Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  Death and water, again.

  Suicide as a rebellion against death.

  Camilla would like to see the place where Virginia Woolf walked into the river, and so we travelled there, to Southease. It was only a couple of kilometres from her house. It was an unassuming location she had chosen as a setting for her death. The River Ouse was narrow at that point, the sloping banks made it look like a dug-up ditch. The banks consisted of bleak brown stones. There was a bridge, exactly at that point; the bridge was supported by wooden structures – to avert collapse. She filled her pockets with rocks before she went out, in March 1941. The water must have been ice-cold. She had made another attempt a few days earlier. She came home soaking wet. Told Leonard that she had fallen in a ditch.

  What does it mean to fling yourself at death unvanquished? That its essence has not penetrated you? What then is the essence of death? Abandonment and withering, resignation? Are you unvanquished if you choose it freely, death – not allow yourself to be overtaken by it? Fling yourself towards it. She flung herself towards it, she waded into it. A conclusion. And the waves broke on the shore – again and again and still today.

  II.

  [Alma]

  And then on to Devon, it is a long drive, and it is not always easy having Camilla in the car, gasping whenever she thinks a dangerous situation is about to arise, it distracts me from driving. She is afraid of lorries, and she wants to get out and walk every time we approach a roundabout, and there are a lot of them (Charles told her they are the most difficult thing to navigate when you are not used to driving on the left.) But obviously she does not get out of the car. A constant stream of messages arrive on her mobile, she and Charles are arguing via text message this morning, to save money. ‘FATIGUE KILLS / MAKE TIME FOR A BREAK’ signs dot the side of the motorway, usually when nearing a service station. Every time Camilla urges me to stop. At one of the places there is a small group of protesters with a couple of dogs lying next to them, dogs that look like miniature horses, covered with blankets. Greyhounds. The people are protesting against dog racing. ‘Why?’ Camilla asks. She has always wanted to experience that type of race. ‘Every year thousands of dogs disappear without a trace,’ one of the protesters says. The dog at her side raises its pointed head, then it falls back into a heavy slumber. I wonder if it has been sedated. These two specimens must have been rescued. ‘But what happens to the dogs?’ While one demonstrator replies by running a finger across the throat, another simultaneously holds out the collection box. Camilla squeezes twenty pounds into the opening. She has a weak spot for animals, all animals.

  It is evening by the time we arrive at our bed & breakfast in North Tawton. We drive up to a white Georgian house, out scampers the landlord. He grabs Camilla’s suitcase.

  ‘We’re here to visit Sylvia Plath’s house,’ she says dramatically.

  The landlord tells us, he’s afraid that won’t be possible; Ted Hughes’ second wife lives there now.

  ‘Then we’ll have to climb a tree and see it from there,’ Camilla says, they have not even crossed the drive yet, ‘you can see it from the churchyard,’ he says. She doubles up from coughing and presses her thighs together.

  We pass through a hall that ends at the foot of a staircase with red runners. An imperial staircase painted white: it runs along both sides of the hall, it is perfectly symmetrical, very beautiful, like in Gone With the Wind, a staircase made for corsets and ruffled petticoats, for great activity; one person can run up, another down. In the hall there is a distinguished-looking wooden rocking horse. Resting on some kind of runner. I touch it in passing, and it does not move up and down, but forward and back, at a smooth, well-oiled gait. Hanging on the wall is a photograph of Prince Charles surrounded by a smiling family, I recognize our landlord. First floor. Our room. What a view, green, green, green and fat grazing sheep. So fat that their cheeks quiver when they lift their head. Camilla sits down on the sofa and starts to make a phone call while the landlord and I drag the rest of the luggage up. We are halfway up the stairs for the second time when a furious scream is heard from the bedroom.

  ‘Is there something we can do for Camilla?’ the landlord asks. Now having an unbalanced person with swine flu staying in his home.

  ‘I’ll find a doctor tomorrow,’ I say, ‘it’s not the flu.’

  ‘It’s not the flu,’ Camilla says when we step inside with the luggage, and she raises her hands in the air as though she was about to be arrested. All the same, the landlord is wearing a mask when he serves us the next morning. His wife is not, ‘she’s the healthy type,’ he says and gives her a quick and circumspect English hug. He has small feet and small hands and looks like a restrained version of Mr Bean. His wife is pale (yet composed), that same morning she was going to a meeting to discuss the erection of wind turbines that will obstruct their view. It would deprive them of guests. Wind turbines are loud. They are ugly. The energy cannot be stored as is the case with hydroelectric power (she is now speaking very warmly of Sweden). The battle is almost lost. But she will not surrender. I look at the long strokes of green outside the window, this English prairie with ample space. I imagine her exiting the hall on her steed, riding there with a fixed gaze and her sword drawn, ready to face the turbines in the battle against reflection and rotation.

  Camilla is busy demonstrating that she is mentally stable and recuperating physically. She asks if she might enquire as to the occasion on which Prince Charles paid a visit to their home and was photographed with the family.

  ‘It was back during the outbreak of mad cow disease. He visited some of the hardest hit families in the region. And then it was decided that he would have tea with us, and that it was safe here, that we were not the types who would consider blowing him up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  And what about the horse – in the hall?

  It is a made-to-order rocking horse, from a factory in Dorset, you can choose the colour of the body, the mane, the forelock. It was originally a present for their riding-mad daughter, she had long since outgrown the rocking horse. (We never see her, but at one point the son passes through the dining hall, all bent-over and transparent from puberty. The cat exists only as a meow from the kitchen, a ball under the chair.) On behalf of their daughter, they had chosen brown for the body and black for the mane and tail. Very horse-like. And the long mane bears a resemblance to the Dartmoor ponies out on the heath, their long manes. The dining hall also serves as a concert hall. There is an organ, a harp, and a piano. The entire family plays, maybe they also played for Prince Charles that afternoon; in the photograph Prince Charles looks startled, the landlord fawning, the wife happy, the children empty and blank. The family organizes concerts, invites famous musicians, everyone in the region flocks there, people drive all the way from London. They fill the large house with music. We have taken up residence in a cultural hub, in the midst of all that green. Where it rains three hundred days a year – ‘that is, out on the heath,’ the landlady says.

  I am exhausted. Camilla’s coughing is keeping me up at night. I give her a sleeping pill every night, in the hope that she will sleep through the coughing (Camilla loves sleeping pills, but her doctor keeps her on a short leash), she washes them down with her opium cough syrup. But nothing helps. I feel like putting a lid on her. I suspect that the sleeping pills are making her unbalanced. One minute she is crying, the next laughing. Soon I’ll be needing a holiday – from her. When we get home, I will take a good long break. No pills for her tonight.

  ‘Excuse me, could you please tell us which house is Sylvia Plath’s?’ I ask a man outside the church, because the churchyard is surrounded by houses.

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly Sylvia Plath’s house. It belongs to Ted Hughes’ second wife.’

  ‘I mean the house that Sylvia Plath lived in for a time,’ I say diplomatically. And then he is happy to help. (I meant her house in – let’s call it a ‘spiritual sense’. She has been dead for forty-six ye
ars. She only lived there for sixteen months, from 1961 to 1962.)

  As far as I recall, Ted Hughes’ second wife also took her own life, in the same way Sylvia Plath did, using gas. Actually it must be his third wife who lives in the house. But I don’t dare ask the man about that. I later find out that number two was merely his cohabiter, they were never married, so she does not count.

  The house is white and surrounded by a brand-new lath fence. Perhaps Ted Hughes’ widow is sitting inside the house observing us through a pair of binoculars, or through the sight of a handgun, exhausted from the hordes of pilgrims flocking to her house. We can glimpse the house both from the churchyard and from the road. I did not realize I was a voyeur, I think a moment later, when I am again pressed against a tree in a churchyard, squirming to catch a glimpse of a house and a garden. And why do I do that? What am I looking for? Before we departed, the idea of it almost seemed unpleasant to me…

  I have to stick with it: the idea of trying to see what she saw. At any rate, standing in the churchyard is the yew tree (it may be) that Ted Hughes challenged Sylvia Plath to write a poem about (they assigned each other such tasks at times). The tree was visible from Sylvia Plath’s bedroom, and according to Ted Hughes it is west of the house. But I have no compass, and the sun is not setting. On the contrary, it is morning. Her poem depressed Ted Hughes, he found it far too bleak:

  THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE

  This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary

  The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

  The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God

  Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility

  Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.

  Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

  I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

  The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

  White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

  It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet

  With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

  Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –

  Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection

  At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

  The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.

  The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

  The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

  Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

  How I would like to believe in tenderness –

  The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

  Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

  I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

  Blue and mystical over the face of the stars

  Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,

  Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,

  Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

  The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

  And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

  It is Sunday, and the bells are bonging today as well, an infinitely long chiming that is initially beautiful and then nerve-racking as it sounds again and again. The chiming is not solely to blame – music has that effect on me, all music, it quickly gets annoying, as though someone was grabbing my soul with their fingers. I generally prefer to be able to listen to my thoughts undisturbed, no matter how unpleasant they may be. While we stand among the chiming, in the churchyard, by the yew tree, Camilla tells me about a carillonneur at the Church of Our Saviour that created the most wonderful compositions, except when she was too stoned, which was clear from the ringing of the bells. (I imagine she might have been content with only a few notes in that case, however she drew them out into infinity, like chanting monks: Oooom – if that is possible with bells.) But it was not like that, Camilla says, there was talk of particular discordant patterns, for the local residents it was as though a mosaic roof was jingling down on them.

  The house is large. The garden is large. Labour-intensive. That much I can see. And just as with Virginia Woolf, a churchyard neighbours the house, death practically a part of the garden. Here Sylvia Plath walked around and attempted to be the perfect housewife and mother in the model of the 1950s woman while writing The Bell Jar, and while writing her poems. Here she was abandoned to be a single mum with two children and wrote some of her best poems from four o’clock in the morning until the infant (‘the fat jug,’ that is what she lovingly calls him in one poem) woke up around six. Everything is possible when you get up early, but perhaps exhaustion leads to death.

  ‘That is the socio-feminist approach,’ Camilla says.

  ‘What do you think?’ I ask, ‘what is the answer to the riddle of her suicide?’

  ‘I think that the loss of the husband reactivated the loss of the father. And I believe what she wrote in a poem, that there has to be a death every tenth year – and according to her personal mythology it was time: her father died when she was eight, her first suicide attempt was at the age of twenty, and the last one, which was successful, when she was thirty. Ten-twenty-thirty.’

  If I count correctly, she wrote twenty-four poems in October 1962 alone. She was abandoned the previous month. And took her own life in February 1963.

  In her zeal to be a good housewife she even decided that she wanted to make her own honey. (That was before she was on her own.) Everything had to be homemade. But maybe she also wanted to keep bees because they paved the way back in time, to her father. He was an entomologist and published a book about the lives of bees.

  We distance ourselves from the house, we can barely see anything.

  The bells are still ringing when we step inside the local Spar to buy some cheese. Camilla enforces a strict budget, I don’t get enough to eat; she holds the purse strings; she feeds me in exchange for my driving. My financial situation is rather fuzzy at the moment. But maybe it won’t hurt to return home a few kilos lighter. Camilla agrees. We eat in our room, something the landlord clearly does not like – he has given us a list of the local eateries – and we smuggle the rubbish out each morning.

  At Spar an older man becomes erotically infatuated with Camilla, in the bread section. With my hands behind my back, I politely wait for a brief interlude in their conversation about fibre, then I jump in and ask whether the village has considered honouring Sylvia Plath in some way – perhaps a small location named after her? A bust? Alarmed, he looks in the direction of the home of Ted Hughes’ second wife, and says that would display a lack of consideration for her. The second. As recently as the other day there was something on the radio about Sylvia Plath, and it is terribly unpleasant for the second wife to be constantly reminded of the first. Besides, Sylvia Plath did not live there very long, and she was apparently rather reserved: ‘She probably wasn’t one to go out for a drink with the boys or talk to the local fishermen.’

  THE BEE MEETING

  Who are these people at the bridge to meet me?

  They are the villagers –

  The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.

  In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,

  And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?

  They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

  I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?

  Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,

  Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.

  Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.

  They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

  Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?

  Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?

  Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,

  Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.

  Their s
miles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

  Strips of tinfoil winking like people,

  Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,

  Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.

  Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?

  No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

  Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat

  And a black veil that moulds to my face, they are making me one of them.

  They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.

  Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?

  The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.

  Is it some operation that is taking place?

  It is the surgeon my neighbours are waiting for,

  This apparition in a green helmet,

  Shining gloves and white suit.

  Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

  I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me

  With its yellow purses, its spiky armoury.

  I could not run without having to run forever.

  The white hive is snug as a virgin,

  Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

  Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.

  The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.