The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘Yes. I’ve read about people doing that. I often feel I want to warn them that growing things is very hard work and sometimes all that work goes to waste, because the pigeons come and eat the broccoli and the chickens get fowl pest. And then immediately you’re back in the world, aren’t you? You buy a gun to shoot the pigeons; you disinfect your chicken hut with some chemical made in Switzerland.’

  Ralph smiled. ‘You didn’t ever really like the farm, Erica, did you?’

  She sighed and her head went back. ‘I liked it when I was a child. My feet loved the grass and my head loved the sunshine. It was all I knew. And there were moments, much later, when I went back there with Bernard, when I felt I belonged to it and I owed it my life.’

  ‘But at the time of Eileen …’

  ‘Oh no. At the time of Eileen, all I thought about was going back to London. I’d become very impatient, not only with Eileen but with the slow ways of the Suffolk people. I used to spend some time with Gully and Dot and although I loved Gully very much, I found his company and Dot’s rather dull. They talked a lot about meat prices, and the possibility of rationing and of course about Buckwheat whose real name was John, I think, but he was never called John.

  ‘I wrote to Chadwick when I was about half way through my book. It was before conscription came in so Robin was still safe and getting exactly the same kind of silk scarves and first editions of Gide that had been given to Athelstone Amis. Robin was the longest lived of Chadwick’s lovers – and the last. I don’t suppose he was at all faithful to Chadwick because none of them ever were, but he stayed with him on and off until he was called up, and he was there when I went to stay with Chadwick in the spring of 1916.

  ‘It must have been eighteen months since I had seen Chadwick and I noticed a change in him. He looked very much older – as if the war had aged him – and his hair was thinning. The Hogans were still there but the troubles in Ireland had made them restless and they didn’t give Chadwick the care he was used to. Dust and strands of Chadwick’s hair were left lying.

  ‘Yet it was wonderful to hear London outside my window. I sat in my room and listened. In part, I listened for the war and I couldn’t hear it. You see, no one close to me had died. None of the men I loved – my father, Chadwick, Gully – had gone to war. If they had, then I would have heard it, just like the old farmers who drank in the pub in silence. They heard it.

  ‘The London theatres had been closed when war was declared, but they opened again quite quickly and Chadwick was writing a new play. On the first evening of my visit we dined in a restaurant (without Robin) and Chadwick talked about his play. He told me it was a satire on patriotism and militarism. Its central character was a Belgian refugee who goes through the whole war pretending that his hands had been cut off by the Germans and everyone he meets in England rushes off to the Western Front to avenge the crime and gets killed before they’ve had time to say “Wipers”. It didn’t, as you can see, sound at all like Chadwick’s other plays. Not a butler in it! And of course he knew no one would put the play on, not while the war lasted. But he believed that when the war was over, the pacifists would come back to popularity, and then everyone would flock to it. It was called What did you do in the war, Jean-Marc?

  ‘I let Chadwick talk about the play for a while and then I told him that I had started to write. I suppose I thought he would be glad and offer to help me in any way he could, just as he’d helped me in 1912. Well, he did try to be glad. He pretended he was glad. Yet I knew straight away that he hated me for this.

  ‘It was as if he saw an eclipse: me blotting him out, all his fame and name and money. It was very, very unexpected and strange. Chadwick was such a kind man, so terribly kind. Yet over this one thing, he felt vulnerable and then he could be unkind. He read my book a day or two later, and he said to me “you musn’t take any notice of what I say, Erica. You must feel quite free to go on and finish the book, but in my opinion I don’t believe this is the best thing for you to be doing – writing. I don’t think you’re making the best use of your talents, not with fiction.”

  ‘It was wounding, wasn’t it? You see, Chadwick was really the only person I knew whom I thought would understand the book and be in sympathy with what I was trying to do. I never, never expected him to neglect me.

  ‘It was a miserable stay, after that. I was very silent and Chadwick and Robin ignored me most of the time. They were very affectionate to each other and I was right outside them. I wanted to shout at Chadwick. I wanted to tell him he had betrayed me. I thought of all my countless nights of writing – all gone to waste, destroyed in an instant. It was unbearable, Ralph. It was like a wound.

  ‘So I came back to Suffolk and the war dragged on and shortages came – bread and potatoes and sugar and meat – and we worked harder than ever on the farm, to grow more.

  ‘Eileen’s nephew was killed on the Somme and she went to Aldeburgh for a few days to be with her sister. So my father and I were alone. And during all the time that Eileen was away, he talked about my mother. It was as if he’d opened a vein and the blood of his love for her came pouring out. He even talked about the bull and her death in the forget-me-not field and how, after she died, he thought of killing himself and probably would have done if it hadn’t been for me. He told me how he had met her and courted her and made love to her beside a pond long before the wedding day and how his desire for her never left him. He talked as if I wasn’t there: the most intimate details of his life with her came tumbling out, and then the minute Eileen came back, he was silent and never referred to my mother again. I asked him, at some point during those days, whether he loved Eileen, and he sighed and said: “A man needs a wife, Erica.” And I couldn’t help smiling. I thought of the children’s game played in a circle, and I imagined my father, silent and confused, in the middle with all the children shouting:

  “The Farmer’s in his den,

  The Farmer’s in his den!

  Ee-ii, tiddly-i,

  The Farmer’s in his den!”’

  4

  ‘I dreamed of my friend, Claustrophobia. She came to my door and she stared at me in my sleep, without my teeth in. She was dressed all in grey and she was very tall, yet she had her child’s face, just as I’d imagined it in the cowshed. Then I woke and looked at her with my mouth hidden behind the bedclothes. She was holding out a basket of strawberries. Offering them to me. And she was smiling.’

  Ralph had telephoned for a taxi and the taxi had deposited them at the north entrance to Regent’s Park. Erica had been afraid of the outing, but Ralph had wrapped her in a coat and a shawl, guided her safely down the stairs and into the sunshine.

  And now they sat on a bench. The horse chestnuts were in pale leaf. Spring was late – later each year, she complained – yet courteous, finally, in its straight clusters of daffodils, apologetic in its sudden warmth.

  ‘It seemed to me,’ said Erica, ‘that the strawberries were Death. She was bringing me death, in her hands that had never aged, and saying: “taste it”.’

  Ralph closed his eyes, savouring the sunlight on his face. On their short walk to the bench (she had been afraid that a sudden gust of wind would catch at her and blow her into the sky; she wouldn’t be led any further than the bench) he had noticed that he was only a little taller than she was.

  ‘The strawberries may not have been death,’ he said. ‘They could have been anything. Imagination, for instance.’

  ‘Oh no. My imagination’s all dried up. I think they were death.’

  Then she looked all around her, as if she’d never seen the park before, the bright grass, the neat paths, the cherry trees …

  ‘It’s very, very nice here,’ she said. ‘I’m always rather moved by that bit in Julius Caesar when Anthony tells the Roman rabble that they’ve been given all Caesar’s parks – for ever. I think parks are very civilizing, full of order and neatness, yet designed to let nature flower. Very clever.’

  ‘Are you glad you came?’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes. I didn’t know it would be so warm. Thank you for taking all the trouble, Ralph, just to get me out.’

  ‘It’s okay. Do you like sitting, or shall we walk on? We could go to the canal if you like.’

  ‘Oh no. The canal’s very dirty. I don’t know how the ducks can live on it and bring up families. If I was a duck, I’d waddle to St James’s, which used to be much cleaner.’

  Ralph smiled.

  ‘Now we must go back,’ she said, ‘before we get so used to it that it fades.’

  In their returning taxi, Erica’s eyes looked red, as if the sunshine had dazzled and hurt them. Tiredness pulled her mouth into a thin line.

  ‘I don’t know where I was, dear,’ she said suddenly, ‘but I don’t think I can talk today. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘What have I become,’ Ralph wrote in his Summary, ‘through reporting the lives of others, doing nothing with mine except reporting? Is reporting doing? If the answer is yes, to what extent is reporting doing?

  ‘I did something, today. I took the old lady for a walk. I showed her there were flowers and sunshine very near her, and she enjoyed this. I enjoyed this. We were both doing.

  ‘Tomorrow, however, I shall go back to reporting – if my toothache can stand it.

  ‘N.B. The last time I did anything, I threw up.’

  Ralph stared at what he had written for a while. Then he added: ‘I’ve no idea whether what Erica said about “dying in a certain way” and my role in her death was a momentary thought or a conviction truly held. To play some role in her death would be doing. Can’t imagine what this role could possibly be.’

  Ralph closed the book and stared round at his room. In it, he had started to knit time in three colours: the pink of Erica’s Tiffany lamp, the grey-gold of John Pennington’s Oxford, the brown of Walt’s shiny suit.

  *

  ‘The war was beginning. “It will be the Last War,” said King Rey to his council, “the only War.” And he ordered that the camels be harnessed and made ready.

  In her exile, Beth heard rumours of the war. “The circus people and all their lands will be laid waste!” King Rey had boasted. “We shall fight to the last camel, and our camels are the proudest in the world.” But Beth had seen the heavy guns. She imagined them moving over the desert now, as silently as they could be moved, and she wept for what was to come. She tried to send messages of warning to King Rey: “All your men and all your camels will be pounded to fragments by the big guns.” But the messages she sent were captured by the enemy. They never arrived.

  The palace was quiet now. When news of the coming war began to spread, the clowns and the fat women took their elephants and their performing wolves and the bodies of the birds they had buried under the stairs and went away in a procession, leaving only their piles of dung, and a few bales of straw behind.

  In the ensuing silence, the King was at last able to sleep. He gave up his search for Zabeth and lay down to dream of a life without her. He slept for four days and nights, and only one dream did he have of her: she came to him and said “If I had been your first wife, I would not have betrayed you. The betrayal, therefore, is yours.”

  When he woke, his nightgown was stained red from the bleeding hole in him, and the war had begun. The King heard the snorting of his camels outside his window and felt refreshed. He knew that the war was his. He would win it in a day.’

  ‘I slept so well, dear,’ she said, ‘it was the fresh air and the park. So very kind of you, Ralph …’

  ‘Good. We’ll do it another day, shall we?’

  ‘Only if I can hold on to you tightly, just like I did. Otherwise, I know I might go off into the sky.’

  Ralph laughed. ‘I don’t know why you imagine that.’

  ‘Don’t you? No, I don’t think I do either. It’s very silly of me, isn’t it? I don’t suppose old women do get blown up into the air at all. But it just seems so very likely. And I was always afraid of the wind. “The Suffolk Wind”, we used to call it and it would sigh round us for days and nights. As the war went on, I used to imagine the same wind, whispering over France, and the soldiers hearing it and thinking, why doesn’t it ever stop?

  ‘I was ill in the summer of 1918. I believe I had the ‘flu that thousands of us got that winter and died of. I don’t think I had ever in my life been ill before – only weak those times after my hunger strikes – so this was a new event for the household and it made Eileen very cross. I couldn’t stand up. I crawled to Eileen’s room and told her to go for the doctor. She called my father and they lifted me and put me into bed. I remember lying half asleep and wondering if I was dying. I thought terribly self-pitying thoughts: no one will care if I die, not even Chadwick or Gully … so much better to have died a martyr like Emily or even a lover’s death like my mother’s.

  ‘A young doctor came. I saw him so undistinctly, Ralph, it was as if his body was just a patterning on the wall – flat and far away. He switched on a pencil-thin light and looked into my eyes. I tried to see him round the edge of the light, but I couldn’t. But when my fever had gone, he came back and smiled at me and all his flatness had disappeared. And I knew from the way that he looked at me that there would be something between us. The war was ending – we knew it by this time – and now this man had come, very handsome, very straight. His name was David. It suited him so well! You could just imagine him naked and upright, with his sling and his little stone. I laughed and laughed from my bed. David indeed! I said.

  ‘Now I was enjoying the comforts of my illness. No early morning milking, no crawling through the strawberry nets on my belly, no bicycling for the vet at all hours.

  ‘Eileen grumbled more than you could imagine. I think in a way she feared the end of the war, because she knew that in peacetime the Tipperary Rooms would make no sense. And women had started going to the pub, you know, and ordering drinks and making noise there: they weren’t content to do their talking in Eileen’s slaughterhouse any more. So she saw it fade and go silent and she sniffed and puffed with hurt.

  ‘But she found a new scheme and this was it: she wanted to marry me off to David! She found out all about him – who his parents were, how much he was paid. She made certain he’d never been married before, wasn’t paying out for children in another part of the country. She even discovered that he had an aunt living in Aldeburgh, a Mrs Shuttle, and went to call on her.

  ‘I had no idea she was doing all this, not until she came into my room one night and began brushing my hair – an intimate thing, a thing she never did – and as she brushed and brushed she said very kindly: “You’re twenty-five, Erica and we must start to plan your life.”

  ‘Pour the wine Ralph dear,’ said Erica, ‘for this David incident is so very funny, so absolutely of its time that I want to cackle whenever I think of it. It worked so wonderfully, you see, that Eileen need never have bothered with her visits to Aldeburgh and all her detective work.’

  Ralph poured the wine and Erica sat back with her glass, enjoying it. Today, she seemed very strong. Then she looked at Ralph worriedly.

  ‘I hope you won’t think I was cruel. I hope you won’t write that in my youth I was uncaring and flippety. You see, half of me did love David. I think I loved the bit of him I could see round the edge of the pencil torch and the pencil torch was like a light inside me that he never touched. So a great or a wild love was impossible. Do you understand? He was a very, very gentle young man. Utterly English, like a plain meal and without any of the cruelty of his class. When he called, Eileen would take out her gros point and sip his vowel sounds with ecstasy.

  ‘And I went up in her estimation now that I was being courted by someone so polite and correct; she thought the rebel in me was dead.

  ‘We never did very much, David and I. We bicycled to bits of the countryside we liked and sat in silence, listening to the hot days. A fair came once to our town and we went to that and David paid for us to try all the amusements. And one of these was a peep show where you stared into a b
lack box and turned a handle and saw ladies in corsets with their thighs showing, and men with flowers flopping down dead at the sight of these thighs – very puerile! You never saw a bum in those days, let alone anything else and there were many things women weren’t meant to know.

  ‘I didn’t tell David about my night with Gully. I let him kiss me – on those hot days – and he was full of words of love at that time, yet I don’t remember them. They were just part of the summer noises, very pleasant. But I think this exasperated David, that I didn’t hear all his swearings of love, because one day he borrowed a little car and drove me to Southwold which was rather fashionable then and full of rich people standing still. He carried me on his back into the sea – the dear, grey old sea of England! – and then he let me fall and I hadn’t expected this. I was absolutely drenched and choking, but David swam away from me and laughed and said “Serve you right!” Yet back at our little hut, he said he was sorry for what he had done. He put his arms round me and told me he had finally made up his mind, he would marry me.

  ‘Well, Ralph, goodness me! My mind fled to Emily and everything we had been locked up for and persecuted for and I snatched up my clothes and ran. We are cheated and cheated again, I thought. We’re like cattle, to be mated or left aside at will. We’re the silent swinging udders of the field chewing the cud while the bulls rampage. You knew, Emily, I said as I ran, you knew it would never, never change and that’s why you chose death!

  ‘But the bull came panting up, with his wet moustache and his blue bathing suit. He seemed ridiculous. I stood still in the road and watched him. I thought of Eileen sitting and doing her tapestry and listening to her voice, and my father watching him come and go, imagining my future safe and secure. I yelled at him. “What makes you think anyone would want to marry you? What makes you think I shall ever marry anyone?” I was so cross, I forgot that it had ever been nice to be with him. I despised him.’

  Ralph smiled. ‘So that was it for David?’