The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  She is full of words trying to make up for almost eighty years of silence and empty dresses that wore out in time, yet she won’t come out into the lane where the early morning sun is blinking through, but hides in the shadow and doesn’t turn to me so that I see her face and won’t let me run to her – ‘my black witch running to her mother, indeed, and she’ll be five this summer!’ – though I wish she would turn, only the one time, or let me run to her and let her stroke my hair which hangs in plaits and hear me say … I never knew you woman to woman, friend to friend and only when the heavy flowers were thrown on you did I understand the finality of you and whisper to the doll ‘she is quite dead, not dead like some plants in winter but quite, quite dead, Ratty May, more dead than you whose body holds its shape and who takes on very often the warmth of my own body. And after your death, there was no finding you – only in my dark dreaming, yes only in the dark and standing always to one side, out of reach – just as I can’t find you now yet I know I’m with you in the lane, and my feet are small.’

  ‘Death is quite easy, Vicar, isn’t it? No harder than dreaming, which comes from nowhere. Is it? No harder than a sum which tires you out in your head and then you want to lie down and sleep. Is it? No harder than these?’ But I am sent away, still not certain if suffering is necessary. I am a child, he says. And he drowned in a well the following winter. A very difficult death for keeping his lambs in ignorance of what he did not know. I want to laugh at the vicar’s death. But the sound I make isn’t laughter. I think it’s only my breath pressed awkwardly out of me by the weight of the cart carrying some cavalcade up the ruts of my spine …

  But I am no longer in the lane, nor by the well where the vicar drowned and heaven knows how they got his icy body out before it rotted and poisoned the water … I am nowhere that I recognize, but I hear two separate breaths, three, counting mine. So I am not alone as I imagined and I wait to see – unless vision is going now as it did once before right in front of the Kommandant’s eyes and for months the death camp was dark – I wait to see who pushes out these comforting breaths to reassure me, no we are not alone when we die! We die hand in hand with the miraculous.

  All night they talked, until an hour or two before dawn when the wind got up and now they sleep, side by side, oblivious of the wind, yet I am sent to warn them, the winds getting up, Chadwick. Gully, the wind’s blowing from the north-east and squalls of rain are coming on the wind. Sleep and sleep. The tepee rocks. Two breaths. And mine outside; the one sent to wake them. The wind’s coming, Chadwick! North-easter you can tell by the shaking and trembling of the leaves. Wake up Gully. Chadwick! And I long to run to the comfort of my room, where the wind is kept out and the darkness hidden by a candle. Oh god, the wind’s coming fast, Chadwick, and blow you both up into the sky, it will … so at last they hear me and I know that Gully is coming out. Don’t look at me, he says, I’m not covered up, because this is my habit, now that I’m too old to feel shame and my body is like yours, used up and white as a maggot, even my ole Long John you liked to watch swinging and thinking of it hard in you … and if you heard two breaths, two sleepers in the tepee, then one of them was the wind, and they say lies are blown into our heads through holes so small in us, we can’t detect them and that they swarm on a north-easterly like a cloud of locusts and are dispersed in us.

  He has crawled out now and sits hunched on the grass. His bull’s head lolls and his eyes in it are tired. His body is thinner than it has ever been and wrinkled and all the hair on it is grey and sparse and of uneven length. Gully. And behind him the tepee begins to break up, its sewn-together skin torn and flying away over the roof of the house. ‘So come in, Gully. There’s a candle in my room – if the draught hasn’t caught it yet and blown it out – and I can go down and make two mugs of cocoa and I promise you, I’ll never speak of it, the other breath I heard side by side with yours, though I swear it was Chadwick sleeping – long before he knew Athelstone or Robin or his hair ran into the bath in golden rivers … I swear all this on my mother’s soul, if I knew where that was, if I could ever learn where it hides, in what part of my mind you see, in what part of me, Gully … of course I would swear if it makes you happy. Yet what could it possibly matter now, old man, when all that waits for you at the pub is an ending of some kind … the handcart on your bull’s back … oh, Gully, I don’t know why, at the end of so many journeys, you were always there, holding your cap with a look of such solemnity and why – oh Lord! – you ever took me to bed in the bed of your wife. I suppose you paid your price for me to her in kisses on her hands and you couldn’t have known that wherever your lips touched her palms and her fingers, warts would come up, and though you burned them out for her, they kept growing and growing till no one could bear to look at her hands and she hid them in mittens.

  The skin of the tepee is almost gone … Chadwick. You went away and left Gully to the winds, left us all in the end, unable to speak of you without tears. You hear me? Chadwick? Sulking in some expensive restaurant. Where’s your sleeping breath that was comforting? I can’t hear it any more, and I feel such a terrible weakness, dear thing, I know if I tried to move my feet, even wrapped up as they are, I couldn’t do this, yet I know my body still turns – from this to that, from that to this – it flows and moves, without any pain I can locate, yet is unable to hold things in place. Dying is to become fluid then? A spilling of the self until features and shape are gone just as yours – did they? – ebbed into your eiderdown, grey as damp clay, and all we buried was the little moisture the bed had not absorbed? Yet you didn’t want to die, Chadwick! You were a seasonal man and you thought spring would come back and start trilling in your throat. You kept on and on with your mumblings … ‘buying a horse to ride in the park with the chestnut flowers coming on, because riding’s the only thing, Erica, so somebody said, to keep a man healthy and full of vigour, and it isn’t as if with my money I couldn’t afford …’

  There are horses, I suppose, pulling the cart that weighs me down. They patiently plough me till I am turned, dark side up, to a September morning and the seagulls fly in to pick me over. There are countless straight lines of me, all the earth of eighty-seven years, laid out under the sky. Death is a turning over. Huntley picks up a clod of soil in his hands and feels its texture, not knowing it’s part of me that he crumbles and scatters, but then he has, all his life, been a slow silly man wearing his old ideas as foolishly as suspenders and killing all the butterflies with a suffocating spray. So that if you went there now, Bernard, on this early September morning and walked all the hedgerows of my field, you’d find nothing, dear. They’re all gone. And the cowshed and dairy are gone, did I tell you? I knew they’d come down as soon as I moved out. Even before. I knew when I sat with you – with your body still wrapped in your beige dressing gown – and held your hand and held my candle, I knew it would be all changed, because change is what is Bernard. Change is our one certainty. Yet the change from life to death … I thought it would be quicker. I feel death immobilize me, as the horses go patiently, round and round. Movement, all except some involuntary flickering of the eye and my breath which can still keep time with the two sleepers I found out there in the dark, yes all movement is over. I couldn’t say to the young man who came at the end, “Let me pour you a glass of wine Ralph dear.” The young American, short for an American, but courteous with my life, custodian of the turned earth which is all that’s left of me … surely he will grow new herbs in me and under them I shall have some creeping existence which understands neither time nor grief and is not haunted by the terrible cruelty of man and his manufactured fire, his plaything … beginning now as a speck in the sky and the girl, no longer a virgin but heavy with the child of General Almarlyes picks up her fustian skirts and runs screaming into the sea to push out a little boat and calls and calls to the hut where the General sleeps wearing only his boots, ‘Almarlyes! For the love of God!’ Oh for the love of God! but the sky is black with machinery and the flame is brighter
than any noonday, wrapping the shore from end to end. And no one comes to ferret in the ash. The land on which the thousand pieces of the body of Almarlyes still lie is dead land, dead for all eternity, ‘Like your souls, little children, at this Christmas-tide if they cannot let Jesus enter in at the door! When your bodies die, as die they must, if you let go this world without the love of Our Lord, then you will find nothing on the other side. So even as I scatter these offerings for you, this precious food, go home and tell your Mother and your Father that the Church is good …’ Yet he drowned in an icy well, his pockets full of nuts, our vicar. No one ever went to the well to say a prayer. And in his after-life he was a coconut, so I dreamed once. An African child poured the milk of his existence into her starving belly.

  I have begun to count. I can’t tell what I am counting or even if I am saying numbers, yet I feel some beat or pulse near the surface of me, keeping time. Perhaps I am counting in years, yet I have forgotten the total. I don’t know when I should stop. Or are we marching … heaven knows where or when, yet if I am marching then surely it is with you, Gérard. Gérard! Gérard! Oh I can feel the two syllables of you, of course, yes, feel them deeper than my womb, but so many worlds lie between our two deaths, I never imagined I could start to cross back, across this open and plough-turned sum of years, years I can’t count, not to you, oh not to you! Yet here we go, in step, invisible surely because I can’t see you yet I feel your shoulder against mine and if I could move, if only I could move, I might reach out a hand. Are your feet marching? And mine? I can hear no crowd, no shouting, no songs. Only us. Oh, are we moving, Gérard? Us two along a road? Gérard?

  I think the road is white. Melon plants straggle it. It’s no more than a track. And heat shimmers, the heat of midday. Where is it and where are you? I keep swallowing your name … Gérard, Gérard … but you are nowhere, only inside me, gentle, gentle companion of my death, navigating all the channels of my blood. It was you I drank, pill by pill, sip by sip, the forty-two years of your existence one by one releasing the slow breaths of an ending. Here. On a dry road in Spain. And what better death could ever have awaited me? What more miraculous? Yet the white road is endless. There is no horizon, just an eternity of road, dry and warped. So how can I dare whisper an ending while I still have consciousness and breath, and the road goes on and on? I am not ended. The ending is still to come. But let it be here. Before the clouds gather, as they did so suddenly in France, on the day we found the dead man, so terribly, suddenly and frighteningly that it became … No! My mother with your seven lives, your eight lives, save me from the darkness that Chadwick saw … like a tidal wave, obliterating all. Save me from the clouds that gather far away but nearing, like the clouds we saw the day we found the dead man, the terrible clouds we saw the day we found the dead man … black clouds, so vast and heavy … on the day we found the dead –

  *

  Ralph couldn’t remember ever having felt so tired.

  In Walt’s over-heated office he was handed strong coffee in a paper cup by Walt’s secretary who left immediately, unsmilingly, closing the door quietly behind her.

  Ralph looked at all the familiar things in the office: the array of telephones; the photo of Walt’s wife, Nancy, taken twenty years before; his single golfing trophy on a stand; his maps and graphs and random news cuttings pinned to wallboards; the cocktail cabinet made of maple wood; the bottle of Biofeed for his plants … all stubbornly unchanged – day to day proof that the man existed and that he existed to work.

  ‘You know you’ve left me no choice?’ Walt’s voice knocked like a mallet on Ralph’s exhausted skull. ‘You know you’ve blown it, kid?’

  Ralph looked down at the black coffee and began to sip it, thinking, whatever happens, I musn’t doze off because this moment is probably one of the most important moments of my life. Sentence is being passed: years are being decided.

  He cleared his throat and looked up. ‘She died, Walt.’

  Here was his plea of mitigation. Pale plea. But no lawyer could have stated it more succinctly.

  ‘I know she died. The whole world knows she died by now – anyone who gives a damn. But you know as well as I do, Ralph, that Bulletin Worldwide has a policy of minimalization on deaths on this kind of category.’

  ‘What the hell d’you mean, Walt?’

  ‘We are not, kid, and never have been, concerned with minor lives. I thought I made this clear at the outset –’

  ‘This was not a “minor life”, Walt!’ And shouting now: ‘I’ve got it all in my apartment – nine tapes …’

  ‘I’m sorry, kid.’

  ‘What d’ya mean, you’re sorry?’

  ‘Company rules simply have to be followed, especially when any member of my team is away on an assignment.’

  ‘Walt –’

  ‘You broke company rules. You checked out of one address without informing this office where you could be contacted …’

  ‘You were hounding me, man! I just couldn’t make you see that, if it was going to be worth anything at all, I had to go all the way with this job.’

  ‘And you are thirteen days – thirteen days! – overdue on your return date!’

  I wish I had a goddamned attorney, thought Ralph. Then he could say it all, everything I’m too tired to say, and it could go on like a play in front of me, and I could close my eyes …

  ‘So you see, kid. What choice do I have?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno, Walt.’

  ‘Dunno? What the hell kind of answer is that meant to be? I honestly don’t think you’re getting the seriousness of this …’

  ‘I told you. I had no choice either.’

  ‘Sure you had a choice: to obey or disobey. You disobeyed.’

  ‘This isn’t high school, Walt. I had my own instructions and I had to carry them through.’

  ‘What instructions?’

  Oh for the lawyer again, to summarize and simplify to make the eccentric sound like the ordinary …

  ‘When I got back from Oxford –’

  ‘Oxford? You went to Oxford?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To get advice.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On everything that was happening to me.’

  ‘You’re not making sense Ralph and I have a meeting at ten-thirty.’

  ‘Oh for Chrissakes, Walt. You’re not giving me time.’

  ‘Time! You’ve had a month and a half!’

  ‘Time to explain.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m interested in explanations. You’ve let me down and you’ve let the team down and I don’t figure I have any choice at all but to let you go. But you go right ahead if you want to. You explain.’

  How could I have briefed the attorney anyway, Ralph thought. He wouldn’t have understood. He would have wanted straight answers: “This is so because …” “I did this because …” And I have what Walt would call a deficiency here: I can never answer “because”.

  ‘I’m waiting, kid …’

  ‘When I got back from Oxford, Walt, I went to say goodbye as I’d promised, and it was then that I found her, and the note to me. You see the note was specifically addressed to me: “Dear Ralph …” It was impossible to ignore it, so I sent you a cable.’

  ‘Never mind the cable.’

  ‘The note reminded me to make sure of the burial in a certain way, with the mimosa blossoms and a grave big enough –’

  ‘Why you?’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Why did she pick on you?’

  ‘It’s complicated, Walt. She had a notion that –’

  ‘She musta known you had a deadline.’

  Ralph smiled. In spite of his editor’s title, Walt sometimes betrayed an extraordinary clumsiness with words. It was as if he lost control of them. Because he uses them as weapons, Ralph decided. Attack, attack! They are always hard and stinging. They make your skin smart, like a whipping.

  Walt noticed Ralph’s smile with profound irritation
. He stood up.

  ‘Look, Ralph, I’m not sure I’m interested in any of this gothic stuff …’

  ‘I can only assume,’ Ralph interrupted quickly, ‘that there was no one else – or she felt this – no one else to take charge and do what she wanted done. But burials are slow, Walt. There’s a lot of formality …’

  Days of waiting, he wanted to add, with only the search for the mimosa to occupy him while they took her body away to the mortuary. Then the inevitable meetings, with Mrs Burford, with Huntley who had to be summoned (and who refused Ralph permission to take the Tiffany lamp because nothing had been written down about this), with the press who turned up. Yet already they seemed far off, these peculiar days, part of a Time Before, when there was no Familiar, no Ordinary, only day following day in unexpected shape, lit by the lamp, monitored now and then by the Summary, days that were his. Only when he had gathered strength would he let them back into his life and examine their importance in it. Staring at Walt’s plants, he had a momentary recollection of his dreams of the lily leaves at Worcester and the incredible gliding of his body. He was aware that his heart was beating very fast.