by Sarah Moss
‘Adam?’
‘Blueberries. They do well in pots. And you can get dwarf plum trees. I’ve seen them espaliered, we could try that on the back wall. I don’t know if we can afford travel insurance for a holiday. We’d have trouble with inhalers and the epipen on a plane.’
She stroked my shoulder. ‘We wouldn’t. They’re used to it. So we stay in the EU, in most of which as you point out the healthcare is at least as good as here. Be good for us all. Show Miriam that she can still travel.’
At last, I put my arm around her. ‘Nowhere too hot. Nowhere where she’ll want to swim.’
Nowhere, ideally, where either of them will want to swim.
‘Mountains,’ she said. ‘Mountains with big hospitals in between. Do you think we really can still do this?’
‘Yes.’ No. I don’t know.
The clouds began to break up and the sea changed colour, began to flicker a cold light. There was a procession of ships out there, bearing Duplo edifices of containers bringing televisions and bananas and trainers and sofas and paint and oranges and girders and car parts and medicines and ink and fish and rubber ducks, almost everything, along the narrow road, the junction between the North Sea, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Britain’s moat. A wave came over Rose’s wellies and Miriam sat down on the sand and got her jeans wet. Time to go, time for dry clothes and hot water and lunch.
I went last up the steps, hands poised to catch Rose. I turned at the top and looked back. The rock pools were long gone, the girls’ earthworks being erased before my eyes. This cove and the next were no longer communicable; it was in the next one that they had found my mother’s body.
angels in rage
The West Screen. It had been part of Spence’s first vision of the cathedral, during the faint in the dentist’s chair when he gazed from the ruins to the yet-unwoven Christ in Glory through the translucent bodies of saints and angels. The West Screen is really what I’m visiting when I return to the Cathedral, because more than anything else, it changes with the seasons, with the angle of the sun and the tilt of the earth. It’s not really a screen because it’s clear glass, a wall or a cliff of clear glass, rising or falling the full height of the new cathedral and forming a window between the ruins and the new building, so that the engraved saints and angels stand – leap, writhe, float – between the present and the past. I’ve seen their shadows on a winter’s night reach down from the darkened wall of the new building, their long feet and fingers plucking, but on a summer’s day they wander the ruins. Haunt the ruins. They’re not friendly. Not cherubic. Long dead, wasted, monomaniac as saints must be; an early critic remarked approvingly that he wouldn’t like to meet one on a dark night.
I do. I like to meet them on a dark night.
John Hutton and Basil Spence had both worked in camouflage units during the war – the whole Cathedral is part of the work of that war – and had kept an eye on each other’s progress since. Hutton, posted to the Middle East, had become so good at hiding British air bases that RAF pilots couldn’t find them from the air, so good at making dummy airstrips that returning Allied pilots tried to land on them. The British Army was so woefully ill-equipped that much of this part of the war appears to have been conducted through the theatre arts: coffee beans from sunk cargo ships scattered to suggest shadows at the bottom of the harbour in Alexandria, scuttled warships hastily repainted with fake shadows so that from the air they appeared unharmed. Painted guns and false shadows. The theatre of war. Hutton had left his wife and infant twin sons living in an intentional community of artists and academics in an Elizabethan manor house in Suffolk.
He kept sketchbooks throughout the war. Refugees arriving at the great London stations from across the Channel. Soldiers in the military hospital in Cairo. Bodies in ditches along the roads in Normandy, the same roads from which Spence was looking at the burnt-out medieval churches of rural France. Bodies on stretchers. An Eritrean soldier pouring a drink into the mouth of a dying comrade. He was never on the front line but often in the aftermath. Before the war, he’d made murals, surrealist, for the first-class cabins and dining rooms of ocean liners and for wealthy private clients. He’d painted clocks. Not now.
He came home. His marriage foundered. He worked alongside Spence on the Festival of Britain, on Britain Can Make It, on the Sea and Ships Pavilion. Murals, not glass, not until Cunard wanted some glass panels for the restaurant on the RMS Caronia. He designed them but the engraving was done by London Sand Blast, and he was intrigued. Wheel engraving, brilliant cutting, sand-blasting, ways of writing on thin air. Willis, the master-craftsman at London Sand Blast, could sling a wall of glass in chains above a grindstone churning in a trough of water and so interpret a design, make a paper drawing manifest in clear glass. Glass is melted sand, sea-shells repeatedly transmuted, solid to powder, powder to liquid, liquid to solid, and still sand writes on glass; one cannot but think also of sea-glass, forged by sand churned through wind and tide. Of the windows of lost ships. Next came the window in the chapel of the Commonwealth Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede; his first glass angels, faces averted already, the trumpets making such raucous music at Coventry already present but soft, symmetrical. Nothing to alarm.
Spence knew from the beginning that he wanted Hutton to make the West Screen. Alternate rows of saints on panels, Spence said, a chequerboard of plain and engraved windows. Hutton started sketching, and didn’t like the regularity. A letter came from Ove Arup, who was working out how to suspend so much glass. Reinforced mullions, he said. No choice. Gravity is gravity. Hutton’s new design was an answer to that. Flight. Dance. Leaping, leaning, jumping. Rising, writhing. He drew new panels, angels in flight, in resistance. Ghost angels, refugee angels, angels in rage, in protest, in agony. Nobody sees the mullions, only the movement, only the fight, the energy, the dance. Their trumpets sound the music of the ghettos, of the camps; I am reminded of Sebald’s account of the troupes of entertainers drifting through the warmer parts of Europe in the late 1940s, concentration camp survivors who danced and made music and had nothing to say to anyone who had not been where they had been. The saints anchor the angels, but there’s no comfort here. Hook-nosed Abraham raises his knife, St Cuthbert is cowled like the Grim Reaper, his face sharp and fallen as if after a long dying. Look on St Mary from the new building and you see the young mother, but from the other side the agony of the cross has fallen over her face. It is not all right.
It is not all right, but there is beauty. We have ways of saying that it is not all right, that there is death and suffering and evil, and they are the same ways we have had for hundreds of years. Buildings. Glass. Weaving.
Words.
where we are
There was something wrong and I woke up. Something awry in the darkness, something missing from the silence. I found myself on the stairs, found myself at Miriam’s door. I had, to my shame, been oiling the catch so we could open it, check on her, without waking her. I eased the door open, holding my breath, feeling my own blood bang, and there was silence and the shape of her in the bed, too still, no breathing, gone, and I went over and touched her face and it was warm and she murmured and moved her arm. Rose, it must be Rose. I slipped out of Mimi’s room, left the door open because every second it takes to reach someone not breathing is another second the brain is without oxygen, and Rose sighed as I entered her room. I went to her bedside anyway, hung over her and stroked her hair, touched her cheek, inhaled her vanilla smell. Missed the little girls my daughters had been. Stop it, leave them be, leave them growing and healing in the company of their dreams. I sat half-way down the stairs for a while, in the moonlight coming through the skylight on the top landing, and thought no, there is nothing wrong, both girls are breathing and so it is all right.
I could tell that Emma was awake from the darkness in the doorway of our room, with its more complex scent of Emma’s perfume and hand cream and grown-ups’ sheets which are about due to be changed.
‘Everything OK?
’
‘Everything’s fine.’
I lay back down and took her in my arms and she lay there, warm and sleepy, and after a while my hand found her face and then her breasts and her thighs and she opened to my fingers and my tongue.
Afterwards, dawn was coming and the traffic and the bird-song outside were beginning. Her head was heavy on my shoulder and my arm beginning to numb but I didn’t want her to move. I stroked her back with the other hand, and then the side of her breast where it lay against me.
She shook her head. ‘Talk to me. Tell me something. Otherwise I keep thinking. Lying here in the dark.’
So do I, I thought. And so I spin stories, to stop myself thinking.
‘I keep thinking about my father. About those huge decisions he made. Leaving Brooklyn. Dropping out. Coming to England. Marrying my mother. It would have been so much easier for him to stay at home and stay safe. And how much his parents must have wanted him to do that, after their own trauma. All they’d seen. It must have seemed crazy to them, for him to turn away from what was comfortable.’
‘Maybe they didn’t feel like huge decisions at the time. Maybe he was just young and doing what he felt like doing.’ She lifted her head. ‘Hey, are you wanting to run away? To light out for the territory?’
I guided her head back to my shoulder. ‘No. I’m wanting to stay here, with you and the girls in a cramped house in a boring bit of England. This is where we are.’
I shifted my arm a bit. Emma’s ribs and vertebrae were better covered than they had been a few weeks earlier and her behind was reappearing. I stroked its curve.
‘Stop it. Tell me what else.’
myths about which we know nothing
It was high summer now, and across America the children of war were on the move, fleeing comfort and prosperity for free love and a revolution that never made it to the streets. My father found it hard not to resent the newcomers, who had spent the winter in college dorms and expected to be welcomed and fed wherever they presented themselves. He smoked a little dope sometimes, had tried acid, but he was learning that he didn’t have the patience for journeys of self-discovery, his own or anyone else’s. He liked to get on and do things, and he liked other people who wanted to get on and do things. He believed, in the end, in material acts, in making and doing. He saw people spending hours sitting under the trees while he and a few others harvested gluts of tomatoes and zucchini, picked the bugs off squash and pumpkin plants growing tall and strong in the California sun. In the kitchen, three women kept one cauldron filled with water at a rolling boil to sterilise jars and another stewing the vegetables. On the meadow, a few men were scything the grass for winter’s hay. There were children in the school, and often dropped-out college professors teaching them. If you had to take drugs to make things interesting, you probably weren’t doing enough in the first place.
He sounded, maybe, like his father. He hadn’t written home in months now.
He moved on again. He didn’t see why he should work so that others, equally young and strong, could lie in the sun. Wasn’t that why people had left Europe for America in the first place, to escape the parasites?
He came in the end, as he must, to the other coast, over the state line and well north of where he’d thought he was going, to a place where the Pacific Ocean ended on a white beach under dark pines and there were mussel shells as big as his hand and driftwood logs taller than buildings, wider than a man’s length. Swell that had been rising and running from the coast of Japan, from the other side of the planet, crashed day and night onto the sand below the group’s cabins, as if he’d come at last to a place where he could hear the earth breathe. Even now, in August, it was cool here, the green breath of the old forest and the salt sea always on his face.
They weren’t farming, the people at Black Rock Cove. Why would we plant, Bill said, when the forest and the inlet are full of food? Mushrooms, berries, and a sea full of fish. The old ways. Hunting and gathering. There was a young anthropologist staying a few weeks, mapping and photographing the last traces of totem poles and wooden houses among the trees. We don’t even know, he said, the names of the nations wiped out in the nineteenth century, my thesis is an exercise in hopelessness but it would be worse to give up and forget they were ever there. In the big cabin there was a shelf of books on foraging, and though there were a few fibreglass canoes pulled up above the tideline, the group was working on a wooden one, carved out of a log. They had books about that too.
My father was not stupid to begin with, and was probably considerably more astute than he had been a year earlier. He could see that this was a summer camp, a midsummer night’s dream, and also yet another example of the parody of an exterminated culture by its killer. But he liked it here, away from the hippie mainstream. He liked it that Bill and his wife Judy were in their sixties, and that their son and daughter-in-law and baby granddaughter were here too, and he liked the way women and men worked together, washing clothes and sheets in the river as well as taking the boats out to fish. There were no drugs here, and no alcohol except when someone went into town for flour and sugar and brought back a few beers too; they traded fish for milk from their nearest neighbour, a farmer who was well-disposed and entirely willing to pass on what he knew about the land. Bill had been a teacher and had a good pension. His daughter-in-law Annie worked as a nurse a couple of days a week at the medical practice in town. They weren’t enclosed, weren’t opposed to the rest of the world. They just wanted to do things differently.
He knew from other places how fragile the balance of money and power can be. So he was grateful, cautious. He made sure to rise early, to do at least his share. He learnt to gut and clean fish, to build a frame out of fallen branches for drying what they couldn’t eat fresh. He followed Bill around, learning which mushrooms and berries were good to eat. Above his head, the trees rustled and bowed. Birds sang notes he hadn’t heard before and sometimes he sensed something watching him, heard it brush through the undergrowth. Bear, probably. The forest floor was dappled under his feet, all the light in movement over the water. As the sun went down, the younger ones drifted to the beach, lit a driftwood fire and sat there, feeling America at their backs and the ocean before them, the day’s warmth washing from the sand as the tide rose. He picked up a mussel shell the size of his hand, let it rest in his fingers, stroked the pearled inside and ran his thumb along the sharp edge. His hand was surprised by the shell’s lightness. His other hand scooped sand paler than skin and let it run from his fingers into the shell. Sands of time. Hourglasses made of melted sand.
‘There’s that raven again,’ said the anthropologist, whom we’ll call Robert.
The raven was larger than Eli thought ravens were, though everything on this coast was larger than he thought things were. It was hopping about on the beach below the group, just above where the waves broke themselves in the last of the sunlight. The raven was pecking at shells like the one Eli held, lifting them, pushing the red seaweed about with its beak in a leisurely way that suggested curiosity more than hunger. The anthropologist, who had been leaning back on his elbows, sat up to watch.
Once upon a time, said the anthropologist whom we’re calling Robert, once upon a time when the world was without form and void, there lived in the darkness an old man and his daughter. They had a house by the river, and inside the house the old man had a box, and inside the box was another box and inside that box another one and inside that box another one and so on until there were more boxes than even the old man could count. The raven already existed in the darkness, and he blundered and chuntered around the lightless world, looking as always for food and mischief. One day the raven’s wandering brought him to the old man’s house, where he leant against the wall and heard the old man talking to himself about the box that no-one had ever seen. In the last box, the man said, is all the light of the world and it is all mine and I am keeping it for ever.
The raven, of course, wanted the light, partly because he’d he
ard the voice of the old man’s daughter as well and he wanted to look at her. So the raven changed himself into a pine needle and floated down the river in the darkness as the girl dipped her basket, and then floated down the girl’s belly as she drank. And there the raven slept and grew, in the double darkness of the girl’s womb, until its walls straitened around his new body and it was time for him to be born in the new form of a human boy.
The old man came to love his noisy grandson and the boy grew in strength and courage. The raven child began to explore the house, to poke his fingers into cracks and crevices, to pull down the objects his hands found, to mouth and to touch everything he could reach. And at last he found the box. Just the outer one, he said, just let me play a little while with the largest one, just let me lift the lid and touch the corners and fit the lid back on. It is the only thing I want. Please. So the old man gave the child the outermost box, and the child played with it for days before he asked for the next one. No, said the grandfather, and the child screamed and kicked until the old man relented. And then the next one and the next, until the last few boxes glowed and the darkness in the house became dimness and the boy and the woman and the old man began to see each other’s forms. Give me the light, the child pleaded, just for a moment let me hold that great golden ball. No, said the old man, certainly not, but as the days went by the child begged and wept and at last his grandfather tossed the light to the raven-child’s outstretched hands.
