I Can't Stay Long

by Laurie Lee

  Real charm is dynamic, an enveloping spell which mysteriously enslaves the senses. It is an inner light, fed on reservoirs of benevolence which well up like a thermal spring. It is unconscious, often nothing but the wish to please, and cannot be turned on and off at will. Which would seem to cancel the claims of some of the notorious charmers of the past – Casanova, Lawrence of Arabia, Rubirosa – whose talent, we suspect, wasn’t charm at all so much as a compulsive need to seduce. Others, more recent, had larger successes through being less specific in their targets – Nehru, for instance, and Yehudi Menuhin, Churchill, and the early Beatles. As for the women – Cleopatra, Mata Hari, Madame du Barry – each one endowed with superb physical equipment; were they charmers, too? – in a sense they must have been, though they laid much calculated waste behind them.

  You recognize charm by the feeling you get in its presence. You know who has it. But can you get it, too? Properly, you can’t, because it’s a quickness of spirit, an originality of touch you have to be born with. Or it’s something that grows naturally out of another quality, like the simple desire to make people happy. Certainly, charm is not a question of learning palpable tricks, like wrinkling your nose, or having a laugh in your voice, or gaily tossing your hair out of your dancing eyes and twisting your mouth into succulent love-knots. Such signs, to the nervous, are ominous warnings which may well send him streaking for cover. On the other hand, there is an antenna, a built-in awareness of others, which most people have, and which care can nourish.

  But in a study of charm, what else does one look for? Apart from the ability to listen – rarest of all human virtues and most difficult to sustain without vagueness – apart from warmth, sensitivity, and the power to please, what else is there visible? A generosity, I suppose, which makes no demands, a transaction which strikes no bargains, which doesn’t hold itself back till you’ve filled up a test-card making it clear that you’re worth the trouble. Charm can’t withhold, but spends itself willingly on young and old alike, on the poor, the ugly, the dim, the boring, on the last fat man in the corner. It reveals itself also in a sense of ease, in casual but perfect manners, and often in a physical grace which springs less from an accident of youth than from a confident serenity of mind. Any person with this is more than just a popular fellow, he is also a social healer.

  Charm, in the abstract, has something of the quality of music: radiance, balance, and harmony. One encounters it unexpectedly in odd corners of life with a shock of brief, inexplicable ravishment: in a massed flight of birds, a string of running horses, an arrangement of clouds on the sea; wooded islands, Tanagra figures, old balconies in Spain, the line of a sports car holding a corner, in the writings of Proust and Jane Austen, the paintings of Renoir and Fragonard, the poetry of Herrick, the sound of lute and guitar … Thickets of leaves can have it, bare arms interlocking, suds of rain racing under a bridge, and such simplicities as waking after a sleep of nightmares to see sunlight bouncing off the ceiling. The effect of these, like many others, is to restore one’s place in the world; to reassure, as it were, one’s relationship with things, and to bring order to the wilderness.

  But charm, in the end, is flesh and blood, a most potent act of behaviour, the laying down of a carpet by one person for another to give his existence a moment of honour. Much is deployed in the weaponry of human dealings: stealth, aggression, blackmail, lust, the urge to possess, devour, and destroy. Charm is the rarest, least used, and most invincible of powers, which can capture with a single glance. It is close to love in that it moves without force, bearing gifts like the growth of daylight. It snares completely, but is never punitive, it disarms by being itself disarmed, strikes without wounds, wins wars without casualties – though not, of course, without victims. He who would fall in the battle, let him fall to charm, and he will never be humbled, or know the taste of defeat.

  In the armoury of man, charm is the enchanted dart, light and subtle as a hummingbird. But it is deceptive in one thing – like a sense of humour, if you think you’ve got it, you probably haven’t.

  Paradise

  It seems to me that the game of choosing one’s Paradise is rarely a rewarding pastime; it either produces images of vast banality, or boredom on a cosmic scale: sometimes a kind of Killarney between showers, ringing with Irish tenors, or a perpetual Butlin’s rigged for everlasting Bingo; for others an exclusive developed area in Stock Exchange marble surrounded by cottonwool and celestial grass. This last – perhaps the most popular and longest sold in the series – has always had its own unimaginable horror, where, in the glaring blue-white of the adman’s heaven, the starched inmates have nothing whatever to do except sit down, stand up, walk around the draughty halls, or hide behind the classical pillars.

  Indeed, through the ages, man’s various conceptions of Paradise have seemed more often than not to teeter on the brink of hell. And with the common element of eternity thrown in, there wouldn’t be all that much to choose between them – except that hell would seem to promise more entertainment.

  Paradise, in the past, as a piece of Christian propaganda, never really got off the ground. Too chaste, too disinfected, too much on its best behaviour, it received little more than a dutiful nod from the faithful. Hell, on the other hand, was always a good crowd-raiser, having ninety per cent of the action – high colours, high temperatures, intricate devilries and always the most interesting company available. In the eyes of priest, prophet, poet and painter, Hades has always been a better bet than heaven. Milton’s best-seller was Paradise Lost (while Paradise Regained was just a plate of cold potatoes). The sulphurous visions of Savonarola, Danté and Hieronymus Bosch are something by which we have always been willingly and vigorously haunted. Of all the arts, only certain rare passages of music seem ever to have touched the fringes of a credible Paradise.

  The difficulty of trying to suggest in any detail what one’s personal Paradise should be is like suddenly coming into enormous wealth. There are no limits or disciplines to contain one’s grandiose plans, and the results are generally unfortunate.

  Having said that, and declared some of the flaws in the game, the time has come for me to outline my own banality. Paradise, for me, is a holding on to the familiar contained within some ideal scale of the past – an eighteenth-century thing, perhaps, in its grace and order (without its squalor and tribulations). I would have a landscape shelving gently between mountains to the sea, with pastures and woods between them. There would be a small city on the coast, a couple of villages in the hills, and a hermitage hanging from one of the distant crags – a place of sonorous mystery, never to be visited, but from which oracles would be issued once a week. The city would be walled, terraced and luminescent, intimate and without wheeled traffic. From its centre, the countryside would always be visible and could comfortably be reached on foot. Temperatures would be constant: 68° to 74° with no wind except a breeze from the sea. No rain either, except for unseen showers in the night, just enough to keep things green; or festive ‘summer-rain days’, known and predictable, when a light warm mist would drift through the streets and gardens, and lovers would fasten their shutters and spend long whispering afternoons accompanied by the sound of moistures dripping from rose to rose.

  Weather, in Paradise, would be varied, yet tactful, never attempting to achieve any monotonous perfection. There would also be long Nordic twilights for walks in the country, beside river or reeded lake, whose rustling waters, standing with tall grave birds, would reflect the sky’s slow shade towards night. The pastoral landscape itself would be lightened by tall flowering grasses, bee-orchids, button mushrooms and snails. Apart from songbirds, who would sing only at dawn and evening and the whisper of river and ocean – no noise: no explosion, public announcement, radio, hammering of buildings, motor-car, jetplane – only the deep, forgotten primeval silence which, like true darkness itself, is a natural balm of which man is now almost totally deprived.

  Breaking this silence, of course, there would have to be mus
ic, for any place without music is a hearth without fire; not music of brass, I think, but music of reed and strings whose sounds are the most potent ravishers of the senses. This music would be based in the skull, to be switched on at will, and inaudible to others unless they wished to share it.

  But what about people? Well mine would be a First Day Paradise, for a very solid reason. In it one would have no past, nor future, only the new-peeled light of the present, and so put the unthinkableness of eternity out of one’s mind. The people of the city, fields and mountains – wits, sages, children, lovers – would shine for you with the original magic of first sight, as you yourself would shine for them. Recognition, but no remembrance, would ensure that they were members of a familiar society whom you could never accuse of repeating themselves; while their pleasure in the newness of you would spare you the purgatory of knowing that you might be boring them. It might be agreeable to imagine that everyone grew imperceptibly younger, like Cary Grant in his old TV films, but having no recollection, this wouldn’t matter – each day would bring its fresh confrontation, each love would be first and only.

  Paradise would also restore some of the powers we lost in that long descent from childhood to death.

  Senses that failed would be returned to the keen, high level of their beginnings. The child’s animal sharpness of taste and smell – which the adult knows only too well he’s lost when he hears the adman trying to prove he still has them – the ability to take in the whiff of heat from summer grass in the morning, the oils in a leaf, the white dust on a daisy, the different spirits in wood, in clay, in iron, all of which allows the child to bind himself intimately to these objects, but from which the adult is inexorably exiled. Paradise would bring back these senses and the contacts they offer – the special aura of a house as you open its door, a tang which tells you its history and the character of all the people in it; the awareness of an invisible animal close at hand in a wood; the girlish texture of a young calf’s mouth: and taste; the brutality of nursery medicines, the delight in a common caramel, the sharp bitter milk of the dandelion root, the acrid horse-breath of straw in a barn.

  Surely, with the handing back of these powers, one might reasonably ask also for the restoration of appetite. Sacred appetite, so readily blunted on earth – at least, three parts of one’s time to denying it, whether it be for food or love, not for puritanical reasons but in order to sharpen it to the edge when it could best celebrate the thing it longed for.

  But one needn’t bother to ask what one would do in Paradise. Timeless, without memory or sense of future, one would live out each day new. An ideal landscape; mountains, fields and woods, and the sea throwing up its light. A deep green silence outside the walls of the city, or occasional sweet airs that delight and harm not; within the city, companionship, the sibilant pleasure of bare feet on marble; wine, oil, the smell of herbs, brown skin; oceans mirrored in eyes that would be the only eternity.

  Above all, I think I’d wish for one exclusive indulgence – the power to take off as one does in dreams, to rise and float soundlessly over the bright tiles of the city, over the oak groves and nibbling sheep, to jostle with falcons on mountain crags and then sweep out over the purple sea.

  On the rooftops, as I returned, silver storks, wings folded, would stand catching the evening light. There would be children in the patios playing with sleepy leopards, girls in the windows preparing their lamps. Alighting on this terrace of heaven I would join my unjealous friends and choose one for the long cool twilight. Asking no more of the day than that I should be reminded of my body by some brief and passing pain; and perhaps be allowed one twinge of regret at the thought of the other world I’d lived in, a sense of loss without which no Paradise is perfect.

  The Firstborn

  I

  She was born in the autumn and was a late fall in my life, and lay purple and dented like a little bruised plum, as though she’d been lightly trodden in the grass and forgotten.

  Then the nurse lifted her up and she came suddenly alive, her bent legs kicking crabwise, and her first living gesture was a thin wringing of the hands accompanied by a far-out Hebridean lament.

  This moment of meeting seemed to be a birthtime for both of us; her first and my second life. Nothing, I knew, would be the same again, and I think I was reasonably shaken. I peered intently at her, looking for familiar signs, but she was convulsed as an Aztec idol. Was this really my daughter, this purple concentration of anguish, this blind and protesting dwarf?

  Then they handed her to me, stiff and howling, and I held her for the first time and kissed her, and she went still and quiet as though by instinctive guile, and I was instantly enslaved by her flattery of my powers.

  Only a few brief weeks have passed since that day, but already I’ve felt all the obvious astonishments. New-born, of course, she looked already a centenarian, tottering on the brink of an old crone’s grave, exhausted, shrunken, bald as Voltaire, mopping, mowing and twisting wrinkled claws in speechless spasms of querulous doom.

  But with each day of survival she has grown younger and fatter, her face filling, drawing on life, every breath of real air healing the birth-death stain she had worn so witheringly at the beginning.

  Now this girl, my child, this parcel of will and warmth, fills the cottage with her obsessive purpose. The rhythmic tides of her sleeping and feeding spaciously measure the days and nights. Her frail self-absorption is a commanding presence, her helplessness strong as a rock, so that I find myself listening even to her silences as though some great engine was purring upstairs.

  When awake, and not feeding, she snorts and gobbles, dryly, like a ruminative jackdaw, or strains and groans and waves her hands about as though casting invisible nets.

  When I watch her at this I see her hauling in life, groping fiercely with every limb and muscle, working blind at a task no one can properly share, in a darkness where she is still alone.

  She is of course just an ordinary miracle, but is also the particular late wonder of my life. So each night I take her to bed like a book and lie close and study her. Her dark blue eyes stare straight into mine, but off-centre, not seeing me.

  Such moments could be the best we shall ever know – those midnights of mutual blindness. Already, I suppose, I should be afraid for her future, but I am more concerned with mine.

  I am fearing perhaps her first acute recognition, her first questions, the first man she makes of me. But for the moment I’m safe: she stares idly through me, at the pillow, at the light on the wall, and each is a shadow of purely nominal value and she prefers neither one to the other.

  Meanwhile as I study her I find her early strangeness insidiously claiming a family face.

  Here she is then, my daughter, here, alive, the one I must possess and guard. A year ago this space was empty, not even a hope of her was in it. Now she’s here, brand new, with our name upon her; and no one will call in the night to reclaim her.

  She is here for good, her life stretching before us, twenty odd years wrapped up in that bundle; she will grow, learn to totter, to run in the garden, run back, and call this place home. Or will she?

  Looking at those weaving hands and complicated ears, the fit of the skin round that delicate body, I can’t indulge in the neurosis of imagining all this to be merely a receptacle for Strontium 90. The forces within her seem much too powerful to submit to a blanket death of that kind.

  But she could, even so, be a victim of chance; all those quick lively tendrils seem so vulnerable to their own recklessness – surely she’ll fall on the fire, or roll down some crevice, or kick herself out of the window?

  I realise I’m succumbing to the occupational disease, the father-jitters or new-parenthood-shakes, expressed in: ‘Hark the child’s screaming, she must be dying.’ Or, ‘She’s so quiet, she must be dead.’

  As it is, my daughter is so new to me still that I can’t yet leave her alone. I have to keep on digging her out of her sleep to make sure that she’s really alive
.

  She is a time-killing lump, her face a sheaf of masks which she shuffles through aimlessly. One by one she reveals them, while I watch eerie rehearsals of those emotions she will one day need, random, out-of-sequence but already exact, automatic but strangely knowing – a quick pucker of fury, a puff of ho-hum boredom, a beaming after-dinner smile, perplexity, slyness, a sudden wrinkling of grief, pop-eyed interest, and fat-lipped love.

  It is little more than a month since I was handed this living heap of expectations, and I can feel nothing but simple awe.

  What have I got exactly? And what am I going to do with her? And what for that matter will she do with me?

  I have got a daughter, whose life is already separate from mine, whose will already follows its own directions, and who has quickly corrected my woolly preconceptions of her by being something remorselessly different. She is the child of herself and will be what she is. I am merely the keeper of her temporary helplessness.

  Even so, with luck, she can alter me; indeed, is doing so now. At this stage in my life she will give me more than she gets, and may even later become my keeper.

  But if I could teach her anything at all – by unloading upon her some of the ill-tied parcels of my years—I’d like it to be acceptance and a holy relish for life. To accept with gladness the fact of being a woman – when she’ll find all nature to be on her side.