by Rose Tremain
Then he saw, as the first line rode on, the English men-at-arms fall back. They fell back in a ghostly way, just as, before, they emerged from the wood – one moment there and the next moment not there. And where they’d been standing, facing the French cavalry, on the very place where they’d been, now there was a line of stakes, newly sharpened, pointing out of the ground. There was a thick fence of them, a thousand or more, three or four deep with room in between them for only the most insubstantial men.
He knew the horses would rear, would try to turn, would do all that they could not to be thrown onto the stakes. But many of them couldn’t turn because in their massed charge, flank to flank, they were coming on too fast and so they exploded onto the fence and their riders were pitched forward into the enemy’s arms.
One of the other heralds had told him at dawn: ‘The English are eating handfuls of earth. This means they accept their coming death and burial.’ And he’d felt pity for them, as violent as love. Now, Montjoy’s horse carries him awkwardly, slipping and staggering in the mud, through the field of the French dead. The dead appear fat with this white moon up, casting bulky shadows. Montjoy covers his mouth with his blue glove and tips his head back and looks for stars. There is one in the west, yawning, and he thinks again of Roland in his tree-house and then of all the souls of the French struggling to cross the chasm of the sky.
He won’t give an account of the battle to Roland because then he would have to answer too many unanswerable questions. Why did the first line of French cavalry turn round and collide with the men-at-arms coming forward? Does this mean that some of the French foot soldiers died before they even reached the English line? And then, when they reached the line, what happened that so many died so quickly? Were they packed together so tightly in a mass that they couldn’t fight properly? Was the mass, shouting and pushing and afraid and confused, soon walled up behind its own dead?
It had rained so hard all through the battle, the heralds’ task of seeing had been impeded.
All Montjoy can hope now, as he nears the English camp and hears voices singing, is that time will bring him understanding.
He rides on. He must make a formal acknowledgement of defeat to King Henry. He hopes that his voice is going to be strong, but fears that it may sound weak and small, like the voice of a stag beetle in an ivory box.
He feels exhausted. In his exhaustion, he aches to be no longer a man apart, but a man going home to his wife with a gift of crimson shoes.
The Unoccupied Room
Marianne is walking home through the wet dusk of the city. She wears an expensive grey mackintosh with the collar turned up, but she has no umbrella and her hair is cobwebbed with rain.
Marianne is forty-eight. She’s an almost-beautiful woman who doesn’t look her age. She has pale skin and a gentle laugh. She’s a doctor specialising in geriatrics and her career is what matters to her now. She’s divorced and unattached and certainly isn’t looking for a new husband. Her only child, Nico, lives in another city. He’s a radio DJ. Though affectionate to her always, she’s heard him being condescending to phone-in listeners and she means to question him about this sometime: ‘Why be cruel, Nico, when this isn’t your nature?’
She carries a smart brown leather briefcase, inside which are her conference notes. This has been the final day of an international colloquium on geriatrics entitled ‘Redefining the Seventh Age’ and Marianne is aware, as the city traffic whispers by her on the damp cobbles, that she is, suddenly, exhausted. There’s an ache in her thighs. Her eyes feel sore. She hasn’t much further to go to her apartment, but she realises that she’s been walking a long time and is surprised by the decision she must have made, but doesn’t remember making, not to take a taxi home from the conference centre. She could have afforded a taxi. Her ability to afford taxis now is one of the modest pleasures of her independent life. So why didn’t she take one? She’s walked at least a mile and her smart shoes are spoiled. Was it that she looked for a taxi and none came by? She doesn’t remember looking for a taxi. All she remembers is that she was at the plenary session of the conference but said very little, or, perhaps, nothing, at it and that she is now here, three blocks or so away from her street. Her longing to be home, to make tea, to sit down, to warm her feet, has become overwhelming. She feels as though she could sleep for several days. She wants to lie down and not move and let nothing move within her sight or hearing, unless it might be a light autumn breeze at her window or the sound, far off, of the children’s carousel in the park – familiar things that wouldn’t disturb her peace. She sighs as she tries to hurry on. Her elderly patients have just such a longing for rest. ‘I tell you, doctor,’ says one old man, who sits at his window all day, counting aeroplanes, ‘the best bit of the day is the night.’
She’s at her street now. She turns off the well-lit boulevard and quite soon the traffic noise becomes faint and all she can hear are her own footsteps and all she can smell is the damp of the cherry trees that line the avenue. She likes this moment, this moving out of the light into the shadows of her street.
It’s a street of nineteenth-century houses converted to apartments. Railings and hedges screen the ground-floor flats from the road. Only one house remains a house, containing thirteen rooms, but Marianne can’t remember who lives in this grand building.
Her apartment is on the second floor. It has a large living room and three bedrooms, one of which is very small – the room Nico occupied as a child. The floors are polished wood, waxed often and scenting the whole place. It’s the kind of apartment, unlike so many in the city, that you feel you can belong to.
Marianne searches in her mackintosh pocket for her keys. She hopes they’re in the pocket and not in her handbag, which has so many compartments in it that things lose themselves there. Her hands are soaking. In damp and cold, her nails, which she’s bitten ever since she was nine, sometimes bleed. They feel as if they’re bleeding now.
The keys aren’t in Marianne’s pocket, so she stops a little way from her front door, puts down her briefcase and places her handbag on someone’s car roof, under a street lamp, to search for the keys.
At once, the contents of her handbag appear odd. She takes out something pale, slightly unpleasant to the touch. It’s a pair of surgical gloves. In her day-to-day work, she wears gloves frequently (again and again she reminds the nurses: ‘there must be a sterile barrier between your hands and all internal tissue of the patient’s body’), but always disposes of them at the hospital or in the homes she visits. These gloves appear soiled and Marianne has never put a pair of soiled gloves in her handbag. Never.
She lays the gloves on the car roof. It’s raining very hard now. She must find the keys, go in, make tea, sit down by the electric fire . . . Then, she will think about how the surgical gloves came to be in her bag.
The keys aren’t where she expected them to be. They’re at the very bottom of her bag. She has to take out her purse, her chequebook, her credit card wallet, her cigarettes, her tampon holder and her hairbrush before she’s able to locate them. There’s a label tied to them, on which is written Keys No. 37, but, just as Marianne has no recollection of putting the soiled gloves into her bag, so she has no memory of this label attached to her keys.
Her friend and colleague, Petra, reminded her some days ago: ‘Conferences are strange things, Marianne. They’re like stepping out of your life.’ And now, as she returns her purse and the other items, including the gloves, to her bag, Marianne starts to wonder whether something has happened during the last three days, something she’s momentarily forgotten because she feels so tired, that has damaged her.
She leans against the car, noticing that the car is dark red. A Volvo. It might belong to the family in the grand house, or it might belong to a woman on her own, gone shopping in the rain on the boulevard, a woman who found a lucky parking space here under the cherry trees. In one’s own street, there are a thousand unknowable connections. Cities express the unknowable. Live your w
hole life in the same one and you will wind up a traveller in it, an ignoramus.
She’s at the door of the building now. She pushes it and enters. The stairwell is massive, poorly lit, always cold. The stairs are stone, very wide, slightly grand. In the middle of this grandeur is an elevator no larger than a confessional, in which it has always been impossible not to feel foolish. Most often, Marianne ignores it and walks up the two flights of stone, but this evening she steps into it gratefully and lets it carry her towards her soft sofa, her fire, and the pot of China tea she’s going to make.
It’s dark in the apartment. Marianne switches on the overhead light and the hall seems brighter than normal. She rubs her eyes. She lets her bag and briefcase drop. She’s aware, in the warmth of the apartment, that she’s been enduring a headache for a long time without really noticing it.
Though she’s been looking forward to the tea, she now feels too tired to make it. She goes straight to her bedroom. The bright light of the hall still feels uncomfortable, so she leaves her bedroom in darkness. She throws off her wet clothes and, wearing only a slip and a silk blouse, gets into the large bed she used to share with her husband, Paul. For fourteen years, they lay there together. On the living-room mantelpiece were stacked the invitations to conferences and poetry readings and private views and dinner parties: Paul and Marianne, Marianne and Paul.
Not that she regrets the passing of that bit of her life. Not at all. And now, as she feels a sweet sleep coming near, waiting, coming nearer, she thinks, not for the first time, I only endured it for so long for the sake of Nico.
She knows she’s slept for a few minutes but no more. She’s warm. The pain in her head hasn’t diminished. She lies very still.
She’s been woken by something she can’t identify. She raises her head, just an inch or two off the pillow, and listens. She can hear the rain on the window and the distant traffic of the boulevard. They’re utterly familiar sounds and yet it seems to Marianne as if she hasn’t heard them in conjunction with each other for a long, long time. It’s as if there’s been some vacant space between her and them. In a busy life, do you stop hearing the ordinary, the everyday? Or do you hear so much, so continuously, that half of it goes unregistered?
Marianne lowers her head onto the soft pillow. And she thinks, it was the past that woke me. I was dreaming about my parents, Otto and Lucie, dreaming myself back in our old apartment that smelled of pipe tobacco and cake baking. I was in my child’s room and it was the sound I could hear from my child’s bed that woke me up. It was one of those noises that used to come from the unoccupied room.
Marianne’s room was at the end of the corridor. It had a small window that looked out over a courtyard, where a rusty fountain splashed during heatwaves and was silent the rest of the year. Hers was the ‘last’ room in the flat. The lives of their neighbours began on the other side of her wall. Their names were Joseph and Joanna Stephano. You could hear them from the bathroom, which was next to their kitchen. You could hear a kettle whistling and crockery smashing on the tiles and their voices shouting. (‘Why do they quarrel so?’ says Lucie. ‘It’s just their nature,’ says Otto.) But in her little bedroom, Marianne hardly ever heard them. So she’d worked out that the room next to hers was empty. It may have been a guest room where no guests ever came, or a fusty dining room that was never used, or even a box room kept closed and locked. And yet it had a function. Just one. It was where Joanna Stephano came to cry.
Marianne thinks, certain sounds from the past are never forgotten. You come out of an important three-day conference and the crying of Joanna Stephano returns to you more clearly than the voices of the conference speakers. Once, it continued most of the night. You sat up and tapped on the wall, very lightly. You wished you’d learned Morse code so that you could send a message of consolation. At dawn, you heard Joseph Stephano start to call Joanna’s name and, after that, you went to sleep.
But then. You heard something else. Later that same year or in the year that followed, when you would have been nine. Something that you never understood. Or did you? Was there an explanation which you once knew and have now forgotten?
It was a noise like a door creaking, a sound out of a Gothic tale. A creak, a squeak, wood against wood, wood against iron? Something opening, slowly, slowly. You heard it in the middle of the night. It woke you and you listened and you thought, what if the thing that’s making this sound were to come through from the unoccupied room into my room?
Later – how much later? – Otto knelt down and held her and said: ‘Try to forget it, Marianne.’ In fact, she remembers now, Otto and Lucie kept on saying this: ‘Try to forget it, sweetheart. Put it out of your mind.’ But what were they talking about? Were they talking about the thing that caused the noise that night or about something else? What happened to Joseph and Joanna Stephano? Marianne is sure that in that building, somewhere in her childhood, there was another event. It took place on the stairs. Did it? On the dark stone stairs? If Otto and Lucie were alive, Marianne would call them up and they would remember, but Lucie has been dead for four years and Otto for two. Marianne is alone in her apartment. The time of families is gone.
Marianne is wide awake now. She decides she will go and make the tea, even eat something, perhaps, and then come back to bed, switch on the early evening news. She reaches out and puts on the bedside light. She sits up. The room is painted yellow. There are yellow and blue drapes at the window. On the opposite wall is an oil painting of a naked woman on a hard chair.
She looks at these things: the yellow walls, the curtains, the picture. She looks at the lamp she’s just switched on. She looks at the book beside the lamp and the digital alarm clock on top of the book. She looks at the duvet, which is blue and white cotton.
This is not her room.
She remembers how her room looks. The walls are beige, the curtains white. By her bed is a photo of Nico.
This is not her apartment.
She is in bed in someone else’s apartment. This is not even her city. It used to be her city, but it isn’t any more.
Marianne fights her way out of the bed and snatches up her skirt. The digital clock on top of the book says 18.49. Along the boulevard, the traffic will be heavy now, bringing people home from their offices and one of these people will be the owner of this apartment. In moments, now, she will hear the elevator stop on the second floor and hear the rattle of the elevator grille.
The elevator . . .
Marianne pauses in her dressing. The elevator is hers. No. Was once. That feeling of foolishness. She knows the elevator like she knows her own car.
She’s trying to straighten the bed. The bed is warm from her own body. Then she searches for her spoiled shoes. She’s swearing under her breath to stop herself from crying. Something has happened to send me mad. I’m as mad as a mad cow. I’m in someone else’s apartment and at this very moment the owner of the apartment is parking her car under the cherry trees.
Wait.
She knows the cherry trees. She knows the elevator. She had the keys to the apartment with a brown label attached to them.
Marianne wipes her face with her sleeve. She stares again at the room.
And then she sees it: hiding behind the yellow walls is the ghost of her old room, the bedroom she shared with Paul for fourteen years. She had walked a mile through the rain, believing she was going home. She’d become, in a few hours, just like one of her patients who believe that a hospital ward is a university or a room in a sheltered house an Italian pensione. So she knows it now without any doubt: something has occurred in the last twenty-four hours to cause this damage. But she has no recollection of what it is. The one and only clue to it could be the surgical gloves.
She puts on her mac and grabs her briefcase. She goes out of the flat and slams the door behind her. As she tries to run down the stairs, she remembers how Nico used to race the elevator. But she hadn’t really liked the game. She worried that he’d fall and gash his head on the stone.
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She goes into the first café on the corner of the boulevard. She chooses a quiet table and orders coffee, not tea, and bread and soup and a glass of cognac. She asks the waiter to bring her four aspirin. The café is busy and she sits back on the banquette and closes her sore eyes and listens to the noise of conversation and laughter. She wishes her feet were dry and that the pain in her head would go. She remembers saying one day to Petra: ‘I’ve always sympathised with the men and women in legends and fairy tales who sell their mules and their souls for trivial things.’
She could almost sleep, here in the warm café, lulled by arrivals and departures. But her food comes and wakes her. She takes the aspirin and begins on the soup, then the bread, then the coffee. She eats and drinks it all together – soup, bread, coffee, cognac. She can’t remember when her last meal was or where.
When she’s eaten and drunk everything, she leans back against the leather of the banquette and lights a cigarette. Out in the shadowy past, Otto, survivor of the death camps, says: ‘People never think, when they’re in a warm café, about the possibility of certain things. They don’t consider that there could be bodies in the river, that bread could one day be scarce. To have these realisations, they have to go out into the street again.’
Marianne will have to go out into the street again. She can’t sleep on the café banquette, but by leaning against it she’s located the source of her pain. There’s a lump on the crown of her head and a scab of blood in her hair. At some time between the second day and the last day of the conference, she fell and hit her head or someone hit her. This, at least, it is now possible to assume. And there is also a second assumption. She no longer lives in this city and therefore must be staying at a hotel or with old friends. In her briefcase is her address book containing the names and addresses of all her friends in the world. Some are as far away as Japan and Australia, but most are still in Europe.