The Night Following

using the labels specially printed with his new address that he would send me in a day or two. He proposed to close our bank account but would pay, into my personal account in monthly instalments, more than enough money for my purposes. His call had awakened me and when I tried to speak, my mouth felt slow and unchaste and slutty. I struggled to say something that would not sound off-balance and degraded. He told me he had already arranged that the garage bill for the Renault’s service would be sent direct to him, and again my words faltered, snagging in the net of his enunciated, suffocating reasonableness. In the moment’s pause, maybe a beat of tenderness passed between us. Then he said if I couldn’t be bothered to stick simple address labels on a few envelopes he would drop by for his letters instead.

Out of pride I feigned a little cooperation, but really I was thinking of all the things Jeremy and I had done for so long, ostensibly for the other’s sake. What expenditure, what a squandering of spirit, this “working at” our marriage; what a thin and childish pact it was in the first place. If we had ever aspired to a state of marital grace, we had long ago settled instead for efficiency; long after I was weary to extinction at my presence seeming still to be in some way required, I had continued to turn in performances connected with laundry, cleaning, and food. Jeremy had continued to oversee cars, money and gardening. We had both pretended to be living together in more than the physical sense, wearing for each other the face we supposed the other ought to see because perhaps, behind it, we were guarding a truer, less resolute version of our selves that we feared the other would attack if they knew about it. With slippery expertise we had concealed first the doubt, and then the noiseless, tearing disappointment that life wasn’t fuller and brighter than this. Jeremy went on to mention his passport, I think in relation to the coming summer and “grabbing a fortnight somewhere,” but my attention had wandered by then. I was wondering when it was, exactly, that we’d started to show each other more tact than kindness.

Since I was awake and it was after four o’clock in the afternoon, I went to my studio-just the smallest bedroom with bare floorboards, an uncurtained window, and a basin in the corner-and tried to think about painting. Illustrated books were open all over the place, reminding me that I had been working on another series of butterfly studies.

Butterflies. I flipped over a few pages trying to remember what I had once found so captivating. I came across notes in my own writing. There were (I read) many species of butterfly-Lepidoptera- whose wing patterns mimicked the appearance of other things in the world. I had begun a list. I counted them on my fingers, right hand first, jammed in my dressing gown pocket, tightening each finger in turn, pressing the end of each nail into my palm just enough to get the nip of the edge on flesh. Some butterflies’ wings looked like the golden eyes of a certain poisonous lizard. There was one with the blue-green Argus eyes of peacock feathers. Another had wings like a flamenco dancer’s pair of fans; another, curling, dead autumn leaves. One resembled the veneer of polished walnut, its wings like little cabinet doors. Then there were some that looked like tropical flowers, one in particular, its wings spattered to resemble the lure of dewdrops marking a pathway down a darkening velvet cave into the deeps of an orchid. Or was it the other way round (I had put a question mark after that one). Was it the orchid that had evolved to look like the butterfly’s wings? Whichever was imitating the other, they both looked like something else; here in my writing was another question mark and the word “vagina,” followed by two more question marks. I smiled, seeing how I had used the medical word and surrounded it with those perplexed, small, tidy curls of inquiry.

But I no longer wanted to know anything about butterflies. A few days ago I would have said I was fascinated by their sheer variety, the opulence of their colours and patterns, and the “challenge” I felt, as a mere amateur, to “do justice” to such delicacy and brilliance. I would also have said, for I had acquired a few real mounted specimens, pinned and fraying above inked Latin names in display boxes with flakes of broken wing in the corners, that I found something poignant and sacrificial in their labelled entrapment. I picked up one of the boxes from the worktable and looked at it: Chrysiridia ripheus-the Madagascar Moth. Not strictly speaking a butterfly at all, but looking like one, its wings open to show a gorgeous twinned miniature sunset. But now I was fascinated not by its classification nor its beauty nor the precise manner of its death. What seemed amazing was the simple cessation of its hair-thin little life, the dry and painless arrest of all the faultless microscopic connections that had joined one beat of its wings, one sweep of its antennae, to the next. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it was the single wanton instant of its final coming to stillness that was spread out on display under glass, that one pure extinguishing moment perpetuated by every pair of eyes that gazed at it in the hundred and more years after the creature would anyway be dead.

I thought of the woman no less reduced to a specimen on a mortuary slab, her body pinned open and exposed to the rummaging of a pathologist’s latexed hands. Such an obscene curiosity, which could be satisfied by encrypting the end of her life in a series of data entered by a laboratory assistant on a clipboard. But the true, inexcusable obscenity was not the physical progress from being alive to lifelessness, nor the recording of it-it was the manner of her death. I alone was responsible for that. I swept the boxes of butterflies to the floor, where all the papery coloured wings fragmented among the splinters of glass and wood. There was nothing poignant about them. They were disgusting.

It was dark when I went out. The night was grey and vapoury, rain misting the darkness. I knew I wouldn’t see the moon so I walked fast out of the ring of the cul-de-sac, flexed both hands in my coat pockets, and began to run, head down, fixing my attention on the silver reflection of my body dancing off the shining road. Weather is louder at night. The drumroll of raindrops brought cold, pungent spirals of scent up from gardens and pavements. I fisted my hands and pushed them down against the inside of my pockets, squeezed my arms against my sides, and ran on. Walking and running, sometimes stopping for breath, I continued without thinking of where I was going except that I knew I was avoiding anywhere lit.

I turned away from the direction of the town and followed the road until it intersected with two lanes leading into the countryside. Soon I was about two miles from my house, on the edge of woodland that I had only ever driven past. I turned off the lane and crackled and stumbled my way through the bracken. I was grunting and wheezing; in the dark I felt like an animal, but one out of its proper place and unfamiliar with wet roots and ditches and low-hanging branches, and I felt both alone and surrounded, my presence both unsensed and sensed. I was raising enough racket to empty the woods; I liked the idea that from their places among the trees and bracken they might be watching, the badgers and foxes, the voles and hedgehogs. I slowed and stopped, my body aching, my face itching under the heat of the sweat I had worked up. Silence, but for my breathing and the seep and trickle of the rain, drifted through the wood. There was no movement but fronds of bracken swinging back from the trail I had broken behind me and the waft of damp air touching my hair and cooling my skin, the only smells my sweat and the rainy green sap.

Now I could see a white cloudy smudge of moon shining through the trees and white darts of rain spitting out of the sky. From far away came an animal cry, a rising screech of distress that it was impossible to imagine might not be human. It was late and lonely enough for me to let out an answering howl if I wanted to, but I had started to shiver and could not utter a sound. Besides, what answer could I give, and to what? Probably it was a fox. But the call was a kind of refrain; it held no note of urgency and might not even have been real. Perhaps it was the cry of a phantom; it sounded, through the dark, like a wail as old as myth or lamentation, or of suffering itself. It might be not a fox but a ravening beast from a fable, crying out and limping the night lanes with sorrow in its yellow eyes, for it must be by night that creatures from the oldest stories of all are summoned up and stalk the earth, wishing to be remembered. I raised my head and felt the rain pour down on me. Further into the darkness I went, crashing through the wood, branches scratching my face.

Dear Ruth

I’m making a big pile of things for chucking, it’s gone on there. Remains of brochure, I mean. Best to get the rubbish all together in one place and do a big blitz and I’m not using the dining room for anything else. Surprising how it mounts up.

Pressure cooker still AWOL.

Later on

Had second thoughts-I took cruise brochure back off the pile and sat there looking at it again, all those photos. Looked for a long time till it was too dark to see.

Wednesday

Am looking at it again now. Mimosa’s odd-looking, little cocoons of bright yellow cotton, not like any other flower. I never did like yellow but I shouldn’t have forgotten you did. I should have thought of yellow for the flowers instead of going with white.

Bye for now