The Night Following

Can’t a man sleep undisturbed in his own house at a time of his own choosing?

Mrs. M from across the road barged in again. Said she was worried to see the curtains unopened in daytime-I wanted to say this was to DETER people like her, not have opposite effect and bring nosy old bags knocking.

Didn’t get the chance though because she came barrelling in, took one look at my sorting-out handiwork (another pile started in hall, thinking practically again, nearer the door come time for the final chuck- out) and of course she got the wrong end of the stick. I suppose I can see why, hall’s filling up and the dining room also pretty crammed now-but it’s only on the surface and did she give me a chance to explain the system?

All these piles are either stuff for a particular purpose, or it’s stuff going eventually in a particular place eg: crockery. No need for all the china we managed to accumulate now there’s only me, so am streamlining operations in kitchen and dining room. Am considering including flowerpots in with crockery. Those ones in conservatory you’ve got begonias in. Are they begonias? Have to report all now deceased, therefore pots can go at some point. No real urgency.

But lemonade bottles. They don’t go into same pile as cassettes and records. Obvious, I’d have thought. But Mrs. M’s the kind of woman who shouldn’t see anything half-finished. She’s clearly of limited intelligence and prone to overreacting.

Last time, forgot to mention, she implied I wasn’t up to cutting the grass. Understandable to have let it go in the circumstances, she said, and would I like her precious son Tony to get it back to rights next time he comes over to see to hers. I was civil but firm. I’ll do it in my own good time. Maybe when this leg trouble has eased off.

I don’t recall ever hearing he was a paramedic. She claims you knew. Obviously Tony can Do No Wrong. She subjected me to latest, he’s been on some extra training course or other.

By the way-I hadn’t noticed till Mrs. M pointed it out, and Carole may have mentioned it, too. It’s not like you, but you slipped up this time. These new clothes don’t fit. You bought me all that cruise stuff in the wrong size. Everything is way too big-Mrs. M said I need to look for a belt for the slacks or there’s going to be a mishap! Didn’t like the look on her face when she said that.

Couldn’t find a belt but made do with that checked tie we nearly quarrelled about. It IS too purple but it does the job.

Nothing I can do about the shirt collars, they gape a bit. These days a sweater on the baggy side still passes muster, I suppose.

At least there’s plenty of it, the cruise stuff, so I needn’t brave the dials on the washing machine just yet. All gobbledygook to me. I never saw so many clothes. Maybe you had in mind not just the cruise on the Belle Aurore Atlantis but the first couple of months in Oz as well, just in case our shipped crates didn’t arrive, or worse, went AWOL. You’re good about things like that. I may not have said so.

Bye for now

A

later

It’s raining tonight. Wonder what rain’s like when you’re out at sea. It’s only now we’re not cruising the ocean wave I wonder we ever thought we’d get away without mishap, small or great. We had a nerve, thinking we could pull a stunt like that, a six-week cruise and a new life waiting. Got rather upset with this line of thinking so resorted to reading.

Iread about the accident in the paper, holding myself tight, my heart bumping against my folded arms.

There was a poetic touch in the way the story of the FATAL HIT AND RUN was told. The paper reported that the scene of the incident was in the heart of idyllic countryside, in an area of outstanding natural beauty. There were two photographs of it: pre-outrage, innocent as a calendar, and afterward, tainted by a cordon of police tape and mounds of flowers in cellophane. “The horror scene” burgeoned treacherously with spring blossom and daffodils, a death trap masquerading as a beauty spot. The implication was that dying somewhere beautiful might have made a difference to childless, recently retired English teacher Ruth Mitchell (61) of 27 Cardigan Avenue, Monkwell Down, and her devastated husband, Arthur (68).

The article didn’t suggest which way the difference might have gone, whether death’s random visitation upon that particular place would forever after sully its beauty or whether the place’s beauty had assuaged, if only momentarily, the bane of death. It did not ask what message about a life might be carried in the very last thing the eye beheld. I wanted to know, if that final blink closed on one last imprinted image of beauty rather than of ugliness, would a person reach a conclusion, just as she was leaving it, about the relative aggregations of glory and squalor in the world? It seemed important.

The West Wiltshire Gazette did not speculate. It dwelled instead, naturally, on what kind of monster was responsible for such a crime. It seemed almost odd that I did not read my name in the same sentence as “the perpetrator of this callous and evil criminal act” and I found myself whispering, it’s me.

I stared again at the two photographs in the paper. Suddenly I was back there, on that April afternoon. I retched and started to sweat; I saw again the hideous colours of the day and the burning sunlight, I felt the deep heavy jolt as the car struck her, and her fall to the ground. I heard the silence. I saw her on the road as only I had seen her, blood pumping from her dead brain and the crows gathering to feast.

I forced myself to read to the end of the article. The police were appealing for witnesses and “pursuing every lead.” Why wouldn’t they come here, and find the Saab locked in the garage? I wanted them to come. I wouldn’t lie. Confession is supposed to relieve everyone, especially the guilt-laden. But even if the next headline on the front page of the West Wiltshire Gazette was FATAL HIT AND RUN: DOCTOR’S WIFE GUILTY, would it bring relief, would it make any difference at all?

The piece ended with another photograph of the couple as young teachers: DEDICATED TO YOUTH WELFARE: RUTH AND ARTHUR AT OVERDALE OUTDOOR EDUCATION CENTRE, followed by an unpoetic paragraph about cycling fatality statistics and safety helmets.

I slept in my clothes, and woke up, before the alarm clock sounded, at nine o’clock in the evening. No drifting around the house tonight; the place was eight miles away, not that the distance meant anything in itself, nor did the rain.

The sky and the cold land together had sunk to an equal darkness, reaching a muffled, stony equilibrium through which I walked with the greatest care. Though the dark was not absolute, the night seemed marginless and I disembodied. I kept close by the hedges. Above the rain and the distant sighing of traffic from the motorway I heard everything: I heard the click of an insect’s wings as it landed on a stem by a garden wall and I heard the singing, empty vastness of the sky above me. It occurred to me that I should have been afraid to be out alone on the road at night, but fear didn’t come. Rather, what a freedom it was, to walk under this sky instead of the wide, lit gallery of the sun’s arc, illuminating every act and failure of a day in its long, sad slide towards nightfall.

Above the high open stretch of road near the place, the moon was a dull ellipse of silver through the thinning cloud, and the houses behind the orchard wore the moonlight coldly, like a sheeting of ice. Under the trees, rainwater trapped in the leaves and blossoms fell on me in slower, wetter drops than on the open road. The traffic cones and cordon of tape had gone, but the bank of piled-up flowers and stuffed toys remained; sodden teddy bears and dripping cuddly dogs presided over a floral shrine almost touching in its pointlessness. Among the flowers lay sheets of waterlogged paper bearing half-obliterated messages, like handkerchiefs drenched in charcoal tears. The huge curling letters of RUTH were turning into watery ghosts of themselves, receding into vagueness. Water plocked down and pooled into little crevices in the cellophane under which the offerings of flowers, trapped in bunches by strings and wires, were already darkening with slime. I knelt down and tore at them, releasing from the crackling of wrappings a shower of cold water and a rank, drainy stench. I pulled some of the rotting blooms off their stems and picked at their petals, tidying and primping what was left of their lolling heads. Slippery black stuff clung to my fingers.

Some of the flower heads were luminous; others seemed soaked in grey. Drifting through the smell of the