16 January
New moon. Brian has gone to the mainland to see his wife and children. He made an appointment. He is staying in a B&B just around the corner from the family home, though his wife said there was no need to go to such lengths, he could have slept in the spare bedroom. He says she wasn’t unfriendly when he spoke to her, but quite definite that she doesn’t want to live with him, not here, not over there, not anywhere. But she agrees it is only fair he should see the children now and then. She has emailed him some recent photographs of them (not of her) and promises to do that at regular intervals.
It is not just because he misses her and Amy and Zoë that he has arranged this interview (as he calls it). He also wants to ask her some questions for his family history, about her childhood in a village on the Lancashire coast. He spent his own childhood scarcely ten miles away, but inland, in a small town, and of course their experiences were very different. He admits her origins and her local habitation always did have, in his eyes, a romance quite lacking in his. The coast there is very flat. It is a queer zone of brackish water, salt grass, little channels, thousands of peewits, and the sheep graze, as it seems, far out on a terrain that belongs by rights to the Irish Sea. He and his wife went back there sometimes when they were courting and it has haunted him ever since. So now he has drawn up a list of questions—seventeen in all—which he hopes she will answer for him, before it is too late. He showed me the list. Among his questions are: What was her mother’s Co-op number? What was the name of her Gran’s farm where she used to look for eggs and where the pig burst out of its sty and scared her half to death? Which uncle was it who got stranded in his car—a Ford Popular?—on the dyke road during the 1953 flood? Were the toilets in her primary school outside in the yard? What was the name of the woman who walked seven miles to the nearest railway station and took the train to her mother’s each time—nine times in all—she felt her baby was about to come?
I could remember the rest of Brian’s questions if I lay on the bed under my army coat and thought. And not seventeen but seven times seventeen are the questions I could think of to put to you.
The tides are big. Brian left early, while there was still water for the launch, and we, his workforce, took the day off. Chris sat down at the office computer to plan the next few months of his life. He still tries for Elaine, but rather half-heartedly. Not that he’s doing any better with anyone else. Sarah, Elaine and I went out on the Merrick Bay flats.
The islands make a broken rim around a sunken plain which floods on the incoming tide and empties on the ebb. At low water the walls of the lost fields continue downwards and out of sight under the sand. The maps still show the vanished causeways. There are obliterated hearths and wells. The tombs are on the surviving hills. And rammed up into the roots of the tamarisks, quite close to the boathouse that was his home for fifteen years, are the few remaining bits of Alf’s boat, held down by the stones that smashed it.
Going out on the flats is like trespassing. You know you mustn’t be found there when the owner returns. I’ve been out on my own, at Merrick Bay and elsewhere, several times, and always with that feeling of brief licence. In the two young women it excited a hilarity rather as the wine and the dressing up had done at Brian’s party on Christmas Day. Poor Brian was away, they had the day off, they were pleased with themselves, they said I shouldn’t go working in the fields for Nathan but should come out with them, on the flats. The day was cold and very bright with a breeze that gave the look of hurry to the ebbing water and an edge to their elation. In fact I had already decided I wouldn’t work for Nathan. I was intending to go out, but alone, to get some idea of where Alf had vanished, and I kept to that purpose, but kept it to myself, and in a way I should perhaps be ashamed of I cherished it all the more in the company of Sarah and Elaine.
Sarah, at least to begin with, had her own serious purpose for which she carried a chart, a notebook, an indelible pen, a dozen small plastic jars, a lens and a sharp knife in a hard leather satchel slung across her shoulder so that it rested on her hip. Her idea was to collect some specimen periwinkles, of the four species, from different tide zones, and also fronds of serrated wrack to study what grew on them. Elaine helped her for a while. The tide was still falling. I watched the birds—two spoonbills, a rare arrival; the more and more common egrets; the local heron and swans; the countless waders I don’t have the knowledge to distinguish; all in their characteristic fashions going about the endless business of probing, uncovering, stabbing, scooping, an intense almost leisurely concentration on getting enough to eat, the sea having withdrawn its protection from millions of edible fellow-creatures. Such grace and menace. The birds moved away from us only as far as they judged necessary. They kept to their purpose, warily.
I watched, walked on, halted, watched. But really I was drifting towards the diminishing channel that still made two islands of Enys and St. Nicholas, I felt pulled as the waters were, so easy has it become to lapse out of human company. Then the girls called out, not my name, just a crying, not gull or tern or curlew or oystercatcher, but of that order of cry, not-human, fit for the bubbling and coursing of salt water and the stink of weed. I waited, they came over. Like me, they were barefoot, their boots on the laces around their necks, trousers rolled up. Sarah said, We’ve done enough work. Elaine said, We’ve had an idea. Her tone was like Sarah’s when at the party she asked was I obedient, would I do what they asked, was I chaste? I nodded. Yes, a drink. There’s time if we’re quick.
The channel was a wide river, shallow and flowing fast. Odd, an ocean quaffing a lagoon. The girls let go of me—they had me by either arm—and paddled through at once, wetted no higher than the knees. From the other side they called across. But for an interlude I was going into myself, into the room in my imagination where Alf stumbled, went under, surfaced, struggled and the cold tide like a shark took hold of him and dragged him off, never to be seen again. The girls hallooed, they were as strange to me as selkies. I splashed through and gathered them against me. I was high on the thought of Alf as he began his afterlife. Drinks, I said. We’ve got an hour.
The Dorrien Arms is no distance. We went there barefoot with our boots around our necks. A brandy each, quickly. Then wine, with bread and smoked mackerel. Monk, said Sarah, we like you when you get us tipsy. Their faces burned, from the flats. I never knew such proximity of life. The two young women, they might decide anything for the good of their lives, they might turn their gaze in a sweet and predatory way on anything, and take it. And there I sat, close and opposite, in pure admiration. You and you, I said. I drink to you. And Alf, already dead, turned in the current and set with it out towards nowhere, towards never being apparent to anyone ever again, he turned with the acquiescence of the dead and headed away and in the solemnity of our bread and fish and wine I took their hands, felt their warmth, kissed their fingers, relinquished them. Monk, said Elaine, you’re nice when you’ve had a drink or two. The hour passed. There was no fog but it was winter and the afternoon did not have long to live. Another half hour. Come on, I said. Drink up. Your mothers would not forgive me.
And so we left, barefoot, the light of outdoors, brilliant, chased with breeze, leapt at everything, jaunty and careless, and all the phenomena were flung into keen appearance and the light that did it to them shouted triumphantly. And we walked out through the coils and spurtings of lives that live under the sand, over popping wrack and the harsh debris of shells to the channel we had to wade. The tamarisks of Merrick Bay were clearly visible but at a distance that looked too great ever to traverse. The tide had turned, the current had reversed, but if you slipped it would not deposit you safe on an islet within the inhabited ring. The ring is broken, the gaps are large and many, the suction of deep water will take you out. I thought we were not where we had crossed. Almost certainly we were not at the shallowest fording place. Wait, I said. But the girls stepped in and went knee-deep at once. Sarah took off her satchel, held it
high and proceeded, Elaine following. The water split in a briefly cresting wave around each in turn, rose to their breasts, then lapsed. They stood on the far side shrieking with laughter. I took off my coat, held it in a bundle above my head. I could not have imagined the cold and the force of the water, the two together as one embodiment, and now I can, it went into my stomach, so now I shall remember it and in the imagination feel it again. An army coat, if you let it get sodden through, would take you under at once. I’ve told nobody—till you—anything at all of what I learned.
We hurried. Elaine, who could hardly speak for shivering, said Sarah said I should come back with them and be warmed up. But I parted company when we were near the beach. In my shed among my papers on my table top there was a gift for me: a vase, I guessed from Eddie and from the tip. My coat was dry, I went to bed in it. The vase was more than a bit chipped around the rim, but none the less beautiful—like a gourd in shape, with red poppies on a black glaze. For some time I shook with cold and my mind ran as fast as the water in a delirium. I wanted to hold the vase, have its roundness between my hands, offer its darkness and its poppies to a beloved person. And in my fever of cold that seemed to me an entirely reasonable wish and I felt sure it would be granted. Then I must have slept and when I woke it was dark and I was warm, glad, hungry.
19 January
Brian has returned from the mainland disappointed. He did not advance at all in his dealings with his wife. On the contrary, she put him further off. She agrees that Amy and Zoë should visit him at Easter, if they want to, but he will have to fetch them and bring them back. She thinks if she came over herself it would put her in a false position, by which she means she doesn’t want anybody here supposing their marriage might be on the mend. When he got nowhere ‘in that department’ Brian thought he could perhaps approach her through his seventeen questions. But there he was sorely mistaken. She refused point blank to answer a single one of them. And when—very gently, in his opinion—he suggested she owed him that at least, the questions being so important to him, she became quite hostile and told him straight her childhood was none of his business, which he found very hurtful because when they were courting he had believed she shared it with him. In the end she said, You don’t own me, Brian, and after that all he could do was go back to his B&B. The girls were already in bed by then and he didn’t dare call next morning and say goodbye to them as they left for school.
Now Brian hardly knows how he’ll find the courage to start the new season and be cheerful with the guests. At the thought of it he feels very low indeed. He knows the rich man who owns the place will want to see a big improvement on last year, though money for most people, even the kind who stay in his hotel, is still quite tight. Brian panics when he thinks of the effort he will have to make. And he won’t find much recreation in his family history. He feels almost prohibited from doing it by his wife’s hurtful words.
Eddie came again. He brought me a fistful of white narcissi and nodded his heavy head in great delight and satisfaction towards the vase. They scent my room. But the best was that, having presented them to me and when I’d filled the vase with water from my can and set the flowers in and we had both admired them, then he sat down on my bed in complete stillness, all his usual small chunnering noises ceased, he became entirely quiet and calm. So much so that after a while I smiled at him and resumed the writing he had interrupted with his visit. And that is how his mother found us when after an hour or more she came looking for him. We were quiet. Eddie likes coming here, she said. He’ll miss you when you leave.
Nests from last year, or from several years ago, held in the clasp of the new branches that sprout around the place where the tall upright was lopped. Once or twice I’ve found the skeletons of fledglings in them, delicate remains in the well-made and deeply protected home. Brambles that climb from the earth through twenty feet of dense euonymus or pittosporum, wriggling through and finally attaining what they were born always to seek: the light. My silver ladder stands in the grey-green fall of branches, twigs and leaves. The leaves quiver like a haul of fishes dying brightly in the sunlight on the net. And the wind, almost every day the wind, bustling through the unkempt crest that I will lop. I rob the wind of a resistance by which it makes the passage of itself felt.
21 January
I set the female bust on the workbench under the lamp and looked at it. A few more hours of work and she would have been there, manifest, come out of the wood, become real out of the idea of her. Even thus far emerged, with her roughed-out face and plait of hair and the swelling that would become her breasts, she has some force. I have sharpened all his cutting and gouging tools and wrapped them in an oily cloth that will keep then ready instantly for use. I sat to one side on a packing case and looked. I examined my hands. Really, I might have some chance of bringing her further out. She would never be wholly there, I don’t have the gift for that. But some way, nonetheless, towards being there. And I’m not forbidden. Mary has said as much. Still I can’t or shan’t.
22 January
Most nights I sleep at once, then wake and see that hardly two hours have passed. Waking so soon, the night still to be got through, I fill up with disappointment and anxiety. I’ve slept worse and worse since I went away from you. In the night, lying awake, the night impossibly long, I undo all the good I did or that was done to me during the day. Every elation, I deflate. Every kindness, I convert to dust. Every insight, joy in a thing, hope of more such things, I worry soon to death. Truly, I can summon up a face that smiles at me and in whose eyes I see myself a welcome friend and I can turn that face and smile to deceit and mockery at once. Then I assemble all the arguments against me. I accumulate the proof that I’m not fit to live. Some nights the fear is such it drives me out of bed, out of the little warmth and comfort and homeliness I have assembled around me under a wooden roof and between four wooden walls, and I walk out through the lovely opening of my blessed horseshoe of tamarisks and climb the dune and huddle in a dead man’s army greatcoat and stare at the sea and hearken to its noise. And after some time, under the pulsing stars, the lighthouse winking mechanically every fifteen seconds, it all feels like a foolishness, the despair itself not worth the candle, the thought of killing myself seems laughably self-important, and all I want is my bit of warmth and shelter under the blankets and some sleep.
23 January
An enlivening tempest, the winds rode in on the risen backs of the Atlantic and I went out among the tumuli and showed my face and opened my arms to them and tried to breathe their force into my lungs. Just north of here, in a cavernous hole, enough timber has lodged to build a log cabin with and live alone in, in a bee-loud glade. When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut …? When I came home, caked in brine, from discovering that cache and wondering was it worth my while to wait for low water and go and lug it in, there was Eddie with more narcissi in his massive fist and again once they were breathing in his gift, the vase, we sat in silence and quietness, he and I, utterly companionable, I did not turn my back on him and write, but there we sat, listening to the gale, till Lucy came through it looking for him.
24 January
Mary looked in at the workshop door. There’s a cake for you on your table, she said. I was standing by the bench, contemplating the unfinished carving. I’ll miss seeing you in Father’s coat, she said. In fact, I’d rather you took it with you when you leave.
I’ll send these last four days together. Even so, they’re hardly worth a stamp.
28 January
I’ll leave a note on my table under the black vase asking that this pen, my notebooks, your photograph and a necklace that was my mother’s should be sent to you. And I’ll leave the postage. I’ll take back to the tip the things I took from the tip and the things I got from beachcombing I’ll take back to the beach. Elaine and Sarah can share the books and Lucy should have the vase itself. I’ll add that to my note. And my rags and my c
amping stuff they can do what they like with. The tip. Mary will collect the things she lent me.
I always wanted to give you the necklace and never quite dared. The beads are of cherry amber. I’ve often imagined how they would look on you.
My notebooks will be worse reading than these letters. At least in the letters I was going out to somebody. If I say these letters are my better self you will realize what a poor thing I have been. And in my notebooks I say so, again and again. I fought against my impoverishment and lost. I had an eye for abundance, I could see it all around me, life for the living, a proper joy, proper sorrows, deeply among other people. I could see it but I couldn’t do it. At least believe me when I say I loved. But I could never have and hold what I loved. Somehow I never had the knack. Or I never had the courage. So I have lived in poverty knowing all the while that life is rich, rich. And I have lived in obedience. I obeyed the orders that would harm me. Early on it was God and the monks and when I was shot of them I devised in myself even crueller, yet more nonsensical and in the end even madder dictators. So I lived in obedience to temptations and commands whose one purpose was to kill the life in me. Now and again I was disobedient, I answered back, I said no, joyously I transgressed. For a while I was a passable imitation of a man claiming his right to live. But I always came to heel in the end, knuckled under, took the punishment for my revolt. In my notebooks I wrote all this—the mechanics of it. I did once think that if I could describe it very precisely I could fight it better. That was a mistake. I never understood why I was like I was, but I did see very clearly how I was, how it worked in me, the mechanism that sided with death against my life. I knew I didn’t understand why but I hoped that if I saw how it worked, I might escape. Must one know why? Should it not be enough to see how? Well, it wasn’t enough. The best I ever got from writing it all down was the bleak satisfaction of making clear sentences. I could analyze and differentiate and split fine hairs and set it all out clearly but it didn’t help. Nothing helped. I saw that I did not have it in me to save myself. I wrote these letters, which have been—grant me that much—more about other people and about the earth’s lovely phenomena than about myself, to keep myself in dealings with somebody else.
In Another Country Page 9