‘Good, good. Got to go, Mum. I’ll be late.’ Sam hung up and breathed through her nose, knowing solace could only be found amongst the trees.
It was dry outside so Sam slipped her trainers on and let herself out of the house, heading off to the woods, grateful for a haven to retreat to. When she got to the caravan, there was no sign of Diana but the embers in the fireplace, though cool-looking, were still slightly smoking and it only took a few well aimed breaths to puff it back into life. Sam emptied her mind completely, and instead focussed fully on feeding the fire tiny twigs and leaves until the flames caught convincingly. She became bolder, adding larger bits of wood before she was confident the fire was ready to accept a dry log from the woodpile. She knelt down beside the fire and let her mind remain empty and still while the flames licked the new fuel tentatively, finding its way into the grooves of bark before grabbing it wholeheartedly. Sam smiled at this primordial pleasure.
‘Oh hello,’ said Diana, appearing through the trees, carrying her basket laden with leaves. ‘Honestly, I thought I’d made my home here to escape society but these days it’s like living in some sort of commune.’
Sam didn’t mind being told off by Diana. Her scolding was earnest and straightforward and because she sidestepped confrontation, Sam now felt confident that Diana would just say if she didn’t want her to visit.
‘I kept the home fires burning,’ she said, proudly, grinning up at her.
With barely a pause Sam’s smile disappeared. She broke a stick she’d been poking the fire with into smaller pieces and dropped them systematically around the burning log.
‘Is your mother still alive, Diana?’
‘Goodness, no. She died a good ten years ago.’ At some point during Sam’s visits, two fold-out chairs had appeared in the shelter, to the side of the wood pile, where before Sam was certain there had only been one. Diana now fetched these and unfolded them one by one while talking. ‘I don’t know if I’d be here in the woods if she had lived longer. I doubt it. It’s hard to know, isn’t it, how the twists and turns of life impact us. Where you find yourself at any given point is sometimes the only place you could possibly be, given those thousand different decisions you’ve made along the way. I’d be fascinated to see my life now, plotted out, having given the opposite answers to all the significant questions I’d ever been asked. Imagine if you’d said yes, each time you’d said no and vice versa. Where would you be, Sam?’
‘Gosh. Weirdly, I know I might be mistaken for an adult but I don’t think I’ve made many significant decisions yet. I said yes when Danny proposed, so my life would have been very different if I hadn’t married. I certainly wouldn’t be here, in the woods with you. And perhaps I wouldn’t be anywhere.’ Sam thought about the consequence of that decision as if for the first time and acknowledged the enormity of it. ‘I suppose, if I hadn’t married, and hadn’t wondered why I hadn’t conceived I wouldn’t have gone to the doctor and I wouldn’t have had my cancer diagnosed as early, so I’d probably be dead.’
‘That sounds like a significant decision to me.’
‘Yes. But when Danny proposed I never truly thought about the consequences. I just said “yes”. I was waiting for him to ask me and it never occurred to me to say no. I’ve always assumed my life was dictated by ultimatums. Mostly I’ve had decisions made for me and the rest of the major upheavals in my life have been a result of things that have just happened to me, so all of those have been quite out of my control. The truth is, Diana, I’ve drifted through my life until quite recently but perhaps if I’d been more assertive, more certain of who I wanted to be, I’d be a better person.’
‘Who is this better person you lust after? What does she look like, what does she do?’
‘She’d look like me – I can’t really change that. I’m just this collection of cells, organised in this particular configuration. But she’d speak up. She’d have a voice. She’d be doing something with her life.’
‘But you do have a voice, don’t you? With your writing.’
‘But that’s not me, that’s Libby. She’s just my alter-ego. Typical of me that my alter-ego is a better version of me. More proactive, more vocal, she has opinions and she’s not afraid to express them. I’m passive and weak and I let people trample all over me. Take my mother for example.’
‘I assumed this was leading there.’
‘I just can’t quite be the person she wants me to be. I am such a constant disappointment to her.’
‘Are you sure? Is it possible that’s just a role you’ve chosen to adopt?’
‘No, really, I am. She quite likes Danny, which is a bonus. But she thinks he deserves better than me which is not what you want from your own mother. I suppose me not having children has been a real blow to her. That was what she wanted for this next stage of her life and I’ve let her down. She’s sort of adopted my cousin – her brother’s daughter Lucy, and her children. She’s channelling all of her love into them…’
‘And how does that make you feel? Jealous?’
‘Um.’ Sam really didn’t know. ‘Jealous? No. I don’t think I’m jealous. Jealousy is a spiky thing, isn’t it? That’s not it. I feel a bit baffled, I suppose, that she’s been so quick to swing her attention from me to my cousin. I mean, I don’t think I’d heard a word about Lucy and Gerry until they had children and now I never hear the end of them.’
‘You are jealous.’
‘I wish I were. That would imply some sort of natural response. I don’t actually care which is probably quite unhealthy.’
‘I think you care about plenty of things but you are trying very hard not to care about this. That’s OK. But I think maybe, just give your mother this.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You haven’t quite lived up to her expectations, she’s found an alternative family. Another daughter and some grandchildren. It’s fantastical, of course but it doesn’t really impact you. Let her have them.’
‘Oh. Is it as easy as that?’
‘Definitely. You’re going to have some battles to fight in your life but this isn’t one of them. You don’t want to be loved by your mother at the moment, but don’t stop her loving someone else instead. That’s just selfish.’
‘Is it bad that I don’t want to be loved by my mother at the moment, do you think?’
‘It’s a necessary phase. You’ll get over it. You’ll discover a reason to love her again.’
‘Oh, OK.’ Sam continued to poke at the fire. Bringing the flames back to life was incredibly therapeutic and Diana’s words now seemed irrefutably sensible.
‘Are you sad or are you angry?’ Diana asked.
‘Sad. Angry. No. Sad. Actually angry. I don’t know.’
‘You can be both or neither.’
‘Then sometimes I’m both but right now I’m neither. Here, in the woods, with you I am not being judged. I feel fine. I feel nice.’
Diana smiled in recognition. ‘Nice is a great state to achieve. It took me over fifty years and a major breakdown to move myself into a space that allowed me to feel nice.’
‘Well, the school of Diana works then, doesn’t it? You’ve helped me get there sooner, minus the breakdown.’
‘Good. Something positive has come out of my own collapse. But, Sam, it’s really OK, though, to feel angry. Anger is natural and important. Being angry can help.’
‘But what can I be angry about? How can anger help me? I can’t regret things that I have absolutely no control over. It’s like being angry about being too short or too tall. Where does anger fit in?’
‘So you never rise, never get flooded by a version of anger that takes root in a helpful, indulgent version of self-pity?’
‘Of course. I’m not immune to that. But what I do with it isn’t very healthy. I take it and I write these provocative pieces, designed to inflame people. That’s healthy for me because I am washing myself of those feelings. But it’s not good. It might be fine if I were doing no harm but I think I pr
obably am. When I feel a wave of what you describe as anger it is very rarely true anger. It is more, as you say, self-pity and that is the thing that makes me angry. But the self-pity doesn’t come from the obvious routes, it’s not that I pity myself because I was ill or couldn’t have children or – God forbid – came through all of that treatment only to plunge headlong into the menopause while other people are still starting out in life. It’s none of that. It’s that I’m never understood. Nobody ever really asks me how I am. They just look at me, see I’m a bit broken and then run a mile in case whatever I have is infectious.’
‘That sounds hard.’ Diana stood up and started walking, motioning Sam to follow. Sam walked beside her, falling into step quite comfortably.
‘It is but it’s confusing, too. Because, what I’d really like, is the right to choose not to have children. And be respected for that choice. People know I can’t have children and they immediately pity me, or they run away from me, or they try to suggest ways to fix me. Their assumption that not having children is a complete disaster is unhelpful and offensive. I would like, just for once, to say that I am absolutely fine not having children, thanks. But I never get that chance. That’s why I write what I write, that’s where I vent. And I’m never truthful. I lie to myself, I lie to Danny. And when I write a version of the truth that I feel comfortable with, I pass it through Libby’s filter, and hand over the authorship to her. I let her write it for me. It’s her truth, it never feels like mine.’
‘You are angry. I’m not judging you, I’ve been angry myself in the past. I’m curious that you have chosen to subsume your anger with passivity.’
‘I really don’t think of myself as angry. I think of myself as provoked. I am capable of being at peace with the cards I’ve been dealt but other people don’t seem to accept it. Their response to me makes me angry.’
‘So, can’t you just ignore them?’
‘No, I can’t! They just won’t let me. I can be minding my business when a neighbour comes to introduce herself and before I even know her last name she’s telling me how to fix myself. She’s telling me I must find a way to have children or I can never be the neighbour she needs me to be.’
Diana and Sam walked out of the woodland and began to wander slowly around the edge of the large field to the north of the copse. Sam fell silent as they walked, letting Diana point out the names of wild plants as they went. She used her stick as both a pointer and a hook to pull a plant closer to them for inspection but now she hung it on a branch and they were perched on a fallen ash, looking back up at the woodland that cushioned Diana’s home from the rest of the world.
‘If you don’t want to be judged by a neighbour, don’t answer the doorbell.’
Sam smiled. Diana had appeared to be immersed in the wildlife surrounding them but had clearly not forgotten Sam’s plea. ‘You know how hard that is. You removed yourself entirely and yet people still found a way to harass you, they tried to chase you away and you don’t even have a doorbell.’
‘Perhaps I’m talking metaphorically.’
‘Oh.’
Sam thought a bit more. ‘Oh. I see.’ Although she wasn’t sure she did.
‘Tell me, Sam. Which aspect makes you angry, the interference from other women or your lack of womb?’
‘Definitely not the lack of womb. That doesn’t make me angry, how could it? I’m alive because of my lack of womb. I made that sacrifice willingly. But ever since my cancer I’ve been pitied and I have been denied the right to not want children. There’s a big difference between childless and childfree and nobody seems to let me be both.’
‘So, you wouldn’t have wanted children? They weren’t in your plans?’
‘They were abstractly, but I just sort of assumed I would go on to have them. There wasn’t a burning desire. I wasn’t focussed on having children as part of my big plan but then I wasn’t really focussed on anything. I was just stumbling blindly forward letting life happen to me. When I found I couldn’t have children, I just didn’t feel a great loss, I readjusted very easily, readily even. And then I started to feel bad because everywhere I looked, people told me that wasn’t a healthy response.’
The view across the field was beautiful and the sun was high. Neither of them felt any great urge to start walking again. ‘What about you? I assume you don’t have children?’ asked Sam, casually, trying to make the question sound as if it hadn’t been fighting to be asked for weeks.
‘No. Never. And I don’t feel a loss. I might have been a good mother once I suppose but I’d be awful now. I’d have had to turn my back on them eventually. I fear that even with children, I’d still be here, talking to you, not there, picking up the pieces of their lives. They’d have hated me eventually, regardless of how hard I’d tried.’
‘You can’t possibly know that, you might have become somebody entirely different, surely. Perhaps right now you’d be baking a cake ahead of a weekend visit.’
‘I don’t think so. I think I was always on this path.’
‘And how do you define this path?’
‘To go at life hard, fast, headstrong and wildly in the wrong direction. To crash into a crisis like a train hitting a wall. To pick myself up, alone, without help from anyone and to contemplate and meditate, to face these last phases like this. But not without effect, not without impact. I will leave a report.’
‘Your notebooks.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I envy your determination. I’ve never led life fast or been headstrong. I’ve been so passive. I haven’t felt like I’m wading through treacle, just drifting along.’
‘But you’re not doing that now, are you?’
‘I am; I very much am doing that. I’m almost compulsively ordinary. And I’m completely pliable. I can’t imagine ever crashing into a crisis. I’ll just walk slowly up to it, apologise and change direction.’
‘I don’t think you’re ordinary. I think you’re extraordinary.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’
‘But I’m not!’ insisted Sam, though desperate to believe she could be.
‘You are the first person I’ve known in all my adult years who I’ve liked more, not less, the more time I’ve spent with them. That makes you extraordinary in my eyes.’
Sam glowed with pleasure.
Chapter 40
Now Sam was carving out so much of her day to sit in the woods with Diana, the weekdays flew by and the grass grew resolutely, marking out the passage of time in millimetres not seconds. The newly planted border, whilst not yet as lavish or lustrous, was bright and vigorous and had now caught up with the height of the older grass of the turfed lawn which had been trimmed twice more. There was nothing much Sam could do for the new grass now other than to watch it flourish.
Standing on the paving stones at the rear of the house and squinting at her garden through half-closed eyes, she could already imagine it in all its majesty. She still had no proof that any flowers would appear from amongst the green, but she accepted that she would simply have to bide her time. Waiting was a challenge that Sam felt she could overcome by being respectful of nature and its ways. Her other challenge, that of keeping Danny at bay, was much harder to surmount.
Fortunately, each evening for the past couple of weeks, a light warm drizzle had fallen vertically from the breezeless sky, leaving no trace other than the earthy scent of burgeoning growth. The weather had delighted Sam. She knew the combination of gentle rain and gleaming sunshine would create the ideal conditions for her wildflowers and it also made it much easier to keep Danny indoors when he got home in the evenings. She had deflected him with carefully prepared dinners and diverting conversation and had concocted a series of increasingly convoluted distractions to keep his mind off the garden.
Meanwhile, Danny was not oblivious to Sam’s scheming. He had allowed her to manipulate him willingly, fully aware that his every moment was being managed until darkness fell and she could finally allow him to wander the hous
e unescorted. He had of course been keeping a watchful eye on the height of grass, it was impossible to ignore, but her progressively complex recreations had amused him and had gone a long way towards nullifying the alarming prospect of the wilderness that Sam was cultivating behind his back.
A couple of midweek twilight hours were easy to fill but the weekends were impossible. Now Danny joined Sam, handed her a cup of coffee and they stood on the paving in silence, observing the long grass together.
‘Gosh,’ said Danny, as if it had sprung upon him unnoticed.
‘It’s amazing how it’s grown, isn’t it?’ said Sam, cheerfully, but looking firmly ahead, unable to face him.
‘It’s a savannah,’ Danny said, trying not to pass judgement but needing to name it.
‘A small one.’
‘And you’re not going to mow it.’
‘Not yet. No.’
‘Do you have a timeline?’
‘No.’
‘Right. I see. But I assume we can’t really walk on it at the moment.’
‘Not really, it’s in a bit of a delicate state. But you can enjoy it by looking at it.’
‘It’s just long grass. I am not sure it will hold my attention all summer.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is just long grass. But let’s see what happens over the next few weeks. I already find it quite captivating.’
They both fell silent.
Sensing Danny’s tension, Sam realised she needed to urgently remove Danny from her lawn, away from the lawnmower, away from the potential wildflowers.
‘Shall we go for a walk? Or find a pub?’ she suggested.
‘Sure,’ said Danny, not sounding sure at all.
‘Apparently, there’s a beautiful wood locally. It’s near enough to go on foot if you fancy it? I think it’s about a four-mile walk, we could head there, see if there’s a pub nearby and walk back?’
Danny frowned.
‘What do you reckon? A long walk would do us both the power of good.’
He turned away from the lawn and headed inside. Sam followed him, hopeful that the hardest piece of the negotiation was now behind her.
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