by Rose Tremain
When the train had finally gone, Ivan Ozolin felt very tired and yet strangely triumphant, as though he himself had achieved victory over something that had always eluded him. He wanted to savour this victory for a little while, so he went into the now deserted station buffet and ordered a tot of vodka and a slice of cinnamon cake and sat at one of the tables with his eyes closed and his heart beating with a steady and beautiful rhythm. He knew there were many tasks still to be done; he shouldn’t remain sitting like this for long, but he felt so elated and happy that it was tempting to order a second vodka and a second slice of cake . . .
He was on his third vodka and his third slice when Dmitri came into the buffet with a telegram. ‘I just took this down,’ said Dmitri, whose habitually red face, Ivan noticed, looked suddenly pale. ‘It’s from your wife.’
Ivan Ozolin reached up and took the telegram and read: Women, too, have the right to escape. I am leaving you, Ivan Andreyevich. I hope to start a flower shop in Tula. Please do not follow me. Signed: Your unhappy wife, Anna Borisovna Ozolina.
Ivan reread this message several times, while Dmitri stood by him, with his arms hanging limply by his sides.
‘What do you make of it?’ said Dmitri at last.
‘Well,’ said Ivan, ‘she’s left me.’
‘I can see that,’ said Dmitri, ‘but why?’
‘She was always fond of flowers, especially violets.’
‘That doesn’t explain it. You’re a good man, Ivan. Why would she leave you?’
‘I have ridiculous legs. When I look at that bit of my legs between the end of my trousers and the beginning of my sock, I see how absurd they are.’
‘That’s no reason, either. Most men’s legs look ludicrous.’
‘Oh well, I expect Anna’s left because she’s tired of my jokes. I don’t blame her at all.’
Dmitri sat down. He yawned. He said in a melancholy voice that Anna’s absence wasn’t the only one they were going to have to suffer. History itself, he said, had come to them and taken up residence with them for a while and was now abandoning them. He asked Ivan what he planned to do once they found themselves quite alone once more.
Ivan thought about this question for a long time and then he said: ‘The time has come.’
‘What d’you mean “the time has come”?’ asked Dmitri.
‘Oh,’ said Ivan, ‘it just feels as though it has. The time for mushroom-picking. I believe the time for this has come.’
Extra Geography
For two sublime years, we were the wingers. We could outrun the field.
For those two years, at Upton Hall School, all lacrosse matches depended upon us.
‘Pass to the wing!’ the captain would screech to the fumbling, tangled slow-coaches in midfield. ‘Pass to Minna! Pass to Flic!’
With the ball caught, cradled, we’d fly over the muddy grass. And the goal would tremble into sight and the opponents’ keeper would lumber out in her creaky shin-pads and our own forwards would prance up, neighing for the ball. But most times, our momentum just carried us on, we couldn’t resist it, and one of us would score a goal and then the whole team would come crowding round and clash their lacrosse sticks with ours in a victory salute.
But in summer, there were no lacrosse games. We weren’t heroines any more, just ordinary girls, and this felt worrying, as though we might soon die.
One hot day, as we sat in the Upton Hall rose garden, bored with everything, inattentively reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Minna said to me: ‘Flic, I’ve got an idea. Let’s fall in love with someone.’
My gaze moved up from Shakespeare’s text and rested on Minna’s features. She was growing into a beauty, with grey eyes and chestnut hair and a chocolate mole on her thigh. We were both fourteen. I said: ‘Who’ve you got in mind?’
Minna said: ‘No one. Let’s make it random, like Titania falls in love with that idiot disguised as a donkey. Let’s choose the next person we see.’
The next person we saw was the geography teacher, Miss Delavigne.
Along she came, with her black hair gleaming in the sunshine, wearing a coral-coloured dress.
‘Hello, Miss Delavigne,’ said Minna.
‘Hello, Minna. Hello, Flic.’
She stopped and made polite conversation. She came from the South Island of New Zealand and her pronunciation of certain vowel sounds was something new to us at Upton Hall School. When she went on her way, we appraised her. Her first name was Rosalind. Her skin was tanned, but her ankles looked chunky in navy canvas shoes. Minna said New Zealand women probably didn’t know anything about fashion, but we couldn’t let that matter to us; love was meant to be blind. We had noticed, however, that Miss Delavigne’s eyes were violet-blue and her teeth white as cuttlefish. We decided her age was thirty-nine.
We thought we’d start by being romantic and courtly. We stole a rose and walked to the bungalow Miss Delavigne occupied beyond the lacrosse field, and scattered the rose petals at the bungalow gate. When we came away, I felt sexy and strange, as though the rose petals had been virgin’s blood.
Then we decided we’d better get good at geography, so we stared at maps of New Zealand, trying to memorise place names and rivers and sites of mineral deposits. The place names that appealed to us most were Brightness Gully and Desolation Creek.
We agreed that our prime targets were to get ourselves invited to tea at the bungalow and to persuade Miss Delavigne to let us call her Rosalind.
Later in the term, our class went on an outing to the Science Museum in London. Minna and I held Miss Delavigne’s hands – one each – as we gazed at a diorama of a Maori village, and she said: ‘What the diorama doesn’t show is the sadness of the people.’
I looked at Minna because I had no idea what comment to make. And I saw that Minna had no idea, either. By now, we knew a lot about New Zealand weather and cabbage trees and flightless birds, but nothing about the country’s history. Miss Delavigne went on: ‘Shall I tell you something not many people know? My grandmother was Maori. She deserted her tribe to marry a white man, a pākehā, my grandfather, Josiah Delavigne.’
Minna said: ‘Does that make you feel sad, Miss Delavigne?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m proud of my Maori blood. But the Maori haven’t been treated well. They’ve lost far too much of their land.’
‘We’d love to see a picture of your grandmother,’ I said. ‘Have you got one at the bungalow?’
‘Yes. I keep one by my bed.’
I didn’t dare look at Minna. Pressing my hand against the hot glass of the diorama, I said: ‘You could invite us to tea and we could do some extra geography and you could show us the picture.’
In the coach going back to Upton Hall, Minna asked me: ‘Are you in love with her yet?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I liked holding her hand.’
‘I like her smell,’ said Minna.
I said: ‘Let’s pretend we’re in the Maori village alone with her, wearing skirts made of flax. Let’s pretend we’re plaiting feathers into her hair.’
So we put our heads close together and closed our eyes and imagined the sunlight depicted in the diorama falling on us and on Rosalind Delavigne and on all the acres of land stolen from her family, rippling away to the horizon. But we were so tired from the long day, we both fell asleep.
Near the end of term, we got our invitation to tea.
Laid out on a teak table was a sponge cake and a plate of Penguin biscuits.
The tea was in a floral china pot. Miss Delavigne had put on crimson lipstick. It was raining outside and Miss Delavigne had turned on the gas fire and lit a cosy little lamp. I tried to imagine that there was nothing beyond the windows, not even the lacrosse pitch or the rain, but only the deep, soft dark of the universe.
We drank the tea and ate the food and passed the picture of Miss Delavigne’s grandmother from hand to hand. The grandmother wasn’t dressed in a skirt made of flax, but in some starchy old dress, with a white l
ace collar and button-up boots, and I felt disappointed, except that her face was beautiful, with heavy black hair wrenched into a bun. Looking from her to Miss Delavigne and back again, you could see that some of her beauty had descended down the generations.
After the second cup of tea, Minna said: ‘It’s fine if we call you Rosalind, isn’t it?’
When Minna said this, Miss Delavigne inclined her head, as though she were listening for something, some animal noise out there beyond the windows of the bungalow. Then she said quietly, ‘What is it, you two? What is it you want?’
Neither Minna nor I could move or say anything. We just sat there dumb, like stupid lacrosse reserves on the pavilion bench. The fire burned blue. Then Rosalind Delavigne reached out and began stroking Minna’s chestnut hair. I saw Minna’s head move slowly sideways and I knew what was going to happen next: there was going to be a kiss.
I stared at the kiss, mouth on mouth. When, after a long, silent moment, Minna’s face was separate from Rosalind’s again, it was smeared with the crimson lipstick and her eyes looked drugged, as though by some weird sleep.
I waited, very still, because I thought that now, my turn for a kiss would come, but it didn’t. Rosalind got up suddenly and began pacing about the tiny, lamplit room. ‘Gracious!’ she said. ‘Gracious, how wrong of me! I just don’t know what happened there. You must go, Minna. Flic, off you go. Goodness me, if the Head knew. Really I dread to think . . .’
We walked back to the dormitories through the rain. I gave Minna my handkerchief so she could wipe Rosalind Delavigne’s lipstick off her face.
When she gave the hankie back, I said: ‘Minna, was it fantastic?’
But she didn’t answer. She strode on, as though what had happened had nothing in the world to do with me.
In the autumn term, there was a new geography teacher, called Miss Smith. When I asked the Head whether Miss Delavigne was coming back, she said: ‘No, dear. She’s returned to her faraway land.’
The lacrosse games began and we took our wingers’ positions on the field. But something was wrong with Minna: she’d lost her speed. The midfielders from the opposing team came charging towards her and tackled her long before she got anywhere near the goal. And soon enough, she was dropped from the team.
I thought she’d be upset about this, but Minna said she didn’t care, that lacrosse was for kids and she wasn’t a kid any more, hadn’t I noticed?
She showed me a photo of a boy called Jeremy she’d met in the summer holidays. She said: ‘That Rosalind thing was a laugh, but this is real.’
The winter began seeping in. And as the dark came down on the lacrosse pitch, I’d often stare over at Miss Delavigne’s bungalow. It was unoccupied now and I noticed that one window-pane was broken and that the paint was flaking off the door. In my mind, I named it Desolation Creek.
A View of Lake Superior in the Fall
Walter and Lena Parker were in their early seventies when they decided to run away from home.
This was in Millennium year. Friends in their neighbourhood of Greenhills in Nashville, Tennessee, who thought the Parkers had taken leave of their senses, liked to explain the crazy decision by calling it ‘Millennium Fever’. But, in fact, it wasn’t done feverishly. It was done after long weeks of discussion and planning. Walter and Lena owned a summer cabin on a small island way up on the Canada side of Lake Superior and this is where they ran to. It was in May weather, hot and bright.
When they got to the cabin, Walter said: ‘I feel like Henry Fonda.’
‘What?’ said Lena.
‘I feel like tired old Fonda in that film with Katie Hepburn.’
‘On Golden Pond?’
‘That’s the one. He thinks about everything that’s gotta be done to make the place liveable and then he just sits in his chair and does nothing.’
‘It’s a stupid film. He does nothing – except get lost in the darned woods – because she does it all. She gets in the logs . . . everything. But it’s not going to be like that, is it, Walter?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Walter. ‘I don’t know what it’s going to be like.’
But on their first night there, they slept like babies, only waking once to look out at the waning moon above the lake, and to remark on the beautiful silence of the night. And in the morning, eating ham and eggs and drinking strong coffee, they felt something like pure happiness come over them.
‘We made a good decision,’ Walter said. ‘Didn’t we?’
Lena got up and came over to Walter and put her arms round him and kissed the top of his grey head. ‘I still love your hair,’ she said.
They began to make lists of the things they’d need for the winter. Winter was far off, but they knew they’d be staying and not returning to Nashville; they didn’t even need to discuss it any more. The priority, they decided, would be to install a wood-burning stove for the living room and some kind of electric heater for their bedroom. Lena, in particular, was susceptible to cold and up here, once the fall was past, you could expect every variety of cold weather you could think of: freezing fog; temperatures so low the water froze at it edges; blizzards, and what the islanders called ‘lake-effect snow’, which fell in sudden thick waves or streamers, the flakes so densely packed together they seemed to choke up the air.
‘It’s funny,’ remarked Lena, ‘I’ve often imagined the cabin enduring the Canadian winter, on its own. I’d kinda feel sorry for it. But now we’re going to be in it. I wonder how we’ll do.’
‘We’ll do fine,’ said Walter. ‘Get a chest freezer, though. We can fill it with moose steaks for when the roads get tough.’
‘Maybe buy a TV?’
‘If you want. Or we can just play Scrabble and talk about the past.’
‘Trouble about the past, it’s so full of Shirley.’
‘Yup.’
‘We might start feeling guilty that we ran away.’
‘I refuse to feel guilty. At my age. Don’t we have the right to some peace and quiet?’
‘I’m not sure what we have a right to, Walter. I’m still confused about this.’
‘Don’t be. Shirley made our lives hell. That’s all you need remember.’
Lena didn’t know if ‘hell’ wasn’t too dramatic a word. Some elderly people might have taken things more in their stride. But she and Walter were so gentle and quiet and kind in each other’s company, they found it hard to tolerate what Shirley had imposed on them, which felt like a crazy and never-ending carnival of woe.
They tried to let their love for Shirley, their only child, triumph over the chaos that she’d inflicted. She had, after all, suggested her return to her parents’ house as an act of kindness, ‘so I can take care of you both, now that you’re getting on a bit’, and it had been too difficult and unkind to tell her not to come. But, as they foresaw, this ‘caring’ never happened. Shirley was forty-two and at a low point in her life. She’d returned to Nashville to start over. On her first night home, she announced, ‘I’m going back to my first love: singing. I should have stuck at music and done that all along.’
Shirley had never stuck at anything. After a college degree in music, which she failed to complete, she got work as a junior assistant in a musician’s agency in New York City. At the age of twenty-three, she married a bassoon player called Nate and divorced him within a year. She became the plaything of an older man, a composer of international renown, who had wives in London and Vienna. She left him before he left her, railed against his ‘stupid rich life’ and dropped out for a while, working in clubs and late-night bars, then joined a women’s commune in Brooklyn and fell in love with a woman called Robyn.
She told Walter and Lena that things with Robyn were stable and that they intended to give birth to a child, or adopt one, they didn’t know which, but this was what they wanted – to be mothers. Walter and Lena kept mainly quiet on the subject and sent monthly cheques. Shirley told them she was working on a novel and would pay them back ‘when I become the new Joyc
e Carol Oates’. But neither the novel nor the baby ever appeared. Shirley moved on and never spoke any more about Robyn or motherhood. The years kept going by.
She left New York City and worked as a teaching assistant in a small-town school in New Jersey. It was during this time that Walter offered to get her home and employ her in the bookstore that he and Lena had owned and run in Hillsboro Village, Nashville, for thirty years. Shirley told him it was a kind thought, but selling books was ‘just too darn monotonous for someone like me’. She’d decided to go back to college now, she announced, to do a degree in management theory. Walter commented to Lena that management theory sounded ‘monotonous’ to him, and all Lena could find to say was, ‘I guess we’ve got to give her the benefit of the doubt.’
There had been doubt all along, however, that Shirley would ever make a true beginning on her life. When she passed the age of forty and returned to New York to be with yet another married lover, they stopped hoping for any such thing as a ‘beginning’. Then, suddenly, a year ago, long after the bookstore was sold and gone and Walter and Lena had bought their cabin on Lake Superior and entered upon a time of quietness and ease, Shirley, alone once more, with her degree course in management theory stretching out from three years to five on a string of low grades and missed assignments, announced her new plan: her return to Nashville to ‘care’ for them.
At this point, they sat down and asked themselves, ‘Do we love Shirley?’ or, put less crudely, ‘Is the love we feel for Shirley adequate to compensate for all that we’re going to give up for her sake?’
Sitting on their porch, watching dusk come on around their favourite red-bud tree, Lena clung to Walter’s thin arm. She could feel the sinews and the bone underneath the meagre flesh. ‘The thing about marriage,’ she said, ‘is that some mothers love their children more than they love their husbands, and I guess that’s OK. Everybody just gets on with it. But I . . . I’ve always only really loved you, Walter. I think I’m like Queen Victoria in that respect. She loved Prince Albert, but didn’t care much for any of her children. And that’s just how it was and how it is.’