by Rose Tremain
“And after Daddy died?”
“After? Nothing important. Nothing that meant anything. Just company sometimes. Another person in the bed. And now look. No one. Leni alone. But I bought you a present for the fiftieth, darling. I got Gary to buy it. If he’s awake we’ll ask him to bring it in, shall we? You go and see.”
Miriam releases Leni’s hands, pats her pillows just as Nurse Bryony used to do. Her day has a simple routine to it now, which begins and ends with the making of hot drinks. In the mornings she often thinks of Larry on the terrace in Pomerac, at night she thinks of the stars above it. Neither thought carries with it any strong emotion. They’re just images her mind discovers.
She shuts Leni’s door, walks along the passage past the small room she occupied as a child and which, since arriving here, seems to beckon her back, past the guest room she currently occupies, to the end room which, for eight years now, has been Gary’s. It’s Saturday. Sometimes Gary sleeps late. Miriam waits at the door and listens. She hears music playing softly. Ella Fitzgerald. Gary in love tightens his heartstrings on the strangulating rhymes of Cole Porter: If a Harris pat, means a Paris hat, okay! But I’m always true to you darling in my fashion . . .
“Gary . . .”
“Yes. Is Mother awake?”
“Yes. Can I come in?”
“Yes.”
Gary’s room, decorated now in his own taste and not Leni’s, smells of polish and stationery, like an office. He airs it a lot, even in winter. He puts roses on his mahogany desk. His bed is kept tidy under a Peruvian patchwork quilt. The walls are pale lilac with framed posters announcing poetry readings at which the name Gary Murphy appears small besides large-lettered ones, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Peter Porter, George Macbeth. Gary is a schoolteacher full-time and a poet on Wednesdays. The boys he teaches play football on Wednesday afternoons. The days between Wednesdays often seem to go very slowly for Gary. He stores words up till he’s bursting. Even at weekends he doesn’t release them. At weekends, he eats, plays music, has love affairs. His latest volume of poems is called Wednesday Man.
Gary in his dressing gown (he sleeps naked, never wearing pyjamas) is lying on his made bed sipping Marmite. He makes the Marmite in a fine bone teacup. This and a plain biscuit are his daily breakfast. He’s a slim and pale man with thick, cavorting hair. He has rather long, shiny fingernails. He’s thirty-five and an orphan. As long as he can remember, which is back to when he was six and shared a Scoutcub tent with a blond boy called Arthur Wellington, he’s been a homosexual. He has never ever touched a woman. The only woman he has ever loved is Leni. He called Leni “Mother” as a joke. Now, without any effort of will, he thinks of her as his mother and her slow dying is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. Of Miriam, Leni’s real child, he’s a little jealous. Some evenings he slips in to Leni’s room with a mug of cocoa after Miriam’s in bed. When Leni dies, Gary thinks he may die too. It will have to depend on how he’s feeling that week. The worst eventuality he can imagine is that she dies on a Wednesday morning.
“Leni wanted to know, could you bring the birthday present into her room?”
Gary switches off Ella Fitzgerald and turns with an expansive gesture to Miriam. “Oh the birthday! What does one say? Commiserations?”
“Yes. I expect so.”
“I told Leni we should have a cake, so I’m going to make one. Butterscotch?”
“Lovely.”
“We’ll have a tea party, shall we? Downstairs?”
“Well, it’s years since there was a birthday tea . . .”
“So we will. I love treats. We need them more as we grow old, not less. I often think, God, why doesn’t someone take me to Peter Pan?”
Miriam smiles. It’s the smile of her father, David Ackerman, which Gary cannot recognise and he thinks only, how strange there’s so little of Leni’s beauty in her. Except the hair. Gary admires Miriam chiefly for her hair. He takes a last sip of his Marmite, lays the little cup down on its saucer. From the bottom drawer of his tidy desk he takes out two parcels, both carefully wrapped.
“I love presents,” says Gary, gently touching them. “Never mind if there’s nothing inside.”
They walk together along the corridor to Leni’s room. Gary goes quickly to the bed and places a tender kiss on Leni’s forehead.
“How are we, Mother?”
“All right, Gary dear. Still alive for Miriam’s birthday. Have you got the present?”
“Of course. Presents.” And he places them gently not into Miriam’s but into Leni’s hands.
“Which one is from me, Gary?”
“Whichever you like. I don’t mind a bit giving her the tiara and you can give the Woolies digital.”
Leni smiles a still brilliant smile. Her intimacy with Gary, their unshakeable closeness, is primarily expressed in the humour they share. Miriam is for the moment the onlooker, the outsider. Leni lifts the gifts, feeling their shape and weight. She selects one and holds it out for Miriam to take. There is no card. Miriam dislikes the solemnity in the opening of presents: people tearing off sellotape with grimly-set mouths: the fear. She unwraps the present quickly – far too quickly for Gary’s sense of occasion – and finds an oblong jeweller’s box in her hands. She feels checked, off-balance. She hopes the jeweller’s box hides something workaday and insubstantial. She eases up the lid. Lying on a velvet pad is a silver and turquoise necklace. Aware of her eager audience, she lifts the necklace and stares at it. It’s heavy. She wonders if it comes from South or Central America. She imagines it circling the olive neck of a Mexican dancer. She looks at her mother, waiting in the pillows with her mouth gaping.
“Well?”
Why? Miriam wants to ask. Why jewellery? You know I never wear finery.
“It’s very beautiful, Leni darling. Thank you.”
“Oh put it on,” says Gary.
“You don’t like it, do you?” Leni’s smile has gone.
“Of course I like it. It’s the most . . . lovely thing I’ve had.”
“Of course she loves it,” says Gary, patting Leni’s arm.
“Yes. I love it,” says Miriam.
“Gary chose it,” Leni says, hurt.
“Thank you, Gary,” says Miriam.
“No. Leni’s the one. She said whatever we do, we musn’t give Miriam anything dull.”
“No. And it isn’t dull. My word, not.”
“Sky,” says Leni.
“Sky?” asks Miriam.
“I told Gary, I think we should find something the colour of the sky for Miriam because the skies were always the bits you loved doing, in the watercolours. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to wear it.”
“I do like it. I’ll put it on now.”
Miriam puts the cold metal round her neck. She fumbles with the clasp. Gary and Leni watch her. The necklace is on. She knows that this piece of jewellery the colour of a pool must stay hidden from Larry for ever. When Leni dies, she will give it to Thomas’s Australian girlfriend, Perdita.
“There.”
Miriam crosses to her mother. Gary, standing sentinel at the bedhead, makes way for the women to exchange a relieved embrace. The little ceremony is over except for the giving of Gary’s present which, in the complicated logic of these three people’s affection for each other, scarcely counts. Miriam opens this eagerly and is pleased to find a slim volume of poetry: Wednesday Man by Gary Murphy. Inside it is inscribed, in pencil: To Miriam Ackerman Kendal. After fifty years.
At teatime, with Leni downstairs on the sofa, Gary’s butter-scotch cake moist in her mouth and a pale sun breaking through the rainclouds, visitors arrive. Dr. Oswald Carlton-Williams, once a student, then a colleague of David Ackerman’s, is now a bookshop-owner and known to all who know him as “Dr. O.”. He is Miriam’s age, or a little older. He prefers the small kingdom of his bookshop to the big echoey palaces of the University. He’s a broad, untidy man. Clothes rumple and sag on him. He’s shortsighted and an excellent draughtsman. He spends much of his
free time in the Bodleian Library making painstaking copies of medieval borders from bibles moralisées, of illuminations from Slavonic gospels, and chiefly for this love of his of early manuscripts is he loved by his assistant in the bookshop and his companion of this teatime, Miss Bernice Atwood. Bernice Atwood is the kind of heavily shod, plain girl who fills Leni with boredom. She trudges through life, Leni thinks, when life should be embraced like a lover. Leni longs to teach her dancing, swimming, some grace. She doesn’t know how Dr. O. puts up with Bernice, always at his side, year after year. No doubt they have some kind of silent love affair. Perhaps he seduces her with his Carthusian Breviaries, his Flemish Apocalypses? Decorates her pale plump body with fools and windmills and weaponry and saints? He’s a loyal man. So loyal to the memory of David, he comes weekly to visit her. Perhaps loyalty rides in his blood like ancient writing: MS. Douce, MS. Ashmole, MS. Bodley. MS. Gough Liturg. – Ms. Atwood. This must be the explanation.
Dr. O. remembers Miriam. He remembers being shown her paintings and admiring what he recognised as careful work. Without knowing Miriam at all, except through her watercolours of Oxford, he once had a dream he’d marry her and come to live with the Ackerman family in the big house in Rothersmere Road, within distant sight of the University Cricket Club pavilion. When he found out she was married to an employee of a Finance Company (in the long days before Aquazure, when Larry worked for the Morgan Beatific Trust) he felt cheated and disappointed. The Ackermans had no other daughter. His chance of binding his lonely life to their peopled one was gone for ever. He had never thought about Miriam as Miriam, only as part of that family in that house. He couldn’t, at the time of that dream of his, have told you whether Miriam’s eyes were grey or green, whether her laughter was loud like Leni’s or gentle like David’s, or indeed whether she ever laughed at all.
Since then, Dr. O. has always suspected his judgement where women are concerned and he has never married. He doesn’t regret this. Bernice adores him. When he touches Bernice, she pants like a lion. He suspects most women are like her in bed, panting and silent with big white thighs like marble, but he’s not particularly curious. Leni he’s admired for years. One of his colleagues, no older than himself, once said to him in a choking voice: “Don’t sleep with Leni Ackerman. If you do, you’ll never love any other woman.” And after this, until she began to get old, he often tried to imagine what it could be like to tear off Leni’s clothes and press himself into her. He knew he would never find out. He preferred to keep her as a friend and spend large clutches of time in her house, talking, drinking vodka, reading, even dancing, which he did so badly and she so erotically, he found it fiercely embarrassing. “Come on!” she’d shout, twirling scarves, “Be the music! Be it!” He’d try to obey. He knew no other house in Oxford where its occupants would suddenly dance and he felt privileged to be there, as if he were spending an evening with the Sitwells. He had never danced with Miriam. Miriam was never there in the dancing days. Or perhaps she hid. Hid from her Mother’s pantomime. For a pantomime it was really: costumes, shrieking, music, jokes. It died with David. After that, Leni seemed to get a little smaller, fade a little. She still had lovers but took them, she told him, without relish. It seems to Dr. O. that her life since the death of David has been like a long convalescence. There was the death and the grief, then this other time in which she sat still and age covered her like a shawl to keep her warm. Now, without knowing it as Miriam knows it, he senses she’s dying. He visited her in hospital and didn’t think then she would come back to Rothersmere Road. But she did and a nurse came. Gary fussed over her – the adoring son she’d never had. And now, on her birthday, eating butterscotch cake, Miriam is here. Dr. O. finds he’s terribly pleased to see her. He wishes in a way that Bernice hadn’t come with him on this visit. Without her there, he would again feel like one of the Ackerman family.
“You remember Oz, Miriam?” (Leni is the only one of Dr. O. ’s friends who doesn’t call him Dr. O. She calls him Oz or sometimes The Wizard.)
“Yes, of course.”
Dr. O. remembers the auburn hair. In this one feature only was Miriam more striking than her mother. “Yes, yes,” says Dr. O. “We met very often. But some years ago now.”
“Leni tells me you have a shop.”
“Yes, yes. Nothing as departmental as Blackwell’s. Rather small in fact. But yes, yes, a bookshop.”
Bernice Atwood waits, smiling, for Dr. O.’s nervousness to subside and for someone to introduce her to Miriam. Nobody does this, but Gary gets up and offers her simultaneously his chair and a slice of butterscotch cake. She takes the cake and sits. The wide armchair, which her bottom fills, is only a few inches away from Leni’s tiny, thin feet on the sofa. Bernice knows little about Leni Ackerman and therefore doesn’t know that Leni dislikes and pities her. She decides that Leni is simply one of the “old type” of dons’ wives, eccentric, wealthy enough to run a big house, a mother figure for the male undergraduates. She’s glad there aren’t many like her. Their dining rooms were like power houses. They had unfair influence. They corrupted the studious mind. And for all their power, they reinforced male supremacy in a closed and competitive world. They are anachronisms. Bernice bites into her cake. No one tells her why there are five candles on the plate.
“I like Oz,” Leni says later to Miriam. Gary is out with a black actor called Gabriel, currently rehearsing Othello at the Oxford Playhouse. This is the first evening Leni and Miriam have spent alone together. Leni decides she feels strong enough to sit in the kitchen in a cane chair while Miriam makes soup. “Do you like him, Miriam?”
“Yes. I remember him from years ago.”
“I always thought you’d marry somebody like that. With a good mind.”
Miriam chops onions, chops parsnips and doesn’t answer.
“Oz would have been very right for you. He’s an artist in his way. You would have got along well.”
Miriam stirs the chopped vegetables in a heavy pan. She understands both the rightness and the cruelty of what Leni is saying. Miriam feels glad she has no daughter to terrorise with love.
“There’s so much, Leni, you’ve wanted to change in my life. So much you’ve wanted to be different. I’m sorry you didn’t always get your way.”
Leni shifts her small weight in the wicker chair, ignoring this statement with a sniff.
“I think Oz was in love with you years ago. I think that’s why he didn’t marry.”
“No, Leni,” Miriam says gently. “He was in love with you.”
Leni smiles, stares at Miriam in surprise. It’s the smile of the astounded teacher; against expectations the pupil has the right answer. “A” will be awarded. A housepoint.
“That was just frivolity,” says Leni. “I used to teach him to dance, to move his body. He liked this of course. Unless you get them on their feet and dancing, men like Oz spend all their lives sitting down. But he’ll never dance again. That Atwood’s like an albatross on him.”
“I should think,” ventures Miriam, “that Dr. O. is very content – he seems content – without any dancing.”
“But no one gets him laughing. He used to laugh. Before the bookshop. Before Atwood.”
“Where is the shop?”
“Oh, tucked away. Some little alley round the back of Wadham. No one buys anything.”
“Of course they do, Leni, or the shop wouldn’t still exist.”
“It scarcely does. When I was last in there no one else came in for half an hour. Not one customer. I think Atwood keeps them away. So she can have Oz to herself.”
“I’ll go to the shop on Monday. I want to buy some novels to take home.”
“You’re not going home, Miriam. I couldn’t manage.”
“Not now. When you’re well.”
“I suppose I could be dying. I’m quite old enough. Then you can bury me and go.”
Miriam won’t give Leni the satisfaction of a reply. She pours boiling water onto a stock cube in a pyrex jug. For the swift
est second, she thinks of the chicken broth Gervaise lives on. Bones boiled and boiled. Bread made by Klaus cut up and dipped in the clear liquid. It occurs to her for perhaps the first time, that Larry, in his nearness to the Mallélous’ wall, may be lonely. She regrets, partially regrets, her harshness on the telephone and decides she must call through to Nadia, tomorrow or the next day. No card has come from Pomerac for her birthday.
“Of course I’m leaving you this house, Miriam.”
“Yes, Leni.”
“Larry won’t want to live in it I shouldn’t think, so you’ll have to sell it. The problem is Gary. I’d like to make some clause or codicil giving Gary the tenancy, but the solicitors say that isn’t fair on you and that it devalues the property. Personally I can’t see why. I’d buy a house with a sitting poet. In fact, I think it’d add. But then we live in an age of philistines. ‘Monetarism’ is the most repellent word they’ve invented since ‘bivouacking’.”
Miriam smiles. “You can solve the problem of Gary. Leave him some money to buy a little place of his own.”
“Yes. I could. But it’s this house that Gary loves. His room. The garden. He does all the gardening now, you know. We got rid of that girl gardener. Gary said she was too fond of miniatures. He’s put in great fat bushes all over the place and it looks much better. You’d see it if the rain would stop.”
“I have seen it, Leni. I walked round it on my first morning.”
“Well. It’s better, isn’t it? Bolder. You wouldn’t think Gary would be a bold gardener, would you, but he is. And he keeps it all so well. Just as if it were his. And then the house. You see, this was really the first home he ever had. He lived with that uncle he hated, then on his own in Earls Court and then here. And he said after all that, Rothersmere Road was paradise. Paradise. He’s felt loved, you see. Probably for the first time. You remember how shy he used to be? Crippled. As if he’d just broken the waters of an egg and come floating out. God knows how he survived his first year in that school. I used to wonder if those loutish boys wouldn’t just dismember him. Crunch him up and eat him, like quail on toast. I dare say they only didn’t out of respect for his poetry. Though, there again, adolescents don’t value the life of the mind. They’d rather have Neanderthals shouting instructions at them in so-called song. Hit me with your rhythm stick! Baffling. Come on, Eileen. I tuned to Jimmy Young one morning on the hospital earphones. Come on, Eileen! I’m sure Jimmy Young didn’t understand that. He’s my age without the topknot, but he was playing it. Perhaps pop is forbidden in the school and they let Gary speak in peace.”