The Cupboard

by Rose Tremain

  ‘Miss Pinney wrote to me in the summer of ’forty-four. She told me Eileen was very ill and I’d better come down and look at her. “Well,” I said, “I honestly don’t want to go and look at her, Bernard! I didn’t enjoy looking at her when she was well and I’ve seen enough ill people in my life.” But Bernard was very excited about the butterflies he might find in Suffolk. He said a Swallowtail had once been sighted near Framlingham. So I wrote back to Miss Pinney saying I would come to see Eileen with my friend, Mr Williamson. I told her we would walk from the station because I didn’t want her to send Gully. I thought, we’ll just slip into Suffolk like ghosts – ghosts with butterfly nets! – and no one would know that I’ve come back, unless of course Eileen dies and the whole farm becomes mine. But I couldn’t imagine Eileen dying; with her upright bosom and her fleshy face, she radiated a kind of permanence.

  ‘But she was dying. David (you remember David, who had once taken me to Southwold?) was her doctor now and he had told Miss Pinney that Eileen had cancer of the bowel. She’d lost all her flesh, even the bosoms had shrivelled, and she lay in her room – my mother and father’s room – like a plague victim waiting to hear the handcart and the bell. We tiptoed round her and brought her soft soups of the kind Thérèse had made for me. Bernard showed her his book of butterflies and it mesmerized her, this. She would prop it up in front of her and stare at one drawing for hours. I expect she was thinking, if I wasn’t dying, I could copy one of these pictures onto a sampler and spend the autumn making a cushion cover for Miss Pinney’s dressing table stool.

  ‘She didn’t talk very much, not to me. She told me I had gone grey – as if it was something I hadn’t noticed – and that when she looked at my eyes through my spectacles it was like looking into a deep well. And I expect I’d just turn away, but I knew that in the well there was nothing for Eileen, only spite. I walked round and round the old house staring at the rooms stuffed full of her things. Even the Book of the Thousand Knitting Patterns was there on a shelf and the fishknives cleaned and put away in a kitcher drawer. I imagined an enormous bonfire and we’d throw everything onto it, all the bibles and the chintz chairs and the samplers which had doubled in number since the beginning of the war, and the hats in the hatboxes and the tins of paint ancient with rust that we had slapped on the Tipperary Rooms. We’d get rid of every trace of her.

  ‘It must have been on our second or third day at the farm that the American airman crash-landed. I was sitting in the garden with Bernard and we saw him float down. As he swung nearer and nearer, I had this extraordinary notion that he was arriving with a message for us, and that he would do his landing roll right at our feet and stand up and salute us as if we were General Patton’s field command! I never expected him to land in the greenhouse. We weren’t prepared for this kind of emergency. But Miss Pinney saw it all from Eileen’s window – the splintering glass making wounds, and the tomato plants all falling over – and her scream was as loud as the actual crash. So we ran then and we found the airman with both his legs broken and blood pouring from his head and neither of us dared move him, so that when the stretcher finally took him away there were squashed tomatoes and bits of leaf all over his uniform. Poor boy, he was terribly young, but I should think he survived. Perhaps they sent him back to Maryland for a while with his legs still in plaster, and then let him go again – to fight the Japanese. He may have died in the Philippines.

  ‘For us, it was a most extraordinary day. Eileen was sick over Bernard’s butterfly book and Miss Pinney started to go mad! She decided to become a cat. She started to lick her body and when things were spilt in the kitchen she wanted to lick them up and we had to hold her back. When she sat with Eileen, she would often pick up Eileen’s arm and lick that, going all along the little hairs, very gently. She taught herself to purr. It didn’t seem to take her long. It was the strangest noise, very very low and monotonous.

  ‘I remember how glad I was to have Bernard there. He was lively and happy, day after day, in spite of all that he had to do – for Eileen and for Miss Pinney. I think he was discovering for himself that slow tempo of Suffolk, not in the house of course, but on his early morning walks, with his net. He often said to me that he’d never experienced a summer as beautiful as this one. It was as if he could separate out the beauty of his walks from everything else – from the terrible crammed house and the death going on in it and the pathetic lappings of Miss Pinney the cat. Yet he wasn’t afraid of the chores we had to do, or disgusted by them. He’d get up in the night when he heard one of them cry out. He said it wasn’t fair for me to do all the work. And I can’t think, Ralph, what I would have done without him. I believe I might have burnt the house down.

  ‘We saw quite a lot of David and once he brought over his wife, Fidelity. He was greyer than me; very thin. I think he looked older than he was. Yet he’d led such a quiet life, never leaving this one village practice, marrying the vicar’s daughter. I wondered what on earth had made him look so old? He was very polite and correct and of course no allusion was ever made to my rides in his car or the silly marriage proposal. I told Bernard all about it and he laughed. He said I would have gobbled David up.

  ‘He came over one evening and went up to Eileen and Bernard and I were sitting on the exact spot where Gully and Chadwick had made their tepee with the Illustrated London News. I remember it had been a very hot day and the scent of the flowers that grew near the house – the roses and the irises and scattered bits of catmint – was wonderful. I looked at Bernard and I saw that his skin was quite brown. I was glad to be near him and I reached out my hand to touch him, but before my hand got to him, we heard David come out of the house and say: “Eileen’s dead,” and my heart began to beat so fast, I thought I might topple over in my deck-chair. Bernard got up and touched my shoulder and then he and David went back into the house and I was left outside, on that beautiful evening, with the knowledge of Eileen’s death. And all I could whisper was: “At last.” “At last, she’s gone.”

  ‘We buried her and not many people came. Not Gully, holding his hat, nor any of his family. There were two or three women I recognized from the Tipperary days, but that was all. Only Miss Pinney who shivered and purred and licked her own tears off her prayer book, she was the only one who mourned.

  ‘We drove Miss Pinney with her few belongings to an address – a sister or a cousin, I can’t remember – in Aldeburgh and left her and we thought we’d seen the last of her then, but we hadn’t.

  ‘We took my father’s will, which had left the house to Eileen for her lifetime, to a solicitor in Norwich. He confirmed that the house and farm were now mine. So we went back and stared at it and Bernard made little circles round and round it, as if he couldn’t believe it could be owned. He took it for granted that we would leave Haverstock Hill and come and live there, and his trays of butterflies would be piled up higher and higher as the summers went on. But me? I don’t know. I didn’t really want to own it. I reminded myself that during the happiest years of my life I had owned nothing at all, only my paypackets at the end of the week and Saladino’s smile on a Friday afternoon.’

  ‘It was Cotton Eye Joe (damned nigger! Never learnt to reverence the name of Stratford-upon-Avon!) who held the tiller. He wouldn’t let it go, not even to sleep, but steered on and on, on and on while the Daughters of the Lamb crept about with bandages in the bowels of the ship, crept about with tincture of iodine and a blood coagulent discovered in South China, and General Almarlyes fell in love.

  Six of the hundred and five had died during the second day and six more during the third day which was a day of storms. The Daughters of the Lamb had laid out the twelve on the tilting deck and let them roll and tip until they nudged the ship’s rail. Cotton Eye Joe looked down from the bridge and asked his slave soul to wander in their sacking death bags, repeating formless questions about freedom to the eyes he found wide open. One of the corpses was black, but salt and slime sucked out the channels of his voice; there were no son
gs in him and no answers. And at dawn, when Cotton Eye Joe woke from a sleep that had lasted no more than five minutes, all the bodies were gone and the empty deck, washed over and over by the storms, glimmered in hazy sunlight.

  General Almarlyes came slowly up to bathe his body in the gentle day. He had forgotten about the twelve who had died (his men) and awaited burial with full military honours; he didn’t notice that, in the darkness, the twelve had plopped untrumpeted into the water and were gone for ever, but only stared like a baby at the heat gathering soundlessly on the colossal beating of his pulse.

  Lazily at his wheel, Cotton Eye Joe began to sing:

  “Let me tell you what the wise men say,

  Say we’ gonna have a judgement day

  But I don’t believe in judgement

  Don’t believe in prayer

  Don’t believe God’s gonna leave

  My share.”

  General Almarlyes looked up and wanted to ask, “Where are we sailing, Cotton Eye? Will I walk out one evening and smell the cool familiar air of Lyme Regis? Who decides where the ship goes? Who decrees the precise and ecstatic moment when fear flies away like gorged carrion – to go and torment the merchant crabs on the beach where we waited for death – and love comes, in a random tide, to flush out the cruelty in me that has been in me ever since I was a boy and held a cane in my hand …”

  But he said nothing and walked to the rail where the twelve had slipped away. The ship was travelling fast and he knew that the man he was, lonely in his trifling wars, homesick and full of holes till the earthquake camel and the ship took him, had begun to change. Imagination’s eye wound his heart with protective threads; his heart was a pupa left on a white leaf, left to unravel its own extraordinary metamorphosis on the breast of a virgin.

  His uniform had been mended and washed. The colours of the ribbon medals had run and faded. Touching them, he said aloud: “All remembrance of acts of outstanding bravery has made way for silence. Only when there is absolute silence on the subject of acts of outstanding bravery, killing and mutilation … only when this is absolute … will the girl consent to part company with her God … to keep company with me.” And above General Almarlyes walking the early morning ship, the nigger sang on:

  “Let me tell you what the black men shout

  Shout about the wise men falling out,

  ’Cos he don’t believe in wise men

  And he don’t believe in dreams

  Yet he’s sown a dream of freedom

  In his seams.”

  It was the fourth day out from the island and at midday Cotton Eye called to the Daughters of the Lamb to come up into the sunlight. He had seen land.’

  There was a flat, grey dawn at Ralph’s window. For most of the night he had been wide awake, watching General Almarlyes watching the girl moving silently about in her robes, seeing – at last, in this girl – the peace for which he had fought and won so many wars, the peace which had never arrived.

  Ralph hadn’t intended to read till morning, but sleep had eluded him. Worries about money, about the rights and wrongs of his decision to stay on in London had trundled round a brain that was beginning to feel tired, from the hours of solitude, from all the hours of talking to itself. Only the book could push the worries to one side. For Ralph, The Hospital Ship held an extraordinary compulsion. It was one of the few books – of the many he owned – that he would read again and again throughout his life. And it was, in effect, the book that had brought him to England. If Erica had stopped writing in 1940, he wouldn’t have made the trip.

  At the Imperial War Museum he searched through volume after volume of pictures of life in Britain between 1939 and 1945. Near the end of the fifth or sixth volume he found a faded print captioned “Bomb Damage at Crowbourne School, June 1944”. Two men in tweed suits stood helplessly contemplating the rubble. In the distance, beyond the fallen joists and bricks, was a small flint house which might have been Bernard’s cottage. Ralph ordered the picture along with others of Blitz damage and was told they would be sent to him within six weeks. Prudently, he gave his home address in New York. When asked if the pictures were for publication, he snapped: ‘I don’t know yet,’ and left, allowing himself the luxury of a taxi from Lambeth to Camden Town, in which he slept.

  When he arrived at Erica’s flat he found her pacing the sitting-room. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I get letters from strangers asking for money. From young writers. And I always try to send something because I know they think I’m rich, and if I was, I’d help them more. But I’m not. I never learned how to keep money and make it grow or whatever it is you’re meant to do with it. I spent all mine or gave it away. I gave all Bernard’s money to the Bertrand Russell Foundation. But this morning I had a horrible letter from Gully’s daughter, Ellen Jane. She didn’t grow up at all like Gully with his dear old gentle head, but dreadfully loud and discontented and fond of yellow cars and that sort of thing – terribly greedy for possessions. So what shall I do? I don’t want to send her money for steam irons or meat slicers. I really don’t. But she knows how fond I’ve always been of Gully; she knows I’ll send it. It’s a very dirty trick!’

  ‘She sounds like my mother,’ said Ralph wearily.

  ‘Your mother? Oh dear, is she like that, Ralph, so loud – ?’

  ‘Greedy.’

  ‘For yellow cars?’

  He smiled. ‘I guess. Though we don’t have too many yellow cars in the States, probably because the cabs are yellow. She’s greedy for everything – food, men …’

  ‘And you never talk about her?’

  ‘Well, I do, sometimes …’

  ‘Not to me. You never mention her.’

  ‘I don’t love her.’

  Erica stopped pacing and was silent for a moment. She looked at Ralph. ‘I wonder,’ she said after a while, ‘if that isn’t sad for you. You see I find it very difficult to imagine not loving my mother. But then of course all I’ve ever loved is a memory – and a smell. And I know this is very widespread, the hatred of parents, and perhaps if my mother had lived on, I would have found nothing in her to love, adult to adult, who can say? Do you think when you were little you loved this mother of yours, Ralph?’

  ‘Oh no. Not much. They used to send me off to Grandma in the vacations. I was a drag for them.’

  ‘And your Grandma? What about her.’

  ‘Oh hell, I dunno! She was the old breed, you know. Fierce and proud and rude to everyone, especially her servants. I don’t think she was lovable, much. But she used to sing really good. Even when she was old, she’d have a go at singing and I liked that when I was a kid. No one ever sang at home.’

  ‘She’s dead, I suppose?’

  ‘Yup. She died in 1970 and her house was sold.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘When she died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I dunno. About eighty. She looked eighty.’

  ‘So you think I ought to send something then?’

  ‘What, Erica?’

  ‘To Ellen Jane?’

  ‘Oh that. Well no, I wouldn’t, if you hate to do it.’

  ‘I expect I will send something – just for the sake of Gully. But I think I’ll have to ask her not to ask me again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  So the matter was settled in Erica’s mind; now she could sit down, and begin. Begin where? She couldn’t remember where she had left her life the previous afternoon. She needed a reminder.

  ‘Eileen’s death.’

  She made no attempt to disguise the smile. ‘Well the war seemed to hurry to its end after that. When V.E. Day came we were in London and we let ourselves dance with the crowds; it seemed right to be part of all that emotion, we just let it bathe our wounds. I’ve never been a good patriot: there is so much that is stiff and cruel about Englishness but I think a little patriotism ran in every vein with the ending of the war, even in mine, and then with the Atlee government of course we had high hopes for the years to come. We knew now th
ere would be changes.

  ‘But there was part of me then, when the new government turfed out Churchill and my second book was published, which wanted to be travelling again. I couldn’t bear the thought of the farm and Bernard – not for ever and ever, not when I’d seen so little of the world. So I got on a train one day at Victoria, and told Bernard I was going to Africa, which he didn’t believe. All I had with me was a small suitcase and of course I never did get to Africa – to see the place I’d invented – until years later when Bernard and I did a kind of butterfly safari. But I got as far as Nice, where I’d never been, and no spring in France has ever been as glorious as the spring of 1946 – I’m sure it hasn’t.

  ‘I wanted to get on the old white steamer to Corsica and see Calvi and Thérèse’s wall and then go on to Sardinia and across to Italy to see what war had done and how the people were living. But I ran out of money and I ran out of clothes! On my last night, I slept on the beach and it was dreadfully cold. I realized then how threadbare I was – so thin on the powdered egg and all my things with darns in them! I must have looked strange to those people on the Riviera. “Poor England,” I expect they said, “she’s a rag-and bone country now.”

  ‘And to my surprise, I’d begun to miss Bernard. I had dreams of him and Emily doing a sad waltz at Epsom – a waltz for all the dead. So I sent him a postcard saying “Decided against Africa” and I got on a train which stopped in Paris in the middle of the night and I woke up and I knew at once where I was and part of me wanted to leave the train and go running out into the empty streets. But I didn’t. I stayed on the train and the next day I was in London.

  ‘Patterson and Tree were very proud of me that year. In the Blind Man’s City went into a second printing after good reviews and there were little celebrations, private ones with Bernard and one most lavish public one in the Connaught Hotel where we drank champagne and even Patterson began to smile.