Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  2 November

  November: the eleventh month of the year. A visit yesterday with Beth to Castle Drogo, Lutyens’ monolith on a promontory overlooking the ravine formed by the River Teign, the Estate’s land reaching out in the distance to the beginnings of Dartmoor. The house is built of grey-flecked Devon granite, the stone undressed inside as well as out, relieved only by Lutyens’ restrained mouldings and massively beautiful oak doors with long iron hinges. We went for a two-hour walk, down and through one of the oldest unaltered deer parks surviving in Britain, its sixteenth-century walls intact, rich in rare lichens, left to grow undisturbed.

  Cothelstone Hill was once an Elizabethan deer park, with a tall surrounding stone wall.

  A phone call to Alex this morning provided an unexpected resolution to my dislike of Christmas: I can borrow his flat in central Paris, and pass the five festival days there alone. Need now do nothing false. Not wanting to stay here in Beth’s proximity, I won’t have to resort instead to inviting myself to stay for Christmas with friends with whom I really do not wish to be.

  3 November

  Keys, the hanging seeds of the ash are called.

  4 November

  On Akiko’s recommendation I’m reading Raimond Gaita’s The Philosopher’s Dog. Akiko is one of the few people from whom I accept suggestions of concerts to listen to, books to read. The trust between us is unusual, our very meeting unlikely: a reclusive Japanese interpreter and … me.

  I cherish our friendship, embodied today in the pleasure of reading a paragraph by Gaita about bees:

  In our imagination we elaborate on the association of bees with flowers and warm days, and because they die when they sting we readily forgive them the harm they cause us, even though we know they can be deadly when they swarm. Perhaps that is why my father consented to their stings, never wearing protective clothing when he caught a swarming hive in a nearby tree or when he took the racks from the hives. Although he was never bitten as severely as one would have expected, he suffered enough painful bites for his refusal to don protective clothing to excite concerned curiosity. When I asked him why he refused, he said that he did not think of them as enemies against which he needed to protect himself. I did not fully understand his answer. Nor I suspect did he. But it had to do with, and was certainly of a piece with, his tender compassion for them.

  Reminded of the bee recommendation from Elizabeth, of a novel by a friend of hers in Notting Hill, Sara George’s The Beekeeper’s Pupil, which I enjoyed reading, the voice convincing, an account of growth in both knowledge of the behaviour of bees and in the courage to love. Elizabeth and I see each other now, when we can. She visited me in mental hospital. Our contact has life again. In December I’ll have lunch in The Hague with her mother. I am happy that this is so.

  5 November

  The summer birds are flown and not all the wintering ones have yet arrived, the weather still warm. I again feel drawn to name the birds here. This morning in the sun on the telegraph wires sat one yellow-fronted and one white-fronted bird, both with long wagging tails, preening themselves: a grey and a pied wagtail. They flew away at the arrival of a hunter-bird, which then perched on the bevelled top of the post and gazed around, its breast flecked light brown and white, head similar, white again on the underside of the wedge-tail, diving after errant young voles in the grass. Watched it through field glasses. An immature sparrowhawk, I discovered from the book.

  Don’t know what best to do, unable to help Beth, my presence seems to make her darkness blacker. Do nothing? Not expect to get things right?

  I myself need help in this. And will seek it, from my friends.

  6 November

  Beth and I took an hour inspecting room by deserted room the abandoned coach house, gathering in bags dozens of rusted nails and keys and things for her to transform into the art she makes. Took a forgotten chair, the adjustable back of which Beth will repair and reupholster, to replace her tomb-like armchair in the sitting room. Weeks ago she mounted in meticulously canelined frames the dried-flat bodies of two shrews she had found squashed beneath her carpet, carried into the house by her cats.

  7 November

  Wordless not long ago to myself, now I’m unable to hear or be heard by Beth.

  The reverse side of the occasional fallen leaf of sycamore is white.

  8 November

  Acceptance is the key, Beth feels. Mutual acceptance that there’s nothing either of us can do for each other.

  Unwilling acceptance.

  Hurt acceptance.

  Her cares are concentrated on getting through each day without falling into the void of nothingness or exploding into self-punishing anger with me. We are each a threat to the other, she feels.

  More, there’s always more, much more.

  Mutual recognition of a capacity for despair was doubtless the original attraction.

  9 November

  Isabel, I’ve discovered, is the name of Will’s wife.

  Picked today in the vegetable patch an all-purple mushroom, bell-shaped with divided gills and striped stem. Never seen such a thing before. Violet webcap (Cortinarius violaceus): the book identifies – one of two differently occurring forms, the first found under hard woods, the second under soft, the only all-purple fungi in Europe – ‘both are quite rare and though edible, are not recommended’.

  Just now a good sound: the kettle purring as I come downstairs on changing after a damp afternoon in the garden, confirmation that I did indeed remember to switch on the water for a pot of tea before putting on dry clothes.

  The other day a professionally togged bicyclist drew up beside me on the road and said: ‘I’ll give you one essential tip about bicycling. You’re struggling in too high a gear. The most efficient way is always to change down into as low a gear as you need, never dropping below 20 revs per minute.’ Can’t manage this myself. Never used the bottom ten of my twenty-one gears.

  This evening Beth and I went to a performance by the local Choral Society of Donizetti’s La Bohème at Queen’s College Taunton, where our family friend of childhood was bursar. My mother, sister and I stayed there several times. Much has changed, but his home still stands. On turning away at the garden gate, I remembered once taking constant care to insure that the runt of his boxer bitch’s litter of puppies received its share of milk. My presence felt vital to the puppy’s survival. I never discovered what happened after our week’s holiday was over.

  11 November

  Yesterday morning, sleep-deprived, I wrote to myself in detail about how I feel around Beth. And showed it to her.

  She wasn’t pleased.

  I can understand why: this focus on myself, on my own feelings is wrong.

  This morning I was able instead to express, in simple words, my thoughts of how she maybe felt and of what it might be possible for us together to do to push through the gloom.

  We spoke.

  Not right of me to have attempted yesterday to decide for her. For myself, though, there are things I need, for both our sakes, to do.

  Delicious rack-of-lamb!

  Daring to aim to cook decently!

  15 November

  Anger. I know what it feels like, spit spraying as I shout: ‘Fuck off! Just fuck off, Beth! Leave!’

  Which is not exactly what I’m aware of meaning, but is, at this moment, an accurate expression of how I feel: that I want her to go away and leave me alone, leave my sight, leave my hearing, leave my house.

  No, not the voice of reason.

  19 November

  At my desk straight after breakfast, I recall the encouragement with which I responded to Beth when we first sought to be together, and remember my enthusiasm about her setting up home over in the cottages at Cothelstone Manor.

  I held the same felt-wishes for myself here in the restored completion of Erkindale. Managed to sustain none of these feelings.

  Passed, bicycling in the rain to Taunton, at Nailsborough a dozen bunches of black grapes hanging over a high
ish garden wall. The leaves of the vine had fallen. I’ve been this way before maybe a dozen times and have never noticed the grapes, in size eatable but out of arm’s reach. In the lane a bird on a branch of the oak dropped black-berried shit onto the front of my shoulder bag, the canvas fishing satchel a version of which I’ve carried with me everywhere for twenty years. It’ll bear forever now the stain.

  20 November

  Yesterday afternoon, while Beth and I were cutting and clearing trees from beyond her bench, Kerry Salmon arrived across the fields from Cothelstone driving his digger, ready to grub out the iron fence for us, remove rubble from the paddock and level the piled earth.

  I helped him.

  One of the giant tyres on his JCB was punctured by an iron strut and a mechanic was called out from Wellington. While the repair man worked on into the dark, Kerry talked to me, of being the last son of six children, forced to go with his father when his parents divorced and learning as a boy the mechanics of cars from his Dad, before returning after leaving school at sixteen to live by choice with his mother on the farm.

  He admires Beth’s deliberately half-finished bench, begun a year ago down by the cleared paddock, made of broken terracotta tiles and shaped like a chesterfield, with out-leaning arms and back. I like it too, very much.

  Kerry worked again today. I again helped him.

  21 November

  Awoke this morning clear about how, if at all, I might be able to make with Beth an arrangement agreeable to both of us.

  Before lunch, having neither seen nor heard her, after working all morning with Kerry, I searched her silent house, afraid she might have hurt herself. Her gumboots stood beside the back door, her bed empty. Finally noticed that her car was not there, and remembered her regular Tuesday appointment with a psychiatrist in Taunton.

  To my astonishment, when we met in the early afternoon, she too had been thinking along the same lines as I had about what best to do.

  A break, not violent.

  There’s a chance.

  We’ll see, we’ll see.

  Beth’s mood, of course, can change at whim. Her distress is acute, unaltered.

  Worse than mine, at present. Only someone with their own troubles could have focused so devotedly on mine.

  As if she preferred those long months of my dependence on her, spending all her time caring for me, doing what she could to prevent me trying again to kill myself. Such a waste. A beautiful young woman, she must move on.

  Sebastian, my neighbour, at dusk walked across our intervening paddock to talk, to inquire what was going on. He is down this weekend from his solicitor’s job in Bristol on the hunch that it might be the year’s mushrooming moment, late, almost too late, yet perhaps with that precise mixture of humidity needed to bring out in plenty the finest boletus of the season, the mornings damp, afternoons hot.

  Recall that when I discovered this tumbled-down place, I at first planned to make the big stables abutting the paddock into a working studio for artist-friends, to be welcomed to stay rent-free for as long as they needed, with their families, at liberty to follow whatever ideas came their way.

  Doesn’t sound such a foolish dream.

  23 November

  Bought from a specialist dealer-friend in Cirencester a small single bookshelf to hold my current reading, which I presently pile at one end of my kitchen table. The hinged shelf is adjustable, similar in style to the 1870s work of Charles Bevan, a documented chair and bedside-cupboard of whose I possess here at Erkindale. The dealer had in stock a rarity: a Pugin garden seat, on which I registered my interest, should the collector by whom it has been reserved fail to settle on time.

  24 November

  Busy days. Days in which I talk too much, indulging in my re-found ability to speak, to entertain. Myself as much as others.

  Worried that the basis is still not there, that I breathe thin air, stand a step away from sinking into soft river mud. The pain hunkers down, out of sight. It hasn’t gone away.

  There’s a long long way to go.

  Beth’s winter black cabbage survived the bullocks’ onslaught and should replenish itself on into the New Year.

  I enjoy cutting and cooking it.

  Probably shouldn’t. It might be better to keep away from her and hers for the present.

  25 November

  Off in an hour to catch the 10 a.m. train for a three-day visit to London.

  Anxious. Not about the trip itself, nor about seeing friends. It’s all the old hurts which still kick in, the ritual patterns of defence against ordinary threats of the day-by-day.

  I’ve always been distant and defensive.

  Am with Beth.

  It’s me, mustn’t take it out on her.

  These are the things that touch me, I don’t know how, touch parts of me to which I have no controllable access.

  I don’t know, I don’t know.

  Disgust on the train at the sound in the seat behind me of a packet of potato crisps being eaten: the open-mouthed munch and metallic crinkle of the packet. The smell too.

  Disproportionate reaction.

  Across the aisle, an Iranian and an Irish woman chatted. And I listened, can’t think why. Hated what they said. Hated hating it.

  Felt better after moving seats.

  28 November

  While I’ve been away Beth has repaired the glass panel in my study door which she shattered in fury.

  This afternoon the sun shone and, with the forecast of a weekend’s heavy rain, I left unfinished the work at my desk to stroll up the hill with a wicker basket and knife to gather the last of the mushrooms. In the warmish wet, with winter rays of sunshine angled low, I came across the extraordinary sight of dozens of tall mushrooms on the slope below a line of ancient beech: a child’s picture-book image of the nether world, long-stemmed mushrooms with wide umbrella rims, the older ones six inches in diameter, young cousins poking whiter flesh above the turf. Parasol (Macrolepiota procera) they’re called. Found some violet-brown blewits too, and one good sample of what I discovered to be the prince (Agaricus augustus), also deliciously edible.

  On my walk back, the long way round, I heard the barking of the hounds in the distance and was gratified to see a grey-muzzled fox race unmolested from the wood to freedom in the far copse. Passed the iron and timber gate of Hugh’s which I’ve asked permission to reuse down here. Parts of two of the oak bars are missing, and one of the iron brackets; Beth can mitre new pieces of wood onto the bars; and on an identical gate, ruined, lying in the undergrowth, I found a spare bracket which a blacksmith could reuse in our repair.

  The junk piled high by Kerry in clearance of my paddock has been removed.

  30 November

  A new struggle: to prevent myself being brought low by the morning news, radio almost as threatening these days as the newspapers I abandoned reading years ago. Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, appealed for donations to re-house Romanian families unable to move from their one-roomed ex-Soviet flats, unheated, pouring damp, the single bathroom shared with twenty other tenants. Southern Africa is devastated by AIDS, scything life to the ground.

  Book of the month is John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Penguin’s 1957 edition of which stands on my shelves in the bedroom, often observed, a work which I delighted to be terrified by when then reading as a teenager.

  Slowly, as an idea for the structure of the day clarifies, I cease to quake.

  The season has come round again to gather Christmas greenery for Podshavers. Someone has cut down the yellow-berried holly tree. Beth helped me find, up by Durford Wood and back past Schopnoller Farm, occasional strands of green holly still bearing its red berries. Later we will join the Sunday helpers at Podshavers for a four o’clock roast, after the paying customers have left.

  Returning after six it is dark, there’s a mist shrinking the lights of Terhill Cottages beyond the bend in our lane, and in the crescent moon the red-woods at the margin of my territory look dramatized, pictorial. We hear i
n the country distance an Evensong peel of church bells.

  1 December

  Embarrassed to admit to myself that a pair of items in the radio-news this morning raised horror-rumbles in my stomach: the scenes of jubilation in Wellington, my sister’s hometown in New Zealand, at the world premiere there of the last in the filmed trilogy of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; and David Cornwell talking of despair for world affairs, the subject of his latest novel. My reasons are childish. Frightened not so much by the world outside as by my internal landscape.