by Zoe Morrison
The wet of the meadow started to seep through the material of my coat, into my sweater, my shirt, the rest of my clothes. It touched my skin, tentatively at first, but then it was all over me. It had entered my blood, surrounded my bones, infiltrated the marrow where it stayed circling, breathing its ice, making itself known. I was so cold, I was nothing; and when I felt him, two fingers plucking at my hand, I curled into myself and covered my head. Then I tried to scramble to my feet, but my frozen limbs were slow, so he held onto my arm and was pulling at it, trying to help, supporting my back. At last I was standing before him.
I recognised him straight away. I’d seen him on busy weekday mornings standing in front of St John’s College with a sack at his side. He did not face the street, but rather the high college wall. He always had his head to one side, smiling a little, as if he were listening to something. He was homeless, probably mad. He was wearing a three-piece suit with holes in it so huge I could see the meadow right through them. His hair was long, greasy, stringy. I could smell him now, sweat and grease and dirt, the unwashed tang mingling with the smell of the meadow.
A clucking sound came from his lips, and he moved his hands, as if he were worried about the mud on me, but when I moved to reassure him he scuttled off towards the long grass and bushes at the edge of the meadow, close to the train tracks, and I realised I had not even thanked him. I had thought, to begin with, that he was going to harm me.
I walked back slowly to the house, thinking about the gentleness with which he had treated me; maybe he had seen me walking in the meadow before, although I had never seen him. A lightness to my walk now, I reached the house in no time, not even noticing the hill. Edward was there already. He appeared not to notice the mud on my clothes as I stood at the door.
‘Where have you been?’ he said.
‘The meadow. Walking.’
He looked at me, narrow-eyed, walked towards his study. ‘You’re late,’ he said, over his shoulder.
I went upstairs and ran a bath. I was sitting on the lid of the lavatory, marvelling at the mud on my clothes, when I heard him coming up the stairs.
‘I fell,’ I called out. There was no reply. ‘I fell in the meadow.’ Still no reply. ‘Someone helped me up, they rescued me,’ I said, louder.
Perhaps he could not hear me, what with the pounding of the water, the closed door. The room had filled with steam, the mirror was foggy. I turned off the taps and got in.
44.
Oxford, March, 1951
I was doing the dishes, my hands fumbled under the suds for a plate, and I dropped it as I was lifting it onto the rack. It fell on the floor and broke into several pieces. Looking down at it I found that I did not have the will or energy to clean it up, this broken thing. I could see in my head what needed to be done, the bending to pick up the larger pieces, getting out the dustpan and brush, sweeping up the flecks and putting it all in the bin, hiding it in there beneath other rubbish, this evidence of waste, destruction. I felt overwhelmed by an immense tiredness; I could not clean it up, not yet. Instead I sat down at the table.
It was March, the house was silent, frigid with cold. Edward wouldn’t allow the heating on during the day, it cost too much money; it came on when he was at home. For the last few weeks I had been teaching myself a new piece by Brahms, the Rhapsody in G minor. After that disastrous performance I decided that I needed some new repertoire. I had a Brahms album; I had always liked that Rhapsody.
Edward no longer liked me to practise in the house when he was there. He said it was too loud and distracting. Even if he wasn’t working he preferred me to refrain because it shattered his thinking. It was all right, I thought, because he wasn’t there much anyway. I could still practise during the day and when he was out in the evenings.
It had not taken me long to learn the notes of that piece; when I started it, I could already hear it in my head. That morning I played it through then sat looking at the music. How could I know if I sounded any good? How could I know with just my own ears listening to myself? I’d always had a teacher to tell me it was ready, or needed more work.
I found some recordings of the piece in Edward’s record collection in the study, listened to them, then chose the one I thought sounded best, from a recital in Carnegie Hall. I played it again and again. I went back to the piano, mimicked what I had heard. I slowed it down, brought out the bass more, did the accents heavily, changed some of the dynamics. I sat looking at the music again. I still couldn’t tell if it sounded any good.
I got up, put my coat on and went for a walk.
I had given up looking for the homeless man. I hadn’t seen him since that incident in the meadow, and I was glad about this, mostly. I had probably scared him, I thought. Occasionally I wondered if he was hiding somewhere watching me, but I never had the feeling that I was being watched, never had the impression of hidden eyes upon me.
The cold was terrible in the meadow that day. Instead of walking out into the middle I walked over to the canal and watched the quick flow of the dark water. There wasn’t a bird on it. It was too cold to be out. I returned to the house.
When I got back, Edward was there already; he was home early, I could hear him in the kitchen. At that moment I remembered the broken plate on the floor that I had not cleaned up. Immediately, I considered turning around and walking away. How was I to face this?
But I did go down the hall, and there he was squatting on the floor in his suit, the tie hanging to the floor, with the dustpan and brush, sweeping up the broken plate, and I started to apologise, to say, I’m sorry, Edward, I’m very sorry, and he looked up and I knew then that he meant to hit me, and I turned and ran.
I ran down the hall into the front room and he shouted, ‘You come back here.’ He came to the room, grabbed my arm, wrenched me around, and I said, ‘No, no, please, it was an accident, it was a mistake, I am sorry, I am very sorry, it will never happen again, I promise, I promise.’
And he shook my arm hard and said, ‘You did it deliberately.’
‘No, no, no, honestly, I didn’t, please, I didn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t,’ and by then I was crying, really crying, and he kept hold of my arm for a bit longer, then dropped it, turned, left.
I stood there, the world orbiting around me, stood there with the piano, the silent piano in the corner. Stood there, and the Brahms came into my head, the swirling bass, the accents on the triplets, the dipping, lifting melody. I started to sway a little, back and forth, rocking on my feet, playing that music in my head.
45.
Oxford, October 14th, 2005
I was bent over the fire anticipating the sight of demand and supply curves buckling, blackening and shrivelling before me when I realised that I was holding instead an album by Brahms, and just in time I snatched it back. Then I found on the desk an economics paper, an off-print from a journal, among the sheets of music. I started to panic. In my dying state was I filing economics papers instead of music? I looked in the boxes, pulling things out to see properly; all the scores I had so carefully arranged came hurtling out. I found no economics papers among them, but I didn’t trust this, not entirely. I started poking in the ash looking for traces of burnt music, expecting to see singed clefs, shrunken quavers, whole blackened lines of melody, vanishing harmony, and while I found no evidence of this the episode frightened me, and I wondered if I should eat a bit to allay my confusion and get the jobs done properly.
One might think some apposite music would have arrived then, Fauré’s Requiem, for example, to send me off, even a nice Schumann impromptu to sweep me away, but there was nothing, no music at all, just a truck roaring up the street then reversing by inches all the way back down. Beep, beep, beep.
Richard rang again that night, just two days since his last call; it should have warned me.
‘How are you, Mum? Are you all right?’
‘What?’
‘I said are you all right?’
‘Yes, fine. Are you?’
‘Sort of. I keep getting prank calls, actually.’
I froze.
‘Someone rings up then hangs up. On the land-line.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Yes. It’s been disturbing. So I finally asked someone about it.’
‘You what?’
‘I said I asked someone about it. You’re quite deaf, you know.’
‘I’m not,’ I muttered.
‘What?’
I said nothing; he sighed.
‘Apparently you can dial this number that tells you who rang your land-line last; I never know these things. Anyway, when I dialled that number it said the call was from you.’
I was sitting absolutely still. Rivers of sweat were flooding into my clothes.
‘Perhaps your phone is faulty,’ I said.
‘No. I did ask about that, given I’ve received quite a lot of these calls.’
I stared at the window, a blank square of light, closed my eyes.
‘So I thought I’d ring up and see how you are,’ he was saying, ‘see how things are going.’
‘Well, I don’t want to waste your time,’ I managed. ‘I know you’re very busy.’
‘All the time in the world at this end, Mum.’
I was feeling faint, as if floating; no, spinning; no, vertiginous.
‘Perhaps someone is coming into the house and using the phone,’ I said.
‘Like who?’
‘Like a robber.’
‘You’re suggesting a criminal is entering the house and prank-calling me from your phone? Do you think that’s likely?’
‘Well, people do very strange things in this town, Richard, all the time.’
‘Now that is true.’
‘Perhaps I should go and check right now if I’ve locked all the doors and windows properly —’
‘What?’ sharply.
I didn’t repeat it.
‘I’m wondering if things have got a bit on top of you. Are you keeping up with the … uh, book club, or what is it? Arts circle? I think meeting with people can do a lot of good …’
As if having a coffee with a friend, meeting with a group for an hour or two, would make one whole again. As if I were two-dimensional and simply needed gluing back together.
‘I’m quite all right, Richard. How are you?’
‘It is quite obvious that you are not all right. You don’t sound all right, and you’re not acting all right, so what’s going on? Come on, I’m not going to put the phone down until you say something.’
And he went on in this vein for some time, until out of sheer desperation, unable to find it in myself to say anything else, I said foolishly, ‘I suppose I am a bit hungry.’
‘Hungry?’
‘Not extremely hungry, nothing like that.’
‘When did you eat last?’
‘I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter.’
‘This morning?’
‘Er …’
‘Last night?’
‘Uh …’
‘Do you have food in the house? When did you last shop?’ His voice was agitated. ‘How long has this been going on? I mean – are you really that … incapacitated?’
‘No! Nothing like that.’
‘I don’t understand. What do you mean you’re hungry? You can’t just say such a thing and expect me not to react, not to worry and try to do something about it. I mean, for Christ’s sake!’
I heard traffic in the background.
‘Where are you?’ I said. ‘I’m at home.’
‘In Bayswater?’
‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘That’s where I live.’
I should have asked why he wasn’t at his studio.
‘Is it nice down there, the weather?’
‘Uh, yes, warmish, unseasonal.’
‘Have you been in the park?’
‘Look, I’ll order you some food, all right? I’ll get it delivered.’
‘No! Please don’t go … to any trouble.’
‘No trouble. That’s what we’re going to do, all right?’ And he hung up.
He rang again not long after to say that an order of groceries would arrive that evening; also that he thought we should visit my doctor together, a suggestion I protested vigorously. I ended up hanging up abruptly. He rang once more, and this time I did not answer, because I did not know what to say, and the phone kept ringing, and I kept ignoring it, and it kept ringing, and I started to reconcile myself to the sound of a constantly ringing phone, an additional torture to top off these, my final days, but eventually I picked it up and put the receiver onto the phone table.
Richard’s voice piped out.
‘Mum! Jesus. Pick up the damn phone, for fuck’s sake!’
‘Hello.’
‘Jesus! What is the matter with you? You need to answer, all right? You can’t just not answer! What am I supposed to think? Something could have happened to you!’ He took a breath. ‘I was calling to say that when the person comes with the groceries you don’t pay them, all right? I’ve paid already.’
‘You haven’t really gone and bought —’
‘Mum, this is not a big deal. I did it online. They’ll just —’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Do you not remember what I said? Do you not actually recall —’
‘Of course I remember. Someone’s coming from the …’
‘From the supermarket, Mum, delivery people.’
‘I know! I know!’
‘And they’ll bring it inside so you don’t have to —’
‘Into the house?’
‘Fuck! Not if you don’t want them to; just get them to … I don’t know – put it on the porch or something. Then you’ll have to take it all in yourself. Now, we must go and see your doctor asap. Edward said …’
And then the world froze over, and I lost all power of speech, the little I had.
‘He said that …’
I held the phone away from me, as far as my arm would stretch, his voice tiny.
‘… be worth getting some things checked and if necessary a referral to this particular psychiatrist who —’
‘Thank you, Richard, I’ll be saying goodbye now.’
After that I sat there thinking for a long time.
That night the food was delivered. A man unloaded a mountain of it at my feet. When he got back into the truck and drove away I closed the door. The food was out of sight.
But someone else would see it, wonder why it was there. I opened the door and dragged the bags down to the kitchen, which took a lot of energy, which I resented because I didn’t have any.
I looked into the bags, wondering what he had bought me. I saw a packet of Custard Cream biscuits. I bent to get it and lost my balance, fell against the bench, hitting my shoulder and nearly hitting my head. I gripped the bench with both hands. Eventually I made myself a cup of black tea, one teaspoon of sugar.
The next night an additional load of food was delivered. What was Richard thinking? I stood staring at the man holding the crate in his arms. Where do you want it? he said, and I pointed wordlessly to the mat. Right you are, he said (exactly the same as the night before; did he not remember doing all this just twenty-four hours earlier?). I thanked him, dragged the bags down the hall and into the kitchen, where, with the previous delivery, they covered the entire floor. After some thought I dragged them all out of the back door and locked it.
But I knew that even in the cool weather all of it would start to rot and stink; and I couldn’t put it in the rubbish, there was too much. I thought about giving it to Quentin anonymously, leaving the bags on his porch in the dead of night, a mysterious gift, but he would probably interpret it as harassment. I could burn them, but what about the packaging? It would create terrible smoke, an almighty fume that would billow black and green into the sky like a banner, saying, Here is the woman responsible, here.
In the end I took all the bags back inside, there seemed no other option, and put the food away in the pantry, c
upboards and fridge. I did this in a near-deathly state of starvation; it was exhausting, lifting all those things. And the stuff he had bought me! Sausages, a pineapple, a chicken, a packet of jam tarts, bacon, tomatoes, cucumbers, spaghetti, a sack of oranges, which I hid in a bottom cupboard.
Later, I started to think about the food again. Even its presence in the kitchen troubled me. I went downstairs and opened the fridge, got out the first thing I saw, the pineapple, found the biggest knife and stabbed the fruit through the middle. I thought I might cut it up into bits, get rid of it that way. The knife got stuck, I couldn’t push it further in or pull it out, and I stood there with my hands on the knife looking out at the garden as the pineapple bled onto the bench, the juice pooling around it in a sticky circle. I took my hands off the knife, went back upstairs.
The worry about the food remained, it elbowed itself forward. I went down to the kitchen again, got out another knife and starting grabbing things from the fridge and cutting them up, just to do something with them – reduce them I suppose was the thinking – and soon I had made an almighty mess; there was chopped food everywhere. I staggered up the hall and rang Richard.
‘There is too much food,’ I said when he answered. ‘You must stop ordering it. I have a total of forty-eight sausages.’
‘Mum, it is two a.m.’
‘Two a.m? Is it?’ I was mortified. ‘I’m very sorry. I’ll go now, I’ll …’ There was a sound on the other end of the phone, as if he was moving, covers shifting.
‘What’s all this about sausages?’
This was a big mistake. The hunger – I was doing things I wouldn’t usually do.
‘Look, nothing, really, I just wanted to say, well, no more orders, please. There was a special offer on sausages this week, you see, so in the second order they delivered a great deal more than the first.’
