Nuns and Soldiers (17 page)

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 committed 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 -’

Gertrude thought, I won’t say more for the moment. I think she will stay, she
must
stay.

‘I want you to help me spend my money,’ said Gertrude.

‘Jet travel and champagne?’

‘Well, that too, why not! I was thinking of good causes.’

‘You know more about that than I do. What about all the work you’ve been doing with the Asian women?’

‘I’m such a beginner at that. They’re so beautiful and spiritual, they ought to be teaching me! Maybe I’ll go back to school-teaching, I don’t know. But whatever I do I want you to do it with me. You’re our nun now, the Count was saying that about you. You’re our holy woman and we need you. A widow is a kind of nun, we’ll be nuns together and do virtuous things! I don’t see why Stanley’s children should have all Guy’s money. Let you and me spend it together.’

Guy had put nothing on paper, but it had been almost tacitly agreed between him and Gertrude that she should make at least an interim will in favour of William, Ned and Rosalind Openshaw. Gertrude, who had no close family, had always accepted Guy’s family as her own. Now however she felt detached from them, almost resentful. Guy, the flower of them all, was gone, while they lived on.

‘You may marry again,’ said Anne.

‘Never! And thank you, dear heart, for keeping
them
at bay. Without you they’d have eaten me alive.’ By
them
Gertrude meant
les cousins et les tantes.
Anne had taken charge.
They
had not all been pleased.

‘They love you.’

‘Yes, yes -’

‘Anyway, I’m glad you’re learning Urdu.’

The two women had established in their time at the cottage a routine of work. In the mornings they sat apart, studying, Gertrude in the little sitting-room and Anne in her bedroom. Gertrude worked on Urdu. Anne was polishing up her classical Greek. More even than her convent training, her own temperament forbade her to be idle. At least she could be attempting to learn a trade. Gertrude too was unwilling to be idle, though she was more restless than Anne and laid aside her books sooner. Anne now saw in her friend the restless lost middle-aged widow. She had lived through her husband. Now she had no children and no work and had lost her way. Well, had not Anne too lost her way? There was one once who had said to her, ‘I am the Way.’

Before lunch they went down to the sea, then drank a glass of sherry, sitting outside on a bench beside the hawthorn trees, if there was even a gleam of sun. Anne had never learnt to cook, and made it clear that she would not start now, so Gertrude cooked lunch. (Gertrude was a modest cook, she had never learnt Jewish cookery as the other Gentile women had done. Janet Openshaw’s
gefilte fisch
was famous.) After lunch they performed household tasks, then usually set off walking, along the coast or inland, following little winding lanes between stone walls where purple and white violets grew, and seeing further off the curving hills of gauzy green, spotted with white sheep, where the cloud shadows constantly passed. There was a small farm near the cottage, but the nearest village was a pleasant two miles walk away. The village shop closed and the village pub opened at the same evening hour, so when Anne and Gertrude came to the shop they could imbibe the local cider before walking home to dinner and to lamplit reading. Anne was reading
The Heart of Midlothian.
She read very slowly, thoughtfully. Gertrude was reading
Sense and Sensibility.
Gertrude read with a sad quiet feeling of revisiting another period of her life and its forgotten pleasures. She had somehow, until Anne arrived, given up reading novels. (Guy only liked philosophy and history. Popular biography was his ‘lightest’ reading.) Anne read with continued amazement. What an extraordinary art form it was, it told you about everything! How informative, how exciting, how funny, how terribly sentimental, how full of moral judgements! Sometimes they argued about the novels. (They disagreed about Jeanie Deans.) They went to bed early.

‘Hey hey the white swan.’

‘Still can’t do it,’ said Anne. Gertrude had asked her about this white swan of Guy’s. What did it mean? Anne did not know.

‘I’ll never find out now, or about that cube,’ said Gertrude. Her eyes filled with tears.

Anne had been surprised by the fierceness of Gertrude’s grief and its duration. But with a kind of professional detachment she knew that the violence of it would not last, even though the pain would never go.

‘It will never go, the pain,’ said Gertrude. Sometimes, it seemed to Anne, they picked the very words out of each other’s heads, so close were they. ‘I remember now he used to say it earlier sometimes when we saw the pub called the Swan. But I never asked him, I feel now I let him down. I ought to have asked. And then I somehow couldn’t - perhaps it was something religious.’

‘I don’t know.’ Anne added, ‘You are without guilt here, don’t invent it. That pain at least is spared you.’

‘I’ll sell the flat,’ said Gertrude. ‘We’ll give up the world together. I can’t do it on my own.’

Anne thought, I left the convent so as to be homeless. Foxes have holes, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head. I must go onward with my Christ, if I still have a Christ. If I stay with Gertrude I shall have a home forever. (She tried not to think: oh what happiness!) Gertrude’s idea of giving up the world would be a little house in Chelsea.

Anne suddenly laughed, and Gertrude very nearly laughed too. It was an old laugh, that special mad complicit laugh which they had used to laugh together when they were at college; and this laugh Anne was teaching again to Gertrude, who had as yet no other.

‘What are you laughing at, darling?’

‘The idea of you giving up the world!’

‘I wonder if you ever really gave it up?’ asked Gertrude.

‘It’s a good question.’ How pride supports me, thought Anne, how unbroken it is. Have I really changed at all, can people change? That death in life which she had attempted: to refuse false gods, to undo the self, a little every day, like picking off leaves or scales ... Was it not
imaginary
? Gertrude thought of Anne’s religion as a prison from which she had emerged, an obsessive delusion of which she had been cured. How unlike this it really was. And yet how was it? Her prayer continued, not a ‘let me out’, but a deep insistent ‘let me in’. Where would she and her Christ wander to now and what would become of them? She had left the convent in order to be truthful and lonely and harmless. If she were to find a cell where she could live as an anchoress in the world and retain her innocence, would that too be ‘imaginary’? Or would she, like Kim’s lama, settle down with Gertrude? How much could love and duty show her here? I could easily do it, thought Anne. That ‘forever’ was at times very very close to her heart.