Difficult Women

I asked at reception for Mrs. Hamer. It always gave me pleasure to use her married name, not the name she was known by. She once told me some of the names she had used in her life to keep her life secret, and I forgot them. To refer to her as Mrs. Hamer, which was a private name, and not as Jean Rhys, meant, I suppose, that I was a part of her private world, the world she wanted to remain forever her world. I wondered why I should want to be a part of it.

The receptionist, an old woman with lank hair, looked at the register. Behind her was a mirror and on either side of the mirror were white glass shells with lights inside. She said, “I don’t think we have a Mrs. Hamer.” I said, “Jean Rhys.” “Yes,” she said, “she’s waiting in the pink lounge.”

I was carrying a bottle of wine. The carpet of the pink lounge was patterned with large soft pink roses on a grey background. The wallpaper was pink. The floor lamps, lit, had great dark pink shades. Jean was sitting at the corner of a red sofa, under a lamp; she wore a wide-brimmed pink hat. Her head was lowered, her fist up to her chin, and she was staring at the floor, her blue eyes bulging a little. She did not look up as I approached.

With a sudden jolt of her small, hunched body, as if I had frightened her, she dropped her hand and raised her head to look at me. “Oh David,” she said, “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you.”

I put the bottle of wine on the little table before the sofa and kissed her. “You’re looking marvellous,” I said.

“Can I ask you something?” she said. “Will you go and buy me a bottle of sweet vermouth? They don’t have any in this hotel.” She laughed, a small ha, that lifted her shoulders. “It’s that kind of hotel.” She looked about, as with sudden suspicion, and gave another small shrugging laugh. “A big dreary hotel in South Kensington filled with old people whom they won’t allow to drink sweet vermouth.”

On another red sofa across the room, and in big red armchairs, were old people, men and women, their canes held alongside them or between their legs; none were talking, and some were asleep.

When I went out quickly to an off-licence it occurred to me the day was bright, and I was very aware, when I came back to the hotel, of the grey interior, and all the lights lit with dim bulbs. I ordered glasses and ice from a waiter with satin lapels and a crooked black bow tie.

As I poured out the drinks on a table before us, Jean sat back and crossed her legs. Her body seemed bent in many ways; she had to grab one leg and heft it across the other, and, once crossed, you thought she could never uncross them. I gave her a drink and she smiled. As she drank she pulled at the brim of her hat.

This was December 1975. I hadn’t seen her in a year, since the last time she had come up to London for a few weeks.

I tried to make my news entertaining; she listened, drinking and pulling at her hat, her large clear blue eyes staring attentively at me. Sometimes she laughed.

“Well,” she said, “I got a letter from the tax people. They said I hadn’t paid my taxes. I got very upset. I thought I had. I’d sent everything off to my accountant, as he’d told me to. But a tax man came to the house and said I had to pay my taxes. I said I’d written to my accountant, but he said that didn’t matter, I had to pay. I said I couldn’t. He said, ‘I’m only here on orders.’ I said, ‘That’s what the fascists used to say.’ He left angry. The next day I got a letter saying if I didn’t pay my taxes they’d take my house away from me. I rang up my accountant. He said, ‘Oh, they’re always threatening to do things like that.’ But I was worried. I was so worried, I fell. I’ve been dying ever since.”

She bared her teeth. “Hate them,” she said. “I know what they do. I know.” She snorted. “Fascists!” Her drink splashed over her glass. “They take what I have and put it in their pockets.” I wondered if she were joking, and I laughed; but her face twisted a little, and she bared her teeth again and said, “They’ve taken over the world.” Then she looked at her drink. “Well, I’ll be dead soon. They won’t be able to get anything more from me.” She drank.

“Neither do I. I never did. I never understood anything that had to do with mathematics and machines, so I never understood more than half of what goes on in the world.”

A thin young woman with black hair and dressed in black came into the pink lounge. She went to a window and drew closed the grey draperies over the net curtains, making the lounge dimmer. At her appearance, a number of old people, clutching their canes for support, began to rise.

“She doesn’t exactly announce it, but they know that when she comes in lunch is being served.”

I sat with Jean as the old people followed the manageress out of the lounge into the dining room.

“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.

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.

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.”

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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

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.

“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.”

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?”

“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 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.’”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

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

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.”

“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.

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

“Fancy you don’t know it. That’s maybe because you’re American. Americans are so stupid. They don’t know anything, only their own literature, which isn’t much. We’re friends, aren’t we? You’ve got to forget about all past American writers. You’ve got to forget about Henry James. You’ve got to forget about America. ‘Live and take comfort . . . thou hast great allies; thy friends are exultations, agonies, and man’s unconquerable mind—’” She put her glass down, her hands to her face; when she took her hands away her face was wet and twisted with weeping. “‘—and man’s unconquerable mind.’” She raised her hands. “Oh, to die like a tree falling. Oh, to be big, to be large, to be huge. That’s what you have to be. To be big. There are no big people in the world now. You must be big.” She picked up her drink, paused, then whispered, in sing-song, “‘Oh England, my England, what can I do for you?’ No, that’s wrong. ‘What can I do for you, oh England, my England?’” Her face tensed. She spat. “It’s shit. It’s shit, England.”

Her face became smooth, her eyes went out of focus. “And yet, and yet. Nelson, he was big. There were big people in England. He was like a Caesar. ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’ He wasn’t homosexual, I don’t believe it. He was bisexual, as we all are. He was big, was great, was huge. He died for England. England? ‘What can I do for you, oh England, my England?’ I came here when I was sixteen, to this cold dark country, where I was never warm.” Her upper lip rose and she again spat. “Shit!”

Immediately, her face relaxed again, became, it seemed, as soft and vague as her eyes. “And yet, I do know it had a certain gentleness, an honesty. Gone, all gone. In the West Country, there you can still find people who are like trees, and when they die they die like huge trees falling over. People close to the land. I’ll never, never forget the dignity of that black man walking through the yard with his sixpence and the loaf of bread under his arm. And it’s all gone, all gone. They’ve destroyed it themselves. Are there any men now like that black man? We didn’t treat them badly, we didn’t. They say we did. It’s all gone, the dignity, and I want out. There are no big men left.” She shouted, “War! War! War! Martyrs, and for what? For what? There was a boy from the West Country, died in Belfast. He was nineteen. He wanted to be a sailor. Oh they killed him, they killed him! I remember, during the war, I worked in a canteen in King’s Cross, serving breakfast to soldiers who were going across. We weren’t allowed, the girls, to get into conversations with the soldiers. We served them, that was all. There was one, a young soldier, belted up with all kinds of straps and tin cans hanging from the straps, who came behind the counter into the kitchen. He must have done it on a dare. He said he had a strap twisted and would I straighten it for him? I did, and he gave me a big wink. And I wondered for a long time if he died. Oh war! It’s all gone. I wanted to tell you how I started to write. I’m telling you. I’ll never write it now that I’m telling you. Will you write it? If you don’t, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, nothing matters. It’s all shit.” She laughed. “I’m a slut without a penny.” Her face twisted and she wept. “Nothing matters. Nothing.” She laughed again, with a shrug of her body, and, in a very quiet voice, sang:

“If you want to be happy,

Like a child with a toy balloon,

Turn your money over in your pocket

In the light of a full moon.”

She shook her head and drank. “‘Man’s unconquerable mind.’ Fancy you don’t know that. ‘Upon this bank and shoal of time, I’ll leap to time to come.’ Do you know that?”

“You don’t know. It’s because you’re American, and Americans are stupid. You should know. You should know it all. You should know all the big writers, the big big writers.” She raised her hand. “You have to be big.” She lowered her hand. “And yet, and yet, I’m so small, I’m nothing.”

“Jean,” I said, “please—” I did not know how to respond to her. When she laughed, I smiled; when she wept, I stared sadly at her. Sometimes, because her feelings changed so quickly, I stared when she laughed, and smiled when she wept.

She said, “Listen to me. I want to tell you something very important. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake. It is very important. Nothing else is important.”

“But you now should be taking from the lake before you can think of feeding it. You must dip your bucket in very deep.”

“Oh David, oh, what one could do, what one could do! Not I. I can’t do anything. I don’t matter. What matters is the lake. And man’s unconquerable mind.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t hate women. I have very complicated feelings towards them.”

“A man needs a woman,” she said, “but a woman without a man is nothing, nothing.”

“Yes. Yes, I do. What they try to make of me, women, I hate. I hate it. Do they understand? No. Does anyone understand? I hate. I hate them. We didn’t treat them badly. We didn’t. I hate them.” She put her hand to her chin. “And yet I was kissed once by a Nigerian, in a café in Paris, and I understood, a little. I understand why they are attractive. It goes very deep. They danced, danced in the sunlight, and how I envied them.” She stopped, appeared to collapse inwardly, her drink resting on her crossed leg; then she seemed suddenly to rouse herself internally, and she shouted, “Oh David, I’m unhappy. You be happy. I’m so unhappy, all my life I’ve been so unhappy. It’s unfair. I’m dying. I want to die. It’s unfair. I’m dying, my body’s dying, and inside I think: it’s unfair, it’s unfair, I’ve never lived, I’ve never lived.” She sank back and finished her drink. “But I don’t care any more. I’m not even interested in makeup any more.

“If you want to be happy

Like a child with a toy balloon,

Just turn your money in your pocket

In the light of a new moon.

I did. I took another for myself; but, attentive and in my attentiveness frightened of Jean, I didn’t get drunk.

She said, “I wanted to tell you how I started to write. I was living in Holborn. I hated it, the bed-sitting room. A girl friend came. No, she wasn’t a girl friend. We were in a movie together. I can’t remember her name. She said, ‘Move to Chelsea. You’ll have a good time in Chelsea. You’ll get over him there.’ I moved, not to Chelsea, but to Fulham, into a room that was exactly like the one I left. I was going to my room one day and I saw in a shop window some quills, red and green and blue, and I thought, how pretty, I’ll buy some quill pens to liven up my grim little room. I went into the shop. I didn’t know why, but I bought a copybook, too, a thick copybook with shiny black covers and a red edge. I bought, too, nibs, a blotter, ink. When I got back to my room I put everything on a table. I swear, I swear I didn’t know what I was about to do until the palms of my hands began to tingle and I knew, all at once, that I was going to write, I was going to write in the copybook everything that had happened to me, that had happened between him and me, and I started then. I wrote for days.”

In my mind I tried to put together the bits she told me. In one way I was bored and thought: She’s right, none of this matters. And in another way I thought: I must get all this put together.

She said, “I filled the copybook and I put it under my under-clothes in the back of a drawer. When I went to Holland to marry Jean I packed it. I packed it, over and over, every time we moved, and we moved about a lot. Anyway—” She closed her eyes slowly, as if she were very tired.

She opened her eyes, as if surprised. “Don’t go now, honey. Stay. But maybe you want to go.”

The corner of her upper lip rose and her face took on the hardness of an old whore who, her eyes red with having wept for so long, suddenly decides to be hard. “Your mother?” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear about your mother!”

I shut up. I thought: What am I doing here, listening to her? Is it because she is a writer? I am not sure I have read all her books, not even sure I admire her very greatly as a novelist. Is it because I want to know her so well that I will know her better than anyone else, or know at least secrets she has kept from everyone else, which I will always keep to myself? If so, why?

She said, pulling her hat brim so it now hung unevenly about her head, “Jean and I lived in Paris. We lived in a hotel. We had a daughter. We didn’t have any money. I suggested to Jean that he write some articles and I would translate them. I remembered that I had met in London the wife of a newspaper correspondent, that she now lived with him in Paris, and that she might help me. I took the articles to her. She said she couldn’t use them. Then, I suppose when she saw the desperation on my face, she asked me if I wrote anything. I said, at first, no. But, I don’t know why, I remembered the copybook I had filled up with writing years before. I told her about it. She said she wanted to see it. I went home, I wrapped it in newspaper, and left it with her concierge, and I thought, well, that’s the last of that. She got in touch with me. She asked me if she could type it out and alter it, and I said yes. I didn’t know what she saw in it. She called it ‘Triple Sec.’ She asked me if she could send it to Ford Madox Ford. I didn’t know who he was. She said, ‘He runs a review, the transatlantic review; and he’s very famous for spotting good young writers and helping them.’ Well, she sent it.” Jean raised her arm and let her hand fall into her lap. “And that’s how I got to know Ford.”

With the mention of his name, I became more attentive, and more, I think, frightened. Here Jean was talking to me about this most private episode, the episode about which, she had said in her only references to it, so many people had told lies, lies, lies. It was as if she suddenly opened the door to the closed centre of her life, a café in Paris in the Twenties, and in the café were Jean and Ford and his wife Stella at one table, and at other tables were Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and half-blind James Joyce. It was the café I had, since my adolescence, fantasized about sitting in. She was going to take me in and give me a seat by her in the café. I thought, staring at her: You are attentive to her, not as Mrs. Hamer, but Jean Rhys; you are not really interested in the private life of Mrs. Hamer, but very much in that of Jean Rhys. It is because she is a writer that you see her, sit with her, listen to her; your interest in her is literary. Her head was tilted and she was looking at me. You want to know her secrets because they have to do with Jean Rhys, the writer.

I gave her another drink. She reached for it with both hands. Her makeup had streaked down her face with her crying, and her hair, which she had been pulling at, stuck out stiffly under the warped hat brim. Her eyes and nose were red.

She rubbed her forehead. “‘ . . . man’s unconquerable mind,’” she said.

“Because I’m an American and inveterately stupid,” I said, “tell me who wrote that.”

She frowned a little, as if it were an embarrassment to say something so obvious. “Wordsworth.”

“To Toussaint l’Ouverture, the black man who governed Santo Domingo and led the free slaves—”

When she drank, the drink spilled down the side of her chin on to her dress; she did not seem aware. It was as if she had to look all over the room to find me before she could stare at me and say, “I’ll die soon.” Her eyes narrowed on me. “I’ll die without having lived.” A sneer came over her face, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that she was sneering at me. She said, with the sneer, “‘Upon this bank and shoal of time, I’ll leap to time to come.’” Her head wobbled. “Yes, yes, I’ll leap. I want out.” She leaned towards me. “You don’t understand. You never understood. I want out. I never wanted to be a writer. Never. I couldn’t help it. All I wanted was to be happy.”

I got up, went, moving carefully about the furniture, to the bathroom just off her room. I peed, washed my face. I looked at myself in the mirror above the wash-basin and thought: Who are you? When I came out, I thought Jean had died; slumped, she was utterly motionless, her eyes wide open and blank. I stood over her, said, “Jean,” and her body, it appeared, was shocked into attention to me; she looked up at me, and after a while, in a slurred voice, said, “I know, you’ve got to go.”

It took a lot of manoeuvering to get her up and into the bathroom; I left her, her hat still on, holding to the wash-basin. In her room, I walked about. There were vases of flowers on the bureau, with cards. I thought: She’s been in there a long time. I heard: “Oh my God!,” and it occurred to me that she had seen her face in the mirror. I waited more, a longer while. I heard her say, “David, David.” I went to the bathroom door, leaned close to it, and called, “Jean.” There was no response. “Jean,” I called. She said, in a weak voice, “Help me.” I thought: But I can’t go in. What does she want me for in there? “Help me,” she said.

I opened the door a little, imagining, perhaps, that if I opened it only a little, only a little would have happened. I saw Jean, her head with the battered hat leaning far to the side, her feet, with the knickers about her ankles, just off the floor, stuck in the toilet. I had, I immediately realized, forgotten to lower the seat after I had peed. Jean said, with a kind of moan, “Help me.” Her eyes were huge. She was clasping her raised knees. I stepped into the puddle of pee all around the toilet, put my arms around her, and lifted her. In my arms, she sobbed. I held her closely, but I was frightened to hold her too closely because she felt so frail, and I thought I might hurt her. Her body shook as she sobbed. The brim of her hat was under my chin; with one hand I took off her hat, put it on the wash-basin, and, holding Jean, kissed her on her forehead. I held her till she stopped sobbing.

But she was hobbled by her knickers. I leaned her against a wall, bent down, asked her to lift one foot then the other, and took off her sopping knickers. We walked small step by small step to the bed. I turned her round so she could sit on the foot, and she dropped backwards. She couldn’t raise herself to lie full length. I drew her up by holding her under her arms and pulling slowly, but she was very heavy; the bedspread rucked under her. I finally got her full length. She was shivering. She said, “I’m so cold.” I took a blanket from the second bed and covered her. She rolled her head back and forth against the pillow, and, weeping, said, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.” Tears came from her nose as from her eyes; she tried to sniff them back. Her entire face, swollen and red, was wet. She wailed, “Nothing matters. Nothing matters.”

In the hotel lobby, my hand shaking, I rang the only person I knew of who could help, Sonia Orwell. She had in fact first introduced me to Jean some years before. I said to Sonia, “Jean seems to be having an attack.” She said she would be there in fifteen minutes. I went back to Jean, who was still moaning, “It doesn’t matter,” but quietly.

Sonia came, said severely, “For God’s sake, David, don’t you know when someone’s drunk?”

The next morning I rang Sonia. I said, “I want Jean to know I wasn’t embarrassed and I hope she wasn’t.”

Sonia laughed. She said, “I’m putting Jean in another hotel. Give her a day or two to recover, then visit her. But, please, remember to lower the toilet seat next time.”

She was staying now in a suite in a lovely small hotel off the Portobello Road. The windows at the back gave on a garden with big bare trees. Jean, wearing a long blue dressing gown, was sitting in a beautiful chair in the middle of the sitting room.

She said, “Now, David, if that ever happens to you with a lady again, don’t get into a panic. You put the lady on her bed, cover her, put a glass of water and a sleeping pill on the bedside table, turn the lights down very low, adjust your tie before you leave so you’ll look smart, say at reception that the lady is resting, and when you tell the story afterwards you make it funny.”

I ordered glasses and ice. A young man with a long gold earring, white hair, and a suit that looked as though made of black plastic, came in with a tray; he placed the tray on a low table by Jean and kissed her, said, “Darling, blue has to be your favourite colour, it suits you so,” and Jean, giggling, said, “I never wear green, that’s an unlucky colour for me.” The young man made the drinks for us.

She was, I realized, happy: she was wearing a pretty dressing gown in a pretty room. One of the signs of Jean’s happiness, I came to realize, was her sadness; happy, she allowed herself to be, at least a little, sad. When she was really unhappy, she was angry. She had been unhappy at the hotel in Kensington; instead, however, of taking a practical step to change the hotel, even to asking for another to be found for her, she simply raged, as though nothing could be done and all she could do was rage. Now, in another hotel, she smiled a little sadly when I told her she was looking beautiful.

She said, “Wouldn’t what happened to us make a funny story? We should write it.”

I was somewhat amazed that she should so quickly think of turning the episode into a story; but I was excited, too. “Yes, let’s,” I said. An uncomfortable feeling came over me which I didn’t recognize then, but which I now do: a feeling as of stealing manuscripts or letters from Jean, though she was allowing me to steal them, a feeling of some presumption, because of course I would be tempted to steal manuscripts and letters, of course I would want to write a short story with Jean. Again, I wondered if my deepest interest in her was as a writer I could take advantage of. I did not like this feeling. Though I wanted to start writing the story immediately, I let it drop; I wanted her to realize the idea came from her, not me, and it was up to her to act on it. But, too, I wanted to let her know I was interested; she very quickly imagined no one was interested at all.

I visited Jean often, and each time we worked a little on the story. I wrote bits of it at home and read them out to her; she corrected. The manuscript became very messy. One of Jean’s notes, dictated, was: “Cut down on her drink. Only two goes of malt whisky.” Jean was responsible for most of the dialogue, I for the description. She gave the piece its name: “Shades of Pink.” As, after a couple of weeks, I became more interested in finishing the story, Jean seemed to me to become less so. Finally she said, “You keep it now and do what you want with it. It’s a gift.” At home, I cut it down to a few pages, following the advice she said Ford had given her: “When in doubt, cut.” I put it in a bottom drawer.

Jean stayed on in the hotel over the winter. She was correcting the proofs of her collection of short stories, Sleep It Off, Lady. She once asked me to read out the story “Rapunzel, Rapunzel.” She asked me to cut a sentence, then said, “It’s a bad story. They’re all bad stories. Mediocre. Worse than bad. What can I do? The reviews, quite rightly, will be condemning. I shouldn’t have allowed them to be published. But it’s done, they’ll be published, and maybe it won’t matter. What I wanted to do was to write my autobiography, but no one seems interested in that. I can’t do it myself. No one can help me.”

From her letters, I knew that Jean could write only with great difficulty, her words large and shaky. I had also seen her sign books for visitors, holding the pen clenched between her thumb and middle finger and jabbing it at the paper.

I said, “Look, Jean, if it’s a question of your needing someone to write down what you want to dictate, I’d be happy to do that.”

“You see,” she said, I just wanted to get down a few facts to correct the lies that have been said. I want to do that before I die.”

We started, I think, the next day, after lunch. She sat in a chair with a big pillow behind her, and she had one drink to get her going. She dictated a passage which, in relation to her fiction, followed on directly from Voyage in the Dark; the heroine of that novel, who lived in Langham Street, might have written the opening sentences of Jean’s dictation, recalling her recovery from her “illegal operation”: “After I got better, I stayed on in the flat in Langham Street . . . I didn’t see him, but he sent me a big rose plant in a pot and a very beautiful kitten.”

After a few pages of dictation, she fell back on the cushion and closed her eyes; she suddenly opened them, shook her head, and said, “Never mind. Let’s have a drink now.”

We sat drinking, and she, lounging back on her pillow, told me stories from her life. We were very easy with one another, and in the easy way she talked about her life, I talked about mine. We were spirited. But it was when we talked about writing that we got excited. Her excitement was in her eyes.

She said, “I think and think for a sentence, and every sentence I think for is wrong, I know it. Then, all at once, the illuminating sentence comes to me. Everything clicks into place.”

What had happened to us in the bathroom was not more personal than our talk about writing; if we could talk about what had happened, we could talk about writing in the most open and vulnerable ways, which, perhaps, we would not want anyone else to hear.

I felt I could ask her anything. I said, “Do you ever think of the meaning of what you write?”

“No. No.” She raised a hand. “You see, I’m a pen. I’m nothing but a pen.”

Tears came to her eyes. “Of course. Of course. It’s only then that I know I’m writing well. It’s only then that I know my writing is true. Not really true, not as fact. But true as writing. That’s why I know the Bible is true. I know it’s a translation of a translation of a translation, thousands of years old, but the writing is true, it reads true. Oh, to be able to write like that! But you can’t do it. It’s not up to you. You’re picked up like a pen, and when you’re used up you’re thrown away, ruthlessly, and someone else is picked up. You can be sure of that: someone else will be picked up. No one in England has been picked up in a long while, no one in Europe, no one in America—”

The expression burst from her like a revelation. “Yes! Yes!” Then she paused. “Perhaps.”

“I don’t know why,” she said. “I don’t know, and I wonder if it was right to allow oneself to be picked up. I wonder if it was right to give up so much of my life for writing. I don’t think, after all, that my writing was worth it.”

“Yes, perhaps,” she said. “I imagine you like to be alone a lot, don’t you?”

I went to see Jean week after week, three or four days a week. Sometimes she was too tired to dictate, having been out to lunch or to shop the day before. We talked. I half imagined she told me a lot about her life hoping I would write it all down; but I felt, whenever I did at home write down what she had told me that day, that I had been listening to Jean for the sake of writing down what she had said, and I wrote down, not what she said, but my reactions.

One grey day in late March, after she had dictated on previous visits a number of disconnected bits about her life, we tried to organize them chronologically. She found this very difficult, as she couldn’t recall the sequence of events of so many years before. I had been careful not to interfere in what she dictated; I told her I was the one machine she could use. (She had never learned to type because she couldn’t understand machines. She refused to speak into a tape recorder because it was an incomprehensible machine. It took me three visits to teach her how to open a compact she was given as a gift.) But now I began to help her to sort out the months and years of her life: 1917, 1918, 1919. She often passed her hand over her face in her attempts to remember, and when she slumped back on her pillow, as if, suddenly, uninterested, I said, “Come on, Jean, when did you and your husband stay at Knokke-sur-Mer and for how long?” She raised herself from the pillow and tried to concentrate. She said, “All I can remember is the sea, cold and green.” “Try,” I said. “1923, I think,” she said, “and we stayed for two weeks. It was cheap. We bathed. We recovered.”

I stayed with her a long time, till long past her supper. The more we got into the chronology, the more muddled Jean became, until, her hands to the sides of her head, she said, “I can’t go on, I can’t. This isn’t the way I work.” We never again attempted to make a chronology.

On my next visit, she had gifts for me: a shirt with red and blue flowers printed on it and a white pullover. She said, “Try them on.” I went into her bedroom and put them on. When I came out, she studied me. “Go get one of my scarves,” she said, “from my room, and tie it round your neck.” I did. I came out. “Now walk around,” she said. I walked around the small sitting room. “Look in the glass,” she said. (She hated the word “mirror,” as she hated the word “perfume”; she used “looking glass” and “scent.”) I looked at myself. Jean was silent, as if silently judging. “Yes,” she finally said, “very nice.” I went to her and, laughing, put my arms around her.

By the time she was to leave London to return to Devon, I had covered thirty yellow and blue foolscap pages, back and front, with dictation. Sonia had typed them out.

I visited Jean briefly on her last day at the hotel. Sonia was packing for her. I kissed Jean goodbye. “Pray for me,” she said. “I will,” I said, “and you pray for me.” “I will, honey,” she said.