by Rose Tremain
‘When I arrived at the house, there was dismay. Gully drove me there and left. Miss Pinney opened the door, and when she saw me she called out to Eileen in a terrified voice. And Eileen came and they both stared at me. Eileen told Miss Pinney to go to her room, which was my old room. Then she looked at my suitcase and said “I’m sorry Erica. Miss Pinney has your room now. There can be no staying.” But I pushed past her and into the sitting-room, where there were new curtains and new covers on the chairs and a large brown wireless on one of the tables. Eileen followed me and waited in the doorway. I turned round and said to her very quietly: “Please tell me how my father died.” But she looked away. She looked past me at the new furnishings and said “I’ve told Miss Pinney and I told Gully, I shall not have that man’s death spoken of. Not as long as I’m alive!” And she went away.
‘I suppose she thought I would get up and leave. I went outside and down to the cowsheds where I had first seen Claustrophobia and then beyond them, along a track we used to call Hobman’s Lane to the forget-me-not field. Haggard’s cows were out grazing. There was no sign of a forget-me-not. It was much too late in the year. I sat on the gate and watched the cows and there was absolute contentment there. It was a place quite without ghosts. It was sunny and quiet and at peace, and I felt no sadness at all. I remember saying to myself, they’re born again somewhere – perhaps: they’re swallows now flying down to Africa! And I suppose this was when the idea that a person might be born again first entered my mind, when I felt that stillness of the forget-me-not field. I’d never been able to imagine this for anyone else, Emily or Chadwick or even for Gérard whom I would love to have seen on my window sill – a pigeon from the Luxembourg Gardens. But I’ve often thought, while I’ve gone on with this life my mother has had ten or twenty and in each one she has been careful to keep my father by her, strong and proud as he used to be – not the silent, impotent man that he became.
‘I went back and told Eileen I was staying. I suppose I knew she couldn’t really turn me out. She gave me Gully’s old room in the attic and it was full of hatboxes. Some of them had hats inside and they were all very old-fashioned, wide hats like dinner plates with dinners on them made out of net and feathers, the kind of thing Mrs Pankhurst used to wear. There must have been twenty of them in that room! I remember thinking, I expect at dawn they’ll all wake up and start jabbering through their boxes about all the weddings they’d seen and all the drinking of tea in bone china, I expect I shall have to silence them, I thought. They’ll be too noisy for me.
‘After my walk to the forget-me-not field, after Eileen had given me Gully’s room, I lay down in it and went to sleep. The hats were very quiet. I slept for hours and a wind got up and began to slip into my dreams. I thought I was in a trench in France and my helmet was made of bone. The wind got stronger and stronger and I was afraid my bone helmet would blow away and go rolling off towards the German line. I crouched down lower and lower in the mud, waiting for the command, but no command came because there was no one to give it. I was the only soldier left alive.
‘It was quite dark when I woke up and there was no candle in this room, so I made my way downstairs where I found Eileen and Miss Pinney sitting in a blaze of light. Electricity had come to the farm! It was most extraordinary. It changed the colours and the size of the room.
‘We ate supper under a pink lampshade. Our hands became the colour of salmon. It was a kind of stew we ate, very thick and English and full of carrot. Eileen and Miss Pinney behaved like deaf mutes, making little signs to each other, but not saying a word. I wanted to laugh at them – and at myself. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I tried, as we ate, to make some plan for going somewhere else, but I knew that I was dreadfully tired and not strong at all. I believe I was afraid that if I was left completely alone, I might forget to eat and drink and my black sea would wash me away. But as it was, my hatred of Eileen was like a raft. Can you understand this? I thought that, with the raft, I could gather some strength – and then I would go away for ever and never think of her again nor of her needlework and her knitting and her Belgian sardines. Never, never! But I have thought of her, of course. She’s one of those people I haven’t been able to forget.
‘When I went to bed, I took up a candle. I didn’t want to turn an electric light on the hatboxes. There was a little table, in the room where Gully used to do his homework, and I sat at this and thought, I could write here. When I’m well again, this is what I must do – sit at Gully’s table and write. Then I put a coat on and went out. I walked very silently to the village which still had its pond and its tiny church and its one signpost pointing three ways and all its little cottages (none with electric light) where the farm workers lived. It hadn’t changed at all, not since the days when Chadwick used to wander about in it, looking for members of the Garrick at midnight. I sat on the bench by the pond and I thought of the evening I’d been locked in the cupboard for teasing Gully. I suppose I was letting my memories of Suffolk come back.’
The hotel Ralph had found was in Chalk Farm Road. It was a cheaper, smellier kind of place than Harrington Gardens; the rooms were old and the curtains thin. There was no dining-room. But it was no more than five minutes’ walk from Erica’s flat, and this tawdry piece of London seemed to possess a kind of disordered life which suited Ralph’s mood. South Kensington was too smug behind its railings. Burglar alarms told of family silver in every house, Staffordshire cottages on mantlepieces. Here, the wind seemed to blow people about like litter. The traffic roared through blind. There was nothing to admire.
Ralph’s room looked out over a concrete courtyard, two sides of which were owned by a garage. On a large sliding door a red and white sign said ‘Spares. Accessories.’ ‘That’s you babe,’ said Ralph to himself. ‘Time you became the whole thing – body and engine. Time you fitted the words to the life.’ Then he took the Summary from his hastily packed suitcase and wrote: ‘She cheats me of every death. Doesn’t she know we’re all My Lai men in our generation? We want to see the bodies.
‘How – precisely how – I want to ask, was Gérard killed. Like who by and where? And then, how did the news get back to Paris? Did it come from Fernandez? But she won’t tell me. I can look up the date of the death in an art book and the rest I would have to invent.
‘My only brush with death is Grandma: funeral packed with black people come to make sure this time she’s really gone. “Oh my,” they wail, “she was one stubborn old lady, your Gran,” and then with relief, “there ain’t no more like her left. She all was the last one, man!”
‘Remember my mother sat in the rocking chair and smoked. Chiffon dress. Tanned legs. Smoked and smiled. She was always fond of endings.
‘Dad and I gave out cakes and drinks, but not many whites had travelled so far. One old guy was a rose grower. He had an acre of glass, he said. His roses bloomed in February through November.
‘Dad said “I’m selling the ranch, son. Lock stock and barrel. Your mother and I don’t see ourselves living here. We’re far too used to civilization.”
‘And that was it. No sequel. Nothing kept or treasured. Not even the rocking chair. Dad and Ma got a plane out. But I stayed there a night to keep her absence company: the dead burying the dead! Tired old nigger shuffles in at sunrise. “Told me she’d leave me something, sir. Some kinda something.” “No!” I yell from an upstairs window, “my folks got it all.”
‘But they left it all and strangers bought it. They took the money and ride it like surf. Their lives are lived on the big breakers.’
It was seldom that Ralph allowed himself to think about his parents. It amused him to notice that by jotting down a few scattered thoughts about death he had let them in: his mother with her fine legs and the scarlet smile of a star, his father in his beach shirt, dying a slow death from barbecue smoke and saturated fats. He imagined their deaths all right: ground to fragments, both of them, in a barrel organ and passers-by would stop to listen to the exquisite music of the
ir dying. In the distance, the sea would explode onto the beach.
‘I started writing again in the winter of ’thirty-seven. I’d recovered a bit by then – I made myself walk quite far each day to try and get some strength back into my legs. And then the hatboxes got me going. They were the voices I used and the novel was going to be called Old Hats. I told you, didn’t I, that it was about Eileen. The only characters in it were hats and some of them were ancient and full of moth, but they could all talk, these hats and little by little they unfold the life story of the women – Eileen – who used to wear them.
‘It was rather an extraordinary idea and I think Ranulf Tree thought I’d gone mad when I sent him the first chapter. But after being with Gérard for so long I think my mind was somehow hitched up to the “extra-ordinary” and it was satisfying to be writing something rather bold.
‘I watched Eileen very carefully. I saw a lot about her I’d never noticed. She took to blowing her nose a lot, for instance, as if she wanted people to think she was crying. And she was getting fat. Her clothes were always tidy and spotless, but now she bulged out of them. Miss Pinney’s idea of companionship with Eileen seemed to be all mixed in with cakes and sweet puddings because these were all Miss Pinney ever made, and Eileen kept eating them. One of the hats gives a running commentary on all the food she’s eaten at coffee mornings and sewing guilds and meetings of the W.I.
‘None of the hats – because their lives are all in the past – give any warning of what may come. They paint a picture of a woman who has always tried to conform and be useful in a useless, niggling way. She’s very fond of rules and hierarchies and has begun to wonder, even, if England wouldn’t be better run by the Germans with their sense of order, when a jackboot walks into the room where the hats are chatting and blows them all to shreds. Bits of them – feathers and net and petals of artificial flowers – float around for a while and then come slowly drifting down. The jackboot then gorges itself on all the pieces and becomes very stiff and erect like a phallus. By the end, the room is empty except for this thing, this dismembered member.
‘Well, it was rather odd, but the work I did on it was precious because I became alive through it. Just like The Angler it was too short for a novel, too long for a story, but Ranulf Tree liked it in the end and for a while, there was talk of putting these two stories in a volume together and publishing them. But Patterson wasn’t keen. They hung on to the manuscript for months wondering what to do with it, and meanwhile I began other stories – much shorter ones – and all of these too had Eileen at their centre. She had pushed her way into my mind, just like she had pushed her way into the recruiting centre with her mufflers. And I suppose I wanted to be the sergeant, mocking her and making jokes about French knickers. Yet the more I wrote about her, the more I came to see that she was one of these women whose own ways make them rather miserable, and you feel tempted to ask, “I wonder why you never got over this habit of obedience to little things and let life froth up a bit in you like beer?” You see, she didn’t seem to get any pleasure from anything she did except perhaps when she spoke to God in her musical box and He spoke back. She baffled me, really. She’d become a miserable thing with her gros point and her silence. Miss Pinney would stare at her anxiously with those watering eyes of hers and sometimes tears came out of them, but you couldn’t tell what they were, those tears, sorrow for Eileen or just the natural overspill of her eyes. And I never asked because neither Eileen nor Miss Pinney liked talking to me. They were very glad I shut myself away and wrote. They didn’t want to hear about Paris and I didn’t want to tell them. The only thing we ever seemed to talk about was the war – the war that came. Neither of them believed there would be a war. They thought England should try to go on being friends with Hitler no matter what he was doing in Austria or Czechoslovakia. As long as everything here stays the same, they thought, we don’t care what happens in Europe. And when I said Fascism must be fought, just as it’s being fought in Spain, they’d look up from their needlework and say: “Spain needs a man like Franco.”
‘I knew I’d have to go away. In the spring I began to make plans, but I can’t remember what the plans were; they changed each week. I think I was well again by then, but I didn’t seem to have any roots anywhere except there, in Suffolk. Sometimes I’d make a plan for dying. I’d remember Gérard and the memory was terrible, like a blade going in me and then I’d imagine how an actual blade would feel and think this preferable. One thing distressed me terribly. After my illness at Saladino’s and my haste to get away from France, I’d brought back nothing of Gérard’s, nothing at all. And sometimes I’d even make a plan for going to Paris for a few days and bringing back some of his pictures at least. I knew I couldn’t bear anything that had actually belonged to him, but the pictures were part of him and yet separate and I had no idea what had been done with them all. Sometimes I imagined them hanging up in Matilde’s room and I’d feel jealous.
‘I didn’t go to Paris. In fact I didn’t do anything except exist – side by side with Eileen and Miss Pinney but not with them. I’d go for walks and sometimes see Haggard and talk to him about Hitler. “I reckon them Fassists ’now gitting more’n their fair share of the rabbit,” he’d say and I’d agree. And I saw Gully now and then and he’d say to me sometimes, “You’re terribly changed.”
‘I had a feeling at this time that I upset Gully so I’d never stay long. He was the one person I might have talked to but I think he dreaded this; he didn’t want me to talk. So I’d cone back to the farmhouse and go on and on with my writing and it was in the winter of 1938 that I discovered I was going blind.
‘And my black dreams began. I’d kept them at bay for ten years, so that I remember thinking, when we were at Chamonix with Fernandez, they’ll never come back, not as long as I love Gérard. But now they came. They were uglier than they’d ever been because I was so afraid of blindness, Ralph. They were dreams of burial, of unbearable weight on me, the weight of black earth and creeping ants pushing into my eyes and sealing up my throat, oh, they were terrible! I tried to hide what was happening from Eileen. I thought she’d get me taken away to the mental hospital. But one night, when I felt the weight begin on me, I stumbled into my old room. I think I was trying to find the cupboard and shut myself in and I’d just forgotten that it wasn’t there any more. I tripped over the wire to Miss Pinney’s electric fire and fell down. The electric fire went over too and the rug in front of it started to smoulder and I could see all this and I could hear Miss Pinney screaming from her bed. And then I remember Eileen’s voice telling me to get up, and I thought, Sam used to lift me very gently when this happened, why doesn’t she lift me and put me down in the cupboard where I shall be able to breathe? But of course she didn’t know I couldn’t get up. She kept shouting “What are you doing? What are you doing?” But I couldn’t answer.
‘I suppose Eileen and Miss Pinney dragged me into the attic room because I woke up there, in my bed, and there was a blinding light in my eye. I remember thinking, they’ve moved my room to Africa and this is the extraordinary African sun that I’ve never seen. I felt someone lift my wrist and I was told afterwards that it was the middle of the night and no doctor was near enough to fetch but Eileen had gone for the vet! The light I had seen wasn’t the African sun at all but the odd little torch a vet used to look down a cow’s anus.
‘I’ve often thought how funny that was, Ralph. It was the same old vet I’d gone running for when I was a girl. He was a Quaker called Cyrus Webley and very old by that time, not too old, I suppose, to diagnose fowl pest or pull a calf out of its mother on a cold morning, just too old to see blindness!
The next day, they sent for Gully. He came over in the evening, after his long day’s work at Haggard’s shop. I remember it was bitterly cold and I’d spent the day huddled up in bed, hardly moving. Eileen had looked in on me twice, with a grave stare. The stare said: “You’ll be the death of me, Erica March.”
‘And I stared back. I w
as very hungry but I didn’t want to ask her for anything and no food came. I think Cyrus Webley had told her I had a fever and should be starved. They were all utterly confused, you see. It had never occurred to them that I might be mad, but now it did.
‘When Gully arrived, he came straight up. I expect Eileen wanted to speak to him privately; I expect she had some old rubbish about the God in the jar of Marmite who had revealed my insanity to her while she made sandwiches for elevenses. But Gully never listened to Eileen. He never had and he never did as long as she lived. I think her voice gave him a suffocated feeling.
‘I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to tell Gully about my eyes. Probably I thought, if I tell Gully, then this question of my blindness will be kept in Suffolk and all I will see when everything begins to wobble and fade will be Eileen’s furniture, and outside, all the empty winter fields. I knew I had to get away while there was still time.
‘So we talked about Gully’s family. I asked him what it was like to be a parent and to see your own children growing up, but I can’t remember what he said. In the town you heard gossip about Dot being moody and sometimes rude to people in the shop, but I think on the whole they were happy, Dot and Gully. Loyalty was very strong in him. But he told me that evening he felt I didn’t belong in Suffolk any more. He said he thought it was the place that had made me ill and that it would be best if I went away. For a moment, I wondered if Eileen had made him say this, but I don’t think she had – Gully wouldn’t have let her. No, I just think that Gully had his safe world which he treasured and there was something in me he mistrusted now – something foreign and dangerous.