A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (29 page)

In the morning Anne asked me to stay on. ‘This cedarn shade your prison,’ she said, gesturing to the vast tree in the pleasure gardens below us, and the pretty little pink Dower House beyond it – rented, she told me, to a romantic actress. ‘Stay here and recover!’ But I knew that if I stayed more than one night I would turn into a pumpkin or worse. I had to go, I had to get back to school, I said, I would ring a taxi and rejoin my car. Nonsense, she said, she would first take me to see her doctor, and if he said I was fit to drive, if I insisted, she would drive me back to the Weir.

On the way to her doctor, who lived on a remote hillside
covered in goats, we were trapped for a while behind an agricultural monster embedded in the hedge. In no time at all a queue of cars accumulated, there, in the middle of nowhere – first us, then two nuns in a Honda Civic, breathless not with adoration but from ceaseless chatter, then a gentleman farmer with a fine moustache, then a young man in glasses wearing a red shirt – anarchist or hunt saboteur, we speculated – then a turbanned Sikh, then a yellow mobile library. Truly the English countryside is strangely peopled.

Well, I am back in urban Northam now. This is where I belong, and when all is said the manners of the people suit me better here. I will not make the mistake of transporting myself in retirement, as my first landlady had done.

My leg is better. The doctor gave me some magic muscle pills. I limp no more.

I am back at work, and my excursion seems like a dream, but I am changed, I am fortified. You may by now have suspected that after that Somerset summer of forty years ago, after graduating, I fell into a profound depression. For a year, I did not care whether I lived or died. I slept weeping, and weeping did I wake. I recovered, slowly, with the help of Wordsworth, finding in him, as had John Stuart Mill in similar despair before me, at first ‘the real and permanent happiness of tranquil contemplation’, and then, at last, ‘an increased interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings’. But like a coward I had feared, with the approach of age and enforced idleness, a recurrence of that despair. I stepped westward to test my destiny. And I found there Anne Elliot, with a wild gleam in her eyes at sixty.

She has said we must keep in touch, and who knows, maybe we will. And maybe we will not. We are stubborn and mistrustful of new friends, we Yorkshire folk. My real and sober life
is here, but I no longer fear the future as I did. The untravelled world still gleams. And Shakira Jagan has read Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture, and she concedes that it is good. Or not half bad, as she put it, in her Guyanese-Yorkshire style. So I brought some magic back with me, and it will keep me through the winter.

(2000)

¹
From an untitled poem. Used by permission.