The Retreat from Moscow: A Play About a Family

ACT ONE

The stage in darkness.

Two armchairs. A table with three upright chairs. A sink, cooker, fridge, and cupboard.

Three people sit motionless in the darkness. EDWARD, a schoolteacher in his late fifties, in one armchair. His wife, ALICE, about the same age, in the other. Their son, JAMIE, in his early thirties, at the table.

All three actors remain onstage throughout. When one character is no longer present in a scene, he becomes still, and the lights go down on him. The audience can still see him, but the other characters cannot. The shadowed actor sits or stands, suspended in time, and does not react to what takes place around him, until the lights return him to the action.

Lights come up on EDWARD. He reads from a book.

EDWARD: As men dropped in the intense cold, their bodies were stripped of clothing by their own comrades, and left naked in the snow, still alive.

(Lights come up on JAMIE, sipping at a mug of coffee, listening.)

Others, having lost or burned their shoes, were marching with bare feet and legs. The frozen skin and muscles were exfoliating themselves, like successive layers of wax statues. The bones were exposed, but being frozen, were completely insensitive to pain. Some officers, suffering from diarrhoea, found themselves unable to do their trousers up. I myself helped one of these unfortunates to put his asterisk-asterisk-asterisk back, and button himself up. He was crying like a child.

JAMIE: I wonder what word he used.

EDWARD: Who knows? Something French.

JAMIE: Yes. I suppose it would be.

EDWARD: A surprisingly large number of the officers kept diaries. Over a hundred and fifty have survived. Remarkable, really, given the conditions on the retreat.

JAMIE: How many died?

EDWARD: Napoleon marched four hundred fifty thousand men across the Niémen. Less than twenty thousand came back. How was the drive down?

JAMIE: Not bad. I left just after five.

(Both check their watches, making the same movement.)

EDWARD: An hour and three-quarters. I wouldn’t have thought there was that much traffic on a Saturday evening.

JAMIE: It took twenty minutes just getting through Tunbridge Wells.

EDWARD: Tunbridge Wells is slow.

JAMIE: I think I might have a bath.

EDWARD: Yes. Do.

JAMIE: Wash off the London grime.

(He rises, and takes his coffee mug to the sink.)

So everything’s alright, then?

EDWARD: Much as ever. And you?

JAMIE: Busy.

EDWARD: Let’s see if we can find a moment. Before you go back.

JAMIE: Sure.

(EDWARD returns to his book. Lights go down on him.)

(Lights come up on ALICE. JAMIE walks across to stand behind her chair.)

ALICE: It seems to me as I grow older that people become ruder. They say nobody’s taught manners any more, but I don’t think it’s that. I think middle-aged women have become invisible. You have to be young, or rich, or beautiful, to be noticed at all. I don’t quite know how to cope with it, except by getting angry, which I do more or less all the time these days. I’ve been having trouble with my printer. Did I tell you?

JAMIE: No. What’s the problem?

ALICE: I dropped it.

JAMIE: Ah. They don’t like that.

ALICE; Sudden and swift and light as that

   The ties gave,

   And he learned of finalities

   Besides the grave.

JAMIE: Auden?

ALICE: Robert Frost. A strange little poem called The Impulse. I’m putting it in my anthology under Lost Love.

JAMIE: How’s the anthology coming along?

ALICE: Well, it isn’t, really, until I can get the printer fixed. Did you come down alone?

JAMIE: Yes. Have you got someone to look at it?

ALICE: Darling, there isn’t anyone. People don’t fix things any more, they throw them away.

I rang every shop in the Yellow Pages, but all they wanted to do was sell me a new one. I found a man at last who said, rather grudgingly, Bring it in, so I drove all the way to this hellish industrial estate, where there was this hellish computer warehouse, and I lugged the damned machine in through one of those ferocious doors that try to crush you, and there was one little man, all alone in this vast space, sitting at a keyboard, going tick-tick-tick. No attempt to help me as I struggled in. Not a word. Not a look. After a while I said, I’m a customer. Aren’t you supposed to serve me? He looked up and said, Well? Just, Well? I said, My printer’s not working. I showed him the page I’d brought in to explain the problem. I’d been trying to print out a Browning poem, the one that ends—

Just when I seemed about to learn!

Where is the thread now? Off again!

The old trick! Only I discern—

Infinite passion, and the pain

Of finite hearts that yearn.

That’s going into Lost Love, too. It’s turning out to be by far the largest section in the anthology. Anyway, the printer had left off the first two words or so of every line, which made the poem rather modern, but not as good. The man in the warehouse said, That’s not a printer problem. The printer’s fine. It’s what you’re doing that’s wrong. You’re the problem. He actually said it, in those very words. You’re the problem. How do you know? I said. You haven’t looked at the printer. You haven’t even switched it on. I know, he said, because if a printer prints wrong, it’s not the printer’s fault. Are you the printer’s mother? I asked him. Are you telling me that printers never go wrong? I’m telling you, he said, that if the printer’s printing, then the printer’s fine. But it’s not fine, I said. It’s not printing right. Well, actually, it is printing right, but it’s not printing left. He didn’t have an answer to that. He went back to going tick-tick-tick. Excuse me, I said. I’m not finished. I want you to look at my printer. He paid me no attention whatsoever. So I picked up my printer, to take it over to where he sat, and I dropped it.

It made a kind of tinkling noise. He looked up when he heard that, and smiled a cruel little smile, and said, Would you like me to sell you a new printer? I was so angry I wanted to hit him. So I said to him, You’re the kind of man who doesn’t love anybody and nobody loves you. You’ve got no friends, and your wife hates you, and your children never talk to you. He looked quite surprised for a moment or two. Then he said, "Do you know me from