The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘More or less. Because it was that same day in September, the day we went to Southwold, that the telegram came from Chadwick. “Robin dead at Salonika,” it said. “Please come at once.”

  ‘So the war spilled back into our lives. Just as it seemed to be ending and everyone was saying – exactly as they had in 1914 – “it will be over by Christmas”, there it was again. Senseless. The slaughterhouse war!

  ‘They didn’t want me to go, because the harvest was just beginning. And they’d hoped for a harvest wedding. It was to have been a season of bounty. But they knew I would go. They accepted my debt to Chadwick. But they were dreadfully confused: “You won’t forget David, Erica, will you dear? Promise us that you’ll write to him. He loves you so.”

  ‘I did see him again, but that was later, and in my scurrying to London I never thought about him, but only of poor Chadwick. The desertion of Athelstone Amis had been terrible enough, but the loss of Robin was unimaginable. Because I was wrong, I think, to say no one loved Chadwick as he wanted to be loved. From what Chadwick told me, it seems that Robin had loved him quite a lot and not only this, he had hailed him as a genuis, too, which was what Chadwick wanted, perhaps even more than love. And now, there was Chadwick moulting, with no taste of a first night for four years, and Robin killed in the very last months of the war. It was so cruel.

  ‘When I arrived, Chadwick was in bed. He was drunk on port and weeping. A terrible sight, like a sketch by Boz. Mrs Hogan said she could do nothing for him.

  ‘“If his room smells o’ piss, Miss,” she said, “’tis because we can’t move him to change the linen.” But when he saw me, he became as obedient as a lamb. He let the tears ripple on and on through his hair (a pool of tears in the hair of Alice!) and I took the port away and helped him to a chair and covered him with a rug while Mr Hogan ran a bath for him.

  ‘I’d never seen Chadwick without any clothes on – only his white legs as I described them to you – but now I did. I saw him almost every day from then on because his broken heart made him cussed and he couldn’t bear to be helped or touched by anyone but me. The first shock I had was not the sight of his body, which was just rather large and grey and soft but the sight of his hair which, when it was wet in the bath, began to run, so that the whole bath soon became golden with hair dye. I’d always believed, you see, that Chadwick’s extraordinary hair was naturally yellow. All my life it had been yellow and to know that now it was just grey like the rest of him was shocking. I tried to hold his hair out of the water, but it was so long, it kept falling back in. In the end I got a ribbon and tied it back with that. What a sight he was, poor darling! I’ve never seen anything like him.

  ‘The Hogans were threatening to leave. With Connolly and Pearce dead in Ireland, they felt like traitors taking the wages of the English. Or at least I suppose this was why they wanted to go. I never asked them. I just persuaded them to stay another month. I imagined that in a month I could get Chadwick to stop drinking (in my first week he was either drunk or ill or sleeping) and then I could cope with him on my own. But he was too heavy for me to lift and he often needed lifting. He was like a huge, incontinent child, disgusting and yet lovable. And I knew that he was letting his grief out, not holding it in like the silent men in the pub in Culham Market, and that if he could do this, he might recover.

  ‘Quite a few people called at the flat and they were always shocked by the way Chadwick looked. His agent came several times but always with the same gloomy prognostications: no one would ever look at What did you do in the War, Jean-Marc. Patriotism had died a little with the tales of useless slaughter but now that many of the soldiers were returning and victory was in sight, it recovered. To have fought in – and survived – the war was to be a hero. Pacifists were out of fashion.

  “I know all that,” Chadwick would say impatiently, “but when the people really begin to count the cost of the war, then they will see the lies behind it, and the posturing and the waste! This play says it all. It’s only a question of choosing the right time to put it on. Robin always said,” he used to add, “that Jean-Marc was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  ‘And then, invariably he would cry and his agent would go away looking embarrassed and I would suggest a walk to Bryanston Square where we could sit in the gardens and watch the leaves fall. Oh, it was a sad time! I tried day after day to make Chadwick laugh. I told him about Eileen and the Tipperary Rooms and the Mons sampler which I had burnt by then. I told him about David in his blue bathing suit. And a little grey smile would sometimes appear and he would reach for my hand and say that he was very, very fond of me and perhaps, after all, I might be a writer some day if I stuck to the truth.

  ‘He was recovering. Bit by bit. The afternoons got shorter and each day he was a little stronger to face the evening. We began to go to restaurants again. He went to the barbers and had his hair retinted. It wasn’t that he started to forget Robin. He talked about him a great deal and kept writing to Robin’s mother in Dorchester saying that her son was the most compassionate and beautiful young man who had ever lived and why on earth didn’t she answer his letters so that they could share their grief? But she never did answer. I expect she refused to believe that her son had been queer. I expect she’d had plans for him to marry into a good family.

  ‘Well, as I say, there was no question of Robin being gradually forgotten (as he had gradually forgotten Athelstone Amis after his legs had recovered) but I could see that, physically, Chadwick was getting better. Some of the greyness left him. He bought some new neckties. He took me shopping one afternoon and bought me a blue dress and coat – forget-me-not blue, startling and beautiful and I began to discover at twenty-five that I was considered rather fine, even by Chadwick’s sophisticated friends. My hands were rough, of course, from the years of farm work, but the rest of me was coming along quite well. I enjoyed the visits to restaurants and the glances of the young men. I knew, at about that time that I would fall in love – perhaps quite soon – but I wanted a black stallion for a lover, not a boy with a sling!

  ‘It was October and the Hogans left. Their hearts had sailed home to Ireland long before their bodies so that when their bodies came to go they went easily, longingly and without a backward glance. They said they would send us picture postcards of Ireland to show us the beauty of their country. They had no work to go to, but this didn’t seem to worry them. I expect they thought they would live on the Irish air.

  ‘Another couple replaced them. They were called the Warburtons and they were very down-to-earth and strong, very London. They’d never seen any of Chadwick’s plays of course but they’d heard of him and he was very gratified and said idiotically vain things like: “Well, Mrs Warburton dear, I like to think I have a small reputation, only a small one, mind …” so I thought to myself, perhaps you don’t really need me now, Chadwick, and I had better go back to Suffolk and help with the end of the harvest. I suggested this to Chadwick but he said no, he would die of loneliness. This wasn’t true in fact, because more and more of his friends called on him and asked him to dinners now that he was presentable again. For sorrow is sometimes obscene, Ralph, and you need a strong stomach for it. So I stayed and we got used to the Warburtons and they got used to us and then Chadwick died.’

  Erica sat very still. She had finished her glass of wine and Ralph got up quietly, took it from her and refilled it. Outside the window a siren passed – an ambulance or a fire engine. Ralph held the full glass and waited for Erica to take it from him.

  ‘I thought,’ she said at last, ‘that I would be able to describe Chadwick’s death to you. I can remember it very vividly and my life was changed because of it. But I don’t think I can describe it; it makes me so sad. I owed Chadwick so much you see – and I don’t just mean money, although he had paid for a lot of things. Oh dear, I wanted to build a tepee round his body, like the one he’d made with Gully. I wanted to do a wild wailing dance to make him breathe. I wept for him more than I’d wept for my mo
ther, more than for Emily. I was told afterwards that sixteen million people in India alone died of flu that winter, just as Chadwick died. It was even more senseless than the war.

  ‘I nursed him, but the nursing of him was terrible, because from the start of the illness he knew he would die and every day he grew more and more afraid of death and would hold my arm with his burning hands and ask me to save him from these dreams of death which he saw always as a tidal wave, beginning far out at sea and then growing, growing so tall and vast that it blotted out the sun and the sky went dark … oh poor soul … there was no one but me between him and his fear; no mediator like a priest, no belief in anything but darkness. I hate to remember it, Ralph, and yet I so often do.’

  ‘When did he die, Erica?’

  ‘On the last day of November. Nineteen days after the armistice. And we buried him in London.’

  ‘By the twenty-third day of the war, only one of King Rey’s camels remained standing: Zabeth’s own camel, tethered to a mango tree in the palace gardens, drunk from eating the mangoes which fell and burst at its feet. King Rey knew that he could not send Zabeth’s camel to war.

  He summoned his Imperial Council and, wearing his Robe of the State Occasion (smelling of monkey’s fur, smelling of the dead Minah birds), he ordered them to make a mountain of the dead camel’s bones, to dry them in the sun, and then to command that every craftsman in the land cease at once to fashion objects of usefulness and begin forthwith to make necklaces – beautiful, polished necklaces – out of the camel bones.

  The King paused and swallowed and said: “We shall put all the necklaces onto our boats, and our boats will travel day and night and never stopping down the longest river in the world, to a point where the river widens into an enormous lake. On the banks of this lake,” said the King, “is the City of a Future Time, and the rulers of the City of a Future Time will buy the cargo of camel-bone necklaces and, in return, send us guns made of pig-iron. And our boats will travel day and night and never stopping back up the longest river in the world to our poor suffering land, and then – in a single day with our guns of the Future – we shall win the war.”

  The war was already lost. The members of the Council knew that the war was already lost. Yet there was no dissent. Not a whisper of it. For the members of the Imperial Council of King Rey were so old that dissent was a word the meaning of which they had long forgotten, just as, long ago, they had forgotten so much else about their lives and about their country, such as the maiden names of their own mothers and what it felt like to be young enough to have a mother and to see in the desert mirages all the wonders of a young man’s heart.

  The flesh was hacked from the camel corpses, and the desert sun burned the bones dry and white.

  King Rey’s wounded soldiers, riders with no mounts, began to dig trenches in the sand and to crouch there, waiting their endless wait for the guns that would never arrive, and hearing in their skulls the dry winds of death.’

  ‘“At least the war’s over,” my father said to me at Chadwick’s funeral. He said this as if he was telling me news, as if he thought the ending of the war had escaped my attention. Then he went on to complain: “I heard they danced in the streets – and worse – in London. London’s no place to be.”

  ‘“There was no dancing in the flat,” I wanted to say. The Warburtons went out and made a night of it, but I sat with Chadwick by the gas fire. His fever was just beginning.

  ‘It was very strange to see my father in London. I remember noticing that, standing among the gathering of Chadwick’s friends, he looked poor and rough. He looked like a servant. I asked him, when all the guests had been given tea and gone, if he’d like to stay with me at the flat. And he was shocked. “I’m not staying and neither are you, Erica,” he said. “The flat doesn’t belong to us.” And it was as he said this that I knew my life had changed again and my heart did a kind of jump inside my funeral coat. “The flat’s mine,” I said. “Chadwick left me everything he had.”

  ‘This was absolutely true. There were one or two bequests. He’d left my father five hundred pounds and Gully five hundred pounds. And Robin’s mother in Dorchester had been left all the odds and ends that Robin had given him, such as a set of ivory brushes for his ripples and some French playing cards with C.M. on them and almost certainly a volume or two of Gide though I don’t really remember. The Hogans in County Cork had been left a hundred pounds, but there was nothing for the Warburtons, they were too new. A clause in the will said that I, Erica Harriet March, should be the sole beneficiary of all royalties or payments that might accrue from performances of Chadwick’s plays (after the agent’s commission had been taken) and that I was free to make my home in the flat or sell it, as I pleased. When all the bequests had been taken care of and the lawyer’s fees paid, I was left with a sixty-two year lease on the flat and just a little under ten thousand pounds.

  ‘Now I never dreamed Ralph, that I would ever be rich and as you see, I’m not rich now – it’s all gone. But in 1918, ten thousand pounds was riches. If I hadn’t been so saddened by Chadwick’s death I think I would have danced or run to Covent Garden and bought a tray of gardenias. But all I could say to the memory of dear Chadwick – and I said it softly, with the grief he had caused me still in my throat – was “I think you’ve set me free.” And then I would spend hours in front of a mirror, measuring every line on my face. For the freedom I had was so precious, so unexpected, I knew I mustn’t squander it. And so much was changing: the women’s vote had been granted that same year and the war was over: there seemed to be no more fighting to be done. So I didn’t know where to go, Ralph. I literally did not dare take a step in case it was the wrong one, and there was no one to advise me.

  ‘David turned up one day. He’d dressed very formally – for London! – and you could tell his collar was hurting. He looked as if he had a broken neck! Lots of days must have passed between Chadwick’s funeral and David’s visit, but I don’t remember what I did with them. I believe I just sat and stared at myself. The whole flat smelled of Chadwick’s hair elixir; I knew the place was his and could never be mine, but I lingered on there for a while. And when David arrived and saw the flat, he said “My word, how spacious! My word, how grand!” So I said simply: “It was right for Chadwick, but not for me.

  ‘I was very curt to David, very beastly. He wanted a marriage and I wanted a life and the two were far apart. I stood in the drawing room and raged. “You’re a doctor,” I yelled, “and now you turn up! Why didn’t you come sooner and save Chadwick?” You see? Very beastly. It wasn’t David’s fault that Chadwick had died. But the anger felt so good. I began to come alive through it and feel my blood gush and my brain push. I became delirious with words and it was ecstasy after all my silent days. I said the most extraordinary things! I told David that Chadwick would be reincarnated as a girl and come teasing him along the Suffolk lanes. I told him to marry Eileen and set my father free. And of course he fled. What else could he do, poor thing? He took his stiff neck away and I never saw him again, not until he was an old man, with a wife called Fidelity.

  ‘I moved soon after that. I sold the lease of Chadwick’s flat and bought a little cottage house in Hampstead. It was very small and cheap and apart from the cupboard, it was the first thing of substance I ever owned. But the strangeness of my new freedom still made me a bit afraid. I looked at Ratty May and said, “What now?” And Ratty May, who is so wise in her bran body, said, “Write to Gully and Gully will go to the farm in his butcher’s van and get the cupboard for you and drive it to London, and once the cupboard is here …”

  “What then?” I said, but she didn’t answer.

  ‘I did send for the cupboard. I wrote to a removal firm and they brought it, and in my little house it looked terribly large. I don’t know why I wanted it really. I think I was afraid Eileen would start filling it up with her things and I couldn’t bear that. But it arrived just as it had always been, with my mother’s dresses still hanging up in
side.’

  The restaurant Ralph chose was crowded. He sat in a far corner of it, almost under some stairs, and ordered himself a large Italian meal, starting with pasta in a clam sauce which reminded him of home. On the notepad he had brought – weapon against the stares of the other diners – he wrote: ‘I have always felt greedy eating expensive food. If I’m alone, I feel even worse, even more greedy, but what the hell. The hotel dining room is getting to me. I could die in there and be buried by a Portuguese waiter.’

  The restaurant was warm and softly lit. Ralph felt hidden, on the edge of contentment. At the next table a balding man, neat in his pinstripes yet gross-bellied, held hands with a laughing girl. He refilled and refilled her glass and her laughter had the monotony of a bell. ‘Later,’ Ralph wrote, ‘they will copulate; his heavy body crushing hers. Ejaculation will make him think about his wife, but of course he won’t tell Miss Muffet. If he sleeps he’ll dream about his kids and if she sleeps she’ll dream about being mother to them. It’s all dumb.’

  For the first time since arriving in London, Ralph felt glad to be alone. The weight of another person, he mused, is often far worse than the weight of solitude. He ordered a second half bottle of wine. The spaghetti came and it was spicy, tasting of fresh parsley and the sea. He marvelled that he could have felt so sorry for himself for so long. ‘I’m making good progress with Erica,’ he wrote. ‘She trusts me more each day and at the end there will be something – a kind of gift of her spirit. Must absolutely refuse to chuck her in till she’s offered it all – the whole life – who the fuck else has ever been so generous? Even Ma and Dad lead X-certificate lives, censored lives. So if Walt tries anything, gotta say “out your ass!”’

  Ralph giggled. A whole baby chicken arrived, cooked in rosemary and garlic, with a dish of zucchini. As he ate the chicken, he remembered his own herbs, dead no doubt on their sheltered sill, but the thought of their death didn’t upset him as it had done recently. ‘Other things,’ he wrote almost illegibly, ‘take shape and grow right here. They take time, that’s all.’