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This is how the story went: Tristan was meant to be a girl, and he was going to be called Isolde. In a sign that eccentricity has a hereditary component, the Farnons decided, on the basis of absolutely no evidence, that their second child was female, and were subsequently very confused when the doctor announced that they were the parents of a hearty baby boy .
“But there must be some mistake,” said Mr Farnon père , removing his pipe from his mouth while his elder son hid his burst of giggles in his sleeve. At twenty, Siegfried found the idea of his parents continuing to procreate both extremely amusing and vaguely disgusting, and couldn’t have been more pleased that the spectacle was ending with his father being proved wrong.
“He’s a lovely wee chap,” the doctor said. “Your wife is doing well, and you can see them as soon as the nurses have her set right.”
“You know, I’m quite sure it’s a daughter,” Mr Farnon said, bewildered as he emptied out his pipe in the fireplace. It was as if he had woken up and found that the sky was now pink and would be forevermore, and nobody understood why he thought it should be blue. He had never considered the possibility of the fifty percent chance that he would have another son.
“Well,” said Siegfried, laying his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Many happy returns and all that. Shall we have a drink?”
The main problem, besides the nursery being made up for a girl and filled with porcelain dolls, was the name. The Farnons had been listening to the Erna Denera recordings of Isolde’s Liebestod, and had spun a shared delusion that their baby would have the long blonde plaits and the endless rage of an operatic heroine. Siegfried, standing in the hall and listening to the atonal warbling, thought there was something perverse in this. He wondered if his parents understood Wagner well enough to pick up the almost pornographic implications, the desire continually ignited and then denied, or if they simply liked the sound of it. What had his father said, when Siegfried asked about his own namesake?
“He’s a hero, my boy. Remember what Brunhilde says: He’s treu dem Freunde. What else could we want from you?”
(In veterinary school, Siegfried read Shaw’s introduction to Wagner and chanced upon a less laudatory description: “[he] is, in short, a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist, the ideal of Bakoonin, an anticipation of the ‘overman’ of Nietzsche.” Charming.)
So really, Siegfried shouldn’t have been surprised when his parents announced that his little sister was to be Isolde, the dead bride, the singer of those ghostly melodies. Except now it appeared that Isolde refused to cooperate with this plan, and the Farnons were forced to scramble for a new, equally eccentric Wagner reference.
“What about David?” Mrs Farnon held the baby protectively, looking to Siegfried as if she’d aged ten years in ten hours. He could hardly see the poor child, swaddled as it was in lace and embroidered linen.
Obviously Mr Farnon would have nothing so ordinary and conventional as David. He shook his head vehemently. “We listened to Miss Denera and that child seemed to like it. She– erm, he – kicked like the Dickens the whole time. She’s got to be Tristan. He. He’s got to be Tristan.”
So not the singer, but the one being sung to. The corpse lying center stage. Siegfried peered down at the bundle in his mother’s arms and wished it luck. Tristan Sebastian Farnon. In later years, when his brother began to ask about his name, Siegfried would always be able to say, with a shrug of his shoulders, that his vote had been with David.
“Sorry, little brother. I tried. They were insistent.”
Siegfried visited his brother often in those first few months, but Tristan was not a particularly interesting infant. Or rather, Siegfried wasn’t particularly interested in children, and Tristan, being representative of that time of life, was no more appealing because they shared parents. The boy did all the things that babies were supposed to do, and was always whisked away by the nanny whenever he began to smell, or worse, cry.
When the war came, Siegfried asked his parents to drive him to the train. He felt a little bashful, like a little boy who needed dropping off at boarding school, but he was also painfully cognizant of mortality, of the possibility that they might never see him again, and that one final memory, of a brave soldier waving from the platform in his new uniform, might make this hypothetical loss easier to bare.
“Trissie has the worst croup I’ve ever seen and I wouldn't like to leave him, even for a minute.” Mother said. “You’ll understand, darling.”
Father, engrossed in a newspaper, pretended that he hadn’t heard any question at all. “The things those Krauts are doing to the Belgians is really reprehensible.” He said it as if he expected Siegfried to personally put a stop to it, as if it was a failing that it hadn’t already been taken care of.
“I’ve heard,” Siegfried said dully.
“You know, my boy,” Father continued. “Maybe you’ll march on Germany and get to see Bayreuth. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing?”
Somewhere upstairs, Tristan howled.
Evelyn was the one who drove Siegfried to the station. She was just learning to drive and said she needed the practice. Glancing over to her long white fingers splayed out on the steering wheel, smelling the clean antiseptic smell of her, Siegfried fell in love.
They agreed to write.
Siegfried forgot about everything that wasn’t ten feet in front of him, that wasn’t something he could grasp with his hand. There was work, back-breaking work, and blood, and constant, deafening noise. During his one, glorious leave, he married Evelyn and wrote to his parents after the fact, when he was already back in Belgium.
Letters came, sometimes. An orange cat in blotchy watercolors. The trembling signature of a child whose hand is being guided by his nanny. Much love, Tris . An anecdote in a letter from Mother, something about Tristan chasing a robin red-breast because he wanted to give it a kiss. Then, as the war went on, firmer handwriting. The misspellings of a child learning to write and not being supervised so closely. I prey for you everie nite. Yore bruther, Tris.
Siegfried didn’t know enough about children to know that such progress was remarkable in a toddler, and if he had known it would have infuriated him.
Then, just before the armistice, a letter from Father, short and perfunctory. Spanish influenza, Mother dead, Tristan nearly dead but pulling through. Don’t worry about us. Do your duty. For some months, Siegfried didn’t care one bit that his mother was dead. It didn’t occur to him that one ought to be torn up about such a thing. It wasn’t until he was demobbed that he thought, for the first time, that he had lost something very precious that he could not get back. He wished she had come to the station.
(Decades later, when asked if he remembered anything of the Great War, Tristan would screw up his face and, trying to sound disaffected, say: “I remember Mummy crying whenever she read the newspaper. I only had five years with her, and she spent them crying over Siegfried.”)
He went home, because he wasn’t sure what else to do. He needed a job. He needed to put his feet up for a bit. Evelyn assured him that she didn’t mind staying with her sister until they got enough money together for a proper flat of their own, but she was nonetheless pleased to spend some time with the Farnons, who treated her with a reverence bordering on idolatry. They were by and by large not sensible people, and a woman with such a wealth of common sense both intrigued and frightened them. She had been indispensable to them during the ‘flu crisis.
“You can see the stone we picked out for your Mother. It’s beautiful, and Tristan brings flowers every week. But then, there he is now– Doesn’t he look all grown up?” She squeezed Siegfried’s arm and pointed at that familiar house, his childhood home looking terribly small from this angle, and a little boy standing by the door.
Somehow he expected that Tristan would be as he left him, nine months old and largely stationary. It was a surprise to see an actual child, wearing black and holding a tin soldier in his left hand. He waved. Siegfried waved back.
When they came closer, it appeared that Tristan lost his nerve, because he disappeared somewhere behind Evelyn’s voluminous skirts and refused to meet Siegfried’s eyes. Every so often Siegfried caught a glimpse of reddish-blond hair and very pale, very fat cheeks. He remembered that Tristan had been ill, and wondered if he was still convalescing.
“My boy,” Father said, gesturing for him to follow into the parlor and take a seat on the lumpy sofa. “God, it’s good to see you. Let me get you a drink. I was hoping you’d wear your uniform.”
“I’m rather glad to be out of it,” Siegfried said. “It’s good to be back and see you so well.”
Only Father didn’t look well, not one bit. His hair was every bit as dark and thick as it had been before the war, and he had the same full, warm face, and the same neat mustache, but there was something inescapably diminished about him. He seemed to have lost weight, or lost a few inches from the top. Siegfried wanted to embrace him, but they weren’t huggers, and he was almost afraid that Father would shatter under the pressure.
Evelyn was stroking Tristan’s hair as he clung to her leg and Siegfried felt something curdle inside him. It was like seeing a funhouse mirror of his life. Evelyn raising the love-death child, and his father becoming like Mime the dwarf. He swallowed down his whiskey too fast, earning a surprised twitch of the eyebrow from his father. Well, damn him . Damn his encouragement to join up, his reminders of patriotic duty. Damn his well-loved second son, too coddled to even say hello. Even (he shuddered) damn Evelyn for being so perfect he couldn’t fault her for anything, when all he wanted was to be angry and break things. He considered throwing the empty glass, then decided it wasn’t worth the bother.
“I thought we might walk to the churchyard,” Evelyn was saying, though she sounded quite far away. “I want Siegfried to see the lovely stone you selected. And the fresh air will do us all good.”
They should have stood up and begun this walk, only instead Father was going to the gramophone and holding up a record. “When it was apparent that it was hopeless, I played all her favorites for her. Hans Sachs’s final solo, and the pilgrims returning from Rome in Tannhauser. And Siegfried sailing up the Rhine.” He smiled, as if the memory pleased him. “And of course, the Liebestod.” He hummed a few bars of it. As if Siegfried could have forgotten. As if they didn’t play it nonstop the winter before Tristan was born. Morning, noon, and night, that horrible racket about fragrances on the sweet wind, supreme delight…
They returned happily to Evelyn’s sister’s house the next day, glad to be gone even if the roof leaked and everything smelled like cabbage and onions. Siegfried found it hard to turn his mind from the sight of the family plot, his grandparents venerable and moss-covered, and poor Kundry, dead at three months in 1906, and then Mother, adorned with fresh and shining granite. Tristan leaned his little head down and kissed the stone, and Siegfried felt, for the first time in his life, that he really might be a born anarchist. There was no explanation for such a touching tableau leaving him cold and sharp all over.
It was a further relief when Tristan was sent to school in 1921, since it meant that he was being taken care of and thus required none of Siegfried’s attention. He could focus on lambing, on riding his sweet gray mare, on making extraordinary, heart-thumping love to Evelyn. He could build up his practice and buy a house and wallpaper the kitchen in William Morris patterns, and drink too much. He could throw away time, shake out the hourglass until all the sand ran out, laugh at death, then cower in his bed.
It was that Christmas, 1921, when it was apparent that something was very wrong. Father did not stand to greet Siegfried, nor Evelyn, only sat in his armchair with a wool blanket around his knees like a much older man. Tristan lay on his stomach and watched an electric train circle again and again, and did not look away from it, no matter how horribly his father coughed.
Two days before the New Year, they finally acknowledged it. Evelyn was putting Tristan to bed, reading to him from the leather-bound collection of Norse myths that had belonged to Mother, giving the Norns quivering crone voices and intoning Wotan with a lofty tenor. Her voice echoed down the stairs while Father and Siegfried sat with a bottle of whiskey.
“It’s emphysema,” Father said. Like he expected Siegfried to be shocked. No, you ? But you’re the picture of health, hardly able to stand and wheezing like an accordion.
Siegfried raised his glass in a salute. “Is it serious?” He tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“I won’t live to see Tristan grow up.” Siegfried was struck by this method of measuring time, as if Tristan’s development was a universal yardstick, as if Tristan was Jesus Christ. A.T., anno Tristan.
“I’m sorry,” Siegfried said. He wasn’t sure what else to say.
Father took a little sip and then cleared his throat. His lungs sounded like wet canvas flopping on the wind. “He’s a wonderful boy. I daresay I wouldn’t have made it this long if it wasn’t for him. I know he could go to your Aunt Agnes, or Cousins Pamela and Freddy, but they won’t understand him, I think. He’s a sen sitive child, full of ideas and imagination. He draws the most wonderful pictures, you know.”
There was a pregnant pause. Upstairs, Tristan squealed with laughter at Evelyn’s blustering performance as Thor.
“I want you to take him, Siegfried. You must promise me that you’ll take him in, that you’ll make sure he gets a decent education and makes something of himself. That you’ll look after him. I couldn’t bear it if I knew that Tris was going to end up floating from relation to relation like an unwanted parcel.” Father had to take a deep breath after speaking uninterrupted for so long, his cheeks pale and quivering. “I beg you. For your mother’s sake.”
At least there was the unspoken fact that Siegfried wouldn’t have, shouldn’t have done anything for Father and Father alone. That Father had no right to ask anything of Siegfried. This was pleasing.
“Of course. I know it’s what Mother would have wanted.”
They shook on it, and that was that. Later that night, Evelyn and Siegfried made their own arrangement and shook on that too, agreeing to do their duty and take on the school fees, the bother of scheduling their lives around term times, the loss of their best guest bedroom. They did not visit again until the call came, in November of 1922, that Father had pneumonia and wouldn’t last the week, that Aunt Agnes was looking after Tristan but couldn’t handle the funeral arrangements, that everything was in turmoil, that Siegfried and Siegfried alone could set it all right.
On his deathbed, looking almost mummified and pathetic, Father repeated his request over and over again. The fever made him forget that Siegfried had agreed many times over, and he would wake up anxious to assure himself that Trissie, poor Trissie, would not be left on the street.
For eight days Siegfried sat with Father, bathing his brow in wet rags, holding his shriveled hand, murmuring useless comfort. “Yes, of course we’ll look after Tristan. Yes, certainly. Yes, you’ll be with Mother soon.”
Then the vicar came and he said that they ought to call in the child, and like clockwork Evelyn appeared in her pretty white voile frock with the point duchesse collar, one arm slung over Tristan’s shoulders. He looked cherubic and thoughtless; she looked very grave.
Father died with the holy water cross still visibly damp on his forehead, surrounded by his family. It was the sort of thing that newspapers always said but Siegfried didn’t believe happened nearly so often. Tristan sucked in his cries and stoically considered the scene with an air of self-conscious martyrdom, then looked up at Evelyn.
“Will I have a bicycle?” he asked. “When I live with you?”
Siegfried ran out so quickly that he almost tripped on his feet.
Besides the bicycle Tristan wanted new cricket equipment, a bound copy of Gasoline Alley comics, a microscope, a toboggan. Evelyn was inclined to give him all those things, reasoning that while material possessions couldn’t quite fill the void left by one’s natural parents, they could at least keep an inquisitive child occupied all day. It was Siegfried who put his foot down, who caved on the bicycle and nothing else, who said that Tristan’s old toys were perfectly adequate. Besides, they moved the old family gramophone to his room, so he could lie in bed and listen to Brahms’ Wiegenlied when he woke up frightened in the night, or the educational recordings of lectures in veterinary medicine that Siegfried found for him. What else could a child want?
It seemed natural that Tristan would prefer Evelyn, as she was beautiful and sarcastic and could act out entire Laurel and Hardy routines from memory, and anyway, it was she who was home all day while Siegfried worked. They were thick as thieves, a fact which both pleased and annoyed Siegfried when he came home only to find the kitchen turned into a laboratory for Tristan’s model volcano, or the dining room table covered in papier-mache so Tristan could build himself a topographic map of Africa, or a million other ultimately minor interruptions to his daily routine that nonetheless impressed upon him that his house was not his own, that his life had been invaded by a child who expected to be entertained every hour of the day.
Tristan was to go back to school in the autumn, because routine was supposed to be good for children, and because Siegfried was beginning to chafe under the yoke of his reluctant fatherhood. It was a little silly, he admitted, to feel ganged up on by one’s orphaned baby brother, but that was how he felt. Tristan and Evelyn were always giggling together, whispering secrets back and forth, and when Tristan was ill or frightened or lonely, he would crawl right to Evelyn and tuck himself in against her chest with an expression of perfect confidence, because he knew he would find comfort, that she would not refuse him a cuddle when he flashed his big cow eyes in her direction.
“He’s playing you,” Siegfried said once, long after Tristan had been put to bed, nestled amongst his army of stuffed animals. Halfway through her sip of sherry, Evelyn choked with laughter.
“He’s a little boy, Siegfried. Think about it rationally. Is it more likely that he’s genuinely bereft after losing his parents and needs some bucking up, or that he’s a child mastermind, using us to achieve his dastardly aim of securing love and affection?”
Knowing she would dislike his honest answer, Siegfried continued. “I was never coddled like this. He needs to make friends with boys his own age in the village instead of hanging around your apron-strings.”
Evelyn considered this, then took another sip of sherry. “I’m not coddling him. I'm his friend. That’s all he wants, someone to talk to and play with. That’s perfectly natural, and it’s a shame if you never had it. Children aren’t as complicated as you think they are.”
With the unspoken suggestion of their own future progeny hanging in the air, Siegfried began to talk about bovine viral diarrhea.
Life achieved a steady seasonal pattern. Tristan home on holiday, life gone topsy turvy, then order returned after a few weeks of chaos. A letter from the headmaster every month or so detailing some new offense, usually borne of laziness more than malice. Stealing the Latin Master’s cigarillos so he could use it to bribe a classmate to do his Geometry for him. Sleeping through a whole day of classes. Pretending to have chicken pox, then discovered to have painted himself with red chalk. And Siegfried would write his apologies to the headmaster and his disappointment to Tristan, sigh deeply but be ultimately relieved that for a few weeks at least, he would have peace.
Animals were born, animals died. Evelyn cut her hair to her ears in 1928, years after everyone else did, and regretted it immediately. Spring allergies in April and lumbago in January. The Darrowby market every third Sunday. Nightmares every week, then every other week, and finally so infrequently that they served as a sort of psychological thermometer, alerting Siegfried and Evelyn that he needed a day or two of rest. They played Elgar records, or Rossini if they were feeling sophisticated. It had been years since Siegfried listened to his namesake’s hammer bearing down on the pieces of Notung, and he left Darrowby so infrequently, introduced himself to strangers so rarely, that he forgot that Siegfried and Tristan were actually very odd names.
Tristan spent the summer of 1931 with a friend from school which Siegfried couldn’t have planned better, since Evelyn was to have an operation on her breast. The surgeon said it was probably a fat deposit, and Siegfried, against his own medical understanding, believed that was true, because Evelyn was young and beautiful and he had not believed things could be any worse. And it wasn’t that things were bad , exactly, only he felt sure he had reached some sort of milestone of loss and it simply wasn’t possible that God (or Wotan, or illness-causing bacteria, or cancerous tissue) could expect any more of him, not for a few decades at least.
Even when the diagnosis came and Evelyn broke down in the hospital, apologizing to the surgeon while she bawled into her hands, Siegfried truly believed that she would live, that no natural force could be so cruel. Someone would do something, think of something, find the right medicine. All would be well. No need to worry Tristan about it, not when he had his own worries (a face full of pimples and at least a dozen failed flirtations), not when Evelyn would soon be all better.
These horrible realizations always came at Christmas. It was a pattern developing, Siegfried could see that, only he was powerless to interfere. He could hardly bear to watch Tristan’s face as he bounded home from his first year of university, snow on the collar of his great coat and his hair freshly cut, gleaming with pomade, this bright young thing glancing at the tinsel and mistletoe and stockings and then at Evelyn, so pale and thin and holding onto the back of the sofa for support. Tristan’s smile quivered then disappeared.
“Did you enjoy your first term?” Evelyn’s voice wavered. She seemed to become more and more sentimental lately, as if the cancer ate up all the reserves of stoic self-control that she had been stockpiling since she was a little girl and her own mother wasted away before her eyes.
“Is it pneumonia?” Tristan sounded accusatory, even as he took a step closer and encased Evelyn’s tiny, skeletal hand in his own.
She shook her head and Siegfried realized that her curls didn’t bounce anymore. Cancer took the bounce from her curls.
“It’s cancer, Tris.”
“Evelyn–” He looked to Siegfried, then to the fireplace. “I– But your stocking is empty? Siegfried, why haven’t you filled Evelyn’s stocking?”
Siegfried was screaming before he consciously decided to open his mouth. “You come in and you start making demands? I’ve been busy! Working all night in the bitter cold to put a roof over your sorry head! I don’t see you bringing piles of presents home, hm? You haven’t bought out Harrod’s for her, have you?”
He rather hoped that Tristan would bellow back at him, but he only stared at Siegfried with an expression rather like their father had had on his deathbed, gasping for air. Then, his face showing the internal effort to bring himself under control, he swallowed and stood up very straight. “I did bring you something, Evelyn. I like to buy presents for people who are nice to me.”
“You must be hungry, Trissie. Come on, I made some sandwiches–” And Evelyn took Tristan by the arm and led him to the dining room, leaving Siegfried alone as tears streamed down his face.
Evelyn survived one year after her diagnosis and died in her sleep, with Siegfried’s arms clutched around her middle. He woke up and she was cold, and he was haunted by the idea that she had been frightened at the end but he, the idiot that he was, had been snoring away, no use to her or anyone.
There was no funeral to prepare since Evelyn, beautiful and sensible Evelyn, planned it all in advance. She set aside the dress, the stockings, the shoes, the lipstick she always wore, and a suit for Siegfried and Tristan too. She hadn’t anticipated that Tristan would have grown three inches in six months, and would need a new pair of black trousers. Or that she would have dropped to seven stone in the final months of her illness and that the dress would hang oddly, would make her look like she was tangled up in a parachute. She had not anticipated that the organist would have an arthritic attack the day before the service, and so there was no musical accompaniment to her carefully chosen hymns. Siegfried tried to make his voice fill the church, but Onward Christrian Pilgrims still sounded hollow when it ought to have been rousing.
Then the empty house, the steak and kidney pie left by a well-wisher and burnt upon reheating by Siegfried. Tristan stretching out and spilling a little whiskey on his white shirt that Evelyn had so carefully pressed.
“During the war, the closest cinema was all the way in Thirsk, and sometimes she’d take me for the day. Her and Mummy, when she felt up to it. I wish I could remember what we saw, only I can’t– I just remember sitting in the back of Pa’s old Model T and looking at the back of her hair. I don’t think I understood that she was your wife, or who you were– I thought she was my sister perhaps.”
Siegfried refilled Tristan’s glass. “She took her responsibility to my family very seriously. She would send these long letters, full of updates on you all. She had to, since Father never wrote.” He was surprised that after all this time, his anger at Father still had the power to almost overwhelm his senses.
“I remember a little bit of having the ‘flu when Mummy died. Mostly I remember our housekeeper– I think her name was Mrs Wray? She kept the windows open day and night in the nursery. She thought it was good for my lungs, I think. And Pa had the gramophone playing the whole time. I think I asked Evelyn to turn it off, because it was hurting my head. She said no, and I didn’t know why she wouldn’t do that for me.”
“He was playing it for your mother. Playing the music she liked, trying to comfort her.”
Your mother. Tristan’s mother. Not Siegfried’s, not in the same way. Nobody took him on car rides to Thirsk. There was that anger again. Siegfried drank and tried to focus his attention on the taste, on the warmth of it in his stomach. Anything but those old grievances coming up again when he buried them so well.
“I think at some point she brought me to say goodbye to Mummy. Evelyn, I mean. She carried me, and then Mummy forgot my name, poor thing.” Tristan was drunk. Probably drunker than he had ever been. There was no other explanation for him to be babbling like this.
Siegfried wished he was that drunk. “She probably thought you were me, as a baby. Or poor Kundry, ten years before you.”
He’d been taken in to say goodbye to Kundry. He had stood over the crib and watched his sister turn blue and then kissed the top of her little head.
“No, she said something funny. I don’t know who she thought I was.”
“She thought you were Isolde. I mean, you are Isolde. You were supposed to be Isolde.” Seeing Tristan’s total lack of comprehension, Siegfried continued. “They thought you were a girl– I haven’t the slightest idea why, but they were listening to Erna Denera and they invented this imaginary child, this daughter. That’s the story, at least. When you came out as you are, they switched to Tristan.”
How quickly the memories came back. Listening to the Liebestod over and over again with them, and the newborn Tristan looking just like a newborn kitten. The fresh snowfall that night. Siegfried ran to send a telegram to Evelyn, who was away at secretarial school. BABY BROTHER BORN STOP EVERYONE HEALTHY STOP HE IS CALLED TRISTAN STOP. Why on earth had he sent a telegram to a woman who wasn’t yet his wife, announcing the birth of a child that wasn’t his? What an enormous waste of money.
Siegfried was still thinking of the cost of the telegram as he removed the ancient record from its sleeve. He wasn’t sure if the gramophone still worked— it had been ages since the days when Tristan played it to help him sleep at night. He half-hoped it would fizzle out, that the song wouldn’t play.
“This is what they listened to. Our parents. All before you were born, they listened and— I don’t know, it reminded them of something to do with you.” His voice shook— Was it the whiskey? “You must have heard it before. Isolde can only return to Tristan and consummate their love through death. Ghastly. I wish I had bothered to ask them why they liked it.”
Then, for a long while, they did not speak or refill their glasses. They listened to Erna Denera and were silent.