Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  Someone said at work today that whenever they see me they always think I look sad. It took me by surprise, hearing that, as you can imagine. I suppose I am a reflective person, and people who keep themselves to themselves must look strange to those who prefer to be talking with someone else. I suppose it’s a product of my upbringing – lots of books, lots of outdoors, lots of solitude. But I didn’t recognise that reading of myself. I didn’t think I was a particularly sad person in comparison with everyone else. I mean, I know I get sad, sometimes I’m very lonely for the longest time, especially when James starts a new term and I have so long to wait to spend time with either of you again, and that gnaws at me as it would anyone, but that happens to everyone, doesn’t it? Surely everyone longs for more than what they are allotted in just the same way I do?

  I just smiled, just laughed it off. I think I said I was very happy, thank you. I think I gave off the impression that my heart was my own business and no one else’s. But I feel unhappy now, thinking that that is how other people might see me. Now I am home and alone again I am wondering whether I have the look of someone who is caged too deep within themselves. Someone who is hard for other people to reach. Is that what sadness is? I don’t know how you could put a feeling like that into words, really.

  I am going to use the keeping of this journal to make myself so much stronger. I will force myself to read it back each morning to see what I wrote the previous day, and where I find it miserable I’ll buck my ideas up, and where it is self-pitying I’ll take a good long hard look at myself.

  The first buck-up is a house plant. I am going to buy something to look after. It is so strange being in this place with nothing else living with me. Rattling alone, far more solitary than any prison should ever be, surely. Because there is no sound of other people’s voices anywhere near. Then there will be my play, my Ophelia, to look forward to. And after that, James will be coming home for the holidays, and I will come up with things for us to do, and talk to him as much as I can, find out what he is looking forward to and what he is hoping and what he is happy about.

  When I was a girl I wanted to know about everything. I used to read everything. I used to ask questions. Ever since I realised I’m not that woman any more I have been wondering who it is I have become instead.

  Tuesday, 18th June

  Rehearsals are almost at an end. I feel sick with the thought of it. We are about to begin. Would you remember what a tech is, I wonder? I don’t know whether you ever really listened when I used to talk about acting; I’m sure it was just something we used to do before sex, because I know you liked me when I got passionate, and I always got passionate thinking about the theatre. Techs are rehearsals where you work out what will actually happen, the way everything will get on and off stage and which lights to turn on when, that sort of thing. In Studio Theatre they give a whole week to this activity. I am missing some of my ushering shifts for a little bit to go in every other evening and rehearse and help, go through the scenes but also stand under lights when needed to, to make sure they’re bright enough I suppose, and hold things and lift things and mend things if it is needed. So forgive me if I don’t write very much in the next few days – my days are busy, thank God, for what feels like the first time in years!

  Friday, 21st June

  In between work and rehearsals and sleep there seems time for very little else. It has eased the loneliness, as I knew it would. Missing you is less physically painful when there are other things in my life. I haven’t spoken to James all week and must be sure to make time for him at the weekend if he has time to Skype me. I suppose he plays a lot of sport, though, at the weekends, so I won’t hold my breath. We spoke tonight, and you told me about the stillness all around you in the night, when you go to the edge of the compound and listen to what’s beyond it, the sense of isolation you live with all the time. I thought of the solitude of this army base. Its one curry house, its laundrette. I feel very small next to what you go through every day. Because of course it’s hard here, of course I’m lonely, but it’s only really half an hour from a cafe and a cinema and somewhere to relax. When I think of the loneliness that must follow you every day I can hardly imagine how you bear it. In the good times like this, when my days are full, when I have something to look forward to, I can see beyond myself and recognise that my troubles are all of my own imagining, and that the troubles of others, above all yours, are far greater and more pressing than anything I have experienced. I must remember that, and be sympathetic, and talk to you, and ask you questions, and be a place where you can go in your head and feel calm and feel at home. Too often I think I make you look after me, and it ought to be the other way round. It’s just that I find it so hard to see beyond the high walls of my own life if there isn’t something special to lift me up out of it.

  Saturday, 22nd June

  Getting on well with the actor I wrote about the other week. He is a good listener, he asks questions in a way actors never remember to, and has winkled all of my acting life out of me in two or three little chats in the foyer. He has suggested we go for a drink. I was a bit hesitant about it, but no one else ever takes me out for a drink, so I thought what was the harm in saying yes? He doesn’t like seeing the other actors in the evening, he says; he finds it all consuming. So I suppose I’m a bit of light relief. His name is Owen. He’s not Welsh, though I suppose you’d assume he would be with a name like that. There is a trace of a Yorkshire accent under his vowels.

  Tidworth looked like the moon when I parked the car. You know how the light of streetlamps makes everything unreal? Not quite orange, just uncertain in its colours and all washed in the same palette. It’s strange the sun doesn’t do that, but allows us the variety of all the colours of the world. Unless perhaps under other lights it would be possible to see completely different colours, and sunlight is just as biasing as lamplight in its own way. I made myself a cup of tea and didn’t drink it. I had the radio on so I didn’t feel alone. Honestly, everyone else here can’t be as pathetic as I am, can they? All the women of this town waiting for their men can’t be this lonely? It would amount to systematic violence by the army if that were the case, if this was inflicted on all of us. There would need to be a judicial inquiry.

  Unless the truth is even more desperate, and this feeling doesn’t stop with the army wives. Perhaps this is only one of millions of evenings that everyone is having that are just like this.

  Monday, 24th June

  Production week begins. I feel so afraid that everyone’s going to hate me, it’s almost debilitating enough to call in sick to work. I won’t, of course. Almost everyone else in the world has worse to deal with, after all, than first night nerves.

  Wednesday, 26th June

  Tired today. My legs feel heavy and my back hurt all the time I was walking round in my uncomfortable shoes; every minute I spent out of the house was uncomfortable to me. On the days when my back hurts I think of Rita and the car crash I saw, the horror of being in an accident. I wonder what a person thinks in the moment their back is snapped. Then it takes all the strength I have to blot that darkness out.

  When I see a young person now, unbowed and untired by life, I feel I can never have been one of them, ever, and it makes me laugh to think everyone old has had that thought, I suppose. We all become strangers to our histories. I loved our beautiful years. Back then it was an adventure even to be near you, and everything we did seemed extraordinary. The postings, of course, that’s how the memories organise themselves above all else, one place after another. Our marriage and then Bovington, Fort George, Colchester, Aldershot, Germany. I thought of that, back then, as seeing the world. I hadn’t yet noticed how similar everything was wherever you went with the army. The way the same kettles are plugged into the same sockets in the kitchens every time. The way you always know where the cutlery is kept whichever army house you walk into, because everyone lives their life along the same tram lines. I didn’t realise the limits of what I was doing back then. I h
ad a baby and brought up a son and marvelled at the different views from the window as years rolled round and we moved from one place to another. I never wanted you to request a stay in the same place back then. I wanted us to keep moving. I wanted to keep seeing the world.

  Thursday, 27th June

  First performance. I am in a daze, in a dream. I don’t think anyone hated it at all. I had two glasses of wine and then drove home. What would you say if you knew I’d done that? I can’t help thinking it is quite exciting of me. I never do anything scandalous. So perhaps I can think of drink-driving as my little indulgence on first night, because there was no one there to give me flowers. As daredevil, Oliver-Reed-hell-raiser as I get. Now I must try to sleep it off before work. Not the drink, the exhilaration.

  Saturday, 6th July

  And it is over. I wish I had written more when it was happening, but there seemed to be so little time. I thought I would be tired, but I wasn’t tired, I was simply so busy, and everything was so exciting, I couldn’t sit down to write. It was a wonderful thing. We got a review in the Salisbury Journal, and I thought I was going to burst when I read they had praised my performance. ‘Subtle and moving,’ they said, and you will see that cutting when you come home, because I’m afraid it’s framed now on our kitchen wall and will not come down from whatever kitchen wall we call our own for as long as I’m breathing. The only proper review I’ve ever had. Proof I exist. And by someone who thought I was good. I look at it when I drink my tea, and it makes me happy every time.

  Saturday, 13th July

  It is a week since the play ended, and the way I feel today I almost wish it had never happened at all. Isn’t it always so anticlimactic, so draining, when something you love has come to an end? Theatre is the worst, and I had forgotten this aspect of plays. Because you all make yourselves so very vulnerable, doing something as silly as pretending to be someone else in front of each other, it makes you feel during the rehearsals that you are getting very close to each other. And then it is doubly painful when the play ends and you realise that in your ordinary lives, you and the rest of the actors are never likely to meet at all.

  There has been the usual drifting apart I remember from other adventures long ago. There was a half-hearted party where the richest cast member got to show off their house and their drinks cabinet, and promises were made to keep in touch that no one seemed to mean to keep, and the very next day I was back to having nothing but my ushering in the evenings, as if nothing had happened. And you and James hadn’t even seen the show. No one who has any part in my daily life, my real life, knows much about it having happened. It was just an interlude in between silences, a jaunt I went on, not a real thing. I told you about it on Skype, but because you hadn’t been there I started to feel as if it hadn’t really happened at all. It has made me lethargic. I can’t get out of bed in the mornings. Then when the night falls I’m angry that I lost my day, so I stay up late writing all this down, and then the cycle continues – I can’t get up the next morning again. I wonder, does everything we don’t like about our lives start with us?

  I think we all live our lives a bit through other people. Nothing’s funny that wouldn’t be a good story to tell to your husband. Nothing’s important if I don’t want to tell someone else about it. But I wonder more and more whether I haven’t got the balance wrong, if I’m not living through you too much. Sometimes I feel as though the life I don’t share with you, the days you aren’t here, aren’t really lived, don’t really happen, as if my life is a project I have embarked on with you that has to go on hold when you are away.

  Look at this writing, even. Looking back over all this ink I can see plain enough that I spend too much time on my own. I have time to write this all down, for one thing. Is it good for a person to be so wrapped up and echoing round the inside of themselves, bouncing around in their own head?

  It is easy to feel incubated in a place like this. These barracks homes, white and faceless like a street where everyone has turned their backs, with their fire escapes out of the back bedrooms making them feel so provisional, like hotels, like film sets. All the hollow eyes of these places, and Sky TV and the digibox for company, and some nights I want to scream because I can’t read a proper book, I never have the mental energy to read, and some nights I can almost hear myself screaming just under the surface of myself. If we stay here next year, if they don’t change your posting, I will buy flowerpots and plant things in the garden. There is no point now. I couldn’t bear it if we moved in the autumn and the plants I bought died in the moving van, the terrible waste of it. But I can’t look out of the kitchen window much longer at that bare square of grass looking false as a carpet because it has no weeds or reality woven into it. I would grow mint and thyme and things we could put into proper salads. When you come home I’ll never cook us ready meals again, because there is almost nothing in my life that seems real to me, but at least while I’m kneading dough it feels like something is happening.

  Sunday, 21st July

  Oh my love, tonight I am feeling so frightened, and the feeling’s so deep in my stomach it makes me almost sick. It is almost physical, the way emotions get when they turn rotten inside you. I don’t want to be writing this at all, because it means now I can never show you this journal, and somewhere in the back of my brain I imagined one day you would get to see this diary, but I have to write this out or I think I will go mad.

  I know I must have done something wrong and brought this on myself, because whenever you point a finger at someone else you’re pointing three in the other direction, but I am telling you, I am being completely honest with you, I had no idea what was going to happen.

  You mustn’t think I’ve ever in my life been tempted even for a moment to stray from you. I wouldn’t be able to live if you thought that. Marriage to me is commitment enough, but that’s nothing next to James. As far as I’ve ever seen things, once you have a child together that’s a commitment between two people for the rest of their lives. For better or worse, that’s the undertaking of being a parent. Because they never stop needing you, do they? I still need my mother long after she’s gone. Her strength and her wisdom and her way of taking the importance out of things so that when you thought the world was going to end you could suddenly look again and find it all rather amusing.

  I don’t know whether you’ve ever cheated on me. God knows we’ve both had the opportunity, and the need, the years of our marriage we’ve spent apart. It feels almost disloyal even to phrase the question, because I don’t think that’s who you are. It has never till this moment really occurred to me to wonder whether you have always been faithful. And that is the strength of us. That is how happy I am because you exist. So this is not a confession; there is nothing to confess. It is a story about a time when I stayed constant to you.

  I am talking about Owen, of course. You would have seen it coming a mile off. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. I wrote here before that we agreed to meet for a drink. We met in the Chough on the market square, had a glass of wine and told each other a little of our lives, careful like birds with breadcrumbs. It was all fine at first. I was a woman interested in the theatre enjoying asking an actor about his work. Then when we walked out of the pub to get something to eat he touched my arm, his hand against my elbow, and I knew something terrible was about to happen. I realised I was doing the wrong thing; it was too much like romance and I hadn’t seen it coming, I had walked straight into it. I couldn’t believe myself. I felt so angry. I hadn’t even told you I was going out, let alone who I was spending the evening with, and once I knew what the man I was walking with thought this evening might be about I wondered why I hadn’t said anything to you yesterday evening when we spoke. It made me feel terribly afraid.

  I couldn’t just walk away, of course. I had to get through the evening. We went to Pizza Express, and I couldn’t make proper conversation because I was convinced I’d been trying to start an affair and h
adn’t realised what I was doing till the moment we walked out of the pub. I couldn’t have wanted to be anywhere less than sitting in that restaurant with that man. I found I couldn’t look him in the eye. Conversation dried up; at the very least I know conversation was stilted. He must have known something had happened, but he ploughed on, trying his best to be carefree, amusing, debonair, and now it was so obvious to me what was going on. Some of the women on the base have flings, but most of them are mothers and don’t have the time. I was a mother who did have the time, but I didn’t want to be the sort of woman who had secrets from her husband, even though I know you must have your secrets from me, even though I suppose every little empty moment I don’t share with you becomes a secret in its own way. We finished dinner, and in the market square by the statue of Henry Fawcett he tried to kiss me. I wondered for a moment whether I had come out that evening because I wanted to kiss him, whether I had stayed quiet and not mentioned this to you because I wanted a secret of my own worth keeping. He looked me in the eyes, and he had beautiful eyes. I suppose he was a beautiful man, and I knew that I wanted him, in the way one animal might want another, at the level below thought. I wondered what it would feel like to kiss someone I didn’t know, someone who wasn’t you. I wondered whether it would make me feel alive. But I felt more fear than longing. He leaned forward to kiss me and I told him no, that I was sorry, that I was married and it wasn’t what I wanted. And I thought as long as no one could see into my soul, where I am far less certain of anything I have ever wanted or done than I have ever admitted aloud, I was absolved in the eyes of the world by saying that to him.