by Rose Tremain
‘I went fishing the next day. Sam went off to see the Cambiers and I sat by the river in the sunshine. I remember thinking, I could be in Suffolk now, slicing winter roots for the cows on the corner of a draughty field. If everything had been different, that’s where I’d be. Yet it was almost impossible to believe, sitting there with my fishing rod, in the existence of anything but the sparkling water under my dangling boots and the voices near me, old men and children who had lived their lives never more than a heartbeat from here.
‘It’s never been difficult for English people to fall in love with Paris. I think they see some spirit at work in its making that they don’t have. They love, and they envy and some of them want to stay for ever and be part of it so that they can say, “Paris is mine.”
‘I think I courted it very, very slowly, one tiny place at a time. I’ve never been very keen on the grandeur of buildings like the Louvre nor on the incredible vistas like the Champs Elysées: the sheer size of them makes me feel livery! One of my favourite places in the whole of Paris was the bread shop next to Maison Cambier’s green stairs.
‘They weren’t really a success, those ten days. We sorted out the contract with Jacques Cambier and my advance was about fifty pounds. Sam thought it was going to be a honeymoon but it wasn’t. I worked all day with Valéry, first in the Maison Cambier office, then in his own room in Montparnasse which was much quieter, and all night, well, I dreamt about Valéry and they were the most shameless erotic dreams.
‘So Sam wandered about, sensing what was happening to me, hating all the long hours I was at Montparnasse. I always had dinner with him, but I think he was very depressed. All he kept saying was, he thought it was time to leave.
‘I never touched Valéry and he never even looked at me. It was an affair of the head which only one of us – me – ached to express in an affair of the body. But I should have known, with someone as beautiful as that, that men were his choice. I don’t know why I didn’t understand that straight away. Then I would have put him out of my mind and out of my dreams and welcomed Sam in again. But when I did understand – on my last day with Valéry – I wanted to laugh. I wanted to write to Chadwick and say: “I’ve found paradise for you, darling! But too late.”
‘We stayed friends though. Valéry Clément translated both my other books. Rather like Chadwick, his lovers would come and go and over the years his remarkable beauty began to sag a bit and he had countless operations to tie his eyes up and stretch his lines away. But I lost touch with him in the ’fifties after he did The Hospital Ship and I expect he must be dead by now. I think he was a little older than me.
‘It’s because of Paris that those years merge. I think it was 1925 when I first went with Sam and we met the Cambiers and Valéry Clément. It must have been 1925 because that was the year of Mrs Dalloway and in 1926 my book was published in France. But because I went backwards and forwards so much and my heart was tugged to and fro for a while, I don’t remember the months and the dates of things. I know that after the first Paris trip, after we were back in Hampstead, I had a very bad bout of depression and I saw things that were so ugly, Ralph, so obscene and awful! I imagined I had battered Valéry Clément to death and set bits of his body floating on my sea. I kept trying to pick the bits out but the sea was taking me down … I so longed for normality, for brightness at the window, for everything in its place … and Sam fought a battle for me, bless his heart! He stayed with me right through it, pushing away his nightmares of asylums.
‘We were having quite a little success with my stories, so the minute I was well again Sam made me sit down and write. I went back to Chadwick’s desk and I thought, the only thing I can write about is change. I feel change. Every second. Our world under the clouds moves in all things as they move, with a restless push and gather and drift. Even my heart. It moves and separates. And the rhythms of my writing are changing, changing and oh, all that is quiet and still at my window, it may go. Any second, when the man selling matches passes, shuffling, altering; just the sight of his hands in the torn mittens is enough …
‘I felt I wanted to have another try at The Angler. I hadn’t looked at it for two or three years. Now I knew – or I thought I knew – how I could end it. I read it through and thought Sam had been wrong, perhaps. He thought it was all about nothing; lavatory paper for Evelyn Borrow! But I said no, I’m trying to look, I’m to present a man with a very wonderful imagination, but that imagination only works when it’s in search of all that’s base in the man – his greed and acquisitiveness, his lust.
‘I thought there was only one end for him – as a writer of brutal, pornographic books. And on these, of course he gets rich, restocks his river with the finest salmon, and drowns trying to land one of the fish. I thought it wasn’t a bad idea, so I started to go on with it, in spite of Sam’s reluctances. He said it was melodramatic, unworthy. But I thought I could handle it so that it wouldn’t be either of these things, and I took the manuscript, as far as I had gone, round to Ranulf Tree to let him read it. He rather liked it. He thought I had been very erotic and bold in my description of the delinquent’s bottom and he said: “I don’t see why you shouldn’t end it as you’ve planned.”
‘So then I really began to work. Sam was as silent as a mussel! I couldn’t prise him open, not a crack, to get him to say anything about it. He was reserving his judgment, that was all he’d tell me, and anyway, he didn’t believe I’d ever finish the book. “Why don’t you think I’ll ever finish it, Sam.” I kept saying, but he didn’t know. He was just certain, he said, that I wouldn’t. But I sat at the desk, and I wrote. The book emerged terribly slowly, a drop at a time, like a strong medicine you administer in tiny doses. Sam watched me. I remember his long face at this time and it was full of sadness and I knew that I had caused him to feel as he felt, yet I couldn’t quite say what I had done or what I was going to do. “Everything changes,” I kept muttering. “Everything does and this is one of the absolutes in our world – constant, constant change.”
She slept then. Sleep came as quickly as it does to a child. Ralph sat and stared at her. He remembered how, at dusk, his Grandma would fall asleep on her front porch, in the middle of a conversation.
6
‘This is the exciting bit. This is the time I thought I’d write about one day, when I was old!’
Erica paused, took a sip of wine, and looked at Ralph.
‘I never wrote about it because I felt I couldn’t master it, Ralph. It existed for a time and each moment had its own colour and sparkle. I think those were the most important ten years of my life and for a while afterwards I thought, I will set something down that belongs only and absolutely to that time. But I couldn’t, you see. Now in The Hospital Ship I made General Almarlyes fall in love and this love of his destroyed itself because it was in his nature never to be satisfied. He needed to possess his love. He squeezed all the life out of it and it became brittle and pierced his hand. He thought he was holding it safe in his hand, but he wasn’t: he was making a weapon to hurt him. I was trying to tell, in this book, something of what happened to me twenty-five years before. But there was very little of me in General Almarlyes. He was a man and a soldier and going mad – and I’ve never been any of these things. I’ve made other attempts, in little stories, to describe my time with Gérard, but they failed. Each one failed. They were like collages – bits stuck on, no event or feeling or conversation emerging the way it was.
‘Just lately – over the last few years – I think I’ve begun to understand why I failed and failed to capture that part of my life. I think it has something to do with the fact that from the moment I met Gérard, the self – the me with all my certainties and ambitions – became secondary. I literally “forgot myself”. I lay curled up in Gérard’s life like a piece of sand inside a mollusc. The proof is that I wrote nothing for ten years! After my good start with The Two Wives, I let ten years pass without setting down more than a few stories and some entries in a diary. I still
guarded in myself the idea that I was a writer. I knew, I think, that one day I would write properly again and that writing would be my life. And I felt guilty, of course. Now and then I would take myself off to the Dôme or the Coupole and sit there pretending to write, but I wasn’t writing, I was living. Every sight and sound in those places was distracting. I wanted to gobble up the essence of each moment so that the external became not merely the internally observed but became the internal. I wanted the totality of my world to flow round me in my blood.
‘Oh this is difficult to explain, Ralph! What I’m trying to tell you – so that you understand why I achieved so little in these years – is that the self I had valued so highly in its struggles with Emily, in the cold Suffolk winters of the war, on its own or with Sam in London, somehow got lost, no, wanted to lose itself, to experience and be, but not do, to lose responsibility.
‘I ought to tell you how it came about, yet I don’t know if I can. Even now there are so few certainties in this part of my life, just the one certainty that I loved Gérard. For a while they wondered who I was, his friends. Gérard told them I had written an important book and this shut them up. And then gradually they came to see that I didn’t exist any longer because of my “important book”, I was the girl who loved Gérard – and this was all. I existed in order to love Gérard.
‘We met in Cambier’s office on my second trip to Paris which I made without Sam whose sense of foreboding made him stay behind. I knew nothing about Gérard. I’d never heard of him or any of the painters and writers who were his friends. Jacques Cambier told me he was doing some drawings for a surrealist work they were publishing. He introduced us and I laughed at his name: Gérard Guerard. He was a very thin man. His features were all pointed, even his eyes which appeared to travel quite far sideways round his face. He wasn’t very tall. He looked a little taller than he was because of his hair which stood up very thickly on his head. It was going grey, his hair, quite noticeably whereas there was no hint of grey in mine and we were both the same age – thirty-three.
‘I was in Paris to do some final illuminating for Valéry Clément. He had done a very, very good job on the translation and through all the hours I spent with him, I began to talk a little bit of French. I bought a cheap Grammar and learned verb declensions and reflexive pronouns – all the spaghetti of the language which is dull on its own and tangled but necessary. I didn’t find it very difficult. It was a relief to do that instead of trying to write. And I was hearing it every day, all around me. I gobbled up the language along with everything else.
‘I had a week. I was at the Hotel Raspail again and every morning I would walk to Valéry Clément’s room in Montparnasse. It was about a seven minute walk. It was April or May of 1926, a beautiful spring. I wore some of the silly clothes I’d bought with Sam in London, even a strawberry coloured soft hat with a flower on it! The clothes were very fashionable, very stupid but underneath them I knew that I was beautiful in a way no one had ever expected. I had been a plain little girl, I was plain, still, when I came to London for the first time and now I was no longer plain. I think I had become!
‘In the films I had seen – American films – it was always the beautiful women who triumphed. It was fashionable to believe that love and beauty went hand in hand, that plainness limited a woman’s ability to love and be loved. Thank heavens your generation doesn’t believe that any more; you’ve grown up in that way. But in the ’twenties beauty was at a premium. I looked very secretly at mine. On my walks to Valéry Clément’s room I took a glance at it in a florist’s window. I saw myself surrounded by flowers. By the time I got to the Rue Déparcieux I was quite flushed with it, quite hot in the spring morning in my strawberry hat. And on my third or fourth morning, as I turned into the Rue Déparcieux, I saw Gérard waiting outside the street door to Valéry’s apartment. At first I thought, he’s one of Valéry’s friends, just leaving after the night, and then I recognized him as the man I’d met with Jacques Cambier. I think I knew then that he was waiting for me.
‘I didn’t go to Valéry Clément’s that day. I expect he waited for me and was cross when I turned up again, I don’t remember. I went with Gérard to La Coupole where he always had breakfast. He ordered croissants and bowls of café crème and hot chocolate for me. He ate as if eating were a rite of utmost seriousness, dipping his croissant in the coffee, bending his head down to bite into it before it dripped. He didn’t look at me until the rite was finished. With his mouth full, he talked about himself, now and again searching (in the coffee it seemed!) for an English word he’d forgotten. He told me that he lived rather poorly in small hotels, in rooms with kitchens, that he was experimenting with form and trying to experience new ways of looking at reality. I had never heard anyone talk in these kind of phrases before – only critics who seemed to have a language all their own which they liked to keep secret. Gérard didn’t want anything kept secret. He thought the pavement artist was the worthiest of men because the most honest. Deception in art, he said, was as significant as deception in politics – worse even because by ambition politicians are deceivers and artists are seekers after truth. “I’m very far,” he said, “from finding the truth, but I can say that I seek for it truthfully.”
‘I felt very odd. Part of me had flown up to the high ceiling of the Coupole and was staring down at what was left of my hot chocolate, at what was left of me. I thought, I’m so small, so permeable I must fill myself out before I disappear, before I’m bound up by this man and can’t breathe. I remember thinking, I’ve never understood exactly the set of feelings and emotions people are describing when they talk about “falling in love” but now I do understand what it is: it’s simply a feeling of breathlessness.
‘I tried to save myself by talking. I began to describe how I had written my novel, burning candles in my cold Suffolk room. I explained that it had been begun as a parody of the war, as a way of opposing the war all by myself. As I talked I remember thinking, I must show this person that I’m more substantial than I feel, that the strawberry hat is a deception: underneath it I am struggling to grow wise.
‘I’ve often wondered what kind of account I gave of myself that day. I believe I knew I was about to be swallowed up and before I vanished I had to prove that I had the makings of a life. I remember that Gérard listened very intently, that he seemed rather impressed by what I said and when I finished he smiled with a kind of relief. The smile said, now I can let my feelings go where they will because, despite her idiotic clothes, the woman is something after all, she is worthy of me. So we sat smiling. We’d both said our little pieces and now we could let our eyes creep over each other and be silenced by what we saw.
‘Neither of us said anything about our private lives. We both talked about ideas, not about people. So that when I went up the little stairway to Gérard’s room I had this momentary conviction that when we got there, I would walk in and find his wife preparing lunch, that I would shake hands with her, have a drink perhaps and then leave by myself. But of course there was no wife – not there that morning in the room – only the room itself with its choking smell of oil paint and some torn curtains at the balcony windows, I went to the window and looked out for a second onto the Rue Chomel. I had never seen a view I liked so much.
‘We made love like starved sailors. Time teased us and became afternoon, became sunset and we lay there. I thought, I shall never go from this room. I shall never, never have the strength to leave him. My heart wanted to break. It said, you’ve found your wild spirit and you will ride it for as long as it carries you and one day it will let you fall. And after that there will be nothing more like it, only replicas.
‘We got up at dusk and dressed and went hand in hand back to La Coupole where we had dinner. We were speechless for a while and then the food revived us and we began to talk. I wanted to talk about what we had done because I had to be certain that guilt would play no part. I am quite free, I kept saying to myself. I am free to love in a way I’ve oft
en imagined and never, until this moment, experienced. I told Gérard, I am quite free to love you. And I suppose he smiled.
‘Well, a great love affair is the hardest thing to describe, Ralph. I’ve tried it, in some of my stories and in The Hospital Ship to make my characters experience something of what I had with Gérard. None of these attempts have succeeded because although I have always enjoyed the company of language, it shows a kind of indifference to strong feeling; it says, “there’s only my everyday workaday self with which you can explain these things, don’t imagine there are any other tools.” All I can do, I suppose, is to try to conjure the essence of what I experienced, to make you believe that this one great adventure was utterly different from any other that I’ve had,
‘You’re the same age, Ralph, almost the same age as I was when I met Gérard. There is no age better than this and yet, you see, I did nothing, only pursue and pursue my own happiness. I let England go. Without a backward glance at it. I kept it, I suppose, somewhere inside me – very tiny – in case I should need it again. When I was alone I sometimes thought of it. I thought of Sam and my leaving of him. I thought of my house which I had sold with all its furniture except the cupboard which I couldn’t bear to sell. I gave the cupboard to Sam. I told him that one day I might come back for it, thinking then that probably I never would. I visited Chadwick’s grave and said “if only you could come to Paris, darling, then we’d have some times!” But even Chadwick had gone from me then, I couldn’t remember him! All I could remember was the gold of his hair that wasn’t real and which, once, I had tied with a ribbon.