‘ “No, why?” we chorused, and there ensued one of the most intricate and erudite explanations that I’ve ever heard, though unfortunately I hardly understood a word, his references were so esoteric. My husband fared a bit better, but afterwards we regretted that we did not keep a Dictaphone behind the lamp so that later we could have studied all that had escaped us. That evening he stayed three hours – he didn’t want a drink – and by eight he hadn’t gotten through with a page and a half. It was illuminating. We agreed to publish only the first bits that were ready for the press and when he left we guided him down the stone stairs and then I mixed us some very dry martinis to restore us to a more familiar sanity.’
‘And Henry Miller? I’m right in saying you were among the first to publish him?’
‘Well, he came to me when he was very broke and living in Paris and needing to be published. He showed me Tropic of Cancer and I was horrified. I wouldn’t publish that book then and I wouldn’t publish it now either. I still think he’s written things that are more valuable and more to my taste and belief.’
‘Like the porn you and he wrote for that dirty old Texan?’ Diana asked. Martin and Caresse looked at Diana in surprise.
‘That was an experiment in erotica, Diana, more in the line of fun,’ she said. ‘Is there anyone else you’d care to cover, Martin? I’m beginning to feel a little tired.’
‘Yes, what about Mr Lawrence?’
‘Ah, Lawrence.’ Caresse sat back. ‘Well, Lawrence was unusual. He loved to explore, was interested in everybody, in everybody’s reaction – a great observer, as you know, of human nature, particularly love. He got mad with his wife Frieda one night and smashed a jazz record – I think it was “The Empty Bed Blues” – right over her head because she kept playing it and playing it and he didn’t like that at all.
‘One day Lawrence said, “There is a book but no English publisher will handle it, I guess it’s too hot for them.” So of course we clamoured to know what it was and that evening he read to us around the fire from The Escaped Cock, about the wanderings of Jesus after his resurrection and how he met and fell in love with a priestess of Isis in a little temple off the coast of Phoenicia. Well, we were terribly excited by it and we offered to bring the book out through the press, though as we did so all the candles burned low and guttered and went out and it really felt like some kind of conspiracy.’
Caresse was silent for a moment.
‘I remember Lawrence being terribly shocked by Harry giving a dissertation in favour of la morsure during lovemaking,’ Diana put in. ‘I’ll never forget the look on his face.’
‘He had a wonderful face,’ Caresse said firmly. ‘Those wide-set eyes that gave his rather grave look an innocent quality. Between his hat and beard they were the only part you could ever see . . .’
‘Sorry to interrupt, but can we just clarify that Harry is . . .?’
Caresse opened her mouth to speak, but as she did so Diana stepped in.
‘Harry was Harry Crosby.’
‘Your second husband?’ Martin looked to Caresse for confirmation.
‘My mother and he were married for a time, yes,’ Diana again cut in.
‘Lawrence was a wonderful conversationalist, challenging and earthy.’ Caresse spoke slowly, as though pushing something heavy before her. ‘Quiet and kind. His talk was like the earth, carried inside him. He was of the earth somehow, with that mushroom mind and those soiled fingers . . . Words flowed from him in a stream, muddy with complex thoughts and ideas . . . We promised to pay him in gold coins for the first piece he wrote for us, real pieces of the sun, much better than that bland paper stuff. In fact, in Peru they believe that an important relationship exists between the substance of gold and that of the sun, and that in the nuggets of gold they dislodge from the mountainside one can see the sun’s tears. A wonderful image.’
Martin nodded in agreement, glancing between mother and daughter.
‘Of course, Lawrence didn’t think for a minute that we were serious about the payment, but we had a friend smuggle twenty-dollar gold pieces from Boston to Paris in the tips of his riding boots, which we then put in a hollowed-out prayer book that had once belonged to the Queen of Naples. At the Gare de l’Est we took a chance on a handsome man we liked the look of who was travelling down to Florence on the Rome Express. “Is it a bomb?” he asked. “No,” we cried, as the train began to move. “It’s gold for a poet.” So . . . we got him his bag of sun,’ she finished with a slow smile. Nodding at the nurse waiting discreetly by the door, Caresse slowly got to her feet. ‘Now, gentlemen, I’m needed elsewhere, but please enjoy all there is. Ask Roberto for anything you need. We will continue later.’
Paris, 1923
‘And so it’s decided – I’m changing my name.’
Diana carried on drinking until she got down to the heavy dregs.
‘Diana, did you hear me?’
Diana put the empty cup down, gasping, black cocoa round her mouth.
Her mother’s hands stroked the hammered gold necklace that circled the dog’s slender throat.
‘Do you want to know what it is?’
Diana shook her head, scowling at the animal, who turned his head away as if in disgust.
‘Are you punishing me for yesterday?’
Diana nodded.
‘You mustn’t build such a pyre out of these moments, Diana. This isn’t easy for any of us.’
‘He scolded me in front of your friends.’
‘Well . . . Why?’ her mother said impatiently.
‘Because I was singing too loudly.’
‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it.’
‘He means everything. He’s not like you.’
‘Well, that’s not very nice of you, Diana.’ She was silent. ‘Now do you want to know my new name or not?’
‘Why are you changing it?’ Diana asked.
Her mother smiled and it was like the sun coming out. ‘Because Mary sounds as though I have cobwebs in my drawers.’
Diana glanced around to see if anyone in the heaving café had heard.
‘I’m changing my name to . . . Caresse.’
Caresse. Diana held the name up next to her mother. It was as soft as the fur that had just slipped off the back of her chair onto the floor. A waiter scurried over to pick it up.
‘Will I have to call you that?’
‘Yes, why not.’ She smiled brilliantly up at the waiter as he smoothed the coat over the back of her chair. ‘But this has nothing to do with you, Diana, it’s for me. I need a new name so that I can finally shake off all that Boston dust.’
Diana had to admit that she liked it. It was a beautiful name.
‘It’s an affirmation, isn’t it? An invitation almost. It’s a welcome. Your Boston aunts wrote me and said it was like undressing in public. I wrote back and told them that, if I did, what of it?’ Her mother took her hand in hers and Diana looked at it caught between the grey suede gloves. ‘Names are important, Diana; they tell us who we are. I’ve been Mary, Mrs Peabody, Mother, and each carries its own weight. I didn’t choose any of those names for myself, do you see? They all belonged to other people. This is a name that I’m choosing, that Harry and I have chosen. It’s about freedom, Diana. The freedom to choose.’
Diana looked at her. But Diana was not to jump on the bed, nor run her stick down the banisters, nor press the buzzers, nor sing with Mette . . . She thought things were much more complicated than her mother was making out. She frowned.
‘Do I have to change my name too?’
‘No. But you will one day, you mark my words,’ her mother laughed.
Alderney, 1993
A thin cry sounded from the garden. From an upstairs window, Elena watched her children playing below. On one side of the garden, Bay was attempting to hide and craning her neck Elena saw the two boys counting beneath the large leaves of the fig tree (the only thing her mother had brought with her from Ibiza). She listened to the faint, steady climb to ten and then
they shot out from the tree’s cover and ran directly towards where the little girl was still trying to fit herself beneath a low-lying shrub.
Elena recalled the hard polished playroom floor beneath her own head, Leonie’s weight pressing on her chest. Why should I? her sister had said, laughing as she pinched her. She bit her lip and pressed her hand to the window.
‘Elena.’ She heard a raspy voice and turned away from the landing window to stare at her mother’s closed bedroom door.
‘Elena,’ the voice called again from inside. She took a deep breath and, squaring her shoulders, went towards it.
Opening his arms, her father took Bay in, laughing softly. ‘You shouldn’t play those rough games if you don’t want to get hurt, we’ve told you that.’ She stood between his knees as he untied the rope. Keeping her between his legs, James took a walnut from a bowl and with a special movement, cracked it in his hand. Bay watched, mesmerised, as he knew she would. Shaking the debris into a small pile on the table, he held out the brained nugget towards her.
‘Eat.’ He smiled.
She popped it into her mouth and chewed the oily nut. She disliked the taste but wanted her father to repeat the performance.
‘Another,’ she said.
‘No,’ he laughed, pulling the book he had been reading back towards him. ‘One’s enough.’
‘Where’s Mummy?’ she asked, holding her rope-reddened wrists out towards him.
‘Upstairs. She’s with your grandmother.’
Bay looked up at the ceiling. Her grandmother was awake. She listened to see if she could hear anything, and could just make out the murmur of women’s voices.
She looked mournfully at her father, but he continued to read, so Bay went to the foot of the stairs and seated herself to wait.
Rue de Lille, Paris, 1923
‘What are you doing out on the stairs?’
‘I’m taking my shoes off so I don’t disturb you,’ Diana said quietly, not looking in his eyes.
He stood back and smiled. ‘You don’t disturb me.’
‘Mother said I did.’
He knelt down and with sure hands took over the unbuckling of her shoe. Diana leaned back, staring at the blond head bowed before her.
‘You look like a wretched rat I once saw in a sodden trench.’ He looked up and smiled; Diana stared into his bright blue eyes. ‘It was a lovely little rat.’
Diana felt herself smile shyly in return.
‘I had to kill it with a baseball bat.’
‘Why?’ Diana whispered.
‘Couldn’t sleep with it scampering about all night.’ He pulled her second foot free. ‘Let’s hear you now.’
Diana skipped silently up and down the steps in her socks.
‘Wonderful.’
Roccasinibalda, 1970
Diana lay on the tiled floor of her large room and bathed her naked body in the sun, a frown creasing the recently tightened skin of her forehead. After the initial hell, the sensation was not unpleasant, made one feel rather alert. Her hands were slowly turning the pages of the manuscript her mother had had Roberto bring to her room last night and she shifted her body so that she sat full in the hard glare and flicked another typed page.
The title was stamped across the top in bold letters. Shadows of the Sun. She frowned at it. She hadn’t asked for these edited copies of uniform type. She wanted the originals.
But her mother was being evasive, as usual, and something told Diana that the little sun-stamped notebooks she was after, almost black with the scratch of his writing, had gone with all the rest. She took a drink and turned back to the manuscript, looking for the page she’d been on, her eyes scanning for a particular word . . .
Children have a very picturesque façon-de-parler – Rat says ‘someotherbody’ and ‘What part of us goes to heaven? Is it our thinks?’
She read and re-read the sentence, trying to remember saying the words. But she couldn’t. Her eyes moved quickly over the following pages, searching.
Sitting up in bed having dinner (C and I in our matching Egyptian robes) when some sinkstone Boston cousins appeared and I was bored by them and C was bored by them and the Rat said Nausea and then one of Schiap’s mannequins arrived and talked about her breasts (good but C’s still unrivalled).
Diana laughed. Had she said that? A rather excellent word, how clever she must have been. She turned back even further and examined the date: 1924. Egypt. Bokhara . . . (She raised her eyebrows in surprise, her mother had left him in.) Yes, the place where they found his sun ring and bought her back that turtle, sadly eaten the very next day by Narcisse.
Bokhara the Temple-Boy and I fall in love with him (to hell with women).
Diana narrowed her eyes. That boy. She looked up at the ceiling and tried to remember the maxim Harry had taught her when he’d returned from that trip. ‘A woman for necessity,’ she murmured, ‘a boy for pleasure, and a goat for delight.’ She laughed, remembering her mother’s expression as she came into the room and heard the phrase. ‘No, don’t get up,’ she’d said, looking at them both coolly over the pelt of silver fox wrapped round her throat. ‘I’m going out again.’ Diana turned back to the manuscript with raised eyebrows.
We were photographed sitting together on the steps of the temple and afterwards I explored the enormous substruction called Solomon’s Stables a harmony of arches with sunlight pouring through then up and along the ramparts and across a garden with three beggars like the picture by Breughel following us until we arrived at the Pool of Bethesda into which I threw a coin instead of giving it to the beggars. This took strength but a prayer is more important than an act of charity and in the afternoon to Bethlehem (‘has existed without change for thousands of years’ – like the minds of the majority of Bostonians) and the place was swarming with automobiles and Cook’s Tourists like so many maggots but these were forgotten among the stone-cold Coptic singing of the Greeks and Russians. When we got back to Jerusalem, the British Regiment Band was playing or rather trying to play (how the hell can the British with their temperament expect to play jazz?). C and I drank brandy in the Sun from my silver flask and we dropped walnuts on the passers-by below (I concentrating on Cook’s Tourists) and at sunset I wandered off through queer streets and had my hair cut by a young Jew in a dark niche under an arch . . .
She turned back further . . . Seville, 1924:
On our way south we stopped and saw a cockfight, known here as a pelea de gallos. A good, rough place with a rabble peering in through a slit in the wall and se prohíbe orinar scrawled in black letters and I invited my cab driver to come inside with me.
Inside there was a balcony that looked down on a small ring and they weighed the birds on large scales suspended from the ceiling. A gong and the cocks were set down and the bookmakers shouted odds and there were tense faces and all the seriousness of a bullfight. There were no other women. For perhaps a minute the combatants eyed each other, wings widespread, bodies elongated, and their heads not much more than an inch apart and one could see that they had gone through a long training for the momentous occasion. One white the other black, and it was not difficult to wager a peseta with my cab driver and another with a morose individual who had been a stoker on a tramp steamer. Chose black. And there was a peck peck peck a peck a peck a peck like the tapping of a woodpecker ever searching for throat and eye. Courage and speed (like my theory of attack – surprise, rapidity, consistency) and no more crowing at the sun, no more covering some squawking hen but attacking peck a peck peck and pinching of throat and coxcomb peck peck and a man garbed in black who seemed to have high authority and whose duty lay in regarding the tall sand-glass fastened to the iron rail of the ring and the fight was to last twenty minutes (about the time of a bullfight) and when one thinks of prizefighters and their intermissions every two or three minutes, one wonders at the endurance and pluck of these birds who go at it from the beginning hammer and tongs peck a peck peck.
But as the fight neared the finish it
became sad and they began to tire and instead of darting at each other they waddled like ducks to the charge and then the cruelty of the sport revealed itself with the almost blindness of the birds, strutting past each other, pecking at space, searching with bloody unseeing eyes. Finally black (a white feather stuck in his eye) sought the other out, and the sand in the hourglass was almost out and white was groggy and sought shelter under black’s wing, until black, his mouth full of white feathers, attacked throat and head, coxcomb and neck until white finally sank to the mat.
Seville rather bleak apart from that.
Good Lord! She remembered reading a letter from him about that. She’d hadn’t slept for weeks.
Her hand turned a few more pages. Étretat, 1924. Their first holiday ‘en famille’. Another of her mother’s attempts to remould a family from clay already kilned.
She held a hand up to the window to shade her face, and recalled the sun glowing red through the back of the chauffeur’s ears as he drove the Daimler up out of Paris towards the Normandy coast. Her mother’s voice talking talking always talking and Harry silent, watching the fields with eyes half-closed against the heavy evening light, before suddenly sitting forward and asking the chauffeur about the prizefight he’d won the night before. The little house – an old machine-gun escarpment that her mother said hardly had enough room for two people, let alone three – squatting on a hill overlooking the chalk cliffs and far below the pebbled beach that dug into your back and the grey endless crash of the waves and a naked body running into the sea, a white parasol on the beach.
Nubile. Diana raised her eyebrows again as she shifted onto her side; her mother had also left that one in.
Simone, the rather simple daughter of a local farmer (she was meant to teach Diana how to swim) who had breasts too heavy for her age, and who smoked cigarettes on the beach, letting small stones fall from inside her closed fist onto her nipple so that it hardened as Diana watched, fascinated.
The Heart Is a Burial Ground Page 5
