The Night Following (8 page)

27 Cardigan Avenue
Dear Ruth
Time passes. We’re almost into June. I suppose it’s warmed up a bit but by no stretch of the imagination could it be mistaken for warm à la Madeira, which is where we’d be now.
Apologies for silence. Been busy. Getting myself organized you’ll be pleased to hear! You’re not hearing, of course, but Carole says I shouldn’t dwell on that if writing these letters is to be at all useful.
So the upturn in the weather put me in the mood for leafing through the cruise and Australia paperwork. I turned up the brochure and itinerary and that inspired me to check what date we’re at today. I lose track of the days, sleep through them when I can. I get more done at night, without the interruptions.
Which is why I know we’d be in Madeira, jewel of the Mediterranean. You always wanted to go.
You were keen to see the mimosa for which Madeira is famed throughout the world. So here’s some photos of it from the brochure, sorry they’re a bit ragged, I couldn’t put my hand on the scissors so I tore them out. Butterflies, too, according to the literature, a feature of the place, some species thought to be unique to the island.
I was looking forward more to the bird spotting, I admit—I had them in the luggage, binoculars, reliable field guide of Mediterranean species, and RSPB spotters’notebook. My motto—never leave home without a notebook! Does that sound familiar or does that sound familiar!?
This notebook still blank, needless to say.
Was walking around most of the night with it in my hands, plus remains of cruise brochure. It’s ruined now, but I won’t need it again.
Also found this to go with photos. Came across the tape so I’m sticking it all in.

Two carefree days of sampling the delights of seafaring life aboard the
Belle Aurore Atlantis
and then “Land Ho!”What a wonderful land is your first port of call—Madeira, beautiful isle of pure blue skies, warm seas, and floral abundance.
From your very first step on the soil of Madeira the delighted visitor understands why it is known as the Garden Island, as the place is simply awash with color.
Day 1: Stroll at your leisure through the large and colorful flower markets that are one of the most arresting features of Funchal, Madeira’s capital. Relax over lunch at one of the quaint bodegas, and while you’re at it, why not sample some of the famous Madeira wine? In the afternoon, rendezvous dockside to travel by luxury air-conditioned coach to Camacha to marvel at the local wicker furniture weavers at work, and then on to the island’s blissful Botanical Gardens for a breathtaking display of subtropical plants and flowers, most strikingly the luscious golden yellow of the famous mimosa groves.
Day 2: Morning free for shopping in the famous lace-and tapestry-making quarter. After a lunch of traditional Mediterranean fare using the finest local ingredients, we again rendezvous dockside to travel by luxury air-conditioned coach to the enchanting fishing village of Camara de Lobos, where Churchill went to paint. Continue on to the celebrated Levada walks, part of the island’s ancient irrigation system, before returning to Funchal for a sumptuous afternoon tea at the worldfamous Reid’s Hotel.
Can you imagine it? I can’t
Arthur
PS Am unearthing all kinds of things. Seems to me you got a bit carried away with that writing group of yours. Poetry that doesn’t rhyme and stories that don’t begin or end properly. OK as a hobby I suppose, but the more I try to sort through it all the more there is. I’m tripping over loose pages, folders in every cupboard and drawer I open. I can’t make head nor tail. There’s reams of it.
PPS Whenever did you find the time? There’s
REAMS…

Jeremy telephoned. He said, reading sturdily from a list, that he would be grateful if I would forward his mail using the labels specially printed with his new address that he would send me in a day or two. He proposed to close our bank account but would pay, into my personal account in monthly installments, more than enough money for my purposes. His call had awakened me and when I tried to speak, my mouth felt slow and unchaste and slutty. I struggled to say something that would not sound off-balance and degraded. He told me he had already arranged that the garage bill for the Renault’s service would be sent direct to him, and again my words faltered, snagging in the net of his enunciated, suffocating reasonableness. In the moment’s pause, maybe a beat of tenderness passed between us. Then he said if I couldn’t be bothered to stick simple address labels on a few envelopes he would drop by for his letters instead.

Out of pride I feigned a little cooperation, but really I was thinking of all the things Jeremy and I had done for so long, ostensibly for the other’s sake. What expenditure, what a squandering of spirit, this “working at”our marriage; what a thin and childish pact it was in the first place. If we had ever aspired to a state of marital grace, we had long ago settled instead for efficiency; long after I was weary to extinction at my presence seeming still to be in some way required, I had continued to turn in performances connected with laundry, cleaning, and food. Jeremy had continued to oversee cars, money, and gardening. We had both pretended to be living together in more than the physical sense, wearing for each other the face we supposed the other ought to see because perhaps, behind it, we were guarding a truer, less resolute version of our selves that we feared the other would attack if they knew about it. With slippery expertise we had concealed first the doubt, and then the noiseless, tearing disappointment that life wasn’t fuller and brighter than this. Jeremy went on to mention his passport, I think in relation to the coming summer and “grabbing a fortnight somewhere,”but my attention had wandered by then. I was wondering when it was, exactly, that we’d started to show each other more tact than kindness.

Since I was awake and it was after four o’clock in the afternoon, I went to my studio—just the smallest bedroom with bare floorboards, an uncurtained window, and a basin in the corner—and tried to think about painting. Illustrated books were open all over the place, reminding me that I had been working on another series of butterfly studies.

Butterflies. I flipped over a few pages trying to remember what I had once found so captivating. I came across notes in my own writing. There were (I read) many species of butterfly—
Lepidoptera
—whose wing patterns mimicked the appearance of other things in the world. I had begun a list. I counted them on my fingers, right hand first, jammed in my dressing gown pocket, tightening each finger in turn, pressing the end of each nail into my palm just enough to get the nip of the edge on flesh. Some butterflies’wings looked like the golden eyes of a certain poisonous lizard. There was one with the blue-green Argus eyes of peacock feathers. Another had wings like a flamenco dancer’s pair of fans; another, curling, dead autumn leaves. One resembled the veneer of polished walnut, its wings like little cabinet doors. Then there were some that looked like tropical flowers, one in particular, its wings spattered to resemble the lure of dewdrops marking a pathway down a darkening velvet cave into the deeps of an orchid. Or was it the other way round (I had put a question mark after that one). Was it the orchid that had evolved to look like the butterfly’s wings? Whichever was imitating the other, they both looked like something else; here in my writing was another question mark and the word “vagina,”followed by two more question marks. I smiled, seeing how I had used the medical word and surrounded it with those perplexed, small, tidy curls of inquiry.

But I no longer wanted to know anything about butterflies. A few days ago I would have said I was fascinated by their sheer variety, the opulence of their colors and patterns, and the “challenge”I felt, as a mere amateur, to “do justice”to such delicacy and brilliance. I would also have said, for I had acquired a few real mounted specimens, pinned and fraying above inked Latin names in display boxes with flakes of broken wing in the corners, that I found something poignant and sacrificial in their labeled entrapment. I picked up one of the boxes from the worktable and looked at it:
Chrysiridia ripheus
—the Madagascar Moth. Not strictly speaking a butterfly at all, but looking like one, its wings open to show a gorgeous twinned miniature sunset. But now I was fascinated not by its classification nor its beauty nor the precise manner of its death. What seemed amazing was the simple cessation of its hair-thin little life, the dry and painless arrest of all the faultless microscopic connections that had joined one beat of its wings, one sweep of its antennae, to the next. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it was the single wanton instant of its final coming to stillness that was spread out on display under glass, that one pure extinguishing moment perpetuated by every pair of eyes that gazed at it in the hundred and more years after the creature would anyway be dead.

I thought of the woman no less reduced to a specimen on a mortuary slab, her body pinned open and exposed to the rummaging of a pathologist’s latexed hands. Such an obscene curiosity, which could be satisfied by encrypting the end of her life in a series of data entered by a laboratory assistant on a clipboard. But the true, inexcusable obscenity was not the physical progress from being alive to lifelessness, nor the recording of it—it was the manner of her death. I alone was responsible for that. I swept the boxes of butterflies to the floor, where all the papery colored wings fragmented among the splinters of glass and wood. There was nothing poignant about them. They were disgusting.

It was dark when I went out. The night was gray and vapory, rain misting the darkness. I knew I wouldn’t see the moon so I walked fast out of the ring of the cul-de-sac, flexed both hands in my coat pockets, and began to run, head down, fixing my attention on the silver reflection of my body dancing off the shining road. Weather is louder at night. The drumroll of raindrops brought cold, pungent spirals of scent up from gardens and pavements. I fisted my hands and pushed them down against the inside of my pockets, squeezed my arms against my sides, and ran on. Walking and running, sometimes stopping for breath, I continued without thinking of where I was going except that I knew I was avoiding anywhere lit.

I turned away from the direction of the town and followed the road until it intersected with two lanes leading into the countryside. Soon I was about two miles from my house, on the edge of woodland that I had only ever driven past. I turned off the lane and crackled and stumbled my way through the bracken. I was grunting and wheezing; in the dark I felt like an animal, but one out of its proper place and unfamiliar with wet roots and ditches and low-hanging branches, and I felt both alone and surrounded, my presence both unsensed and sensed. I was raising enough racket to empty the woods; I liked the idea that from their places among the trees and bracken they might be watching, the badgers and foxes, the voles and hedgehogs. I slowed and stopped, my body aching, my face itching under the heat of the sweat I had worked up. Silence, but for my breathing and the seep and trickle of the rain, drifted through the wood. There was no movement but fronds of bracken swinging back from the trail I had broken behind me and the waft of damp air touching my hair and cooling my skin, the only smells my sweat and the rainy green sap.

Now I could see a white cloudy smudge of moon shining through the trees and white darts of rain spitting out of the sky. From far away came an animal cry, a rising screech of distress that it was impossible to imagine might not be human. It was late and lonely enough for me to let out an answering howl if I wanted to, but I had started to shiver and could not utter a sound. Besides, what answer could I give, and to what? Probably it was a fox. But the call was a kind of refrain; it held no note of urgency and might not even have been real. Perhaps it was the cry of a phantom; it sounded, through the dark, like a wail as old as myth or lamentation, or of suffering itself. It might be not a fox but a ravening beast from a fable, crying out and limping the night lanes with sorrow in its yellow eyes, for it must be by night that creatures from the oldest stories of all are summoned up and stalk the earth, wishing to be remembered. I raised my head and felt the rain pour down on me. Further into the darkness I went, crashing through the wood, branches scratching my face.

Dear Ruth
I’m making a big pile of things for chucking, it’s gone on there. Remains of brochure, I mean. Best to get the rubbish all together in one place and do a big blitz and I’m not using the dining room for anything else. Surprising how it mounts up.
Pressure cooker still
AWOL.
Later on
Had second thoughts—I took cruise brochure back off the pile and sat there looking at it again, all those photos. Looked for a long time till it was too dark to see.
Wednesday
Am looking at it again now. Mimosa’s odd-looking, little cocoons of bright yellow cotton, not like any other flower. I never did like yellow but I shouldn’t have forgotten you did. I should have thought of yellow for the flowers instead of going with white.
Bye for now
Arthur

   Evelyn saw Stan and his mother off from the door herself. It was a dry evening, but foggy. Mrs. Ashworth sniffed and turned up the fur collar on her good coat.

“Nice spread, Evelyn,”she said, nodding. “Much obliged to your Mam. Come on, Stan, that train’ll be along.”

Stan, winding his red scarf around his neck, glanced down at his mother and then at his fiancée.

“Aye, right nice it was, say ta again for us, will you?”he muttered, shuffling toward Evelyn for a kiss. Mrs. Ashworth cleared her throat and stared hard at her son.

She does it on purpose, the old curmudgeon, Evelyn thought. She wasn’t letting the two of them have even a minute alone to say good night. She could at least pretend to be busy putting on her gloves or looking up the street. But Evelyn didn’t care. They’d got through the ordeal of Stan with his mother in tow meeting all the assembled Leigh family for a special Sunday tea, a week before the wedding. Mrs. Leigh had soaked and braised a whole ham, and she and Evelyn and Auntie Peg had all been baking for days, to say nothing of the sweeping and polishing of the house, which was always spotless, anyway.