable in Britain.   

I feel as if I have a foot in both camps.  For me to vote Leave was a marginal decision taken reluctantly in what I hoped was the interest of Europe and not only of Britain.  The EU was manifestly in poor shape (it did not need the Daily Mail to tell us this) and I hoped that a large enough Leave vote would be a message to the EU leadership that a change of direction was needed.  I underestimated the extent to which the EU is fixed on its path by its accumulated policy decisions – to tug on any end only seems to pull the granny knot even tighter.  And unfortunately it seems I greatly overestimated the mental and moral capacity of Britain’s ruling political class.  It’s a shame that this is so, but probably better to find out how bad it is, through a shock like the referendum, than to remain unaware.  The progressives who were leading us to a liberal dawn through the twentieth century have finally, without realising it, morphed into a classic Ancien Regime: terrified of change, oblivious to opportunity, unable to deal with opposition except by characterising it as morally corrupt, the work of sinister, treacherous forces.  While the late-medieval Church mulled over ancient dogma and burned heretics, it burnished its halo by evoking the early Christian martyrs.  While the pro-EU establishment pockets donations of millions and plots legal manoeuvres in the House of Lords, its bon-enfant youth wing takes to the streets in the borrowed clothes of the hunger marchers and Civil Rights activists of the twentieth century, people for whom such gatherings were their only desperate chance to be seen and heard, and could result in arrest or physical attack – rather than just a nice selfie and a lot of upticks on Facebook.  Decadent.  It seems that in the end, whatever the principles an elite holds, however raised in consciousness it thinks it is, in the end, under threat, it will behave like an elite – it will fight as dirty as it needs to in order to preserve its privileges.  It has been a sorry, disillusioning spectacle and I see no improvement in the near future, as long as the self-styled ‘more intelligent’ half of the population remains unwilling to look at itself in the mirror or to conceive that ‘othering’ the other half, attempting to excise it from civic life and even from humanity, is no recipe for healing the nation’s ills, or indeed for preserving its own position in the long run.

I welcome the Briefings for Brexit initiative by Robert Tombs and Graham Gudgin.  It is a brave move, and just possible that the public avowal of the Leave vote by a number of independent, well-respected intellectuals will recall the Remainers to a more reasonable frame of mind and stem the flood of denunciation.  I hope Professor Tombs and his fellows are optimistic and have steady nerves, though.  Some friends and colleagues of decades will undoubtedly turn their backs.  Within hours of the story coming on the Sunday Times on line, one commenter, oblivious to the irony, had compared these independent-minded men to the academics who served under Hitler.  It is going to be a tough time.  Let’s hope we ride it out.

BUT DO THEY REALLY LOVE EUROPE?

The more I think about British EU-philes, the stranger it seems to me how committed they are to Britain staying within the EU, and how insistent they are that the EU is the source of all that is good and civilised in Britain, when so many ways of doing things that are normal in European countries are things that they don’t like at all.

Off the top of my head: insurance-based healthcare systems; heavily armed policemen; hefty bribes to middle-class parents to have children; church taxes; preservation of historic city centres ‘in aspic’; ultra-tight rules about how you may conduct yourself in rented/shared housing, and neighbours who will give no quarter if you break them; fiercely elitist state education; extreme formality in day-to-day interactions; the ability to introduce someone as ‘Univ. Prof. Dr. med. Dr. theol. Mag. pharm. X’ without the slightest sense that you’re saying anything funny …

This is how our largest neighbours within the EU behave, and always have done.  This is why the EU works for them.  The whole EU project depends on a level of respect for respectability itself, and a certain po-faced grandiosity in public life, which Britain has not had for a long time, if it ever did.  I submit that British EU-philes don’t actually want it, any more than Eurosceptics do.

Perhaps they’re wrong not to want it, because in some ways it works very well on the Continent.  It is a social glue that makes European cities far more liveable and pleasant than their counterparts in the UK.  No tawdry fast-buck development, no piles of litter, no hordes of aggressive drunks out on Saturday night … But Brits in general aren’t willing to pay the price.  If even Europhiles were willing, then British society would have converged a lot more with Continental norms in the half-century we have been in the EU.  Has it?  No.  If anything, it’s diverged even more, with the supposedly Europhile centre-left making the running away from respectability even more than the Eurosceptic ‘Tory right’.

So, Remainers, unless you’re going to have a road-to-Damascus moment and start demanding, at the very least, the reintroduction of universal child benefit and the immediate dismantling of the NHS as we know it, please stop pretending that Europe is the source of everything you love.  We might just start suspecting that it’s not a question of loving Europe so much as of hating Britain …

Look Who Thinks He Can Afford to be a Miserable Sinner

There’s a well-worn Church of England joke that goes …

On Ash Wednesday, the Vicar has stayed after the service for private prayer.  Kneeling in front of the altar, with a profound sense of his unworthiness before God, he murmurs, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’

The churchwarden, tiptoeing up to the rail and kneeling down by the Vicar’s side, follows his example and repeats, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’

Now Albert Brown, a slightly tipsy and shabby member of the congregation, overhears these holy men praying and is moved to follow their example: he falls on his knees saying, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’

Whereupon the Vicar rolls his eyes and murmurs to the churchwarden, ‘Look who thinks he can afford to be a miserable sinner!’

This joke also circulates as a Jewish joke; I’m not sure which version is the original.  But the fact that it is so readily transferable shows that it tells a general truth about human nature.  Self-abasement can be another form of self-aggrandizement: as long as a tender conscience is valued, anyone who claims to think badly of himself can expect to be thought rather well of by others.  An admission of guilt, in fact, is a not-so-subtle claim to privilege. 

I found it a possibly reassuring route to understanding the way that all good, educated, left-wing or centre-left people seem to feel they have to talk about Britain these days, especially in the run-up to and in the aftermath of the EU referendum.  I knew that definitely leftist people tend to blame the USA, and Britain as its satellite, for most of the world’s problems – the problems with Russia, the Middle East, the financial crisis, increasing inequality, climate change, you name it.  But the referendum multiplied the phenomenon enormously.  Suddenly every good person in Britain seemed to be agreed that ours is a thoroughly horrid little country: its national identity a vulgar fake, its history a sorry tale of violence and imperialism, its economy a mess, its culture third-rate and its food and weather a joke.  The IRA and ISIL terrorists were morally preferable to the British state – certainly when Tories were in power.  For ‘Great Britain’ to be finally dismembered by means of Scottish independence, or merged in the cleansing sea of a federal Europe, or, preferably, both: these were consummations devoutly to be wished for by all right-thinking people.

As I read more and more newspaper columns in this general vein, I became despondent.  Why do these people all hate their country so much?  But then the vicar and Albert Brown came to my rescue.  A few of them perhaps really do hate it, I thought, but for most of them – even if they don’t quite realize it themselves – it’s just a sort of terribly British inverted self-regard.  Other countries may feel they have to be prickly, self-interested and boastful, but we should be above that.  And if we’re not, then we can afford to be miserable sinners.

This feeling that the behaviour that is good enough for other countries is not good enough for us maybe rests on nothing more than the twenty miles of water between us and the nearest potential invader, and the concomitant fact that England/Britain hasn’t lost a major war for nearly a thousand years.  That is why, perhaps uniquely in the world, comfortable, educated Britons refuse to be nationalist.  In every European country it is possible, indeed expected, to be both left-wing and patriotic: not in Britain.  When your country has been through an existential crisis within living memory – invaded, defeated, partitioned – then you keep a certain jumpiness about your survival, a visceral feeling that the national unit must be prioritized.  When it hasn’t, you can get complacent.

It explains a certain amount about British government policy over the last few decades, both on the Left and the Right.  Conservative governments embraced first privatisation, then globalisation, without reflexively putting British requirements first.  Free-market dogma meant we sold our utilities, previously state monopolies, to introduce the competition and efficiency of private enterprise – and seemed surprised and pained to find that they were quickly bought up by other countries’ state monopolies.  Governments of both persuasions signed away our fishing rights to Europe in a flourish of high principle.  Green-leaning governments committed us to the costliest carbon-reduction targets in the world: we could afford to be ‘miserable sinners’, and it was up to us to lead the way in repentance.  Perhaps in no field has the triumph of high principle over national pragmatism been more complete than in education.  Those countries that have felt the tramp of jackboots, however socialist and humanitarian their principles may be, will still use education as an instrument of national strength.  They will sit their pupils in rigid rows and din literacy and numeracy into them as if their lives depended on it – because they do.  If the country needs engineers, engineers it will have.  Nor will anyone be allowed to forget about its canon of great thought, literature and art.  But not Britain!  Our schools are ‘child-centred’.  Not for us schools that churn out dutiful citizens, or factory fodder.  It’s about individual fulfilment on the one hand, and social justice on the other. 

This leads to the most ironic consequences of all.  Since the 1960s, when the grandparents of today’s pupils were at school, through all the zigzags of government policy the Left has effectively dominated the teaching profession (have you ever met a right-wing teacher?)  And yet the results seem not to be to its liking.  Since the EU referendum took place, we have heard a great deal about under-achieving, lazy, entitled Britons who won’t do low-paid and arduous jobs – fruit-picking, building, nursing – at a realistic rate of pay, so that the country is ‘forced’ to import migrant workers to do them instead.  These ‘ill-educated’, ‘information-poor’ working-class voters then wonder why the migrants get all the jobs, and fall victim to the appeal of ‘populist’, right-wing politicians who play on their xenophobia.  The irony is rich here.  The willing Eastern European migrants who are now so lionized by the bien-pensant Europhile Left are the products of patriarchal families of the sort that the Left has worked hard to phase out in this country, and of old-fashioned authoritarian educational methods that they would never for one moment countenance being used on British children.  What lefty, now bewailing the perfidy of the Leavers of Lincolnshire, would have gone into a state school at any time in the last forty years and told the pupils, ‘Now smarten up and learn to be punctual, polite and cheerful while working a twelve-hour day digging up spuds for a fiver an hour, paid next week, because that is what lies ahead for most of you!’  Yet that is the message the leftists now seems to think they should have got.   The home-grown working class, encouraged to stand on its rights, work to rule, have no truck with authority, was supposed to be the vanguard of the revolution, back in the 1960s to 1970s.  Margaret Thatcher came along and put a stop to that.  The middle-class leftists still hung on to their professional jobs.  The workers were not so lucky.  Their one-time patrons now disown them. 

After all, the patrons are not those nasty things, nationalists.  They are citizens of the world – no narrow-minded, ‘Little Englander’ attachments for them.  They are perpetually apologising on the international stage for the failings of their country.  Subconsciously feeling, perhaps, all the while, that Britain must be held to higher standards than the others; that only foreigners, lesser breeds without the law, do anything so common as defend their national interests, or react to provocation.  

As Flanders and Swann put it,

‘They argue with umpires, they cheer when they’ve won,

And they practise beforehand, which ruins the fun!’

These inverted patriots simply don’t seem to realize that they are creating an ever-widening disconnect between themselves and the sections of the population who can’t afford to be miserable sinners.  The Daily Mail and Sun readers maybe just want their professional and political classes to be a bit less sanctimonious and a bit more down and dirty like other countries’ leaders; to bend abstract principle for the sake of national advantage and use their elbows on their behalf every now and then.  After all, in the end, while the professionals and politicos enjoy the moral luxury of being miserable sinners, it is the Mail and Sun readers, and the non-readers, who mainly pay for it.  

Enough with Enough of Experts

Since the Brexit vote, and even more since the election of Donald Trump, Michael Gove’s remark that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ has become the new ‘There is no such thing as society’.  I’ve already lost count of how many times it has been trotted out as typifying everything that is wrong with those dreadful right-wingers.  Mr Gove said it in the context of predictions of doom following Brexit by a group of economists – a branch of experts who, even leftists admit, frequently get things wrong.  (Famously, the chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs said of the 2007 financial crash, ‘We were seeing things that were 25 standard deviation moves, several days in a row’, a basic statistical howler: such an event would be so improbable that it would not be expected to occur even once in the lifespan of the universe.)  Nevertheless, the broadsheets were quick to interpret Gove’s words as proof of a troubling anti-intellectualism, a wilfully know-nothing thuggishness on the right that has a pedigree going back to Hitler’s contempt for ‘gentlemen with diplomas’.  Link ‘we have had enough of experts’ with the notion of ‘post-truth politics’, et voilà, a rightist conspiracy to drown out reason with emotion, facts with lies, democracy with demagoguery.  Ain’t it awful.  (See, for instance, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/21/in-defence-of-experts-whether-they-support-leave-or-remain/.)

But it’s funny, really, to see where these complaints are coming from, because in the past century, in Britain, the left has easily led the right when it comes to distrust of intellectuals and intellectual ‘elitism’.  Has the left forgotten who campaigned against grammar schools because social cohesion was more important than academic achievement, and who has constantly put pressure on universities to prioritize social engineering over scholarly excellence?  Who has surrounded experts in public employ – academics and doctors – with a proliferating managerial class that exists to interfere with their work? 

Who was it who discredited the idea of cultural expertise as elitist?  Who objected to children (especially working-class children) being taught to appreciate classical music and read big difficult Victorian novels?  Who systematically undermined the idea of deference to authority of any kind, including intellectual authority?  Clue: it wasn’t the Right.

It would be wonderful to think that the soft Left has undergone a road-to-Damascus conversion to the idea of impartial expertise and objective truth.  But haven’t these new-born Mr Valiant-For-Truths been teaching for decades, in their academic guise, that there is no such thing as truth?  That all is relative, that there is no one attainable reality but only a maze of competing, subjective ‘narratives’?  Why, only a couple of years ago, they hounded Mr Gove himself out of the job of Education Secretary for suggesting that children should be taught a series of historical ‘facts’.  There are no ideologically innocent facts, they said: however you select and present them, you will be pushing some sort of party line. 

If that is the case, is it not just as true of the ‘facts’ presented by left-liberals as of anyone else’s?  If the Right is now peddling conspiracy theories and fantasy politics, the Left is scarcely behindhand.  From ‘Big Oil’ to the ‘Zionist lobby’ to the supposed ‘Tory plot’ to dismantle the NHS, or the idea that Teresa May’s post-Brexit premiership is a ‘right-wing coup’, the left-liberal intelligentsia’s version of events is far from being a balanced, dispassionate exposition.  Just as tendentious is the idea that during the EU referendum campaign, one side espoused ‘truth’ and the other ‘lies’.  Both sides created propaganda, only the Remain propaganda was a fair bit subtler, as one might expect from ‘experts’ who have been telling the story their way, and convincing the people who matter, for a long time.  ‘The EU has kept the peace in Europe since 1945.’  ‘It is thanks to the EU that we can enjoy European culture and travel.’  ‘Only the EU guarantees workers’ rights, environmental protection, consumer standards.’  Are these lies?  Not exactly. Are they facts?  Hardly.  They are assertions dressed up as facts and strengthened by repetition: a perfect illustration of the subjectivity of expertise.

Leftist academics have not even pretended to believe in truth for a long time.  They regard the scientific method, and Enlightenment rationality, as essentially imperialist constructs, power-plays in disguise.  To believe in power rather than in truth becomes self-fulfilling: little by little, fashion and consensus replaces free-thinking expertise, and a hive mind develops.  Trust experts by all means – but when you find they are all saying the same thing, you know something is wrong. 

It gets worse.  When objectivity is discredited, the hive mind will tend to gravitate not towards opinions that can be supported by evidence, but towards those that are upheld with the greatest passion.  There is a direct line from this to the toxic fog that now swirls around the internet, where the wildest fantasies gain traction if their proponents seem to believe in them hard enough. 

The leftists have created this situation.  But it seems to have taken them by surprise that the lunatic Right (the intelligent Right having been systematically purged from positions of influence) is now learning to use their weapons of grievance, passion and anti-objectivity against them.  So forgive us (though they won’t) if we see their sudden conversion to the idea of truth in the same way they would themselves, if someone else was using it: as an attempt by representatives of a prevailing ideology to counter a threat to their power by seizing the moral high ground; even more cynically hypocritical than most such attempts, because they know exactly how it works.  It’s not ‘truth’ they’re worried about: it’s who gets to tell the story. 

They can afford to relax a little bit, though, when it comes to ‘hate’.  I don’t think there is as much of that around as there might seem to be.  The post-Brexit vandalism and shouted insults, the online trolling and misogynist death threats: much of it is performance art.  Again, there is a direct line back to the 1960s, when the Left decreed good manners to be bourgeois and transgressive behaviour of all kinds to be laudably anti-Establishment.  The direct victims of this behaviour were just collateral damage: the real aim was the heady pleasure of being naughty, of infringing social norms.  It still is.  Only now, dear soft-leftists, they are your social norms.  Just as you taught them, the disaffected are still ready to épater les bourgeois.  But – how to put this? – les bourgeois, c’est vous.

My Brexit Diary

My first preference was never to leave the EU.

What we all wanted, of course, was a ‘reformed EU’.  The single currency project would be either abandoned, or wound back to a central core of countries whose economies were sufficiently on a level to cope with it.  The aim of political union would be given up, as posing insuperable problems of accountability.  The CAP would be done away with, or at least radically updated, MEPs’ and officials’ expenses reined in, the free movement of people rethought to stop millions of workers depressing wages in wealthier countries while depriving poorer ones of their skills, and, of course, Britain would finally be given a ‘top table’ say in policy formation instead of perpetually jumping up and down like a schoolboy dying for a pee, being told to wait in line by the impregnable France-Germany duo … yes, this was what we wanted, but we didn’t seem likely to get it.  Not this year or next, anyway, as long as the prospect of Europe imploding still seems less unbearable to the Eurocrats than losing face and admitting they were wrong.

And when Mr Cameron came back from his negotiations with 1% of nothing much, that seemed all the less likely.  A painful sight. 

So the next option was to vote Leave.  When you are in a train racing towards a disastrous collision, and you can’t get hold of the brakes, your next best bet is to try to derail it to cause a limited accident before it gets there.  Europe can’t be allowed to go on sleepwalking towards disaster.

I had given up on UKIP previously because of their disgraceful xenophobia.  Here was the xenophobia again.  Unfortunate, very.  Still, the way I saw it, xenophobia is something that can and must be tackled over and over again, at home, whereas a vote on Europe would not come round again in my lifetime.  A substantial majority for Remain would be actively harmful to Europe, as it would reassure the EU leadership that they were fine to carry on just as they were, and that Brits would put up with any amount of humiliation because they were too scared to leave.  Juncker’s crowing made that more or less explicit.  ‘Ha ha, we know you’ll never dare to leave and you can’t affect what we do from inside, we have got you exactly where we want you’, he said, in effect.  Can he be so surprised that a lot of people thought ‘Oh, really?’

I did my best to ignore the Leave campaign, although when that leaflet came through the door with the £350 million more a week for the NHS nonsense, I cringed before shovelling it in the bin.  That claim will come back to bite them, I thought … how can they be so stupid?  But then, I thought, it’s not surprising that this campaign is being led by mavericks and knaves and generally disreputable characters.  Anyone who leads the way in calling 50 years of received wisdom into question and advocating a leap into the unknown is bound to be a chancer.  The respectable won’t commit too fast, they have got their reputations to think of.  But if change really comes, sooner or later they’ll persuade themselves they were for it all along.

Instead I paid attention to the Remain campaign.  Perhaps it’s true, I thought to myself, that the press has represented the EU unfairly from the start.  Maybe the EU is better for Britain and Europe than we realise.  Maybe it has brought a lot of quiet, unsung benefits that we don’t sufficiently appreciate – other than the obvious ones like easy travel and assorted forms of patronage – and here is the Remainers’ chance to tell me.  I might change my mind.

Fat chance.  The Leave campaign would have made me vote Remain if anything could … but the Remain campaign finally tipped me into voting Leave.  It was called ‘Britain Stronger In Europe’ but that was a misnomer.  The general tone of campaign was more like ‘Britain Useless Even In Europe’ …

Britain, the pundits lined up to say, is finished, a has-been, a paltry little rain-soaked island that nobody in the rest of the world much cares about.  Its only chance of survival is to huddle together with its 27 kind Euro-neighbours and accept their crumbs of charity.  Moreover, Britain cannot be trusted to elect governments that will protect workers’ rights and prevent the vulnerable from being exploited.  Without the benign influence of Brussels, Britain would even now be a heartless capitalist hell-hole where climbing boys were sent up chimneys and old folk starved in the street, and if it left the EU, it would certainly get back to that stage in a few years.

Anyone who thought Britain would be better off outside Europe, or hadn’t got the deal it deserved inside, was a fantasist – a Little Englander nostalgic for the palmy days of Empire, for an all-white, stuffy, deferential Britain that never existed, or that was quite ghastly in so far as it did.  Moreover any such person was obviously a racist who detested anything foreign on principle.  To be anti-EU was to be anti-civilisation: it meant rejecting Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Monet, Beethoven, Proust, and even decent food in favour of suet puddings and warm beer. (Yes, according to A. A. Gill in The Times, the EU was responsible for bringing us European culture in its entirety, rather like the Party in Orwell’s 1984 giving itself credit for discovering electricity and inventing the steam engine.)

And furthermore, if Leave won the referendum the economy would tank, the pound in your pocket would become worthless, no one would trade with us, house prices would crash, the City of London that pays for the whole show would fold up its tents, expats would be bundled back home, and we wouldn’t be able to take holidays in Europe ever again.  And without all those nice Eastern Europeans willing to do tough jobs for wages that no Brit would accept, our old people would go uncared for, our fruit unpicked and our drains unfixed.  Barack Obama came over specially to tell us we’d be ‘at the back of the queue’ for any trade deal with the US of A.  The Eurocrats took particular pleasure in telling us that being such good friends of ours, they would turn every possible screw on us if we had the nerve to walk out.

Bizarre, ahistorical claims were made so often they became factoids.  The European Community/Union has kept the peace in Europe since World War II, we were repeatedly told.  By exactly the same people who I remember, back in the 1980s, laughing in the face of anyone who told them that the nuclear ‘balance of terror’ had kept the peace between Russia and America.  Correlation does not imply causation, they would say.  You might as well say that there are no polar bears in Piccadilly because a bloke is keeping them away by firing a shotgun.  Their present argument is on precisely the same level of logic but because they want to believe it, they can’t see that.  (In reality what has kept the peace in Europe is that no country in it can aspire to being a superpower any more.)  Similarly, we were told that Britain’s growth in prosperity since 1973 was due to our membership of the EU.  Nothing to do with Mrs Thatcher, then, or the Big Bang, or the end of the Cold War, or a generally growing world economy, or any of that stuff.  The liberalisation of society, the advancement of women and minorities, etc, etc, all obviously would have been impossible without that particular set of bureaucrats shuttling busily between Brussels and Strasbourg …

Underneath it all was an arrogant, sneering dislike and contempt for Britain (especially England) as such.  These right-thinking people were not just indifferent to the nation they had grown up in, they were actively hostile to it.  They didn’t want it to be ‘stronger in Europe’, they wanted it to be dissolved in Europe – for Europe to help them forget it ever existed.  Britain meant nothing to them except a discredited, imperialist past and an embarrassing, fudge-and-flummery present.  To be proud of your country, even to want it still to exist and provide you with an identity, was parochial, backward-looking and borderline racist.  This is why most bien-pensants supported Scottish independence two years ago, and are so gleeful at the fact that tearing Britain free from the European Union seems to come at the price of risking losing Scotland all over again.  Only the death of Britain will wipe out their shame: they want it cut in two and buried with a stake through its heart.

By class, education and occupation I am one of these people, but I don’t like them.  I am half Austrian and one quarter Irish and have Australian citizenship.  I don’t have to be British, but I choose to be.  The British national character is something real, not a fake, and I value it even though it drives me mad.  If these were the kind of people who were urging us to stay in the EU and those were the best reasons they could offer, I wanted no part of it.  Nick felt the same, and we both felt increasingly lonely at work and among our friends and families as everyone seemed to unite in scorn of the Brexit ‘quitters’, ‘bed-wetters’, ‘ignorant chavs’, ‘nutters’, ‘racists’, ‘haters’, ‘Little Englanders’ etc etc etc …

We both have PhDs from Cambridge and work at high professional levels, Nick as a statistician, I as an academic historian.  Between us we are fluent in three European languages (other than English).  We did not much like to be told that our opinions made us poor deluded proles, at best.  We gradually found out, though, that it wasn’t just us.  The Leave voters who shared their views with us are people whose sanity I would rate well above my own.  David, the chilled, humorous fortyish driving instructor who got all our children through their tests the first time, being working class, wasn’t shy about telling us how he was voting.  Michael, who is a hands-on father of four and the CEO of a fast-growing eco-building firm, who has worked his butt off to provide apprenticeships and training opportunities for teenagers, came out passionately for Leave as we put our books away after singing in the church choir.  Mary, a Yorkshire lady, the mother of one of my students, a teacher of adult literacy and numeracy classes at her local further education college, confided in me at her daughter’s graduation ceremony; I think if she had known what the average Cambridge academic’s opinion was likely to be, she might have kept quiet.  All these people are the sort who cheer you up when you meet them, and make you think the country has a future; solid, practical, effortlessly kindly, public-spirited without making a fuss about it; miles away from the angry, confused, alienated Leave voter of media myth.  Add to those the lay reader at church, a twinkly chap and a diplomat to his fingertips.  What a catch he would be for a pro-Brexit march; but he will never stand up for his vote in public, because it would be ‘divisive’.

And that is just the point.  In a very similar way to what happened at the general election last year, the opinion polls got it all wrong, because All the Right People had so seized the moral high ground that you would be hesitant to admit you were on the ‘wrong’ side, even to an anonymous pollster or your best friend.  Perhaps Remainers were well-off and Leavers poor, Remainers city types and Leavers small town or country, Remainers young and Leavers old … but an under-reported divide is Remainers noisy, Leavers quiet.  Remainers all over social media, creating the narrative; Leavers getting on with their jobs and sticking to the old-fashioned idea that their vote is between them and the ballot box.  (This was well expressed in a column in the Spectator by Emily Hill.)  There must have been some parts of the country where it was the Leavers who were making the noise, but it wasn’t the case around here.

The upshot was that nobody had the faintest idea that Leave was going to win.  I mean this quite literally.  Boris Johnson didn’t expect it: he hadn’t written a victory speech.  David Cameron didn’t expect it – he had no plan for a Leave vote, no more than anyone did on either side.  (Cameron seems to have promised the referendum imagining that it would be a cosmetic exercise, designed to show the Tory rebels that they had absolutely no mandate with the country.  Quelle surprise.)  I certainly didn’t expect it.  The opinion polls did have Leave edging ahead momentarily shortly before the referendum, but in the last day or two it slipped back again, and I thought that was that.  Caution and the status quo would prevail, just as they had in the Scottish referendum.  That being so, I made my mind up finally to vote Leave, because if the Leave vote was below 40% - as I quite expected it to be – no sort of message would be sent to Europe at all, except that Britain really was finished.  My biggest worry was letting down the Eastern European countries, and in a worst-case scenario, emboldening Russia to invade them.  But even as presently constituted, the EU doesn’t seem to offer much assurance that that won’t happen …

So we all voted, the whole family, for the first time, but in separate shifts. (I’m pretty sure the kids all voted Remain.  The EU is normal for them, it’s been around in its post-Maastricht form all their lives.  They think holidays and ERASMUS scholarships.  They haven’t seen the mission creep, the deception, the gradual stranglehold forming, the way that those of us who were around in 1975, for the first EU referendum, do. That makes their votes worth more than ours, of course, in the eyes of Remainers.  Long memories, experience and perspective, who needs them?)

I went to bed pretty cheerful, reckoning that breakfast time would be soon enough to find out how things had gone.  Just enough Leave votes to make a point and I would be satisfied.  But Nick couldn’t sleep, and got up at 2.30 a.m. and booted up his computer, waking me up in the process, and coming back to tell me that Leave was ahead.  Blimey.  He did it again at four and this time it was a cert.  Leave had won, and by a decisive margin.

It was a fine, sunny morning and very quiet.  We went outside and we both found ourselves thinking of the line ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive’.  Our nation had just got together and done something gloriously unexpected.  It had been so easy, after all, like pushing on an open door.  It reminded me of the scene in Terry Gilliam’s Baron Munchhausen movie where the Baron leads the townspeople out of the city gate and the enemy army that was besieging them has simply … gone.  Just melted away, as if it had never been.

…And then the howling started.  They hadn’t gone, after all.

If we thought we’d seen hatred and bile before, it was nothing to what came afterwards.  ‘Unfair! Unfair! We was robbed!’ wailed the entire Establishment.  The stitch-up had unravelled.  The cosmetic exercise had got out of hand.  They had listened only to each other and paid attention to the actual public too late.  Oh, how wise they were after the event – the referendum should never have happened, at least it should have been weighted towards the status quo, you can’t trust those ignorant people from council estates to inform themselves, to vote for the right reasons.  We demand a re-run! 

Well, if a retrospective stitch-up is applied and real Brexit never happens, at least the people have had a good chance to learn what the Establishment really thinks of them.

An excellent analysis here: http://ukandeu.ac.uk/why-britain-backed-brexit%e2%80%8f/.  This supports my hunch that Project Fear was counter-productive on this occasion, even though it worked – just – in the Scottish referendum.  The Remain campaigners, in the end, were old-fashioned economists who thought money was everything.  They thought that threatening people who are already badly off with being worse off as a result of voting Leave would work. From their ineffable height, they failed to realise that the poorer you are, the more – not less – your honour matters to you.  They hadn’t taken note of Fukuyama’s exposition of ‘megalothymia’, the need for a sense of self-worth.  Nor had they apparently heard of the games theorists’ experiment whereby you offer people the chance to join a game with you and win guaranteed prizes: they get a small proportion of the prize money and you get most of it, whereas if they refuse to play neither you nor they gets anything.  It has been consistently found that if you offer people only one or two per cent, even if the actual sum is very large and they are so poor that it will have a huge effect on their lives, they will have none of it.  Very few people will join the game for less than 25%.  The choice between having a few crumbs thrown your way, or a chance to send a complacent git about his business?  No contest!  Like the defendant in court who shouted ‘I don’t want to do myself any good, I want to do that b****r some harm!’

Nothing new here.  The dehumanisation of the poor, the failure to realise they have legitimate feelings as well as stomachs, has always been with us.  The extraordinary thing is the prevalence of this attitude among people who build their whole self-image around the idea that they care about the disadvantaged, that they are on the side of the underdog.  The increasing gap between rich and poor has wreaked its mischief on them without them even realising it.  It’s a high-danger moment for Western societies in general.  If the stake in society of the mass of the people falls below a certain level, they will disengage from the political process, and voter apathy in elections shows that this is already happening.  The Establishment, the people who run things, are beginning to respond in the standard manner of oligarchic elites by regarding the masses as the enemy within, as non-citizens who have to be ‘kept down’ rather than engaged.  If they don’t re-think and engage them, populism will grow crasser and nastier and the elite will have only itself to blame.

What astonished me even more, if possible, was the extraordinary level of risk-aversion manifested by people who at some level all espouse ‘revolutionary’ politics, who are all for embracing change and progress.  They all took it for granted that it was utter folly to rock the boat, to court a few years of turbulence for the sake of a greater good to come.  A week after the vote and the pound had lost 10% of its value against the dollar.  ‘What did we tell you?’ they shrieked, as though any Leave voter had expected that a U-turn after fifty years was not going to register with the money markets or cause so much as a ripple in a serene (?) economic sea.  It epitomised the ant-like Euro attitude.  Don’t deflect, don’t deviate, keep marching in the same direction, even if it’s towards the edge of a cliff.  Better all to get there together than try doing anything on your own!

A few days after the referendum, I had to stop saying anything about it on the internet under my own name for fear of upsetting a troubled family member.  This seemed a microcosm of the moral blackmail that the Remainers employ as their leading weapon.   There was a nasty outbreak of xenophobic and racist attacks in the days immediately after the referendum, or at least there was reported to be; unless it was simply that the normal trickle of bullies and yobs with a pretended cause could now use Brexit as a flag – or have it pinned on them regardless.  So of course as a Leave voter one had automatically voted for this and was an evil racist – the blackest of all evils in the left-liberal rulebook.  Was it such a wonder if the BBC managed to chase down a few people who were prepared to say they’d regretted their Leave votes – and imply on that basis that the result was illegitimate, because at least a million people probably hadn’t realised they were ‘voting for racism’, etc?  When thousands marched ‘against the referendum’ in London, I wanted to find out where you could march to respect the result.  Nowhere.  People like David, Michael, Mary and Rob, very much the ‘decent people’ of Nigel Farage’s much-mocked phrase, not the marching kind at the best of times, have been shamed into silence.  

The Blob are up to every trick in the book. 

Articles by Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times and various people in the Spectator and on spiked.online cheered us up to an extent.  As did this brilliant piece http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/07/english-revolt by Robert Tombs, professor of French at Cambridge, which should at least give pause to all those weekend-trippers who claim that Eurosceptics know nothing of Europe.  There was also a surprisingly sympathetic and insightful analysis in French in a Figaro magazine I picked up at the airport.  (The one thing that really astonished me in this was the French perception that the British have a relaxed confidence and pride in their national identity!!!!  If only! What did not astonish me was that the article openly proclaimed that the EU had been created to give France a dominant role in post-war Europe – with quotes from De Gaulle et al. – even while mildly criticizing Britain for ‘unashamedly [or shamelessly?] pursuing its national interests’! ‘L’Europe des Six sera, selon le rêve du Général, le “levier d’Archimède” de la puissance française.’  And then the pro-EU types over here claim that popular British dislike of this French empire is just created by propaganda in the “Murdoch press”!!!)  Whatever happens now, as I said, the establishment has unmasked itself, the EU project has a major blow to its credibility, and a new and better kind of politics may be jolted into life.  But the Blob won’t give up that easily.  They are in charge of the universities, the schools, the councils, the public services, the quangos, and a large slice of industry.  They write the script.  At the moment the script says that not only the referendum result, but the Conservative government itself (democratically voted into power) has no legitimacy.  This anti-Establishment Establishment completely fails to see its own vested interests, though they have shown up quite a bit in the post-referendum kerfuffle.  

Of course all these disputes may be just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as Europe runs out of money and inexorably declines relative to China, opportunist Russia and rampant Islam … and America won’t be able to save it this time, itself in decline and moving towards isolationism as it fails to cope with its own deep internal divisions.  History – if there is any history of the rational, Enlightenment kind in the future, if those values don’t disappear from the earth – will surely judge the EU harshly, for commandeering and suffocating the true, quarrelsome, irrepressible virtues of Europe in the cause of a political fantasy, a myopic bureaucratic fortress that even relies on others to defend it.  ‘You can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence the world out.’  But in the meantime we are in for interesting times.

Education, Education, (Please No More) Education

Another year, another series of tinkerings with the education system.  Academies; free schools; abolish AS levels … abolish GCSEs … on and on it goes, and the teachers, slogging away in the trenches, resign themselves to yet another round of upheaval.  Indeed, for most of their professional lifetimes upheaval rather than stability has been the norm.  But does all this constant change really change anything?

There are overdue rumblings of doubt whether compulsory full-time academic education up to the age of 16 was such a good idea in the first place.  The Sunday Telegraph published figures to show that young men’s last year of schooling, whichever year that was, was the year in which they committed most offences, throughout the twentieth century.  Francis Gilbert’s book I’m a Teacher, Get Me Out Of Here blew the lid off ‘bog standard comprehensives’, revealing them to be universities of anti-social behaviour rather than nurseries of talent.  The system, as it stands, is not just failing to prepare adolescents for citizenship, it is actively encouraging them towards a life of crime.  Yet why should anyone be surprised?

Compulsory education was introduced with the best of motives – to protect children from exploitation and to equip them with skills they needed to succeed in an increasingly complex society.  In a hi-tech world it is no longer economic to employ children as agricultural labourers or sweatshop operatives; instead of an inefficiently exploited and expendable resource, a child is now a valued luxury, and in most respects this is a great blessing.  But it has a downside.  In removing children from the workforce, society declares them useless mouths.  In protecting them, we stuff them into a box in which nothing they do can make any conceivable difference to anybody – except themselves, in the remote future.  We’re more comfortable with that.  Trust spotty, giddy teenagers to do anything that matters?  No thanks.  Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, community service, as long as it’s safety-checked and sanitized, but nothing that has the rank smell of real money or real danger. 

Well-brought-up children are the imperial concubines of our society – showered with gifts, taught to show off utterly useless skills, simply because we can afford it.  Children from dysfunctional or non-existent families, badly behaved children, are society’s prisoners, banged up in schools for want of anything better to do with them, with teachers as their equally trapped warders.  Why do we expect them to like it?   School can work for docile, highly intelligent children who are good at deferring gratification.  But these are a minority, and in most ordinary schools the discontented majority will not let even them get on with it.

The perceived uselessness of children and adolescents is at the root of most of the problems in schools and many of those of society at large.  All down the ages humans have dreamed and schemed to be freed from the necessity of getting their daily bread.  But human character is formed under that necessity just as the human skeleton is formed by the force of gravity, and few people function well when it is removed.  Right from the first time a baby is plonked in front of a television screen to be entertained, through the classroom years in which passivity is rewarded and independence treated as a threat, children today are trained to the behaviour patterns of a parasitic aristocracy.  Depressive, self-destructive behaviour – excess consumption of food and alcohol, gambling, aimless violence and promiscuous sex; the languid enjoyment of possessions gained without effort; inactivity whenever possible – these used to be the preserve of the idle rich, but compulsory education followed by the welfare state have made them the condition of choice of an entire society, known by the collective, approving label of ‘cool’.

This enforced parasitism is the chief cause, for instance, of bullying in schools.  Most human tolerance and co-operation is founded on the practical realization that different people make useful contributions, in their various ways, to the group’s survival.  Unlike a baboon troop, a human society contains all kinds of niches in which people with different abilities can survive with some self-respect.  The aggressive fighter will support the weedy intellectual because the geek’s skills complement his own; even the poor, inoffensive idiot will be valued as a worker.  In school, none of this happens because survival and economic benefit are not at issue.  No one needs anyone else in a classroom.  The battle for status becomes as stark and pure as in any baboon troop.  The most aggressive and intimidating members enforce a rigid conformity; anyone who shows difference or vulnerability is persecuted without escape.  And yet some of the most horrible bullies I knew at school became helpful and affable individuals, once they got to do a job that needed doing.  Nothing combats bullying like responsibility; but without responsibility all the valiant efforts being made to combat it will do little good.  Bullying is structural.  So are many of the other behaviour patterns we deplore in teenagers.  A fourteen-year-old girl’s deliberate decision to become pregnant, for instance: what is it but a desperate assertion that she matters, that she wants to have the ultimate responsibility for something in her life, rather than simply taking what is dished out to her?

But we prefer not to notice this; having herded our children into a dysfunctional sub-society, we attempt to rationalize and gloss over their appalling behaviour as normal and inevitable.  Solemn academic studies ‘find’ that young people are ‘socialized by’ and ‘draw their values from’ their peer group, not their parents, absolving parents in retrospect from their abandoned duty to instil a sense of social obligation in opposition to the fainéant mentality of school.  In a recent Sunday Telegraph article on the suicide of a bullied schoolgirl, Jenny McCartney wished the victim could have kept her hopes up until she left school: ‘there is no workplace so vile that you will be jostled and taunted on your way to your desk’.  Why do we accept that schools are viler than workplaces?  Why do we assume that to be a teenager is to be a depressed misfit or a jeering bully, when we know perfectly well that teenagers are as various as adults, and capable, moreover, of amazing idealism, courage and generosity – if ever they get the chance to show it? 

I suppose we put up with it partly because we know deep down that it is still an improvement on what went before.  Visitors to Africa and China often comment wistfully on how much the children there value education, on their eagerness to learn compared to the sullen apathy of Britain’s well-cared-for youth.  Of course they value education: it is the best passport out of a life of squalor and miserable, back-breaking labour in societies with little compassion to spare for the poor.   We have Dickens and Kingsley to remind us how comparatively recently we were there ourselves.  We have books like Barry Hines’s Kes and Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood to remind us how far from ideal British schools were even in the nostalgically recalled 1950s.  But the fact that we don’t want to go back shouldn’t mean that we go ever further forward down a blind alley.

Young people have to be re-integrated into the world around them.  They need to feel their efforts count, and they need to be mentored and taken seriously by adults who haven’t the vested interest of parents or the crowd-control problems of teachers.  Isn’t apartheid by age group one of the strangest things about our society?  Whence this unnatural situation in which many, perhaps a majority of adults can go for days at a time without speaking to a child, foisting the duty of bringing on the next generation onto teachers?  Where did we, as adults, get the expectation of working in a ready-socialized, child-free environment?  No wonder most children, addressed by an adult, return a blank stare and seem to have no idea how to respond.  No wonder they get their own back on us on the streets, parks and buses.

Sometimes I imagine a town in which every restaurant would have a few aproned eleven-year-old waiters wishing the diners bon appetit; where accountants and estate agents would have a complement of teenage trainees applying their school maths to real life; where, once you started secondary school, you could choose to spend real time at a variety of these jobs – and get real money for them –as part of your ‘education’.  And where schools, in turn, were places you could go to at any age, to catch up on the academic subjects you saw no point in when you were a young man in a hurry.  It would not be easy to safeguard children in such a scheme from danger and exploitation, and also to ensure that the work they were given was real and not just cosmetic.  But it would be worth the effort, if it introduced them to the need for striving before they got hooked on the habit of skiving.

Marchesa Maddalena (A Tosca Story)

I based this story on one of my favourite operas, Tosca, taking some ideas from Sardou's play and some liberties with Puccini's libretto, but staying true, I hope, to the opera's spirit.  This story is told from the point of view of the Marchesa Attavanti,  a key figure of both play and opera who never appears on stage.  

For a year or two, it was the craze among all the best people in Rome to be painted by Cavaradossi.  They did not pay merely for stiff portraits, but for pictures of themselves as they dreamed of being: gods or nymphs or heroes of ancient times, in a bright swirl of dance or battle.  Yes, many of these people could be flattered into thinking they were gods.  But it was the painter’s visit, as much as the pictures they were left with, that made them feel favoured beyond the ordinary run of men.  The spice of danger, the teasing charm: having Mario’s intent eyes all to oneself, for as long as the sitting took … it was heady wine.  Who would know that better than I? 

And I never kept any of his sketches.  Perhaps I really thought he was immortal.

I was surprised when he asked me to be his model for a sacred subject.  He did not usually go in for saints and angels.  It turned out that someone had reported him for owning forbidden books, the works of Voltaire, as it happened.  To avoid being thrown out of Rome, he had offered his services to the Cardinal Priest of Sant’Andrea delle Valle, to paint a mural of Mary Magdalene in his church, and the Cardinal, in return, had pulled strings.  When I saw his sketch, I observed that there was no sense in his currying favour by painting a pious picture, if he was going to make it look as unorthodox as that.  He said:

‘Nonsense, Francesca. The kind of people who will be looking at this picture won’t notice.  As long as the Magdalene is on her knees, and her hair and robes are the right colour, no one gives a fig.  If my Magdalene shows the face of an avenging angel, instead of simpering weak-chinned submission, and if her hands are raised to accuse God of his cruelty to humanity, instead of pleading for forgiveness … in fact, if she looks like my wonderful Francesca, instead of Magdalene, what’s that to them?  People like the good Sacristan here are completely blind.’

Between sentences, he was glancing at me, and then putting more strokes on his picture, with his thumb poised to smudge the charcoal.  I kept my smile distant, and merely said, 

‘Perhaps so.  But, you know, you shouldn’t tease the Sacristan.  It’s dangerous.  Don’t go thinking he isn’t important enough to matter.  The spite of a put-upon servant has ruined many a great man and lady before now.’

‘Tease him?  Me?’ protested Mario, all wide-eyed innocence.

‘Yes.  You know what I mean,’ I said severely.  ‘Dallying with your dusky diva under his nose, and that sort of thing.  He’s not that blind.’

Mario’s mistress was a bone of contention between us.  The celebrated singer Floria Tosca … I admit I was not always kind about her.  The dusky diva, the godly goat-girl, the brainless brunette.  I couldn’t understand what he saw in her, and feared she would do him no good.  Even then, he was having to lie to her about painting me, because the mere thought of another woman posing for him would send her into fits of fury.  My modelling sessions were carefully timed during her opera rehearsals.

‘This senseless jealousy of hers must be exhausting for you,’ I would say.  ‘How on earth do you put up with it?’

‘First of all,’ he answered, sketching away as always, ‘you must realise that there is nothing senseless about her jealousy.  Marchesa, you were born and bred in the purple.  You always know what to say and what to do in refined company, without a moment’s thought.  Floria grew up herding goats, as you point out.  She knows how to behave like a lady now, because she has worked at it, and is not, as you imply, stupid, but a very quick learner.  But she knows her position is not secure.  She knows that, at her very next performance, if she disappoints her audience, their adoration will turn to hissing, her contract will not be renewed, and back she will go to the goats.  I mean to stay with Floria, but how can she know that?  All her friends at the stage door will be telling her that she had better line up another rich lover or two, because it can only be a matter of time before the Cavaliere tires of her, and of course he will be looking for a bride, a well-bred girl of his own rank in life … it would be astonishing if she were not jealous.’

I had nothing to say to that.  I only thought: yes, she has every reason to be jealous, except one.  He is staying in Rome, in danger, just to be with her.  He is spending the night with her, every night that they can.  And all I ever had were a few gallant kisses.  So do I have no reason to be jealous?

I did not show any of this.  Like every celebrated beauty, I had practised from an early age making my face a mask, and now it was second nature.  Being a beauty is an exacting task for a woman.  Mario, now … when you looked at him you did not see his face, but his laughter, his quicksilver mind, his headlong enthusiasm for his work, for good company, for everything.  He never gave his looks a thought.  Whereas I – I could rarely afford to forget mine.

I am the Marchesa Attavanti.  My husband, the stiff-backed old Marquis Ottavio, is as it were the yardstick and the guarantor of the Roman nobility, and I am the ornament of his house, the tireless arbiter of taste, oiler of wheels, stifler of discord and distributor of favours among the people who matter.  Invitations to my balls and levées are the sign that one has arrived at the pinnacle of society.  The Queen is my personal friend, and I know exactly how to approach the upper clergy, demurely in black, with meek ring-kissing and precisely judged almsgiving.  Even the Pope himself unbent a little in audience with me.  But of course a great beauty also has to know how to practise galanteria: especially the young wife of an elderly husband.  People would be disappointed if there were no exercise for wagging tongues: with whom did the Marchesa dance last night, on whom did she smile, who kissed her hand with particular fervour?  The popular notion is that the Marchesa takes her pleasures freely though discreetly, and that the dear old Marquis is an acquiescent cuckold – perhaps even a pander, who furthers his own influence through his wife’s satisfied lovers.  And this reputation was no hindrance at all to the life I really wished to lead.

For it allowed people to forget that my own family, the Angelotti, were “tainted with treachery”.  That my brother, Cesare, had been a consul in the Roman Republic, and then had become a fugitive, never heard from again, after the King of Naples invaded.  Faced with my beautiful blank mask, no one would be so indiscreet as to accuse me of republican sympathies.  How could politics ever enter so utterly feminine a mind?  How could such a mercenary goddess even remember that she had a brother? 

And so I went everywhere, and spoke to everyone.  I knew exactly the place to stand in the white-gilt salon, so that the trusty servant, behind the panelling designed to hide his plebeian presence from the company, would hear every word and go unnoticed on his errand.  I had a splendid ally in Mario, the society painter, the fascinating half-French chevalier. He, as a foreigner, was licensed to talk mild heresy with a jesting air, often bringing hidden dangers into the open.  I was the severe sphinx before whom anything could be said.  What I really thought was such a mystery, Mario used to nickname me Beltade Ignota – the unknown beauty.  Together, we warned quite a few people, hid them and helped them to flee the city before they could be arrested.  We sheltered the secret groups who met to read forbidden books and plan the return of a rational secular state. 

We were allies, we were friends, we flirted, but we were never lovers.  Tosca got there before me, and I was not quite unscrupulous enough to do my utmost to cut her out.  Perhaps I could not have done, even if I had tried.  If it was hard for Mario to resist the temptation, he never showed it.  It was quite difficult for me.  But the dissembling, the play-acting, that was easy.  Until the person to be hidden mattered too much: until it was my brother.

Things were worse than ever in Rome.  Napoleon, the embodiment of revolution, was threatening Italy and everyone believed our defeated republicans would stage a revolt in his support.  To repress it, the city governor brought in a new chief of police, a Sicilian: Baron Vitellio Scarpia.  He came with a ready-made entourage of cut-throats, and soon added to them from the scum of the city.  Spies were everywhere.  Gossip had it that Scarpia even controlled a network of priests who disregarded the seal of the confessional and told him people’s secrets – especially women’s.  The gossip went further: if Scarpia heard of a lady’s peccadillo, he would ‘invite’ her to his office and suggest that, in return for his silence, she should give him, too, a share in her favours.  He was bored with prostitutes and courtesans, and found this a more invigorating way of gratifying his appetites.  I dismissed the talk at the time.  But what was certain and worse, people were seized and imprisoned secretly, and, in the Palazzo Farnese itself, the very heart of Roman civility and grace, Scarpia’s men used the extortion methods of Sicilian bandits.  I met him once or twice.  I found his religious observance punctilious, his manners impeccable.  He made me shudder.  Two of his lieutenants were always with him, and I saw their dead eyes assessing me, passing on and taking the reckoning of everyone in the company.  To them, cruelty was what card-playing is to a hardened gambler.  He hardly cares for it any more, but he cares for nothing else.  Breaking men, destroying human souls, was their one, trivial pastime and they could never stop thinking about it.  But Scarpia could sip it like wine, enjoy it like a connoisseur, and discourse civilly while he planned his next trap: which made him even more terrifying.

And I got the message, by roundabout ways, that Cesare had fallen into his hands.  Trying to return secretly to Rome, he had been betrayed and was a prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo.  At once I determined that I would never rest until I had saved him.  It was of no use to plead for his release, even to the royal couple themselves.  To pardon Cesare would be to strike at the heart of everything they stood for.  But to free him by stealth would be a difficult and deadly game.  Cesare was almost the biggest prey that Scarpia had ever hunted: to lose him would be more than his own life was worth, although he perhaps dared not execute him openly.  I trusted, nevertheless, that I, the Marchesa Attavanti, was too high for even Scarpia to touch.  If I were caught helping my brother, I might be banished or locked in ‘protective custody’ in a convent, but I would survive, and nothing would happen to the Marquis.  He was indispensable.  Not that he ever did anything: his simple existence was a corner-stone of the Roman state.  For Mario, though, a few places further down the ladder, it would have been much too dangerous.  So I determined I would not tell him.  That was my great mistake.  If only I had confided in him, and if he in turn hadn’t lied to Tosca... We were afraid.  Fear destroys the best-laid plans, more than anything else.

I put out feelers, and proferred money, and a wonderful rogue of a tavern-keeper, whom my coachman knew, found a weak point among the jailers.  I was able to send Cesare food and clothing, and at last risked a message, a slip of paper inside a loaf of bread.  I got word back, too: when my packages first reached him, Cesare was more dead than alive, too weak even to attempt to escape, but after a month or two, with a better cell and better food, he gained a little strength.  The jailer, already prospering thanks to my bribes, was promised enough to leave Rome as a rich man, if he happened to forget to lock the door one evening, and arranged for the guards to stay out of a particular passage. 

The Attavanti have a private chapel in Sant’Andrea della Valle, although we do not use it much.  It worked well that I was posing for Mario’s painting.  As I knelt in prayer, being Mary Magdalene, it was easy to slip a key to the chapel under an altar cloth without even Mario being aware of it.  And my maid and I had sorted out a basket of women’s clothes, which I brought to the church, ‘to give to charity’.  They were spirited into the Attavanti chapel and hidden behind a family tomb.  Cesare was to escape from the castle at dusk, make for the church, let himself into the walled, railed chapel, disguise himself, and hide there until one of our brotherhood met him and helped him out of the city.  There should have been several hours of darkness to make use of (and in Rome, the night is dark).  He did not know the whole plan: I was only able to send him a very short message, naming the day and telling him where the key was hidden.

And it all went wrong.  For some reason he escaped at midday, instead of at nightfall, and I did not find out.  Perhaps the message was unclear.  Perhaps an unexpected chance presented itself and he thought it better to take it than to wait.  Perhaps the jailer knew that he was suspected, and insisted on haste: in any case, he collected his money and was gone.  And was too obvious about it, so that Cesare’s flight was discovered almost at once.  When Cesare staggered into the church, I should think he had already been seen in the street, by one of Scarpia’s spies who loitered at corners, even in the noonday heat, when almost no one was about.  Certainly none of my people were there: only Mario, taking advantage of the afternoon quiet to paint in peace.

Mario should have gone home for the night, and never have known.  But even if I had foreseen this accident, I did not realise that Mario would actually risk his life for my brother.  He knew Cesare, respected him for what he had done, and knew perfectly well what was at stake if he helped him.  I treasured Mario so much.  I thought that he would value himself, see that his life was more important than other men’s, a thing of beauty.  He was an artist.  How I underestimated him.

Mario didn’t hesitate.  He realised that they couldn’t afford to wait in the church.  Knowing of no other plan, he took Cesare to his villa.  This wasn’t his family property, it was a little place just inside the city walls that he rented under an assumed name, for political purposes … and lately, it turned out, for amorous purposes as well: he had got into the habit of meeting Tosca there.  Otherwise it might have been safe enough: it could have taken Scarpia a long time to find out where it was, even though suspicion fell on Mario.  But with Tosca on the scent …

I did not know any of this until much later.  I had a full day of engagements.  In the early morning, though, I had slipped into the church to make sure that everything was still in place.  Mario was not at work yet, but he had finished roughing out his picture after I left the previous day.  I was struck by astonishment, seeing the composition complete for the first time. 

Mario used to say, ruefully, that he would be a better painter if he were not a gentleman of leisure but had to earn his bread by it: he would have less time for finicking.  I always thought he underrated himself.  He had learned from David, but David’s pictures, however brilliantly composed, always strike me as marmoreal, cold.  In Mario’s pictures everything seemed to be breathing, about to take wing.  His Magdalene, larger than life, filled the space between two pillars with the balance of a piece of expert calligraphy.  She was kneeling on one knee as if she had just flung herself down, or was about to leap up: she knelt as much like Diana as Magdalene.  Her hands, stretched towards heaven, might have been holding a bow.  The hair was my fair hair, in disorder, flowing in waves.  The face was my face, but not my beautiful calm mask.  It was unguarded, full of a wild, proud sorrow.  I looked long at the picture, deeply moved and disturbed.

Mario had painted me as much more beautiful than I saw myself as being, and it was because he had painted me as if I were free.

I pretended to say a decade of the Rosary, still looking covertly at the picture, and then I stood up to leave.  My maid, waiting behind, made some un-called-for joke about the Cavaliere and his paintbrush.  She was an impudent wench whom I had had to correct several times already.   I stared at her coldly.

‘If I have to tell you to watch your tongue so much as once more, Lucia, I shall send you packing without a character,’ I said. 

‘Your pardon, signora,’ she said sulkily.

We went home, and I dealt with some charity work and met several distinguished guests.  In the middle of the day, news came by courier.  The Austrians had defeated Napoleon in Piedmont: it looked as if Rome was safe from the French.  At once my time was further taken up with a grand celebration in the Palazzo Farnese, where the Queen would be present, and Floria Tosca would sing a new cantata in praise of victory and peace.  I went to my rooms to put on evening dress.  My coiffeuse was waiting to thread pearls in my hair, while I collected together my scent-bottle, reticule and fan with Lucia’s help. 

‘Where is my fan?’ I asked her.  ‘The black one with the family crest on it.  I thought I had it yesterday.’

‘That fan, signora?’ she asked, with surprise that seemed feigned.

‘Yes, that one.  Why do you ask?’

‘I left it in the church this morning,’ she said deliberately.  ‘It’s an old one.  I thought you wanted it to go with the other things we left for charity.’

I felt a deep stab of fear go through me.  There was nothing else in the basket that could be proved to come from the Attavanti, but if the fan was found, it would give me away instantly.  This girl had betrayed me, and she did not care if I knew it. 

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said indifferently.  ‘Just find me the one with the feathers: that will go with my gown well enough.’

As we drove to the Farnese, I was in a ferment of worry and indecision.  As far as I knew, Cesare’s escape would take place that evening.  The key and the clothes would only have to lie unseen for a few more hours, at most, I told myself.  The fan added very little to what was already a high risk, and I had been taking it quietly up to then … but this trivial mishap awoke me to all that could go wrong with the plan.  Perhaps, somehow, I knew that it already had. 

The Diva was late.  We had to listen to an endless speech from the Governor’s deputy, and then converse politely while the orchestra played gavottes.  My face ached from smiling.  I was relieved when at last the audience took their seats and Paisiello tapped his baton to begin.  Tosca looked beautiful, I had to admit, with a dignity well suited to a state occasion.  The Cantata might be an undistinguished piece that the maestro had pulled out of a drawer and dusted off to look new, but I had never heard Tosca sing better.  I preferred this sacred music to the histrionics of her stage roles.  The calm discipline with which her voice rode the trills and runs, soaring evenly to a high C, took my mind from my fears and set it on other thoughts.

‘She is not stupid,’ Mario had said.  Evidently not.  She had mastered her craft and, working within its rules, she had complete freedom.  Just as Mario had.  No wonder they understood one another.  But also, she was vivid, passionate, and did not dissemble.

He loved her best, and for good reasons.  I would simply have to accept it.  But he did love me too.  I hugged the thought of his Magdalene to myself.  For him to see and paint that grief that I could not allow myself to show, that depth of feeling that I could not see in myself … it was an act of more than ordinary love.  And yet … I was suddenly struck by doubt.  I remembered some artistic conversation I had not properly understood at the time, when Mario had been babbling (it had seemed to me) about harmonious contrasts, and the possibility of blending the features of different people in the same portrait.  What if the face and figure were mine, but the soul was Tosca’s?   What if he had used her stage grief, that she could pour out so freely when she was Dido or Cassandra, to give life to his Magdalene, and my part in her was no more than that of a frigid mannequin?

And I, shallow egoist that I was, was worrying about this, when already … well, you shall hear.  I will say for myself that I had decided to speak to Tosca at the end of the performance, to assure her of my friendship, and perhaps to let her know, somehow, that I was not her rival, that it was only politics that involved me with her lover.  But as the audience gathered round to congratulate her, a lackey handed her a small piece of paper, and she looked at it and her olive skin became ashen.  She turned on her heel without a word and left the room.  The maestro had to cover for her.  ‘A thousand apologies, signori, signore … the artistic temperament … the nerves sometimes overwhelm her when the performance is over …’

Now I was really afraid.  Something had happened: what was it?  I dared not ask anybody.  I went outside without waiting for the Marquis or my maid, and walked to our carriage where the coachman and horses had been waiting throughout the reception.  This man was my unfailing contact with the world of the streets.  Without turning his head he said as I came up: ‘It’s bad news, signora.  We think that Signor Cesare is out.  He was in the church, but he’s vanished … he’s not taken yet.  But the Cavalier Cavaradossi has been arrested: Giuseppe saw them take him into the palace.’

Oh God.  So that was what Tosca knew.  I feared the worst at once.

‘Please tell the Marquis,’ I said, ‘that the Queen has asked me to stay behind to speak to her.  He should go home without me.  I am going back into the palace.’

‘God be with you, signora,’ he said.  He understood well enough.

I was indeed going to speak to the Queen.  Before she left, I was going to ask her for a private audience, and beg her to intervene to secure Mario’s release.  Maria Carolina was a capricious woman, and not over-bright, but she had her kindly side.  I was already composing my speech in my mind … how to pull at her heartstrings, without sounding in the least like a supporter of revolution.  

As I entered the salon, my eyes went straight to her seat of honour.  For a moment I could not see her for the crowd.  The room looked like a kicked anthill.  The Queen was sprawled backwards with her arms dangling towards the floor, apparently in a faint.  Her ladies were chafing her hands and holding salts under her nose.  An equerry stood by with a piece of paper in his hand, and nobles, beribboned officers, plum-coloured monsignors, were milling around him, shouting: ‘Let us hear it!’ ‘Silence!’ ‘Treason!’ ‘Read it again!’ ‘No, it’s a lie!’  The equerry cleared his throat and there was dead silence.

‘Fifteenth June … Your Royal Highness … At the close of day the enemy was reinforced by a fresh army and after fighting on the plain of Marengo for the greater part of the night, our forces were beaten.  At the present moment, encamped with the remains of our army, we are seeking terms with …’

Cries of ‘No!’  ‘Shame!’  ‘Villainy!’ drowned the rest of the dispatch.  I stood rooted to the spot.  So Bonaparte had won, after all.  The French, not the Austrians or the crown of Naples, would decide what happened in Italy.  Perhaps they would get as far as Rome and set up a second Republic.  If the Pope returned at all, it would be on their terms.  The Jacobins might revolt in anticipation … oh, dear God.  What a night to be asking the Queen to pull strings for a half-French Jacobin!

Her ladies had raised her to her feet and, in a brightly coloured clump, fussing and shuffling, began to help her out of the room.  I pushed shamelessly in among them.  ‘Your Royal Highness,’ I said urgently. ‘Signora …’

She opened her eyes and looked at me.  ‘You,’ she said theatrically.  (She could have given even Tosca a few lessons.) ‘Francesca Angelotti.  You and your brother should be happy now.  Power to traitors and infidels!  Leave my sight.’

She soon left mine; I stayed standing there. 

The crowd of courtiers surged this way and that, broke up, reformed in random circles.  For the next hour, I went from pillar to post through the palace.  Would Governor Naselli honour the Marchesa Attavanti with an audience?  No, he was with the Neapolitan captains, deciding what terms to offer to Bonaparte.  Perhaps: he would be briefing members of the court in an hour.  No, he was taking measures to place extra soldiers on the street.  Would the Queen perhaps change her mind and see an old friend?  Yes, perhaps … and I got some way towards her apartments, only to have my way blocked by guards.  No, the Queen was still indisposed.  By this time I would have resembled Mario’s Magdalene, though less beautiful, if I could have found anyone to fall on my knees in front of.  At last, frantic, I decided there was nothing for it but to brave Baron Scarpia himself.  He would have to answer to me.  I walked round to the opposite side of the quadrangle, to the foot of the staircase that led to his suite of rooms, lit by a dully burning oil lamp mounted on the wall.  There were soldiers with fixed bayonets standing on either side.  They saluted, but moved to stand in my way.

‘May I pass?’ I said, loudly, but my voice quivered.  ‘I am the Marchesa Attavanti.’

‘Here she is!’ shouted one of the soldiers. 

A squad of eight, in uniform with cockades, jogged up from the other side of the courtyard.  I made as if to push past the ones on the stairs, but they easily barred my way and the others surrounded me.

‘Come with us, signora,’said their corporal, shamefacedly but doggedly.

‘By whose orders?’ I demanded.

‘Baron Scarpia’s,’ he replied.

So I was to meet Scarpia by his own choice.  My heart beat even faster.  I knew what I would say to him … I would see if he dared molest the Marchesa Attavanti … But instead of going up the stairs, we moved in a hollow square across the courtyard and out under the high archway, to where a carriage awaited … my carriage.

My husband the Marquis got down and extended his hand to me.

‘Please enter, Francesca.  We are going home.’

I stared at him, between the heads of the soldiers.  ‘But Baron Scarpia wants to see me.’

‘No.  The Baron has been kind enough to communicate with me … he simply wishes you to go home.  Come, Francesca.’

I felt as if I had been a child playing alone in a dimly lit room, convincing himself that he is fighting monsters and pursued by spectres, while all the time his parents have been looking on indulgently, and at last come in with a light and tell him it is time for bed.  I no longer knew what was real.  I was utterly at a loss.

My husband took my hand; I pulled back.  It was time to scream, shout, fight, refuse to leave this place until I was assured of some safety for the men I loved … I actually drew in my breath to cry out.  Yet it seemed false, dingy, theatrical.  The sort of thing Tosca would do.  I was supposed to have dignity: I was a Marchesa.

Like an obedient child, I climbed into the carriage and sat back in the cushions beside my husband.  The soldiers made way for me, and saluted as the carriage moved off.

We did not speak a word on the way home; perhaps Ottavio knew that he could not trust the coachman.  I sat there trembling.  Once we were home, he suavely sent the servants this way and that and then ushered me into his study.

‘Francesca,’ he said as he closed the door, ‘it is time to be frank.  I do not mind your amours and vagaries, but you must stay out of politics from now on.  It is much too dangerous.’

‘But Cesare is my brother!’ I cried.

‘Yes,’ he said heavily.  ‘But Cesare has made one false move too many.  He did not have to return to Rome – unless he wanted to cause further trouble, in the pay of a foreign power.  On his own head be it.  I hear he has escaped.  I do not know what you may have had to do with that and I do not ask.  But it has to stop here.  It was as much as I could do, this afternoon, to persuade Scarpia not to arrest you.  I cannot save your brother from being hanged, if he is caught.  But I can save you, and by Heaven I will, whether you like it or not.’

‘He is not caught?’

‘Not as far as I know, not yet.  But he must fend for himself.’

I couldn’t hold back the words.  ‘But the Cavalier Cavaradossi!  Scarpia has him …’

The Marquis’s lips tightened.  ‘I don’t really want to hear about your hot-headed young cavalier.  But I advise you to put your mind at rest.  He has been arrested … so are many people, when there is a threat to the State.  Scarpia probably wants to remove as many crazy Jacobins as he can from the streets until their enthusiasm for Napoleon’s victory has cooled.  I don’t suppose any harm will come to your Mario: he will simply be interviewed and released.  As long as he is not mixed up in anything seriously treasonable.’

I felt the flood of relief I wanted to feel.  Ottavio’s words sounded so wise.  I had sprung to the conclusion that Mario had been caught helping Cesare: but how did I know that?  After all, Cesare was still free … and surely, surely, Mario would not have taken such a risk, he would have known how to extricate himself at the right moment, if only for Tosca’s sake …

‘Tosca has something to do with it as well,’ I muttered.  ‘She had a message after the concert and ran away in a panic …’

‘As to that,’ said Ottavio wryly, ‘who knows the ways of actresses?  They are not really a fit topic for marital conversation …good night, my dear … do stay in your room, by the way.  I shall take precautions but I had rather there was no need of them.’

I was speechless.  He bowed me out, and mechanically I followed a footman who was waiting to carry a candlestick ahead of me, up the stairs. 

Actresses … how extraordinary was the aristocratic mindset.  If the Marquis was barely concerned about Mario, he cared less than nothing for Tosca, for all her artistry and stately dignity.  I resented that, yet I remembered when I had used exactly the same word about her to Mario’s face.  Usually, I kept my tone very light when discussing Tosca with him, but this time we had got into deeper water … too deep.  I had been indignant at some jealous tantrum of hers. 

‘Who does she think she is?’ I had demanded.  ‘If she had her way you would cut yourself off from all civility, be some kind of brute who only meets women in the bedroom … it’s not only coarse and ill-bred, it’s utterly presumptuous the way she tries to control you.  And you let her … she makes you look like a besotted henpecked fool, if you want my opinion.’

‘What the devil do you know about it, Marchesa?’ he replied furiously.  ‘Do you realise that in all her life no one, no one has ever kept faith with Floria?  Her family sold her to the nuns, the nuns sold her to the maestro … money for a lovely voice … no one cared for her.   Of course she snatches at love as a starving child snatches bread!  She needs loyalty, she needs care, she needs to be told that she is loved twenty times a day, and then she will grow into the great and happy woman she truly is …’

‘And this will take how long?’ I demanded.  ‘How much of your life are you going to devote to this actress? A year?  Five years?  A lifetime?  Mario, you are …’

‘A lifetime.  Yes, if she wants it,’ he interrupted in a choked voice, as if daring me to laugh.

I nearly did laugh.  A cool, musical, sympathetic laugh was welling up in my throat, together with the words, ‘Oh, Mario.  You are such a sweet, romantic boy …’

But I bit them back.  He did not just then look either sweet or romantic, and certainly not like a boy.  It was probably as well that I said nothing.  That was the nearest Tosca ever came to causing a complete breach between us.  It passed over, but it seemed that it was only now that I really understood what he had said.

I went to my room, made ready for bed and sent away the maids, but I did not get under the sheets.  I sat and shivered in a kind of stupor.  It was a sultry midsummer night, with no moon, and there were no lights in the streets.  As the night wore on I heard drunken singing, bellowing and the occasional rifle shot from the direction of the Castel Sant’ Angelo.  The Jacobins were indeed celebrating, as Ottavio had said, but it was a dismal sound.

In the small hours I got up and quietly opened the bedroom door and peered out.  At the end of the passage stood a footman, leaning against the wall and yawning.  He saw me, hurriedly straightened himself and bowed.  I went back in, closing the door, and looked out of the window instead.   It was two storeys up.  I could not see anyone, but I heard a throat-clearing and the sound of someone shifting from foot to foot in the space I could not see directly below the window.  Ottavio had put a close watch on me, all right.

No one had ever kept faith with Tosca, Mario had said. 

Keep faith … it was not a phrase much used in the world of galanteria.  I realised at last what he must have meant by it.  What mattered most was not whether he found Tosca or me more charming, or which of us he might be happiest with: it was that Tosca needed him, and he was going to stay with her if it killed him … but that was the very reason why he would have risked helping Cesare.  I felt certain of it.  When he saw someone who would be lost and undone without him, my exquisite Mario would keep faith even though it was insane: something that I would not do, and had not done.  And now it might anyhow be too late.

Dawn began to break, but before the sun rose, I fell into sleep without being aware of it.  I did not wake until the sun was high and my room bright.  A maid was tapping on the door and saying urgently, ‘Signora … signora …’

I got up.  The Marquis wished to speak with me, she said.  I threw on a peignoir and let him into my dressing-room.  I will give him credit: he showed warmth and sympathy.  Taking my two hands, he said, ‘I am sorry, Francesca … Cesare is dead.’

I slumped into a chair.  I felt no surprise: if anything, a kind of dull relief.  He would not know how I had betrayed him.

‘He was found in hiding and when they tried to arrest him, he swallowed poison.’

Yes, I knew that.  I myself had put the vial of poison in the basket of clothes we left in the church.  I knew that Cesare had had enough; that he would rather die than be taken prisoner again.  At least I had been able to do that much for my brother.  His troubles were over.

Ottavio saw that I was weeping quietly.  He touched my shoulder.  ‘The police will release his body to us, Francesca,’ he said.  ‘We can pay our last respects to him.  Baron Scarpia, I think, had … other plans, but … that is the other news.  Baron Scarpia has been murdered, stabbed.  No one knows by whom.’

He saw my expression.  ‘No, I cannot pretend to any great grief either.  But it does make things difficult.  The French on their way, the Jacobins rioting, no chief of police and the agents all much too busy covering their traces and knifing each other to keep order in the city … I have had a time of it already this morning while you have been sleeping, believe me, Francesca.’

I still said nothing, only managed to bend my head towards him by way of thanks.

He moved towards the door and then said, ‘You needn’t despair of your Cavalier Cavaradossi.  With Baron Scarpia gone, there won’t be any executions … he can sit safely in jail, if the Jacobins haven’t let him out already.  He will probably turn up in a day or two as good as new.’ 

‘Where did they find Cesare?’ I managed to ask.

‘In the grounds of a villa just inside the city walls.  Hiding in a well, apparently.’ He sighed.  ‘I am sorry, my dear.’

As I still didn’t reply, he left the room, merely saying, ‘I will tell everyone you are indisposed.  The maid will bring you something warm to drink.  Try not to grieve too much.’

And that was all I knew for the next two days: I was guarded in the house and rumours were kept from me.  While riots swept the streets and the leaderless troops tried weakly to keep order, I swung between wild hope and despair.  Cesare had been found in Mario’s garden.  Surely that meant Mario was implicated.  Was he not in mortal danger even though Scarpia was dead?  Or had he fled or been spirited out of the city?  And who had killed Scarpia?  My mind ground round this useless circle day and night. 

At last things began to settle.  The Jacobins realised that despite Napoleon’s victory, there was no prospect of the French seizing Rome; the crown of Naples would relinquish control, but only to let the Pope return.  Their ardour cooled accordingly, and the authorities, chastened and uncertain, refrained from reprisals.  On the third day the streets were thought safe enough for noble ladies to venture out, properly escorted: and so I decided to go to church, to Sant’Andrea della Valle, dressed in deep black, to pray for my brother’s soul and seek comfort in the Mass.  And also to see Mario’s picture again, and hope that if it survived, so might he.  It might never be finished now, I supposed, but at least I might hire a copyist to take a likeness of it …

But as we entered, several minutes before the service began, I saw nothing in that space between the pillars but fresh, gleaming whitewash.  The old sacristan was walking down the aisle towards the vestry with a paint pot and a broad brush in his hand, and my memory has it that he was whistling, although he cannot have been, in church.  I swept towards him.

‘What have you done,’ I demanded, ‘with the painting of the Magdalene?’

‘What do you ask, my lady?’ he cackled.  ‘What?  About that blasphemous picture?’ (Or it might have been “blasphemer’s picture”.)  ‘Oh, the Cardinal said we must cover it over.  It would be quite unfitting to be showing a picture by a criminal who has just been executed.’

He looked me in the eye, triumphantly.  He knew.  It was clear that he knew.  So that was that.

The church went dark around me.  I sat on a bench between my servants, and heard the whole Mass sitting down.  I neither stood nor knelt.  The girls did their best to draw attention away from me.  The words flapped and echoed meaninglessly in my ears.  I stared at things for minutes on end and could not have said what I was looking at.

Mario was dead, and I had nothing to remember him by.

********

After some time, I found out what had happened, from the new Chief of Police, a reasonable man … I will not say he was not corrupt, all police officers are, but he was corrupt to the extent of sometimes allowing himself to be bribed to do things that one proposed to him, rather than only to refrain from abusing his powers.  And he in turn was able to put pressure on Baron Scarpia’s chief jackal, one Enrico Spoletta, to give a full account of his master’s doings in return for immunity for himself, for all kinds of scandal was coming out about Scarpia’s time in command now that he was safely dead.  I sold a pearl necklace to have an especially detailed interview on the Angelotti case recorded by a clerk, and to be allowed to read it in the police chief’s office, although not to copy it or take it away.  Yet when it was ready, I delayed going to read it.  And when it was open in front of me, my glance would not stay on the words, but rebounded everywhere like drops of water on hot metal.  My heart pounded and my hands were cold.  What was I so afraid of? I asked myself.  They were dead.  It was all over.  I at least was safe.  But as I forced myself to read, I realised I was right to be afraid.

I begin at noon on the day of the failed escape.  From what Spoletta said, he and Scarpia must have arrived in the church only a few minutes after Mario and Cesare had fled from it.  But the trail would have been cold, except that the sacristan, curse him, was eager to imply that the infidel painter must have had something to do with the escape of the republican traitor.  And then there was the fan.  Lucia couldn’t even have put it in the basket.  It was lying on the floor in the chapel, where Scarpia found it.  Scarpia suspected me in any case, but he was able to use the fan as bait for Tosca.

Tosca came in just then, to tell Mario that she would have to sing at the reception that evening, instead of meeting him as they had planned.  She found him gone, and she would have been suspicious at once.  Scarpia knew all about the painter Cavaradossi’s jealous mistress.  It was not just the professional knowledge of a good chief of police, nor yet of a connoisseur of opera: his interest was much more pressing.  But of course he did not reveal it then.  He practised his oily graces on her.  He pretended that he had seen Mario leave with me – Marchesa Attavanti – and showed her the dropped fan by way of proof, in case the painting wasn’t enough.  The stupid bitch fell right into the trap.  Instead of asking herself why the Chief of Police should be so interested in Mario and me, she believed him and stormed off.  Straight to the villa, about which Scarpia would otherwise have known nothing – and he had Spoletta follow her.

Now, Mario and Tosca had each treated the other badly, but no worse than other foolish young lovers do every day.  In any wholesome city in the world, one without Scarpia in it, you can imagine what would have happened when she arrived at the villa.  There would have been a fierce quarrel.  The words ‘selfish liar’ and ‘jealous fool’ would have filled the air.  And then they could have made love all night and been happy again.  For their misjudgments to be the death of them … for that, it took Scarpia.  And me.

When she got there, God only knows what she thought, to see a ragged desperate fugitive instead of the demon Marchesa.  Mario must have known at once that they were in imminent danger.  As far as he knew, there was not a moment to waste – the police might be right on her heels.  I suppose that was how she came to see where he hid Cesare.  Or perhaps she had heard him talk of the well in the past.  It was a terrible mistake, either way.  In point of fact, Spoletta hung back and let Tosca leave the villa and set off back to the city before he sprang his trap.  He kept watch but stayed hidden: he was waiting for reinforcements, and he wanted her to think it was a false alarm.  Mario, for his part, must have wanted Tosca gone for her own safety, and once she was convinced that the Marchesa wasn’t there she would have been quite ready to go.  She didn’t understand politics: perhaps, even then, she didn’t grasp how serious the business was.  She left unmolested.  But she was late for the reception.

And when she had gone, then came the raid, the search: Spoletta and his rabble found no sign of Cesare, but laid hands on Mario, who was being ‘insolent and obstructive’.  (I went there afterwards.  All his painting gear had been thrown on the ground, the unfinished canvases slashed, the sketchbooks torn and scattered.  No wonder he was insolent, but if they thought he would give up a man’s life to save his work, they were mistaken.  He could have given them a hint so easily.  Oh Mario.)  They brought him to Scarpia at the Palazzo Farnese and, while I admired Tosca’s singing in the cantata, they questioned him.  He told them nothing.  But Scarpia had the answer: he sent for Tosca.  He mentioned Mario’s name and instead of flying for her life, the poor silly baggage walked straight into his lair. She might have gone free: there was no reason to arrest her.  Probably she imagined she might smooth things over by paying some routine bribe or calling on one of her noble patrons: she might make amends for her blunder about the fan.  It was all for the love of her Mario.  And Spoletta explained exactly how Scarpia made use of it.

‘That was why the Baron was a good man to work for,’ he said.  ‘He used his head. Having the woman there made it much easier.  All we had to do was set to work on her fine gentleman where she could hear us.  She wasn’t anywhere near as pig-headed.  A few good screams from him and she snapped like a string of beads, couldn’t spill fast enough.’  This was what I had abandoned Mario to: and Tosca.  And had I not known it from the first?  Everyone knew what went on behind barred doors in the palace, and everyone turned a blind eye, as long as the city was safe.  I read, sick and shaking, sitting in my fine lady’s veil and gloves, the hired ruffians staying respectfully clear of me, in the very room where it had happened … How could I bear to live with myself?  Yet I live on, regardless.  I am not as honourable as Tosca.

Could I blame her for betraying Mario and my brother?  Did she ask to be entangled in my schemes?  I would have done the same in her place, however much better I understood things.  But she was the one who was there, with Mario.  I will wager she screamed, cursed and fought.  She did not get as far as the door, only to turn back meekly because she was told to.  If she gave way, it was only because they were too many for her.

But that was not all.  When that part was over, when Scarpia had sent his hounds to find Cesare, and had Mario dragged away to wait for the hangman, his game with Tosca was just beginning.  It turned out that he had had his eyes on the Diva for a long time, and to see her spit hatred at him, in agony for her lover, had only whetted his appetite.  He offered to spare Mario’s life if she would give him her body.  I am not making this up: Spoletta was perfectly frank about it.  Women were one of the perquisites of his master’s job, and after all, who cares if an actress is raped?  Scarpia himself, I am sure, saw things on a higher plane.  It might be a new sensation even for him, to possess a woman who loathed him with every fibre of her being, while her very love for another would force her to comply with any demand he cared to make.  I believe that love was altogether an intense irritant to Scarpia.  He thought that if he flung enough filth at it he could assure himself that it did not exist: the finer and truer the love, the greater the urgency to do so.

And of course – again – Tosca at last agreed.  And again, what else could she do?  She gave in, in return for a promise that Mario would not be hanged, but would be ‘shot’, for appearance’s sake, in a sham execution, after which the two of them would be allowed to escape.  Evidently Scarpia was playing with her.  It defies belief that she trusted in such a fanciful lie, but it was his only offer.  After she left Scarpia she was allowed into the Castel Sant’Angelo, where they had taken Mario, to tell it to him, an hour before dawn.  I do not suppose he believed it for one moment, but perhaps he let her think he did.  I hope at least they were able to forget everything for an instant, for one last embrace.  The Jacobins’ bonfires were burning just below the castle walls; another few hours and the garrison would have lost its nerve, and no one would have been executed, and Mario would have been safe … As it was, they followed their orders: they put him against the wall.  Tosca saw that he had been shot, without any pretence.  She walked to the parapet – walked into air without flinching – fell straight to her death.  Scarpia had had his way in everything.

Except for the small detail that when she left him, he was dead.  If he hadn’t kept his side of the unequal bargain, neither had Tosca.  He had made the mistake of sending his men out of earshot, and the double one of leaving a sharp knife on his table.  And when he tried to collect his payment, she stabbed him to the heart. 

She and Mario were true to each other for a lifetime.  A short lifetime, but still.  They lived free and they died together, while I, Marchesa Attavanti, did as my husband commanded, stayed safe, and failed them. 

I shall never know what Mario thought or foreknew when he painted me as the Magdalene, or for whom he really meant the love with which he painted her face.  But I would kneel, and put on sackcloth, and tear my hair and stretch my arms out to heaven, just as she did, if I thought that, like her, by doing so I would be forgiven.

********

Hardly any of my acquaintance ever speak of Cesare or Mario in my hearing.  It would be ill-bred.  Never mind if your brother is hunted to his death, if your only true love is tortured and killed like vermin, such things are not mentioned in polite company, and as a great lady who is never seen without an elaborate coiffure, how could you possibly wish it otherwise?  I see murderous old generals, and courtiers who have long since forgotten what truth is, strut and preen at my soirées (oh yes, I soon began giving them again), decked in ribbons and medals, honoured by all.  While Cesare and Mario, who gave their lives for justice, have no monument, and are talked of in shamefaced whispers.  Cesare at least got a decent grave.  I have never been able to find out where Mario was buried. 

But he did leave me something, after all.  Not a work of beauty and skill like the Magdalene, wantonly destroyed: a grimy piece of cheap paper, crumpled, straightened out and twice folded over.  The Chief of Police handed it to me, furtively, saying that he got it from Spoletta.  It was a letter, addressed to Floria Tosca.  Someone must have taken a bribe to let Mario write it while he waited for his death, and as Tosca was dead too, that worm Spoletta had kept it.  When his new master started asking questions, I imagine he said with a leer: ‘Who’s paying?  The Attavanti woman?  Oh yes, she was his piece too, wasn’t she?  Perhaps she should see this …’

I unfolded the letter when I was alone, terrified of the bitterness of the moment when it was written, as if it might have poisoned the paper itself. 

Did I mention what beautiful hands Mario had?  I used to watch sidelong as he was drawing: they were so steady and sure, and I used to drive myself wild by imagining … well, never mind.  The letter, not counting the address, was only a few short lines.  All it said was:

Dearest Floria.  If only I knew this would find you alive and safe, I should be content.  I am afraid to think of what you may have suffered.  Please forgive me.  I had to help him but you should never have been hurt so.

I love you until I die. 

Floria

How shall I

I sobbed with the letter in my hand, in triumph and horror and rage.  Mario had written that: the Mario I loved seemed to live still, in those few words.  They had not destroyed him, not until they killed him.  But it was not for want of trying.  Scarpia’s artists had left their signature, in the very letters that trailed across the page, wavering and broken, as if his hand would barely grasp the pen, becoming almost impossible to read, finishing in a heavy ink stroke where he must have let it fall when he could not write any more.

I have wondered many times how he might have gone on with the letter, but as to why he broke off, I believe I know.  It was not simply that his hand gave out.  It was that he could think of nothing to say that would make amends to Tosca.  She would not be able to live without him.  Even in the joy of the moment when she came to him, they must both have known it. 

Mario had so much to live for, yet he threw it all into the balance, without a second thought, out of pity for a spent force, a broken man.  He kept faith and it cost him everything.  And what good did it do?  Why did he have to die comfortless, knowing that he had not saved his friend after all, and was leaving his love despairing? 

Did he think of me at all, during that night?  I have to hope that he did not, for how could he have forgiven me?

I did not kiss the letter, or any such foolishness.  I had no right: it was Tosca’s.  But I kept it, and sometimes when I have bad dreams or hopelessness comes over me I look at it and let myself feel again a fury that I mean to use one day.  Although, who am I to talk?  When Mario died, I was sound asleep.

For Tosca, it was different.  She was loved by the common people, and they will insist on honouring the unfortunate, even those who die in not altogether polite circumstances.  There were contributions to give her a fine tomb, and there are always flowers on it.  Bunches of white roses, scattering their petals, also appear, mysteriously, at the place below the castle walls where she ended her life.  Every so often I lay some there myself.  The most widely believed story is that she threw herself down to escape being ravished; that her lover stabbed Scarpia in revenge, and was killed in turn by the soldiers.  It is not bad, but the truth is better.

It cheers me to think of how she must have used all her strength to drive that knife into Scarpia’s heart.  I want to shout encouragement to her, to tell her that I am coming to help.  Between the two of us, we could have made an even better job of it.  We could have taken longer over killing him, made him pay a fairer price for all the harm he did.  I often think how many people had cause to hate Scarpia, and how we Voltaireans, the Jacobins, the republicans planned and plotted solemnly to free our city … and yet in the end the task that none of us could accomplish, not even the might of France, was carried out by one poor simple woman whom he had pushed too far.  The goat-girl, the brainless brunette, the coarse-bred actress who, unlike a lady, knew how to fight, how to strike home when the moment came…   but she had to do it alone, and then, alone again, when there was no hope left, she chose to die. 

It seems beyond absurdity that while she and Mario were alive, I detested her and she could not bear the sight of me.  How we were almost ready to kill each other for the sake of the man we both loved, whom we would have done anything to save – and ended by sealing his fate, between us.  What does it matter, now, that he loved her better than me – what did it ever matter?  What a wicked waste that I only feel friendship for her now that they are both dead.

Peace, Tosca.  Forgive me, wherever you are, and sleep well.

********

Explanatory note by Julia Angelotti, 18 January 1860

Having taken it upon myself to arrange and preserve what letters and papers I can find relating to the Italian side of my family, the Angelotti, I should include the memoir above, which I have translated from its original Italian, written by my great-aunt, the late Maria Francesca, Marchesa Attavanti, née Angelotti, probably soon after June 1800, when the events to which it refers took place.  But I hesitate, because of the highly intimate nature of her account.  I recommend whoever takes charge of this small archive in future to exercise discretion in allowing access to it.

My father’s family was divided by the troubles in Rome in the last years of the eighteenth century.  My grandfather Adriano Angelotti departed Italy at that time and set up in trade with moderate success in England.  The light in which his brother, Cesare, appears in this account helps to explain why he was seldom spoken of in my hearing.  Their sister, Maria Francesca, childless and for many years a widow, lived in the Attavanti palace in Rome, alone except for a few servants.  She visited us a handful of times, always reluctantly.  She did not herself encourage visits.  She was an austere personage in her later years: yet she and I were fond of each other.

The Marchesa placed this writing in my hands as a direct result of an occurrence during her last visit to England, in the summer of last year, 1859.  We took part in a tour of a country house whose owner I know slightly.   In his picture gallery, my attention was caught by a beautiful small painting of a pastoral dance.  I do not think I have ever seen a painting in which there was so infectious a sense of movement.  Our host explained that the picture was a Cavaradossi, one of very few known surviving works by a Franco-Italian painter of the late eighteenth century whose promising career was cut short by political violence.  (His account implied that such tragedies were, in a sense, a fitting and unavoidable part of an artistic life, and especially to be expected in such a volatile country as Italy.)  Aunt Francesca seemed deeply affected to hear the name of the artist.  She examined the picture with close interest and showed, beyond doubt, that she had been one of its models.  She was a great beauty in her youth, and, according to family legend, much courted.

That same evening, my aunt handed me a small silk-wrapped package containing this writing, asking me to keep it carefully, but not to read it until she had returned to Italy.  In explanation, she said:

‘I never told anyone.  There were always so many secrets.  But it is wrong to carry secrets to one’s grave.’  Then she spoke of her joy in finding that not all the artist’s work had perished, but rather bitterly of our host’s summing-up of his life.  ‘People talk as if the past had to be what it was,’ I remember her saying.  ‘As if one can only sigh, and accept it.  To those who were there, and wept and fought to change it, it was otherwise.  Remember, Giulia.  Although I hope that you will know happier times.  Nothing has to be.  It is so only because people decide.  And there are some decisions that, in this world, can never be forgiven.’

And then she said very quietly: ‘To speak like that of Mario, my Mario.  It makes me feel how long ago it all was … and yet still I sometimes wake in the night thinking that it is not too late, that somehow I can save him …’

After she was gone and I had read her account, I wrote briefly to my aunt to thank her: to let her know that I had understood, without going into details that could only give her pain.  I asked her whether she would like me to make enquiries about buying Mr Harries’ painting, for although he had said he would not sell it, he might change his mind in the light of what we knew.

However, I received a letter by return from a cousin of the Marchesa saying that she had died peacefully at her home, the day before my letter arrived.  There was no time for me to travel to attend her funeral, but I sent my condolences to her cousin, Umberto, and he was kind enough to invite me to meet him on my next visit to Italy.

We fell into reminiscences of Aunt Francesca, first guarded, then rather less so. I remarked that she seemed to blame herself for events in the past that she had been powerless to change.  He looked left and right, along the vine-grown terrace on which we were walking: in Italy one grew used to such circumspection.  Then he said:

‘And yet it is almost certain that few people have done more to change this country than the Marchesa, in the course of her life.’

I expressed surprise.  My ramrod-backed aunt, never seen without a black lace veil over her snowy white hair, looking as if she herself had not changed in a hundred years …

‘Yes,’ he insisted.  ‘No one knows: that is the measure of her success.  After she was widowed, she lived as a recluse, but she fostered every reform movement in Italy, she kept her hands on all the threads … Believe me, there was very little that was not discussed, behind the blind shutters of that old palazzo.  She helped the 1830 insurrections.  The revolutions of 1848 would never have broken out in so many of the states of Italy at once without her, although she was already an old woman.  And although they failed, the failure would have been bloodier still but for her.  She saved scores of lives.  She played a long game … and now, I believe, in another year or two Italy will be unified, and no longer a despotism, perhaps even the Republic she always dreamed of, although she did not live to see it.  The Marchesa did not waste her life.’

What would the Marchesa herself have thought of this judgement, I wonder? 

I do not know how much Umberto knew of that earlier episode in her life.  A feeling of tact forbade me to mention the details, and I certainly never asked whether he knew anything of that other, shorter document that she had kept, although it was not hers: the letter that Mario Cavaradossi had written to his beloved, the day they both died.  I imagine that it was too precious and painful to her to be shared even with me.  It seems most likely that she had it buried with her, without letting anyone know what it was.