by Adrian Plass
It seems an inevitable feature of any kind of residential weekend, however congenial the residents, that there is one period — more often than not it tends to be the Saturday afternoon — when a certain bleak aimlessness descends, and the whole affair begins to look like a very bad idea indeed. It felt rather like that after Angela drove us back from the pub. Our meal had been so light and bright with chatter and laughter that it really did feel as though some ill-intentioned magician had cast a negative spell on the atmosphere of Headly Manor during our absence.
No agenda had been set for the second half of the afternoon. Angela disappeared into her office to attend to urgent business matters as soon as we returned, inviting us all to help ourselves from the kitchen to anything we wanted in the way of tea. By the time I came back in from a short stroll around the perimeter of the grounds at about four, it seemed that everyone else must have headed for their rooms to sleep or rest or read. Fires had been laid in readiness for the evening but were not yet lit, and the house was far too big and draughty to offer any real comfort or cosiness in the larger downstairs rooms. I knew, from all too frequent exposure to the joys and sorrows of conferences and church weekends in cold, echoing country houses, that these periods of bleakness were often deceptive. They were no more authentic and reliable as experiences than the sessions of sparkling fellowship and profound identification and togetherness that sometimes followed them. I reluctantly confessed to myself that it was very nearly refreshing to feel such a familiar sense of discomfort, one that was in no way connected with the desolation of loss. I could do something about this problem. The sensible thing for me on these occasions was to have a very deep, very hot bath and then either crouch over any heat source available in my room or simply get into bed for a while and read or doze until something else was due to happen.
Finding the house so chilly and cheerless on returning, my Plan A had been to locate an easily readable book in the library, take it upstairs, run gallons of hot water (please, God, let there be hot water!) into the huge, enameled Victorian bath with the claw legs in the high-ceilinged bathroom just down the corridor from me, read my book in the bath for as long as the heat lasted, leap out, sprint back like a boiled lobster to my bedroom as swiftly as possible before I froze, and then huddle over a two-bar electric fire that I had found in my room, one that may have hummed and stunk like a happy tramp whenever I turned it on, but also gave out heat. Or I might get into bed.
Plan B was not my idea at all.
Intent on completing the first stage of my personal schedule, I pushed open the heavy oak door that gave access to the library from the hall, only to find that not all my fellow guests had retired for the afternoon. Peter was sitting alone at the other side of the room, apparently engrossed in a hardback book that lay open before him on a green leather rectangle set into the writing surface of the roll-top desk beside the window. Curious, I walked over to see what kind of reading matter could be absorbing the attention of a man normally so focused on one very particular aspect of life. I would have bet a sizeable amount of money on Peter’s selection having some kind of specific religious interest or bias. In which case I would have lost every penny of my investment.
Suddenly sensing that he was not alone, Peter swung round with an agitated jolt of the head and shoulders as I came up behind him. I felt obscurely flattered on seeing a friendly, slightly embarrassed smile bring some relief to the natural tension in his thin, pale face when he saw me.
“Oh, hello, David, I was just reading the, er, well, I suppose they’re the poems I love most. I should say, they’re the poems I like more than any others. They mean something to me. I haven’t seen them for quite some time. But they are important . . . to me, I mean.”
“I see.”
I drew up one of the high-backed library chairs beside his and sat down. I was intrigued. In my self-absorption I had cast Peter so instantly and solidly in the role of blinkered religious repairman that I would never have guessed at an interest in poetry. What an idiot I was! Just as bad as Mike, I thought. Carefully and deliberately I took a seat in the stalls.
“Who are the poems by?”
“Do you know any of the work of this poet?”
Peter closed the slim volume, keeping his place with one precise finger, so that I could see the name on the front cover.
“Oh, yes, Robert Frost. Of course. American, wasn’t he? I think I used to know some of his stuff. There’s one about a road in a wood, isn’t there?”
Peter’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. He opened the book again and handed it to me.
“It’s this one,” he said, pointing to the left-hand page. “It’s called ‘The Road Not Taken.’ It — it’s actually my favorite one. I wonder — do you think you might — could you read it aloud, please?”
“Er, yes, of course.”
Sitting very straight in his chair, hands and long, tapering fingers placed in neatly parallel fashion on his knees, Peter gazed out through the window, intently listening as I read his favorite poem out loud to him.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden back.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
“And that has made all the difference — all the difference,” repeated Peter softly to himself, still staring out of the window and remaining motionless, as though he was hearing the whole of the poem over again in his head.
After that a lengthy silence fell. Not an empty one. It was one of those silences that David Attenborough would have understood. It was the kind of concentrated stillness that you have to maintain if you are hoping to see rare, timid creatures emerge from cover when they finally feel unthreatened and safe.
“Why is that particular poem so special to you?” I asked eventually.
Peter’s whole being seemed to tighten and coil itself. I sensed that a crucial decision of some sort was being made. The nervously balanced head jerked round in my direction, the sensitive lips twitching a rehearsal of the words he was about to speak.
“Do you have a favorite tree?” he inquired.
I did my best to sound as though personal tree preference was a perfectly logical and reasonable direction for our conversation to take.
“Well, yes, I suppose I like oaks and beech trees, and I’ve always rather fancied hornbeams because they’ve got funny leaves. What about you?”
“Silver birch,” he replied, his eyes beneath their heavy lids seeming to burn with the fear of self-revelation. “There’s one other poem — a longer one.”
Reaching across with sudden eagerness, he took the book from my hands. After flicking through the pages for a moment, he handed it back and, without another word, resumed his listening position. Fair enough, I thought, here we go again. Oh, well, I had always enjoyed reading poetry aloud. This one was simply called “Birches.”
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them
L
oaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust —
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows —
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
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.
I closed the book and laid it gently down on the desk. Was that it, then? Should I tiptoe out of the cold library now toward my hot bath and leave this man alone to deal with whatever intense emotion had him in its grip? Or was there something else for me to do? He turned toward me once more, the expression of terrified entreaty on his face so plaintively vulnerable that I think I would have agreed to almost anything if it had been guaranteed to bring peace to his soul.
“David, I’ve always wanted to do it. I’ve never done it. Will you . . . will you do it with me now? This afternoon?”
My wife had always maintained that if you were going to be sacrificial you needed to do it extravagantly. Mentally I slammed shut the readable book I might have found in the library, turned off the tap from which lashings of steaming hot water were gushing into the bath, pulled the plug of the electric fire from its socket, and bowed, not to the inevitable, but to the divinely optional.
“Okay, Peter,” I said, springing to my feet with all the enthusiasm that I could muster, “go and put three jumpers and a pair of jeans on, I’ll do the same, see you in the hall in five minutes, and then we’ll go and do it. Right now!”
Peter had not brought a pair of jeans to Headly Manor with him. My suspicion was that he did not own a pair of jeans. He probably never had owned a pair of jeans. Even as a teenager he had usually turned up for church or the youth group wearing a tie with sports jacket and trousers, or even a suit. When he reappeared in the hall, claiming to be ready for our expedition, he was wearing what must have been his third-newest pair of gray trousers, a thick black jumper over a thin black jumper over a navy-blue roll-neck T-shirt, and — a smart jacket. I sternly commanded him to return to his room and place his jacket back on its hanger. Two minutes later, armed with the large torch from my car in case we were still out when it got really dark, we set off.
During my walk around the grounds earlier that afternoon I had noticed a line of birches. They tripped like skinny schoolgirls along the edge of a wood that formed one of the boundaries of Angela’s property, running more or less at right angles to the road. I had never considered the idea of swinging from birches, but I had been noticing them all my life. As a small child I knew that they were made of solid silver. I dreamed of cutting one with a saw and running my fingers over the cold, shining metal surfaces that would be revealed. There were three silver birches in our garden. We were rich. If all else failed we could chop them up and sell the pieces for a fortune. Silver logs. As an adult I still believed that they were made of silver. The things you knew as a child may turn out to be factually incorrect, but that is a mere detail. They are true forever.
Something, possibly involvement in such an apparently secular activity, seemed to have atrophied Peter’s powers of conversation as we tramped through long, wet grass toward the darkening wood. There was no doubting his excitement though. At the sight of those trees looming like a row of spidery ghosts in the gathering dusk, he turned to me and simply said, “Aah!”
This was something he really did want to do. But why? I assumed that I would soon find out.
“Right!” I said, as we finally arrived at our destination. I slapped the nearest trunk with one hand and gestured toward the next in line with the other. “These two do?”
“Yes, they’ll do very well indeed, thank you.” Peter nodded like a toy dog in the back of a car. Moving to the tree I had indicated, he stood at the base of the trunk, gazing wonderingly upward like Jack about to climb his beanstalk. I shone my torch so that he could see clearly where to put his hands and feet for the first part of the ascent. It struck me that there was something ineffably Victorian about Peter’s long-legged, angular silhouette. As he began to haul himself up, even in his “suitable” clothes, he still managed to look like a man in a frock-coat climbing a steeple.
I watched for a moment and then nervously began my own climb.
I discovered that silver birch trees are easier to climb than one might have supposed. The whippy black branches that occur at closely spaced intervals along their paper-white length are flexible but don’t snap. At the point where they actually join the trunk they are surprisingly strong and unbending beneath the weight of an average-sized person like me. Despite my strenuously role-played enthusiasm in response to Peter’s request, I had approached this extraordinary adventure with quite a lot of trepidation. Poems are recollections in moments of tranquility. Real life can turn out to be wet and sharp and scary. It can mess your hair up and make you breathe heavily and graze your knees. Finding that these particular trees were so simple and safe to climb was a great relief — for a while.
We reached the top of our respective trees at about the same time. It seemed terribly high to me. This was crazy! After getting my breath back I called out to Peter:
“Shall we let go at the same time?”
“Right! Ready — steady — go!”
Taking a deep breath I released my
feet and kicked out into nothingness. The top of the tree descended for a matter of five or six feet then stopped. It seemed that I was suspended in mid-air until either my arms gave way or the tree snapped or the fire brigade arrived. Gasping for breath, bouncing gently and hanging on to the slender top end of the trunk for dear life with both hands, I bent my chin to my chest and peered down between my dangling feet. That carpet of leaf-mould and bits of dead wood down there must be the ground, and it was more than twenty feet away. I bit my lip and swore. Finding that that didn’t do me any good, I prayed.
Peter had let go with his feet a fraction of a second after me. The main difference was that his tree behaved itself. His tree must have read the poem. From my position of increasingly serious danger high above the ground, I was just about aware that my fellow swinger had made the perfect, graceful descent, landing lightly on his feet and then releasing the top of his silver birch so that it sprang gratefully back into its natural growing posture. He was standing down there below me now. Even in the fast-fading light I could see that his normally pale face was flushed with triumph and exhilaration as he gazed upward, waiting for me to join him.
“I’m stuck!” I bawled. “The bloody thing refuses to bend any more!”
“I’m gay!” he yelled back, as though my hoarse, panic-stricken cry was merely an attempt to initiate an exchange of personal information.
If I had given in to the urge to burst into hysterical laughter at this point I am convinced that I would have lost my grip and been killed or badly injured by the fall. Even at this moment of imminent disaster a picture flashed into my mind of Jessica, helpless and weeping with laughter as I described the context within which my latest counseling session had been conducted. What comforting words should I scream at Peter immediately before plummeting to my death at his feet? I saw him freeze suddenly, cupping his face in those long tapering hands, wide-eyed with fear as the realization of what might be about to happen to me struck him for the first time. Ducking down, he located the torch that I had left in the grass near the base of my tree, switched it on, and carefully directed the powerful beam straight upward into my eyes.