by Rose Tremain
‘Yet I never pretended to Bernard that I would marry him. I never lied and said I would. He was just certain that, in the end, I’d change my mind. I expect he thought of marriage as a kind of reward for everything he’d done for me; he thought he’d earned it. But the marriage talk became very tedious. For a while I left him. I said I couldn’t go on with our friendship. I said I wanted to be left alone to write.
‘So he was very sensible. He left me alone and sent no letters and I stopped going down to Surrey to see him. But I found I often thought of him, in his room with its hundreds of books and its two microscopes and his little boxes of water colour paint and his narrow bed where I had occasionally slept. I didn’t want to think about him, and yet I did. He was in me somewhere and I had a sense of all the years to come and I thought, if I don’t spend them with him, I shall probably spend them quite by myself.
‘I finished In The Blind Man’s City. It had taken me almost two years and by the end of it I knew that my left eye which had done the work of two for a long time was very bad. I remember it was at the start of this new blindness – of the left eye – that I wrote to Saladino and told him the Americans would come in and there would be a joint Allied landing and France would be saved. But I never had any reply and I wondered if Saladino was safe.
‘Ranulf liked the book. He took me out to one of his famous lunches to celebrate and we had potted shrimps which were a great luxury in the war. He told me that paper was terribly scarce. We might have to wait at least a year to publish the book, and this depressed me. I thought, I won’t see it, then. It was years since I’d seen my name on a book and I wanted this now. I wanted the book to be praised.
‘But the potted shrimp lunch was the end of it – for a long while. It finally came out in 1945 and by then I had almost forgotten it: so much else had happened.
‘I was paid a small advance and I went to see an eye specialist in Wimpole Street. I think the eye specialist took all the advance money. He told me I would have to have two operations, the first on my right eye to remove the lens, and a later similar one on my left eye. He explained to me that the period between the two operations would be one of distorted vision. Special glasses would be made with an artificial lens for my right eye, but to co-ordinate the vision of the two eyes would be difficult, almost impossible.
‘I wrote to Bernard. I didn’t think I could go through these operations on my own. There were too many questions I hadn’t asked and I suppose I thought Bernard would know the answers. All those hours he spent with the microscope – I thought they might give him the special answers. But of course they didn’t! He knew all about the ommatidia of butterflies but nothing about the human eye. I don’t know why I ever imagined that he did.
‘But we became friends again. Bernard had been mourning me, and he was glad to be out of his black armband. He wanted me to leave my flat and take some cottage or something to be near him in Surrey. But I couldn’t do that – not then. I had three months to wait for the operation which would be in Guy’s Hospital, unless the air raids began again and it was blown to pieces. I couldn’t plan anything until at least the first operation was over. And then, after this there would be this second time of waiting, and I didn’t know what to expect. I wondered if I would begin to see the world upside down.’
‘There was hardly any pain. But perhaps there was shock in my body, I don’t know. I know that the war filled my mind. Under the bandages, my eye, without its seeing part, became global. There were dreams at first of the red-haired man in Paris, then the certainty that my eye was marching, rolling along with the stamping crowd: “Arms for Spain! Arms for Spain!” But my eye knew that these things were preliminaries. There had been light on these times and now there was none. The Jackboot – the gorged Jackboot of my story about the hats – was hung up above my bed. It was hung on a thread of saliva and the thread would soon snap. We knew by that time about the camps. The bursting of the saliva thread would signal death.
‘The specialist from Wimpole Street came, but I saw him as a camp Kommandant. I tried to say: “My father used to tease me about my black hair. He used to say I was a witch, but I’m not Jewish, not that I know. But then of course I did lie with Sam Green for more than a thousand nights and Sam had a father called Louis Greenberg, in prison for petty larceny, but preferring that to the world, preferring to be left alone …”
‘So the camp Kommandant went away, and only in my dreams did he come back and hold my eye in the palm of his hand, my round, moist eye, toss it from one palm to the other and say: “This is how the world moves, you see. Not round and round as you expected, but in a series of leaps or jumps, expertly controlled so that it never falls and breaks up, not quite, though of course this threat is always present, and will become greater as time goes on …”
‘Nurses came and said I was disturbing the other wards with my screams. I remember their soft arms holding me. I was given injections to make me sleep, but the pain of one injection seemed to last all through that one sleep till the next. The needles were like Bernard’s welded bayonet, making colossal wounds. I shouted to Bernard to throw his weapon away for ever.
‘One of the worst dreams – illusions, whatever they were – was believing I was a cow trying to graze off a little bare patch of scrub, dying of hunger for fresh clean grass but knowing that every time I put my head down to nibble the scrub, my eye would fall out, yet still be attached to me by the kind of ropes and pulleys that held together Roger Walters’ heart. It would roll around on the ground in front of my mouth and because I couldn’t see it, I was always in danger of eating it up. Then the ropes that held it would be snapped and it would be gone for ever! It would become manure and Eric Haggard would spread it on his land – my eye that could see the whole of the world, not only the oak trees and the skies of Suffolk, my eye that was the whole world!
‘Well, I haven’t remembered it for a long time, that time. Sometimes I remember that it only lasted a few days – so Bernard said, yet it seemed like months, years even. But then it was over and I was calm and I saw that Bernard had brought me roses, I thought, perhaps the end of the war will be like this, a wonderful gentle calm and white roses in a jar.
‘I could see light when the bandages came off. With the spectacles they gave me I could see everything clearly but it was terribly difficult to judge distance or size. I often bumped into things.
‘The Kommandant (I always thought of that eye specialist as the Kommandant!) told me that only after the second operation would they be able to match exactly the two artificial lenses and then, with the spectacles, my sight should be quite good. But the thought of the second operation was frightening. I told Bernard I didn’t think I could go through with it.
‘It was in the spring of 1943 that I had the first operation. I came out of hospital at Easter and Bernard was on holiday from Crowbourne. He stayed with me in London and he told me that he had located his cousin in Aberdeen. Her swimmer had been sent to North Africa and she was tired of the war, tired of his terrible absence. She agreed to the divorce: it gave her something to think about – and papers were being signed. But Bernard was careful at that time not to nag at me with his hopes of a marriage. I was fifty that year, anyway, far too old to think of marriage which I’ve always thought is something you do at twenty or not at all. And of course my beauty had quite gone. Almost suddenly, it went, because when I first met Bernard some shreds of it were there. But now I was very grey and the glasses made me ugly. So vain to be depressed by this, but I was. I think, secretly, I’d always been very proud of my black hair. I used to say to Bernard: “I wish you could have seen it. I wish you could have seen me at thirty-five.” But of course he didn’t mind, the dear Bernard! He used to say longingly, “One day I shall have you and I shall have the butterflies – in some country place after the war – and then I shall be happy.”’
Erica stopped talking. Ralph turned the recorder off and poured her some wine.
‘Caviar on my last day!
’
But she shut her eyes.
‘Never mind about all the rich things,’ she said quietly, ‘just let me explain to you, Ralph, that I can’t trust anyone to take charge, dear. Only you.’
Take charge?’
‘Yes. Huntley would do it all wrong, you see because Huntley is someone utterly bound by rules. That’s the way he likes to live – all strait-jacketed up, but you Ralph …’
‘I’ll do it, Erica. Whatever it is. Just tell me what to do.’
She took a sip of her wine. Ralph waited. He noticed that his heart had begun to beat fast. For some days now he had tried to put away from himself the possibility that she would ask him to kill her.
‘Mrs Burford wouldn’t do it either,’ said Erica, ‘authority is very cruel to her and she’s afraid of it. It’s not unusual for someone like her to be afraid of it.’
‘No,’ said Ralph.
‘And the neighbours in the building, I don’t know them. Sometimes we say good morning. Sometimes I hear the man upstairs practising the ’cello, but I don’t even know his name.’
‘No. It’s always like that in big cities.’
‘D’you know his name?’
‘Who?’
‘The man who plays the ’cello.’
‘No. I’ve never seen him.’
‘Well, you see, there’s no one. Plenty of people in fiction who’d do it, but what good are they? Raskolnikov would be all right, but where is he? And Hamlet. He’d dither, but he’d do it in the end. But I don’t know where he is, do I?’
‘No.’
‘Well. So there it is. It’s terribly simple, Ralph. You’ll find me in the cupboard, dear, that’s all. I’ll make certain I’m there and I’ll put a scarf around my face so you won’t even have to shut my eyes, which is a thing I hate doing. And all you have to do is to go out and see if you can find, even from some expensive shop, some mimosa to put round me. And then lock the cupboard with me inside, and make sure that I’m buried in it, not in a coffin which they knock up, these days, from any old bit of wood. And the silk inside isn’t silk, but poly-something or other. Just tell the council or the undertakers or whoever it is, that I am not to be moved out of the cupboard and that this is my last wish. I know it’s very large and I suppose someone will have to dig a wider hole than normal. But I’ve left plenty of money in the bank to pay for this. It’s all very simple.’
‘But Erica –’
‘What, dear?’
‘Supposing I’m gone before – ?’
‘On no, I’ve thought of that. You won’t be gone. And anyway, Ralph, I’d like you to have the Tiffany lamp. Huntley wouldn’t appreciate that, and I know you like it.’
10
Ralph sent the cable:
“Erica March is dying. Must delay return to May 4th. Ralph.”
He gave no address nor telephone number. He imagined Walt trying to call him at the Harrington Hotel and getting the bald information: “Oh no, I’m so sorry, Sir. Mr Pears has left us.”
I’m very near the edge, Ralph thought. There may be no job to go home to.
Sitting alone in the Italian restaurant, he drank. The waiters hung about, waiting. They regretted their friendliness of some other evening when he hadn’t lingered to keep them up. ‘I cannot,’ he wrote on a wine-stained notepad, ‘let her die before I have asked all the right questions.’ He knew what they were: practical questions, ethical questions, questions to satisfy, if not everyone who could come to know of her death, at least himself, the whole self, not just the reporter in him who had gone round a continent with a single lament, ‘Why are Americans not loved …?’
But the questions hung just out of reach. One question seemed to obscure another. The waiters hovered near him, yawning.
‘I can’t remember when the war turned. I think by the end of ’forty-three, when our admiration for the Russians was so great, and the Americans had come in, I think we knew then that we had a chance.
‘The bombings on London began again in ’forty-four, and Crowbourne was bombed.
‘I suppose the Germans thought they were over London and they weren’t. Because why would they want to drop bombs on Surrey, unless – but this is unthinkable – they knew the school was full of Jewish boys, sleeping? I don’t think they could have known, could they? Not about the boys in their dormitories – it’s too macabre. But they almost all died. Bernard told me how he had helped the firemen to dig them out, hoping, just hoping that some had miraculously survived – but there were very few.
‘The nightmare of the bombing of Crowbourne stayed with Bernard for years. He couldn’t accept that those children had died. It was terrible. But of course they weren’t the only ones. Sixty thousand people died in the Blitz and a lot of these must have been children asleep. And we committed the same horrors. We burned Dresden …
‘All my books have been allegories of war – some kind of war. When I write about a character, I know at once what he’s capable of – the self-delusions, the crimes; I know the war in him. You see, General Almarlyes is the embodiment of war. Even when he’s making love, he hears the soldier in him talking. And I think, Ralph, this is why people have praised The Hospital Ship, because they recognized their own dreams in it and their own visions of hell. It was right to make Almarlyes flawed and tattered, capable of love even, because then people could identify with him; he stopped them saying: “I’m not like that. I don’t recognize humanity in him.” They couldn’t say that because Almarlyes is human: he’s the insurance salesman, he’s the boy with the penny whistle. And his insanity, well, so many of us are mad, aren’t we? Even Bernard, he was “crazed” as they say in Suffolk, after Crowbourne was hit, and the next year Miss Pinny went mad. She went mad the day the American airman landed in the greenhouse and she never recovered.
‘I’d had my second operation by then – with the artificial lenses of course – my sight has lasted me out. Without the glasses, all I can see is patches of light and sometimes, you know, this is rather comforting – to take out the shape of things. I’ve seen so much that I would prefer not to have seen.
‘The second operation didn’t seem to be as frightening as the first. I wasn’t afraid of the hospital any more, or of the bandages. I didn’t have any nightmares of the camp Kommandant (though he came to see me, this same specialist) but only this one dream, and all my life I’ve never been sure if it was a dream or if it happened. I asked Bernard hundreds of times “Did it happen, the thing I dreamed?” but he would never say yes and he would never say no. He’d smile. He’d say, “Imagine what you like.” But time has confused it further.
‘All I remember is that two nurses came and took the bandages off my eyes and the Kommandant came and stared at them and put the glasses on me and I could see everything in the ward, but it all looked very far away and tiny. I saw Bernard and he was holding some white flowers and I think he came close to me and put the flowers into my hands because I could smell them. I think it was lilac I smelled and it was beautiful. And after this a man came in, wearing robes and a sash round his neck and holding something which could have been a prayer book. And they started to talk, the man with the book and Bernard and the Kommandant and one of the nurses who had stayed behind holding the white bandages. And then of course I knew what it was: it was my wedding! I let it go on. I didn’t try to sit up or say anything to stop it. I knew that after talk had gone on for a while, the man with the book would ask me a question and that Bernard would tell me what to say. “I do.” “I will.” I said the words and all the people began to smile and then I could feel something wet on my hand and I knew these were Bernard’s tears. There was no ring; only the ring I had worn since my father’s death, my mother’s wedding ring. But it would have served. The nurse could have slipped it off my hand when she unwound the bandage and Bernard could have slipped it on again while I held the flowers. I know that I heard my name, Erica Harriet March. I knew I heard it. Yet I don’t remember hearing Bernard’s name, only mine. And this
, more than anything, has convinced me over the years that it was all a dream, this absence of Bernard’s name. Bernard Edgar Williamson. I never heard that: Bernard Edgar Williamson. So I’ve concluded – yet without any certainty – that none of it happened, only the flowers which were put into a vase for me and Bernard’s tears perhaps, because he cried often.
‘How strange and idiotic – not to know if I was married or not! I could have gone to Somerset House, couldn’t I, and found out? Yet I preferred not to. I thought, in my heart I will never be married yet in Bernard’s heart he is. And that’s what’s important in our two lives, our different ways of relating to each other which do the other one no harm and yet enable us both to keep our balance – and our love, such as it is, and in this way, not knowing about the marriage, I allowed a little love into me and it got stronger with time.’
*
‘Bernard had no job after the bombing of Crowbourne. What was left of the school was closed down for the duration of the war. The cottage that Bernard had shared with two other of the Crowbourne masters hadn’t been touched, but apart from this, all that was left was the gym and the chemistry lab and the sports pavilion.
‘So he came to stay in my flat and volunteered as a fire-watcher. His fire-watching post was near Kenwood. In the summer he saw butterflies there in the early evenings.
‘We became very used to each other in the war. We never thought of leaving London – not until the farm was left to me. I think after my two operations and after Crowbourne, we needed to stay put. All the monotonous “dos” and “don’ts” of the war we found rather comforting. Even rationing: we became quite inventive with carrots and swedes and powdered egg. It was astonishing you know, how much people talked about food in the war. The less they had, the more they talked about it, always remembering some fantastic lunch or dinner they’d eaten years ago. And sometimes even I, when I was very hungry and I knew all we had left of the rations was a tin of spam, I’d remember the profiteroles at Saladino’s and the hot croissants and the mille feuilles … and Saladino’s stomach of course! I didn’t know how large that could be any more. I didn’t know what the war had done to that!
