Yet I had seen his empty shell. I had seen the light flicker and go out. Where had it gone? Was it blown to emptiness after all, like the light of a candle, and does each one of us, in the end, vanish into darkness? If this is so, and our dreams of survival after death are only dreams, then we must accept this too. Not with fear and dismay, but with courage. To have lived at all is a measure of immortality; for a baby to be born, to become a man, a woman, to beget others like himself, is an act of faith in itself, even an act of defiance. It is as though every human being born into this world burns, for a brief moment, like a star, and because of it a pinpoint of light shines in the darkness, and so there is glory, so there is life. If there is nothing more than this, we have achieved our immortality.
Meanwhile, for the bereaved, who will never know the answer here on earth, the practical living of day-by-day continues. We must rise in the morning, eat, go about our business, watch the seasons pass, our life no longer shared. To plan for one, instead of two, brings a sense of apathy. Instinct says, ‘Why bother? What can the future hold?’ The sense of urgency is lacking. A younger woman, with a family to rear, would be spurred by necessity to action. The older woman has no such driving force. Her children are adult, they can fend for themselves. The older woman must seek her reason for living either in outward forms—good works, committees, the demanding tasks of a career—or look inward, deep within herself, for a new philosophy.
‘At least,’ said a kind, well-wishing friend, ‘you have your writing,’ as though, with a magic wand, I could conjure at will a host of dancing puppets to grimace and do my bidding, their very antics proving an antidote to pain. Yes, I have my writing, but the stories that I fashioned once were fairy tales, and they cannot satisfy me now. Death, surely, will make me more aware of other people’s suffering, of other people’s ills, of the countless women there must be who, widowed like myself, have no form of consolation from without or from within. Some lack children, sisters, friends; others are financially bereft; a vast number lived in their husband’s shadow, and with the shadow gone feel themselves not fully individuals, unwanted and ignored. What life can these women make for themselves, how will they adapt?
The widow, like the orphan, has been an object of pity from earliest times. She received charity. She lived, very often, with her married son or daughter, and earned, sometimes rightly, the hostility of her daughters- or sons-in-law. Her place was the chimney corner, and in more modern times the little flat upstairs or the bungalow next door.
The Hindu woman, in old days, committed suttee. She laid herself on the funeral pyre of her husband and was burnt with him. This was one way out of her dilemma. My own grandmother, widowed at the same age as myself, at fifty-eight, entered upon old age with grace and dignity. She donned her weeds and her widow’s cap, and I can see her now, a kindly, grave, if rather formidable figure, endeavouring to teach me, a child, how to knit, in the First World War.
I look down today at my own weeds, dark slacks, a white pullover, and I wonder if the change in garb is basic, a symbol of woman’s emancipation, or simply a newer fashion, while fundamentally the widow’s sense of loss remains unchanged. No matter how brave a face she puts upon her status, the widow is still a lonely figure, belonging nowhere, resembling in some indefinable manner the coloured races in a world dominated by whites. The attitude of the non-widowed is kindly, hearty, a little overcheerful in the attempt to show the bereaved that nothing is different, just as the liberal white will shake his black brother by the hand, smiling broadly, to emphasise equality. Neither is deceived. Both are embarrassed. The widow, aware of her inadequacy, retires into her shell, while the other, dreading the floodgates of emotion, beats a hasty retreat. Carried to extremes, the division results in apartheid, the widowed and the non-widowed withdraw to their separate worlds, and there is no communion between the two.
The old adage, Time heals all wounds, is only true if there is no suppuration within. To be bitter, to lament unceasingly, ‘Why did this have to happen to him?’ makes the wound fester; the mind, renewing the stab, causes the wound to bleed afresh. It is hard, very hard, not to be bitter in the early days, not to blame doctors, hospitals, drugs, that failed to cure. Harder still for the woman whose husband died not by illness but by accident, who was cut short in full vigour, in the prime of life, killed perhaps in a car crash returning home from work. The first instinct is to seek revenge upon the occupants of the other car, themselves unhurt, whose selfish excess of speed caused the disaster. Yet this is no answer to grief. All anger, all reproach, turns inwards upon itself. The infection spreads, pervading the mind and body.
I would say to those who mourn—and I can only speak from my own experience—look upon each day that comes as a challenge, as a test of courage. The pain will come in waves, some days worse than others, for no apparent reason. Accept the pain. Do not suppress it. Never attempt to hide grief from yourself. Little by little, just as the deaf, the blind, the handicapped develop with time an extra sense to balance disability, so the bereaved, the widowed, will find new strength, new vision, born of the very pain and loneliness which seem, at first, impossible to master. I address myself more especially to the middle-aged who, like myself, look back to over thirty years or more of married life and find it hardest to adapt. The young must, of their very nature, heal sooner than ourselves.
We know, and must face it honestly, that life for us can never be the same again. Marriage was not just another love affair, an episode, but the greater half of our existence. We can never give to another what we gave to the partner who has gone. All that is over, finished. And the years that lie ahead, ten, twenty, perhaps even thirty, must be travelled alone. This is a challenge, just as marriage, in the first place, was a challenge.
I remember on our wedding day, in July 1932, the good priest who married us drawing a comparison between the little boat in which we were to set forth on our honeymoon and marriage itself. ‘You will embark,’ he said, ‘on a fair sea, and at times there will be fair weather, but not always. You will meet storms and overcome them. You will take it in turns to steer your boat through fair weather and foul. Never lose courage. Safe harbour awaits you both in the end.’
Today I remember this advice with gratitude. Even if I must, of necessity, steer my boat alone, I shall not, so I trust, lose my bearings but, because of all I have learnt through the past three-and-thirty years, with my fellow helmsman at my side, come eventually to my journey’s end.
One final word to my contemporaries. Take time to plan your future. Do not let your relatives or friends, anxious for your welfare, push you into some hasty move that later you may regret. If it is financially possible for you, stay in your own home, with the familiar things about you. We need many months to become reconciled to the loss that has overtaken us; and if at first the silence of the empty house may seem unbearable, do not forget it is still the home you shared, which two persons made their own.
As the months pass and the seasons change, something of tranquillity descends, and although the well-remembered footstep will not sound again, nor the voice call from the room beyond, there seems to be about one in the air an atmosphere of love, a living presence. I say this in no haunting sense, ghosts and phantoms are far from my mind. It is as though one shared, in some indefinable manner, the freedom and the peace, even at times the joy, of another world where there is no more pain. It is not a question of faith or of belief. It is not necessary to be a follower of any religious doctrine to become aware of what I mean. It is not the prerogative of the devout. The feeling is simply there, pervading all thought, all action. When Christ the healer said, ‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,’ he must have meant just this.
Later, if you go away, if you travel, even if you decide to make your home elsewhere, the spirit of tenderness, of love, will not desert you. You will find that it has become part of you, rising from within yourself; and because of it you are no longer fearful of loneliness, of the dark
, because death, the last enemy, has been over-come.
The House of Secrets
[1946]
It was an afternoon in late autumn, the first time I tried to find the house. October, November, the month escapes me. But in the west country autumn can make herself a witch, and place a spell upon the walker. The trees were golden brown, the hydrangeas had massive heads still blue and untouched by flecks of wistful grey, and I would set forth at three of an afternoon with foolish notions of August still in my head. ‘I will strike inland,’ I thought, ‘and come back by way of the cliffs, and the sun will yet be high, or at worst touching the horizon beyond the western hills.’
Of course, I was still a newcomer to the district, a summer visitor, whose people had but lately bought the old ‘Swiss Cottage’, as the locals called it, a name which, to us, had horrid associations with an underground railway in the Finchley Road at home.
We were not yet rooted. We were new folk from London. We walked as tourists walked, seeing what should be seen. So my sister and I, poring over an old guidebook, first came upon the name of Menabilly. What description the guidebook gave I cannot now remember, except that the house had been first built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, that the grounds and woods had been in the last century famous for their beauty, and that the property had never changed hands from the time it came into being, but had passed down, in the male line, to the present owner. Three miles from the harbour, easy enough to find; but what about keepers and gardeners, chauffeurs and barking dogs? My sister was not such an inveterate trespasser as I. We asked advice. ‘You’ll find no dogs at Menabilly, nor any keepers either,’ we were told, ‘the house is all shut up. The owner lives in Devon. But you’ll have trouble in getting there. The drive is nearly three miles long, and overgrown.’
I for one was not to be deterred. The autumn colours had me bewitched before the start. So we set forth, Angela more reluctant, with a panting pekinese held by a leash. We came to the lodge at four turnings, as we had been told, and opened the creaking iron gates with the flash courage and appearance of bluff common to the trespasser. The lodge was deserted. No one peered at us from the windows. We slunk away down the drive, and were soon hidden by the trees. Is it really nigh on twenty years since I first walked that hidden drive and saw the beech trees, like the arches of a great cathedral, form a canopy above my head? I remember we did not talk, or if we did we talked in whispers. That was the first effect the woods had upon both of us.
The drive twisted and turned in a way that I described many years afterwards, when sitting at a desk in Alexandria and looking out upon a hard glazed sky and dusty palm trees; but on that first autumnal afternoon, when the drive was new to us, it had the magic quality of a place hitherto untrodden, unexplored. I was Scott in the Antarctic. I was Cortez in Mexico. Or possibly I was none of these things, but a trespasser in time. The woods were sleeping now, but who, I wondered, had ridden through them once? What hoof-beats had sounded and then died away? What carriage wheels had rolled and vanished? Doublet and hose. Boot and jerkin. Patch and powder. Stock and patent leather. Crinoline and bonnet.
The trees grew taller and the shrubs more menacing. Yet still the drive led on, and never a house at the end of it. Suddenly Angela said, ‘It’s after four… and the sun’s gone.’ The pekinese watched her, pink tongue lolling. And then he stared into the bushes, pricking his ears at nothing. The first owl hooted…
‘I don’t like it,’ said Angela firmly. ‘Let’s go home.’
‘But the house,’ I said with longing, ‘we haven’t seen the house.’
She hesitated, and I dragged her on. But in an instant the day was gone from us. The drive was a muddied path, leading nowhere, and the shrubs, green no longer but a shrouding black, turned to fantastic shapes and sizes. There was not one owl now, but twenty. And through the dark trees, with a pale grin upon his face, came the first glimmer of the livid hunter’s moon.
I knew then that I was beaten. For that night only.
‘All right,’ I said grudgingly, ‘we’ll find the house another time.’
And, following the moon’s light, we struck through the trees and came out upon the hillside. In the distance below us stretched the sea. Behind us the woods and the valley through which we had come. But nowhere was there a sign of any house. Nowhere at all.
‘Perhaps,’ I thought to myself, ‘it is a house of secrets, and has no wish to be disturbed.’ But I knew I should not rest until I had found it.
If I remember rightly the weather broke after that day, and the autumn rains were upon us. Driving rain, day after day. And we, not yet become acclimatised to Cornish wind and weather, packed up and returned to London for the winter. But I did not forget the woods of Menabilly, or the house that waited…
We came back again to Cornwall in the spring, and I was seized with a fever for fishing. I would be out in a boat most days, with a line in the water, and it did not matter much what came on the end of it, whether it would be seaweed or a dead crab, as long as I could sit on the thwart of a boat and hold a line and watch the sea. The boatman sculled off the little bay called Pridmouth, and as I looked at the land beyond, and saw the massive trees climbing from the valley to the hill, the shape of it all seemed familiar.
‘What’s up there, in the trees?’ I said.
‘That’s Menabilly,’ came the answer, ‘but you can’t see the house from the shore. It’s away up yonder. I’ve never been there myself.’ I felt a bite on my line at that moment and said no more. But the lure of Menabilly was upon me once again.
Next morning I did a thing I had never done before, nor ever did again, except once in the desert, where to see sunrise is the peak of all experience. In short, I rose at 5:00 a.m. I pulled across the harbour in my pram, walked through the sleeping town, and climbed out upon the cliffs just as the sun himself climbed out on Pont Hill behind me. The sea was glass. The air was soft and misty warm. And the only other creature out of bed was a fisherman, hauling crab pots at the harbour mouth. It gave me a fine feeling of conceit, to be up before the world. My feet in sand shoes seemed like wings. I came down to Pridmouth Bay, passing the solitary cottage by the lake, and, opening a small gate hard by, I saw a narrow path leading to the woods. Now, at last, I had the day before me, and no owls, no moon, no shadows could turn me back.
I followed the path to the summit of the hill and then, emerging from the woods, turned left, and found myself upon a high grass walk, with all the bay stretched out below me and the Gribben head beyond.
I paused, stung by the beauty of that first pink glow of sunrise on the water, but the path led on, and I would not be deterred. Then I saw them for the first time—the scarlet rhododendrons. Massive and high they reared above my head, shielding the entrance to a long smooth lawn. I was hard upon it now, the place I sought. Some instinct made me crouch upon my belly and crawl softly to the wet grass at the foot of the shrubs. The morning mist was lifting, and the sun was coming up above the trees even as the moon had done last autumn. This time there was no owl, but blackbird, thrush and robin greeting the summer day.
I edged my way on to the lawn, and there she stood. My house of secrets. My elusive Menabilly…
The windows were shuttered fast, white and barred. Ivy covered the grey walls and threw tendrils round the windows. The house, like the world, was sleeping too. But later, when the sun was high, there would come no wreath of smoke from the chimneys. The shutters would not be thrown back, or the doors unfastened. No voices would sound within those darkened rooms. Menabilly would sleep on, like the sleeping beauty of the fairy tale, until someone should come to wake her.
I watched her awhile in silence, and then became emboldened, and walked across the lawn and stood beneath the windows. The scarlet rhododendrons encircled her lawns, to south, to east, to west. Behind her, to the north, were the tall trees and the deep woods. She was a two-storied house, and with the ivy off her would have a classical austerity that her present shaggy covering denied
her.
One of her nineteenth-century owners had taken away her small-paned windows and given her plate glass instead, and he had also built at her northern end an ugly wing that conformed ill with the rest of her. But with all her faults, most obvious to the eye, she had a grace and charm that made me hers upon the instant. She was, or so it seemed to me, bathed in a strange mystery. She held a secret—not one, not two, but many—that she withheld from many people but would give to one who loved her well.
As I sat on the edge of the lawn and stared at her I felt as many romantic, foolish people have felt about the Sphinx. Here was a block of stone, even as the desert Sphinx, made by man for his own purpose—yet she had a personality that was hers alone, without the touch of human hand. One family only had lived within her walls. One family who had given her life. They had been born there, they had loved, they had quarrelled, they had suffered, they had died. And out of these emotions she had woven a personality for herself, she had become what their thoughts and their desires had made her.
And now the story was ended. She lay there in her last sleep. Nothing remained for her but to decay and die…
I cannot recollect, now, how long I lay and stared at her. It was past noon, perhaps, when I came back to the living world. I was empty and lightheaded, with no breakfast inside me. But the house possessed me from that day, even as a mistress holds her lover.
Ours was a strange relationship for fifteen years. I would put her from my mind for months at a time, and then, on coming again to Cornwall, I would wait a day or two, then visit her in secret.
Once again I would sit on the lawn and stare up at her windows. Sometimes I would find that the caretaker at the lodge, who came now and again to air the house, had left a blind pulled back, showing a chink of space, so that by pressing my face to the window I could catch a glimpse of a room. There was one room—a dining room, I judged, because of the long sideboard against the wall—that held my fancy most. Dark panels. A great fireplace. And on the walls the family portraits stared into the silence and the dust. Another room, once a library, judging by the books upon the shelves, had become a lumber place, and in the centre of it stood a great dappled rocking horse with scarlet nostrils. What little blue-sashed, romping children once bestrode his back? Where was the laughter gone? Where were the voices that had called along the passages?
The Rebecca Notebook Page 11