The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘I arrived back in Paris with a wad of five pound notes sewn inside my knickers. I brought all the clothes I had and all my notes on The Angler which still wasn’t finished. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do! Move straight in with Gérard and stay silent in a corner while he painted: become his lap dog. When I saw his room again I realized it was so small there was hardly space enough tor him and his work. I felt very stupid. So I began to search for a room not too far away, but rooms seemed very hard to find. I knew that until I could speak fluent French at least there was no hope of finding a job in Paris and that the money I’d brought could disappear very quickly on food and rent. I had to find a cheap room. I courted discomfort, too, because I wanted to be like Gérard in all that I did. Comfort separates classes and kinds. Gérard had already hinted at his contempt for the petit-bourgeois with their passion for furnishings, their over-heated rooms and I felt tainted by my two years in Bryanston Square.

  ‘The first room I took was a sad kind of place. It was in a small hotel built around a courtyard and it was utterly dark and silent. The concierge, whose husband had been killed on the Somme, had the room next door and she used to sing herself to tears each night and fall asleep weeping. She neglected the place and the courtyard stank of open drains and rubbish. You saw rats there.

  ‘I remember unpacking my bright clothes in this cold place. I tried to scorn my clothes as frippery, to welcome my dirty room as the cradle of my new life. But it was sunless. It bore no resemblance to Gérard’s room, with its little fretted balcony and its beautiful light. So I escaped from it as quickly as I could. I bought a map and set about discovering where I was, how long it took me to walk from my room to Gérard’s, from Gérard’s to La Coupole, from there to the Boulevard St Germain and the Café Flore, from there to the river and so on. I tried to stay out of Gérard’s way as much as I could, to let him work.

  ‘But I was often there, uninvited, on his stairway. To keep away was very hard and often his work was neglected. Just like Sam, he began to encourage me to start writing. I mistrusted this. I thought he’s tiring of me, he wants me out of his way. But then he would talk to me seriously about his own belief that those who create in one decade, shape the time to come, about the importance of finding new ways of seeing. He began to use what I later thought of as his “public voice”, the voice that united him with public events – with a public reality – the voice that I, who had been brave at twenty, now longed to ignore. I’m very ashamed of this, Ralph. It was a kind of sleep, you see, a sleep where there was only one dream, to experience Gérard’s love.

  ‘I tried, in my horrible room, to discover the patient, creative part of myself. I worked at The Angler but it had no life, I literally couldn’t see what I was doing. And I became very depressed. The singing of the concierge was indescribably mournful. And in a dream one night I woke to feel tiny pattering feet on my face; mice had invaded my room. I found their droppings on my clothes. And I knew then that I would go mad in this room.

  ‘So I packed my suitcases and left. I spent three days in Gérard’s room with my suitcase unopened on the balcony and I told him I couldn’t work, that I found separation from him terrible. He laughed at me. He said I was too pale and needed sunshine. The next day he bought second-hand bicycles and he pulled out an old rucksack from under his bed. He designed a very beautiful decorated message to his friends, to those who might call while we were away, and pinned this to his door. It invited them to write to us, poste restante at Aix-en-Provence in the event of a workers’ rising or some such long-awaited happening. And then we were gone, taking the overnight train from the Garde de Lyon for Avignon. It was late June. In the middle of our night on the train I remembered that publication date for the French edition of The Two Wives of the King was July 10th. Jacques Cambier had promised to organize a little party for me and I would miss it. I would also miss all the reviews. But I don’t think I minded. I believed that, away from Paris, Gérard would belong less to ideologies and more to me.

  ‘It is strange how, in my years with Gérard, I was always very moved by the smallest things he did for me. Sam had done a great deal for me and most of this I accepted, without giving it any attention. But when Gérard abandoned his work to take me to Provence, when he cared for me without sleeping once when I was ill – everything he did for me – I took as a reaffirmation of his love and I treated it with a sort of solemnity!

  ‘We began to discover each other on our first holiday in Provence. We gave our bicycles names. Mine was La Reine Victoria and Gérard’s was Maréchal Joffre. These names helped us to laugh at punctures which were exasperating and meant hours lost. “He’s farted again, the poor bugger!” Gérard would say when a tyre went on Maréchal Joffre, and when mine had a flat I’d groan, “You’ll have to wait for Her Majesty. She’s fallen down!” We discovered laughter. And somewhere near the point of laughter in Gérard was the scampering urchin who liked to tease and run, take me with him on his back and sleep with me under the stars. At these times, he let his public soul fly away into the black above our heads and a private joy overcome him. To make love with Gérard, then, was no longer a deliberate act, merely the expression of a surfeit of happiness, the reaching out of two dreamers whose only knowledge of morning lies deep in each other’s eyes.’

  ‘It is only since she has begun to talk about passion,’ Ralph wrote in his Summary, ‘that I’ve begun to see something of what separates me from her, my time from her time. I knew, after the first few days’ talking, that there was some fundamental thing, informing what I must call Erica’s life but which also goes outward from her and informs the times she lived in. I believe this thing is passion, or desire, or call it what you will, a craving of the spirit that’s lacking not just in me but whose lack characterizes this era. Because if I ask myself – and get this, Walt, with your petty tantrums and all your sound and fury under your necktie – where do I get a whiff of passion or desire in anyone, anyplace? If I ask myself, is there any guy out there showing even the private face of passion, let alone the public thing, I get a NO, underlined. And Jesus, if I go further with this thought, then I have to admit, I’ve found nothing as scary as this. Because if we all – in the West anyway – have got beyond these feelings we shall simply erode ourselves with boredom – with non-feelings! We’ve let all the light go out of our heads and we ask ourselves like imbeciles, why isn’t there someone around who can see for us? And this is the stupidest thing: we imbue people with light – therapists, analysts, so-called prophets – and there’s no more light in them than in my ass! They’re just a crass part of this lightless, passionless generation. I mean, I don’t even know one person, man or woman, not one who loves another person, not really loves them in the way that Erica understands and describes love. I guess there was more compassion – and love – in her for Uncle Chadwick than there is in most women for their husbands, in most husbands for their entire family. Yet she’s not old fashioned. She believed in individual freedoms. She didn’t pester for marriage and rights and shit. She’s like a tall ship. You hear me, Walt? She’s sailed a thousand lives.’

  Ralph took a sip at the large whisky he had poured himself. He was hungry and began to promise himself another Italian meal. Then he wrote on: ‘There is no doubt in my mind, I shall stay on till what I have come to think of as “the end”. I don’t know when the “end” will arrive. I guess it could arrive any time because she could just decide to stop talking. Heaven knows whether the talking is making her weak. Sometimes she seems to gather great strength from it, but it’s hard to say. Perhaps, in her heart, she’s finding it a strain. In any event I won’t go back on the 24th as commanded by Walt. Who gives a shit about the presidential election anyway: one lying sonofabitch outspending another lying sonofabitch. If Walt fires me, I shall make a creative event out of it; I’ll start trying to write, and I mean invent, not report. Because we’re a generation of reporters. Our favourite pastime is reporting on each other’s wars and taking c
rap photographs of each other’s mutilations.’

  Ralph didn’t go to the Italian restaurant. Still hungry, he bought a glutinous hot-dog from a street vendor and took this with him to a new production of Hamlet. To his satisfaction, the Dane was played as a man sidestepping the larva of his own hatred and terror but nearing, always nearing the crater edge, his every breath, in the sulphurous times, bringing his lungs close to bursting. There was not an ounce of the dreamer in this Hamlet, only the sweat and fever of the revolutionary, the rage and solitude of a man who sees corruption steaming at his very feet.

  It was apt. Ralph experienced a gentle lifting of his earlier deep gloom. He wanted to shake the actor’s hand. Here, at last, had been a show of something which passed for passion. The show had happened.

  He took Erica the programme the following day and she at once fumbled for her glasses and began to read it. ‘I don’t know any of these actors any more,’ she said ‘nor the director or anyone at all. Of course I don’t! I haven’t been to theatre for years, although I do read the reviews sometimes and hope they’ll print a picture so that I can imagine the play.’

  ‘Would you like to go, Erica?’ said Ralph.

  ‘To the theatre? Well of course I would in a way. I would love just to be inside a theatre again. But the journey would be awful and if I felt tired, then I’d just go to sleep, so what’s the use?’

  ‘I could take you,’ said Ralph. ‘If I called a cab, then the journey wouldn’t be bad.’

  She hesitated. ‘You’re very kind, Ralph. Always very thoughtful, you are.’

  ‘Would you like to go to see Hamlet?’

  ‘Hamlet? Well I’m not sure. I know how long it is, you see, because I was in it once. I was one of the Players who came to Elsinore. I had no lines and we did a marvellous dancing, rough-and-tumbling kind of entrance which I loved. Matilde was playing Ophelia and she wasn’t very good because she was quite wrong for Ophelia. She was a gypsy, Matilde, and she could look wild but she could never look weak.’

  Erica paused, handed the programme back to Ralph, asked him to pour her some wine and then she said: ‘Matilde was Gérard’s wife.’

  She took a sip at her wine and waited, as if for Ralph’s comment, but he was silent.

  ‘I expect that surprises you, doesn’t it. It surprised me at first. I accused Gérard of a terrible betrayal. Because if I thought about it, I had given up everything for him, yet I hadn’t come to know about Matilde until our return from Provence in the early autumn. He’d never mentioned her. This was strange in a man who valued the truth so highly. Yet when I came to understand what he had with Matilde – just a friendship that was easy and innocent – I forgave him. He’d married Matilde at twenty. They’d lived together for no more than two years and then gone their separate ways. Only after he had parted from Matilde had Gérard begun what he called his “search for form”. The marriage didn’t “belong” to him any more and nor did it to Matilde who was in love with Philippe Fernandez, an actor whose father was Spanish. Really, Matilde and Philippe were both gypsies. They looked like brother and sister and among all Gérard’s friends whom I came to know, I loved them best.

  ‘I think my jealousy of Matilde lasted for a week or two, perhaps more. I moved out of Gérard’s room and into one of my own, with a kitchen attached, not far from Maison Cambier in the Rue de Grenelle. It was a kind of attic, but filled with the wonderful September light. I could almost see the river from it. On the ground floor was a patisserie with a stand-up counter where you could have coffee and sometimes, as the winter came on, I would treat myself to breakfast in there – two bowls of café crème and two pains au chocolat – because the patisserie was always warm and sweet-smelling and my attic was very cold.

  ‘The pigeons used to trample all over my sill. I was watching and listening to the pigeons very early one morning when Gérard knocked on my door and began to shout at me: “I can’t work without you! What’s this ridiculous sulking and hiding? Are you going to hide up here for ever, or are you going to come down?”

  To tease him, I said I had decided to go back to London. I expect I wanted him to beg me to stay but of course he didn’t, he shouted all the more. He told me I was petty and childish and then he left, slamming the door behind him.

  ‘I’d been having dreams of our holiday in Provence. We were in the Luberon hills at midday. We found a river of white stones, absolutely dry with lizards scampering everywhere. In my dream we died there. We never got down to the grass road where our bicycles waited. We put our heads between two white stones and they were severed. Our heads went tumbling down where the water should have been. The strange thing was that I felt my head falling and I knew that I could bear even this, even death, if my head would only stop tumbling and come to rest on the ground beside Gérard’s.

  ‘So I had to decide to forget Matilde after that. I had to stop thinking “Gérard has a wife” and to help myself do this I went to Gérard and apologized and asked him if I could meet Matilde. I think I wanted to be sure that she had a life quite outside him, that she exercised no rights of possession over him, nor he over her.

  ‘So we met for lunch at the Brasserie Lipp – Gérard and I, Matilde and Philippe Fernandez. Matilde was very large and lively and dark. I wondered if she had been called a witch by her father, as I had been. It was rather an enjoyable lunch. I was shy of the bad French I talked and Matilde and Fernandez (we always called him Fernandez and not Philippe, but I don’t remember why, unless he chose this himself and liked to be reminded of his ancestors in Madrid) hardly spoke any English and laughed very loudly at Gérard’s English when he talked to me, reminding him that he had gone to a posh school where they taught English and fencing. He had also spent six months in London before the war but he had found it depressing. The only memory of any wonder he retained was being caught in Trafalgar Square one day by a huge crowd who were there to watch a great procession pass. As the carriages neared him the crowd went silent. Then he saw women in their hundreds, dressed in white. He found it very beautiful and mysterious and he had never understood it. I explained to him that it was Emily Davison’s funeral.

  ‘To my surprise, Fernandez had read my novel which, I told you, had come out in Paris while we were away. He said it was a most interesting book and that the critics had been right to praise it. He also said that he and Matilde were great friends of Valéry Clément and that he had worked very hard to seek out all my meanings from the text because he believed the book was important, and why were not all writers writing about the sorrows of war so that we would be spared the next one? I remember that Gérard said “The next one? The next one will be a civil war and the working men and women of France will win it.” Matilde and Fernandez smiled. They had heard Gérard say this before. They didn’t like the self-satisfied bourgeoisie either: they expressed their dislike in the dress, which was colourful and bizarre and in the way they lived – rather like Gérard and myself – in underfurnished rooms with no heating, without possessions.

  ‘As I settled in to my life in Paris, I realized I knew no one who possessed inherited money. I began to feel guilty about Chadwick’s thousands, yet on my final trip to England I had discovered that my English bank would be able to make a monthly bank draft to me in Paris. The money would be more than enough to cover rent, meals and new clothes if I wanted them. By the end of the year, as I made plans with Gérard for the little new year party we would have I had decided that until I felt I could begin to write again, I must find a job. Gérard was quite angry. “I don’t see how you’ll be able to work if you’re doing some petty job. And if you don’t work, Erica, you’re betraying yourself!”

  ‘I tried to explain what I had explained to Sam: that it is difficult to go from one novel to the next, to sustain an idea through all that time. But Gérard couldn’t see this.

  “I work every day,” he said, yet sometimes his day’s work consisted of a tiny sketch, sometimes of putting together a mathematical formula or writing down s
natches of ideas for his friends to see. His work on canvas was sporadic and it always exhausted him. At those times I kept away until he came shuffling round to my room, very white with a three- or four-day beard and we would drink Pastis and I would make us a meal in my tiny kitchen. His eyes would be very bright in his tired face. Often he got drunk and would make love to me on the floor, shouting obscenities.

  ‘It did trouble me that I couldn’t write. I was at last living side by side with writers and painters and from them, with them, I suddenly saw my life quite, quite differently. It had the quality of water. It was everywhere, in the crevices of every building, every face. It sparkled. I began to keep a kind of diary but no ideas gathered in it. I observed and noted, I recorded impressions. If you like, dear, I can rummage about and find the diaries. Perhaps you can make more sense of them than of anything I can tell you. I expect they’re a lot more intimate and lively and they will certainly convince you that I was very, very happy. I just wasn’t able to write a book, that’s all; I was too immersed in the colours of each day.

  ‘We had our New Year’s party in Gérard’s room. We cooked beef with red wine and served it with a dish of noodles. We never bought very expensive food but we cooked well. My patisserie made us a chocolate gâteau. Fernandez was sick out of the window from eating too much of it. Aragon and André Breton were invited. We used to have a café relationship with these people and it was strange to see them in Gérard’s room, eating food I had cooked. Aragon arrived very late, very flushed; he said that Matilde and I, who had chosen black dresses, looked like carrion. A lot of actors came, friends of Fernandez and Matilde. They were faces I had seen sometimes at the Coupole or the Dôme or the Flore – young men in sparkling clothes, a Russian girl called Ilyena who wept. The room was lit by candles. When it was too hot to breathe, I opened the balcony windows and the night was very still and freezing. I carried a candle out and stood still listening to all the noises in the street. I tried to imagine that somewhere, beyond all the roofs and river, no more than a few hundred miles away, was England.