The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  His grandmother noted exhaustion in his eyes at breakfast time: “Reverend Jones do have some things to say ’bout young boys of your age!” But Ralph shadowed Pearl, savouring the movement of her hips, the fire of her black eyes and above all, the smell of her, which made him want to weep.

  The days of his vacation slipped away. On his last night at the ranch, he splashed cologne onto his jaw and crept like a burglar to Pearl’s room. Outside her door, he stood limp and afraid. Where were the thousand-and-one nights of his lust? Where, in his imaginings, had her body gone?

  He knocked and there was silence. Then he heard movement inside the room and Pearl tiptoed to her door and unlocked it. Blocking his entrance with her body, she stared at him in the darkness. He suddenly sensed the ridiculousness of his white flesh inside his striped pyjamas. He cursed himself for having made the longed-for journey to her door and then finding that he couldn’t say a word. Gently, Pearl smiled at him and whispered: ‘Got my man inside, see? Can’t ask ya in for a cookie nor nothin’. Not tonight, Ralphie.’ Then she reached out and touched his face, just where he had splashed on the cologne. Her hand felt heavy, very hot. Then she closed the door quietly.

  Ralph ran out of the house. He had never felt rage and humiliation like this rage, which was a hard stone inside him, a stone he wanted to hurl with his shout and smash with his fists. Running didn’t lessen the rage, so he let it climb, and the climb he made was the climb ever afterwards known as the Tennessee Incident and which marked him for life.

  Dawn found him on the barn roof, astride the ridge like a saddle tramp. But as the sun got up, sleep at last took him and his grip on the roof weakened. He fell thirty feet to the ground and broke both his legs in several places. The pain, when his head woke and felt it, was far worse than the pain of loving Pearl and he lay on the hard white ground, screaming.

  The Tennessee Incident probably stunted Ralph’s growth by three or four inches. ‘Other incidents,’ he noted in his Summary, ‘have stunted my mental and emotional growth and my progress towards the package (i.e. perspicacious appraisals, empathy with the condition of all men, the ability to engage in enlightened reasoning and generally to eschew bullshit and untruth) I understand loosely as wisdom. I’ve made hogshit of all my love affairs and the dentist says my teeth will crumble to pus before I’m forty.’ Ralph then wrote: ‘I suppose I start with myself,’ and under this scribbled pessimistically ‘Probable cost of having teeth fixed = a thousand dollars.’

  ‘You know I only had one friend,’ Erica said, ‘before Gully came. She was an invisible friend and her name was Claustrophobia. I thought Claustrophobia was a wonderful name for a girl, ever since I heard my father say it. I suppose he said something like “there’s claustrophobia in that ole cowshed,” but I went straight away to look and see if I could find her and ask her if she’d be my friend.

  ‘But I found no one. Of course I didn’t! Only the cows and the milky smell of them and the carpeting of straw and muck. I called to her, I think. I know I could say her name perfectly – every syllable. Claustro-phob-ia. Claustro-phob-ia! But no one appeared. So I invented her there and then. She crept out of one of the cow-stalls and sat on the gate, looking at me. She was terribly pretty and fair, but a little smaller than me. And I remember that she couldn’t run as fast as I could, and when we went running down the lanes for blackberries and elderberries, I’d have to keep on calling to her to hurry up.

  ‘Claustrophobia appeared between the time of my mother’s death and Gully’s arrival. She stayed about a year and a half, I suppose, and then she went away. I put her in the cupboard to sleep, because the cupboard frightened me then, and if I imagined her in it, I wasn’t so afraid. And of course I talked to her. She had no mother either, so she knew how horrible this was. At night, we often had very long conversations and I’d break off now and then and ask in a posh voice: “Are you sure you’re quite comfortable in the cupboard, Claustrophobia?” And she’d reply, very politely: “Oh, quite comfortable, thank you very much. In fact I prefer a cupboard to a bed, Erica my dear.”

  ‘So this was very satisfactory, you see, because through her I conquered my fear of the cupboard and through her I learned about friendship, because she was very loyal and I was loyal to her, particularly on the question of her existence, in which my father refused to believe. He thought I was going mad, but Chadwick now, he quite liked Claustrophobia and once brought me two gingerbread men in a box from London – one for me and one for her. But then later, he stole her name – without even consulting me – for a character in one of his awful plays, and I was very cross about this. Very cross indeed.’

  Erica pursed her lips, sat back in her chair. Ralph watched her, but she looked away from him.

  ‘Oh, why did you come?’ she said suddenly.

  Ralph switched off the tape recorder and folded his hands round the notepad he kept open on his knee.

  ‘I think …’ he began hesitantly.

  ‘Please tell me,’ said Erica. ‘I want to know why you came.’

  ‘Well, I think I asked to come here because I didn’t seem to be going anywhere much. I thought I was, ten years ago, but now everything seems quite bad … and I guess I thought that if I could listen to someone who’s been so far … I’m not explaining this well, Erica …’

  ‘Yes you are. Go on.’

  ‘Well if I could talk to someone who’s got near the end, then perhaps I’d begin to make better sense of it all.’

  ‘It all? What’s “it all”, dear?’

  ‘Well my life just follows the same idiotic pattern as an assignment I once went on called “Why are Americans disliked in Europe”. I go on and on asking a question, getting different answers and then I find there is no real answer – just a list of possibilities which is too divergent to make sense of. So I try to find another question. But I keep getting stuck with the same one, like I got stuck with the “Why are Americans” question. It just wouldn’t leave me. So I took it back to the States and I began asking it there – to people in restaurants and bus lines and to blacks and Poles and every goddamn ethnic group …’

  ‘I wonder why you got stuck with that? It sounds rather a stupid question to me, Ralph dear.’

  ‘I just don’t know. I suppose I thought, if I could collect enough data on that question, then I could get on to other more advanced questions and that eventually I’d be asking questions to which there would be sound answers, I mean answers that I could believe in. But I never got further than the “Why are Americans” question because the answers I got back home were so pathetic! I mean one woman said to me: “Well I blame Clint Eastwood. That’s entirely the wrong impression to give to the world – silence and gunshooting!” And a guy from the South said he blamed the Statue of Liberty. He said, “that statue gives everyone the idea that liberty is desirable and that in America every sonofabitch’s second name is Liberty. But name the man who’s free. Liberty’s hogshit! No one’s got it and what’s more they don’t want it!”‘

  Erica threw back her head and laughed. ‘My poor Ralph,’ she said after a while, ‘you probably won’t do any better with me. I don’t have any answers. I never have. But I think it’s very nice for me that you’re here. I can feel you doing me good. Let’s have some wine!’

  Obediently, Ralph poured it. Wondering if the wine had become a ritual, one she couldn’t really afford, he said: ‘You don’t have to give me wine every day, Erica …’

  She sat up and took the glass he handed to her.

  ‘No of course I don’t,’ she said, ‘but it helps me. It oils my mind and my memory, and both are very rusty. Especially when I’m trying to remember that early time, when I was a girl in brown boots and pinafores. I love to dream of that time because there was a lot of innocence and wonder in it. I dream of Gully very often. He had a very large penis, you know, and over the years I dreamt a lot about Gully’s penis, although you mustn’t record that for your magazine, will you? But I think that’s why Gully got on, after h
e became a young man and was apprenticed to Tom Haggard (cousin of the other Haggard, Eric, who kept the bulls) and learned the butchering trade. Because the girls liked him, you know, despite his head being on sideways and I think I was jealous for a while. I believe I thought Gully was mine. I was fifteen or sixteen, I suppose, when Gully went courting and he would have been about seventeen, and his hair was thick and wiry like a bull’s hair and he had the smell of a man – or so it seemed to me.

  ‘I remember that I lay awake, almost every night at one time, waiting for Gully to come home to his attic room, and often it was near sunrise when he came in and we’d have to be up at six to get the milking done before he went to work. So in the milking shed, with my face pressed into a cow, I once said: “Where d’yew go then, Gully March, that you be out all night?” But Gully didn’t answer. He just milked a bit faster and swore at his cow.

  ‘So a few nights later, I went up to his room when I heard him come in, and he was lying on top of his bed with all his clothes on, fast asleep. I shook him and said: “Gully! Tell me where you go at night.” But he rolled over and wouldn’t say a word. And I believe it was then I felt jealous. Not just jealous of what he did, but of his secret which he wouldn’t share. So I began to tease him, even in front of my father.

  ‘“Gully’s courtin’!” I said. “Gully’s after an old witch who lives on the pond!” On and on I teased and watched him blush, till one day my father shook his fist at me and said: “You leave Gully alone, girl, or you’ll git shut up in the cupboard!”

  ‘But I didn’t leave him alone: “Gully thinks he’s growed up, don’t you, Gul? Planning to get married an’ all, eh?” And rude things I said. Dreadful things a girl my age shouldn’t have dared to say. But I wanted to punish Gully. Punish him good. But it was me who got the punishment in the end. My father shut me in the cupboard one suppertime, and I thought he would leave me there all night, so I kicked and screamed and I know they heard me down in the kitchen – Gully and my father witn their good supper of soup and bread and ham. But no one came to let me out, so I put my head on a blanket and tried to sleep, and the hours passed like this, thinking about my lost supper and trying to sleep on the prickly blanket.

  ‘Then I heard someone come into my room, and it was Gully. He’d left my father asleep by the fire and he put his face very close to the bottom of the cupboard door, where the door didn’t quite fit, and he whispered: “Tell you what, girl, yew’s the one is right! I bin courtin’ an’ all and with Dot works up at the Manor. An’ maybe we ought to git married an’ that, ’cos I had her now seventeen times.”

  ‘Seventeen times! I couldn’t imagine seventeen times, not at fifteen and shut in a cupboard which still smelled of my mother’s clothes. “You wicked bor!” I whispered. “You din’ ought to have done that seventeen times. You’ll pay for that in hell, I reckon.”

  ‘And then we both laughed, and Gully said: “That’s not hell, girl! That’s more like heaven!”

  ‘But whenever I saw Dot – in church, or at one of our village festivals – my stomach would flutter at the thought of those seventeen times which, as the summer went on, no doubt became eighteen times and twenty-eight times … I thought, you see, that if Gully could do it twenty-eight times with Dot, then he could surely do it just once with me – to show me how it felt, so that later I wouldn’t be afraid.

  ‘But he never did and of course I never dared to ask for it. And soon afterwards he married Dot and Mr Haggard gave them rooms over the butcher’s shop.’

  2

  Mrs Burford brought the satin eiderdown from the bedroom and covered Erica with it. She was cold. Mrs Burford lit the gas fire and left.

  Erica dozed under the soft covering. Outside her window, rain fell silently on London, and in Erica’s dream two young nannies, heavily shod, began to run with their prams through the crocuses in the park. The pert crocuses were bent and crushed, and the rain, elsewhere so silent, tapped like hail on the round brown hats of the two nannies. Dry inside their prams, the babies laughed with joy at their jolting ride, laughed and bounced until their bellies were full of wind and they belched a green sickness.

  ‘Drat it, Nanny Purvis! My Rupert’s gone and brought up his pudding,’ said one nanny to the other, and Erica woke. The gas fire burned near her temples. Her turban was awry.

  ‘Terrible … terrible …’ she whispered.

  ‘I’ve brought you a present,’ said a voice.

  Erica looked up. Ralph was sitting opposite the sofa where she lay. He was smiling. Erica didn’t know how long he had been there. She sighed.

  ‘My hands are dead,’ she said flatly.

  Ralph’s heart began to race.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ he began, ‘I won’t stay today …’ And he thought, with old people there is no warning: deterioration comes like a moth in the window. So he got up, leaving the freesias he had bought on the floor, where she might see them. But she didn’t notice the flowers. Her eyes followed him urgently.

  ‘I’ve never written it down, what I want …’ she said.

  Ralph stopped, his hand on the door.

  ‘But I should have written it down …’ Her voice was faint, like a voice used up. She took a breath and her left hand crept out from under the eiderdown, fumbled at the edge of the scarlet turban.

  ‘You could do it, though, Ralph!’ And her eyes stared and stared at him. ‘You could tell them, there used to be the smell of her dresses in there and the odour of the forest, sometimes in the darkness, and I imagined the trees that made it. And afterwards, there was the smell of books, like a clean sanctuary, and never in there was there anything that hasn’t been a part of me …’

  She paused. ‘Oh, you could tell them that,’ she said, and closed her eyes.

  Ralph hesitated by the door. He was dismayed at her. And dismayed at himself, at his presence which got in the way, at his failure to understand her.

  ‘Shit!’ he said under his breath, and crept out onto the landing, shutting the door quietly behind him.

  But the following day she was as bright, as straight as a daffodil. She wore a yellow cardigan; her eyelids were shaded blue. In a thin glass vase were Ralph’s freesias.

  ‘Rain sickness,’ she said as he sat down. ‘Chadwick had it, too, sometimes, and would lie down in his silk dressing gown on the hearthrug. I think that was the first time I saw Chadwick’s legs, when he had his rain sickness and couldn’t get dressed, and honestly Ralph, they were the whitest legs I’ve ever encountered and the question of his going on a cruise would then enter my mind. And I’d imagine him sitting in a deckchair with those white, quite hairless legs of his hanging over the front of it and in his heart hoping to be recognized as a celebrity with his rippling hair and dying, of course, of internal combustion for the deckhands in their tropical rig! I forgave Chadwick, of course, for stealing Claustrophobia. I had to forgive him very soon after he’d done it because he brought me to London to stay with him in his rooms (he lived in a flat in fact just off Bryanston Square and it was a very spacious flat with four bedrooms, but he insisted on referring to it as “rooms” for a reason I’ve never really understood although perhaps he thought “flat” was plebeian). Yes, he brought me to London to see his play with the character Claustrophobia in it and I remember that the play was called The Weathering of Lady Winchelsea and it was full of people asking each other to dinner and leaving calling cards like they do in Jane Austen, so really the butler had a dreadfully busy time opening doors and handing round salvers and announcing people, so that the butler could easily have been the main part but he wasn’t and the character Claustrophobia was a cloying friend of the Winchelsea family with five daughters to marry off. Very boring, as you can see, but extraordinarily successful at that time, heaven knows why, and Chadwick was enchanted by fame and the flat was full of flowers and messages of rapture.

  ‘I honestly don’t know why Chadwick had time for me. I think perhaps he saw that I was in a kind of bondage to my father and to th
e farm, so planted you see, in the monotony of the house and the animals, and my life would have gone on, unchanging in my father’s need of me, and Chadwick snatched me away – only for a month, he said – but in the end I stayed in London for two years. Chadwick abhorred bondage of any kind, “And the farm!” he said, “you can die on that farm if you want to, Erica, but not until someone has let you live!” I was nineteen. Gully and Dot had a child by then, a little boy who was always known as Buckwheat. And my father? Well, Chadwick knew and I knew that he’d marry Eileen soon and then his need of me would cease. He complained of course, my father. I’d done the milking for him every morning for at least ten years – three thousand six hundred and fifty times I’d milked the cows! And for years I’d done the cheese making and all the cooking and lit the fires and swept and cleaned like Cinderella, and I was a woman by then, almost a woman. So he let me go.

  ‘He did what he could about buying me new clothes, but when I came to live with Chadwick, well, the clothes, the wonderful clothes of the women in London!

  ‘I couldn’t believe the rustle of them and the beautiful sewing. Mine were like fustian in comparison. And the strangeness of London. It was full of bells, you know. Hardly a quarter hour passed without a bell chimed, yet nowadays you scarcely hear a single one. And horses and motor vehicles both cantered round the streets then and I thought of Gully in his butcher’s shop and I said to myself, if he heard and saw all this, his head would fall off!

  ‘I was ashamed of my Suffolk accent: that’s something I remember. But what a snobbish thing! I wished I’d had a governess as Chadwick had suggested and been taught elocution.

  ‘But I was a weak vessel then. Very ordinary. Very susceptible to things. I was amazed by my room in Chadwick’s “rooms”, with a bath next door and a Thomas Crapper for my use alone, with its comfy polished seat.

  ‘I touched all the surfaces in my room and they were all beautiful in one way or another. I had a mahogany dressing table and mirror and a rosewood writing table, inlaid with other kinds of wood, and a velvet-covered armchair where I put Ratty May. Ratty May sat in that comfy chair for two years and watched me change. Poor thing! Luckily, her hair was yellow wool or she would have gone grey. Luckily, her body was bran.