by Adrian Plass
ZONDERVAN
Silver Birches
Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2009 by Adrian Plass
Previously published as Ghosts
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EPub Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-56420-1
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‘The Road Not Taken’ and ‘Birches’ are from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Latham, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
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This book is dedicated to
Kate, with all my love
Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter One: Loss
Chapter Two: Friday
Chapter Three: Saturday Morning
Chapter Four: Saturday Afternoon
Chapter Five: Saturday Evening
Chapter Six: Sunday
About the Publisher
Share Your Thoughts
I’ d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Robert Frost
CHAPTER ONE
Loss
There is an old schoolboy joke that goes, “How do you know when an elephant’s been in your fridge?” The answer is, “You can tell by the footprints in the butter.”
Losing someone you have loved and lived with carries echoes of that silly joke. The one who was half of your existence is gone but, between them — the vastness of her life, and the elephantine, Jurassic creature called Death — leave paradoxically tiny marks or footprints all over your house, your heart, and your life. For a long time these marks of passing are to be found everywhere, every day. Each new discovery is likely to trigger a fresh outburst of grief.
Some of them really are in the fridge. On the bottom shelf stands a carton of skim milk, a small aspect of the scheme that she devised to make sure of losing a few pounds before going on our planned sunshine holiday in late summer. She bought it on the morning of the day before she was taken ill. The carton should have been thrown out a long time ago, but the dustbin outside my back door is somehow not large or appropriate enough to contain the implications of such an action.
Upstairs, on the table next to her side of the bed sprawls an untidy pile of books that she has been devouring, dipping into, hoping to read. One of them was about pregnancy and childbirth. This was to have been the year...
Beside the books stands a tumbler, nearly filled with water.
The books should be returned to the bookcase, but the exact order and positioning of them on the bedside table, the sheer disarray of them, is a unique product of her hands, of her attention and her inattention, and will be lost forever as soon as they are moved or removed.
Her lips were still warm when they touched the cold, hard smoothness of that glass as she sipped from it. The amount of water that remains was precisely determined by the extent of her thirst.
She has no choice now but to give up exactness and inexactness.
These tiny museums of personal randomness are all that is left to me.
How many times and in how many ways is it expected that one should have to say good-bye? I assent and assent and assent and assent to the death of the person I love, yet still she phantoms to life and fades once more to her death in the sad ordinariness of an unfinished packet of cereal, a tube of the wrong-colored shoe polish, a spare pair of one-armed reading glasses in a drawer, CDs I never would have learned to enjoy, the Bible that is not mine, its thousand pages thickly cropped with markers that were sown over a decade, but have yielded their harvest in another place, her sewing box filled with “bits and bobs that might be useful one day,” familiar doodles on a pad beside the phone, and, buried behind coats hanging in the hall, a wide, dark-blue woolen scarf that, when I bury my face in it, still smells of her.
I disposed of such items as the milk carton eventually. Of course I did. There was never any serious danger that I would descend into some kind of Dickensian preservation mania. The books were returned to their correct position on the shelves. I tipped away the water and washed the invisible prints of Jessica’s lips and fingers from the tumbler. It took about half a minute and meant nothing immediately afterward. I noted how the glass shone and sparkled as I replaced it with its fellows on the top shelf of the cupboard above the draining board. It was, after all, only a glass. Tomorrow I would be unable to identify which one of that set of six had contained the last drink that my wife had enjoyed in her own home.
In fact, after the very early and most intensely anguished days I became reasonably good at clearing and sorting and dealing with things of this kind as soon as they appeared, albeit sometimes by gritting my teeth or through little bursts of sobbing, conduits carrying away the overflow of continual grief.
The problem was that it never seemed quite to end. Months after Jessica’s death I was still having to cope with less frequent but no less unexpected reminders of her life and her death. Some of them came from outside the house, brought by the regular postman, a young man with shiny spiked hair and a brick-red complexion who continued to whistle his way up our front path every morning as if, in some strange way, the world had not stopped turning. He brought letters addressed to Jessica that had important things to say about her mobile phone, or her library books, or which bulbs she might like to order for planting in the autumn, or the amount of credit she had on her British Home Stores card, or the fact that she had come so close to winning eighty thousand pounds in some magazine draw that the act of returning the enclosed slip and ordering a year’s subscription to the magazine in question was little more than a tedious formality. I answered the ones I needed to and tossed the rest.
One or two were innocently cheerful communications from friends or acquaintances from the past who knew nothing of what had happened to Jessica. I replied with as much brevity as politeness would allow and tried to spend as little time as possible looking at the letters of condolence that followed.
One summer morning, six months to the day after I had leaned down to kiss my wife’s cold lips for the last time, a letter with a Gloucester postmark dropped onto the front mat. It turned out to be from one of J
essica’s oldest friends, but it was not for her. It was addressed to me.
Dear David,
I do hope you remember who I am, now that so many people in the church know who you are, and I hope you won’t mind plowing through what is probably going to be quite a long letter. My married name (I’m separated from my husband now) is Angela Steadman, but when we knew each other it was Angela Brook. That’s what I’ve gone back to calling myself now that I’m on my own again.
I was in the same youth group as you many years ago when we were all going to St. Mark’s, so I’m in my latish-thirties now, as I suppose you must be. I used to go around with your Jessica, who was my closest friend all through school, and a biggish girl with frizzy hair called Laura Pavey. I was sort of blonde with high cheekbones and a goofy smile and enjoyed wearing bright jumpers in the winter and was a bit bossy and talked too much. Is that enough for you to identify me by? It’s enough for most people. The bossy bit usually rings a bell!
We only knew each other for a relatively short time after you started going out with Jessica, but we actually did quite a few things together. Decent coffee at Laura’s parents’ lovely house round the corner in Clifton Road after the group to get rid of the taste of that thin, rank church coffee, quite a lot of Saturday mornings at Wilson’s, the café at the top of the steps opposite the station where everyone got together to find out if there were going to be any parties they could crash. Two coffees between five or six of us — if we were lucky! It’s just come to me that we all went on a church weekend together once as well, some school or something down in the south I think it was. Coming back now? All very happy memories for me.
Anyway, as you know, apart from Christmas cards Jessica and I pretty well lost touch with each other over the years, but I was very fond of my friend and I never forgot her. I always told myself that one day I’d make the effort to meet up with her again, and with you, of course, so that we could chew over old times. Yes, well, we should just go ahead and do these things and not talk about them, shouldn’t we? I know it’s nothing compared to how you must be feeling, but I am filled with a terrible, desolate sadness when I think that it’s too late now. Having said that, there is one last thing I can do for Jessica, and that’s why I’m writing to you.
David, I think you might be very surprised to hear what I’m going to tell you now. You see, Jessica wrote me quite a long letter only a day or two before she died. In it she talked about what had happened to her, how sudden it had been and how serious it was. She obviously knew perfectly well that she had a very short time left to live. People usually do, in my experience. Of course, as soon as I read this I was on the point of jumping into the car and driving for however long it took to get to her bedside, and that’s exactly what I would have done except that she specifically asked me not to. She wanted me to wait until a few months had gone by and then write to you. I’m doing what she asked.
Jessica sent me something to give to you, David, and when I managed to talk to her for a very short time on the phone at the hospital she was very insistent that I must take responsibility for deciding how and when that should happen. I was a bit taken aback, as you can imagine. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before or to anyone else I know. But one thing’s for sure. I’m not going to let anyone or anything stop me from getting it right — for Jessica’s sake.
Before I tell you what I’ve decided to do I think I’d better just fill you in briefly on what’s been happening to me over the years since we last met. We all know what’s been going on in your life, of course. I’ve never actually been to one of your meetings, but I gather they’re pretty powerful and helpful and that sort of thing. I, on the other hand, have remained happily obscure — well, obscure, anyway.
As I think you probably know, or knew, but I don’t blame you in the slightest for forgetting, I went off and did Art and History at Bristol — absolutely loved it, then I poodled around for a bit before getting a really nice, really badly paid job at a gallery in Cambridge. That’s where I first met my husband, Alan. He was up in Cambridge on business one day, and he’d ducked into our gallery to get out of the rain. Blinking rain! Bringing the good news and the bad news all in one package. To cut a long story short, this Alan being a nice-looking, independent-minded, charming sort of chap, we got on very well, exchanged phone numbers, kept in touch after that first encounter, and began meeting on a regular basis. And to cap it all, he was a Christian! Amazing! I couldn’t believe my luck. About six months later we got engaged, and the autumn after that we were married in York, which is where my dad had moved to after my mum’s death. It all felt so perfect. We prayed together, we laughed together about the same things, we shared dreams about what we might do in the future.
One of our commonest dreams was to find some kind of big old ramshackle property in the country, do it up and somehow make money out of it. A few years later, after both our parents had gone, there was enough money to think seriously about doing it. Well, to cut an even longer story short, after a lot of very enjoyable searching all over the country — marvelous times — we found somewhere. It was an ancient place, and when I say “ancient” I mean it. There were stones in the cellar dating from Roman times, and in just about every century since then someone seemed to have added something to the building. And just to add a little spice to the whole thing, the place had a well-documented reputation for being one of the most haunted houses in England! And is it haunted? I hear you ask. I’ll tell you more about that when/if I see you.
We bought it. It was a mess, but we bought it. We figured that once it was cleaned up and we’d gone round the sales and bought some authentic stuff to put in the rooms, we’d be able to charge the public to come in and look round the place. It was so exciting and such fun. We had this dynamic girl called Karen who came in every day from the village to help, and within two or three months the thing was up and running. Seeing the very first paying customers walk through the door was an amazing experience. There was still an enormous amount to be done to the house, but we reckoned we could do that as we went along and according to how the money was going. It was marvelous having Karen to help. She was practical, versatile, quick, and all the other things you need someone to be when you’ve taken on a venture that every now and then seems just too big to handle. And I got on really well with her. We were great buddies, Karen and I, we really were. Like sisters. And all that good stuff lasted right up to the point when she and my husband stood side by side like discontented servants at the kitchen table one cold morning when I was bleary-eyed and barely awake, and announced that they’d fallen in love and were going to go away together. Alan was good enough to explain that he needed someone “more feminine and adaptive,” someone who didn’t feel the need to dominate him all the time.
I don’t want to say any more about that now. It puts my whole being out of joint. I can hardly write the words down without smashing something.
I’m still at the house, and still trying to run it as a business.
Right! That’s me in a rather crushed nutshell, and here’s my suggestion. I’d like to have a bit of a weekend reunion down here at the house, and I really want you to be part of it. It would probably run from Friday evening to Sunday morning or afternoon. I’ve still got some addresses and numbers from the old days, but you know how it is. People selfishly get married and move and emigrate and things, without any regard for people who are trying to organize reunions. I’m going to try for seven or eight of the folks you and I might remember best, and we’ll see how we go. I gather that these things can turn out pretty dire if they’re handled badly, so I want to plan at least a rough agenda that gives the weekend half a chance of being useful in some way, or at the very least enjoyable, for everyone who comes. I hope the idea of the ghosts won’t put them off. I suspect the fact that we’ll have to share expenses a bit will probably put them off a lot more!
There you are, then. I’ve enclosed a list of some possible dates. I assume your diary gets filled
up pretty quickly — I suppose you’re back on the speaking trail by now — so the sooner you reply the sooner I can fix it with the others. If you can’t or won’t come on any of those dates, and you don’t come up with any alternatives either, then I won’t do it at all. In which case you won’t be getting what I was given to pass on to you. That would not be good, because we are both going to have to face Jessica again some day. She was very sweet, but what a temper! Seriously, this may be the last thing you want to do, but please do it. Ring, write, ask any questions you like, but just do it!
More details when you reply
Love and blessings (if there are some about)
Angela (Brook)
I read Angela’s letter once in the clean and tidy kitchen while my single, life-sustaining slice of toast got cold. Then I took it into the dusty but even tidier living room and sat, bathed in early sunlight at the little round table by the window, to read it again.
Since Jessica’s death I had barely used most of the rooms in my house. She and I had taken so much time, trouble, and pleasure turning it into a place that suited the kind of people we were and the sort of life we were building together with such enthusiasm. Sleeping, eating, and washing were the only areas in which practical need regularly impinged on my unhappiness. I tended to live in the bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom. I only came into the living room to water Jessica’s beloved plants. I felt cold and awkward in there. After the day on which I made the horribly sensible decision to clear those little bits of random evidence that proved my wife had existed, I had spent every minute of the next weekend scrubbing and tidying the whole house with a ferocious thoroughness. This wild urgency of intention was probably born out of a need to remove every distraction from the all-absorbing business of feeling and thinking and grinding through my grief.