In Another Country

by David Constantine

  Then began a good time for the three of them; for the four of them, since Gwen among the childish grown-ups continued in gaiety and satisfaction with only little bouts of fret. That very evening, in a lingering daylight, in firelight and candlelight, Seth begged their forgiveness and explained as clearly as he could what he must try to do in his drawing and painting henceforth. He said: I look at you. I look from you to my hands. I can make a likeness of you but it will not be enough. It won’t be what it is truly like. So my premise is failure. My axiom is that whatever I can do, whatever my hands can make, will not suffice. Carrie was anxious, wanted to halt him, she saw him raising the precipice. No, no, he said. Through what I can do, its manifest failure, I will feel my way towards what I should do, always by failure, I’ll know what isn’t right, what manifestly will not do. Carrie stood up and stopped him softly with her fingers on his mouth. We haven’t had enough music lately. She fetched the guitar for Benjamin, the fiddle for herself. Benjamin shook his head. You men, she said. So fearful. Start, it will come back. Listen to this.

  Seth said he would go and stock up. Food, and we need a sledgehammer and a pickaxe, he said. Gwenny’s coming with me. Back for lunch. Carrie strapped her carefully in; leaned over her, kissed him on the mouth, feeling for his tongue with her tongue. Benjamin stood in the doorway.

  A bit uncertainly, Carrie first, Benjamin hanging back, they came out of the house, to greet him. They were like children, he laughed at them, how he loved them, he laughed aloud over them and him, he exulted, the life there lifting up before his very eyes filled him with a wild glee. Guess what, he said, handing Carrie the sleeping child, guess what, or perhaps you knew, and he kissed her lips, perhaps you knew already when you brought me here? What? She asked. Such a shop I did, food and alcohol for a fortnight and tools for eternity. He was handing the plastic bags out to Benjamin, overburdening him. What did I know already perhaps? Carrie asked. Shelley’s down there, him and Harriet, under the second reservoir. They were alive down there and planning a thorough revolution of our ways of being in the world, in the summer of 1812. They came up here for picnics. It’s all in a book, I bought a book, it’s in that bag Ben’s holding with the cheeses, five different cheeses. Truly, there’s no end to this place. He faced the towering black wall. That wasn’t here then, of course. It was a high valley with the little river hurrying down. He cupped his mouth, tilted his head and shouted at the dam. Back came the clearest sound of craziness imaginable—the sole name: Shelley, fracturing and chiming. Gods, said Seth. Did you know that as well? No, said Carrie. Benjamin stood like a beast of burden with the shopping, watching Seth and Carrie as he had under the viaduct when they appeared like an enchantment on his life. Shout, Ben, said Seth. Shout out who you are. Echo it to Rhayader that you’re here. Benjamin looked called up for an ordeal. Shout, said Carrie. Stand where Seth is and shout your name. First time no sound came, none from his mouth at all. He licked his lips, raised his head, called out his name. The echoing fell away in a cadence that was utterly forlorn. Carrie ended the game. Food, she said. Then work, said Seth. Work and pray. Work and play. But work first, the chain gang. Anchor me with a ball and chain, don’t let me float away.

  That afternoon, with pickaxe, sledgehammer, shovel, wheelbarrow, in boots and heavy gloves, they worked at smoothing a way from the girder bridge to their platform under the dam. Parts had become like a riverbed, from frost and sun and torrents, and it was with some reluctance that Seth made them carriageable. He worked next to Benjamin, or parting and returning as the tasks required, almost without a word, in the intimacy of a shared hard labour. At first Benjamin was shy, watchful, but Seth won him over, slowly and surely into something akin to his own present state. By four the job was half done. Enough, he said. The sun was behind the dam. They went indoors, made tea, sat at the table in a too-early dusk. Carrie was at the window with Gwen. Not far down the valley lay the sunlight still, the shadow advancing very slowly over it. She felt the haste more characteristic of Seth. We must show Benjamin the water, she said.

  All they had seen so far cried out to be seen again, to be seen and shown, and he was the only fellow human they wanted for the revelation. The climb was eerie, chilling; the wet trickled on them as though night and blackness were exuding an icy dew. They felt the cold of the body of water through its concrete shield. But all the while, as in a seaside town when a street heads at an incline for the sea, Carrie and Seth were expecting the enormous light over the brink and treasuring it like an imminent gift for Benjamin. At the last they sent him ahead and waited, looking down over their own chimneys to the pool of sunlight on the woodland very far below. Then they joined him on the rampart of the dam. The breeze; but gentler, warmer, a zephyr if there ever was such a thing. And sunlight dancing, a shattering white radiance further than they could see, more than they could bear to contemplate. They drifted apart, drifted together, gauche and ineffectual, brimful of love and joy and their mouths silenced with shyness.

  So their days rose, whatever the weather, they had work to do, they played like children, were passionately companionable. Benjamin went back to the echo, he became the master of it. He positioned Gwen on the ground to listen to the names returning strangely. He invented birds and animals, he brought them forth for her, as though from an ark.

  In the evenings they read or Seth painted, Benjamin withdrew as far as the room allowed, turned his back on them, strummed softly at the guitar and in an undertone, barely audible, hummed and mumbled some words of his own invention. Seth said aloud: Nantgwyllt went under the water in 1898. The Shelley Society lodged a formal protest. The Welsh were evicted from their homes, where they had lived for many generations. Carrie went for her bath. The clock ticked more audibly. She came in naked and kneeled on the hearth rug between her husband and her lover, bowing her head, towelling her long hair, the curve of her spine in the lamplight. She sat back on her heels, the firelight on her knees, her belly, her breasts. She slung her damp hair forward in one hank over her left shoulder. What else is under the water? she asked. The house of his cousin Thomas Grove, where he stayed in 1811, wondering what to do, when they had sent him down from Oxford for professing free love and atheism. Nothing under our dam here? Some sheepfolds, one or two cottages already given up and the ruins of a chapel at the very far end with a holy well, a hermit lived there in 1300, he had moved further and further into solitude and come this side of the hills from the Cistercian community at Strata Florida.

  They trekked over hill and bog and down through woodland to a vantage point over the second reservoir from where, closely comparing Seth’s old maps and the reality, they believed they must be looking on the surface under which Nantgwyllt and the house belonging to Shelley’s cousin lay submerged. On a long day, first climbing the stairway that started from their liberated spring, they circumambulated the reservoir, the highest, under which, night after night, they slept, and located, to their satisfaction, the place a diver would have to sink himself who wished to visit the anchorite’s roofless cell. Question, said Seth. Does the well still bubble up oppressed by tons of water? They took out the deeds of their home, Craig Ddu, and climbed the little stream, to see where they began and ended, their forty or fifty acres. But this was harder than imagining a village or a dwelling fixed forever under sheets of water. The walls had collapsed, the bracken and sedge were over all. At the head of the stream, where it split, where its three strands were plaited together into one, there was a ruined fold, one hawthorn clinging on, its roots in rock, its shape, set by the wind, offering a threadbare roof over a waterfall. Emblem: the survivor. I don’t know what we own and what we don’t, said Seth. Whatever, wherever, the land was given up, for humans it was long since finished and the crows, the kites, the buzzards and the kestrels were left at liberty to scour it lot by lot.

  Seth’s work was changing. Carrie looked over his shoulder now and then, his concentration was intense, he did not mind. She loved to watch his hand, s
o quick, so deft. But what came of it troubled her. At first she thought she must make a new effort of understanding, to do him justice. He had said his way must be that of groping through failure towards the truth. But in truth she had to confess to herself that she understood him perfectly well. The lines of his art were forfeiting all insistence, one figure elided into another. One that by the shock of black curls and the steady eyes most resembled Benjamin had the bodily shape of an adolescent girl; she saw herself with Seth’s short hair and features haunted by all his previous alienations. Everywhere there was doubling, tripling, echoing, fragmentation and dispersal, fleeting as Welsh weather, faithless as water. Even that she might have said yes to, and praised his courage. They were change, flux, movement, or they were dead. That was their principle, was it not? What distressed her were his trials with colour, the way he exceeded and overrode his slight outlines with a willed carelessness, like a child’s smudging and genial mess, the watery colours running and giving up their selves whilst the draught of some elusive shape ineffectually showed through. But this was a man with the keenest sharpest gaze she had ever known. She had watched him when he bore on a thing and truly saw it. She knew how exact and knowing he was: when he dashed off a likeness for a favour; and in the devising and execution of a particular pleasure. So why this allowing a world in which nothing belonged, nothing had shape or fixed identity or an outline marking it off from anything else? She remembered his axiom, and it chilled her: Whatever I can do will not do. He was reneging on his peculiar abilities. For what?

  Seth took off his boots and entered on stockinged feet, quite silently, though he had no intention of stealth. Carrie and Benjamin were sitting in the window. She was buttonng her dress, he was cradling Gwen and murmuring over her. Carrie was contemplating him and her baby with a contented love. The light from outside was on the three of them. Seth stood, he saw the beautiful ordinariness of their intimacy, the daylight fact of it. He turned, quitted the room, his movement alerted them, Benjamin came out to him as he was putting his boots back on. Seth kept his face averted. Nothing, he said. I was going to show you something. Benjamin touched him on the shoulder. What then? Seth shrugged, still averted, but walked across to the stone barn, allowing Benjamin’s arm along his shoulders. And step by step he felt the virtue going out of him.

  In the barn, standing still, he couldn’t for the life of him remember what he had wanted to show Benjamin. He was attending dumbly to the transmutation taking place in him, a sort of petrifaction, the replacement of every atom of faith with an atom of hopelessness. He stared in stupidity at the tractor. It had slumped forward on burst front tires. He motioned vaguely at it. The weights? said Benjamin. No, no, said Seth. Nothing. The weights, a couple of cast-iron pyramids, were still slung from their rings under the tractor’s front bar. Stop you going over backwards, said Benjamin. He was staring at Seth, who at last looked him in the eyes. Tell Carrie, will you, Ben. I’m very sorry. Then he covered his face. The tears forced through his fingers, the wells of his hopeless sadness burst their strong restraint.

  He curled up on the bed of love, tight as an embryo, and sobbed; he choked on his own snot; he was a grub, a grown man with his knees up to his brow, smelling his own terror and despair; in overalls, with dirty working boots, a competent man, weeping over his exile from all fellowship with love; shoved into space, into the cold and the dark of the interstellar spaces, turning forever like a finished capsule. For an eternity, for an hour or so. After that, uncurled and lying quietly in his wife’s embrace, behind the curtain of her hair, he said in a level voice he was not fit to live, he had a coward soul, he cringed in shame that he had ever associated himself—in a far-off laughable mimicry—with any of his saints and heroes, the artists and the poets. He begged in the flat, the leaden voice that she would burn every scribble of his or daub she ever found. He begged her to promise there would be nothing left, not a scrap or jot to show the world his folly and ridiculousness. And he said again that he wasn’t fit to live, that on her house and home and child and love he was unfit to have the smallest claim. Then shame over these his speeches. Dumbness then, the mute inability. And a vague terror, hard to pinpoint, hard to lay a finger on its whereabouts. Inside or out? The air he breathed, the wreath of atmosphere around his neck and shoulders. Or in the blood, coursing around him for as long as he was he. The nights had terrible gaps in, rents and pits, and every morning waking he felt sheeted under lead.

  Ten days of this, a bad passage. He came out lachrymose and vastly sentimental. He sat with Gwen in the bedroom window like a grandfather, her hand clasped tight on his little finger as though she anchored him and nurtured him. With a large benevolence he watched Benjamin, like his own younger self, labouring at the finish of their steep track to the bridge and the beginnings of the outside world. The thistly grass was gay and innocent with rabbits, like a tapestry. Carrie, her hair coming loose from under a red headscarf, pushed manfully at the wheelbarrow. She waved, said something to Benjamin, he looked up and waved. They swam in tears as far as Seth could see.

  Then his return began, unhoped for, miraculous, never biddable but somewhere in the depths of him insistent as a germination or water forcing up. He wandered about in the house and out of doors with Gwen on his hip, she was easiest to be with, he could babble at her or murmur like a breeze and what delighted her in the early summer delighted him, thistledown, dandelion clocks, forget-me-nots around their neatly stone-flagged spring whose water was a clear continuous beginning again. He viewed himself with more indulgence now, with a wry friendliness. Held up the child against the soft blue sky and intoned while she kicked and chortled: My own heart let me more have pity on; let/ Me live to my sad self hereafter kind … Brought her close, kissed her nose, went down on his heels and toddled her towards him. Her cool hands warmed in his; he marvelled with her over the unpractised action of her legs. Scooped her up to admire the woodpile, Benjamin’s special pride, and the new plots set as well as possible for the growing season’s sun. The stone barn, the very sight of it, tilted his spirits towards a steep collapse, so he walked away, down the slope past Benjamin and Carrie smoothing the last few yards, to the water where the wagtail liked to visit and sat there till they called him, willing his fears into submission in the happy consciousness of the child. Returning, admiring, he suddenly saw where a new plot might be dug, on the slope itself, with some terracing, almost Mediterranean; he would begin it next day.

  That evening he read in the Shelley Benjamin had given him. He read Mary Shelley’s notes on the poems year by year, until the last. They were brave, these people, he said. It’s brave just being in a place like that, so far from anywhere, facing the open sea. And Mary collecting everything afterwards and writing her notes, that’s brave. What happened to Harriet? Benjamin asked. Seth made no answer so Carrie said: She went in the Serpentine. He had left her for Mary. They married and went to Italy. Seth was thinking of her heavy clothes, sodden, the mud, the weed. And her heavy belly, she was very pregnant. They didn’t look after one another, Carrie said. One to another they were a catastrophe. I suppose everybody is responsible, Seth said. I mean for what he does. They left one another their own responsibility. He was feeling bolder. He was thinking about his terracing—whether to tell them or not, or make a start first thing, for a surprise.

  Next morning Seth appeared at the foot of the bed. He whispered a strange sentence: the boat has come. It was early, he had parted the curtains slightly and the sun shone on the black paint and the golden brass. Carrie woke. Benjamin was asleep on her left arm. He looked, to Seth at least, much as he had lately in his drawings and paintings, only more beautiful, the black curls, the lashes. Carrie smiled, gently disengaged herself, sat up. Seth said again: the boat has come; but with his eyes on Benjamin shook his head in wonder and added the words: sweet thief. Carrie joined him outside in the sunlight. You’ve been working already? Yes, he said. Come and see. He took her to the edge and pointed down to where he
had begun hacking out a terrace. We shall grow what we like, he said. Carrie put her arms around him. Was I dreaming, she asked, or did you say something about a boat? I did, said Seth. That’s the strange thing. But not strange at all really. Not for this place. I was working and I looked up at the dam and thought how lovely the water must be with the sun on it already. I thought I might go and swim and when I got up there I saw the boat, a little rowing boat with the oars in. It was bumping against the land where I might have gone in swimming. It’s nobody’s, we can use it.

  Everything from the far end drifts before the wind and arrives sooner or later up against the dam or lodges in a near angle. They claimed the boat and the shipped oars until they should hear of someone who had a better claim. They made a mooring in a tiny inlet, out of sight of the rampart should anybody walk there, which was almost never, and whenever they liked, which was often, the four of them were out on the water. There was nearly always a breeze but rarely too strong to make headway against. And besides, by keeping close and following on water the path they had followed or made to the far end of the lake, they could creep along, like a yacht skilfully tacking. They packed a picnic, landed where they pleased: by two or three hawthorns, by the broken line of a drystone wall where it descended and entered the water. Poignant, these traces, these indications of a connection and a use gone out of sight. Keeping an eye on the weather—they were never foolhardy—they crossed with steady strokes the width near the far end, to experience, said Seth, the imaginable tremor of the hermit’s holy well still bubbling out of the ground invisibly below. And best were their returns, scarcely rowing at all, idling down the centre, confident of safety within reach on either bank, wafted by the breeze and what felt like the bent or inclination of the water always to be coming from the west and heading, however quietly, towards the ruled line and the little tower that made the limit and the brink. It was sweet to drift like that, as though to a sheer falls but knowing they could halt when they chose, safe in a secret harbour, and disembark and descend their secret stairway into their house and home. Often they had a soft music on these returns. Carrie sat in the stern, holding Gwen and singing; Seth rowed, his eyes on them, and behind him in the bows Benjamin, become accomplished, played and murmured an accompaniment. Seth was between them, between their music. Their last such return was at full moon. They had not thought of it. They were idling down the length of the water, the music dying behind them like a wake, there was the merest breeze, and the blue of the sky was becoming pale so very gradually they were beginning to drift into nightfall before they would notice. Then Seth saw in Gwenny’s face what she had seen. Her eyes were all amazement, she thrust out her pointing finger, as though she were the inventor of that gesture of an astonishment demanding to be shared, then Carrie saw too and suffered likewise a childish shock and pause or gap in her adult comprehension. Moon! The moon! White as a bone, frail as a seed, big as a whole new earth, the moon was rising over the rim of the dam, dead centre, clearing it, first with the ugly stump of tower intruding, then free, sovereign, beyond measure beautiful and indifferent. Seth turned sideways on, so all could see, and like that they drifted nearer and nearer, in silence but for the water lapping.