by Jean Rhys
‘Oh, don’t be funny. I haven’t had much to eat today – that’s all.’
After a few minutes Monica said impatiently, ‘Well why don’t you eat then?’
‘I think I’ve gone past it,’ said Audrey, fidgeting with the sausage and cabbage on her plate.
Monica began to read from the morning paper. She spoke loudly above the music on the radio.
‘Have you seen this article about being a woman in Germany? It says they can’t get any scent or eau-de-cologne or nail polish.’
‘Fancy that!’ Audrey said. ‘Poor things!’
‘It says the first thing Hitler stopped was nail polish. He began that way. I wonder why. He must have had a reason, mustn’t he?’
‘Why must he have had a reason?’ said Audrey.
‘Because,’ said Monica, ‘if they’ve got a girl thinking she isn’t pretty, thinking she’s shabby, they’ve got her where they want her, as a rule. And it might start with nail polish, see? And it says: “All the old women and the middle-aged women look most terribly unhappy. They simply slink about,” it says.’
‘You surprise me,’ Audrey said. ‘Different in the Isle of Dogs, isn’t it?’
She was fed up now and she wanted to be rude to somebody. ‘Oh do shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m not interested. Why should I have to cope with German women as well as all the women over here? What a nightmare!’
Monica opened her mouth to answer sharply; then shut it again. She was an even-tempered girl. She piled the plates onto a tray, took it into the kitchen and began to wash up.
As soon as she had gone Audrey turned off the radio and the light. Blissful sleep, lovely sleep, she never got enough of it . . . On Sunday mornings, long after Monica was up, she would lie unconscious. A heavy sleeper, you might call her, except that her breathing was noiseless and shallow and that she lay so still, without tossing or turning. And then She (who?) sent the gentle sleep from Heaven that slid into my soul. That slid into my soul. Sleep, Nature’s sweet, something-or-the-other. The sleep that knits up the ravelled . . .
It seemed that she had hardly shut her eyes when she was awake again. Monica was shaking her.
‘What’s the matter? Is it morning?’ Audrey said. ‘What is it? What is it?’
‘Oh, nothing at all,’ Monica said sarcastically. ‘You were only shrieking the place down.’
‘Was I?’ Audrey said, interested. ‘What was I saying?’
‘I don’t know what you were saying and I don’t care. But if you’re trying to get us turned out, that’s the way to do it. You know perfectly well that the woman downstairs is doing all she can to get us out because she says we are too noisy. You said something about jiggers. What are jiggers anyway?’
‘It’s slang for people in the Tube,’ Audrey answered glibly to her great surprise. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
‘Oh is it? No, I never heard that.’
‘The name comes from a tropical insect,’ Audrey said, ‘that gets in under your skin when you don’t know it. It lays eggs and hatches them out and you don’t know it. And there’s another sort of tropical insect that lives in enormous cities. They have railways, Tubes, bridges, soldiers, wars, everything we have. And they have big cities, and smaller cities with roads going from one to another. Most of them are what they call workers. They never fly because they’ve lost their wings and never make love either. They’re just workers. Nobody quite knows how this is done, but they think it’s the food. Other people say it’s segregation. Don’t you believe me?’ she said, her voice rising. ‘Do you think I’m telling lies?’
‘Of course I believe you,’ said Monica soothingly, ‘but I don’t see why you should shout about it.’
Audrey drew a deep breath. The corners of her mouth quivered. Then she said ‘Look I’m going to bed. I’m awfully tired. I’m going to take six aspirins and then go to bed. If the siren goes don’t wake me up. Even if one of those things seems to be coming very close, don’t wake me up. I don’t want to be woken up whatever happens.’
‘Very well,’ Monica said. ‘All right, old girl.’
Audrey rushed at her with clenched fists and began to shriek again. ‘Damn you, don’t call me that. Damn your soul to everlasting hell don’t call me that . . .’
Rapunzel, Rapunzel
During the three weeks I had been in the hospital I would often see a phantom village when I looked out of the window instead of the London plane trees. It was an Arab village or my idea of one, small white houses clustered together on a hill. This hallucination would appear and disappear and I’d watch for it, feeling lost when a day passed without my seeing it.
One morning I was told that I must get ready to leave as I was now well enough for a short stay in a convalescent home. I had to dress and get packed very quickly and what between my haste and unsteady legs I got into the car waiting outside the hospital without any idea of where it was going to take me.
We drove for about forty minutes, stopping twice to pick up other patients. We were still in London but what part of London? Norwood perhaps? Richmond? Beckenham?
The convalescent home, when we reached it, was an imposing red brick building with a fairly large garden. The other patients went into a room on the ground floor and I walked up the staircase by myself, clutching the banisters. At the top a pretty but unsmiling Indian nurse greeted me, showed me into a ward, helped me unpack and saw me into bed. There was a lot of talking and laughing going on and a radio was playing; it was confusing after the comparative quiet of the hospital. I shut my eyes and when I opened them a young good-looking doctor was standing near me. He asked a few questions and finally where my home was.
‘I live in Devon now.’
‘And have you been to any hunt balls lately?’
This was so unexpected that it was a second or two before I managed to smile and say that they must be great fun but that I’d never been to a hunt ball and didn’t know what they were like. He lost interest and went over to the next bed.
I couldn’t sleep for a long time, the radio and the conversation went on interminably and I was relieved when, early next morning, a nurse told me that I was to be moved into another room.
The new ward was smaller and quieter. There were about fourteen patients but I was still too weary to notice anybody except my immediate neighbour, an elderly woman with piles of glossy magazines at the foot of her bed. She pored over them and played her radio all day. That night we had an argument, she said I ought to put my light out and not keep everybody awake because I wanted to read, I said that it wasn’t yet ten o’clock and that her radio had annoyed me all day, but I soon gave in. Perhaps I was keeping the others awake.
Somebody was snoring; just as I thought the noise had stopped it would start up louder than ever and though I had asked for a sleeping pill, it seemed hours before it worked and when I did eventually sleep I had a long disturbing dream which I couldn’t remember when I woke up. I only knew that I was extremely glad to be awake.
When I looked at my neighbour her slim back was turned towards me and she was brushing her hair – there was a great deal of it – long, silvery white, silky. She brushed away steadily, rhythmically, for some time. She must have taken great care of it all her life and now there it all was, intact, to comfort and reassure her that she was still herself. Even when she had pinned it up into a loose bun it fell so prettily round her face that it was difficult to think of her as an old lady.
I can’t say that we ever became friendly. She told me that she was an Australian, that her name was Peterson, and once she lent me a glossy magazine.
I hadn’t been there long when I realized that I didn’t like the convalescent home and that the sooner I got out of it the better I’d be pleased. The monotony of the hospital had finally had a soothing effect. I’d felt weak, out of love with life, but resigned and passive; here on the contrary I was anxious, restless and yet it ought to have been a comforting place. The passage outside the ward was carpeted in dark red, dark red curtains hung ove
r the tall window at the far end and the staircase had a spacious look, with its wide shallow steps and broad oak banisters – just the sort of house to get well in, you would have thought. But I felt it shut in, brooding, even threatening in its stolid way.
The matron soon insisted on my taking daily exercise in the garden and another patient usually walked at the same time as I did. She always carried a paper bag of boiled sweets which she’d offer to me as we discussed her operation for gall bladder and my heart attack in detail. But all the time I was thinking that there too the trees drooped in a heavy, melancholy way and the grass was a much darker colour than ordinary grass. Something about the whole place reminded me of a placid citizen, respectable and respected, who would poison anyone disliked or disapproved of at the drop of a hat.
No kind ladies came round with trolleys of books, as they had in the hospital, so one day I asked if it wasn’t possible for me to have something to read. I was told that there was a library on the ground floor, ‘Down the stairs,’ said the nurse, ‘and to your left.’
When I went in the blinds were drawn and I was in semi-darkness but I was so certain that I wasn’t alone that I stopped near the door and felt for the light switch. The room was empty except for a large table in the middle with straightbacked chairs arranged round it, as if for a meal, and a rickety bookcase at the far end. There was no one there. No one! ‘Oh don’t be idiotic,’ I said aloud and walked past the table. The books leant up against each other disconsolately. They had a forlorn, neglected appearance as though no one had looked at or touched them for years. They would have been less reproachful piled in a heap to be thrown away. Most of them were memoirs or African adventures by early Victorian travellers, in very close print. I didn’t look long, for I hated turning my back on that table, those chairs and when I saw a torn Tauchnitz paperback by a writer I’d heard of I grabbed it and hurried out as quickly as I could. Nothing would have induced me to go back to that room and I read and re-read the book steadily, never taking in what I was reading, so that now I can’t remember the title or what it was about. It was after this that I began counting: ‘Only eight days more, only six days more.’
One morning a trim little man looked into the ward and asked ‘Does any lady want a shampoo or haircut?’
Silence except for a few firm ‘No thank yous’.
Then Mrs Peterson said: ‘Yes, I should like my hair trimmed, please, if it could be managed.’
‘Okay,’ said the man, ‘tomorrow morning at eleven.’
When he had gone someone said: ‘He’s a man’s barber, you know.’
‘I just want it trimmed. I have to be careful about split ends,’ said the Australian.
Next morning the barber appeared with all his paraphernalia, put a chair near a basin – there was no looking glass above it – and smilingly invited her to sit down. She said something to him, he nodded and proceeded while everybody watched covertly. She sat up and he dried her hair gently. Then he picked it up in one hand and produced a large pair of scissors. Snip, snip, and half of it was lying on the floor. One woman gasped.
Mrs Peterson put her hand up uneasily and felt her neck but said nothing. She must have realized that something was wrong but couldn’t know the extent of the damage of course, and it all happened very quickly. The rest went and in a few minutes she had disappeared under the dryer while the barber tidied up. When she paid him he said: ‘You’ll be glad to be rid of the weight of it, won’t you dear?’ She didn’t answer.
‘Cheerio ladies.’ He went off carrying the hair that he had so carefully collected in a plastic bag.
He hadn’t made a very good job of setting what was left and her face looked large, naked and rather plain. She still seemed utterly astonished as she walked back to bed. Then she reached for her handglass and stared at herself for a long time. When I saw how distressed she grew as she looked I whispered: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be surprised how quickly it’ll grow again.’
‘No, there isn’t time,’ she said, turned, pulled the sheet up high and lay so still that I thought she was asleep, but I heard her say, not to me or anybody else, ‘Nobody will want me now.’
During the night I was woken to hear her being violently sick. A nurse hurried to her bed. Next morning it started again, she apologized feebly to the matron who came along to look at her. ‘I’m so very sorry to trouble you, I’m so very sorry.’
All day at intervals it went on, the vomiting, the chokings, the weak child’s voice saying: ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry’, and by night they had a screen up round her bed.
I stopped listening to the sounds coming from behind the screen, for one gets used to anything. But when, one morning, I saw that it had been taken away and that the bed was empty and tidy I was annoyed to hear a woman say: ‘They always take them away like that. Quietly. In the night.’
‘These people are so damned gloomy,’ I said to myself. ‘She’ll probably get perfectly well, her hair will grow again and soon look very pretty.’
I’d be leaving the convalescent home the day after tomorrow. Why wasn’t I thinking of that instead of a story read long ago in the Blue or Yellow fairy book (perhaps the Crimson) and the words repeating themselves so unreasonably in my head: ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair’?
Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic?
She sat in one of a row of deck-chairs with other silent, impassive, elderly people watching the sea. Unlike the sky it was the usual dark grey. But it was calm, the waves making a soothing sound as they rolled in gently.
The beach was empty except for a little boy playing by himself and some way off a man throwing a stick for his dog. Over and over again he threw, over and over again the dog dashed into the water barking, wild with enthusiasm. A cat, now, might get bored even if it could be taught the trick, but dogs must be optimists, thinking every time was the first time. Or perhaps just plain silly.
‘I’ve got the car’, and he was in the next deck-chair.
‘That’s the Atlantic, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘Of course. What did you think it was?’
‘I thought it might be the Bristol Channel.’
‘No, no. Look.’ He produced a map. ‘Here is the Bristol Channel and here are we. That’s the Atlantic.’
‘It’s very grey,’ she said.
But driving along a road by the sea she thought that it was a pleasant little town. Why shouldn’t she take one of those flats painted yellow or pink, green or blue? Holiday flats, they called themselves. Spend a week or so here? Then she imagined the town full of people, cars and coaches. Not the same thing at all.
Besides – she made so many plans.
When they turned inland he began to sing. Songs from various operas but not in any language she knew. Every now and again he’d stop and explain what it was all about. ‘That he sings when he first sees her. This is when he is dying.’
‘They always sing when they are dying. So loud too,’ she said.
But he went on singing. He had a good voice. How long was it since she had sat by a man driving fast and singing? Years and years. Or was it perhaps only yesterday and everything that happened since a strange dream?
On the day before this one – which was also yesterday – she’d been sitting in the kitchen of her cottage looking out of the window at the dismal sky and listening to the silence. No farm cart passed. No lorry. When she heard a soft knock, ‘That must be Mr Singh’ she thought. Everyone else in the village knocked as if they were trying to batter the ramshackle place down. She kept very still and listened. ‘Surely he’ll think I’m out and go away.’
Mr Singh visited the village at intervals selling blouses, scarves and underclothes; he usually persuaded her to buy something gaudy and useless. It had started one day when she was feeling even more lonely and bored than usual, longing for any distraction; then she saw him fairly often.
‘The price is £5 but I will let you have it cheaper. Also I will give you a lucky bead. I am holy man
and will pray for you.’
‘But I don’t want it, Mr Singh.’
‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that. You break my heart, you break my heart. You don’t have to buy, only look,’ he’d say gently.
How does he get so much into one suitcase, she’d wonder.
‘Good-bye mam, thank you mam, God bless you mam.’ He always called her mam or mum.
She remembered that the door wasn’t bolted. ‘He’ll walk in and look for me,’ she thought. And decided to go into the passage, shake her head at him through the glass top and turn the key.
But instead of the white turban and black beard that she expected, a strange young man in grey was waiting patiently outside.
‘I’m Jan—,’ he said smiling. ‘I wrote. Don’t you remember? We met last year in London, you gave me your address and said that if ever I was in England again I could call on you. Didn’t you get my letter?’
Then she remembered the letter from Holland. It was written in English, three pages of it. She’d pored over the difficult handwriting, the passages of unfamiliar poetry. It said that he would be in London and could he come sometime in the afternoon of Tuesday the – of May? She replied that she’d be pleased to see him and added: ‘But this is a rainy place in the spring.’
Tuesday – but this was Monday.
‘Of course, of course,’ she said, trying to sound welcoming. ‘Do come in. You’re just in time for a drink.’
But he refused a drink. The sitting-room was dim at this hour and he sat with his back to whatever light there was, talking smoothly and easily about his hotel in Exeter and about the difficulty of finding her place. He was wearing smooth London clothes. He apologized for his English but he had no accent. Every now and then he’d hesitate for a word, that was all.
‘You can spend tomorrow with me? Perhaps we could go to the sea. Would you like that?’
‘Yes I would. I haven’t seen the sea for a long time.’
Next morning he’d arrived wearing country clothes and carrying a large bunch of flowers.