At six a.m. on the 18th of January 1932, the blast of a dozen factory sirens over the roofs of Aldbury in Lancashire signalled the end of the night shift. A few moments later a crowd of chattering women and girls poured out from the Brightaglow Electric Apparatus factory into the raw winter morning. Among them was Evelyn Leigh. Slightly built, her girlish dimples and rosy complexion were offset by abundant dark curls that belied her twenty-nine years. She moved as if she were afraid of being jostled and her shoulders stooped with tiredness. But these days her dimples came and went more often, in private half-smiles. As the two hundred night workers clattered through the gates, their scarved and shawled heads bowed under the icy rain, Evelyn drew herself away from the tide and paused, looking up at the sky and letting her eyes adjust to the daylight.
It’s like a dirty leaky ceiling up there, she thought to herself, trying to focus. It did seem to be raining grey, as if an upstairs pipe had burst and the clouds were wads of wet newspaper stuffed into the dripping cracks. She screwed up her eyes but still she couldn’t make out anything clearly. The dirty rain just went on dripping down all around her, mucking everything it landed on. The walls of the factory were a wet dark blur, and beyond the gates nothing could be seen except for the mass of people moving through the street. Evelyn turned up the collar of her coat and walked slowly on towards the tram stop, blinking through the rain. She was tired and already her headscarf was soaked through.
Her eyes were stinging as they always did following the nine-hour shift in the Testing Division as a bulb checker, making sure that all sets of fancy lightbulbs were in working order before they were packed. It wasn’t onerous work but in the eighteen months she had been there Evelyn had found it increasingly exhausting. Still, there was no choice, you worked where there was work, and at least it was quieter than the weaving sheds in the mills, and you didn’t choke on the cotton dust.
The work wasn’t heavy. First she had to assemble a box from the pile of flat cardboard sheets at her feet, folding and fitting the tabs in a matter of seconds. Then she would take a set of lights from the never-ending supply, regularly topped up by the lads from Assembly, in a carton on the floor at her side. She would hold the bare end of the brown snake of flex and touch it against the socket on the bench, and as long as the whole string of bulbs flared in a blaze of coloured light, she would wind it around her crooked arm as she had been taught and pack it neatly in the box. The duds went into another carton for adjustments and retesting.
Every half hour, another lad from Dispatch would come along wheeling a deep basket on castors, and take the stack of packed boxes from the other side of her bench. A note would be made on her work sheet of the number of packed boxes she achieved and the supervisor’s beady eye would peruse those sheets at the end of each shift, so it was just as well she had mastered the folding and packing quickly so that she could do it without really looking. Dazzled by each flash, she could see nothing for several moments afterward, except a starry afterimage.
Not until the end of her shift would Evelyn look up from her work and notice the shimmering, glassy air of the Testing shed and the strange, hard, salty smell of electricity. The space above her head seemed laden with tiny shocks that sparked against the white glazed bricks lining the walls and glanced back like arrows. Like a headache waiting to happen, Evelyn thought. Then she would rub her eyes and long for the fresh air. Every one of the hundreds of bulb flashes would smoulder on in her vision for hours afterward, erasing detail as if they had made ragged red and grey holes like cigarette burns across the surface of her eyes.
Today, out in the freezing rain, she marched on briskly. She had more important things to think about than sore eyes. She would not let even the most dismal January she could remember interfere with her good spirits. After all, it would soon be spring, and she would be getting married. Then there would be the baby and so what if a few people talked? It wasn’t unheard of, a honeymoon baby coming early, most folk wouldn’t probe. The fuss wouldn’t last. It would be a shock for Mam, and Evelyn hated the thought of upsetting her, but she would make her understand and she’d come round in time. Stan would settle down fine and there would be nothing more to worry about.
As she walked, a voice from behind interrupted her thoughts. “Oy, Evelyn Leigh, hang on, can’t yer!” She turned and waited for her friend, Daphne Baker, to catch up. “Heck, you’re in a hurry!” she puffed. “Where’s the fire?”
A grinning Daphne came lumbering towards her in her shapeless coat and tight stockings, careless as always of her lack of elegance. She had inherited, as she said herself, “me Dad’s build and me Mam’s legs, worse luck.” It was true that she had his strong, square shoulders and short arms, and her legs were, like her mother’s, almost elephantine below the knee. There was a medical name for it that Daphne had told Evelyn once and she’d forgotten, but a medical name didn’t mean there was a remedy. Daphne laughed it off, as the only girl in a family with three teasing brothers, Paul, Colin, and Jem, had learned to do. “I’m as strong as an ox,” she said. “And who looks at your legs if you’ve got a nice friendly face?”
The two friends linked arms and made their way to the tram queue where they stood patiently. There was no letup in the weather. The tram came, a dark shape appearing out of greyness, and it struck Evelyn that it too had lost its colour, as if the rain had washed off its dark green paint and it had soaked away down the street drains. On board they had to stand as usual for the first few stops, but once past Coronation Mills they found spaces to sit. The motion and noise of the tram made talking difficult. Daphne brought out her cigarettes.
“Fancy one of mine?” she said, offering the pack to Evelyn.
“Oh, no, not for me, ta all the same,” she said.
“Please yourself. Still off the cigs, are you?” Daphne lit one for herself and blew out the match with her first exhalation of smoke.
Evelyn turned away, trying to take her mind off feeling sick. She knew every bend and halt of the tram route by now and she didn’t need to see through the grimy windows to know where they were. Soon they would be at Canal Street, the stop where occasionally the odd woman got on. Not that she was all that odd, not at first glance, she was just what Evelyn thought of as “different” and what Daphne called “not all there.” She blended in all right as far as clothes and general appearance went but you could tell she wasn’t from Unsworth’s, where the other people getting on at Canal Street worked. For one thing, she wasn’t regular enough, only boarding the tram on maybe two days in every six. Evelyn supposed the woman worked casual hours, maybe as a char. Daphne said she’d heard from somebody that she’d lost a son and had funny turns. She was generally considered to be harmless but definitely not all there. Nobody seemed to know her name.
Not that she drew attention to herself, rather the opposite. On the tram, whether she was standing or sitting, she would close her eyes and a smile would settle on her lips. She’d stay like that for the entire journey. The tram would creak along, jolting at every stop and juddering on again.
Now and then somebody might address a remark to her. “Mind if I get past you?” or “ ‘Scuse me, is anybody sitting there?” and the woman would usually reply quite sensibly. But not once would her eyes open or her smile falter.
Today she got on and took the seat opposite Evelyn. Her eyes weren’t closed in sleep or obvious tiredness, or squeezed tight against something unpleasant. As usual they were just shut and smooth, though her face was blotchy with cold. Her smile, even on her wintry, pinched face, made Evelyn think not for the first time that she knew well enough where she was, in a smoky tram surrounded by drab, glum passengers, and had just decided to spare herself the sight of it.
But today as Evelyn watched, all at once the smile vanished and the woman’s eyes flew open in agitation. She blinked round the tram for a moment, her mouth working furiously. Evelyn was ashamed in case the woman had seen her staring. She tried to look away, but it was too late.
“Bloody look at it! I tell yer! Bloody look at me!” the woman suddenly shouted. She waved a greyish frozen hand towards the rain-streaked window. “Look! It’s enough to make you, make you… it’s enough to make you…”Her voice tailed off and the hand dropped in her lap. Her lips were trembling. People exchanged glances. Composing herself, she sighed and spoke again, quite calmly this time, and to nobody in particular.
“I’ll tell you. Look at it. It’s enough to make you go to bed New Year’s Eve and not get up afore Easter.” Apparently satisfied, she surveyed the carriage, smiled, folded her hands together, and closed her eyes.
A few people looked around nervously and one or two, including Evelyn, nodded. A gruff voice further down the tram muttered,“Aye, don’t blame you, missus.”
Daphne nudged Evelyn. “Only sensible thing she’s ever said. She most definitely is not all there,” she whispered. “Look. Get her now. Butter wouldn’t melt!”
“Maybe she feels better for getting it off her chest.”
“Maybe. Wouldn’t mind it myself, sleeping New Year till Easter. Wouldn’t be missing anything, would I?”
Evelyn smiled. “Rum kind of Sleeping Beauty you’d make, Daphne Baker.”
Daphne laughed wryly. “Aye, but I’d catch up on my sleep, wouldn’t I? You’d die of old age waiting for Prince Charming round here. I’m past all that, anyway. Getting too old, me.”
“Do you mind? I’ll thank you to remember I’m two years older than you, young lady.”
“Aye, but you don’t look it. And you’ve got your Stan. You’re not stuck on’t ruddy shelf like me, not that I’m bothered. They’re all the same, men.”
“Oh, Daphne Baker, you are not over the hill. You’ll see. Somebody’ll be along and sweep you off your feet. Mr. Right.”
Daphne grunted. “I’m not worried. I’m better off. At least you won’t catch me at a man’s beck and call. I’m nobody’s unpaid skivvy. You’re a fool, Evelyn Leigh, getting married. Come on, this is us.”
After they’d clambered off the tram at Station Road, Daphne had said “Ta-ta” and set off on the short walk to her home in Chadderton Street. Evelyn let out a deep sigh. Daphne could be so tactless. And she only pretended not to care. To hear her talk you’d think she’d seen a hundred Januarys, not twenty-seven. She was too young to come out with half the things she said, but that was what Daphne was like nowadays, bitter. She was becoming a bitter old spinster, a type all too recognizable since the terrible Great War, which had taken so many of the young men of their generation. Now there were simply too few to be the sweethearts and husbands of all the women who remained, many of whom were now resigned to spinsterhood, all their hopes of youthful romance and wife and motherhood dashed. Evelyn knew she was one of the lucky ones.
She turned to gaze in the direction Daphne had taken but she couldn’t see her. After only a few yards the walls and pavements of Station Road melted into a thick blur. She rubbed her eyes and set off towards Roper Street, protesting inwardly at Daphne’s words that were still echoing in her head.
It wasn’t true that getting married meant ending up somebody’s unpaid skivvy. She wouldn’t. It wasn’t true that men were all the same. Stan was different. Stan didn’t want a skivvy. He was principled. He believed in equality and the rights of the working man. And this January was different from other Januarys, not freezing and colourless at all if you only looked a little deeper, beneath the cold, ashy surface of the world.
27 Cardigan Avenue
The whateverth May
Dear Ruth
I’m not sure these letters are right. Carole says there isn’t a right or wrong, the idea is I just write what I want, whatever I’m thinking. I can express anything I feel. Including anger, she added.
Write what I want? What does that mean? I said to her, You don’t appreciate the situation, Ruth’s the one for the words, not me. I’m no good with words. Not the letter writing kind, anyway. Oh, give me rainfall bar charts for Derbyshire since the second world war or an ornithological distribution map of the British Isles and I’ll bore for Britain on those, I said. I’m on safe ground there. But as I told Carole, you were the English teacher, I was only Geography. I looked out some Overdale photos and showed her. Even found some Overdale poems your kids did.
Carole won’t let it go though, she says of course I don’t have to if I don’t find it helpful, but she’d like me to persevere with the letters. Just write whatever I’m thinking, express anything I’m feeling. It’s well known, she said, to be a useful tool in grief management.
Huh, I can’t even think straight so how can I feel straight? Let alone write it down? I told her, Ruth’s the one with the words, or aren’t you listening, I said.
Maybe you are angry, she says. You don’t need qualifications or special language to say you’re angry. Or to write to your wife. Just use ordinary words.
Use ordinary words to say what? I don’t see how telling you about window cleaner, pressure cooker etc can be a useful tool for anything. I never was the writer. Nor the talker. You were. What would the listener have to say after all this time?
Carole says whatever I write it’s for you, not her, but I asked her toread this just the same. She thinks it’s a start. I asked her to leave. Told her I was tired.
Well, no more for now.
Arthur.
Ps later-STILL no sign of pressure cooker yet.
I would rather omit this. I observe it now only reluctantly and without hope of forgiveness, because nothing should be omitted. Though I have braced myself time and again to go back over it, as I might make myself watch a film with shocking scenes that I thought I ought to try to understand, I don’t remember, to begin with, that I did actively decide to close the garage doors behind the wrecked car. Until that day I had always left the garage doors open for Jeremy’s return in the evening, but this day was unlike any other, and certainly I was now quite unlike myself. So I can’t know if my reason for closing them was to conceal my shame, or the evidence of the collision, or because some part of my mind had already planned what was to happen next. Was I at that point angry or frightened, rational or deranged? I must in some way have chosen to do what I did next but I have no idea if I was in control of my actions or not. I can’t locate a memory of anything as deliberate as motivation, so any finer distinction such as the shading between compulsion, intention, calculation, and desire simply has no meaning for me in this instance.
I was aware nevertheless of a single swift moment of puzzlement, and intense regret, that I should be reaching up to pull a hammer, a crowbar, and a heavy chisel from their hooks on the garage wall at roughly the same time as I would ordinarily have been lifting this or that delicate paintbrush-a tiny, fairylike bunched tail of sable, itself so exquisite-and stroking another smoky, barely pigmented sweep of colour across one of my diluted studies of petals and stamens, or butterflies. But that was all. I did not pause. I did not consider, let alone reconsider. I wasn’t thinking at all.
I didn’t stop until the bonnet was hammered in, the doors were smashed, and my feet were crunching through the orange and red chips of glass littering the floor from the busted lights. The front bumper was split and hanging off, the grilles were shattered, the tyres ripped. The windows and windscreen had gone except for a frill of broken glass. I was gasping and sweating, and when I paused to rest I caught my reflection in the window in the back wall. I could see I had changed. My eyes were larger and brighter but I wasn’t sure if that made me look younger and prettier, or just insane. Then I noticed a smell of fruit and petrol, and a chinking sound, quieter than silence, as a few bits of glass dripped from the windscreen like little cubes of melting ice and landed on the bonnet and dashboard and shopping bags. I took a deep breath and thought, Oh, thank God. It’s over, thank God. Whatever it is, it’s all done now. It’s all stopping.
I was wrong. I raised the crowbar in my hand and lowered it gently, gently. Then I heard myself scream. I lifted the bar again and smashed it down hard again on the bonnet, a number of times, and I followed that with several blows of the hammer. Then I doubled over and yelled, but I couldn’t hear myself above the din I’d made. It was like standing inside a splitting bell. I straightened and tossed the bar and the hammer onto the roof of the car. They banged across it, slithered off, and clanged on the floor. Then I reached in through the ragged passenger window, opened the glove compartment, found the condom wrapper, and placed it carefully in the center of the pitted roof. I could hardly see. After a few moments the noise changed into a kind of fuzzy echo that set my skull vibrating and shivering under my hair. A distant ringing started up from even deeper and lower inside me. I stood watching the loose bits of glass hanging in the windscreen until they stopped swaying and glinting.
When all was still and quiet again, I wheeled from the corner of the garage an old barbecue we hadn’t used for years (too basic for Jeremy now, just a metal basin on legs) and brought it to the middle of the floor. I returned to the shelves and rummaged until I found what I needed and then, using some sticks of kindling and a slosh of liquid lighter fuel, I set a small fire going in the barbecue.
Then I reached into the back of the car and gathered up the pages I’d picked off the road. I began automatically to put them in order, as if my destroyed, methodical self was struggling obstinately to discover some system at work in all this mayhem. I concerned myself only with the numbers. Whatever the words were about, I didn’t have a complete set. The beginning was missing; the first page I had was number 94 and was headed Chapter 15: 1962 Christmas Eve.
One by one I fed them into the flames and watched them flare and blacken and turn fragile and silvery. The garage filled with hot smoke and a choking smell, but the rhythmic lift and turn of each page as it met the flames soothed me. By the time the last one was collapsing into the pile of rectangular grey veils, I was quite calm again.
27 Cardigan Avenue
Tuesday
Dear Ruth
On entering spare bedroom couple of days ago, saw someone had been in. Whole place ransacked. Got a bit of a shock, I got straight on the phone.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t in a panic. Didn’t even ring 999. The policeman that’s been before left his card by phone and he told me I could ring him anytime I needed updating. So I did. When did the police start getting business cards?
For that matter, when did they start talking about “needing updating”? Made me sound like a 5-year-old car.
He wasn’t in, of course. I got some girl. She wanted to know all kinds of stuff. When had I last left the house unattended, did I find the property secure on my return, any signs of forced entry, etc.
In the course of trying to accommodate her, I cast my mind back. I hadn’t been out since I don’t remember when. Had to get rid of her, so I said someone was at the door and put phone down.
Realized it was me, you see! A while back, searching for pressure cooker-not sure when-I must’ve upset all the packing. In haste to find it, I suppose I hadn’t noticed stuff falling all over the place. Or maybe I was just too frustrated by wild goose chase after pressure cooker to care, because I STILL haven’t found it. Everything from the cases is now scattered everywhere, sorry to say, including a great deal of your paper. Was surprised you’d decided to take so much of that gobbledygook (your word for it!) of yours with you, given how heavy paper weighs.
It’s all very colourful isn’t it, cruise wear. I can’t see either one of us in those colours now. I wonder I ever could.
Got to go.
After midnight or thereabouts
Got a bit upset there. To continue: on day after said phone call (seeabove), my policeman came again. No headway on your case-if you ask me they’ve given up. But can’t fault them on promptness this time. Just follow-up, he said. That girl I spoke to had left a few loose ends, obviously. I let him check the spare room window but he didn’t say much, only gave me more advice on locks.
Later on comes yet another, the woman from Victim Support. I’ve a feeling she’s been before. I don’t register faces much these days. She was the last straw-I let rip. Left her in no doubt what I thought of the hit-and-run bastard. She was quite shaken, I believe, didn’t stay. Good riddance.
They’re all co-ordinators of something, these visitors. Units, networks, support groups, you name it, they coordinate it. Must mean I’m getting the top people. Anyway I’m inundated. Keeping curtains closed doesn’t do a lot to deter.
Especially not Mrs. Marsden across the road. She pops over with alarming frequency. Is she a Mary or a Rosemary, I’ve forgotten. No, I never did know, never had cause. No good asking you now.
I can’t think what else to say so I will close now.
Bye, Arthur
After the smoke died away, my first thought was incongruously, and in the circumstances I felt unforgivably, exactly what Jeremy’s would have been. Although perhaps it wasn’t altogether strange; perhaps it was at least explicable, after more than twenty years’ assimilation of his honed, palliative urges, that suddenly I very badly wanted a cup of tea. I walked slowly from the garage, rubbing my eyes.
I entered the kitchen and was at once surrounded by the smell of clean house, mildly leafy with an undertow of carpet and new bread and paint. It was as pervasive as a sound; it was the layered, burnished scent of a house not merely recently cleaned but kept, on principle, piously and improvingly stainless, as if every day I sprayed some attar of the domestic virtues-Order, Constancy, Thoroughness-into all the corners and then went round with a cloth. The worktops were wiped and shining, oranges and lemons (more than I needed, acquired for the look of them) glared from a bowl sitting next to a stack of green tins. I could see my obedient herbs flourishing in their terracotta containers on the decking outside the kitchen window; I could see sparrows and finches swinging at the birdfeeder. Above the slow tack-tack of the kitchen clock and the rising purr of the kettle I could hear a mower growling a few lawns away.
It was no good. I knew how smug and how fugitive it all was: the arranging of fruit in a display of bogus generosity, the offhand cherishing of little wild birds, the taming of gardens. It amounted to no more than the application of an unimaginative respect for hygiene, habit, sentiment and surface. And I knew now the dangers of the fatal absence of spirit that that concealed, and how flimsy it was as armour against it; I felt afraid and nauseated, and I began to shake again. Glass will splinter as easily as it will send back a polished shine. Bodies tear, blood spills. I had just wielded a metal bar as lightly as I would flick a duster. I rushed to the back door and got myself outside just in time to be copiously sick into a pot of marjoram.
When I was calm once more, I wandered through the house. I think I was memorizing it as it was, because as soon as Jeremy came home everything would change again, though it had changed already, and I couldn’t detect what it was in the silence now that prevented it from being peaceful. What was it I couldn’t touch or see or smell or taste or hear that charged the air in every room with aggression? There had always been something about our house that made it difficult even to raise a voice. I had always kept loud noises at bay, along with dust, upsetting odours, and objects challenging to the eye. The very walls and carpets and furniture seemed to be in on it, contributing their so co-ordinated, so understated solidity and hush to the solidity and hush of our marriage and its traditional patterns, its established and exquisitely intimidating courtesies. It was as if the house itself knew that Jeremy disapproved of shouting. Did I? I approved of his disapproval, certainly. Shouting meant being not just too loud, but in the wrong. Solid, hushed people such as we were did not resort to shouting. Until today, shouting was the worst thing I had ever had to apologize to Jeremy for.
It was nearly seven o’clock when I heard the Renault turn in to the drive. I sat waiting in the sitting room. He came in from the garage and stood in the doorway, staring. He was holding the condom wrapper. We were both horribly embarrassed. I tried to say something, but whatever it might have been came out in a voice that I hadn’t used all day and was no more than a whisper. Jeremy’s mouth opened and closed. Then he burst into tears and turned away from me. I heard his sobs juddering as he rushed upstairs. A few minutes later came the unmistakable bumping and scraping of drawers and cupboards being emptied, and then all was quiet. About half an hour after that another vehicle, one of those scaled-down, tarted-up versions of a jeep, drew up and parked outside. The driver didn’t get out.
Jeremy struggled downstairs with our two biggest suitcases and left them in the hall. Then he marched into the sitting room and placed my car keys on the mantelpiece. Though his eyes were red, his face was again smooth, fixed with a look of aloof regret that I imagined he used for the relatives of dead patients. A heart might have stopped forever while Jeremy was in charge of keeping it beating, but that rueful, authoritative half-smile avowed that his part in any such death would always be blameless. He looked as if he knew he wasn’t in danger of shouting at me, and was proud of it.
He made a short speech about the rest of his belongings, every word of which I forgot at once. Then he paused to compose himself with some learned breathing technique, before speaking again. It didn’t take him long to deliver himself of the reasons why he was leaving me. He had tolerated years of “emotional neglect” and now (and apparently coincidental to my discovery of the condom wrapper) he had had enough. I didn’t take in the details of what he told me about his new living arrangements, which were, of course, intricately bound up with the circumstances of the driver of the waiting jeep-ette. I was too taken aback by the realization that he thought that all of this was happening because of his affair. My hammering his yellow Saab convertible pride and joy to bits, his insistence that he was leaving me: these were what he thought important. Because his affair hadn’t crossed my mind for hours, I said I simply didn’t understand why he was getting so worked up. I suppose that was what made him slam the door on his way out.
I climbed upstairs to the landing window to see him go. The front path was empty. He must have paused under the porch, maybe to wipe his eyes in the silence after the slam, more likely to check he had everything he needed. Suddenly I couldn’t bear to watch, and I closed my eyes. Then came the sound of his feet on the path and the trundle of the cases. Of course he was in a hurry to be gone. Of course they both must have been; I heard the car start before the opening and closing of the boot and the passenger door were quite done with. I opened my eyes only at the burr of the engine at the end of the cul-de-sac, when they would be out of sight. I imagined the disappearing wisp of exhaust as they turned onto the main road and I knew that to Jeremy, as he was driven away, I was invisible now, not just physically but in the sense of ceasing to be anywhere at all, even in his mind. To Jeremy, I was not present, nor sentient; I was barely living. I was nowhere. I did not stand at this window, I did not listen, or grieve, or wonder.
But I stayed there for a long time, collecting and ordering in my mind the scrape of feet and squeak of wheeled luggage, the cough of an engine, a slammed car door, the distant mingling of traffic and birdsong above the roofs of the cul-de-sac. Sounds overheard have a deliberate music, a pacific and sequential logic that’s absent from the noise of unwitnessed behaviour. Jeremy’s departure played sounds that I might want to remember one day and run over in my head, like a tune.
27 Cardigan Avenue
[date]
Dear Ruth
Did you see the car before it hit you?
This may sound harsh but Carole misses the point. I didn’t ask her inside the last couple of times she visited and again yesterday she’s on the doorstep.
This time saying she’s a bit concerned. SHE’S a bit concerned??? I try to tell her I STILL have somehow to establish whereabouts of the pressure cooker so I’m MUCH too busy to sit about talking to her. She says if I don’t want to talk, would I like her just to sit with me a while. Well, what’d be the good of THAT, forgive me for asking. That’d be an even bigger waste of time (see what I mean about missing the point?). She forgets there’s a great deal to be sorted out. Especially given the suddenness. This whole situation is all up in the air and somebody has to get a hold on matters. I have to raise my voice to get her to see that.
Next and don’t ask me how, she’s over the threshold, saying the pressure cooker seems to “represent a more important loss” and does it have special associations, and I shout yes, associations with Irish Stew start to finish in thirty minutes, veg. in under two. Or has she never heard of TIME AND ENERGY SAVING?
When did you use it last? I seem to remember it was a wedding present.
Well hoping it turns up
Arthur
On the day after the accident I awoke to a morning full of dangers. In the shower, water broke around me like beads of wet glass on stones and my throat stiffened with steam and soap fumes. I emerged with something undesirable still clinging. I got dressed and went downstairs masquerading as a person who belonged here, a person who might have a legitimate connection with a tranquil house in Beaulieu Gardens on another sunny spring day. When I put on the kettle and poured cereal for myself, my hands shook.
I wondered if I could reinstate a former manageable smallness as the order of the day. I knew very well the advantages of going through the motions; if I didn’t do it anymore, what would I go through instead? If I didn’t, how was I going to become again what I had been for so long: absorbed, unseen, relieved?
But the air in every room I entered was suspended like breath held in anticipation of something splintering. I tried to think about housework, but I struggled to remember how I had ever been able to touch ordinary objects, for what might they become, in my hands? I could render anything and everything in the house lethal. Daylight burned on the edges of furniture, revealing them as unbearably raw. Ordinary colours punctured my eyes. I wandered the floors in fear of scalpels hidden under surfaces, of straight lines turning into blades. The emptiness of rooms glimpsed through doorways terrified me; I was afraid to walk under the lintels for fear of what I might bring in with me.
Yet I did not blunder from room to room, clumsy with distress. Despite what I felt, despite what I had done, I moved smoothly and did not disturb the quiet. It seemed I was still to appear, at least, to be part of the unchanged surface of the world. But I could never resume my old harmless life, not if I were also to be part of the new day upon whose ration of catastrophe the sun had already risen, just as it had yesterday. Because of me, a woman was dead. Somewhere, a family was in ruins. I was the one who deserved to be dead, they would think, and I didn’t know why I wasn’t; it seemed implausible, incredible even, that I should be able to go on breathing while disgust and hatred, justifiably without limit, mounted against me. They would want me caught and punished, of course; they would want me to suffer. The search would be already under way. Should I not simply give myself up? But whatever happened then, I wouldn’t pay enough for the woman’s life. I could never suffer as they did. Something was inadequate about the notion that any consequence less than my own death could counterweigh for hers. Something was askew, simply, in my remaining alive. It was a mistake, an oversight that should be corrected.
Anything could happen. I went back to bed and stayed there, frightened of the purposeless way angles fill houses, frightened of all the minutes and hours of light that fill a single day, flaunting themselves, so brightly coloured and jagged with risk, so available for the infliction of damage. I closed my eyes until it was dark.
When night came I got up. The moon reached in through the windows and painted luminous squares across the floors, lit the landing and stairs, laid a white path along the kitchen tiles to the back door. I went outside and kneeled on the ground. I was thinking of nothing, except to wonder if such emptiness of mind is felt by those about to be executed. Damp needles of cold pricked my legs and I pressed my palms down and stretched forward and rested my forehead on the grass, pushing it into the earth till my head was numb. May I not please also be dead? The mushroomy sop of the ground, an ancient, resurrected smell from deep below, seeped into me. I pressed my skull harder and harder into the gritty slide of soil and moss and worm cast, I tore up lumps of turf and rubbed them into my head, as if I could grate myself clean. I had to resist a desire to stuff my mouth with handfuls of mulch. I wanted the earth to soak in through my hair and skin and replace me, cell by cell, and if I couldn’t be replaced I wanted to disintegrate.
Of course, none of these things happened. The garden all around me trembled in the wind. If it had been daylight I might have panicked and run away, but the moon shone and so I stayed, and soon, from the shadows, differing shades of dark emerged and receded, revealing themselves as wavering shapes: soft pillowy mounds and clusters of improbable, irregular domes. After a while my eyes were able to judge more than the simple presence of the trees and shrubs. Under the moon they had become vessels for hoarded light. Around their floating penumbrae I perceived something of their daytime solidity and distance, yet they imposed themselves so gently on my sight, wearing their white haloes like ghosts hinting palely at previous selves. They were so benevolent and colourless. I couldn’t close my eyes against their beautiful absence of colour.
The dark and the moonlight shimmered together; leaves hung as chill as the scent of the grass. I released my breath slowly. Again and again I ran my hands through the earth. Whatever might once have been buried here, and however long ago, and whether one night to be exhumed or not, to be seen again or never again uncovered, it all came to the same. All the uncountable particles once so fantastically joined up as to be living people were drawn to this end, reduced to one sodden compound with its familiar, equalizing, watery smell. Every glance and touch and hope, every driving beat that stabbed the heart when love failed, was atomized, finally. I thought of the woman’s body softening and darkening, all its fleshly dreams and shocks melting into some patch of cool degenerative earth solemnly breached and laid open to take her.
I covered my face with my hands and remained there, kneeling on the grass. Time tucked its head under its white wings; all the time in the world lay floating on the lake of the night. I could stay here undisturbed until daylight came bobbing at the edges, bright with malice.
27 Cardigan Avenue
Dear Ruth
Carole’s been again.
I let her in just for the sake of peace. Was going to show her the latest on letter writing front but realized in nick of time I couldn’t let her read the last one. I’m not especially enamoured of the woman but there’s no need to hurt her feelings.
She seemed interested in my big cleanup of attic, drawers, cupboards etc. She did have to wade through a bit of stuff to get to a chair but even so I don’t think it’s quite her business to start picking papers up off the floor. MY papers off MY floor. Papers mainly yours in fact, a load of bumf looking like bits of poems, but you know what I mean. It’s the principle of it. Snatched them away from her before she could get a look-see.
She means well but how can anyone else have a clue what all this is like?
However, getting off the point. Which is-as I’m not up to a regular laundry day, finding myself short on socks and whatnot, I raided spare room and put on some of the new stuff. Can’t say it appeals, but it’s a criminal waste all that new cruise wear hanging about in there getting trodden and crumpled. You’ll remember I was forced to undo all your packing looking for pressure cooker. Of which still no sign, by the way.
Spare room still a mess but my new look is up and running!
I had on a green shirt and that light blue sweater with the anchor when Carole came. She seemed a bit shaken by the change of style.
I tried to make a joke about it. I was telling her about the cruise and then I remembered she’s from CRUSE! You know, those coping with loss people, they had a fund-raiser not that long ago. Carole takes it all very seriously anyway. Delivered a stern lecture on the word “cruse”-did I know it’s an Old Testament word for a widow’s jar of oil that never ran dry, blah blah, the point being that support was there as long as it wasneeded? That’s just the kind of thing Ruth would know, I told her. Then she wanted to know if I cry much. Nosey parker!
Still, changing subject again, can report headway of sorts. Often as not I see Mrs. Marsden from across the road coming out to catch Carole just as Carole’s going, holding her up chatting, not very considerate of her.
Anyway, the Mary or Rosemary dilemma solved! Not that she minded me not calling her anything, or not talking at all, but it preyed on my mind. So, brainwave!-now I call her Mrs. M, in a light-hearted manner of course.
She noticed the new look too! She agreed apricot was unusual on a man except for golf but she said these slacks were really a kind of burnt apricot. She said you had a good eye for a bit of style, in a quiet sort of way. Then her eyes filled with tears.
Mrs. M’s bossy. Says she keeps her front room gas fire on low till May so I should do the same. Oh, and getting huffy with it-she found something or other of hers in our fridge when she was throwing out the milk (gone smelly, she found it at the back) and got all offended. Didn’t I care for either her leek and potato soup or her sausage casserole? I said, Not really and you can get rid of them along with the milk while you’re at it, thank you very much. Then she peered at me and asked did I have an allergy, my forehead seemed to be breaking out. Psoriasis? Or maybe eczema? I pointed out it wasn’t yet against the law for a man to scratch if he had an itch and if my appearance offended that was her problem, not mine. If looks could kill.
Bye for now
Arthur
Ps Suppose I can’t let Carole see this letter either. So it’s just you and me then. Nicer, I suppose.
PPS Am not letting her see any of that story you wrote, either, don’t worry. Private, between you and me.