by Rose Tremain
‘Valéry Clément was invited to this and he arrived with his new friend, both dressed in white and looking like actors. I was so glad to see him. I wanted him to tell me how Paris had survived the Germans, but he wouldn’t talk about it. He said those had been the years of honte, the years of enfer. And they had aged him. I suppose he was in his fifties by then and it was soon after this that he began to have operations for his face, to tighten it up. Neither of us mentioned Gérard, out of tact for Bernard I suppose, or because we knew we couldn’t – we knew we’d spoil the occasion with out sorrow. We talked mainly about the novel. Cambiers would publish it in ’forty-seven and of course Valéry would do the translation. I told him that, this time, I didn’t think I could come to Paris to do any “illuminating” for him (though I’m sure there was a lot that needed illumination in my pretend Africa!) and he agreed to bring the work to London.
‘Walking home after this celebration, through Hyde Park and then up past Paddington and Little Venice and St John’s Wood (a lovely walk) I persuaded Bernard to let us stay on in London till the translation of The Blind Man’s City was done. Then we’d go to Suffolk. I suppose he knew and I knew that I was putting it off. I think honestly I wanted to sell the farm, or just give it away, which is what we did in the end and stay on in Hampstead, because there was no permanence in our flat, no garden to reproach us and no memories except our own. If there was a ghost, I daresay it was the ghost of Crowbourne but Bernard had a weapon to frighten it away – not the piece of lead with the welded bayonet, oh no! He had the trays of butterflies.
‘Bernard went ahead of me to Suffolk. He promised me he would give all Eileen’s things away even though he didn’t know who to give them to because no one could find her will. No will was ever found, and this was very odd, wasn’t it? Because there was so much to leave – all those things so carefully collected – and in the end Bernard just held a sale in the sitting-room and women came crowding in from all the villages round about and the pearl-handled fishknives were sold for seventeen and ninepence. He gave all the proceeds to the church, and with them new hassocks were bought. They were tapestry-covered hassocks – perfectly right for Eileen – so we never felt any guilt about selling her belongings, until Miss Pinney arrived one day and told us that Eileen had promised them all to her.
‘She came back more than two years after Eileen’s death. She walked in one morning not long after I arrived and the house was still very bare because almost all the furniture, except the few things that remained of my father’s time, had gone into the sale and Bernard told me that one woman had ridden off with a chintz armchair tied onto a butcher’s bicycle! I suppose we intended to buy chairs and new curtains but we hadn’t; we’d begun to work at the vegetable patch instead, reclaiming it from the horseradish and the brambles, and all we’d done to the house was to clean it from top to bottom and paint the outside which was very dingy with verdigris and moss gathering on the walls, and in Gully’s room we made what we called a lepidoptarium for Bernard.
‘So Miss Pinney came into this bare place with hardly anything in it except my books and Bernard’s books and a few glass cases of rare moths. I suppose she expected to find the old comforting rugs and the tea trolley and the lace mats and the samplers. I think in some corner of her mind she expected to find Eileen, because she went straight to her room – which was our room now – and looked all round it, even in the cupboard. She was trembling and her skin was yellow. She looked like someone who had been kept in darkness for years on end. We sat her down in the kitchen by the Rayburn, and Bernard made tea while I tried to talk to her. I asked her how she was and whether she was still living at Aldeburgh, but she didn’t answer. Her trembling never stopped. She drank the tea and stared at us and I tried again with some more questions. She seemed very frightened of us and almost as soon as she’d drunk the tea she wet herself and a pool of urine dribbled off her chair.
‘She had no coat on and it was late autumn and it was Bernard who understood that she was in care now, in one of those mental places. “How did you get out?” he asked suddenly, and his voice, which was always a bit booming and loud, seemed to terrify her because she got up and walked out of the kitchen and then we heard her in the sitting-room and she was calling for Eileen.
‘I went upstairs and got a big cardigan and I put this round her. She was terribly thin and I honestly don’t know if they fed her well enough at the mental hospital or if they just neglected her because often and often since then I’ve read of cases of cruelty and neglect.
‘We didn’t know what on earth to do with her. We knew there was a hospital near Blythburgh but we couldn’t remember the name of it and Miss Pinney wouldn’t tell us. She’d stopped being a cat anyway. She was a person again – on that day – and this was a relief. But she wouldn’t talk, only to point to all the spaces in the room and say “mine”. So Bernard told her very patiently that no will of Eileen’s had been found and that her things had been sold (even the hats, which children bought for a few farthings, to dress up in) and that now the church had new hassocks and the vicar had sent a letter of appreciation. But she kept on and on saying “mine” – just like babies I’ve seen with their plastic toys – until a very large woman arrived, driving a Wolseley, and took her away. She was driven off still wearing my cardigan, so she’d claimed something after all, even if it wasn’t Eileen’s. And over the years, when we used to go and visit her in her hospital, she was always wearing it. It wore out at the elbows and no one mended it. One day, I offered to take it home and darn it for her, but she wouldn’t be parted from it.’
Ralph left Erica early and slept. The glare of the bright afternoon behind the thin curtains continued to cast an extraordinary light on his unconsciousness. Sleep and moments of waking merged in and out of each other so that the sleep was almost without refreshment. He woke tired in the late afternoon, stained by his dreams.
There were four more days. Time, in her tall ship, was almost at the horizon’s edge. And then what? Ralph was certain now that he could make no coherent explanation to Walt of the week stolen; he had a beginning, that was all, which went ‘Can you understand, Walt, that I’m half way through my life …?’ No doubt Walt could. He would wait for the meaning behind the statement, one that would satisfy the waste of company time, the extra funds … But Ralph would offer nothing. Perhaps there was, in the end, nothing profound to explain, merely his professional concern to see an assignment through. And Walt would have to be satisfied with this or “let him go” as the euphemistic jargon for sacking now ran, pitch him back into the ramshackle life from which Bulletin Worldwide had rescued him. And you saw them, the ones who believed imagination could buy bread and mortgages, in the Village bars you saw them, talking always of the screenplay, the mythical mirage of the screenplay that would put recognition on their pallor like paint. Drink and time had replaced work; the writer had stopped writing.
‘Bernard started going to sales to buy furniture for the house. You could buy oak in those days because it wasn’t fashionable: it looked too workaday, I suppose, like a cowman’s hands.
‘So the rooms filled up a bit and I bought an old sewing machine with a treadle and made new curtains.
‘I suppose I must have noticed middle age. Bernard began to go grey after Crowbourne and, as I told you, I was grey already and all the black shine had gone out of me. But I never thought, we’re getting old here. We worked very, very hard on our vegetable growing and although the Haggard family still rented most of the land, I often got up early and went to help young John Haggard with the milking – just to feel the cold of a Suffolk dawn again, you see, to remember that part of me belonged there. He was a very silent boy, John Haggard, so there was no chatting and swearing over the milking like years before with Gully, only this silence and cold and the warm body of the cow and a saliva strand of memory going back and back.
‘I often thought of Gully. He knew I was at the house and he came once or twice to see us and brought h
is children and Dot who had grown warts on her hands. But I don’t know what it was with Gully after my father’s suicide: he was never the same gentle, teasing man, not with me. I saw him be patient and sometimes full of laughter with his family, but never with me. He looked at me like a trespasser. I think he wished I’d followed the instructions he hadn’t dared to give and left Suffolk to its own people, people like him who had never travelled away but all his life stayed near the clay pond, where once I imagined his birth. I expect I thought, I’ve as much right to be here as you, Gully March, orphan boy found one day by accident stealing our chicken scraps. And in front of him and Bernard I once told the story of his pissing in the playground on the first day of school. But he shook his old bull’s head. He didn’t like me telling the story. He didn’t like to remember
‘One night I said to Bernard, I believe Gully blames me for my father dying. And we had a conversation about this sitting up side by side in bed, in the dark and I was so struck, suddenly, by the oddness of this way of constructing a conversation that I began to laugh and laugh and I can’t remember really what Bernard said about Gully blaming me or not blaming me. I expect he said something like “I wouldn’t wonder” or “It wouldn’t surprise me” because he was full of little phrases like this that seem to be rather without meaning and when I hear one I always imagine Bernard saying it and yet thinking something entirely different and irrelevant like: “In the hills of Umbria and Tuscany, seven or eight strains of Marbled Whites have been noted,”
‘He spent hours and hours in his lepidoptarium – Gully’s old room, that still had the desk where Gully had worked out his difficult sums. He had begun research into the fungal diseases butterflies get but I think the research was beyond him because we never saw the end of it, nothing written down with footnotes. He just went back to his wonderful, precise drawings and he did a book for young beginners in the butterfly world with instructions on how to kill them and how to stretch them out and how to recognize a dead leaf from a pupa.
‘I remember very beautiful summers, though perhaps they weren’t. The sun came up opposite the cowshed door and I’d be hungry by that time. Bernard had a frayed beige dressing gown and he’d wander about in this when I got dressed for the milking. And I often – even now – imagine him by the Rayburn in this old dressing gown, cooking mushrooms for our breakfast and making tea. I think we were happiest in the early mornings and by nightfall we were silent. Perhaps it was then we thought about our middle age.’
The next day was wasted. Mrs Burford sent Ralph away and called the doctor.
‘Why?’
‘Burned ’erself.’
‘Only the light of the lamp, dear,’ she told him later, ‘I went to sleep with my face right under it and you can see, it’s burned me. I thought I was in Africa. I had a dream of Bernard and me in a Masai village in the terrible old Landrover we hired. We were admiring things. This is what tourists do in those villages. They admire the children and the dung houses and the blood pot and the flies are everywhere, even on the eyes of the children they’re admiring. I dreamt Bernard gave all the Masai children butterfly nets, but there are no butterflies on that dry scrub and the nets just filled up with the black flies. We put all the flies into a sack and the sack weighed us down so we crawled along, slower and slower, with this weight of flies till the sun woke me and it was the Tiffany lamp.’
Ralph smiled at her gently.
‘Erica,’ he said, ‘I’ve only got one more day – after today – and then I go to Oxford.’
With her claws of hands she tried to straighten her body in the chair.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘I thought that was it.’ Then she leaned nearer to Ralph and whispered, ‘I lie awake now in the night and I can hear a little movement in there …’
‘Where?’
‘In the cupboard.’
Ralph was silent, staring at her. She looked away from him towards the window. The sun was bright.
‘I expect it will get louder – something I can identify – tonight or tomorrow night, and then I shall know …’
Ralph let the unfinished sentence go. A phrase, very familiar now, formed itself in his mind, asked to be uttered: ‘I’m half way through my life.’
‘What, dear?’
But he didn’t know if he had said it or not.
‘I’m afraid for you, Erica.’
‘Afraid? Oh no, you mustn’t be afraid, Ralph. The only thing you must do is to follow my instructions. I haven’t made them very difficult.’ Then she sighed, ‘I suppose you think it’s all rather gothic and silly.’
‘No. But I don’t understand. You’re not ill or anything …’
‘Yes I am, Ralph. To be very old like me is to lose all that part of yourself that was capable of doing. I don’t do any more and this is a dreadful disease, this not doing. I dream of course and in my dreams I run and travel about but where’s my body? Here or in my bed. I sit or I sleep, sometimes I cook, very feebly, and I can still get down the stairs to those Indian shops, but that’s all. I’ve been ill in this way for quite a long time. Long enough. But I knew, I suppose, all along that someone would come and I’ve been very patient waiting.’
‘I’m afraid of death.’
‘Yes. Well you would be. I was at your age. I was afraid to be cheated by it, just as Gérard was cheated. Heaven knows the wonders he might have made … but I won’t make anything more now, or say anything, and I’m tired of my little pitter-patter, my silly pitter-patter, oh heavens I’m tired of it.’
Ralph took out his Marlboro pack and stared at it.
‘I feel …’ he began.
‘What, dear?’
‘Well …’
‘What?’
‘I feel … you’re wrong.’
‘Oh no Ralph. Please don’t say that. I must not be wrong, because, if I am, then there will be nothing for me, dear. And for years I’ve had a certainty that there will be something, and then I shall have to get busy, being whatever it is I am.’
‘There is nothing, Erica.’
‘I won’t listen to you, Ralph! I’ve never listened to any of your generation because almost all of you are content to be crochet-men, minim-men, set moving along your pathetic lines. And the symphonies you make? I haven’t heard them. So why should I believe that any of you have wisdom or knowledge? Why should I? You make no sound at all. Sometimes I want to cry for you because I can find so little in you!’
Ralph fingered the Marlboro pack, took out a cigarette and put it quickly into his mouth.
He thought, now … perhaps … I can’t hold them back any more … tears not for the ugly spoiled city, tears not even for Erica’s death, but tears for the half of my life that’s gone, year threaded to year, question to question, years unrecorded, questions unanswered … Why are …? Why is …? Why am I crying now in a stranger’s room, unembarrassed as a kid, if I was ever a kid, clinging to Gran no doubt while Pa threatens some beating with his willow branch and Ma curls her lip … irrelevant now of course, buried in time, irrelevant absolutely to what I am, to what I must become …
‘I’m so sorry, Ralph dear. I’m very, very sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything wounding. I’m sure, you see, that the fault’s in me. Of course it is. I don’t understand your generation of people because I don’t belong. Everything I belonged to has gone, you see?’
Ralph fumbled for his lighter and lit the Marlboro. His tears were falling onto his hands and onto the Marlboro pack. He thought, the room is dilapidated with tears, yet my fingernails shine …
‘Oh Ralph, I’m so very sorry, dear.’
He was making no sound, none that he could hear, yet he wondered if some sound wasn’t there, far off, yet belonging deep inside him.
‘Bernard used to cry in his sleep, Ralph, and wake me up, but I never knew how to comfort him. I think it was his nightmares of Crowbourne that made him do this, but I simply don’t know why you’re crying, dear, so what on earth can I say that will be any good, ex
cept apologize for what I did say …?’
It will never stop, he thought. It’s a kind of flooding of the whole mind and body, my nose filling and dripping now and running into my mouth, this salt flood which has been gathering ever since I left my herbs and got on the plane … and only she will have seen it and been amazed to see it flow on and on in her room. For no reason.
11
‘In his cabin, lined from wall to wall with the medical and evangelical writings of the Daughters of the Lamb, General Almarlyes waited to be told, the land is safe General, Sir, the land is at peace and untouched by the earthquake, unvisited by carrion and blessed with the gentle air that breathes on Lyme Regis. And the message came, from the advanced guard of ten he picked from those who remained of the hundred and five, the land is empty of people, General, but we have seen streets of white houses and avenues of trees taller than palms bearing camellia flowers, and all may now be ready for us to leave the ship and even the sick and the dying will be carried ashore in their bandages smelling of iodine and laid out in the cool of the white houses.
So General Almarlyes went up on deck and stared at the land and the wind that sighed through his body was calmed in the expectation of a time when Acts of Outstanding Bravery would no longer be necessary and that part of his mind that had slipped away from him in his wars and lay hidden in his dreams of Bourton-on-the-Water would return, and he would be at peace.
It was a turquoise sea that lapped the ship. The bay, General, is full of oysters, the forests hung with fruit, said the advanced party of ten. The dried figs and the salt sacks of nuts of the hospital ship can be emptied into the sea and we can fill our bodies with fresh food, and there are no merchant crabs on the beaches, Sir, none that we can see.