Wise Follies

by Grace Wynne-Jones

  ‘Your soul is sometimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgement wage war against your passion and your appetite.

  ‘Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.

  ‘But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?

  ‘…Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;

  ‘And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.’

  ‘Lovely,’ murmurs Matt.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I agree, wishing I wasn’t quite so aware of the clinking of cups in the dining area. That last quote was really nice. Suddenly everyone’s jumping up from their cushions and heading eagerly out of the room. I must follow them, I don’t want to be caught straggling. ‘Just fifteen minutes,’ Samantha calls loudly after us. ‘I’d like us to all be back here at 11.30.’ No one looks round. A nice cuppa is our passion at this precise moment. That and an oatmeal cookie and a visit to the loo.

  In the dining area I opt for the real tea – not the herbal variety – and grab a wad of biscuits. I munch them quietly. One of the nice things about this kind of gathering is that one is not impelled to talk. People respect your ‘space’ and that kind of thing. I look over at Matt. Good, he’s chatting with a nice young man in a yellow pullover. I decide to drift out of the room with my big indigo mug and do a bit of exploring. I open a stripped-pine wooden door and find myself in what must be the library. There are shelves and shelves of books and a dog, who is snoozing on a sofa. He’s an English sheepdog. Just like the one Paul McCartney used to have. I love big dogs like that. Maybe if I marry Eamon I could keep one. I think it would be nice to have some animals around the place, and his house is certainly large enough to accommodate them. His rooms can seem very silent sometimes, as though they’ve absorbed some of his own tendencies. Yes, I’d definitely need a dog. I hope Tarquin might be persuaded to move in too.

  ‘Hello, doggy,’ I say to the English sheepdog. ‘What’s your name?’ He looks up at me patiently, clearly used to this kind of pointless questioning. I look round the room.

  The colours they’ve used are similar to the sitting-room in my cottage. How fond I am of my little cottage. As I think this I sit down on the sofa sorrowfully.

  I’m beginning to realize that I’ll really miss my cottage and garden if I marry Eamon. They’re like old friends. I’ve known them for so long now. There’s a cosy feel to my small, slightly shabby little home which Eamon’s just doesn’t have. I’ve even wondered if I should suggest that we stay there – but it wouldn’t be practical. If we have children we’d need the extra space. His house is in an extremely desirable area. It has a Jacuzzi and the garden is large and a horticulturalist’s dream. There’s even a view of Dublin Bay from the front bedroom. It’s a wonderful house really. I simply must try to get more enthusiastic about it. I could add my own little touches. Yes, of course I could. Even though Eamon said he’s had a lot of it freshly decorated there must be some additions I could make. And, of course, there’s the artist’s studio he plans to build for me. That would be all my own.

  I start to pat the sheepdog absentmindedly. Maybe Samantha is right. Maybe ‘passion’ is an issue for a lot of us at this workshop. After all ‘reason’ is the reason why I’m drawn to marrying Eamon. And if I do this I’ll simply have to find an outlet for the passionate side of me. The side that James Mitchel has made me so uncomfortably aware of.

  I look up at a large painting of a lavender-covered field which is hanging above the fireplace. Painting – yes, maybe that could be the answer. I could paint wild, passionate, wanton pictures in my wonderful studio. I’d enjoy that. It would be fun. After having painted them frenziedly it might even be quite soothing to wander into the sitting-room and find Eamon watching golf on the television.

  Golf…no, I mustn’t think about the golfing honeymoon Eamon has suggested just now. It’s so far from the passionate honeymoon I’ve often dreamed of that I can’t bear to think of it. I rise and start to mooch around, looking at the book titles. Then I notice a crumpled paperback copy of The Naked Ape wedged against the wall. I haven’t seen that book since I was eleven. Annie and I read it together. It fascinated us. It was the first book that offered us any explanation for sexual passion. Passion, there I’ve used that word again. There seems to be a lot of it around today.

  I take the book down from the shelf and look at it. It had seemed so bold and brazen with its naked cover when I was eleven. It’s awakening all kinds of memories. Happier days when sex was something deeply mysterious. ‘See this book, dog,’ I say. ‘It’s pretty saucy stuff. It’s deeply giggly.’

  The sheepdog just sighs contentedly and stretches.

  ‘My friend, Annie, and I used to read this book,’ I explain. ‘We thought it was incredibly naughty.’

  The dog scratches his ear.

  I and The Naked Ape and my cup of tea head for an overstuffed armchair. ‘Maybe I’ll just have a little browse through it,’ I think, but I don’t. I’m remembering the first time I looked at its pages. I’m remembering how daring I’d felt. How furtive…I’m in Annie’s attic. We’ve got torches. We feel like bandits. We’re crouching over the book that is currently on my lap and giggling…

  No. No, I mustn’t start daydreaming now. I must go back to the workshop. It’s probably already started.

  I’m late again like the White Rabbit. I scurry out of the room.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Alice, I was wondering what had happened to you,’ Samantha says serenely as I rejoin the workshop and head for my big cushion. ‘We were just discussing the importance of the “inner child”.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ I smile at her warily. Then I add, ‘That sounds interesting,’ because I don’t want to appear uncooperative.

  ‘In fact we’ve just started a little exercise, Alice,’ Samantha continues. ‘I want you to remember a time in your childhood when you felt really carefree. Really happy. I want you to write about it as though you’re telling a trusted friend what happened. You’ll find a notepad and pencil beside you. Take as long as you need.’

  I look around. Everyone else is scribbling. Oh no – it’s just like being late with an article. I pick up the pencil grimly and start to chew it. What on earth am I going to write about? Then, as Samantha smiles at me kindly I get my answer. Of course! I’ll write about Annie and me and The Naked Ape.

  ‘I’m remembering a spring afternoon when my friend Annie and I read a book called The Naked Ape in her attic,’ I scribble, my pencil scurrying eagerly across the page. ‘One of the advantages of knowing Annie when I was eleven was that she’d sneaked a copy of The Naked Ape off her parents’ bookshelf and they hadn’t yet missed it. We devoured the sex bits with horror and glee. They excited us, somehow, though the whole thing sounded awful. The details of enlargement and engorgement, lubrication, flushes, pelvic thrusts and vaginal contractions, not to mention sperm and other squishy stuff, all seemed deeply embarrassing. The only way to do sex, it seemed to me, was to choose someone who would kindly overlook the whole thing later. Which in my case was a boy called Aaron, even though we weren’t as close as we’d been when we were younger.’

  I pause and wonder if I should have stayed with the sheepdog in the library. Suddenly these recollections don’t seem so ‘carefree’ and ‘fun’ after all. Maybe I should just doodle a bit and wait for the others to finish. I look at Matt. He’s really getting into this exercise. Oh well, I might as well give it a go too.

  ‘Aaron had been my best friend for years,’ I scribble. ‘But now that he was older there was something less soft, something wilder, about him. He was suddenly taller than me. He seemed to have spurted up overnight, like those mustard and cress seeds he used to grow. He didn’t care about birds or ants like he used to. And he was n
early always too busy to go to the river. Football had become his big thing. Whenever I watched him and his friend Eric McGrath pretending they were George Best he didn’t even look at me. I somehow knew that having sex with Aaron just wouldn’t feel right, so I suspected I’d never ever have it with anyone at all.’

  I look at my notepad fearfully. Why have I described Aaron in such detail? These reminiscences are supposed to be just about Annie and me and The Naked Ape, only now I’m remembering them I see that they aren’t. The important bit happened later, after we’d left that attic. It had very little to do with The Naked Ape at all.

  I turn the page on my notepad, and as I do so I feel as though I am pushing a door open into my own past. To a day when my childhood was dappling into something different. A day when I could feel the severance and yet could glory in what remained.

  ‘After we’d read the sex bits in The Naked Ape at least five times that spring afternoon, Annie put it back on her parents’ bookshelf with amazing lack of detection,’ I scribble. ‘This seemed to reassure her in some way because she suddenly announced that she’d been thinking about sex and she’d decided something. She’d decided that the only thing that could possibly make people want to bump and bounce off each other so slurpily and scarily was love. And if love made you want to do something that ridiculous it must be a big and wonderful thing and she wanted it. I looked at her for a while after she’d announced this, not knowing what to say. In fact I didn’t say anything. We left the subject quickly, almost carefully, as if guided by one of those beams of insight that can come at any age. Suddenly we wanted to leave all that ‘stuff’ until later, because we knew that’s where it belonged. And so we ran off to the river to see if there was any frog spawn yet, and found Aaron and Eric McGrath there too. We paddled and giggled and when I was climbing up a muddy bank Aaron held out his hand to help me. And it felt firm and warm and right. And I looked into his face and I knew

  I loved him. And I knew he loved me too. And it had nothing to do with The Naked Ape and those strange words that had so perplexed me. It was just that there, that afternoon, there was no one else I would have preferred to be with. No one else who knew me so well. And I somehow knew too that time was dappling our certainties. I knew that sometimes none of this would seem true. And then we walked for a while until we came to the narrow bridge. The one with no sides – just a plank across the water. I had crossed it so many times before. Completely unafraid.

  ‘That was the last time I crossed that bridge without looking down. In later years I would walk further to the footbridge, not even considering it. But that day I followed Aaron’s firm, steady footsteps. Revelling in our daring. And then we went to the Delaneys’ shop and bought four of the marshmallow mice we liked so much. The marshmallow mice with proper tails. We were – so happy – so happy to find that we were young again. Young in the old way that we knew.

  ‘And then Aaron and Eric drifted back to their football, and Annie and I went to her house to watch The Monkees and wish we could meet Davy Jones. And though we knew time was making things different, a small sweet strand from the past had somehow reached us like a narrow bridge over our different dreams. Reminding us that what had now nearly gone had been so very precious, and that we knew it. And it was in some deep part of us all and would always be there.

  ‘That spring a woman in the village read my tea leaves and told me I would marry “the man next door”. I was sure that she meant Aaron. By the time summer came Annie had decided she wanted to be a jazz singer in a smoky New York night club. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but it didn’t matter. The tadpoles changed into frogs and I hopped around our lawn saving them from the mower. And then, shortly after my twelfth birthday, Aaron’s parents announced they were emigrating to Australia. They sold their house and shipped their furniture to the other side of the world in huge wooden crates, and I never saw Aaron again. So much was changing. They even built bungalows on the meadow by the river where we used to play. And then, that autumn, I went to boarding school and in a way my childhood ended. And on my first day home during the autumn break I discovered the Delaney sisters no longer sold pink marshmallow mice with proper tails.

  I stare numbly at what I have written. Where did all these words come from? Why did I write them so urgently, so passionately? There is no comfort in them. None at all. They seem so mute and abandoned as they lie there. Lost. Bewildered. Like me.

  I hear sniffling sounds and look round. The woman in the pink tracksuit is crying. Samantha does not seem too surprised.

  ‘Some of you are probably feeling a sense of loss,’ she announces, as she shifts her long slim legs so that they are curled beneath her on the cushion. ‘That is quite natural. You’ve been remembering something precious. Something, perhaps, that you’d almost forgotten.’

  ‘When’s lunch?’ the man who wants to be a graphic designer interrupts. He doesn’t seem to be sharing the general mood.

  ‘Soon, Peter,’ Samantha answers firmly. ‘I just want to address some issues that seem to have arisen first.’

  ‘Could I open a window?’ asks the woman in the blue kaftan. ‘It’s getting a bit stuffy in here.’

  ‘Of course, Laura,’ Samantha replies. ‘You may need to use a chair.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ says Peter gallantly.

  ‘To get back to what I was saying,’ Samantha says. ‘We all have lost parts of ourselves, and we can reclaim them. Find a way to incorporate them in the person we are now. That carefree, playful child that you were remembering is still inside you and can teach you so much.’

  Though I know what Samantha is saying is important I, and a number of other people in this room, are now looking at Peter as he struggles to open the window. It seems to be jammed in some fashion. He’s pushing and pushing and it’s not shifting. ‘Try the other one,’ Samantha suggests, and he does. This time the window opens and Julie isn’t crying anymore. She’s been distracted. We all have. We want lunch. We can smell it. The dining-room is just down the corridor.

  ‘Is there anyone who would like to discuss what they have written?’ Samantha is now asking, rather pleadingly.

  Silence. I look at her sympathetically, sharing her disappointment, even though of course I could relieve it. I could speak about Aaron, but I just don’t want to.

  ‘Can I tell you after lunch?’ Julie asks tentatively.

  ‘Yes, after lunch’ – a number of people echo her suggestion. I watch them shifting restively on their cushions. Reason and passion. Poetry and prose. We are all such a mixture of things. Even the ones who were looking nostalgic are now glancing eagerly towards the door. Samantha glances at her watch.

  ‘Yes, you’re right. It is lunchtime,’ she smiles tolerantly. ‘Bon appetit, but do try to be back here by two o’clock. We’ve got a lot more personal exploration to do this afternoon.’

  ‘Save me a place, will you? I want to go to the loo,’ Matt whispers as we all rise from our cushions and our conundrums.

  ‘Yes, of course I will,’ I reply, as I follow the others out of the room. We’re almost running with glee. The simple solace of vegetarian risotto suddenly seems enormously enticing. In fact, our ‘inner children’ are so excited that there’s a minor spat about who is to have second helpings of the bread and butter pudding.

  ‘Wait. Wait,’ Samantha addresses us firmly. ‘There’s another bread and butter pudding over there on the sideboard.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Peter demands petulantly.

  ‘If you’d looked you would have seen it, but you only saw the one in front of you.’ She smiles at him and then for some reason glances at me as she adds gently, ‘Perhaps that’s a small insight in itself’.

  Chapter 21

  That ‘Personal Exploration’ day was more interesting than I’d thought it would be. I think the last ‘exercise’ we did was the most helpful. Samantha asked us to make a list of all the things we’d like to do but are frightened of for some reason. She said it might h
elp us reconnect with some of our own ‘passion’.

  ‘You may even find yourselves putting love on that list,’ she told us. ‘A lot of people are frightened of loving. Of the intimacy a close relationship brings. They are scared of being truly known in case they are rejected.’

  ‘Well, that’s not me anyway,’ I thought, remembering James Mitchel.

  The list of things I’d like to do but am too scared to try could have filled an entire shorthand notepad. Thankfully we were only given one A4 lined page each, so I just made a random selection. Among them was my desire to do an art course in Paris. There’s a college there I’d wanted to attend when I left school. In fact, I almost went there until piles of people pointed out to me that living in a garret isn’t quite as romantic as it sounds.

  ‘Why not try journalism?’ Uncle Sean suggested. ‘You loved writing essays at school. You’d enjoy the variety. And you could keep your painting as a hobby.’

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ everyone chorused. ‘What an excellent suggestion.’

  ‘Mmmm – maybe,’ I said. It certainly seemed a sensible solution, even though on at least three occasions I almost buggered off to Paris with a haversack. Annie and Laren thought I should go, but in the end I didn’t. I was scared of being alone in a big strange foreign city. Painting seemed a whimsical thing suddenly, journalism was far more sensible and solid. My French wasn’t fluent enough anyway. The reasons why I shouldn’t go to Paris grew and grew. But they have never entirely convinced me. I’m not sure they ever will.

  Another thing I put on that list was that I’d like to visit my parents’ graves again. I used to visit the graveyard occasionally, but then there came a point when I found it too upsetting. I’d like to give them flowers. Show them they are remembered. But it seems so lonely standing by their headstones. Maybe if I marry Eamon he could come with me.