While the Women are Sleeping

lord rendall’s song

James Ryan Denham (1911–1943), born in London and educated at Cambridge, was one of the ill-starred talents of the Second World War, The son of a well-to-do family he embarked on a diplomatic career that took him to Burma and India (1934–1937). His known literary work is scant and hard to come by consisting of five now unobtainable books, all published in private editions, since it would seem he never considered this activity to be anything more than a hobby. He was a friend of both Malcolm Lowry whom he had met at university and of the famous art collector Edward James, and he himself came to own a fine collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French paintings.

His last book, How to Kill (1943), from which this story, ‘Lord Rendall’s Song’, is taken, was the only one he tried to publish in a commercial edition; however, at the time, with the country still at war, he was unable to find a publisher willing to accept it, partly because of the depressing effect it was felt the book might have on civilians and soldiers alike and partly because of the oddly erotic undertone present in some of the stories. Before that, Denham had published a book of poetry, Vanishings (1932), another volume of short stories, Knives and Landscapes (1934), a short novel, The Night-Face (1938), and Gentle Men and Women (1939), a series of sketches of famous people, among them Chaplin, Cocteau, the dancer Tilly Losch and the pianist Dinu Lipatti, Denham died when he was thirty-two years old, killed in action in North Africa.

Although the story published here (a vertiginous mise en abîme,) is self explanatory, it might be useful to know that the popular English song ‘Lord Rendall’ consists of a dialogue between the young Lord Rendall and his mother after the former has been poisoned by his lover. To his mother’s final question, ‘What will you leave your sweetheart, Lord Rendall, my son?’ he replies: ‘A rope to hang her, mother, a rope to hang her.’

I wanted to give Janet a surprise and so I decided not to tell her exactly when I would be home. Four years, I thought, is such a long time that a few more days of uncertainty will not make any difference. Getting a letter on Monday informing her that I would be arriving in two days would be far less exciting than finding me there on our doorstep when she opened the front door on Wednesday itself. I had left war and imprisonment far behind me now, and so quickly had they been left behind that I was already beginning to forget them. I would gladly have forgotten it all instantly so that I could do my best to ensure that my life with Janet and our son would be unaffected by my sufferings, so that I could pick up my life again just as if I had never gone away, as if my time at the front — along with the orders and the fighting and the lice, the mutilations, hunger and death — had never existed. Nor the terror and the torments of the German prisoner-of-war camp. She knew I was alive, she had been notified to that effect, she knew that I had been taken prisoner and was therefore alive and would come home. She must have been waiting daily for some word of my return. I’d give her a surprise, not a fright, and that would be a good thing. I would knock at the door and she would open it, drying her hands on her apron, and there I would be, dressed in civilian clothes at last, looking rather ill and thin, but nonetheless smiling and longing to embrace and to kiss her. I would take her in my arms, untie her apron, and she would bury her face in my shoulder and weep. I’d notice my jacket growing damp with her tears, so very different from the constant dripping of the damp punishment cell or the monotonous rain falling on our helmets during marches and in the trenches.

From the moment I made that decision not to announce my arrival, I enjoyed the anticipation of my return so much that when I finally found myself standing outside the house, I almost regretted having to put an end to that sweet waiting. And that was why I first crept round to the back, hoping I might hear or see something from the outside. I wanted to accustom myself to all the usual, familiar sounds again, the sounds I had missed so dreadfully all the time I had been kept from them: the kitchen clatter of pots and pans, the creaking bathroom door, Janet’s footsteps. And the child’s voice. The child had been one month old when I left, and then he only used his voice to scream and shout. He would be four now and would have a real voice, and his own way of talking, perhaps like his mother’s, since he would have spent all that time alone with her. His name was Martin.

I could not be sure if they were at home or not. I got as far as the back door and held my breath, eager for sounds. The first thing I heard was a child crying and I found that odd. It was the crying of a small child, as small as Martin had been when I left for the front. How was that possible? I wondered if I had got the wrong house or if Janet and the child had moved away without my knowing and another family had moved in. The baby’s crying came from far off, apparently from our bedroom. I peered in. There was the kitchen, empty, no one there, no food. Night was falling, it was about time Janet started preparing something for supper; perhaps she would do so as soon as the child had calmed down. I could not wait, however, and I walked round to the front of the house to see if I had any better luck there. On my right was the living-room window, on my left, on the other side of the front door, our bedroom window. I walked round the house to the right, keeping close to the wall, half crouching so as not to be seen. Then I slowly drew myself up until I could see into the living room with my left eye. That was empty too, the window was closed but I could still hear the child crying, the child who could not possibly be Martin. Janet must be in the bedroom, calming the child down, whoever that child was, and always assuming that the woman was Janet. I was just about to move over to the window on the left when the living-room door opened and I saw Janet come in. It was her, I hadn’t got the wrong house and no, they hadn’t moved away without my knowing. She was wearing an apron, just as I had pictured her. She always wore an apron; she said taking it off was a waste of time because she would only have to put it on again later to do something else. She looked very pretty, she hadn’t changed. I saw and thought all this in a matter of seconds, because behind her, immediately behind, I saw a man following her in. He was very tall and from my perspective his head was cut off by the upper frame of the window. He was in shirtsleeves, but still had his tie on, as if he had just come home from work and so far had only had time to take off his jacket. He seemed very much at home. When he came in, he had walked behind Janet the way husbands in their own homes walk behind their wives. If I crouched any lower, I would be unable to see anything, so I decided that I would wait until he sat down to get a good look at his face. He turned round for a few seconds, presenting me with a close-up view of the back of his white shirt, his hands in his trouser pockets. When he moved away from the window, I could see Janet again. They did not speak. They seemed angry. It was one of those brief, tense silences that tend to follow marital arguments. Then Janet sat down on the sofa and crossed her legs. I thought it odd that she should be wearing sheer stockings and high heels when she had her apron on. She suddenly buried her face in her hands and started crying. He crouched down by her side, but not to console her; he was just watching her cry. And it was then that I saw his face. His face was my face. The man in shirtsleeves looked exactly like me. I do not mean that he bore an unusually close resemblance to me: his features were identical to mine, they were mine; it was like looking at myself in a mirror or, rather, like watching one of those home movies we made shortly after Martin was born. Janet’s father had given us a movie camera so that we could see our child when he was no longer a child. Janet’s father had had money before the war and I hoped that, despite any financial difficulties, Janet would have been able to film something of the years with Martin that I had lost. I even wondered if what I was seeing was, in fact, a film. Perhaps I had arrived at precisely the moment when Janet, feeling nostalgic, had chosen to sit down in the living-room to watch one of those films showing scenes that took place before I went away. No, that was impossible, for what I was watching was in colour, not black and white and, besides, no one had ever filmed us from that window — what I was seeing I was seeing from the position I was occupying at that moment. The man in the room was real: if I broke the glass and reached in, I could touch him. He was crouching by the sofa and he had my eyes, my nose, my lips, my blond curly hair, he even had the small scar at the base of his left eyebrow from the time my cousin Derek threw a stone at me when I was a child. I touched the small scar. Outside, night had fallen.

He was talking now, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying through the closed window and Martin had stopped crying since they went into the living room. Meanwhile, Janet was still sobbing and the man who looked like me was crouched beside her, saying something to her, though I could tell from the expression on his face that his words were not consoling but mocking or even accusing. My head was in a whirl, but despite that, two or three ideas still surfaced in my mind, each more absurd than the last. I thought she must have found a man identical to me in order to take my place during my long absence. I thought that time must have been incomprehensibly altered or cancelled, that those four years actually had been forgotten, erased, just as I had wished, and that I really might be able to pick up the threads of my life with Janet and the child again. The years of war and imprisonment really hadn’t existed and I, Tom Booth, had never gone to war or been taken prisoner which was why I was here, as on any other day, arguing with Janet on my return from work. I had spent those four years with her. I, Tom Booth, had not been called up, I had stayed at home. But then, who was the ‘I’ looking through the window, the ‘I’ who had walked up to this house, the ‘I’ who had just been released from a German POW camp? Who did all these memories belong to? Who had fought in the war? And I thought something else too, maybe the excitement of returning home had evoked some scene from the past, a scene, maybe the very last scene, that took place before I went away, something I had forgotten and that resurfaced now with the shock of homecoming. Perhaps, on that last day, Janet had cried because I was going away, possibly to my death, and I had treated it all as a joke. That might explain the child Martin’s crying, for he was still a baby then. The fact was, however, that it was no hallucination, I was neither imagining nor remembering it, I was seeing it now. Besides, Janet had not cried before I left. She was a woman of great strength of character, she had kept smiling right up until the very last moment, she had behaved as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if I were not really going away at all. She knew that any other attitude would have made everything so much more difficult for me. She would weep today when I opened the door, but this time she would weep on my shoulder, making my jacket damp with her tears.

No, I wasn’t seeing something from the past, something I had forgotten. I knew this with absolute certainty when I saw the man, the husband, the man who was me, Tom, suddenly stand up and seize Janet by the throat, his wife, my wife, sitting there on the sofa. He seized her round the throat with both hands and I knew that he had begun to squeeze even though, again, all I could see was Tom’s back, my back, the vast white shirt blocking my view of Janet who was still sitting on the sofa. Of her I could see only her outstretched arms, her arms flailing in the air and then hidden behind the shirt, in desperate attempts to loosen the grip which was not my grip; and then, after a few short seconds, Janet’s arms appeared again, fallen on either side of the shirt of which I could see only the back, except this time they were limp, inert. Through the closed windows I could hear the child crying again. The man left the room, going off towards the left, doubtless towards the bedroom where the child was. And when he moved away, I saw Janet there dead, strangled. In the struggle her skirt had ridden up and she had lost one of her high-heeled shoes. I saw the garters I had tried so hard not to think about during those last four years.

I was paralysed, but I managed to think: that man who is me, that man who has not moved from Chesham during all this time, is going to kill Martin as well or else the new baby, assuming that Janet and I have had another baby during my absence. I must break the glass and go in and kill that man before he kills Martin or his own newborn child. I must stop him. I must kill myself right now. Except that I am outside the window and the danger is inside.

While I was thinking all this, the child’s crying stopped, suddenly. There were none of the little whimpers you usually get as a child calms down, none of the progressive calm that overtakes children when you pick them up or rock them or sing to them. Before I went away, I used to sing Lord Rendall’s song to Martin and sometimes I managed to soothe him, to stop him crying, but it took a long time, I had to sing the song over and over. He would go on sobbing, but his sobs would gradually diminish, until at last he fell asleep. That child, on the other hand, had fallen silent abruptly, with no transitional phase. And in that new silence, without realising what I was doing, I stood up and started singing Lord Rendall’s song by the window, the song I used to sing to Martin and which begins: ‘Where have you been all the day, Rendall, my son?’ except I used to sing: ‘Where have you been all the day, Martin, my son?’ And then, when I began singing it there next to the window, I heard the voice of the man in our bedroom join me to sing the second verse: ‘Where have you been all the day, my pretty Tom?’ But the child, my child Martin or his child who bore my name, had stopped crying. And when the man and I stopped singing Lord Rendall’s song, I could not help wondering which of the two of us would be hanged.

(1989)