Saturday, 3rd August
We got up at a relatively reasonable hour, had breakfast and went to Stonehenge, and trooped dutifully round the cordoned path that circled the site, which never allowed you closer than twenty feet from the stones. It was extraordinary to me in the grey light of a new day that I could see this thing for real, that this miracle was on my doorstep in this quietest part of the world, but James felt cheated because he couldn’t walk among them.
‘It’s only at the solstice you can go right in,’ I said. ‘The rest of the year they keep people out to preserve it all.’
‘I won’t be here at the solstice.’
‘We could go next year, get it in the diary early.’
He laughed as if I had told a joke.
‘I don’t think you’d like the solstice, Mum.’
‘I’m only forty. I’m not collecting my pension yet. I can still have fun.’
‘We could break in one night and have a better look; it’s quite low fences,’ he said, and it was my turn to laugh. ‘What’s so funny? That might work.’
‘If I’m too old to take a bottle of cider to the solstice, I’m definitely too old to break into English Heritage sites.’
‘It might be cool. We could try and watch the sunrise.’
‘You can see the sunrise from our house, you know. You can see it anywhere. It comes up wherever you are.’
‘Yeah, I know. I just thought it might look good from here.’
We finished our circuit of the stones and got in the car and drove home.
Tuesday, 6th August
I spent a minute or more today deciding whether to keep or throw away the order of service from Rose’s husband’s funeral. It is awful to put something like that in the bin, but without looking at the service sheet I couldn’t even remember the man’s name, so is there really any reason for someone so distant from me to clutter up our drawers? It is not a day I want to remember. The funeral was the most awful thing, without hope, without meaning, just filled with sadness for everyone there. His death was quicker than had been expected, and he was too young to be dying, as well, so there was of course a sadness lying heavy over the whole thing. We all felt the injustice of it. We all went to the funeral, all us girls from the front desk, and it was very sad to see Rose and her son up at the front of the church, the boy clinging on to his girlfriend, Rose standing alone, both crying but standing apart, not looking after each other. I would have gone and spoken to them both and told them no son talks to his mother enough, you should at least try to talk as much as you possibly can, then perhaps you’ll get somewhere. But a funeral’s not the place to give advice.
I didn’t go to the grave after the funeral. I didn’t know the family well enough for that. I walked through another part of the graveyard instead, looking at the headstones, reading the inscriptions, enjoying the peace you find in graveyards. After a minute I turned back to look at the entrance to the church and saw Rose’s son standing there, head bowed, all on his own and not with the rest of the burial party. I walked over to him. He looked up and saw me as I approached, but didn’t walk away.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ I said.
‘Thank you. I don’t think I know you.’
‘My name’s Alison. I work with your mum.’
‘Oh. I’m Sam.’
‘Hello, Sam.’ I hesitated, wondering whether I should tell him what was on my mind, then decided I must, no matter what he was feeling. ‘Listen, I don’t want to intrude, but don’t you think you should go with the others to the burial?’
He looked at me warily. I imagined quite absurdly that he might spit at me or hit me for interfering.
‘I didn’t want to be there.’
‘I see.’
‘I don’t want to look in the grave.’
I took a deep breath.
‘Do you mind my saying that I think you’ll regret it if you don’t go and catch up with them now? You don’t have to look. But I think you’ll regret it if you don’t go there.’
‘I’m too scared,’ he said, and seemed impossibly young and afraid as he tried not to cry.
‘But you should go for your dad. And you should go for your mum as well. You can’t imagine how much she needs you, Sam.’
He seemed to think about this.
‘Does she?’
‘Of course she does. You’re the person she loves most in the world. She needs you very much.’
He nodded. I thought he would speak again, but he didn’t. Instead he moved away from the wall quite quickly and hurried in the direction of the funeral party. I watched him crossing the graveyard. When he had almost caught them up I turned and started walking back to my car, and left Rose and Sam to their grief and their privacy.
Looking at it in my hands now, I am seized with a sudden clarity, and I know I must keep the order of service. It is provocative to look at the coldness of words on paper and think how completely it would break me if we were ever parted as Rose and her husband have been parted. I have always known I would not be able to live without you. But now I wonder, thinking back to that funeral, that boy standing around on his own, in need of his mother, whether the same is true for you and for James. Perhaps you need me as well, and I shouldn’t think of myself only as hanging on to you both, to keep some hold in the real world and have something to love. Perhaps you need me just as much as that boy needed his mother. There is a thought to stop me in my tracks. It doesn’t ever occur to me that I might be important. To you or James or anyone. It didn’t occur to me when I was swallowing down pills that I might be throwing away anything except a few more days and months and years of my own experiences. But what if I’m wrong?
Friday, 9th August
Two weeks have passed since James came home, and he and I have eaten our meals together, and gone to the Odeon on the Wednesday evening to see a disappointing thriller, and now he has left for Norfolk for a week to visit a school friend, with his bag seeming almost as full as it was when he arrived here. He gave me a kiss when he left. It was awkward. Neither of us felt comfortable with physical contact any more; that kind of love was too naked for us both now. I went back inside and watched him walking to the bus stop from the kitchen window. I had offered him a lift, but he said he liked catching the bus. He said you got to really see a place when you got a bus through it, got a feel for its landscape and its architecture and its history and its character as well. He said he liked buses best of all methods of transport he had ever tried and planned to use them in order to annoy the ghost of Margaret Thatcher. Not that he has the slightest clue what she was all about. I was all for her at the time, God save me, though I see that as regrettable now. Much of what she did was necessary, when you get right down to it. She just did it all too fast, too thoughtlessly.
That’s something I’ve never been guilty of. My life is so small and unenlightened. I am just another Tory woman who thinks she has a story to tell about how unbearably genteel her life is. If I were in a story, I’d run away to Africa and have a child with someone I would have to struggle not to refer to as a native, and name it Rainbow or Hero or Pomegranate. I would wear saris, precisely because they were wildly inappropriate to the continent I was on, in an attempt to appear liberated and non-conformist. I would drink too much and sleep around and tell myself I was liberated. A young Meryl Streep would play me in the movie. I would learn an instrument and several languages. I would die of a beautiful and romantic disease.
It actually sounds rather wonderful, thinking about it. All my life I’ve thought about performing one real action, really leaving the country or somehow breaking the cycle of things. That year round Italy we used to talk about. The pilgrimage to Santiago. Not on foot, God no, life’s too short, but the route at least, or a bit of it. Or I would like to see where tea comes from, as that has been the longest love affair of my life. I would like to visit Darjeeling, take in the mountains of Nepal on the way back. But somehow all that life I dreamed of or read about in books neve
r quite happened. Somehow I never quite get round to it. I suppose none of us do, really. Somehow you keep on singing in the same key for ever, and every plan you half concoct never turns into more than an idea for you to mull over while you drink your tea in the same old kitchen, in the light of the same endless mid morning of your life. Or, in my case, a different kitchen every year that just looks the same as the last one, filled with the same silence as I wait for you.
It’s embarrassing to admit, but that night with the pills and brandy has forced me to realise that I have, over the months without you, had what you might call a bit of a breakdown. I have sleepwalked through my daily life and sometimes merely slept. I have been tearful and afraid for no reason. I have spent a lot of time staring at the review of Hamlet on the wall. I have hated myself.
I’m going to Skype you. I’m going to talk to you. I need to talk about this. I have to do something. I have to get back into my life. It’s two years now till you leave the army. I’m going to tell you it’s time we started thinking about buying a home and deciding where to put down proper roots. I must do something; I must have something; I must work at something. And if it cannot be a job or a career or running away to Africa or a talent for watercolour painting, which I have accepted I am terrible at and will always be terrible at, I will find satisfaction in a different kind of life, in different values, in a different way of being. Millions of people across this country do it. Instead of pitching headlong at wealth or importance, at success or growth or consumption, they define themselves and value themselves by the corner of the world they have made for themselves, by place and history and rootedness. I’m going to Skype you and tell you I need a purpose, I need to take back some control.
Tuesday, 13th August
An utterly different day today. I am shining. I feel as if I have just come out of the dark and into new light, fresh oxygen. The whole of me is singing. I called you and told you I wanted to be one of those people who kept house and had a house worth keeping, because I have never found any calling but you and me, and because we had our baby too young and he is not ours now, he has moved away from us, even though we are still his, and even though there will be days when he still needs us, they will only be days here and there, not enough to build our life around. I insisted that as there are only two years till you leave the army now, we ought to be thinking about the future. Work can come second for once. We can buy a house, perhaps let it out till you leave service if the money would help, then settle at last once you’re able, and then finally grow up and come out the other side of this itinerance, which seems to have kept me in a delayed state of almost teenage indecision all these years. We will have pets, and they will die, and we will bury them there, and the place will take on a meaning that will be part of us, and our lives will become bigger as a consequence.
I have just gone up to the bathroom. I took all the pills and packets that were left from the cupboard over the sink and put them all in a carrier bag. And I’ve come back downstairs and put the bag in the outside bin. I have to put all of it behind me. I’m going to put all of that far away from me.
It was strange when you asked me where I wanted to live to try and explain what it was about Salisbury that makes me want to stay here. We have lived in so many different parts of the country, we could go back and settle almost anywhere and feel some familiarity with the area. Our families are nowhere near this place. But in all honesty I never much cared for visiting either of our families, so that feels like a blessing, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. A bit of distance between us and them will keep a healthy limit on the number of hours I have to spend making small talk with your sister.
Salisbury’s a nice city, of course, and the countryside around is beautiful. But I think it’s something more than that. I could satisfy my curiosity anywhere, I could probably live almost anywhere if I could only be with you. What seems exciting to me now about this place is that it was here that I decided we were going to change – it was during this tour of yours and my lonely days in Salisbury that I decided to take some control over what was going to happen to both of us. I hadn’t even thought about it till you asked me why I wanted to be here, but I realise now that is the reason. It was here that I felt alive for the first time in a long time. That is something to be celebrated, something to hold on to. That is a memory I want to live near.
You told me a number you thought we could work to, and yesterday I went to Myddleton & Major and asked about places on sale for something like the figure you gave me, and I saw a house in a brochure which seemed to perfectly express the way I want us to live when you come home, a farmhouse hidden deep in the middle of nowhere, and today I went to view it and fell in love with the windows like hazel eyes looking soulfully over the land like a ship that is looking out over the sea, and the low beam of the main room, and the knotholes in the floorboards that showed you the secret worlds of the rooms below when you walked through the bedrooms. You said that if I was certain then I should arrange a conversation with a mortgage provider, and once I knew the money would be available I should put in an offer, and we would go forwards with it when you got home.
Friday, 16th August
Things move so fast in those rare moments when you know what you’re for. I have found a house, and put in an offer, and learned that the seller is an elderly widower who had lived there forever, and I feel very bad that I should be buying his whole life like it was a commodity, but at the same time I am happy because I knew when I heard about him that it would be right for us. This is a house with weight, with meaning. This is an idea big enough to be the centre of the world, the centre of a life.
I went to visit the house on a bright morning, and I suppose that always makes a difference. Driving out along the Coombe Road was difficult because of the steam fair, which must be held at Blandford or somewhere like that. Dozens of old steam trains were being freighted down on big lorries, and there was a train actually driving along the road, which held everything up. I don’t know how that is possible, but I have seen that it works, against all probability, because I overtook it coming over the hill as I left Harnham. Then I drove on as far as the turning for Martin and found my way to the farm. The man waiting for me there to show me round had driven the same way as I did, and I asked him about the train travelling on the road, but he said he hadn’t seen it. We stood and looked up at the house and the yard around, bright in the sun with honeysuckle climbing the walls as if we had walked into a story. It was a simple place, and unadorned, and the view across the down was very lovely. I asked the estate agent how much of the land around belonged to the farmer, and he said it had been most of it till now, a few hundred acres, a rare small farm persevering with the old way of doing things in this part of the country where farming has become so industrial and big organisations farm thousands of acres. But now most of it was being sold off separately to the big farms around, except the field in front of the house itself. I told him I might like to turn that into grass, a little nature reserve of our own, and he said it would be ours to do what we liked with if we wanted to buy the house. Then we went from room to room, peeking in on a very simple life that had been lived here. The estate agent told me that the farmer was having to move into sheltered housing due to ill health, and that his wife had died a few months ago. But it didn’t seem like a sad house. I felt it had been very loved, that two people had loved each other very much while they were living here. I suppose that’s just my fancy, but I couldn’t help it.
As I drove back past the convoy of steam trains, I was on fire with the place. I was in the bank talking about money before the end of that day.
I know I have been mad and impetuous and impractical, and that when you come home you’ll either be very angry or laugh at my silliness, but the thing is that I need to do this, I really do. So I will always be grateful to you for letting me make these mad and extraordinary commitments to the estate agent and the HSBC mortgage assessor man, because since I found the house I’ve felt
like I’ve woken up.
I think that is why I love you so much. I think you know me, and what I need, and who I am, and so you have let me commit you to a thing like this because you see that for me it is necessary. To be rooted like a laurel in one place. To plunge down deep into this idea we have of ‘home’ and try to drink some meaning from it.
I can hardly believe I’ve found the place to put down those roots. But this part of Wiltshire’s a nice neck of the woods. We could do worse than here. And perhaps there comes a time when you must make a stand and believe in something and lend some meaning to this endless, beautiful everything, so I will ask you to make our lives happen in this place, and take on all their meanings against the backdrop of this landscape.
I took a walk round the cathedral before I went to the bank. Not the inside of it – it costs about twelve quid to get in I think. I walked round the close looking up at the building. How often do we really look at buildings? Wonder why they are like they are? The cathedral close is a comforting place. It makes me feel like no human life really matters very much at all. You can feel easier in yourself when you know you are part of a society that did something like that, and lose yourself in marvelling at what is possible if people only think and act a little consciously.
On the drive home I thought about Rita. I must confess I hadn’t thought of her in weeks and weeks. It’s shaming to think that I had forgotten her, and she had been so ill. But then perhaps I have had an illness of my own all this time, perhaps I have been living somewhere very dark and deep. I wonder what has happened to her now; I wonder whether she is out of the hospital, whether she is living her life again like it’s new, the way I am? Perhaps I should have visited her after all, while she was there. I just didn’t think I knew her that well, and if I was her, and a stranger came to see me, I’d be embarrassed; I wouldn’t want the attention. If I had religion I would pray for her tonight. What can we do instead, now we don’t believe in anything?
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain Page 20
