‘Fighting the Nazis?’
‘Well, no. Not necessarily. Let’s just say that an ideology that monumental does not gain power without the complicity of a sizeable portion of the population, and leave it at that.’
‘So some of her family were on the other side.’
‘Of course, of course. Nationalism is an infection, Robert, a parasite, and after years of recession many were willing hosts. The tide had too rapidly turned against all things Germanic here also. The prevailing question was: what does one do when rejected at home, yet hailed as a sage abroad – even if only fleetingly – but then just as swiftly renounced again purely because of the soil on which one happens to have been born? Romy had barely drawn breath before she found herself rejected on both sides: by the grubby scrum of English critics who had praised her, but who now had to be seen to be questioning every single comma lest they be accused of being unpatriotic, and by those over the water in her homeland, where Romy’s voice had simply not been given an outlet. Her readers retreated, the publishers fell silent and all those sycophantic contemporaries who had scrabbled to laud her work mysteriously stopped writing. Her creative fire, once raging so ferociously, had been dampened by nationalistic fervour and ignorant twots. She was stymied.’
‘Well, I don’t know anything about poetry but I enjoyed the poems that I read,’ I said. ‘She sounds like a very talented person.’
‘She was,’ said Dulcie. ‘She was. Very special.’
She fell silent. In my naivety it was only then in that awkward, still moment that I realised that perhaps the maiden’s garland had belonged to Romy, or been used to mark her passing. But I did not dare mention it because, as Dulcie had said, she would tell me what she would tell me. Her tears were not for a broken relationship but a lost life. A tragedy unspoken.
‘As you can well see, the cottage is poky, and seems to shrink during these bloody endless winters that blow in from the Baltic, and of course back then it was still full of the gimcrack trinkets of my father’s many mistresses, so we had Romy installed in the meadow. Domiciled in the Yorkshire wild. I had the studio especially built for her. A bespoke commission. It was a place in which she would write, with a beautiful view of the meadow and down to the bay. A desk, a wood burner. Even a little cot bed. Everything she needed. The Emerald Chandelier was a metaphor, you see. For the breaking waves, and the way they fling green jewels into the sunlight, and the infinity of it all. From here she would plot her comeback. Her renaissance, if you will.’
‘I can see that it must have been a nice place to work before it became overgrown.’
Dulcie’s face had darkened again.
‘Perhaps it was,’ she said quietly. ‘Perhaps. But impending war is difficult to ignore, and loss of one’s nerve even more so.’
She took another drink of tea and then looked around.
‘Where is that dog?’ She stood up and called his name, and the dog came through from the kitchen. ‘Oh, there you are.’
Butler stood there for a moment and then, seeing that his services were not required, he turned and left again.
‘I expect you want to know what happens next.’
‘You don’t have to tell me. Really, you don’t.’
Dulcie sighed. All the while she had been standing but now she finally sat down, as if exhausted from the sharing of her story. She flopped heavily into an armchair and reached for a folded newspaper, which she wafted in front of her face like a fan. But she could only sit still for a moment, because then she pulled herself to her feet again and became busy around the room doing not much at all.
‘The war happened next,’ she said with her back turned to me. ‘And a lot more besides. We should have more tea. Do you want tea? Or maybe something stronger?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘I’ll make some anyway.’
As Dulcie squeezed past me into the kitchen to fill a kettle and set it on the stove, then returned to fetch the teapot, caddy and strainer, which she kept in a large cabinet alongside a mismatched selection of cups, plates and cutlery that seemed to have been collated from a wide variety of sets, I was aware of how small the cottage was, and indeed how it could be seen to shrink during the long dark days of winter. It was enough for two compatible people, so long as they were in good spirits.
‘Do you think there will be another world war?’ I asked.
Listless, she paused in the doorway, swaying slightly. Her hands were full and her reply was emphatic. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘A third one? You really think so?’
‘With great certainty. I’d bet my house, my hat and my horse on it.’
‘Do you have a horse?’
‘No, but I did – several. To call it a third war is misleading, though.’
‘But how can you be sure?’
‘Because there is always a war being waged somewhere, and we never learn a damn thing from any of them. Mankind exists in conflict, and always will so long as it is called “mankind”. Nothing changes. And anyway, a third war will probably be a final war.’
‘Don’t you believe in progress, though, Dulcie?’
She came through from the kitchen, placed the tray bearing empty cups on the side and then flopped down into the chair for a second time.
‘Not in a linear way, no. I don’t think we are continually improving, if that’s what you mean. We may learn lessons, but we don’t apply them. It’s always one step forward, two steps back. Then a leap sideways. Then diagonally. Do you see what I mean?’
I must have twisted my face in confusion, as Dulcie elaborated.
‘Take your cathedral again. A magnificent building. Celestial. Constructed to evoke awe and wonder amongst all who chanced upon it – and nearly a thousand years old. A miracle of the imagination, as if God himself had drawn up the blueprint.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in – ’
‘Shush, I’m making a broader point. Now. Pan out from the picture and what do you see – a city, yes, fine. What else? I’ll tell you what: drab municipal buildings built from cheap concrete, uniform mass-produced bricks and – oh, my eyes – the epitome of bad taste, pebble-dash. Not just your city, but almost every town or city. I’m talking about civic buildings as easy on the eyes as an astigmatism; buildings built to evoke feelings of – what? Nothing but ennui and lassitude. A sinking feeling. A cruelty played by planners with no spark whatsoever. If they had their way the entire country would be pebble-dashed, metaphorically speaking.’
Dulcie was really warming up now.
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘Oh, you know. Them. The janitors of mediocrity. The custodians of drab and peddlers of dreck. Men, mainly. Where once we built towers to heaven, now we build frumpy sweatboxes for pen-pushers. After nine hundred years I don’t call that progress. Not a jot. We’re moving backwards, forwards and sideways all at once. We’re oscillating, Robert. We live in chaos and out of chaos comes war. I could put it a more simple way for you, if you like: the Great War was the worst atrocity committed by humankind. What lessons were learned? Build bigger bombs and better bombs, that’s all. Hitler still happened, and there’ll be another angry little man along in due course. I sometimes think that in many ways we’re completely screwed, all the time. I suppose it’s a collective state of insanity. It must be, to keep repeating the same patterns of death and violence. Romy saw this. Romy knew. She had the poet’s insight, you see. Because the true poet looks beyond the lamina of lies, peers into the space between the dimensions. And now I am rather tired. Perhaps a nap.’
‘Of course.’
‘Perhaps you might like to take Butler for a wander later, after you’ve finished whatever it is you’re doing.’
‘I’d be glad to.’
In the kitchen the kettle was whistling like the wind.
The conversation did not continue that night. Perhaps Dulcie had run out of words for now.
After I had taken Butler up onto the moors for a t
wo-hour walk that left my lungs burning and during which I saw my first-ever snake – a fat adder basking in the middle of a narrow old packhorse track that ran through the heather – I returned exhausted.
There was no sign of Dulcie and her curtains were drawn, so feeling rather furtive I boiled four eggs in a pan of water, to which I added a clump of nettle leaves and a twist of lemon. I carried it to the steps of the cabin and carefully peeled each egg, and slowly ate them one by one, and then when the tea had mashed I drank it straight from the pan as the sun slowly set. Then, when the meadow was still and fading from view, I lit a lamp and took out the manuscript that Dulcie had insisted I return to its briefcase in the studio.
Something compelled me to read the poems again. I think it was the desperate look I saw in Dulcie’s eyes, and her words that had gone unspoken. An attempt, perhaps, to better understand this strange and brilliant individual that she had described. All the answers as to who she was, and the truth of her friend Romy’s life, were to be found in this stack of papers that had, for several years, been touched only by spiders.
This time I paid closer attention to the language, and on a scrap of paper I wrote down all the words that I did not understand alongside those from other poems I had devoured since arriving at Dulcie’s. The list read:
islomanes
cumulus
phosphorescent
codicil
meniscus
vellum
hara-kiri
arbutus
whitecaps
shibboleth
anoxia
hypoxia
Saksamaa
Elbe
seppuku
Many of the poems remained a mystery during those early nocturnal readings, but enough of a mystery for me to want to unravel their meaning. Sitting there, the oil lamp’s flame casting writhing shadows across the pale pages, I felt as if their author was in the cabin with me. That they were conceived in this very place was thrilling, and for the first time I understood what it meant to be haunted, as the more I read, the greater was the sense of loss for the fact that Romy was no longer living, the sense that these poems were in fact messages from the dead, missives sent from a place of abject loneliness. Not only that but they were messages – pleas, even – sent back to their place of creation. Here, where I lay, in a shack, in a meadow in Yorkshire.
It became clear in my untrained, barely read mind that as I progressed through the collection each poem was arranged in such a way that Romy Landau was writing towards her own escape, her own expiration. They were laments for herself, exit spells.
What I had first read as being superficially concerned with a world I instantly recognised – the lanes, the cottage, the meadow and especially the sea – now began to fall away to reveal a complex mind descending into the murk of ultimate and infinite despair. The stark and unflinching horror of the opening lines of one poem in particular, ‘Unmothering’, struck me like a fencepost rammer.
A womb awaits
what?
Nothing but a
child;
a birth-machine you are
not.
It was the middle of the night when I finished the collection and finally discerned what had happened to Romy. The answer had been there all along, in Dulcie’s hatred and mistrust of the sea, and in the maiden’s garland. Yet it was only when I read the collection for the third, fourth or fifth time that I, a young man more readily used to wandering the lanes, working with his hands or dreaming what great adventures might lie ahead now the veil of war was lifted, finally understood.
It was one poem in particular that revealed the truth of the matter, the poem that now most commonly features in anthologies, is taught on academic courses and has been read on radio and stage and set to music, and even chiselled into a memorial stone that sits behind a trail that runs deep into the heart of a wood near the Germany–Austria border, but which back then was still just a poem secreted away from the world, and read only by me, the humble son of a hard-working miner:
Exeunt (or White Horses)
I leave this land
and give myself to golden water.
How deep, I wonder,
do the sun’s tresses
trail, how far the reach of the wretched
figure on the wretched beach,
and what awaits she
who rides white horses
then slips
to swaying darkness
down coralline chains to fingerling roots,
and briny beds
where bestial wails chorus
like carillon chimes
where all is rust and shadow,
and salt-stripped bone.
A snuffed-out sun, the retreating shore.
The perfect undertow seeing her home.
Romy Landau had drowned herself.
VIII
Drizzle fell in the middle of the night and continued through the early hours, slow and persistent, drilling right on through to daybreak, so I stayed inside for most of the morning, first checking the floorboards – I found two had come loose so hammered them back into place and then stained them with varnish to prevent woodworm – and then working on lengths of skirting that were showing the early signs of rot. I prised out the nails that held them in place and then removed them. Rain thrummed down on the roof once more but then it passed and when I looked out Dulcie’s curtains were open, as too was the kitchen window, and the dog was hunched over at the bottom of the meadow, having a quiet moment in the long grass.
Dulcie waved as I approached.
‘Fourteen hours,’ she said with incredulity. ‘I slept for fourteen hours. Right through. I can hardly believe it. Have you eaten? Your guts must be growling in protest.’
‘I hope you don’t mind but I had some eggs last night.’
‘With what?’
‘Just by themselves. I boiled them.’
‘I mind very much that that is all you had, and you’re still eating like there’s a bloody war on. Good lord, man, you’ll be internally impacted for days unless I put some porridge in you. Come in, come in. I’ve done a pan with a dash of bilberry jam and my own special secret ingredient.’
‘What is it?’
‘You’ll have to guess. It’s half the fun.’
Work on the studio continued each day this way for a week, and then two. I patched up the shack and with each small task created a greater problem to be solved. Replacement guttering. A new windowpane. Two new windowpanes. A drain to unblock, a cracked ceramic pipe to unearth and fix.
Stripping, sanding, varnishing.
Patching and painting.
When I wasn’t working I was fed increasingly lavish meals by Dulcie, who was an inventive cook working from a rationed diet augmented by ingredients that she managed to source from friends in high places: elaborate meat pies and steamed puddings, home-made pasta, boeuf bourguignon, fruit flans, curries, roast ducks and geese and all manner of other new discoveries. Then, when the tide and the weather allowed, I walked down bay to enjoy a swim most evenings, tumbling and spluttering in the backwash to burn off the calorie-rich food that I was quite unused to.
And each night I slowly read the books that she had given me by lamplight in the creaking shack in the meadow, confused and bored by some, but inspired and energised by others.
Full summer had arrived and I felt my body changing. So lean and pale when I left my home, it was now filling out, seeking a new shape. Cords of narrow muscle ran through my arms and the soft puppy flesh of waist and stomach was hardening from all the stretching and swimming. I felt different too: stronger and more capable. It was a strength that seemed to come from within. All the reaching and chopping and Dulcie’s rich home cooking, and the unbroken stretches of sunshine too, had done wonders for my physical form, which had begun to take on a honeyed hue where once it was the colour of proving dough.
I saw the world in a sharper focus too.
And all around my wrists and up
my arms were nicks and scratches, scars and stings and welts, each an emblem of outdoor toil, proudly sported like a medal awarded for an unbelievable act of valour.
The bay was becoming busier.
I watched as each day the pulsing-hot centre of summer brought people, and the people brought buckets and spades and ham-and-pease-pudding sandwiches wrapped in paper, and boiled eggs and cold ration-book sausages shining greasily with a slick rime of grey fat. They peeled hard-boiled eggs and unscrewed warm bottles of pop, and some had windbreaks or footballs or flimsy little fishing nets fastened to the ends of broom handles, and most had children, and soon they were all turning a parboiled stinging red as they ran amok on the broad beach beneath the relentless sun.
The rock pools became subjects of forensic examination for excitable barefoot boys from the industrial towns of Teesside and West Yorkshire – the locals called them ‘diggers’ because of their fondness for digging holes – while mothers arranged their packed lunches on blankets, dogs coughed up salt water and irritable fathers slept beneath their handkerchiefs; those who had made it back from the war, anyway. Everyone was glad to be alive, and no one said so.
Just to feel the damp sand between their toes was enough.
And there were girls too. Young women, around my age. So many sullen, cream-coloured women in bathing suits and headscarves, and in bloom, outnumbering the men as they carefully placed their towels apart from parents and younger siblings, whom they disowned with petulant glances of disdain from behind the lenses of their sunglasses.
Each day I saw them, these young ladies, scattered around the beach, some paddling in the shallows in pairs, shrieking at the snapping jaws of the cold North Sea, others reclining to smoke cigarettes alone, with attitude. They occupied that no-man’s-land between adolescence and adulthood, where insecurity and innocence, joy and world-weary cynicism do battle, where different masks are tried on for size. They seemed utterly unobtainable to a honking youth from the northern industrial backcountry such as I.
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