Clapham omnibus

the bus takes me from the Wandsworth Road through the Sunday morning quiet to the art-song study day at St John's, Smith Square. Is it worth paying ?25 for a sparsely-scattered middle-aged audience, a jolly, wisecracking lecturer, the frigidly beautiful concert-hall, this art of Lieder, in which my interest has waned?

At the morning break I accost a shy elderly man, who knows how to deal with the coffee I spill on my jacket. But then the day comes to life for me when the lecturer discusses the song by Gerald Finzi, Proud Songsters, to a poem by Hardy. He says that in its series of gently-stabbing dissonances and suspensions it is a late example of the stile antico, which came into western culture with Palestrina in the 16th century, runs through JS Bach and much church music, and through art-song from Schubert onwards.

I realise suddenly that, after 25 years of loving Lieder, this is because I am a slave to the stile antico. Perhaps it is an endless emotional loitering in the corner. Yet the Lied is among the most subtle and beautiful of conversations: between voice and piano; between poet and composer; meaning and interpretation; music and words.



As we break for lunch, and the lecturer is still on the platform, I pluck up the courage to ask him a question. He is unexpectedly welcoming, and invites me to join him at his table. He is Roderick Swanston, the well-known academic; I reveal that, hesitant and stammering as I seem, I am writing a column for Prospect; I fetch him his dessert; he buys me coffee; people at neighbouring tables are looking at me with interest and respect.

The afternoon session is a masterclass, conducted by the leading accompanist Malcolm Martineau, with five young singers performing English, Russian, Spanish and Norwegian songs. They are so uniformly talented, personable and articulate that, as with young actors, it seems somehow a tragedy.

Martineau coaches a splendid young baritone who is possibly more suited to the heroic world of opera than the delicate one of song. They work on Amid the Din of the Ball, by Tchaikovsky, to words of Aleksei Tolstoy. This touching piece is the song of a man lying in bed, bitterly regretting the contact he failed to make with a beautiful woman at a ball, perhaps many years before.

Suddenly I am transported back to Lisbon last summer, when I was alone in my mother's flat-the first time I had ever been free of my relations in my mother's country. I went to hear Matthias Goerne sing Schumann settings of Heine at the Sao Carlos Opera House, the only concert I have so far attended in Portugal.

I was conducted to my box high up in the charming 18th-century opera house. Far away on the stage, I heard the pale figure in tails, like some wraith from the world of Schumann himself, sing of the familiar themes: longing, despair, regret. I felt deeply moved by this performance, enhanced by its setting at once strange and my own.

Afterwards I felt exalted, but I knew that a visit to a gay bar would dissipate this mood. What else but to go home? I went down into the Metro, which in a comically short time would take me to the Praça de Espanha. There I would catch a bus across the Tagus bridge to my mother's flat in a half-finished suburb at the very southern edge of the Lisbon conurbation.

On the train, I saw a beautiful man. He was standing at the end of the carriage, although there were seats, and he had a student's small rucksack on his back. He was perhaps about 20, physically powerful but refined, with a look of nobility, self-confidence and early sadness.

I couldn't take my eyes off him. The need to speak to him was overwhelming. We arrived at Praça de Espanha, and he got off. With as much speed as I could, I followed him through the subway, up the dark steps to the grim bus-station. He was waiting at my stop. I spoke to him immediately, asking him about the bus. He was going to the stop beyond mine.

He was friendly and unsuspicious, and loved to talk English, so we soon abandoned my halting Portuguese. He was a student-studying computing, as they all are. He hoped to spend time abroad, but lived with his parents, as they all do.

The bus came, and I sat down next to him, hoping he didn't notice the hard-on that I had suddenly developed. Or did I hope that he noticed all too clearly, and knew exactly what I wanted? We went under the 18th-century aqueduct, illuminated in the darkness, and I pointed out the Bairro da Serafina, where my aunt lives. Then we went past all the shanty-towns and interlocking roads of the Alcantara Valley, and I vowed that before we crossed the bridge I would propose to him.

High over the Tagus, and talking about nothing much, I said to him, "I think you're very beautiful."

"Sorry," he said, "I don't want that."

"No, well, it's hardly to be expected that you would. I'm a lot older than you."

We went on talking, as if nothing had happened, through the infinitely messy suburbs south of the river, with huge McDonald's signs punctuating the gimcrack flats. I said that perhaps I would sell my mother's apartment after she died, and he gently said that I shouldn't do that. I had five more days alone in Lisbon, and I gave him the phone number, although I knew he wouldn't use it.

I turned to wave at him as I left the bus, and he waved to me. I walked along the unmade road, very happy, perhaps relieved that I didn't have to go through the struggle with two people's plumbing, but knowing that I would have given that struggle the same verve and tenderness with which I had spoken to him over the Tagus. n