The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘To celebrate, I got laid. Realized, no, remembered how much I crave coloured girls and probably always have done. Katherine, hostess at Mr Toad’s, no exception. In the dark, the whites of her eyes looked aquamarine. And she forgave me the night of vomit. Was all sweetness. Paid her a fortune to stay the night and bored the hell out of her talking about the white master in the white man. Told her all the zap’s gone out of his look. Cracks his whip (frayed old whip) and strikes himself!

  ‘Guess in my (what passes for a) heart there’s a coloured maid struggling to get out with her tray of tea and muffins. Seduce, subdue, they’re in there somewhere, these words. And Grandma nods, out there on her porch, nods and says nothing. She remembers Pearl. “No darn good, that Pearl!” she spits at last, “she’d have herself these nigger boys, night after night. They’d ride in from the town on bicycles!” Oh hell! When I get home, a lot’s gonna be different. We live in the era of the Intimate Deodorant and Gary Gilmore. The roll-on shrink locks us away from life – for life.’

  ‘In the spring Gérard’s old room in the Rue Chomel became vacant and I moved into it. It had been partly refurnished, with a little desk put near the balcony window, and all through that year I made attempts at sitting at it and trying to write. I think I finished two stories – two or three perhaps – but no one published them. They stayed in the room like litter.

  ‘Fernandez went off to Spain in that year because his father was dying. He was in Madrid when Matilde’s baby was born and his father died the same day. They christened the baby Julio, after Fernandez’ father. But it was born early and it was a sickly baby, very small and pale and not at all like Matilde and Fernandez who were brown and strong like Indians. Matilde started to go grey with worry over that little Julio and Fernandez seemed to be drifting, half in sorrow at his father’s death, half in dread of his responsibility towards Matilde and the baby. He began sleeping with a very young girl, hardly out of the Lycée, called Xavière. Xavière followed him like a spaniel and begged him to leave Matilde and the child.

  ‘Sometimes Matilde would wheel the baby to Saladino’s and bring it in, bundled up in ragged woollen things. It would cry and cry and Saladino told me Matilde would have to stop coming in because the baby upset the Americans drinking their Best English Tea. Matilde said she came to Saladino’s because it was warm and the two rooms she had weren’t heated and besides she was dying of loneliness and liked to be with me. Fernandez would go out early and she’d be left alone with this poor little Julio thinking of her years as an actress all gone to waste.

  ‘I explained all this to Saladino, and Thérèse crept down the stairs and heard every word. Thérèse said she would take the baby upstairs if it disturbed anyone. She said she would sing to it while she did her work. Saladino liked Matilde, who reminded him of a Corsican girl, so he agreed to this. He let Thérèse take the baby and Thérèse knitted it some new shawls to replace those rags. She grew very fond of little Julio and sometimes Matilde would come into the patisserie, go straight up the stairs to Thérèse, dump the baby with her and go out again. I think she went off in search of Fernandez. She found out where Xavière lived. She told me she would kill herself if Fernandez left her for Xavière.

  ‘But the baby died. Fernandez and Matilde came together again and were closer than they had ever been and Xavière was forgotten. Neither of them grieved. It was as if they knew what would happen and only, after it was all over, could they begin to love each other again. They went to Alsace, to the mountains, to forget death. They sent us cards full of rapture about the spring flowers and log hearths. They said they walked for miles every day and often slept very high up in the mountains, in rest huts, and that from these heights they could see new visions of the world.

  ‘I was glad they were together and not scarred by everything that had happened to them. But at Saladino’s it was a bad time. Thérèse was heartbroken by the death of Julio and she neglected her work. For days no overalls were washed and the stairs gathered dust and Saladino’s evening meal – the most important event of his day – was forgotten! Nobody sympathized with Thérèse. Matilde had just forgotten her and Saladino kept shouting at her “The baby wasn’t yours! Save your tears for the thing’s mother!”

  ‘It was a dreadful state of affairs. From the kitchen you could hear Thérèse weeping in her bedroom and Saladino would shrug his enormous shoulders and say, “It’s a kind of madness. We’ll have to see about it.” And if you went up there, to comfort Thérèse, she would tell you that she could have made the baby well, that if only it had been hers, it wouldn’t have died. She said she’d fed it secretly, that it cried because the mother couldn’t give it enough milk. She said Matilde was a murderer.

  ‘When I looked at Thérèse’s life and at mine, I saw a void between them and more than ever I remembered Emily and everything we’d tried to do to haul women out of their bondage. But we’d never imagined little dark-haired girls fishing for crabs off stone walls in Calvi; I expect we thought all the wrongs were in England with its mildewed old Empire and the barking of Mr Asquith. Paris was always a sanctuary for Christabel and I used to picture her reading in a garden. I think I believed that in France women were free – to be scholars, politicians, anything they chose. Yet of course they weren’t and Thérèse’s life was as bleak as any woman’s in the Bow Road in 1912. It was a life of abject servitude. The only things she treasured in it were her memories of Corsica and her love for her patron saint, Théresa. Pointless, though, to accuse Saladino. He believed in his “rights”: he thought his rights were in him like his saliva and his blood. No one could have persuaded him otherwise and until her desolation over Julio, Thérèse colluded with Saladino’s feudalism; she led a creeping life, she tried day and night to please him.

  ‘It was during the incident with Thérèse and Matilde’s baby that I decided never to marry and never to have children. Gérard was divorced from Matilde during that year, but we never talked about marriage until I said to him one day: “Promise never to marry me! Even if I forget my resolve and begin wanting to be your wife, you must promise to refuse me!” We celebrated our non-marriage with an extravagant dinner with champagne. And we walked all night along the quais. We sat down and waited for dawn at the very spot near the Pont Neuf where I’d gone fishing on my first visit to Paris with Sam. I think it was a summer dawn because I don’t remember once feeling cold. And Gérard was never happier than at this time. His work was at last “unfolding” as he called it. He had begun to see where he was going.

  ‘But of course as the ’thirties went on, it became very difficult to hold any kind of private optimism in the face of a public misery that just gathered, silently, on street corners and then suddenly, like something unexpected in darkness, lashed out. It was as if our poor earth had taken poison and vomited up confusion everywhere.

  The owner of the bicycle factory opposite Gérard’s studio went bankrupt. It was only a small factory and I suppose it employed about a hundred men, that was all. But when I remember the confusions of the early ’thirties I always remember the faces of those men, arriving for work on the bicycles they had helped to build, so early it was hardly light, but I had spent the night in Gérard’s studio and I was up making coffee, getting myself ready for the long walk to Saladino’s. They arrived and they found the doors of the shed closed and a notice nailed to the doors. They waited in groups. They rolled cigarettes and slapped themselves against the cold and waited for something to happen. They didn’t believe the notice of closure. They wanted the owners to come and tell them they could go in, that the notice was a mistake and their jobs were safe. But no one came. And as it got light and the working day began, they banged with their fists on the metal doors and kicked them and shouted obscenities. I was afraid to go out because they filled the street. They called the owners the filthiest names they could think up and a man with ginger hair kicked his bicycle over and began to weep. And then, gradually, they left, one by one. But their rage and despair lingered.
They had written it on the dented doors and it filled the Rue Pierre Nicole for months and months to come. And in those months we saw everything change. I suppose the rich still drank at the Ritz Bar and ate at the Tour d’Argent and dreamed the dreams of the unassailable in the Crillon and the Georges V. But the poor and the unemployed were arming themselves, not with knives but with ideologies. Demonstration and counter-demonstration. March and counter-march. Left, Right, Left, Right: everybody in step somewhere, forming alliances, prodding the air with fists and with slogans. And hunger marched with them: they shouted from their stomachs.

  ‘Gérard described himself at this time as a somnambuliste. He saw himself walking with the Left, marching with them hand in hand. When Laval came to power he began to believe that what he called the “old order” would go and we would rebuild our world. But he did nothing. He couldn’t make the bridge from “sleepwalking” in his studio to marching in the street. He wanted to make it and yet he couldn’t. He was very restless and exhausted by his own indecision. He began to believe that he’d lost touch with his heart and that he was growing old. He said “old men sit down with their pipes on their doorsteps, but the marchers in the street are all young and on fire – and where is the fire in me?” It wasn’t that he didn’t feel afraid, you see. He hated what was happening in Italy and Germany. He saw France being surrounded by Fascists and he hated them, with all his being. He would talk for hours, usually with Fernandez and often with Valéry Clément who was a little in love with Gérard at that time and who was suffering from a terrible fear of being alone. He had nightmares of thugs coming to arrest him.

  ‘I tried to understand the dilemma in Gérard and I think I got near to it. It was the struggle between the militant in him and what I could call the mystic – the creative part of him – which was also making pathways to change, but they were different paths. The two grew in him side by side. They grew in the same soil, breathed the same air and most of the time they were never in conflict because the militant nurtured itself on words and let the mystic act. And now the militant began to feel guilty. It devalued the achievements of the mystic. What good is art? it said. I should be burning pictures to warm the people? Yet the artist still wanted to be left in peace, to be apart from the people so that it too, in the quiet of a room, could discover new answers and then, only then, give those answers to the people. And for a long time, the artist had its way.

  ‘But of course I see now that all of this was a prelude, the first shivers and shudders of the convulsions to come. The conflict in Gérard went on inside him for several years, as the public events slowly shaped themselves. But when I think about it all now, I can remember days and days that were ordinary, when the conflict was buried among the ordinariness of simple things – a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens, the completion of a collage after a whole night’s work, breakfast at La Coupole. I remember also thinking, there will be an end to all this – perhaps. Our favourite waiter at La Coupole was called Etiènne and he had an epileptic fit one morning on the floor beside our banquette. It was a Sunday and we were drinking pastis. We had the train fare for an afternoon trip to Fontainebleau. But after we’d seen Etiènne’s epileptic fit, we couldn’t make the trip. We felt afraid, full of horror. And this was exactly how our lives were led – keeping hold on what was familiar, knowing that from one minute to the next it could go, and when we looked up again, something else would have replaced it, something we couldn’t bear to see.

  ‘The bicycle factory stayed shut. People came and stuck up advertisements for concerts and plays on the doors. One advertisement was for a string quartet playing Mozart and we found this very strange, the contrast between a string quartet in their tail coats in a room with chandeliers and the red-haired man crying and kicking his bicycle. And it must have been then that Gérard began work on his enormous painting called “Mozart and the Bicycle Factory”. I expect you’ve seen it in books, haven’t you? When he began it, Gérard talked a lot about precision – the precision of Mozart and the precision of the bicycle wheel. But then the idea of the bicycle factory workers represented as crochets and quavers came to him. He saw similarities, because the people could be scratched out or set moving along certain lines, according to the composition of the society at the time, exactly as in the composition of a piece of music. And after this painting all Gérard’s people looked terribly thin, like crochets and quavers. They were stick men with little twigs of limbs that could snap.

  ‘The painting was exhibited at the Galerie Bonjean and the critics didn’t understand it, just as they didn’t understand Miro or Picabia. They said a baby could have painted the crochet men. But Gérard was pleased with the picture and he didn’t mind. He felt he had made progress since the struggles with the plaster of paris bones. To be free of the bones felt rather wonderful, I think. He started coming back to Saladino’s and eating brioches.

  ‘Matilde went back to acting. She was finding it more difficult to get parts in the ’thirties because her gypsy beauty seemed to vanish after the birth and death of Julio and her eyes looked puffy. She couldn’t play Ophelia or anything like that; she had to play people’s mothers and this made her feel old. She began to mourn for what she’d been. She was jealous of Fernandez who didn’t seem to age at all, and some of her jealousy spilled over onto me because I was two years younger than she was and I never thought about ageing, only about keeping my love alive.

  ‘She began to keep company with some of the younger poets and writers. She took a lover called Jan who was Russian. He was terribly white and nervous, just like I imagine Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. But he intrigued us all with his pronouncements. He said that the French xenophobia which grew as the unemployment got worse was as repulsive as Fascism. “France deserves Fascism,” he’d say. And he talked a lot about going back to Tblisi, which is where he came from, just as Fernandez began to talk about going back to Spain.

  ‘Gérard hated this talking about going back to Spain. He persuaded Fernandez to come with us to Chamonix in the summer of 1935 and we left Matilde behind in Paris. We stayed at a tiny place called La Bucherie. The only other guests in our hotel were an English couple called the Sloanes. We spent our days walking and listening to Gérard. “Look at us!” he’d say, “we’ve walked in step for years, so how can you think of leaving us, Fernandez?”

  ‘The first days of our holiday were fine. We saw some beauty in everything, every colour, every sound. And it was a year for wild strawberries; we found hundreds and quenched our thirst with them. When we thought of Paris, it felt black and noisy. We wondered if we could go back.

  ‘But then it rained. It was a grey gentle drizzle and the peaks of the mountains vanished in it. I think the Sloanes, who came from Taunton, felt terribly cheated: it was an identical drizzle to the one which fell on all their Devon springs. They sat and played two-handed bridge and drank fine à l’eau and talked of going south to Monaco. And of course the more it rained, the more Fernandez began to imagine sunlight in Spain and the brass bands of the corrida and pimento bushes. He told us that he and Matilde were “lost”. He was tired of Paris and the theatre. He said, “It’s all finished for our generation in France.” We argued with him. We said, “France will never let Fascism in,” and Gérard promised him that his time of somnambulism was over. But the weather defeated us. I believe we travelled back to Paris in absolute silence.’

  With Ralph’s key, the hotel receptionist handed him a telegram. It said simply: ‘Please confirm your return April 24th. Walt.’

  Ralph took it up to his room, crumpled it and let it fall into the metal waste paper basket.

  Exhaustion from his long night with Katherine had crept around his body all day. He had struggled with a desire to lie down and sleep, and images of his night kept coming back to him, interrupting Erica’s voice so that it became almost inaudible – something whispered and gone. Thank God for the tape recorder.

  To atone for his inattention, Ralph got into bed with the two volumes of
the diary. He noticed that the pages of the first volume smelled faintly of olive oil. In the second book, the pages were dry and brittle. Before Ralph slept he decided she wanted to preserve the first and let the second turn to dust.

  But in an hour he was awake. There was dusk – dawn? – at the window. The curtains hadn’t been drawn and the telephone was ringing.

  ‘Ralph? You got my cable?’

  ‘Walt?’

  ‘Yeh. Is it night time over there or what. You sound kinda muffled.’

  ‘Yup, it’s night time.’

  ‘You got my cable, Ralph?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What? You didn’t get it?’

  ‘I don’t think I got it.’

  ‘Shit. Well look, kid. I just want you to confirm you have an April 24th flight. We need you back in the office on April 25th.’

  Ralph was silent. Walt said, ‘You hear me, Ralph?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Can you confirm this date to me, Ralph?’

  Ralph tried to think fast: lie now, lie later? Try to wade right on through without lying?

  ‘I can’t confirm that date, Walt,’ he said flatly.

  ‘What? What ’you say, kid?’

  ‘I just can’t confirm the April 24th date.’

  ‘Now see here …’ Walt began.

  ‘You said when I joined Bulletin Worldwide,’ Ralph interrupted, ‘that the judgment of what you called “the man on the job” is always superior to that of the office. You said, sure, the office dictates the policy but at Bulletin Worldwide we trust our men in the field to decide exactly what importance – and therefore time – should be given to the issues they’re facing. Now you said precisely that to me, Walt. You talked about “free hands” and “on-the-spot sensitivity” and all that crap, so just don’t go back on it! I need the full month for this job and I’m gonna take it.’