ellen bell

It’s been a week since I saw her. Seven days. I wonder how long it will be before I see her again. That look on her face after she’d opened the door cut through me. It still does.

I see it too sharply. It’s the detail of it, it arrests my eyes, always. Yesterday it was the torn net curtains in Flat no: 1. The windows had been opened and the wind was blowing them inwards. It was a bleak scene, regardless of the sunshine.

Someone has moved in. We’d been hearing noises from down there all day and the day before her chest of drawers had been removed from outside the front door. It’s a family, with two young children. The father is in the army and has been quartered here. He told him he isn’t happy with it. I don’t blame him, its a bleak, unkempt space. I thought of them last night, unable to feel at home in her once-much-loved home.

Mostly it isn’t. Life that is. Or at least it isn’t from our perspective, which, by all accounts is a narrow one. My heart aches for them. They weren’t the aggressor and yet it seems that they are the ones that must concede. Must it be so? Cannot someone intervene? I hold my breath, waiting, as I am sure they are for some better outcome….

I understand why she did it. She was in distress, and the end of her tether. I feel for her, even then, in all my hurt at what was essentially a rejection, I felt for her. She had to do it. To shut me and all that I came with, out. So she did. But she did ask him to call me, to explain, as best he could. It was something. Some thing.

Travelling doesn’t agree with me. My head loves the adventure, the escaping, but my body struggles to maintain its much-needed equilibrium. And I don’t sleep, at least not enough. Home now, and the pieces must be picked up and work resumed. But slowly, for today.

When he calls her he always asks what she is reading. She has a small library of books in her room that she returns to over and over. They are quiet stories, familiar, gentle. It is a comfort to her, I think, as it would be to me if I were in her situation. I feel such a tenderness towards her, despite her inscrutability.

I struggle with it, his temper that is. It feels like an assault. I am winded by it. The force, the insistence of it to be heard and to dominate. I want him gone then. Totally, so that my peace, albeit the little that I have, can be restored. He’s blocked the loo again, and the fault, apparently is mine. She talked of not murdering a marriage. Sometimes….sometimes…..

It’s a nebulous thing in dreams. Recently they’ve all been about being displaced, on the move – things were in bags – including two large sacks of oranges that I couldn’t fit into a cupboard. There were conversations about flats and where to go. None of it was linear. Space was moveable. As were we. I wasn’t distressed, just watchful. As I am now.

I find it one of the most moving scenes of the whole TV adaptation. It isn’t sophisticated or complicated, it’s just her sitting in front of her looking glass, in her underwear slowly and carefully removing her finery and jewels and laying them carefully down. Her husband, Bulstrode has been disgraced, his nefarious past having caught up with him. She is sloughing off all his ill-gotten riches – making herself naked of them. It is a solemn act, after which she walks down the stairs and, asking him to look up at her, she holds him. They both weep.