Cover
About the Author
Also by Rose Tremain
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Copyright
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Epub ISBN 9781446450307
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VINTAGE
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London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Rose Tremain 1981
Rose Tremain has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Vintage in 1999
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton in 1989
www.penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099284178
For Johnny, with love
and for Bo Dean, with high hopes
About the Author
Rose Tremain’s novels have been published in 27 countries and won many prizes, including the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Fémina Etranger and the Sunday Express ‘Book of the Year’ Award. Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was made into a film (1995) and a stage play (2009). Two of her novels, The Colour and Music & Silence, are currently in development as films, and the best-selling The Road Home is being adapted for television.
Rose Tremain lives in Norfolk and North London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.
ALSO BY ROSE TREMAIN
Novels
Sadler’s Birthday
Letter to Sister Benedicta
The Swimming Pool Season
Restoration
Sacred Country
The Way I Found Her
Music & Silence
The Colour
The Road Home
Short Story Collections
The Colonel’s Daughter
The Garden of the Villa Mollini
Evangelista’s Fan
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
For Children
Journey to the Volcano
‘We are all cupboards, with obvious outsides – which may be either beautiful or ugly, simple or elaborate, interesting or amusing – but with insides mysteriously the same – the abodes of darkness, terror and skeletons.’
–Lytton Strachey
At the age of eighty-seven, Erica March died in a cupboard. She wrapped her body in a chenille tablecloth, laid it out neatly under the few skirts and dresses that still hung on the clothes rail and put it to death very quietly, pill by pill.
She left a note, but the note made no mention of her suicide, nor of the cupboard in which she had chosen to commit it. In the room, she had seemed only to make ready for the night, turning down her bed, setting out her indigestion tablets, drawing the curtains and switching on her bedside light.
She had known, however, that it would be Ralph who would discover her body. She had left the door unlocked for him, certain that he would come in next afternoon to say goodbye as he had promised and that when he found her, he would do everything she had asked, exactly as she had asked it. And only after it was done as it had to be done, would he call up his editor at Bulletin Worldwide in New York and say, ‘Okay, Walt. I’m coming home.’
‘I don’t know where you want me to start.’
The voice didn’t sound particularly old. There was an almost childlike breathlessness in it.
‘I don’t know either,’ said Ralph, ‘but I hope you’re not shy of talking.’
‘Shy? I’m eighty-seven, you know.’
‘Old people are sometimes shy …’
‘Are they? They’re deaf, those ones, I expect. I’m blind, without my glasses, but I’m not deaf.’
‘You don’t feel shy of me?’
‘How old are you, dear?’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘Well. I’m eighty-seven.’
He looked up at her. He expected to find her stern, but she was smiling. She fingered her neck. Ralph noticed that her right hand was arthritic, bent hopelessly sideways, but that her left hand was quite straight. It was the bent hand that moved almost constantly.
Ralph smiled, the smile acknowledging his own nervousness.
‘Where would you like to begin?’ he asked gently.
‘Is your machine on?’
‘The recorder? Yes, it’s on.’
‘I don’t know why they sent you.’
‘Bulletin Worldwide? Oh they didn’t send me really. I asked to come.’
‘You see, lots of people have come, over the years. Even a lady from Finland. But I never thought an American would come. I didn’t think I was important enough for one of you.’
Ralph laughed. She was dressed as a gypsy really. That was how he would photograph her, in the bright scarf she wore tied at the nape of her neck, but put on so badly, it hung over one eye. She caught him looking at the scarf.
‘I’m almost bald, you know,’ she said. ‘That’s why I wear it. My hair used to be thick – in big plaits – but now it’s just like duck down.’
‘Begin there!’ he said suddenly. ‘When you had the plaits.’
But she was silent. ‘I had plaits for years,’ she said at last.
‘How many years?’
‘I don’t know. I think as soon as my hair was long enough to plait, they plaited it and I still had a plait going round and round my head when I was seventeen.’
‘What colour was your hair?’
‘Black. Yet both my parents were fair. My father used to call me his little witch.’
‘When you were a child ?’
‘Yes. And I was a child a long time. People were in those days. I think I was still a child after Gully had grown up and become a man and gone away.’
‘Gully?’
‘Gully was made out of the Norfolk clay – that’s what I used to imagine! I used to dream that they dug down and down, making a pond as they dug and then they found him, with his head stuck on sideways. And then they ran a mile when they saw him! Dropped their spades and scrambled off. Because he was odd with his twisted head and no one trusted him at first, except my father who found him, and me.
‘He was scavenging, you see? Hiding and then taking our chicken scraps. My father chased him over two fields and my God, that boy could run! But my father knew better than him how to run on the plough, and he caught him and brought him home. But he wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t say a word till we fed him.
‘In those days, you see, people could get lost. We didn’t have a welfare state – oh no! And Gully was one of the lost. Even the institutions were badly lit. People escaped round corners, into shadows and then they ran helter-skelter and it was impossible to find them. And they could be lost for months, living off pond water and mushrooms like Poor Tom in King Lear. And Gully was one of these Poor Toms. Until we found him.
‘My dad cleaned him up and took him to the orphanage, but Gully hadn’t come from there. He wasn’t registered. So he was brought home again and the questioning began:
“Who’s your Ma, Gully?”
“What’s your Pa do?”
But Gully wouldn’t say. “My name’s Gully” – that was all he’d tell us.
“Come on Gully, then. Tell us where your Ma lives, boy. She’ll be missing you, I reckon.”
Shook his head and shook his head.
“Got to get you home, Gully. Can’t keep you here, with your poor Ma crying her eyes out and missing you and thinking you drowned.”
‘But we never found them, his Ma and Pa. So he stayed with us and I remember the first day I had to take him with me to school, I was ashamed of him. “He’s not my brother,” I wanted to say, “nothing proper like that. We just found him.”
‘And the children were mean and cruel:
“Reckon ’e’s batty,” said John Tomkins. “What you doin’ with a batty bor, Erica girl?”
“He’s not my brother …”
“Bet ’e don’t know no sums nor nothin’ like that.”
“He’s not my brother. We just found him.”
“Found him? Found ’im where, eh girl? Found ’im in a rat hole? Found ’im in a pig’s arse, eh eh?”
‘They all crowded round Gully and me. They were staring at us and laughing. And then I remembered what my father had said to me when he gave us our dinner bundles: “I’m counting on you, girl” he said, “because children can be mean mucks and yew don’t forget it. So you make sure that bor don’t take no harm.”
‘So I whispered something to Gully. I was punished afterwards for what I whispered and stuck in a corridor all afternoon waiting for the schoolmistress to beat my hands with a ruler. My hands got so cold and numb in that corridor, I couldn’t feel the beating when it came. And anyway who cares about beatings?’
Ralph waited.
Erica March had shut her eyes. Her head had dropped and she seemed quite suddenly asleep. He watched her. The tape recorder hummed on the table between them. He was leaning forward to switch it off when he heard Erica chuckle.
‘We had a lark that first morning at school! And after that, things were never so bad for Gully, even though they were bad enough. You see, I’d never liked big John Tomkins and his gang and I wanted them punished good and sound for their sneering. So I whispered to Gully: “Get your willy out and piss at them!” And he did it right away and splashed them all – John Tomkins and Charlotte Bunn and thin Sonny Aldous. And they went crying, telling the teacher, so I nudged Gully, “for heaven’s sake get that put away ’fore Miss Miller sees it.”
‘Gully came to live in our house, just before that time. Our house was an old Suffolk farmhouse with half the farm animals wandering in and out. It was a farm of bad-tempered animals which kicked and pecked! Even the two cows were standoffish and when I tucked my head in to milk them they’d open up their bowels and the mess would flop onto my boots. I told my father, “I’ll never be a farmer when I’m growed up!”, but he took me onto his knee and held me and said “nothing to give you, girl, no money nor grand education, so yew take the farm when I’m gone an’ be grateful.” And I expect he cried, thinking of Ma and Ma’s blue skirts in the forget-me-not field. And I snivelled round his collar, which was a straight-up band with no proper collar on it and always grimed as if he never washed his neck. But then he’d stop his crying and blow his nose and say “Where’s Gully, Erica? Not lost again, is he? Not gone again?”
‘Gully only ran away from us once. He ran to a clay pond that was almost dry and hid. And when I found him there, it was then that I thought, this is his real mother, this pond. This is Gully’s flesh. He’d thrown his boots into the water and I knew this was a dreadful ungrateful thing, because my father often and often said, “Shoe leather’s dear and you’d best take care of it. Boots is not stoons to be let lyin’ or lost.” So I yelled at Gully. “My dad’s gone white with dreams of you drowning!”
I said, “He could die from being so white. So you come back, Gully bor before I turn you into a maggot!”
‘He let me run on towards the farm and then I saw his lopsided shadow following me and after that he never ran away again to the pond. But nor did anyone come for him: no mother or father or person from the orphanage. So he became ours and we called him Gully March.
‘And when I think about my child’s lifetime, I see him always. Our Gully. He had black, tight curls and a man’s eyebrows that met over his nose. The first sum I taught him was, “How many inches are between London and Newmarket?” But I don’t remember the answer now. And the second sum I taught him was, “A rich nobleman in Spain owns twenty-five castles and in each of the twenty-five castles are twenty-five rooms and in each of the twenty-five rooms are two sacks and in each of the sacks are one hundred and forty guineas. How many shillings, then, does the rich nobleman possess?” And all of this we worked out on the kitchen table, with a big drawing of the nobleman and his castles to help us. But the answer came to so many shillings, we didn’t believe it.
‘But Gully did begin to learn a few things. He never understood anything which began “If a man throws a girdle of barleycorns round the earth …” because he had no real notion of what the earth was – not then. And he wrote his numbers so blackly, they looked like a pirate’s hand. But when he came to us, he couldn’t write at all and I think it was we who taught him most because Miss Miller was afraid of his big head (I suppose she thought he’d butt her in the stomach like a bull and knock her over!) and she put him in a corner of our classroom and forgot about him most of the time. And he often stayed away from school to help my father: at harvest time and with the sugar beet and even with the fencing and ditching, because he was strong. And I remember that when I was at school and I saw the sunlight outside, I longed to be in the cornfield or on the cowshed roof and put a curse on God for making me a girl.
‘He had the room above mine in our house. He cried at night and we never found out why. I put wool in my ears and one of my dolls, Ratty May, over my head to blot him out. Perhaps he cried in his sleep like Bernard, I don’t know, because he never told us. Perhaps he had dreams of being lost again with no boots. Perhaps his old lopsided head remembered a time when it pushed out of the clay like a mushroom. Who can say?
‘He was ten when we found him. His hands were wide and red like butcher’s meat and perhaps it was because of this – because of his hands – that when he left school he became a butcher’s apprentice. He didn’t know how to care for his things or say thank-you for anything my father bought. And one night, I walked with my father to the forget-me-not field and in the dark he said, “I reckon he’s got to go, that Gully.” But I’d grown fond of Gully by then. We had secrets, I think, one or two and I liked doing sums with him and I’d got tuppence or threepence saved for his Christmas present. So I said “No!” I said “If Ma was alive she’d keep him with us and see to him.”
‘But this was a terribly unkind thing to say. It turned my father to stone – absolutely to stone – and he couldn’t move. He lay down on his face and the moon came up and shone on him and I beat his back with my fists and shouted at him. But he couldn’t hear me. So I ran and ran to the house and snatched Gully by the hand and we tore back to where he lay and tugged him and lugged him over the field and up the lane and over the yard, till we had him lying down by the fire.
‘Gully ran a mile for the doctor and the doctor came at midnight and gave him brandy. And after that, my father never again suggested that Gully should leave us. So Gully stayed and on his eleventh birthday I gave him an old map of the world so that he could throw a girdle of barleycorns round it.’
On this first day, Erica March had prepared wine and biscuits for her American visitor. It was about three in the afternoon. She watched him as he poured the pale pink wine, handed her the plate of sweet biscuits.
‘Tomorrow, we’ll have vodka, if you like,’ she said, ‘and caviar. What about that?’
Ralph shook his head. ‘On my last day, we might have caviar and vodka.’
‘When I was a child, we were told that all Americans were rich. I think I imagined everyone owning twenty-five castles full of precious things and gold pieces and bones of Indians. But now you’re not rich, are you? Only some of you, with homes in Bel Air.’
‘I’m not rich,’ said Ralph. ‘I have quite a bad apartment in Brooklyn. Walk-up. Repairmen won’t walk up to repair it.’
‘But you’re paid well, aren’t you,’ and she looked round her little room, ‘for this sort of assignment?’
‘It depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On what I make of it.’
‘Don’t you know then, dear? Isn’t it going to be something for your magazine?’
Ralph hesitated. ‘I’d like to stay in London for quite a while,’ he said. ‘I’d like to come and see you every afternoon, and you can talk – about anything you like, about your work and about your life, anything you remember – and then I’ll know what I’ve got.’
Erica looked at him sternly. ‘They wrote a lot about me at one time. After The Hospital Ship became popular, they used to put me on panel games. But then they forgot me.’
‘I know,’ said Ralph.
‘I suppose you’re reviving me, dear, are you? Before I pop off? I think it’s quite clever, because I can’t go on much longer, can I? I might even die before you’ve finished.’
Ralph smiled, took a sip of the wine.
‘I’m serious,’ said Erica, ‘I say goodbye to everything every night now, just in case. I say: “Goodbye square which is my room, goodbye London, goodbye pigeons on my ledge, goodbye Ratty May, goodbye books, goodbye noisy lavatory, goodbye lamp, goodbye cupboard …”’
‘Do you?’
‘Oh yes. Because at my age, death doesn’t need to send an army, does it? It sends something rather quiet, I imagine, like a paper dart.’
‘You seem very strong, really.’
‘Do I? Well, I think I am most days. Not very strong when I wake, so that now and again I think I’ll have to ask Mrs Burford to stay the night and bring me something in the mornings. But this would be inconvenient for her and I’ve always hated the idea of servants. So I go on. By the afternoons, I usually feel all right.’
‘Have I tired you today?’
‘Oh lord no, dear! I’ve tired you, I expect, with all my chat. But it’s a very long time since I talked about Gully. Or even thought about him. And yet for years – until he came to mistrust me – I treasured him. Do you understand what I mean? I wasn’t in love with him or anything like that. Heavens no! But he was a wedge in my heart.’
Erica reached out with her left hand and turned on a Tiffany lamp. The light was the same colour as the wine. Behind her head, the sky at the window was deep blue.
Ralph got up. The camera held at his brown eye didn’t belong to him. So that he would never be tempted to forget this fact it was labelled in red lettering “Property of Bulletin Worldwide Inc.”, but he held it carefully and it brought him rewards which were his own. In front of the darkening window, half of Erica’s face was lit by the lamp.
‘Please turn towards the lamp, just a fraction,’ Ralph asked.
The head moved. Behind the thick glasses, the eyes were grey, like polished stone. Ralph took the picture.
When the wine was gone Ralph prepared to leave, but Erica handed him a box of matches and said, ‘It gets cold in here. Light the gas fire for me, will you dear, and then we won’t feel it.’
It was a very old-fashioned kind of fire, made of light brittle tubes which eventually glowed red. Ralph knelt and held his hands out to it.
Erica sat in silence for a while and then she said: ‘The cupboard I mentioned was my mother’s. She used to keep her clothes in it – the long skirts women wore in those days and the embroidered blouses. She did all the embroidery herself. And you never caught her looking shabby. Blue was her colour and her hair was blonde. I think the cupboard had been her mother’s before, because it was the only good piece of furniture we had. And she kept it polished. Not like the old kitchen table which we scrubbed with soap.
‘I was eight years old when the cupboard came to be mine. My father took it almost to pieces to get it out of their room and rebuilt it in mine. He knew he couldn’t part with it because it was in the family, but he didn’t want anything left in his room to remind him of her. I told him, I didn’t want the cupboard either. If you got in it, you could smell her, and the smell of her was both wonderful and unbearable. I spent nights in the cupboard holding her clothes over my face. I think I wanted to suffocate. Because, to be eight and to lose her was terrible. And not to know why, you see. Only to be told: “The bull kicked her. The bull was angry and kicked your Ma and she’s dead.” That was all: “the bull kicked her and she’s dead.” Because they couldn’t tell me, you see, Ralph. I was eight years old and it was their grown-up secret. They did it each year for eight years and in all that time the calves born to their cows were strong and healthy and fetched good prices, and their love was the same, I suppose, strong and good and there for all to see.
‘But some years later, I found out what they did, from Father’s diaries. And if she hadn’t died, then I would have laughed, because there was a wonderful madness in them. I can remember the kind of thing I read in those diaries. I can remember how he tried to describe it:
“Did the bull today,” he’d put.
“Better than last year. Last year my Ellen dressed herself in red but this year all in blue and lay down as usual in the forget-me-not-field.
Haggard’s bulls are fine. Of exceptional size. Bull not attracted at once by Ellen’s waving blue skirts so she calls it. And it comes lolloping. It noses her and she laughs. She begins whispering our fertility rhyme. The bull is on top of her and she strokes it. Then she shouts to me and I open the gate to the cow’s field. The bull almost runs and together we shut him in. As he mounts a cow, Ellen kisses me. She is hot and trembling.”
‘A game, you see! They played it each year for their land. The land was all they had and they gave it their own desire. Each year she’d played with the bull while he watched her and waited to open the gates as the bull came to the cows. And every year the calves born were strong, until the year of my eighth birthday, when the bull trampled her to death.
‘So you see, by the time Gully came, she was gone. I was nine when we found Gully and he moved into the room in our attic.
‘When Gully came, my father woke up from his mourning and saw that everything was neglected. He seemed to wake up all of a sudden and start mending things. He’d get up at five and work till dark. I was very thin because we didn’t eat well. The vegetables weren’t planted for one whole year and horseradish took over the patch. We had eggs of course and I expect the fresh eggs and the milk kept me alive. We had a rabbit or two and cheese sometimes, if he’d made any, and fruit in the summer. And fresh air. Often, when I remember those times, I think that we lived on the air.’
When Ralph returned to his hotel in Harrington Gardens, he walked down his corridor to a machine which dispensed miniature bottles of gin, whisky, brandy and vodka. He paid for a little bottle of whisky and walked quickly back to his room. He poured tap water into the whisky and sat down at the narrow teak desk which, apart from an extraordinary polished clothes-stand and an armchair, was the only extra piece of furniture the hotel provided for the price of the bed.
He rewound the first tape and switched it on.
‘I don’t know where you want me to start,’ he heard Erica say. Ralph smiled because, once started, she had talked without stopping, her memory seldom letting her down. He switched off the machine. He had expected to find her frail, forgetful. He had had a bad time persuading Walt that she was worth company time.
‘You see old people, Ralph. They’re no good for this kind of thing. They’re sentimental as hell. Especially women. And Erica March? Who cares? She was a name in the forties and fifties, but who needs her now?’
‘It’s worth it, Walt,’ Ralph had insisted. ‘No one else has done anything about her for years, and she’s gotta die soon.’
Walt complained about the month Ralph asked for.
‘Jesus! You got a girl in London, or what?’
‘No, Walt. It’ll take that long.’
‘Okay, kid. But if the old lady’s senile, you chuck it and come on back. You hear?’
Remembering Walt, Ralph took out a piece of hotel writing paper from the desk drawer and began: “Dear Walt …” But he got no further. He sat back and yawned, remembering that on his only other assignment in London he had felt tired all the time, oddly undernourished despite the meals he had bought himself. It had been a depressing assignment, loosely titled ‘Research into why Americans are universally disliked in Europe’ and involving Ralph in a tour of Europe’s capital cities in which he had tried to put the question ‘Why are Americans universally disliked in Europe?’ into idiomatic French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian and Greek.
It had been a Frenchman who had pointed out to Ralph that the word ‘universally’ was inappropriate to his question, indeed utterly misleading, and that when he moved on to his next questionee he would do better to leave it out. Yet while on his London stretch of his ‘Why are Americans?’ assignment, no one – not even Ralph himself – had noticed the redundancy of the word ‘universally’, and it had therefore travelled with him to France.
What London had done for Ralph, however, was to seem to confirm the hypothesis that there did exist a dislike of Americans, but that hardly anyone could say why it existed or when it had begun. A lot of people of course had said that Americans weren’t disliked at all and where on earth had Ralph got his silly idea. They went on to stress that most Americans (“I mean, gosh, take Robert Redford as an example!”) were courteous, hospitable, generous, articulate and quite often handsome, and that never, never should it be forgotten that they were the saviours of Europe twice in her blood-soaked history. But Ralph noted that when he encountered this kind of answer, he tended to disbelieve it and felt reluctant to write the answer down.
His final report to Walt on the ‘Why are Americans’ assignment had made isolationist reading. It had been filed discreetly in the Bulletin Worldwide basement and never used.
The possibility that the work Ralph intended to do with Erica March would end in a drawer marked ‘English novelists. F. Biographical Data’ depressed him. It won’t happen, he told himself, just as long as she doesn’t die.
‘After my mother’s death,’ she said, ‘I was obsessed by funerals. Hers was so terrible, so utterly solemn, that I didn’t dare weep till the flowers flopped down on her but then I thought oh no! I wouldn’t like that! Oh heavens, no! Not all those flopping bundles of wet flowers on top of me. And I started to scream and I suppose someone had to take me away.
‘But then, if an animal died – a piglet or a gosling – I buried it with my trowel and cut things from the hedgerows like hips or blackthorn to put on the grave. And I said all kinds of dreadful prayers in rhyme like “Oh God this piglet take, though it will never wake.” And one day, I took down the fly-paper from over the kitchen table and picked off all the sticky dead flies and put them into a box and I buried the box in the muck heap because I knew flies like manure and would feel at home there in their after-life. And for some months after this, I always had a flies’ burial, and I stuck stones into the muck with the number of flies I had buried written on them, like “August 20th, 1901. Seventeen flies” and “September 30th, 1901. Twenty-two flies.” It was very macabre, wasn’t it, and strange? Especially when I had so hated my mother’s funeral. I daresay I wanted everything dead to suffer what she had suffered – the terrible service with the white flowers and the mumbled prayers.
‘But do you know something strange? When I met Emily, my friend who died in 1913, she told me that when she’d been a child she’d found death very satisfying and romantic and had once buried some flies.
‘We laughed and laughed and I told Emily about the muck heap and all the other graves of dead things littered around the farm! But life is so odd, Ralph, don’t you think, because the next funeral I went to was hers. And I expect you’ve seen pictures of this, haven’t you? Of the carriages, and all of us in white with our sashes and our purple and orange flowers, and the great crowd. It was the most gilded funeral of its time.’
It was early afternoon in Erica’s room. Next door, in the small bedroom, Mrs Burford was hoovering. A squat woman of fifty with unlined skin, Mrs Burford had given Ralph the scant greeting that was all she could ever find in her for strangers and warned him bluntly: ‘She’s tired today.’
Erica wasn’t wearing the scarf, and without it, her serenity had gone. The head with its dusting of white down was at once repulsive and faintly comic. There was a scab on the crown of her head which her bent hand touched from time to time. Ralph sat down and waited. But she couldn’t speak. Not today. Did you imagine, said her limp gesture of dismissal, that we old people are the machines of history? Don’t you understand that we very often forget?
He turned up the next day and she was refreshed. She wore a red silk turban.
‘And what dreams, Ralph!’ she said before he had closed her door, ‘of a town that I’ve often seen somewhere in me and it was that town I tried to write about in The Hospital Ship, where the people come running because the scent of the air is so wonderful and they go helter-skelter down the white streets and they find camellia trees, taller than pines. And of course they want to bag all the vacant houses and put up notices saying “Private Property. Keep out.” They want to possess the town and breed in it and put down their pale roots into the soil. And only after a while do they find that the roots keep pushing through the earth twisting and growing and burrowing through the foundation of the white houses till the houses begin to crack and splinter and the roots start coming up again through the floors, tiny white growths at first, like capillaries, then wider, fleshier, stronger, coiling round the furniture and round their feet … Oh yes! I often take myself to this town. When I’m tired, my mind spends whole nights there, being a silent girl with limbs that can climb the camellia trees, and from high up watching the struggle of the Rooters and rocked to sleep by the flowers.’
‘I remember the Rooters,’ said Ralph.
‘Do you? They became very pale, didn’t they, with their own struggles? The sun shone on them but their struggle to be normal was so great it made them white with pain. And the pallor of the Rooters, you know, was inspired by someone I knew, my Uncle Chadwick who was the palest man – the palest human being – I’ve ever seen. And I remember my father saying to Chadwick once: “With your money, Chadwick, I don’t know why you don’t go on a cruise!”’
Erica laughed and leant back in her chair. ‘Chadwick was what people used to call a “card”. He lived in a style we never dreamed of, with books in glass bookcases and meals at his club. He was quite well known in his day: Chadwick March. He was compared to Oscar Wilde and really in many ways he was very like Oscar Wilde except that he wasn’t as witty, not by a long chalk, and he never went to prison, because he was a discreet man who never had love affairs with sons of Marquesses or anyone like that who might make trouble.
‘His plays had ghastly titles like The Fortunes of the Honourable Avis Brimstone and The Weathering of Lady Winchelsea, and they were all about the aristocracy, of which he definitely wasn’t one! He’d started out as a vicar, but I suppose he must have gone too far with the choirboys because the Church didn’t keep him long, and I remember him arriving at our house the summer before my mother died and sobbing. And I thought, I can’t imagine why he’s crying (grown-ups didn’t usually cry like that) unless he’s hurt himself very badly, and I waited to see whether any of his blood would run out under the kitchen door, but it didn’t.
‘I grew very, very fond of Chadwick when I was older. I don’t think he ever did go on a cruise, but he sometimes came down to our house for a kind of holiday, and I used to go for walks with him and he’d talk about London. He was very restless. Sometimes he’d announce after supper: “Think I’ll just go and see what’s to do in the village,” and off he’d go, off into the night, full of excitement, as if he expected to find travelling players or young members of the Garrick. But of course he never did! All he found were the cottages in darkness and a few ducks on the pond and a signpost pointing three ways. But he never seemed to be put off. He went time and time again to the village, even on winter nights, and I suppose he just walked about in the silence till he felt tired, and then he’d come home and say: “Nothing much doing tonight. Bit quiet in the village!”
‘He was a terribly quiet man. Gully was afraid of him at first because he looked so strange in his London get-up, as if he’d come out of another world from the one we knew. But then in time, he won Gully over. He told him made-up stories and tried to help him with his school work. The only time in my childhood that Chadwick was angry was when Gully told him that at Christmas the vicar came to our school with nuts for all the children, and he’d throw these nuts onto the floor of the schoolhouse and laugh as we children scrabbled about trying to pick them up. This made Chadwick very, very cross. He said that a man who didn’t treat children with dignity deserved to be hanged. And he tried to make my father take us away from elementary school and employ a governess for us instead, but we knew this wouldn’t happen. The money just wasn’t there.
‘I suppose I ought to describe Chadwick. He was my father’s brother, but he was nothing like my father. They were Jacob and Esau: one hairy (my father) and one smooth (Chadwick).
‘Not, of course, that there was any question of one of them trying to trick his way into some silly inheritance, because there was no inheritance, only the farm which had been left to my mother by her mother and then to my father when she died, and then to me. And Chadwick was rich. He got rich very quickly with his plays. He had a terribly slow walk, I remember. You had to keep pulling him along and this was irritating. But his hair was a wonder! It was parted in the middle and grew in ripples. His eyes were round and blue, and when I was older, I understood that his heart was rather like his eyes, always darting about in search of love.
‘Gully once told Chadwick that when he grew up, he wanted to be a Red Indian. And instead of laughing, Chadwick said: “Well, better build a tepee, eh?” And they went for a walk along the boundary of the farm and cut sticks from the hedges and began to build their tepee on the grass outside the kitchen window. The structure was very good, very professional, but the skin was hopeless. They tried to sew together pages of the Illustrated London News (Chadwick always brought us back numbers of this when he came to stay), but in the night the wind came and scattered them and bits of the Death of Queen Victoria Souvenir Issue went flying up onto the haystack.
‘I don’t know where Gully got this idea about becoming an Indian. It was long before the time of the great Western films. Perhaps there was a drawing of a Red Indian in our geography book or in a children’s atlas. Chadwick pretended to take it seriously, anyway: I remember him sitting in the ruined tepee, with a few shreds of the Illustrated London News flapping on the frame like vultures, and saying to Gully: “If you’re going to be an Indian some day, you’ll have to watch out for your white skin. Because the white man inside his white skin will come plundering, and give you worthless things for your land and try to talk you out of doing your rain dances. So you watch out for him, your white man enemy, and never let your arrow sleep.” Gully was baffled, of course. But years later, he said to me: “I got that straight now, Erica – what your Uncle Chadwick was on about. He said there’s more ’an one side to a person and yew never can tell what the one side might do to the other. And in ’imself he had two sides an’ they were never at peace, not what you’d call peace. I’nt that right, girl ?”
‘Gully was a butcher by that time!’
*
In his hotel room, Ralph had copies of Erica March’s three novels: The Two Wives of the King (1921), In the Blind Man’s City (1945) and The Hospital Ship (1954). He had read them all, but he planned to spend some of his spare time in London reading them again. But he hadn’t begun yet. He had given his evenings to what he called his Summary; he wrote very little down, yet promised himself he would write more. He sat in silence in the half-empty dining room, where bland, uninteresting food was served by disdainful waitresses in heavy shoes.
He was bearded and rather pale. His hair was black and wiry. He was shorter than he might have been because of what his family referred to as ‘The Tennessee Incident’. The Tennessee Incident had occurred when Ralph was fourteen. On holiday with his Grandma while his parents travelled in Europe, he had fallen in love with the only girl ever to come near the lonely ranch house where his grandmother lived in aged and defiant isolation – her coloured maid. She was called Pearl. Her father had been an errant English colonel. Her skin was amber. Ralph lay sleepless in his high, soft bed and dreamed his first dreams of a woman.
His grandmother noted exhaustion in his eyes at breakfast time: “Reverend Jones do have some things to say ’bout young boys of your age!” But Ralph shadowed Pearl, savouring the movement of her hips, the fire of her black eyes and above all, the smell of her, which made him want to weep.
The days of his vacation slipped away. On his last night at the ranch, he splashed cologne onto his jaw and crept like a burglar to Pearl’s room. Outside her door, he stood limp and afraid. Where were the thousand-and-one nights of his lust? Where, in his imaginings, had her body gone?
He knocked and there was silence. Then he heard movement inside the room and Pearl tiptoed to her door and unlocked it. Blocking his entrance with her body, she stared at him in the darkness. He suddenly sensed the ridiculousness of his white flesh inside his striped pyjamas. He cursed himself for having made the longed-for journey to her door and then finding that he couldn’t say a word. Gently, Pearl smiled at him and whispered: ‘Got my man inside, see? Can’t ask ya in for a cookie nor nothin’. Not tonight, Ralphie.’ Then she reached out and touched his face, just where he had splashed on the cologne. Her hand felt heavy, very hot. Then she closed the door quietly.
Ralph ran out of the house. He had never felt rage and humiliation like this rage, which was a hard stone inside him, a stone he wanted to hurl with his shout and smash with his fists. Running didn’t lessen the rage, so he let it climb, and the climb he made was the climb ever afterwards known as the Tennessee Incident and which marked him for life.
Dawn found him on the barn roof, astride the ridge like a saddle tramp. But as the sun got up, sleep at last took him and his grip on the roof weakened. He fell thirty feet to the ground and broke both his legs in several places. The pain, when his head woke and felt it, was far worse than the pain of loving Pearl and he lay on the hard white ground, screaming.
The Tennessee Incident probably stunted Ralph’s growth by three or four inches. ‘Other incidents,’ he noted in his Summary, ‘have stunted my mental and emotional growth and my progress towards the package (i.e. perspicacious appraisals, empathy with the condition of all men, the ability to engage in enlightened reasoning and generally to eschew bullshit and untruth) I understand loosely as wisdom. I’ve made hogshit of all my love affairs and the dentist says my teeth will crumble to pus before I’m forty.’ Ralph then wrote: ‘I suppose I start with myself,’ and under this scribbled pessimistically ‘Probable cost of having teeth fixed = a thousand dollars.’
‘You know I only had one friend,’ Erica said, ‘before Gully came. She was an invisible friend and her name was Claustrophobia. I thought Claustrophobia was a wonderful name for a girl, ever since I heard my father say it. I suppose he said something like “there’s claustrophobia in that ole cowshed,” but I went straight away to look and see if I could find her and ask her if she’d be my friend.
‘But I found no one. Of course I didn’t! Only the cows and the milky smell of them and the carpeting of straw and muck. I called to her, I think. I know I could say her name perfectly – every syllable. Claustro-phob-ia. Claustro-phob-ia! But no one appeared. So I invented her there and then. She crept out of one of the cow-stalls and sat on the gate, looking at me. She was terribly pretty and fair, but a little smaller than me. And I remember that she couldn’t run as fast as I could, and when we went running down the lanes for blackberries and elderberries, I’d have to keep on calling to her to hurry up.
‘Claustrophobia appeared between the time of my mother’s death and Gully’s arrival. She stayed about a year and a half, I suppose, and then she went away. I put her in the cupboard to sleep, because the cupboard frightened me then, and if I imagined her in it, I wasn’t so afraid. And of course I talked to her. She had no mother either, so she knew how horrible this was. At night, we often had very long conversations and I’d break off now and then and ask in a posh voice: “Are you sure you’re quite comfortable in the cupboard, Claustrophobia?” And she’d reply, very politely: “Oh, quite comfortable, thank you very much. In fact I prefer a cupboard to a bed, Erica my dear.”
‘So this was very satisfactory, you see, because through her I conquered my fear of the cupboard and through her I learned about friendship, because she was very loyal and I was loyal to her, particularly on the question of her existence, in which my father refused to believe. He thought I was going mad, but Chadwick now, he quite liked Claustrophobia and once brought me two gingerbread men in a box from London – one for me and one for her. But then later, he stole her name – without even consulting me – for a character in one of his awful plays, and I was very cross about this. Very cross indeed.’
Erica pursed her lips, sat back in her chair. Ralph watched her, but she looked away from him.
‘Oh, why did you come?’ she said suddenly.
Ralph switched off the tape recorder and folded his hands round the notepad he kept open on his knee.
‘I think …’ he began hesitantly.
‘Please tell me,’ said Erica. ‘I want to know why you came.’
‘Well, I think I asked to come here because I didn’t seem to be going anywhere much. I thought I was, ten years ago, but now everything seems quite bad … and I guess I thought that if I could listen to someone who’s been so far … I’m not explaining this well, Erica …’
‘Yes you are. Go on.’
‘Well if I could talk to someone who’s got near the end, then perhaps I’d begin to make better sense of it all.’
‘It all? What’s “it all”, dear?’
‘Well my life just follows the same idiotic pattern as an assignment I once went on called “Why are Americans disliked in Europe”. I go on and on asking a question, getting different answers and then I find there is no real answer – just a list of possibilities which is too divergent to make sense of. So I try to find another question. But I keep getting stuck with the same one, like I got stuck with the “Why are Americans” question. It just wouldn’t leave me. So I took it back to the States and I began asking it there – to people in restaurants and bus lines and to blacks and Poles and every goddamn ethnic group …’
‘I wonder why you got stuck with that? It sounds rather a stupid question to me, Ralph dear.’
‘I just don’t know. I suppose I thought, if I could collect enough data on that question, then I could get on to other more advanced questions and that eventually I’d be asking questions to which there would be sound answers, I mean answers that I could believe in. But I never got further than the “Why are Americans” question because the answers I got back home were so pathetic! I mean one woman said to me: “Well I blame Clint Eastwood. That’s entirely the wrong impression to give to the world – silence and gunshooting!” And a guy from the South said he blamed the Statue of Liberty. He said, “that statue gives everyone the idea that liberty is desirable and that in America every sonofabitch’s second name is Liberty. But name the man who’s free. Liberty’s hogshit! No one’s got it and what’s more they don’t want it!”‘
Erica threw back her head and laughed. ‘My poor Ralph,’ she said after a while, ‘you probably won’t do any better with me. I don’t have any answers. I never have. But I think it’s very nice for me that you’re here. I can feel you doing me good. Let’s have some wine!’
Obediently, Ralph poured it. Wondering if the wine had become a ritual, one she couldn’t really afford, he said: ‘You don’t have to give me wine every day, Erica …’
She sat up and took the glass he handed to her.
‘No of course I don’t,’ she said, ‘but it helps me. It oils my mind and my memory, and both are very rusty. Especially when I’m trying to remember that early time, when I was a girl in brown boots and pinafores. I love to dream of that time because there was a lot of innocence and wonder in it. I dream of Gully very often. He had a very large penis, you know, and over the years I dreamt a lot about Gully’s penis, although you mustn’t record that for your magazine, will you? But I think that’s why Gully got on, after he became a young man and was apprenticed to Tom Haggard (cousin of the other Haggard, Eric, who kept the bulls) and learned the butchering trade. Because the girls liked him, you know, despite his head being on sideways and I think I was jealous for a while. I believe I thought Gully was mine. I was fifteen or sixteen, I suppose, when Gully went courting and he would have been about seventeen, and his hair was thick and wiry like a bull’s hair and he had the smell of a man – or so it seemed to me.
‘I remember that I lay awake, almost every night at one time, waiting for Gully to come home to his attic room, and often it was near sunrise when he came in and we’d have to be up at six to get the milking done before he went to work. So in the milking shed, with my face pressed into a cow, I once said: “Where d’yew go then, Gully March, that you be out all night?” But Gully didn’t answer. He just milked a bit faster and swore at his cow.
‘So a few nights later, I went up to his room when I heard him come in, and he was lying on top of his bed with all his clothes on, fast asleep. I shook him and said: “Gully! Tell me where you go at night.” But he rolled over and wouldn’t say a word. And I believe it was then I felt jealous. Not just jealous of what he did, but of his secret which he wouldn’t share. So I began to tease him, even in front of my father.
‘“Gully’s courtin’!” I said. “Gully’s after an old witch who lives on the pond!” On and on I teased and watched him blush, till one day my father shook his fist at me and said: “You leave Gully alone, girl, or you’ll git shut up in the cupboard!”
‘But I didn’t leave him alone: “Gully thinks he’s growed up, don’t you, Gul? Planning to get married an’ all, eh?” And rude things I said. Dreadful things a girl my age shouldn’t have dared to say. But I wanted to punish Gully. Punish him good. But it was me who got the punishment in the end. My father shut me in the cupboard one suppertime, and I thought he would leave me there all night, so I kicked and screamed and I know they heard me down in the kitchen – Gully and my father with their good supper of soup and bread and ham. But no one came to let me out, so I put my head on a blanket and tried to sleep, and the hours passed like this, thinking about my lost supper and trying to sleep on the prickly blanket.
‘Then I heard someone come into my room, and it was Gully. He’d left my father asleep by the fire and he put his face very close to the bottom of the cupboard door, where the door didn’t quite fit, and he whispered: “Tell you what, girl, yew’s the one is right! I bin courtin’ an’ all and with Dot works up at the Manor. An’ maybe we ought to git married an’ that, ’cos I had her now seventeen times.”
‘Seventeen times! I couldn’t imagine seventeen times, not at fifteen and shut in a cupboard which still smelled of my mother’s clothes. “You wicked bor!” I whispered. “You din’ ought to have done that seventeen times. You’ll pay for that in hell, I reckon.”
‘And then we both laughed, and Gully said: “That’s not hell, girl! That’s more like heaven!”