Colouring In (21 page)

So … I sit here. In my study. At my desk. Swing from right to left, left to right, in my comfortable old swinging chair. I know every note of the groaning song it sings when I move. I look out of the window. The pattern of leaves that straggles across it is just beginning to turn. Evenings are getting cooler. My best time to write, September till Christmas.

And I’ve nothing to write.

‘Why,’ I ask myself, ‘do I keep writing?’

It would be so much easier to give up, acknowledge that though it was a compulsion, I was no good at it. Well, perhaps that’s going too far. In all honesty I’m quite good, but just not good enough. My Oxford play was an inspired moment and, after all, undergraduate stuff: easier, among friends, especially those who want parts, to win praise. Pity it made me so vain. Pity its success encouraged me to keep trying. In a way I can laugh at myself. I’m simply one of those millions of people who fancy the idea of being a writer, and spend a great deal of their time and energy producing stuff that’s no good. Perhaps the hardest thing is to realise one’s own limited talent, the fact that however hard you try you’re never going to achieve whatever it is that’s suddenly recognisable, desirable. And just like those other writers and painters who put
painter
or
writer
on their passports, I’m reluctant to be defeated. I’ll go on hiding from myself the fact that I haven’t actually got what it takes. Is this masochism? No: because I enjoy the whole process so much. So maybe it doesn’t matter that none of the huge amount of work piled in my cupboard will ever be produced.

Except, it does. It’s a constant sadness.

The act of writing, I think I believe, is when you push aside the kind of daily thought we all have to live with, and allow something else to happen. There’s no denying that’s a process of extreme excitement. The idea that you’re trying to produce something that, as Conrad said, will make people hear, make them feel, above all make them see – is satisfying like nothing else. The fact that you’re not capable of achieving that doesn’t make any difference to the pleasure of trying.

I open the desk drawer and take out a cutting I’ve read so many times it’s close to falling to pieces. Balzac’s words, written in despair while struggling with
Cousin Bette
. ‘Great artists, true poets, do not wait for either commissions or clients, they create to-day, tomorrow, ceaselessly. And there results a habit of toil, a perpetual consciousness of the difficulties, that keeps them in a state of marriage with the muse, and her creative forces.’ As one who’s far from a great writer, I must suppose myself also bound in a habit of toil – a habit from which I don’t want to be free.

Goodbye to
Rejection
, but if and when a new idea comes, I shall start a new play.

I pick up the manuscript, add it to the piles of other rejections in the cupboard. No point hanging around here any longer: I’ll go down now and talk to Isabel. But I shan’t tell her what’s happened.

Not till I start again.

This was the best decision I could possibly have made. I lie in a bloody great four poster, cup of coffee by my side, bit of the huge Norfolk sky pale through the window. Slept like a baby, every night. What with all the walking, I suppose, and the breathing in of the famously soporific air.

When Carlotta rang a few minutes ago, I have to admit it was the first time I’d thought of London, her, Dan – though Isabel, of course, has flared constantly in my mind – fantasies, fantasies, superimposed over reeds, marsh, sand, sea.

Soon as I got here I became immersed in the place that I once knew and loved so well, but hadn’t re-visited for years. I didn’t give a damn about all I’d left: I just wanted to fade far away, dissolve and quite forget all the unease of returning to England, a changed London. I wanted simply to remember and remind.

Carlotta snapped my dreaming. She sounded quite cross with me at first. Well, I suppose I have been a bit thoughtless. Forgot to tell her I was off, didn’t ring. But in the end she was jolly, friendly. We went in for a bit of banter. I remembered her breasts. I suppose, given such a long period of abstinence, we could get it together. But there’d never be any pretence of loving Carlotta. All my love is for Isabel.

I finish my coffee, lie back. I want to re-think things before I get up. Be quite sure. Because I seem to have made a wild, mammoth, life-changing decision. I just want an hour or so more to re-affirm it isn’t a mistake. I don’t mind rash acts, but I like to be sure they are going to result in something good. Last night, convinced I’d done the right thing, alone I drank a lot of the kind of claret Dan would have enjoyed to celebrate my plan. So my rationalising was cloudy. The businessman within me says ‘Give yourself an hour or so longer, Bert old man, before you get up and set about signing things.’

First two days here were extraordinary. The village in which I was born, always a pretty place of Georgian houses round the green, seemed to have become a Mecca for the loud voiced Londoners in uniform clothes, their huge cars parked everywhere. To accommodate their tastes, the locals had provided what they wanted: gift shops, estate agents, shops selling over-priced clothes and tat, boutiques stuffed with ceramics and tiles, and Indian rugs (how Carlotta would sneer).

When I was a child you could buy rope, saddles, fishing gear, buckets, soap not fashioned into the shape of a Beatrix Potter character. It was an ordinary village scarcely frequented, out of season, by visitors. There was a butcher, a baker, a greengrocer, but no fancy shops and I don’t recall an estate agent. The simple pub had been transformed into the very expensive hotel I’m now staying in – good food, disgusting coffee. It all took some getting used to. I went through the turmoil of thinking well at least the local shopkeepers are making a good living, and how sad that so undiscovered a place had been ruined by crowds of rich people. I wandered about, amazed at all the shops that had disappeared, but re-appeared in some fancy guise. The only pleasure was a bookshop – the village had always been sadly lacking in books, so this calm new shop was an improvement. I saw no one I knew. Hardly surprising.

Then I drove off to the beach – various beaches, observed how the dunes had been eaten away, some beach huts were almost buried in the sand, a car park near the golf course was full as a supermarket car park. Still, I walked away from the crowds. I walked miles along the dyke, and out to the island, the north shore. The skeins of birds were the same: and the distances made miniature by the vast arc of sky. The wind, the faint smell of gorse. And I went to the staithe, down on to the hard where Tom and I used to go crabbing as children. Bits of bacon on lengths of string: foolish crabs whizzing towards them to meet their end in a small red bucket. God, the stink, a few hours later. There were boys, there, still crabbing. I turned back, looked at the Sailing Club – much enlarged now, with a bar and providing sophisticated sandwiches. I remembered so many summer nights when we’d go down to the sea’s edge to jump in the phosphorescent sea – girls holding up their skirts, boys soaking their jeans. Those millions of sparks of light riding on the small waves, frothing up at us when the waves broke with their small watery chords, a mystery to those of us who were no good at science, so weird and beautiful there was no room to think of holding a girl’s hand.

And the teenage dances – I remembered those. Being sick somewhere among the boats. Snogging some girl on the marsh path, I think in view of everyone – we couldn’t wait to walk a few yards till we were out of sight. When at last – we must have been clamped together for half an hour – we pulled apart, I saw she was holding, in her free hand, a pair of glasses. Tried to hide them. I also saw – now that the moon had appeared from behind a cloud – that she was far from pretty. One of my first conscious shaming acts, then: I ran away from her, never spoke to her again. I thought nothing of this bad behaviour. What a brat I must have been.

Yesterday morning I went back along the marsh path. Horses were tethered, swifts traced the grey sky, but I was alone. And a strange sense of being back, being home, overcame me. I had resisted returning to the house where I’d spent my childhood for fear of seeing change there: I didn’t want to see the flowerbed, where my mother had dropped dead among the lupins, re-planted. But I didn’t have to visit the old house to feel I’d come home. It occurred to me, in that strange and misty way that ideas come to one, that during the afternoon I would make use of the many estate agencies. See if they had anything on their books that might be appealing.

But I continued on my walk towards Brancaster: I’d decided to spend the whole morning walking. The small path runs close to a wall that divides the marsh from the few old houses that have been there for ages – no visible new buildings there, thank goodness. Doubtless not many people want to face the marsh in winter.

I came to the small flint and brick house I remembered well: a friend of Tom’s lived there. I looked over the wall. The gate to the garden – much improved – was open. An old woman, in bright yellow oilskins, was talking to a young couple. They didn’t look like locals. They followed her round the corner out of sight.

I stayed where I was, marvelling at the planting of the borders. A yellowhammer sat on a branch of buddleia, frightening away a goldfinch. It was obviously a garden full of birds: I’ve no recollection of its popularity with birds when I knew it as a child. My only real memories are of making camps in the apple trees. They were still there, heavy with fruit.

The old woman returned, alone. She waved at me. Shouted that she knew all along such people wouldn’t want it – she wouldn’t have let them have it anyway. Waste of time. She came right up to me. From her side of the wall that divided us, she looked out over the marsh with forget-me-not blue eyes. I knew she’d taken in the view so many times that her glance was no more than a confirmation of a picture that lived deep within her. Then she turned to me. Her scant white hair stood upright like a flag in wind. Her skin was battered and bronzed, but beneath her cheek bones were hollows so shallow they could have been pressed by the delicate thumbs of a potter. I could see that years ago she must have been beautiful.

‘Years ago,’ I said, ‘I used to play in your garden. The house belonged to the parents of my brother’s friend.’

At once her irritation, disappointment, whatever it was the young couple had caused her, disappeared. She looked interested.

‘Come and have a look round, you must,’ she said, ‘see what I’ve done over the years.’ Her accent was gently lilting, Irish.

I passed through the open gate and went in. We walked slowly along the main border while she explained how difficult it was to grow shrubs and flowers with any success in so unprotected a position: the word unprotected did something to my heart. I felt a kind of strange excitement – anticipation, perhaps – that was even stronger than the pleasure of so unexpected an encounter. Then I was invited in for a cup of coffee and a slice of carrot cake. She said she more or less lived on carrot cake, it was the only kind she could make. As we walked towards the house we introduced ourselves. Her name was Rosie Cotterman. She had to leave, now, she said, and move to a wing of her married son’s house in Oxfordshire. Health reasons, she added. I noticed she limped. Old age, bugger it. Leaving was the last thing she wanted to do.

‘I don’t want comfort,’ she said. ‘I want sea and sky.’

She reckoned she’d die pretty quickly once she’d left the marsh.

She mentioned this with no trace of self-pity or fear: it was, as she saw it, a simple fact. She herself would rather have died in her sleep during one of the harsh winters that can assail this coast, but her son had insisted she be in a more c
omfortable
place – she delivered the word with a sneer – and was
overseen.
That word, too, came out as a sneer.

She flung off her yellow oilskin and made her way through the detritus of the kitchen to the kettle. The place was a shambles: stained cracked walls, rust, dust, stalagmites of books and boxes and, everywhere, water colours. They hung tilted on the dun walls, they were stacked up on the floor. A pile of sketchbooks occupied a chair. At one end of the room was an easel, on which was propped a half completed painting of the marsh, and a table which bore a rubble of paints and brushes. Rosie Cotterman was an artist. I asked her if she made her living from her paintings. She turned from the stove, gave me a long, long, silent, stare.

‘There used to be a very constant buyer,’ she said at last. ‘That source of income has dried up now – but, yes, well, I sell the odd picture from time to time.’

I was pacing about, hoping not to appear either intrusive or too eager, eyes flitting along the quiet landscapes. She seemed to have inherited something of the understatements of the Norwich School: a kind of fierce delicacy that, to me, is the essence of Norfolk.

‘Could I be a buyer?’ I asked.

I pointed to three pictures that particularly appealed to me, but I would have been happy with any of them.

Rosie Cotterman staggered for a moment – hand searching for a stick she had mislaid, so she leant against the stove.

‘Is this possible?’ she asked at last. ‘Why now, which ones would you like? … But first,’ she said, and I could see she was barely able to contain herself, ‘we must have some refreshment.’

We sat in armchairs that might have been storm-tossed, so battered were their covers and exposed their springs. Old cushions with crocheted covers made no contribution to comfort. But there was a faint, summery warmth from the fire: the coffee was marvellously strong, and the carrot cake, which she sliced onto chipped and faded plates, was sublime. On a small table by Rosie’s chair were a pile of unopened brown envelopes, a pile of Agatha Christie paperbacks, and a new looking copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphosis.
She saw me looking at it.

‘I do enjoy reading the
Calydonian Boar Hunt
,’ she said. I sensed she was trying to contain herself, put off for a moment longer the overwhelming fact that I wanted to make a purchase.