Turning for Home

by Barney Norris

  I remember the years when Hattie and I were young, when it used to be us who travelled together to visit Hattie’s mother when her birthday rolled round. Everyone takes their turn at the different stations of a life for a while, as they barrel through it all. That time is still almost visible around me, it seems, if I let it all come, if I draw out the thread of that part of my life and let it run through me like electric current once again. The drive out to Devon, bare expanse of the moor as you crossed over, wildness of gnarled trees clutching the roadside. The peace and greenness, and feeling close to each other as talk flowed easily while I drove the car.

  ‘I think your mother knows that she ought to downsize, but the trouble is the thought of what she’d have to give up if she did.’

  ‘What would she have to give up?’

  ‘Well, the memories in the place. The life that she’s lived there. And everything she still has to remind her of your father.’

  There was a musicality to those drives, and all the ritual pilgrimages home or back to the place of your graduation, or back to a town where you used to work, the journeys which seemed to pattern every human life. All those trips and returns formed a latticework of landscapes like refrains, calling you back to who you had been the last time you took them in, weaving together the seemingly diverse experience of year after year into something like a single and coherent dance, a set of variations always finding their way back to images which had assailed you before. The repetition of those journeys seemed to find expression, for me and Hattie at least, in conversational byways we would rediscover every time we made the same drive back down to Devon, subjects we never touched on in our ordinary lives but which we would dive into again as the affluent and cultivated slopes of the Hampshire countryside gave way to the wildness of Wiltshire, and the lush sleep of the valleys of Dorset, and the sharp green intake of breath that seemed to welcome you to Devon.

  ‘I wish she’d let it all go and remember that she’s not so very old, and life doesn’t have to be over for her, life doesn’t have to be all about remembering,’ Hattie said. In the memory we were coming to the end of our twenties, and bathed in the light of the years before Hannah was born. I remember the blue scarf Hattie was wearing, the deep red of the flowers that patterned it, her hair flowing over her shoulders and calling out an echo of the wheat in the fields we drove past.

  ‘That’s always going to be difficult for her to contemplate doing though,’ I said.

  ‘Of course it is. But we get one life, don’t we? We have one opportunity to get a few things done, and see things, and to experience. And getting all that done will sometimes mean doing the difficult thing, and getting on, and putting a stop to all this remembering she’s mired in. Because it holds her back. It will stop her being happy.’

  ‘Unless it makes her happier to remember the years of her marriage than it does to be in the years she has now?’

  Hattie sighed in exasperation. ‘If I go before you, I expect you to remarry, you know.’

  I felt my heart quicken. I had never heard Hattie say anything like that before. It made me feel shaky and electric, to let in the alien thought of our lives ending. ‘Why on earth would you want that?’

  ‘It’s what I’d do,’ Hattie said. ‘Not because I wouldn’t love you any more, but because I wouldn’t be able to have you back. What pleasure is there in pining for something you can’t have back? Why not just go and hang yourself there and then, if the world offers so little?’

  ‘I’m sure you don’t actually think your mother should hang herself.’

  Hattie laughed. ‘Sometimes I wonder.’

  ‘Hattie!’

  ‘No, sorry, you’re right, I’m being silly. Of course I don’t. It’s just she frustrates me. I want her to be happy and she won’t be.’

  ‘You’ll make her happy by being there this weekend.’

  ‘Perhaps. But she’ll make me sad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she’ll just want to talk about Dad like she always does, and it makes me sad to think about him.’

  For the rest of the year, we would never discuss the emotional state of Hattie’s mother. We would talk about work and what was for dinner, because those were the conversations life was made out of, that was what people did. But in the car on the drive down to Hattie’s mother’s birthday, in those years after the death of her father, the talk always led back to him. The distant and emotionally crippled man Hattie had grown up keeping clear of, in case he lost his temper and clipped her round the ear. The man she had loved with the whole of her heart, and could not bear having lost.

  ‘Do you think what you really want is to not have to visit the farm any more?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it hurts you to think about him. And that’s why you don’t like her thinking about him all the time. Perhaps it would feel easier if it seemed like he’d never existed at all.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Let’s not get too psychoanalytical about all this. I just want her to set her face to the future.’

  Silence fell then, loud as mourning. Hattie turned to look out of the window at the wheat fields blurring by. I didn’t know what to say to break the mood, to cheer her up. I remember the shame of that moment. The feeling that a better man would have known how to make her smile again. Sometimes I think I never quite solved the light that went out in Hattie when her father died. She carried that sadness with her to the end of her days. And she only ever really talked about him on those journeys spent westering home, trundling to Devon and another clutch of candles blown out on the top of another cake her mother had baked for herself. I used to long for those journeys, weeks before they rolled round. I think I looked forward all year to the chance to feel that close to her, when she would allow herself to talk for a little while about what mattered to her most. Her family, the roots of her life.

  The crowd under the marquee grows, and now there are fifty of us milling. I move among them, thanking people for coming, asking those I haven’t seen all year what they have been doing since we were last together. I can’t quite commit to all these questions, though, I can’t quite bring myself to care about it all. Ireland is in my mind. But that isn’t all of it. I can’t quite care about any of it, now Hattie isn’t here with me.

  For sixty years, the other half of the ribbon of my life was her. Try as I might, I can’t understand what it means for me that her voice has fallen silent now, while mine is still running on. We never thought of ourselves as separate beings in all the married time we had together; we always saw ourselves as half of two, indivisible, interdependent. We had taken on the project of our lives as a partnership, and always believed each of our achievements had been dependent on the presence of the other, that we wouldn’t have achieved anything on our own. It was, in other words, a good marriage. So what am I now she has gone?

  We met at Oxford, in the spring of 1956, the first Hilary term after matriculation. The romance of thinking back to that time now is irresistible, of course. It astonishes me to recognise how much wonder has been granted to me in the course of my life, and my years at Oxford were among the best that were given to me. In the memory, the Oxford of that time is bathed always in spring sun and shining, not unlike the cool light of this day I’m standing in now. And there used to be bicycles, long walks over Port Meadow, and the glare of glass and the clatter of glasses in the King’s Arms and the Turf Tavern. And there were cellos playing in the Holywell, punters circling the river round the deer park in Magdalen, the rawness of tired lungs flung into rowing practice at dawn on the year’s coldest mornings. And there were long, wine-dark nights, and having to climb out of the women’s colleges after dark when the gates had been closed, and having to break back into your own college over the back wall. And then there was Hattie, and the feeling of fainting that was falling in love.

  I had done my national service before going up, and Hattie had come straight from school, so she was two years younger, and I fancy that she lo
oked up to me at first, she thought because I was older I might perhaps be wise. That didn’t last long, of course. Once she knew me properly she learned that I needed her guidance far more than she could ever benefit from mine. But by then there had been time enough for her to come to care for me. So we did what was natural at that time, and married in the summer of our graduation. I wish I could still feel that I belonged in Oxford. The thought of the place still feels like home when I call it to mind. The memory of youth is always like harking back to home, after all. I envy Frank his position with a college and access to lunches and conversation. There was a time when I could have become part of that world myself. A headhunter approached me to ask whether I might consider applying to become the head of an Oxford college at the time of my retirement, and I examined the possibility for a while. It was flattering. It might perhaps have proved enjoyable. The trouble was that I never felt comfortable visiting the city, never felt satisfied by going back ever since I had graduated and left my digs. It had always felt like a lost domain. I see now that the only way I would ever have been able to shake off that sense of loss would have been by plunging back into the place and making new memories. I should have taken the job. But I didn’t realise that was what was being offered to me at the time, so I let it go. Now it is too late, it is long vanished.

  I met Hattie while we were doing a production of The Cherry Orchard on a college lawn, the only play I ever appeared in. I wasn’t there because of any talent. The play had a lot of parts, and bodies were needed to fill the scenes, and I must have been in the room when the rallying cry for actors went out. I don’t quite remember how it happened that I ended up on a stage – I never liked being looked at.

  I felt I loved Hattie the first time I saw her. We auditioned together – I was tried out for several parts, despite my evident lack of ability, there being a general surplus of women and a shortage of men available for every theatrical undertaking at Oxford since time immemorial. I remember she walked into the room, and our eyes met, and I couldn’t look at her again for the rest of the time we were in that room together, I felt so afraid of her, and so alive. I suppose that attraction must have been part of the reason I only got a part with seventeen lines, along with my abiding lack of talent, as not being able to look at the girl you auditioned with was always going to be a significant impediment. But I couldn’t help myself. The world had become huge and wonderful and terrifying, transformed utterly in the space of a breath, because I had learned that she was in it, and I had never known how much life was lying in wait to amaze me. I had never known till then that I wasn’t awake. I had never known it was possible to feel the blood that coursed like music through your own body as the adrenaline sang.

  It might have been only the charged sexuality of any rehearsal room that meant I was struck by the thunderbolt, but it did the trick. We didn’t do anything about what we were feeling till we came to the party on the last night of the show and started to drink, as was traditional with these affairs. Then, in a far-flung, unfamiliar common room, I found the courage to speak to her, and we kissed, and that was the start of everything, or the end, depending on how you looked at things. She sat on my lap, and cocked her head while she looked at me, smiling.

  ‘Well. What are we going to do about this then?’

  I knew I was done for the moment she spoke – I felt sure that this was fate reaching out to claim me. She wanted to smuggle me back to her rooms that night, but I wouldn’t go with her. ‘Not tonight, Hattie.’

  Her cheeks flushed, and she drew back from me. ‘Why not? Have I said the wrong thing?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. I just – I don’t want to do things wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t want to just be a night without sleep for you. I’d like to be someone you wanted to know.’

  She seemed too important to me to just go home with, to dive in at the deep end. She was something I felt suddenly sure I wanted to last for ever. So we went home to our separate beds, and met the next day, and nursed our hangovers together.

  I have always thought finding Hattie was a little like an ending, the conclusion of an interval of loneliness. In the right light the whole of the rest of my life could be read as a postscript to the first time I told Hattie I loved her. No matter how difficult life sometimes seemed, nothing really frightened me again once I knew I would journey through the world with her. Until the time came for dying, that is, which is why all this comes back to me now. I should try not to let all this in today.

  I proposed a few weeks after we finished our finals, in a rowing boat on the Thames above Henley. I had champagne there with me, waiting for her reply. I was trying to construct a romantic scenario we’d be able to tell friends about later. In the event, whenever we talked about the day we got engaged, we always ended up laughing. I nearly overturned the boat when we climbed back on to the bank, shaky from the emotion of the day, shocked by the gravity of the question, never having guessed how momentous it would really feel in the moment of asking. I had to catch Hattie as she started to pitch over into the river. We married later that summer. Neither of us knew what life had in store then. I hadn’t yet secured my first position in the civil service. That came a few weeks after the breathless days when we gathered both our families into the same place and celebrated the engagement all together.

  It all unfolded endlessly from there. We rented a flat in south London and moved in together after the wedding, and I would catch the train in from Earlsfield in the mornings, then walk the rest of the way from Waterloo through all the picture-postcard views that sprang up one after the other as you crossed the Thames. I liked Earlsfield. Edward Thomas had rambled through its streets as a boy, and Hardy had lived there as a young man. I liked to stand under the older trees and imagine those men resting under them, standing just where I was, staring at the same branches, different leaves falling.

  We spent our leisure hours walking over Wandsworth Common, Wimbledon Common, Richmond Park, and going to cinemas and the theatre and to concerts, weekends filled with picnic hampers, disbelieving happiness that always seemed to hang suspended in the air between us because we both always felt lucky to be with each other. When you finally find the person you need, and find they need you too, things can come to seem absurdly easy. Work came to us when we needed it, and we had a place to live, and when we decided to have a family we bought our first house. Life opened up for us as lilies do in the light of summer.

  Buying this house came about by chance, a risk we decided to take because those were the days when the world lay all before us, and if we were brave enough we felt we could do anything. We had gone to spend the weekend with my family in Wiltshire, and driven past this house on the way down. At that time it was a ruined, tumbling heap of ivy-choked brickwork with a ‘For Sale’ sign in the driveway. It had been occupied previously by a religious order who had run out of money, or otherwise died out and moved away. The story was never made absolutely clear to us, but we knew they had been there, carving up the house to suit their own purposes, to tell their own story through its rooms. When we first moved in there were still locks on all the doors.

  ‘What a wonderful project that will be for someone,’ Hattie said, smiling at me as we passed the house. ‘Giving life back to a lovely old place like that. It’d be just like building a life, wouldn’t it? Working on a place like that.’

  The following Monday, when we returned to London, the vision still lay there before us, calling. So we made enquiries, and found we could afford to do it if we wanted to commit ourselves to a different life with a different centre. And we decided that we did.

  When we had decided we wanted a child, both of us experienced the sensation of vertigo. It was extraordinary to us to think we had been children ourselves so recently, and then suddenly to be contemplating the realities of bringing a new life into the world. It seemed extraordinary that we were allowed to do this thing, which would make our lives so very different. It was
as if we were missing a catch. The same feeling came to us again when we decided to move out of London, to take on the house. It’s frightening to think how many decisions we make that change our lives just as decisively, every week, every year, without realising. All my life, I must have been shaping and limiting what was possible for me, and only seeing the tip of the iceberg of the choices I made.

  The source of the love I feel for this house now is the work we did together to restore it. I see all the beauty and all the life I shared with Hattie reflected in all the rooms around me.

  I glance towards the mounting yard, packed tight with cars, and see Frank driving in through the gates. I will need to explain to him why there are so many people here, and put him at his ease a little. The man will surely be alarmed by the crowd. I separate myself from my guests as carefully as I can, and watch as Frank parks in what little space is left. Then I cross the lawn to Kate where she stands among the wine and lagers and the old men topping up their glasses as they bathe in memory and spring sun.

  ‘Kate.’

  She looks up, knowing already what I am going to say, it seems to me. ‘Yes?’

  ‘The gentleman I need to speak to has arrived. Will you be all right to cover for me here for a little while?’

  ‘Of course.’ Kate’s eyes flick across to the cars where Frank is emerging from his faded grey Corsa. No trace of understanding or dawning realisation is visible on her face as she takes him in, the old tweed, the lined face, the last of what was once a great thick mop of unruly hair, like fog coming over a hill. I feel sure that this will all be all right. Things will be secret and safe; no one but Frank and myself will know what happened between us today, because no one is going to suspect anything, ask any difficult questions. How could anyone possibly work it out just from the look of him?