Full moon this weekend. The weather is very still. In the abandoned bulb fields the daffodils and the narcissi are in flower. They find their way up into the sunshine through dead bracken, gorse and brambles. In the fields most recently let go they appear in their regimented straight lines, in a continuing discipline though the forces of law and order have departed. But in the oldest ruins the flowers have split and spread and they come up where they like through all the dead stuff gloriously. The tides will be very big again this weekend.
Saturday 30 January
Forgive me, I changed my mind. I’ve thrown my mother’s necklace into the sea and fed my notebooks and your photograph into the hotel’s incinerator that we call Puffing Billy. So nobody from here will post you anything after this. I was ashamed of my notebooks and didn’t want them lodging in your mind. And again I didn’t quite dare give you the necklace of a woman you heard me talk about but never met.
Sometimes I have imagined you burning these letters as they arrive, burning them all unopened and unread. Only very rarely have I had the sudden conviction that you do read them and keep them. Lately I’ve told myself you don’t open them but you lay them down in a safe place in order of arrival so that the last would be first to hand. And now I am hoping that when, after a few weeks, nothing further arrives, you’ll take up this last one first, for an explanation. There is no explanation—but only this request. Please burn the rest unread. They were my effort and it failed. There’s no reason now why you should read them.
When I posted Thursday’s letter Mrs. Goddard said, You keep us in business, Mr. Smith. I don’t know how we’ll manage when you leave. She is very happy these last days because her daughter is coming home from New Zealand with a husband and a baby boy she has never seen. They plan to stay three months and, who knows, they might stay longer.
I’ll take this letter to Mrs. Goddard and she’ll say what she has always said when I’ve posted a letter to you on a Saturday: You know it won’t go out till Monday now? I’ve always liked her for her tact. She has never said, You don’t get answers, do you? I shan’t tell her this letter will be the last.
Mary’s workshop looks all shipshape. I’ll walk through Nathan’s fields. The hedges look very trim. I’ll take my books to the community centre, except one each for Elaine and Sarah which I’ll leave here. The rest, but for the vase which I want Eddie to give to his mother, is for the beach or the tip. I’ll keep this heavy coat on. I’ll keep this pen in its deep inside pocket.
Tea at the Midland
The wind blew steadily hard with frequent surges of greater ferocity that shook the vast plate glass behind which a woman and a man were having tea. The waters of the bay, quite shallow, came in slant at great speed from the southwest. They were breaking white on a turbid ground far out, tide and wind driving them, line after line, nothing opposing or impeding them so they came on and on until they were expended. The afternoon winter sky was torn and holed by the wind and a troubled golden light flung down at all angles, abiding nowhere, flashing out and vanishing. And under that ceaselessly riven sky, riding the furrows and ridges of the sea, were a score or more of surfers towed on boards by kites. You might have said they were showing off but in truth it was a self-delighting among others doing likewise. The woman behind plate glass could not have been in their thoughts, they were not performing to impress and entertain her. Far out, they rode on the waves or sheer or at an angle through them and always only to try what they could do. In the din of waves and wind under that ripped-open sky they were enjoying themselves, they felt the life in them to be entirely theirs, to deploy how they liked best. To the woman watching they looked like grace itself, the heart and soul of which is freedom. It pleased her particularly that they were attached by invisible strings to colourful curves of rapidly moving air. How clean and clever that was! You throw up something like a handkerchief, you tether it and by its headlong wish to fly away, you are towed along. And not in the straight line of its choosing, no: you tack and swerve as you please and swing out wide around at least a hemisphere of centrifugence. Beautiful, she thought. Such versatile autonomy among the strict determinants and all that coordination of mind and body, fitness, practice, confidence, skill and execution, all for fun!
The man had scarcely noticed the surf-riders. He was aware of the crazed light and the shocks of wind chiefly as irritations. All he saw was the woman, and that he had no presence in her thoughts. So he said again, A pedophile is a pedophile. That’s all there is to it.
She suffered a jolt, hearing him. And that itself, her being startled, annoyed him more. She had been so intact and absent. Her eyes seemed to have to adjust to his different world.—That still, she said. I’m sorry. But can’t you let it be?—He couldn’t, he was thwarted and angered, knowing that he had not been able to force an adjustment in her thinking.—I thought you’d like the place, she said. I read up about it. I even thought we might come here one night, if you could manage it, and we’d have a room with a big curved window and in the morning look out over the bay.—He heard this as recrimination. She had left the particular argument and moved aside to his more general capacity for disappointing her. He, however, clung to the argument, but she knew, even if he didn’t know or wouldn’t admit it, that all he wanted was something which the antagonisms that swarmed in him could batten on for a while. Feeling very sure of that, she asked, malevolently, as though it were indeed only a question that any two rational people might debate, Would you have liked it if you hadn’t known it was by Eric Gill? Or if you hadn’t known Eric Gill was a pedophile?—That’s not the point, he said. I know both those things so I can’t like it. He had sex with his own daughters, for Christ’s sake.—She answered, And with his sisters. And with the dog. Don’t forget the dog. And quite possibly he thought it was for Christ’s sake. Now suppose he’d done all that but also he made peace in the Middle East. Would you want them to start the killing again when they found out about his private life?—That’s not the same, he said. Making peace is useful at least.—I agree, she said. And making beauty isn’t. Odysseus Welcomed from the Sea isn’t at all useful, though it is worth quite a lot of money, I believe.—Frankly, he said, I don’t even think it’s beautiful. Knowing what I know, the thought of him carving naked men and women makes me queasy.—And if there was a dog or a little girl in there, you’d vomit?
She turned away, looking at the waves, the light and the surfers again, but not watching them keenly, for which loss she hated him. He sat in a rage. Whenever she turned away and sat in silence he desired very violently to force her to attend and continue further and further in the thing that was harming them. But they were sitting at a table over afternoon tea in a place that had pretensions to style and decorum. So he was baffled and thwarted, he could do nothing, only knot himself tighter in his anger and hate her more.
Then she said in a soft and level voice, not placatory, not in the least appealing to him, only sad and without taking her eyes off the sea, If I heeded you I couldn’t watch the surfers with any pleasure until I knew for certain none was a rapist or a member of the BNP. And perhaps I should even have to learn to hate the sea because just out there, where that beautiful golden light is, those poor cockle-pickers drowned when the tide came in on them faster than they could run. I should have to keep thinking of them phoning China on their mobile phones and telling their loved ones they were about to drown.—You turn everything wrongly, he said.—No, she answered, I’m trying to think the way you seem to want me to think, joining everything up, so that I don’t concentrate on one thing without bringing in everything else. When we make love and I cry out for the joy and the pleasure of it I have to bear in mind that some woman somewhere at exactly that time is being abominably tortured and she is screaming in unbearable pain. That’s what it would be like if all things were joined up.
She turned to him. What did you tell your wife this time, by the way? What lie did you tell her so we could have te
a together? You should write it on your forehead so that I won’t forget should you ever turn and look at me kindly.—I risk so much for you, he said.—And I risk nothing for you? I often think you think I’ve got nothing to lose.—I’m going, he said. You stay and look at the clouds. I’ll pay on my way out.—Go if you like, she said. But please don’t pay. This was my treat, remember.—She looked out to sea again.—Odysseus was a horrible man. He didn’t deserve the courtesy he received from Nausikaa and her mother and father. I don’t forget that when I see him coming out of hiding with the olive branch. I know what he has done already in the twenty years away. And I know the foul things he will do when he gets home. But at that moment, the one that Gill chose for his frieze, he is naked and helpless and the young woman is courteous to him and she knows for certain that her mother and father will welcome him at their hearth. Aren’t we allowed to contemplate such moments?—I haven’t read it, he said.—Well you could, she said. There’s nothing to stop you. I even, I am such a fool, I even thought I would read the passages to you if we had one of those rooms with a view of the sea and of the mountains across the bay that would have snow on them.
She had tears in her eyes. He attended more closely. He felt she might be near to appealing to him, helping him out of it, so that they could get back to somewhere earlier and go a different way, leaving this latest stumbling block aside. There’s another thing, she said.—What is it? he asked, softening, letting her see that he would be kind again, if she would let him.—On Scheria, she said, it was their custom to look after shipwrecked sailors and to row them home, however far away. That was their law and they were proud of it.—The tears in her eyes overflowed, her cheeks were wet with them. He waited, unsure, becoming suspicious.—So their best rowers, fifty-two young men, rowed Odysseus back to Ithaca overnight and lifted him ashore asleep and laid him gently down and piled all the gifts he had been given by Scheria around him on the sand. Isn’t that beautiful? He wakes among their gifts and he is home. But on the way back, do you know, in sight of their own island, out of pique, to punish them for helping Odysseus, whom he hates, Poseidon turns them and their ship to stone. So Alcinous, the king, to placate Poseidon, a swine, a bully, a thug of a god, decrees they will never help shipwrecked sailors home again. Odysseus, who didn’t deserve it, was the last.
He stood up. I don’t know why you tell me that, he said.—She wiped her tears on the good linen serviette that had come with their tea and scones.—You never cry, he said. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry. And here you are crying about this thing and these people in a book. What about me? I never see you crying about me and you.—And you won’t, she said. I promise you, you won’t.
He left. She turned again to watch the surfers. The sun was near to setting and golden light came through in floods from under the ragged cover of weltering cloud. The wind shook furiously at the glass. And the surfers skied like angels enjoying the feel of the waters of the earth, they skimmed, at times they lifted off and flew, they landed with a dash of spray. She watched till the light began to fail and one by one the strange black figures paddled ashore with their boards and sails packed small and weighing next to nothing.
She paid. At the frieze a tall man had knelt and, with an arm around her shoulders, was explaining to a little girl what was going on. It’s about welcome, he said. Every stranger was sacred to the people of that island. They clothed him and fed him without even asking his name. It’s a very good picture to have on a rough coast. The lady admitted she would have liked to marry him but he already had a wife at home. So they rowed him home.
Strong Enough to Help
But that Saturday morning, end of October, instead of trying to write a poem, he suddenly and without knowing why began to write out all he could remember of the sayings and turns of phrase his mother and her mother and her sister had reached for to colour and solemnify their speech. They came in a rush in no particular order, he heard them in the women’s voices, distinct voices, but any of the three women might have spoken them out of the stock they held in common for the family down the generations on the female side. Listening, he wrote: little pigs have big ears, least said soonest mended, enough’s as good as feast, face like a wet Whit Week, love locked out, like death warmed up, the ever-open door, black as the chimney back, better to be born lucky than rich, pots for rags, he had a good home and he left, like feeding a donkey strawberries, waste not want not, made up no grumbling, rise and shine, sooner keep you a week than a fortnight, I’ll make one less, it’s as cheap sitting as standing—And there he halted. At the back of his head, or behind him in the room pressing on his neck and shoulders, he felt the vast reservoir of the women’s unspoilt language, he felt it would bow him flat on the table top if he sat there any longer listening to those voices and transcribing what he heard. In the dining room where every Saturday morning he cleared away his breakfast things and folded back a certain measure of the cloth and seated himself at the dark table with his pen and sheets of paper, in that familiar room he was oppressed. Best stop, he said aloud. Better go out now and do my shopping. Carry on this afternoon perhaps. But then he looked at the last thing he had written. He said it aloud in Gran Benson’s voice: It’s as cheap sitting as standing. And he saw the old woman herself, white-haired, skewed, shrunken in her scuffed armchair by a bit of fire, the light behind her through the dirty windows from the yard, and the dog, Sam, on her right side against her feet. But that wasn’t it. Her words were still in the air and he knew with a thrill of something akin to fear that there was a gap before them, a space, and into that space, before he could question it, with a shock of cold, with a starting of tears, came the words that belonged there: Sit thee down, lad. And that was it, her exact tone. The white-haired old woman in a shawl, the friendly mongrel laying its head across her feet, her left side faintly warmed by the few coals, she looked up at him as he came in and he stood there and, having kissed her on the cold smooth forehead, still stood there, at a loss no doubt, seeming unsure, and looking up she said: Sit thee down, lad. And added: It’s as cheap sitting as standing.
So he sat at the polished black table in the dining room, among furnishings he had not chosen but had merely gone on living with, and loneliness, hopelessness, deep deep sadness possessed him utterly, froze him, the pen still in his hand, and he seemed to be seeing the opposite wall and his father’s copied painting of a painting of Wastwater, not just through tears but through ice.
Then the doorbell rang.
The bell frightened him, it made no sense. In his own house he was elsewhere, facing something he did not feel equal to. What had the bell to do with that? It frightened him, he could not understand it ringing where he was.
The bell rang again. Merely obeying, he went to the front door.
There stood a black woman, wearing gold. Altogether her appearance was radiant. Mr. Barlow? she said.—Yes, he answered. I am.—Mr. Arthur Barlow?—Yes, he said.—Well my name is Gladys, she said, I’m from the DCMS and here—she lifted her lapel—is my Interviewer Identity Card, to prove it. I do hope I did not wake you, Mr. Barlow. You are my first port of call.—No, said Arthur Barlow, I get up at six every morning, weekends included, to read.—Gladys smiled very happily. You read, Mr. Barlow?—Yes, he said. Poetry. I read a lot of poetry. Who are you, if you don’t mind me asking? You’re not an estate agent, are you? You’re not a religion?—No, no, said Gladys. Nothing like that. I’m from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and I’ve come to ask you how you spend your time and what you think of the leisure activities and facilities available in this town. We sent you a letter about ten days ago, to tell you you were chosen.—Oh, said Arthur Barlow, perhaps I haven’t opened it yet. When I’m very busy I tend not to open things like that at once.—It had a book of first-class stamps in, said Gladys, which was our little thank you to you, for agreeing to be chosen. Do you write letters, Mr. Barlow? The stamps will come in handy, if you do.—I send away for poetry books, sa
id Arthur Barlow. So thank you very much, the stamps will come in handy for that.
Gladys opened her bright red folder, but said: Are you all right, Mr. Barlow? Would you rather I came back later, or another day?—No, no, said Arthur Barlow. Nothing to worry about. I’ve had a bit of a shock, that’s all.—Oh dear, said Gladys. I’m so sorry. Some bad news? A bereavement?—You mean my suit? said Arthur Barlow. No, I always put this on when I read poetry, or try to write poety, which is what I always do on Saturday mornings only today something else happened and it gave me a shock. It’s true I wore this suit to the funerals but when I apply myself to poetry I put it on because it’s the best I’ve got and I do think a person should dress up when he reads poetry or even tries to write some of his own. Mother bought me this suit for my interview and of course I wore it for the funerals but the interview was years and years ago so, as you see, I haven’t put on weight, there’s that much can be said in my favour.—If anything you must have lost some weight, said Gladys. By the looks of it. So you think you could answer my few questions, Mr. Barlow, if the shock you’ve had hasn’t upset you too much? And she opened her folder again and looked him full in the face.—If you’ve sent me a book of first-class stamps, said Arthur Barlow, I can surely answer your few questions.—Gladys smiled.
In Another Country Page 10