Difficult Women Read online

  I looked at them.

  Jean said, “This is a horrible hotel.”

  “It is a bit grim.”

  “Well,” she said, “we’d better go in. The manageress will be annoyed if we’re late. Will you give me my stick?”

  I gave her first her handbag, then her silver-topped stick, which she used to steady herself as I helped her up with my hand under her arm. She was surprisingly heavy, and dropped back. I got her to her feet, held her arm, picked up the bottle of wine from the table, and supported her as we walked slowly to the dining room.

  She said, “Let’s pretend you’re my son. That’ll cheer me up.”

  A waiter opened the bottle of wine while Jean and I studied the menu. She was wearing her glasses, got from her handbag; the lenses were so smeared I wondered how she saw through them. We both ordered curried eggs. She put the glasses back in her handbag. The waiter poured out the wine.

  There was a smell of mould in the dining room. My napkin was almost wet.

  With one glass of wine Jean began to giggle as she talked. I could only get words, as she held her hands, sometimes her napkin, to her mouth while she talked. Whenever she giggled I smiled. Her hands were as if disjointed at the knuckles.

  With more wine, she ceased giggling. I still didn’t understand most of what she said, which, spoken in a soft grave voice, seemed to me jumbled. She tugged more and more at her hat brim, pulled her hair, and rubbed her forehead, and I understood that what she was talking about was making her somewhat frantic. I heard: “The world . . . awful it is . . . gone phut . . . want out, that’s all . . . taken over . . . not understanding, anyone . . .” She held out her glass to be refilled.

  As her hands were shaky, her makeup was hit-and-miss; there were patches of thick beige powder on her jaw and on the side of her nose, her lipstick was as much around her lips as on them, the marks of the eye pencil criss-crossed her lids, so I thought she might easily have jabbed it in her eyes. But the eyes were very clear and blue and strong, and the angles of her cheekbones sharp.

  She put her hands to her mouth, laughed, and her eyes went bright: I didn’t know what she was laughing about.

  We had baked apples for pudding, but she left most of hers. She said, throwing her napkin down, “Thank God that’s over. Now we can go up to my room for a drink.”

  Getting Jean up to her room was difficult. She leaned on me so heavily I at times lost balance. We lurched from piece of furniture to piece of furniture, wall to wall, she with her hand extended to lean for a moment before we continued. Sometimes her cane got caught between her legs, and I had to straighten it. Getting her into the lift I had to twist my body, it seemed, in many directions at the same time. I could not imagine how she had got down to the lounge from her room. She leaned her small hunched back against the passage wall and sighed as I opened the door to her room with her key.

  The room was all pink. There were two beds; a lamp, with a big pink shade, was on a table between the beds. Jean, in her pink hat, sat on the first bed. She threw her cane down and closed her eyes; after a moment she opened her eyes wide, shook her head, and said, “Never mind.”

  “Never mind what?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Let’s have a drink,” she said.

  “What will you have?”

  “Rum.” She tried to rise by pressing her hands on the bed. “But I want to sit on a chair.”

  I helped her to one of the two red-brown chairs before a window with net curtains and red-brown draperies. She, as she would have said, “collapsed” into the chair.

  I went to the desk where the drinks bottles and glasses were on a tray.

  “The manageress won’t let us have ice,” she said.

  “That’s ridiculous. Of course we’ll have ice.” I rang for some. She did not seem impressed or in any way proved wrong when the ice came; she might have thought the ice came because I was a man.

  I said, “Jean, there’s no rum here.”

  “No rum? Did you want rum?”

  “No. You asked for it.”

  “Did I?” She passed her hand over her forehead. “That’s strange, I must have thought I was in Dominica, where of course you’d have rum. But it’s so long since I’ve been in Dominica. I’ll have a gin and vermouth. And please don’t put too much ice in. They fill the glass with ice so I won’t drink too much. Well, why shouldn’t I?”

  I thought: Yes, why shouldn’t she? I gave her a big drink. I took a smaller one, lit a lamp in the dim room, and sat on the other chair.

  “When were you last in Dominica?” I asked.

  “Oh, years and years ago, on a visit. But I left when I was sixteen to come to England, and the visit later made me see that I could never go back to the island I knew as a girl. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful. When I went back I found all the rivers—you know, there are three hundred and sixty-five rivers in Dominica, one for every day of the year—all were polluted. I used to drink from them when I was a girl. Gone, all gone. And who’s responsible? Who?” She crossed her legs. “I know, I know.” She snorted a little. “Yeah. I know.”

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t know if I should ask her. I said, “Who?”

  She stared at me. “You’re liberal, aren’t you? I’m surrounded by liberals. You don’t understand what’s happening. They’re taking over. Yeah. I know. I used to be liberal. No more.”

  I said, “I thought you told me you were once a communist.”

  She laughed; her thin yellow teeth showed. “I was a G. K. Chesterton sort of socialist, a cow and an acre of land for every man, that kind of thing. No.” She threw up one hand; the other held the glass. “Anyway, honey, I’ll be dead before they take over.”

  I said, “We’ll fight them together.”

  “Will we?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what we were fighting.

  She pulled her hat brim and leaned forward. She said, “I’m going to tell you something.”

  I smiled at her.

  “I’m going to tell you how I started to write.”

  I kept my smile, a smile, I recognize now, I always kept when she told me something that interested me very much, but which I did not want her to think I had in any way solicited from her. Perhaps one of the reasons I was with her was to hear how she started to write; but the moment she was about to tell me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear, or wasn’t sure I wanted her to think I did.

  “Do you want to hear?” she asked.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “you’ll write it down. I can’t now. I can’t write. It’ll never be written. I’ll tell you, and you write it down.”

  “All right.”

  “Give me another drink first, honey.”

  I gave her another big drink.

  Jean, I think, often prepared what she was going to say to you before you arrived, and when she told you she made it seem as if she had suddenly thought of it.

  “When I was little I heard voices in my head that had nothing to do with me. I sometimes didn’t even know the words. But they wanted to be written down, so I wrote them down. Well, there it is. Some time after, a long time after, but still a long time ago, oh a long time ago, before the First World War—” She took a drink. “People say about him he was a villain. He wasn’t. People don’t understand. He was kind to me. He was kind to me when I had no one else to help me. And if he left me after the abortion, well—” She shrugged. “I lived afterwards in a bed-sitter in Holborn. I had so little money. If you had an evening gown at that time, that was all you needed to get into the crowd scene of a film. I made a little money that way. But not enough, not enough for the landlord. When I paid the first week’s rent I was surprised to see how little money I had left. I sat in the armchair looking out of the window on to the empty street. London is always empty at Christmas. The landlord knocked. He came in with a Christmas tree, about three feet high, with candles and silver paper and a star at the top, and he put it on the table and
said, ‘Very pretty,’ and went out. And there was money. I thought, I can’t take this, I can’t take this—” Jean looked down at the floor, her lower lip drew up as if she had just tasted something very sour, and she began to cry; the tears ran down her nose. It took her a long time to continue, and when she did her voice was higher. “But I thought, I need it, I need it. So I kept it. And after that I didn’t care, it didn’t matter—”

  She paused again, her face contorted; the tears flowed down her nose and cheeks, and when she wiped them away with the sides of her crooked hands, her makeup streaked. I reached out and put my hand on her arm. She looked at me, weeping and, I thought, pleading with me. I said, “I’ll get you a tissue.” I went into the bathroom, pulled a tissue out of a box, brought it back to her. She put her drink down, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. She sat still.

  “When I met someone else, I jumped at him. He wanted me to marry him. I said yes. His name was Jean. I went to Holland to marry him. I didn’t know much about him, about what work he did. I had, do you know?, a Japanese passport for a while. That was the only passport Jean could get, so I, as his wife, got one too.” She suddenly laughed, her face immediately shifting from one expression to another; she opened her mouth and “ha, ha, ha” came out from between her teeth, and her blue eyes were wide and bright. “When I came back to England with my Japanese passport, they stopped me, they said, ‘You don’t look Japanese.’”

  With a hand reaching as if uncertainly into darkness, she reached for her drink. “The man I had for so long been dependent on met me. He took me to the Piccadilly Grill. It was smart then. He said, ‘I want you to know that Jean’s a spy, I’m warning you.’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ I didn’t. Nothing mattered. That was in 1919, after the war.” She drank and pulled at the brim of her hat and pulled the hair that came out on her forehead back under the hat; she pulled again at the brim.

  ‘Anyway, I gave the Christmas tree away; took a taxi to a hospital for sick children and gave it away, then went back to my room, and I thought, well, I know what I’ll do. I’ll wait till the landlord goes out, till the house is empty. Plenty of time. I smoked half a pack of cigarettes and looked at the bottle of gin on the table. I hated gin. Someone knocked on the door. It was a girl from one of the crowd scenes of the old-time movies. She immediately saw what I was planning to do. She didn’t tell me not to. She said, ‘You won’t kill yourself if you jump out the window, you’ll just maim yourself. You don’t want to be a vegetable for the rest of your life, do you?’” Jean laughed. “I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want to be a vegetable, not me.’ So we drank the bottle of gin. I hated gin then. I don’t know why I bought it. Maybe I didn’t buy it, but found it in a cupboard. Now, I drink gin and sweet vermouth. Maybe I should change my drink. I think I should change my life entirely. I’m going to give up on my life. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m indifferent. I’m indifferent, even, to passion. I don’t care. I’ll wear red slacks, a shabby silk blouse, and a red wig. Anyway, who cares? No one cares.” She drank. “She brought me some Turkish slippers as a Christmas gift, bought them in a market. She didn’t know my size, but they fit. That was nice of her. We drank the gin. I don’t know where that came from. This is all so unimportant. Who cares?”

  “Well,” I said, “I do.”

  “Do you? Sometimes I think you only pretend that you do.”

  “You’re going to have to take my word for it,” I said. “And if I didn’t care I could make an excuse and leave.”

  She shrugged. “You could.”

  I waited as she stared at the floor. Then she remembered her drink.

  “She said to me—I can’t recall her name. I liked her rather. We were in a party scene together in the movie. We had to pretend we were talking together and having a good time. She said, ‘Why don’t you move out of this dreary room?’ Would she have used the word ‘dreary’? I don’t know. She said, ‘Why don’t you move to Chelsea? There are a lot of sugars there.’”

  “Sugar daddies?” I asked.

  “Sugars,” she said. “Yeah. Sugars. I never thought of him as a sugar, though I guess he was.”

  “Who?”

  She looked at me as if amazed that I should ask. “The first one,” she said.

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “They misunderstand him. He used to ask me about Dominica, about the flowers and the birds. They say we treated the blacks badly there. We didn’t. And who has ruined the island? Who has polluted the rivers? He listened to me talk. He was patient. Maybe I do have black blood in me. I think my great-grandmother was coloured, the Cuban. She was supposed to be a Vatican countess. I think she was coloured. Where else would I get my love for pretty clothes? And oh how I envied them, in their clothes, dancing in the street. But what have they done to Dominica? What? It’s all gone. I don’t ever want to go back. No, never, never. He understood me—a little. I don’t know if Jean understood me.”

  “Your husband?” I asked.

  She seemed not quite sure whom I was referring to, as though I had introduced a character from outside the story. “My husband?”

  “Didn’t you say you married Jean?”

  “I married him. I went to Holland to marry him, after the war. I took the first boat I could get on. I didn’t care. I didn’t know what he did exactly, I still don’t know. From Holland we went to Paris. That was lovely, Paris. We lived in a hotel, and sat out on the balcony and drank white wine.” She stared at me. “You know,” she said, “I had a son who was born in Paris.”

  “A son?”

  “Did you know?”

  I wondered if she thought I might have had some access to the story of her life which she didn’t know about—and of course I did: her novels. She did not, however, think that in reading her novels one knew anything about her life.

  “No,” I said.

  “I came back to the hotel room with it, from the hospital. It slept in a cot in a corner. One day the sage femme came from the hospital to look at it. She said, ‘I think your child has to go back to the hospital.’ I said, ‘You think so?’ She took it away. I got a bleu a little while later to say it was dying and did I want it baptized? I asked Jean. He said, ‘No, never, I won’t have a child of mine baptized.’ I became upset. He went out and bought some champagne; we drank the champagne and I felt better. The next morning I got another bleu saying my son had died. I wondered if it died while we were drinking champagne.”

  “What did it die of?” I asked.

  “Je n’sais pas,” she said. “I must have done something wrong. I was never a good mother.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “After Paris we went to Vienna. But I don’t want to talk about Vienna.”

  “You wrote a story called ‘Vienne.’”

  “Yes,” she said, “I did. I bought some pretty clothes in Vienna. Then everything went wrong. All wrong. Anyway, give me another drink, honey.”

  I put a lot of ice in the drink and very little gin in the vermouth.

  She raised her glass to me. “Here’s to you.”

  “Here’s to you,” I said, and raised my glass.

  “No, not me. I don’t matter. I never did, much. I don’t now.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. It is true. I don’t matter, and I want out.” She looked at her drink as she brought it to her mouth. She said, “You put a lot of ice in this.”

  “It’ll melt,” I said.

  “That’s what they all say,” she said.

  I sat by her.

  “It wasn’t exactly Chelsea,” she said. “It was more Fulham. And the room looked exactly like the one I had left in Holborn. I didn’t meet any sugars. And I couldn’t forget him. You see,” she said, “I had to keep accepting money from him. I got used to that. I didn’t see him. The money was sent through his solicitor. I took the money. I didn’t care.” Her face contorted, and tears rose to her eyes as she looked at me. “I don’t care about anything any more. I know how to do it now. Not
jumping out a window. Not taking pills, because they just pump out your stomach.” She stuck out her jaw. “No, I’ve got it all plotted out. And I won’t tell anyone. Not even you.” She paused and stared at me; her crying was making her eyes swell. “I’m boring you.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I know I am. I am a bore. But it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, my work less than anything.”

  I said, “Jean—,” wondering how reasonably to reassure her.

  Startling me, she suddenly stuck out her thin neck and shouted, “Oh what a Goddamn shitty business we’ve taken on, being writers! Oh what shit! What shit!” She shook her head, with its hat, whenever she said “shit,” as if to shake the word out with physical disgust. I had never heard her use the word before. “I’m over eighty.” She had never revealed her age before. “Look at me. And what have I done? Nothing! Nothing! Mediocrity. Mediocre, that’s what my work is. And these stories they want me to publish. Not good. I don’t want to publish them. I’ve wasted two and a half years on them. I wanted to write about my life. I wanted to write my autobiography, because everything they say about me is wrong. I want to tell the truth. I want to tell the truth, too, about Dominica. No, it’s not true we treated the black people badly. We didn’t, we didn’t. Now they say we did. No, no. I’m becoming a fascist. They won’t listen. No one listens.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Oh yes, you,” she said, as though I would listen. “I remember a black man in Dominica walking through the yard. My father and I were on the back steps of the house. My father made me give loaves of French bread—Dominica was once French and the bread was still in long loaves—and sixpence to poor black men who came to us. No women ever came. I recall this black man walking away from us, the loaf under his arm, and his dignity. His dignity and his unconquerable mind. Do you believe it?”

  I asked, “What’s that, Jean?” I was suddenly speaking, it seemed to me, from a great remoteness.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “‘Live and take comfort . . . thou hast great allies; thy friends are exultations, agonies, and love, and man’s unconquerable mind.’”