The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  There was no wine. Only some fresh lemonade which Erica had made herself, and she asked Ralph to pour some out. As he handed her the drink she said: ‘They paid me, you know, your magazine, to do all this talking. It’s very nice of them. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Hers is just one life,’ Ralph wrote on page two of his Summary. ‘Pointless, perhaps, to imagine that this life, given me second hand and most of it lived in another era, can really help me make sense of mine. Erica’s sympathy will not revive my dead herbs.

  ‘Question one, then: “Why have I attached so much importance to this assignment?”

  ‘Question two: “What am I actually hoping for?”

  ‘Because aside from asking questions, I do absolutely nothing. I listen. I get confusing dreams. I remember Grandma a lot, and Joe Beale across my landing, damn it, with his Nina Simone records but no key to my door. Two of my teeth are hurting like hell and celibacy is becoming a pain. Think I must get hold of a) a dentist, and b) a girl.’

  Ralph abandoned the Summary. An hour later, he was walking urgently towards South Kensington in search of a taxi. Three hours and forty pounds later he was floating on the red velvet heat of a banquette at Mr Toad’s, a club where once before he had found a skinny girl twice his height to go reeling home with, skinny English girl with good teeth and thin hair and a body that stayed ramrod straight under his exhausted passion, giving and feeling nothing.

  ‘I came to avenge myself,’ he found himself saying, ‘to find vengeance on the very very bitter English and unmoving eye …’ No one seemed to hear him, yet after a moment he was aware of something warm on his mouth and he reached up and it was a hand. He pulled the hand away and saw that it belonged to a well-shaped brown arm. He followed the arm and saw beside him on the red banquette a smiling brown girl.

  ‘Pearl …’ he mumbled.

  The girl smiled and smiled. The shoulder straps of her dress were diamante and blinded him. He leant back and examined the girl, squinting in the light of the shoulder straps.

  He wanted to ask her how long she’d been there and whether she was staying or going, staying or going … the two words were like a see-saw in his head, unutterable.

  ‘Pearl …’ he said again.

  ‘Pearl Bailey?’ said the girl. ‘You that old, honey?’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no, no …’ said Ralph.

  Staying or going, staying or going, staying or going …?

  ‘Have some more champagne,’ said Pearl.

  ‘Sure.’

  The girl poured and Ralph drank. Time was a high wheel, way above existence. He let his hands caress the girl’s plump shoulders, the pushed-up tits … staying or going, staying or going?

  ‘Oh Pearl …’ he said and it was a wail.

  ‘C’mon honey. What’s so sad?’

  ‘Staying or going?’ He said it at last. The see-saw began to slow down, the shoulder straps streamed back into focus. Ralph had a clear and coherent thought: my teeth have stopped hurting.

  ‘Up to you,’ said Pearl.

  ‘Up to me?’

  ‘You wanna take me back. Have some treats, eh?’

  Yes he did. Yes he did. She was beautiful. The smell of her was an unction. No one could take her from him. He had waited years for her. Pearl.

  ‘I love you Pearl,’ he said, ‘I’d like to lay my head down …’

  ‘C’mon baby. Let’s go, eh?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Let’s go have some fun.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He was falling. Wasn’t he? Of course he was falling from the barn roof … ‘Hey!’ The voice was sharp and cross. Someone pushed him and he was upright. But the longing to fall down wouldn’t leave him. He had to let go of the ridge and fall and fall …

  ‘No!’ said the voice.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘please let me, Pearl… please…’

  ‘Shit!’ said the voice. But the fall was beautiful. The morning sun was warm on his back and the ground drew him gently inwards and covered him.

  *

  ‘I’m very worried about Ralph,’ said Erica to Mrs Burford. ‘He’s always here by two and it’s ten past three.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ said Mrs Burford.

  ‘Well why wouldn’t you? It’s so unlike him.’

  ‘Could be anyfing, couldn’t it?’

  ‘What d’you think it could be?’

  ‘Well. Could be the Ayatollah.’

  The Ayatollah?’

  ‘Well. Yer Americans now. They’re targets, ’nt they? For yer Persians, or whatever they calls themselves now. I’d say ’e’s been took ’ostage.’

  Erica poured herself a glass of wine and sat silently waiting.

  At four, just as Mrs Burford was leaving, Ralph appeared at the door. Mrs Burford winked at him as she passed him. ‘Thought they’d got you this time an’ all!’ she said.

  He was very white and his hands holding the recorder and notepad shook. He made a gesture of despair as he came into the room.

  ‘I’m sorry, Erica. I’ve just wasted your time …’

  ‘Your time. You’re the busy one, Ralph. I’ve got nothing to do.’

  ‘I’m really sorry …’

  ‘Mrs Burford thought you’d been kidnapped.’

  ‘Did she? Yes. Well I was in a way. By my own idiocies. I got plastered.’

  Erica smiled. ‘Do you feel terrible?’

  ‘Yes. More or less.’

  ‘Do you want to go home again?’

  ‘No. I’d like to stay for a bit.’

  ‘Well poor you, Ralph. I wonder why you got drunk?’

  Ralph shrugged. ‘Lonely, I guess.’

  ‘Were you? Don’t you have friends here to see in the evenings?’

  ‘I’ve got one friend. He’s in Oxford.’

  ‘But none here?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘So you feel lonely, do you?’

  ‘Sometimes. I guess.’

  ‘You miss New York?’

  ‘In a way. I’ve been lonely there too a bit.’

  ‘Cities, you see. They’ve become terrible really, don’t you think?’

  ‘They’re dirty.’

  ‘It’s not just that. They’ve become so empty-hearted.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘London more than any. I sometimes think I ought to leave it, but I know I won’t. Not now.’

  ‘Where would you go if you did leave it?’

  ‘Where would I go? I don’t know Ralph. Perhaps if I was younger, I’d go to Africa.’

  Ralph smiled. ‘To Africa?’

  ‘Yes. To the desert.’

  ‘It’s full of oil wells and petro-chemical waste dumps.’

  ‘It’s not, is it? All the desert?’

  ‘I guess not all.’

  ‘Well I’d go to a bit that was empty.’

  ‘What about Paris? Didn’t you live in Paris for a while?’

  ‘Oh Paris. Yes. I lived there for ten years! But it chokes me, I find. I was too happy there ever to be happy there again.’

  ‘So here you stay. In London.’

  ‘Yes. Here I stay. Do you know I’m fifty-eight years older than the Festival Hall?’

  Ralph went to the kitchen and made himself a strong cup of tea. He brought it back to Erica’s room and sat silently warming his hands on it.

  Erica watched him.

  ‘D’you want to tell me about your drunken evening,’ she said after a while, ‘or is it best forgotten?’

  ‘It is forgotten. I just can’t remember what happened, how I got to bed, anything … it’s all very vague. I had a kind of fantasy about a girl I once knew called Pearl, but that’s all I remember.

  ‘Pearl? What a beautiful name. Will you tell me about her?’

  ‘Oh no. I don’t really want to, Erica. She was years and years ago. I’d rather get on …’

  ‘Why don’t you talk today and I’ll listen?’

  ‘Oh shit no.’

  ‘Why not?’


  ‘I’m too fogged. I couldn’t get any thoughts out.’

  ‘Couldn’t you try?’

  ‘No I can’t. Honestly.’

  ‘What about your herbs, Ralph. Have you found out about them? Did you telephone?’

  ‘Oh no. I guess they’re dead. Now look, can we get on, Erica? I had a cable this morning – this afternoon or whenever – from Walt who’s my boss, and he’s threatening to cut my time in London.’

  ‘Is he? What did he say?’

  ‘Oh some bullshit. Something about something cropping up. So I may only have another week or so.’

  ‘Do you want me to go faster? Am I saying everything too slowly?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I could miss out things.’

  ‘No. I don’t want you to miss anything out. Really I don’t. Can you tell me about going home today at the beginning of the war and about starting your book ?’

  ‘About beginning my book?’

  ‘Yes. And about Eileen?’

  ‘I didn’t begin my book straight away.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. It was autumn – the autumn of 1914 – when I went home and I think I began the book that winter, the first winter of the war. It was terribly difficult, you know, to understand the war, from where we were. I used to lie awake and try to imagine it – the noise of the big guns and Englishmen trudging along French roads in straggly lines, with their bully beef and their chilblains. I could imagine them, but I didn’t know what they were doing there! I didn’t understand alliances.

  ‘As the war went on, more and more changes came – even to Suffolk. There was a lot of “requisitioning” which is a word I hate because it just means taking for very little money and you have no redress. They took the men of course, all the young men of whatever class except Gully who I suppose would have looked untidy in a parade with his head sticking out sideways, and they took our horses in time, hundreds of them. And I tell you one funny thing that happened. A neighbour of ours, “li’l ol’ boy Dawson” we called him, he lost all his houses to the requisitioning under the D.O.R.A. and couldn’t work his plough. He only had two or three fields to plough, that was all the land he had but even one field – you can’t plough it without an animal. So d’you know what he did? He harnessed his two fat sows to the plough. He made a special collar for them and they pulled the plough for him. What a sight – to see those pigs going round and round! But they did it, and Dawson got his harvest in. And I’ve often thought, that was exactly how life was then – funny and cruel: pigs pulling the plough and old men following after.

  ‘But now there were two women in our house – Eileen and me. The house was full, full of Eileen’s belongings, so that when I first went into it, I thought this isn’t our house.

  ‘The night I arrived, Eileen cooked trout and we ate our trout with pearl-handled fishknives, and the kitchen table was spread with a white damask tablecloth. There were two framed samplers hanging up by the kitchen range and one said “The Lord Giveth” and the other one said “The Lord Taketh Away”. And of course this is exactly what had happened in our house. God had given us this new bric-a-brac and fishknives and, in return, he’d taken away our old ways. There’ll be a private war, I thought.

  ‘I ought to describe Eileen. She was a very neat woman who smelled of soap. She was forty-five but well preserved. I expect the soap had preserved her. She didn’t like to be touched, not by me, not by the animals, not even by my father – or so it seemed because whenever he did touch her she’d brush him away like a fleck of dust. She hardly ever smiled, but when she did, you saw that she had excellent teeth, as hard and shiny as the handles of the knives. And her heart was hard. It never softened up. I just couldn’t understand how my father could have replaced my mother so carelessly. Yet I had to remind myself that he had been on his own without a wife for fifteen years, and of course I should have rejoiced for him and for Eileen too, who had never been married, yet who had collected all these possessions as a kind of dowry. But I couldn’t rejoice. I went to my old room and opened the cupboard. I half expected the cupboard to be full of Eileen’s hats or boxes of linen but it wasn’t; it was just as it had always been with some of my mother’s clothes in it and some of mine. So I crawled in among the dust and the soft skirts and rocked myself.

  ‘I hurt inside, from my grand lovemaking with Gully, and I was afraid of what was to come.

  ‘There was work to be done on the farm, I could see that. With the young men beginning to go, we who were left on the land had to care for it. We knew shortages would come and of course they did. We knew we were lucky to own land and animals. I kept wondering what Chadwick would do in London if the shortages became severe. I imagined him saying to Robin: “Now look, dear heart, imports from Russia don’t seem to be getting through: no caviar to be seen anywhere!” I missed Chadwick, his little bits of wit and his thirst for what he called “culture”, even his search for love. My father had gone so silent you see. He let Eileen give orders, orders, always orders: “The house is my province”, she’d say, “I’ve lived in a town long enough to know how a good house should be kept and far too long to take to farm work. I warned your father when I married him – animals have their place in God’s world and so do I and that place isn’t the same and never will be.”

  ‘I was up at five, milking. I began to pity the cows for their prison shed. A new calf was born in February and I called her Emily. “We heard you were mixed up with her and her like,” Eileen said, “and your father agreed with me, there’s no sense to any of that vote nonsense. I don’t know what women think they’re doing, going against God and Nature like that! We put it down to your age and we wouldn’t hear a word spoken against you, would we, Geoffrey? But of course we couldn’t condone it.” My father was silent, always so silent. All he said was, “You’re home now and that’s the greatest blessing of the war.”

  ‘We were “told” (I don’t know who by – it could have been Mr Asquith or Lloyd George or Lord Northcliffe or anyone) that the war would be over by Christmas. I can’t imagine why they thought that! I suppose they just pictured one mighty cavalry charge and the Germans scuttling back through Belgium as fast as they’d come. I don’t believe they ever envisaged trenches. Or if they did, they certainly didn’t tell the volunteers, “You’ll sit down in France, lads, in the mud and that’s what you’ll do!”

  ‘The young men who went believed in glory. They got on their trains grinning. My father regretted that he was too old to fight: he said if he was twenty he’d show the Hun a thing or two. And this kind of bravado talk was with us for a while and all the poor young men who hadn’t joined up were prodded and pestered – even Gully – and accused of cowardice.

  ‘Gully said to me one morning: “I’m not cowardly like, Erica. Not in myself. But soldiering now, I don’t think I could do that.” And he never went, thank heavens. He survived all the pestering and carried on. The only thing he had to do was to stop selling anything that sounded German, like Frankfurter sausages. No one in England could sell anything like this any more because of all the whipped-up hatred of Germany. They had to change their names, and relabel them “Best British Viands.”

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the lengths to which we had to go in our Germany-hating. The Daily Mail told us that if we went to a restaurant (not that we ever did) we should refuse to be served by a German or an Austrian waiter, and: “if your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport.” I remember I cut this out and sent it to Chadwick (who went to a lot of restaurants) and he wrote back to me and said ‘Arnold Bennett says “one is becoming a militarist”, but who is “one” I wonder? Robin and I wouldn’t dream of interrupting so delightful an experience as a meal with the display of so mundane a thing as a passport.’

  ‘So Chadwick wasn’t joining in the hating. His letter was a rebuke. At the end of it he wrote: “the war you waged in London was worth the fight but this war is despicable and we should not be in it. Tell those who say their prayers, to pra
y it ends soon.”

  ‘I think I was confused. My father and Eileen couldn’t utter the word “pacifist” without vomiting. I told them one evening at supper: “Uncle Chadwick’s a pacifist, you know,” and Eileen spat out a huge chunk of meat onto the table. And then they began a tirade against Chadwick, the two of them, and I saw that even my father despised him, yet he had let Chadwick pay for my keep and buy me clothes and care for me for two years. So I said this. I said: “How could you let Chadwick do this, if you disapprove of him so?” and then of course my father whipped round and came out with my own lie: “we understood you payed Chadwick rent out of your earnings at the tea-shop.” And I went mad then: I began to shout at them. I told them I had never worked in any tea-shop, that I had given all my time to the movement and that Chadwick paid for everything, everything, even my bus fares. I told them that I had starved for a total of twenty-nine days and that each time Chadwick and Mrs Hogan had looked after me and made me well again and that I hated being home because there was nothing in the home, nothing but things!

  ‘I remember that my father went very white and Eileen began to whimper. They both stared at me. So I left the meal and went to my room. I got Ratty May off the bed and took her into the cupboard and I put my head against her flat face and said “Scheisse” which I knew meant “shit” in German. I said the word lots of times and after a while I found the word incredibly beautiful. I said it slower and slower: “Scheisse, Scheisse, Schei-sse … and then I wondered if I was saying it properly, the way a German would say it. I was still saying Scheisse when Eileen came up. I held on to the cupboard door so that she couldn’t open it but she knew I was in there so she began to talk to me and I tried not to listen. I tried to keep on saying “Scheisse, “Scheisse,” to block her voice out. Yet I remember what she said that night. It was the first of her monologues and the one I hated most. She told me that she was a very religious woman, that God often gave her signs of Himself, that He appeared to her in lots of different forms and one of these forms was a lacquered musical box which played Greensleeves and it was through the musical box that God had told her to marry my father.