Country Girl: A Memoir Page 29

  It was while traveling in Singapore that I realized I had hit a nadir. Love had gone underground. As a writer I was deemed wanton and irrational, my range was thought to be narrow and obsessional, a mere concoction of clichés aimed at foreigners.

  I could not, according to my critics, get any experience into perspective; the story was forever the same. An English lady journalist, obviously of Irish extraction, found my prose “stifling” and, with the sensibility of a small-town hussy, said that I had done well enough out of Ireland.

  Singapore airport was spick-and-span.

  I knew at least three people who had committed suicide. A man who once casually asked me to marry him and who in fact was due to marry someone else had gone into a wood, en route to London, with a loaded pistol in his overnight bag. In the bag, found subsequently, there was a pair of pajamas and a half-bottle of Bollinger champagne, should the pull of life have proven stronger than that of nonlife. A young boy in Geneva, bidding good night to his friends outside a crowded café, called, “I’ll sleep sound tonight,” and did not waken from the overdose he had taken.

  One morning in a hotel on the Atlantic Ocean in France, a young woman offered to walk me across to the casino, to cash money, as the machine in the hotel was broken. She was the last word in chic, different outfits each day and very high heels as she tended to the multiple needs of the clientele. She was due to be married later in the year and was considering various cities that they might or might not go to on their honeymoon. It was winter. The sea was in a right old tether, disgorging waves of such gorgeous brightness, only to be swallowed up and annihilated in troughs of black and indigo. The carousel, on the other hand, was utterly still, the white china horses with golden manes and tilted forelegs, riderless and pearled in dew. After I had cashed the money, we sat to have coffee in the gaming room and she told me her story. Why she needed to tell me, I would never know. It may have been that the room, empty of croupiers and tables, with quenched lamps hanging low over the green baize tables, seemed, in its solemnity, a sort of confessional.

  She had lived with her future husband for almost ten years, then had begun to notice a difference, a cooling. He was a traveling salesman, and she believed, and indeed later found proof, that he was having an affair in Deauville. She never mentioned it to him, though she discovered the name of the woman in question, the pharmacy where the woman worked, and the restaurants they had eaten in. One day, while he was still away, she decided to drown herself. She was a strong swimmer and swam far out to sea, so far that nobody walking on that shore could have sighted that ash-blond head bobbing up and down. Out there in that lonely vastness, she lost her will to die and began to turn back, but equally she lost most of her strength to swim. How she stayed up in that water, how after many hours she had crawled her way back through it and lay on the shore, she could not tell, but knew that she was found, lying in a wet bathing suit, freezing and her speech gone. A couple who found her talked to her, stood her up, tried to get her to talk, and eventually brought her to the hospital, where she was put in the psychiatric wing. It was weeks before her husband-to-be was contacted. When he did visit, he was like a mortician, formal and remote; he did not ask her why she had done it, but simply said that she could be a guest in his house for the period of her recuperation. Now, as she told me that morning in the empty casino, they were due to marry, but what she did not tell me was the changed nature of love, the metamorphosis that had taken place.

  The hotel in Singapore, which my publishers had arranged for me, was in its own grounds, the gardens so beautifully tended, grasses, shrubs, trees, and wide rhubarby leaves in fanlike and carefree sway. It was October.

  The “Business and Shopping District,” as I learned when I looked through the brochure in my bedroom, was a mere seven-minute walk away, and though intending to take my own life, I still persisted with the niceties of the living. I was on my way to Australia on a book tour, expected in three cities, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney. I would bring gifts to the people who were going to meet me there. The department store where I found myself was on many floors, all glassy and heartlessly bright, inane music throughout. At a cosmetics counter my face, in a standing magnifying glass, looked bleached and grotesque. Two young girls were showing off. They wore identical linen pinafores with tiny, braided straps decorated with flat cloth rosebuds. They were trying various lipsticks from a giant display, letting out hoots of laughter. They daubed their lips with layer upon layer of it, and soon their hands and cheeks were scored with bright tattoos. Then they clowned, doing glissades from counter to counter, proclaiming their happiness, their youth, and their blithe spirits. I hated them. I hated their giggles, their exuberance, their ponytails bouncing off their thin, dusky collarbones. What did they know of love, what did they know of despair? It occurred to me that if I were to say to them, “Excuse me, I am going to kill myself at eight-thirty this evening,” the laughter in that department store would become infectious. I then permitted myself the fleeting vision of a man I was in love with, then withdrew without even a knowing gesture. By such sad associations love withers.

  I bought silk scarves and silk ties for strangers in Australia whom I was supposed to meet but would not be meeting.

  Back at the hotel the floodlit garden was like a setting for an outdoor theater, the various greens even more startlingly alive, tree trunks with little golden granules of light scaling them, the shrubbery lit from above and below, and the cropped, round crowns of box hedging, like cupolas, on fire. How beautiful life could be. Couples were on the terrace, having their cocktails, the men in cream and white jackets, the women with pearls and fur stoles. There was dance music, some distance away, and from hidden hoses water trickled quietly, faithfully, unnervingly.

  In my room the bedcover had been turned down, Singapore orchids of pale purple on the pillow, a small square of dark chocolate, and a breakfast menu. The pills were in a handkerchief from long, long ago. It was yellow silk with a white lace border and a touching motto—“Love the Giver.” I had emptied bottles of pills from down the years into it that I had accrued from various doctors, for jet lag, for journeys to America and elsewhere. I do not like the taste of whiskey, so I began with a glass of champagne. Then I sat by the window with the curtains open, hearing the voices down below, the waltz music and the incessant sound of the water, which somehow suggested my being flushed out, and that was something I recoiled from thinking about. Things were getting scarier. Only an hour to go.

  I was on my second glass of champagne when there came a light knock on my door. Who could it be? There were three knocks in all, and then an envelope was slipped under the door with Facsimile printed on the outside. The message was from Sasha, in his familiar Cyrillic handwriting. It said, “Guess what, you are having lunch with Polly White tomorrow Sunday. She will collect you at one o’clock.” She had been a friend of his at Bedales, and his first real love was her sister Lucy. I reckoned that he had bumped into her in Notting Hill Gate in London, just as she was returning to Singapore, where she now lived, and it was there and then that the rendezvous with me had been agreed. I walked around the room and kept repeating it, “Guess what, you are having lunch with Polly White tomorrow Sunday.”

  I could not imagine the lunatic self of moments before. I decided to go downstairs and talk to someone, anyone, in order to rejoin life. Looking down at the handwriting that I loved, the message hurried and breezy, yet secure in the knowledge and in the certainty that I would be having lunch with Polly White on the morrow, and so I would.

  From time to time I go back to the bedroom in the irrational hope that the foxes have gone. They are still there, merry and frolicking. I wished William Faulkner would walk in. Lily Cushing, whom I met in America, described a visit she and her husband, Anthony West, had from Faulkner, who for one whole afternoon stared out the window at two foxes as in a frieze, the apotheosis of stillness, the Vladimir and Estragon of the animal kingdom. But William Faulkner is not in my sitting room
, though all his books are in the glass-fronted cabinet among those books that I love most.

  Flaubert’s mother said that his love of words had hardened his heart. Could that be true? Could that be true?

  In a pile of letters there is one from Carlo enclosing a letter that he has plucked for me from the vast memorabilia of his father. My husband’s handwriting so faded and yet so familiar. It is a letter addressed to me and one that I have never received, or maybe one that he wrote merely for the sake of writing it. It was written about five years before his death. “My darling,” it begins. The “My darling” bewilders me. It had been true once and for a time, its trueness most felt when in the evenings in Lake Park, I would sit in his study with the overhead light not on but maybe the Tilley lamp on the desk, where he placed it, having just come in from the toolshed, where he pottered during the day. In those early months together he said that he did not want to write, he was too happy to write. He would encourage me to tell him stories about home, dock and nettle, drunk men going home on a fair day, relieving themselves against the piers of our gate, and smells, dung and wild woodbine, and what for me was the most lingering smell of all, custard powder of the palest, airiest pink. He liked hearing these anecdotes, and he was not jealous then. The evening that stayed longest with me was when, in a tentative and yet emotional way, I told him that I might be having a baby. I had morning sickness for a few weeks and would go into the woods to vomit. A strange man in a coat made of various skins, a hunter perhaps, came upon me once accidentally and said that the best cure for my condition was to suck on a raw tomato. Another evening up there I caught sight of a herd of deer that were already moving, in mazed and weightless flight, scaling the barbed wire that was flecked with shivery bits of yellow-white sheep’s wool, and I knew for certain that I was having a child, and the sensation was strange and startling.

  In the letter that began “My darling,” this estranged husband was suggesting that we live together again, because, though mindful of my innumerable failings, he had come to the conclusion that I would never be happy without him. I had loved him once, or thought I had, and there were three or possibly four other loves, one who had the makings of a poet and another who chose the path of power, and still another, who had fended me off as if I were a Dido, tempting him away from conquest, back to Carthage and to love.

  It was in a beautiful garden in Dorset, with the smell of roses and lilac and fresh grass, croquet mallets on the steps, and an open book facedown on a wooden table, that it happened. Siesta time. I was biding my moments to go down to the swimming pool. It was in the garden of a house that Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser rented each summer, and Francis Wyndham and I, like two excitable country cousins, would meet at Waterloo station, setting sail for our four-day vacation. I can still recall that intake of breath, our mutual exclamations at the first sight of the sea, like a spill of mercury, the light from it so dazzling, glimpsed and then lost as the train wound its way inward and ceremoniously from Bournemouth toward the fields and hedges and shales and coppices of Dorset. Four happy days in which conversation never flagged and Harold told stories that he had often told before, but like old wine (of which there was also an abundance) they were richer with age and not without the presence of death. Adopting the Scottish burr of the professor who had treated him in his illness, Harold would say, “But you’re our star pupil, Mr. Pinter.” Often he would recite for me lines of Yeats, though neither of us could name the poem, for Constance Gore-Booth, whom the poet saw ride out to the meet under bare Ben Bulben, “The beauty of her country-side/With all youth’s lonely wildness” about her.

  On a particular visit, word came that Jude Law and a producer would come to lunch in order to talk to Harold about a screenplay. It was still not confirmed, and I hoped they wouldn’t come, since our rhythms now were so nicely established. I was in the bedroom overlooking the long avenue, with its echoes of Last Year at Marienbad, when I saw their car come over the cattle grid, saw the two men get out and collect their belongings, including swimming togs, from the boot.

  It is afternoon in the garden, with hundred-year-old trees and a shaded walk and, underneath, tiny speckled flowers that I did not know the name of but that obviously preferred shade. Everything so quiet and slumberous. There was Jude Law, Adonis, fast asleep. I retraced my steps, as this constituted a setback to my intended swim. As a nonswimmer, I wore armbands for my dip, armbands which, when blown up, had in capital letters NIVEA CREAM prominently displayed. Moreover, I had a kitchen chair, turned on its side, to serve as a prop that I could grip before venturing in. Each day I had chosen this time, when the garden was deserted, but now there was Adonis, who might waken at any moment and wander across. I went back to sit at the bottom of the steps and keep vigil. He was walking toward me, golden-haired, lit by soft August sunshine, when unexpectedly he came over and without a word bent down and kissed me. Like fiction. I knew the story that it reminded me of, a Chekhov story, inevitably called “The Kiss.” In it a group of officers had been invited to tea on the estate of Lieutenant von Rabbek, where there was also the smell of roses and lilac and fresh grass. One of them, not confident enough to play billiards or join in the mazurka, took a stroll throughout the large house, blundering into corridors and little anterooms, then, seeing a gleam of light from a doorway, the officer stopped, heard footsteps and the rustling of a dress, the light being turned out and a breathless, feminine voice whispering, “At last.” Two soft, fragrant, unmistakably feminine arms are clasped around his neck, a warm cheek pressed to his cheek, and the sweet impact of a kiss. The bestower of the kiss, realizing that she had kissed the wrong officer, uttered a faint shriek and stepped back. But that did not happen in the garden in Dorset, with its roses and smell of cut grass. Like the narrator in Chekhov’s story, who for hours afterward gave himself up to the sensation of it, I recollected the fact that Jude Law had kissed me, had not said a word, and then had disappeared inside the house. Yet by nightfall, when they had left, I thought how glad I was to be old, heaving a sigh of relief that it was not the beginning of something, of getting on the love trampoline—more intensities, more fervor, more hope, more desolation, more everything.

  Signing books in Kennys Bookshop, Galway city, 1978.

  After weeks of bedlam in the garden, with foxes coming and going, I at long last located a company willing to take them to the country. Two men came to survey the scene. They looked shifty as they walked around, sniffing and following the tracks. They called me by my first name all the time. They would bring cages, they said, and they did, or rather, one of them did. Big cages for the parents and littler cages for the cubs.

  The bait was chicken wing, slightly bloodied, and suspended on a metal hook at the far end; the ruse being that, when a fox reached it, a spring snapped and the trapdoor was shut. The view in the garden was grim: ugly, squat cages, seven in all, and the bloodied chicken bait, which would get more rank by the day. I foresaw what was to come. Foxes in cages and those who had been crafty enough to avoid incarceration coming in sympathy to bay. There would be ongoing laments out there. Except that it did not turn out like that at all. Everything became weirdly quiet. At what hour of night, I asked myself, did the unsuspecting fox, perhaps the mother who had often outstared me, walk into her doom? Because next morning, treading my way, I saw a haunch—mahogany-brown and weirdly still. I froze, then hurried back to ring the man, asking him to come at once, except there was no answer from either phone line. When at last he came and picked up the cage, the fox was delirious, jumping back and forth, letting out mewling cries, which he answered with soft aspirations, the almost o’s and the almost a’s, as he put the cage in the back of the van for the long drive to the somewhere in the country.

  Each morning after that, I went out to find trapdoors closed but no fox inside. They had twigged. When I rang, he said it could be gusts of wind, but I did not believe that, because several foxes had returned, treading in and out between cages, and I both feared them and waite
d for them. Then, about five mornings later, there was another fox, much younger, though not a cub, in a cage, under the fig trees, silent and seething. It kept looking at me, the gaze so fixed, so remorseless, that it brought to mind something I had put away, the gaze of the father to whom I was not reconciled.

  We were in the nursing home, a friend called Agatha and myself, with my father. Our visit was just coming to an end, and he sensed it. It had not gone badly, but it had not gone well either. Questions and answers: “Why won’t you eat in the refectory with the other patients?” “I told you I won’t and I told you why. Mohawks, nothing but Mohawks. When are you going back?” I said I would be returning to England in a day or two, but hoped to be back by Christmas. “Christmas Day, the loneliest day of my life.” “But you wouldn’t eat with the others and pull crackers and things.” “I told you I wouldn’t and I told you why. The loneliest day of my life.” We edged out of that small room somehow, Agatha and I standing and he now standing in furious silhouette. We went down the corridor, and I knew that he followed. He caught up with us in a big room that was the concert room, as I imagined, as there was a baby piano, a guitar, and a mural of ballerinas in the sickliest purples. Dipping from a low white cord were birthday cards, all with the word “Grandpa” in every conceivable lettering and color. There was even one that twinkled on and off. How many hours’ twinkling did it have left in it? I wondered. He had caught up with us, and he dragged one of the many chairs along the floor, scraping the stone slabs. He sat down and started to sing “Danny Boy.” “The pipes, the pipes are calling…” He sang it right through, and there were tears in his eyes, and when he had finished, he looked up with a desperate, imploring expression. I knew that he wanted me to go across and throw my arms around him, and I wanted to, but I couldn’t, and the solitude closed in around him in that cavernous room.