by Rose Tremain
Here, on this cold morning, unaware of Gary walking towards her in the mist, is Bernice Atwood, wrapped in a threadbare coat and staring at the water. She doesn’t own any wellingtons, nor has anyone lent her a pair, and her strong brown shoes are very damp. Her toes in nylon tights inside these shoes, curl and uncurl in time to a tiny swaying rhythm her body has set up. She’s singing to the baby inside her. No words or notes come out of her, but just as, without consciously offering food to her baby, it takes what it needs from her body, so when she sings in her head she knows the baby is calmed in its waters and rewarding her by its silent growing. She likes to sing to her baby several times a day in this way. Its existence is unknown to anyone but her. The child is her secret and only she can sing it secret songs.
These walks she takes in the damp December countryside are in obedience to her child, who seems to ask that she fill her lungs with freezing air and get her feet wet in the sodden grass, but who then lets her come home to her flat, deciding not to go into the bookshop, deciding to put off for yet another day the questions for Dr. O. with which her heart feels squeezed, lets her come home and light the gas fire and eat a buttered scone and rest and wait for the future. Lying down on a rug, she can sleep away the whole day after her walk by the river, so tired is she from the air and the walking and from the invisible giving of her blood into her baby’s buds of limbs. She wakes up at a teatime and thinks of Dr. O. turning on the lights in the shop and putting on the kettle in the stockroom. In the fading teatime light, she longs to tell him about the child which, though hers, is part of him. If the sunset is golden and green and brilliant at her window, she thinks of her pregnancy as a thing of splendour and imagines Dr. O. filled with admiration for her, embracing her stomach, humbled at her womanhood, saying sonorously: “My task was a small one, Bernice, but yours is mighty.” The fact is Dr. O. is absenting himself from her life. Going. Day after day. Slipping off. Not since the Sunday of the Bergman film has she been alone with him, except in the shop. In the shop, he’s silent, withheld, preoccupied. Even the lunches she makes he eats in silence. A voice in Bernice – the voice of the child? – tells her to be patient. By nature, she’s a patient woman. Her work, her life, is lived painstakingly out. Now, at the river, she patiently sings her song and curls and uncurls her feet and reminds herself that people’s lives have had the strangest shapes, that the most famous lovers endured seasons of separation, and prays to the earth of Oxfordshire to let Dr. O. come back to her. When she looks up and sees Gary walking towards her, she feels afraid.
In all its minute detail, Bernice remembers the teatime visit to Leni Ackerman. She remembers the colour of the cake and the colour of Miriam Ackerman’s hair. She remembers the way Leni screeched and how Gary fussed over her. More acutely than the fact that no one introduced her to Gary or Miriam does she remember what happened to Dr. O. in that room, in that company. He became awkward. His hands looked too big for the teacup they gave him. His clothes looked shabby. He was a man who never apologised for the way he was, yet in the Ackermans’ room all his gestures were apologetic. This grieved her. Immediately, she’d seen Leni as the cause and thought not much more about it. But now, as she sees Gary, she realises with a stab of pain like a quill going through her abdomen, that it was on this day and in the presence of Miriam, yes, Miriam, not Leni, that Dr. O. began to change. In the time it takes for Gary to raise his arm to her in a muted greeting, in these scant seconds, has Bernice understood her fate.
Gary stops a little way from Bernice and rubs his hands. He doesn’t want to have to spend time with this dowdy girl and offers a gesture which says, it’s too cold to stop. Bernice stares at him with a pasty and terrified face. Her song has vanished with her stab of fear and her body has stopped its rocking.
“Not too cold for you, Miss Atwood?”
She doesn’t know Gary’s name and is surprised that he’s remembered hers. Perhaps, in that household now they talk about her: “That poor faithful Miss Atwood! What on earth will become of someone like that?”
“Hello,” she says slowly. She hopes Gary can’t hear the fear inside her. A coot bobs at the water’s edge and Gary looks from her face to it.
“One gets fond of the river, don’t you think?”
“How’s Mrs. Ackerman?” says Bernice bitterly.
“Much better,” says Gary. “Thank you. I’m taking her to the theatre next week.”
“Oh, what are you going to see?”
“Othello. A friend at the playhouse has the lead.”
“Oh, Othello, gosh. It makes me so jumpy, that play. Why does he kill her? Why? If he’d only believed her . . .”
Gary smiles. “Then there’d be no play.”
And he starts to walk away from her, tugging slightly at his red scarf. To Bernice’s own surprise, and to his, she begins to follow him. They walk side by side in silence for a few steps until Bernice stops suddenly and hears herself say:
“Does Dr. O. come to your house?”
Gary stops and looks at Bernice. Her coat is literally worn out. Her fists are clenched. For a moment he feels deep sorrow for her.
“Dr. O.?”
“From the bookshop. Dr. Carlton-Williams.”
“The man Leni calls Oz. Yes, of course. Yes he visits from time to time.”
“To see Mrs. Ackerman, or . . .”
“Yes. To see Mrs. Ackerman. They’re old friends.”
And he walks on. Bernice follows for a moment then decides she will cross the river and cut back through to the city. In her realisation that Dr. O. may be in love with another woman, she feels swoony and sick. She and her baby must sleep, must renew their strength before they see him and find out.
“I’m going this way,” she says to Gary, indicating her direction with her still-clenched small fist. He says goodbye to her and watches her go. She seems to be hurrying – to the bookshop perhaps, or is Wednesday her day off, as it is his? Just to my room, she could explain, to turn on the fire and lie on my bed covered by the bedcover, to try to sleep, which is good for my baby and good for me, and try not to imagine my life is changed, my life is finished . . . She’s begun to cry at this point, but by now she’s walking fast on the other side of the river and to Gary she’s no more than a tiny brown shape, a sparrow. In her coat pocket, she discovers a used mauve Kleenex and she struggles to stem her abundant tears with this.
To forget her, Gary turns his attention to the struggles IVb are having with Heart of Darkness. Yesterday, a blond freckly boy called Billy Skipper said he thought Conrad must have been a manic depressive like Billy’s Aunty Rose who was sacked from her job at the Wimpy for eating fudge while writing down the orders. She took this sacking badly, he told Gary and the class, so badly she started to see black spaces in the TV and even in the bedroom walls. He bet Conrad saw black things. Else, why would he go on and on up that river? though writing the actual book could have made him better. He’d heard, if you wrote things down, it got them out of your system and you cheered up. Gary wanders on, his restyled head bound in the scarf and four lines of a new but hopeless poem settling obstinately into his brain. (If you write things down, you get them out of your system.) Aloud, to the winter meadows he recites:
“Any news
of the famous Hughes
stops
my heart with envy.”
His voice, in the cold air, lingers for a split second, like an echo.
In the crush of people and the hot spotlights of the gallery, Dr. O. feels giddy and light. It’s not a terribly large space and Dr. O. is the biggest person in it. He sips the sparkling wine the gallery owner has served and thinks, in this push of admirers, I am outnumbered. From the walls, Miriam’s face watches him. That fabulous face! His belly feels empty of all but worship. She has surrounded me. He doesn’t see the Pomerac paintings, even though red “sold” tags are going up on some of these; he sees only the portraits. Every one of these, in his hectic brain belongs to him. 1 am privy. She asked his advice about the f
irst self-portrait and all the rest followed from there, from that day. He has made her promise, promise on Leni’s life, on David’s memory, not to sell the bandana drawing which is, in the end, the only one of all these pictures he can afford. There’s no “sold” disc on it and he doesn’t know why. He wants to corner the gallery owner, an upright and silky man with a soft voice like a woman’s, and tell him: This one is mine. But Miriam told him not to do this. “Don’t be silly, Dr. O.,” she scolded “you don’t want to pay the gallery price. You can have the drawing direct from me when the exhibition comes down.” And she was off into the push and gabble of the people, her cheeks red, in a coral dress that made playful fire with her hair, wearing Leni’s turquoise necklace, telling the people about her life in France, letting him fend for himself. She loses me. His darting eyes follow her everywhere. They can’t get enough, enough of the sight of her. Any day that he doesn’t see her is featureless and dark.
Leni is there. Thomas stands guard by her wheelchair. Leni’s forgotten how screechy and silly people sound at cocktail parties. Her eyes sting. The bubbly wine inside her is acid. She’s glad of Thomas, her sentinel, and won’t let him move. And together they watch Miriam, magnificent tonight, they both recognise, a success. The French watercolours are much admired. The gallery owner is cooing like a hand-reared pigeon over his catalogue: “Oh quite clearly, France is an inspiration to her. Quite clearly! Dramatic shift of colour emphasis. So much more radiance in them . . .” He moves from person to person, wearing his matching grey silk shirt and tie, ruffling his neck feathers, a neat and springy man, flattered to find “so much of the University” in his tiny space, his face charmingly smiling, his hand laying on Miriam’s coral shoulder a gentle, congratulatory caress.
“Look at Oz!” Leni whispers to Thomas. “She’s got him bowled over you know.” And they watch Dr. O.’s struggles with the crowd and with his scarlet infatuation. Though he moves about the room, his eyes perpetually follow Miriam. He makes a circular kind of progress, talking to no one, knocking into people without meaning to and spilling their wine. They glower at him and he doesn’t notice. “Just look at him!” hisses Leni, taking Thomas’s hand. “Men in love are helpless, you know. Just like toddlers! Well I think that Atwood’s done for, but what now?”
“What does Miriam feel?” says Thomas.
“Oh, she’s not saying. Not to me. I suppose she’s being honourable.”
“Honourable?”
“Yes. She said to me, what should one be at fifty and I said, honourable. So she’s being it.”
Perdita is there. In the shiny skin of Perdita with its down of blonde hairs Leni has glimpsed gigantic sands and skies of fathomless blue and decided to approve of these for her grandson. Also, Perdita is witty. Wit and the gift of a continent seem, to Leni, more than adequate for Thomas, and she tells him sharply, “Marry her.” But no one is obedient now to Leni’s commands. Miriam’s success, the crackling wit of Perdita, both these things reaffirm that Leni’s days of power are over. Only Oz, in falling in love with her daughter, has obeyed her, yet his helplessness maddens her. “Look at him, look at him,” she says, tugging at Thomas’s arm. “Call him over, Thomas. Let’s try to do something for him.”
Leni’s right: he is helpless. Day after day, Miriam refuses him. He doesn’t know why. He prepares his room for her arrival in his bed, tidying up some of his papers, sending his curtains to the dry cleaners, removing his washing from the fireguard. Why is my love refused? Bernice never once refused him. She was silent, admittedly, but silently accepting. And her body, even now, keeps seeking him out. He knows that in her Cattle Street room she lies and dreams of him and cries, probably, and feels hungry in her woman’s emptiness. While he lies uselessly in Plum Street with his prick so full of ache he has to keep milking it himself and holding it in the dark to comfort it. He thinks his longing will, if many more nights pass in this way, drive him mad. When he takes Miriam out to dinner to the theatre – neither of which he can really afford – he sees her looking at him so kindly, so fondly and his heart vaults with hope and he starts to tell her for the thirtieth time: “Miriam, Miriam, I’m so much in love with you. Let me kiss you, Miriam. Please. Just kiss you. I can’t go on like this . . .” But all she does is smile her orchard smile and stroke his hand and even laugh and say: “It musn’t be like that, Dr. O. It can only be friendship.” Why? He keeps asking her, Why can it only be friendship? Then he won’t let her answer. He knows the answer: It’s all I want. Yet how can this be? When he wants, wants, wants her night after night. His wanting’s like an animal in him, a jungle male in its spring season sounding its hullabaloo over all the acres of veldt and forest and brimming river. Primitive. Man, in love, is primitive. His books and manuscripts, all his careful work he neglects. The nourishment has gone from them. He’s amazed they satisfied him for so long. They and Bernice. He’s sorry for his neglect of Bernice. He can’t bear to think what she’s feeling, but he won’t let her talk to him about any of it. He just walks away. “I’m sorry, Bernice,” he says and walks away from her. She is not Miriam’s equal.
“Come and talk to Leni, Oz.” Thomas is at Dr. O.’s side. He lets himself be led over to the corner, near a potted palm, where Leni sits in her throne. He stoops and kisses her hand flamboyantly. She looks up at him. This heavy, loyal, intelligent man. What’s Miriam up to, making him suffer like this? Like Roddy in his hurting wellingtons. He suffered. He wrote letters saying, boorishly, I can’t bang my wife any more. Silly Roddy. Silly Oz, acting like a toddler.
“What are we going to do about you, Oz?” she says with her witch’s smile.
“Do, Leni?”
“Yes. About you and Miriam.”
Dr. O. blushes like a child and straightens up. Help me Leni, he wants to say. He wishes Thomas would go so that he could talk to her privately.
“I’m very pleased,” he stammers, gesturing at the crowded room, “it’s such a success. I don’t think Miriam dreamed it would go so well.”
Leni passes Thomas her glass and asks him to refill it for her. In the thicket of heads, he can spy Perdita’s corn-coloured hair and he walks towards her. Though he doesn’t admire watercolours, he feels delighted for Miriam and suddenly radiantly happy in his life. Only the image of his father, alone in the fields Miriam has sketched, troubles him slightly and he wonders if he won’t take Perdita out to Pomerac to see him.
“Sit down, Oz,” says Leni and gestures to a black plastic chair. He tumbles into it with a sigh and it creaks under his weight. “Stop toddling!” she says. And he casts her a look of real agony.
“Yes, I know, Oz,” she says, gently for Leni, a tender, chiding voice. “What you have to realise, darling, is that Miriam’s learning to be obstinate. She refuses to obey anyone any more. Certainly not me. She looks after me wonderfully, but she absolutely won’t do what I say. I’m beginning to admire her.”
“I admire her, Leni,” Dr. O. says casting a look in the direction of Miriam’s coral frock, “too much, I suppose. I admire her too much . . .”
“And of course she’s loving it. She pretends she’s indifferent, but at fifty one can’t be indifferent, n’est ce pas?”
“I don’t know Leni. Heavens, I don’t know what to think, what to hope . . .”
“Just be sensible, Oz. Play the game.”
“What game?”
“Be mercurial, Oz! Be fantastical! Do some disappearing tricks. Stop all this constancy.”
“I can’t stop what I feel.”
“Of course you can’t. But you can stop showing it. You’re not three years old, are you? You’re not still teething.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Leni. In love I am like this. My experience is . . .”
“What about Atwood?”
“What?”
“Use Atwood.”
“What, Leni?”
“Make Miriam jealous. Let her know you’re still involved with Atwood.”
“But I’ve told her I’m not
.”
“Well, how silly of you. Why did you do that?”
“Because it’s the truth.”
“Yes, but this is love, Oz. You’ve got to practise a little deceit.”
“But I don’t seem able . . .”
“What? Don’t seem able to what?”
“To lie. I can’t.”
“Then try.”
“I can’t, Leni.”
“Then you don’t deserve her, Oz.”
“Well, I probably don’t ‘deserve’ her.”
“Oh, don’t be silly.”
“I’m not up to all this. I’m going crazy.”
“So, be the magician. It’s your only hope.”
“You mean, go back to Bernice?”
“Or seem to. It’s the seeming that’s important. And stop paying for dinners out. You can’t afford it.”
Leni says this with finality. The conjurer snaps the box shut. Dr. O.’s heart is thumping like a lion’s tail. Leni holds out a white, frail hand and her fingers touch his tweed jacket: a soft butterfly landing there.
“You’ve got time, Oz,” she says. “She won’t go back to France.”