An Irresponsible Age

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  She phoned Carlo: ‘I’m collecting dead leaves.’ She could hardly hear him.

  ‘People go there in order to do that, but forget leaves, that bloody woman’s resigned. The revolution has come!’

  ‘What? Listen. They’re like the first photographs. Some of those were of leaves, weren’t they? What I mean is they fix the passing light, only here, now, it’s all happening in nature and in technicolor.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll get a bit of work done after all.’

  ‘What?’

  Juliet laughed. She was so far away. She wrote another list of colours and slid it into a file. She pulled out a piece of paper and wrote ‘I must not invest.’ She remembered something from somewhere: ‘Look at the leaf or the wood but never the tree.’ Who said that? It was a notion of visual discipline that pleased her more than whatever it might mean.

  Jacob rang, as he usually did, late at night. Juliet smiled into the receiver and settled back to weigh the silence when she heard a noise on the line, not a noise, a quiet high cry which formed itself into a voice and said, ‘I forgive you.’

  Juliet said nothing as the voice went on gathering strength: ‘You were not to know, you don’t, you can’t, I forgive you.’ It sounded like an old recording – scripted, over-used and obsolete.

  Someone called Juliet from the doctor’s office to ask her to come in to discuss the results of her scan but she said that as her back hurt so much, could they please wait. The doctor herself called that afternoon. The next day she showed Juliet some cluttered monochrome images, and tried to explain.

  The doctor’s view was that she should have the investigative operation: three small incisions, a tiny camera; she could be in and out in a day. They would do nothing more, just find out exactly what was going on. It was what Juliet had wanted for almost a year, since the pain and bleeding had got so much worse, and so she said yes, please, as soon as possible. Everything here happened so quickly, which was good of course. It left her no time to think but that was good, too.

  She returned to the hospital for one more conversation and again one morning for what she described to Terence as ‘a little camerawork’. He collected her at the end of the day and took her home to bed. Two days later, he took her back to hear the results. This time, they showed her colour photographs. The doctor talked about displacement, cyclical growth, flow and adhesion but all Juliet could see was that everything looked raw yellow, brown and red, twisted and stuck together.

  ‘It looks like an incredible mess,’ said Juliet.

  ‘The damage is fairly extensive. It’s evidently been developing for some time.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘We can do a great deal with surgery and lasers these days but I think in your case we should begin with a course of hormones which will suspend your cycle for a while. That way, the growths ought to reduce and we will be able to remove them more easily.’

  Terence had to rely on Juliet’s rather abstracted explanation: ‘It’s all to do with displacement. Cells migrating … They must burrow or something … anyway, they stick to everything else and they grow and bleed like they would normally only they’re trapped. I’m full of old blood.’

  ‘You look exhausted. What will they do next?’

  ‘There’s more. Other growths, which looked like bubbles and fingers.’

  ‘Can you be a bit more technical?’

  ‘You want names? Do you know, I can’t remember.’ She was lying, and he let her.

  ‘What will they do?’

  ‘Slash and burn, eventually. For now, I have some little white pills which should calm it all down.’

  That night, Juliet lay with her hands on her belly and remembered Jacob’s touch. At dawn, she got up and realising that she had never known the number for his room at the Shipping Office, she dialled her old office number next door and listened beyond the ringing for someone asleep on the other side of the wall to be woken by this after-hours noise, and to read its signal.

  As the last leaves fell and fizzled out, Juliet decided to explore further. She headed out on the main road and then turned off along a dirt track, her headlights sweeping the wreckage of the recent maize harvest, the smashed stalks and husks and in an otherwise bare field, a cluster of pumpkins swelling out of the black earth. A week later the town was lined with jack-o’-lanterns, whose grins were as wide and inscrutable as those of Juliet’s colleagues. Overgrown children banged on the door and flatly stated ‘Trick or treat’. Juliet gave the first few some dried fruit, which they dropped on the stairs. After a while, she answered the door holding an axe she had found behind the stove and said, ‘Go on, my dears. Trick away!’

  She was woken at dawn by someone screaming and pulled up the blind to see an owl on a branch a foot or so from her window, surrounded by a mob of crows. It was they who were making the noise. The owl blinked and shook its head as if unable to believe what was happening. Juliet ran outside and shouted at the crows but only succeeded in driving them into another tree, along with the exhausted owl.

  ‘You cruel bastards!’ she screamed at the crows. ‘You don’t even mean it!’ and wheeled round to find Merle Dix slipping out of Buckie Buckingham’s front door. The old man was behind her, doing up his horrible gown. Juliet turned back to the owl to make sure they knew she was yelling at the birds and not them. ‘Get out of here, dimwit, save your stupid self!’ Worse and worse. She turned and said as nonchalantly as she could, ‘I’m only trying to help.’

  This episode did not upset Juliet. The small white pill she took each morning was having magical effects. Her body grew silent and steady; she waited for the pain and the bleeding, and when they did not come, she relaxed. She stopped clenching her jaw, flexing her toes and packing her fingers into fists. She looked at things and made notes, and watched the town of Littlefield continue to happen around her.

  Americans have a lot of weather, Juliet wrote to her mother, but they just move it out the way. All those leaves were blasted with some kind of giant hoover – blown into big piles and then sucked up. After the leaves were gone, there was darkness and by late November, four feet of snow. They move the snow too. Ploughs lit up like ships come grinding along, putting back all the streets and drives.

  The snow began one afternoon as Juliet sat at her table drinking tea and fighting sleep. She watched it muffle a cedar tree, by which time the surrounding pines were choked. She felt all the excitement of an English child, to whom there is no such thing as too much snow, until she found that until the plough had been through, she couldn’t get anywhere.

  Her car was buried, and the surface of the snow thawed and refroze as a layer of ice. To walk was to break glass with every step, so effortful and noisy that Juliet did not want to be seen trying to do it. Every night, more snow fell and every morning the plough came by. She sat in her window and noted how the Americans went about their day, undeterred and properly equipped with snow boots and snow suits, with snow-chains on their tyres, on skis and ski-mobiles. They used sharp spades to cut away slabs of ice from their paths and steps. Everyone cleared the space in front of their house. They knew what was expected of them and how far to go.

  There were two more weeks of teaching left. Juliet and Terence drove out of town to see the illuminated Father Christmases, reindeer and madonnas which loomed over small houses that looked as if they were made of cardboard rather than clapboard. Some appeared to have capsized under the joint weight of snow and fairylights.

  ‘So there’s life in the place after all,’ Juliet said to Terence as they pulled up at the sports bar.

  ‘Oh no, that isn’t part of Littlefield proper.’

  ‘So what does a Littlefield Christmas consist of then?’

  ‘God knows, I leave the day after I’ve finished grading papers.’

  ‘You go home?’

  ‘You thought Littlefield was my home?’

  ‘No, but you never talk about anyone in England.’

  ‘I’m not g
oing there. Leigh’s back from six months in Sydney and we’re meeting in New York.’

  ‘Leigh?’

  Juliet realised that she could not assume what gender this lover might be, and that the idea of Terence as a sexual being surprised her. She had emulated his self-sufficiency and now felt cheated.

  In a small dense English wood, Jacob walked ahead of his mother and his wife. He had pushed Monica’s wheelchair along the bumpy path and now that they had turned back towards the car park and the thin pink sun was going down, he let Barbara push instead and hurried on. Almost immediately, he realised he was an indecent distance ahead and stopped to wait. He watched them catch up: his sharp-edged mother, folded and swathed, and Barbara, always so vivid, always such momentum, skimming the wheelchair over oak roots and clots of dead leaves, pointing and talking and being so insistently present and alive … They were almost on him now, looming, tugging, and so he swung away, he couldn’t help it, at first just in his head and when that didn’t work – Juliet, why could he not reach Juliet? – he strode off into the dark light of the afternoon, and his wife and mother watched him go, knowing it was dark and wondering how it was that they could still see him.

  Juliet threw her pressed leaves away and sat at her window looking through the branches at the white ground, the white hills and the white clouds in the white sky. While the plough still passed each day, it only skimmed the top layer of slush and sprinkled grit on the compacted ice beneath. There were no more paths or driveways, just contours and outlines filled in with gritty shadows. She was glad of the trees now that she could see through them, glad too of her antique radiators which had woken one morning, hissing and rumbling like elderly snakes emerging from hibernation.

  For her students, Thanksgiving seemed to have signalled that work was over for the year. They had returned half-heartedly, making no excuse for not having read the texts she set.

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning. There is a central image and there is a frame. Right?’

  One of them took the trouble to nod.

  ‘It’s like … it’s like this town. If Littlefield disappeared in a puff of smoke –’

  ‘You mean, like, if they nuked us?’ The nodding student looked interested.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Juliet. ‘So, there’s no town, but there is a clearing in the forest. The frame remains. The trees.’

  ‘You make frames out of trees, right?’

  ‘This is the conceptual frame, not the literal one,’ said one of the bright students, a Hawaiian girl on a rowing scholarship who would contribute more were it not for the fact that even now that the Connecticut River was half-frozen, she had to train at dawn every day. ‘It’s what happened post-Iconoclasm in the Low Countries – you couldn’t paint the Madonna any more, so you painted her flowers.’

  Juliet waited for the girl to continue but she had had no breakfast and her fingers were faintly blue.

  Juliet took over: ‘That’s right. The subject has been removed, so the space is there to be filled. The artist invests the framing devices with the meaning of the subject. So instead of the Madonna, we have the first flower paintings.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with nuking Littlefield?’ someone else said.

  In teaching people not much younger than herself, Juliet had become aware of how discouraging she could be. She was trying to develop patience and tact. She thought for a moment and then said, ‘If I showed you a picture of all the trees around this town, but with the town removed, what would the trees suggest to you?’

  ‘Picture frames?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘Yes and no?’

  ‘Do you mean a frame or a framing device?’ queried the rower.

  ‘Glue and nails and stuff?’

  Juliet lost patience. ‘If the frame moves into the centre of the picture then we impose another frame. We insist, in that way, on a clearing, even if we do not, so to speak, chop down the trees. We don’t want to see further, we need to have a sense of limitation, for our own safety, instead of boundless implication … we need to believe that what we do only travels so far … OK, Tommy,’ she said to the sleepy boy, ‘you know how hard it is to drive in this weather?’ He nodded. ‘So you have to stay here, only the town has been blanked out by the snow. The town is gone and I, I mean you, are stuck here. How do you feel about that?’

  Tommy was flattered to be singled out like this. ‘It’s totally … but you know, what can you do?’

  ‘I kind of like it,’ said the quietest girl. ‘You have to think hard about if you really want to do something or not, because it’s going to be this really big effort, so mostly you don’t. It’s really quiet and if you do get out there, there’s nothing and no one, only sometimes you meet someone you know and that’s all of a sudden a big deal. And you can feel the town still happening, even though you can’t see it.’

  Juliet decided that she liked them after all, so much so that two weeks later, after the last class, she was hurt by their perfunctory farewells. They had three weeks off and were heading home, as was she, only by now she had invested something in them and thought she might miss them, and took a while to remember that they were only nineteen, an age at which it seems natural and effortless to keep up with life.

  She was astonished to find that Christmas was a one-day holiday here and that there was no Boxing Day, and began to think of her family traditions with new-found sentiment. ‘We still get stockings,’ she boasted to Terence.

  ‘Old socks? We always got pillowcases. What can you fit in an old sock?’

  ‘There’s a tangerine, a pound and some nuts in the foot, then there has to be chocolate money and after that, anything.’

  ‘Anything quaint or educational. You are twenty-nine, Juliet, and you sound as if it would be a catastrophe if your stocking were not there on Christmas morning.’

  Juliet had been drinking White Russians and the combination of sweetness and alcohol was making her tetchy and sentimental. ‘What did you get in your pillowcase then?’

  ‘Televisions, that kind of thing. I bet you didn’t even have a television.’

  ‘Yes we did, eventually.’

  ‘Black and white?’

  ‘So? We didn’t watch it on Christmas Day, though.’

  ‘Especially not the Queen’s Speech. You were too busy making egg-nog and singing carols.’

  ‘We did sing carols, it’s true. We do. I love carols.’

  ‘That’s your last White Russian.’

  ‘Don’t you love carols?’

  ‘Come on, I’ll walk you home.’

  The next morning, Juliet lay in bed feeling sick. She would be back in Littlefield in the New Year and so this trip to London had to be treated as a visit, not a return. Perhaps it was in order to start thinking of Littlefield as home that she decided to have a Christmas drinks party. She would invite whoever was left in town of her colleagues and students. It was the sort of thing her mother did.

  What about the following evening? Juliet had never issued any kind of formal invitation and it did not occur to her that people might require notice. Feeling munificent, she designed an invitation and put one in every departmental box. (‘Leave your essays in my pigeonhole,’ she had instructed her students during the first week. ‘Pigeonhole?’ ‘We’ll be discussing that text in a fortnight’s time.’ ‘Fortnight?’) She even put an invitation through Buckie Buckingham’s letterbox. Recently he had been singing carols: ‘Silent Night’ in pedantically enunciated German.

  The department secretary, the only person to send Juliet a Christmas card, was kind enough to explain that most of her colleagues had packed up and gone the day they finished marking papers. Terence had been offered a lift to New York and so left earlier than planned. Merle and Rogen were visiting friends in Trieste.

  Juliet drove to The Higher Realm and bought whatever she could find that approximated the filling of mince pies. In Publix, she bought frozen pastry and cheap red wine, which she planned to mull. She phoned her mo
ther to ask about mull.

  By mid-afternoon, she had baked a tray of mince pies which looked convincing enough, and the wine was in a pan with whatever she could find of the fruit and spices her mother recommended. When she returned from her third shopping trip, the garage was empty and, tired of having to dig out her car and then persuade it to start, she drove right in. Buckie must have left town like everyone else, she thought, imagining a faux-baronial pile in the Connecticut countryside, plenty of egg-nog and no television.

  Snow began to fall, as it did every afternoon, wiping out all trace of activity – footsteps, paw prints, the tracks of tyres, sledges and skiis. The guidelines drawn by the plough’s grit sank and disappeared. Juliet put on a tape of carols that she had seen by the checkout in Publix. She had asked people to come at seven and by six thirty had laid out twenty green plastic cups and red paper napkins, played the tape three times right through and had eaten two mince pies.

  She watched (when was she not watching?) the snow flicker and accumulate in the dark, considering the town and what it was to be outside it and at the same time outside yourself, because that was what it felt like not to be in London or with her family – or Jacob. I miss him, she admitted, and then, I miss Jacob even more than I miss Tobias. Or do I miss Jacob because I can’t bear to miss Tobias? The two impulses collided with each other, leaving Juliet troubled by a feeling she had begun to interpret as love.