Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  Later, as they stood on the pavement, saying goodbye, Youki told Claude that when the camp at Terezín was liberated Robert had been offered a lift to Paris, but he had turned it down. He had lost a box in which he kept his valuables—a novel he had started, the letters she had written to him, some poems by a friend. It was while he was looking for the box that he caught typhus. If only he had forgotten about the stupid box. If only he had just come home. Youki began to cry again.

  Turning to me, Claude asked what I thought about the story of the box.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “How could he go looking for a box if he had dysentery and a fever?”

  Youki had implied that Robert’s failure to return from Czechoslovakia had been a matter of choice. He had been thinking of himself when he should have been thinking of her. In dying, he had betrayed her, and yet, as Claude and I both knew, he had loved her more than anything. But it was like Youki, I thought, to have manipulated the facts in such a way as to allow her to feel wounded. There was something about this aspect of her character that reminded me of Claude.

  “What is it?” Claude asked.

  She had caught me looking at her quizzically.

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  That autumn, Claude began to struggle for breath. She spent more and more time upstairs in a darkened room, the windows closed, the curtains drawn. The stale air rattled in and out of her lungs. She would hardly eat. Her breastbone showed through her skin. She felt there were two of her, she said, one of whom was drowning inside the other. We wouldn’t be moving to Paris, I realized. We wouldn’t be moving anywhere at all.

  An impatient edge crept into even the most ordinary conversations. Afterwards, she would apologize, but the pattern would repeat itself. Her behavior became moody and erratic, as if she were going through a second adolescence, and I began to feel like the mother of a sullen and precocious child. We no longer slept together. Instead, we turned into the sisters that people had always taken us for. Yet, in some ways, we were closer than ever…Is physical love bound to decay, just as everything in the physical world decays? Is it natural for love to change and deepen into something that feels almost spiritual? Had I altered, or had she?

  When Edna left, after ten years of working for us, it took me a long time to find a new housekeeper, but in the end I settled on Lucille, a young woman who had been recommended by Bob Colley, and also by Mr. Gibau-Ratel, who ran the post office. She was tiny, less than five feet tall—she seemed dwarfed by our Jersey doorways—but she was honest and industrious, and I liked the inscrutability of her wide blue-gray eyes. She had been with us for only a few months when she approached me one morning and asked if she could clean Claude’s room.

  “You don’t need to ask,” I said.

  “She told me to go away.” Lucille’s wide eyes grew wider still. “She swore at me.”

  “I’m sorry, Lucille. She’s not been herself.”

  Lucille bit her bottom lip.

  “I’ll have a word with her,” I said.

  I went upstairs and opened the door to Claude’s room. As usual, the windows were shut and the curtains were closed, even though it was in the seventies outside. The only light came from a lamp on her bedside table. The air felt still, almost solid.

  “Claude?”

  She was sitting in bed with a pen in her hand, a sheet of paper propped on her knees. Ever since the late forties, she had been writing letters—to Charles-Henri Barbier, to Jean Schuster, to Gaston Ferdière. Some of them stretched to twenty or thirty pages. Her eyesight had deteriorated to such an extent that her face would hover an inch or two above the pen, and her handwriting was shaky, as if she were on a train or in a moving car. She didn’t show me the letters, but once, as I straightened the blanket that covered her, I caught a glimpse of a single, short sentence. J’éteins la lampe. I switch off the light. Its meaning was clear. She was preparing for the end.

  “Lucille needs to clean your room,” I said.

  She glanced at me, her face afloat in the half-light but tremulous, in danger of sinking below the surface, into the dark. “Some other time, perhaps.”

  “You always say that.” I looked around. Clothes heaped on the floor, crumpled paper. Dust. “It’s dirty in here.”

  “I don’t want to be seen by anyone,” she said. “Not like this.”

  I sat on the end of her bed and stared at the wall, which was lined with the star-flecked, dark-blue silk she had ordered from Paris. The names she had hurled at me that day—in the kitchen first, then later, in the garden…Though she appeared not to remember what had happened, I had been unable to forget. Some things, once said out loud, seem to live on in the mind, with no dulling of their effect. Vulgar, wooden—ugly…I scrutinized the silk, my eyes moving methodically from one section to the next. There was no sign of spilled coffee, no hint of a stain.

  “Can’t you do it?” Claude said.

  There was a new noise, she told me. She could hear it every time she took a breath. It was like old brass wheels turning. Creaking, but also grinding. Sometimes it was almost musical.

  I called the ambulance.

  Claude was taken to St. Helier, and I traveled with her. She gripped my hand with what felt like the last of her strength. Her voice was weak. I had to put my ear to her mouth to hear what she was saying. Her breath smelled metallic, as if her gums had started bleeding, and her eyes looked milky, veiled. Once in a while, though, her gaze would sharpen, and I could see that she was well aware of what was happening, and that she hated it. During the first few hours in the hospital, I suddenly understood why our imprisonment on Gloucester Street had been so difficult for her. It wasn’t the lack of light or the constant hunger or the cold. It wasn’t the way we were kept apart, in different cells, or even the death sentence that hung over us. It was the fact that she had forfeited control. The idea that she might be treated just like everybody else represented an assault on her belief that she should be free to create and define herself, with no interference and no limitations. It unmade what she had worked so hard to make—the constantly shifting construct that was herself.

  For the next five days I hardly left her side. There were moments when she was awake and lucid, and I did my best to think of subjects that might entertain her. I told her that Édouard de Max had kissed me once. She wanted to know when.

  “The night I saw him in the Georges Rivollet play,” I said. “You weren’t feeling well. I went by myself.”

  “You came home very late.”

  “You remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was drawing him,” I said.

  “Did you make love?”

  “No. But he tried to force himself on me.” I paused. “He said I had nobility.”

  “Cheeky sod.”

  I smiled.

  “Anything else,” she whispered, “that you would like to confess?”

  My smile lasted a few seconds longer, then I began to cry. Claude didn’t notice. She had fallen asleep again.

  Once, in the middle of the night, I left the room to stretch my legs. The hospital corridor reached away into the distance, deserted and immaculate, its floor glossy as a sheet of glass. At the far end, a nurse in a white hat sat in the light of a bare bulb.

  When I returned, Claude’s breathing was fast and shallow, and her head had lifted off the pillow.

  “It’s all right, my love,” I said. “I’m here.”

  Her hand lay in mine, brittle and weightless as the skeleton of a bird’s wing. Time became an element. Something we were floating in.

  Sixty years.

  It was a wonder she had lasted as long as she had. I remembered my father telling me about his favorite dish, glass eels. Born five thousand miles away, in the Sargasso Sea, they swam north through the Atlantic, only to be caught by French fishermen, in the waters of the Loire. He was
n’t sure if they were transparent when they set out on their journey, or if they shed color as they went. It was hard to believe that such a delicate creature could travel so far. It was a kind of miracle.

  There was a moment when Claude’s eyes opened wide, astounded.

  “Natural causes,” she whispered.

  A dry husk of a sound came from the back of her throat. Her last laugh. The irony of the manner of her death had not escaped her.

  Just before dawn, on the morning of December 8, she began to murmur. Her voice was so faint that I couldn’t make out any of the words. I leaned close to her. A sweet dense smell, like compost, or rotting hay.

  Her lips moved again. “Lady Noggs…”

  In the early twenties she had called me Lady Noggs, one of the many nicknames she had given me over the years. Lady Noggs was a silent film we watched when we first moved to Paris. At the time, we had been convinced that Joan Morgan, the actress who played the heroine, was homosexual. Morgan had never admitted it, of course. But she had never married either.

  While a nurse gave Claude a bed bath I turned my eyes to the window. A rooftop, a gull. A pill-white sky.

  The day was ordinary. Cruel.

  There are people who claim you can see souls leave the bodies of the dead. They talk about a field of energy that hovers in the air above a corpse. They say it has a shape, a color. I don’t know about any of that. When Claude stopped breathing, not long after the bath, I felt something go—but not from her, from me. Can the love somebody has for you be tangible like that, there one moment, gone the next? Does it take up space inside you? And when it evaporates, does it leave a gap where it once was?

  Against the crisp whiteness of the pillow Claude had a jaundiced look, but the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth had been smoothed away. She seemed younger, less troubled. I placed a hand on her forehead. It was cool and damp, not like skin at all.

  Death.

  A loss of control, an end to flexibility and change. The assumption of a final form.

  Everything that she did not believe in.

  It was a February afternoon, and I was sitting in the garden wrapped in a blanket, the sea rustling beyond the wall, the air a smoky blue that felt autumnal. The rector had come by earlier. He regretted not having visited Claude in hospital, he told me. He hadn’t known she was so ill. As I told you the first time we met, I said, we’re private people. That may be, he countered, but you’re still my flock. He paused. Perhaps I could have offered her some comfort. If you had appeared at the hospital, I said, she would probably have asked you to leave. I imagined Claude aiming a trembling forefinger at the door. Get out. The rector adjusted the glasses on his nose. And you? he said. Are you in need of any comfort? I think it’s too late for that, I said. He nodded slowly. After a long silence, he began to recite a poem. Our two souls therefore, which are one / Though I must go, endure not yet / A breach, but an expansion / Like gold to aery thinness beat. The English was difficult for me to understand, and I asked him to repeat the lines. When he had finished a second time, I thanked him. That was beautiful, I said. John Donne, he said. Then he gave me his blessing and left.

  A gust of wind turned the pages of my newspaper, and I glanced up. Claude’s face lifted through the leaves of a nearby rhododendron bush like wreckage surfacing. Her eyes were closed, then open. She was smiling. Something cold crawled up my spine, into my hair. I couldn’t speak. In her arms were the kinds of flowers she used to arrange throughout the house, sometimes in such abundance that it began to feel like a mausoleum—dahlias with white fringes to their deep pink petals, blood-black tulips, and dwarf gladioli, their scarlet shameless against the darkness of the evergreens. A question rose into my mind and floated there. Why didn’t you come before? After all, the cemetery where she was buried was only a short walk away.

  She was dressed in the raincoat and headscarf she had worn on the day I photographed her with the German eagle between her teeth. This wrong-footed me. In death, I had imagined she would be flamboyant, as she had been in life, but she appeared to have stopped caring—or perhaps it was a form of tact. She had been trying not to startle me. She had wanted to be recognizable for once…I still couldn’t think of anything to say. Nor, it seemed, could she. Her smile was benign and wistful, in keeping with the mystery of the world beyond the grave, and it made me feel like a novice. Like someone who embarks on a journey without the proper knowledge or equipment. She had often made me feel like that. It was the fineness of her mind. Not her erudition, though that had a similar effect. The mind itself. The instrument. She thought like no one else.

  Finally, I spoke. I’m not sure what I said. Something banal, no doubt. Something ridiculous. She turned her face away and sighed and sank back into the bush. She left no trace of herself in the foliage, not even a ripple to suggest that she had passed that way. Had I disappointed her? If I had kept silent, would she have stayed? I put my paper down, and the loneliness that gaped in front of me, like the entrance to a dark, damp cave, was worse than anything I had experienced since the day she died.

  Three weeks later, she came to me again. This time she was naked. She was young too, much younger than before. I almost didn’t dare to look. I was in an outbuilding we had always called the garage, though we had never owned a car. Thinking I might start drawing again, thinking it might fill my time, I had removed everything except a wooden chair and a door that rested on a pair of trestles. She sat sideways-on to me, on the dirt floor, her thighs pulled up against her chest, her hands clasping her ankles. The sun angled down from a high window, a thick beam of light that reached across her body, making her look insubstantial, only half there. Such a delicate thing, in any case, with hardly any flesh on her, and me in my ugly glasses and my sweater with the holes in the elbows, old enough to be her grandmother.

  She behaved as she used to behave when I was photographing her. There was no communication—or rather, the communication was unspoken, based on familiarity and intuition. She knew I would know what to do. Every few minutes she would alter her position, like a model in a life drawing class, revealing nothing but a quarter of her face, or sometimes half, the loose curve of her spine, and the tighter curves of calf, thigh, shoulder, ear, but no disclosure of her breasts or sex, and everything in the garage motionless except for the dust whirling in silent fury inside the shaft of light, and her ribs, which rose and fell, a shell appearing and disappearing beneath her skin as the air went in and out of her, the breathing of the dead…

  Hairs rose all along my arms.

  Afterwards, I wondered what would have happened if I had fetched the camera and taken a picture. Would it have showed rough walls, a floor of beaten earth, the sunlight reaching diagonally across the frame? Or would I have captured, magically, the suggestion of a figure, the subtle but electric outline of a girl—the last faint trace of a great love?

  I had thought that if I stayed on in La Ferme sans Nom I would find some measure of consolation, and that memories of the time Claude and I had spent there would sustain me, but my life felt hollow, desolate. My heart wasn’t broken so much as missing. I had nothing left with which to feel. We had been together for more than forty years. If I was in a dark mood, she would lead me out of it. If I gave off light, she basked in it. Reflected it. In her absence, though, everything I did exploded outwards, hurtling away from me, vanishing into a kind of infinity. Nothing came back. I felt frictionless, too thinly spread.

  I contacted an estate agent in St. Helier and instructed him to put La Ferme sans Nom on the market, then I began to go through the For Sale advertisements in the Evening Post. I didn’t have much money at my disposal. After the war, Claude and I had remortgaged the house, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to survive. Luckily, though, my needs were modest. I had been looking for several weeks when I found something on the promenade in Beaumont. A solid, unshowy house with pale-yellow walls, Carola stood at the far end of a row
of seaside villas, on a narrow strip of land between the coast road and the beach. Though the front door opened on to the road, the real front was at the rear, where the windows took in the whole wide sweep of St. Aubin’s Bay, with nothing in the way except a low wall and two stunted cordylines. It felt to me as if the house had turned its back on the land; all it had time for was the water and the sky. Inside, it was just as contrary, since the two bedrooms and the bathroom were on the ground floor, off the hall. If you wanted the kitchen or the lounge, you had to climb the stairs. My desk was in the lounge, in front of a window that overlooked the road. Not long after moving in, I decided to paint the glass. I chose a cool pale green—like ferns. The light passed through it, but people in the houses opposite could no longer see in. It gave me the privacy I had become accustomed to, the privacy I couldn’t live without. At the other end of the lounge was a picture window with a view over the bay. A balcony ran along the back of the house, and a wrought-iron staircase curved down into an unassuming rectangle of garden. Lucille, who had agreed to carry on cleaning for me, even though her journey would be much longer, called it “an upside-down house.” Claude wouldn’t have understood my choice—aesthetically, Carola had little to recommend it—but she wasn’t the one who had lived on, alone.

  Six months went by.

  On a warm evening, as I was changing my bed, the sheet billowing out over the mattress, a movement beyond the open window caught my eye. The sheet dropped through the air to reveal Claude posing on the garden wall. Facing east, she was dressed in a piece of gauzy fabric she had secured with a thin leather belt. On her head was the flying helmet. It was the outfit she had worn once before, in the graveyard next to our old house, at dawn.

  “What are you doing, you fool?” I murmured. “People will see you.”