Who I Am

by Rampling, Charlotte; Bataille, Christophe;

  You see, Christophe, people say you have to create a mystique. So I hid away here.

  In a pastel profusion of satin and lace I fall onto a soft bed and disappear into a velvet world of sensation. Coloured silks moulding the bodies of her princesses, my mother relishes her daughters’ transformation with every fibre of her being. Her scarlet mouth kisses the colours, her hands run sensually over the materials. Ecstasy every time the party begins. Peals of delighted laughter. Two picture perfect little girls.

  Is it going to go on like this, my life as a river, the river of my life? What am I meant to do? The contrasts are so strong. I can’t see my face anymore.

  But Charlotte: storytelling is a wonderful thing and this is not play-acting.

  One day my mother can no longer leave her room. My father dresses her, feeds her, listens to her. Pushes her wheelchair. He plays her husband and her whole world. He becomes the guardian of her life.

  The years go by. The notebooks in purple ink fade away. Growing old is difficult. She is like a small bird on a branch, gently swinging, sweetly smiling.

  Sitting at her bedside, my father and I finally talk. I think of my sister Sarah, whose beautiful face still seems close enough to touch.

  My father, who had never written a diary or a memoir, who had always kept his joys, sorrows and thoughts to himself, didn’t want to die before his wife. He didn’t want there to be a chance she could be left on her own.

  While preparing to move to their last home, he did a strange thing: he took his wife’s writings and the diaries she had kept since she was twelve, along with all her photos and hundreds of letters, stuffed them into big plastic bags and … put them all out on the pavement, without saying anything to anyone.

  You laughed as you told me this, Charlotte, and I felt your sadness. Freud loved the story of Gradiva, who walks through sun-scorched Pompeii in a white toga: alive, dead, a figure from a dream, she wakes us from our sleep. We should find an equivalent deity for your father, Charlotte. A name for this enigma: this young man who runs in the stadiums, powerful, winged. The sun transforming everything.

  But did you love him?

  You look down. It is neither a yes nor a no. Silence falls, overwhelms you.

  Then you look at me for a long time before you break into a smile. This is to be your answer. I feel as if I already knew it. The secret is not in melancholy, but maybe in its vital essence, in its silent beauty that never ceases to intrigue and remains still at the heart of everything.

  Through the window I look out at the trees etched against the sky. Skeletal forms waiting for the transformation to begin. They lend themselves to the cycle of life that man, in his uncertainty, refuses. I close my eyes before nature’s truth. I wait for words to come. Inspiration glides in on a breath.

  A little man in a hat rings the bell of my house in London. I open the door to a character straight out of Dickens. He quickly explains that he is in possession of certain items that might be of interest to me.

  I wrote that the heart is a safe, but no, the heart is a bag. To prove he is serious, he takes a sample from his satchel, ‘but I have much more’: a twelve-year-old girl’s exercise book, photos of my mother in evening dress, a certificate for good behaviour, newspaper articles, letters. A life snatched from the dump.

  I ring my father. Why have some London dealers got their hands on our family treasures? I want to know. I insist. I beg him. But he doesn’t answer, he refuses to say anything until suddenly, in a violent voice, he shouts, ‘I THREW THEM AWAY!’

  I’m devastated. I picture the overflowing bin bags being carted off by the rubbish van, impacted and stacked in piles before disappearing forever into the flames. But there is a god of thieves.

  The little man in the hat started talking money. His friends were asking for an insane amount. He claimed vaguely to be a collector, a dealer. He specialised in things connected to the Olympics, certificates, photos, documents. I imagined him at his stall in the East End hawking stolen medals, guns and trinkets.

  We did the deal, he counted the money twice and we shook hands.

  And that was how I bought back my mother’s youth.

  After the war, my father was broke. He tried to sell his gold medal or have it melted down. He went to a jeweller’s in London and discovered it was made of steel. Hitler had tricked the athletes, palmed them off with fakes. The medal simply disappeared after that, possibly lost in one of our moves. It mattered and it didn’t matter to my father, who was engaged in a desperate quest which took him far beyond.

  I sealed the boxes away in an iron trunk. All that life, virtually within reach. I never reopened it.

  A young girl in a crêpe dress is sitting on the backboard of a caravan. She is barefoot in this paradise of graceful black and white flowers. Some sort of poison hangs in the air, I don’t know what it is. Was she thinking of something when the photograph was taken? She looks at me so sweetly.

  I was ready to ride away into my dream of woods and wind, the daughter of melancholy and laughter, but in the end I stayed.

  Well, this photo without an album is for you, Christophe. For you who were looking for a legend and found a child.

  I wish I could touch Tessa Charlotte Rampling’s beautiful face as she waits on the threshold of adulthood. I would like to tell you not to worry, that it will often be difficult and opaque, inhuman even, but you will give us so much – all of us – and this book will be part of it.

  I listen to a director discussing his film. He laughs mirthlessly, dread is in the air, in his films, in his strange, muffled voice. Suddenly he says my name followed by these words: ‘a sense of ghost’.

  Yes, Charlotte, that’s it: a sense of ghost, appearing and disappearing, talking to the living, cherishing the departed, searching for your name, your face as you glide light-footed through cinema and literature. I see your hand on the page and screen, slender and pure, pushing it away and grabbing hold of life.

  One day, I found you seemingly lost in front of a cardboard box you had wheeled over on a metal trolley from the Boulevard Saint Michel. Your hair was tousled and you were smiling. I thought of Gena Rowlands. Of Barbara Loden in Wanda. I didn’t say anything.

  I didn’t know you at seven in a pleated skirt and white blouse in Norfolk; I never came across you in a miniskirt in Chelsea in the sixties, but isn’t it better like this?

  I opened the box, unpacked the machine, attached the nozzle, plugged it in and set about vacuuming your apartment with meticulous care. You followed me around, laughing. When I finished, you whispered: ‘I’ve been in this place twenty years, and I’ve never vacuumed. You had to appear.’

  With this remark worthy of Miss Havisham in her palace of dust, we sat down to talk.

  One mustn’t of course become attached. I must forget your phone number, your two home addresses, your email address. I must write without expecting an answer. Believe that silence always wins. Remember that it’s not a scheme or a strategy. Keep heading towards the child you once were.

  Swaffham in Norfolk, once a small town. The trains go no further, it’s the end of the line – but country roads push on beyond. Past the rose-entwined gorse hedges that shelter the fields, the long beaches stretch out empty and windswept towards the sea. Brancaster Beach. I walk past The Greyhound Inn and I see the huge granite church and, further on, the colon-naded bandstand with a goddess adorning its dome. It is 1950.

  My father has been posted here for two years and I don’t know how to put it exactly, but something is wrong. We are living in a plain, neat little house, furnished with the few bits and pieces that follow us around from place to place. Army life, regimented down to the last detail. Discipline is paramount.

  Rather than a ‘sense of ghost’ there’s a ‘sense of unease’. It’s a gentle sort of haunting.

  Sarah is sent to boarding school miles away because there isn’t a good school nearby. I feel like I’m losing my sister, my only friend.

  And you, mother, you who wo
uld sing us those nursery rhymes that I remember still, you who were always so tender and light, how did you cope?

  Childhood is a mystery.

  I was seven and something happened at school. I remember a disgusting meal. I remember my plate. I remember the checked tablecloth. My hands clenching. My fury. Suddenly I’m getting up. I’m fleeing the dining hall, fleeing the school, running as if wolves are at my heels, running as fast as my father, running for my life.

  I get to the house and then I don’t remember what happened. All I know is that I was sent almost immediately to the same boarding school as Sarah. And our parents were left on their own in the little house in Swaffham.

  My country is heavy as lead. It drags me down into melancholy. It leaves me with a sense of unease. I look at the neat little houses like soldiers in perfectly straight lines. The lawns perfectly mown. The dogs perfectly trained to avoid disturbing the neighbour. The neighbour so sorry for disturbing the dog. Behind the net curtains I imagine a quiet life. But my unease tells me a different story.

  It’s early May now and I read what we’ve written. You’re still here. It’s strange. You haven’t run away, nor have I.

  If this is a poem, Christophe, if we end up knowing so few things, if everything is genuinely laid bare, then don’t be angry with me. I’ll add a word, a comma, a breath, and I’ll disappear into the wind.

  For as long as I can remember, there were worries about Sarah. When we were reunited at boarding school, she was my ten-year-old sister.

  She used to get up at night and sleepwalk, along the corridors, haunted by dreams. Our instructions were clear: do not wake her!

  She would take her blanket and a pillow with her. We would find her in the early hours snuggled up in someone else’s bed, my big and little sister. It was a dangerous tale: where were we going to find Sarah tomorrow?

  My sister spent hours in front of the mirror trying to understand. She challenged a forbidden taboo and found death before she could find the answer. Mirrors have since been forbidden. The appearance of things must remain an enigma.

  Sarah was like a beautiful doll: pale porcelain skin, big eyes looking into the future, blonde hair that Mum was constantly combing and smoothing. Sarah was pampered, preened, kissed … She needed looking after. I have this memory of beauty overshadowed by exhaustion, unease and these words: ‘Charlotte, take care of your sister.’ My big and little sister: ‘look after her.’ The classic English novel with a pale child coughing in her bedroom. When she was about five, Sarah was operated on, but she remained fragile all her life, like a flower that is not truly meant for this world.

  When he returned from Malta in 1946, my father was posted here and there to different points of the compass. Those were the days when Her Majesty’s Kingdom, like France and America, covered vast expanses of territory.

  We moved seven times in thirteen years. Wherever we went, I knew that each new friend would soon be lost. I knew that one day my father would announce, ‘We’re leaving. I’ve been posted to Gibraltar. Or Wales. Or Norfolk.’ And once again we’d pack up our school books and favourite toys, put our furniture into store, fold our clothes, kiss the old times goodbye and not look back. Living like that, Sarah was my one great friend.

  It ended up becoming a part of me, like a discipline or a torment: I knew I was going to leave and that I wouldn’t come back.

  I stand up straight like the lieutenant my father wants. I submit to orders that make no sense. I carry out duties without knowing what they are. I obey to be loved for the child that I am.

  I wear the doll’s dresses that my mother makes. I sleep in curlers to have hair like hers. I smile to be loved for the child that I am.

  You’re not easy to describe, Sarah. I circle around you. Around us. Around our childhood, our games, our dancing, our moving homes. Around your beautiful face. Your life eludes me. You elude me.

  You were nearly three when I was born. We were still living at our grandparents’ house. I was handed over to a nanny almost immediately because Mum was worried about you. She was afraid and wanted to be by your side every minute of the day.

  Afterwards my mother told me that she regretted not having been able to be there for me. It’s true, I’ve always had the feeling of being kept at a distance. And you, Sarah? You didn’t get to know our father until you were three.

  Childhood is its own small battleground.

  We watch a soldier in uniform come through the door. His face gaunt from so many horrors. Our father has come home. He looks at us but he doesn’t see us. He talks to us but can’t find the right words. Tired of his inadequacy, he retreats into silence.

  When he was very young my father had set his heart on joining the Royal Air Force. He dreamt of becoming a young god flying close to the sun, seeking glory above the clouds.

  Godfrey Lionel Rampling was tall and strong, and he breezed through the RAF College’s exams. But he suffered from nerves, and when he had to take a simple breathing test, he flunked it.

  Devastated, my father had no choice but to join the artillery. He was earthbound, permanently grounded.

  This setback propelled him on. Physical weakness was transformed into a rage to win. He found within himself the breath the doctors had refused. He ran like the wind, in a state of grace. The arena at Olympia rose to applaud him. He was no longer a man but an angel, a winged demigod fallen to earth. He was Ariel. But England is not Crete, and our labyrinths are gardens.

  The world reveres his masterful skills but he invents illnesses as a way of avoiding them.

  The force that launched him onto the paths of glory turns against him and wreaks havoc.

  I know very little about the Ramplings. About my father’s grandmother, who took him when he was seven. About his father, who died in Basra. About his stepfather who gave him away. No one talked. It was a time when you didn’t ask questions. Later, when I began to ask people about the family, no one seemed to remember. It was as if nothing had happened, no farewells, no smiles, no sorrows, no songs. And yet the images keep flowing past, soft or hard-edged, jostling me, and I end up loving them – and the people they depict – more than the spoken word.

  I love what I read.

  Everything ends up surprising me.

  I am ready for the world of language and words.

  Two brothers look at one another. Their eyes take in the same image. Discomfort flickers back and forth, transmitted by their gaze.

  They look down, embarrassed by their discomfort.

  The Royal Air Force demands the ultimate sacrifice of a blind courage that knows no limits. The Royal Air Force, in all its majesty, takes the brother who is prepared to give his life in this way. The ultimate sacrifice of a glorious death consigns my father to the shadows.

  Group Captain Kenneth Johnson Rampling was shot down over Frankfurt in his Lancaster in 1944.

  Away we go to the sea

  To have a jolly good spree,

  We’ll dig and run and have a jolly good tea,

  We’ll have eggs and ham and lots of strawberry jam

  And then we’ll have a lettuce too

  And then we’ll think of something to do.

  Away we go to the sea

  To have a jolly good spree.

  I remember us singing and laughing. The eggs would get all mixed up with the strawberry jam and the ham. My father would join in, in a voice more used to booming God Save the Queen. Our little car would rock from side to side and I’d imagine it was our nursery, or a horse drawn carriage, or a Lancaster bomber plunging towards the dunes that stretched out before the sea.

  When we arrived at Fontainebleau in France, everything seemed exotic: the school, the clothes, the food, the houses, the colours.

  We lived on a quiet street at the edge of the forest. A house of grey stone in the midst of incredible trees. My room was in a small, pink tower. Sarah’s looked onto the garden. We spent hours in the forest with our dog Tinka. It was pure freedom. Everything was changing. It was
the beginning of our revolution.

  My father’s batman would come every morning to attend to him, and then he would set off to the Allied Forces’ headquarters. This was a whole world unto itself, with its school, shops, swimming pool, social life. It seems remote today that world, half black-and-white, half colour, encapsulated in the phrase: the postwar years.

  My parents were nonconformists, in their own way. Even though we were Protestant, they enrolled us in a Catholic school, le College Jeanne d’Arc. We didn’t understand a thing. Not a word. Quite apart from the decimal system, which was a complete mystery to us with our pounds, shillings and pence.

  No one spoke English. My father would listen to records every morning as he shaved, repeating endlessly, ‘Bonjour Paul, comment allez-vous? Paul, as-tu garé la voiture?’

  And this mysterious Paul would never deign to reply.

  In the summer we would go down south to La Croix-Valmer. A retired English colonel ran a very beautiful campsite overlooking the sea.

  My parents trust us and leave us free to do we want because we respect their rules. We spend wonderful days with boys and girls of our age in the shade of the pine trees or on the beach, caught up in a sunlit dream. At night we lie by the fire, sing songs, talk in whispers. Such happiness feels as if it will never end.

  Sarah is fourteen and I watch her smile subtly change, that opaque, slightly distracted smile of hers. The innocence, the not knowing, how do we recapture that? What name shall we give it? All childhood is bathed in light.

  There should be a list of happy days. To preserve them, cherish them, and then of course not believe them. How many diaries does one need not to remember?

  I’m coming, Sarah. I want to tell our story. I want to be with you.

  When you turned twenty-one, our parents gave you your first big trip abroad. With a girlfriend, you left London for America. You went to New York and then your tour of the continent took you to Acapulco, that spectacular strip of land pinned between the ocean and the mountains.