by Jane Gardam
BECCY She adopted me. She adopted me and my sister. We were Jewish refugees. My father sent us from Germany. They’d been lovers of some sort. I never exactly heard. I never saw my family of course again.
JOURNALIST I heard. Weren’t they—?
BECCY Yes, Auschwitz. All of them. My sister and I came out of Germany on the second from last train. My father hesitated. He was a great hesitater. Though usually he was lucky.
JOURNALIST You must have been little. Coming all that way to England. Did you only know Miss Flint?
BECCY We didn’t even know Miss Flint. We thought she was a bit mad at first. But she spoke German. We felt safe with her. Soon we loved her. We’d had no mother for a long time you see. She’d gone off when we were babies. She died at Dresden.
JOURNALIST And your father at Auschwitz. Oh my God!
BECCY Oh no. My father didn’t die in Auschwitz. The rest of the family, not my father. Don’t ask me how he survived. I asked him and he said, ‘All that I can say is that I do not know.’ He had the number across his wrist. He used to cover it with his other hand gripped tight. It’s all I can remember of him really, though I was seventeen by then. That and the look of him on the white seat by the privet hedge.
JOURNALIST Here? He didn’t come back here?
BECCY Yes. Oh dear me—where is Tante Polly? We’ll have to go round to the back. The nuns keep a key for when this happens.
JOURNALIST I didn’t know your father came back. They all say Miss Flint’s a—well—
BECCY An old virgin? So indecent. Yes. She is. It was a terrible shock his coming back. It was one morning in the summer and my sister Hep—you know her? Yes. It is that one. The international lawyer. She runs Europe. Hep had got up early to work. She was taking the Scholarship to Oxford—which she won of course with twenty stars—and while she was dressing she looked out of the window, and then she came upstairs to me. I had the little attic bedroom—the crow’s nest where the poor maids used to sleep in the bad old days. I liked it. Tante had made it lovely. So then Hepzibah and I both looked out of the window. And then—it was odd. Hepzibah being so bossy and always trying to be in charge. She simply said, ‘Come on,’ and we went down into Tante’s room and stood there, looking down at her in bed. She’s rather large you know—or she was. She was lying there asleep, rather splendid. And she opened her eyes on us in the early light, and looked. Then she got out of bed and went to the window and said, ‘Stay here,’ and put on her slippers and a queer old coat—but she looked beautiful.
And we saw her walk in to the garden to the awful-looking thing on the seat. And they stood looking at each other, and the wind blew Tante’s nightdress about. Then she brought him in to us.
JOURNALIST And he stayed?
BECCY Yes. He died soon.
JOURNALIST They didn’t marry?
BECCY I think it had gone beyond that.
JOURNALIST They were old?
BECCY No, no. It was not important. Let’s get the key from the nuns.
In the book-room inside the yellow house POLLY FLINT is seated looking on a television screen which does not seem to be switched on. The bright window is behind her, the clouds soaring along. In the shadow the other shadowy figure is now rather more defined.
POLLY FLINT I was looking—what was I looking for? I don’t know—losing things, forgetting things. The key. And I knew she was coming, the journalist. Dear Charlotte Box. For my memoirs.
CRUSOE My creator was a great believer in memoirs.
POLLY FLINT So impossible, so false. Talking about memories.
CRUSOE Oh, I don’t know. My creator had quite a facility. Stood him in very good stead. Memoirs.
POLLY FLINT Nonsense—he made it all up. Fiction isn’t memory.
CRUSOE But memory is fiction. I tell you my creator had no compunction—well, here I am, for a start.
POLLY FLINT Making things up from nothing is another matter. An easier matter.
CRUSOE He didn’t quite do that. I’m not sure that I was easy, exactly. I believe I quite tired him. Even God had to rest on the Seventh Day.
POLLY FLINT Your creator must have been ready for a rest by the end of Book Three. I’ll concede that.
CRUSOE He said something of the sort. He said that I tended to take charge.
POLLY FLINT You are apt to do that.
CRUSOE Can’t think why. I’m very ordinary.
POLLY FLINT Yes—Dickens thought so.
CRUSOE Never met him.
POLLY FLINT I never thought so, though. You’ve lasted me out, Crusoe.
CRUSOE You’re not dead yet. You may find another yet, Pol Flint.
POLLY FLINT Not at eighty-seven.
CRUSOE You never know. Your mind may begin to wander.
POLLY FLINT It has never done anything else. But you’re the only—You have been my great love.
CRUSOE That was your misfortune. Your heart was never thoroughly in it, Pol. Loving real men. You were after the moon.
POLLY FLINT One ought to be after the moon. And what do you know? My heart was in nothing else but love for years and years. Like a dumpling in broth.
CRUSOE My creator liked a homely phrase. Pol Flint—your men were all duds or shadows.
POLLY FLINT The men one meets are matters of luck. I was properly kissed once. On Darlington Station. I can remember that.
CRUSOE I know nothing of it. Pol Flint—you know that I never loved you?
POLLY FLINT Yes.
CRUSOE I have made you happy. But I have never loved you.
POLLY FLINT Yes.
CRUSOE Characters in fiction cannot make new departures. We are eunuchs. Frozen eunuchs.
POLLY FLINT Maybe we are all just fiction.
CRUSOE Don’t be ridiculous. You are talking like a satirist. Like that fool, Swift.
POLLY FLINT He thought nothing of you, either. Maybe your creator, maybe Defoe himself, was only a character in fiction. Nobody really knows. He had a lot of disguises—very queer. All those warts, and the stoop. And in the pillory and prison. He sired you at sixty. An unlikely man.
CRUSOE A perfectly ordinary journalist. Bit of genius. In a minute you’ll be on about what is fiction.
POLLY FLINT No I won’t. I’m over fiction. As I’m over drink. I keep cream sherry for the nuns and watch them sip, all nods and smiles. As I nod and smile when people talk about the importance of art. I cleared the shelves after all. That gave you a shock Crusoe, didn’t it? When I sent all the books to Thwaite School? Marooned all over again.
CRUSOE Well, you kept me.
POLLY FLINT Of course. And a few others. A few since your day, too, dear Crusoe. But on the whole, it’s all over now.
CRUSOE What, fiction? Or you having affairs with novels?
POLLY FLINT Both.
CRUSOE Fiction’ll fade out?
POLLY FLINT It won’t fade out, but it will have to change. It’s become quite canonically boring—all about politics or marital discord. The minutiae. You should see the fiction they have thought up about you and Friday.
CRUSOE Yes, well, he could be very trying.
POLLY FLINT We don’t have heroes now. We shan’t see your like again.
CRUSOE You didn’t see my like before. I was an innovation. Though I was but a plain man.
POLLY FLINT Yes. But you became immortal. There are no immortals now.
CRUSOE No, no. I was just a man. I can’t think why I still hang about. I do hang about, don’t I? It’s not just you?
POLLY FLINT Oh yes you’re still here. They put you in films and song-and-dance acts. They’ve had you On Ice.
CRUSOE However did they do the footprint? My setting of course was good. He knew all the best sites. And very exciting. He knew about excitement, my creator.
POLLY FLINT Novels aren’t exciting now. Just writers rambling on.
CRUSOE How curious. In my creator’s day writers hated one another.
POLLY FLINT Oh they do now. Great haters.
CRUSOE Ah yes. Kn
ew very few.
(Pause for thought.)
I did think it was all rather moving of course. My battle. My courage. The way I dealt with things, all those years.
POLLY FLINT Let’s not boast.
CRUSOE Our weaknesses begin to show in old age.
POLLY FLINT But you’re ageless, Crusoe. You were new and yet eternal. You were ‘novel’. Dramatic. Poetic. You could tell the tale. You nourish us.
CRUSOE Like bread.
POLLY FLINT You were my bread. You are my bread.
CRUSOE That sounds like blasphemy.
POLLY FLINT Quite a few people see an affinity between you and Jesus Christ. They are given grants for theses on the subject.
CRUSOE These are blasphemers.
POLLY FLINT Oh, quite often people confuse their fictional heroes with God. As they confuse their human lovers. Or themselves. It is a great hindrance to a happy life. Emily Brontë did it. So did Proust.
CRUSOE I don’t know them. Should I care for them?
POLLY FLINT You’d find conversation difficult with Proust.
CRUSOE Pol—I think you should find that key. The journalist’s been on the step for quite twenty minutes. It is a great profession. You should remember my creator and treat it with respect.
POLLY FLINT I’ll look in a moment.
She sits back in the button-back chair. The sky outside darkens. The CRUSOE-shape grows clearer—shaggy beard, tattery garments, great hairy-mushroom umbrella, suspicion of parrot on shoulder. As this figure grows grander and bolder, POLLY FLINT’s figure begins to fade. Now she looks old. Her cheeks sag. Old, knobbed hands drop down, slide off her lap. Her head rests sideways at a gentle angle. Her mouth hangs open a bit. CRUSOE has become a Titan.
CRUSOE (rambling. Even Crusoe grows old)
You’ve been a good and faithful woman, Pol Flint, and children love you. A room of empty shelves, but still half in love with books. Is it enough? A quiet life. But Godly—and some of that because of me. As a life, not bad. Marooned of course. But there’s something to be said for islands.
POLLY FLINT Good night.
CRUSOE You know, when my wife died, there were children. There was a daughter. We don’t hear about the daughter. What became of her?
POLLY FLINT Goodbye, Crusoe, Robin Crusoe.
CRUSOE Goodbye, Pol Flint.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year (for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land). She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of literature.
She has published four volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society for Literature’s Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); and most recently, Missing the Midnight.
Her novels include God on the Rocks (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Faith Fox, The Flight of the Maidens and Old Filth, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Jane Gardam lives with her husband in England.
