Thank you.
Anders
Bury St. Edmunds
June 1
Dear Anders,
I have never owned a briefcase. Or carried my lunch with me from home to a place of work, unless you count taking sandwiches out to the fields on occasion, during the harvest. I do, however, own a laptop.
Looking back at your letter of early May, I see you suggested we could continue our correspondence on a more joyous note, once you had told me the story of your wife. Instead, we seem to have become quite tearful. I may as well admit that your last letter made me cry. If I were to think of something it might comfort you to find in your briefcase, I will send it to you, as if it had fallen into the envelope when I wasn’t looking. Although, having had this lovely thought, I should probably not have shared it, so it would come as an unexpected bonus. There again, I may never find the right thing to send, and if I did, you might not recognize it as anything other than a piece of flotsam swept off the table as I wrote. (You see how I am talking to you as if you were standing beside me?)
I am now going to proceed with some joyous news. My daughter, Mary, my youngest child, was married last week. We went to the church in the village, all dressed up, and Mary was escorted down the aisle, looking quite magnificent in a plain but elegant dress, by her father, looking as if he had been trussed up like one of his hay bales in a hired morning suit. She married a young man called Vassily, from Lithuania, whom she met when he came to work on some outbuildings we were converting into holiday cottages. He also had a hired morning suit and managed to look like a Bohemian prince come to claim his bride. After the ceremony we went to a hotel, and there was food (which I did not cook and therefore enjoyed) and speeches. This went on all afternoon, as the food was slow to arrive and the speeches had to be given, and then given again in the other language. After this, all the members of my family, except Mary and me, drank far more than they are used to or than is good for them. The Lithuanians drank considerably more than my family but were better at it. They traveled from somber to gloriously cheerful, while I’m afraid many on our side of the room went from cheerful to maudlin or argumentative. Nevertheless, it was a pleasure to me to see Mary looking so happy.
I never expected her to marry. I’m not, you understand, suggesting that a woman’s life is only fulfilled if she is a wife—I would have been happy for Mary to remain single—but we all need someone who is close, someone we care for and who cares for us, and up until she met Vassily, she did not appear to have any particular friends. She is a mystery to me, but so are all of my three children. I was all right when they were young and helpless and needed loving and nurturing. Edward was no good at this side of things, but it came naturally to me, and I was happy to cuddle and soothe and play. As soon as they reached an age where they had some self-determination, I had no idea how to behave toward them. They were so distinctly themselves, and I didn’t feel as if I had the right to tell them what to do, or even to give them advice. I had never made any choices for myself, or not the right ones, so who was I to guide them? Edward was much better at this stage of their lives. I would say he took them by the hand and led them to the places they have ended up, but it was a rather more brutal (not in any physical sense) process than that. He was confident he knew what was the best path for them and he gave them no choice, though they seemed not to want one, and lo and behold, he was right. They have all ended up, in one way or another, working on the farm, and they seem to want to be doing it.
My two boys, Tam and Andrew, have turned into farmers without ever looking to right or left at other choices they might have made. Mary qualified as an accountant and then came home to do the books. The women of my acquaintance congratulate me on having pulled off the trick of keeping my children together in the place where they were brought up, forever around to delight me and make me feel anchored. Although I say “congratulated,” I know, and they know, that it is nothing to do with me; they are commenting on what they see as my undeserved good luck.
Mary is more than just the farm’s bookkeeper. She does the accounts for many of the farmers and agricultural businesses in the area. She is also the one with all the ideas on how to improve the farm’s income. Not just the reduction of input costs and the maximization of high-value outputs, which is what Edward, Tam, and Andrew talk about all the time—less fertilizer, less manpower, higher-yield crops. Mary is the one who finds grants for replacing hedges, maintaining field margins, managing watercourses. If it were not for her, we would not be making money by generating electricity through solar panels. And we would not be providing tourist accommodation, which is how Vassily came into our lives.
I thought Mary would never be close to anyone because she seemed to care so little for what anyone thought of her. She is extremely forthright; she does not say much, and what she does say is not about opinions or emotions, but facts. When someone else says something stupid or, in her view, wrong, she says so. I sometimes think English is a language with too many options for how to express a single thought, and we tend to use this to the full, in conversation, wrapping up a criticism in phrases that reduce its impact. Mary never does this. She is lean and tall and strong featured, like her mother, and has always been, I fear, easier to dislike than to like. Vassily also speaks very rarely, and not just because his English is limited. With his Lithuanian friends he is the silent one. I wondered at first if Mary liked him for not expressing opinions she disagreed with; I had no idea why he liked her. However, they are suited to each other, and as I watched them at the reception, I knew they would be happy. Something about the way they turned their heads toward each other without speaking, or touched each other without forethought or purpose.
So Mary is happy. Edward is happy because she has secured Vassily’s building skills for the benefit of the family business. I am happy because I love my daughter and want her to be happy but have had no idea how to bring this about since she stopped wanting me to play with her. Now that burden has been taken away from me by Vassily.
A joyful outcome. Tell me about your children.
Best wishes,
Tina
Silkeborg
June 12
My dear Tina,
Thank you for your joyful letter, and for the feather, which I know did not fall from the table as you wrote but was chosen by you, for me. You know I deal in objects, and the first step in understanding an object is to be able to name it. To give it a category. I am enjoying the feather, when I open my briefcase, but really, I need to know: What bird is this from? What part of the bird? I could look through books identifying birds, or even on the internet, and at last I expect I would match my feather to a species, but you are closer to birds, with the life you lead, and I am sure you can tell me what I want to know. I would rather you told me.
As you tell me you have a laptop, I wonder if you wanted to continue this correspondence by electronic means? I have thought carefully before I suggested this. I may as well confess now that when your first letter to Professor Glob arrived and I picked it up to reply, I was irritated you had not included an email address. If you had, I would have replied at once by email. I would have written something like: “I am afraid Professor Glob is no longer with us. If you wish to visit the museum, please see the website,” and I would have copied and pasted the link and clicked on “send.” I have found that it is no use to write an email longer than three or four lines, because whoever receives it will not read to the end.
Instead, I had to compose a letter. I could picture you reading the letter and I imagined you would do this slowly and carefully, so I felt I needed to write my letter to you slowly and carefully. I had to be sure I had read yours to Professor Glob slowly and carefully so that I could be sure to address the points you made. So we have gone on. We have written at length and thoughtfully, and to do this, we have both had to read the letters we received in a thoughtful way. The writing and the reading have both been such an unexpected pleasure to me, I would like to be
sure we will not lose this—that is, the length and the thoughtfulness. However, I am so used to communicating by computer, I find the business of sending letters an awkward interruption of the conversation we are having—finding the envelope, the stamp, visiting the postbox, waiting for days before I can be sure you have read what I have written, when I want my thoughts to reach you as they occur to me.
So I have a proposal. Instead of the envelope and the stamp, we could attach our letters to an email. I will do this only if I can be sure you will treat them as carefully as you have treated the letters sent by post. I would like to think you will print them out, save them up to be read, slowly and carefully, when you have time, instead of clicking on the attachment and scrolling down the screen as soon as the email catches your eye. Will you do this? It would make me feel more in touch with you. If you say no, I will, of course, carry on with the envelopes and the stamps. I would cycle miles in the rain, if I had to (which I don’t), to post letters to you, if this were the only way to make sure you continued to write to me. And you must go on with the envelopes and the stamps, if that is what you would prefer, for your letters to me.
* * *
You ask about my children. I have a daughter, Karin, and a son, Erik. They are a marvel to me. When they were growing up I was so much occupied with keeping Birgitt happy, I never really thought of them as separate people, just as members of this family forever working to hold itself together. It was our job, as a family, to keep Birgitt happy. I do not remember being anxious about them, as most parents, I believe, are anxious. Only after Birgitt had gone, and we were grieving together, did I think about them as adults, with their own lives to lead.
When Birgitt was alive and the children were young, we went often to the island where Birgitt’s grandparents lived. The house is still there, and we still own it. We came to know the other families who visited each summer, for this is a place of summer visitors now. It would have been a bleak and isolated place to live. I did not enjoy those holidays very much. Each time Birgitt walked away from us, toward the sea or along the sands, I feared she would never turn back. I used to watch her so hard, my eyes would start to see things that weren’t there; I would mistake a rock for a boat or a bush for a person, and so often, after she had turned and was walking toward us, I was sure I could still see her walking away. Where other fathers would be watching their children, worrying if they were safe and happy, I was watching my wife. The children always were safe; they were sensible, well-behaved children, and if Birgitt kept walking until she would in a moment or two be out of sight, it was often one of them, or both of them, who ran after her to remind her it was late, or cold, or suppertime, while I was still trying to work out what was reflection or shadow and what was my wife in the midst of the sea and the sand. (What was? What were? You must correct me if I go wrong.)
After she left us, we went back, the three of us, and now that I had only them to watch, it felt as if I were noticing them for the first time, and it amazed me to see how self-possessed they were. We were in the deepest grief and talked to each other all the time, mostly about Birgitt and their childhood. I do not usually talk much. I find I do not often have anything to say that would interest other people to hear. Though other people talk about things I am not interested in and I am happy to listen, so maybe it is not others’ lack of the will to listen but my lack of interest in speaking that is at fault. As we talked, the children and I, I could see that even in their grief, Karin and Erik were perfectly in control, capable of managing themselves. I don’t know how this happened. It had little enough to do with me. When you talked of your daughter, Mary, you said you had been at a loss to know how to make her happy. I am ashamed to say I don’t remember ever having understood it was my job to make my children happy.
Karin is a lawyer working in Copenhagen, and Erik is an architect in Stockholm. They made such sensible but hard career choices. Both of them had to study for a long time, and faced much competition, in order to do what they wanted to do. Both their professions, I feel, require understanding, empathy, and some measure of creativity. I am very proud of them both. I do not see them as often as I would like, though they are both diligent in visiting me or inviting me to visit them. Karin has phoned to say she will come and stay next month. I am looking forward to it.
Write soon. Do not forget about the feather.
Best wishes,
Anders
Bury St. Edmunds
June 16
Dear Anders,
I am sending this, as you suggest, as an attachment to an email. I have loved the method we’ve used to talk to each other: the physical effort involved in finding the paper, the envelope, the stamps, the time to go to the postbox, and the time delay before I received a reply. All this makes our letters seem so much more important than a few lines of text on a screen. Most of the emails I receive are about special offers on plants, or notifications of farming events, or reminders it is my turn to run the Women’s Institute cake stall at the farmers’ market. Your letters are a world apart from all that. I feel I know what it must have been like to be the last generation for whom gaslight or candlelight was normal, and electricity the new invention. I am looking back over my shoulder, writing letters, knowing the new way of communicating is more efficient but wanting to hold on to the softness and elegance we are leaving behind. Mostly, though, I want us to stay in touch, and so this is an attachment, sent electronically. I promise, if you reply the same way, that I will print out what you send and read it as if it had arrived through the door, in an envelope. Will you make me the same promise? To read as carefully and to think as carefully about a reply before sending it? Of course, if I find something else I want to send, like the bird’s feather, I will do that by post.
It is the wing feather from a female pheasant. I am teetering here, between telling you everything I know about pheasants, as if you know nothing, and simply letting that first sentence stand, as if it told you everything you needed to know about the feather I sent you. I am hesitating to tell you everything I know, not only because I do not want to presume you know nothing, but also because I might sound as if I were trying to prove that I, like you, know some facts. I might sound as if I were trumping your information on Iron Age life with my information on game birds. It is not at all likely I would do that, because I am woefully devoid of ambition to prove myself better than someone else and always have been. When someone does something well, I might wish I could do it just as well. But I have never felt I needed to strive to do it better. It is a fault, I think. I ought to have had a better idea of myself.
I will tell you about pheasants, and just hope it is not too boring. We have breeding pens on our land; a local shoot manages the birds, and half a dozen times a year a convoy of 4×4 vehicles and a trailer or two turns up full of men all wearing caps and carrying guns. Several pickups arrive with men, boys, and the occasional woman in the back, carrying sticks with pieces of white plastic feed sack tied to them. They climb out and set off over the fields waving their sticks to drive the pheasants up off the ground and into the air. The “guns,” as the hunters are known, as if all humanity had left them for the purposes of this sport, go and stand by markers and shoot the bewildered pheasants, who only yesterday were being fed by some of those now trying to kill them, as they fly over wondering what on earth is going on. (I am being anthropomorphic—pheasants are exceptionally stupid birds and doubtless have no thoughts in their heads at all.) Muddy, excited, but obedient dogs collect the carcasses, which are strung up in rows on a sort of scaffolding set up in one of the trailers for the purpose. In the middle of the day, the beaters and the guns find a shelter or, in the unlikely event the weather is fine enough, a bank where they sit and eat the sandwiches their wives have prepared. At the end of the day they carry off their share of the dead birds and their muddy dogs in their 4×4s and go home to their wives. Edward and Tam are among those designated as guns on these days, and so I know from experience that the wives are expec
ted to congratulate the returning warrior, hang up the spoils somewhere convenient, and then clean up the mud carried into the kitchen by the dog and the gun. Later, when the birds are almost, but not quite, too rotten to eat, the grateful wife will pluck and draw them and put them in the freezer. The number of pheasants in the freezer is kept at a constant level by my serving up pheasant on occasion, but mainly by the surreptitious disposal of birds not yet eaten, as newer trophies arrive.
I know I sound scornful, but actually I am ambivalent about this pastime. On the one hand, it is ridiculous behavior, breeding and feeding birds, persuading them to fly, and then shooting them. If the flesh of the birds were highly prized and the flavor were enhanced by terrifying them before blasting them out of the sky—rather than just wringing their necks like a chicken—it would be less absurd. In fact, no one that I know chooses to eat pheasant very often, or at all, and the most ardent fan of shooting does not claim the meat tastes better. On the other hand, the shoot requires copses, hedgerows, strips of field planted with otherwise unproductive crops like sunflowers, and if the shoots were banned, or ceased to operate, there would be no need for this much diversity, and parts of the countryside I value would be turned into arable land. Also, I like the pheasants and the dogs. The pheasants, as I have said, are brainless, but they have a trick of hiding in a bush or clump of grass and breaking cover, when disturbed, with the most wonderful clatter of alarm, and gliding off over the nearest open space like a perfectly formed paper airplane. They are pretty, too. The males are (I’m sure you know this) the more colorful, but the females’ feathers have the beauty of a symmetrical pattern in shades of brown and cream, without any showiness. I like patterns more than colors. Have you ever looked at the frond of a fern as it unfurls? It is a masterpiece of complexity without a single random element. I like dogs because there is no artifice in a dog. They can be cunning and underhand but only in a predictable way.
Meet Me at the Museum Page 5