The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘I’m sorry kid …’

  ‘I’m just gonna take it, Walt!’

  ‘Now I don’t want you to think that my attitude to the man on the job has changed at all, Ralph. It’s a principle of successful journalism and I learned that when I was seventeen.’

  ‘You’re bullshitting, Walt.’

  ‘But there are exceptions …’

  ‘You’re bullshitting.’

  ‘And we have an exception situation here, Ralph. Not only do we have the run-up to the presidential election; we have a Russian presence in Afghanistan and no movement at all on the hostage question in Iran.’

  ‘I know all this, Walt.’

  ‘Sure you do. But I just don’t think you’ve got the full impact on board, kid. There is simply no time available, and I repeat, no time available, for investigations into minor lives.’ Walt then shouted, ‘April 24th, okay?’ and hung up.

  Sonofabitch, Ralph thought. So used to getting his own way. Like a drill sergeant. Everyone clicking their heels for him. Five years ago, Ralph had admired him: Walter B. Beresford, hot from his desk at Time-Life, hard as hell inside his soft body. Under Walt’s editorship, the circulation of Bulletin Worldwide Inc. had trebled. It was now published in England, in West Germany and in Japan. The company now owned an entire building on East 53rd Street. They played canned music to you in the elevators; the plants in the over-heated foyer were spotlit, the offices had carpets. But to work on Walt’s corridor was to become aware of the man’s growing megalomania. Orders were barked; memos were curt; and his footfall, it was an apparently deliberate flapping, as if his shoes were five sizes too large for his feet. Ralph had nicknamed him ‘The Frog’.

  And to be away from Walt was a profound relief. Ralph likened it to a pain in his gut that had gone away. Freed of this, freed of his toothache, he felt he could now begin to look squarely at himself. He was glad to find that his decision not to return on the 24th, to disobey Walt for perhaps the first time in almost six years left him absolutely unafraid. For a moment longer, he pictured Walt, pouring coffee from his Cona machine, swallowing restaurant food flat out, talking as he swallowed, taking laxatives as he gave dictation, voice lowered a little for his secretary who made him horny – with the world of world events all within his reach, every share price fluctuation, every global pronouncement, every un-American death.

  Then he put Walt out of his head, deciding only to move hotels as soon as he could so that the man wouldn’t be able to find him.

  It was half-past eight. Ralph dressed and went down to eat. Soup ‘of the day’ and some slices of gammon in a sweetish sauce passed, almost unnoticed, into his stomach as he read hungrily from Erica’s diaries:

  September 15th, 1935

  ‘Paris is full of movement. At Chamonix we seemed to be set apart from all happening. The damp silence now seems astonishing. There were times when the quality of the green made me think of England. I wondered if I should write a letter to Suffolk to ask, what are the English thinking? Have they noticed the rise of Hitler and Mussolini? Will England and France be allies in the event of another war? But of course I didn’t write. I don’t expect I ever will.

  Fernandez is definitely leaving. He is applying for teaching posts in Madrid. He is offering the idea of doing some kind of drama work with the children, but no schools have responded and he’s getting downhearted. He says he feels old. Gérard has stopped trying to persuade him to stay. He knows this is useless now. But he also believes that Fernandez is his greatest friend and that when he goes, he will feel like a mourner. We laugh about the fact that he now has a little money to compensate for the loss of Fernandez; a young American collector has bought “Mozart and the Bicycle Factory” and two other paintings (in the Fat Man series) and we have some dollars to flaunt!

  The socialist newspapers say there are almost two million people without a job in France. I wonder about the red-haired man. His family? His bicycle? You see men and women scavenging in dustbins outside restaurants. Sometimes, I expect to see him, yet always hope I won’t.’

  October 5th, 1935

  The price of books goes up and up. Someone told me this has something to do with the price of trees from Finland. But it’s difficult to believe that France imports trees when there are so many already here.

  I mention this because of two occurrences: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers from my friend on the Quai St Michel is marked at 2/6d in the English edition but he’s asking five hundred francs. I tell him off, but he refuses to bargain. I buy it anyway.

  Secondly, Maison Cambier have at last moved into a Maison, or rather they now have two floors of quite a large building in the Place Saint Sulpice instead of one floor in a tiny building in the Rue de Grenelle. Jacques is looking prosperous and overweight. I suppose, in difficult times, a lot of people shut themselves up in cold rooms or sit in warm cafés and write. And Jacques Cambier says to me sadly, “Why are you not doing this? After such a beginning …” But I don’t have a satisfactory answer, except my private answer which is cowardly and very womanly in all the bad ways: if I lost myself in a book, I am afraid to look up and find Gérard gone.

  October 19th, 1935

  Fernandez is gone. I went to the station to see him off, but Gérard wouldn’t come with us. He said he was going to walk up to Montmartre and get drunk, but he didn’t do this; he worked all day.

  One of the schools Fernandez wrote to has asked to interview him. He believes they will take him and he was full of smiles as he left. He has invited us to come to Spain as soon as he’s “settled” – if indeed anyone can be settled in these ravenous times. I cried to see him go, for all the days and nights of talk, for the journeys in Provence, even for Chamonix which has taken on the substance of a dream. To share something and then lose the sharer, is to lose the thing.

  I don’t think he said any goodbye to Matilde, who is drunk a lot of the time these days. She paws her Russian and talks about the world being full of traitors. Gérard, I know, believes Fernandez is one of these. Yet already he’s worrying. “Do you think Fernandez will write to us? Can we save up and – next summer – spend a holiday in Spain?”

  December 1st, 1935

  The sudden cold weather seems more terrible to endure than any winter I can remember. Walking back from Saladino’s, I go into cafés or stores that are open late just to get warm.

  With the American dollars (most of them) Gérard has bought a new stove that burns wood and coal. A special flue and chimney had to be put in. If we can continue to afford the wood (from Finland is it all, it’s so expensive?) and a few lumps of coal, then the room stays wonderfully warm. Mine is desolate in comparison, but Gérard seems to want me with him all the time, so I’m hardly ever at the Rue Chomel. Our loving of each other is the only thing (apart from the new stove) that has any warmth and comfort in it.

  In bed we make elaborate plans for our visit to Spain, which neither of us has ever seen. We try to imagine that all is laughter there, and dance and hot paellas. We’ve even begun to scour Paris for Spanish restaurants – all of this in memory of Fernandez, the Judas of our hearts! He has written us only one letter since he left Paris, telling us he failed to get the school post and is working “on the roads”. We don’t know if this means cleaning them or making them.

  At Saladino’s, the Americans still come to tea. Secretly, Saladino is making designs for a bûche de Nöel for Celestine and I don’t want to ask him: “Who will she eat it with, Saladino, while you sit face to face with Thérèse and hear her dreams of Calvi?”

  ‘Of course we had other friends than Fernandez and Matilde. Gérard “flirted” with Breton and his crowd and they “flirted” with him. But there was never a complete involvement with them. We stalked different beats. We became very close to Valéry Clément and there were perhaps five or six other people we saw quite often. One of these was an English writer called Roger Walters. He was an imitator of Hemingway, who we occasionally saw in the Closerie des Lilas. We knew he (Hem
ingway) had a passion for horse racing and we couldn’t understand this. And we found him rather prickly.

  ‘We saw more of our other friends after Fernandez had gone. I think they were all writers or actors or painters. The Englishness of Roger Walters amused Gérard. It was the Englishness of Harrow and Cambridge – the firm bridge of the nose, the loud voice. Gérard did an extraordinary painting of Roger Walters, which is why I remember him. The face is almost the face of a horse, toothy and proud, but the body gapes open onto an enormous heart, very moist and dark but clamped to the limbs of the body, held in place if you like, by wrenches and pulleys and pieces of steel. Roger hated the painting but Gérard was very pleased with it. He believed it captured, with a maximum of visual shock, the essence of Roger Walters.

  ‘So there he is, framed somewhere, and bought for a fortune no doubt and I will never, never forget him. Yet some of the other people we knew have just vanished from me. I believe they’ve gone only recently. I think I remembered them for years – how they painted, what they wrote, what we were to them and they to us – and then I just forgot them.’

  Erica bent forward to pick up her glass of wine, and dropped it. After Ralph had scurried for a cloth, wiped the table and the carpet, refilled Erica’s glass, he looked up and saw that she was trembling.

  ‘I’m in trouble again, Ralph,’ she said. ‘When it comes to anything very awful – like Chadwick’s death, you remember – I can’t bear to talk about it, not long enough to make sense of it for you, dear.’

  ‘Don’t fret about it, Erica,’ said Ralph, ‘just pass on to wherever you want. I know that Gérard was killed in Spain. You don’t need to say anything about it.’

  She paused, then with her eyes closed and her head low on her chest, she began talking again.

  ‘You know,’ she said slowly, ‘that no help was sent from France, no guns, nothing, when the Spanish Civil War began? I simply don’t know why. With help from France, Franco could have keen defeated but the Blum government just stood aside and watched. And the defenders of the republic of Spain couldn’t believe it. Of course they couldn’t! They couldn’t believe that France would let Fascism into Spain – especially when we had a left-wing government – they couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Gérard and I had planned our holiday in Spain for August. But after July, it was impossible. We started going on the “arms for Spain” marches. We were at last on the street and all the years of somnabulism were past and gone.

  ‘Then there were the letters from Fernandez. He called the French salauds, cochons – all the abusive words. He said the working people of Spain would fight to the last stone. All through the year the letters came. They said nothing about the road cleaning or the road mending – whichever it was – they simply mocked and chafed us for our betrayal. And Gérard saw everything, everything differently after that. He said his art was wasteful self-indulgence, absolutely without meaning.

  ‘So I suppose I knew he would go to Spain. I knew he would go and fight. I don’t remember ever talking about it, but there it was – a certainty.’

  She looked up at Ralph and her eyes were wet. She put a frail hand up to them and said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, dear. I can’t go on.’

  8

  A letter from John Pennington arrived the same day, Ralph’s last day at the hotel in Harrington Gardens:

  Worcester College

  Oxford

  Dear Ralph,

  The yellow pills have helped me over the illness. I can breathe again, thank heavens.

  The weather is glorious in Oxford now, and I wouldn’t like to think of you going back without seeing the sun on our famous stones. They are transformed by it, and one feels idiotically privileged to be here.

  As I am well, so is my novel sickly. I’m trying to invent the kind of love affair I’ve never had, I know that what I’m writing isn’t felt, and therefore doesn’t work. Yet the love relationship is central to the book. When I started, I really thought I could succeed, but now I don’t know. Perhaps, after all, I can’t create anything – only analyse and criticize, safe behind my exquisite window!

  So please come up and stay and perhaps you can tell me if I should go on with this fiction, or creep back into my don’s camouflage; the stick insect who thought he could become a humming bird: I suggest May 2nd or 3rd – or both if you can bear the sofa for two nights. It’s very difficult to get anyone a decent (cheap) room in term time these days.

  Yours ever,

  John

  Ralph was glad to have the letter, not only because he now knew that he would spend some time with John before going back to face Walt’s anger, but also because after a brief and sad afternoon with Erica he knew that he had a lot he wanted to write down. It was more comforting to write it in a letter to John than to make it part of his Summary:

  Dear John,

  Yes, I will come and see you on May 2nd. To stay two nights will depend on state of work here and London and on flights home.

  Well, ol’ pal, I want to say, the whole BIG question of love – not just the fictional kind – has to come under close scrutiny and quick, before we all die right off in our totally unpeopled hearts. I’m thirty-five and I’ve never sniffed at love. Lust follows me obediently. Fucking isn’t at issue. But love? Blame my foul-mouthed mother if you like, but that’s too easy. Blame me? Well, nearer. I’ve never had a go at nurturing so much as a goldfish, not to mention my total un-nurturing of people – women, men, I wouldn’t care which, if I could feel the thing – no, not to mention my total inexperience of absence of anything I could define as love.

  Kinda weird, your letter arriving today. The old lady (E.M.) has been remembering Paris and her celebrated affair with the painter, Gérard Guérard. ‘Affair’ is a dumb word; ‘passionate involvement’ is better. At the end, she was so broke up, she couldn’t tell me how he died or when. Yet she knew him fifty years ago. Her whole life is held together – kept intact, a life truly lived – by her extraordinary ability to love. Not just Gérard, though I guess she’s never been able to feel with anyone else what she felt for him, but everything, people, things, ugly, broken, surprising, miraculous. It’s as if love was a state of being or at any rate the kind of “outer skin” of a state of being; other feelings could exist in her (she found Hemingway “prickly”, she abhorred Fascism, she was afraid of Gérard’s black moods), but her life was informed by open, positive loving feelings. Love sharpened her vision, of everything she saw, just as I think it always had done before because she had deeply loved other people: her mother, her uncle, Emily Davison.

  Well, shit, I don’t know why I feel so depressed, John. And yet I do. The only thing Erica March simply couldn’t do during the Paris time was work; when I look at my life and all around me, all I can see is people working their asses off. Greedy fuckers – like me – putting work way up there in front and never feeling one goddamn thing from November to November. We’ve really gassed ourselves, John boy. We’re down there in the slime at Ypres – minus patriotism even, to blow our noses on – and, from where I’m standing I just can’t see us getting up again: it’s the wasteland from now on in. Well, go on, set the spires dreaming for me. If we can’t feel things, perhaps we can dream them?

  Ralph

  P.S. Sure you’ll never be a humming bird. Name one humming bird!

  Mrs Burford opened the door to Ralph.

  ‘Finders keepers,’ she said to him.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well, left your tape recorder, didn’t yer?

  ‘Yes. I guess I did.’

  ‘Finders keepers!’ And she grinned. But then she stalked off to the kitchen, turning only to ask, ‘You nearly finished with ’er?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ralph.

  ‘You didn’t ought to be doing it, you know.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Gobblin’ up ’er life.’ And the kitchen door slammed.

  Ralph hesitated. There was no sound in the flat and he wondered if Erica
was asleep. He remembered the day of her ‘rain sickness’.

  He moved to the sitting-room door. Erica was sitting, as she always sat, near her Tiffany lamp. Facing her, in an armchair, was a stranger, a man of perhaps fifty-five or sixty, deliberately smart in a faded suit, the woollen tie clumsily knotted. Erica was smiling at him. In silence, the stranger, too, was smiling.

  Ralph knocked on the door and they both looked at him. The remains of a cold lunch was on the table between them, the pink wine, usually offered to Ralph, had been drunk. Erica looked flushed.

  ‘Come in, Ralph dear,’ she said, ‘come and meet Huntley who has travelled all the way down from Suffolk to see me. Huntley is a wonderful modern farmer.’

  The man stood up and shook Ralph’s hand briskly. He was a heavy person, pink from his outdoor life. His hands were strong.

  ‘I’m just on my way,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no …’ Ralph mumbled, ‘look, please don’t go … if you’ve come down from Suffolk …’

  ‘Oh he never stays,’ said Erica, ‘do you, Huntley? You just tell me all about the marvellous milking parlours and all of that. That’s what you come to tell me, isn’t it? And then off you go back to the farm. Huntley detests London, don’t you?’

  But she didn’t let him reply. She turned to Ralph and said, ‘Huntley is Bernard’s nephew and when Bernard died, we gave Huntley the farm, which was what Huntley always, always wanted, a farm of his own. And now, he’s turned it into something modern.’

  ‘I wish you would come down and see it, Erica,’ said Huntley.

  ‘I know you do, dear, but you see I often tell Ralph, I’m afraid of open spaces now. They’re the only things I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of the wind.’

  ‘There’s not a lot of wind at this time of year, and we’ve planted a cyprus hedge –’

  ‘In Suffolk? Of course there’s always a wind. It just blows in from the sea and it hardly ever leaves you alone.’

  There was a moment’s silence and then Huntley said cheerfully: ‘Well, better be getting the tube back to Liverpool Street. Splendid lunch, Erica.’