And when you want to stop being anthropomorphic or even pantheistic, sea bathing is a wonderfully solitary pleasure, because all that lover lord business is only in your mind. It’s your head inside your vigorous body, and that’s it.
It’s an odd thought, that Geoffrey’s death may have given her the gift of solitude. The cathedral is a place of immense stony contemplative calm.
At the festival in Tasmania, when she read her story called The Unquiet Grave a woman at the back of the room said, That’s a poem, you know. ‘The Unquiet Grave’.
Is it. Ah.
Yes. A folk song. A ballad. People still sing it.
Clare nodded.
The thing is, said the woman, it’s got a year and a day in it. The girl sits on her lover’s grave for a year and a day and mourns him and he complains that he can’t get any peace. He wants her to go away and leave him alone.
Oh, I see. I didn’t know that. I mean, I knew it was a phrase, a saying. I’d love to get a copy of the poem.
There’s plenty around. There’s one in the Norton Anthology.
The Unquiet Grave. A year and a day. It all seems too serendipitous.
She has to wait until she gets home to look it up. It’s not quite as the woman in the audience described it; interesting how our memories select and shift.
‘The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true love,
In cold grave she was lain.
‘I’ll do as much for my true-love
As any young man may;
I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave
For a twelvemonth and a day.’
The twelvemonth and a day being up.
The dead began to speak:
‘Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?’
‘’Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek.’
‘You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.
‘’Tis down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that e’er was seen,
Is withered to a stalk.
‘The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away.’
So it is the girl buried and the man who sits weeping, and it’s not until the twelve month and a day that she asks who’s not letting her sleep. One kiss doesn’t seem much for a lover to want. Except of course that it is a token. Clare wonders why the man will be doomed: because a kiss from her so long dead will be mortal, or because of some more supernatural danger, that by kissing her he will share her fate? And if their hearts will decay, does that mean that love will die with it? Hers doesn’t seem to have yet. Whatever, it’s good advice she gives him:
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away.
It’s what she’s trying to do, make herself content. She just has to work out how.
She rings up her daughter, who’s been listening to the news headlines.
Listen to this, she says. A man, in Wales, has one diseased kidney and one healthy one; he has an operation to remove the diseased kidney and after it’s over they realise the doctors’ve taken out the healthy one.
Her voice is soft with horror. She feels a terrible affinity with bad hospital stories.
On no, says Clare. That’s a terrible story. She’s shuddering too.
What’s he going to do, says her daughter.
Die, I suppose, says Clare.
The poor man. The poor man.
It’s the perfect horror story. Succinct, dense. Roald Dahl could use it as the twist in one of his tales, but it needs no more words, The man, Wales (Wales the only detail, a neat little anchor), the kidneys, the doctors, the wrong one.
She often thinks of this story, for the pleasure of a narrative so small yet perfectly formed. Her favourite kind; a few spare words, and everything else provided by the reader.
Teacup. Teapot. There’s a certain clarity in the way these words form themselves in the mouth. They have a freshness, a dryness, in the way of unsweetness. They chime with the pure notes of silver spoons and thin china. There is orderliness in them: teacups, teapot, a life in which they occur will be ceremonious and fine in its detail. Like the curved spout which shapes the tea itself into an arc of steaming gold. So it seems when your mouth shapes the words teacup, teapot. Manners and morals will stand to attention.
Clare back from Tasmania is making tea for Polly. The cups are shallow, in bluish-thin porcelain, washed with a brown flushing to orange under faded-garish pink and green transfer roses. They are Victorian, they belonged to her grandmother who was born in 1872, they are quite possibly hideous, and she is very fond of them. She places the strainer over a cup and picks up the teapot, her fingers fluttering over the knob of its lid though it is well made and won’t fall off when she tips it. She feels like a picture out of a Girls’ Own Paper that belonged to her mother; Victorian too.
The Cup that Cheers but not Inebriates, she says.
Polly gives that wonderful snub-nosed little chuckle that sets Clare off too. Polly knows these things, and she has cups like these odd little brown ones, only hers are green, and have more gilt, and are posher. They don’t know much about them but think they must be nineteenth century Japanese imitations of English china. Or maybe Austrian. Acquired it is likely in some early ambitions of upward mobility.
Lips that touch alcohol will never touch mine, says Polly.
That’s not a picture. That’s a temperance slogan.
Yes, not my scene really.
Polly was brought up a good Catholic girl in a country town, Clare a nice little Protestant in an industrial city, but they share all sorts of curious Victorian-Edwardian remnants of culture, and take delight in exploring them.
Now there’s a lot of gossip to catch up with. Hardly any of it cheerful. Like the story of Lily, who’s been organising going to Melbourne to live with her lover.
She must have left by now, says Clare.
It was all fixed up, says Polly. Her furniture had gone. Her piano, everything. And suddenly he says, Don’t come. I don’t love you any more.
What! But they were absolutely besotted with one another. You only had to look at them. They were radiant.
Well, I thought so.
What a shit.
They were so handsome together; maybe that deceived them.
How is Lily?
Not good. I don’t think she’s stopped crying for a week.
The cups chime against the spoons. The silver milk jug is beaded with water drops. I suppose the tea table has always been the place for telling tragic tales, says Clare.
Watching Polly’s long fingers holding out her cup to be refilled she hears her father singing as though he were in the next room. Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, she says.
Polly obliges by warbling the line, very prettily, her voice quivering with the musical emotion it seems to require.
What comes next, asks Clare.
I don’t know that I’ve ever known.
You don’t need to really. The whole story is there. The beautiful woman, pale hands are always a beautiful woman, the lost love, the exotic setting. Where is it, the Shalimar? India, or Persia? It is a river, isn’t it?
I know it’s a French perfume. In a curvy little Persian sort of bottle.
That’s a lot of help.
Hang on, is it loved? Are you sure it isn’t love? Pale hands I love, beside the Shalimar.
Oh well, then, it’s a completely different story. Not lost love at all, but love requited.
Or maybe not, maybe he hasn’t declared himself yet. Or this is it, and she’ll say no.
Or yes, and they’ll live happily ever after.
Speaking of perfect one-line narratives, says Clare, How’s this . . . and she tells her about the man in Wales having the wrong kidney removed. Polly gasps.
Oh, she says. Oh. It’s the fates. Blind fates. One eye between them, and the one with the eye never the one with the scissors. Or the scalpel, in this case.
Some people would wreck that story by turning it into a narrative forty pages long, says Clare. But the sentence is all you need; the reader does the work. Odd, though, the place is important. You need the place.
Like Shalimar. Pale hands I love beside the Molonglo: you can make it scan but it doesn’t have at all the same ring.
We have to find out where it is.
They get out all the dictionaries and such but can find no entry for Shalimar. Then Clare gets an atlas, and there it is: Shalimar Railway Station is the reference. Polly’s snub-nose chuckle sets them off again. And when they look up the map it turns out to be on the south west edge of Calcutta, opposite the Kiddepore Docks, on a river called the Hugli. (It’s a detailed atlas.)
It’s the British in India, says Polly.
There must be something else. Why Shalimar Railway Station? Does it go there, or come from it? Why isn’t the place on the map?
It must be all there is.
They can’t help laughing at the idea of a young man serenading his love’s pale hands beside a railway station.
If only we knew the rest, says Clare. Maybe it’s a comic song.
No no. Has to be romantic. She warbles the line again.
Who can we ask? Who knows about antique popular love songs?
Maybe just about only us.
Not yet, surely.
The phone rings. It’s Polly’s youngest son, guessing where she is. Her face goes solemn.
Oh my goodness, she says. Oh my goodness. She says to Clare: Francis Hepple has died.
Clare doesn’t know Francis Hepple but she knows who he is. He’s the kind of very senior public servant who talks to the prime minister. She heard him give a speech once, in the sense that she was present, but failed to make herself listen. His wife Marie is a colleague of Polly’s.
Yes, she says on the phone, yes.
Clare asks: An accident?
No. A heart attack. At work. His secretary found him. At his desk, pen still in hand, the words trailing off. . . kind of classical, really. Almost a quotation.
What they call a good death.
Good for the person dying. Bloody awful for everyone else.
How old was he?
Middle fifties. Marie is fifty-three, he was a bit older.
Too young, says Clare. And Marie too young to be a widow.
Oh yes.
The obsequies of Francis Hepple are attended by grandeur. The nearest the city has to a cathedral. Numerous eulogies. Children fly in from overseas. Mourners come from all over the country. Distinguished people are photographed for the television news: politicians, diplomats, mysterious bureaucrats. Marie in a black suit and a face entirely devoid of expression is only glimpsed. This is not the glamorous television funeral-as-entertainment, when the country can feast on its popular grief for heroes of disaster, firemen incinerated, policemen shot, helicopter pilots crashing on mercy dashes, or for pop stars suiciding or maybe just snuffing themselves out practising unsafe sex, or sporting stars expiring in the fullness of time and honours. Funerals with tons of flowers, extravagant tears, quavery-voiced idolatry. Francis Hepple’s funeral is the hieratic culmination of the life of a public servant, good and faithful, and probably the most public event of it.
Quite strange, really, said Polly, who went. Marie and the kids didn’t seem to be much part of it at all. I mean, they were there, there was quite proper formal recognition of them, but it didn’t belong to them.
The property of the state.
In death as in life, you might say.
I saw Marie on the television.
That face. You can tell she doesn’t know what’s hit her. At least you had a chance to get used to the idea of Geoffrey dying.
Oh yes, I know. I know how important that was. But also you know it didn’t help, afterwards. Remember how I said there are no rehearsals for grief.
I remember. But there are for the moment of death.
Not at all like the real thing. And the point is Marie is still in the early part. When there’s so much to do, that’s just inexorably got to be done. It’s later, when the ceremonies and all that attention are over, and it’s just you and no husband. . . It makes me think of that hymn: The tumult and the shouting dies. . .
Lest we forget. Not much danger of that with you.
Would you want there to be?
Perhaps, beware of hagiography.
Clare looked at Polly, she frowned, as though listening to the echo of the word.
Hagiography? Do you think . . .
I didn’t say . . . I just meant, beware.
I don’t think I’m making any kind of saint out of him. Just missing the person he was, even his flaws and warts and all. Not that I’m thinking of warts, really . . .
Should I say, exactly.
I’m pretty robust about him. Remember that time we were meeting Miriam and David in that restaurant and they arrived two minutes early and we were already there and they said, You’re early, you’re never early, and I said, That’s because we haven’t got Geoffrey to make us late, and they looked rather stunned and then laughed like mad.
Yeah, you’re okay. Marie now . . .
She’ll be okay. Eventually. As ever one is. People say to me, You’re so wonderful, you cope so well. And I think, well what the hell else can I do. I suppose I could stand in the middle of my life and howl, but where would that get me? I bet everyone I knew would move well out of earshot. People say, In your place I think I would go to pieces, and I want to say, have you noticed, people only go to pieces when there’s somebody around to pick them up.
Well, says Polly . . .
I know, some people do go round the bend, lose their marbles, etcetera. But I am pretty bloody rational. Too rational for my own good, I sometimes think.
Clare knows she is lucky to have Polly for a friend. She can say anything to her. Just about anything.
Hagiography? She knows Geoffrey wasn’t a saint. It’s not saintliness that she misses. Rational, she says to herself. Too bloody rational.
When she embarked on an adulterous affair she might not have seemed to be behaving rationally. What I like about you, the lover said, is that you are ruled by your emotions. You let them show you how to behave. Ah, she said, I take notice of my emotions, but in a rational way.
Well, that was then. This is now.
In one of her novels the heroine realises that she has been reading a primer of women to help her to work out how to live her life. Some are alive, some dead, some friends, some a matter of history or repute. Her character thinks that by examining their lives (the unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates, which she put in another novel) she will find clues for living her own. Clare liked that image, the primer of women, the idea of all the lives a person could read to work out her own. But then after all you just have to go about it, and your own life becomes a part of the primer. You hope not a cautionary tale: don’t do it like this. Avoid that at all costs.
But it was quite a few years ago, that book. Now the power and the strength of the women offering themselves for examination seem always in danger of being overwhelmed by sadness. Now her life seems more like living in a Greek chorus. Finding words, and you hope they will be shapely, memorable, poignant words, for grief, death, disaster. Turning terror into a poetry of beauty and dignity, whose only comfort is its own grave self. Dancing with light feet that belie the heavy hearts that move them.
She got the Tasmania photographs developed. The raindrops on the windows pictures
turned out very well, she was pleased with them. Photographing great scenery doesn’t interest her, it’s this unexpected small detail that charms.
She didn’t see Polly for a while. She hadn’t been one of Marie Hepple’s closest friends, but now Marie was needing her. Recognising however obscurely Polly’s gift for looking after people. Then one day after work she called in with a small sheaf of papers. Clare was again sitting beside her fire reading, creating her small ceremony of comfort and control in the cold spring afternoon.
I’ve found it for you, said Polly.
Sit down, said Clare, I’ll get some wine. What?
Shalimar. Not a river, but gardens. Water gardens, with fountains and pools, Mughal gardens.
Ah, Kashmir.
Yes. On the edge of the Himalayas. Srinagar, it seems. Built by the son of Akbar, called Jahangir, which means Seizer of the World. Famous for his gardens too, and Shalimar is the most famous of them. Polly reads from her paper: Shalimar Bagh has an air of seclusion and repose, and its rows of fountains and shaded trees seem to recede towards the snow capped mountains.
I knew it had to be more romantic than a railway station.
And so it is. We’ve all seen those gorgeous tourist pictures of Kashmir and its water palaces, all those domes and lacework and slender columns, that Mughal style. Lots of fountains that fling tiny drops of water in the air, so you walk around in a rainbow mist. Well, that’s where our hero is. And what’s more, here’s the poem.
No! You haven’t found that too!
Yup. It’s one of the Indian Love Lyrics. 1902.
Of course, of course. We had the music of them at home. And of course it’s Edwardian. Where on earth did you get all this?
Off the Net, said Polly smugly. Then she gave a hoot of laughter. Did a search on Shalimar. And you know where I found it? The poem? On a site devoted to P. G. Wodehouse. Designed to cross-reference everything he ever mentions.
The Fog Garden Page 13