by Rose Tremain
During their visit to Regent’s Park, Erica had described the English spring as ‘surly’. It came on with a bad grace; it made you ill-tempered with waiting. But now in London it arrived. The daffodils shone; the chestnuts put on leaf, in the squares you saw almond trees and forsythia and magnolias and the air was warm.
Ralph felt such a relief at the sudden change that all his fear of the city of solitude seemed suddenly to leave him. He found a dentist not far from Erica’s flat and persuaded the receptionist to give him an emergency appointment. One more day of pain was all that he would have to suffer. Then without the pain, which was constant and exhausting, he promised himself he would make progress on his Summary. He would also write to Walt, unafraid. He would simply inform Walt that he wouldn’t be back in New York until May 1st.
He found Erica sitting by an open window. She had sent Mrs Burford out to buy mimosa – she longed, she said, to smell that incredible smell of Southern France. But there was no mimosa in Camden Town. Mrs Burford had returned with tulips and narcissi and stuck them at random into a glass vase.
‘It’s something,’ said Erica to Ralph, ‘but it conjures nothing.’
And then she apologized.
‘I’ve talked too much about Paris, haven’t I? You want to hear about my work, Ralph, don’t you, and of course in the Paris years I did none, hardly anything worth mentioning, and it wasn’t until I went back to England that I began In the Blind Man’s City. So I can go straight on to that, if you like. I can miss out quite a bit of time.’
‘Please don’t,’ said Ralph. ‘I want to hear more about Gérard. There must be so much more, isn’t there?’
‘Did you look at the diaries?’
‘Yes, I dipped into them. The bits I read were about Mr Saladino and then –’
‘Saladino! He was indestructible, Saladino! He kept going all through the war, all through the occupation, bribing people to sell him flour and sugar I suppose. And chocolate! How on earth did he get chocolate, when the shops had hardly anything in them but lentils and swedes? But he kept on. He was there when I went back, just that once with Bernard, after the war. He was so pleased to see me that he cried. He told me that his mistress, Celestine, had been bombed in her bed. “But they found two bodies, Erica. Some other salaud died with her! With my Celestine!”
‘I often thought of leaving Saladino’s patisserie, but in the end I worked there for nine years. Nothing changed in it. The English Spoken sign came and went to be repainted, and Saladino’s English never got any better. My wages went up. He wasn’t stingy with money, not to me, because he saw me as an “asset”; he loved to show me off to Americans – a real English girl serving what he advertised as Best English Tea. I often explained to him that all the tea in England came from India or Ceylon or China, that there was no such thing as “English Tea”. He seemed genuinely surprised. Perhaps he’d imagined tea plantations on the slopes of the Pennines, I don’t know! But he went on advertising Best English Tea and his customers kept drinking it, so everyone was happy. And I was happy to be there, in a way. Sometimes I imagined the things I could be doing, the useful things. But I had no qualifications to do anything really useful. And in the winters it was marvellous to work in a place that was so warm. And often Gérard came in and our friends came from time to time and Saladino got to know them all and teased them about their lives: “painters, actors, riff-raff!”
‘He used to bully Thérèse. This was the basest aspect of Saladino, this sadistic bullying of his wife. She was from Calvi, she told me once. She could remember fishing for crabs off a high wall in the old port and she longed to go back there, to Corsica and the sea. Paris was a grey tomb to Thérèse.
‘I tried to stay out of Saladino’s rows. They didn’t concern me. I don’t know to this day why he used to beat Thérèse or why she didn’t leave him and drag herself onto a boat back to Calvi. Perhaps her family in Calvi were all dead and she had no one and nothing, only Saladino and the patisserie. I often wanted to say to him, why do you hurt poor Thérèse who works for you day and night? Why d’you do it? But I never said it. When I told Gérard he said simply, “All married men beat their wives. It’s part of the ritual.”’
Erica stared at the flowers Mrs Burford had bought. ‘They used to sell mimosa in London, you know,’ she said. ‘I think it’s my favourite flower on the earth. When I die, Ralph, I’d like you to pack my head round with it and put it over my eyes and then who knows if I might not be reborn as a butterfly, in the Marché aux Fleurs in Nice?’
‘You’re not going to die while I’m here, Erica. You may have years and –’
‘Oh yes I am! I couldn’t tell you which day because I have to wait for certain signs …’
‘I don’t believe that, Erica.’
‘You must start believing it, Ralph.’
‘Why?’
‘Then you’ll be ready, dear, and do everything properly.’
‘Do what?’
‘Help me.’
‘Help you with what?’
‘Help me to die. Because I’m so ready for it, Ralph. I want to run to death like a lover and yet I’m afraid to do it yet because nothing yet has shown itself to me on the other side of death. No hint of anything but eternity and silence. But something will show itself – it must.’
She was silent, staring at the flowers. Ralph heard Mrs Burford close the kitchen door and quietly leave. There was no wine today. She had forgotten it. Ralph felt thirsty and got up to get himself some water. When he came back with the drink, she had turned away from the flowers and was watching the sunlight on her arm.
‘Tell me about the skeleton,’ said Ralph. And she looked up sharply.
‘What skeleton?’
‘The one you found in the Cevennes in 1927, the one you put in a sack.’
Her face creased into a smile. Smiling she looked older, even, than she was.
‘Oh that!’ she said, ‘we lugged it all the way home. Gérard was full of ideas for putting it to good use. He planned a series of big canvases looking at man’s aims and pathetic aspirations in the light of his brittle mortality. We brought the skeleton right to my door in a taxi, but we’d both fallen asleep on the way from the Gare de Lyon and we got out of the taxi without it. Gérard was demented by its loss. He walked around Paris for a night and a day, taking taxis in the hope of finding it. But he didn’t. And while he was away, the police came. They thought we were murderers. We spent hours at the Gendarmerie explaining ourselves away. But I don’t know where they buried it. Perhaps they sent it back to Thoziers les Colombes by post.
‘Gérard began his series without it. He manufactured bones with plaster of paris. He studied his old anatomy books. Bones absorbed him for three years. He lost weight so that he could feel his own bones more closely with his hands. He wanted, literally, to put his own bones into his pictures, to give them his own life. He became very morbid. He began to hate the confines of his studio, so he started looking for a very large room that he could lease or rent. He was fed up with hotels.
‘He found a room in the Rue Pierre Nicole. It was opposite a bicycle factory and had once been used for storage. It had nothing in it, so we spent days at the flea markets, buying cheap utensils and chairs, and a brass bed that had been painted white. By the time we’d fixed it up – with a kerosene stove, too – for the winter mornings – Gérard had begun work.
‘Until this time I’d never seen him go into a piece of work with such a fury. He destroyed everything he’d done with the plaster of paris bones in the Rue Chomel and started again, He’d work sometimes for twenty hours without food or sleep. He stopped coming to Saladino’s. He gave up spending nights in my room. He became like a stranger. I knew he would come back – in his own time. It was during his exile that I got the tiny part in Hamlet and Matilde did her Ophelia. I spent a lot of time with Matilde and Fernandez, even a night in their bed, and we smoked hashish. But I felt very cold, without Gérard’s love, terribly terribly cold. I asked S
aladino for a month’s holiday, which he gave me. I let my room go and I came to England.’
7
‘I suppose it was the winter of 1927. There was a storm in the Channel and almost as soon as our boat had set out from Calais it had to turn back. I’ve never seen such a sky. It was like the sky that comes round me, when I feel I’m losing hold …
‘I found a hotel room for a few francs and I lay in it listening to the storm. I thought, if storms came every day there would be no travelling to England, only in a little plane and even the plane would be swallowed up in the black. Then I slept, with all the shutters banging and I dreamed of Gérard struggling to make sense of his bones.
‘We crossed over the next day and it was snowing in Dover. I think I cried in the train. There was desolation in England. And the trouble was, Ralph, I didn’t know why I was there! It seemed idiotic to be there when all I wanted was to be with Gérard. And I began to have such fears. I thought, he’ll become so thin, he’ll waste away to nothing. I thought, his eyes will sink back into his skull.
‘As soon as I got into London, I wrote to him. I tried to describe my love, which was as black as the sky over Calais and as bright as the midday heat at Thoziers les Colombes. Separation from him was like a wound and I wondered if he felt it, too, a kind of bleeding in him. I think it’s very terrible, to feel the weight of another person on your heart. I began to remember my father and to wonder if, when my mother died, he felt it, the silent weight of her, and had to carry her around year after year, till he met Eileen and the weight unravelled itself in the Book of a Thousand Knitting Patterns.
‘I expect I told myself that I should go and see my father, but I knew I wouldn’t. I imagined him growing old and I was afraid of this. I remember thinking, Gully will take care of everything.
‘I stayed in a hotel in Bayswater. It was a very drab kind of place, much worse in its way than my room in the Rue de Grenelle, because it was full of old women and ugly furniture and there was an air of piety about it, piety in whispers, piety in the fabric which smelled of hassock seeds. There was a coal fire in my room, though, and this was kept in most of the time. I sat by it and wrote letters and waited for letters to arrive. The snow fell almost every day.
‘After a week, I plucked up courage and went to see Ranulf Tree. He was wearing an overcoat because of the cold and he looked very, very large. He stared at me in astonishment and told me that I had become very beautiful! He bought me lunch in a warm restaurant and asked me, where is it then, the new novel? And when I said I’d done nothing, only The Angler, which neither he nor Patterson had liked much, he gave me a lecture on idleness and waste. I tried to explain to him that writing had become very irksome to me. I told him I would write another book – one day – but he would just have to be patient. And of course he was very pessimistic; he said The Two Wives would soon be forgotten and my name with it. You simply must follow it up soon, he said. So I knew he hadn’t understood. I wanted to get cross with him but the food was too good, and I expect I was glad to be talking to somebody at last, instead of writing my letters and waiting by the coal fire.
‘After ten days there was a scribble from Gérard. The pages were all stuck together with something sticky and purple which could have been blackcurrant jam so it was quite difficult to read. He told me that the loss of the skeleton was still driving him mad, that he’d been up to the Père Lachaise cemetery, to see if anyone could be dug up “in the interests of contemporary art and man’s understanding of his eternal dilemmas.” But of course they wouldn’t let him dig anyone up, not even someone very ancient whose grave no one visited. They thought he was insane and sent him away like a dog. So he began all over again with the plaster of paris bones, but the longing to use real bone never left him. He told me, very openly, that he’d slept with a whore in the Passage de l’Opéra but that she’d smelt of rubber and he didn’t know now if she’d been real or if he had imagined her. He said he didn’t understand what on earth I was doing in England and he described the joyous part of himself I had stolen from him by leaving. And after that first letter, he wrote almost every day. He became obsessed by the girl in the Passage de l’Opéra. She must have lost her smell of rubber, I suppose, because he went to her quite often, sometimes at four in the morning when he couldn’t sleep. He always called her Erica and imagined she was me – or so he said – but when I later asked him her real name, he said without hesitating that it was Claudette. I don’t suppose he called her Erica at all!
‘When I left Paris, I promised myself I wouldn’t go back before a month was over. When the snow melted, I walked around a great deal in London and took trams to places I’d never been like Kew Gardens. Since then, I’ve always rather liked Kew. It’s very easy to imagine botanists with little moustaches and white legs like Chadwick’s, struggling down the Congo in dugouts searching for rarities and then bringing them all the way back to London to grow in that artificial heat. And Queen Victoria going round and saying, “Pray tell me what this is, and this with its thorns and were the native bearers unmannerly!” The very idea of a tropical garden in London is utterly strange to me, and yet there’s something very wonderful about it.
‘Sam found me one day. He’d heard from Ranulf Tree that I was in London and Ranulf Tree must have told him where I was. He was the last person I was expecting and to find him in my hotel made me feel seasick. I believe Sam had promised himself that he wouldn’t be angry with me, because what was the point of it? But when he saw me he couldn’t but be angry. He’d been harbouring very jealous feelings and now they came out in a rush and the pious hotel was stunned. He told me I had spoiled his life and that if I was unhappy with Gérard, I was well punished. He said if it hadn’t been for him, I would be no one and my book would have stayed shut up in the cupboard forever, turning yellow.
‘He was probably right about the book, but this hurt and fury was dreadful nevertheless. I told him to be quiet, or I would be thrown out of the hotel and I dragged him out into the Bayswater Road. We walked down it and into Kensington Gardens which were very dead, with all the trees dripping, and Sam stopped on one of the paths and put his arms round me and rested his head on my shoulder. I felt very sorry for Sam. I wanted to hug him like a brother. But I couldn’t feel any desire for him, none at all. It was hard to believe I had shared my life with him for so long. What I’d felt for Sam in those years was utterly unlike what I felt for Gérard. Utterly.
‘Like Ranulf Tree, Sam was appalled to hear that I’d done no writing. He refused to believe that I worked in a patisserie. He said I was wasting my life. And I thought, oh lord, if only I could tell you, Sam, that far from wasting my life I am living it, almost for the first time since the days of 1912. And if I work in the patisserie till Saladino is a hundred years old, too frail to beat Thérèse, too weak to climb the stairs to Celestine’s bed, I don’t mind! Of course it’s a haunted life, with Gérard’s bone pile staring out at its edge and the girl in the Passage de l’Opéra staring in, but love is by its nature followed everywhere by ghosts, no more no less than life itself is led side by side with death. Isn’t that true, Ralph? Isn’t it true?’
In the dentist’s waiting room, Ralph opened the first of Erica’s diaries at an entry dated February 26th 1927:
‘I am back with Gérard. London was an interlude, like a watch stopping for a while.
His room is white with plaster dust, like a sculptor’s place. The first bone collage is finished. The bones are “anchored” to wood by very old nails and the thing is called simply Crucifixion. He has used stones also and painted anguished eyes on them. And there are tattered bits of red and black rag and feather. He says they’re vultures.
We lie in bed and stare at this thing and we sleep exhausted, tangled up, bone on bone. Then a day goes by and we don’t get up. We make love like spring toads, clambering about. Fernandez comes round with the news that Matilde is pregnant. He says the room smells like a brothel. We make coffee. I would like years to pass in this
way.
Then I am back at Saladino’s. Nothing had changed. Thérèse creeps down the stairs with the washing the customers never see. She hangs up sheets and shirts and overalls and aprons in the tiny courtyard behind the shop. Saladino makes a birthday cake for Celestine. He hides it on the “special orders” shelf. Oh yes, there is a new assistant, Joseph, in the kitchen. He is quite inexperienced – therefore paid very little. I’m surprised at Saladino who is very patient with him and helps him all the time. No attempt made yet to find a room. I am at Saladino’s all day and Gérard’s compulsion to work at night has (temporarily) left him. So we eat suppers at the Coupole for which I pay and our life is ordered, but we both mistrust this. Gérard even comes to Saladino’s and sits in his usual corner. Saladino teases him: “She left you, Monsieur le peintre! Eh? She left you for a month!”
I had a dream of Emily last night. She came and offered Gérard her bones – on the one condition that I move out of his studio and rediscover that part of myself which doesn’t belong to him. Yet I’m still there today. I can’t find the strength to go.’
‘Will you go in, Mr Pears?’
The clean, smiling receptionist, the black leather chair, the light on a mechanical arm, the washing of the dentist’s hands, the instruments laid out – all was formal, ritualistic. Ralph let the ritual begin with the clipping of a little towel round his neck and the tilting of the chair under him. He longed to sleep, to wake up on another day when the ritual was over. As the probing of the pain began, he remembered Walt saying once: “I have never understood, Ralph, with your education and your intelligence, why there is so much of the coward in you.” With considerable effort, he resisted an urge to weep.
‘So pain has receded, almost to nothing,’ noted Ralph in his Summary. ‘Begun to feel a) wholesome again and b) relieved that my teeth will stay with me for some years yet. English dentists are less pessimistic and less expensive than American ones.’