The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,18

people who don’t even notice it any more because they’re so used to seeing it, and just two months to go before there’ll be nothing left of it but a burnt-out hull, a scoop of scorched plankwork.

We are doomed on land and doomed on sea, you and me; as doomed holding on to each other’s arms on the underground as we are arguing about culture in your partner’s car; as doomed in a bar sitting across from each other or side by side at the cinema or the opera or the theatre; as doomed as we are when we’re pressed into each other in the various beds in the various near-identical rooms we go to, to have the sex that your partner doesn’t know about us having. Of all the dooms I ever thought I might come to I never reckoned on middle-classness. You and me, holding hands below the seats at Fidelio, an opera you’ve already seen, already taken your partner to; and it all started so anarchically, so happily, all heady public kissing in King’s Cross station. Mir ist so wunderbar. That’s me in the £120-a-night bed, and you through in the bathroom, thoroughly cleaning your teeth.

I’ve read in the sleeve notes for the version of Fidelio I have on CD that at an early point in the opera, when all four people, the girl, the thwarted young man, the woman dressed as a boy and the gaoler, are singing about happiness and everybody is misunderstanding everybody else and believing a different version of things to be true, that this is where ‘backstairs chat turns into the music of the angels.’ How wonderful it is to me. Something’s got my heart in its grip. He loves me, it’s clear. I’m going to be happy. Except, wunderbar here doesn’t mean the usual simple wonderful. It means full of wonder, strange. How strange it is to me. I wish I could remember her name, the ironing girl who loves Fidelio, the light-comedy act-opener, the girl for whom there’s no real end to it, the girl who has to accept – with nothing more than an alas, which pretty soon modulates into the same song everyone else is singing – what happens when the boy Fidelio is suddenly revealed as the wife Leonore, and everybody stands round her in awe at her wifely faithfulness, her profound self-sacrifice. O namenlose.

Which is worse to her, the ironing girl? That Fidelio is really Leonore, a woman, not the boy she thought he was? Or that her beloved Fidelio is someone else’s wife, after all, and so, in this opera about the sacredness of married love, will never, ever be hers?

Oh my Leonore, Florestan, the husband, the freed prisoner, says to Fidelio after she’s unearthed him, after she’s flung herself between him and certain death, between him and the drawn blade of the prison governor. Point of catharsis. Point of truth. After she does this, everything in the whole world changes for the better.

Oh my Leonore, what have you done for me?

Nothing, nothing, my Florestan, she answers.

Lucky for her she had a gun on her, that’s what I say, otherwise they’d both be dead.

Oh, I got plenty o’ nuttin. And nuttin’s plenty fo’ me.

It’s famously unresolved, you know, I say. Even though its ending seems so celebratory, so C-major, so huge and comforting and sure, there’s still a sense, at the back of it all, that lots of things haven’t been resolved. Look at the ironing girl, for instance. She’s not resolved, is she? Beethoven called it his ‘child of sorrow.’ He never wrote another opera after it.

Half a year ago you’d never heard of Fidelio, you say.

Klemperer conducted it at two really extraordinarily different times in history, I say.

I am flicking through the little book that comes with the version of Fidelio you’d just given me. The new CD is one of my Christmas presents. Christmas is in ten days’ time. We have just opened our Christmas presents, in a bedroom in a Novotel. I bought you a really nice French-looking jumper, with buttons at one side of the neck. I know that you’ll probably drop it in a litter bin on your way home.

Imagine, I say. Imagine conducting it in 1915 in the middle of the First World War. Then imagine the strangeness of conducting it in the 1960s, when every single scene must have reminded people of the different thing it meant, for a German conductor, the story of all the people