All over the hillside people were packing up and heading down to the path to file through the sheep gate. Evelyn watched the line of walkers. She couldn’t make them out clearly but she gazed at them as they went on into the distance, thinking that they looked liked a long dark snake sliding ahead along the path. She could see well enough the side of the hill against the sky where it suddenly steepened above the path, and soon enough the snake of people slithered away completely, leaving Evelyn alone, aware of no other living thing except the birds. Those must be skylarks, she thought, though she could also hear familiar town birds, crows and gulls and some other sort, too, making a cry of “sweek-sweek” that mixed with the wailing of the wind.
As Evelyn was gazing into the distance, the sun broke unexpectedly through the clouds, turning the surface of the reservoir into a flat mirror, like a sheet of steel. Then a squall of wind blew across it and broke the sheet into sparkling, brittle splinters. Evelyn shivered and settled herself for a rest. She used Paul’s sweater as a pillow and was glad of a couple of cardigans to tuck around her legs. She found herself another biscuit to nibble, just to keep the chill away, and then she lay back, looking up at the sky and thinking how beautiful it all was. Then she fell asleep.
And because she had been asleep, she was never able to say with certainty afterward how long she had spent alone there on the hill. They told her it had been the best part of three hours, but if someone else had said it had been no more than ten minutes, she might have believed that just as easily. She would never know how much, in hours and minutes, that patch of her life up there on the hillside had taken out of the whole. She knew only that it marked the difference between Before and After, and changed everything, forever.
She did know, however, that in some drowsy state, she heard the birds again and they seemed to be much louder. She sat up and looked again at the reservoir and had to put a hand up against the flash of the sun coming off it, but she was too late, and she was left with a burning, ripped feeling across her eyes. She lay back again to wait for the stinging to die down, and then the birds began to sound friendly again and she turned her head on the pillow of Paul’s sweater so the wool tickled her face, and her baby lay like a warm, thick stone in her belly. With her eyes closed she felt Stan’s locket between her fingers and ran it along the chain close to the side of her neck next to her ear because she liked the silky,buzzing sound it made. Then she must have fallen asleep again.
She woke to the noise of shouting. She sat up, blinking, and waited for the dazzle to fade. Through the grainy darkness of her vision the reservoir was now a blot of lavender blue and the sky was heavy with clouds that lightened to whiteness where they met the water. Evelyn felt as if she were rocking about on a raft, for the hillside grass was rippling around her under wavy stripes of sunlight and shadow.
Over to her left where the shouting was coming from, where the path from its highest point dipped sharply into William Clough, she caught a movement. Some people were making their way back towards the sheep gate. She saw at once the gash of bright red around the neck and the dark, hunched figure of Stan, walking alone. Then she saw, moving ahead of him, a smaller figure, a bright, drifting smear of colour against the path. It was a girl in a yellow skirt and a blue jacket, with a yellow hat or scarf. Behind them some more figures came along, dark and moving urgently so Evelyn supposed they were men. They were shoving at one another and running and shouting. There was laughter, too, and voices chanting something.
She turned her attention back to the figure that was unmistakably Stan. The girl in blue and yellow was now waiting for him at the sheep gate, watching him walk towards her. She stood with her hands in her pockets. Evelyn could tell she was saving up the look of him to keep for herself. She had done the same thing herself and she knew you only did that when you felt a certain way. But just before he reached her, there was another shout, this time from a way further down in the clough, and Stan stopped and turned to the men coming from behind him. He set one hand into the back of his waist and lifted the other hand and clasped the back of his neck. Then he tipped his head back as if he were letting the weight of it rest in his cupped hand. Evelyn knew it so well, that way he had of gripping his neck, and with a rush of simple tenderness opened her mouth to call out to him. But just then the girl moved forward, skipping along from the sheep gate. She put her arms around him and pressed her face into his back. Stan turned to her. He was much taller than she was. Evelyn saw him dip his head to her, saying something, and then he loosened the red scarf Evelyn had knitted for him and drew it around the girl’s neck and pulled her close. Then he brought his face down to hers and kissed her. Evelyn saw the red scarf around both their necks and the girl’s blue arms up around his shoulders, and the two heads meeting. A couple of whistles came their way from the men down the path and they separated.
All at once Evelyn’s eyes began to run with sore, gluey tears and the baby heaved inside her stomach with a kick that she felt almost in her throat. She would have cried out but the kick startled her, and then suddenly she started to shake uncontrollably. She went on staring and staring down the hillside but now it was like gazing through a dirty window and she couldn’t see anything. It began to rain, in hard, spitting drops that felt like hail or grit, and Evelyn went on gazing. She tipped her face up to the sky wishing it would pull her up into itself until she disappeared, or that it would rain down hard enough for her to be dissolved. She was so breathless she felt faint. The world seemed to be turning dark, as if the rainstorm were blowing her before it, sweeping her westward to the very end of this bright day on the hillside and straight down into the night, where she would be left alone and lost in complete darkness, with the wind howling and the rain pouring down. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and sobbed, and it seemed her crying would never, ever stop. She was frightened of looking again at the sheep gate for fear of seeing them kissing once more, their colours entwining and blending, but when she opened her eyes there was nothing to see at all.
It was much later when they led her off the hillside. They found her quite some way from their picnic spot, huddled and shaking and soaked through. Paul and Daphne each took one of her arms and there were other people around, all trying to help, though Evelyn was so dazed she could not take in very much or answer all the questions she was being asked. She was chilled to the bone. They led her down slowly, their voices gentle and with none of their usual bantering and teasing, so that she could sense their deep, unspoken concern. Daphne and Paul got her to the pub, where the landlord and his wife could not have been kinder. They were found a quiet room and blankets were fetched, as well as a cup of tea to go with the glass of brandy that the landlord said would be very warming. After a while a doctor arrived and announced that she was suffering from shock and mild exposure. He wasn’t qualified to comment on the sightless eyes but shock could do strange things especially to pregnant women, he said, and they would probably be as right as rain after a good night’s sleep. The baby would come to no harm, babies were tough little creatures, and that was the main thing, wasn’t it?
Months later Evelyn heard from Daphne, who got it from Paul, that everybody was saying the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass had gone down as a great day by all accounts, even a historic one. And I was there, she thought to herself. I was there, but really, I missed it. The violent confrontation between the walkers and the keepers had occurred further away, past Kinder Downfall and deeper into William Clough, and all up along the top of Ashop Head. People had been swarming all over the place, charging around and knocking one another about with sticks and what have you. And all, Evelyn thought privately, all for a few acres of heathland.
For her the day had drawn to a confusing and unhappy close with the bus ride home. She sat shivering and exhausted in blankets while excited singing and shouting went on around her. Daphne sat next to her and patted her hand from time to time and asked if she was all right. She nodded and kept her eyes shut. No looking out the window this time. Instead she let her mind’s eye wander over the images of the day. She tried to memorize its details, knowing they were now no more than things she had seen once but never would again, except as mementos in an album, memories of a day on Kinder Scout etched deep on her heart, that would devour the rest of her life. All she had left now was what she brought with her down from the hillside: the cold and the beauty and the dark, one present, one vanished, and one waiting up ahead for her.
Dear Ruth
Re: legs.
Nurse whats-her-name and the other one came together today, ominous in itself and that was before I saw their faces. One came to the front door, the other was prying round the back. It doesn’t do anybody any good getting woken up like that, all in a fright. I’d nodded off in conservatory. They startled me, and that floor’s more slippery now. What are you using on it, they demanded to know. One of them was sliding her foot along it. You must be using something on it.
Told them to ask you, cleaning products being your department, and got the pursed lips. One wanted to go into the soft talk but I wasn’t having any. Treating me as if I was demented, I won’t have it. Mutterings about Community Psychiatric Services again, which I ignored as per.
The other one sits down and starts making notes. Home care review, she says. Goals, paperwork, drives them all mad. The first one gets me back in my chair and pinned down and does the legs. She launches into a lecture. Polishing the floor may be “unadvisable” as combo of wax and ceramic tiles can be extremely slippery. And there is such a thing as overdoing housework and would I please heed earlier advice about resting with legs up, and bear in mind risk of breaking skin on shins and infecting the ulcers if I’m charging around the place. Obviously a waste of breath on my part to try and explain again about you and the housework, they just don’t want to hear the facts.
Pigheaded young woman, actually-she didn’t take kindly to being corrected. The word is INadvisable not UNadvisable, I took some pleasure in pointing out, and she gave me one of those “who’s a naughty boy” looks and said there was no need to shout. I wasn’t shouting, which I also pointed out.
Actually the IN not UN business is more your kind of remark than mine, though you generally saved that kind of thing for later instead of coming out with it at the time. But it felt like it was you in my brain,and you talking. Don’t recall you ever tripping anyone up on this particular example, but it was you, all right.
I’m glad you’re speaking to them. I suppose you have to do it through me, at least for now. I wish you’d speak to them more. I wish you’d speak to them about my legs. Wouldn’t you think in this day and age they’d be able to do something? Other than squeezing them into elastic bandages, I mean, and that gunk they smear on.
You could get them to understand. You could get them to see I can’t be doing with the discomfort 24 hours a day and if I take the bandages off it’s only because I need a respite. They should try it for themselves, they’d soon see what I’m talking about. And if I forget to put the bandages back on I can’t see that affects anyone but me so why the bullying. I don’t care for the tone they’re taking. Oh yes they’ve got a job to do but I’m more than twice their age.
They’ve no right using words like uncooperative and threatening me with hospital.
Arthur
OK-trying to obey orders of Bossyboots and Co. went to sleep at some point once they’d gone and after I woke I just lay there, still resting. Keeping legs up. Thinking and thinking thoughts of Overdale. I tried talking to you but I don’t think you were in the vicinity, quite. It was on the early side for you. Still light.
So instead I read some more of your story about Overdale. You take me right back there. I had some pictures fished out over the floor already, hadn’t looked at them in years.
And I found this, your poem with the photograph.
Overdale
I remember the white waterfall,
a liquid horsetail spilling over white rocks,
wires of spray silvering the white air,
making rainbows and wetting our faces.
I suppose you meant to finish it someday. Was that all you remembered, the waterfall?
I’ve taken the liberty and come up with a second verse. Here goes:
We ate lunch out of flapping paper bags.
We tried to open cheese triangles with gloves on
and the girls’ hair stuck to their noses.
One boy’s juice carton waltzed off with the wind
And you gave him hell about the environment.
Does that scan or whatever it’s meant to do? Della says poems don’t have to rhyme, just as well, I haven’t the talent, don’t claim to. In fact if it’s a poem at all, I don’t see why.
But A for effort?
Here’s the photograph. Taken by that lad mad about cameras, came two years running. Forget his name, was it Lee, he got us the prints, wouldn’t take the money, it was to say thank you, he said.
Now, not sure if I’m remembering the day from itself or from the photo. Or remembering a bundle of days like that. There were countless of them, those hiking days, the stiles and sheep gates and views and resting places and bogs and rocks. Different kids of course, give or take, but the same complaints: blisters, hunger, thirst, boredom, wet, cold. Same smiles, too, even if just for a photo. Same lunches in paper bags, wolfed down somewhere out of the wind if we were lucky-roll with luncheon meat or similar, choice of cheese triangle (see poem above) OR hardboiled egg, Yo-Yo OR KitKat, an apple, and a carton of orange squash. All litter including apple cores and eggshell to be carried home.
What became of luncheon meat? It wasn’t that bad if you were hungry and freezing. I have clearer recollection of the luncheon meat than of the waterfall. Has anybody ever put luncheon meat in a poem?
Bye for now
A.
In the end, only my grandmother’s smile proved inexhaustible. Her hips gave up and her hands also became arthritic but she continued to smile, working her knitting on her lap a little more slowly. She took painkillers smiling over the rim of her glass; when she got too crippled to get in and out of the bath I brought basins of water and washed her in her chair, and she would smile. Afterward I would take her compact and lipstick and dab her face and lips and leave her smiling in a sugary-scented haze. She found these washing rituals exhausting; almost at once she would doze off, vacating the smile that would somehow wait on her pink frosted mouth until she returned from sleep and re-entered it.
By then I was suspicious of it, that smile. It seemed to me implausibly rapturous. It could mean only that she had decided to see in her darkness certain things and not others. She talked about the view from a hill somewhere in the north one April day when she was young, and I could tell from her face that she had gone back in her mind to gaze at it again, seeing from her chair next to the sweating gas fire and the liverish wallpaper patterned with brown lozenges, skylarks’ wings brushing against the clouds over a sparkling reservoir half a mile away and stiff stripes of sun and shadow rippling deep violet water. I think she returned there easily, to this place whose name escaped her, to that bright cold day more than half her lifetime ago. Her mind was not so much failing, as obscuring the importance of knowing precisely where or when a thing occurred; she spoke of her gratitude at being able to remember it at all, and smiled.
As the walls between the years and decades came down, she began to think that life had a way of turning out all right in the end; there were ways back, after all, from disaster, and the old cruelties, even her husband’s, had seldom been deliberate and so perhaps had hardly been cruel. Just who had inflicted them anyway, and upon whom, exactly? The smell of alcohol, the sounds of someone falling against furniture and crying out, furious words, the swipe of a hand or a fist came out of darkness and at random whether from her husband or from anyone else. And it was either now, or it was all a long time ago, she didn’t remember. Time had lessened the sting; time reduced all wrongs because misdeeds died just as people did. Records faded and got muddled and generation melded into blurry generation the way photographs piled on a windowsill imprint shadows of themselves on the image below, one upon another. So my grandmother settled into her smiling contemplations and let her fragile and partial visions illustrate a whimsical philosophy of all things being for the best. Her memories, freed from sequentiality and filtered clean of bitterness, ceased to add up to her true history and so ceased to trouble her.
To conjure these flimsy apparitions from the past was work that kept her no less busy than her knitting did; she knitted, I now think, for more than the comfort of repetition. I think she knitted so that her skipping fingers might somehow impart some of their agility to her mind, to help it go on sifting through its gallery of imperfect and far-off images. There was perhaps something of a grimace of concentration about her smile.
Because how unimaginably tiring it must have been for her, every day, to summon from the dark a faith that the world though invisible to her was benign, finally, and had been all this while busily fashioning out of the uncoloured fragments of everyone’s defeats and little pleasures, not just consequences, but parables. Or perhaps, spared every smear and crease on the surface of events, every blank glare on her daughter’s devastated face, my grandmother found it easier than I did to believe that nobody’s life was ever so blighted as to be wholly without point, that memories never were thin and useless but bloomed out of experience to some good end, to become stories that would stand for something greater than themselves.
Dear Ruth
I remember that story of yours in the Save Overdale Campaign Newsletter but that was back in the Eighties, when we were trying to stop them from closing it. I knew you had your writers group, Della & her cohorts, and there was that booklet of poetry and whatnot you got printed up that one time. All well and good.
But I never saw anything you wrote. You never showed me a word. You called it all “work in progress.” You always made it sound as if you were just practising. You most certainly did not mention a novel and here it is popping up all over the house.
The Overdale photo, I keep it on me now. I don’t remember if it was taken before or after the juice carton incident but we all look well, if not cheerful. You can’t smile nicely into a force five gale, not even for some lad’s Duke of Edinburgh Award Special Photography Project.
But Ruth, see, the picture. It’s what’s not in it. It’s got 1969 on the back. It looks about late April so it must have been Easter. You can just see lambs there with the ewes in the field miles away on the right, little white blobs close to the big dark ones, and look at the state of the bracken, it’s certainly not October. Which means it must have been just after. Might even have been the very morning after! Funny how you can’t tell from our faces. You’d think it would show.
Remember, Ruth? 1969 Easter at Overdale, only a few weeks after the February half-term when we first met there. The night we arrived, the Thursday before Good Friday, when we sneaked out and we talked in the dark? You told me you’d been the first person at your school to put your name down to bring the Easter party to Overdale. You’d made yourself a bit unpopular in the staff room because you’d just been at half-term, but it was first come first served. And that was all because I’d happened to mention at half-term that I’d likely be back at Easter with another of my lot?
I was pleased when you told me that, Ruth, but I couldn’t say so. Icouldn’t tell you I hadn’t “happened to mention” coming back at Easter. I’d worked it into the conversation just so you’d know. Shaking with fear in case I was making it obvious. It seemed important I wasn’t obvious, can’t think why now. Not able to do the direct thing and just tell you I had to see you again. Dropping a hint instead of saying what I wanted and then making it happen. Calling it being shy when all it was was weakness. Weak with words.
I’d spent that Thursday travelling with the kids on the bus. The usual mayhem-three vomit stops-and my insides lurching, wondering if I’d see you. Getting ready for a big letdown in case you weren’t there.
But you were. Your brown hair in a single long pigtail right down your back and some pendant made of pottery on a leather thong- you looked like a squaw. I couldn’t wait to get the kids’ tea and the first round of the darts and table tennis tournaments over. We postponed picking the Snakes & Ladders teams, and let them skip showers, remember? Thought we’d never get them settled. The first night’s always the worst, they’re high as kites, been cooped up on the bus half the day. And first night there’s always one or two feeling lost and homesick, the silent weepers you have to watch out for. The dorms didn’t go quiet till nearly eleven, and by then it was well after dark.
That stumped me! I’d thought of asking you to come out to see the sunset to get you away from the others, and it was already pitch dark and I didn’t know what to do.
But you said, So, Arthur, you’re the ornithologist, do you get nightingales hereabouts? I’ve always wanted to hear a nightingale.
And I nearly said, Nope, no chance this high up, or this far north, or this time of year.
Then I saw your eyes, and I said, Oh, uh… well maybe, and it’s a fine clear night. Care to venture out?
So out we went to listen for a nightingale. I saw the others, Bill What’s-his-name and Mary Dixon, smirking, didn’t care. All they caredabout was getting a few beers open and the ciggies out. Who else was there that year, I can’t remember, can you?
I remember I initiated you to the unofficial spare key system that night-the set Bill had made and we kept hidden outside in the porch so any of the staff could slip out after lockup? With Bill and the others it was most often down to the pub or the fish and chip shop. In our case, into the hills, to be alone.
Ruth. The way the wind dropped, and we lay in the shelter of a rock under the hill’s curve. The stars-candles seen through pinpricks in a black velvet curtain according to you (you see, I remembered!) and the moon over the reservoir and not a sound except the wind higher up on the peak, a sighing sound. No nightingale, no night birds at all. My parka on the ground and the smell of the reeds and heather. Like old vines and honey you said, this must be what ancient Greece smells like. I didn’t comment, to me it was just dried and rooty, plus that muddy smell off the parka.
I’ll never forget that time, Ruth. We never did talk about it. You were lovely that night.
And here’s another thing I never said. Thank you. What happened was heaven on earth. Never mind ancient Greece, heaven on earth. I was thirty-two years of age and it was my first time. You told me about your ex-fiancé and you asked did I mind I wasn’t the first. And all I said was, no I don’t mind. Did I add something like, well, this is 1969 after all?
Why didn’t I say I already loved you so much you could have come to me with the smell of a hundred men in your hair and I wouldn’t have cared, as long as you stayed with me?
With love
Arthur
PS Did it mean as much to you?
PPS I ask because I think you forgot about the parka, significance of-you didn’t understand why I held on to it, “Oh, THAT smelly awful old thing” you called it, the first time I looked for it after you’d put it in the rubbish. Must have been twenty years later.
Jeremy had taken to telephoning me when it was not convenient for me to speak to him. I didn’t want to leave the receiver off the hook because he might then have reported the line as faulty or even come to the house, and either of those events would have meant intrusion. It was easy enough after the first few times just to ignore the ringing.
It was more important that I got adequate rest. I would arrive back at the cul-de-sac at daybreak and go to bed at once, though I couldn’t sleep straightaway. I would lie feverish in the way I remembered being as a child once or twice, in bed and missing school, and secretly happy to be so still and separate. After what seemed a long time, sounds would bob in on the surface of the day outside: motors running, children’s feet on gravel, doors opening and closing. My mind played out the scenes whose sounds I heard: my neighbour Gail shepherding her daughters Thomasina and Jessica from their mock-Tudor house into their estate car, big and small hands clicking seat belts, her slavering dogs, Bertie and Maisie, jumping in the back, leashes thrown in after them. Later would come the cruck of letterboxes in between the revving and halting of the post van at its usual two stopping points in the cul-de-sac.
Eventually, silence would come and embed itself. No, not silence. It was more like sound loitering in the shade while the day outside swelled with light, and the morning hours, burdened with heat, struggled to pass and expired, inevitably, in the end; then it would be afternoon, when the day seemed to sigh and slacken and give in to an indolent winding down towards evening. Languorous and minimal as a cat, I barely moved from hour to hour except, in my sleep, to yawn and stretch, as if testing some notion of elasticity in my lungs and limbs. I would sleep, and wake, and sleep, dreaming that I was not in my white nest of a bed but outside, under a warm sky. At intervals I would find myself half roused as if I had been dreaming in a hammock under white trees in a white garden somewhere, or lying on a pillowy bank of white grass like rough toweling, lulled by the prinking of distant radio tunes, a barking dog. Then I would lie very still in case I really was in a garden and the neighbours might be walking by, talking about me, and might see me and cast worried smiles and call out with questions. Only half awake, I would wonder if I had just missed the ringing of a telephone, or I might think that I could hear one but that it didn’t matter. It soothed me to lie still and not even try to get to it, for surely it was too far away.
Then I would let myself slip further away, deeper into my whiteness, and the whisper of the sheets as I drew them up around my ears and over my head was the same sighing as the wind in the pink blossom branches overhanging the narrow road in April, and the beat of my pulse on the pillow under my throat the same sad faraway sound as the drip of rain on the colourless flowers under the trees and on the messages of loss and regret, washing them all away.
Later a telephone or a doorbell would ring again, but not here, nor anywhere very near. All sounds came from the faraway “out there” of a warm cul-de-sac afternoon of opened windows and summery gardens and neighbour greeting neighbour: dreamy calling voices, the tap of claws as dogs trailed along the sun-soft tarmac of the road, the tick of a pram or a child’s tricycle wheeled by under the shade of the hedge. I had to burrow away from the sounds of innocuous, innocent lives. A telephone would go on ringing, in another room or maybe in another house, maybe the one against whose wall a pruning ladder had just struck with a soft, wooden tock that travelled across the way and flicked off the side of the house opposite, then bounced back, the sound mingling with the clip of shears slicing high up under the eaves and an exuberant fluster of clematis fronds falling in clouds of black and green against the brittle blue of a July sky. It was bitter and pleasant to lie immersed in whiteness with eyes closed against the sight of any more events beyond my window. The police were still hunting for a killer. There was so much more than glass, now, between me and what went on out there.
Eventually, of course, I had to answer the telephone. I told Jeremy I hadn’t got more than a few minutes because I was already late, and he asked me what I could be late for at nine o’clock in the evening. I was startled by this question. I hadn’t been awake long. As usual I had waited until it was dark so that when I got up I didn’t feel I was leaving my bed behind so much as entering another embrace. I stepped out of my bedroom not to confront a darkening house merely unlit, but to encounter the night. It breathed on me as I walked downstairs, and it floated behind, lifting the hairs on my neck, swirling around my feet, hanging on my clothes. It swept ahead and spread into the spaces before me. I had lit some candles for the pleasure of the counterpoising dots of gold in the blanketing darkness, just enough light by which to watch the night filling my empty rooms. The telephone had rung as I was putting down the box of matches.
Jeremy said he wanted to know if I was all right and then began to tell me why he knew I wasn’t. As I listened, I nipped out the flame of a candle and dabbed the escaping drop of wax between my thumb and forefinger until it was a cool, curved disk with brittle edges, like a fingernail detached from a corpse. I nibbled it while I waited. It tasted of oil and smoke.
“Are you there? Hello? This is the whole problem. This is pure emotional blackmail.”
I didn’t speak.
“All right. But since you have at least answered the telephone, perhaps you would tell me how you are?”
“I am here. I’m the same.”
“Are you?… I mean, have you…how are…have things…” He couldn’t flatten down the brisk interrogative breeze fluttering through his voice, lifting the edges of words and sniffing underneath. What things? “Are you coping with the heat, for instance? It’s terribly hot.”
“I told you, I’m the same.” As I said that an ache was rising in my chest and my heart began a kind of bumpy climb up my ribs. I tried to concentrate on how safe I was, to remember that I was alone in a dark room and that although his voice was present, he wasn’t.
“I know you’re shutting yourself away in the house,” he insisted. “Gail says she and Hector haven’t seen you for weeks, she thought you were away. She’s been trying to rouse you.”
I nipped out the flame of another candle. Smoke from the sooty wick trickled up my nose and I coughed. “I’m all right.”
“Look, I’m concerned. I think you may be at risk of going into a depression. I know just the person you should see; I think I should fix you up with an appointment.”
I swallowed the fragments of wax nail. “There’s no need for that.”
“But you are reacting very extremely to this. I’d like you to see him.”
“I don’t want to see anyone.”
“I think you should. I’m worried. In fact, I think I’ll come round this weekend.”
“Don’t. You can’t. The thing is-I’m going away.”
“Going away? Where? What for?”
“I haven’t decided. But definitely somewhere. Possibly for the rest of the summer. Maybe longer.”
“Well, maybe a holiday’s not such a bad idea. Actually it’s a good idea. France, I suppose? Make sure I have the details before you go, all right?”
“All right.”
“Good. Well done. A long break, how I envy you. By the way, the weather! Have you been remembering about the basil?”
“The basil?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t watered the pots? They’ll be bone dry! The parsley’s probably had it already!”
“You’re worried about the herbs?”
“Well, I don’t see why everything has to go to the dogs. I did a lot of work on those pots. You said you wanted to make pesto.”
I hung up. I couldn’t draw the breath for a reply in case it encouraged any more; before I could stop him we would be on to greenfly and the lawn sprinkler. But in the end, Jeremy proved helpful. A conversation with him that I hadn’t wanted to have at all had shown me my way forward. I had not realized before I said it that I even wanted to go away, let alone that I intended to. But of course I did. It was the natural and only possible next step.
As per
Dear Ruth
Developments. As I’d got it off the wall and had no further use for it, I was aiming to put Della’s memorial effort out for the bin men. That should have been that. Only did I stumble or did I drop it (or was it shoddy goods to start with) but the glass in the frame broke. I managed to nick my hand and I’ve written a note to remind myself to avoid the hall in bare feet from now on. You never get every last shard up. Less floor room in hall now, anyway, as I’ve got a lot of stuff stored there, got it down from the attic where it’s no use to anyone, and I’m not undoing all my good work just because of a little broken glass.
But mindful that it was broken glass, I didn’t stick the memorial in the actual dustbin. I can just imagine the hoo-hah if one of the bloody bin men got so much as a scratch. They don’t seem to wear gloves anymore. So I just placed it carefully against the wall next to bin. Next day, bin’s been emptied, a minor miracle-AND left on its side halfway up the drive. That’s happened before, they just FLING it down and seem to expect thanks for it. Anyway, damn tribute’s still there against the wall, not even touched. That’s wilful dereliction. No doubt they’ll find some red tape or small print to justify yet more atrocious service, as per.
Damned if I’m giving in was my first thought, you’ll be pleased to hear. A sure sign I’m getting back to normal. Standing up for myself visà-vis obstinacy of bin men instead of going down in welter of self-pity. They are NOT getting away with it and I’ll damn well leave it there till they DO pick it up, we’ll see who prevails. I’m the taxpayer, as I’ll remind them. I’m staying at home these days, as it suits me to, but I certainly intend to be on the lookout and I’ll make my feelings known next time they deign to call.
So I left the bloody thing-and left also wheelie bin on its side because there’s a principle involved. Next thing is Mrs. M’s at the doorwith a bunch of freesias. She starts spouting some notion that you were fond of them. I couldn’t shed any light on that possibility, I said.
Then she asks, did she get me out of the bath and have I mislaid dressing gown-did I grab raincoat as first thing to come to hand? Mind your own business, I said.
Then she waved freesias and said she thought she should ask first, was it all right with me. Floral expressions of sympathy are all very well, she goes on, but she’s sensitive to the fact that somebody’s got to clear up in the end and she’ll never forget those sordid scenes at Kensington Palace post-Diana. They had to bring in those diggers you use after avalanches.
And they’re piling up already, she said, waving down the drive. Give it a week and it’ll be a nasty heap of compost obstructing the thoroughfare and encroaching onto the pavement (her very words). Not at all welcome, not very Cardigan Avenue. She says, if somebody slipped you could be liable. Maybe she should ask The Great Tony to tidy it up. I stood and let her go on. Maybe she thought she was making sense or she was expecting me to say something back. I was completely at sea.
Though clearly, she said, sniffing the freesias, others haven’t had the courtesy to check first. I was still baffled and said so. Then she said, you know, your poem out on the drive, the poem you left out for people to read. She’s got an excited look about her now.
So out we go (she insisted I get my slippers on first) and there at the end of the drive in front of Della’s tribute there are at least a dozen bunches of flowers including a handful of dead daisies tied with a bit of tinsel, “From Amy Watson (aged 5) at No. 48.” Just lying there where the wall of the drive curves out. Still baffled. Mrs. M says people like to leave a marker. She says people are just showing support in the best way they know. Showing support.
Ruth, you’re the one with the words-what does that mean? SHOWING SUPPORT? I’m not talking about the word itself, that’s plain enough,I mean, what does it MEAN? SUPPORT? A prop for a leaning wall? What’s the use of that if bricks have been pulled out from the bottom? It’s collapsing anyhow. Support will only put off the inevitable, it’ll end up a pile of rubble eventually.
So Mrs. M puts her flowers down with the rest and blows her nose, peers at my face and says now she sees me in daylight she wonders if I need a dermatologist. Then she launches into the usual-importance of eating properly etc and it’s no bother at all if she’s cooking for herself anyway, and later on she’ll just pop over with something.
See what’s going on? Freesia business was a ruse to get me out of the house and agreeing to all kinds of things, more hot dinners etc.
I am beginning to understand her motives. Probably been waiting to pounce for years and now with you gone she’s making her move. Think of the kerfuffle that would create. There’s no way to deal with that sort of thing except walk away, it’s the only language her kind understand. Which is exactly what I did.
Wish you were here.
Won’t you come again?
That’s all.
Arthur.