That morning there were several calls for her during rehearsals but she had left strict instructions that she wasn’t to be disturbed, and when she got home that evening she took the phone off the hook.
She was surprised during the following days how little she yearned for him, it was as if a weight had lifted. She felt an affection for him that she felt for the part of her life she had passed with him, but she saw clearly that it was for her own life and not for his that she yearned. She would go on alone, and when he demanded to see her she met him with a calm that was indifference which roused him to fury. She had not built a life with him, she had built nothing: but out of these sentences The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July she would build, and for that she had to be alone. She would leave this city that had so much of her past life, the theatre where she had worked so long. She would leave them like a pair of galoshes in the porch, and go indoors. She rang rich friends: was their offer of the house in Spain still open? It was. They only used it in July. They would be delighted to loan it to her. She went and offered her resignation to the old manager.
‘But you can’t leave in the middle of a production.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t explain properly. Of course I’ll see the production through, but I won’t be renewing my contract when it expires at the end of the year.’
‘Is it salary?’ He sat down behind his big desk and motioned to her to sit.
‘No. I am leaving the theatre. I want to try to write,’ she blurted out to save explanation.
‘It’s even more precarious than the theatre, and now that you’ve made your way there why throw it over for something worse still?’ He was old and kindly and wise, though he too must have had to be ruthless in his day.
‘I must find out whether I can or not. I’ll only find out by finding out. I’ll come back if I fail.’
‘You know, contrary to the prodigal son story, few professions welcome back their renegades?’
‘I’ll take that risk.’
‘Well, I see you’re determined.’ He rose.
As soon as a production begins to take shape it devours everybody around it so that one has no need for company or friends or anything outside it, and in the evening one takes a limp life home with no other idea than to restore it so that it can be devoured anew the next day. As she went home on the tram two days before the dress rehearsal she hadn’t enough strength to be angry when she saw her photo in the evening paper and read that she was leaving the theatre to write. She was leaving to try to write. She should have been more careful. Kind as he was she should have known that the old manager would use any publicity in any way to fill the theatre. To write was better copy than the truthful try to write. She wondered tiredly if there was a photo of the coffin being lifted out of the oyster wagon or of the starving man in his summer coat in the rain outside the restaurant while the boy crunched on the oyster shells within; and whether it was due to the kindness usually reserved for the dear departed or mere luck, no production of hers had ever opened before to such glowing notices.
She left on New Year’s Eve for Spain, by boat and train, passing through Stockholm and Copenhagen, and stopping five days in Paris where she knew some people. She had with her the complete works of Chekhov, and the two sentences were more permanently engraved than ever in her mind: The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July.
She stayed five days in the Hôtel Celtique on the rue Odessa, and all her waking hours seemed taken up with meeting people she already knew. Most of them scraped a frugal living from translation or journalism or both and all of them wrote or wanted to be artists in one way or another. They lived in small rooms and went out to cheap restaurants and movie houses. She saw that many of them were homesick and longed for some way to go back without injuring their self-esteem and that they thought her a fool for leaving. In their eyes she read contempt. ‘So she too has got the bug. That’s all we need. One more,’ and she began to protect herself by denying that there was any foundation to the newspaper piece. On the evening before she took the train to Spain she had dinner in a Russian restaurant off the Boulevard St Michael with the cleverest of them alclass="underline" the poet Seven. He had published three books of poems, and the previous year she had produced a play of his that had been taken off after a week though it was highly praised by the critics. His threadbare dark suit was spotless, and the cuffs and collar of the white shirt shone, the black bow knotted with a studied carelessness. They were waited on by the owner, a little old hen of a Russian woman who spoke heavily accented French and whose thinning hair was dyed carrot. A once powerful man played an accordion at the door.
‘Well, Eva Lindberg, can you explain to me what you’re doing haring off to Spain instead of staying up there to empty that old theatre of yours with my next play?’ The clever mordant eyes looked at her through unrimmed spectacles with ironic amusement.
‘I was offered a loan of a house.’ She was careful.
‘And they inform me you intend to write there. You know there’s not room for the lot of us.’
‘That’s just a rumour that got into a newspaper.’
‘What’ll you do down there, a single woman among hordes of randy Spaniards?’
‘For one thing I have a lot of reading to catch up on.’ She was safe now, borrowing aggression from his aggression.
‘And why did you leave the theatre?’
‘I felt I was getting stale. I wasn’t enjoying it any more.’
‘Have you money?’
‘I have enough money. What about your own work?’
He started to describe what he was working on with the mockery usually reserved for the work of others. The accordion player came round the tables with a saucer, bullying those who offered him less than a franc. They had a second carafe of red wine and finished with a peppered vodka. Warmed by the vodka, he asked her to sleep with him, his face so contorted at having to leave himself open to rejection that she felt sorry for him.