The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life Page 27

  You’re the one I gave my heart to all those years ago, and I don’t have it to give to anyone else.

  The things he says.

  She’s drying and brushing her hair, drying and brushing, when Henry touches her arm, making her jump. She hadn’t heard him over the noise of the dryer. He wants her to tie his bow tie.

  ‘I hate these fucking things,’ he says.

  Laura ties his tie and pats his shoulders but she can’t give him what he wants, not here, not now. She knows that sullen and pugnacious look, that lowering of the head. He has decided that he’s going to have a bad time, and his only satisfaction will be in finding himself proved right. She could talk him out of it if she really made the effort, could laugh with him at Diana’s transparent boasting or at Roddy’s monk-like unworldliness, sustained as it is by the enormous sums of money he earns at his bank. But she has too much to do, she hasn’t even begun to dress yet. A man puts on his dinner jacket, no thought processes are involved, no decisions necessary, and he’s ready in five minutes. Laura needs an hour minimum.

  ‘Don’t look so miserable, Henry. It’s no fun for the rest of us.’

  ‘You know I hate Glyndebourne.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You hate the audience. You love the music.’

  ‘I feel like I’m in Jack’s dream. Walking on walls, high above the clouds.’

  ‘Go away, Henry. Let me get dressed.’

  White sky outside. No sign of rain at least.

  Laura takes the grey silk and linen garments out of her wardrobe and hooks the hanger over the mirror. She catches sight of herself in her underwear easing on her tights, and looks away. Bad angle, the sag of her stomach seen from one side, bending down. Not that she’s fat, just no longer flat, not for a long time. But she was once. The girl who lay in Nick’s arms was beautiful. She knows it now, never believed it then.

  Was I happy then? Before he left me?

  She tries to remember, but what comes back is mostly the intensity of her longing, the waiting for the sound of his tread on the stairs, the sweet release from anxiety when he came. There must have been ordinary days, days when they were together and in love, complete in themselves, but they have been outshone by the dazzle of the moments of intense feeling, every one of which is associated in her memory with meeting or parting.

  If we were so much in love, why were we always parting?

  She lifts the silk trousers from the hanger and draws them carefully over her legs. Then the linen top. Then the shoes, cream leather with a single strap and a discreet wedge heel. She stands before the mirror giving little tugs to the garments to allow the fabric to sit comfortably on her body and to fall freely. She’s looking at herself but not yet committing to the true appraisal. This is still work in progress. There’s still the necklace to choose, earrings, bracelets, clutch bag. A scarf, perhaps. But on the whole she’s pleased. The material responds beautifully to movement. In the evening light, walking in the gardens, she’ll look her best.

  If only Nick could see me like this.

  * * *

  Henry is irritable, aware that he’s poor company. He keeps thinking of Jack’s school composition. Was it a nightmare, or was it a dream of escape? It seems important to find out. Jack himself is nowhere to be seen, and Laura has told him to go away, so he goes into Laura’s study to look for the composition in the place where she keeps all the children’s creations.

  The first thing he sees when he opens the desk drawer is a scrap of paper with a scribbled note. The second thing he sees is a letter in Laura’s handwriting that begins: ‘Dear Nick.’ Without thinking, he takes the letter out and starts to read it. The phone rings. He pays it no attention.

  I’m writing this, not long after you asked me to leave you. I’ll give it to you when you ask me to come back. I know this day will come because there’ll never be anyone for me as wonderful as you.

  Upstairs in her bedroom, Laura realizes that no one is going to answer the phone, so she goes to the bedside extension and picks it up. As she does so she’s aware of a staring face outside the open bedroom door. Jack.

  ‘Hello?’

  It’s Miles Salmon, the rector. He thinks he’s traced Billy Holland’s missing lady. He’s sure it’s old Mrs Willis.

  Laura says, ‘Oh, yes. The old lady in the electric buggy.’

  Suddenly Jack’s by her side, tugging at her sleeve.

  ‘Stop that, Jack.’ The boy will stretch the material, it’s delicate fabric. ‘Sorry, Rector. Go on.’

  The rector tells her about the inscription on the grave. He says he’ll leave Laura to pass it on to Lord Edenfield.

  ‘Yes, I’ll tell him. He’ll be most grateful.’

  She hangs up and there’s Jack looking up at her, white-faced.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Jack? You shouldn’t interrupt when I’m talking on the phone.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘It was the Rector. It was nothing to do with you.’

  ‘He said about the old lady.’

  ‘Please, Jack. It’s nothing to do with you. Has Lenka come yet?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Laura returns to her dressing table. Billy Holland will be at the first night of Glyndebourne. She’ll tell him there.

  By the time she comes down all the others are ready.

  ‘Heavens!’ says Diana. ‘How much did that cost?’

  Diana is startling in black and scarlet but on her petite form, inherited from their mother, the look works. Her lipstick is exactly the same red.

  ‘Very nice yourself,’ says Laura, touching her own lips to show she’s noticed.

  Diana is pleased. ‘Took me hours to find the right one.’

  ‘The right what?’ says Roddy.

  ‘Lipstick, Roddy.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Your tie’s crooked.’

  ‘Of course it’s crooked,’ says Roddy. ‘It’s real.’

  Laura shows Lenka what to cook for the children’s supper and gives her a sequence of phone numbers to call in an emergency. Henry joins them. Diana says to Henry, ‘I hear you’re working for Aidan Massey now.’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Henry says.

  ‘What fun. It must be like being back at school.’

  Laura kisses Jack and Carrie.

  ‘Don’t just sit and watch television for the next six hours.’

  ‘What else are we supposed to do?’ says Carrie.

  ‘I don’t know. Play a card game.’

  ‘You want to play cards, Jack?’

  Jack shakes his head.

  ‘See,’ says Carrie.

  The sound of car doors opening and shutting. Laura follows, conscious as she goes of the slip and swish of the layers of silk against her legs.

  ‘So what is it we’re seeing?’ says Roddy.

  ‘Oh, Roddy,’ says Diana. ‘I’ve told you. It’s Figaro. A new production.’

  ‘Oh God,’ exclaims Roddy as the engine of his enormous BMW purrs into life. ‘That means they’ll be in camouflage jackets and it’ll be set in an abattoir.’

  Laura waves for the children. She feels Henry sulking beside her. She wonders if it will rain. The car sets off.

  ‘Are we going to risk the gardens?’

  ‘Careful, Roddy!’

  The car swerves to avoid a walker making her way down the lane.

  ‘What the hell’s the dozy cow doing in the middle of the road?’

  Laura catches a glimpse of the walker as they sweep by. She’s an elderly woman with severe grey hair, wearing a quilted nylon jacket and Wellington boots. She walks with a stick. From the look on her face it seems she never heard the car coming and doesn’t see it now as it speeds away from her down the lane.

  Diana turns back to speak to Henry.

  ‘So have you seen the famous Nick, Henry?’

  ‘Briefly, yes.’

  ‘You know who he looks like? Your man. Aidan Massey.’

  ‘Oh, Diana!’ excl
aims Laura. ‘Nick doesn’t look anything like Aidan Massey.’

  She glances at Henry. He’s looking out of the window.

  ‘I don’t think we should risk the gardens,’ she says. ‘The forecast is for rain.’

  44

  This is the way they came on his last walk, all that time ago, an unimaginably vast chasm of time that was only Thursday and today is Saturday. But the intervening hours have closed on the past like an iron door. It is beyond her reach.

  He ran on ahead down this track, released from his lead because this is not a road for cars. Here he could be allowed a little precious liberty. Costly liberty.

  He runs from side to side of the track pulled by smells, never lingering, a quick snuffle and off again, always another more enticing smell tugging for his attention. What must it be like to be him? She reaches into her past for a comparable experience, perhaps going as a child to the fair after dark, running from one brightly-lit stall to another, unable to choose between the candy floss and the toffee apples and the doughnuts that are fried before your very eyes. But Perry isn’t greedy. He doesn’t smell in order to eat, he smells to know. What is it he knows? What impels him to know, why the eagerness, why the hurry? She tries to think as he thinks. He stops, turns, looks back towards her. What am I to him? He doesn’t know I’m getting old. He doesn’t know that Rex left me years ago, and that the anger in me has never faded. He doesn’t know that my life, which demands every day an ever greater effort of will, is meaningless.

  She loves Perry for not knowing these things, just as she loves him for what he does know. He knows her voice, her tread, her moods, her intentions. If she plans to leave the house without him he knows, she never has to tell him. He creeps to his chair and sits there gazing at her, his eyes reproachful, accepting, uncomprehending. For the blessed truth about Perry is that she is the centre of his existence. As he runs zigzag down the farm track ahead of her he stops, over and over again, to look back and make sure she is following behind.

  There looms the overgrown concrete pillbox. He found its bramble-guarded entrance, disappeared inside. She called to him, afraid there might be broken glass, vagrants sleep there, they leave their bottles. He came springing out, bouncing over the long grass, ears pricked up. Did you call me? Here I am. Is all well with you? Seeing that all was well he ran on down the track, over the cattle grid, through the stand of beech trees, and so out of her sight. Out of her life.

  The rector said, ‘It’s a matter of humility.’ Aster Dickinson knows her chosen sin is pride. When Rex left her the grief and the pain were so intense she thought she would die, but she didn’t die, and the wounds healed. Only the anger remained: and that was because of her pride. She could not bear to be what she would always be in the eyes of others, the woman whose husband had left her. An object of pity. Out of dread of pity was born rage, and in her rages, unwarranted, unjust, hurtful to others, she was at least not pitiable.

  So humility is an unfamiliar virtue to her. She is approaching it cautiously, not sure how far it will bear her weight. But already there has been a reward. She has allowed herself to talk aloud to Perry, to Perry who is gone for ever, and in doing so has found respite from the all-encompassing pain.

  So now I’m a mad woman who talks to herself.

  Except she doesn’t talk to herself. She talks to Perry.

  Alone on the farm track re-tracing Perry’s last walk, she calls to him as she wishes she had done then, so that it won’t be her fault.

  ‘Don’t go too far, Perry. You know you’re not to chase the sheep. Come back now, Perry. I can’t see you. Oh, you bad dog! Perry! Come here at once!’

  A charade, of course, but there’s no one to hear. He ran on through the trees to the field where the sheep graze, which is a big field, one of the beautiful valley bottoms that lie like bowls at the feet of the Downs. His resting place, more truly than the earth mound in the churchyard. For this is where she found him, a tumble of white in the green, lying so still.

  He that believeth in me though he were dead yet shall he live.

  Is it as simple as that? Believe, and death is no more? Humility grows more demanding.

  She picks her way slowly into the field, the track here now no more than two parallel ruts. The important thing is not to fall. She finds the spot which might be, she can’t be sure, where he lay.

  ‘Are you still here, Perry? Can you really hear me? I don’t mind you running away, so long as you’re safe now. Are you watching me, Perry? Are you looking back to make sure I’m following? I’m afraid I have to go slowly. I have to be so careful not to fall.’

  Ridiculous, of course, but who would have thought it could be so reassuring? So liberating? I should have done this before.

  ‘I love you so much, Perry.’

  I should have done this with Rex.

  ‘I love you, Rex. I miss you. I hate you.’

  She bows her head, pressing her lips tight together, shocked by her own words. Not the thoughts, the thoughts never leave her, but the public utterance. Then the shock passes, and she feels euphoria.

  ‘You bastard, Rex!’ she says. ‘You bloody bloody bastard!’

  Perhaps Rex hears her, somewhere in Maidenhead.

  ‘You selfish cruel bastard! I hope you rot in hell!’

  She feels the tingle of her skin, and is suffused with a new vigour. She turns back towards the trees, thinking it’s time to go home. The words come of their own volition.

  ‘You always were a useless coward, Rex. You didn’t even have the guts to tell me you were leaving.’ And this almost thirty years ago. ‘You were supposed to love me. Why didn’t you love me?’

  She’s a child again. This isn’t Rex she’s talking to.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do. What did I do wrong? Why didn’t you love me?’

  Heavens, what must she sound like! An old woman whining in a field because someone or other let her down years and years ago. Only it’s not someone or other. It’s her mother.

  She sees her clearly: those uncomprehending eyes, that tired irritable voice. What is it now, Aster? Must you be so droopy?

  She talks to her mother aloud as she follows the track home across the valley bottom.

  ‘You never let me explain. You never listened. Why wouldn’t you listen, Mummy? I tried not to be a nuisance. All I wanted was for you to listen.’

  This is a revelation. A new marvel. She can talk to anyone she wants. No need to believe, no justification necessary. It’s a matter of humility. Who is she to be so afraid of the ridiculous?

  I am ridiculous. I have been ridiculous for years.

  Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

  She’s reached the trees now. Looking up she sees the cool white of the sky burning through the young green of the beech leaves, a green so fresh and keen and luminous that the canopy could be eternity itself, life for ever renewed. For this is May. She had forgotten about May, the one month in England when every day brings new explosions of glory.

  ‘Lord God in heaven,’ she says aloud. ‘Don’t leave me.’

  What kind of prayer is that? Never a believer before, no comfort sought in the cold gloom of the church. But this is what she has it in her to say, to this nothing she has never known. Don’t leave me.

  And wonder of wonders, her prayer is answered. No voice from the sky, no vision. But all at once there falls on Aster Dickinson an absolute and profound conviction that she is part of something immense. She sees the same bright young leaves on the same branches above; the same soft carpet of beech mast in the wheel-ruts beneath her feet; but now everything is charged with a new meaning. These woods, these fields, this sky are no more than fragments of the immensity. What we see and know is not wrong: it’s just inadequate. It’s little. There’s so much more. How absurd to seek meaning in our own tiny lives. There is meaning, but it’s on an entirely different scale. Infinitely large, eternally unfolding.

  I am seen. I am heard. I am not abandoned.

>   This is Aster Dickinson’s revelation. She has been touched by the sublime. None of it hidden from view, but to see it takes a kind of innocence. Loss and grief have torn away her protective covers. All around her is a mighty otherness which goes on its serene way, unconcerned by Rex’s desertion or by Perry’s death.

  Of course, she thinks. Now that I see it, it’s true that I’ll never die. I’m part of it too. I am held in the arms of God.

  She walks home in wonder, expecting with every step that the sensation will fade, but it doesn’t. Back in her own kitchen she finds she can look at Perry’s empty chair without pain. Perry has gone, but it’s only as if he’s run out into the garden. He’s not far away. The only reason she can’t see him at present is that she’s too small, her eyes are too weak. Those that die are not truly dead. They have entered into the greatness. And she too is part of the greatness. She is in the arms of God, and Perry is in the arms of God, and all is well.

  45

  Carrying the picnic proves to be quite an operation. Roddy takes charge of the wine so Henry, honour-bound, heaves the enormous picnic cool-bag out of the boot. This dark-green webbed and strapped sarcophagus contains the three courses prepared by Laura’s mother Anthea, as well as plates, bowls, cutlery and condiments for six. It is dismayingly heavy. Roddy, in recognition of his lighter load, takes the roll-up table in his other arm. Laura, Diana and Anthea take two folding chairs each. John Kinross, who has a weak back, carries a rug.

  ‘You will be careful, won’t you, Henry?’ says Anthea. ‘The bag has to be kept upright.’

  Henry does not answer.

  So laden they clamber over the bed of rocks that divides the lines of parked cars, and make their way down the sloping car park to the gardens. Roddy leads, stocky and confident in his mulberry-coloured waistcoat and patent leather shoes. Diana follows, a brightly-coloured bird, walking with Anthea, who pales by her side: Anthea, always elegant, always understated, her long silver hair high on her head to show off her still youthful neck. Then John, a little stooping these days, walking with a stick; Laura by his side, looking ethereal in her new outfit, shimmering and silver-grey, cool as a waterfall, the two folded chairs clanking in her arms.