by Rose Tremain
‘What?’ asks Ellen.
I point to the CD box. ‘What else did Sandra tell you?’
‘Nothing much,’ says Ellen.
This cannot be true. ‘Tell,’ I say.
‘She said she could never understand how you could read with a radio on, and another radio blaring next door.’
I point out that when you walk down the street there’s stuff going on all around you: people talking, music coming out of cars and shops, and while all that’s going on you’re seeing adverts and glimpses of newspapers and magazines and TVs in shop windows. ‘Think of it as an indoor street,’ I tell her.
It takes a while for me to say this, and Ellen listens attentively, frowning, as if listening to someone to whom English does not come easily. When I’ve finished, she says: ‘But you don’t read in the street, do you?’
‘OK. But you read in the park, no?’
‘Suppose so,’ she says, unpersuaded, smoothing the fresh bedlinen.
‘Sandra hated this stuff,’ I tell her. She knows Sandra hated it. ‘What about you?’ I ask.
‘Sounds like a mad person throwing cutlery down the stairs,’ she says. ‘I’ll go and get your breakfast.’
Ambroise Paré on the meaning of dreams: ‘Those who abound with phlegm dream of floods, snows, showers and inundations, and falling from high places … Those who abound in blood dream of marriages, dances, embracings of women, feasts, jests, laughter, or orchards and gardens.’
The quartet dines together, and Charlie produces a fine bottle of Burgundy to mark the occasion. I dribble profusely; the food – a nice-looking assemblage of chicken fillets and pine nuts and raisins and rice, over which Janina has worked for hours, no doubt – tastes of oatmeal. Ellen cuts up my portion of meat with the minimum of fuss. Conversation sporadic and unrelaxed; I’d rather be in my room. Charlie is giving Ellen a summary of his day at the office when the doorbell rings. Janina answers, and returns two minutes later, nicely flushed. The caller was some horrible woman who wants to become a local councillor, she says. There’s a rumour that the council is going to be taking a lot of asylum seekers, and this woman thinks our money should be spent on better things – things that benefit us, the community. Janina called her a Nazi and sent her away with a flea in her ear. ‘There are so many people like that around here,’ Janina informs Ellen. ‘They want the government to crack down on the immigrants, but they’re happy to pay a Polish girl a pittance to keep their house spick and span.’ Charles gives her a light slap on the shoulder. ‘That’s my girl,’ he says, pulling a face of comic alarm. ‘My wife likes a scrap,’ he says, ‘but I’ll do anything for a quiet life. Mr Risk-Averse, that’s me.’ Janina says this isn’t true – he’d taken risks with the business, and they’d paid off. A brief passage of affectionate bickering ensues, for Ellen’s benefit.
Ellen out for an hour in the morning, to meet Roy, the exhusband. They have one or two things to discuss; nothing major, she says. She suggests that I might like to sit in the garden, as it’s such a nice day. I stay in my room instead, reading in the chair by the window. At twelve I see Ellen at the end of the road; viewed through the telescope, her face suggests that the encounter has not gone well. ‘Everything OK?’ I enquire, when she brings in the lunch.
‘Fine,’ she says.
‘Not how it looked,’ I say.
‘That’s just the way the face hangs,’ she answers. ‘It’s all going south.’
‘Tell me.’
‘There’s nothing to say.’
It’s obvious that she and Roy argued. ‘Tell me, please,’ I wheedle. ‘Come on, tell me,’ I go on, irritatingly.
‘That’s enough, Daniel,’ says Ellen. ‘Behave.’
Tanizaki writes that the Japanese sensibility prefers tarnished silver to polished, the shadowy lustre of jade to the crass glitter of precious stones. The gold decoration of Japanese lacquer-work, he says, must be seen in candlelight, not in the glare of electricity.
Ellen is drying my back and I notice, reflected in the window, her gaze slipping over the skin. A wince of pity, and I can almost hear the question being whispered: ‘I wonder who you’d be if you didn’t look like this?’ Answer: ‘Well, I wouldn’t exist, would I?’
I tell her about the count and countess, a long time ago in Italy, who had a daughter who was a dwarf. They raised her in a house in which all the staff were dwarves, and never allowed her out, so she grew up thinking that her parents were giants. Not sure if I’ve read this story or made it up. The former, I think.
The Death of Marat
NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE (born Worcester, 1957) grew up in the Far East and South America. After a stint making documentaries for the BBC, he joined The Times and then became literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. A winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask prizes, he has written five novels, including The Dancer Upstairs (which was filmed by John Malkovich), and an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin. His latest novel is Secrets of the Sea (2007), set in Tasmania, where since 1999 he has lived for part of each year. He is currently editing Bruce Chatwin’s letters.
WHO IS DILYS HOSKINS? A 55-year-old widow with white hair and sharp blue eyes that look out from unintendedly fashionable hornrims. The mother of two children, both now in their twenties. Widowed for eight years. Born on the east coast of Africa in a country of high-duned beaches, deep lakes, fertile plains, intractable marshes and deserts. A woman to whom the following words might apply were you to speak with neighbours in her run-down apartment block: detached, resourceful, a hard barterer, ladylike. In other words, a most improbable assassin.
She is at the end of her long month in London. Her daughter Rachel has just given birth to Dilys’s first grand-child, an eight-pound boy with a piercing cry. Dilys has been staying in the converted basement of Rachel’s terraced house in Putney, helping out. In five days’ time, she will fly to Australia for her son Robin’s graduation ceremony, from his school of architecture in Perth, before returning to her one-roomed flat in her African capital, into which she moved after the government confiscated Coral Tree Farm. She does not deny the surplus of fear that spills out when she considers the chaos that awaits her, or the poisonous sense of her own impotence. She is only one untrained person. What can she do to help? She is not a nurse, not a doctor; she is a farmer’s wife who for the past eight and a half years has wanted a husband and a farm. But her mind is made up.
Her children have been emailing each other. They don’t think that she should return. She has a strained relationship with both.
On a rainy evening in the last week of her visit, Dilys stands in her daughter’s kitchen, waiting for a pot of tea to brew, when she hears Rachel call in an urgent voice: ‘Mum, you’ve got to come. He’s on the telly.’
The word ‘he’ burns on her breath.
Dilys impatiently fills two mugs, then takes them into the living room where, seated on a large sofa beside her breastfeeding daughter, she watches, over her tea, the still-boyish features of her president denying the epidemic.
It is a novelty for Dilys to observe how outsiders report on her country. There is no one to contradict the President from within. Foreign journalists are forbidden. When Dilys is at home, her short-wave radio is jammed to blazes. Russia says nothing; China is just as feeble. But here on the BBC there are regular news items.
‘Nay, there is no epidemic,’ the President insists in his mission-school, old-fashioned English, jabbing his forefinger at an appreciative crowd. It is a rumour put about by the nefarious white minority with the Europeans and Americans behind them. It is the Europeans and Americans who are responsible for the food queues, the fuel queues; who even now are intercepting vital oil supplies on the high seas and scheming to recolonise the country with the assistance of greedy racist usurpers … He is dressed in his signature blue kaftan and a white baseball cap which looks ridiculous perched on top of his thick black shock of hair.
Rachel listens to the hectoring voice. Her baby,
unlatched momentarily from its breast, gives a small air-sucking convulsion, then reclamps its gums around the dark purple bullet of her nipple.
Neither Dilys nor Rachel says what’s on their mind. The words have been used over and over:
You malignant bungler. Only one man is responsible for reducing the country to ruin; everywhere the stink of death, disease gnawing its way from village to village, farms deserted, motherless children grovelling for food through stacks of uncollected garbage; and night after night the pick-axe handles rising and falling, the bloodshed, the mutilations, the rapes, the abductions. One man, Mr Pointer.
What her daughter does say: ‘I’ve had another message from Robin. He says you’re mad. You’ve got a round-the-world ticket – all you have to do is keep flying till you get back to London and I’ll pick you up again at Heathrow.’
Dilys swallows another watery sip of Darjeeling and says nothing.
Irked, Rachel cradles her baby. ‘I know it’s hard, Mum. It was our home, too.’
She lapses into silence. She has a blonde fringe and her father’s small chin. Then, in a reasonable voice: ‘Listen, I’ve spoken again to Tim about the basement. It’s not what you’re used to, but you’d have your own entrance.’
‘Robin is getting quite serious about this Australian girl?’ with great firmness.
‘For God’s sake, Mother!’
Rachel’s emotions are running very close to the surface. She is, however, an old hand at manipulating her mother.
Dilys slams down the mug. ‘I am going back, Rachel,’ in a flaming tone. ‘And nothing you, Robbie or your husband can say will stop me. It’s where I belong.’
Her ferocity shakes them both. Arms folded, she sits at a perpendicular angle and watches her daughter cover the baby’s ears, shielding it from the shouting.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Rachel hisses, and turns the child towards the television screen, giving it an uninterrupted view of an embroidered blue kaftan and a brushed-up halo of black hair. She prepares to leave the room. ‘Where does this anger come from? You can be angry, but not that angry.’
Next morning, to avoid the stress of another argument, Dilys borrows Rachel’s umbrella and leaves the already cramped house and waits for a bus to take her to Piccadilly. It’s a midsummer morning, but the rain has not stopped since she arrived in London. At last, a bus sloshes to a halt. When a teenage boy – white and spotty, with wires trailing from under his woollen cap – attempts to barge past her onto it, she grabs his arm. ‘Excuse me.’
She elbows her way ahead of the boy to buy her ticket and is mildly astonished to be told that the fare is the same as a week ago. She gives the driver the right coins and a grateful, shaky smile, and pockets her ticket and moves along to the rear of the bus.
Settled into her seat, Dilys feels foolish for having exploded. She sits back and casts her eye around the other passengers. The faces are white, black, brown, yellow – and mostly British, presumably. As the bus crosses the Thames, she floats the opinion that what she is seeking is reassurance. She is looking for someone like her. Because isn’t what she faces merely the lot of all 55-year-old women of a ‘certain generation’ who have disappeared on themselves in the quicksand of domestic life?
She gazes out over the river at the dark mob of clouds assembled in the London sky. But the tunnelling mole of her anger hasn’t gone away.
When Dilys was a young mother, her friends called her ‘Sleeping Beauty’. A feisty and rather plump child, she had had the handicap of a late-blooming beauty. Suddenly to find herself at twenty-eight turning heads was almost more disorienting to her than the birth of her first child, which followed closely after. Overnight, along with the extra weight that had insulated her, she lost her pluckiness and confidence. With the arrival of cheekbones, she became benign, mild-mannered, accommodating. Now Dilys – she who flies off the handle at the tiniest provocation – has repossessed her childhood ferocity. Other people might think that she has turned into someone new, but they are quite wrong. You can’t remake yourself into who you are not. On the other hand, you can return to the person you once were. She is simply stretching the muscles, dormant for so long, of the unruly girl.
Four impervious rows ahead, the teenager watches the rain-spattered window, swaying his head from side to side.
Thirty-five minutes later, Dilys steps down opposite the Ritz and is walking past the Royal Academy, feeling cold and wet and oppressed, when she notices on the railing a framed poster for a Munch exhibition and is reminded of the reaction on her daughter’s face the night before. Dilys can’t recall her last visit to an art gallery. Her fine white hair twinkling with raindrops, she collapses her umbrella and goes in.
The painting hangs in the furthest room. Dilys doesn’t see it at first. Her eyes glide dutifully from wall to wall and then her heart stops. A face looks out at her, into her – sparking a shock of recognition.
It’s hard for Dilys to explain, this giddying affinity she feels for the young woman with tangled yellow hair. The small breasts and swollen belly remind her of the desperate black girls in her East African capital. But the pale colour of the skin – squeezed fiercely from the tube and painted in rapid horizontal brushstrokes, like slashes – is her own. The colour of celery, white clock towers, pith helmets.
Only closer up does she see that the young woman is not alone: stretched out on a bed behind her, also naked, is a man with a moustache.
Dilys fumbles with her audio-guide and learns from a dispassionate voice that the man is the French revolutionary leader Marat; and the woman – who has gained access to Marat on the pretext of revealing a plot against him – Charlotte Corday. ‘Munch completed the work in 1907, a year before his breakdown …’
The subject of the painting surprises Dilys. The two figures are so modern, like lovers in a bedsit. And, while she has heard of Marat, she knows nothing about Charlotte Corday – except that she famously stabbed Marat in his bath. She definitely wasn’t in the painting by Jacques Louis David. Who is she? How did she kill him?
She lifts her head and meets the stare of the assassin. The expression is vacant, corpse-like (even the dead man on the bed seems more alive), but it goes on snatching at Dilys.
Some time later, Dilys steps back from The Death of Marat. The painting has entered her marrow. The signalling emptiness of the young woman’s face, its aura of aloneness, confronts Dilys with the bleaching of the canvas of her own existence. She feels boiling over all the things that she can’t – or won’t – discuss with Rachel and Robin. They are the one family link left, but their thrust to start again, to build new lives in Britain and Australia, has deafened her children. Dilys knows the pattern too well – she has taught it to them: In order to survive, you have to forget. You have to. But her oblivion, so painstakingly achieved, is unravelling.
As she walks back to the cloakroom, the outsized feeling takes hold of Dilys to challenge one of these people entering the Royal Academy: ‘Are you aware that my president thinks you are supposed to be enjoying an unholy alliance with a few defenceless farmers who live in another continent?’
She’d expect shrugging shoulders. ‘Sorry, the situation sounds ghastly,’ as they shove past. And over the shoulder, ‘Didn’t you choose to stay? Isn’t that what happens in Africa?’ Or, if they know some history, ‘Isn’t he simply taking back land seized by whites in the 1890s?’
In her obstinate mind she runs after them, shakes them, violated by their indifference. ‘I’m sorry, but did you know that eight out of ten of these ‘settler vermin’, my late husband included, bought their farms since independence – that is to say, under the President’s very own laws?’
There is so much that she would like to get off her chest. She could stand here and talk all week and there’d be plenty left over. But how fast the blinds rattle down whenever she tries to explain – her parents had not come out until after the early days, when they were busy killing people; she does not carry a gun; did not call he
r dog after the President or sing, ‘Climb the hill, baboon’. She is not one of those excruciating ‘whenwes’, who begin each backward-groping conversation ‘When we lived in ….’ But even though she isn’t one of those, Africa is the only place she knows. She is an African just as much as her president is. Britain owes her nothing. All she has in common with the original pioneers – and with some of the crowd in the Munch exhibition – is the whiteness of her skin.
One person who understands is a mad, dead Norwegian painter. In the catalogue, she reads that Munch said he was pregnant with his painting The Death of Marat for nine years.
Dilys is not due to leave for Australia until Friday evening. Tingling with the novelty of being truly herself, she will spend her remaining afternoons in London in the Putney library, digging out books on the French Revolution.
Charlotte Corday arrived in Paris on a blazing July afternoon, battling her way through crowds all dressed in tricoloured cockades and soft liberty caps, and booked into the Auberge de Provence, a stuffy first-floor room overlooking the Rue des Vieux Augustins. The porter put down her bulging leather bag and without saying anything drew open the heavy curtains. The nosy summer sunshine picked out a marble-topped desk and an unmade bed. She turned to the porter, a big-boned man, slightly deaf with a box jaw that hung open, and asked him to fetch a chambermaid to make up the bed and then to bring her a pen, ink, some paper.
That afternoon, she set down the words she had rehearsed in her head on the journey from Caen. She wrote quickly, no crossings out. The peace of France depended on the fulfilment of the law. She was not breaking it by killing a man who had been so universally condemned. If she was guilty, then Hercules too was guilty when he killed Geryon and Cacus. But did Hercules ever meet a monster so odious?
She folded the sheet six times and pinned it to her baptismal certificate.
This was the conviction she had reached: Marat had to be killed and peace restored.
