Nuns and Soldiers Page 13

  While Guy was talking to Anne the Count had arrived with Veronica Mount, and they had both spoken appreciatively of Gertrude’s ‘nun’. Victor was absent dealing with an epidemic of Asian ’flu. Manfred came, as he always did, and Stanley who brought Janet with him. She had just been given a lecture. She brought more flowers and was sweet to Gertrude. Mrs Mount talked about a splendid exotic Jewish wedding she had attended in her deceased husband’s family, with Oriental music and dancing rabbis. She went on to criticize the arrangements at Jeremy Schultz’s bar mitzvah. Stanley talked about ‘the House’. Moses Greenberg, the family solicitor, a middle-aged widower who had married an Openshaw, arrived late. He talked about his niece who was to marry Akiba Lebowitz, the controversial psychiatrist. He also mentioned that Sylvia Wicks had come to consult him on a point of law on behalf of a friend. Sylvia had not reappeared since the night when she asked to see Guy. Gertrude felt she had been rude to Sylvia. Guy had not wanted to see the Count, and had been curt with Gertrude later in the evening. Gertrude had not asked Anne what she and Guy had talked about and Anne had not said.

  Today it was foggy and neither of the women had been out. London was huddled under a damp freezing-cold pall of brownish air. The street lights had been on all day, and Gertrude had pulled the curtains at three o’clock. A fire was burning in the grate. Janet Openshaw’s chrysanthemums were still quite fresh with the beech leaves and eucalyptus on the marquetry table. Gertrude had arranged Janet’s new flowers, a mass of mauve and white anemones in a big oatmeal coloured Staffordshire mug, and put them on the mantelpiece, beside one of the Bohemian vases. (Flowers were never put in the Bohemian vases in case the water made a mark on the glass.) She felt a physical agony of restlessness, and a desire to cry out loudly. She dropped her book on the floor, aware of Anne’s quiet gaze.

  The nurse put her head round the door. ‘Oh Mrs Openshaw, Mr Openshaw wants to see you.’

  Gertrude leapt up. This was unusual. The days had fallen into such a steady pattern. This was still the time of Guy’s rest. Then the nurse was with him. Then after that was Gertrude’s time. Gertrude thought, this is it. But the nurse was smiling her dry professional smile as she held the door open.

  Guy’s door was ajar. Gertrude entered, breathless with fear. The single lamp was lighted by the bed. Guy was sitting propped up. His bearded face shocked her. Other things were different too. He held out a hand towards her.

  Spellbound, Gertrude took the frail hand, sat in the bedside chair, was convulsed with a desire to sob. Guy was suddenly present to her, all present, with his whole tenderness, his whole love, his real being.

  He said. ‘Steady, my darling, my dear heart, my love, my own dear one, my dear -’

  Gertrude cried quietly, leaning over, her tears dropping onto his hand, onto the sheet, onto the floor.

  He said, ‘You know how it is. We aren’t parted. In a way we’ll never be parted. Forgive me if I’ve seemed so sort of far away.’

  ‘I know-I vknow -’ said Gertrude. ‘Oh Guy, how can I bear it -’

  ‘Bear it you can, and if you can you must. I’m so full of beastly drugs, that’s partly the trouble. And-I don’t want to weep my way to the tomb. It’s better to be calm and dull. I don’t want to see you distraught, I don’t want you to be distraught. We know about our love and our life, how good it has been. We don’t have to repeat it all now with weeping and wailing. You understand, dearest heart?’

  ‘Yes, yes -’

  ‘Well, weep less, there’s something I want to say to you.’ He shifted sighing, pulling at his hair for a moment with his other hand. ‘I enjoyed talking to Anne.’

  ‘I’m so glad.’

  ‘It was a foretaste of heaven.’

  ‘A - ?’

  ‘You recall some witty Frenchman said that his idea of heaven was discuter les idées générales avec les femmes supérieures. But don’t worry, I haven’t been converted. “Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee!” Do you remember Uncle Rudi singing that?’

  ‘He knew all the Anglican hymns.’

  ‘One thing one does learn at an English Public School. A perfectly suitable song for a cantor. I’m glad Anne’s with you.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘I wanted to -’

  ‘To tell something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you all right, in pain -’

  ‘I’m fine -’

  ‘You suddenly seem so much better - oh God if only -’

  ‘Gertrude, don’t. Now listen my darling, my dear one - kiss me first.’

  Gertrude kissed his strange bearded lips. She felt desire for him, which had been absent. She groaned and sat back, holding his hand and caressing it with a sudden passion.

  ‘Good dear girl. Gertrude, I want you to be happy when I’m gone.’

  ‘I can’t be happy,’ she said. ‘I shall never be happy again, I can’t be. I won’t kill myself, it won’t be necessary, I’ll walk and talk but I’ll be dead. I don’t mean I’ll go mad, but I won’t be happy, it isn’t possible. I can’t be happy without you, it’s a fact of nature. I wasn’t happy till I met you.’

  ‘An illusion,’ said Guy, ‘and anyway a quite different point. You will recover.’

  ‘What does it mean to -’

  ‘We’ve had a wonderful time.’

  ‘Yes -’

  ‘Listen, I must talk rationally while I can. I most intensely want you to be happy when I’m gone. They say “He would have wished” this or that has no sense, but it has. I am giving it sense now, for you, do you understand? Don’t waste time being miserable. I want you to find happiness, to be ingenious and resolute to live, to survive. You are intelligent and strong. You are young. You can have a whole other lifetime after I am dead.’

  ‘Guy, I can’t. I shall be dead too - walking and talking and dead - Please don’t try to -’

  ‘You love me, but you won’t grieve forever. I want you to seek joy and to seek it intelligently. I beg and pray you not to grieve. I know you can’t imagine it now, but you will pass out of these shadows. I see a light beyond.’

  ‘Not without you -’

  ‘Now, Gertrude, stop. You must try, for my sake, to have the will now to please me in the future. In that future when I won’t exist any more. There won’t be any me any more and long grief will be stupid. People mourn because they think it does some good, it’s a kind of tribute. But there’s no recipient. “Many a one for him makes moan, but none shall know where he is gone!” Can you remember any more of it?’

  ‘It’s a Scottish ballad, but I can’t remember -’

  ‘ “His lady’s ta’en another mate” -’

  ‘Oh - Guy -’

  ‘Don’t just be emotional, think and think with me. Be with me now, even if it’s hard. Why shouldn’t you marry again! You could have a whole new happiness with another person. I don’t want you to be alone.’

  ‘No. I am you.’

  ‘So you feel. It will be different later. Life, nature, time will work upon you. I’ve thought about it and I want you to marry. You could marry Peter for instance. He is a good man and he loves you. He is pure in heart. You know that he loves you?’

  Gertrude hesitated. She sort of knew. She had never worried about it. ‘The Count, yes. It did sometimes seem - but I -’

  ‘I’m just saying this to concentrate your mind. Heaven knows what will happen to you next year. It may be something entirely unexpected. But I so much ... want you to be ... safe ... and happy ... when I’m not around ...’

  He sank back among the pillows. ‘I want to die well ... but how is it done?’

  Just outside the partly open door the Count, who had arrived early and come quietly up the stairs, stood frozen upon the landing. The drawing-room door was shut, so was Anne’s door. The nurse was in the kitchen. In silence and alone he overheard Guy’s words concerning himself. He turned about and tiptoed away, out of the flat and down the stairs.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TIME
HAD PASSED and Guy Openshaw was dead. He lived longer than had been expected, but obliged the doctor’s prediction by dying on Christmas Eve. His ashes had been scattered in an anonymous garden. It was now early April in the following year, and Gertrude Openshaw, née McCluskie, was looking out of a window at a cool cloudy sunlit scene. To her right, fairly close, was a small rocky headland where furry emerald grass was brushed down like a hat over a bulge of grey cliff, cluttered with tiny facets, which descended into the sea, it being now high tide. At low tide the rocks descended to a beach of stones below which was a little line of pale yellow sand. The stones were grey, oblong flattish, of a uniform size and shape, so that from a distance they looked like the scales of a fish. They had been clashed and beaten by the millennial sea into a terrible density and an absolute smoothness. Here and there only was one chipped or pitted or covered with little runic scratches. The faceted headland was quite easy to climb, and had been climbed by Anne Cavidge the day before. Ahead of Gertrude was the open sea, a cold dark blue sea with burly white clouds moving above it. The waves were breaking upon the semi-circle of stones which formed the little cove, with the house at its centre. Between the house and the stones there was a wind-swept garden, a sheep-cropped lawn, and two low crumbling downward-reaching stone walls lined by tormented hawthorn trees, through which the frequent rain crept and dripped. At the foot of these trees, in densely crowded profusion, primroses were in flower. On Gertrude’s left, where the land continued to slope gently to the sea, there was a pattern of little fields, surrounded by more stone walls, in rather better repair, which cast hard shadows when the intermittent sun shone upon them. Gertrude was staying alone with Anne in Stanley Openshaw’s country cottage in Cumbria. Manfred had driven them north three weeks ago in his big car.

  Guy never asked to see Anne again, he seemed to have forgotten her. He saw the Count once more briefly. He never talked to Gertrude again as he had done on the evening when he asked her to be happy when he was dead. The Day Nurse told Gertrude later that he must have been in great pain during that conversation because he had refused the pain-killing injections so that his mind should be clearer. After that evening Gertrude held no more ‘Visiting Hours’, and les cousins et les tantes retired to a distance, ceased almost to inquire, waiting for the event. Guy became aloof and dreamy, silent, gazing past Gertrude at what was to come. He asked to see Moses Greenberg, but they did not talk at length. All the legal arrangements had been made much earlier. Victor became evasive, had nothing to say. Towards the very end, Guy became suddenly confused, talkative, rambling to himself about ‘the ring’ and ‘logical space’ and ‘the upper side of the cube’ and ‘the white swan’. He also talked about Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Then he asked anxiously for his father and for Uncle Rudi. In the end he died alone, in the night, probably in his sleep the Night Nurse said (yet how could she know). The nurse, not Gertrude, found him dead. Gertrude looked once on his dead face and turned away. There was a convulsion in her like an act of birth.

  Gertrude attended the cremation. She leaned on nobody’s arm. She did not otherwise leave the house for several weeks. She lay in bed, and now took all the pills and drugs which Victor prescribed for her. She wept quietly or sobbed, her body racked by a choking breath and a droning wail. Drugged she slept, then woke to the renewed horror. Anne, taking control, tended her. Gertrude heard dimly, sometimes, the muted voices, voices she recognized. Mrs Mount, Stanley, Manfred, Gerald, the Count, talking to Anne in the hall, anxious inquiring voices trying to develop solutions and plans. She saw no one except Anne, though at first she did not communicate even with her. Then one day in January she suddenly stopped sobbing and moaning and got up, though her eyes remained red and wet. She accepted from Anne speech, touch, love, the food of consolation, although at first she did it really more for Anne’s sake than for her own.

  Moses Greenberg came with a briefcase full of papers which he spread out on the dining-room table. Of course Guy had left everything in apple-pie order. His will was simple. He left everything of which he died possessed to his beloved wife Gertrude. There were no other legacies. Moses tried to explain something about investments to Gertrude, but, handkerchief to mouth, she did not understand. She had never thought about these matters of which Guy had never talked. She summoned Anne, who did understand. Anne and Moses Greenberg discussed problems about taxes and insurances and bank accounts. Moses Greenberg could not have been kinder.

  In a fever of activity Gertrude began to change the flat. She sold the bed which Guy had died in, and the bed in which they had slept for all those years together. She would have liked to burn them in a ship at sea. She moved everything in the flat, made new bedrooms for herself and Anne, moved pictures and rugs and ornaments which had not been moved for years. Then, accompanied always by Anne, she set out as if dutifully upon a round of family visits. It was as if she wanted to ‘show herself’ in her widowhood to Guy’s people. Many, even remote Schultzes, invited her to stay. She spent a few days, with Anne, at the Stanley Openshaws’ London house. Then, on Janet’s suggestion, they came north to the cottage in Cumbria. Some calmness came to Gertrude’s misery, but it was a black black calm, and the old wild despair came back in gusts, and walking by herself beside the sea she wailed aloud.

  Had she expected with death, some relief? Not to see the ‘simulacrum’, to imagine the grinding pain, to suffer the daily loss of the bond of consciousness, to see the eyes vague, mad, even hostile? But no, death, absence, utter absence was worse, the thing she had not imagined. The empty space, the nothingness of what had once lived and moved, the loss of that sense of his being somewhere which gave poles to the world. Guy was gone, and her heart questing for solace discovered only void. Even Guy alienated, suffering, had been a place of comfort to which she could come, for all the pain. Now she was alone. She thought, all those memories of me are gone, no one knows me any more at all; I too have left the world. All the things which he might have told her were gone, everything which they had known and loved together was taken absolutely away. No joy which she had had with Guy could be a joy to her ever again. Yes, absence, that was worst. She had therein a new kind of being composed of tears. She heard the birds singing in the misty English spring, but there would be no happiness in the world any more.

  Yet very gradually the terrible mourning subsided, and the time passed when Gertrude felt that she must die literally of a broken heart. She could not imagine now how she could have survived without Anne Cavidge, and Anne’s return to her now carried the significance of the world.

  ‘I was possessed by a devil and you saved me.’

  ‘Why by a devil?’ said Anne.

  They were walking at noon beside the sea, walking in stout brogues upon the flat grey stones which the sea had so battered into a dull beauty.

  ‘Oh I don’t know-I gave myself up to it. Like wanting to die in a bad way. Like fighting the world and wanting to hurt it.’ Gertrude was thinking of how Guy had wanted her to be happy. She would never be happy, but there was a duty to resist despair.

  ‘One must resist despair,’ said Anne. ‘That’s one of the few rules that exist everywhere always. I think it’s a duty even in the torture chamber, though there no one might ever know whether it had been obeyed or not.’

  ‘Only God would see.’

  ‘Only God would see.’

  ‘Such a useful fiction.’

  ‘Yes!’

  Gertrude understood about duty. She thought, Guy would have enjoyed discussing this.

  The light had changed and under a warm sun the sparkling sea was covered with mysterious trails of lighter blue.

  Anne thought, it is Lent. What will happen to me at Easter? Easter had always seemed to her like a great slow explosion of dazzling light. She shifted her mind to thoughts of innocent unstained things. Children at Christmas, children at Easter. Children enacting the Christian story. Was innocence her good now, not that intolerable light? At first she had felt like one who had successfully commit
ted a crime. Now she wanted shelter in the world, a refuge from sin.

  Gertrude was thinking I want Anne to stay with me forever, I can’t live without her now. The presence of Anne in the house is necessary to my continued survival. Gertrude had put off saying this clearly to Anne, though she had hinted it.

  ‘I could not have survived without you, Anne. God sent you to me.’

  ‘Another convenient fiction.’

  ‘No, no, you know what I mean. You’ve come now when I need you. It means something.’

  ‘It’s superstition, my darling. But I’m glad - I’m glad - I’ve been of use.’ Yes, superstition, thought Anne. Any idea of God’s purpose in my life must henceforth be just that. And yet she wished that she could respond to Gertrude’s idea.

  ‘Anne, dear heart, stay with me - won’t you -’

  ‘You know I said I’d -’

  ‘No, I mean always. Forever. You must. We’ll be together, deeply together. Of course we’d go away and do different things, I wouldn’t tie you, but we’d make our home together. Why not? It’s so clear to me. You’re free, Anne, you’re free, and everything’s different now. Choose this, please. I think you have chosen it. Stay with me always.’

  Anne thought, Gertrude keeps telling me I’m free, but what does it mean? She did not yet want to think urgently about Gertrude’s ‘forever’ though it moved her very much. She said, ‘I’ll never be far away, you know that -’