by Rose Tremain
His contentment outlasted his meal and his walk back to the hotel. Then, lying in the darkness, trying to sleep, it left him. He felt bloated from the food. His breath was sour. He didn’t know where his feeling of optimism had come from – or why. For the day hadn’t been particularly good. It had been monotone in its sad repetition of a mourning. And with Chadwick gone, it was as if a lot of bright colour had left the story.
Ralph switched on his bedside light. He took up The Two Wives of the King and read till dawn, and the book was finished. Seeing the sun at the window, he thought, there is almost no light in the book.
In her twenties, it seemed, Erica March had said: ‘We live in darkness. Day is far off. Day may never come.’ Only at the very end of The Two Wives was there a flicker of light, long after the cargo ships have returned empty, long after the circus-war has turned King Rey’s once beautiful kingdom into a mud waste and the King has journeyed on foot seven hundred miles in his search for Beth. Beth is dead. Her body has been flattened and stretched and painted and turned into a wall map of the Kingdom. Her navel is King Rey’s palace. Her breasts are the mountains he has crossed, her mouth the chasm of despair into which he falls. Yet in falling, in letting his despair engulf him, the convulsions of his body are so great that the capsule it has harboured for so long with such exquisite agony is finally expelled.
Only then can King Rey find access to his own wisdom and begin to lead a life that isn’t founded on lies and vanity. Very slowly, he makes the seven hundred mile journey home. Nothing is left alive in the palace grounds and the earth is stained yellow with the rotted mango fruit. The King begins scrabbling at the soil on his hands and knees. Deep down in the soil there is life and his tears are the rain that waters it and makes it grow.
Ralph put the book away and slept. He dreamed of a young Erica, wearing her blue dress. ‘On the outside,’ she announced to him, ‘I have discovered my own beauty. In my head, I feel nothing but grief.’
‘You’ve no idea,’ she said, ‘how difficult it was to get that book published! When I finished it – quite soon after I moved into my house – I went very boldly along to Chadwick’s agent who had a smart office in the Aldwych. Did I tell you that he was called Evelyn Borrow, which always struck me as a very idiotic name, so that I found it difficult to say. Of course he couldn’t help being called Evelyn Borrow but he did let his friends call him “Eve” (which he could have helped) and when I went to see him with my book, he said “do call me Eve,” but I really couldn’t! Anyway, I didn’t stay long. It turned out he was only interested in plays and looked on books as if they were lavatory paper, so I came humbly out, still with my manuscript and got on a train to St Paul’s and I sat on the steps of the cathedral and tried to think up a prayer that would help my book get published. I can’t remember if I did think up a prayer or not. If I did, it didn’t take effect very fast because I had to wait another two years before anyone would take the book on.
‘I found a book agent eventually: a very nice man called Sam Green. There’d been a “berg” on the end of Green but Sam preferred to drop this because it sounded too German. He worked in a small, rather poor office in Hampstead, very near my cottage, so this was very convenient and Sam and I became friends and he talked to me about all the “real” literary people in London, like the Woolfs and Lytton Strachey and Aldous Huxley and this would make me feel very envious and determined to be “real” myself one day, and I began to write a lot of short stories.
‘Sam worked very hard for The Two Wives and in the end his commission was just a few pounds because a very small new publishing house, Patterson Tree, took the book on and paid me terribly little. But I didn’t mind really and nor did Sam. Sam had a theory that, after the war, English people only wanted to read happy things – love stories on trains, that kind of rubbish! – and my book was far too sad for them and serious and they simply weren’t up to it. So we’d both become very pessimistic about ever selling it and Sam had begun to say things like “Why don’t you start another one, Erica and we might have more luck with that?” But I couldn’t start another one. It had taken me so long to do that one, I just couldn’t start it all over again. I’ve always written dreadfully slowly, you see?
‘But when Patterson Tree came up with their offer I felt like dancing in the street and to celebrate I began an affair with Sam! We were very alike in many ways, very ambitious for ourselves and not particularly clinging, so this began to make me happy and Sam was happy too.
‘I remember that not very long after I began my affair with Sam, I got a letter from Eileen, warning me against the new, shorter skirts that were coming into fashion then. She said: “The women of Suffolk are outraged by these new London garments.” But I thought, how can Eileen know what the women of Suffolk like or don’t like – she only ever meets about twenty or thirty of them. But this was typical of Eileen. If she disapproved of something, she pretended everyone agreed with her. She said: “Your father agrees with me: he hopes you are not wearing them.”
‘But I stopped answering Eileen’s letters about that time. Even my father’s letters I didn’t answer. I felt as if a green sea lay between us. To swim back to them would take me a lifetime, and my lungs and my heart would burst with the effort.
‘Sam and I were very content with each other, but my father wouldn’t have understood this. And when I wrote and told him that my first novel was to be published, he was incapable of joy. He couldn’t say, “I’m glad you’ve found a talent in you and used it.” He just said: “I’m told there is little money in writing books, and perhaps you might do well to follow your uncle and try a play – if you really believe you have the writer in you.”
‘So I abandoned them. Years went by after that and I never saw them. I used to imagine them sometimes, eating in silence with the pearl-handled fishknives, or sitting by the “Lord Giveth” samplers, waiting for a cow to calve, or just waiting, always in silence for the darkness.’
5
They merge, the ’twenties and the ’thirties. They were different from each other, yet they merge in my mind. I can’t remember the dates of things. I get them muddled. I expect it will be confusing for you, Ralph. I expect you’ll keep saying: “When was this?” and “When was that?” and I may not be able to remember, not exactly.
‘Because they went so fast, those years! They were the galloping years – before the fences were put up. Sam Green thought I was on the lane to insanity. Because sometimes I would run so fast and then suddenly find I was looking into a black, black sea filled with horror. And the things I saw made me so weak that quite often I couldn’t stand up and Sam would find me lying down on the floor. And always in these black times, I would “find” my mother. I would see her perfectly, just on the edge of the blackness. And the sad thing was that I knew if I touched her she would vanish, yet I wanted her to hold me. But I started to talk to her and I suppose this is why Sam thought I was going mad, because I talked out loud. I found that the talk comforted me – not at first, but after I’d had a very long conversation that sometimes carried on, on and off, for hours. Then she would go away and I would come out of my black place and Sam would be weeping somewhere very near me, thinking of asylums and restricted visiting.
‘But I don’t want to talk to you about my black times which I still have, often darker now. I won’t talk about them because here was my life beginning, beginning all over again in 1921! I became the writer I had wanted to become for six years. I became a new thing with a new voice. This was the wonder of it, Ralph, finding a voice and knowing that it was my own.
‘It was the reviewers’ doing. If they’d been dismissive, just swept my book aside with a flick of a duster, then I don’t think I would have heard my voice, or if I had heard it, I wouldn’t have believed in it. It would have mocked me. But they didn’t flick me away. They said my voice was original and brave; they said people should listen.
‘Sam and I got drunk at breakfast! We saw success buttering our toast an
d we whooped like Indians. We celebrated for days, buying things we couldn’t afford, food and silly clothes. Patterson Tree sent me flowers; there was talk of an immediate second printing so I suppose they suddenly saw that I might help them grow big, grow into a big tree! It was all very wonderful, like the first taste of a strawberry after a cold spring. I think Sam and I even whispered drunken marriage talk to each other, an eternal literary partnership just like the Woolfs (or the Wolves as I called them) and perhaps we believed it, I can’t remember. But it was a time full of colour just like this lamp, just like a sunrise – pink and red. And a time of music, which had never been part of my life till then (only the marching songs composed for us by Ethel Smyth when we were Suffragettes, but no real music, Schubert or Brahms or Beethoven). But then we bought a second-hand gramophone with an enormous horn like an arum lily and we began to buy records and Sam, who responded far more ecstatically to music than to literature, began to teach me what was what. It was Beethoven’s Pastoral then that I played endlessly, endlessly … da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da … oh I can’t sing any more, but it always reminds me of that time even though I don’t like it much any more. Only Bach now, his discipline and purity, he’s the only one of the whole lot that I like now. When I listen to him, I feel that music going through me, clear as a stream, bright as a knife.
‘Sam wanted me to begin another book. It was quite logical of course, quite right. I should have begun another book; got down to work. But I couldn’t. I knew that the writing of The Two Wives had been painful and I thought it had to be just the same with the next one – very painful, a time of anguish – and then it would be something, not just a story. I tried to explain this to Sam. I said “I don’t think I can Sam, because I don’t want to. I don’t want to experience that same pain all over again, not now when we’re so happy.” He said he understood, but inside him I don’t think he did. He would question me and question me: “What is it exactly that’s painful?” And I couldn’t explain it, not to his satisfaction. All I could say was that I saw this new time as a time of gathering. You sow beans and then you gather them and in the ones you leave are another kind of “gathering” – the seeds of next year. But you can’t plant them straight away. The frosts come and the ground is too cold and hard. “So you just have to wait,” I told Sam, “you wait till you can put your back into the digging and the hoeing, till you feel strong enough and then you start …”
‘Dear Sam! I should describe him. He had the face of the Rabbi, serious and long with a rather short body growing out underneath it. But it was a neat body, quite strong, with a lot more browny-yellow skin tones in it than mine. He was twenty-eight I suppose, just a few years older than me and like me he had no mother, only a father, Louis Greenberg, who was in prison at that time for petty theft. Sam was never ashamed of his father and I loved him for this. We used to have long talks about prisons and what prisons can do to your soul, because I knew about prison first hand and Sam knew about them second hand from his visits to Brixton. I offered to go with Sam to see Louis Greenberg but he wouldn’t let me. He said strangers bothered Louis Greenberg. He was a man who liked to be alone. So in the end I never met him because he died in the prison hospital, at fifty, and a terrible thing happened to us then: Sam’s mourning coincided with one of my black times so I couldn’t help him, not as much as I should have done, and I think he felt very sad and confused.
‘But I don’t want to talk about that today. Ralph. No sad times. Because for six years, or seven, was it, I was with Sam and we saw London coming alive after the war and even the sandwich men, some with medals from the Crimea, seemed to advertise a new hope.
‘We imagined, for a bit, that the angry military men had gone silent for ever and that England was civilizing her heart, being gentler to all her people.
‘She was very gentle to me. My stories were finding places in the uppity literary magazines. They didn’t pay much, but my name was out, that was the thing. I imagined it flying like a speck over London: Erica March. And hardly anyone saw it, but a few did. Sam thought the speck would get bigger. He thought it might turn into a kite, teasing and turning, “if only you would get down to work …” he said.
‘I tried. In about 1923 I began a novel called The Angler and it was going to be about a man a little bit like Chadwick. He leads a solitary life near a river. He’s married to a long-suffering plain thing called Betty but he dreams of boys with bottoms like ripe fruit as he dreams of catching a salmon in his river. But no salmon ever swim into his river so he goes on a journey to find where the salmon begin and makes up complicated plans for redirecting them to his own piece of water. And on the journey, which is a very long one, he meets at last the boy of his dreams and brings him home. But the boy, who is very charming and polite on the outside, is a delinquent inside. He puts poison in the river – to which the salmon have swum – and all the fish die. Betty goes mad and starts jabbering a kind of insane wisdom about man’s need to eat up his precious things. And I had an ending for it all but I never got to it, not then. Because Sam said “You can’t give them a book about a man like this and with a morality like this.” So I stopped. I stopped at the moment the boy poisons the fish.
‘Mind you, we were a generation dominated, in London, by Bloomsbury. Part of me hated Bloomsbury and thought it all very high and mighty and a bit idiotic, and part of me longed to join in and have country weekends and be full of wit and light.
‘I saw Lytton Strachey outside Hatchard’s one day, with his thin body and his beard, and he didn’t look at all forbidding, only rather a shuffling kind of man, walking as if he was very ill or weak. I thought of going up to him and saying something like: “I think it’s very odd, Lytton, that you’ve all missed me out.” But this seemed too bold, too puffed up. So I just watched him wandering on, and then I ran into Hatchard’s and said to one of the young men in there: “I just saw Lytton Strachey outside the shop. Could you tell me please what book he bought?” And it turned out that he’d bought The Two Wives! The shock was extraordinary. I wanted to run out and find him again, but I didn’t.
‘But they haunted me, those Bloomsbury people. I was rather pleased when Lawrence said that they reminded him of black beetles, because part of me wanted to step on them – the jealous part. Then Lawrence came along and stepped on them all! Though of course a lot of things reminded Lawrence of insects: soldiers for instance. And he wanted to trample all the insect people to death. “They’re done for,” he said.
‘People have asked me so many questions about Bloomsbury all my life, and honestly, I’ve never known how to be fair because I didn’t know the individuals, not as friends. I think there was a lot of good in what they were trying to do, tempered with some bad, tempered with intellectual sniffery, as if everyone else’s work except their own smelled repulsive. I didn’t like this about them. It made them appear narrow. And as for Moore’s Principia Ethica, I’ve never read such a load of bunkum! It was drawing-room philosophy and no more use to anyone than those pairs of mantlepiece dogs with dead-looking eyes. But then, all the Bloomsbury people had drawing-rooms – just like Lady Winchelsea! – and I expect there were a good many Staffordshire dogs over their fireplaces.
‘I had a drawing-room in my cottage. But it was very small, so I called it the sitting-room. In fact it was a study. It had a very small window, so not much sun got in and my bulbs never came to anything. I had Chadwick’s huge desk in it, and I worked there, looking out of the little window, out onto the street where hardly anyone passed.
‘Except for the farm, it was the quietest house I’ve ever lived in, very hidden and safe. And I remember the summers in it, sitting at my desk with the window open, smelling the privet hedge which I grew from small plants, and experiencing a state of being that was as sweet and solemn as that smell!’
For some days, Ralph hadn’t heard Erica’s laugh. Now she threw back her head and her laugh was an odd squawking like a jungle bird battering bright wings on high branches
after the rains.
John Pennington’s letter was waiting for Ralph when he returned to the hotel. Seeing the Oxford postmark, he at once imagined himself there, in John’s quiet room, his mind lively, his pulse normal. They drank wine. John sprawled on big Indian cushions.
Worchester College
Oxford
‘Dear Ralph,
Thank you for your letter, which somehow got buried for a day or two under a pile of bills. Refreshing to find you after a demand for £59 from Blackwell’s!
But I’m ill. I’ve got what the doctor calls a “spring cold” but it feels remarkably like the bronchitis I had as a boy. I wheeze and ache and only feel comfortable in bed. I’m taking some yellow pills which are meant to cure me rapidly. But until then, it’s pointless for you to visit. I’d just be wasting your time.
I hope your project is advancing. I was reading a book of Lit. Crit. the other day which touched on Erica March but dismissed her rather swiftly. I fear she is out of fashion and you will have to work hard to engender a revival.
I will write again when the yellow pills have mended me.
Yours, apologetically,
John
P.S. If this is what novel writing does to a person, then I don’t think much of it!’
Ralph stood in the hotel lobby. He was dismayed by the letter and by his reaction to it. I shouldn’t give a shit, he thought. Why do I put so much onto seeing John? Yet he wanted to cry. The marine in him was lonely again. His patch was empty of all companionship.
On the way up to his room, he found he was following the girl. She reminded him of the girl he had christened Miss Muffet in the Italian restaurant, the girl with the big-bellied man. He followed her, then passed her and looked back.