The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

Association? Stella shook her head, what sort of word was that? It summed up everything about Gordon that would never do. His dogged timidity, his caution that amounted to emotional paralysis, his putting of politeness before passion. And yet . . . she frowned as she flicked her cigarette through the top of the window . . . here was the letter, in itself quite a bold move considering the short shrift given to his previous communication. She did him the favour of finishing it.

  ‘. . . can imagine. But it might surprise you to know that at long last my circumstances have changed . . .’ she supposed that by this he meant his wife ‘. . . which is hard on everyone, but long overdue. I really don’t know which way to turn at the moment, I suppose I’ve taken too much for granted for too long. Anyway, Stella, if you’ve read this far, which I doubt, please accept my good wishes for the wonderful future you deserve and if you should want me, anything, you know where I am.’

  It was a poor stumbling thing, like Gordon himself but for that reason alone it made her eyes prickle. Of course she didn’t know where he was, she never had. She hadn’t wanted or needed to, because he always came to her. And anyway, where would he be now that his ‘circumstances’ were different? Not, she fancied, in some cool and uncluttered bachelor flat. It was all too painfully easy to picture Gordon in a bedsit of the old Rising Damp variety, with a gas meter, a baby Belling, a candlewick bedspread and Y-fronts over the radiator . . . She grimaced with a sort of sorrowful irritation. Now the underlining popped off the page at her: ‘anything’. The awful truth was that he meant it. Anything that she needed and that was in his power to give, he would, from a bed (shared or otherwise) for the night, to his life savings or his internal organs, and no questions asked. It was pathetic in the true sense of the word.

  On her way out of the carpark she drew up by a litter bin shaped like a Womble, and stuffed the letter down its throat. Ten miles later she realised she’d thrown away the song idea, and when she tried to remember it, she couldn’t.

  The weather, which had been bright and brisk on her departure from London, grew progressively more sullen as she got further north and the afternoon closed in. By the time she drove on to the Countess of Ailmay it had settled into a soft, muffing mist that left her coat and hair pearled with moisture and made the darkness opaque, so there was little point in spending the journey on deck. If there were any gulls wheeling they were keeping it to themselves, and the only sound was the churn of the ferry engine and the secretive tap and slither of the card game being played by two of her fellow passengers. The ferry was no more than a quarter full, and though the lower seating area abounded with facilities – a bar and self-service snack counter, fruit machines, a juke box – none was being used.

  She went to the bar, perched on a stool and ordered a Scotch, with a pleasing sense of making the barman’s day. ‘I generally drink bourbon, but when in Rome . . . Plus whatever you’re having.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll have a beer.’ He gave her a wry look along with her change. ‘Don’t fret about it, they all drink Chardonnay over there these days.’

  ‘Too many people like me, huh?’

  ‘They’re no’ so bad,’ he said, admitting nothing. ‘And the island would collapse without them.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’ She raised her glass and gave him her foxiest smile. ‘Here’s to us.’

  ‘Santé.’

  Driving into the swirling unlit fastnesses of Ailmay at eight o’clock on a winter’s evening, with only Fran’s enthusiastically annotated map for company, Stella found herself wishing for rather more evidence of the Chardonnay-swigging incomers. But when she did eventually locate Glenfee there was only a couple of hundred yards of unmade road up not too hairy a gradient, and the house itself was reassuringly intact. It was possible to see that it had once been a simple, low croft clinging to the hillside, but however Fran and Roger had lived in the heyday of the Ailmay community, they’d since sold out to common sense and Glenfee was now to all intents and purposes a respectable re-cladded small house with a chalet roof, a garage, an outside light and double glazing. Stella was a little ashamed to feel comforted.

  Inside it was spare but comfortable in the style of most holiday homes. Books ranged from Ruth Rendell to the local tourist guide, there were chess, Scrabble and Mid-life Crisis on the shelf, and a fridge-freezer and microwave in the kitchen. She had been warned about there being no television, that didn’t bother her, but she was glad she’d brought her portable stereo and some CDs. The double bed was made up, and the radiators were not completely cold. A fire lay ready to light in the living-room grate. There was a note on the kitchen table.

  ‘Dear Miss Carlyle, There are basics in fridge, pint of milk on order every other day. Heating is on timer, turn up in hall if wanted. Logs out the back. Payphone also in hall, my no. is 531206. Shop is Brundle’s in the village, ten minutes by car, they have most things. Hope you enjoy your stay, Jean Sherlock.’

  She unloaded the car, put her things away, lit the fire and made a bacon sandwich. Suddenly she was exhausted, poleaxed by the journey, the emotional and physical stresses of the past weeks and her own isolation. It was all she could do to drag herself away from the half-eaten sandwich, and the fire, and up to bed.

  Later, when she thought of Ailmay and how events there changed her life, it was the memory of the view that first morning which brought it all back to her. The mist of the previous evening had cleared, to reveal the dark, secretive mass of Stone Fell overlooking the house to the north; the dour moors coloured like an alsatian dog – tan, brown, black, grey, scarcely a hint of green – rolling and stumbling towards the distant shine of pewter sand, beyond which fretted the Atlantic. And the sky, the extraordinary volatile sky, which on that morning was dramatic with thunderous galleons of cloud, their swollen sails seamed like black opals with fitful sunlight.

  This was a mercurial landscape, charged with fluid energy, continually changing character with the light and the weather. On those rare days where there were long periods of unbroken sunshine the island seemed to sleep, to be held in a spell of unnatural stillness before it could once again shake and stir and come to life.

  Like a first real love-affair she was never to forget it, nor fail to acknowledge its influence. Nor did she ever go back.

  She was utterly unprepared for the immediate effects of her self-imposed exile and the isolation she had so craved. Once she had located the whereabouts of the life-support systems – the shop, the post office, the garage, the pub – she fell into a routine that was almost completely solitary. She woke early and worked for a couple of hours, then walked down the unmade road to the point where it joined the tarmac, picking up her pint of milk every other day on the way back. She rediscovered the delights of a cooked breakfast and then worked all morning and had a bottle of beer and a sandwich at about two.

  In the afternoon she walked. She had a map of the island and occasionally set herself objectives, but on the whole she walked on a time basis, being sure to turn back at a point from which she could reach Glenfee by dark. When she did check the distances covered in the first week they weren’t that great – though mentally tough she was chronically unfit – but the space and all began to pump through her system and fill her head so that she felt as though the edges of her identity were blurring. Her sharp, intense sense of herself diffused under the onslaught of so much emptiness. The endless sky, the open sea, the mountains – especially Stone Fell, whose summit remained, for her, wrapped in mystery.

  What she thought of as work here became a very different process from that which she undertook in London. As always when without a piano she had to find another place, a situation in which she felt secure so that her imagination could graze in its haphazard way. After a couple of days’ trial and error she settled on a small folding card table which she set up in the picture window facing the sea, on the principle that there was no point in even attempting to recreate the familiar. She was dependent on what she herself could sing, and retain. This had the inevit
able effect of making the music, like her surroundings, more fluid. She was by no means sure, when she hit on an emotive or witty sequence one day, that it would still be there in exactly the same form the next. The line or two of lyric with which, for Stella, every song began, became not just the genesis but an absolutely vital aide memoire.

  And here was another thing. On Ailmay she thought differently. It was difficult here to find the smart, spoiled, fraught urban perception which informed the songs she wrote in London. Here she was subject to a wider, deeper emotional current which to begin with she resisted fiercely, terrified of letting sentimentality have its head. She was not immune to it, it was there in her and she’d been able to use it to good effect but always with that salutary touch of irony and world-weariness.

  A song she had not heard or remembered for years haunted her.

  ‘The water is wide, I cannot get o’er, And neither have I wings to fly ...’

  That was the kind of song she felt she might be able to write here – something timeless about yearning and separation. A song that relied not on specificity, but on something more visceral for its emotional pull. A song that would speak not just to individuals but to the common stream of which they were all part. And then she’d catch herself thinking these things and wince at her grand pretensions.

  All things considered it was inevitable that on the fourth day she slid into a period of profound unhappiness. Not depression she’d known the apathy and despair of depression in the past but a helpless sadness. She who scarcely ever wept found herself trudging the sheep tracks with tears pouring down her cheeks. She couldn’t eat . . . fell asleep in the day and was wakeful at night . . . longed for company but couldn’t face people . . . The part of her that had always poured scorn on the counselling culture and its jargon fought the idea that all this was a necessary process of ‘letting-go’. But the other and greater part, the analytical pragmatist and student of human nature, recognised that of course it was. Some years before, when George had claimed that the babies were driving her to the brink of insanity, Stella – herself in the wake of a termination – had sent her sister a card which read: ‘Don’t tell me to relax – it’s only my tension that’s holding me together’.

  Now that was QED, bigtime. Stella was a fully paid-up believer in the benefits of stress, but she was finding the effects of its sudden removal revelatory, and disturbing. Later she was able to pinpoint the moment when, in a spirit of who-the-hell-can-see-me-anyway, she gave way to the inevitable. It was about halfway up the west slope of the fell on a stormy afternoon, with a giant Atlantic wind banging around her head and her feet soaked. Above her the peak was obscured by a thick, rippling shawl of highland rain; below her the moor was smeared and flattened by the fierce hand of the weather. These were wild, hostile surroundings and she felt how utterly alone she was. Like a child she thought, if I die at this moment it could be weeks before anyone found me.

  That was the first time she cried, loudly and messily, her sobs inaudible above the wind, her tears invisible in the rain, her famous toughness reduced to so much shattered storm damage.

  For days thereafter she scarcely knew herself. But when she did emerge and begin to find her feet and her direction once more she felt better than she had in some time. Tired, but healthily so, as if her mind and spirit had caught up with her well-exercised body and been rid of longstanding toxins. She slowed down, slept longer, put on a little weight and rediscovered the pleasure – and usefulness – of doing nothing. She would sometimes sit at her table, or on a rock when she was out walking, and simply gaze for an hour or more. She became a sponge, soaking up impressions without feeling the need to process them.

  The result, at the end of week two, was a song. A song that grew unforced, organically, out of this fertile new mulch. It began, unusually for her, with the music – three notes that she whistled on a dying fall, a wistful little phrase with a pleasingly Celtic cadence. And three words to go with them. Three words that fell on to the notes from that mysterious place in her head which she acknowledged but could not identify.

  Are you there?

  She saw nobody, or nobody with whom contact wasn’t dictated by necessity. She filled the car’s tank with petrol and its boot with supplies on the first day, she kept Mrs Sherlock at bay with an appreciative call, and she didn’t go near the pub. Her nearest neighbours were a quarter of a mile away and the man gave her the sort of offhand wave which denoted acceptance of Glenfee’s shifting population. The notion of being a focus of local curiosity, the woman-in-dark-glasses fantasy which she had briefly entertained at home, was anathema to her now, as was the very idea of trying out new songs on some foreign piano. She drank at home and forced herself to regulate the drinking – a bottle of beer at lunchtime, a couple of Scotches followed by half a bottle of wine in the evening. A regime which, although far exceeding the recommended weekly number of units, was modest by comparison to her usual intake, and since she was currently celibate, smoking less and exercising more, she considered perfectly reasonable.

  ‘Are You There?’ pretty well wrote itself during the gentle melancholy of her recovery period, and she wrote another ballad on the back of it. ‘All to Play For’ mined the same seam of wistful optimism but to a sweet-sour ragtime tune. The contents of Gordon’s letter came back to her and inspired ‘Just to Say’ and ‘Sorry but I’m Happy’. She was pleased and surprised by the songs, and put them down on paper as best she could in her time-honoured shorthand of dots and scribbles.

  Given her satisfaction with this initial output it was, predictably, music that lured her back into company. She’d been stocking up at Brundle’s one lunchtime, and having put everything in the boot she went for a short walk around the harbour. It was a damp, fretful day with the sea combed by an onshore wind, slapping and surging around the legs of the wooden jetty and butting the fishing boats moored to the quay. The wake of the midday ferry to the mainland was still visible beyond the breakwater.

  The Harbour Light was by some way the less attractive of the town’s two pubs, a single-gabled grey Victorian building, scabbed and streaked by Atlantic weather, fronted by cracked hardstanding and with a flapping A-frame sign advertising Hot Food. But as she passed she picked up the unmistakable vibration of live music and the warm babel of a well-refreshed audience, a sound which exerted a magnetic pull over Stella. The excitable shudder of drums, the yelp of fiddles at full pelt and the trill of a tin whistle drew her into the public bar.

  She need not have worried. The bar was packed and no one gave a stuff about one more squeezing in. She pushed her way to the front and ordered a Guinness just as the music stopped to an explosion of applause. The noise, the warmth, the crowd were overpowering after her fortnight’s solitude and she edged her way to the corner of the bar where she could at least lean on the wall while she adjusted. From here she could observe the band as they put their glasses down and went into their next number. They were four, on fiddle, banjo, tin whistle and drum. The drummer was a red-faced boy of about sixteen, with an eyebrow-ring that sat uneasily with his bad, parted haircut. The banjo player was old, cool and black. The whistler was a stout, handsome woman of about Stella’s own age in a long green skirt and a thick sweater. But it was the fiddler who caught and held her attention – an original folk wild man, tall, etiolated and hirsute, bending, weaving and stamping with the music, unseeing eyes either tight shut or bulging from his head, focused on God knows what. His face was webbed with angry red veins, his hands seamed, his thick nails black-edged and cracked. He wore plimsolls without socks, revealing skinny grey ankles. He played like the devil and his music was divine.

  Gradually Stella unfurled and felt a part of her surroundings. It was good to be with people again, particularly this anonymous crash of genial, music-loving boozers. She ordered another Guinness, and one for the man next to her. By the time the band had done another three numbers he’d returned the compliment. There wasn’t the slightest suggestion that either of them exchange
a single word beyond these basic reciprocal transactions: no innuendo; no body language; no come-on, no standoff . . . No agenda. She had forgotten that such a situation – unthinkable in London – could exist. It made nonsense of the woman-in-shades scenario. From the cosy outskirts of squiffiness, she thought: These are my people; I could live in this place.

  The band reached the end of their first set, amid cheers and some token complaints. The woman waved her arms in the air.

  ‘All right, all right, we love you too, we’ll be back. Why doesn’t someone else come up here for a few minutes, eh?’

  This provoked some more barracking.

  ‘Stuart!’ She cast around the room, raised her voice over loud cheers: ‘Stuart Macdonald, you drunken bastard, now’s your chance!’

  In the end Macdonald, a local hero with a snouty face that only a mother could love, was pushed to the front and the band retreated to the far end of the bar. Even allowing for the willing suspension of her own critical faculty Stella could appreciate that this was an amateur in name only. He played the mouth organ in the way the fiddler played the fiddle, with preternatural exuberance and flair, extemporising around various tunes – traditional, pop and even, cheekily, opera – and moving seamlessly between modes with the facility of a piano-bar pro.

  When he’d played for five minutes without a break he simply stuck the mouth organ in his trouser pocket and walked off, apparently unmoved by the applause, blinking in acknowledgement as his back was slapped.

  ‘Still drinking time!’ called the woman from the back. ‘Someone else do us a favour and get up there.’

  Suddenly, it was irresistible. She didn’t even have to think about it, but found herself standing in front of them all with her arms folded, in an attitude half patient, half threatening which she knew would make them shut up. They hadn’t expected or noticed her, and she was neither recognisable nor very tall, so it took longer than it might otherwise have done, but in the end they fell silent. She could tell simply by the quality of the silence that they were a dream crowd – open-minded, appreciative, ready to empathise, honestly respectful of her wish to entertain, but discerning: her predecessors proved that.