He tells me of the people he meets when he walks. Yesterday it was an old friend who told him about his wife and her MS. She is in a lot of pain. In some ways, he told, I wish she could just die. It is difficult for both of them. For her because of her excruciating discomfort and for him because he has to watch, unable to help. I sat at the dinner table last night, answering crossword clues and thinking how I could heal her. Do we have that power to heal remotely. I’ve met people who believe that we do, and I’ve tried to do it. Some would call it prayer.
I was reading about marriage in Jane Austen’s novels and more generally in the late 18th and early 19th centuries yesterday. It was fascinating. After finally accepting a man she’d refused to please her family and seeing that after time she had grown to love him, a woman had written in her diary: ‘but oh the sunshiny morning of youth…’. Yes.
She makes me feel safe. I think it is the chat and the world that she brings forth as she talks, one that is so unlike my own. I think she talks to hide her discomfort. She is a clearly a sensitive soul, a worrier. Life frightens her. So she talks to keep it at bay and to off load. She is incautious, much more so than I. She talks about her father, her partner, her dog and her trips out in their camper van. I like her. He did too. It’s the details that I love and I hurry to scribble them down so that they aren’t lost. I ask about her father, recently widowed, and about what he does with himself all day. ‘I know what he’ll be doing right now,’ she says, ‘he’ll be standing with his back up against the radiator in the kitchen and watching Quest.’ He phones me after his appointment to ‘check in’. I knew that he’d either know her or her family. Small towns, you see. And he did. I prefer not knowing. I like the mystery and the detachment. Let him make connections. I just want to observe and feel compassion (at a distance). Bless her.
It’s been over a year. I haven’t missed the doing of it, that sitting in front of a mirror and making chat (though she, and all the others have been lovely), but I have missed looking neat. It’s all I ask of my self, my body and my clothes, a certain neatness and order. Everything in place. And the flared ends have let the side down, almost witch-like at times. I could’ve done it myself, after all I have cut his, but I struggle with doing things badly (quelle surprise) so I’ve left it and waited. So today is the day, and even that makes me a little anxious. I walk in happily (well, almost) in the dark but during the day is a different matter. No, I must be brave. And I am fond of her and she says that there is a surprise in store in the salon. Has she redecorated?
If her biographers are to be believed, Jane Austen was as proud of the deftness of her needle as she was of her pen. She made things as well as wrote. Most women of her class did, and if it wasn’t shirts for the menfolk, it was gifts for relations and friends or objects for the poor. It’s my way in to her. I cannot reach her brilliance in writing but I can sit as she sat over a piece of cloth. It’s a small thing, a connection of sorts. I read her life again, and still she is far off.
A colder morning. They talk of snow at Easter. Really?
I’m still struggling with my ideas for drawing this morning. I wanted them to be light, a series of flights of fancy. I’m not good at that. I never was. But I shall plug away. No earning work on the horizon. Need I worry? Shall I nudge them or take this period of calm as a gift. The work will soon come, won’t it?
I paid attention to the sounds playing out around me as I drew. There was the noise from the tree surgeon working on trees on a road further up the hill, there was birdsong and the screeching of sea gulls, there was the sound of children laughing and shooting in a playground followed by the ringing of a bell and then there was that of metal cutlery being washed, dried and put away in a drawer. I’d been standing by a terrace house as I drew and its front door was open to the sun. At one point the woman of the house had come out and I’d greeted her. It was a nice sound that of her busying herself in the kitchen. It was somehow comforting, regular and familiar.
I am most myself when I draw. It’s not that I am happiest, for drawing is difficult and pleasing myself with the result is even more so. No, it is just that I am the most engaged, the most ease-ful because I know it. I know when I am paying attention and when it is lapsing. I even talk to myself as I am doing it – encouraging a sharpness that now and again wanes. I love that kind of concentrated looking, you see things you didn’t before. And does the outcome really matter? Isn’t it more about that paying attention – that really looking at the tree. Getting to know its nuances. Isn’t that the main point. The outcome is a by-product. What have I learnt, how has it changed me? That is the nub. Oh, and the sun on my face.
Was it a recurring dream, the one about the man in black who I see at a distance, who smiles as if at a private joke and comes running towards me and I know that he will blow in my face (and presumably infect me)? I thought I’d had it before. He will be so angry with me, I think as I wake.
Do the birds know how much their song cheers us? They don’t sing for us but we are the better for it – at least I am. It helps so much in these still dark mornings and when the wind continues to blow. The flat has been dusted, hoovered and mopped and now I am ready to do my work. Though what that work is to be is yet to be fully determined. I have ideas, sketched out in my head as I walked this morning, but whether they will work on paper I don’t know. Such are Mondays. Tea is made. Now I must call the bank and then get on. To the drawing board.
Will they set her free? Let it be so. Let her torment end and let her return to her husband and child. Please.
We’ve been watching back copies of ‘Call the Midwife’ and we’re up to the one in which Sister Evangelina, played by the wonderful Pam Ferris, realises that she has gone to far with her ‘breast is best’ campaign and asks Sister Julienne if she can go to stay with a silent order for six months, so that she can start ‘listening’ again. I always find such an idea immensely attractive. I know that I am looking at it romantically and basing it on just one day spent in that way. But nevertheless it was wonderful. Words so often get in the way, or they are just plain wrong. That day in that Quaker Hall was so freeing. No small talk, no ‘pouring tea for anyone’, just an inward peace – that was until the end when we were invited to ‘tell the group’ how it was. I left, sharpish. It’s the blundering I long to dispense with. Like yesterday, and our set-to just before the end of the rugby. I could’ve just kept quiet.
I said yesterday that ‘a man’ had compiled Austen’s letters. He was more than simply that apparently – as I read today, R W Chapman is a known Austen scholar. Apologies, R W.
As I walked along Llanbadarn Road this morning I saw a man ahead. He was lurching, sometimes against the wall, other times dipping into the road. I kept my distance and all the time paying attention. I do that. I helps to calm me when my hackles are up. I start listing what potentially threatening people look like and what they wear. If they are in cars I try to remember the number plates, saying them over and over in my head till I feel safe. This bloke (the lurcher), was young, possibly a student. He was tall, slim and with a haircut chopped in a razor cut at the back. He carried a black leather bag over his shoulder, wore a tartan print raincoat and his boots were black with a white sole. The light from his phone (he read it as he lurched) shone yellow on his face and head.
I write down words that I don’t understand (or if I’m at the breakfast table I ask him and he looks them up on his iPad). Sometimes I know them but the meaning is uncertain. Sometimes I just like the sound of them and the sense they give of something.
It was a reading day yesterday, and I set out to read about 19th century women. I began with working-class women. What hard lives they had. Did they see it that way? Or did they accept their fate with grace? I also began reading Austen’s letters. They are in a small collection published by a man, probably in the 50s or 60s. They make for interesting reading. It’s all about detail. Homely detail.
Like her daughter on the phone. (I didn’t speak to her. Her daughter said she was sleeping and didn’t want to wake her). She spoke about double-deckers and wormwood. Not just any biscuit or indeed remedy. It is the detail that makes us human, unique even.
The woman with the bag has a new jacket. She was wearing it this morning as she ambled along South Road, buffeted by the wind. It was a kind of cagoule in pink and mauve.
It must’ve been the wind that did it. It was when I got home from my walk yesterday and happened to lick my lips. They tasted of salt, salt from the sea that must’ve been carried in the wind. Sometimes there is no separation between us and the elements. None at all.
I’ve had it. Well, at least the first one. It was painless enough and the procedure smooth and efficient. The nurse who jabbed me was gentle and kind. Oh, lovely, she said, a readily exposed arm.
A wild wind this morning. The roads and pavements are littered with twigs. And the sea rages. I walked but a protracted one. It’s the buffeting I struggle with. Yesterday I watched a mass of rooks being hurled about as if they’d been thrown into the sky. Flying must be hard enough, poor things.
