by Rose Tremain
‘No, we didn’t,’ the rebellion rising in her voice. ‘I have this certificate from your government’ – she has stopped saying ‘our’ – ‘It specifies that it is not needed for resettlement.’
She shows it to him. It will get her nowhere. But she wants him to see it, this annoying young man who all of a sudden has made her feel middle-aged and powerless.
‘See there. “No Present Interest”. Signed by the courts. Your courts,’ harping on it.
He frowns at the legal language.
‘Mr Pointer makes the law, not the courts.’
‘This is still private property. If you don’t leave, I shall call the police.’
He laughs. The arrogant, unedited laughter of someone with the sanction of the provincial governor’s office. ‘The police will do nothing. We can do what we like.’ And rips it in half.
Dilys slams the door, bolts it, then seizing Beauty’s hand, runs through the house, out the back, to the office shed, thrusting her housegirl down beneath the desk. She’s not worried about being raped herself, but the story among the local farmers is that these idiots have been told to rape women like Beauty. To create babies who will vote for Mr Pointer.
Her hands vibrate as she radios the Trasensters. ‘Oscar Romeo Four Five.’ Across the lawn, she can see the lights being switched on one by one. She listens to the mob thumping on Rachel’s harmonium and singing hysterical songs of liberation as they tramp through the rooms. ‘We will find you, we will find you …’
‘Oscar Romeo Four Five.’
At last, she raises Vanessa Trasenster. ‘I need help.’
‘Isn’t Peter with you?’
‘White bitch, where are you?’
A golf club smashes through the panes. Hands stretch through the shattered glass and grope for her hair. A black tentacle fastens around the cable and rips it from the wall. When all of a sudden the baying stops and they are running off, piling onto the tractor with their booty. Car doors slam in the darkness. There’s the chatter of a radio. Then Peter Trasenster’s voice. ‘Dilys?’
In the morning, she walks through the rooms. The children’s blackboard broken to bits. Miles’s record collection. Her books. Even her son’s watch in fragments. And an acrid tang of urine – coming from where, she can’t tell.
Mr Pointer’s response? ‘This is a peaceful demonstration of people who are frustrated.’
Dilys is surprisingly undisturbed by the house invasion. She doesn’t perceive it exactly as a tea party at Government House – as one or two neighbours mutteringly suggest – but rather as part of her toughening-up process. What she can’t get used to, what unhinges her, is the imminent loss of the farm and the deteriorating effect that this has on Miles. Than her husband no one could be more finicky in the kitchen, but she notes that he has started to leave his knife by the sink, still covered in marmalade.
The hackney cab drew up outside 30 Rue des Cordeliers. She asked the driver to wait and walked in long strides through the porter’s lodge – empty as before – and up the stairs.
Her gloved hand tugged on the bell.
The door was swung open by a fat, one-eyed woman, wearing a man’s ill-fitting trousers. Visible in the dirty hallway behind was the pile of newspapers she had been folding – copies of L’Ami du Peuple, edited by Marat, and printed on the press which he and Simone had installed in their apartment.
Charlotte started to explain herself all over again.
But the fat woman interrupted. Marat was not seeing anyone. He was taking a bath.
Then would it be possible to find out if Marat has received her letter?
The fat woman glared at her. At the sight of that elegant hair-do and ravishing white bust, a vision of health and privilege, her face contracted. ‘Oh, he receives many letters,’ and turned to pick up another newspaper. ‘Sometimes too many.’
Before anyone could say anything, two men ran up the staircase and barged past. One waved an invoice that required signing. Another had come to take a bundle of newspapers to the War Office.
Angry, she stamped her foot and called out, trying to catch someone’s attention. ‘I have come from far away with important information that I need to deliver personally to the People’s Friend. There’s a plot against him. I have names!’
Simone, the mistress, appeared, attracted by all the hubbub. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ momentarily nonplussed by the summer dress and the hat with its knot of emerald ribbons.
‘Did he get my letter?’
‘Letter? I don’t think so.’
‘I have to see him.’
‘Maybe in two or three days.’
But a man was shouting something from inside the apartment.
Simone excused herself.
She waited, leaning against the wall, watching the fat, one-eyed woman who very deliberately folded another copy of next day’s edition of L’Ami du Peuple. Charlotte noted with horror that it called for the head of her friend Charles Barbaroux.
Suddenly, Simone was back. ‘He will see you.’
Dilys wonders why on earth her son has insisted on her spending two overnights in Singapore, where she knows no one. Unable to sleep, she decides to set out early for a stroll through the city centre.
The humidity hits Dilys the instant she steps outside. She looks right and left before deciding to head off in the direction of Orchard Road. The shops taunt her, their windows filled with filmy sarongs and skirts translucent as flies’ wings. Five minutes into her walk and sweat is meandering down her cheeks and neck. She feels disoriented, as if she has stood up in a hot bath. When she comes out into a park with spreading angsana and flame trees, and sees a bench, she flings herself down onto it. All she wants to do is strip.
Dizzy and flushed, she hauls off the burgundy cashmere cardigan that was a gift from her daughter. Her eyes blink with sunshine and sleep and the cardigan clings to her – she had exchanged it for a size smaller because she anticipated shedding the weight she put on in England. She allows it to fall on the bench while she lifts her elbows to let the air circulate. Then fishes inside her bag for a tissue and starts mopping her face.
She is looking about as if she expects the flame trees to lean forward and smother her, when the bench sinks a fraction beneath the weight of another woman.
Her dizziness passes. The park is still again when she falls into polite conversation.
The woman is waiting for her daughter to finish a swimming lesson. She speaks fluent English, but is not English. Tall, slim, mid-thirties, with her light brown hair pulled back and dressed in thin clothes that show her youthful shape, she reminds Dilys of a backpacker who once stayed at the farm. There is something vivacious about her, indiscreet. A woman who likes a good gossip, Dilys senses.
‘Are you from here?’ Dilys asks, wiping her forehead.
‘With a name like Van der Hart!’ No, she’s Dutch. She has been in Singapore two years. Her husband works for an investment bank; he is in hospital (‘an operation for a floating kidney’); he should be home by the weekend (‘Fingers crossed – otherwise, I’ll have to take him more books! Barend’s always got a book in his hand. I sometimes think he’s more interested in books than in me.’).
Dilys half-listens, not really engaged. Not accustomed to this humidity. Even sitting down with her cardigan off, she does not feel like herself.
Until Mrs Van der Hart looks at her. ‘You’re not from here, either.’
‘No,’ stuffing into her bag the beige-stained Kleenex.
‘Are you English?’
She could easily say yes. It’s what her children do. Stifling a yawn, she replies, ‘No,’ and braces herself for the inevitable.
‘Where are you from?’
Dilys smiles a little wanly. Even as her tongue moulds the word, she experiences the familiar embarrassment mingled with shame. But what answer can she give? She is not from anywhere else.
Certainly, she is not prepared for Mrs Van der Hart’s response.
Instead of changin
g the subject or commiserating or getting up and leaving, Mrs Van der Hart says to her: ‘Did you know your president is here?’
Dilys pales. She sits up, her back stiff as the cane that she always carried for snakes. Ever so slowly, she swings her head around. ‘My president?’
‘He is in the same hospital as my husband.’
‘What, in Singapore?’ she asks. ‘Here?’
‘He wanted my husband’s room, but the hospital wouldn’t allow it; he’s in the next room, which is smaller,’ Mrs Van der Hart says with satisfaction.
Her heart has stopped and her blood is flowing backwards. ‘I had no idea he was ill.’
‘Well, it can’t be too serious, because yesterday he had a tailor in with him,’ and before Dilys can ask how in God’s name Mrs Van der Hart has come by this information, ‘I get it all from Barend, who gets it from the nurses. He’s probably just having a service check. Dictators are high maintenance.’
Dilys listens to the gossip passed on by those talkative nurses to Mr Van der Hart. The ban preventing the President from travelling to Europe. The Cuban urologist whom he always insisted on visiting in Kuala Lumpur. The recent transfer of this doctor who has won his trust to a senior position in Singapore – ‘where they do things differently. Your president decided to follow him here for treatment, but this being Singapore it means he has to leave all his bodyguards outside, except one, who sleeps on the sofa. Barend found himself standing next to him in the toilet and realised that’s who it was.’
But she is standing up and waving. ‘There’s my daughter. I have to go.’
Over the road – a crocodile line of damp-haired children in white short-sleeved blouses and blue box-pleat belted pinafores.
Dilys studies her long pale fingers that have interlocked as if the future is written in her hands and she can read it. The skin on them is cracked, like a farmer’s. Her head tilts back. ‘Wait, what hospital did you say?’
‘The Stamford – on Arab Street.’
Her palms prickle. ‘Which floor?’ trying to discipline the excitement that has leaped into her eyes.
Simone led the way along a dark passage, smelling of printer’s ink, to a small narrow bathroom adjoining a bedroom. The air was thick and damper than a swamp.
He was lying in a clog-shaped copper bath, naked to the waist. A brown dressing gown was draped across his shoulders and a wet towel wrapped his forehead. Her first impression: his head – crowned with bunched-up tufts of lank black hair – was grotesquely large for his body. Her second: how leathery and inflamed his skin looked. It was the same texture as the knife’s sheath.
Balanced across the bath was a pine plank with papers on it and copies of newspapers speckled with drops of bathwater.
Simone retrieved an empty jug from beside the bath and went out, not closing the door.
He was correcting proofs. He reached the end of the paragraph and looked up.
That face. Yellow-grey eyes. A crushed nose. Long sparse hairs for eyebrows. And scabby scales blotching the deformed body. Leprosy had left its rodent’s teeth all over his bony shoulders and there was a bitter reek of vinegar that she traced to the towel.
The man in the bath leaned back at an angle. His bloodshot eyes exploring her with Calvinist intensity. Gravely, he assessed her perfect breasts. His eyes grazed over her throat, along her scarf, down her gown. No woman dressed like this, looking like this, had ever stepped into his bathroom.
He indicated with his pen a low stool below the window. She sat, her eyes sweeping the room, taking in more details: the map of their country pinned to the wall; a plate on the windowsill, heaped with sweetbreads.
‘Your name again?’ asked Marat.
‘Charlotte Corday,’ she told him, her gloved fingers fidgeting with her lace bodice the only outward sign of nervousness.
‘How old are you?’ His voice was powerful, melodious; out of keeping with his undeveloped frame.
‘Twenty-four.’
He tossed the proofs to the floor. ‘Simone says you have come from Caen to see me.’
‘That’s right.’
The tone in her partner’s voice speaking to this beautiful young woman brought Simone back into the bathroom with the jug that she had refilled with water.
She poured him a glass that he raised to his swollen lips. Pieces of almond and ice floated on the surface.
‘All right?’ his mistress wanted to know.
‘You might give it more flavour next time,’ grimacing, and handed it back.
She took the empty glass and the untouched plate from the sill. ‘I’ll heat this up.’
His eyes on the young woman, he nodded and seemed not to notice the door close.
Dilys shakes hands with Mrs Van der Hart as if pumping up water from a long way down. Then she walks back to the Raffles Plaza. The heat from the pavement rises up through her thick skirt, but she does not feel it.
She spends the rest of the morning at the swimming pool on the eighth floor. In the old days, in the days when she was Sleeping Beauty, she would keep her hair above the surface, but she wants to dive under, soak herself. She comes up for air and swims out over the rooftop towards the empty sky and the city. When her fingertips touch the small blue tiles at the other end, she turns and swims in an even breast-stroke, back towards the breakfast bar.
As Dilys finds frequently happens, the act of swimming – like dreaming – releases deeper thoughts. Her mind had stopped at the moment of revelation and now it makes reckless seesaws to catch up.
– This coincidence. His presence literally around the corner/my sudden obsession with Charlotte Corday. Isn’t it fate speaking?
– No, it would be immoral, illegal. Besides, what difference would it make? Look at Iraq after they hanged Saddam Hussein. Look what happened to Charlotte Corday. She was guillotined and reviled and Marat became a martyr.
– But if Hitler had died in that suitcase bomb, how many millions of lives would have been saved? Who would suspect a white, middle-class grandmother?
Up and down she continues. After thirty laps, she climbs out. She knows that she looks a mess, and once she has towelled herself dry she goes down to the lobby to make a hair appointment – it needs a trim anyway. But the earliest they are able to take her is tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. She considers cancelling it, then recalls a hairdresser once telling her that a new haircut can be as good as plastic surgery. She had looked with puzzlement at the pregnant young woman who ran forward to greet her at Heathrow, until she recognised her daughter Rachel beneath the unfamiliar fringe. Dilys’s flight doesn’t leave until the evening. She confirms the appointment.
It’s not yet noon. She feels renewed, less jangled.
Three hours later, Dilys returns to the hotel carrying two large brown paper bags. The swim has sharpened her appetite and once upstairs she orders a steak from the room-service menu. While waiting for it to arrive, she unpacks her new purchases and hangs them up. The smallest item is a laminated identity badge on a chain. She holds it out at arm’s length, inspecting it. The lettering is not up to the standard of Miles’s printing firm, but from a short distance it convinces. It looks official, she thinks.
Footsteps down the corridor and something squeaking and a rap on the door. A man pushes in a trolley with her meal on it. She has sat down to eat before he is even out of the room.
The steak is minuscule and Dilys plays an antique game from childhood of carving it into smaller and smaller portions to make it last longer. She has picked the plate clean when abruptly she stands up.
She unzips her suitcase and rifles through it for the plastic bag in which she has wrapped the Munch catalogue. Was there a knife in the painting? I’m not sure there was.
Dilys digs out the catalogue and checks the illustration. No, not even a bath. Just two naked figures in a room with a bed. An anonymous room like this one – like the room I’m flying back to, she thinks.
She will never retrieve all the days she sat in a cane chair, no
t leaving her tiny cement-floored flat back in Africa. Severed, useless, shrunk. The time that was stolen, like the momentous loss of the farm, of her darling Miles – it is unreimbursable.
But does she have the courage to do it herself? In a battle, she can almost imagine killing a figure in the distance with a rifle. Or pushing a button to drop a bomb. But to stab someone …
Charlotte Corday didn’t have a moment of doubt.
‘Who taught you to pierce Marat to the heart at first blow?’
‘The indignation that filled my own. I was determined to sacrifice my own life in order to save that of my country.’
Dilys picks up the steak knife from the trolley and with the napkin wipes it clean, one side and then the other. Sitting on the edge of her comfortable bed on the twelfth floor of the Raffles Plaza, she remembers the breakfast knives that she kept finding in the kitchen, black with ants. And Beauty leading her out into the chicken yard and reaching an arm into the coop.
Did Charlotte Corday sit in her hotel room and weigh up which part to stab? The heart or throat? His throat would be above the bedclothes; she couldn’t bear the horror of pulling back the sheets.
She tests the blade with her thumb and an image of Miles slaughtering a springbok flashes before her. The neck tautened back, the swift slash of the sharpened blade, the bright spurts of blood on the tobacco-coloured earth.
‘This is how you do it, Mrs Hoskins,’ Beauty had said, holding up the chicken like a lantern.
She drops it with a clatter onto the plate and goes into the bathroom. Coming back out, she changes into her nightdress. But she is not able to leave the steak knife alone. Once more she walks over to the trolley and picks it up. Hadn’t she managed to put that cow out of its misery – the bulging, all-seeing eyes meeting hers, knowing what she was about to do, and after she had done it a whistling sound as awful in its way as the last sound that she would hear bubbling out of Miles’s mouth.
Dilys looks around the room, her eyes settling on the bed. She decides to try the knife out on the pillows. But when she raises it, something in her resists doing damage to the hotel’s Italian linen. It remains suspended at a ridiculous angle in the cooled air above her pillow.
