Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  This is obvious, what to do about it less so.

  A feeling maybe begins to revive from the outset of my time here at Terhill, that this is the place for me, secretive, protected, the place where I’ll learn that … We’ll see, we’ll see.

  Fragments, the stuff of dislocated daytime thought. And of nightmare. A boy digs his talons-of-hands into my neck. There are other characters, recognizable, family members. Neck, nexus, the point of connection.

  Every person in every dream of mine is me, a self-representation.

  Words are returning, less stifled sentences form.

  2 December

  The light first thing is beautiful, a slim golden break in the winter sky.

  Nobody else can know how it is to feel as I do, how it is for Beth to feel as she does, both of us troubled, neither of us able to turn, in essence, anywhere else for understanding but to our own separated selves. We need help, yes, and find it in various places, in part even from each other, but night and day we must learn first to rely on ourselves.

  Same for everyone.

  It’s lonely. There’s such a way to go. I’ve hardly started.

  Blown by the North wind the clouds hurry from my strip of sky. I see things inside to do, a bath to scrub, food to be replenished, clean white linen to replace the old blue sheets on my bed. The day unfolds.

  Beth is fixing removable wooden fronts to the brick pair of compost bins which she built a year ago on waste land beyond the old privy. The panels are salvaged from Victorian farm doors which we saved. It will make the compost easier to fill to the heat-primed brim, and inconvenience the food-raids of badgers. There are too few worms yet for the bin properly to function.

  3 December

  Rain two days ago swept leaves and mud into the centre of the lanes, where it rests, dries, becomes the seed-ground for grass and weeds which will grow green in the spring. I like this, the rural look of these single tracks, on which cars draw in to the occasional gaps to let others pass, the centre in general untrammelled, the seeds freed to germinate.

  Notice that the grapes at Nailsborough have gone, eaten maybe by birds, or fallen to the ground to rot.

  5 December

  I asked Jim how he stayed calm in the face of his patients’ repeated despair, their – my – quest for death. Was he aware, I asked, that on one particular visit I was in effect saying goodbye to him.

  He knew.

  There were several times, apparently, when he feared he might not see me again. For a full six months I was very seriously ill, it was touch-and-go, Jim said.

  6 December

  Being not doing. No nearer achieving this. Always I’m drawn to think of what I might do to change things, believing a response is demanded of me. Beth talks of being locked into a soundproofed room, unheard, unlistened to, forgotten, and it’s difficult for me to accept that there’s nothing I should do.

  Me, me, me!

  I bore myself.

  Spend the afternoon by Bridgwater Bay with a group of birdwatchers from the Somerset Wildlife Trust. On my way I drive past Hawkridge Lake, near Aisholt, and witness how very little water is in the reservoir, due to the worst drought Janet has seen since coming to live higher up the valley, thirty-nine years ago. Down on the seashore the day is overcast, the water far distant, not ideal for distinguishing the different flocks of birds feeding at the water’s margin, out there on the second longest tidal reach in the world – an hour either side of high tide and a sharp westerly wind are the ideal conditions, when the sea-birds hunker down in easy view from the four protected hides. It takes me time to attune to the pleasures of the place. Heard the calls to-and-fro of curlews, noted a century ago for their poetic Englishness, mournful, phlegmatic, postured. Spirits warm to the sight through my binoculars of the spearhead flight of a flock of small black birds, their undersides flashing white as they wheel in flowing formation across the flat expanses, suddenly together dropping to the ground again to feed. Dunlin they’re called, five thousand of them currently out there in the bay, our leader tells us, a nice man, head warden for English Nature, owners of both the site here and the land on Shapwick Levels, half a mile from the home and workshop of George Clement, the furniture maker with whom Beth worked for nine years.

  Half a mile out are the remnants of wooden chevrons built by the Saxons to trap fish. A man with a telescope-on-legs informs us that he can identify by the water’s edge two godwit and a redshank – both have long beaks, and I realize that I’d be unable to separate these rarer birds from the common curlew, several hundred of which I’m astonished to observe grub in a group on the mud, normally seen by me either alone or in pairs. I overhear another ornithologist speak of the lizard orchids he journeys to see every season in the dune-rough of a links golf course along the coast. The man I warm to the most, and keep closest to as we wander from hide to hide, is a retired farm-worker from nearby, who knows the area intimately and prophesizes the arrival of a peregrine falcon to set the birds wildly wheeling. He’s happy, for us all, when the hunter-bird turns up twenty minutes later and we catch sight of the dunlin rise in their thousands, the curlew, cormorant, shelduck, herons and other bigger birds staying put. I imagine a conversation between this clever gentle man and one of his several children, grown town-wise away from home. The son teases the father for his boundless love of nature. ‘It’s all out there, if you know how to look,’ the man defends. ‘I’m as rich in life’s ways hereabouts as can anywhere be.’

  7 December

  While bicycling in the early morning frost down through Bishops Lydeard to catch the Sunday post, I passed a tallish youngish man dressed in a close-fitting black coat, his blonde hair short, neat-cut. I saw him stop every twenty yards and turn a full circle before walking on, head down, carrying in his left hand a plastic bag of purchases from the corner shop.

  In the sun I started the mower, drawn on impulse to cut the weeds on the walled drive ending at my old openwork oak gates, bought two years ago from George Clement and recently installed by Frank on old timber posts. And, by chance, I then found the ideal resolution to the butterfly meadow’s summer encroachment of the cobbled path: to cut with the mower a low green grass verge a foot either side of the path. Feel sure that by next spring this strategy will look exactly right.

  The other day I purchased fresh mackerel from the fish shop in Wellington and tonight grilled them for the two of us together to eat. Beth wants us to be able to live here as friends. I do too.

  9 December

  I’ve been to London for the day, to have lunch with Alex’s father, John Winter, one of my oldest friends. He lives in Tuscany, in the hills above Lucca, and deals internationally in early works of art. Newly placed at one end of the top shelf of his bookcase in Bruton Street is a majolica albarello which I covet, painted on the white body in cobalt blue with the prancing figure of a crazy hare, a pair of cypresses to the right and idealised landscape in the centre. John bought the Florentine renaissance jar, he told me, the week after he finally quit Sotheby’s. The hare is him, he said, making a leap for freedom.

  After lunch I sat for a while on my own on a bench around the corner in Berkeley Square. Bow-tied black plastic sacks of dead leaves were scattered haphazardly across the grass, looking like dozens of Gavin Turk’s painted bronze bin bags. Down in the country, I have missed Gavin’s company. And John’s.

  Pleased, before catching my train home, to see at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington the exhibition Gothic Art for England 1400 to 1587. Henry IV’s favourite emblem was the forget-me-not and these modest blue flowers, executed in enamel on gold, decorate the foot of one of the richest pieces in the whole sumptuous show: the Reliquary of the Order of St-Esprit, given in 1412 by Joan of Navarre, second wife of King Henry of England, to a son from her first marriage, John Duke of Brittany, thence, in 1830, to the Musée du Louvre.

  11 December

  This morning I leave to spend a night and a day with my mother in Lymington.

 
; 12 December

  I had assumed these self-writings had finished with yesterday’s statement, back at my beginning, with Mother.

  Apparently not – it seems I haven’t yet said to myself the things I need to if I’m going to get better. Unless I manage to do this I’ll be ill again, in no time, I bet I will.

  The hope: by recording muddled feelings of distress, to soften my anxiety.

  Tend everywhere to see irresolvable disputes: Iraqis kill other Iraqis at their day-by-day business; British men and women, while persuaded by TV advertisements to eat more than they need, seek to work off the fat in pools and Pilates, strain their hearts and die young; the destitute are turned away from the succour of food and warmth at St Martins-in-the-Field, in London’s Trafalgar Square, too dirty, drunk, and disorderly to deserve attention.

  Contradiction.

  On Radio 4 the one o’clock news announced that Saddam Hussein had been captured alive. Maybe Iraqi society will exert its independence and choose freedom from the confines of all the varied forms of dictatorship.

  With difficulty.

  There are different kinds of coercion, and Western money-greed is one of them. Why should the Iraqis succeed where we, the ‘civilized’ rest of humanity, daily fails?

  14 December

  In an album shown to me by my mother is a black and white snap of my sister, me, and our friend Jonah standing beside his boxer dog, somewhere in the English countryside. I am about nine years old. The photograph is labelled The Quantocks. This is earlier than I remember. And I had not expected my sister to have been with me.

  I don’t blame my mother, she’s done her best.

  She – of course – is one of the subjects I’m failing to write to myself about.

  15 December

  Last night I drove to Stogumber Church to attend a concert given by a friend’s flute teacher and family, the Craddocks. All four children are gifted, one a recent scholar at the Royal Academy of Music, another a semi-finalist at last year’s Young Musician of the Year Award in Cardiff. The church, built at the highest point of the village, is old, its squat red sandstone tower of square section, like many in this area. It looks still to be the centre of village life, solidly endowed for hundreds of years by farmers of the valley, the altar walls elaborately stencilled in Gothic Revival colours.

  The church was full. The children played beautifully: on cello, double bass, viola and violin. Bach, Mozart, Samuel Barber, Gershwin, Robert Schuman and others, in solos and duets, and altogether, with their parents, in a family sextet. Two of the girls are twins. I saw the three girls rush home as I left, lugging their instrument cases, keen to get to a party. The family lives near the church, in a house with a courtyard. They were shouting and giggling.

  Like children.

  They are children. Clever children.

  16 December

  Find myself dwelling on another item of news which disturbed me a couple of days ago. It was in an article I read in the New Statesman, on the journalist William Shawcross, stalker of the standard political path from exultant socialist to right-wing bigot. This piece fuelled my fears, felt threatening.

  Just now been down to the kitchen table to re-read the NS.

  Dislike the smile in his drawn-portrait, its unappetising air of over-confidence.

  Shawcross is an old Etonian, son of the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials; he lives with his well-connected second wife in a stately home in East Sussex; his first marriage, straight from Oxford, was to Marina Warner, the novelist. The New Statesman piece concerned Shawcross’s newly published book of crude simplicity on the Iraq War, and mentioned the fact that he has been commissioned to write an official biography of the Queen Mother.

  A relief for Warner to have got rid of him?

  To write well, it’s what we all want, even as we fail.

  17 December

  I slept last night solidly for six hours, from fifteen minutes before midnight till a quarter to six in the morning, longer than at any time during the last couple of years.

  18 December

  Take a coffee in town this morning.

  Read the TLS, drink and eat at a café in Taunton, taking a pee and packing up and paying with care to arrive on time at my 11.30 appointment around the corner with Jim, in the terraced house into which he has moved from Kingston.

  Ring the bell and enter, letting myself in and up the narrow staircase, noticing that the consulting room door is shut and settling myself, as agreed, to sit and wait in the bare spare bedroom. The session goes on for an extra seven minutes before I hear a female voice preparing to depart, and I then tell Jim I’m in no hurry, aware that he must have had unusual difficulties if it was so hard for the client to leave.

  When Jim comes back in with his mug of tea to the consulting room he tells me that, as I’m here, it’s OK if we start five minutes early. I totally deny that my regular Thursday appointment with him, for over a year now, has been at 11.45. I am so sure of myself, so convincing in my self-rightness that he momentarily believes he may be wrong and checks his diary.

  Sudden realization that it is I who am mistaken. Shocked at the power of the unconscious to blind me to the truth of something I know full well and draw me irresistibly early to Jim. My last appointment of the year.

  A minor matter, but important, to me. Which is why I’ve made such a meal of it on the page.

  The other day I noted in my current file of quotes a paragraph by Evelyn Waugh from his novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which is a kind-of self-portrait:

  Another thing which troubled him and which he soon began to attribute to his medicine, was the behaviour of his memory. It began to play him tricks. He did not grow forgetful. He remembered everything in clear detail but he remembered it wrong. He would state a fact, dogmatically, sometimes in print – a date, a name, a quotation – find himself challenged, turn to his books for verification and find most disconcertingly that he was at fault.

  Two incidents of this kind slightly alarmed him. With the idea of cheering him up Mrs Pinfold invited a weekend party to Lychpole. On the Sunday afternoon he proposed a visit to a remarkable tomb in a neighbouring church. He had not been there since the war, but he had a clear image of it, which he described to them in technical detail; a recumbent figure of the mid-sixteenth century in gilded bronze; something almost unique in England. They found the place without difficulty; it was unquestionably what they sought; but the figure was of coloured alabaster. They laughed, he laughed, but he was shocked.

  This is a retrospective account of impending signs of the author’s temporary breakdown. Lychpole is a fictional name for Waugh’s house at Combe Florey, a couple of miles from here, and the ‘remarkable tomb’ is one of two sculptural memorials in Cothelstone Church across the fields from me, the more elaborate of which is in English alabaster – not coloured, though, that’s the other one, earlier, in stone, of a crusader and his lady.

  19 December

  On my windscreen last night at the swimming pool Beth left a note, of urgent warmth, concerned that I should have a decent time over dinner at Podshavers after my regular swim.

  I was moved.

  On my answerphone this morning a message from Elizabeth, wishing me well for my trip tomorrow to The Hague, to stay for three days with Willem Boymans. I plan to invite her mother out to lunch. And then take the train on to Paris to stay alone in Alex’s flat for Christmas.

  Original Beth and I were married in The Hague, happily.

  20 December

  On the train to London I remember that, as I left Jim’s on Thursday morning, I noticed my Virginia Woolf postcard to him propped against his phone in the hall. There is little other personal decoration yet in his new house in Taunton.

  Emerged moments ago from the Channel Tunnel into the French countryside. It is midday, English time.

  Getting myself here: such a journey.

  The train is bearing me via Brussels to Den Haag, where I’ll take a guest bedro
om at Kleycamp, the giant apartment block in which Willem lives, beside the dunes north of Scheveningen. I’ll then be travelling on by Thalys Express from Brussels to Paris, following the path taken thirty-three years ago on the opening day of my honeymoon, after our first night in the old-fashioned Wittebrück Hotel.

  21 December

  There’s a twenty-four hour nursing service for residents at Kleycamp.

  All over Willem’s flat are wooden clothes pegs, clipped to lampshades, to hats, to shelves, everywhere, for he cannot concisely see and needs the pegs to hand in order to hang out to dry around the place the shirts and things he washes in the bath. In the flat and on the balcony are piles of driftwood combed from the beach, and large logs cut for him by the woodmen he used to meet on his bicycle rides. The table at which he and guests eat is a polished piece of equatorial wood, four feet in diameter, in which fissures have cracked open in the heat of his apartment.