That is what truth to life is. The way to be true to life is to remain alive.
Later on Sunday, William took me to have a drink with our friend whose big window looks out over to Jura, whose raised beaches looked close enough to touch in the evening light across the blue sea. She has multiple sclerosis, is badly compromised physically, and frisky and busy mentally, running a bookshop, the community online newsletter, and belonging to many boards and committees. She told us about a recipe for cormorant pie; skart is the word in the Gaelic for cormorant and for shag, that the old harbourmaster, Big Peter, Para Mhor, used to enjoy in a pie. I remembered Peter, with his white sea-boots and his wide beard, his deep chest and his rosy cheeks. I had remembered him at his grave that morning. He held the old ferry in at the bow with a rope around a stanchion, balancing another rope sprung in tension at the stern. He slung sacks beneath the tyres of cars before they were wound out of the ferry by davits, when the ferry was not yet ro-ro (roll-on, roll-off). He wore petrol blue overalls that grew paler throughout the year and were replaced when they had reached a blue as thin as the last shallow sea over sand.
While we were taking a drink with our friend, a small red cruise ship came close to the island, and moored in the flat calm. Almost as soon as its anchor was set, the black ferry, twice its size, hauled through the silky water, with the large declaratory words Caledonian MacBrayne along the hull. For a moment it looked as though man had mastery over land and sea. We might have been looking, through our friend’s picture window, at a poster from the nineteen-sixties about advances in travel by sea. The scene might have been posed by models in a tank of moodless blue water, that same sea though that will ensure that not the drowned of this place alone are in time known only unto God.
On the way back from our drink, we drove into a sun so bright that it wasn’t just me who couldn’t see. William drove slowly by feel into the sun past stretches of water that pulled its white light down in stripes of glitter into themselves, wild flag iris leaves like knives at the lochans’ margins. At each passing-place we pulled in to let another car pass. We stopped for lambs. Why race to the end of a day so full of light?
Chapter 6: Goosey, Goosey Gander
Goosey, Goosey Gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs,
And in my lady’s chamber.
There I met an old man
Who would not say his prayers,
Took him by his left leg
And threw him down the stairs.
My computer has just offered to me, within its menu of formatting, the information that ‘Widow/orphan control’ is already in place. This means that no lone word will be left to stand unprotected by the words with which it has been conjoined, or with which it has grown up on to the page.
When I worked at Vogue, laying out copy, we hunted these widows with our scalpels, taking out antecedent text in order to bring the widowed word up into a warm paragraph away from the cold of white space.
Today the weather on Colonsay is so clear so calm so bright that I am afraid to use it up by mentioning it. I feel that by staying indoors in my apron trying to catch words and put them down, I am buying a day in the sun for someone else. If I have a dark indoor day, will that not equalise things somewhere? Won’t the weather keep itself for the weekend, when we have our sister Caroline visiting, and Katie’s daughter Hannah and a pair of newly married friends, Rupert and Ellis?
If you fly an aeroplane, you cannot think in such ways. You read for what is actually going on. You do not navigate by magic. Alexander reads bodies of water, for the direction of their spume, the energy of their choppiness. If the loch that is full of brown trout is spilling over its dam on to the traces of the old road, he knows that the ferry will not be able to get into the harbour. He lands his small plane no distance from meadows where corncrakes nest and ragwort grows, the one a protected, the other a notifiable, species. He can’t make provisional bargains such as mine with nature. His life, and the lives of those whom he flies, depend upon his reading its actual intent from its present state. Before the tsunami of Boxing Day 2006 struck, a teenaged girl who had learned in her geography class that, if the sea suddenly sucks in its breath so that beach is exposed where it has not been before, there is going to be a great tidal wave, ran about a beach in Sri Lanka, telling people to run for their lives.
Would you obey such a command? Some did, and escaped with their lives. She cannot have had time to explain her urgent order. Her listeners must simply have trusted and acted in the same breath. Knowledge gave her authority.
What interrupted her holiday distraction sufficiently to persuade her that the sea was holding its breath before it roared inland for devastating miles? There must have been a sound, or a silence, some sea change; possibly a melancholy long withdrawing roar. Or did she see the bed of the sea, exposed and appallingly dry, every bit of water sucked back into itself to reinforce the giant wave?
That girl was doing what we are told is the only way to live, now that an afterlife is all but discounted by rationalists, that is to live in the moment. Her moment gave what must have felt like an afterlife to those who survived.
Who, fully conscious, lives in the moment, actually? I have met some who think they do, or even appear to. The first are often intolerably selfish, the second usually very old and of apparently high principle, or very young indeed.
But can we know that even infants really do live in the moment? Anyone who has looked into the eyes of a baby knows that its soul is preoccupied. Those who try to live in the moment fail, since consciousness of the attempt occludes the purity of its essence. It is far easier to accept existential discomfort and accommodate oneself to it than to live existentially.
Aren’t we more like the goose in the nursery rhyme, wandering upstairs and downstairs and from room to room in a house we cannot envisage as a whole?
Although Fram thinks of me as that sleepy lion, it is the goose who has lately predominated, and he would, when exasperated, call me a goose. In plenty of ways he is right. Like a goose, I hatched and fixed upon him, making of him my parents as well as a focus for my thoughts and days, just as a gosling will, of whoever brings its enclosing egg to term.
Like a goose, I would be rewarding to render down to fat, like a goose I hiss if my idea of home is attacked. I panic in advance just as did the Roman geese sacred to Juno, herself an intensely feminine and domestically petty older goddess, who suffered from jealousy incidentally, and was, while we are about it, unattractively insecure about her appearance. Also, like a goose, at the moment, and this is where the rest of the nursery rhyme comes in, I waddle.
And ‘gander’ is a word for a verb of looking, in which English is demonstrating to me its richness the less I am able to see. In English slang, to ‘have a gander’ is to take a look.
Last autumn, I moved from the upstairs flat in Tite Street to my older son’s house, still in London. He was twenty-six at the time, with a demanding job, a girlfriend and a busy social life. He moved out of his own room for me and put himself in the small spare room which he had previously rented to a nice, very tidy, girl lodger. He is six foot six and a bit tall, and very tidy himself.
He opened his house to me and my clutter, my too many grey cardigans and my unnecessarily growing number of books, my large out-of-date CD player, the clattering heaps of talking books, my stocks of ballet pumps in silly colours, my eighteenth-century Scots-Napoleonic child’s chair that I have had since I was two, and my chunk of lettered stone–the design for my father’s grave–my fading watercolours of fish, executed in Macao by a painter, ‘almost certainly of Chinese origin’, and my painting in oils of a jug of pink roses made by Henry Lamb for my grandfather Ormiston Galloway Edgar McWilliam. The piece of funerary inscription says UTILITAS incised in grey Scots stone. Usefulness is one of the three essentials for architecture, according to Vitruvius. The others are FIRMITAS, strength, VENUSTAS, beauty. My father had these characteristics. Th
e stone in the Flodden Wall of Scottish Heroes declares them together with his span 1928–1989.
My son has a thin television. His ironing is immaculate. He looks new. Even when I was more presentable, the way I look did not come naturally into his view of the world. No sooner had I begun to live in his house than it started filling up. He does not like stuff. His tolerance of my way of being has been gentle.
It’s more graceful than tolerance in fact. He has twice alluded to something he has called ‘homeliness’ starting to happen in his house. But I don’t think that he is being satirical. He is never snide. His face was open when he used the term.
It was a fine day further on into the autumn, and I had a doctor’s appointment. I decided to make an effort with my goosey appearance. It was a grey jumper I lit upon, instead, for once, of a cardigan, and black skirt and ballet pumps. I was running not as punctually as usual. My son’s house is arranged around a steep but solid staircase, fitly carpeted, firmly banistered.
I keep my white sticks in a bowl by the stove, like the utensils they are. My mobile telephone was charging by my bed upstairs in my womanish bedroom; no old man, reluctant or not to pray, was up there in my lady’s chamber. I was on the last flight down stairs when I fell in a way that struck me as new, and then as very new.
I saw what I was made of, clearly. Two white bones stuck out through the now surprisingly blue and white skin of my left leg. There was something pinkish like veal.
I remembered what my friend Robert had done when he had a stroke years before, as a young man. He took over twenty-four hours to do it, but he rolled and dragged his literally half-dead body to reach the telephone. Now, Robert was even taller than I, and in worse trouble, and telephones were immobile in those days, so I was lucky. These were my first thoughts.
I remembered that my son wouldn’t be home for two days. I vehemently wanted to get out of this pickle before two days had passed as I did not want Oliver to find me broken and filling his front hall in a spill of handbag contents. I had resolved that he must never again find me wrecked.
I did pray then, simply and aloud. Praying for oneself is discouraged by every friend I have who is serious about prayer. I prayed for something I lack, whose lack has contributed to Fram calling me a goose. I asked my guardian angel to tune me in to the frequency some people are on all the time, common sense.
I was apparently stuck. It must only be apparent. I thought. I made three steps upstairs on my bottom and arms, backwards, towards the mobile telephone plugged into the wall two flights up, and saw that I was already late for my doctor’s appointment that had before I fell been due in an hour and forty minutes. I thought that it would be a bore to pass out.
It might also be quite pleasant to pass out if I was going to spend forty-eight hours alone with my odd leg.
What was wrong with it?
The foot was pointing the other way. It was pointing backwards. I took it in both my hands, pulled my foot away from its leg and did my best to turn it round, so that the toes would point forwards. Nothing hurt because I held all my thinking away from my left leg. I cut off its messages.
It was the look of the thing I didn’t like, so that proved that my trusty body, just as when I had my fit, was allowing me my eyes now that I was, in anatomical equipment terms, a leg down.
I was apprehensive about my family. They would not like this.
I thought of Robert, inching towards that telephone years ago to call his mum. I asked my mother for help. I neither cried nor shouted.
Not many people are around in the day in a small London street.
I was going to have to risk embarrassment. I did not want to shout. Noise makes me panic. It is seldom necessary.
I could go no further up the stairs. The line of least resistance exerted its to me inexorable sway and I was, not soon, but at some point after taking the decision to do so, making some sort of progress back down the stairs and towards the front hall.
Both Oliver and I had heard what may have been an urban myth about fishing rods with magnets on the end used to burgle the houses of people of methodical habit who keep keys close to the front door. We fondly feel we have another method.
I lock myself in when I am alone, almost automatically, having for over a decade before I moved to London lived next to an individual of whom I was afraid.
That once prudent habit might be, if not the death of me, a nuisance now, I reflected.
My son likes big umbrellas. I saw one, hanging behind my untidily many voluminous coats on that gloriously orderly boy’s coat hooks in his front hall.
I prayed again, this time for as much stretch as I had had before I began to fall in towards myself, for my young stretch that had fled only in the last pair of years.
I reached Oliver’s umbrella. I wasn’t in pain, but I was high as a kite, observant in the way I am when in a chemically altered state. If only I didn’t have to fall down in a fit or break myself to get my eyesight back at its former pitch and heightenedness.
Oliver’s umbrella was naturally perfectly furled. He is a man of action who understands the importance of small things. He is the man who stows the parachute correctly every time.
I held the ferrule of the umbrella and moved its hook towards the door, not hopeful, but trying to implement the care of a burglar with his fishing rod, the other way about.
My earlier inattention to detail might just be going to save me from my flying slipshod fall, for I had not closed the front door on its intractable deadlock as I think that I almost always do.
I opened the front door, which was one astounding stroke of luck.
I began, quietly and not convincingly, to say, ‘Is any one around?’
I had grown used to hearing no one pass the windows of the house in the day except to set off for work or come back. It was late lunchtime.
I did not want my upsetting left leg to be visible, were anyone to come. I tried to bend my knee back and conceal my shattered ankle within my black skirt with stars in its weave.
I’d not noticed the stars before.
I was seeing stars, like in a comic. I missed having someone to tell my thoughts to.
It was bright sun outside, low autumn sun.
I saw two angels, male of course as angels may be, one shorter than the other.
It was two weeks since the crash in the markets of 18 September 2008.
My rescuers had the sort of manners that occur only in romances. One was Greek, the other German.
When the paramedic who was driving turned on the siren of the ambulance in which I found myself I remembered that I’d been in the hands of these vigilant kind people before. They put a line in me and started with the morphine, managing at the same time to talk soothingly and to obey the bureaucracy that surrounds the administration of Class A drugs, while listening to my chief worry, which was that Oliver might find his house imperfectly tidy. They talked down their radios into the emergency bay.
It was the same hospital.
I had dreaded that.
The hospital had become my place of fear of dying alone.
Hospital had been till that fit the place where the children had been born. I was that lucky a woman.
Now, though, I belonged to that major part of the population whose knowledge lay with their fear; that it is our modern lot to die away from home and away from those we love.
In some ways, though, this was like another place, so different was the atmosphere of this ward from that of the first ward where I had lain with the silent doctor quietly dying and opposite the stark shrieking old woman reduced to open bowels and mouth.
It was during the following days and nights that I discovered that I do not get on with morphine, which I had been keeping as a treat for the rainy day when an addict knows her number is up and so she can accept pain relief without fear of dependency.
Morphine makes me itchy. Junkies often scratch, I remembered now, from gatherings I used to attend under the shared delusion that we were at a
party, when gear was another way to spend money with nothing good to show for it. Not, ever, my bag. Too scared, too broke, too oral.
This time the dying old woman on the ward had a name that was lovingly used.
I was barely coherent and about to be taken to the operating table (the surgeons work all night in that place) when one of the angels arrived with orange roses in his hand, ‘For the lovely Mrs Dinshaw’. People remember their first kiss. I will remember my last gallant bunch, and that courtly untruthful adjective. This was not flirtation. It was the completion of a certain form of gentle behaviour. What flowers these were, a disinterested, foreign, correct bouquet. I felt as fortunate as a researcher coming upon an unknown primary source.
Hospital gowns are made for people of average size. I had hardly been so unlovely, immodest in my gown, spotty with opioids, haywire with anxiety about the children. I asked him to put the flowers so they were for all of us women in that ward, in a jar on the ledge of the big window where pigeons panicked, settled, tapped with their bills on the other side of the glass through which lay London.
It is such things as my rescue by the two angels that make me in life believe more in E. M. Forster’s and Elizabeth Bowen’s sort of plot, that intersperses literally incredible melodrama with lulls where the shifts are apparently minimal, rather than in the steady organised tempo offered by more evenly plotted novels. Elizabeth Bowen says this in her notes on writing a novel: ‘Chance is better than choice, it is more lordly. Chance is God. Choice is man.’
I’d say, chance is fiction at the top of its reach, choice is comfort reading.
Tolstoy feels like life, as you read him, with all the never irrelevant extraneousness, and the fullness of it all. But life, to me, seldom is Tolstoy. He improves on it, at any rate, for this reader. To read him is more fully and steadily to live. One calms down, daring to be tranquil within his fields of power. He is like life, if we were fully able to remember it outside the bias of our own temperament.
What to Look for in Winter Page 37
