Children of Light

by Lucy English

  The warbler sang its liquid song like trickling water, or was it water trickling into the gully? She listened again. It was water and it was unusual to hear it from so near the hut. She walked towards the gully. The rain had swelled the stream and it was now pouring down as if the hills were over-full sponges. She walked towards the Ferrou. The pool was as still as ever, but the water pouring out of it was a small waterfall over the stone and down the rocks. Perhaps when it was raining the water was cloudy, but now it was clear.

  She dipped her hand in. She could see her face in the water and her grey hair suddenly surprised her because she had been thinking of a younger her, and she was still there in the past, aged thirty-five by the window at The Heathers. Too old to be young. Too young to be old. She looked away from the water, away from her reflection. Standing by the Ferrou she could be any age, 35, 22, 18, 10. She could be ten years old in her own private place.

  And as she had done when she was ten, she undressed and stepped into the pool.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Monday 23rd May. Morning

  Felix, I’ve been thinking about you. It’s early morning but it’s already warm. I’m having my breakfast outside under the tree. I’ve taken the table outside. You would like that, you seemed to live in the outdoors and houses were places you only went to sleep, and not even that sometimes.

  I saw you yesterday. When I swam in the pool. I dived under and when I opened my eyes I saw you, just your face for a moment and your hair swirling in the water. Then you opened your eyes. Dear Felix, so much can happen in a second. When did I last see you look at me like that, sometime in an early morning, waking up and you were there. You never got up in the mornings but you opened your eyes, and even if you didn’t smile your eyes did. I saw you happy. I couldn’t hold my breath any longer and I shot to the surface. I once said to you I would take you to the Ferrou and yesterday I saw you.

  Today I’m tearful and tired. I couldn’t sleep much last night. Isn’t it what we all want when somebody goes, to see them again, just once? I used to see my father, sometimes so real I felt I could touch him, but he was never looking at me.

  All the water in the world connects and this little pool runs into the gully, runs into the river, runs into the sea, and the canal water meets the River Avon at Bath, and the Severn at Avonmouth, and becomes the ocean. I’m thinking of water around the earth as flowing and shifting as the wind that blows into this valley. On a day like this when there is no breeze and the air is still, it feels like time has stopped, movement has stopped, but what movement is here that I can’t see? High up, the air streams over the mountain peaks, and beneath my feet, moisture moves underground towards the river.

  Thursday 26th May. Afternoon

  I think it’s Thursday. These last few days have been strange. So much is happening a day feels like a week, but nothing is happening that anybody else could see. I’m moving from one terrace to another, walking in the woods, sitting by the pool, eating when I want to, sleeping when I want to. It’s like being a child, when a day was so long and an afternoon was forever.

  I swam in the pool again. I didn’t see Felix. I didn’t think that I would, these things don’t come to order. I used to see my father so often. I’ve never seen my mother.

  She disappeared so gradually that when she did die it felt she had already gone. I noticed it first when Sanclair was at college. She started sleeping more in the afternoons. I thought it was because she missed him. We both did. The Heathers without him was a white, static place.

  In the evenings the television gave the illusion of chatter and animation, but we were both silent. My hair started to go grey, a few strands at first, but in three years it was grey all over. I felt old. My mother said I should dye it, but I didn’t want to. It seemed pointless, who would I be fooling? I was old. My son was at university. My lover was gone and I was left to look after my mother and do the garden for her because it made her feel so tired.

  At university Sanclair changed. I thought at first it was the pressure of studying and the worry of having to support himself that caused it. He talked more about job prospects and career moves, he seemed to be obsessed with finding a well-paid job. All through school he had been easy-going and even when he was taking his ‘A’ levels he was more concerned with surfing and his bike than with exams. But he was a bright young man and he did well. At university he got a glimpse of success and it overwhelmed him. He said, ‘I don’t want to land up having to live with my mum when I’m thirty-five.’ That hurt me, because I had stayed in Bath because of him. You can’t expect children to be grateful but I never felt so distant from him as the year after he left college. He changed his name to Stephen and this underlined it as well. He wanted nothing I wanted. I wanted adventure, excitement and journeys in the mind. I wanted to be close to the growing world. I wanted experiences I could remember for ever. I wanted to try and feel the strange magic of the Ferrou in the most deathly-boring routines.

  He wanted a job. He wanted a house. He wanted a car.

  He started work with a computer firm outside Bristol and within a year had bought a starter home near Yate. Vivienne and I went to see it. It was a boxy little house decorated in shades of white. The garden was a pile of mud because Stephen was laying a patio. He had a large music system and a large telly. His bedroom had a bed with a red duvet. It depressingly made me think of The Heathers, but The Heathers had been designed by an architect around the view and the light. This place was jammed in with other little boxes. The view was of next-door’s washing line.

  Sanclair/Stephen. I wanted him to be what I thought he was, extraordinary. And he was. He was an extraordinary little boy and right through his childhood everyone who met him loved him. Even at the Catholic boys’ school when I saw the teachers at open day they would go misty-eyed and say, ‘Well, you know … Sanclair’s unique …’

  This is Stephen. Tall and blond with hazel eyes. It’s Sunday and he’s come over for lunch at The Heathers. On Saturdays he goes windsurfing, on Sundays he plays rugby and he’s come straight from there. Just showered, he’s wearing an Arran jumper and jeans, his hair’s wet. It’s cut in a way that flops over his face so he keeps flicking it back. He kisses Vivienne and asks her how she is. She’s fine today. She wants to show him a new mahonia she bought for the garden. He can have a cutting. ‘Hi, Mum,’ he says and I smile. He doesn’t ask me how I am. He doesn’t ask me if I’ve heard from Gregor lately. Vivienne attends to the lunch. We sit by the view. He looks at his watch. What I want to do is get my accordion and sing, but I haven’t done that for a long time now. He looks me up and down. I know he thinks I’m frumpy. I went to see him at college. I met him in the bar, he said, ‘I knew it was you. I saw you walking through the door and I thought only my mum could wear such frumpy old gear as that,’ and he laughed. It was a hard laugh I wasn’t used to hearing.

  ‘So how’s the job?’ I ask him and he yawns and stretches and tells me about sales targets, five-year plans and an expansion programme. It’s funny, the way he pokes the air when he talks is just like Gregor. Are gestures learned or inherited? I wonder what he has learned from me? Vivienne says, ‘Lunch is up,’ and I help her serve. She’s made far too much. She has the appetite of a sparrow. It’s a whole leg of lamb. It will take us all week to eat it. Stephen looks at his watch. He eats and talks about windsurfing, rock-climbing and the lads in the club. Vivienne listens and smiles as if he’s revealing the wisdom of Solomon. Stephen eats two helpings and declines a third. We leave the dishes and sit by the window for coffee. Vivienne is tired. She puts her feet up on the sofa. Stephen sits on the floor. On the other side of the canal the cows are lying down. Does that mean it’s going to rain?

  The valley is going to be dug up soon for the by-pass and I feel the impending loss of this view.

  ‘What do you think about the by-pass?’ I say to Stephen, who has been listening to my mother telling him about the ins and outs of the Costellos. Dermot is in retail and is doing qui
te well.

  ‘You’ve got to get from A to B. Batheaston’s a bottle-neck.’ He looks irritated that I’ve brought the subject up. He laughs. ‘Mum, are you going to become one of those protesters? I can just see you in your wellies and your stripy hat!’ His laugh reminds me of how Vivienne used to laugh.

  ‘It’ll be a shame about the view,’ says Vivienne. ‘Hugo built this house for the view. I wrote a letter to the council but they never replied.’

  Stephen stands up. ‘Well, I had better be off. The lunch was excellent. Thanks, Grandma. Bye, Mum.’

  We stay by the window. The light is fading and it’s not even three o’clock. It’s November and the trees are bare. The garden is all colours of dingy yellows and browns.

  ‘You didn’t give him the mahonia,’ I say to Vivienne but she’s asleep.

  I hated that winter. I hated the rain and the mud. I hated the sleet and the cold when I cycled to work. I hated work and the bored teenagers sent to England by their wealthy parents, and the same lessons over and over again. The gloomy house converted into the language school, painted all sorts of cheerful colours but the downstairs toilet smelled and the staff room wasn’t big enough. And I hated the other teachers, who liked to pretend their work had a meaning when of course it didn’t. They were there, just like me, because somewhere along the line they had failed to get the big prizes. And I was fed up with the folk club, the same backward-looking traditionalism, the same tunes. I had £5,000 in the bank and I was restless.

  I wrote to Tony but he didn’t write back. I wrote to Gregor, but he wrote saying the Baba had been unwell and the whole ashram had been in a state of anxiety for a month and now they were all facing the inevitable, that the Baba would die one day ‘and then what would we all be doing?’ Yes, indeed. I still didn’t want to go to India. This was the money I had saved over the last twelve years. I didn’t want to waste it. I looked at holiday brochures. I looked at flats in town. I looked at cars. I even looked at motorbikes, but I couldn’t spend the money.

  It was April and the apple trees were in blossom in the gardens of Sydney Sussex Buildings as I cycled to work. The canal was a lively place now with hired craft and was navigable all the way to London. People moored narrowboats in small groups from the Widcombe pond to Bathampton. There was a line of them just down from the wooden bridge. About seven, some carefully painted, some tatty, some barely habitable. I passed them every day. Sometimes there was a person emptying water or tying up a bicycle. The gardens on the other bank were vibrant and the sky was a patchy blue.

  The third houseboat from the end had a ‘for sale’ sign on it and a telephone number and that sign was there for two weeks. On the second week I stopped and looked. The boat was painted dark blue with fading pink borders. The windows were tiny. I peered in. I could see a little kitchen done up in an old-fashioned style with a lacy table-cloth and flowery cushions. There was a store and a polished-wood floor. A little gingerbread house. A doll’s house, like my own hut still in France that I never went back to. And I thought, yes! I want to live here! I want to be a little old woman in a little tiny place and Stephen and my mother can go on having Sunday lunches till the end of time. Yes! I want to wake up and light my stove. Yes! I want to wear long Johns and socks in bed. Yes! I want to be alone and cranky with nobody telling me I’m a frump or I’m not smart enough and nobody asking me what I’m doing or what I want for supper. Yes! I want to be alone.

  At home I phoned the number. The boat was owned by an old man from Oldfield Park. He used to have holidays on it with his wife, he said, but now she was dead he couldn’t manage it on his own. ‘It’s not la-di-da,’ he said, ‘there’s a leak in the roof. 1930s Sheffield, with a Seffel two-stroke. Seventy-foot. There’s a water-pump toilet. It’s not la-di-da but we liked it.’ I said I didn’t care about la-di-da. ‘Perhaps your chappy can fix it up.’ ‘I don’t have a chappy. How much?’

  It was £6,500. ‘I’ll get you the money tomorrow,’ I said, and I did. I took out my savings and got a loan for the rest.

  I met him by the boat. He was a grumpy old thing with a stick. ‘They’re all right,’ he said, waving his stick towards the next boat up, ‘but the rest of them, you’d be wasting your time.’ He could barely get on the boat. Once inside he gave me a history of every single object plus all the trips they’d ever taken. ‘I wanted to do the locks at Devizes, but Betty wasn’t up to it. Before she went she said, ‘‘Ern, you do the locks at Devizes,’’ but my leg’s been worse. The engine’s good. I always saw to that. I started her up last week.’ There were cups and plates in the cupboards and knives and forks in the drawers. There was a gas bottle under the sink. ‘Don’t forget to keep the bilge pumps going.’ He gave me a short lesson about navigation and where to get diesel and other provisions. I think he doubted my sanity. I was doubting it myself.

  I gave him the money and he stuffed it down his shirt. He refused any help getting off the boat. He looked back only once and, when he saw me, gave a surly ‘be-off-with-you’ wave.

  I sat in the little kitchen-sitting room and listened to the water lapping against the sides. It was late afternoon and the light was fading. I already had an urge to stoke up the stove and take away that damp, empty chill of neglect. I hadn’t told my mother yet. I hadn’t told anybody.

  I told her on Sunday when Stephen came round. She reacted much as I thought she would, as if I were seventeen and about to run away with a strange man.

  ‘Why do you want to leave? Haven’t you got everything here? I mean has it got hot water, has it got a flushing toilet, how will you wash your clothes? Oh Mireille, what a lot of money to spend on a whim!’ But I knew of course what she was really worried about was being left alone.

  ‘I’ll only be at the end of the garden,’ I said. ‘I can see you every day.’

  ‘Why? Why?’ She got so upset she couldn’t eat her lunch.

  ‘I’m nearly forty. Don’t you understand I might want my own place?’

  Stephen, who had been listening to it all, surprised me by taking Vivienne’s side. ‘Mum, don’t you think you’re being a bit mean, leaving Grandma without any warning, and as for an investment, a leaky old boat is not a good bet. You could have got a decent little flat, I know you don’t earn much but you could have sorted out a mortgage package, I’m sure. I mean, can you work this thing? What do you know about narrowboats anyway? And what if Grandma has a fall and can’t get to the phone?’

  ‘Oh no!’ wailed Vivienne.

  It went on like this all afternoon. I was irritated by both of them. In the end I had a row with Stephen. He said, ‘I mean, why do it now, Mum, buy a boat? Don’t you think you’re just a bit too …’

  ‘Old!’ I shouted. ‘You think I’m too old to have a life!’

  ‘It wasn’t going to say old,’ he snapped. ‘I was going to say weird, you know, odd. Well, you’ve always been odd, haven’t you? Living in France and all that. Don’t you think it’s time you settled down, I mean you’ve got to be pretty together to live on a boat.’

  Then I realised Stephen thought I was an incompetent. I realised he had written me off because I didn’t have a well-paid job. Me living in France, cooking, chopping up wood, managing on nothing, singing, looking after him, meant absolutely nothing because he couldn’t remember it. His memory of me was as Vivienne’s unpaying guest. This was my mother’s view of me and I had long ago ceased to pay attention to it, but this view had leaked into Stephen. We had all been together so long, of course it would.

  ‘I have different values from you,’ I said to him and to my mother if she was listening. ‘Why is it OK for you to pursue your life and not me? Why is it OK for you to make decisions about your life but it’s not OK for me to make decisions about mine?’

  Stephen couldn’t answer that, nor could Vivienne, blowing her nose. She sniffed loudly. Stephen sat next to her and said, ‘There, there, Grandma, I’ll make sure you’re safe.’ They deserved each other.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said an
d left. I walked down the garden, over the bridge and on to the tow-path. I was going to spend the night on the boat even if it was freezing cold.

  ‘Mum! Mum!’ Stephen was running after me. We met on the tow-path. He scratched his head. ‘Um … look … sorry … I didn’t mean to call you weird …’

  ‘Weird means different. We’re different. We want different things.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you want,’ he sighed.

  ‘No you don’t, and that’s what makes us different.’ He looked more like Gregor than I’d ever seen him, but Gregor would have understood.

  ‘I wish you’d married Tony,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘I don’t. I’m fine the way I am.’ We were walking towards the line of boats.

  ‘Do you think I should stay with Grandma tonight?’

  ‘She makes a lot of fuss but she can cope you know.’ I was standing by my boat. ‘Do you want to see it?’ I said.

  Stephen shook his head. ‘Next week. I’ll help you move some stuff.’

  I sat in my boat and listened to the water slap the sides. This is what it was to be alone.

  This is what it is to be alone. Sitting at the table outside my hut writing my life history. Writing the choices I have made. Stepping away from what is considered normal.

  Alone isn’t lonely. Lonely is a gap, is a hole that can’t be filled, is a dull pain that won’t go away, is a longing for company, for anybody to distract you. Alone isn’t that. Alone is the choice of quiet. Alone is the slow movement of silence. Alone is the thoughts streaming through my mind becoming these words. Is the scratch of this pen across the paper.

  A moment, another moment, another moment.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Thursday 26th May. Evening

  The sun is just going down. It’s warm enough to sit outdoors. Later, when it gets dark, the cold air comes up from the river. By mid-June the nights will be warm as well. Sticky nights with open windows and the cicadas singing, but now in the evenings it’s cold enough to wear a jumper.