The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘The texture of England grows in my fingernails … I play tennis with my eyes … my voice is all they taught me, all they expected of me …’

  Oh, that kind of girl, Ralph thought. That’s for laughs, who needs it? Yet he found he had stopped, blocked her way, thought up a lie.

  ‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘d’you happen to know if this hotel has a dining-room?’

  She blushed. She found his American voice rather comic and blushed to hide her laugh.

  ‘Yes it does,’ she said, passing him awkwardly. ‘But it doesn’t look particularly nice.’

  ‘Are you going to eat in there?’

  She wore very pale tights, almost white – an odd English fashion – and black shiny shoes. She carried her thin body very straight. Her hair was mousy.

  ‘I’m with my father. He’s taking me to see Evita.’

  Ralph tried to muffle the derision in his voice. ‘Evita?’

  ‘Yes. We were jolly lucky to get tickets.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ralph. But his momentary interest in her had gone. He let her walk up almost to the landing before he said flatly: ‘Hope you enjoy it.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, and smiled. When he didn’t return her smile she looked oddly hurt. ‘One is very used to being smiled at,’ said her face, ‘one has grown up to expect it: young men with smiles and large bank accounts, driving BMWs. And if one is treated any differently, well, I mean, you know one feels a bit confused.’

  Ralph made a mental note: derision and pity go hand in hand. Where either is present, fucking is impossible.

  Then he bounded up after the girl. ‘Have you got any idea,’ he called after her, ‘why Americans are not particularly liked in Europe?’

  She stopped and frowned. ‘They probably don’t understand you in Europe,’ she said, ‘but of course in England one does!’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Ralph and carried his laughter safely to his room where he let it out and out till it began to hurt.

  The telephone rang and it was Walt. Ralph estimated that it was about three p.m. New York time. Walt would have just returned from Bianchi’s full of seafood salad and Orvieto.

  ‘How’s it going, kid?’ said the big far-away voice.

  ‘Fine Walt.’

  ‘Got your letter today.’

  ‘Yuh?’

  ‘Talk of movies and all that. Who the hell d’you imagine’s gonna back that kind of movie. You know I was joking about United Artists.’

  ‘What kind of movie?’

  ‘Movie ’bout a little old English granny! Who the hell’s gonna sponsor that?’

  ‘That’s not the way I see it, Walt.’

  ‘What? Not the way, what?’

  ‘It’s not the way I see it. This life spans almost a century …’

  ‘Almost a what?’

  ‘A century …’

  ‘20th Century? You got connections with Zanuck?’

  ‘No Walt. I said –’

  ‘I can’t see a movie in it, Ralph.’

  ‘Sure. Well, let’s talk about it when you see the kind of material I got.’

  ‘And anyway, things are busy here with the primaries coming up. You’d better cut it short there.’

  ‘I can’t do that Walt. I’m very involved.’

  ‘Look, I had to send Willard to Iowa. Willard! You should have been covering that.’

  ‘Guess Willard did okay.’

  ‘Okay? He did lousy.’

  ‘I’ll be back long before the thing starts getting hot, Walt. Just give me the time to get finished here. This is much more than one article.’

  ‘More than one what?’

  ‘One article …’

  ‘It’s only worth one article, kid. That’s all the space you’ll get. ’Less she dies. We could beef it up a bit if she dies quickly.’

  ‘I need at least another two weeks, Walt.’

  ‘No, kid. I want you back here in time for Massachusetts; on the 25th, say the 24th …’

  ‘I have to go at her pace, Walt. I can’t push, okay? If I push, she’ll clam up. And at the rate I’m going, I’ll need another fourteen days.’

  ‘Ralph. I am not sending Willard to Massachusetts.’

  ‘Massachusetts isn’t imporant, Walt. Kennedy’s got it wrapped up.’

  ‘I need the whole team at this time, Ralph. I need a competent team and you’re screwing it up.’

  ‘I’m fed up with being a fucking team, Walt!’

  ‘What? What you say?’

  ‘I said I’m fed up with being a fucking team. I’m over here doing something on my own initiative and on my own, and I can tell you that it’s fucking lonely and fucking cold and I hate London but the material I’m getting is good. And no one else is bothering to get it Walt. We have the beginnings of a great book, with a TV spin off perhaps …’

  ‘I just don’t rate it, kid.’

  ‘You don’t rate it because you haven’t seen it …’

  ‘The 24th Ralph, okay. Not a day later.’

  Walt hung up. Ralph felt tired from the shouting. When he was out of step with Walt, he hated the man. And he lived, he realized, with the perpetual fear that Walt’s personal greed would become contagious. Even the obesity. He was afraid that would, in the end, be catching.

  He lay down on his bed and re-read John Pennington’s letter. The thought that he might have to leave England without seeing John made him uneasy. It was, he realized, as if he expected John to give him an answer, to tell him why he had come. On his own, he probably wouldn’t find the answer, just as he had never found a satisfactory explanation to ‘Why are Americans Disliked?’ He had got near it and it had eluded him. Now he was getting near to a life that spanned the whole of his century and more. But the movie idea is bluff, he thought, isn’t it? So what am I going to do with it all, the hours and hours of tapes? Sometimes I think I know; then it slips away. ‘But I can’t believe,’ he said sadly, ‘it’s of no value.’

  ‘She was on that settee all night,’ said Mrs Burford accusingly. ‘She never saw ’er bed all night.’

  ‘Why?’asked Ralph.

  ‘Something you said? Something upset ’er, did it?’

  ‘No. I didn’t upset her.’

  ‘Well I put ’er to bed straight away. She was worn out from sitting. So she can’t see you today, love.’

  Mrs Burford turned away with a sniff and Ralph stood by the door, dejectedly counting the days left to him, knowing there weren’t enough. Then he heard Erica call, a frail voice (often her voice was remarkably strong) from the bedroom, which Ralph had never seen.

  Mrs Burford took immediate charge. She stumped to the bedroom door, opened it without knocking and advised: “Don’t see ’im today, Miss March. He’ll only tire you, dear …’

  But she said she would, she wanted to see him if Ralph didn’t mind talking to her in bed and without her turban. She looked a sight, she knew, but she had remembered something, something important, and before she forgot it, she wanted to tell him about it so if he wouldn’t mind sitting down …

  ‘I remembered it last night;’ she said, ‘when I was going through Gérard’s letters. It had nothing to do with Gérard so I don’t know why I suddenly thought about it, but I did. It happened during the time, in 1944, when I went to see Eileen, and I told you, didn’t I, that this young American airman landed in our greenhouse? I think he’d been doing imaginary bombing raids on Bungay, pretending it was Heidelberg or somewhere in the Ruhr and he crashed his plane and ejected and came down in the greenhouse, so of course he was cut to pieces and blood was flowing from him everywhere. Well, I nursed him while Bernard telephoned for an ambulance and I tried to talk to him very gently because he was in awful pain and thousands of miles from Maryland which is where he came from and the sight of Eileen’s tomatoes all round him must have been terribly strange. I tied his wounds up with pieces of sheet, but I couldn’t move him because both his legs were broken. He was conscious, though, and just before the ambulance came and t
ook him away he asked me my name and when I said Erica, he managed a wonderful smile and whispered:

  “Erica, Erica

  Take me to America.” and I said – and this is what is so important – I said “No, I can’t do that because I shall die there and I don’t fancy dying yet.” I told him I would die in America! I remember saying that as if it were yesterday. Yet I can’t imagine why I said it. You see I’ve never been to America, Ralph, and of course I won’t go there now, it’s far too late. But I told the airman I was afraid to go because I knew I would die there. And now here you are, Ralph, right at the end. Isn’t that strange?’

  ‘I don’t really see the connection, Erica.’

  She looked very disappointed. ‘Don’t you, dear?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. Well perhaps there isn’t one after all. It was just that … last night … I felt sure there was. Perhaps you’re right, though. There may be no connection at all.’

  She was silent. In the heavy wooden bed she looked small, very very old. Next to the right hand wall of the room stood the cupboard. It took up the entire wall space. It was dark oak with carvings on the panelled doors and along its top. It was much more ornate, much finer than Ralph had imagined it. It might have come out of Hampton Court. He reached out and touched it. Time and Mrs Burford had given it a shine; the wood was pleasing to touch. For the first time – now that he had seen it – Ralph began to understand why she had attached so great an importance to it. It was the only thing in her life that had never changed.

  ‘If you’re tired Erica,’ Ralph said quietly (she had closed her eyes), ‘I won’t stay any longer.’

  ‘No I’m not tired,’ she said. ‘I had a marvellous night! I read all Gérard’s letters, every one of them, and they made me laugh with joy because they are wonderful, full of wildness and passion and I honestly think, if he were still alive, he’d be like that still, wild and passionate, even though he’d be a hundred by now and blind I expect, too blind to shave, so he’d have a long beard!

  ‘No, you mustn’t take any notice of Mrs Burford. She grumbles a lot but she’s very kind and protective, a bit like Bernard’s labrador. He grumbled! I’d much rather talk to you than sleep. Some days it’s all I can do – just let sleep drag me down. On those kind of days, I can’t even lift my hand. But I’m all right today.

  ‘I must tell you first what happened to The Two Wives. It sold very well after those flattering reviews and it went into a second printing and then a third and Patterson Tree got very excited and started putting out their branches to France, to see if they would publish a translation. I used to go and have long talks with Ranulf Tree who was a very untidy resplendent kind of man, smelling of cheroots, and rather fat. I often thought if Father Christmas were real, he’d look and sound just like Ranulf Tree, and it’s a shame he’s not, only in C. S. Lewis’s head, poor old thing.

  ‘Ranulf Tree had been Father Christmas to me. It turned out that he had liked the book and Ian Patterson, Tree’s other half, had only been lukewarm. So it was Tree who persuaded Patterson to go ahead and publish it. Without Tree’s persuasive powers, Patterson would have sent it back, just as all the others had done. So I had a lot to thank Tree for and now here he was, trying to sell it in France.

  ‘Sam got terribly excited. He said of course, a French publisher would take it because the theme was mondiale. He said if that theme wasn’t mondiale, he didn’t know a theme that was.

  ‘So we bought a few more clothes, and more expensive food. We were becoming just like the people Eileen warned us against, wearing short skirts, and white trousers, eating luxuries. And in London it wasn’t difficult to do this, to be like this, because all the young people wanted to forget the war and the old men who had started it; they wanted to dance the war into oblivion. I don’t think we felt any guilt. Now and again I would feel guilty about not writing and I’d begin something, but Sam was doing well; new writers came to him and we used to laugh over some of the rubbish he got, but quite a lot of it was good. So Sam was growing and Patterson Tree were growing and now here was talk of a publisher in France.

  ‘Tree found a French publishing house. They were called Maison Cambier and they were small like Tree and Co.; but growing. Just a week before Sam and I left for Paris to begin negotiations with Maison Cambier we got an invitation from the Woolfs – to dinner at Gordon Square! We were going to be away for ten days and we’d have to miss it, and I knew that if we refused, no other invitation would come. It was 1925, the year Virginia published Mrs Dalloway and had such a success with it. Everyone in the literary world or on the fringes of it wanted to know her then; they were all dying for invitations to Gordon Square. If my name was a speck, hers was a bright comet with a tail!

  ‘But there it was. We couldn’t accept. When I thought about it, I cared more about seeing my book in France (where I had longed to go, when Christabel Pankhurst was in Paris) than I did about the wretched Wolves and their intellectual chitter-chat. Sam was very down-hearted, though. I expect he’d thought there’d be a stray writer or two to catch between the soup and the fish course. So I offered to go to Paris on my own, in spite of my not speaking French. Sam and I, you see, always believed we should let the other be free, sometimes just free to be alone. But he said no, he wanted to have the ten days in Paris with me and he thought negotiations couldn’t be properly handled without him. I think it broke his heart to refuse the Wolves, so to cheer him up I bought a copy of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in which they all believed, those Bloomsbury people, and started reading quotes to him over his boiled egg or when he was on the lavatory. There were some terribly ridiculous ones like “the general practice of murder seems certainly to be a hindrance to the attainment of positive goods,” and “admirable mental qualities do consist in an emotional contemplation of beautiful objects, and hence the appreciation of them will consist essentially in the contemplation of such contemplation” – and even Sam had to laugh! I think he’d got over his disappointment about Gordon Square. He remembered it later, of course. He remembered a year or two later that he’d given up the Wolves for the trip to Paris, and then, because of what happened to me on my second trip, he felt very angry about missing the Wolves and wrote me a letter saying I had ruined his career. Not that this was true, Ralph. Don’t think that, will you? It was hurtful to Sam when I left him for Gérard, but I never “ruined his career”. He was successful all his life.

  ‘We stayed in the Hotel Raspail, on the Boulevard Raspail. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been in a lift.

  ‘We had separate rooms because Maison Cambier had booked them. Maison Cambier were in the rue de Grenelle, two minutes’ walk away. Sam explained to me that we were on the left bank.

  ‘It was raining and the cobbles were very slippery – worse than London. The first thing I bought was a fishing rod with reel and bait. I kept it in my hotel wardrobe till the weather cleared and I went down to the Seine with it. To fish in the Seine was the one thing I wanted to do. Yet the man who sold me the fishing tackle laughed and grinned and shrugged his shoulders. It was as if he couldn’t imagine a woman like me fishing.

  ‘Sam wasn’t well. He’d been terribly sick on the Channel boat and the hours in a crowded train had exhausted him. In his exhaustion, his ability to speak French deserted him and we mumbled our way around in the rain, paying too much for everything (far too much for the fishing rod, Sam said!) and feeling lost.

  ‘I put Sam to bed. I said on no account was anyone to déranger him: he was gravement fatigué. I got brandy sent up to him which he mixed with tapwater in a tooth glass and he collapsed into a sleep that lasted two days and nights.

  ‘I was very tempted to wake him for our first meeting with Maison Cambier, but he still looked so white and deathly that I didn’t dare. I just went on my own and hoped that someone would speak English and that I could explain who I was.

  ‘I expected Maison Cambier to be grand. I somehow expected pillars of marble and polished doo
rs, and all there was was a little tin plaque next to a bread shop, then a dark stairway painted green and on the first floor two rooms, one small, where manuscripts were read and discussed and one very large, where all the design and typesetting and printing went on. It was more like a workshop than a publisher’s, and it was run entirely by the two brothers, Jacques and André Cambier. How they had the cheek to call themselves a “Maison” when all they had were two rooms, I don’t know. I suppose they knew, in time they would be a proper “Maison” with secretaries and readers and sub-editors and a firm of printers at Auxerre. Just like Patterson Tree, they knew they would grow because now, with the war well and truly passed, everything seemed set to grow again and it wasn’t till a few years later that the growing stopped.

  ‘They were very nice to me. Jacques Cambier had learnt a bit of English in the war. He could even sing “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary”, he said, but I wouldn’t let him because it reminded me of Eileen. André was younger and hadn’t been in the war and couldn’t speak English so all I could say to him were a few formal things I knew like “Desirez-vous une cigarette”, and all he could say to me were the patriotic things he knew like “God save the King” and you couldn’t call this a conversation! I came to know him a bit better when Sam woke up and deigned to speak a bit of French, but until then I could only talk to Jacques.

  ‘Jacques wanted me to work with the translator for the whole of my stay. Once the contract and the advance had been agreed, by Sam, then this man called Valéry Clément would begin the slow work of the translation. I would dissect the book with him, illuminating anything that needed illuminating (Jacques was very fond of this word, “illuminating”) and when I left, Valéry would soldier on until my next visit when he would ask for more illumination. “How many visits do you think this will take, Monsieur Cambier?” I said. And of course he smiled. “As many as you like,” he answered.

  ‘I woke Sam on the third day. It was a bit like a resurrection because the sun had come out and was streaming into his room. He refused point blank to believe that he’d slept for two days. He also refused to believe that I could have dared to go to Cambier’s on my own. But we went and had a meal in a very nice brasserie I had found and he began to come alive and start to believe things again. I told him all about Cambier’s and Valéry who I had met by then. I didn’t tell him that Valéry had made my heart race. I didn’t say, “Valéry is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen”. I just said, “I’ve done as much as I can with Jacques Cambier, Sam. Now it’s your turn.” So he laughed then. I could tell he was proud of me. Sam loved me best when I was daring.