by Rose Tremain
She talks. Miriam watches the stock cube dissolve, then pours it on to the vegetables. Leni will talk talk talk till her last moment on earth. While the soup simmers and Miriam pours herself a weak scotch and water, Leni starts to talk about David Ackerman. Her remorse when he died. The question that still torments: did her infidelities shorten his life? So many men wanted a share of what they said she was – beautiful. No age has ever side-stepped the physical beauty of woman. It was always hard currency. And if you’re rich with it, as she was rich, how can you bear to hide it and not spend it? But she thinks she might be wiser now. So much of what we call beauty is fabrication, a false concept, a conditioning. So it betrays, in the end. Turns to dust. She envies Miriam her plainness, her lack of natural riches. Beauty and loyalty conflict. Loyalty and art are a recipe for the sane mind . . .
Yes, yes, I’ve heard it all before, Miriam thinks, but doesn’t say. In my love of Leni I’m doubly punished: for my lack of beauty; for my willingness to preside over the final death of hers.
Suppertime comes. Miriam blends the parsnip soup and adds parsley. Leni’s chair is pulled up to the table and a bowl of soup set before her. But she isn’t hungry and the soup cools under her shaky spoon. She can feel the butterscotch cake slowly drifting down the trickling stream her body has become.
On Sunday morning, after this Saturday of talk and visitors and cake, Leni sleeps. Miriam brings up tea, turns on the fire and Leni stares at her with exhausted eyes like sloes. The moment Miriam leaves the room, she turns over and sleeps again. She dreams a surgeon comes and tells her: your heart is technically dead. Snails have sucked it too small to be viable. The only long-term hope is a transplant, but blood is the problem. Your blood group is H2O, which you may recognise as the scientific hieroglyph denoting water. She wakes and tries to drink the cold tea. So much of her wants to be obedient to Miriam’s kindness. But the tea is bitter and foul and all Leni longs to do is sleep and sleep. Miriam tiptoes in, removes the tea and turns off the fire.
Gary isn’t in his room, nor has been all Saturday night. For the first time since her arrival, Miriam has the house to herself. The rain keeps on and she feels contained in it, a kind of prisoner, like a night-watchman. She stares out at Gary’s rusty car. Will Leni insist that this, too, stays when the house is sold? The jealous daughter in her resents Leni’s concern for Gary the stray, Gary the outsider. And the woman of fifty resents Gary the man, fifteen years younger than herself, coming and going like a cat. The black boyfriend. The exquisitely satisfied lust. Men ignoring women, except as mothers. A parade of cockerels. Two cocks hard as fists. Men in men. She feels dowdy, lonely and unnecessary.
Without acknowledging what she may be about to do, she searches in Leni’s study (a small, downstairs room with a telephone, always referred to by David Ackerman as Leni’s library) for the Oxford telephone book and finds Dr. O.’s number. She writes the number down on a piece of paper and stares at this for a while, then picks up the telephone receiver and dials it. Until his voice answers, she has no real idea of what she’s going to say.
“Dr. O.?”
“Yes.”
“Miriam Ackerman here.” Miriam Ackerman. It’s years since she called herself Ackerman. She feels astonished, as if by an act of daring.
“Oh yes, yes. Oh indeed. Miriam.”
“Am I disturbing you?”
“No, no. No.”
“I don’t know why I’m ringing. I think Leni’s going to sleep for most of the day and I suddenly thought it would be nice to talk to someone. I hope you don’t think this is very selfish.”
“No, no. No indeed. I’m delighted to talk to you, Miriam.”
“My mother was telling me how very kind you’ve been, visiting her so often, and I wanted to thank you . . .”
“De rien. De rien. Leni is one of my most cherished friends. I’m always very happy to see her.”
There’s a sudden silence. Wondering urgently if Bernice Atwood is at Dr. O.’s shoulder, listening in to the conversation, Miriam feels tongue-tied and embarrassed. I’ve become feeble, she thinks. I let myself feel lonely, instead of working. “I should be working today . . .” she stammers, “I really should. But my concentration’s bad at the moment, since leaving France . . .”
“Well, Sunday. I don’t work Sunday. A little manuscript gravure sometimes, but nothing too engaging.”
“So you have a, well, a more or less free day?”
“Yes, yes. Nothing planned. The weather’s too poor for walking which is what I like to do at this time of year.”
“Oh I like this, too. I remember I just used to like walking round the city in the autumn, when I lived here.”
“But in France, in the area where you live, I recall superb walks.”
“Yes. They are. Superb.”
A dog, Miriam thinks suddenly. Perhaps Larry and I should have bought a dog, to give us a better sense of belonging there. And I’d feel better about Larry’s loneliness if there was a dog . . .
“I travel to France not infrequently,” Dr. O. is saying. “I do what I call my medieval tour. Starting at Fontevraud and Eleanor’s tomb. A kind of pilgrimage. I could call your way one year. What did you say your place was named?”
“Pomerac. It’s between Périgueux and Angoulême.”
“You must tell me about it. I know Perigueux of course. That Roman-Byzantine cathedral. What’s it called?”
“St. Front.”
“Oh yes, yes. I have some photographs of it, not good, I’m not good with a camera.”
“I was wondering . . .”
“I’m so sorry. What did you say, Miriam?”
“Oh. Well, I was wondering . . . I’d bought a chicken in the hope Leni would eat some, but I don’t think she will today. And it seems a shame to waste it. Would you like to come round for lunch?”
There’s a long silence. Miriam feels nervy and silly. She wonders what on earth she’s doing. For the first time, she feels sympathetic to Nadia’s loneliness, to her need for company. She prays Dr. O. will accept, out of kindness and pity, as she accepts invitations from Nadia.
“I wouldn’t want to intrude, Miriam, if Leni is poorly today . . .”
“No. You won’t intrude. She’s sleeping. She has days when she just sleeps. But of course I musn’t go out and leave her.”
“No, no. No.”
“So I would be very grateful to have some company . . .”
“How kind of you to think of me. Now I have promised Miss Atwood we shall go to the Ingmar Bergman film at four-ten. This is of course a solemn promise, but yes, I would be very pleased to come to lunch. What time should I arrive?”
“Whenever you like,” says Miriam, calm with relief. “Say twelve-thirty.”
So for the rest of the morning she prepares. Setting the table in the dining room, she feels for the first time in her life as if this house, whose very skirting creaks in sympathy with Leni’s bones, belongs to her and she’s quietly happy. “Give a woman a house,” her father once teased, “and she’ll ask for so very little else you must conclude that all her curiosity has gone up its chimney!” “I cried,” Leni said, “when David bought Rothersmere Road. Just the size of it. The garden. I cried for joy!” Leni remained curious however. About the world. About the flesh. About the devil. All that flew out as smoke from the sitting-room fireplace was perhaps her conscience.
Miriam prepares the chicken and makes a tarragon sauce with fresh tarragon she finds in Gary’s herb bed. She makes Lyonnaise potatoes, ices a bottle of wine. The rain stops and the brilliant sun shines on her calm endeavours. She feels as purposeful as when she paints. The colours of the roasting chicken, the sauce, the potatoes, the wine, the green-stemmed wine glasses are as obediently pleasing as a successful watercolour of cornfields and grasslands and plough.
Leni sleeps. Her dreaming, empty flesh doesn’t disturb or trouble Miriam. She goes up once to stare at it, to listen to the shallow breaths. Since arriving, I love her a little less, she t
hinks. When the separation comes, I’ll be ready. And she closes the door.
Dr. O. eats with relish. This reminds Miriam of Larry. Swathes of chicken are gobbled. She, suddenly, has no appetite. Now that her guest is here, she knows it must have been wrong to invite him. He’s headed for the cinema and Miss Atwood – and Miss Atwood’s little pleading hand. Yet he seems happy. Happy and jolly and at ease. He takes long draughts of the wine, wipes his lips, smiling at her over his napkin. “Delicious, Miriam. I’ve had many, many meals in this house, but I can’t remember any as good.”
“Just a roast chicken, Dr. O. . . .”
“But the sauce. Excellent. Yes, indeed.”
The silly urge to talk has left her. She can’t think now why it was so strong. Far better to have spent the day painting. Only a month or so to the exhibition. So much to start. She is silent then, watching this large, untidy man. One of her mother’s lovers, probably. She’s had younger than him. He doesn’t seem troubled by her stare. He’s talking eagerly, eating, talking, eating, talking . . .
“I’ll confess, Miriam, years ago – what a confession, my God, I never thought I’d make it! – I wanted to marry you. you musn’t laugh. I was quite serious, and yet not, because I didn’t know you. I only admired you very much, you and your painting, and I thought, there she is, my wife. You were married already of course, but in some foolish way, I’d overlooked this. When I found out, I was so put out. I actually thought of it as a betrayal.”
“I’ve never betrayed anyone,” says Miriam gravely.
“No, no. No, no. Of course you haven’t. And of course you didn’t. And of course it wasn’t. The thing is, what I’m so pleased about, is now I have the chance to get to know you properly. Starting now, as they say.”
“Oh yes,” says Miriam weakly, “starting now.”
“I was planning yesterday, you see, how to lure you out for one of my Sunday walks. I thought you might come into the shop. Or I’d simply come back here to see Leni, and invite you. And now you’ve invited me. I’m very, very flattered. Can I help myself to some more of this wonderful potato thing?’”
“Yes. Of course.”
She passes the dish. As the wide hand comes out to take it, she has a cruel sense of something done wrongly, too hastily. The hand ladles potato and onion, piles the plate up. Upstairs, Leni is starving and neglected, shoved into sleep, abandoned. Miriam wants to weep.
“You know Leni’s dying,” she says and hears her voice quiver. Dr. O. puts down his fork and looks at her anxiously over his spectacles.
“Yes,” he says. “I think she may be.”
Utter silence descends. Miriam and Dr. O. look at each other in dismay.
“Shall we talk about it, Miriam?” Dr. O. eventually says. “Or shall we just enjoy each other’s company?”
Miriam’s tears fall like soft fruit-juice, fall and slide. Behind his glasses, Dr. O.’s eyes are petrified with confusion, with his year-in, year-out sense of inadequacy as the kind of man women love. In the film he is about to see, the actor playing this part – his part – gets up and crosses to Miriam. The camera tracks him. He takes Miriam’s weeping head in his arms. But Dr. O. doesn’t move. He puts his knife and fork together on his new helping of potato Lyonnaise and stares helplessly across it while Miriam cries. She buries her face in her napkin. Dr. O. thinks he hears movement upstairs and whispers to Miriam: “I think Leni’s coming down. We musn’t let her see you crying.”
I’m not crying just for Leni, Miriam wants to say. I’m crying because I’m so tired, tired of being strong for other people. To be the strong one is so, so lonely. No one realises. Least of all Larry. Least of all Thomas. Even Leni, she doesn’t realise. They’re the tears of years, she thinks. Pent up. Accumulating. The tears for Aquazure. The tears for Pomerac and exile. Tears for being fifty. Tears for this house, full of strangers, empty of David. Tears for the son she never sees. Tears for her own weakness which finally blanketed her strength and caused her to invite an old, untidy friend to lunch.
The footsteps above die out. A door closes. Dr. O. breathes with relief. And free of his fear of Leni’s arrival, he gets up, the actor in the film now, gentle but firm, with the right script in his head, and crosses to Miriam whose whole body is convulsed with sobbing. He squats down by Miriam’s chair, gently puts his arms round her shoulders and pulls her head forward onto his green cardigan.
The sobbing continues, but he feels Miriam’s hands hold fast to him. The inconsolable child? He doesn’t know. He’s never held a child. Her lovely hair smells of lemons. She’s a gift of fruit in his arms, from the rich French countryside, from orchards and vineyards. Years ago he may have imagined her like this, something bright and scented and large. He rocks her gently, binds her to him more closely. He’s no longer the actor playing the part, but himself and marvelling at all the years that have passed between the day when he imagined holding Miriam to him and the day when he did. The kisses he now plants on her burnished head are kisses of pure passion.
For Miriam, to be contained in Dr. O.’s odd embrace is comforting and good. His body smells of fresh baking – of scones or muffins, some homely English invention you enjoy by the fire. I’ve come home, she thinks. I’ve come home. Larry and the life she’s trying to start in Pomerac have, for this little moment, been removed from her, as if she’d folded them away in a brochure, thinking, that’s a place to return to, one day. And loneliness recedes. She’s able, after a very few minutes, to pull gently away and blow her nose on the table napkin.
The Bergman film is rather long. Dr. O. remembers, the moment it begins, that he’s seen it, dismembered into three or four parts, on the television. Many sequences have Liv Ullman, dressed in what looks like a cardinal’s robe and hat, flitting through the sad chambers of her mind. In one of these she discovers her parents, poor little thin and terrified people. She screams and rages at them, then cries with remorse, then rages again at this pattern they inflict of fury followed by guilt.
At his side, Bernice Atwood is hot and quiet, eating Toblerone. Dr. O. wonders if Bernice would like to look like Liv Ullman. He looks at her in the flickery darkness. She has a tiny, doggy nose, turned up and pink. Her eyes are small but she opens them as wide as possible all the time, so that she looks both startled and short-sighted, which she is. Her hair is colourless and thick. She clips it back in a slide. She’s thirty-three, but there are times, like now, eating her chocolate, when she seems half this age.
Dr. O. is very used to the white hills and grey hollows of Bernice’s body. It’s a body quite unblemished by time, untouched by sun, a lapping loving landscape, contentedly heaving. In all his years of knowing it, he has never and she has never admitted desire. Though Dr. O. and Bernice spend their days toiling over words and ancient meanings, language plays no part whatsoever in their love-making. Neither asks. Neither offers. They give silently. The only sound is the suck of their flesh. Dr. O., so easily accommodated and satisfied between Bernice’s snowy mountains of hips, has no idea whether the movements he makes give her the pleasure she seems to strive for. He doesn’t ask. She doesn’t say. Sometimes when he lies still on her, satisfied, heavy and sleepy, he feels her belly continue to move under him, her little mound still thrusting at him. He likes this. He presses down on her as she breathes and pants. He wants to suck her breasts, but she holds him fast in place above her, presses her lips to his. Then she lies still and opens her eyes, and her arms relax and gently stroke his back. Was that good? Is what we do enough? He doesn’t ask. She doesn’t say. He concludes he satisfies her. She never refuses him. Sometimes in the night, she wakes him and starts fondling him again and he feels her huge soft breasts pouring over his arm. He doesn’t like his sleep broken. It’s difficult for him to make the gestures of desire. She rubs and rubs his prick. He feels old. But then she kneels and kisses him, her mouth hot with sleep, her tongue lively as an animal. Her hair falls on his face. He is enveloped and borne away. He turns and tumbles into her, rocking in the
darkness. He can’t deny this gift of her, slippery and silent. I can’t deny you, Bernice, says the feeble jet of sperm she wrings from him. And she smiles knowingly. My happiness is his. His is mine.
Now, watching this long, sad film, Dr. O. trembles with the thought that he may betray her. “I wish I understood Swedish,” she suddenly whispers to him. He stops looking at her and turns back to the screen. Liv Ullman’s grandmother shows her into a little child’s room, decorated with pink castles. He forgets to look at the subtitles. The Swedish dialogue goes on like a jaunty train; yoni-oni – yeni-meni – rhude-hude . . . He closes his eyes. The language is beautiful, he thinks, its cadences so gentle, you could prise meaning from it without understanding a word. Yet it journeys at the very edge of his thoughts, thoughts which keep doubling back and doubling back into the five minutes of that very day when he held Miriam’s head against his cardigan and found in his sturdy English heart foreign orchards of craving and desire. They invade him and bloom. He’s dizzy with their perfume, hard with their fruit. He doesn’t recognise himself, the quiet Dr. O. in his habitual place at Bernice Atwood’s side. He wants to lean across to her and confess, I’ve fallen in love with Miriam Ackerman. I was denied her once. Now I’m going to have her. He has no plan, however. He knows he may let Miriam go back to France without ever telling her that he loves her. So momentous does his desire for her seem that he doesn’t know how or when or with what words or gestures to approach her. It’s so easy to love Bernice in silence. So easy not to answer what she doesn’t ask. But in Miriam’s orchard, words will surely be needed. She’s Leni’s daughter. That family can colour whole rooms, whole houses, whole streets and skies with words. Yet in love-language he’s a naif, a pupil, an innocent. Bernice has never taught him. He’s never taught her. The embrace was enough. Movement was enough. He craves some manual or dictionary. All his life, he has looked for answers in books. He’s not certain if the book exists that can help him now.