In Another Country (11 page)

 

19 January

 

Brian has returned from the mainland disappointed. He did not advance at all in his dealings with his wife. On the contrary, she put him further off. She agrees that Amy and Zoë should visit him at Easter, if they want to, but he will have to fetch them and bring them back. She thinks if she came over herself it would put her in a false position, by which she means she doesn't want anybody here supposing their marriage might be on the mend. When he got nowhere ‘in that department' Brian thought he could perhaps approach her through his seventeen questions. But there he was sorely mistaken. She refused point blank to answer a single one of them. And when—very gently, in his opinion—he suggested she owed him that at least, the questions being so important to him, she became quite hostile and told him straight her childhood was none of his business, which he found very hurtful because when they were courting he had believed she shared it with him. In the end she said, You don't own me, Brian, and after that all he could do was go back to his B&B. The girls were already in bed by then and he didn't dare call next morning and say goodbye to them as they left for school.

Now Brian hardly knows how he'll find the courage to start the new season and be cheerful with the guests. At the thought of it he feels very low indeed. He knows the rich man who owns the place will want to see a big improvement on last year, though money for most people, even the kind who stay in his hotel, is still quite tight. Brian panics when he thinks of the effort he will have to make. And he won't find much recreation in his family history. He feels almost prohibited from doing it by his wife's hurtful words.

 

Eddie came again. He brought me a fistful of white narcissi and nodded his heavy head in great delight and satisfaction towards the vase. They scent my room. But the best was that, having presented them to me and when I'd filled the vase with water from my can and set the flowers in and we had both admired them, then he sat down on my bed in complete stillness, all his usual small chunnering noises ceased, he became entirely quiet and calm. So much so that after a while I smiled at him and resumed the writing he had interrupted with his visit. And that is how his mother found us when after an hour or more she came looking for him. We were quiet. Eddie likes coming here, she said. He'll miss you when you leave.

 

Nests from last year, or from several years ago, held in the clasp of the new branches that sprout around the place where the tall upright was lopped. Once or twice I've found the skeletons of fledglings in them, delicate remains in the well-made and deeply protected home. Brambles that climb from the earth through twenty feet of dense euonymus or pittosporum, wriggling through and finally attaining what they were born always to seek: the light. My silver ladder stands in the grey-green fall of branches, twigs and leaves. The leaves quiver like a haul of fishes dying brightly in the sunlight on the net. And the wind, almost every day the wind, bustling through the unkempt crest that I will lop. I rob the wind of a resistance by which it makes the passage of itself felt.

 

21 January

 

I set the female bust on the workbench under the lamp and looked at it. A few more hours of work and she would have been there, manifest, come out of the wood, become real out of the idea of her. Even thus far emerged, with her roughed-out face and plait of hair and the swelling that would become her breasts, she has some force. I have sharpened all his cutting and gouging tools and wrapped them in an oily cloth that will keep then ready instantly for use. I sat to one side on a packing case and looked. I examined my hands. Really, I might have some chance of bringing her further out. She would never be wholly there, I don't have the gift for that. But some way, nonetheless, towards being there. And I'm not forbidden. Mary has said as much. Still I can't or shan't.

 

22 January

 

Most nights I sleep at once, then wake and see that hardly two hours have passed. Waking so soon, the night still to be got through, I fill up with disappointment and anxiety. I've slept worse and worse since I went away from you. In the night, lying awake, the night impossibly long, I undo all the good I did or that was done to me during the day. Every elation, I deflate. Every kindness, I convert to dust. Every insight, joy in a thing, hope of more such things, I worry soon to death. Truly, I can summon up a face that smiles at me and in whose eyes I see myself a welcome friend and I can turn that face and smile to deceit and mockery at once. Then I assemble all the arguments against me. I accumulate the proof that I'm not fit to live. Some nights the fear is such it drives me out of bed, out of the little warmth and comfort and homeliness I have assembled around me under a wooden roof and between four wooden walls, and I walk out through the lovely opening of my blessed horseshoe of tamarisks and climb the dune and huddle in a dead man's army greatcoat and stare at the sea and hearken to its noise. And after some time, under the pulsing stars, the lighthouse winking mechanically every fifteen seconds, it all feels like a foolishness, the despair itself not worth the candle, the thought of killing myself seems laughably self-important, and all I want is my bit of warmth and shelter under the blankets and some sleep.

 

23 January

 

An enlivening tempest, the winds rode in on the risen backs of the Atlantic and I went out among the tumuli and showed my face and opened my arms to them and tried to breathe their force into my lungs. Just north of here, in a cavernous hole, enough timber has lodged to build a log cabin with and live alone in, in a bee-loud glade. When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut …? When I came home, caked in brine, from discovering that cache and wondering was it worth my while to wait for low water and go and lug it in, there was Eddie with more narcissi in his massive fist and again once they were breathing in his gift, the vase, we sat in silence and quietness, he and I, utterly companionable, I did not turn my back on him and write, but there we sat, listening to the gale, till Lucy came through it looking for him.

 

24 January

 

Mary looked in at the workshop door. There's a cake for you on your table, she said. I was standing by the bench, contemplating the unfinished carving. I'll miss seeing you in Father's coat, she said. In fact, I'd rather you took it with you when you leave.

 

I'll send these last four days together. Even so, they're hardly worth a stamp.

 

28 January

 

I'll leave a note on my table under the black vase asking that this pen, my notebooks, your photograph and a necklace that was my mother's should be sent to you. And I'll leave the postage. I'll take back to the tip the things I took from the tip and the things I got from beachcombing I'll take back to the beach. Elaine and Sarah can share the books and Lucy should have the vase itself. I'll add that to my note. And my rags and my camping stuff they can do what they like with. The tip. Mary will collect the things she lent me.

 

I always wanted to give you the necklace and never quite dared. The beads are of cherry amber. I've often imagined how they would look on you.

 

My notebooks will be worse reading than these letters. At least in the letters I was going out to somebody. If I say these letters are my better self you will realize what a poor thing I have been. And in my notebooks I say so, again and again. I fought against my impoverishment and lost. I had an eye for abundance, I could see it all around me, life for the living, a proper joy, proper sorrows, deeply among other people. I could see it but I couldn't do it. At least believe me when I say I loved. But I could never have and hold what I loved. Somehow I never had the knack. Or I never had the courage. So I have lived in poverty knowing all the while that life is rich, rich. And I have lived in obedience. I obeyed the orders that would harm me. Early on it was God and the monks and when I was shot of them I devised in myself even crueller, yet more nonsensical and in the end even madder dictators. So I lived in obedience to temptations and commands whose one purpose was to kill the life in me. Now and again I was disobedient, I answered back, I said no, joyously I transgressed. For a while I was a passable imitation of a man claiming his right to live. But I always came to heel in the end, knuckled under, took the punishment for my revolt. In my notebooks I wrote all this—the mechanics of it. I did once think that if I could describe it very precisely I could fight it better. That was a mistake. I never understood
why
I was like I was, but I did see very clearly
how
I was, how it worked in me, the mechanism that sided with death against my life. I knew I didn't understand why but I hoped that if I saw how it worked, I might escape. Must one know why? Should it not be enough to see how? Well, it wasn't enough. The best I ever got from writing it all down was the bleak satisfaction of making clear sentences. I could analyze and differentiate and split fine hairs and set it all out clearly but it didn't help. Nothing helped. I saw that I did not have it in me to save myself. I wrote these letters, which have been—grant me that much—more about other people and about the earth's lovely phenomena than about myself, to keep myself in dealings with somebody else.

 

Full moon this weekend. The weather is very still. In the abandoned bulb fields the daffodils and the narcissi are in flower. They find their way up into the sunshine through dead bracken, gorse and brambles. In the fields most recently let go they appear in their regimented straight lines, in a continuing discipline though the forces of law and order have departed. But in the oldest ruins the flowers have split and spread and they come up where they like through all the dead stuff gloriously. The tides will be very big again this weekend.

 

Saturday 30 January

 

Forgive me, I changed my mind. I've thrown my mother's necklace into the sea and fed my notebooks and your photograph into the hotel's incinerator that we call Puffing Billy. So nobody from here will post you anything after this. I was ashamed of my notebooks and didn't want them lodging in your mind. And again I didn't quite dare give you the necklace of a woman you heard me talk about but never met.

 

Sometimes I have imagined you burning these letters as they arrive, burning them all unopened and unread. Only very rarely have I had the sudden conviction that you do read them and keep them. Lately I've told myself you don't open them but you lay them down in a safe place in order of arrival so that the last would be first to hand. And now I am hoping that when, after a few weeks, nothing further arrives, you'll take up this last one first, for an explanation. There is no explanation—but only this request.
Please
burn the rest unread. They were my effort and it failed. There's no reason now why you should read them.

 

When I posted Thursday's letter Mrs. Goddard said, You keep us in business, Mr. Smith. I don't know how we'll manage when you leave. She is very happy these last days because her daughter is coming home from New Zealand with a husband and a baby boy she has never seen. They plan to stay three months and, who knows, they might stay longer.

 

I'll take this letter to Mrs. Goddard and she'll say what she has always said when I've posted a letter to you on a Saturday: You know it won't go out till Monday now? I've always liked her for her tact. She has never said, You don't get answers, do you? I shan't tell her this letter will be the last.

 

Mary's workshop looks all shipshape. I'll walk through Nathan's fields. The hedges look very trim. I'll take my books to the community centre, except one each for Elaine and Sarah which I'll leave here. The rest, but for the vase which I want Eddie to give to his mother, is for the beach or the tip. I'll keep this heavy coat on. I'll keep this pen in its deep inside pocket.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tea at the Midland

 

 

T
he wind blew steadily hard with frequent surges of greater ferocity that shook the vast plate glass behind which a woman and a man were having tea. The waters of the bay, quite shallow, came in slant at great speed from the southwest. They were breaking white on a turbid ground far out, tide and wind driving them, line after line, nothing opposing or impeding them so they came on and on until they were expended. The afternoon winter sky was torn and holed by the wind and a troubled golden light flung down at all angles, abiding nowhere, flashing out and vanishing. And under that ceaselessly riven sky, riding the furrows and ridges of the sea, were a score or more of surfers towed on boards by kites. You might have said they were showing off but in truth it was a self-delighting among others doing likewise. The woman behind plate glass could not have been in their thoughts, they were not performing to impress and entertain her. Far out, they rode on the waves or sheer or at an angle through them and always only to try what they could do. In the din of waves and wind under that ripped-open sky they were enjoying themselves, they felt the life in them to be entirely theirs, to deploy how they liked best. To the woman watching they looked like grace itself, the heart and soul of which is freedom. It pleased her particularly that they were attached by invisible strings to colourful curves of rapidly moving air. How clean and clever that was! You throw up something like a handkerchief, you tether it and by its headlong wish to fly away, you are towed along. And not in the straight line of
its
choosing, no: you tack and swerve as you please and swing out wide around at least a hemisphere of centrifugence. Beautiful, she thought. Such versatile autonomy among the strict determinants and all that coordination of mind and body, fitness, practice, confidence, skill and execution, all for fun!

The man had scarcely noticed the surf-riders. He was aware of the crazed light and the shocks of wind chiefly as irritations. All he saw was the woman, and that he had no presence in her thoughts. So he said again, A pedophile is a pedophile. That's all there is to it.

She suffered a jolt, hearing him. And that itself, her being startled, annoyed him more. She had been so intact and absent. Her eyes seemed to have to adjust to his different world.—That still, she said. I'm sorry. But can't you let it be?—He couldn't, he was thwarted and angered, knowing that he had not been able to force an adjustment in her thinking.—I thought you'd like the place, she said. I read up about it. I even thought we might come here one night, if you could manage it, and we'd have a room with a big curved window and in the morning look out over the bay.—He heard this as recrimination. She had left the particular argument and moved aside to his more general capacity for disappointing her. He, however, clung to the argument, but she knew, even if he didn't know or wouldn't admit it, that all he wanted was something which the antagonisms that swarmed in him could batten on for a while. Feeling very sure of that, she asked, malevolently, as though it were indeed only a question that any two rational people might debate, Would you have liked it if you hadn't known it was by Eric Gill? Or if you hadn't known Eric Gill was a pedophile?—That's not the point, he said. I know both those things so I can't like it. He had sex with his own daughters, for Christ's sake.—She answered, And with his sisters. And with the dog. Don't forget the dog. And quite possibly he thought it was for Christ's sake. Now suppose he'd done all that but also he made peace in the Middle East. Would you want them to start the killing again when they found out about his private life?—That's not the same, he said. Making peace is useful at least.—I agree, she said. And making beauty isn't.
Odysseus Welcomed from the Sea
isn't at all useful, though it is worth quite a lot of money, I believe.—Frankly, he said, I don't even think it's beautiful. Knowing what I know, the thought of him carving naked men and women makes me queasy.—And if there was a dog or a little girl in there, you'd vomit?

She turned away, looking at the waves, the light and the surfers again, but not watching them keenly, for which loss she hated him. He sat in a rage. Whenever she turned away and sat in silence he desired very violently to force her to attend and continue further and further in the thing that was harming them. But they were sitting at a table over afternoon tea in a place that had pretensions to style and decorum. So he was baffled and thwarted, he could do nothing, only knot himself tighter in his anger and hate her more.

Then she said in a soft and level voice, not placatory, not in the least appealing to him, only sad and without taking her eyes off the sea, If I heeded you I couldn't watch the surfers with any pleasure until I knew for certain none was a rapist or a member of the BNP. And perhaps I should even have to learn to hate the sea because just out there, where that beautiful golden light is, those poor cockle-pickers drowned when the tide came in on them faster than they could run. I should have to keep thinking of them phoning China on their mobile phones and telling their loved ones they were about to drown.—You turn everything wrongly, he said.—No, she answered, I'm trying to think the way you seem to want me to think, joining everything up, so that I don't concentrate on one thing without bringing in everything else. When we make love and I cry out for the joy and the pleasure of it I have to bear in mind that some woman somewhere at exactly that time is being abominably tortured and she is screaming in unbearable pain. That's what it would be like if all things were joined up.

She turned to him. What did you tell your wife this time, by the way? What lie did you tell her so we could have tea together? You should write it on your forehead so that I won't forget should you ever turn and look at me kindly.—I risk so much for you, he said.—And I risk nothing for you? I often think you think I've got nothing to lose.—I'm going, he said. You stay and look at the clouds. I'll pay on my way out.—Go if you like, she said. But please don't pay. This was my treat, remember.—She looked out to sea again.—Odysseus was a horrible man. He didn't deserve the courtesy he received from Nausikaa and her mother and father. I don't forget that when I see him coming out of hiding with the olive branch. I know what he has done already in the twenty years away. And I know the foul things he will do when he gets home. But at that moment, the one that Gill chose for his frieze, he is naked and helpless and the young woman is courteous to him and she knows for certain that her mother and father will welcome him at their hearth. Aren't we allowed to contemplate such moments?—I haven't read it, he said.—Well you could, she said. There's nothing to stop you. I even, I am such a fool, I even thought I would read the passages to you if we had one of those rooms with a view of the sea and of the mountains across the bay that would have snow on them.

She had tears in her eyes. He attended more closely. He felt she might be near to appealing to him, helping him out of it, so that they could get back to somewhere earlier and go a different way, leaving this latest stumbling block aside. There's another thing, she said.—What is it? he asked, softening, letting her see that he would be kind again, if she would let him.—On Scheria, she said, it was their custom to look after shipwrecked sailors and to row them home, however far away. That was their law and they were proud of it.—The tears in her eyes overflowed, her cheeks were wet with them. He waited, unsure, becoming suspicious.—So their best rowers, fifty-two young men, rowed Odysseus back to Ithaca overnight and lifted him ashore asleep and laid him gently down and piled all the gifts he had been given by Scheria around him on the sand. Isn't that beautiful? He wakes among their gifts and he is home. But on the way back, do you know, in sight of their own island, out of pique, to punish them for helping Odysseus, whom he hates, Poseidon turns them and their ship to stone. So Alcinous, the king, to placate Poseidon, a swine, a bully, a thug of a god, decrees they will never help shipwrecked sailors home again. Odysseus, who didn't deserve it, was the last.

He stood up. I don't know why you tell me that, he said.—She wiped her tears on the good linen serviette that had come with their tea and scones.—You never cry, he said. I don't think I've ever seen you cry. And here you are crying about this thing and these people in a book. What about me? I never see you crying about me and you.—And you won't, she said. I promise you, you won't.

He left. She turned again to watch the surfers. The sun was near to setting and golden light came through in floods from under the ragged cover of weltering cloud. The wind shook furiously at the glass. And the surfers skied like angels enjoying the feel of the waters of the earth, they skimmed, at times they lifted off and flew, they landed with a dash of spray. She watched till the light began to fail and one by one the strange black figures paddled ashore with their boards and sails packed small and weighing next to nothing.

She paid. At the frieze a tall man had knelt and, with an arm around her shoulders, was explaining to a little girl what was going on. It's about welcome, he said. Every stranger was sacred to the people of that island. They clothed him and fed him without even asking his name. It's a very good picture to have on a rough coast. The lady admitted she would have liked to marry him but he already had a wife at home. So they rowed him home.