The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (19 page)

I ingested the dregs of my latte. I wanted to say to Ross that, when people utter sentences like the one he'd just pronounced, I feel they're living in some parallel universe where the air is too murky to be breathable. But I didn't say this. I said: ‘Oh. I've never seen
The Cherry Orchard
. Is it marvellously good?'

‘Yes,' said Ross. ‘I think it is. Chekhov described it, when he finished the play, as a “light comedy”, and it seems a very simple story, but there's such feeling and passion underneath. It's not really light comedy at all.'

‘I love ambiguity,' I said. ‘It sounds so fascinating.'

I caught, then, the tremble of a smile on Ross's mouth and he looked away from me, out at the tranquil fields of Normandy, all ploughed and harrowed and ready for the spring.

‘What are the “simplest components”, then?' I ventured.

‘Well,' said Ross. ‘It's a bit of a steal from something done by Peter Brook some years ago at the Bouffes du Nord. They're using rugs.'

‘How do you mean?' I asked.

‘Well, no scenery. Bare stage. Rugs on the walls and as furniture and probably as the views from the window, the views of the orchard itself.'

‘How is that going to work?'

‘I'm not sure. But there's an intricacy to the design of beautiful carpets which mirrors the intricacy in the text. Also, they're probably woven by slave labour in Afghanistan or Turkey, and this also feels right for what Chekhov is saying in this play about the idle aristocracy and their long years of owning serfs.'

‘Oh,' I said, ‘it sounds so interesting. In my very small way, I know a lot about rugs.'

‘You do?' said Ross.

‘Yes. I work in the carpet department at Peter Jones.'

Now, Ross laughed. He didn't mean to laugh
at me.
I don't think he did. This burst of laughter just came out in a kind of involuntary way. And the words ‘Peter Jones' did sound somehow embarrassing when juxtaposed with the words ‘Peter Brook'. But, immediately, I pretended to be very hurt. Daniela is excellent at this. She can almost cry at will. I looked down into my empty latte cup. I wiped a fleck of foam from my lip with a French-polished nail. Though I didn't look at Ross, I could tell that he was mortified and his laughter was replaced by a heavy silence.

‘Well,' I said, after I'd let the silence go on for a while. ‘I'd better be getting back to my seat.'

I looked up at Ross. His face was pink and his eyes deliciously bright.

‘Listen,' he said. ‘I don't suppose you'd like to . . . I don't suppose it would interest you to come with me to see
The Cherry Orchard
?'

We drank Pernod in the crowded theatre bar. Ross was wearing a soft blue mohair jacket and a black shirt, buttoned all the way up. He looked nice. For the first time, Daniela thought that she would like to lie in his arms.

The auditorium itself was very small and the rows of seats set too close together, so that we sat with our knees sticking up. Four knees, side by side. I tried to concentrate on
The Cherry Orchard
, but I had some problems. It was in French and my French is round about the B-minus grade. I think a lot of what Ross had called ‘the underlying complexity' of the play was lost on me. I couldn't help finding most of the characters annoying, and quite soon I was sympathising with the businessman, Lopakhin, who wants everybody to grow up and go away.

And then there was the question of the rugs. At work, I'd been in charge of Oriental Layout and I can honestly say that the way Patrice Boniano arranged and then rearranged the rugs on the set of
The Cherry Orchard
was never, to me, as aesthetically pleasing as the way I'd arranged them in Peter Jones's carpet department. And this distracted me. I thought, I'm no one and he's a supposed genius, but I have an infinitely more subtle understanding of colour groupings.

I was quite relieved when the play was over and we walked into a small but buzzy little restaurant and Ross ordered Chablis and oysters.

Ross began to talk about Chekhov's death in 1904.

I said: ‘Isn't that weird. Today, on the train, I was sitting in coach 04, seat 19,' but Ross ignored this. He told me that when Chekhov came on stage after the first performance of
The Cherry Orchard
, he was so moved by the audience's reaction that he was seized with a fit of coughing and this fit turned out to be the beginning of the end of his life.

‘How was that?' I asked.

‘He was ill from that moment on,' said Ross. ‘A few months later, when he was dying, the doctor said to him: “I'm going to put ice on your heart,” but the playwright said: “You don't need to put ice on an empty heart.”'

I ate an oyster. When I dabbed my mouth, I saw a darling little smudge of pink left on the napkin. I said to Ross: ‘What about you? Is your heart empty?'

‘I don't know,' he said.

I reached over and took his hand and I felt it burning.

Back in my room, I asked Ross to undress me. He laid the blossom-white suit on a chair.

When I was almost naked, Ross said: ‘I can't do this.' And he began to cry.

I stroked his hair. I said: ‘Ross, if I understood it properly, one of the things that play's about is longing. Am I right? And the way people don't face up to what they know is true.'

Ross nodded. He kept on crying. I put on a silk robe and sat quietly by the window, listening to the intimate sounds of the Paris night.

After a while, Ross stood up and put on his overcoat. I remembered it was St Valentine's Eve. I said to Ross: ‘Why don't you kiss me before you go?'

I never saw him again.

When I went back to work and looked at the rugs, they kept reminding me of
The Cherry Orchard
, as if the play had been something marvellous and significant and overwhelming in my life. I prattled on about it until my work colleagues got completely fed up. One day, the manager of the carpet department took me aside and said: ‘Daz, for pete's sake shut up about Chekhov. Just concentrate on the business in hand.'

The Dead Are Only Sleeping

When the telephone call came, Nell was cleaning out the parrot's cage. The parrot itself had alighted on a windowsill and was pecking the glass.

‘It's Laurel,' said Laurel's voice from long ago. ‘It's your stepmother.'

Nell said nothing, only waited and kept her eyes fixed on the parrot.

‘Nell?' said Laurel. ‘Are you there?'

‘Yes,' said Nell.

And then came the statement. Laurel made it quickly, in a tight whisper, as though saying it could damage her vocal cords: ‘I rang to tell you your father died.'

The room where Nell stood, with the white telephone and the grey parrot, was high and light, with a shiny wood floor: a place where a person could feel calm and unconstrained.

‘When?' asked Nell.

‘This morning,' replied Laurel. ‘I wasn't there. No one was there.'

Now, Nell sat down on a cotton upholstered chair and lightly touched the fabric of its arms. Her thought was, from now on, the world may seem a kinder sort of place.

Yes, but what if it wasn't true? Laurel had said no one had been there to see it. What if another call came, cancelling out the first? What if a trainee nurse had gone in and mistaken sleep for death? And suppose now, as they manoeuvred her father on a trolley into the lift and down into the basement morgue, he was just lying there dreaming? Because even death would surely have been afraid of him and kept its distance until he was old and weak, wouldn't it? So he must be fooling death and fooling the hospital staff. When the temperature dropped as they laid him on the slab, he was going to wake up.

All Nell could do was wait. She finished clearing out the parrot's cage and replenished the feeder with seed. She took the bird off the windowsill and stroked its head. It muttered to her. This-and-that. This-and-that. But it was the only sound. The phone didn't ring. Laurel had asked politely: ‘Would you like to come home for the funeral?'

Home? What a word to use, when Nell hadn't been near that house for years, when her thirtieth birthday was only a few months away and the flat she shared with the parrot held everything she owned. She'd told Laurel she would think about it. But then, the idea that her father wasn't really dead made her determined to be there, to see for herself. For only if she
saw
would she know that this was death and not a game of the same name.

It was a Saturday morning. Earlier Nell had washed and polished the wood floors, and now the flat smelled scented and clean. In a moment she would call Laurel back (brassy Laurel with her solarium tan and her beaky nose designed to sniff out the currency value of every last item in the world) and say: ‘I'll come this afternoon. I want to see him.' But first, Nell walked into her kitchen and poured herself a glass of cold white wine. She took a deep drench of it and found the taste so sweetly satisfying that she smiled. Smiled and drank again. Outside the kitchen window, in the top of a chestnut sapling, some London bird was warbling in the gentle April sun.

Her father's house on the outskirts of its northern city had always seemed large to Nell. Too large. As though for every room there had to be an invisible occupant, a person whose space this rightfully was. As a child, she'd searched for these people – behind curtains or in old wardrobes – or thought she heard them (yearned to hear them) talking together on the landing. She had a name for them: the Clusters. She dreamed of them crowding in to her attic, dressed in white. They would tell her: ‘Here we are, dear. Don't be scared. And look who's with us: your mother! She's woken up at last.'

Now, as Nell drove north, she decided she would refuse Laurel's offer to stay overnight. What her attic room contained these days was Laurel's exercise equipment: rowing machines, cycles and weights. It had become a kind of gym where middle-aged Laurel's sinew and muscle were toned, to keep her young and fighting fit. So where, in the huge house, would she sleep anyway, if her attic was a fitness centre? Not in what her father called the Old Room, the bedroom he'd once shared with Nell's mother. And all the Cluster rooms had functions now: computer room, games room, solarium. There would be no space for her in any of them. No bed.

And for years, anyway, the very idea of the house had been loathsome to her: its stale-fruit smell, its way of seeming dark. No, she'd find a cheap hotel nearby and perch there. A narrow bed, a TV within reach. Or perhaps she wouldn't even stay the night, but turn straight round and drive back to London? All she needed to verify was the incontrovertible fact of her father's death. She certainly didn't want to lay flowers on the mound. She wasn't going all this way to forgive him.

The house was full of people she'd never met: Laurel's friends. They stood about in the kitchen, searched cupboards for teacups and sugar and packets of biscuits. When Laurel introduced her, they turned from whatever they were doing to look at her. ‘Did he have a daughter?' said their stares. ‘How peculiar that we never knew.'

Nell took the cup of tea she was offered and, as though drawn by some remembered physical routine, began to make her way up the stairs towards her attic.

‘Nell,' said Laurel's voice behind her, ‘wait a moment. Don't you want to talk?'

Nell didn't pause, but went on up. ‘No,' she said. ‘And I'm not staying. I only wanted to look at my room. Then I'm going to see him.'

‘Listen,' said Laurel, ‘if you're blaming me because he never got in touch . . .?'

‘I'm not blaming you,' said Nell. ‘I didn't
want
him to get in touch. I wanted to forget.'

‘You know he mellowed . . .' began Laurel.

‘I don't know anything,' said Nell.

Laurel was standing on the half-landing (the very place where the gentle Clusters used to whisper), her tanned face looking lean, her white angora sweater crackling with the electricity of sudden shock. Nell turned her back and climbed the remaining stairs to the attic. In London, the day had been sunny, but here the sky was heavy and sudden squalls of rain blew in from the west.

There was still a bed in the attic room. Or, not a bed exactly, but a kind of couch covered with a towel where, Nell presumed, Laurel rested between sets of exercises.

Nell went to it and sat down and stared at all the body equipment. Then, suddenly tired after her drive, she put her cup of tea down on the floor, drew up her feet on to the couch and closed her eyes. The couch was where her own bed had been, under the window. Twenty-four years ago, she'd been lying right here on a spring night when her father's sister, Aunt Iris, had come tiptoeing in and knelt down on the floor, with her arms resting on a chair. She had looked very pale. Nell had wondered if this aunt imagined the chair were a toilet bowl and that she was about to be sick into it. ‘Nell,' said Aunt Iris, ‘something has happened to your mother. And I'm the one who has to tell you.'

Nell asked Iris if she was feeling sick, but she said no, not sick, pet, only sad. And then she explained that Nell's mother had been hit by a car and, after this terrible hitting, she had fallen asleep. Fast asleep for ever. And she was never going to wake up.

Five-year-old Nell didn't believe her aunt. In the early morning, she crept down to the Old Room, expecting to find her mother lying there beside her father, but there was no one in the room and after searching for her father, she discovered him snoring on the kitchen floor. She woke him and asked: ‘Is it true my mum's gone to sleep?'

The father put his two fists in front of his eyes. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘It's true.'