Costume Drama.




Nathan rang, ‘Peter, who’s this Osvaldo? Says he’s a friend of yours. We’re to do a costume for him. Haven’t seen you for a while. Katie’s jacket is almost ready. And about time you dropped in to see us, anyway’.
Katie’s call followed to say she had a sudden engagement for three concerts in Edinburgh returning home on Sunday.


One week later I met up with Osvaldo at Nathan’s studio. I was there to collect the jacket for Katie and Ossie was there for a fitting for a Mozart costume, not a character from an opera but Amadeus himself - he was to be dressed as Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart (I supposed for a fancy-dress party or for one of his promotions, perhaps for an award ceremony). My arrival had interrupted Ossie in one of his freewheeling inventions.
‘I was saying just as you came in, Peter: at the concert last night I was watching the cymbal clasher at the back of the orchestra, the way he swings those shivering haloes, and I thought then that he should really be given more prominence, a more theatrical role, be provided with, say, a raised platform and encouraged to make his whole action a strong visual performance, a dramatic thing, sometimes ending on one knee, for example, with the cymbals held aloft or another time finishing by facing the audience with arms and legs forming an ‘X’, on his toes, spats over silver shoes a must, I think, his face framed between the cymbals, a wide fixed smile; a whitened face with dark lipstick would be a great help. Lots of mascara’.
Anna, with pins in her smiling mouth, was going round him pulling and adjusting the jacket.
Ossie continued, ‘Of course, I can see jealousy running through the orchestra. Naturally enough. The conductor wanting a green spotlight from one side and a red one from the other and using some sort of illuminated baton, one where the electronics allow it to change colour according to the degree of violence with which it’s waved; and the violinists and oboists and flautists and the like, not to be put in the shade, resorting to extravagant hairstyles, fluorescent finger rings, brilliant bow-ties, velvet trousers, short skirts (the ladies of the orchestra, that is), cowboy-boots. I can see the drummers choosing nineteenth century pugilist gear, those striped vests and black tights. Perhaps these percussionists could add a little to the orchestration by employing skipping ropes and soft boots in the way that boxers do, adding a subtle piece of soft drumming’.


Osvaldo was something highly successful in the advertising world with a label like a 'Freelance Creative Director', something akin to that. He had many awards in the industry and was prominent in those moneyed circles concerned with good causes and charities. There were photos of him in the press from time to time standing next to Royalty and Famous Figures, a shortish, dumpy figure, hair in disarray, always a smile of great charm. Ossie could hold an audience; nobody had a bad word to say of him. I had known him from student days and though we seldom met up we had a lasting bond of friendship.


Whenever I was somewhere near Nathan’s I always made a point of calling in. Nathan’s studio was full of fascinating work, a vast room choked with the rags of Russian peasants or the bright uniforms of Wellington’s army or the creams and silvers and greys and greens and drabs of Dickens, with wide tables laid with cloth, Anna and Becky laying out patterns, whirring away on sewing machines or sweeping irons across garments.
Nathan was making the jacket for Katie to wear to Glyndebourne. ‘Oh, lovely!’ cried Ossie, ‘And what are you going to see? Wonderful! Seen it. You’ll love it!’
‘Come on, Anna’ said Nathan, ‘Put it on. Let’s show Peter what it's like’.
Anna turned and slipped out of her shirt giving us all a coy sight of her beautiful naked back and slid cautiously into the jacket, gleaming like a dragonfly’s wing.
‘Yup! Pretty snazzy, Nathan!’, said Ossie, ‘You know, half the pleasure of going to the opera is gawking at the hideous dresses most of the women wear and reeling in surprise when you see something as delightful as this!’.


I knew that Ossie also went in for madcap commercial enterprises that were unique and astonishingly ill conceived, as if it was the high risk of failure and the silliness that drove him forward as a mad challenge. 'Such as?', asked Nathan. I told him of the Japanese finger puppet venture, a perfect example, a puppet no more than the finger of a glove in the form of a Japanese man or woman, to be bought and worn on the index finger by the passengers cramming into the Tokyo transport systems, allowing the wearer to make a token bow towards those jammed and squeezed against you, in either greeting or apology and thus accommodating Japanese etiquette to impossible circumstances. Time and money will have been spent on prototypes for the sheer fun of it. 'But he can afford it, Nathan'.


That afternoon was in Nathan’s last year, weeks before the effort and the travel and the stairs had put the studio beyond him. Another six months of rapid decline in his apartment, then the hospice and the dark room, the dark glasses, the quietness and the impossibility of saying anything comforting or of bringing useful things like foodstuffs or books.
I had visited about three days before Nathan died. I had stepped out of brilliant sunshine into the foyer of the hospice, low-lit and carpeted in the manner of a fancy hotel. The receptionist’s desk had table lamps throwing cones of yellow light onto documents, folders, registers, phones. The receptionist was new, a small blonde moustache, a ponytail, one silver earring and a slight stammer to his voice. ‘I’ll ask’, he said, ‘He may not wish to see anyone’. It was a brief meeting with nothing much for either of us to say. ‘You don’t really want me here, do you, Nathan?’ and Nathan shook his head and I had left, left without finding any proper words of good-bye. ‘Towards the end’, said the man behind the desk, ‘they almost all sink into a deep depression, as you can well imagine. Nathan is very near the end now’.
The weather reflected the dismal state of my emotions during the journey home from the hospice. The bus window was a dense web of raindrops being blown in darting runs by the wind and the slipstream of the bus’s movement. The flat carried an oddly forlorn air, a strange feeling to it that I was half prepared for. Before I opened the folded sheet on the table I looked into the wardrobes and the chest-of-drawers.
The orchestra was scheduled for a new foreign tour, Kate wrote, and yet another long absence convinced her that our faltering relationship would be best terminated at once to avoid a slow tearing apart and useless recriminations. The last ten months had been politely handled, this being not enough for either of us as we both well knew. It had been a sad, hard decision but it was for the best and we would both recognise this before long. She wished me well; she would remember the good times. I thought that Kate would be unpacking her bags in the apartment of another man, most likely a colleague who shared the grind of orchestral life, the airport tedium, the debilitating air journeys, the jet-lag, the lousy pay, the uniform hotel life, the rehersals when sleep was all that was wanted.


Anna had sat on a high stool at the cutting table and dabbed at her eyes. ‘If only he had found a proper partner to share his life with. Not the sort, of course. He always knew his stupid promiscuous life would get him in the end. Regularly went overboard for a new face. Comes in gushing about a bloke who would turn out to be pretty ordinary if not downright awful when we finally met him. A new wonder every few months or so. How does someone so nice and kind and good and clever be so bloody blind and stupid?’ She gave me a bleak smile and added, ‘There’s a lot of fools about. Which reminds me. How's that friend of yours? Osvaldo. And what was the Mozart costume for? It cost him the earth. Now, you’re giving me a smile, Peter!’.
‘A story to amuse you and puzzle you, Anna!’, I said. ‘I get into concert halls all over London wherever Katie is playing. Well, not any more but that’s another story'. I told her that ome time after that meeting with Ossie in Nathan’s studio I was settling down in the Barbican concert hall when a small stir in the gathering audience made me look down and across the rows of seats to see Mozart arriving to take the end seat about eight rows back from the platform. He carried a score that he opened across his lap. There were broad smiles and quizzical faces everywhere and some faces being pulled amongst the musicians who were beginning to fill the chairs on the platform. At the finish of the first Mozart piece the audience applauded enthusiastically and no wonder for the orchestra and the conductor had been quite superb. It was as the applause burst forth that everyone realised the trick, that they were obliged to turn to see Mozart’s reaction to the interpretation of his music, you simply had to see how Mozart would respond. Even some members of the orchestra were turning their heads to check. And Mozart simply rose from his end seat and rushed up the stairs shaking his head from side to side, not to return for the rest of the concert. God knows what pleasures Ossie got out of all this. Was he getting his own back on someone, perhaps? Was he engaged in a bet?
I saw him again at a Shostokovitch concert. Here, Mozart leapt into the isle at the finish of a tumultuous, pounding and thrilling finale where he stared open-mouthed at the rows near to him, turned in bewilderment to stare at the conductor and the orchestra, turned again to look up and around in disbelief at the rising bank of an applauding audience then slowly mounted the stairway to the exit, head down. A mutual friend saw Ossie in his costume at a Glyndebourne performance of Idomeneo. As people left at the interval for the restaurants and their picnics they streamed past him standing with his head buried in the bosom of a lady companion, shoulders heaving, head shaking from time to time as she spoke consoling words to him. Then, I’m told, he stepped back and shouted to the sky, ‘Why, why, why put my opera in the hands of a deluded hairdresser?’. In the restaurant Ossie had sat forlorn until the wine appeared when he began to look at people and nod and smile in a most gracious manner, even blowing little kisses to the women.
At a recital by Alfred Brendel he showed delight at the end of ‘his’ Sonata in A minor by leaping up, grinning and giving the thumbs-up with both hands to all corners of the auditorium. Mr Brendel showed no signs of having seen him.


I asked Anna if they were going to cope now that Nathan had gone. She said they had a good reputation and lots of contacts and more than enough work in hand to see them through another six months. We have, said Anna, lots of people we can call on, who need the work. I’m sure we can survive. It won’t be the same, of course. And Nathan was the contact man, the getter of work, as well as the designer’.
I picked up my bag. Anna said, ‘I hope you’re going to call in whenever you’re passing!’.
‘As often as I can’, I said, and gave her a hug and a kiss. She said, before I released her, ‘In other circumstances’. With my life now being solitary and strange and uncertain I chose to say, ‘I’ll bear that in mind, Anna’.
Anna said, ‘Just bare me in your mind as often as you like! By-the-way, Did I tell you that in Nathan’s last few weeks Osvaldo turned up at the studio to commission a bishop’s mitre? He never collected it. What was that all about? I wonder what holy events were spared his appearances?'
I said, 'Osvaldo has vanished from my radar, Anna. I should try and track him down'.
'Well, remember, Peter, I have a bishop’s mitre going cheap. It would suit you’.


A month after that I opened the newspaper to read of the news of Ossie's death, a particularly spectacular twilight suicide off one of the bridges over the Thames, a suicide that also did for a musician on a boat passing below. It was an ex-colleague who rang me asking if I'd heard the news, seen the news, and surely there couldn't be two Osvaldos of that description? I dashed out for a couple of newspapers. The dramatic suicide ensured that this story was in every paper. I took the two most reliable journals.
A pleasure boat hired for someone's birthday party was passing under the bridge, its jazz band at the stern being at a particular point related to Osvaldo's place in that moving triangle of time, horizontal knots and vertical miles per hour. I imagined the frightful discordant salvo of that impact on the drummer and his kit of drums, the cymbals, the high-hats. Though it was the percussion section that announced the awful event it was the saxophonist who had been pole-axed by Osvaldo and sent flying into the drum kit, dying from a broken neck and a blocked windpipe.
Poor, poor Osvaldo. The last thing I'd imagine him ever doing. Scruffy in the successful way that only the wealthy can manage, slightly overweight, pale faced, thinning-haired, so strangely loveable, too. I felt guilty that I hadn't asked about any of his troubles, hadn't offered him an ear. Well, he'd always seemed trouble free. I wondered what it had been like to sit on the cold granite wall of the bridge, lit yellow from above by the bowl of electric light, the slight breeze tugging at his thin hair, taking in that last lungful of cold night air, eyelids closing on the low moon and the stars and the blinking lights of aircraft, to feel the worn, cold, smooth edge of the granite perch drag at the seat of his trousers as he slid forward.


Anna came with me to the funeral. At the crematorium there were plenty of people I recognised but none that I knew.
Anna and I were talking outside in the sunshine when she gave a loud squeal. We were standing on the shadow of the rolling smoke from the crematorium chimney, standing on Ossie's last manifestation. We skipped away pulling faces.


If there were any obituries I missed them. Those magazines to do with the worlds of advertising, creativity, design, would certainly have referred to his passing, to the numerous charities he had worked for, to his clever and effective TV Commercials on behalf of several international causes. Photos of him in newspapers and magazines had shown him alongside royalty, ministers of state, foreign heads, industrialists, photos pictured him on the arms of the glamorous women fronting these appeals. Women were drawn to him by his humour, his generosity, his charm, his talents. Then I thought of that circle laced with the fame-seekers, the vane, the super-wealthy, those who had banked fortunes by riding roughshod, skewing the markets, treading a wavey line between cleverness and criminality, those for whom charity came only as long as it came with celebrity, people who believed they could and would buy anything and anyone. There will have been someone there whose trophy-wife or glitzy partner had hung a little too long on Ossie's arm, lingered too long in Ossie's apartment. Ossie was never one who would throw himself off a bridge.


The bishop’s mitre now sits, a bookmark to my memory, on top of the wardrobe opposite Anna’s bed. I see the silk threads gleam a little from the small table lamp at the side of the bed, glitter when the Spring mornings bring sharp sunlight in and it shines just a little in the late Winter afternoons when the yellow glow of the street lamp filters through the net curtains to so softly light her room.