by Rose Tremain
No one is so strong as the woman who stands alone. She had asked nobody for help, breathed not a word of her plan to anyone. Those who knew her imagined she was in England. Before departing Caen, she had written to her father: ‘I am going to England because I do not believe one can live happily and quietly in France for a very long while to come.’
A whole nation can pay for the folly of one man. She was going to restore peace to the world by ridding it of a monster.
Who is this Dilys Hoskins who is so infatuated with Charlotte Corday and is now seated in the economy-class cabin on the overnight flight to Singapore? A woman in her imperfections and vanities not markedly different from any other passenger. Not a hero as a consequence of her determination to stay put, but a menopausal widow with nowhere else that she wants to go – except home. A woman who has no answer to the question: At what point are you entitled to feel part of the land where you were born; at what point do you earn your stake in its living earth?
She glances at the young couple in her row, engrossed in their film. Do you know what is going on, how bad? If you do not know, how can you help? But if you knew how bad it was, would you be able to help?
The newspaper in her lap tells her that the epidemic is spreading, aggravated by the rains. There is a photograph of an empty hospital, the wards deserted. Two children sit on the steps waiting for their parents to show up. The President has not been seen in public for several days.
‘The tragedy’, says a representative from an aid agency, ‘is that this disease is deadly but curable.’
Her hard-headed husband once said to her with reddened eyes in the days after they lost their farm: ‘I would do it, given the chance.’
‘I know you would, darling,’ she said and squeezed his hand as he had grabbed hers at the start of her labour with Rachel, and two years later with Robin.
That’s how deep it was with Miles – he wouldn’t vote again for the President to save his soul from hell. But his cancer went deeper.
Her meal tray cleared and the overhead lights switched off, Dilys tries to sleep. But her feet are swelling up and a shadow flitting from side to side across the back of her mind is preventing her.
Charlotte Corday woke early on that hot Saturday morning in July, and put on a simple brown dress of piqué cotton, a white linen fichu that she tucked into her bodice, a black hat. All very quiet and sober.
It was 7.30 a.m. when Madame Grollier, the hotelier, unlocked the front door to let her out. The shops were not yet open. She reached the Palais Royal within twenty minutes and went for a walk around the public gardens. The plants were shrivelled and coated in dust. She made ten circuits and then left the gardens and walked up the Galeries de Bois to number 177, where a burly man was pulling open the shutters. In the window she spotted a display of cutlery. The man, Monsieur Barbu, the shop’s owner, invited her in. She was looking for a kitchen knife, she told him; something to pare fruit with. He took out a velvet-lined tray and she chose a black-handled knife with a six-inch steel blade. The handle was carved from ebony and had two rings on it – and he demonstrated how it might be hung from a shelf or a cook’s belt. She paid forty sous for the knife, which came in a green leather sheath, and slid it into her pocket, and thanked him and walked out.
On her way back to the gardens, she bought a newspaper and sat on a green bench to read it. The news from Orléans was that nine men were to be guillotined following an attempt to murder Marat’s deputy. She put down the newspaper, the breath pushed out of her. At that moment a small boy running past fell over. He yelped in pain and looked up at her, chin wrinkling, his face pressed to the path. Their eyes met and, though from a different angle, each saw that the other wanted to cry, and perhaps because of this recognition both held back from actually doing so. She helped the boy to his feet and stroked his applered cheek, smiling, a small grave smile of sadness, and he stumbled off, rubbing the gravel from his knees, with an exaggerated limp.
‘Black Robespierre’ is what they had called him, some of the farmers she grew up with. The same ones who fled abroad after his election. ‘You wait, Dilys,’ as they packed their belongings. ‘Beneath that preposterous kaftan, there’ll always be a Mao collar.’ She wanted not to argue, but believe. She was in her mid-twenties then, Rachel’s age, and had faith in the President and the vision he articulated for their (yes, their) country in his shy, polite, wedding photographer’s voice. These farmers were taking the Yellow Route out, she couldn’t help thinking. She went to one of their yard sales and bought a Black & Decker drill with some bits missing and a Zenith short-wave transistor radio.
And how reasonable the President appeared at the outset. All that stuff about forgiveness, his passion for peace, of wanting to take everyone with him. The President wanted the whites to stay, help rebuild. There would be no retribution, a little redistribution maybe, in time; but revenge, nay, not that. He appoints a white farmer as his agricultural minister to safeguard the farmers’ future. He listens attentively, in his blue kaftan. He has a new name: Mr Pointer, the people call him with affection – because he always points his finger when speaking. He’s a messianic figure. Everyone wants to meet him.
So her husband takes Mr Pointer at his word. Her husband in his floppy green hat who loved lemon cream biscuits and fine-shredded marmalade and the tangos of Carlos Gardel. Who saw the worst in everyone only after he had seen the best. One always admires the qualities in people that one lacks oneself. Miles’s assertive manner was the same towards everyone. A man whose unbelievable bluntness went hand in hand with an extreme honesty. When they met, he was the owner of a thriving printer’s shop on the capital’s main street, but with a hankering for the land: land that Mr Pointer with outstretched arms was urging people such as Miles to take up.
‘The secret of success in life’, Miles tells Dilys as if she were his apprentice and not his wife, and as she would later tell their children, ‘is to be ready when your opportunity comes – and go for it.’ He sells his printing business and with their joint savings they buy a small tobacco farm twelve miles inland from the sea. They invest in a herd of milk-producing cows. They install a new hand-pump in the chicken-yard to draw up water from the aquifer. They renovate the house, a modest whitewashed single-storey building at the top of a long lawn hedged with thorn bushes in which plum-coloured starlings like to nest, and a view beneath a thrilling sky over a horizon tufted with elephant grass. The sandy soil needed plenty of fertiliser, but the river gave water all year round. She would watch her children slide down the water-smoothed rocks and go exploring with them on an escarpment veined with an ancient stone terrace.
She needs to be useful. She starts up a school, employing two teachers; she creates a library for the village; she ensures that the workers have a nice place to live in. To use her president’s words, she is doing her best ‘to move forward together’. She has grown up playing with African children. It doesn’t always make you a non-racist, but in her case the strong feelings that they all form part of one scrappy tribe have stayed. Although she is never so assertive or abrupt as her husband, she treats Africans as does Miles, as she would Europeans, and they like her for it. They notice that Sleeping Beauty is increasingly picking up her husband’s ways, but at least they know that when she is being rude to them she would behave no differently towards white people. Everyone waves at her when she drives around – unlike at the next property, where the farm workers glower.
Dilys was educated in the capital in the same school as her mother. In her French class she studied Camus. She envied him when he wrote, ‘This earth remains my first and last love.’ At Coral Tree Farm, she learns to understand Camus’s sympathy for the land. During harvest time, she is never out of the tobacco shed. Each time she grades a leaf and rubs the ribbed arteries beneath the tips of her fingers, she feels an immediate connection with those who have cropped the plant and with the soil that has produced it; an involvement which passes beyond intimacy. The tobacco leaf, like the warm fr
othing milk that she squeezes from the cows, is tangible, something she can pinch and smell. It is life itself.
Unlike her liberal friends, Dilys is unsentimental about Africans; she has seen enough to know that Africa is a tough place – the Troubles have taught her that. But it’s only when living on the farm that she experiences the authentic sense of Africa being her place. As though a book she is reading in another language has shifted imperceptibly into her language.
At what point did the truth come tumbling down on her that Black Robespierre had diddled – Miles’s word – his people? At what point did the bluebottle settle on the lens to reveal that the President’s promise of integration was just a fiction? Specifically, at what point did the quiet, shy, friendless wedding photographer become the raucous shock-haired demagogue in a baseball cap, urging his thugs to turn on settler vermin like the Hoskins family? In other words, at what point did Mr Pointer decide to punish her for the white taint of her skin?
The questions are like the furious horizontal strokes of Munch’s brush.
The driver of the hackney cab in the Place des Victoires had no idea where Marat lived and had to climb down and amble along the rank asking his colleagues. ‘30 Rue des Cordeliers,’ one of them yelled. ‘Just off Faubourg Saint-Germain.’ He heaved himself back up and shortly before eleven o’clock dropped her off outside a tall grey shabby house with shops on either side.
Charlotte walked through an empty porch into a courtyard where two women chatted in the shadow of an arcade.
She asked: ‘Citizen Marat?’
‘Staircase on the right,’ nodded one of them, her eyes lingering on this fastidiously dressed, rather beautiful young woman with enlarged blue humourless eyes.
She crossed the courtyard and ran up the steps, following the iron balustrade to the top of the staircase. The bell pull was a curtain rod with a makeshift canvas handle. She tugged it. Then stepped back, patting down her bodice where she had concealed the knife.
A muffled sound of females talking. Then the door opened and a woman stood there, biting her lip. The disarray in her face mimicked the chaos of the hallway behind. Tiles missing on the floor. Filthy wallpaper – patterned with broken Doric columns. And the rancid smell of over-fried fish.
‘What do you want?’
She explained herself in a composed voice. She wanted to meet Marat. It was urgent. She had vital news – about a planned insurrection in Caen.
‘Out of the question,’ the woman said brusquely. ‘Marat is sick. He can’t see anyone.’
‘What if I come back tomorrow?’
Just then another woman appeared in the doorway: Marat’s mistress, Simone. She seconded everything that her younger sister had said. No, she can’t make an appointment. It’s impossible to say when she’ll be able to see him, when he’ll be better.
‘Then I shall go home and write to him,’ she replied calmly, resisting every cell in her body that screamed for her to fight her way beyond them.
Dilys breaks the long flight to Perth with a stopover in Singapore. At the insistence of her son, she is booked for two restorative nights into the Raffles Plaza. The steady hum of the air-conditioning drives out the noise of the city twelve floors below. But she cannot sleep. She wakes and does not know where she is, and for a moment her husband is alive and she is in Africa still.
She is sitting at her tinny little table, trying to lose herself in a novel, when Beauty her housemaid bursts in.
‘Mrs Hoskins, you must come …’
Dilys barely keeps up with Beauty as they run to the end of the lawn. She hears the cries from behind the thorn bushes. The cow is stumbling and stopping every few steps, its intestines wrapped around its legs like South American bolas. The grass glistens red from the slashed udders. A head twists around at a strange angle, sensing her presence, and the look in the creature’s eyes sends Dilys racing back to the house.
She grabs the keys, her breath coming in short thrusts. She has to kill it. And she doesn’t know how. She needs Miles …
The agonised bellows continue to reach her as she struggles to unlock his gun cabinet. Hunting is man’s business. But her husband has taken the children for safekeeping to a cousin’s house in the capital and will not be back until next day.
She pulls out the rifle and a handful of bullets. She has never killed an animal, other than a chicken when Beauty was away. Miles had infuriated her by saying: ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll do it. You’ll never be able to do it,’ and she had not let him – she had jolly well halal-killed the chicken exactly as Beauty had taught her.
But a chicken was not a cow.
She stares at the bullets loose in her palm. The same panic has assaulted Dilys ever since Miles’s cancer was diagnosed. The panic that tells her he isn’t going to be around and she will have to do more and more and she doesn’t know how.
That unearthly lowing, it’s intolerable.
Through the mesh window – another horrible cry. And she knows in a small, dry, cold and ruthless part of her, in a space beyond the emotions and the histrionics and the tears, that she has no choice. Only she can put the animal out of its suffering. There is only her.
The rifle is unexpectedly light. She walks with a pallbearer’s tread back down the lawn. It isn’t that she’s unaware of the path she must take. All her life, she has been an observant passenger. But she has never done the driving, and now she has to.
On the other side of the hedge, something is still staggering. A mouth wheezes open and a tongue curls up, stiff, blue, abnormally long. She fumbles and pulls the trigger.
In the dying light, she walks over to the office shed and raises Peter Trasenster on the battery-powered radio. The neighbouring white farmers do a security roll-call every night. Until now the area has been peaceful; their road is the only road into the capital without a curfew. But a fortnight ago, Coral Tree Farm was gazetted in the government newspaper. Ninety days to vacate. Her sick husband is running around calling on lawyers to dispute it.
Trying not to sound melodramatic, she explains to Peter what has happened. He tells her to stay where she is, a local patrol will come by and check. She locks the rifle in the gun cabinet and crosses the lawn and bolts the doors.
Afterwards, no one believed it. Sleeping Beauty – this mild-mannered woman – shooting a cow. Her children were incredulous.
Back in her hotel room, Charlotte Corday manoeuvred the baptismal certificate out from under her breasts, along with the piece of paper attached to it, containing her manifesto. Next, she removed the knife and placed it on the desk behind the ink bottle. She stared at it for a moment, before reaching out and taking a fresh sheet of paper.
Her letter written, she folded it into an envelope, scribbled Marat’s name and address on the outside, and rang for the porter. ‘Be sure to deliver this by seven o’clock this evening.’
Then she asked Madame Grollier to arrange for a hairdresser to be sent up.
It was something about the sisters, their strong, careless faces. She decided that Marat had a keen eye for women. She was too primly dressed this morning. This time, she would arouse the ex-monk’s vanity.
The timid young coiffeur who knocked on her door at 3 p.m. found her waiting for him, already wearing a loose white bombazine gown with a grey underskirt, a low-cut bodice, and over her shoulders a rose gauze scarf. For the next hour he stood behind her, gathering the gold tresses from her round lovely face and braiding them into a single garlic string that fell down the middle of her back.
All this time, she sat there in the solipsism of her conviction, not saying anything. Detached. Her eyes on the marble-topped desk and the knife in its green leather sheath. Absolutely indifferent to what his hands were doing.
He sprayed her hair and throat with cologne and powder.
When she walked downstairs at six-thirty on this baking July evening, it took Madame Grollier a second or two to connect the white-gowned woman who descended in high-heeled shoes, wearing an emerald cockad
e hat, and fanning her scented face with a gloved hand, and the person who arrived three days earlier from the Normandy countryside with cake crumbs on her sleeve.
Dilys cannot hear them, since bare feet make little noise; and then they are there.
A high-pitched voice draws her from her chair. She parts the curtain and, when she sees who is out there, motions that she is coming. Before leaving the room, she pauses at Miles’s desk to pick up something.
The angry voice speaks again as she enters the hall. ‘Open this door or we’ll fuck you up, mamma.’
She unbolts the door and stands in the feeble porch light. Assembled before her, a silent ominous mob stretching back to the tobacco shed. Leather jackets, green caps, red and yellow T-shirts printed with Mr Pointer’s smiling face.
A few of the young men carry branches torn from the trees. Others clutch whips made from fan belts and bicycle spokes. Their faces gleam with the prospect of violence.
‘What do you want?’ addressing their leader. As if she doesn’t know.
He raises a golf club. Solidified in its grooved metal head, the mood of menace and uncertainty that has lurked in the background these past months.
‘We have come to take your land.’
She runs her eyes over the faces, recognising one.
‘Elias?’
When he was a boy, she had bought Elias reading glasses so that he could study.
He looks away.
Disappointed, she turns back to the man holding the golf club. Fresh blood is spattered across his T-shirt. She wonders if it was the cow’s blood.
‘How old are you?’ her eyes angry. Thinking of the cow. She can sense the blue veins standing out on her neck.
The question makes him uncomfortable. He wipes his nose on his leather sleeve.
‘Nineteen.’
‘Then you were born after the Troubles. That was the year I bought this house …’
He shakes his arm. ‘This land belongs to us. You white Kaffirs came and grabbed it long ago from our people.’
