The Very Thought of You

by Rosie Alison

  The film was running now, spooling through a noisy editing machine with a small screen. Anna sat back and watched random shots of wartime London, captured in the vibrantly simple colours of old film. People walked by, smiling at the camera. Workmen drank tea and ate sandwiches, all casually nonchalant against a background of destroyed buildings and cratered streets. For ten minutes or so, Anna saw nothing but strangers flickering by, until suddenly there she was – her mother striding down an empty pavement, ridiculously poised in her hat and suit as she passed the daytime debris. Anna cried out. The young man stopped the machine and rewound the footage.

  The shot lasted for nine seconds. That was it. Just one extended glimpse of her mother walking down a street, before the reel cut to somewhere else altogether.

  Robin was the archivist’s name. He showed Anna how to replay the shot, then left her to watch her mother over and over, as he went out to make a phone call. “Not strictly allowed,” He told her, “but I can see you need some time to see it properly.”

  Anna played the scene repeatedly and watched her mother glide off, apparently without a care in the world. She was tantalizingly recognizable, though there was no eye contact with the camera. Or was it really her?

  It was more than sixty years since Anna had seen her. Here she was, an old woman watching her mother in her prime. But as she rewound the shot over and over, the spirit of her mother began to depart from the scene. As if seeing Roberta there, beyond the control of her own imagination, had set her firee.

  Her mother had had her own life, and that was that. She was Roberta sands, walking away from all of them to do her own thing, until, by chance, she became one of the war’s many casualties.

  Anna had waited for so many years to say goodbye to her mother. As a child, there had been no funeral, only her mother hovering as an imagined observer in her life. Causing her guilt sometimes. But now she saw that her mother had been an independent soul, striding down streets to meetings which Anna knew nothing about. She could let her go now – or might let her go, once the shock of seeing her had dwindled.

  It was some months before Anna recovered her equilibrium. She had retired from publishing now, and was living alone, but with plenty of visits from her children and grandchildren.

  Her marriage had ended many years before.

  “I wanted to set off on a journey through life with you,” Jamie had told her when they parted, “but you wouldn’t join in. You were always somewhere else.” It was true; in the aftermath of her visit to Thomas Ashton, Anna had allowed herself to grow too detached from her husband. She had never even tried to tell him about her odd retrospective love for her teacher; Jamie would have thought her mad.

  When he had left her, it had been a relief, in some ways. She was able to enjoy their children without worrying any more about her inadequacies as a wife. With Jamie, she had always felt an emotional fraud – and over the years, whenever she saw him, she always thought how handsome he looked, and was amazed that she had ever been with such a man. Jamie, for his part, always explained away their broken marriage by saying that Anna had been too much defined by an unhappy wartime childhood.

  After the divorce, she and her children had moved to a run-down Georgian house in Clerkenwell and she had begun a long process of reclaiming it: restoring the old fixtures, cleaning out the cornices, reconstituting the fireplaces and window shutters. She had even steamed off the wallpaper to uncover several layers of earlier paper, reaching right back to a Regency original.

  “It’s like turning the pages of the House’s history, and peeling back the past to release its ghosts,” she would explain to curious visitors. Her children thought her a little eccentric, but enjoyed their trips to architectural junkyards, too.

  After her own displaced childhood, Anna had drawn such comfort from motherhood that she was never much troubled by being single. She had her friends; that was enough for her.

  By now, she had narrowed her life down to its essentials – books and music, and a simply furnished home. And the three slender volumes of poetry which she had written over the years, her careful distillations of a lifetime. Books which had been respectfully reviewed in their time, though none of them remained in print. But recently even the impulse to find words for feelings had left her: that was the measure of her placid self-suffciency now. She might be a little solitary, but on good days, she knew how to value life’s everyday beauty. A mindset, she sometimes reflected, which she had first learnt from Thomas Ashton.

  One Sunday lunch, just after her seventy-fifth birthday, one of her grandsons asked her if she had been rich as a child. The question puzzled her.

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “Because you wrote a poem about a House with long corridors, so you must have grown up in a huge House,” he said. She smiled and explained how she had been evacuated to a stately home during the war.

  “That was the House with the corridors, somebody else’s House.”

  A memory of handstands on a sunlit lawn came back to her. Later, once she was back at home, she sought out the poem from her bookcase, and read it to herself before going to bed.

  Back to the Old House

  Let us go back to the old House

  The House we once knew

  The familiar door

  The airy rooms

  The light on the stairs,

  Still at the back of your mind.

  And if it is not quite so tall

  As the house you used to know,

  And less bright too, and emptier,

  You need not turn away;

  For a place is a time, too,

  And you are older now,

  And long since lost

  From your own past.

  Let us go back to the old house

  The House we once knew, even

  If it is a stranger’s house,

  With windows blind to you,

  And long, featureless corridors

  Oblivious to all the old times.

  The old house – the valedictory note was catching. Even though Anna was old herself now, she was still a child running down the long corridors of Ashton house. Her memory of the house’s exterior was like an architect’s model: she could see its whole shape as if photographed from afar. Yet, inside, the house seemed to stretch on for ever in her mind – unexpected passages and high staircases, surprise landings and tall empty rooms.

  She had been to so many places in her life, but inside her it was still Ashton Park which spread its contours: the long white drive, the light off sandstone walls, the morning view onto empty parkland. Sometimes, as she sat in a room, she could still be swallowed inwards to the long shadowed corridors of Ashton and the sound of children on the grass outside. It was a healing place, she thought, as she put away the book.

  She awoke early the next morning to the sound of slow rain, a soft rhythmic pulse which lured her into a waking dream. The sound seeped deep inside her, returning her to old times, lost places, rainy days long gone. Once more she was inside the landscape of her childhood, a vista of wide sky and grey-green parkland, Ashton in the late bloom of evening light. All unease was stilled in the infinite calm of the place – its remove, its serene undulations. There was an inexpressible bliss in the light of the sky.

  Yet even as she felt herself walking on grass, the dream began to fade. She struggled to hold on to the line of the horizon, but it eluded her like a vanishing melody – going, gone. She surfaced to consciousness with a deep ache of regret not to be there, not to be running on the lawns, through the woods, down the hill to the river. The landscape receding, the light dying – that private rapture evaporating into silent, colourless air.

  She lay in bed, fully awake now, still yielding to the impact of her dream. It was so many years since she had been back to Ashton Park, and yet the place had never left her. She was stirred by a firesh longing to return to her old childhood home – for it had been that, even if she had only ever been a visitor. She must go back.
<
br />   And so she took a train, early the next day. The station at York still had its curving platform. From there, she caught a bus straight to Ashton village.

  When she arrived at the park gates, she hesitated. Here it was, her place, her past. Yet it was open to the public now, and there was a lodge where visitors had to buy a ticket just to step into the park.

  But curiosity and excitement were spurring her now. She paid her money – a ticket for both “House and garden” – and set off on foot up the drive. A woman of seventy-five with aching joints and heavy bones, walking slowly to catch her breath.

  She passed the same trees, the same sky. Thistles alongside the drive, she recognized those too. The aroma of wild garlic. The rotting hulk of a fallen oak which she had clambered over as a child, all those years ago.

  She turned the corner of the drive, and there at last stood Ashton House, with its curved wings. She paused to observe its unflinching façade, and a wave of sadness passed through her. What was it? The regrets of age, for her own childhood? She could not say.

  The lion and the unicorn still stood on the gateposts, more begrimed than she recalled. Smaller too. Their expressions fixed, closing her out from their mutual past, stones that could not remember. A mix of memory and longing was flooding through her now, though she could not tell whether she felt sad or elated. All she knew was that the place was stirring up sediments of old emotion which made her heart ache.

  She turned to face the rising plain before the House, a view which had filled her with such hope as a child. She could remember her first weeks here, autumn at Ashton Park, the great oaks flaming with gold, the coppery sunshine reaching right through her fingertips to the unawakened spaces inside her.

  Today’s sky was white and still, muting the October colours. In the weeks to come, the withdrawing tide of the dying year would slowly pull on her pulse, as winter set in. But today there was no hint of that. She had arrived just in time to see Ashton Park in all its sober autumn glory – so why did she feel so curiously detached from the scene before her?

  ...But there’s a tree – of many, one –

  A single field which I have looked upon,

  Both of them speak of something that is gone...

  Perhaps life was one long story of separation, just as Wordsworth had said. From people, from places, from the past you could never quite reach even as you lived it.

  But she did not want to give up yet on this place. She turned to the House and walked up the stairs to the tall mahogany doors which were still stiff to open. Then into the Marble Hall – she remembered waiting here for her flather’s arrival, so many years ago. And all the hours spent playing badminton on this chequered floor, with the sound of Thomas playing the piano in the saloon beyond.

  Now there was a local woman selling postcards at a small table, proffering well-intended information about the House’s classical details.

  “That’s Apollo playing his lyre in the dome, and those are griffins over the stone fireplaces...”

  Anna turned and stood in the centre of the Marble Hall. Voices came to her, ringing through the years, Hillary Trevor calling out the names of children with letters, all of them crowded about her, longing for news from home – Maltby – Bailey – Peet – Rothery – Todd – Russell. And there was the place where the Christmas tree stood, she remembered hanging the baubles, and all their spontaneous pleasure at the prospect of Christmas, that firesh, uncomplicated happiness of children – Tyler – Dixon – Burnham – Peake.

  She went towards the stone stairs, past the door to Thomas’s bedroom. Is anybody there? the place was thick with ghosts of the past, the lost, the dead. Memories of Thomas and the winter light of his eyes.

  “Excuse me, madam—” A man in a tweed jacket stopped her, Explaining that she could not wander around at will but must follow one of the house tours. So she joined a group and saw the dining room, and the saloon, and all her old familiar places now redecorated in high Edwardian style – everywhere looked so different to the tattered school of her day with its desks and dormitories.

  But when they reached the library, she was relieved to find it unaltered; it was still the same galleried room glowing with old books.

  “The late Thomas Ashton was a classical scholar, and he completed many distinguished translations,” said the tour guide with as much enthusiasm as such information could merit. “We have his collection of old Greek and Latin books up there in the gallery.”

  Anna looked up. She saw where the guide had pointed, and recalled the day Thomas had shown her the secret door to the gallery. A flicker of rebellion crept into her, and she lingered behind as the group moved on.

  She found the hidden handle, and the click of the door was just as she recalled. Here she was, an old woman sneaking up the steep library steps on her own to find – what? She could not say. But she stood in front of Thomas’s books, and ran her hand along their covers.

  Her fingers snagged on a slender book sticking out. Her heart jolted, because she knew it at once, it was Ruth Weir’s book of Tennyson, the one which she had taken to Thomas all those years ago. She slid the book out and opened it. Here was the folded sheet with the pressed flower. But there was another letter there too – in Thomas’s handwriting.

  Nobody was looking, so she removed the book and tucked it into her handbag. Then she slipped down the gallery stairs and stepped out into the gardens with a fragile heart.

  She paused for a moment by the sundial in the rose garden, strangely elated to have retrieved Ruth Weir’s book. Seeking a quiet place to sit down, she made her way to a bench by the copper beech tree which had been planted, she knew, to mark Thomas’s christening. Gingerly she sat down before opening the book. There was the new letter, in Thomas’s hand. It was dated the year she had visited him. But the envelope was addressed to Ruth. An unsent letter written to a dead woman.

  May 1964

  My dearest,

  Of all the many people we meet in a lifetime, it is strange that so many of us find ourselves in thrall to one particular person. Once that face is seen, an involuntary heartache sets in for which there is no cure. All the wonder of this world finds shape in that one person and thereafter there is no reprieve, because this kind of love does not end, or not until death.

  For the lucky ones, this love is reciprocated. But for so many others, everywhere, anywhere, there follows an unending ache of longing without relief. Incurable love is a great leveller. Yet I believe that this bittersweet love is better by far than the despair which blights those with a dead heart.

  You are the woman I loved, Ruth. I have lost you all these years, but I believe and rest in the thought that we had our time of love together; it was extraordinary and I cherish the memory of it.

  Today was a glorious day. There was a glow to the evening light which fired the trees into a green so radiant that I could feel the life of each leaf. The sight stirred me to a rare joy; I sat by the window, and my spirit reached out into the fields beyond until I was blessed with this recognition: that everything was illuminated by the auxiliary light which you once gave me. You may be gone, but you gave me love, and you opened my eyes to the daily miracle of the world about me. On good days, I can still see you everywhere. An inestimable blessing, for which I thank you, my best beloved.

  Anna read the words and felt her heart puncturing, all the life leaking away from her. She tried to steady herself, and rocked gently on the bench, taking deep breaths.

  It was a shattering letter. An expression of absolute love, nothing less, the love which Thomas had carried for Ruth Weir through all those years. The love which she had heard as a child through the wardrobe door, but never known for herself.

  What was it, this pain which sliced through her? Jealousy? Awe? His letter revealed the one love for which she had longed, and yet it belonged to somebody else, in dead time beyond reach. And she had always been, and would remain, outside such love.

  What she had witnessed all those years ago was som
ebody else’s unconditional love. And what she could read here in Thomas’s letter, so many years later, was the boundless patience of his love.

  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,

  endures all things. Love never ends...

  The words from Corinthians surfaced in her mind, but in them she recognized her own devotion too. His was a love lost. Hers was a love never quite known. Even so long after Ruth’s death, she could sense the consummation of his love in that letter: even in the leaves of a tree he could find his peace. But all such things remained outside her; she could stand in Ashton Park, and look at the lawns of her luminous childhood, and see only life beyond her reach.

  How did she find herself here now, all her years gone, still in love with someone long dead? How had it happened? After all the many people she had met, all the places she had been to. Surely there should have been somebody to enter her heart, at one stroke wiping out her devotion to this man she had met as a child? Yet here she was, back at Ashton Park, still locked into her first love, still remembering his eyes.

  Her body was aching now, and she felt breathless, as if a vice was tightening her heart. She began to cry, the dry eyes of old age welling up and overflowing until at last her tears were spent, and her weeping began to ease. Then she breathed more deeply and grew quieter.

  She looked down again at Thomas’s unsent letter. The light of love. Even so many years after Ruth’s death, he still had moments when he could retrace the shape of his wonder. Was it not so for her too? She would have liked to tell Thomas that walking down the street and seeing buildings and trees and people – or any detail of anything, really – had been a daily wonder because of the love he had lit in her so long ago.

  Her life rolled before her, flickering in glimpses: moments of tenderness, moments of reaching out – her mother dancing with her, or her daughter’s first day back from school, that look of loving dependence on her face.