Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  This little grotto, let us call it a house, a shack, a shed, a vantage point, had one window (without glass) through which the waterfall could be observed. There was a painter inside with her back to the door, facing the window; I felt it would be cheating to look at her painting. I tiptoed behind her and was sure to only look outside.

  The window framed the waterfall.

  The frame turned the waterfall into a picture.

  The frame established a point of view to the waterfall.

  The frame carved a rectangle out of the scenic view, the romantic motif, the waterfall.

  Sir Daniel Fleming’s viewing post enticed (and continues to entice) many tourists and artists. One of the most famous paintings of the waterfall is by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1795 (I bought a postcard of it in the tea room). In this picture, where the falling water resembles streaks of white paint (or perhaps a well-combed head of hair with traces of the comb still visible), nature’s true wildness is found in the tree trunks around and behind the waterfall, living their own twisted, pathless lives. The water is neat and still. Both the falling water, and the pool of water formed by the rocks – the water in the rock pool is by and large unaffected by the water falling into it.

  Behind the waterfall is a small bridge, a perfect wooden arch, which the demented trees will soon get the better of.

  Perhaps the water is so tame because the moment it was selected as a motif it was cultivated.

  I got so annoyed that Sir DF had determined how I should view the waterfall, the part I was actually able to view, that after a single glance from his perspective, I exited the small house and climbed up on the roof so that I could view the waterfall as it suited me. Straddling the roof (which cut me on the crotch, I later discovered I was covered in splinters) like some kind of Hamlet, with my legs dangling on either side of the ridge, I realized that the essence of art is to force a particular way of viewing upon others.

  Yes, I know – without an angle, a choice of subject, narrowing, zooming in, focusing, there is no work. I am perfectly aware of that.

  The fact that Sir DF had carved out this segment of the view using the window as a frame… how should I put it… I suddenly realized that it was an act of power; he had made himself master of the angle, he had cut into the view, and like sheep the tourists and painters had flocked (and continue to flock) into the house in order to stare out.

  Fortunately for my mood, a young woman with a shapely figure in a purple bathing suit and with visible goose pimples suddenly entered my unobstructed view. She balanced delicately above the rocks in front of the waterfall and then settled into the pool of water with a gasp. A couple of strokes carried her behind the curtain of water. When she reached the rock wall, she turned and looked at me.

  I was just about to wave to her – whatever that might have led to – when I spotted a man standing on the bank, clawing at the dirt with one foot like a raging bull. I felt a tad ridiculous, me, Prince Roof Ridge. I don’t know what they thought. Maybe they thought I was one of those so-called cloudspotters.

  I sat on the roof and below me, inside the house, the painter made a noise. A thought entered my mind, that in a sense I was riding her. The house was a Trojan horse: place a man astride the ridge of a roof and immediately the building becomes a horse, in this case it contained a painter, and a horse filled with people – that sounds very Trojan.

  Maybe they thought I was inspecting the house, looking for damage, that I was a builder; or even worse: that I was one of these sensual creatures who feels the need to touch everything – down on his knees to touch the withered leaves, up on the roof to feel it between his thighs.

  [Kristian]

  There are so many deodorizers in our room that we both develop a migraine while staying there; I am worried about getting brain damage so we keep the window open, living in a constant draft, to Alma’s great irritation, and she has developed quite the cold; I keep thinking of the long-haul lorry driver I saw on the news who was forced to retire early because he had kept deodorizers in the cab where he spent most of his life, in that case it would have been far healthier to have a small plastic skeleton, as long as you don’t suck on it or touch it too often.

  Naturally there is a deodorizer hanging over the rim of the toilet, no surprise there, and it has two functions, it colours the water purple and eliminates odour; but we are also met by a synthetic pong in the shower cubicle, meaning you can’t smell yourself until you turn the shower on and the problem goes down the drain. And in the wardrobe, and on the shoe rack – and in every single drawer there is one of these small poisonous thingamajigs. And today I spotted one above the bed! That reminds me of something! Once at my organic hair salon, a male stylist sprayed a fragrance into the air for a male customer to sample… When asked by the customer when the fragrance might be of use, I heard the hairdresser reply: ‘Well, when the gentleman is shagging in the morning, for example.’

  The salon went completely quiet. I am certain that each and every customer, hairdresser and sweep-up-the-hair-boy thought they had been the victim of a misunderstanding. And I pictured an amorous couple, regularly refreshing the air above them, particularly the southern region, as they say, with a few puffs. My hairdresser froze for a moment, her scissors hovering in the air, then abruptly launched into some nonsense about wigs: ‘During the Renaissance,’ she said, ‘people used white lead, both on their face and in their hair, it caused large open facial wounds that would not heal, and their hair fell out, so by the time the baroque era was reached, there were very few people who still had hair, and that is how the wig was invented. Poor people had wigs made of felt, they probably looked more like hats than hair.’

  And I was forced to imagine these wretched people, hairless, lingering on, era after era with large lesions, hundreds of years old, until they entered the age of wigs and found salvation.

  The landlady is very fond of lime and strawberry scents. She has a rather synthetic appearance herself, and a very intense smell, also from these smelly things that she most likely has hidden in various places under her clothes. She has a slight lisp, because she has one tucked inside her mouth like a wad of chewing tobacco, she would prefer cancer to bad breath any day. Faced with all this unnaturalness… it really surprised me when the landlady told me that she held a kind of badger show in her drive every night, for her guests; there was an entire family of badgers living under her rhododendron (a very lush and extensive specimen) and every night around eleven she fed them leftovers from breakfast, bacon, eggs and fried sausages, ‘they are probably the only badgers in England with high cholesterol,’ she said, and I could tell that was a line she got a lot of mileage out of. And no sooner had she said it when, like an echo, (slightly nauseating; tell me: what became of the joy?) I hear myself repeating the line when I describe the incident upon returning home, and I pictured Alma looking away – it does not require much imagination, she often does that.

  That same evening we took our seats on folding chairs as a couple of bright floodlights suddenly bathed the drive in a light worthy of a prison yard or a prison camp, and the landlady arrived wearing a pink dressing gown and offered these final instructions: ‘They are practically blind,’ she said, ‘so if you just sit completely still, they will come right up to you. But the slightest movement…’ and she made a sudden movement with her hands. Lost, disappearance, whoosh-away-they-go. Then she generously scattered leftovers across the drive and retreated into her castle of scents.

  Only a moment passed before the animal poked its head out of the rhododendron bush. And a little later a plump, short-limbed creature with snake-like movements appeared, sniffing loudly, and approached us with its nose to the ground, entirely at the mercy of its sense of smell, ready to die for the titbits (I felt a stab of envy; I longed to have something to die for). It munched on the bones, and of course I was reminded of how in the past, when the woods were teeming with badgers, people filled their boots with charcoal when they were hunting because badgers b
ite until they hear a crunch.

  Its nose guided it to the next bite, it came right up to the leg of my chair where there was a fried potato, and I glanced nervously at my sandalled foot. It munched and moaned. Then it heard something! And bolted! The air was full of galloping and pattering body parts. It sounded like a fat naked woman running. When your wife starts to take her clothes with her into the bathroom in the morning, and her nightgown in the evening, in order to avoid your gaze while she gets changed, there is something wrong. Alma is not fat, on the contrary. The bath in our room doubles up as a jacuzzi, if only she could be tempted into the waves. Hardly.

  She sits watching the cat – the pink lady has one just like it. And the cat looks at Alma. She makes little sounds in a distinctive feline tone – a combination of hissing and deep, cuddly noises – the kind you learn to use on cats from an early age. And it starts to purr and rub up against the rubbish bin, the sound alone is enough, she does not need to touch it. It submits. It positions itself in her vicinity, in front of the door.

  Our landlord arrives home, parks and is about to go inside – to join the pink angel of the house who has run rampant with a feather duster all day long. He greets us; he has a very masculine appearance, tweed and pipe. A pie probably awaits him in the oven. While he eats, she will kick off her slippers and place her anointed feet on his lap. He will put down the knife, eat and squeeze her sweet little toes a little. I am dying for a similar idyll. Like marzipan.

  The cat is disturbed. It needs to move or the master of the house cannot get inside. It looks at him, wronged and defiant. It does not think of itself as his cat. He has long since disappeared inside the house. There is nothing to be done. Nobody to complain to.

  [Alma]

  If you did not want to be the angel of the house in the time of the lake poets, you had to climb into bed. There were plenty of illnesses to choose from and nothing to cure them other than opium and brandy. You could lie there and lose yourself in reading, in translation, in opium visions; you could write. While other people looked after the children, relatives, master of the house, housework, callers, dinner parties and churchgoing. May I introduce a breathless Sarah Coleridge:

  At the hour of nine we all assembled at the breakfast table – S. his wife & two eldest daughters, myself and Sara, all well, except the good Lady of the house [Edith] who is in a very complaining way at present, (Mrs Lovell always breakfasts alone in the schoolroom & Hartley alone in his study.) A note is brought in – Sir G. & Ly B[eaumont]’s compliments hope to see the whole party to dinner including the young ladies. We promise to go – Away fly the two cousins to Shake the Pear Tree before dressing for Church – in a minute Edith arrives, breathless – “Aunt Coleridge, Sara has shaken something out of the tree, into her eye, & she is distracted with the pain.” After bathing the eye & lamenting over it, & and deprecating the folly of the poor sufferer for nearly an hour, S. raps at the door with all the children ready for church, except for one. Where is Kate? “She has such a bad headache she can’t go to church, her mother is going to stay with her to give her James’s-Powder, so I hope Sara is better & you are both ready for church.” Sara was too blind to go, but I huddled on my things and got to church as the last Psalm was reading, found our pew full, obliged to go into another, & when the communion plate was brought round, had left my purse at home, & sitting among strangers looked very foolish… On our return, Kate was in a high fever; Mama [Edith] very unhappy, poor Aunt Lovell on the couch in her very worst way, & on entering the bedroom, I found it quite darkened, and Sara in tears… We sent off for the Dr who tried with a camel’s-hair pencil to clear the lid of the eye, but made it worse; prescribed for Kate who was put to bed, and Sara lay down again in despair, & I sat by her bedside reading… I had hardly prepared myself to be with her for the night… The maid comes up – Ma’am, here are two gentlemen who must see you, they are friends of Mr Coleridge – “pray call Hartley to them, I am nearly undressed” “Mr Hartley is just gone to the inn”… Well, after sitting a full hour with these gents, I suffered them to depart without asking them to stay for supper, for which I got a trimming from S. who did not venture to ask them himself not being sure whether there was anything in the house to give them…

  With a talent on a par with that of her famous father, longing for immersion and peace and with a similar opium dependency, Sara Coleridge (without an h; daughter of Sarah and Samuel) often lay down on the sofa, or once she simply disembarked the stagecoach on a journey, and pleading poor health (she truly was in a bad state), she lodged at a guest house for weeks where she wrote, until her husband, after sending numerous letters in an effort to tempt her home, appeared in person and brought her home. Maybe it was on that occasion that she wrote the poppy poem, which later, strangely enough, and despite the protests of her family, was published in an educational rhyming book for children, written by her:

  The Poppies Blooming all around

  My Herbert loves to see,

  Some pearly white, some dark as night,

  Some red as cramasie;

  He loves their colours fresh and fine

  As fair as fair may be,

  But little does my darling know

  How good they are to me.

  He views their clustering petals gay

  And shakes their nut-brown seeds.

  But they to him are nothing more

  Than other brilliant weeds;

  O how should’st thou with beaming brow

  With eye and cheek so bright

  Know aught of that blossom’s pow’r,

  Or sorrows of the night!

  When poor Mama long restless lies

  She drinks the poppy’s juice;

  That liquor soon can close her eyes

  And slumber soft produce.

  O’ then my sweet my happy boy

  Will thank the poppy flow’r

  Which brings the sleep to dear Mama

  At midnight’s darksome hour.

  We left the Lake District, all the beauty, the hills and the glittering lakes, the sinewy ramblers with their silver-tipped walking staffs and long strides, and drove through Discount England; at each stop the bus grew heavier; 150-kilo teenage mothers boarded the bus with overweight children with close-cropped haircuts stiff with hair gel.

  Kristian has got tar on the back of his white shorts. He tried to wipe off the worst of it with kitchen roll. Naturally the paper stuck to the tar. So now he is walking around with a large blotch on his backside with kitchen roll stuck to it. It goes without saying that it looks rather unfortunate. But he perseveres. I feel like a pubescent teenager who is embarrassed of her parents. I maintain a vain hope that people won’t think we are together, as long as I stay a couple of metres ahead of or behind him. I’m happy when he sits down; I leant my head against the window of the bus, and it felt like the landscape rolled through my left eye and out the back of my head at a ferocious speed.

  Hands have seized them from below and shaken them: the gravestones are tilting, pointing in every direction. They are meant to be in straight rows, they are wild and tooth-like, it would take a strong set of braces to straighten them. The churchyard lies in the village of Haworth, we (I’m learning!) have to walk through it to reach the path to the heath. We cross the churchyard in the morning, we cross it again in the afternoon.

  ‘Also’ is written before the names of family members, also her, also him, also her, and one stone reads: ‘also or enough!’ yet another child lost, perhaps the exclamation mark is addressed to God; enough already! To have buried an entire family, where you have to wander aimlessly in wait, perhaps with a lock of your loved one’s hair in a locket around your neck, wound around a lock of your own hair. People were obsessed with keeping locks of hair in the 1800s. Displayed in a glass case at the Brontë museum, the hair of Father Brontë and one of the daughters is married together in a small open container. Did someone occasionally open the locket and put their nose up to the interwoven plait in the small grave? A
lock from each of the deceased, that could add up over time, so much love, and so, so dry! in such a small space. The last surviving member of the family roaming around with a miniature churchyard around the neck.

  I remember an entire wall teeming with hair, it was in Turkey, in a cluster of caves where the first Christians had lived in hiding, one of the caves was furnished as a bar, and the wall of the cave was covered with locks of women’s hair, thick layers of hair that you had an urge to stroke, and dangling from each lock was a note with the name of the owner. An eager Turk with a pair of scissors ran after Alwilda and me, but I do not think we yielded. Or else in the end we really did bow our heads for the short man; and two amputated Scandinavian giants boarded the waiting bus in annoyance.

  At the church where Father Brontë preached, summoning all of his strength after losing his wife and over the course of the years his six children – Emily died on a sofa, I stood behind the rope barrier of the Brontë Museum and looked at the sofa and attempted to conjure up the, by all accounts, short and chunky image of Emily, possibly made ethereal by tuberculosis, a body worn down by all the coughing, but the sofa remained empty – in the church we meet a man who is in a bad way. He violates my personal space, which like most people is just under a metre, and he sticks his face right up to mine and asks about my relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. I say that I was baptized, so I should belong to his kingdom, but that was about as far as it went.

  ‘What’s your opinion.’

  ‘I suffer from violent fits of rage, yes, I suppose I shouldn’t be saying that in here.’