The Night Following

water it was warm, and in it my breath softened and slowed and I swam or floated towards a bumpy-looking ledge that turned out to be the distant line between a lake and a sky just beginning to blaze with light; as I came nearer, the horizon split against the rising dome of the sun.

The dream woke me as if a torch had been shone into my eyes. I got up to get a drink of water and I stood in the kitchen listening to the kind of low noise all kitchens make, not really a sound at all. Every kitchen’s undercurrents are the same and different, and kitchens smell the same and different. Here it was milky, sweetish. I wandered out to the back garden. The fresh air rushed at me and I plonked myself down on the terrace steps. It was so cold and lovely.

I was shivering. I was in need of food, too, I realized; my stomach began to grumble. Though I knew I should go in and get warm and find something to eat, I went on sitting there, looking up at the sky. I wondered what it would be like to be in a house near running water and surrounded by mountains so that every night would be filled with flows and echoes. I could hear the emptiness up there, and it made me think of flying, not with great flapping wings but in the way the gift of flight is bestowed in a dream or by magic, when the wind streams under you and you soar without effort simply because you have been granted the belief that you can. I closed my eyes and felt myself flying close to the top of a hillside invisible in the dark but there all the same, rising from a gleaming stretch of water.

Before it grew light, and now thinking practically of Arthur’s return, I went back upstairs. I chose quickly from the wardrobe, not taking time to assess its contents carefully. The clothes were obvious, anyway: sensible, not ugly but certainly not alluring or attractive. There was something so habitual and plain about them it seemed impossible they had ever been bought new, or chosen at all, never mind with pleasure; it was difficult to discern anything in them that would cause them to be selected from among others. I put on olive green slacks, a cream sweater, and some slip-on shoes. I looked like nobody, or anybody. I didn’t mind. For years I had been heading the same way myself, towards a capitulation to the expectation that women past a certain age dress only for weather, convenience, and disguise. It was obvious to me that it had been decades since Arthur had either been asked for or offered an opinion of Ruth’s appearance.

I didn’t know when to expect him, of course. My safest course was to wait out each day in my usual way, but with extra caution; probably he would not return alone and they might barge in while I was asleep. So when dawn came, I made my way up to the attic. The air was pleasantly thick and warm. I was so tired I could have bedded down on the bare boards but I was pleased to find a pile of curtains and some rolledup rugs. I arranged them into a kind of nest and settled down, dragging a dusty white net curtain around myself so that it covered me completely. I held it to my face until it was wet and salty. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the cloth right around my head and held it taut so I couldn’t blink. I stared through its gauzy whiteness. The sun from the skylight glimmered through, a cloudy bright rectangle in the flat, milky shadow of the sloping ceiling. I breathed in and pretended I was in the countryside in a field full of flowers, looking up at the sun just after it has rained. Over the white nylon I ran a finger down my nose and over my cheeks and across my lips, which were smiling now. My musty smooth curtain was a new white skin come to cover me up so nobody would know what I was like underneath. I fell asleep, and the day passed.

When I got up again I was restless and could not settle to anything. I knew he would not come at night, but still I tried to kill time by measuring my every move in little units of anticipation, awaiting his return. I stripped his bed and changed the sheets, smoothing my hands over the pillow just where his head would, very soon I prayed, leave a soft dent. I opened the bedroom window with some funny idea that he had flown away and now he’d be able to get back in, like Peter Pan; if I were to go down to make tea, he would alight on the floor above me in the moment between my filling the kettle and opening a bottle of milk. If I counted the strokes as I brushed my hair, he would be here before I reached a hundred. If I started to sing to myself in a low voice, affecting a nonchalance I didn’t feel, it would summon him back, and the opening of the door would be the first sound to interrupt this meandering, patient song of mine.

By the next morning I was worried. I spent all day in the attic, unable to sleep. So I heard everything as I lay there: the arrival of a car, the front door opening, people talking, and after a few minutes a woman’s voice more insistent than the rest. In all the noise and movement I could not make out a sound from Arthur himself. After a while the house grew quiet again, and I slept. When I woke, I guessed it was around three o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe they had put him to bed. I thought of him in his room, wakeful, curious, perhaps still afraid. I willed him to turn over and close his eyes, not to fight sleep, and I fancied I heard a little whine, the kind an animal makes when it knows that the time for choosing to fight or to give in has passed, because either it is already defeated, or it is safe. Then I fell asleep again.

27 Cardigan Avenue

Dear Ruth

I’m back. I couldn’t wait to get back.

I’d forgive you for thinking me slow to catch on-well, I have been slow-but I’ve got it now. I’m getting to the crux of it now. I can think clearly here. You’re here, but only here. You’re nowhere else. Not in the hospital. I missed you terribly.

The hospital-it’s a zoo in there.

The ward was hellish. I came to thinking how could this get any worse-then it did. Mrs. M swooped in and perched like buzzard refusing to budge because, she said, somebody had to catch the doctor and explain the situation. She said the nurses don’t pay attention to anything these days much less pass it on to the doctors-all this according to The Great Tony. I was lucky, she said, to have an NHS insider like Tony on my case. You need somebody who can get to the right people, knows their way around the system.

She brought a book for me, something somebody had given her but it wasn’t her kind of thing. An anthology. She didn’t know till recently I was a poetry fan, she was surprised to find the house swimming in it or she’d have passed it on before.

Doctor didn’t come all morning, so finally she went. I had a squint at the book, it didn’t do anything for me either.

Poetry isn’t like water or air. You actually don’t need it to live. I can hear you disagreeing, but it’s a fact. Poetry’s more like the wine or perfume in a life. It’s nice to have, but you can get along all right without. You can manage with just having everything plain, or at least you can until you’ve acquired the taste for the more rarefied, then it’s harder. But as long as you’re getting along without anything fancy, you don’t see that you’re missing much.

All right, you’re frowning at that. But that’s me. Ordinary and plain. It’s my history, I suppose. There are some histories you couldn’t squeeze a poem into sideways and that was mine, not that I’m complaining. Good people, my parents, though of course you only knew Dad and he wasn’t the same man after Mum died. All that’s history, too, in the background-nobody really remembers.

Funny word-I’m thinking about words-the background. My background-when was it? Where is it now? Overdale Lodge? Or before we met? Or after? When does anyone’s background stop and their foreground begin? We were married all those years, isn’t that a background in itself, does it blank out what came earlier, does whatever comes after meld into it and get lost, or does it stand out sharper? Maybe we’re just a fuzzy pair of figures somewhere in a painting, so small and on the edge that only we know we’re there at all. Nobody else really sees us.

But it’s still ours, our life-no matter it’s just a collection of dots in one corner of a picture, no matter we’re background figures, no matter how many people miss that we’re even there.

But you can’t set it down, not even our little life, nobody can-not in a picture, not in words.

I just wish I could.

I remember the kind of pictures you liked. The ones you said were like film sets if only they’d known how to make films then. In the Renaissance. We watched that thing on TV, remember, about how they painted them to make your eye go straight to the little golden figures cavorting about in flowers without a stitch on, and next onto the tumbling green cascades and ruins and peacocks, and then to the blue distant forests and mountains and sky. Was the order of the colours meant to calm you down or something, make you think deep thoughts? Maybe that’s the kind of background you need for poetry. Or for cavorting.

I’m no poet and I never was a cavorter. Obviously. I see now I may have let you down there.