We sat in the sun for an hour yesterday afternoon. It was warm on my face. I kept falling asleep listening to his voice calling out the clues. It made him laugh. It was the warmth, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Thank you for that, for the sun and his voice and the stroking of my feet.
There are but a few scattered reminders that Halloween is due at the end of the month. The White Horse, now called The Varsity had strands of angel hair stuck to its windows in an attempt to mimic cobwebs and I’ve seen a few domestic dwellings’ windows with rubber spiderwebs and little skeletons fixed to the glass, oh and Starbucks are advertising their ‘Vegan Pumpkin Latte’ but that is it so far. Perhaps people are feeling too jaded by the threat of another lock down to enter fully into the spirit of it. One positive must be the lessening of the possibility of trick-or-treating, for what parents would let their children knock on strangers’ doors at the moment?
Charlotte Bronte mentions one in Jane Eyre. I’ve read the book several times why is it that I’ve not found out about it before? As far as I can gather it’s a big, black hairy dog, a phantom, a northern faerie who haunts lonely roads. I collect words. Sometimes they stick sometimes they don’t. Seeing Mr Rochester’s dog Pilot made Jane think of it. I’m so enjoying hearing it. And I’ve finished the latest William Trevor book, The Children of Dynmouth, and Timothy Gedge has been dealt with, or at least accepted, someone will show him kindness. He too was some kind of goblin, a feature of life we must needs live with, I think. And now, in this brief interlude between Trevor’s (another one is on the way from the Library on Monday) I’m back with Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac once more. An old friend, and perfect with its grey tones for this time of year.
I did write yesterday. But I made slow progress. Everything I do is slow. Can’t that be turned into a positive? Must everything be fast? Must everything be done for a swift outcome? I think not.
I find the few lighted windows that I see as I walk, now in the pitch dark, a comfort. Others, like me are awake, sleepless, perhaps working, or anxious or distrait. The yellow squares of light dot the blackness, floating, seemingly without anchor or belonging. Sometimes I catch details of a blind held askew or a sparkling beaded curtain. I always think of the paintings of Edward Hopper, his Nighthawks (did he call it that?) or his images of offices, its inhabitants working late into the night, where overhead bulbs are the only illumination. The staff in the Pelican Bakery are usually in there when I walk past, earlier now than of late. Mostly it is the girl with the thin, blonde ponytail and the baker himself. Sometimes I can hear a radio playing, its music coming through the grill that is pulled down in front of the open door. I try to do a circuit that means I walk past their shop twice, one so that I can smell the baking bread and two so that I can get the comfort of seeing the warm lights and hear the murmur of their voices, though they are mostly silent, companionable but silent. Also it’s nice to see the gentle work (or so it seems to me) that they are doing, checking the orders, placing the newly baked loaves on the shelves and so on.
He’s just come into the studio all water-proofed up for his walk but we both decide, as the wind and rain lashes the window, that perhaps he should put it off.
A writing day today. My head is blank. Will it come?
Dream upon dream, layer upon of vivid imagery of escalators, an old employer who’d become a college lecturer and for whom I was to work for, a hotel, who’s outside was made of glass and a couple of grey-haired men talking, one of whom was wearing green suede boots (rather like mine, actually). I was also sewing in one part of dream, trying to resolve a waking problem that has given me a tight knot in my left shoulder blade.
I walked regardless of the prediction of strong winds and lashing rain. The wind wasn’t strong and the rain didn’t lash. It was OK. I always feel better for braving it. And now the sky is clearing and I feel ready to take on the design problem I left unresolved yesterday. That is, with the help of tea….
I told him of Timothy Gedge over breakfast, one of Trevor’s Children of Dynmouth – an amoral, always smiling fifteen year-old who wreaks havoc with his spying on people of the town. Utterly devoid of empathy or compassion he bargains by promising to keep their secrets in return for help with his costume for a Spot the Talent Competition. I’m severely troubled by him. That’s what psychopaths are like, he says, but it’s only fiction. But is it?
The plastic bag I saw yesterday had moved. It was lying, at rest, on a bank of grass between the Little Angels Nursery and the gated house with the wind chimes. Puddles of rain, no doubt from the biblical downpour we had yesterday, filled its crevices. I noticed that La Taberna Tapas Bar and Spanish Restaurant has finally sold and that Jack’s Pie Shop, closed after the first lockdown is soon to be metamorphosed into a Bulgarian Restaurant. ‘OPENING SOON’ reads a sign in the window, felt-tipped in the what I can only suppose are the Bulgarian flag’s colours.
I forgotten so much of the detail of Jane Eyre, though I’ve read it several times. It’s lovely to have it read to me practically in full. She has left Gateshead for Lowood School. It takes me back to my own boarding school days. She was ten I was eleven. ‘The present was vague and strange…’ I remember that same feeling of powerlessness of having no choice but to yield to an institution’s unfamiliar ways and rites. I recall that same giving over of my body to be taken here and there by strange girls and teachers and house mistresses. I was wretched, though like her I didn’t really want to return home, I just wanted to have some autonomy, some right to make my own decisions and to be alone. I was never alone, nor was she. Sleeping, eating, dressing, washing, working was all done in the company of others. There was no escaping company. There was no space of my own. And eating too. Other people decided your appetite, what you must eat. You had no say. If you didn’t eat what you were given there was nothing else in its stead. I remember the echoey sounds of large dining rooms, of assembly halls and the dreaded swimming pool. And crying, and crying. There was also the new and strange tastes. I ate Alpen for the first time there, aping one of the teachers who swore by it and I’d watch her chew and chew. And English mustard, the only way to make the ropey ham we had for Sunday breakfast edible. And tapioca and shaving cream pie and spotted dick and the skin off the rice pudding. It was a surreal time for me, at least initially. I was cast adrift from all that I’d known and nothing was ever the same. It made me anxious, wary, watchful, diffident. I didn’t have Jane Eyre’s ‘passionate nature’, not then.
It was at the far end of the road before it began coming towards me. The wind was carrying it. No, not exactly carrying it but rolling it. It was rolling towards me, the reflections of the streetlights above causing it to shimmer like liquid. It was a large, clear plastic bag, that had been formed into a sausage shape by its ingestion of air. Carried by the wind’s gusty currents it rolled and tumbled its way along the road, sometimes being lifted up into the air before dropping down with a bounce. It was quite beautiful. Leaves followed in its wake, tossing and tumbling and scattering.
On my return journey I saw it again, still now it had become waterlogged, trapped into statis in a puddle and covered over with leaves, it’s adventure spent.
Sometimes it all gets too much – the news bulletins and the stories from Our Own Correspondent – and I need to escape. Sometimes it’s Austen or Eliot, the unabridged versions read to me through the BBC Sounds app, more recently it’s been childrens’ stories. I listen to them when I’m sewing the gift samplers. You have to adapt a little. They were written for younger ears than mine but when you do it is rather magical, especially if they were known from childhood, such as Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. I started listening to that yesterday after the final chapter of The Railway Children. Yes, they are a little dated but the escapism is complete as they relay that sense of having nothing very much to do, the stretch that one felt as a child at the beginning of the school holidays when the sun shone and there were fields to play in and dens to make. At the end of a morning’s sewing I can feel a little guilty, something wicked has been done, like going to the cinema on a weekday afternoon. He says, rubbish, enjoy yourself. Do I? Do I do that? Yes, if escaping onto the river with Mole and Ratty or laying the table for tea in Three Chimneys cottage is enjoying myself – I do. Ah, literature, what would I do without it?
The wind and rain was and continues to be furious. It lashes at the windows. I went out in it anyway. I don’t like to be defeated, to be kept indoors. And it so often isn’t as bad once you are in it. I wore two layers of waterproofs, there being no chance of using an umbrella in these winds. There were a few students about, and even they were wearing anoraks. A couple were walking down Terrace Street, past Andy’s Records and the smaller one, who was wearing an outsize coat, was saying No, No, to every question her companion asked her, before letting out an Aaah! sound as a gust of wind smacked at her face.
My dreams were deep and complex, at one point I held a severed thumb tip in my hand, only to then realise that it was mine.
Trevor’s stories continue to delight, enchant and unsettle me. This morning I read about a little boy recalling how he was told of his mother’s death at boarding school and his remembering of the details – the tray of hot chocolate, the sherbet lemons he was offered, and his washbag, then looking strange having taken on the horror of it all. It is stunning storytelling and I cannot help but want to tell my own but am in awe. If I just try might it come good?
A slow day yesterday. I am still not hundred percent, as people say. And yet the ideas for work come and badger to be made manifest.
No walk for him today.
The studio was lit by the moon’s eerie light when I woke. It lifts my heart when I see it and I’m loathe to switch on the overhead bulb. It shone as I walked, that white light that I struggle to describe. No torch was needed on the Perygyl. I stood for a short while on far reaches of the jetty. It was quiet, will barely a wind. I’m under the weather, not quite myself, a little off colour, all those things. It is nothing but something that takes away a little of my motivation. It will pass, it always does. I worry about her. Her daughter was taken into hospital and she so hates to be alone in the house. But neighbours and friends have rallied, it seems. One of the wives electing to stay overnight. I glad she is taken care of, watched out for. Life has been hard for her, and I wonder sometimes about her daughter carrying the weight of her. Keep them as well as can be.
He slept better. I hear him putting on his waterproofs. The rain has just come, not heavy yet. And the sky is opening to the day, finally. Winter begins to close in.