by Angela Huth
I open the desk drawer and take out a cutting I’ve read so many times it’s close to falling to pieces. Balzac’s words, written in despair while struggling with Cousin Bette. ‘Great artists, true poets, do not wait for either commissions or clients, they create to-day, tomorrow, ceaselessly. And there results a habit of toil, a perpetual consciousness of the difficulties, that keeps them in a state of marriage with the muse, and her creative forces.’ As one who’s far from a great writer, I must suppose myself also bound in a habit of toil – a habit from which I don’t want to be free.
Goodbye to Rejection, but if and when a new idea comes, I shall start a new play.
I pick up the manuscript, add it to the piles of other rejections in the cupboard. No point hanging around here any longer: I’ll go down now and talk to Isabel. But I shan’t tell her what’s happened.
Not till I start again.
BERT
This was the best decision I could possibly have made. I lie in a bloody great four poster, cup of coffee by my side, bit of the huge Norfolk sky pale through the window. Slept like a baby, every night. What with all the walking, I suppose, and the breathing in of the famously soporific air.
When Carlotta rang a few minutes ago, I have to admit it was the first time I’d thought of London, her, Dan – though Isabel, of course, has flared constantly in my mind – fantasies, fantasies, superimposed over reeds, marsh, sand, sea.
Soon as I got here I became immersed in the place that I once knew and loved so well, but hadn’t re-visited for years. I didn’t give a damn about all I’d left: I just wanted to fade far away, dissolve and quite forget all the unease of returning to England, a changed London. I wanted simply to remember and remind.
Carlotta snapped my dreaming. She sounded quite cross with me at first. Well, I suppose I have been a bit thoughtless. Forgot to tell her I was off, didn’t ring. But in the end she was jolly, friendly. We went in for a bit of banter. I remembered her breasts. I suppose, given such a long period of abstinence, we could get it together. But there’d never be any pretence of loving Carlotta. All my love is for Isabel.
I finish my coffee, lie back. I want to re-think things before I get up. Be quite sure. Because I seem to have made a wild, mammoth, life-changing decision. I just want an hour or so more to re-affirm it isn’t a mistake. I don’t mind rash acts, but I like to be sure they are going to result in something good. Last night, convinced I’d done the right thing, alone I drank a lot of the kind of claret Dan would have enjoyed to celebrate my plan. So my rationalising was cloudy. The businessman within me says ‘Give yourself an hour or so longer, Bert old man, before you get up and set about signing things.’
First two days here were extraordinary. The village in which I was born, always a pretty place of Georgian houses round the green, seemed to have become a Mecca for the loud voiced Londoners in uniform clothes, their huge cars parked everywhere. To accommodate their tastes, the locals had provided what they wanted: gift shops, estate agents, shops selling over-priced clothes and tat, boutiques stuffed with ceramics and tiles, and Indian rugs (how Carlotta would sneer).
When I was a child you could buy rope, saddles, fishing gear, buckets, soap not fashioned into the shape of a Beatrix Potter character. It was an ordinary village scarcely frequented, out of season, by visitors. There was a butcher, a baker, a greengrocer, but no fancy shops and I don’t recall an estate agent. The simple pub had been transformed into the very expensive hotel I’m now staying in – good food, disgusting coffee. It all took some getting used to. I went through the turmoil of thinking well at least the local shopkeepers are making a good living, and how sad that so undiscovered a place had been ruined by crowds of rich people. I wandered about, amazed at all the shops that had disappeared, but re-appeared in some fancy guise. The only pleasure was a bookshop – the village had always been sadly lacking in books, so this calm new shop was an improvement. I saw no one I knew. Hardly surprising.
Then I drove off to the beach – various beaches, observed how the dunes had been eaten away, some beach huts were almost buried in the sand, a car park near the golf course was full as a supermarket car park. Still, I walked away from the crowds. I walked miles along the dyke, and out to the island, the north shore. The skeins of birds were the same: and the distances made miniature by the vast arc of sky. The wind, the faint smell of gorse. And I went to the staithe, down on to the hard where Tom and I used to go crabbing as children. Bits of bacon on lengths of string: foolish crabs whizzing towards them to meet their end in a small red bucket. God, the stink, a few hours later. There were boys, there, still crabbing. I turned back, looked at the Sailing Club – much enlarged now, with a bar and providing sophisticated sandwiches. I remembered so many summer nights when we’d go down to the sea’s edge to jump in the phosphorescent sea – girls holding up their skirts, boys soaking their jeans. Those millions of sparks of light riding on the small waves, frothing up at us when the waves broke with their small watery chords, a mystery to those of us who were no good at science, so weird and beautiful there was no room to think of holding a girl’s hand.
And the teenage dances – I remembered those. Being sick somewhere among the boats. Snogging some girl on the marsh path, I think in view of everyone – we couldn’t wait to walk a few yards till we were out of sight. When at last – we must have been clamped together for half an hour – we pulled apart, I saw she was holding, in her free hand, a pair of glasses. Tried to hide them. I also saw – now that the moon had appeared from behind a cloud – that she was far from pretty. One of my first conscious shaming acts, then: I ran away from her, never spoke to her again. I thought nothing of this bad behaviour. What a brat I must have been.
Yesterday morning I went back along the marsh path. Horses were tethered, swifts traced the grey sky, but I was alone. And a strange sense of being back, being home, overcame me. I had resisted returning to the house where I’d spent my childhood for fear of seeing change there: I didn’t want to see the flowerbed, where my mother had dropped dead among the lupins, re-planted. But I didn’t have to visit the old house to feel I’d come home. It occurred to me, in that strange and misty way that ideas come to one, that during the afternoon I would make use of the many estate agencies. See if they had anything on their books that might be appealing.
But I continued on my walk towards Brancaster: I’d decided to spend the whole morning walking. The small path runs close to a wall that divides the marsh from the few old houses that have been there for ages – no visible new buildings there, thank goodness. Doubtless not many people want to face the marsh in winter.
I came to the small flint and brick house I remembered well: a friend of Tom’s lived there. I looked over the wall. The gate to the garden – much improved – was open. An old woman, in bright yellow oilskins, was talking to a young couple. They didn’t look like locals. They followed her round the corner out of sight.
I stayed where I was, marvelling at the planting of the borders. A yellowhammer sat on a branch of buddleia, frightening away a goldfinch. It was obviously a garden full of birds: I’ve no recollection of its popularity with birds when I knew it as a child. My only real memories are of making camps in the apple trees. They were still there, heavy with fruit.
The old woman returned, alone. She waved at me. Shouted that she knew all along such people wouldn’t want it – she wouldn’t have let them have it anyway. Waste of time. She came right up to me. From her side of the wall that divided us, she looked out over the marsh with forget-me-not blue eyes. I knew she’d taken in the view so many times that her glance was no more than a confirmation of a picture that lived deep within her. Then she turned to me. Her scant white hair stood upright like a flag in wind. Her skin was battered and bronzed, but beneath her cheek bones were hollows so shallow they could have been pressed by the delicate thumbs of a potter. I could see that years ago she must have been beautiful.
‘Years ago,’ I said, ‘I used to play in your garden. The ho
use belonged to the parents of my brother’s friend.’
At once her irritation, disappointment, whatever it was the young couple had caused her, disappeared. She looked interested.
‘Come and have a look round, you must,’ she said, ‘see what I’ve done over the years.’ Her accent was gently lilting, Irish.
I passed through the open gate and went in. We walked slowly along the main border while she explained how difficult it was to grow shrubs and flowers with any success in so unprotected a position: the word unprotected did something to my heart. I felt a kind of strange excitement – anticipation, perhaps – that was even stronger than the pleasure of so unexpected an encounter. Then I was invited in for a cup of coffee and a slice of carrot cake. She said she more or less lived on carrot cake, it was the only kind she could make. As we walked towards the house we introduced ourselves. Her name was Rosie Cotterman. She had to leave, now, she said, and move to a wing of her married son’s house in Oxfordshire. Health reasons, she added. I noticed she limped. Old age, bugger it. Leaving was the last thing she wanted to do.
‘I don’t want comfort,’ she said. ‘I want sea and sky.’
She reckoned she’d die pretty quickly once she’d left the marsh.
She mentioned this with no trace of self-pity or fear: it was, as she saw it, a simple fact. She herself would rather have died in her sleep during one of the harsh winters that can assail this coast, but her son had insisted she be in a more comfortable place – she delivered the word with a sneer – and was overseen. That word, too, came out as a sneer.
She flung off her yellow oilskin and made her way through the detritus of the kitchen to the kettle. The place was a shambles: stained cracked walls, rust, dust, stalagmites of books and boxes and, everywhere, water colours. They hung tilted on the dun walls, they were stacked up on the floor. A pile of sketchbooks occupied a chair. At one end of the room was an easel, on which was propped a half completed painting of the marsh, and a table which bore a rubble of paints and brushes. Rosie Cotterman was an artist. I asked her if she made her living from her paintings. She turned from the stove, gave me a long, long, silent, stare.
‘There used to be a very constant buyer,’ she said at last. ‘That source of income has dried up now – but, yes, well, I sell the odd picture from time to time.’
I was pacing about, hoping not to appear either intrusive or too eager, eyes flitting along the quiet landscapes. She seemed to have inherited something of the understatements of the Norwich School: a kind of fierce delicacy that, to me, is the essence of Norfolk.
‘Could I be a buyer?’ I asked.
I pointed to three pictures that particularly appealed to me, but I would have been happy with any of them.
Rosie Cotterman staggered for a moment – hand searching for a stick she had mislaid, so she leant against the stove.
‘Is this possible?’ she asked at last. ‘Why now, which ones would you like? … But first,’ she said, and I could see she was barely able to contain herself, ‘we must have some refreshment.’
We sat in armchairs that might have been storm-tossed, so battered were their covers and exposed their springs. Old cushions with crocheted covers made no contribution to comfort. But there was a faint, summery warmth from the fire: the coffee was marvellously strong, and the carrot cake, which she sliced onto chipped and faded plates, was sublime. On a small table by Rosie’s chair were a pile of unopened brown envelopes, a pile of Agatha Christie paperbacks, and a new looking copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. She saw me looking at it.
‘I do enjoy reading the Calydonian Boar Hunt,’ she said. I sensed she was trying to contain herself, put off for a moment longer the overwhelming fact that I wanted to make a purchase.
‘I read it over and over again,’ she said. Was I acquainted with it?
I said I’d read Classics at Oxford, and, yes, indeed, had much enjoyed the Boar Hunt, though I’d not read it for many years. From there we progressed to the past, her life here – never lonely for a single second. ‘Solitude is an art worth learning,’ she assured me. I understood her once eager buyer of pictures to be a married man, but she did not go into any detail. We discovered we had a few Norfolk friends in common, though two of them were now dead. She explained that these days her work was much interrupted by completely unsuitable people the estate agent sent to ‘view’ (another of her sneers) the house. Some of them were so appalled they didn’t even bother to look round, drove away fast.
‘People fancy they’d like remoteness,’ she said, ‘but faced with the reality they soon change their minds.’
A lot of London people had been moving to the east coast in recent years, but couldn’t take the harshness and – thank God – moved away again. She smiled, laughed – a soft, cooing laugh like a mourning dove.
We sat talking through the afternoon. She produced fish pâté and homemade bread, more carrot cake, and damsons from the garden. A bottle of claret was opened. I fetched logs from a pile outside and put them on the fire.
Eventually, she thought it time to wrap my pictures, and in the intense muddle of the room managed to find paper and old plastic bags. They came to a very large amount, she said: I said I didn’t mind, and wrote her a cheque for what seemed to me a rather modest sum.
And then – I don’t know how it happened. It certainly wasn’t a premeditated thought. But as I walked towards the door, mellow with food and wine, pictures under my arm, I asked if I might buy the house as well. It’d save you any more bother with estate agents and unsuitable viewers: we could negotiate between us, I said, to break a long silence. Rosie stood bemused, pink cheeked, incredulous.
‘The house is yours,’ she said quietly.
‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ I promised, and kissed her on the cheek. It was the happiest afternoon I’d spent for years.
And, yes, now, reflecting on it all, I’m convinced I’ve done the right thing. Living here is a thrilling prospect. What I shall do, exactly, I’m not sure: what I would like to do is put a large part of my fortune to good use. I can consult Rosie about that. She’ll know exactly how best I can help around here – the preservation of Norfolk churches, perhaps. She’ll have lots of ideas. And when I’m not working at whatever it is, I’ll read all the books I’ve been meaning to read for years, when there was no time. I’ll walk, I’ll sail. Like Rosie I’ll learn the art of solitude. Isabel will slowly fade.
But for now I must get up, return to Rosie to make arrangements, which should be very simple.
The telephone rings. Isabel. Isabel!
She wants to know how I am, what I’m up to, when I’m coming back to London. In my internal struggle about whether to tell her what has happened, I become hopelessly inarticulate. She’s annoyed by my reticence. ‘Something’s up, I can tell,’ she says.
So I tell her. I tell her of my change of life plan, and the story of how I bought – well, am about to buy – a house. There’s a long silence.
Then Isabel asks if I’m sure. I tell her I am: I’m sure, I’m thrilled, this is the answer I’ve been waiting for. Then I swear her to secrecy. I confess I would not have told anyone, just yet. But I was in a state of such excited anticipation that it would have been hard to keep it entirely to myself. Darling Isabel said she quite understood and swore not to tell anyone, even Dan. I have a feeling – though I could be wrong, I’m so happy my antennae could be muddled – she sounded a touch sad. But I assured her I’d be back in a week or so, and would come round immediately.
She said: ‘Do. We miss you. I miss you.’
Isabel misses me…
A few moments later, putting on my socks, tiresome practical thoughts zoomed in: the house is in a terrible state, needs a lot of work. How should I set about all that?
I tie the laces of boots suitable for the marsh path.
Carlotta comes to mind.
Chapter Ten
GWEN
In the end, I stayed till the Sunday afternoon. Mr. G had taken Sylvie off to
see her grandmother, so Mrs. G and I had an omelette and salad, then Mrs. G drove me home. She gave me a basket of provisions – everything I could possibly need, for the next few days, and a lovely pot of jasmine besides. ‘A real Red Riding Hood,’ I said. She’s kindness itself, is Mrs. G. The arrangement is that I go back to work at the end of the week if I’m feeling up to it. Which I’m sure I will. Besides, I’d be bored stiff sitting at home all day, nothing to do. I can’t wait to get back to normal.
I’m definitely well on the way to recovery. My cheek is still various nasty colours, but fading, and the swelling has gone down. Even the red eye is better. Well, I suppose I’m a tough old thing, I told myself, as I took a long hard look in the bathroom mirror. I do look more like a pensioner than I did before the fall, but it would take more than a punch or two to knock me completely off my feet … thinking of which, my legs for some reason are still a bit wobbly. My knees were shaky coming downstairs at Number 18, but then the doctor said shock takes us all in different ways. Perhaps the shock still isn’t out of my system, though the mercy is I haven’t had any nightmares.
Home! My…! Needs a good dust and a breath of fresh air. I opened the windows and put on the kettle. The past week, the comfort, the kindness, it’s been like a dream. Whatever would I have done without the Grants? I put on the kettle and sat down at the table. The chair was very hard beneath my legs. I wondered if I’d ever noticed that before, or has it just come to me now I’m used to the Grants’ lovely furniture? I moved to the armchair, and there again I was surprised. The springs in its seat, pushing up at me. I don’t recall them, either. It came to me what I should do is save for a new armchair, and few yards of the pretty cotton stuff with the pictures in the spare room at Number 18. I’d grown so fond of it. I knew those shepherds. Yes: that was my plan. Save for a few nice things. Life isn’t worth living if you’ve nothing to look forward to. I’d look forward to a few improvements here, very much. Only wish it wasn’t so noisy, and there was a nice view over a garden. Still, you can’t have everything and compared with some, I’m pretty well off.
