by Rose Tremain
He thinks of Mick Williams and John Aviemore now and wonders who rented the space between them. They’d had a farewell drink with him. That morning Aviemore had clinched an order for two acres of greenhousing and Larry saw the lesson he should have learned: in England all life is creeping inside shelter, like pictures back inside frames. He was working on domed plastic covers for his pools but they were too vulnerable to gales and punctures, not reassuring enough. John would prosper with his glass and Mick with his kitchens because this was where life had paused. The grandiose experiment, the bold essay, these weren’t happening any more. England seemed to be learning only from the Dutch. Covering vegetables while they grew. Larry got sick-drunk on these late realisations and Mick Williams drove him home, lighting Rothmans for him with the car lighter and sticking them in his mouth like a thermometer. And this is what he became from then on: the patient.
Larry finishes the second beer and orders a third. The dominoes players are drinking red wine in small glasses, like Mallélou does all day. Larry has a longing he can’t classify to be discussing Steve Davis and Hurricane Higgins with John Aviemore and spreading Branston pickle on dense white bread in The Ferryman’s saloon bar. Those were optimistic days. The news beleaguered you, but then in the mornings your office carpet had been hoovered and you knew that on Edith Cavell Way there was order and sense and everyone going about their business. Susan of the dark hair and quick-batting Leeds voice made excellent coffee on the Cona and brought in the first cup of the day, smiling, and you knew that a day might come when you’d go not to The Ferryman at lunchtime but to the downs with Susan and fuck her in your car. You bought the Renault 16, with its reclining seats with this act in mind. And Larry can’t see a cherry coloured 16 now without remembering the way Susan’s white feet had pounded the dashboard. Odd that it was the same car who refused to let him leave Miriam. Odd too, how easily Susan was forgotten.
Forgetting England needs practice, he knows. Surprisingly, he’s doing better on his own than when Miriam was there; he’s hardened his heart. Then, without warning, nostalgia – for the Today Programme, for Match of the Day, for Blackwell’s Bookshop, for Marks and Spencer, for his Oxfordshire kitchen, for milk deliveries, for the voice of Sir John Gielgud, for Wimbledon, for the smell of post offices, for the double ring of a telephone, for his Aquazure desk, for The Ferryman and for the sound, the unmistakable cadences of his own language – invades him like a fierce pain, and all he wants then is for things to be as they were. At moments like this, he longs to ask more famous exiles than himself what they miss most. The trivial things, he decides. The smell of London buses. Cheap tea. The Test Match . . .
He stares at the men banging down their dominoes and envies them their place in their own culture. He drains the third beer and goes to piss in a foul smelling open urinal before driving home without a gift for Agnès. Klaus is still in the pit laying blocks. When he sees Larry, he calls him down to tell him the morning’s news, his huge body pleased with what it relates.
“Good. Not? Not? Thunderboulders whizzing!”
Hervé Prière is very pleased with his decision to go to America. In Florida, they understand the terrors people get not just of death or violence but of their own shortcomings. They’ve got ways to soothe you. The hotels have storm windows. The cars are like portable rooms. French food is reverenced. The women have shiny hair. The elevators are large. Money is a friendly not a devious God. It’s not difficult, there, to go through a day without smelling any uncomfortable smells, aside from exhaust clouds. Even the toilets are air-conditioned with lavender air. You feel like an ancient Roman. Pampered. Clean. An elite. The bathwater is hot. The hotel supplies soft white bathrobes, like togas.
Hervé has been a doctor for thirty years. His mind makes a terrible collage of all the wounds, the tumours, the warts, the faeces, the rashes, the shaven hair, the burns, the bleeding and the dead souls he’s examined over this great stretch of time and an exhausted voice inside him bleats, “Enough!” The sight of his own toenails flaking off makes him shiver these days.
His memories of America, where he’s been three or four times in his life, are of clean teeth and white roller-skates and charcoaled T-bone and oldsters’ jokes. He feels superior to his hosts in their Bermuda shirts, yet comforted by them, reassured, separated from his own (European?) mournfulness. He quickly acquires the taste for the whisky camaraderie, the back slapping, the hand pumping. “Hair-vay!” they call him, accenting the second syllable and his liking of their country makes them hurrah like children. He prefers speaking American to English and likes to put zest into his favourite expressions, “Sonofabitch!” and “Yip, yip, yip!” He’s not certain what “Yip, yip, yip” actually means, but he says it often: “Freshen your drink, Hairvay?” “Yessir! Yip, yip, yip!” “Ever met Brigitte Bardot, Hairvay?” “No sir. Yip, yip.” America makes him feel like a celebrity. Celebrities are cushioned from their own consciences because their least actions are thought worthy of attention. In America he becomes a man of substance. People take care of all his needs. They make sure he’s comfortable on his lavender-scented toilet. His ancestors are centuries older than the country and deference is paid. Someone makes certain he has practically no need of the regimental box.
So it’s with enormous relief that Hervé informs his colleagues he will be retiring before Christmas. He lets thirty years of knowledge slip from him like a shirt due for the laundry. He sits in his bureau and thinks, very pleasurably, of the idle days and months ahead, his reward at fifty-one for the dedicated medical man he’s been since his youth. He feels serene and calm, freed of an unbearable weight. His suite at the Demi Paradise Hotel, Boca Raton, is booked, as is his flight to Miami, first class. He plans his farewell dinner: his partners, Dr. Roger Jolivet and Dr. Jacques Albert and their wives, Larry, Agnès, Mme. de la Brosse, a distinguished solicitor from Thiviers and his wife, an undistinguished but charming writer, Georges Agnelli, also a bachelor, an old friend of Claude Lemoine’s. Ten is an excellent number round his mahogany dining table. His maid, Chantal, is back from Paris and will take care, with Agnès, of the dinner. Before the sweet course, Hervé will make a speech – an au revoir. Champagne will be served.
The date set for Hervé’s dinner is December 14th. The following day, the 15th, it is planned that Agnès will catch the train back to Paris.
These two events are less than three weeks ahead on the day when Xavier Mallélou and Agnès Prière make, at the river edge, a bed of wild pampas grasses.
It’s a still mid-day, cold but motionless. The dark water, empty of pike now, meanders on towards the Gironde. The willows are leafless and black. Agnès feels this hard winter earth at her back and knows that only lovers make of it anything but a cradle and a tomb. And Xavier, looking down at this pale face turned up to the sky, remembers the students on the other side of his wall in Bordeaux, his jealousy of their tenderness, and feels choked with love. So hurtingly in love with Agnès does he feel, he can’t stifle a grateful crying when he feels himself push past her little reproaching membrane and tear like a hurricane into her blood. It’s a crying he can’t still. He kisses her and both their triumphing faces are wet. And he moves her more than anything in her life. She who is so obedient to beauty, finds in Xavier a lover her enfolding arms want to possess for ever. She wants to shout with him. Hurl rocks. Climb the sky.
“You’re beautiful, Xavier!”
“So are you. I love you, Agnès.”
“So strong in me, so hard.”
“More than I thought I could love . . .”
“I love the hardness of you.”
“Marry me. I want you to marry me.”
“Marry you?”
“Yes.”
She laughs a delighted laugh, then silences her own laughter by kissing his mouth hungrily. From the overcast sky, rain falls on the empty trees over their pampas bed and drips onto their heads, a peculiar third baptism in the life of Xavier Mallélou. Though they begin to feel very cold
, neither can bear to break away from the other. They just hold each other more tightly and Xavier covers them with his coat.
This place by the river is some way from the window where Nadia stares out at the rain. For the time being, then, the love affair of Xavier and Agnès remains hidden from Nadia and it is Larry who says to her that morning: “Something’s happening in Pomerac.”
She turns from the window and looks at Larry with bright beady eyes. “Something happens? Oh at last is something! Well, you tell Nadia and we’ll have some little vodka to toast.”
But then to Nadia’s irritation he sits silent. He’s hunched up in an old green cardigan. He looks miserable. Nadia gets out the vodka glasses and the last two inches of vodka in what she’s promised herself must be her last bottle till Christmas when a cheque is sent to her from Claude Lemoine’s estate. She’s broke on vodka. She’s eaten no butter or cheese for three weeks. Her meals are boiled vegetables and cheap sausages. This state of affairs is getting bad. Her nails are becoming brittle. When she climbs her stairs, she feels weak. She’s begun having a dream that she’s put herself in a concentration camp.
Larry watches her pour the vodka and feels grateful for its impending warmth. Life, on this day, seems to Larry Kendal as sad as an English hymn.
“So? So? You tell me what, old bean!”
Smiling, Nadia hands Larry his glass of vodka. He sighs. Her irritation increases.
“Well, come on! What’s this so terrible thing you’re sitting like a shivering dog in the veterinary waiting to put away? Is someone threat your life, or what?”
“No, no. Of course not.”
“Then what, my dear? They fill your pool in again?”
“No. The snows will do that. But not until.”
“Well I don’t know you’re so pessimistical! We’re not live in Siberia, you know!”
“No. But it’ll be a hard winter. I feel it.”
“How you can feel it, my darling? So you become a snail making the deep burrow?”
Larry’s silent. Yes, he wants to say, I’d like that: carve out something under the earth and stay there till spring, or till Miriam decides to come back.
“Well, I don’t mock,” says Nadia gently and comes and sits by Larry and pats his hand. “I’m sorry, my bean, if I’m so impatient, but Nadia is pass so much time waiting, always waiting and always I’m so glad if they tell me, something happens. You don’t mind. Okay?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Nadia,” says Larry slowly. “Something’s happening to Agnès.”
“Oh, to the fairy princess? You don’t say she is turn into a frog?”
“No. She’s fallen in love with Xavier Mallélou.”
A look of astonishment crosses Nadia’s pink face. She takes a hasty sip of vodka.
“Well, I’m telling you, when I see this boy come up to Pomerac, I am think, now he puts some firecracker under all the bums! No, truly, I am decide this. I think, now the dead bones wake up in the earth! But how you know this for sure?”
“Klaus told me. He described to me how they met. He said he’s never seen this before, two people just struck dumb by each other.”
“So that is what, then. Well, I like this, you know. Like Wuthering Height, no? The girl of so perfect family and in her silk bodices loves the wild boy. But I don’t know what Hervé is saying! My God. I think he’s not approve at all! My God. I think he’s having to stroke his bloody box now!”
“Perhaps they’ll keep it a secret.”
“Well, in Pomerac, it’s not so easy, you know. Every person stick their necks into your onions. You think it doesn’t go, the story of those Mallélou’s and Klaus König? Believe me, people are learn there what is what.”
“Maybe, maybe,” says Larry dejectedly. “I’m not really bothered by any of it.”
“So I don’t know why you’re so sad, my dear.”
“I’m not sad.”
“But you seem. I think it’s not Nadia crying today, but you.”
“I’m sorry, Nadia.”
“No, no, you don’t sorry. You tell Nadia what. Is this fucking Leni send you some poison-letter?”
“No.”
“And you don’t get a word from Miriam? You don’t know when she’s coming?”
“No.”
“So no wonder you get sad.”
“Yes. But it’s not only Miriam.”
Nadia walks to the window and stares out for a moment, then turns and looks reproachfully at Larry.
“So I think I was right,” she says, “I think ever since you’re putting eyes on this Agnès, you’re think of the bed, Larry. I’m not right? No? You deny? I don’t think you deny.”
“I do deny. It was she who came to me.”
“And after?”
“What?”
“After she is putting this thought in your mind, you don’t thinking how wonderful, how fantastical I’m making love with a virgin, I’m taking her maidenform?”
Larry shrugs. “I don’t know what I thought, Nadia. All I know is that now I can’t stop thinking about her, I’m so jealous of Xavier, I could kill him.”
Nadia’s silent. She looks dismayed and disappointed.
“Well I tell you my old bean,” she says at last, “every man in Nadia’s life is sighing after these little princesses. But what madness, you know. What stupidness. I just don’t know why they are doing this. Why is youth so wonderful? Just for the buds of tits and the flat belly? Perhaps this is all you’re wanting in the end. Not companionship. Not any intellectual conversationing. Not any loyalty and familiar person. Just tits and maidenforms. I am so amaze. When I am young and in the teashop with my Uncle Leopold, I don’t know what I have, this so precious thing, this youth you’re all strive after. I don’t appreciate. I long for growing up and experience of life. But no one of you wants my experience of life! You want maidenforms. I tell you, my darling, this world is so badly arrange, better to be like Claude and shut out or shut up, I don’t know which or what. I am just confuse. It’s like we are all sleepwanderers. Even me. Why am I wait at the window? I don’t know. I know Hervé is leaving. I knew he’s leave without one word to Nadia. And still I wait. Stupidness no? Sleepwanderers. You, me, Hervé, even these young lovers. So what will happen? You tell me, my dear. What is come next? Winter, we know, that’s all. And perhaps you’re right: all the animals are burrow down and down and snow is coming from Siberia.”
Larry says nothing. Outside, the drizzle is steady now and the trees are still and shiny. Nadia takes up the vodka bottle and empties its contents into their waiting glasses.
FOUR
Winter
One December Wednesday, two days before the opening of Miriam’s exhibition, Gary Murphy abandons his lilac room and the unwritten poems that sit in it like bored guests, and takes himself walking in the Cherwell meadows. He feels the piercing cold of the day most keenly in his neck, from which all his jutting hair has been shaved. His new hairstyle makes him look younger and more cruel. The front is kept long and falls over his eyebrows. Piers, whom he’s forced to meet very often these days, informs him he’s “bang in with the new mood” and Leni tells him the beaux of her youth cultivated this look under broad-brimmed velvet hats. Gabriel, who’s decided to play Othello as shaven-headed as Kojak, has dreams about Gary’s hair. The altered face of his friend disturbs him. He’s superstitious about touching the shorn neck. He wishes that Gary had no modern vanity.
Leni has equipped Gary with a pair of green wellingtons, attaching to which is a little history that still creases a smile in her once matchless cheeks. The wellingtons belonged to a lover of hers, a Gloucestershire farmer called Roddy and always known to her and David as “our dear Philistine”. David never once imagined that Roddy was Leni’s lover and indeed never knew. Leni wanted to punish David for his presumption and punish Roddy for being the kind of man he was. She sent Roddy away. But only after she’d exchanged, in their respective cars, David’s wellingtons for his, identical green wellingtons, di
fferent only in size. If David ever noticed, he never admitted the discovery. Leni would watch him walking on the downs in boots one size too big for him, the innocent, his feet tucked up in warm socks, not knowing the flip-flap of the rubber was Roddy’s. And she’d imagine Roddy on his farm, staring at pigs, fingering grain, becoming aware that his boots pinched him, thinking he’d got off scott free, thinking, men can come and take what they like – own the land, own the women – but punished day after day in his hurting feet. Petty. She knew it was. Yet she didn’t like events that had no consequences. Both these men had to pay a small price for what had happened. Otherwise, what did any of it signify – the words of love on Roddy’s hayseed breath; David lying like a boy in her arms and sleeping? She made fools of them to tell them both: nothing is ours as of right; in the least action, we are responsible.
Gary’s feet are the same size as Roddy’s, so the wellingtons fit him very well. He wraps his bare nape in a crimson scarf and trudges with his hands in his pockets through a landscape shorn, too, of all its foliage. A heron on the river stares at him and flaps off. A skirt of mist sits on the further fields. Nature is pared down, quiet, pale, waiting. The sky is a flat white. Ahead are the January storms, the snow blizzards, the sleet, the winds. Ahead, too, is Gabriel’s Othello. Far into each night, now, this Othello is being made. Like the getting of coal, it seems to be hard, back-breaking, heart-straining work. Gabriel’s eyes are red with exhaustion and excitement and fever. When he looks at Gary, it’s with a miner’s contempt for one who’s never been near a coalface. Gary shivers with fascination and dread. The more hectic, the more savage Gabriel seems, the more he craves his wild embrace. The performance itself waits to catch him – the gazelle in the lion-trap – and wound him with too-strong emotion. He practises sitting quietly. He persuades Leni to come with him to the first night. He warns her he may have to sob. She promises to bring chocolate truffles to pop into his child’s mouth and scented hankies for his tears. A special space is reserved for Leni’s wheelchair. Filled with vanity and longing and strangely empty of poetry, Gary orders himself a new Italian suit made of dark green velour. And the days pass.