by Rose Tremain
‘So I thought it was better to be quiet. There was no one left alive to bully me into writing and I suppose I knew that in The Hospital Ship I’d said the best of what I have to say.’
12
‘The day General Almarlyes started to paint the house, it began to rain. Rivulets of whitewash ran down the walls and made puddles at his feet. His uniform was sodden and flecked with white, and all along the street he could hear the laughter of his men – Fine day to choose, General! Didn’t you know the rains were coming, General, Sir?
But he had to cover it up, the stain of his year’s tenancy in the house – from the first stain of the first occupant’s blood, to the last stain of the dead camellia flowers blown into his gutter by the autumn winds and now, with the rain, oozing a brownish-pink excrement down his walls.
Because she would not come to him. Not until his house was white again and fresh and smelling of the winter jasmine he would gather for her in great armfuls. Not until he had whitewashed every wall and every doorway, even the walls of his own room and the doorway of his own room and even the hinges on the doors that creaked where the summer heat had warped them. Only then – to this perfectly white miracle of a house would his future bride come silently, when the men slept, drunk, on their thresholds and the Daughters of the Lamb slept, chaste, on their hard mattresses, and Cotton Eye Joe had wandered back to the sea-shore to sing his freedom songs to the hidden coral of the bay. Only then.
For so she had promised him countless times. In answer to a pleading that had taken on the words and the cadences, even the unbearable beauty of a prayer that lapped the silent grey of her virgin head with longings buried, deep, deep inside her and which caused her, at her sunset devotions, to turn her face from her sisters and whisper: Mother, Mother of us all who sees my blush and feels my pulse, cast me out into your blue eternity for so I should be cast and damned for ever for my thoughts of love and a bridal bed in the arms of Almarlyes, soldier born in sin and grown to terrible manhood in his numberless wars.
“But the day is not far off,” said General Almarlyes to the scampering lizards and the crested birds which had left the trees and come to shelter under his roof, “the day is coming, in a winter we have never experienced, when I shall part company with each and every remembrance of madness and together with my bride, I shall put down roots into the soil.”
The rains blew from the south. They were the warm, sour rains that brought sickness and lethargy, not the pure rains of heaven, so said the Daughters of the Lamb, but the rains of another continent, harbouring death. So as General Almarlyes worked and the whitewash covered his hair and dribbled into his eyes, the sixty-three remnants of the hundred and five stopped their laughter and closed their doors warped by the summer sun and lay in the darkness of their houses and dreamed of women and wars.
And it was then, with the beginning of the rains that some of the men noticed for the first time that they were no longer free. It was then that they understood why the previous inhabitants of the town had come and gone leaving the white houses empty and shining in the sun yet inside smeared with bloodstains and filled in every room with coiled and tangled fibres like the bodies of pale snakes. The ends of the fibrous growths were brown with dried blood where they had been hacked away and to touch them was to touch a soft mass, like the limbs of babies. But General Almarlyes had ordered that a pit should be dug, at the very end of the avenue of camellia trees, and armfuls of the horrible fibres were thrown into it and buried and the Daughters of the Lamb said a prayer standing in a wide circle round the pit in case they had buried part of a life.
They were almost invisible at first, the new thin roots that grew out of the limbs of the men and hung like cobwebs down to the ground. Yet they had begun to burrow and push through the dry rushes and leaves into the bare, baked earth of the floors, and while a man slept on his hammock, with his hand dangling to the floor, that hand would be anchored to the ground and when he woke and tried to move it, the pain of wrenching and tearing at the roots that were part of him was a pain he had never imagined and never thought to endure, even in death.
So once more the Daughters of the Lamb came and bound up the bleeding limbs of the men with fresh bandages, painted each finger, each toe with the last of the blood coagulant saved from the hospital ship and stifled their screams with their cool hands and at dusk while the rains fell, they enquired of their Gentle God: “Who has sent this new tribulation Lord, and when will it end?”
Almarlyes worked on till darkness. In the night he heard the screams of his men and lit a fragile candle. He was afraid.’
Ralph put down the book and lay still. He lay and looked at John Pennington’s room and at the black beyond the window. Ducks which had slept in the shade of huge willows all afternoon began to fidget with sound, but their squawking seemed only to add to the weight of silence, not to disturb it. Ralph imagined that it had a liquid quality, this silence of an Oxford garden. He drank it gratefully, and was satisfied. It was more refreshing than sleep.
And after London … after the eternal push of traffic on Chalk Farm Road and a sky that was never completely behind the thin curtains, here, suddenly, was a night blacker than Tennessee, moonless but full of stars. Outside the window, wisteria in bud gently tapped the glass. The room smelled of paper and pencil shavings. Next door John Pennington slept on a narrow bed, but Ralph, on an ancient sofa, slightly ludicrous in a purple sleeping bag, was content to keep company with the night, to store its peace in his body. Dawn, he knew, would begin, not at this window which had seen the sunset, but far behind him, behind countless courtyards and roofs and belfries that he might or might not have seen on his afternoon’s walk round the city. Here it would show only palely, the ducks and the lily leaves would be motionless in its early mist. There would be dew on the grass where, during the afternoon, students had arranged metal and canvas chairs in a semi-circle, dew on the stone benches with their solemn carvings, dew on the window and on the iron balcony beyond it. Then, perhaps, Ralph would sleep. John would get up and put on the dressing gown he’d worn since his last term at school, look in and see Ralph still curled up in his sleeping bag. He would make toast and coffee and bring it in. The last day would begin.
Ralph couldn’t think beyond breakfast, couldn’t imagine this last day that would end in his flight home and all the sleepless hours to follow … Walt snapping like a general, dead plants on his window sill … America! He wanted to stop time here, so that night and silence were endless, eternal. And in it he would unfathom all the mysteries that remained. ‘For myself,’ he whispered, ‘because in the end no one comes up with any answers – none that I can use!’ Not even John, in his other culture, lifelong friend and stranger, so why had Ralph counted so much on seeing him, on having time to talk? They’d talked – yet not for long enough, or perhaps, once again, Ralph had simply asked the wrong questions. They had sat by John’s window, open on the quiet sunset, with a bottle of cheap Italian wine between them and Ralph had tried to explain what he could only express as a sense of commitment to his assignment on Erica-March. He knew it had a place in his life – in a life that found room for so little and so few. He knew it counted. Yet he couldn’t say why (the two basins of corn were the nearest he’d ever got to saying why) and hoped that John, who always seemed so wise, even in his silences, would explain the truth of it to him, would tell him in fact why he had come to England and what he had done. But John had only smiled, sipped the wine, looked out lazily at the darkening trees and said ‘I don’t know. I don’t see why it’s important to know, but if it is, it will come to you, one day.’
‘But Erica saw that it was important. She believed it was important for her, too.’
‘I expect she was flattered. She’s been left alone for years now.’
‘No. She saw some significance in it – beyond any immediate feelings such as flattery. She alluded to it very often.’
‘To what?’
‘To my being there. She often sai
d: “I knew someone would come, one day,” and she believed it was me, the someone.’
‘To bury her in her cupboard?’
‘That’s her riddle. She gave me instructions but I couldn’t believe in them – not completely. I think it was a kind of dream of hers, just one of many. I don’t think she’ll die.
‘But you can’t be sure?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve taken the risk?’
‘Coming here?’
‘Yes, and leaving her.’
‘I couldn’t have stayed with her all night, John.’
‘No.’
John paused, made some comment on the cheapness of the wine relative to its palatability and then said half-seriously: ‘What do you think about the novel? Dying, dead or buried?’
Ralph parried the question: ‘Your novel?’
‘Oh no, not mine. Mine’s a weak fledgling, still in the nest. I mean The Novel.’
‘They ask that one on chat shows now. I can’t give it my attention.’
‘So you don’t know? Don’t care?’
‘Sure, I care.’
‘Well, then?’
‘Well, it’s kept alive. Just by a few good surgeons …’
‘I won’t be one of them.’
‘How d’you know?’
‘Like you said, the metamorphosis is too traumatic. I can’t find a voice. Not only that, nothing breathes, there. Certainly not love, which is what I’m after.’
‘Why love?’
‘It’s what I want to record.’
‘So why can’t you?’
John had made a rich meat stew. Said he’d scrounged tarragon from the Provost’s garden. Ralph remembered that John had always liked cooking and served meals very carefully – butter and parsley on the vegetables, hot bread in linen napkins – and they sat at a tiny table, neatly laid in one corner of the room, eating by candlelight. It was all much as Ralph had imagined it, the feel of the very ancient in the stone corridors, but then the room – well proportioned with its one exquisite window – was full of John’s patient work, papers and pamphlets piling up where shelves no longer had room for them, more books than Ralph possessed in his lifetime, an oak floor smelling of beeswax, the inevitable old sofa. I suppose, Ralph thought, as the meal went on, he’s found that he belongs. I doubt that he’ll ever leave these rooms but grow old and dry and a bit crazy in his colourless clothes, and be seen walking round the Pump Quadrangle with a stick, still remembering the novel he never finished, the novel about love. He laughed at the image of John as a very old man.
‘When you’re old and a celebrity here, John, some second-rate journal will send a young American to do a profile of you!’
‘As long as it’s only a “profile”; I’ve always thought I looked very odd face to face!’
‘And you’ll scare the shit out of the guy with some notion about suicide.’
They laughed.
‘Well, if I look at my work, Ralph, perhaps I ought to end it all far sooner than that. I mean long before the young American arrives. You see, I’m not even on speaking terms with the Metaphysicals any more. New ideas have come out about them and they seem to like the new ones far more than mine. Yet I used to think I was an authority.’
They laughed again. Ralph noticed that in John’s pale face his nose was becoming red, as if the wine he had drunk had lodged itself there.
‘No,’ John went on, ‘it’s my novel now, or nothing. I’m set on it and yet it doesn’t work. And I’ve told far too many people about it which is idiotic of me. Even the manager of Blackwell’s said: “I hear you’ve completed a novel, Dr Pennington.” Completed! It’s a farce: I don’t know where to put myself.’
It had grown dark very suddenly. Only the corner of the room was lit by the candles, the rest disappeared in shadow. Ralph remembered Erica and knew that by now her Tiffany lamp would be on. Wondering suddenly whether he would ever come to possess it – the lamp that had shed its pleasing light on all the yards and yards of conversation – he imagined for a moment that her room was in darkness and next door in the bedroom she had bundled her body away, to wait for death in her cupboard. The door of the cupboard was open and the moon glimmered on her face. Her mouth still moved: she talked on and on until unconsciousness rolled in and she was silent.
‘I think,’ he said hurriedly, ‘that The Hospital Ship is an extraordinary novel – perhaps rather great.’
‘I don’t know,’ said John, ‘I couldn’t ever really get on with the Almarlyes character, although I know he’s meant to be something “universal”: he always seemed too much of a fool. I don’t think she was rigorous enough with him; she just let him happen.’
‘Oh no, John …’
‘And this writing about pretend places. I find it all oddly irrelevant.’
‘To what? Irrelevant to what?’
‘To anything one’s experienced or has knowledge of.’
‘She told me it was primarily about England after the second war. Soldiers coming home and trying to find themselves – to find something important, something that was worthy of all the sacrifice. And then stopping their search, letting themselves become the Rooters …’
‘And Almarlyes?’
‘I don’t know. I think –’
‘Exactly! You don’t know.’
‘No, I think …’
‘What?’
‘He’s the only one who keeps on searching. The Daughters of the Lamb tell the men that some of them will find “home” quite soon and some will never find it. Almarlyes knows, in spite of his virgin bride and the wonderful trees, that the first island isn’t home. He has the courage to tear away from the roots and get back on the ship.’
‘He’s a killer.’
‘Yes. But no more than any of us …’
‘Much more.’
‘Only because he has dared to see more than we can bear to see. Untold horrors …’
‘But how can one sympathize with that?’
‘Why not? I think there’s a sense in which we can – and are meant to – admire him. He’s very bad at expressing what he feels, yet he believes … he knows what the human spirit could be capable of – all the incredible possibilities – he senses their infinity. And he knows that the women from the ship have reached a higher plane of awareness, which is why he has to start living with one of them. He’s too afraid because of his wars and the crimes committed in those wars to believe in Gentle Jesus, but he has to experience the virgin – to rediscover the virgin in himself so that he can begin –’
‘The rapist in himself.’
‘Both. The two poles – the mutilator and the mutilated. And his eyes are opened on the Possible.’
‘It fails to convince.’
‘No, John. Read it again. In the fire at the end –’
‘I don’t think I ever got as far as the end.’
‘In the fire –’
‘Don’t tell me. I might read it. One day.’
‘Sure. Well, it’s worth reading.’
‘And you, Ralph? You’re going home to resurrect her, are you?’
‘Resurrect Erica?’
That’s your tryst to yourself?’
‘I don’t know, John. I was hoping you’d tell me what I was doing.’
‘Me?’
‘Yup.’
‘I tell no one anything any more. Even the students: I’ve stopped telling. I’m struggling to learn!’
Ralph heard a clock strike two. Sleep was still far off. He imagined John snoring, unaware that Ralph had come hoping for so much and been given so little. It’s not his fault, he thought. He’s doing life in this college. Very little outside it seems important. Only the place itself, in its privileged peace, had put a bandage on Ralph’s uncertainties. And in the moments before he slept he discovered in himself an infinite contentment.
When he dreamed, it was all of Oxford. He was in the college gardens with John. In the centre of the lake, out beyond the willows, the sun was dazzling on
the water. A group of French tourists, all younger than they were, passed them, chattering happily. Ralph was aware of a kind of agility in them – both verbal and bodily – which he lacked. And to compensate, to show them all, anyone who passed, that he was still young enough, audacious enough, to be daring, he began to walk to the lake where a cluster of lily pads was green and dense and to let his body glide onto them like a skater. He was barefooted and the feel of the leaves was like thick satin. John began calling to him from the bank. The young French tourists stopped and stared, the ducks, woken by this extraordinary feat, waddled away. He glided on. The leaves now covered the entire surface of the lake, and the faster he went the better they seemed to hold him up. The sun was on his head and on the lily leaves and on his bare feet. He reached the far corner of the lake and saw the students, in their semi-circle, turn and stare at him. He let go a sound from his throat which was pure pleasure. Then he saw that the lake, which had been no more than a large pond, had become enormous and that John, standing on the other side of it and calling had lost all his size and bulk. He was a black note, dancing. He was a crochet-man, far far away, making silent music. The lake had become Ralph’s world and he was buoyant in it, unafraid. There was an ecstatic murmuring in his head, and to this his body kept perfect time.
He woke and it was still dark. He pondered the dream for a while, remembering vividly its quality of joy, then slept and dreamed again and woke. And now he saw, just as he had imagined it, a misty dawn at the window. He felt cold.
Turning, she thought. My body turns. So many countless thousands of turnings, to face this, now that, now this, now that … and now this. It has grown old, just like the world, in all its turnings and, like the world, it waits for silence.
Death is easy. Death is the throat, swallowing. Ten swallows. A Swallowtail in Bernard’s net. The swallows of all summer – so easy with their knowledge of the seasons and temperate zones, to sit in a line on a telegraph wire when I wore pinafores, grubbing for sticks by the thinned hawthorn and blackthorn and my mother says, ‘Count them. Count the birds. Tell your father what we saw. Swallows on a line, with us till autumn.’ But I couldn’t count. Too small to know that a rich man has twenty-five castles and in each of these twenty-five rooms; waist-high I was, or less, holding sticks in my pinny, taking her hand, but “mind how we go because wood’s scarce this year, scarce because he won’t touch them, not the oak trees outlasting kings and dynasties, says it’s wrong to burn in an hour a thing that will outlast us, outlast even you, tiny child with so little knowledge of how much and how many and why, why they could outlast you, with your whole life to come and a farthing a week pocket-money, in your brown boots ‘hand made by Alfred Taylor and Son, Norwich’, – why indeed, yet we must get wood like scavengers, like the poacher with his gun swinging a rabbit home to the pot, pleased as pie, dreaming of a full belly and the warmth of it by his own fire with his own pipe in a blue jar on the mantle, just like your father’s – jar and pipe and an ounce or two of Riley’s Virginian – just like him! oh, who knows the sum of things and even the spiked ways of noblemen, going from castle to castle, even that and a lot more besides when we sit hand in hand at nightfall and you sleep upstairs with a bran doll tucked under your chin, doll made of rags by your Gran the day you were born …”