The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘She said that in marrying my father she wanted to become my “mother” and that God had appeared to her again, this time in a tin of Belgian sardines (Belgian sardines!) and told her that I was one of his wayward children and that it was her duty as a daughter of St Paul to help me on to the path again and be my protector. “I have never,” she said “done anything in my life that wasn’t in answer to a commandment from God.” So I was very nasty to her then. “What about the fishknives?” I said, “Did God command you to buy them, and the Chippendale chair and the cushions with tassels on them and the card table and the fire screen and the Black’s Book of a Thousand Knitting Patterns, and all the gadgets with “patent pending” on them …” I went through the list of all her furniture and odds and ends, every single one that I could remember and when I couldn’t remember any more I stopped. I thought she would start whimpering again but she didn’t. She’d gone.’

  Erica stopped talking and looked at Ralph. He had let most of his tea go cold in the mug, yet there was a bit more colour in his face.

  ‘How do you feel, Ralph?’ she said.

  ‘I’m okay,’ said Ralph. ‘Was that it, then, was that the time you began to write?’

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go home and rest?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure. It was about then, was it, that you began?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You just … began?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you feel –’

  ‘No I didn’t feel important or anything like that, if that’s what you were going to say. I felt confused. I told you. I knew I should try to like Eileen for my father’s sake, and I also knew that I couldn’t. I felt confused about the war. At that time, we were being asked to love the war, but the war had brought to an end the only thing I believed in and when I heard that Sylvia Pankhurst had gone against Christabel and her mother and was urging working women to oppose the war it seemed to me that she was right, we should oppose it. Chadwick influenced me, of course. I didn’t think Chadwick could be wrong. So I started to oppose the war. I was the only one for miles around, I should think, who opposed it, so I had to oppose it in secret and this was very dull and lonely. So it seemed much better to write it all down and I started with my feelings about the war and then, rather by accident, I thought up this allegorical story about the war. It turned out to be more accurate than I could have foreseen, because the country I wrote about was laid waste by invading peoples, all its trees and vegetation destroyed, just like the Western Front. It was also about my father and his marrying Eileen – about stupidity and self-delusion. I called it The Two Wives of the King. The King isn’t a wicked or a cruel man. He’s vain, like the rulers of Europe were vain men, and he lets himself be fooled by a lie: he sticks a kind of suppository – a capsule – up his bum because he’s been deceived into believing that it contains untold wisdom and that, with this in his body, he’ll become wise and revered, like Solomon. But he doesn’t become wise. He loses his first wife and his second wife and then his kingdom.

  ‘I used to write after we’d all gone to bed. I never wrote for much more than an hour because the days on the farm were so long, it was hard to stay awake. I kept thinking the story would founder. I didn’t believe I’d get to the end and that later it would be published. I hid each page I wrote at the bottom of the cupboard, and I never told anyone what I was doing, not even Gully. But I began thinking up excuses to go to London to see Chadwick – this was before the first Zeppelin raids – in the hope that Chadwick would be able to tell if my story was worth finishing, or if it was very bad. I trusted Chadwick’s judgement and it was only later that I saw I was wrong to do so, and why.’

  *

  Ralph was on time. He brought the camera again. He had decided to ask Erica if she would go with him in a taxi to Regent’s Park and he would photograph her there. ‘It’s much warmer today,’ he would tell her, ‘and to get out would be good for you.’

  But when he said this, she laughed: ‘Good for me? Heavens no, dear! I don’t go out any more, not to open spaces. An open space would terrify me. I’d be blown up into the sky, like a kite, I’m sure I would.’

  ‘So you never go out?’

  ‘Now and again. I go to a shop. They’re mostly Indian or Pakistani, the shops around here and they sell things loose in sacks. I like loose things in sacks because they have a smell. Packets of anything don’t smell at all. Except detergent. That seems to smell a little, through the packet.’

  ‘We could smell the flowers in the park.’

  ‘What flowers?’

  ‘Crocuses.’

  ‘Are they up?’

  ‘Sure. They’re almost over.’

  ‘In winter?’

  ‘It’s April.’

  ‘Is it? I can’t tell.’

  ‘You didn’t know it was April?’

  ‘I expect I did. I expect I forgot.’

  She looked down at the two frail hands in her lap. They were bird-claw hands, one bent, one straight. They could be broken off, Ralph thought. And it was difficult to imagine that they had ever been any different, ever filled out with flesh and colour and strength, hands that milked cows.

  ‘I read some of The Two Wives this morning,’ said Ralph.

  ‘Did you? It’s a long time since I’ve looked at it.’

  ‘I tried to imagine you writing it. I tried to visualize you as you were then.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t pretty. Not at that time. I was too eaten up with hate and resentment. My skin was green.’

  Ralph smiled. ‘And your father did nothing? He couldn’t see you were unhappy?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was very sullen as the war went on. I expect he longed for me to go away. But I don’t think he ever blamed himself or Eileen for how I was. He blamed my two years in London. He blamed Chadwick.’

  ‘And Eileen?’

  Erica sighed. ‘I don’t know how he could have loved her. But he did. When she let him hold her hand I remember that he held it very, very tightly. And he fussed over her. He had to make sure she was all right amongst her furniture. He let her say grace at mealtimes – a thing we’d never ever done. And he let her be the patriot she was: he bought her red, white and blue wool to knit mufflers for the troops from Black’s Book of a Thousand Knitting Patterns. She took nineteen mufflers to our local recruiting station and I went with her to help carry them. She was in full sail, with her mufflers. She billowed. But she wasn’t given the attention she deserved. The recruiting station was crowded and we had to push our way through. She’d expected to see an officer in charge, not an N.C.O. She’d expected a young lieutenant with a cultured voice and all we got was a sergeant. “Look at this lads!” he said when we gave him the mufflers, “French knickers!” So Eileen blushed scarlet and began to push her way out. “Only a joke lady!” he called, “one has to have a bit of a joke in time o’ war. But that’s very kind of you, ma’am. Very kind I’m sure.” But she didn’t knit any more mufflers after that, not for a while. She was active in the White Feather Campaign, though; she wanted them all gone, including Gully. She tried to white-feather Gully, but he wasn’t having it. “If you love the war, Eileen girl,” he said, “you go on and fight it.”

  ‘The Angels of Mons inspired her. I expect you’ve heard of them, haven’t you? They were supposed to have appeared at Mons, which was the place of the first reported victory for the Allies. It wasn’t a victory, of course, because really there were no victories. The commanders in the field had dreamed of men dashing in on horseback with pennants flying; they hadn’t prepared for a static war with no victories. Eileen stitched a sampler with two angels on it and hung it up between “The Lord Giveth” and “The Lord Taketh Away.” “Let us never forget Mons” it said, but of course we did forget Mons! And after the Somme, I doubt whether anyone in England remembered it, except Eileen. The Angel of Mons fell down in about 1917 and I burnt them. I gave them a pillar-box cocktail.

  ‘I wanted to leave the farm. It w
asn’t my home after Eileen came to it: it was her home. I used to dream of my room in London, and the Thomas Crapper. I dreamed of Emily too. I dreamed I buried her in the garden and planted lily-of-the-valley above her head. I was very lonely.

  ‘And then came the dreadful business of the Tipperary Rooms. This must have started in the summer of 1915. I know a lot of the men had gone to the front by then and our little town, Culham Market, where Gully worked, was very quiet. The older farmers still came in, to deliver or buy and have their ale at the Lamb, but their sons had gone, most of them and they were a poor lot, all tied together with string. I suppose some of them had dead sons already. I can’t remember. They’d drink their beer in silence.

  ‘Anyway, it wasn’t for them, the Tipperary scheme. They had the pub, even though beer had gone up. No, it was Eileen’s idea and it was for the women, a venue for patriotism and knitting! She and her friend, Violet Marshall, formed a kind of club and I think it was called the Tipperary Women’s Federation or even the Royal Tipperary Women’s Federation, though by what right, I don’t know. Eileen went round the town looking for premises. She wanted to invade the Church Hall and take it over but the vicar’s wife had just died and the presence of women too near his nostrils brought on his queer turns at that time and so he refused. Eileen and Violet Marshall were terribly angry with the vicar. You see, once they’d thought up the Tipperary Scheme, they believed it was the most important thing anybody had ever thought up, so they pestered us all day and night until it got going. She held collections. Violet Marshall designed a banner which said “Women of Culham Market, what are you doing for the War Effort?” and I wanted to say to her, Eileen of Aldeburgh, what are you doing for my father’s farm? Because she hardly let her skirts touch the field. She helped now and then with the butter making, but that was all.

  ‘She got her premises in the end. She got a slaughterhouse! It was an old, high brick building near the station. Mr Haggard had used it to slaughter in at one time and then built his own more modern slaughterhouse and store nearer the shop. It was owned by the railway so Eileen and Violet had to pay a rent for it.

  ‘The rent must have been small because Eileen seemed very content and in a few months a sign was up saying “Tipperary Rooms”. It was a terrible place, Ralph! Gully had mended the broken windows for her and Violet Marshall and I whitewashed the walls which were thick with bloodstain. I remember that bits of blood tissue had hardened on the walls so they were never smooth because we didn’t scrape the blood off, we just painted over it. I don’t know why women came there. I never went near the Tipperary Rooms after I finished the whitewashing, but in no time it was crowded, so Eileen said. Women came with thermos flasks and sat on hard chairs with their knitting. They were middle-class women, like Eileen, with time to spare. They bought a loom and made blankets and rugs. They took it in turns to bring cakes, till sugar ran short. And all through the war, they kept going there. I don’t know why.

  ‘The next time I saw that building, where they’d had the Tipperary meetings, was when the farm became mine. I went with Bernard and by then he knew all about Eileen and the pearl-handled fishknives and the “Lord Giveth” samplers and the Book of a Thousand Knitting Patterns.

  ‘We went into the building and it felt very chilly. But time had neutralized it. There was no trace of the slaughterhouse and no trace of the Tipperary Rooms. It had become nothing. Just a derelict place where no one ever went.’

  The Harrington Hotel,

  Harrington Gardens,

  London S.W.7.

  ‘Dear John,

  Thanks for your letter, and well done about the novel. On no account come near London, which is no place for the very sensitive (you) nor the idiotically depressed (me).

  On the other hand, I would like to get to Oxford not later than the 26th–27th. You will note the advanced state of my depression when I say that I am in dire need of friendship. I’ve become so unskilled with strangers that I’ve hardly talked to a soul since I got here; only Erica, and she it is who must talk, not I. I’m obsessed with the neglect of my herbs back home. I grew them all from seed and now I’ve let them die. I could, literally, weep for them.

  If I could stay two nights in Oxford, say the 24th and 25th and see you each evening, this would be great. In the daytime I shall conduct myself like a good American and tour the city, and you will write, lucky you, with a piece of work all your own. If I was writing a novel, I don’t suppose I’d mind about the oregano.

  “And all our vacant space

  we fill

  with hired things” – J.P. 1964!

  Please let me know if these dates are okay (and please say they are).

  Ralph’

  Ralph considered, only for a moment, going back, cautious and apologetic, to Mr Toad’s, to seek out the coloured hostess who had arranged his Tennessee fragments into drunken lust, and into whose soft lap he had finally vomited £40-worth of champagne. But the club – and the girl – seemed a long, long way away. Before he left London he would go back – perhaps he might even try to make the girl, if he could recognize her. If he recognized her, he would remember not to call her Pearl.

  He lay down on his bed and picked up The Two Wives of the King. He read how, some days after the insertion of the capsule into his anus, King Rey, tormented by his lust for his second wife Zabeth who is hiding from him, sends his first wife, Beth, into exile:

  ‘The King commanded that she should journey alone with two camels. The second camel was loaded with all the tapestries Beth had stitched since Zabeth had replaced her in the King’s bed and in his heart. The tapestries were wound round the camel like a bandage.

  King Rey watched her go. In his dreams of the coming war, Zabeth had appeared to him wearing the Invisible Robe of the King’s Primogeniture and told him she would remain hidden forever among the circus people unless Beth was sent from the palace, back to her father’s lands. So now he watched her go with all her days and nights of falcon and huntsmen, with all the intricate foliage of her grief. He thought he would forget her.

  “Only,” said a voice at his side, “when you have forgotten her, shall I come back to you.” And the King, seeing Zabeth, reached out to her with a cry. But Zabeth had turned and run. She disappeared inside the palace at the very moment that Beth’s second camel stepped over the horizon. From a high window, a minah bird began to screech: “Men at arms! Men at arms!’ and King Rey sat down on the wisdom of generations. His anus was bleeding.

  News of the bleeding of the King’s anus carried fast. It travelled by elephant and by chimpanzee. Jugglers threw it and caught it in village after village. Doctors struggled into their waistcoats of the Great Emergency they had thought never to wear again and made their way on mules to the palace. The doctors had grown much too fat for their waistcoats of the Great Emergency; they arrived faint on their silly mules and the King refused to see them. He had discovered that the bleeding of his anus lessened the pain in it. The capsule seemed lighter. So he let the blood flow, and concentrated instead on the forgetting of Beth. The doctors undid their waistcoats of the Great Emergency and lolloped back to their villages. Once there, safe in their villages they said: “there is no Great Emergency. The Great Emergency was a lie.”

  King Rey pleaded for silence in which to count his royal heartbeats. With his bare hands, he strangled fifty-three minah birds. Fat women arrived at his bedside demanding gold for the dead. King Rey closed his eyes.

  “Sleep my darling,” whispered a gentle, troubled voice and obediently, so weak from the blood that flowed out of him, he slept. Then in his sleep he recognized the voice as Beth’s voice and he remembered the camel bandaged with tapestries going over the edge of the world. When the fat women saw the King weep in his sleep, they went away. They buried the minah birds under the stairs.’

  In Ralph’s (American, 1960) edition of The Two Wives of the King, the publisher described the book as ‘a powerful satirical novel about love and war by the author of The Hospital
Ship.’

  It wasn’t a very long work, the shortest by far of her three novels and deemed to be her least successful. Already, however, Ralph found himself held by the dilemma of King Rey, faintly disturbed by the images that surrounded this extraordinary man. He began to wonder if, at twenty-two, Erica hadn’t sewn the first seeds of the incredible General Almarlyes in the character of King Rey. The similarity between the two inventions lay in their humiliation which, in each case, is brought about by their own weakness. Yet almost thirty years separated them and the young woman who wrote, by candlelight, in the first winter of the first war must have been a very different person from the one who, with Bernard for companion, wrote The Hospital Ship in late middle age. Ralph closed the book and put it away. He tried to imagine Erica at twenty, Erica at fifty, yet it seemed pointless to do that. Before he slept, an odd phrase crept into his mind: ‘she became herself at the age of eighty-seven’.

  ‘There was so much we could measure by,’ she said. ‘In those days patriotism was a heartbeat, not just a word. For most of my life I was able to join – or not join – movements which bound people, which got them up and doing. Yet today what is there for you, Ralph? I sit here and I wonder: how can the new generation express its humanity? You see, we talk about peacetime don’t we? We think we’re living in peacetime but we’re not. We’re at war with our time and our enemies are everywhere, even in ourselves.’

  ‘A lot of us feel washed up,’ Ralph said gloomily.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean I know I have to start with myself. I have to make certain decisions … a lot of people I knew at college have just gone for shrinkage.’

  ‘Shrinkage?’

  ‘Yup. I mean they’ve shrunk down. They’ve become microscopic in fact.’

  ‘What do you mean, dear?’

  ‘Well, they’re not in the world any more. They’re not out there. They’re just trying to climb inside their own heads. Most of them live out of town and grow things. They’re keeping sane, I guess, but only by being isolated.’