Then, of course, there are the little red books.
Early in our marriage and before either of us could see the gathering clouds, she began keeping a diary. She announced her intention quite openly. We were shopping one day when she entered Woolco’s and bought a wad of notebooks. Her first entries might almost be joint efforts, since they are about things she and I did together that required no discussion or afterthought. Then she writes comments on books she has read, films we have seen, Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, for instance: At the end, at night, the donkey lies down among a flock of sheep but we do not know that it has been shot accidentally by a hunter. I knew. I knew by then, through men’s cruelty, that it had earned its sanctity, that it was a symbol of saintliness, before B told me. I remember telling her. ‘Telling’ may have been sarcastic.
Our garden was evidently planted by a previous occupant who ensured that somewhere there would be colour at all times – yellow jasmine in winter and fiery berries in autumn, as well as the overture and chorus of colours in spring and summer, and these appearances are noted for future reference. So exposed are her jottings that she always leaves the books lying around with a biro marking the page she is on. I think the books are symptomatic of what is waiting to ambush her and her need to keep intact something already under unannounced threat. Diarists who do not succumb never realise how much they contribute to their continuing integrity by daily lowering their noses to the page and scribbling away.
Just after I knocked down the housemartins’ nests – I could never do it properly because there is always a horseshoe of muck left where the first frantic adhesions are made – she suffered her worst spell. I always have to guess how she is interpreting an event that to me is an extension of experience, like the lumps of clay the housemartins use to build up their miraculous orbs. I found her in the kitchen, her arms still folded, waiting for me to admit a wrong I was unaware of and reminding me of a child which finds itself taking the blame for someone else’s misdemeanour. Within hours, she had gone upstairs and cut herself.
Even though I am alert to unusually long silences following her disappearance from my sight – I cannot just trail her – I missed the event itself. Calling her without reply, I pushed open the bathroom door and there she was, sitting side-saddle on the edge of the bath, bleeding from a wrist wound and looking up at me, her head inclined, with a sort of religious pity. Her damaged arm was resting upturned on her knee, and the blood – not much of it, to be sure – was running down her leg. I noticed that several tears had dripped on to it, clearing a purified channel for themselves. Seduction by inessentials.
‘Look’, she said, pitifully.
It was as if the harm done was somehow wondrous, external to herself.
‘For God’s sake,’ I enjoined. ‘What have you done?’
She stared at me curiously, as a child falsely accused stares at a denouncing adult.
Days later, on my return from the hospital and for the first time, I opened one of the red books.
I use the word ‘diary’, but there are no dates. I recognised an analysis of a strange foreign film we went to, not like Bresson’s, but one of those avant-garde movies composed of seemingly unrelated events and images, though some things, possibly motifs, kept repeating themselves, as if the director had been saying to the audience, those bemused phantoms in the half-light: ‘Come on – can’t you see what I’m getting at?’ We laughed off our incomprehension at the time, but the book records no amusement. There is a description of rooks’ nests ‘snagged’ in the treetops. Poetic, I think. Then there is a reference to ‘R’, who has come to tick her off about something. I look at the other books. ‘R’ makes regular appearances. Fairly soon, the identity of ‘R’ becomes my obsession. Woman’s malady, old flame, spectre, the spreading ink blot of melancholy, alter ego, friend from the past, substitute confessor – whoever it is, the visits are frequent, their reasons ambiguous: ‘R’ will understand, ‘R’ will sort it out, ‘R’ would never have approved. On one page ‘R’ is reprimanded for reneging on a promise, on another thanked for turning up (It was great to see you). I feel the enlivening rush of jealousy, that curious repositioning it causes when you suddenly see a loved one in a different light and begin courting its relative, gnawing speculation.
So partly as an attempt to join her in whatever world she is describing in the books, I start to look upon ‘R’ as a real person – ‘Robbie’ – not some ghostly companion she’s invented. In her moments of release, as the doctors call them, she is as lucid as anyone else and as capable as I of subterfuge and duplicity. We often talk about whether we are ever likely to strike up another relationship and vow to be open about it. But we both know it probably won’t happen that way, because an ‘affair’–a word that tickles us both – is clandestine almost by definition, something that denotes a temporary state, full of truth and expectation at the same time but just about holding its self-destructive tendency in check. Anyway, we never open each other’s mail, not even when it’s a bank statement or a flyer for car insurance. There are always letters for each of us whose contents the other cannot divine. When she’s ‘away’, her mail piles up. But the novelty of identification soon wears off. I imagine Robbie finally waving farewell with a smile – not the smile of a fugitive’s triumph but one of the simpering sort that marks the passing of a trite, insubstantial character. Maybe it went with her to the hospital below Holy Mountain.
She will get to the phone at all hours and say: ‘It’s me.’
Irritating. Who do I think it is? Once, I heard a scream in the background, some other’s torment. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Is anything the matter?’ In the silence that followed, I was invited to ponder my awkwardness: ‘I mean, has anything happened?’
There are plans to accommodate spouses and other carers in the grounds, to minimise travel. One morning, before visiting, I gained the summit, domain of buzzards, to see the place from a distance, a height. Apart from a Victorian façade, the buildings are fairly new but remind me of the Maze Prison, with their image of capital letters stamped into the ground. Make a name, I muttered, make a name. It was spring, and a few skylarks spun out of the heather at my approach. The way down was rocky and painful, unlike the ascent.
At home the calls from friends and family are less frequent, but there is little to report, except to say that she is still battling. Doing so reminds me of issuing bulletins on someone who has decided to explore the Amazon alone: either they’d succumb or they wouldn’t and from the beginning they are always making for home. It is a case of awaiting their return, should Providence will it.
But I suppose it seems heartless to talk about anything else at length. I imagine the countless things people do or care about, some of which they forget. It is not a question of priorities, it is that everything is a priority. At any moment, one of them might be nursing a recurrent pain, or become mystified at a daughter’s strange behaviour, or notice that of late the boss seems always to be questioning their judgement. As long as she is in capable hands, that’s all that can matter to them.
But I still cannot get out of my mind that she is forgotten until someone decides to make inquiries about her. I even forget her myself. The year after the housemartins’ nonappearance, I saw a swallow on a telephone wire, its forked tail unmistakeable. It was early for returning migrants but patterns were changing. Still, I couldn’t help thinking I’d been a sole witness to something, and for a while, totally absorbed, I watched for others to begin circling the old barn that stood on my neighbour’s property. I hoped the housemartins wouldn’t be far behind. It would be something positive to tell her.
I went out the next evening to wait after replacing her notebooks where she had left them. The sun, still high in the west, seemed reluctant to set. I’d read somewhere that birdsong was a fraction of what it used to be. The coming of the silent spring. So what I heard was a stragglers’ chorus. I tried to imagine how some people could not come to terms with such knowledge. I
spend a lot of time just standing in the garden, pondering.
I looked up at the housemartins’ imprints from the previous summer and whispered to myself: ‘Is it me? Could it be me?’ And I waited for a flicker, a sound – some sign before nightfall outside the empty house of a bird trailing a name.
Cherry Hill
The weather-worn ruins of the old town of Les Baux rise to a cliff’s edge, from which medieval noblemen pushed malcontents to their deaths as a deterrent. Even today, the fertile plain rolling away from the foot of the cliff is an antidote to the evidence of the town’s last remaining function as a lazaretto. With their backs to despair, the victims of executioners, vain or insidious, must have contemplated a future paradise. For this much at the very least, I am indebted to a pair of dogged expatriates, Bee Compton and Mavis Smith. It was among the ruins that I first came across Bee’s shadow, approaching mine like an oil slick over the bleached stones.
‘You are a sad woman, very sad,’ she said.
I turned to discover the thinnest person I had ever seen. She could scarcely stand in the wind, which had sped across the flatlands from Arles and was dispersing wildly on the cliff top. In her white dress with the blue polka dots she might have taken off, like a kite. I would normally have walked away from the sound of an English voice in France, especially the hectoring sort with its air of tired familiarity aimed at children; but hers was different, almost solicitous.
‘Would you help me?’ she inquired. ‘I find pilgrimages so arduous. Necessary, but arduous.’ She held my arm. ‘Not the religious sort. I mean journeys to the countries of the heart.’
She was staying in a small house in the valley, her ‘command HQ’. From the cliff could be seen three other villages perchés in different directions; they crowned hills which rose from the quilted valley bottom on shoulders of hot, white rock. We stepped on to a circular viewing-platform and it was as if we were suddenly spinning through the molten white sky of a Provencal noon. Once the reason for my condition, my sadness, had been established intuitively, she lost interest, staring instead at a figure approaching from the direction of the cemetery. This was Mavis, coming at us with a shuffling hesitation. They could almost have been twins.
It was a relief to be free of the vast tourist drift. By definition, Tim was always in my thoughts. I saw his death as my loss only, unconnected with how his brothers and parents felt. It had no purifying effect. It made me even more selfish than normal. Into the void it left poured all manner of experience, especially that proscribed by a happy marriage. The outward flow of emotion, so supporting and protective, had reversed its course to become unfamiliar but exciting.
We seated ourselves on the terrace of a café and Bee began telling me what she thought of France and the French. ‘Take churches, my dear,’ she said. ‘Dingy places on the whole, badly lit by a tight-fisted clergy and full of awful paintings.’
‘Great in hot weather, though,’ Mavis chipped in. ‘You can’t beat sitting astride a damp sarcophagus when you’re feeling sticky and the vicar is out of sight.’
‘Curé, dear,’ Bee said. ‘You’ll get us bloody well shot one day.’
‘Pay no attention,’ Mavis advised. ‘In my book, discretion and valour are coterminous.’
They seemed to have arrived at some kind of mutually agreed antipathy, not just on this question of decorum but possibly on other matters as well. They glanced about at the other customers, as if for confirmation of their views. In their dark glasses they resembled long-forgotten celebrities hoping for recognition among peers.
‘So what’s up, dearie?’ Bee asked.
I told them. They stared at me as though I were an adolescent confessing to a raffish priest.
‘Yes, well, we’ve all gone through it, haven’t we Mave?’
‘Oh yes,’ Mavis said. ‘We’ve done the mourning bit.’ She examined me closely. ‘But you’re too young to be a widow.’
‘Was he handsome?’ Bee asked, cutting her short.
I’d never thought of Tim as handsome. I supposed he was.
Mavis allowed her arms to dangle beside her chair. I think she was bored with these revelations. ‘So what do you think of Les Baux?’
‘Impressive,’ I said.
‘You wouldn’t think that if you had to struggle up here every morning for bread,’ Bee answered. ‘Not that we have to. We usually send Bertie – for the exercise.’ They chuckled.
‘Probably takes it out of him,’ Mavis said, hypnotised by the deft movements of the waiters. ‘And the tourists are something awful, present company excluded.’ She turned to me with her elbows planted on the table. ‘Did you know that the Romans trained dogs to chase old mules off the cliff as a form of entertainment?’ She registered shock, as if the fact still made her incredulous. ‘I mean, can the practice of slave-holding be mitigated by the achievements of a so-called civilisation? Indeed, is the expression “slave-holding civilisation” a contradiction in terms?’
Bee nodded as these questions were put, not so much at their relevance, more at their rhetorical weight. The single-mindedness that attracted one to the other, like opposite poles, had been transformed into an almost aggressive consensus. Bee had only to smile at me as her companion spoke to convince me of this. They had left the familiar behind and were on a two-woman journey of discovery. I was going through the same experience alone. One incident in particular illustrated this: in a darkened hotel room at Le Puy, Tim had made love to me all afternoon, perhaps atoning for something we lacked in the routine procedures of the night. The sort of skirmishing which made all-out war inevitable had begun.
Bee and Mavis escorted me to the courtyard in front of the little church. In the valley were clusters of flat-roofed homes, some with swimming pools and clay tennis courts, spliced by the flaming cypresses of Van Gogh. Bee pointed out the place where she and Mavis were staying with Bertie. There was an old car in the drive. I stared at the scene but was not concentrating; I couldn’t get Tim out of my mind. I felt that I was working him out of my system and that the process, hastened somehow by meeting these two odd women, was nearing its end. Was I still grieving?
A month after Tim’s death, I read a book on how to cope with grief. I accepted that it reduced you to a helpless state in which any kind of assistance was always available if not welcome. This was what was meant by death’s being a leveller. I suppose that my journey was a descent in more ways than one and that what so many hated or feared about death was its exposure of a self-reliance built on the shaky stilts of an education. The book set deadlines for recovery and renewal. It was too facile. For a long time, I felt deserted. Tim, gone from me, became the focus of my resentment.
‘You shouldn’t dwell on things,’ Mavis said.
‘Dwell?’
‘Don’t deny it,’ Bee said. ‘Geography revisited is but the skeleton of a lived-through joy.’ (I had let slip that all the places on my itinerary were those I’d visited with Tim.)
‘Would you like to see where they landed?’ Mavis asked me.
I looked puzzled.
‘The donkeys and, for that matter, the rebels. Apparently, that was a spectacle and a half, aussi. I suppose that if you’re at a fairly safe distance there’s little to choose in terms of your own sensitivity between the suffering of Roman animals and the wretchedness of fifteenth-century humans. What do you say?’
‘I’d love to see it.’
‘Didn’t mean that, silly!’
We walked the short distance to the foot of the cliffs, with Bee and Mavis leading like a pair of tourist guides. The wind had dropped to a warm breeze. It must have been there, on that downward path, that Cocteau had filmed scenes from Le Testament d’Orphée. I looked straight in front, over and beyond the heads of the two women, towards the flat, livid fastnesses of Provence. Huge distances, their detail lost in the haze, spoke of eternity: now comforting, now unsettling. A hundred years before, Dumas and Merimée had visited Les Baux to find only a handful of beggars living there, confu
sed I suppose by the same prospects of hope and damnation.
‘Just along here,’ Mavis said, negotiating a huge boulder.
‘We found out about the games,’ Bee said. ‘You’ve got to in this country. Some places are obsessed with labelling the past. Here, they seem to live it.’ I knew what she meant. I’d stopped off at Chartres: at the end of the day I’d half expected to hear the slapping sandals of a gang of cowled lay brothers come to sluice down the nave.
Mavis and Bee strolled about while I leant against another large rock. It was a sheer drop from the precipice directly above. Suddenly, Mavis shouted: ‘Yoo-hoo!’ She was looking up at a tiny silhouette, which first offered a timid wave then began flapping its arms in imitation of a birdman.
‘It’s Bertie,’ Bee explained.
For an instant, he was not Bertie at all but the representative of some other, faraway region, dimly acknowledging the gulf between us. I remembered that it was something Tim often did, forging ahead to make the discovery about a new place, whatever it was, and beckoning me forward – calling my name out loud as if I were a child. I don’t mean to be unkind when I recall that Tim possessed little imagination. It’s just that the differences between couples which early on are submerged by desire ultimately become the sources of hostility. I guess that this was an imaginative assessment on my part of the state of our relationship. When I look back on that afternoon in the bedroom at Le Puy it is always with the feeling that Tim’s lack of perception had prevented him from recognising a more vital self exposed by new conditions. If I smiled as he moved above me it was because I formed this idea of a miracle happening in a place which thrived on a solemn and eternally-deferred hope of the miraculous. I remembered saying as he bore down on me yet again that the wooden Virgin on the wall was shedding tears, but in his ecstasy he must have mistaken my laughter for a distant expression of pleasure, which was never reconstructed with the same intensity. Foreign ways for foreign parts.
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