That night before she goes to bed she says, ‘Good night, my son,’ and in the middle of the night she tucks the blanket about me to keep me warm. I feel that she is watching over me and I sleep better than I have done for many years. In the morning I am happy and wake up as the light pours through the windows. She is sitting by my bed with a shawl wrapped round her.
‘Mother,’ I cry, ‘I am here. I have come back.’ The windows change their shape as I say it. But she doesn’t answer me. She is dead. She is a statue. She is solid and changeless. All that day I kneel in front of her, staring into her unchanging face.
In the evening one of her eyes becomes green and the other blue. I take my bag in my hand and leave the house. The birds are singing in the hedges and a man is walking through a ploughed field. I do not turn back and wave. The houses are turning into cardboard and the violins are stuck to their walls. I feel sticky stuff on my clothes, my hands and my face. I carry the village with me, stamped all over my body, and take it with me, roof, door, bird, branch, pails of water. I cross the Atlantic with it.
‘Welcome,’ they say, ‘but what have you got there?’
‘It is a nest,’ I say, ‘and a coffin.’
‘Or, to put it another way, a coffin and a nest.’
Napoleon and I
I tell you what it is. I sit here night after night and he sits there night after night. In that chair opposite me. The two of us. I’m eighty years old and he’s eighty-four. And that’s what we do, we sit and think. I’ll tell you what I sit and think about. I sit and think, I wish I had married someone else, that is what I think about.
And he thinks the same. I know he does. Though he doesn’t say anything or at least much. Though I don’t say much either. We have nothing to say: we have run out of conversation. That’s what we’ve done. I look at his mouth and it’s moving. But most of the time he’s not speaking. I don’t love him. I don’t know what love is. I thought once I knew what love was. I thought it was something to do with being together for ever. I really thought that. Now I know that it’s not that. At least it’s not that, whatever else it is. We do not speak to each other.
He smokes a pipe sometimes and his mouth moves. He is like a cartoon. I used to read the papers and I used to see cartoons in them but now I don’t read the papers at all. I don’t read anything. Nor does he. Not even the sports pages though he once told me, no, more than once, he told me that he used to be a great footballer, ‘When I used to go down the wing,’ he would say. ‘What wing?’ I would say, and he would smile gently as if I were an idiot. ‘When I used to go down the wing,’ he would say. But now he doesn’t go down any wing. He’s even given up the tomato plants. And he imagines he’s Napoleon. It’s because of that film he says. There were red squares of soldiers in it. He sits in his chair as if he’s Napoleon, and he says things to me in French though I don’t know French and he doesn’t know French. He prefers Napoleon to his tomato plants. He sits in his chair, his legs spread apart, and he thinks about winning Waterloo. I think he’s mad. He must be, mustn’t he? Sometimes he will look up and say ‘Josephine’, the one word ‘Josephine’, and the only work he ever did was in a distillery. Napoleon never worked in a distillery. I am sure that never happened. He’s a comedian really. He sits there dreaming about Napoleon and sometimes he goes out and examines the ground to see if it’s wet, if his cavalry will be all right. He kneels down and studies the ground and then he sits and puffs at his pipe and he goes and takes a pair of binoculars and he studies the landscape. I never thought he was Napoleon when I married him. I just said I do. Nor did he. I used to give him his sandwiches in a box when he went to work and he just took them in those days. I don’t think he ever asked for wine. Now he thinks the world has mistreated him, and he wants an empire. Still they do say they need something when they retire. The only thing is, he’s been retired for twenty years or maybe fifteen. He came home one day and he put his sandwich box on the table and he said, ‘I’m retired’ (that was in the days when we spoke to each other) and I said, ‘I know that.’ And he went and looked after his tomato plants. In those days he also loved the cat and was tender to his tomato plants. Now we no longer have a cat. We don’t even have a tortoise. One day, the day he stopped speaking to me, he said, ‘I’ve been hard done by. Life has done badly by me.’ And he didn’t say anything else. I think it was five o’clock on our clock that day, the 25th of March it would have been, or maybe the 26th.
Actually he looks stupid in that hat and that coat. Anyone would in the twentieth century.
I on the other hand spend most of my time making pictures with shells. I make a picture of a woman who has wings and who flies about in the sky and below her there is a man who looks like a prince and he is riding through a forest. The winged woman also has a cooker. I find it odd that she should have a cooker but there it is, why shouldn’t she have a cooker if she wants to, I always say. On the TV everyone says, ‘I always say’, and then they have a cup of tea. At the most dramatic moments. And then I see him sitting opposite me in his Napoleon’s coat and I think we are on TV. Sometimes I almost say that. But then I realise that we aren’t speaking since we have nothing to speak about and I don’t say anything. I don’t even wash his coat for him.
In any case, how has he been hard done by? He married me, didn’t he? I have given him the best years of my life. I have washed, scrubbed, cooked, slaved for him, and I have made sandwiches for him to put in his tin box every day. The same box.
And our children have gone away and they never came back. He used to say it was because of me, I say it’s because of him. Who would want Napoleon for a father and anyway Napoleon didn’t spend his time looking after tomato plants, though he doesn’t do that now. He writes despatches which he gives to the milkman. He writes things like ‘Tell Soult he must bring up another five divisions. Touty sweet.’ And the milkman looks at the despatches and then he looks at me and then I give him the money for the week’s milk. He is actually a very understanding milkman.
The fact that he wears a white coat is neither here nor there. Nothing is either here or there.
And sometimes he will have forgotten that the day before he asked for five divisions, and he broods, and he writes ‘Please change the whole educational system of France. It is not just. And please get me a new sandwich box.’
He is really an unusual man. And I loved him once. I loved him when he was an ordinary man and when he would keep up an ordinary conversation when he would tell me what had happened at the distillery that day, though nothing much ever happened. Nothing serious. Nothing funny either. It was a very quiet distillery, and the whisky was made without trouble. Maybe it’s because he left the distillery that he feels like Napoleon. And he changed the chair too. He wanted a bigger chair so that he could watch the army manoeuvres in the living-room and yet have enough room for the TV-set and the fridge. It’s very hard living with a man who believes that there is an army next to the fridge. But I think that’s because he imagines Napoleon in Russia, that’s why he wants something cold. And on days when Napoleon is in Russia he puts on extra clothes and he wants plenty of meat in the fridge. The reason for that I think is that the meat is supposed to be dead French soldiers.
He is not mad really. He’s just living in a dream. Maybe he could have been Napoleon if he hadn’t been born at 26 Sheffield Terrace. It’s not easy being Napoleon if you’re born in a council house. The funny thing is that he never notices the aerial. How could there be an aerial or even a TV-set in Napoleon’s time, but he doesn’t notice that. Little things like that escape him, though in other ways he’s very shrewd. In small ways. Like for instance he will remember and he’ll say to the milkman, ‘You didn’t bring me these five divisions yesterday. Where the hell did you get to? Spain will kill me.’ And there will be a clank of bottles and the milkman will walk away. That makes him really angry. Negligence of any kind. Inefficiency. He’ll get up and shout after him, ‘How the hell am I going to keep an empire together with
idiots like you about? Eh? Tell me that, my fine friend.’ Mr Merriman thinks he is Joan of Arc. That causes a lot of difficulty with dresses though not as much as you would imagine since she wore men’s armour anyway. I dread the day Wellington will move in. I fear for my china.
Anyway that’s why we don’t speak. Sometimes he doesn’t even recognise me and he calls me Antoinette and he throws things at me. I don’t know what to do, really I don’t. I’m at my wits’ end. It would be cruel to send for a doctor. I don’t hate him that much. I think maybe I should tell him I’m leaving but where can you go when you’re eighty years old, though he is four years younger than me; I would have to get a home help: he doesn’t think of things like that. One day he said to me, ‘I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. My star is here.’ And he pointed at his old woollen jacket which had a large hole in it. Sometimes I can hardly keep myself from laughing when I’m doing my shells. Who could? Unless one was an angel?
And then sometimes I think, Maybe he’s trying it on. And I watch out to see if I can trap him in anything, but I haven’t yet. His despatches are very orderly. He sends me orders like, ‘I want the steak underdone today. And the wine at a moderate temperature.’ And I make the beefburgers and coffee as usual.
Yesterday he suddenly said, ‘I remember you. I used to know you, when we were young. There were woods. I associate you with woods. With autumn woods.’ And then his face became slightly blue. I thought he was going to fall, coming out of his dream. But no. He said, ‘It was outside Paris and I met you in a room with mirrors. I loved you once before my destiny became my sorrow.’ These were exactly his words, I think. He never used to talk like that. He would mostly grunt and say, ‘What happened to the salt?’ But now he doesn’t say anything as simple as that. No indeed. Not at all.
Sometimes he draws up a chair and dictates notes to me. He says things like, ‘We attack the distillery at dawn. Junot will create a diversion on the left and then Soult will strike at the right while I punch through the centre.’
He was never in a war in his life. He was kept out because of his asthma and his ulcer. And he never had a horse in his life. All he had was his sandwich box. And now he wants a coronet on it. Imagine, a coronet on a sandwich box. Will this never end? Ever? Will it? I suffer. It is I who put up with this for he never leaves the house, he is too busy organising the French educational service and the Church. ‘We will have pink robes for the nuns,’ he says. ‘That will teach them the power of the flesh which they abominate,’ and he shouts across the fence at Joan of Arc and says, ‘You’re an impostor, sir. Joan of Arc didn’t have a moustache.’ I don’t know what I shall do. He is sitting there so calm now, so calm with his stick in his hand like a sceptre. I think he has fallen asleep. Let me put your crown right, child. It’s fallen all to one side. I could never stand untidiness. Let me pick up your stick, its fallen from your hand. We are doomed to be together. We are doomed to say to the milkman, ‘Bring up your five divisions’, for morning after morning. We are doomed to comment on Joan of Arc’s moustache. We are together for ever. Poor Napoleon. Poor lover of mine met long ago in the autumn woods before they became your empire. Poor dreamer.
And yet . . . what a game . . . maybe I should try on your crown just for one moment, just for a short moment. And take your stick just for a moment, just for a short short moment. Before you wake up. And maybe I’ll tell the milkman, We want ten divisions today. Ten not five. Maybe that would be the best idea, to get it finished with, once and for all. Ten instead of five.
And don’t forget the cannon.
Christmas Day
On that Christmas Day she was the only customer in the hotel for lunch. ‘I shall take the turkey soup,’ she said. The dining-room was very large and she sat at her table as if she was on a desert island. Above her head were green streamers and green hats and in the middle of the dining-room there was a green tree.
Somewhere in Asia the peasants were digging.
The fact is, she thought, I’ll never see him again. He is irretrievably dead. The pain was inside her like a jagged star.
There was this particular peasant with a bald head and when he was finished digging he went home to his family and played the guitar. It might have been China or Korea but when his mouth moved she didn’t understand what he was saying. To think, she mused, that there were all these peasants in the world, and all these languages.
She drank her turkey soup and watched the two waitresses talking, their arms folded.
She had watched him die for three weeks. His pain was intolerable. After that there were the papers to be checked. One day she had left the house with a case and gone to the hotel in which she now was.
There were millions of peasants in the world and millions of paddy fields, and they all sang strange unintelligible songs. Some of them rode on bicycles through Hong Kong.
‘I love you,’ he had said at the end. Their hands had tightened on eternity. When she withdrew her hand the pulse was beating but his had stopped.
She wished to change her chair so that she could not see the waitresses, but she was naked and throbbing to their gaze.
When she had entered her room in the hotel for the first time she had switched on the television set. It showed peasants working in the fields in the East. She had picked up the phone and wondered whom she could talk to. Perhaps to one of the peasants in their wide-brimmed hats. She had put the phone down.
There were twenty of them in the one house, children, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and they were all smiling as if their paddy fields generated light.
‘I am thin as a pencil,’ she thought. ‘Why did I wear this grey costume and this necklace?’
She finished the turkey soup. Then she tried to eat the turkey. For me it was killed, with its red comb, its splendid feathers, its small unperplexed head on the long and reptilian neck. Nevertheless I must eat.
Wherever Tom had gone, he had gone. ‘Put me in a glass box,’ he used to say. ‘I want people to make sure that I am dead.’ But in fact he had been cremated. She heard that the coffins swelled out with the heat, but he had laughed when she had told him. ‘Put me in an ashtray in the living-room.’
The smoke rose above the paddy fields and the peasants were crouched around it.
She left much of the turkey and then took ice-cream which was cold in her mouth. She was alone in the vast dining-room.
Christmas was the loneliest time of all. No one who had not experienced it could believe how lonely Christmas could be, how conspicuous the unaccompanied were.
From the paddy field the peasant raised his face smiling and it was Tom’s face.
‘Hi,’ he said in a fluting Korean voice.
The green paper hats above her swayed slightly in the draught which rippled the carpet below. It seemed quite natural that he should be sitting in front of her in his wide-brimmed hat.
‘The heat wasn’t at all unbearable,’ he said.
He took out a cracker and pulled it. He read out what was written on the little piece of paper. It said, ‘Destiny waits for us like a bus.’ Or a rickshaw.
The world was big and it pulsed with life. Dinosaurs walked about like green ladders and bowed gently to the ants who were carrying their burdens. The peasant sat in a ditch and played his guitar and winked at her.
‘I remember,’ said Tom scratching his neck, ‘someone once saying that the world appears yellow to a canary. Even sorrow, even grief.’
And red to a turkey.
She got up and went to her room walking very straight and stiff so that the waitresses’ glances would bounce off her back. Who wanted pity when death was so common?
She sat on her bed and picked up the phone.
She dialled her own number and heard the phone ringing in an empty house.
‘If only he would answer it,’ she said. ‘If only he would answer it.’
Then she heard the voice. It said, ‘Who is that speaking, please?’
She knew it was Tom and
that he was wearing a wide-brimmed hat.
‘I shall be home soon,’ she said.
She took off her clothes and went to bed. When she woke up she felt absolutely refreshed and her head was perfectly clear.
She packed up her case, paid her bill at the desk and went home.
When she went in she heard the guitar being played upstairs. She knew that they would all be there, all the happy peasants, and sitting among them, quite at home, Tom in his green paper hat with the wine bottle in his hand.
The Arena
It was at Pula that she had the vision that she would never forget. She had taken Paul there on the bus and he was rather tired as usual. Ever since his big operation he had been tired and at the end of their holiday he was going back to another operation. According to himself his boss had been rather kind and had said, picking up the phone that lay in front of him on the desk, ‘Paul has been with us for thirty years. There is no question of this half-pay nonsense.’ Paul worked as a clerk in the Civil Service and had never missed a day till his operation. He had been in severe pain for a while and no one knew what was wrong with him till the specialist had finally diagnosed it as an aortic aneurism. He had lost a lot of weight and looked thin and drawn.
When she looked back over the years she realised that their life together had been on the whole a peaceful one. But she wondered if in fact the disease had come because Paul was tired of his work though he used to tell her, ‘When I first started I was happy. I can’t tell you how happy I was. And then it all changed. We used to have a joke together in those days but now it’s all different.’
He had many little anecdotes to tell her, such as the one about the day when quite young he had been doing an imitation of the manager, an imaginary pipe stuck in his mouth when the latter had put his head round the door and caught him. ‘He was a man entirely without humour,’ he said. ‘And after that I beat him at billiards.’
The Black Halo Page 49
