‘I’m going to get the paper,’ he said. ‘Stay there. I will bring you green tea and the paper.’
He was up, stepping into trousers and pulling on a top, not bothering with contacts but hooking his little wire glasses over ears and nose. So irritating that you couldn’t have a paper delivered but the thing was to pretend you weren’t getting out of bed at all: nip out and back with the snugness still around you.
Now he was down the stairs; jacket on; there was a flyer on the carpet – he saw the letters ‘Birth of the . . .’ but he was opening the door, out into the air. Warmish. Damp. Snowdrops in the planters but he was across the courtyard of Eden Grove now, not thinking, not noticing much, just being in the rhythm of the walking, hands in his pockets, face trying not to feel the air. Left along Parnassus this time. No one about on the tidy street. Oh, but there was someone. Washing his car. Washing his car at 9.30 on a Saturday! Philip’s mind was livelier now, despite himself. It was moving ahead of him, seeing the end of Parnassus and the awkward artificial joint that connected it to Fountain Street at the edge of the old town where the paper shop was. And Mrs Hanworth’s house which he had visited when she had had a fall. It was really amazing that nothing had broken: there might well have been secondaries in the bones by now. Even so she wouldn’t last much longer. Don’t think about it, don’t think about patients on your days off, allow yourself to relax. George was right it was always better to live some distance from the practice: remember that with the next job.
Here is the newsagent, the bell clanging as he goes in, the paper, a euphoric Arab crowd, one pound seventy. Now he was hurrying back: one eye on the street one on the news. ‘Standing down’, cross the road, ‘handing power to the military’, mind that lamp-post, ‘a new dawn’, it was definitely warmer, ‘in the name of Allah the most merciful . . . fuck off’. With a smile he slid the lump of newspaper under his arm and, supporting it at its bottom edge, he strode along. Such amazing things going on over there – their whole world changing. They were risking their lives. While he . . . though at least he was doing something good. And at some point he could always go off somewhere like Adam Hibbert. That would be nuts and bolts medicine, rehydrate someone and save their life. Or just simply properly clean a wound. Whereas so much of what he did here was basically reassurance. Or marginal. Securing an increase of 0.2 Quality Adjusted Life Years at a cost of.
And yet, as he crossed back into the tidiness of The Willows, he felt a swelling of revulsion at the sort of thing Adam Hibbert was doing, bringing the glories of western medicine to the Third World. What was off-putting was the way it was made to seem like an adventure. You could jet in, make a difference, and jet out again, patting yourself on the back. That was clear in the email they had all got from him: ‘Job done!’ – and the pictures of epic, sunlit, mountain landscape with Adam in the foreground, sweaty, tanned, in military-looking gear, grinning, eyes squeezed against the light, his arm across the shoulders of a man whom he had helped, who was wearing a white robe and brown waistcoat and white pill-box hat, and who was so thin he seemed hardly to be able to bear the weight of Adam’s arm.
That’s just me being prissy, Philip thought as he turned into Eden Grove. Oversensitive, i.e. basically a coward. Because Adam Hibbert was really making a difference. If you added up Quality Adjusted Life Years he would be light years ahead, in a whole different category like a billionaire, a plutocrat of good. Whereas he, Philip Newell, all he did was spend his time mildly ameliorating the lot of e.g. a dying old lady who wasn’t even that nice. But as soon as he said that to himself a countercurrent of feeling flowed through him. He remembered her stern, watery, greenish eyes, her brave head in profile with the patchy, blotchy skin sagging from it in wrinkles and folds, her delicate, scattered, white, white hair. There was a tenderness and a dignity in helping her. It was actually something wonderful.
Now he was finding his key and his mind switched to thinking about how he would nip in quietly, and quickly make the tea for Sue and a coffee for him, and then with the two cups in one hand and the paper in the other glide up the stairs to where she might be dozing again all snug and dissolute and warm. But as he opened the front door he could see a figure at the kitchen end of the living room, dark against the window. She was there, in her dressing gown, with her back towards him, looking out. His body smiled at seeing her but he also felt a swoon of disappointment that the lingering longer in bed together was now not going to happen. She could be so brisk sometimes.
She turned. She switched on the kettle which boiled at once; and then she reached for the cafetiere: so sweet of her. He chucked, meantime, the paper on the table, and in one movement took off his jacket and threw it on the sofa. A square-cut wooden chair screeched on the lino when he pulled it back to sit on; now he was yanking at the plastic round some bits of the paper as she put a coffee for him down beside it. The newsprint spread across the table top. She was still standing, leaning against the edge of the sink, the window behind her, her arms crossed in front of her, keeping the fabric of her dressing gown tight around the root of her neck, her cup held in one fist.
‘I want to go to that,’ she said – nodding at something on the table. It was the flyer he had seen as he went out. ‘Birth of the Earth,’ he read. ‘Our planet is sick. But just as, in the case of the legendary phoenix, life bursts from the ashes, so in this case too the environmental emergency may release a greater spiritual benefit to us all. Come and discover what is happening and why and what you can do to help. It might just be time for you to change your life. Change your life and help to save the world.’
‘Why?’
‘Curiosity. It’s on a boat, did you see? I think it must be moored in Kidney Meadow.’
‘It says,’ he said, looking at the small print, ‘follow the signs.’
‘A treasure hunt,’ she said. ‘I’ll make us some brunch and we can go for our walk and end up there.’
‘Alright.’
As he settled into the paper it seemed to him suddenly so very nice that Sue, that another human being, simply wanted to do something for him, with him, make a plan, make him coffee and make him brunch – OK he mainly did the cooking during the week but that was because of her long commute, only fair; whereas this was spontaneous and warm; this was because of love. He sipped his hot coffee and scanned the page, reading of a moment of historic significance, of a revolution carried out by ordinary people, of something in our souls that cries out for freedom. Each phrase sparked a little image or opened a tiny pathway in his mind; while Sue, watching him, was thinking that even just reading a newspaper lifted you away from where you were. That maybe the web wasn’t such a big change. So that really there had been something faddish, overblown, about Elton Barfitt’s idea, the pile of body parts, a mixture of obviously artificial prostheses and imitation bits of real limbs. The idea being that after Butler, and especially now with the web, there was no difference, really, between a plastic limb and one that was made of flesh and blood and bone: neither of them was actually You. Because, these days, You was a disembodied entity that could manifest itself in many different forms, avatars, performances. But that idea was so false, it struck her more forcibly than before now she thought it over again. She sensed her own body, her skin warm with a sheen of dry sweat on it, a little bit tacky if you touched it or niffy if you smelled it, all swaddled in this dressing gown which, now she set about sensing it, was touching her in a million different places with its towelling fluff.
Next there would have been a gallery full of projections, of light waves which would focus into an image here and there on the walls but which would also permeate and illuminate the air, bouncing off floating bits of dust and rebounding off the punters so that they too seemed to be laced with immaterial information. After which . . . but she became aware again of Philip reading the paper, lifting the big pages and lowering them, smoothing them, letting his eyes dart across them, lifting, lowering, smoothing, until his attention was drawn into a story; at whic
h he would lean forward so that his head was accurately positioned above it, and reach from time to time for his coffee. Watching him, she was thinking that she simply couldn’t work out, even after going over it and over it, whether Elton Barfitt had all along been toying with them, with her and Charlotte, or whether they had at first really been keen to do a show and then really had suddenly got offended. She moved around the table. She touched a finger to Philip’s cheek as she squeezed past him and he raised a hand to halt it, pulled it to his lips. Because it had seemed to be going so well. She moved onwards and settled in the slippery, faux-leather armchair by the door. They had seemed to believe, and appreciate, what Charlotte had said about how much she loved their work, how much it meant to her. Why shouldn’t they – it had been true. And they had really seemed to agree with the idea of just for once exhibiting in a gallery, because choosing a not-tremendously-prestigious place like Spike would be a way of showing how thoroughly they did not care. It had felt like such a real intellectual connection. It was only at the last minute, at the moment of what should have been absolutely trivial practicalities, that everything had gone wrong.
‘What’s magic,’ Charlotte had said, ‘is that we have a slot this summer, a clear three months.’
At which they had totally cramped up.
‘How come?’
‘It’s just . . .’ – but the terrible hostile double sniping had begun:
‘You’ve had a cancellation?’
‘You want us to fill in for who, for Howard Hodgkin?’
‘Anish Kapoor?’
‘The Prince of Wales?’
‘To get you through a sticky moment?’
‘Plug a little hole in your calendar?’
‘Be the Elvis tribute band?’
‘The Paris Hilton Lookalike?’
‘The I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter?’
‘Another nourishing dollop of so-called “Art”?’
‘No! No!’ – Charlotte had howled. They quietened. She tried saying she had thought they didn’t care about prestige – but that had only set them off again:
‘It’s not about prestige,’ they had cried out in their terrible duet: ‘It’s courtesy.’ Etc. Etc. And that had been that.
Well, nothing she could have said would have changed it. There was no other way of handling it. They were just fucking twats – that was what the matter was. Sue felt so sad, horribly sad, that these people whom she really had admired, who had seemed so principled, who must, after all, have put themselves through so much pain for the sake of their art, should end up just like the rest of them. Conceited. So fucking focused on their reputations.
Which had left her and Charlotte, a weeping Charlotte . . . but there was Philip stirring, rising . . . which had left her and Charlotte in their quandary. Philip was moving towards the sink with his cup. Why hadn’t she told him? She watched him, his shirt tucked into his jeans, the belt around his waist. Because – well, this was obvious: she’d known why all along. Because she didn’t want to risk him not reacting as she wanted. For him to feel anxious and for her then to get irritated. She didn’t want to feel a jot of difference between them about something that meant so much to her.
Or maybe. He was rinsing his mug under the tap. Maybe it was actually more because the gamble might look different when it was in the open. If she told it to someone who was not Charlotte. He was filling the mug with water, lifting it to his mouth, drinking. Maybe it would look plain stupid. Maybe it was all – but the thoughts left her as she landed wholly in the world again. She called: ‘Going to get dressed.’ She pushed herself up off the chair. She was standing. She was walking out.
After coffee and green tea; after the paper. After brunch and after chat about this and that. After more coffee and green tea. After they had pulled on their coats and shut the door behind them. After they had exited The Willows and turned right, and crossed the railway, and taken the narrow muddy path, they were wandering through Kidney Meadow hand in hand. There was the sky. There were trees. There was a lot of green. There was wide, reedy grass beaten down in clumps and dotted with wet. And there were bright little nettles with furry leaves, not yet ankle height.
What was odd was how much of everything was dead. Tangled above the low, green layer were the brown-ish and white-ish remains of taller plants, stripped of leaves, scrubbed bare, slim trunklets bent and broken and jumbled, tens, no, thousands of them, all around.
‘Like skeletons,’ Sue said.
She noticed – there – a solitary, ruddy-brown, dead plant, about head height, its slender branches pointing acutely to the sky, punctuated every inch or so by amber scrunchies of shrivelled foliage.
‘You gruesome girl,’ said Philip.
It was like something made of oxidised copper, she thought; an intricate ancient candalebrum. And what were these geometrical constructions like the frames of bust umbrellas, a few seeds still clinging to them, gleaming like flattened pearls?
‘Burnet saxifrage,’ said Philip.
‘It’s a junk-yard,’ said Sue.
‘Listen,’ he said: ‘What’s that?’
‘Yeh, yeh,’ she said ‘Great tit. But shall I tell you a secret?’ She popped up on tiptoe to reach his ear, and whispered: ‘I think it’s better not to know its name.’
‘Can you see it?’ – he asked as she swung down and away from him again, though their hands still held.
She looked; they both did, lifting their heads, squinting at the network of black branches. The cloudy sky behind was surprisingly bright. There it was, the little eyelash beak a-flutter, the amazingly loud, shrill whistle blaring out.
‘Do you see,’ Philip said, gathering Sue to him with one arm and pointing with the other. ‘Can you see the black stripe down its front like it’s split in two?’
‘Yup.’
‘And the mossy greenness of the back.’
‘No. I can’t see that.’ She looked a bit longer: ‘I don’t think you can either.’
‘Yes I can.’
‘No you can’t against the light. It’s just a silhouette, apart from the bright yellow and black.’
‘I can.’
She was wriggling against the hug of his arm, pushing him. ‘No: you know it’s there and so you think you see it. See? That’s why it’s better not to know. That way’ – she had broken away from him – ‘you can see what’s really there.’
‘But it is really there.’
‘I mean: that way you see just what you really can see.’
‘But knowing what to look for helps me really see it.’
‘That’s true. That’s definitely true.’ She was standing apart from him, speaking forcefully but full of happiness and trust. She was about to carry on her declamation but he put in:
‘That’s how I make a diagnosis.’
‘That’s right. You’ve said it. It’s political. Your way of seeing pushes the world, including people, into a structure of knowledge that defines them and gives you power over them. The other way, my way, which is actually fundamentally left-wing, democratic, tries to have each new sensation fresh, each time.’
‘Be astonished at the taste of a cup of tea,’ he said, smiling at her. Sue could be such an egghead.
‘So I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘you are one of the oppressors.’
‘Whereas you are delighted by the lovely ring of the alarm clock every morning.’
‘I am,’ she said. ‘I really am. I leap up every morning with a happy smile. You’ve seen me. Or you would have seen me if you weren’t such a slugabed, lying there groaning.’
‘When they invent the intravenous coffee machine I’ll be just fine.’
Hand in hand, they wandered on, through a place which, a century before, had been the town dump and which now grew russett apples and bramleys, crab apples and damsons, comice pears, greengages and sloes, though all that could be seen of them in this present moment of late winter and early spring were the battered trunks and branches. On these bare structures
perched here a blackbird, there a magpie, here a threatened sparrow, its feathers fluffed against the cold, and there a wood pigeon with its swollen, elegant, pinkish front, its neck sunk in its shoulders. A squall of long-tailed tits came scattering across, cheeping and spluttering. High up, a standard robin sent its delicate, skyey doodlings through the air.
They passed a grizzled hawthorn with its coating of lichen like little cabbages, some grey, some fierce cumin yellow; and then they were out into the open part of the landscape, the part which flooded in winter, the water permeating the topsoil and pooling on the underlying clay. The wind whipped them and they leaned together as they walked. Ahead a convoy of huge railway poplars marked the line of the river. A gull swung overhead with its kukri wings; another soared higher; a rook flapped raggedly across.
So, on they walked, over the mud, which was over clay, which was over chalk and flint, which was over gault, which was over Jurassic slate, which was over carboniferous limestone, which was over much else, down to the distant core.
And on they walked, under the atmosphere where currents swirled and undulated in the upper air, forming clouds in blotchy, cellulitic bands.
They reached, Philip and Sue, a lock whose thick wooden valves had stood two hundred years against the flow. They nibbled a bit of chocolate, kissed, rubbed each other’s hands. They watched a boat go through, then crossed between wiry railings, then turned to follow the towpath back along the other side of the river. Now they saw a laminated bit of paper nailed to a wooden stake: ‘Birth of the Earth’, with an arrow. Philip checked his watch and they walked on.
The path ahead was sunk into a narrow muddy groove, barely a foot wide: how strange, Sue thought, that people should follow so precisely in one another’s footsteps. She and Philip erred to this side and that on the flat grassy verges, holding hands. To their right, a tangle of hawthorns and brambles, then low-lying grazing fields; then a muddle of other indistinct trees; in the distance, a shadowy line of hills. To their left, the greenish muddy river, its water swirling, gleaming under the bright white sky. Beyond it, the flat expanse over which they had come just now, infrequent dots of humans wandering, the tinier specks of birds fleeing across. And beyond that, the houses, little lumps, half-hidden.
The World Was All Before Them Page 7