The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘And you see … I had a kind of dream, a vision almost, quite recently that if I could be sure to organize death in a certain way, in a certain place, then I might be given a little more time, not as me of course and I wouldn’t want to be me all over again, but as something, Ralph, something that has existence – a beetle or a camel I think, one of these two. And I could live for quite a time as a beetle in a pine forest perhaps and even longer as a camel, and I’d see the desert at last, which I’ve never seen. But it will only happen if my death is the right one … and I’ll know the day because they’ll be signs …’

  ‘I don’t really want you to talk about death,’ said Ralph and he fingered his tape recorder protectively.

  ‘Whyever not?’ snapped Erica.

  ‘I don’t want to imagine your death.’

  She looked crestfallen. ‘I’m very disappointed,’ she said, ‘I’d convinced myself that you were the right one.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For all the organization, dear. For the fight with Camden Council or whoever’s responsible for these things. And of course I would have given you power. I’ll write it all out. You only have to follow instructions.’

  Ralph sighed. ‘Please Erica,’ he said, ‘you haven’t finished telling me about Emily. Please can’t we go on and not talk about your death?’

  She sniffed. ‘Certainly we can go on. But we’ll have to discuss it one day soon, or you‘ll be gone, won’t you, and my chance to become a camel will be lost.’

  That night, in his faded yellow room, Ralph dreamt that he was driving down from New York to Tennessee in a rented car to visit his grandma. The car was an ancient Oldsmobile and he knew, precisely, at which point on the road the car would break down.

  He was in the mountains, on the road from Bristol to Knoxville, with miles of mountain roads uncompleted, little hope of a lift, no water and no shelter from the freezing late afternoon except the car. He sat in the car and put his head on the wheel. The wheel became spongy and soft under his forehead and he let himself fall forwards, let the comforting wheel absorb tears of rage and tears of fear. He wanted to hit the wheel and feel its hardness hurt his hand, but it was entirely soft, and soon very soothing to his hand, so he let his hand touch it and begin to stroke it and his fear receded.

  He was aware, after a while, that the car was moving again, quite slowly and absolutely silently and when, wearily, he lifted his head from the soft wheel and turned, he saw that someone was pushing the car, straining and pushing the big old car along the mountain road in the dusk. He stared at the figure pushing the car. The figure was running now, trying to keep up with the car as it gathered momentum and finally letting go as it careered on and on down the steep track. Its speed was terrifying. Ralph grabbed the wheel but the wheel was limp and wouldn’t steer the car. The car careered towards a curve in the road and Ralph felt it lift it off into the void and saw death, like a bird, begin to gather him in its wide wing.

  Ralph woke and he was sweating. He reached out and put on the light. He lay very still, trying to calm the beating of his heart with deep breaths. But the dream wouldn’t leave him. It wouldn’t leave him because it was unfinished. He wanted – needed – to know who had been there on the road, pushing the car. Detail by detail, he tried to recall the shape, size, even the sex of the person running behind and eventually falling back as the car had sped on. But he could remember nothing. Only a grey figure, stooping and then falling, surely? Hadn’t the figure fallen down into the dust at the moment when he/she had let go of the car, fallen and lain motionless as the car began to soar above the trees?

  For an hour or more, Ralph searched. He imagined the road, exactly as it had been in the dream. He put himself back on the road and started to climb to the point where the car had stopped and then started to move. He recognized the road and the rocks and trees which bordered it. He imagined the exact quality of the light: flat and chill with night coming on. And he knew when he reached the spot where the car had been. He knew. But there was no sign of anyone. Nobody was waiting. Nobody lay in the dust. ‘Jesus,’ whispered Ralph, and sat up. It was half past five.

  He ran cold water into his washbasin and splashed it over his face. His hands were shaking. He filled a glass and drank. ‘Tell you why we don’t like you white ’mericans,’ said a laughing black face, ‘you give the poor guy his wet dreams!’

  Ralph walked to the writing table. He turned down the volume control on his tape recorder and punched the ‘play’ button: ‘… and the burning and destruction of property!’ came the artificially muted but still urgent voice. ‘Because property – and respect for it – was the bedrock of Liberal England and what Mrs Pankhurst called “the argument of the well-aimed stone” was the one we chose. Because words and pleas had failed by 1912, or so they told me, the ones who knew. All the promises had been broken.

  ‘Emily and I had a speciality we called the “pillar box cocktail”. We wrapped petrol-soaked rags in newspaper and hid them in our big handbags. Then we stuffed them into the slit where you posted your letter and pushed them in. We lit them by means of a piece of string, down which the flame travelled, like a fuse. Sometimes it didn’t work. The flame went out before it got to the rags, but mostly they went off like a bomb and you had to be out of sight by then.

  ‘We destroyed hundreds – probably thousands – of letters in this way, and the post in London became very erratic. Chadwick wasn’t keen on this. He began to say that letters he was expecting didn’t arrive because I’d burned them. But I don’t suppose I had. I expect the people to whom Chadwick wrote didn’t care enough about him to write back.

  ‘He was better by the end of the year. His swellings went down and he visited me in Holloway and brought me a lardy cake made by Mrs Hogan. I had to explain to him that I couldn’t eat it because we were all on hunger strike, and he said, “thought you looked terrible my poor child. For God’s sake don’t die of it, or we’d have to tell your father.” But my father never knew. He was courting Eileen by that time and couldn’t let his mind travel further than Aldeburgh, where Eileen lived.

  ‘It was strange, I suppose, that he didn’t know what I was doing; very sad that I couldn’t tell him. I often thought of him, but my lie put a distance between us and we were never close again, not as we had been, as long as he lived. Rumours came to Suffolk, he told me later, that I had joined the Suffragettes. Someone thought they’d seen my face in a picture of a meeting not far from Christabel Pankhurst’s. But of course I said nothing in my letters. I said things like “London is very agreeable and I am learning the ways of it.”

  ‘It was a kind of apprenticeship for a time that came later. “Agreeable” wasn’t at all the right word for it. Not at all. It was a kind of immersion in fire, but I didn’t feel the fire, Ralph, didn’t know I was in it, till the next summer, and then I felt it.

  ‘You see, I hadn’t really believed that Emily would die. She’d often talked about death and done things in prison to make people believe she wanted it. And she often said that what the movement needed was a martyr. But she wasn’t a melancholy woman, not at all. She laughed very often. And her eyes were bright like an animal’s eyes. And she had promised to be my teacher and help me to grow up. I couldn’t believe she would abandon me. There was no meanness in her.

  ‘We spent Christmas 1913 together with Emily’s mother at Longhorsley. We were both on bail, I think, awaiting trial for our pillar box cocktails, but it was a wonderfully happy time in spite of this. The weather was clear and clean and we went for long walks in the beautiful beech woods and in the evenings Emily would play and sing. She loved hymns and she sang very well. I think she always believed that God saw and understood her and I suppose, over the months that followed this time, when we were in and out of prison and very weak, she came to believe that God was waiting for her and that nothing, not even the woods at Longhorsley, could be as beautiful as death.

  ‘So she abandoned me and went to try and meet God. For a whil
e it was terrible to know that she preferred God to me. But I hope she did meet Him. She wanted it so badly!

  ‘I was at the Lincoln’s Inn office on the morning of Derby Day. I was helping with letters and filing which I often did and I found I was rather good at this kind of meticulous work. I liked the smell of an office. Paper is such a clean thing.

  ‘Emily rushed in to the office, in a great hurry, asking us for flags with the Union colours on them. We found two for her and she ran out. I knew she was excited about something and I wanted to go with her – to share in it. But of course I couldn’t share in it. I wasn’t ready for death, as Emily well knew. I could never sense God, not even then, as she seemed to sense Him.

  ‘And the rest is known. There is even a photograph of Emily tangled with the horse, and when I look at this I want to rage and weep, because no one is looking at her, Ralph! She was dying there and then, yet no one looked. They were all looking at the other horses. And sometimes I feel that this whole episode of my life is captured in that photograph: we were trying to change our world and the world looked the other way.’

  3

  ‘You look worried, dear,’ said Erica as Ralph sat down.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘What are you worried about?’

  ‘Oh, well, I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about my herbs …’

  ‘Your herbs?’

  ‘Yeah. I meant to ask the guy across the hallway to water them while I was away. I meant to give him a key. But I forgot.’

  ‘You grow herbs indoors? I used to do that in the war, to make things taste of something.’

  ‘No. They’re on my sill.’

  ‘Then why should they die? It rains in America, doesn’t it?’

  Ralph smiled. ‘Sure, it rains. But the sill is too protected from the weather by the balcony above. The rain doesn’t get to them much. Or the sun either. They grow looking north.’

  ‘What kind of herbs are they?’

  ‘Oh, oregano and sage and parsley and tarragon …’

  ‘And you cook with them? You like cooking, do you?’

  ‘Yeah. I like cooking.’

  Erica took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. ‘Men used to be so frightened of domestic things!’ she said. ‘Bernard thought his balls would shrivel if he peeled an onion – till I told him otherwise. And then he got quite interested in cooking. But all that old-fashioned thinking is changing. Women have said, “Enough’s enough.” Yet some of them are like barnacles, still. Clinging to safety and possessions. Now, if I was young, Ralph, I’d say to myself: “Here it is! Eve’s unimaginable morning!” And I wouldn’t let my spirit be shredded by kitchen things. But possessions are our weakness. I really think men care less about them and will therefore always be more free than we are. I’ve tried to live my life without them, yet, I haven’t totally succeeded! You see, I’m very fond of my lamp which cost a lot of money. I talk to it and say: “You are very, very beautiful.” So you see? I’m not exempt. And of course the cupboard, which is all that was ever left of my mother, and I will never be parted from it. I suppose I’m entitled to love a few things, now that I’m old. But if I was a girl, I wouldn’t waste my time collecting things.’

  ‘If you were a girl, what would you be doing?’

  ‘What would I be doing? Oh Lord knows dear. I might be paddling a dugout up the Zambesi River, or I might be sitting on my bum with the Venerable Bede or someone in the Bodleian Library. I don’t know! At least I wouldn’t be in a Discount Centre. I’d like to burn them all down, those places!’

  Ralph laughed and Erica laughed with him. Then Ralph let his laughter subside and asked the question that had been inside him ever since the first day: ‘When did you start writing, Erica, and why?’

  She was silent. The red turban was on again and she put a hand up and touched it.

  ‘I had to start …’ she said, after a while. “During the First War I started, when I went back to my father’s house and found it so changed and him so changed. I think I wrote to stop myself going mad.’

  ‘Was it the war?’

  ‘No. The war was going on of course, but we were left behind. And what the war left behind was terrible for me. So I began The Two Wives of the King, which was a kind of fable about stupidity and waste, and it came out of what I saw and lived through on the farm with my father and Eileen.’

  ‘Why did you go home, Erica?’

  ‘Duty, Ralph. I didn’t have much of a sense of duty, but I had a little. And when war was declared, the Women’s Movement foundered, you see. Germany robbed us of our enemy. We couldn’t fight the government of England when England was at war – though of course I saw later that we should have done. We should have gone on. But we didn’t. We folded away our sashes and rolled up our banners and just dispersed like mice. And with the vote still not won! It was so wrong. But patriotism stiffled us. We knew we were finished.

  ‘So I sat up all one night with Chadwick. He was very dapper by that time with a new lover called Robin, far too mortal and frail to shoulder a kit bag and therefore safe from the Western Front – or so he and Chadwick thought. And Chadwick said prophetically: “Women will be needed on the land, Erica, because all the young men will go hurtling into the recruiting centres. They’ll all go. And how will your father manage if he can’t get labour at harvest time?”

  ‘I told Chadwick I didn’t want to go. I said I would get a job in a factory in London and start to pay him rent for my room. Because I felt, you see Ralph, that my life had begun the day I came to London and in two years I had lost the part of me that belonged to Suffolk. Even my Suffolk accent had gone, more or less. And my room in Chadwick’s flat; I looked at it and thought, I don’t want to leave it – it’s mine.

  ‘I cried that night. I cried for Emily. I cried for the terrible war that was beginning and I cried for myself. I think I knew I would be unhappy when I went home. And Chadwick knew. He kept promising me that I could come to London to see him whenever I wanted to and he would make sure Mrs Hogan made something special. He was trying to be loyal to his brother, though. He knew I had to go.

  ‘I remember that this Robin person arrived very early in the morning and found Chadwick and me sitting at the dining table, exhausted and weeping and he burst out laughing and gave us each a silk handkerchief and Chadwick looked very embarrassed and said to Robin: “Aberration, dear one. Aberration of the heart.” But I cried on into the silk handkerchief, on and on until I realized I was alone so I put my head on the table and went to sleep.

  ‘I didn’t weigh much. All the strength I’d had from working on the land had gone in prison. I was very thin and white and a bit weak, even though Mrs Hogan had been trying to build me up. Small things frightened me. Things which never would have frightened me before. The journey, for instance. I dreaded that journey home, Ralph. I dreaded it with all my heart. So I did a strange thing. I wrote to Gully. I told him I would be coming home on the train on a certain day and asked him not to tell my father, but to come and meet me and, if he could, let me stay with him and Dot and the little child, Buckwheat,ior a few days, until I felt strong enough to go home. I had often thought of Gully, you see, and hoped he was “getting on” as they say in Suffolk, in his trade. I missed him now and then with his big old head and his hair like a bull’s forelock and his laugh. I missed Gully far more than I missed my father because Chadwick had become a father to me and I shared all my secrets with him.

  ‘Gully’s reply has stayed in my mind all these years. “This war be some terrible thing Erica,” he said, “and you be best out of it.” I think Gully thought that part of the war was going on in Bryanston Square! Perhaps he had dreams of the Hun sailing up the Thames in a gunboat! I laughed when I got his note. I knew that he, at least, hadn’t changed.

  ‘But why did I go to him? I saw him as a “safe house”, I think. I knew I wouldn’t have to lie to him, not to Gully. I could just say to him, this is how it�
��s been, Gully, and I don’t expect you to understand it, but I know you won’t think badly of me and I know you will help me.

  ‘He was at the very far end of the little station. He held his cap in his hands, as if he was at a funeral. He looked very neat and tidy. I think he’d dressed up for me, with a clean shirt. I clambered down with my luggage – all the new clothes dear Chadwick had paid for – and I ran to Gully and threw my arms round him and put my head on his rough jacket and cried. It must have been terribly puzzling for Gully! He’d hardly changed in two years but to him I was a different person: he couldn’t recognize me.

  ‘Dot and Buckwheat weren’t there. Dot’s father had died and she’d taken the little boy to Ipswich to her mother’s, to be company for her. So Gully and I were quite alone in his little place above the shop. We were very shy, I remember. The years we’d been together didn’t seem to help us. So I started to tell Gully about meeting Emily and joining the Suffragettes and then about going to prison. And he couldn’t believe I’d done all this. “I don’t know,” he kept saying. “I don’t know at all …”

  ‘We drank his home-made cider and had a little meal – a stew that was mainly vegetables – and when it was time for sleep I asked him if I could come and lie in his bed. I told him I felt very cold, which I did, and I think all I wanted was for him to hold me and let me go to sleep close to him. Of course, I suppose if I’m honest, I’d begun to think of those seventeen times and my evening in the cupboard and somehow, after all that I’d done, to be a virgin still was strange and I was fed up with it. So I expect I was asking for it and never gave a thought, you see, for Gully’s loyalty to Dot or anything like that. I never even considered it and I daresay this was very wrong of me. But there it was. He took me and my virginity was gone and I felt a wonderful joy. Gully made love to me three times that night and the weight and size of him was like no other man I’ve ever met. Then the next day I left, and we’ve never talked of it again as long as we’ve lived.’