The Cupboard by Rose Tremain

Author:Rose Tremain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446450307
Publisher: Random House

7

‘I suppose it was the winter of 1927. There was a storm in the Channel and almost as soon as our boat had set out from Calais it had to turn back. I’ve never seen such a sky. It was like the sky that comes round me, when I feel I’m losing hold …

‘I found a hotel room for a few francs and I lay in it listening to the storm. I thought, if storms came every day there would be no travelling to England, only in a little plane and even the plane would be swallowed up in the black. Then I slept, with all the shutters banging and I dreamed of Gérard struggling to make sense of his bones.

‘We crossed over the next day and it was snowing in Dover. I think I cried in the train. There was desolation in England. And the trouble was, Ralph, I didn’t know why I was there! It seemed idiotic to be there when all I wanted was to be with Gérard. And I began to have such fears. I thought, he’ll become so thin, he’ll waste away to nothing. I thought, his eyes will sink back into his skull.

‘As soon as I got into London, I wrote to him. I tried to describe my love, which was as black as the sky over Calais and as bright as the midday heat at Thoziers les Colombes. Separation from him was like a wound and I wondered if he felt it, too, a kind of bleeding in him. I think it’s very terrible, to feel the weight of another person on your heart. I began to remember my father and to wonder if, when my mother died, he felt it, the silent weight of her, and had to carry her around year after year, till he met Eileen and the weight unravelled itself in the Book of a Thousand Knitting Patterns.

‘I expect I told myself that I should go and see my father, but I knew I wouldn’t. I imagined him growing old and I was afraid of this. I remember thinking, Gully will take care of everything.

‘I stayed in a hotel in Bayswater. It was a very drab kind of place, much worse in its way than my room in the Rue de Grenelle, because it was full of old women and ugly furniture and there was an air of piety about it, piety in whispers, piety in the fabric which smelled of hassock seeds. There was a coal fire in my room, though, and this was kept in most of the time. I sat by it and wrote letters and waited for letters to arrive. The snow fell almost every day.

‘After a week, I plucked up courage and went to see Ranulf Tree. He was wearing an overcoat because of the cold and he looked very, very large. He stared at me in astonishment and told me that I had become very beautiful! He bought me lunch in a warm

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