by Rose Tremain
‘Only cold meat, dear. I can’t cook anymore. Except spinach. Sometimes I cook that.’
‘Jolly good lunch.’
‘I expect I imagine spinach will give me strength, like that Popeye person. But it doesn’t. I’ve got no strength at all, have I, Ralph?’
‘We went to the park …’
‘Yes. Wasn’t that nice? Ralph took me to the park – in a taxi.’
‘Good for you, Ralph,’ said Huntley, ‘dare say you’re one of what we used to call the Yanks, aren’t you?’
‘Yup. I was born in Tennessee, but I live in New York now.’
‘New York, eh? Well, must be casting off, Erica.’
‘Yes.’ Then she whispered to Huntley, ‘I’m terribly near the end, Hunt. I can feel it, you know …’
‘Oh tommyrot, Miss March! Wouldn’t surprise me, if you lived another hundred years. Eh, Ralph?’
When Huntley had gone, Erica looked down, disappointed, at her hands.
‘He’s a very silly man, you know,’ she said, ‘dreadfully kind but very silly. Bernard and I used to be rather fond of him. He was the only bit of either family who was going to continue. And it was quite right that he had the farm. But I should think the cows hate his milking machines and the soil hates the things he throws on it. But he’s made it pay, you see, so he’s all cockahoop about it. But I don’t think I’d want to go and see it. I never have gone. I’ve made a point of not going.’
Erica shut her eyes. Ralph wondered if, with this gesture, she was dismissing him too. Huntley’s visit had seemed to elate her, remind her perhaps of places she had long forgotten. Then, suddenly she was tired of him. She remembered he was a silly man.
Ralph was on the point of getting up and quietly leaving when Erica said: ‘I wanted to tell you today, dear, that as soon as Paris was over, I did begin to write again. I expect you’ve been thinking how undisciplined I was during all those years with Gérard and it’s true, really. Yet I couldn’t write – nothing important – at that time. I simply didn’t have anything to say.
‘But I was very ill after Gérard died. I believe it was a kind of shock illness, because I couldn’t get warm, even though it was summer, and I cried all the time, just like Thérèse crying over that little Julio.
‘One day I began to believe that I would die like that, just freeze to death in my room. I had hallucinations of death. Then I saw Saladino standing in my doorway. I don’t believe anyone else had visited me until that time, but Matilde might have come, I can’t remember, or Valéry Clément. I don’t know. I wasn’t aware of anyone else, but on the day Saladino came I could see him very clearly. Thérèse was with him and they had brought me some soup. They had a very loud argument about whether to take me to hospital. I tried to tell them that I didn’t want to go to the hospital, but I couldn’t speak. I swallowed the soup and then almost at once vomited it up. So as they cleaned the mess, they began their argument again.
‘I think this was one of the very few arguments that Thérèse won because Saladino wanted to put me in the hospital but Thérèse said no, she would look after me and when I woke up again I was in a strange room.
‘I think a doctor was called because Thérèse would bring me pills in the early mornings and again at night. And she wrapped me in the same kind of coloured shawls she had knitted for Julio. When I saw myself, I looked like an old woman.
‘And it was this sight of me, Ralph, so white, with dirty hair, swaddled up in these shawls that made me want to come out of the death I was in. I began to have dreams of England. Without Gérard, Paris had become terrible – a place to die in. So I struggled to get well. I let Thérèse bath me and wash my hair. I ate her soups and they stayed in my stomach. But then one afternoon I crept down to the patisserie, I stared at the banquette where Gérard used to sit and I thought I saw him there. I started to shout out to Saladino and he picked me up in his arms and carried me upstairs. But I knew, after this, I had to get to England somehow. I asked Saladino if he would call Valéry Clément and persuade him to help me get to England, if he would come with me. Saladino said I was too weak to travel and for days – even weeks, I don’t know – he refused to go to see Valéry.
‘I left sometime in the autumn of ’thirty-seven. It was turning cold again. Very cold on the boat, yet we sat on deck and I thought of Athelstone Amis sailing off to Venezuela.
Thérèse and Saladino both cried when I left and they hugged and kissed me and told me that Corsicans had never held Waterloo against the English! I didn’t know how to thank them for what they’d done. They probably saved my life – I don’t know. I wrote to them during the occupation. I told them all the Americans who had drunk Best English Tea would take off their mackintoshes and their houndstooth jackets and put on uniforms. I said the Americans and the English will save France for you – if only in return for my life!
‘I don’t remember the journey to England. Only sitting on the deck of the boat. That I remember. But when we got into Victoria Station, Valéry asked me where I wanted to go. And of course I had no idea. I didn’t want to go anywhere or think anything out. I longed for someone to take charge. So we sat in the station buffet at Victoria and I tried to piece England together. And it got dark and bright lights came on in the buffet and all I wanted was to sleep.
‘Valéry got us into a hotel somewhere. There was only one room available, so we shared it. Before I went to sleep Valéry said to me, “Now you must work, Erica. There’s nothing else for you to do.” And it wasn’t very long after this that I began again, Ralph. I began to write.
‘I slept all through my first day back in England. When I woke up, it was dark again and Valéry had gone out. I lay very very still and listened to London. I remembered my first night in Chadwick’s flat, hearing the bell-chimes. Now there were no bells, only lorries and trams and sudden shouts. I didn’t know what street I was in. Even when I looked out of the window, I couldn’t recognize it. It just looked very black and drab.
‘So I thought, I don’t think I can make sense of London, not now, not for a while yet. I began to think, if I go to Suffolk, they will let me have my old room for a while and let me sleep, and at least there will be silence.
‘Strange how, only a few months before, when I still had Gérard, I never would have dreamed of going to Suffolk. I thought then that Suffolk and my father and Eileen were gone for ever. I wanted them gone! But now, all I could think of was resting and being away from London, which I didn’t understand.
‘Valéry and I had dinner in the hotel dining-room. There was an orchestra playing and some people got up to dance. The grandeur of it all was most peculiar. I said to Valéry, “I don’t know why you chose this grand place.” Yet I admit it was oddly comforting, the formality of it; everything keeping its distance. Even the couples who danced. Very straight, they were, like skittles face to face.
‘The meal wasn’t good, but Valéry ordered some wine and I felt like a spectator at a show, in a comfortable seat. I told Valéry I would send a telegram to my father the next morning and wait in London only until I had an answer.’
‘It was like that other arrival in 1914. Seeing no one at the station at first, then Gully, years older but still in the same attitude, holding his flat cap. There was only one difference. This time, he looked afraid. When I put my arms round him, I felt him stiffen and pull away. I wanted to say I was sorry for my neglect of him. I wanted to explain that there was a world of silence now between his life and mine and I hadn’t been able to cross it. But he wouldn’t let me speak.
“Just don’t yew talk, girl, till I’ve said it,” he snapped. “Just don’t yew say nothin’!”
So I looked at him and I thought, heavens everything in the world had changed, as I once saw it changing in the clouds above my window. I am ill with change. Only the little station was unaltered. I could see leaves on the oak trees.
‘I was staring at these last leaves when I heard Gully say: “Went down that ol’ field, see? Night-time last
winter, he did. An’ he took his ol’ gun and shot himself.”
“Who?” I wanted to ask, but of course I knew.
“Your father,” he said, “and mine.”
‘But there was no weeping left inside me, Ralph. None. From that day to this, I don’t believe I’ve cried at all. Gérard took all my tears, all that were left in me after my mother went and Emily and Chadwick, and I’ve never shed any more, not for a soul. In dreams of course, I hear myself crying sometimes, but it’s a very distant sound, like an echo.
‘Questions crossed my mind: why did no one try to find me and tell me? Which field had he died in? The forget-me-not field? Why had he done it last year instead of years and years before? But I didn’t ask them. I stared all around me and then up at the sky. I could see a bird, circling. It had been raining in London, but here it was a bright morning. I can’t remember what I said to Gully. Perhaps I said nothing at all and we drove to the house in silence.’
Erica stopped talking. She leant back and closed her eyes. After a moment or two of silence she mumbled: “I’m so sorry, Ralph dear. That silly old Huntley tired me out with all his farming talk. If I just lay down, would you read to me for a while? Would you mind? I love it when people read aloud. It’s very peaceful.’
‘Sure,’ said Ralph.
‘I’ll try not to go to sleep. Then we can talk a bit more, afterwards.’
‘Sure.’
‘Would you fetch the eiderdown from my bed, dear? Then I can just lie here.’
‘Would you rather go to bed?’
‘Oh no. Never in daylight. Not if I can help it. It seems so wasteful.’
Ralph cleared away the remains of the lunch and took it to the kitchen. Mrs Burford had gone.
Then he went into Erica’s bedroom, turned back the torn candlewick bedspread and pulled out the eiderdown. He noticed the softness of the eiderdown, real eider feathers in it, surely, not bits of rubber, but the fabric which covered it was faded, and torn in places.
Erica lay down with her head on a cushion and Ralph covered her. The sun, at her window, was bright.
‘I try to read,’ Erica said, ‘at night but the print seems to have got very small and it tires me. Yesterday, you see, after you’d gone, I wanted to have a look at In the Blind Man’s City. If I read it, I knew I would remember for you how and why I had written it. But I couldn’t read it. The words just danced about in front of me. They wouldn’t stay on their lines. Perhaps you could read me a little of it, Ralph dear, would you mind? It’s years since I looked at it. I can’t even remember the story.’
Ralph searched along her shelves till he found it. It was stuffy in the room. He sat down in his chair and began:
‘The missionary told the boy that the boy was black. In the thick shade of the baobab tree where he had been put, the boy touched the skin of his knees. He tried to feel what black was. The missionary had told his mother that white doctors would cure his black blindness one day.
Yet his blindness served.
Now that the white man had arrived, there was money in it. His mother Ngumbi wouldn’t send him to the mission school. She sat him on his little mat with his wood bowl in the shade of the baobab tree at the edge of the market place, and the white men threw money into it – francs and pennies. Sometimes the coins missed the bowl and hit his feet.
The year the white men came, he was no older than seven. At midday, his grandmother, Matarina, would bring him a little hot maize-meal in a bowl and some brownish water in a gourd. He had been taught to feed himself and wipe spilt food from his face and body. His arms were strong from working in the fields with Ngumbi and he could tip up the heavy gourd with ease.
While he ate, his grandmother squatted by him in the dust, her skirts hitched above her knees. Nobody knew how old Matarina was – only the witchdoctor’s father who had been buried with ceremony in the forest. Monkeys now chattered above the old witch doctor’s tomb, but the witch doctor was silent on the question of Matarina’s age.
Unknown to the boy, Matarina had offered koki-beans to the mission teachers to teach her a word or two of their language, and she had painted a sign which she brought out to the boy one day with his maize-meal and his water. With a charred stick she had written on it in English and in French: BLIND CHILD, ENFANT AVEUGLE, and propped the sign against an upturned bowl quite near to the boy’s mat. The boy knew nothing about the sign.
The horseflies shared the shade of the baobab tree. They stung the boy’s neck and his thighs. He swore at the horseflies, just as he had heard Ngumbi swear in the fields in the days when she had taken him to work with her.
It had been very hot in the fields, but the boy knew that the world of the fields was a world of women, safe and wide. And they had given him small jobs to do – stripping the maize husks into huge baskets, fetching water from the stream, in wooden buckets, tethering Ngumbi’s goat to its pole in the little basin near the river where the grass was still ereen. And the talk of the women had shaped the day for him. It was slow, weary talk in the quiet early mornings; it brightened with the sun. At midday when he was given nuts, fruit, sometimes a little cheese wrapped in a cloth, the woman-talk was like a clustering of birds and their squawking laughter rang out across the fields. Then there was a period of quiet; the women felt sleepy: they remembered the old men or the village who lay down in the cool of the huts. But as the evening came on, they would begin to talk happily of food: there would be antelope meat for supper with a good sauce, Matarina was making foo-foo balls … And the boy was content to be near them. Their warm, strong legs were the anchors of his life.
He didn’t understand why he now sat by himself all day under the baobab tree in the dust of the market square. Ngumbi had told him that the coins dropped into his wooden bowl were very precious. With these coins the family would soon be able to buy tin plates and paraffin lamps from the Indian traders. Yet he still didn’t understand, either the need for these odd-sounding things or the new pattern of his new life, in which no one spoke to him – only Matarina, in the dust of midday – and the babble of the market, its smells and flies made his head ache. Some of the traders came to urinate under the baobab tree and the sour urine would splash the boy’s shoulders. All day he would wait for the feel of the cooler evening air on his face and for the sound of Ngumbi, singing as she came home from the fields.
There were days when no coins where thrown into his bowl. Ngumbi would complain and shout. She said the boys from the mission school had crept up and stolen the money. She told the boy to hold the bowl in his lap, to spit if he heard a child’s footstep near him. And he would hear her complain to the whole village, “the boy got nothing again today. He doesn’t know how to beg.” And he would think, I don’t recognize your voice my Ngumbi, my mother. One day, I shall come to hate you.’
Ralph paused. Erica opened her eyes and smiled. ‘Africa!’ she said. ‘It was terribly important to set this story in Africa, yet of course I knew nothing about it. I knew, you see, that I couldn’t possibly write about Suffolk or London or Paris: there was far too much to crowd my mind in these places. But Africa! I knew that there, my story would begin to work. And with all my writing the same pattern had appeared: to make sense of what was on my doorstep, I had to take the story far away – to somewhere like Africa, or to a made-up place. The settings for The Two Wives of the King and The Hospital Ship were both made up. People have tried to liken these places to actual countries, but that’s very stupid. They exist in my mind, that’s all.’
‘How did you come to know Africa?’
‘Well. I went there once with Bernard, to Kenya – but that was much later. When I wrote the book, I just invented Africa. All I’d read was something called Diary of a Missionary which I found in my father’s bookshelf. It was written by a woman called Alice Morahan who was in the Congo for six years. I suppose she must have been a nun, but I can’t remember. She gave me some very good descriptions of the mud houses of the villages and all the vermin in them – coc
kroaches and mice. She also seemed to be rather moved by Africa and say extraordinary things like “the blood of Christ our Saviour flows in the red lilies of the Congo basin.” Anyway, she helped me. She was all I needed.’
‘To begin?’
‘Yes. Though I didn’t begin with Africa. That came later.’
‘But you began something straight away?’
‘No. I began wanting to write straight away, because that was all there was left at that time in my life – the writing. But it took me a while to get used to England and used to discipline. I suppose it was the following winter that I began.’
‘Gully was very, very upset about my father. Dot told me that at the burial, which was a grudging, brief kind of thing, reserved for suicides, his poor old sideways face had been awash. I expect he thought I had grown hard and unfeeling, because I didn’t cry. Certainly he was very formal with me, as if he hated to remember that long-ago night we’d spent together. And even our childhood. He didn’t seem to want to remember any games we’d played or the peculiar sums we’d done about Spanish noblemen with twenty-five castles, or even the day when he pissed on Sonny Aldous and John Tomkins in the playground. The only thing we still had in common was our dislike of Eileen. Gully had his own home and family (he had another child by then, a little girl called Ellen Jane) and he never went to see Eileen or help with anything up at the farm. Most of the land had been let to Haggard’s son and he kept it very well, with good deep ditches and all the hedges trimmed.
‘But the house – that was Eileen’s. There was very little left of my father in it, just a photograph or two and his pipe, which she kept in a blue jar. She’d replaced him, almost straight away, so Gully said, with Miss Pinney. Miss Pinney was someone she’d known at Aldeburgh. She became Eileen’s “companion”.
‘She was younger than Eileen who must have been sixty by then. She had a little flat face and eyes that watered a lot. She spoke very softly and started to tremble if anyone on the wireless was rude. Her favourite pastime was making pictures out of shells and dried flowers. She told me this was the ancient craft of her ancestors who came from New Zealand – shell pictures! She let Eileen carry on just as she’d carried on before, doing her ceaseless rounds of spit and polish and fold and tidy and dust and flick. It was Eileen who decided what they ate and with which sets of mats and plates. It was Eileen who took them endlessly to church. It was Eileen who hired a Suffolk girl to do the dirty work of the house and then bullied her. Miss Pinney never talked to the girl. She thought conversation beneath her. And the girl left in tears. Before she went, Eileen made her kneel down in front of her latest sampler, “Blessed are the pure in heart”, and ask God to send her some manners.
