Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

Judy, who had just reappeared, was there in an instant. ‘Rosa, are you OK?’ She put her arm round Rosa. It was odd but she seemed to have caused a scene. She had started to cry. She couldn’t remember what had begun it but she was weeping into the lamb shank.

*

Later they went to bed, Rosa clattering along the corridor, quite ashamed even in the stew of her drunkenness. She had one hand to her head, in the other she held a pint of water. Judy had insisted. ‘You might need it in the night.’ She might need it when she woke, ravaged by embarrassment, that was the idea. She had developed a coursing headache, which seeped across her forehead and ebbed around her eyes. Her head was pounding and in a fleeting moment of lucidity she knew she had drunk all the wine.

Sobered by the coldness of her whitewashed room, she sat for a while staring at the floor, then she pushed open the jalousies and breathed in the night air. She could hear the sound of the ghyll spilling down the mountainside. It was a beautiful clear night. The sky was almost cloudless; the stars were brilliant in the sky. With the air bringing her round again, she knew she had behaved badly. She had started out well enough, but the wine had smashed her resolve. For a while she had perhaps convinced them, but her loss of control had done nothing for her cause. By the end they suspected her. They had been trying to help her, and that made it even worse. Whatever she might whisper, they had enough to think about already. Anyway, she had come to exploit them. She had come knowing that she could rely on them to host and understand her. She had only expected tolerance. They had once admired her, she thought, vanity seeping through her drunkenness. ‘Well,’ she said aloud, ‘they don’t now.’

She fell onto the bed. Fumbling for the covers, she managed to pull them around her. For a long time she lay there staring at the ceiling. The rich food was heavy in her stomach. Her heart ached and a lamb chop pained her colon. She thought of many things. She said out loud, ‘I am grateful after all. I am grateful to all of them.’ It was silent all around the cottage, and the room was steeped in it. Outside darkness stretched beyond. That made her start and shiver in the bed. Struggling against it all, these tidal waves of silence, she thought,

Go back to London

Find a place to stay, explain to Andreas

Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.

Get a job.

Sit down with Jess and apologise for everything

Go to the bank and talk to Sharkbreath.

Hoover the living room

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Understand the stranger verse of Blake.

Read The Vedas.

Write to Whitchurch and explain.

Phone Braze and beg her.

Stop writing these lists that waste your time

And she thought TEMP.

*

Grandfather Tom was dead tonight, untroubled by a sense of failure or banished hope. He had been dead for nearly thirty years. And then she wondered what grandfather Tom had to do with it, and why she was clutching at the covers, terrified. Go to the bank and negotiate an extension on your overdraft, and ask them if you can extend the limit on your credit card. Hoover the living room. Re-develop the carapace. Calm your nerves. Read Marcus Aurelius. Accept the necessary limits of human life. Immortality quite impossible. Eternal life implausible. Wash your clothes. Call Andreas and explain. Develop an awareness of the finer points of pragmatism. Determine whether you will sink or aim to float. Stop bothering people. Find a place to stay. Get a job. Stop writing these lists. Go your own way. It’s hard enough to go your own way without trying to second-guess the others. Read The Republic to the end — no dropping out. Gather names. Forget the longings of the self. Things are considerable but not insurmountable. It’s impossible that you would ever know how the universe was made. So stop worrying. Read Finnegans Wake. You’ve tried it before but this time you might enjoy it. Revere great art. Find a place to stay. Get a job. Sit down with Jess and apologise for everything. Redevelop the carapace. Calm your nerves. Read Marcus Aurelius. Accept the necessary limits of human life. Immortality quite impossible. Eternal life implausible. Call Andreas and explain. Develop an awareness of the finer points of pragmatism. Determine whether you will sink or aim to float. Stop bothering people. Find a place to stay. Get a job. Stop writing these lists. Don’t wait to become perfect. Just do it now. Go your own way. It’s hard enough to go your own way without trying to second-guess the others. Read The Republic to the end — no dropping out. Gather names. Forget the longings of the self. Things are considerable but not insurmountable. Read Finnegans Wake. Revere great art. Honour your father. Plunge into the void, dispense with the world. Accept the thunderbolt. Avoid the bell. OR should you ring the bell? Drop the jewel and pick up the lotus. FIND THE TEMP. Then she thought her grandfather Tom was sitting next to her, quite calmly and quietly, holding her hand. She shook off the thought, but she couldn’t open her eyes. She pulled the covers around her and tried to sleep. But she imagined him again, kindly, tall with his bent nose, explaining to her that she hadn’t behaved well, as he had done when she was a small girl. He wasn’t angry — she had never seen him angry — but he was disappointed. She thought he was there, emanating waves of kindly reproach. Your mother is very tired, and so we’ve left her to sleep. Mummy gets tired sometimes, when she’s had too much of her lovely daughter. That was how he spoke to her when she was a child. So darling, you just be nice to your mummy, won’t you? She’s a lovely girl, quite my favourite in the world, after you of course. And you must understand, Rosa, you haven’t time for this sort of thing. Life is sweeping you onwards. There’s hardly time to look around. You must get on with it. And she imagined — imagined, she knew, because she had her eyes shut tightly, and there was no way she was opening them, though she felt a cold wind around her, like a force gusting from the grave, but she clamped her eyelids down and huddled beneath the covers — her grandmothers behind him, and grandfather Don, and she saw them in the garden of a small suburban house, the kind of place they had worked a lifetime to buy, saying Come on, Rosa, look at you — you! In a room, drunk and out of control! She was hearing them as a discordant chorus, and she kept her hands down by her waist, she curled into the covers and hid herself, afraid that she would feel something, a real hand coming towards her, a real voice sounding through the silence of the room. She imagined him again, this kindly old man, her mother’s father, Please, Rosa, understand this, a jovial, talented man, a loyal friend, a good sportsman, who worked so hard to bring up the daughter who had died so suddenly, her death predestined or merely meaningless, she would never know, never never never and then she sat up in bed and with her eyes shut, still clamped tightly shut because she was a coward and drunk and still more cowardly in her drunkenness or intoxicated with fear, she thought TEMP must mean CONTEMPTIBLE and that means you and now she was shouting, ‘HELP! HELP! SOMEONE PLEASE HELP!’ She grabbed at the covers and tore them off her. She tumbled out of the bed and found she was bent double on the floor, shaking in the cold air, crying loudly. For a while she was quite beside herself; she couldn’t think at all. She was drooling and rubbing spittle across her face, trying to push back her hair, which was falling into her mouth. She said HELP HELP! again, down below the iron bed and she put her head down so sharply on her knees she bit her tongue. She came round, slowly, and realised that there was a danger Judy might come in and find her. Still, they frightened her, the cold white sheets and the stone room. And she was kneeling on the floor, speaking quickly, saying, ‘Mother, I understand, I am failing to enjoy the experience of being here. After all the trouble you went to, the years you passed in my birth and nurture. I am sorry for having deviated from the path. You spent decades trying to make me happy. And now! And NOW!’