by Rose Tremain
Claudette showed him into her beautiful rooms, which did feel cold, as if no one had been living in them for a long time.
‘You see?’ she said. ‘I can’t live up here like this, can I, Stefan?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t.’
She took him to the boiler and he knelt down in front of it and opened its casing. He saw immediately that the pilot light was out and he thought that all he would need to do was relight it. But each time he tried to relight it, it extinguished itself and he had to think for a moment to remember the likely reason for this. Then he turned to Claudette, who was crouching beside him. He put his fist in front of his mouth, so that she wouldn’t smell the drink on his breath.
‘It’s the over-ride,’ he said. ‘This black thing here. It’s a safety device. It cuts off the gas if, for any reason, the pilot light goes out. Normally, it can be reset in order to relight the appliance.’
‘Then reset it, Stefan.’
‘I’ve tried, Madame Albi. It won’t reset.’
‘Well,’ said Claudette, ‘that’s ridiculous. The gas people already fitted a new one of those black things, but this new one must be faulty too. So what am I to do?’
Stefan turned back to the boiler. He ran another test on the over-ride and found, once again, that its trigger was jumping, too soon, allowing no gas at all to be fed to the pilot. He said: ‘I’m sorry, Madame Albi. The gas company will have to come back. I can’t adjust the over-ride. They’ll have to put in another new one for you.’
Claudette stood up. She said she would make coffee in her espresso machine for both of them. Then she said: ‘Stefan, I’m tired of being cold. While I make the espresso, disconnect the stupid over-ride and get the boiler going.’
Stefan was about to say that he couldn’t do this, but then he looked at Claudette, shivering and pale, and decided to stay silent.
He was in the apartment with Claudette Albi for about half an hour. When the radiators began to heat up, he checked them for air locks and leaks. In the music room, he saw the shutters were closed and the grand piano covered with dust sheets.
He drank the strong coffee and Claudette Albi thanked him and pressed into his hand a crumpled twenty-euro note, and then he left.
As he went down the stairs, he felt strangely happy, just as if he’d worked some miracle. And, in a small way, he had. What had been missing in those rooms was warmth and this was what his professional expertise had enabled him to supply. He thought, from now on, from this moment, perhaps Claudette Albi will start to play the piano again.
But Claudette Albi knew she would never play the piano again. She knew that a vast, unending silence had settled over her life.
She waited until nightfall. Then, she switched off the boiler and opened the glass casing that covered the gas burner. She extinguished the pilot light.
She laid her head on a cushion as near as she could get to the burner with its pinprick escape holes for the sweet and sickly gas, and moved the boiler switch to ON. Dying, she thought, is identical to living: it consists only in breathing.
Madame Moutier wanted to keep the news of Claudette Albi’s death from Stefan. But it couldn’t be kept from anyone. For forty-eight hours the whole building was under siege from the police and the press. Nobody thought to question the Moutiers about the defective state of Madame Albi’s boiler.
Months passed. Madame Moutier knew how Stefan had admired and revered the Albis, and she was afraid this latest catastrophe would pitch him even further down into his spiral of drink and depression.
But this didn’t happen. In fact, by the time the warm weather came again, Stefan Moutier seemed, at last, to be coming out of his nightmare.
It was difficult to understand exactly why. He himself wasn’t absolutely certain. But he knew that losing Claudette Albi had something to do with it.
It was as if, once both the Albis were gone and he knew that no more Beethoven or Debussy would ever come out of that apartment, Stefan had over-ridden his distant past and, with it, the more recent past of his own tragedy. He had left them both behind and was now able to turn his face towards the future. In this future, he told himself, there would one day arrive a different kind of music.
The Ebony Hand
In those days, there was a madhouse in our village.
Its name was Waterford Asylum, but we knew it as ‘the Bin’.
It appeared to have no policy of selection or rejection. If you felt your own individual craziness coming on, you could present yourself at the door of the Bin and this door would open for you and the kindly staff would take you in, and you would be sheltered from the cruel world. This was the 1950s. A lot of people were suffering from post-war sadness. In Norfolk, it seemed to be a sadness too complete to be assuaged by the arrival of rock’n’roll.
Soon after my sister, Aviva, died of influenza in 1951, my brother-in-law, Victor, turned up at the Bin with his shoes in a sack and a broken Doris Day record. He was one of many voluntary loonies, driven mad by grief. His suitability as a resident of Waterford Asylum was measured by his intermittent belief that this record, which had snapped in half, like burned, brittle caramel crust, could be mended.
Victor was given a small room with orange curtains and a view of some water-meadows where an old grey-white bull foraged for grass among kingcups and reeds. Victor said the bull and he were ‘as one’ in their abandonment and loneliness. He said Aviva had held his mind together by cradling his head between her breasts. He announced that the minds of every living being on the earth were held together by a single mortal and precarious thing.
I had a lot of sympathy for Victor, but I also thought him selfish – selfish and irresponsible. Because he abandoned his daughter, my niece, Nicolina, without a backward glance. It was as though he simply forgot about her – forgot that she existed. Nicolina walked home from school that day and did her homework, and ate a slice of bread and jam and waited for her father to turn up. There was no note on the table, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Nicolina fed the chickens and did the ironing, and by that time it was dark. There was no telephone in that house. Nicolina was thirteen. She’d lost her mother less than a year back. Now, she sat in that Norfolk kitchen, watching the clock tick and listening to the owls outside in the black night. She told me that she sat there wishing she were five years old once more, eating salad cream sandwiches on her mother’s lap. Then she found a torch and put on her coat, and walked the two miles to my house. ‘Auntie Merc,’ she said, ‘my dad’s gone missing.’
It was a cold November. We knelt by the gas fire, wondering what to do. We made ourselves sweet drinks out of melted Mars bars and milk. We wished we had a telephone or a car. We hoped that when morning came, normal life might be resumed. But some things are never resumed, not as they have been before, and my life was one of these things.
Nicolina was too young to live on her own in an empty house where her beautiful mother had once practised flamenco dancing and baked tuppenny silver charms into Christmas puddings, where her father had once come home from the war with gifts of nylon stockings and windup toys. So she stayed with me in the little brick bungalow where I’d lived alone for more years than I bothered to count. And I, who had no children of my own, or a husband, or anybody at all, tried to become a mother to Nicolina. I was forty-one years old. I had no idea how to be a mother, but I thought, well, in five or six years’ time, Nicolina will find a husband and then I can hand her over to him. All I need to do is make sure this husband is a good one. I thought I’d begin looking for him right away. And until then, I’d wash her hair on Friday evenings and save up for a radiogram. I’d tell her stories about Aviva and me when we were girls. I’d show her the picture of our Spanish grandfather who owned a bakery in Salamanca. I would try to love her.
She always called me Auntie Merc. Aviva and I had both been given Spanish names and mine was Mercedes. She – who had died at thirty-six – had been christened after life itself and I – who was unable
to drive – had been christened after a car. Some of the people in our village still laughed out loud when they said my name.
Despite this, I was very fond of the village and never wanted to leave it. I couldn’t imagine my life as a liveable thing anywhere outside it. I had a part-time job in a haberdasher’s shop called Cunningham’s. I enjoyed measuring out elastic and changing the glove display on an ebony hand which stood on the counter top. When Victor said what he said about our minds being held together by peculiar things, I thought to myself that the peculiar thing, in my personal case, was this wooden hand. It was well made and heavy and smooth. I polished it with Min cream one a week. I enjoyed the way it never aged or altered. And I began to think that this hand was like the kind of man I had to find for Nicolina: somebody who would not change or die.
On Saturdays, Nicolina and I would walk down to the Bin to visit Victor. We always took exactly the same route, through the village and out the other side on the road to Mincington, then made a short cut along a green lane than ran down to the water-meadows through orchards and fields.
There was one cottage on this lane, where a young man, Paul Swinton, lived with his mother, and it was often the case that when Nicolina and I came along, on our Saturday morning visits to Victor, Paul Swinton would be out working in the cabbage fields which bordered the lane. He would stop work and raise his cap to us and we would both say ‘hello, Paul’ and walk on. But one Saturday, after we’d walked on, I looked back and saw him staring at Nicolina. He was leaning on a hoe and gazing at her, at her pale hair tied in a ribbon and at her shoulders, narrow and thin, beneath her old green coat. And what I saw in this gaze was a look of pure longing and infatuation. And it was then that I thought that perhaps I had found him – before I’d officially begun my search – the good husband for Nicolina, whose feelings for her would stand the test of time.
I said nothing to my niece. On we went, down the hill to the meadows where the bull trudged round and round, then up the tarmac path to the gates of Waterford Asylum, alias the Bin. We always took some gift to Victor, a jar of honey or a bag of apples. It was as if we couldn’t let ourselves forget that Victor had come back from the war with his kitbag loaded up with presents cadged from the Americans. And I remember that on the day when I looked back to see Paul Swinton staring at Nicolina, we were carrying a basket of eggs.
When we gave the eggs to Victor, he took them all out of the basket, one by one, and arranged them on the windowsill in the sunshine, beside the orange curtains. ‘They’ll hatch out now,’ he announced.
‘Don’t be a nerd, Victor,’ I said. ‘They’re for eating, not rearing.’
He looked puzzled. His eyes darted back and forth from the eggs to Nicolina and me, sitting side by side on the bed, which was the only place to sit in Victor’s tiny room. I looked at Nicolina, who would soon be fourteen and who was managing her life with fortitude. ‘The eggs will go bad if you leave them in the sun, Dad,’ she said quietly.
‘No, no,’ said Victor, ‘your mother used to hatch eggs. In the airing cupboard. Turn them twice a day. She was full of wonders.’
Visits to Victor seldom went marvellously well. Sometimes, he seemed lost in a dream of an imaginary past. On the day of the eggs, he told us that he and Aviva had taken a cruise on the Queen Mary and that they had won the onboard curling championship and afterwards charvered in a lifeboat.
‘What’s “charvered”?’ asked Nicolina.
‘Dear-oh-dear,’ said Victor, looking at his daughter with anguish. ‘I see your mind is already turning to smut.’
‘Shut up, Victor!’ I said. ‘If you can’t control what you say, then don’t talk.’
We sat in silence for a while. Nicolina took out a handkerchief from her pocket and wound it round and round her finger, like a bandage. Victor reached out suddenly and snatched the handkerchief from her hand. ‘That belongs to your mother!’ he bellowed.
‘No . . .’ said Nicolina.
‘I will not put up with people appropriating her things!’
‘Calm down, Victor,’ I said, ‘or we’ll have to leave.’
‘Leave,’ he said, folding the handkerchief very tenderly on his knee. ‘Get the fuck out of my nest.’
When we got back to my house, Nicolina sat at the kitchen table, playing with two cardboard cut-out dolls she’d had since she was nine. These dolls had a selection of cut-out clothes that could be attached to their shoulders with paper tabs: polka-dot sundresses, white peignoirs, check dungarees, purple ball gowns. Nicolina referred to these dolls as her ‘Ladies’. Now, taking the dungarees off the Ladies, leaving them in their pink underwear, she said: ‘I wish I was a Lady. Then I wouldn’t have to visit my father any more.’
I didn’t reply directly to this. But I crossed over to the table and picked up a ball gown and a paper tiara. ‘These are lovely,’ I said.
After her fourteenth birthday, I began to notice a change in Nicolina. She was gradually becoming beautiful.
When she came into Cunningham’s, the old Cunningham sisters stared at her, like they sometimes stared at advertisements for millinery they couldn’t afford. And now, every single Saturday, even when it rained, Paul Swinton waited for us, pretending to hoe his cabbages, and we would stand and have long conversations with him about the clouds or the harvest or the ugly new houses they were building along the Mincington road. As we chatted, I would watch his brown eyes wander over Nicolina’s body and watch his hands, restless and fidgety, longing to touch her.
Nicolina and I never spoke about Paul Swinton. Though I knew he would one day become her kind and immovable husband, and believed I saw, in the way she stood so still and contained in front of him, that she knew this too, it seemed too soon to mention the subject. And I didn’t want her to think I was counting the years until she left my bungalow, for this was not the case. My efforts to love Nicolina were succeeding fairly well. I began making her favourite fruit crumbles with tender care. When she was late home from school, I would start to feel a weight in my heart.
One Saturday in May, Nicolina refused, for the first time ever, to come with me to visit Victor. She told me she had revision to do for her exams. When I began to protest that her father would be upset not to see her, she put her arms round me and kissed my cheek, and I smelled the apple-sweetness of her newly washed hair. ‘Auntie Merc,’ she said, ‘be a sport.’
I left her working at the kitchen table and went on my way to Waterford and when Paul Swinton saw that I was alone, he stood and stared at the lane behind me, hoping Nicolina would materialise like Venus from the waves of cow parsley.
I had no present for Victor that day and when I told this to Paul he took a knife out of his belt and cut a blue-green cabbage head and said: ‘Take this and say it’s from me and tell Victor that one day I’m going to marry Nicolina.’
A silence fell upon the field after these solemn words were spoken. I watched a white butterfly make a short, shivery flight from one cabbage to the next. I noticed that the sky was a clean and marvellous blue. Paul cradled the cabbage head in his hands. He stroked the veins of the outer leaves. ‘Watching her grow and bloom,’ he said, ‘is the most fantastic thing that’s ever happened to me.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘I’ve promised myself I won’t invite her out or do anything to push myself forward until the time seems right.’
‘I’m sure that’s wise.’
‘But I’m finding it difficult,’ he added. ‘How much longer do you think I have to wait?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps until she’s sweet sixteen?’
Paul nodded. I could imagine him counting the weeks and months, cold and heat, dark days and fair. ‘I can wait,’ he said, ‘as long as, in the end, she’s mine.’
With Nicolina’s beauty came other things. She put her Ladies away in a box that was tied with string and never opened. She badgered me to buy the radiogram I still couldn’t afford. I found one second-hand. Its casing was made of walnut
and it was called ‘The Chelsea’. And after that, Nicolina spent all her pocket money on Paul Anka records.
A boy called Gregory Dillon came round one teatime and Gregory and Nicolina danced in my front room to the song ‘Diana’. They played the same record seventeen times. When they came out of the room, they looked soggy and wild, as though they’d been in a jungle.
‘I think you’d better go home, Gregory,’ I said. And he went out of the door without a murmur. It was as though dancing with Nicolina had taken away his powers of speech.
He came back a few days later, smelling of spice. His black hair was combed into a quiff, like Cliff Richard’s, and his legs looked long and thin in black drainpipe trousers. He brought the record ‘Singing the Blues’ by Tommy Steele, but I told them to leave the door to the front room open while they danced to it. I sat in the kitchen, chopping rhubarb.
I’ve never felt more like singing the blues
Cos I never thought that I’d ever lose
Your love, dear. . .
Half my mind was on Nicolina and Gregory and the other half was on the changes occurring at Cunningham’s, changes which might put my job in jeopardy. The two Miss Cunninghams were retiring and there was talk of the premises being sold to a fish-and-chip bar. That day, I’d gone to see Amy Cunningham and said to her: ‘If the shop closes, please may I keep the ebony hand?’
‘What ebony hand, Mercedes?’
‘The hand for the glove display.’
‘Oh, that. Well, I suppose so. Although, if it really is ebony, then it might be valuable. It might have to be sold.’
‘In that case, I’ll buy it.’
‘What with? You spend every penny you earn on that girl.’