by Rose Tremain
‘But the illness dragged on, Ralph. Saladino, Thérèse, Valéry Clément … I was haunted by those people and by the smell of the streets and the stairways. They followed me around like the porpoise treading on the whiting’s tail or whatever it is. I’d get up very early, but not to milk. I’d go for long walks, further and further each day. I suppose I thought, if I can walk far enough away from Bernard, then when I meet him again, I will feel differently. You see, he was becoming very morose and defeated and his nightmares began again. I was damaging him terribly and I didn’t want to do this. There was no spite in me or hate for him: just indifference. I’d stopped caring about him.
‘But I was becoming a bit of a celebrity that year. They put pictures of me in the newspapers and I went on the wireless. So I had to go to London quite a lot and it occurred to me that perhaps if I stayed in London for a while – on my own – I might recover and then I could go back to Bernard and we’d be all right. I remember we discussed all this in the kitchen. I don’t think Bernard wanted me to go away, but we both knew anything was better than living as we were now in this unfair way. So I went. I rented a little flat from a radio producer in Ladbroke Grove and I began to go on very silly panel games like “Twenty Questions” and try to be witty and clever. And I gave talks. I think I only had one talk but I gave it to a lot of different literary societies and even at lunches and of course I began to meet all the writers of the day which was very nice.
‘I suppose this was the only “literary” period of my life. I’d done a very long apprenticeship for it – about forty years! – and now The Hospital Ship had let me qualify. And I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it. I liked being in a city again, especially London which I’ve always loved from the moment I first came to it. And it was still very nice in the ’fifties, quite proud of itself and quiet. I walked around it a lot and I thought about Chadwick and about Emily and I found I was perfectly happy to be on my own.
‘Bernard often wrote to me – very cheerful letters all about the garden and the farm, telling me how well the sweet peas had done and the marrows … I can’t remember if I wrote back. I don’t think I did because I had nothing to say so I suppose, as a year went on, he must have worried about me and thought I was never going back. I often imagined him of course, with the house far too big for him, cooking mushrooms for himself in his beige dressing gown and spending all day in Gully’s old room with his butterflies. I remember dreaming once that I went back to Suffolk and there he was, in his same old clothes but aged beyond recollection, all stooped and white and with overgrown eyebrows and grey hairs sticking out of his nose. I expect I had lots of dreams about him because he was often on my mind, but I can’t remember any others, only that one of him getting old.’
Erica took a sip of her vodka and smiled. ‘It’s very warming, isn’t it? That’s why the Russians can’t do without it – that and those flaps to cover their ears. I wonder if they have this lumpfish now in Moscow? I think we’d better try it, hadn’t we? They say it’s Swedish, so it’s probably very good for you.’
Ralph passed her the plate. He didn’t feel like eating and chose the smallest piece of toast. He thought, it’s meant to be a celebration and yet neither of us know what’s going to happen. We celebrate the momentous solemnly, in expectation. We only know that our time together’s run out. Unless of course she knows it all, exactly as it will be yet keeps it to herself …
‘Do you like it, dear? Isn’t it rather salty?’
‘It’s okay.’
‘I think it’s salty, but I suppose it goes rather well with the vodka.’
‘Sure.’
She smiled again. She seemed alert and happy, perhaps more so than on any other day.
‘I’m so glad they sent you, Ralph. It’s very odd that they should have sent you now when I don’t suppose anyone remembers my name.’
‘I sent myself.’
‘Did you? But it hasn’t been easy for you, has it? All the days when I couldn’t talk to you …’
‘It’s been fine. I don’t like London too much, but I feel okay here, especially when your lamp’s on!’
‘And have you got all you want? I don’t think there’s much more I can tell you.’
‘Yes, there is, Erica. I’d like to know what happened … to you and Bernard.’
She stared into her drink and sighed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I often think my life might have stopped there, in 1955. I never imagined living so long. I don’t know why I have. I suppose I was very strong when I was a Suffolk girl and that strength has lasted me out. I must have been born with bones as hard as cow horn, mustn’t I? Because they still let me walk – without a stick – and none of them are bent, only my hand. But although my body’s gone on and on, I’ve never done another book. I never became the real writer I wanted to be and a lot of people have asked me why. But I don’t think I’ve ever known the answer. It could be that all my books, even The Hospital Ship which was very popular for a while, have failed in their intention which was to make people confront the repulsiveness of aggression. But England in the ’fifties was still imperialist and greedy and when Suez came – with all the greed and conspiracy surfacing again – I wanted to burn poor old Eden and his government just like I burned Almarlyes. Oh I hated that Suez business! I became very ill with a black, black depression when I heard we were sending an army. I just sank down into my dark sea and the horrors I saw in it – none have ever been as terrible. Terrible, terrible! They’re gone now. I don’t remember them. But I remember lying by my flat door in Ladbroke Grove trying to hold something back with my body. I don’t know what I was trying to hold back: all the men and planes perhaps, but I knew I had to stay there. But after a few days – I don’t know how many – my neighbours broke down the door and found me and I was put into a hospital. I was so weak I couldn’t move a finger and I had to have a drip in my arm. And then I saw Bernard.
‘I can’t remember how he found out where I was. Perhaps the producer from the BBC wrote to him and said I was dying. He looked just the same of course, not aged as he’d been in my dream, and when I was stronger, he told me that he’d been in Switzerland in the Bernese Oberland and had found some wonderful butterflies there. He looked very brown and healthy, and I thought, only with him will I ever come out of this darkness. I can’t do it on my own and I don’t want to lose myself like Virginia Woolf and go walking into the River Ouse.
‘So I asked him to take me back home to Suffolk, and try to forgive me. I didn’t know how it would be: there was a lot of confusion in me then. But I suppose I knew if we had a chance to be together again it was now.
‘We got on a train and I saw London slipping by me again, all the ends of walls and a few bomb sites still, with willow herb sprouting out of them. It was strange how, all my life, I watched myself leaving London again and again going back to the Suffolk house, never certain somehow of what I’d find there or how I’d feel, but letting myself be taken there, seeing the fields begin and the sky come down to them, but knowing that I didn’t belong anywhere – only parts of me to certain places – and that I would never ever feel it, this sense of belonging.
‘I kept on the flat in Ladbroke Grove and in two years or so I was back there again. I’d met Bertrand Russell in 1955 when the CND movement began and he wrote to me and asked me to speak at a meeting. I knew what it would all mean: banners again and marches in the rain, but I had to do it of course. But Bernard wouldn’t let me go alone. Perhaps he thought I’d fall down in a puddle and be trampled to death on the way to Aldermaston, or perhaps, when he remembered the fire at Crowbourne, he thought it was his turn to do something.
‘By the time we joined Russell we’d recovered some balance at home. We could let ourselves get back on the train and see Suffolk disappearing. It was harvest time, very hot in London. I thought about our own vegetable harvest going to waste. And John Haggard’s wedding – we’d miss that.
‘I was glad Bernard came to London that time. He stopped m
e falling in love with Russell which would have been very idiotic and painful. And he worked harder than I did – pamphlets, speech writing, petitions, scuffles with the police – all the paraphernalia of something small but growing and with a bursting heart. We didn’t think we could lose. We believed that armies can be stopped by the old woman who lies down in the street, but it’s not true: the army marches on with a wumping chant of “progress” and the old woman is crushed to powder like a moth.
‘We went back to Suffolk from time to time, to rest. We’d sleep for two days and nights sometimes, but now Bernard slept in Gully’s room and I was alone in the big bed of my parents. I don’t think passion was ever in our lives, even at the beginning. We used to like to put our arms round each other and feel the lifebeat of the other one and we often did this. But after 1955 I preferred to sleep alone. Sometimes I’d lie there and think how wrong this was. It’s a fallacy to believe that passionate feelings conveniently leave you when you get old and your hair loses its weight. I tried to imagine how my life might have shaped itself if I hadn’t met Bernard in Patterson Tree’s office the day I fell asleep on the chesterfield. But I dare say it wouldn’t have been very different. If I hadn’t found Bernard, I would have found someone very like him, because no love affair could have matched what I had with Gérard: I needed to love without loving. Do you see?
‘I suppose we put the passionate sides of ourselves into the movement for several years. Bernard was sent to prison in Glasgow for two months and a lot of the younger people were in prison on and off all the time. So I’d go and visit them and take them bits of food I couldn’t really afford and try to make an hour or two bearable for them by saying: “At least you won’t be force-fed with gruel like we were in 1912, all strapped up to the chair.” But there was a rail-strike in 1958, the year Bernard got sent down, so I couldn’t get to him in Glasgow and I found that I worried about him all the time.
‘His family – Huntley in particular – wrote me very nasty letters saying they “didn’t approve” of Bernard being sent to prison. They said the family would suffer. They were all very ignorant and conservative so I threw their silly letters away. And it was only ten years later, when Bernard was very ill, that Huntley came grovelling round offering to pay for private specialists and private this and that.
‘I don’t know what they did to Bernard in Glasgow. He came out looking very thin and terribly afraid of crowds and loud noises. So back we got on the Suffolk train and he seemed quite bewildered by everything he saw. He said he had been cold all the time in his cell, too cold to sleep and then, in the warm train, he slept and when we got to Culham Market, I had to get two men to help me carry him off the train because he couldn’t wake up properly, just as if he’d been drugged.
‘I nursed him for a month but even after that he had no energy or strength. He wouldn’t go out into the garden but shuffled around all day in his dressing gown or sat by the Rayburn warming himself. I tried to keep a life going between London and the farm but I felt defeated. We knew our hopes for disarmament had failed. We tried to keep them alive and believe there could be a change of policy but it was difficult to feel any optimism and I couldn’t bear to think of all the wasted suffering. So we fell out of the movement. It went on without us and the bomb still hung above our heads. I used to imagine it on a saliva strand above the forget-me-not field.
‘We went back to Switzerland in the summer of 1959, to try to make Bernard strong again. We went to Wengen at a time when the gentian flowers were out and I thought it was extraordinary, that untouched Switzerland with its sense of safety and neatness in the midst of those mountains. It was a very glorious summer there – none of that drizzle which fell on us at Chamonix – and we’d climb up into the grass slopes, a bit higher each day (I made Bernard walk and walk). The hotel packed up picnic lunches for us in pink paper bags and very high up we found a flat meadow used by a saw-mill as a kind of first base for the pine trunks. It was surrounded entirely by trees and no one ever came there except some children one day who sang for us in German. So we used to eat our lunches there and sometimes go to sleep in the warm grass. I suppose we looked like two very old people to those Swiss children, like the Sloanes playing their two-handed bridge and dreaming of Monte Carlo.
‘But it was wonderful for Bernard. By the second week, we were taking all the butterfly paraphernalia with us – the nets and the chloroform jars, and our whole collection, by the end of our stay, was blue. A thousand blues! Some were as dark as the gentian flowers, some pale purple. They were very beautiful. They helped Bernard get well and forget his fear of cold and his fear of noise. Yet on the sleeper coming back through France, he remembered it again and started shivering. I had to lie with him on the narrow bunk to try and keep him warm.’
Erica sat back on the sofa and finished her glass of vodka. Ralph was about to switch off his machine, but Erica sighed again and began:
‘I think this being afraid of things was with us always – on and off – after that; so I knew we had to stay in Suffolk. London frightened Bernard and he refused to go there. We gave up the flat in Ladbroke Grove and turned back towards the house and the garden. For the last ten years of Bernard’s life the house and the garden were what mattered to him; he’d lost the spirit for everything outside them.
‘I expect he knew he would die there. He got pneumonia in the winter of 1967 and I suppose he should have gone into hospital as Huntley suggested but he didn’t want to. I moved him back into our big bed and slept on a mattress beside him. I’d lie and listen to his breathing which was all wrong. He made extraordinary noises like jungle cries. And then one night they stopped. The jungle was silent.
‘I got up and went to turn on the light, but there were January storms and there’d been a power failure. So I groped my way to the larder and got a candle. And seeing his death in the candlelight was extraordinary. I could never forget it. I didn’t close his eyes, but sat on the bed with him holding my candle and holding his hand. The winds outside were very fierce, but I didn’t feel at all afraid; either of them or of Bernard’s death. I’d known all along that I would outlast him.
‘But I’ve outlasted everything, that’s the trouble, Ralph. I’ve outlasted my own usefulness and every single person I’ve ever been close to – all except Gully.’
‘He’s still alive, Gully?’
‘Yes. Though I haven’t seen him for years, not since Bernard’s funeral. But Huntley notices him from time to time. He tells me he goes to the pub and sits there, with his old bull’s head nodding. I expect he’s batty by now. I expect he’s still trying to puzzle it out – how to throw a girdle of barleycorns round the world.’
‘Yet his kids write to you.’
‘Oh yes. They think, because I was a name once, that I’m rich, and they ask me for things. But I’m not rich because I gave everything away when Bernard died.’
‘Everything?’
‘I was wooding – we used to call it that, going into the woods and getting kindling and small branches for the fire – very early on a winter morning and I thought, this is one of my first memories, being sent out for wood on cold mornings and now here I am again, getting old, still stooping down and feeling for dry sticks. And it’s like a circle – a beginning (here) and then a life, and then an ending (here). But I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to end as I’d begun – oh my God, no! So I called Huntley over and said he could have it all, the house, the land, everything. I said I would take the cupboard and one or two other things that I didn’t want to part with, but in the end there wasn’t much else. And in return for all this he pays my rent on this flat. It was very cheap when I got it, but now it’s thirty pounds a week.’
‘D’you ever regret it, Erica – the house?’
‘Oh no. Imagine me living there on my own. I couldn’t manage. I’d have to pay someone to nanny me and I couldn’t bear that. And Huntley has made it all fine, you see. He’s put central heating into the house and thick carpets, and he
’s built silos and milking parlours and pulled down the old dairy and the cowshed where I met Claustrophobia. He’s changed it all and made it very clean and efficient which it never was, not in my parents’ day and not in my day when Bernard and I struggled with our vegetables. It’s in beautiful countryside of course and I do sometimes wish, if I had an arm to lean on, I could walk to the forget-me-not field and then beyond it into the woods. But that’s only on summer days, when I remember the oak trees.’
They heard a door slam as Mrs Burford left. Ralph refilled the two glasses with vodka.
‘She always goes off like that,’ whispered Erica. ‘She could put her head in to say goodbye, but she never does, not when you’re here. She just slips away.’
‘I think she’s resented me.’
‘Has she? I don’t know why. I told her how very considerate you are.’
‘She thinks I tire you.’
‘Tire me? Well, you do! Talking about my life is very tiring, Ralph. But it’s been awfully helpful, dear. I’ve often thought, my life needs tidying out like sometimes I tidy the cupboard and find things in it I never knew I had. And if you hadn’t arrived, I never would have done this, because I’ve grown lazy. I wake up in the morning and I think, I can’t bear to do anything today; I can’t bear to be. So I lie there. I hear the man upstairs playing his ‘cello and I wish I could do that – play an instrument. But I don’t do anything. I just let my body stay alive.’
‘And you never, never wrote again, after The Hospital Ship?’
‘No I didn’t, Ralph. I think I lost my zeal. I’ve never been one of those writers who just think up plots and then put them down; I’ve always had to feel that something was wrong and that I was going to change it – even a little – with my writing. I don’t suppose I’ve actually changed anything at all, just as nothing changed in spite of all our efforts for C.N.D. When you think of it, it’s heartbreaking, and when you’re sixty, as I was, you see so clearly that for all your self-importance and going on panel games, your piece of work is something so pitiful and tiny and the world goes rollicking on and you lose touch with the young people, and your hunger for words, which used to be so strong in me, leaves you. I suppose it’s a bit like hunger for a person: when it leaves you, you never get it back.