by Rose Tremain
So in the dark, she leaves St. Mary’s and walks home by herself. So in the dark, Dr. O. stares at the yellowy moon, envying Larry Kendal his summers and winters of Miriam’s palms and navel and earlobes. You haven’t really kissed her. Now with his wings he plays with me. Each in a separate language, Dr. O. and Bernice Atwood examine the past and toy with the uncertain time ahead.
Thomas leaves for London, promising to stay in touch. With his departure, Miriam seeks the shelter of her old room and makes up the narrow bed where once she lay awake with the house wrapped in the fortunate silence of the winter fog and Dilys Weston’s vacant future whispered to her from the Zedbed.
Leni, stern in her plaster cast, is wheeled on a trolley to a private room which Gary, in the full blossoming of his love affair with Gabriel, has ostentatiously filled with flowers: carnations, though it’s October, asters and chrysanthemums and little pots of African violets. Miriam is instructed to fill in more BUPA forms. Leni, in her bower, fed with fish pie and sponge pudding, seems to rally. In her commandments to the tireless nurses, Miriam detects some returning strength. The Leni of years ago, with all her beauty hurtling in her blood, begins to shimmer back.
Her child’s bed smooth and tidy, her possessions in place on the old chest-of-drawers smelling of mothballs, Miriam now approaches her father’s attic, turns on his radiator and here begins at last to work. She feels suspended, closed in and safe. Here, neither Leni nor Larry can touch her. She stares straight at her fifty years of life and sees the survivor she has become, the castaway who stayed sensible among the island cruelties that came after the shipwreck. There’s a look of exhaustion and of triumph. It’s time, she says to the dead surfaces of her father’s study, to do something for yourself – without the reproaches of Leni, without the weeping of Larry. Something which is outside them both – a deliberate exclusion.
And so when she paints, it isn’t Pomerac or the wooded hills behind Ste. Catherine, it isn’t Oxford or the rolling downland where she once lived; it’s herself. In the space of a morning, a pastel portrait is finished. She signs it but decides pastel is the wrong medium: she looks too young, too soft and indistinct. She wants to capture the hard edges of her own stare. She begins an ink drawing – simple, purposeful lines like black thread. Now she feels excitement come. What she boldly reveals is a face pared of its craven compassion. The eyes have a proud set like the eyes of an ancient Indian chief. She ties a bandana round her thick hair, starts the drawing again with her brow bound. The afternoon arrives and darkens. Leni is unvisited. When she thinks of Larry, as she does when the evening comes on, it is to imagine him alone for ever in Pomerac, watching the walnut tree being carted away, digging out his hopeless loss of her from his mind with the making of a swimming pool. He is, the fierce Indian decides, a futile man. Yet she’s waiting, she knows, for something to happen. Or someone. Someone to give her permission not to go back to France. A sudden absence of love, though it has invaded her utterly, isn’t sufficient, she senses, to set her free. She and Larry have given, taken, shaped side by side so many years.
Larry was – and remains – her one defiance of Leni. With this stranger from outside the charmed Oxford circle, she decided to grow up. It was Larry’s sturdy health that attracted her. He was uncloistered, energetic and free. He kicked life like a ball. With him in the Oxfordshire summers she ran. She knew he wasn’t clever or even wise. She knew he had a small man’s dreams. She knew Leni would pout and scold. Intellectually he’s very weak. He’s too physical for you, Miriam. David Ackerman kept quiet. Leni’s disapproval was enough. And when Miriam married Larry in secret in the year of Suez, her father merely recognised that the world did, and would ever, behave in ways inimicable to him and returned to the sanctuary of the room where Miriam now stands staring at the new severity of her face. She remembers David always with quiet pleasure, with a sense of loss so familiar, it has become comfortable. As for Larry’s courtship of her and their wedding, these, too are precious memories. What she feels now doesn’t corrupt or destroy what she felt then. Larry was a passionate and brave bridegroom. Having won her love, he began his long fight to make himself worthy of her. Now, it’s precisely this struggle that she’s weary of. She knows, as she finishes her drawing, that the sun has gone from the Pomerac garden, that Gervaise is leading her cows past their door to the milking barn, and that in this rural twilight Larry is bitterly alone. But she feels no guilt or pain. She refuses to feel these. He’ll come to accept it, is what she whispers aloud.
She hurries late to the hospital. A don and his wife, friends of Leni’s she doesn’t know, are with her. So she stays only long enough to note the dabs of healthy colour in Leni’s face and to admire Gary’s flowers. When she returns to the empty house (Gary is not seen these nights, even though today is Wednesday) she sees an unfamiliar car parked behind the Mini. At the wheel, patiently waiting, is Dr. O.
As soon as she and Dr. O. are out of their cars, she hears herself apologising: “Dr. O. I should have telephoned you. I’m so sorry about what happened the other day. I feel so stupid . . .”
“Oh no,” Dr. O. says hastily, “don’t say that.”
“I actually seldom cry,” Miriam explains, “and I don’t really know why I did except that I seemed to feel so tired all of a sudden . . .”
“I don’t want you to apologise, Miriam,” says Dr. O. with emphasis. “The incident allowed me . . . to get to know you better, and I’m so grateful that it did . . .”
“Come in, Dr. O.,” says Miriam, opening the front door. The moon is up and the air is very cold. She wonders if the first frost is coming. “If you’ve got time, I’d like to show you the work I’ve done today. You can tell me if it’s good or if I’m wrong in thinking it is.”
In the yellowy light of the hall, she turns and smiles at Dr. O. She notices that under his familiar overcoat he’s put on a dark, well-cut suit. In this, he seems leaner and younger. The thought flits across Miriam’s mind: he’s wearing a corset.
She leads him up to the attic without asking him why he’s called on her. She assumes he wants news of Leni. He follows her up, a little breathless by the time they reach the attic door. She remembers Leni’s instruction: You have to get these men up and dancing!
The ink drawing is shown to Dr. O., who holds it with awe, as if it were a Carthusian Breviary.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“I don’t often do portraits,” says Miriam, “and I’m not sure my technique is right for them. What do you think?”
“Oh yes,” says Dr. O.
“You like it?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes.”
“I look stern, I think. This is what I’m pleased about.”
“Superb.”
“Oh, I’m glad.”
“One can’t take one’s eyes from it.”
“Well. Would you like tea, or a drink perhaps?”
“Is this the face . . . ?”
“What, Dr. O.?”
“You’re very beautiful, Miriam.”
“You’re very kind. It isn’t true of course, but you’re kind to say it.”
“I say it because I believe it. I would very much like to buy this portrait.”
“Would you? I think I might do others of myself and they may turn out better.”
“I’d like to buy this one.”
“Well. Come and have some tea.”
“And I’d very much like . . .” Dr. O. lays down the Breviary with shaking hands, “to take you out for dinner tonight . . . if you’re not otherwise committed.”
He swallows. Miriam stares at him. Her thought is, he put the corset on for me! She feels embarrassment and shame but chooses to set these feelings aside in favour of a quiet tableau her mind makes up: she sits with Dr. O. in a warm and pretty restaurant. They talk about David and Oxford and books, and the coming exhibition. All is comfortable and civilised and easy. And there is no ambiguity. They’re old friends. Dr. O. was like a son to the Ackermans in his
youth. They’re brother and sister.
“Are you sure,” she asks calmly, “that you want the expense? You don’t have to pay me back for the lunch, you know.”
“No, no. It’s not that at all.”
“Well. I don’t know what to say, Dr. O.”
“Say you’ll accept. I’ve booked a table at a rather pleasant French restaurant.”
“You’ve booked a table?”
“Yes. I took the liberty . . .”
The restaurant is not unlike the imagined tableau. The tablecloths are pink and the lighting warm. Dr. O. ’s wide face gazes serenely at her over a red candle. He seems anxiously happy – like a boy out on a treat. The food is excellent and the restaurant busy and cheerful. Miriam feels rewarded for her day of good work – spoiled and fortunate. She wants to talk about the recovery she has spied in Leni, the death postponed, but Dr. O. seems for the first time almost uninterested in Leni and uncharacteristically concerned to tell her about his own life.
“I expect,” he says, looking away from her and rearranging the napkin his large hands have already creased, “I expect word has got around Oxford that Miss Atwood and I have been, how shall I put it, ‘fellow travellers’.”
There is silence. Again Miriam thinks of Leni: Atwood keeps the customers away so she can have Oz to herself.
“I don’t belong to Oxford any more,” says Miriam, “so I don’t know what people say or think about each other.”
“No, quite,” says Dr. O. Momentarily, he seems filled with melancholy.
“I wouldn’t care a jot about the gossip,” says Miriam, gently. “It’s your life. Oxford was always gossipy. You just have to ignore it and get on.”
“I agree, I agree.”
“And you and Miss Atwood have so much in common. I used to think – at the time when I married – that this wasn’t very important, but of course it is, and sharing your shop the way you do . . .”
“No, no. What I wanted to explain, Miriam, is that anything at all that might have existed between myself and Miss Atwood is now in the past. I confess I had thought this relationship would be lasting, but I want you to know that nothing more will now, er, take place between us . . .”
Miriam wants to smile at the old fashioned cadences of this speech. Dr. O. would have belonged very well in Barchester. She looks at him fondly. He’s agitated and red.
“I’m sure Miss Atwood must be very sad,” she says.
“Well . . .” Dr. O. takes a grateful sip of wine. “I think she must come to realise it’s all for the best, that we are not, in certain respects, completely compatible. I hope I’m not offending your sensibilities, Miriam, when I tell you that in the, er, privacy of the, er, bedroom, Miss Atwood is utterly silent. Now of course I’m not a man of the world, but on this one very personal question, I do feel that true sexual congress cannot take place when there is, well, silence. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Miriam stares at Dr. O. in disbelief. Today she had felt free of the ancient intimacies binding her to Larry. She’s not in the mood to discuss Dr. O.’s closet secrets. She marvels at his sudden insensitivity and sighs deeply.
“How we each behave,” she offers, “in our private moments is luckily not a matter for legislation. Now, Dr. O. I don’t want to pry into your life. Please. Let’s talk about something else.”
Dr. O. now looks totally confused and begins gulping wine. “Have I offended you, Miriam?”
“No. Let’s talk about my father, shall we? I was so happy working in his room today.”
“I have offended you.”
“No, Dr. O.”
“I have. Oh dear. It was only my anxiousness to make you understand . . .”
“Understand what?”
“How deeply I love you.”
Bernice Atwood is listening to a radio programme entitled Vanishing Fire about the disappearance of the red squirrel from English woods. A Norfolk gamekeeper recalls: “There want no shortage a’ them. You saw plenty a’ them when I were a bor. An’ we had thisere game. Squiggie-stooning, we named it. Cruel, I reckon. But we did that. A bor’s game. Harmless, we thought . . .”
Bernice enjoys programmes which tell her about nature, vanishing or not. She likes to imagine, on her infrequent excursions to the countryside, the tens of thousands of creatures she can’t see, invisible to her yet at this very moment burrowing, building, gathering, spinning, fornicating, fleeing, flying. If nature was still, it wouldn’t interest her. If nature showed her all of itself, it wouldn’t interest her. It’s the boundlessness of its hidden world that makes her stand still in the forest and say breathlessly to Dr. O., “Listen!” Now, sitting silently by her fire, she imagines seeing a red squirrel one day. Then in old age saying on the radio, “I remember the last days of the red squirrels. I saw one not far from Oxford.”
Yet even as Bernice listens to the programme, she knows that something terrible is happening in the quiet, primeval forest of Dr. O. ’s love for her. Something has crept in under cover of darkness and turned the soil. All the roots of trees more ancient than buildings are cold and dying. She knows that the chief protector of this love was time, settling gently year by year on the quiet arrangement of her limbs with Dr. O. ’s, on their minds, on their identical responses to the labours of long-dead monks for the glory of the illustrated word. And now, time has unsettled them. Why? Why, she wants to wail. Her love is unchanged. Her love is as fiery, as swiftly-leaping as the vanishing squirrel. For Bernice, future and past are one, unchanging. Time held them safe, she thought. She even imagined them old, side by side in the shop, side by side in their tumbled bed. On the night of the madrigals, she felt sad. Now, days have passed, days in which, with a mortifying clumsiness, Dr. O. has, like St. Peter, denied her. Why? Bernice’s mouth sits in a little straight line of pain. Why? She knows – but this is small comfort – that she isn’t guilty of even the briefest moment’s withdrawal of love. She is as constant as the mayfly to its single day. Her only transgression is to be sick in the bookshop lavatory one morning, causing Dr. O. to stare at her accusingly and ask: “No connection with maternity, I trust, Bernice?” and her to answer as stylishly as the dying Nelson: “None. Would you kiss me, Dr. O.?” He pecked her hot cheek and withdrew. The smell of him near her made Bernice reach out her white arms and bring him to her and lay her face on his neck. Again, he withdrew and she let him go, afraid. She smelled of sick and disgusted him. And so for the rest of the day he showed her no kindness. That night, in need of his comfort and finding herself alone, she began to feel afraid.
The programme on the squirrels ends. Someone informs her that these creatures are still plentiful in France, especially in the densely wooded area of the Dordogne. So Bernice, who has never travelled to this region, tries to calm her helplessly anxious heart with imaginings of these distant-seeming forests.
Leni is alone in the mauvish light of her private hospital room. Books and magazines have been brought to her by her visitors, but tonight she isn’t reading. She lies propped up and dreaming of her life.
Leni, the witch, stares at the brew she has made.
Age, she decides, hasn’t quelled her love of mischief. Merely, the people she knows are too old or too dry or too lazy to practise it any more. The Oxford of her younger days has vanished from sight. In rooms she doesn’t visit, where she isn’t invited, she imagines that something which passes for mischief goes on quietly. (In the old, quiet world it was daring to be noisy, to dance and cavort and yell; now in the modern scream-bombarded world, it might seem bold to be silent and secretive.)
A night nurse, her eyes puffy with daylight sleeping, comes in and gives Leni the two pills she has taken each night for sleep since the death of David, and Leni thanks her. The first night she took the capsules, she dreamt they contained a tiny powdering of ash from David’s burnt body. He was a man who, all his life, slept well. Sleep is like thanks, she decided, for the strength of the day. David’s contentedly snoring face reaffirmed this. Now all her days are weak
and her brain won’t give her this blissful gratitude. She mourns it guiltily, swallows her pills, lies like a cat in the dark, seeing the edges and outlines of her past.
She had a nickname at one time, the “Duchess of Oxford”. There was some venom in it, from which David tried to protect her. She laughed at his protection then, knew there were a hundred women in Oxford jealous of her beauty and more jealous still of her wit. So few people she meets now are witty. For all that it allows, this age is bleak. As if all the big juicy brains had shrivelled and dried like her own womb which is so small now in her small body it couldn’t push out a bird. She’d like David’s protection from this drying up of life. With age, he would have grown in girth, as she has shrunk. In his bulky warmth she would have felt less arid.
The night nurse removes Gary’s flowers, some of which have begun to wilt. Seeing the flowers go, she remembers today was Wednesday and wonders what bits of love-blinded thought he’s struggled with. She thinks of him tenderly, his head close to the desklight, the night coming on in his lilac room. “Mother . . .” he calls her softly, “I’m going to miss you, lovely.” And Leni sighs, remembering his future homelessness. “I must do something about that,” she says aloud.
“What did you say, dear?” asks the nurse.
“I must remind myself to do something about the house. Or Gary will be chucked out – by my son-in-law.”
The nurse, whose morning this violet-lit darkness is, looks reproachfully at Leni. The old suffer from disconnected thought. You have to yank them back to reality and pin them down.