by Rose Tremain
‘Talking to Ranulf Tree, I think I realized that I had the whole book – even the ending, which a lot of the critics didn’t like – in my head and I was desperate, then, to begin it. I wanted to start straight away – that very morning, but I had nowhere to stay. I told Ranulf that I thought I had the strength for writing now, but for nothing else. My night on the heath had been very stupid because it had made me weak. All I could keep thinking again and again was, someone must take charge.
‘Patterson came in and nodded at me. He’d never liked me, Patterson. I was too odd for his taste. He nodded at me as if I was nothing – a decorator of lavatory paper. Ranulf started to tell him that I had a new book planned out, but he wasn’t interested; he just remarked that I looked very tired. Much later, he confided to me that he’d noticed something odd about my eyes that day, but that was bunkum! No ordinary person can detect a cataract, not at that very early stage. Later there’s a kind of greying of the pupil, but even that, you don’t notice it. Even the vet with his torch had seen nothing.
‘Patterson and Tree began a conversation about a man who wrote about butterflies. I went to sleep on a leather chesterfield near a gas fire and I had a dream of Gérard’s bones buried under a Spanish road. Tanks and guns and trucks came down the road and his carcass underneath it was broken to pieces.
‘When I woke up, I was boiling hot and Ranulf was talking very quietly to a stranger in a tweed coat. It was Bernard.’
She handed Ralph the photograph. Faded and brown, it showed a man past his best. He was smiling into the sun. He seemed large in a cumbersome way, overweight, inside his baggy trousers. He held a butterfly net.
‘That’s him.’
Slightly at a loss, Ralph said: ‘He looks very British.’
‘British. Oh yes, he was. He could have come from no other culture, not Bernard. He had the flag folded round his heart.’
‘And when was this taken, this picture?’
‘Oh I don’t remember. In nineteen fifty-something. He’s standing on what Chadwick used to call the lawn.’
Erica took the photograph from Ralph and looked at it.
‘I’d forgotten he had his net with him. It looks like a hot day, doesn’t it?’
Then she put it aside, face down on the sofa.
‘He didn’t look very much like that when I met him. He was thinner and not so grey. Yet in fact there was a part of Bernard that never, never changed. His quiet ways, he never lost them, nor his patience. And his smile for that matter. That hardly altered.’
‘So he was the one then,’ said Ralph, ‘the one who took charge?’
Erica looked surprised. Then she nodded.
‘Yes. I suppose he was. It’s very strange isn’t it, how we become entangled in someone’s life, just because they’re there, waiting for a bus or doing a survey of animal lovers – doing the most ordinary or extraordinary things, and they just happen to glance up …
‘He was a teacher then, the day I had my sleep on Ranulf Tree’s chesterfield. He taught classics. He’d been teaching classics ever since the first war and yet his love of the classics had dwindled quite early and been replaced by his love of butterflies. He still enjoyed the precision of Latin, its sparingness and lack of ambiguity, so he said, and he used to read me bits of Catullus sometimes, though I can’t remember a word of him except a very stupid line in the vocative case which went “O, Lesbia, Lesbia, Lesbia, Lesbia!”
‘He taught in Surrey. It was a small public school, called Crowbourne, a regimented and ambitious place. It had a high quota of Jews – rejects from Eton and the other snob places – and Bernard always said its academic standards were very high because of all its gifted boys. I never got on with it very well, not with Crowbourne. I remembered my own education – the vicar scattering nuts in the hall at Christmas – and I’ve found it difficult to accept the public schools. I know this is very two-faced, as Bernard often pointed out: I accepted Chadwick’s money – none of which I’d earned – and this of course was privilege, yet I couldn’t accept private education. I think if I’d had a son, I wouldn’t have sent him to Crowbourne or anywhere like it. Somehow I imagined all the parents of these boys having holidays in Paris and waiting, just like Chadwick of course, for waiters to unfurl their napkins at Fouquet’s. I don’t know, Ralph. I think the revolutionary part of me – the Emily part, the Gérard part – had gone a bit silent by the time I met Bernard. And I’d begun to see the world through a kind of grey soup. Sometimes I wondered if all of me – mind and heart and everything – wasn’t slowly going blind. There were so many confusions.
‘I suppose the greatest confusion was the war, which couldn’t seem to get going and then when it did, our part of it was inept. They tried to pretend Dunkirk was a victory, but the victory only disguised the enormous failure behind it. We left hundreds of French soldiers behind, too. Did you know this? We just left them on the beach at Dunkirk, for the Germans to intern. It’s never talked about, that, but it’s often haunted me. I wondered if any of our old friends were among the ones they left.
‘At the time, Bernard helped me to forget about France, about my years there. Even Saladino began to grow thin in my memory! I found a flat in Haverstock Hill and for the second time in my life, I sent a removal van to get the cupboard. From that day in 1939 it’s stayed with me. I’ve never lent it to anyone or even left it for long, only to go into hospital and to go abroad.
‘The flat had one very nice light room which I furnished before the years of utility things, and it was a place to begin. That was how I felt about it: “Begin again,” I said when I sat there and watched the afternoon come on, “try to begin something.” So I began the novel and Bernard went back to Surrey and perhaps I would have forgotten about him except that he kept sending flowers. And with the flowers there were sometimes long letters telling me about himself. He told me that he’d fought in the first war and tried to write poetry in the trenches. But poetry just hadn’t come out of him – only feelings, which he couldn’t express. Ever since then he’d envied writers and wished he could be one, and then he’d discovered butterflies and now he’d written a book about them. Only after that book was published did I find out that Bernard had done all the careful, beautiful drawings for it himself. He never mentioned the meticulous draughtsman in him, only the failed trench poet and the brother killed at Vimy Ridge and then the marriage to his cousin June who had left him in one year for an Olympic swimmer.
‘They were very curious interruptions to my world of invented Africa, those letters from Bernard. I was trying to imagine swamp and damp and forest shrieks and children with dusty feet, and in they’d come, these quiet pulsebeats of an Englishman. I don’t think I really wanted them and yet I knew they were important. “The more I let them in, the more sane I shall become,” that’s what I thought. And there was no one else. Only the voices on the wireless telling of this new regulation and that. And the darkness. That’s what I remember: “If the enemy can’t see you, he can’t hurt you.” Yet enemies are made in the mind. In my book, the choice of the enemy is arbitrary.
‘Confusions then. More confusions. Bernard wrote to tell me that as a Local Defence Volunteer he’d been given a weapon. The weapon was a piece of lead pipe with a bayonet welded onto it. He said “It’s very hard to present arms with this contraption and no one seems to know exactly what to do with it.” No wonder! We were all utterly confused – the whole country – all in darkness. I think when the first bomb fell in 1940 it threw some light on things. I think we saw war after that, instead of just imagining it. We put in our Anderson shelters and planted vegetables where there had been flowers. These were things you could see!’
Erica reached for the photograph again, turned it over and stared at it.
‘He had a little car,’ she said, ‘and while you could still get petrol, he used to come and visit me. I can’t remember what we did. I expect we walked on the heath and listened to the wireless and Bernard talked about Catullus. We never touch
ed. I think a year went by before we did. Or perhaps we held hands when we walked, I don’t know. But then the letters from Crowbourne become more and more frequent. I think at one time, there was a letter every day and gradually the trench poet was burrowing up in them, trying to say something yet never alluding to it, when we met, as if, until it had finally been found words on paper, it had to be held in.’
She smiled. ‘It was so silly of him, wasn’t it? Why did he think that love had to be written down?’
The girl at the travel agent’s desk flashed Ralph a weary smile.
Pan Am flight, 201. Arrive New York 10 p.m. local time. May 4th. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
Ralph paid with a credit card and left. In the bright early evening light, he went with his camera in search of the two places in Hampstead where Erica had lived. Neither was hard to find. The Haverstock Hill flat, the second floor of an untended Edwardian house, was now part of a hotel, the Britannia. Partitions blocked off sections of windows; Ralph imagined cardboard walls, easily shaken by the traffic that roared up and down the wide road. It seemed cheap and inhospitable; blossom fell on the tarmac garden. London’s tourist boom had reached it and claimed it, seemingly for ever. No one would ever again live here.
The village cottage was as undisturbed as it had been in 1921. Huddled in its narrow paved-over street, the sun had already left it. Ralph photographed only the front door, now painted brown. In contrast to the Britannia Hotel, the house was expensively cared for; the solid brass doorknocker announced the quietly privileged life within.
‘You an estate agent or what?’
An upstairs window had shot up. A middle-aged man in shirtsleeves was leaning out.
‘Pardon me?’
‘Why are you taking snaps?’
‘Oh …’ Ralph touched his camera apologetically. ‘Only of the door …’
‘The door? Taking a snap of the door?’
‘Yup.’
‘What on earth for and who on earth gave you the right?’
Suddenly tired, tired from the day, tired from all the days he had now spent in London, Ralph stared at the man in antagonistic silence.
‘Did you hear me?’ said the man. ‘Who on earth gave you permission to take a photograph of my front door?’
‘It’s not a punishable offence,’ Ralph said wearily.
‘Spy are you, or what? or just an infringer of other people’s property?’
‘Neither,’ said Ralph, beginning to wander off. ‘Just one of those commodities you used to call Yanks.’
The man was still shouting, but Ralph was out of the street, walking fast. ‘Jesus Christ …’ he murmured as he turned into the sunshine, ‘the English can be pains in the ass!’
For the first time for a week or more he experienced a sudden longing to join hands with his own life again. Even Walt’s blustering seemed, for a moment, acceptable, because it was all in its place, in the familiar, in a world where you owned things and were somebody, not just a stranger with a camera. The eight days remaining felt like a penance, yet at the same time Ralph knew that they weren’t enough. I’ve fucked it, he thought.
Back at the Chalk Farm Hotel, he lay down on his bed and started to read through the pages of his Summary. They seemed hopeless – a lot of vain scribbling.
‘Yet what else would you expect,’ he began to write, ‘of me now in our starving generation ? Generations of sleepwalkers.
‘If I’m on the road to Knoxville in my dreams in a mutilated car, then of course I’m in the driver’s seat, powerless, waiting for someone to push me in the right direction. But I’M ALSO THE GUY BEHIND, PUSHING! Sure, I am. And the guy behind says: “Use all of you, not just the terrified flabby part on the flabby wheel. Find a direction – not over the hilltop road and into darkness – get out of the damn car and start to walk!”
‘And then what? Exhilaration and cold of the walk. Mourning for company by sun-up – the car radio with its pulp talk and its time checks. By nine or ten I’m exhausted. Grandma’s house is still miles off, and what’s her place, anyway, but the one exquisite memory of the past?’
‘I’m facing the wrong way.’
The dreams came, under the all-night throb of traffic: voices spitting from the barbecued meat – his mother’s, moist and ticklish, his father’s, hard under its Southern skin – talking of a future in a blaze of white and coral, the midday of their lives lived out beside a swimming pool where a neighbour’s child once drowned. And their laughter, their everyday accompaniment to the passing of time, unbearable laughter, noisy as breaking ice. But slowing, quietening into an early evening of accusation, bewilderment: “It’s so hard to get any picture of your life, Ralph, when you don’t come to visit. We heard you were covering the primaries, but politics is a dirty word with you, isn’t it, dear? But do tell us …”
Arrivals. Interruptions. A man called Tom she kisses on the mouth. His father prods the four oozing steaks, asks her if she’s made relishes, or what?
But there’s no answer. To the question of relish – no, she can’t be bothered, only takes Tom’s hand and smooths it out and puts it, smoothed enough she decides, against her cheek.
The steaks are carefully turned. Momentarily, flames leap from the charcoal and lick them. “Doing the primaries, then, son? We’re Reagan people. You knew that? Actor, see? That’s what this country needs. Know what? Man who knows how and when to act.”
His arms in the coral shirt sag. Wouldn’t have said the barbecue tongs were heavy. But the evening presses on them perhaps – bowls empty of relishes, Tom’s body, well preserved in pale blue, but carefully placing his napkin where she begins to arouse him. And the meat – awful to chew the meat by itself undisguised, a hunk of flesh. So he empties today of its humiliations. With a sigh, he turns again to his son and begins to talk of tomorrow. “If you have it in mind to stay over for once, we could go surfing …”
‘Supposing you talked today, Ralph?’
‘No, Erica.’
‘Why not? I’ve talked and talked.’
‘I booked my flight home yesterday. I have to go to Oxford on May 2nd and then home on the fourth. So I’d like you to tell me all you can … till I have to go.’
She looked hard at Ralph, then away from him. When she spoke, it was almost a whisper.
‘When you come back from your friend in Oxford, you’ll drop in to say goodbye?’
‘Sure.’
‘You won’t forget?’
‘Forget?’
‘Yes. You might forget.’
‘No. I won’t.’
She looked relieved, and smiled at him. Then she sat back.
‘Bernard spent most of the war trying to get divorced. His cousin and the Olympic swimmer had moved and it became very hard to divorce a person you couldn’t find. He fretted a lot about it. After we began to sleep together, marriage was always on his mind. I think this was because he was rather a Christian man. He told me that lepidoptery had converted him from Sunday hymn singer to believer in divine creation. His god was the god of butterflies, of all things bright and beautiful – a child’s god. And he, of course, was the loving obedient child. He made love very gravely – as if this was a grown-up thing hallowed by grown-up rules – but afterwards he’d turn onto his back and sleep like a little boy. Happiness and fresh air turned his cheeks pink; the merest sad thing could make him weep. When I told him about my blindness, he put his face near to mine and let his tears run into my eyes.
‘I grew terribly fond of him. I don’t know if my fondness was ever mixed with any love; I don’t believe it was. But all through the war, when I was often alone and he was safe in Surrey with Virgil and Catullus’s wretched Lesbia, I’d find myself thinking of him. I’d finish my day’s writing and pin up the blackout curtains and eat a little meal that was all vegetables and then wait for the air raid warnings, and start thinking about Bernard. There was about a year, from the middle of 1940 onwards when bombs were dropped every night. Patterson and Tree�
��s new offices were bombed early in ’forty-one, and Patterson had a kind of breakdown with all the symptoms of shell-shock, even though he’d been safe in his Anderson shelter at the time. I think he was put into hospital for a while – though heaven knows where, when there were so many wounded in London – and Ranulf Tree went on without him, just working from his own flat and trying to make inventories of everything he’d lost.
‘I would go down to Crowbourne sometimes. It wasn’t far from Epsom race-course, but I never went there: I imagined I would see something, some purple or white tatter, left behind from all those years ago.
‘The school had a lovely park. In it, you couldn’t imagine the war. The boys played cricket and gardeners went round cutting the grass, and Bernard would talk about our wedding. The boys used to titter when they saw us walking together: lovers! I minded the tittering very much. I wanted to say to those sheltered boys: “No, you haven’t understood. This is friendship, companionship which now and again expresses itself in an oddly muted version of the sexual act. This is not love. We are not lovers.”
‘But I suppose Bernard had told them we would be getting married – one day, when he had divorced his cousin, when something had been done about my eyes. One day.