ellen bell

Should we interfere with Nature? Or what we call Nature? In cases like these, I always think of L. P. Hartley’s Shrimp and the Anemone. I did it anyway. There was a cat, a small black one that I saw on the other side of the road, just below the rock under the castle. It was teasing something with its paw. I walked over and saw that it was a tiny field mouse. I raised my stick (I walk with one sometimes as my hips are a little stiff in the mornings) not to hit out at it but to scare, the cat that is, away. The cat was most reluctant and the mouse seemed too much in shock to move. When I looked back it had gone. You won’t eat it, I told the cat, nor do you need to (though it did look a little skinny). It looked at me with what I read as scorn. It was certainly cross. I had denied it it’s plaything. I walked on.

The sea was a gentle lapping and I could see the lights of two boats in the distance. The lights were still but strong, where they collecting lobster or crab pots? Two men were outside the Marine Hotel, one stood, the other sat. The sitting one called out Good Morning to me. And I replied in kind.

She walks everyday, breaking her tour of the estate with a sit on her seat (that is, a pile of railings and bricks on the, so far, abandoned building site). Sometimes she sleeps and other times she stares, or thinks or prays, who knows? She is locked inside herself, deafness and virtual blindness must do that. But I don’t think she is unhappy, merely waiting out her days (it cannot be long, she is 103 this year).

I keep drawing. I ask much of myself. I know when they work and when they don’t even in the doing of them. It’s a life, an energy, sometimes it just isn’t there. Yesterday was a challenge, I’d grown out of the habit of drawing things and people in motion. And I was self-conscious. Will I improve? Practice makes perfect, someone said in my head.

Was it listening to Northanger Abbey and Catherine Morland with all her wide-eyed wonder at Bath and the Abbey? I mean I am content. I love him. And it is marvellous to be so cherished and understood and respected. It’s just sometimes I long for an adventure, to be taken out of this, this known life and somewhere different. Just to be somewhere, someone different for a little while.

We are off to see The House of Cards on Wednesday, so that will be an adventure of sorts. And later I will go and draw. I’ve missed it. And it is enough. It is.

I heard him before I saw him, running towards me down St David’s Road. I couldn’t make out his face it was too dark, but his hair was black, he was tall and thin and didn’t wear a coat. Excuse me, he called. Hello, can you help me? Oh, no, I thought (hating to talk to people when out walking , lost in my selfish bubble of thoughts) what can he want? Can you tell me where I can find the Four Seasons Budget? It took me a while to orient myself. What and where is that? Oh, yes it’s that cheap hotel where my niece stayed once, though I’ve never heard it called ‘budget’ before. I managed to cobble together some directions, though I don’t think he heard. I’ve been man-handled, he said. What? I had no idea what he was talking about, though he did seem a little distressed. Had he been raped? I’ve been man-handled by a woman and now she has thrown me out. What could I say? I’m sorry. I gave him the directions again – don’t forget to turn turn right at the bakery – and he scuttled off.

One of the Kray twins have been killed. Ronnie, the hunter, has been run over. She stopped him to tell him yesterday. She must be devastated. She’s had them five years, he said.

She’s been moved to a local community hospital. She is getting better, though he’s not sure if she can walk yet. Her husband is deteriorating fast. They, her sons and his, are looking for a home for them both. I am sad for her and for him. They were so much in love, he said. And she is so private a person. And she loved her home. I am sorry.

I heard voices from the sea, disembodied voices. It’s really not so bad, said a woman. A couple of indistinct hunched figures sat by a fire on the beach. While the soft sounds of the end of summer came from the whispers of two boys on a bench at the end of North Road. No one shouted.

There is a mist this morning. The sun is trying to come out.

The shock was her’s not mine. Her voice was remarkably different when I called yesterday. I could barely hear her. And there was the sun shining, and the sky so blue. I’d expected her to be out and loving it. Poor love. She is shaken after that fall. It takes its toll. It’s gone to her chest and her voice is a mouse squeak of a sound. We didn’t talk for long, it was too much for her. Life is a see saw. Up and down. Up and down.

I didn’t go into to town to draw and missed it. I drew him instead and our ‘garden’. Another warm day is promised. The sun will be good.

I drew down by the harbour yesterday, sketching one of the boats still in dry dock and then the lifeguards hut along the Prom. It was busy with sauntering couples, families and dogs. So many dogs. (There was one – one of those toy breeds, bald and with long hair about its ears – who’d been dressed up in a t-shirt and shorts. Bless it, it looked utterly ridiculous.) One of the lifeguards, in a red towelling gown, asked me if I was drawing and wanted to see. Cool, he said. Can I take a picture of it when I get back? (He was off to do some surfing.) And then, further along the Prom just by the Crepes stall, a man I know from old also called out to me. Is it a Turner or a Monet? before walking over to look. Oh, he said, disappointed, you’re drawing that man over there. And then promptly went over to him and told him. For all the busy-ness I liked being out there, people were having a nice time (though the sun was a liquidy-thing). On my way home I picked blackberries.

A slight feral-ness gives it away. There is something, a disorder, a chaos hardly perceptible but it is there. I saw him from a distance. I think he came out of a block of flats. There was a dog with him. Initially I thought it was on a lead but it was not. Perhaps that was the first inkling of disarray, the dog being loose. I wanted to give them both a wide birth. I kept to the left hand pavement but then he began to cross the road towards me. I lurched to the right and he did the same. It was a dance. A dance of avoidance on my part. I smelt a wildness, a non-honouring of politeness, of order. I expressed my irritation. Did I make a sound? He noticed it. Drunkenness (for he was clearly inebriated) doesn’t make you blind to instinct, it just makes your responses awry. He changed his mind and kept to the right pavement instead. His dog however had other ideas and came towards me. A black bull dog cross with his ears flipped back, he sniffed at me. I kept walking, trying to maintain my composure. He called the dog away. And it went. I suppose my choosing to walk in the dark opens me up to such encounters. I don’t want them but they are part of the idiosyncrasy of my behaviour. It was nothing but at the same time it wasn’t. Am I always safe? I was surprised at my flash of anger (for I think it was anger that I expressed) for I rarely feel it these days. Perhaps it saved me, though from what I’m not sure.

The loss of the Americans has touched us both. They’d thrown a handful of peanuts on their step as a parting gesture for the birds. It has hardly been touched. Are they sad at their departure too?

I forgot to say that we picked blackberries on the way home yesterday. When I got in I noticed that my thumb had been stained purple.

Town was quiet again this morning and the moon was still visible though shrinking. 3 boys were standing around a sooped-up sports hatchback outside the Pier Pressure club. It’s lights were on and one of them was bending down to look at the tyres. Further along 2 girls were sitting cross-legged on the pavement smoking and talking, a thermos flask by the side of them. One, a girl with a strong Irish brogue and slurring a little, was saying, ‘…it’s the commitment’. Before I’d climbed the hill I’d seen an elderly woman in what looked like pyjamas (at least there was a kind of Disney character motif on the front – Daffy Duck or Bugs Buggy, I’m not sure, it was too dark) pushing a ‘walker’. I smiled at her but she gave me a grimace and continued her slow inching. Another elderly person (not sure sex-wise) was sitting on a similar walker (some come with flip down seats) on the Prom. He or she was hunched over. I thought I might have to go and see if they were alright but when I passed her or him, I could see that he or she was looking a mobile. Up in the Castle park someone had clearly slashed away at the hydrangeas for several of its heads littered the path. Why?

I saw the Americans getting into a taxi at 5.30 am. He’d told him he was going (though much of what he said was unheard), that they had to due to their visa expiring but that they intend to keep on the flat for a bit in case they can return. I am saddened. Not that were knew them very well but the birds and the local vegan shop have all come to rely on them. As have I in my small way. I liked their gentleness and slow politeness. And seeing the birds that come to their balcony. Must there always be change?

I’m later writing this this morning. I’ve been out drawing, on a kind of ‘pub crawl’ of cafes in town sketching people queuing or sitting down drinking. We’ve sat in three cafes, all chains (they are generally better, I say generally, the first was, other two not so). I worked hard and watched the ebb and flow of my energy and my concentration. It was cold, the wind a sharp one. He read the paper and chattered to me, intermittently. He partners me in everything I do, patiently accepting and cajoling where necessary. There was a nice flurry in Caffé Nero and P was there, unexpectedly as we thought he gone to Newquay in Cornwall. I’m moonlighting, he said with the lovely twinkly smile of his. It took me a while to warm up with my drawing, I know when it is working but I carry RS in my head and know I have a long way to go.

I noticed the sign for the gift and tack shop just off the Prom and how the letters have either worn off (through to wind and rain etc.) or fallen off. So what should say AMBASSADORS now only reads ADORS.

We saw the young mother today who had hung her washing out along the hand rail. She was bending down over a pram trying to clean out the food that the child had deposited there. I’d called out to her yesterday through the window advising her against using the safety rail as a drying facility. I’d tried to do it gently. We of course thought she’d moved here permanently, with her three kids, but no, she told us she was only here for two days visiting her father who works in the hospital and that she was going back to Birmingham today. My train goes at 2, she said.

I saw the first law-breaker mobile home down by the harbour today. I mused over the fact that such flouting of the rules unsettles me. What harm are they doing? He gets quite exercised.

The slug trails along the pavements glisten quite beautifully in the moonlight.

I keep making marks on my furniture. I haven’t got much and what I have, though not expensive or particularly marvellous, I am fond of, if only for their aesthetic and utility. The first is my table. You got this in Bath, he said the other morning, I remember you getting it. And the second recipient of a stain is the red tool cabinet in my studio. Mostly they are water marks. The tool cabinet is where I rest my tea pot. I woke from a dream thinking that T Cut polish might do it. Alas, my table is not so fortunate. Most of the varnish has now gone with all the scrubbing I’ve done of it over the years. Much has been eaten and made on that table (the whole of my East End show, at least). I need to learn to accept the marrings, they show experience, I suppose.

My current JA book talks of stoicism, namely that of Anne Elliot but also Austen herself. All that making the best of things, of acceptance, fortitude and silent endurance but with resource. I have much to learn.

Oh, yes. I did draw yesterday, him mostly and they were appalling. He read out crossword clues and I drew. I know his face too well to make a good sketch of it. He is patient. Stop being self-indulgent, he says, just keep doing it and you will improve. Heidi was a better candidate, though she never keeps still. I drew her, when I could, when he’d gone, watching her catch flies and yes, eat them. This is her replete with tinkling collar bell. What a sweetheart, though painfully shy.

I wake fretting sometimes. Last night a dream set me off course. I shouldn’t allow it to be so. Their only dreams, he says. Yes, but their disorientations shadow my day. There was an old man, a mix of people I know, who had dementia and the whole house (where I also lived) had to be turned upside down and consequently where I was sleeping was unfamiliar to me (as were the things inside it) and the walls had holes in them.

I copied yesterday afternoon, though unsuccessfully and it brought me down. Can I really do this? I will try again today. Keep going. Just keep going. The click will come.

A little blue car stopped at the corner of Llanbadarn Road to let me pass. We did that kind of dance – do I wait, will you go, no you go. I was touched by their politeness and solicitude. It felt nice. The town was alive with noise. I could hear boys’ voices from the shoreline. Come on, let’s go, was one of their cries. And then the sound of splashing. Lights were on, squares of yellow against the black night. A girl with a ponytail got out of a car and rushed across the street. The car lights stayed on. An alarm was sounding in a block of flats. It makes one edgy all this wakefulness.