The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘I’ve told you, haven’t I, that Chadwick disapproved of bondage. Yet he was bound himself by the morality of the day and his own struggles made him very aware of all the dead old ships stuck in the tides of English life, and one of these was the attitude of men to the Woman Question.

  ‘Of course Chadwick was too much of a drawing-room person by then to be an active Labour man like Keir Hardie, but he knew and liked Frederick Pethick Lawrence whom he’d met at the Reform Club, and little by little he’d come to sympathize with the aims of the militant suffragists, and although I don’t think he spoke at meetings, he gave money to Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, the WSPU.

  “And so when I arrived, as soon as all the excitement over The Weathering of Lady Wincbelsea had died down and the bouquets began to droop a bit, he started to ask me, didn’t I realize that for centuries women had been prisoners of the law and that now, at last, they were no longer twittering like sparrows but had begun to roar like lions? “Up there,” (he always referred to our farm as “up there”), “you probably don’t even realize what’s going on. You don’t hear any roaring and most of you are content with your miserable lot, but here …”

  ‘Well, Chadwick was idiotic in a way, because this was 1912 and of course people in Suffolk knew about the Suffragettes, though he didn’t believe me when I said we did. I suppose he thought that no one in Suffolk knew anything about anything except the ways of the fields and the weather and that we all imagined the world was flat.

  ‘I’d never dreamed, though, that I would meet any of those women. They were like film stars in their way – especially Christabel with her extraordinary beauty – and it was difficult to believe they had skin. I’d only seen them in photographs. I never thought I could touch one of them.

  ‘But it wasn’t long after the first night of Lady Winchelsea that the Pethick Lawrences came to tea with Chadwick and there was a great deal of talk about Swan and Edgar’s bankruptcy because this had been the time of the incredible window smashing in Oxford Street (Swan and Edgar’s was a shop in Oxford Street, you see) and poor Fred Lawrence was being sued for damages and all his money was used up.

  ‘I sat very quietly in Chadwick’s drawing-room. Mrs Lawrence wore a wide hat with a veil, Chadwick had a finicky preference for herbal tea which tasted of daisies, and we all drank this although I thought it was absolutely disgusting. And then I suddenly heard Chadwick say: “Erica is a child of ignorance,” and I thought, how dare he say such rot to strangers when he’s never seen and smelled the birth of a calf, never got his fingernails green. And I wanted to stand up and say I was off home. But I didn’t. I sat there, staring down at my daisy tea, and I expect the Lawrences smiled very kindly at me because they seemed very kindly people, and then they forgot about me and began discussing their house in Dorking which they’d lost or were just about to lose, I can’t remember which.

  ‘When they’d gone, Chadwick said to me: “They are very fine, Erica, because they’ve given everything they possess to the cause, and here you see how human nature can divest itself of all that is ordinary and petty and take on the nobility of a wild white stallion.” Dear Chadwick! His use of imagery was often rather transparent and poor and I honestly think a white stallion must have stalked his erotic dreams because he so loved to compare things to it – everything from the nobility to the Pethick Lawrences to a cloud he saw one day above Fleet Street.

  ‘But of course he was right in his way about the Lawrences. They were wonderfully brave and when I went to bed that night and thought about the house in Dorking and everything else they must have lost I knew that I really was a “child of ignorance”, sheltered all my life by the boundaries of the village and the farm. I cried for all that I didn’t know. I got Ratty May off her chair and took her back to bed with me and I said to her: “I’m not going home till I find out.”

  ‘My finding out was a bit postponed, however, because of Chadwick’s crisis. Chadwick’s crisis began the next day, the very day after the Pethick Lawrences had come to tea. It was terribly sad. The only good thing about it was that it enabled me to stay on in London after my month was up because poor Chadwick had become very ill by then and couldn’t walk with his swollen-up legs, and it was I who nursed him, just as we nursed sick animals on the farm. He was a bit like an animal in his suffering: very mute. Except that he cried occasionally, and of course no animal does this, cries real tears.

  ‘He got this letter from Venezuela. It arrived the day after the Lawrences came, and when I went into the dining-room for breakfast (he had two servants, Chadwick, which was why everything was so polished, and I’ll tell you about these servants later on). Chadwick was sitting there reading it and he was quite petrified with sorrow. It was as if he couldn’t breathe or move or make a sound and his face was burning red with a kind of fever. I said something to him and he didn’t answer. Then he drew in a little stifled breath and I knew that he was in a state of shock. I ran to the sideboard and poured some brandy into a glass and I knelt by him and held the glass to his mouth and eventually he took a tiny sip. And then he pulled my head towards him and pressed it against his clean silk shirt and said, almost inaudibly, “Athelstone’s gone to Venezuela.’”

  A familiar sense of destitution haunted Ralph’s return to his hotel. He felt lost. Like a US Marine, stuck for the night in a corner of death’s backyard. He lay down on his bed and covered his eyes against the ugly, overhead light.

  A week had passed and he had talked to no one except Erica. He had eaten the mediocre dinners they served in the hotel dining-room, listened to each day’s recording, made notes and pondered idly how it would feel to make the film. THE FILM. But he knew he was nowhere near it. For without a sense of direction what, in the end, would the film be about? ‘Nothing,’ he decided. ‘The film will be horse’s ass.’

  On the days when Erica had sent him away, he had walked a little. Untempted by the zoo, he had noticed the first chilly signs of spring in Regent’s Park, the grey-green winter dusted here and there with colour. Pigeons had begun their distant, ruffling love-play. And Ralph had sauntered and watched, a stranger with his hands in his pockets (“and gosh, rather short for an American!”) his nationality camouflaged then perhaps, his identity hidden, but haunted by his Manhattan dreams of nullity and by Walt’s voice:

  ‘If you fuck this one, kid, I mean if you don’t get something really good from the old lady, I think we’re going to have to look quite hard at your job situation …’

  The bleakest answer Ralph had ever got to his ‘Why are Americans’ question had come from a French professor of literature, member of the Academie Française, with whom he had hoped to spend a little time, imagined foolishly that the eminent man might defrost his grey, manicured exterior to reveal a warm Gallic heart offering statements of global importance over a glass of Ricard. But no. ‘Quels Americains? the academician had snapped. ‘Moi, j’ignore les Americains.’ And now, alone in London, with the threads of his career seeming to slip from his hands like leaves blown downstream he’d begun to inhabit an April of desolation.

  He hated his hotel room. Lying under the ugly light he compared it to Erica’s room where, in the glow of the Tiffany lamp, he had once caught a glimpse of his own shadow and Erica’s, face to face on the wall and suddenly been appalled at the importance he was attaching to this assignment. He had wanted to shout out: ‘Don’t you see why I’m here? I’m halfway through my life and the first half’s fucked. I need help.’

  Her room was small and faded and cluttered. Sometimes she sat so still, she seemed only to be a part of the room, something set down carelessly, dusted by Mrs Burford three times a week. Ralph imagined Mrs Burford’s hand flicking over the scarlet turban and thinking, peculiar thing! Don’t know what anyone would want this for.

  To think of her room was comforting. In it, Ralph didn’t feel destitute. Yet as soon as he left it, fears brushed his heart like a conjurer’s flowers. ‘J’ignore Ralph Pears,’ said th
e downcast eyes of the English in their streets and parks. ‘I don’t know or care about his existence.’

  Ralph got off the bed and sat down at the writing table. From the shallow drawer, he tugged at the paper headed ‘Summary’, He took up a pencil and wrote:

  ‘The nearest I can get to an image for our two lives – Erica March, 87. Ralph Pears, 35 – is two basins of wheat. Her basin, which should be almost empty, is heavy and full. The wheat is spilling over and some grains have fallen. There is no mental nor spiritual famine here. But my basin, which should be full, is very light – about a quarter full only. I have almost no knowledge of how the grains got used up. But I know the grains left are too few. I’m not nourished …’

  Ralph paused, took the last Marlboro out of the day’s pack and lit it. He noticed that the familiarity of the design of the Marlboro pack was comforting. On his walks, he had sometimes taken the Marlboro pack out of his pocket and just stared at it. He inhaled, picked up the pencil again and continued:

  ‘I think what I’m doing is putting my basin near to Erica’s. I’m kinda hoping grains will fall from hers into mine, hundreds of grains, so that it begins to fill up and there is some

  RECOVERY.

  This is simplistic and over-optimistic. I admit this. It is also stealing.’

  Ralph let the pencil drop. He felt tired. Tired with himself and his own whining. In the magnificence of her Tennessee night, he suddenly heard his Grandma pronounce: ‘I never saw in any-wun have what you’ Ma do have, Ralphie, and that is leprosy of the soul. Now you must mind it ain’t catchin!’

  Mrs Burford was there. Ralph smiled at her as he walked past her stare into Erica’s sitting-room. She looked away. She was married to a retired postman, Erica had told him. He’d had a Battersea round.

  ‘I didn’t sleep very well, Ralph,’ said Erica. ‘Sometimes I don’t and that is very annoying. But never mind. I’m going to tell you about Chadwick’s crisis today and then about some meetings I had while he was ill. But I didn’t put out any wine this afternoon because I think it would send me to sleep and then your time would be wasted, wouldn’t it? How much more time have you got, dear?’

  ‘All the time we need,’ Ralph lied.

  ‘Till we get to the last day and we eat the caviar!’ said Erica and laughed.

  ‘Right!’ said Ralph.

  Before going to bed, Ralph had written to Walt, the first of his promised bulletins on his progress.

  Walt had told him, ‘Don’t bother writing, kid. Just call me and tell me how you’re doing. See if you got anything there we can sell to United Artists!’ But Ralph hadn’t wanted to talk to Walt and had written only a short report:

  ‘Dear Walt,

  Just a line to say the old lady’s verbal and quite sharp. You’d never believe she’s three off ninety. Nor is she stuck in a sentimental time-warp. Not so far. So it’s looking good and I’m running out of tapes fast. It’s also movie material.

  Cold spring in London. Everyone still muffled up, including me. E.M. has no heating. Only an antique gas fire. I think she’s very tough.

  I’ll be in touch again next week.

  Say hello to the other office furniture for me.

  Ralph’

  ‘The thing about Chadwick,’ said Erica, ‘was that he was almost always in love. At the time of the crisis, he had been having an affair with a very beautiful but rather stupid young man called Athelstone Amis (no relation of Kingsley, I think, or he might have been a bit more sparky, but who can say?).

  ‘But Chadwick could never really match his love affairs to his life. He fell for the wrong people and they deserted him. It was a bit like his play-writing in a way. I mean, there was Chadwick, a defrocked vicar, indelibly homosexual, diving off his pulpit into the world of drawing-rooms! The fact that he came to own a drawing-room himself very quickly really makes it no less extraordinary, because the people he put in his plays with such success really weren’t the kind of people he cared about so that you always felt with Chadwick, the writer and the man are absolutely separate. And so it was with his lovers. He never, till the end of his life, loved anyone who loved him back, not really loved him, not with their hearts, and he died full of yearnings. This Athelstone was no exception. He had dallied with Chadwick for a year. Chadwick had spent a fortune on gold tie pins and silk foulards. He’d even discovered some extremely expensive hair elixir which he thought would make his ripples yet more Raphaelite and thereby entrancing for Athelstone’s fickle fingers. Oh, he’d done everything! But the minute Lady W was over Athelstone upped and offed to Caracas or somewhere in Venezuela in search of adventure and suntanned boys and Chadwick was ravaged by his departure, ravaged by it and began to decline.

  ‘He was really very ill. His doctor came and looked at him and uncovered his white legs which could so easily have been on a boat with Athelstone Amis but which in fact had swollen up to terrible proportions with an absolutely unidentifiable malady and which gave him constant pain. There was talk of putting him into hospital so that tests could be performed on his legs, but he refused to go. I think he knew he would recover when his heart began to mend, and meanwhile I was there to nurse him, and he knew I would.

  ‘The servants were a Mr and Mrs Hogan from County Cork in Ireland. They lived in the basement flat and we shared them with the ground floor tenant who was a widow called Mrs Garnett. Chadwick always thought of the Hogans as “his” and never admitted to anyone that we shared them. They were very loyal to Chadwick and though they came to disapprove of my antics when I joined the movement, they were loyal to me too and Mr Hogan once said to me: “Prisons, Miss? Tis outrageous entirely if they can do these things to a woman!” and he made me broth and porridge when my mouth was bruised. So Chadwick was lucky in a way, you see. He had the Hogans to cook for him and keep the rooms tidy and me to read to him and sit with him, and in time the crisis passed and his swellings went down.

  ‘I think I told you, didn’t I, he was terribly silent while he was ill? Perhaps his mind was tangled in a rain forest with Athelstone. I began to read him Little Dorrit and this was ironic because the time wasn’t far off when I got to know prisons. Chadwick cried quite a lot during my Little Dorrit readings and he came to look a bit like a drowned man, wet and white and swollen. I wrote to my father and said “on no account can I abandon Uncle Chadwick who is took right poor with the heartbreak and yew must manage longer without me.” I was still very Suffolk, you see. I was still a child of ignorance. But it was all beginning to go.

  ‘Visitors came. And one day I answered the door and it was a woman of about forty with fair hair and dressed in dark green. She stood very, very still with her head slightly on one side, and then she smiled and said: “You must be Erica March.”

  ‘I was confused because I’d never seen her before and I couldn’t imagine how she knew I was there or what my name was. I showed her into the sitting-room – or rather, the drawing-room, because Chadwick always called it that – and she sat down and took off her green gloves and said: “My name is Emily Davison.”’

  Erica closed her eyes. For a moment, she kept them closed as she talked. Her head was tilted back and she began to speak very fast, as if the images she held in her memory were fleeting and might suddenly elude her.

  ‘Emily was the first of my meetings at that time, Ralph, and in a sense the last, although from that day on my life was full of meetings and I was caught up by an extraordinary tide which rocked me and pulled me and flung me down and then crept to me again and dragged me back and held me moving and moving until it was all over. I was weaned in that peculiar ocean. And once it had taken me in, that very morning when Emily arrived at Chadwick’s flat, I became wild! I don’t believe the wildness of those days has ever completely left me. Even now, when I’m far too old to be alive, I feel the hard stone in me and my hard stone has shaped me and been my rage and my understanding. And there could have been no understanding without my hard stone don’t you see? Because to understand, is to see
the world with an eye of steel and a belly of fire. And to people who believe that love and compassion are born of tears, I say no! They are born of fire!’

  Erica opened her eyes and they were wet.

  ‘Ralph dear,’ she said quietly, ‘will you ask Mrs Burford to put the kettle on and make us a cup of tea?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ralph. He switched off the tape recorder and stood up. ‘I can leave now, if you like,’ he said, ‘if you’re tired.’

  Erica smiled.

  ‘You’re very considerate,’ she said. ‘I think Americans are, aren’t they, although in all my hundreds of years I’ve hardly met any. I don’t know why I haven’t. Just accident I suppose. I met an American airman once. He was considerate even though he was in pain. He’d landed in our greenhouse.’

  Ralph laughed and went to the kitchen where he found Mrs Burford on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. She looked up at him accusingly. He hesitated.

  ‘Don’t you have a sponge-mop for this job?’ he asked.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Well, a mop – so you don’t have to kneel down …’

  ‘There’s ’alf of wot a person needs in this flat. But wot can you expect? She’s old i’nt she, and she don’t fink.’

  ‘I could get you a mop, if you like …’ Ralph began.

  ‘You?’ snapped Mrs Burford.

  ‘Sure. Why not?’

  ‘Journalist you said you was? Well I’ll tellya somefing, love. Never trusted you lot no furtha ’n I’d trust a politician. Pack o’ lies, you are.’

  ‘Miss March trusts me,’ said Ralph.

  ‘Yeah? Well she don’t know no better. Old folk don’t ’ave no choice.’