The Night Following (26 page)

I didn’t know when to expect him, of course. My safest course was to wait out each day in my usual way, but with extra caution; probably he would not return alone and they might barge in while I was asleep. So when dawn came, I made my way up to the attic. The air was pleasantly thick and warm. I was so tired I could have bedded down on the bare boards but I was pleased to find a pile of curtains and some rolled-up rugs. I arranged them into a kind of nest and settled down, dragging a dusty white net curtain around myself so that it covered me completely. I held it to my face until it was wet and salty. Then I opened my eyes and pulled the cloth right around my head and held it taut so I couldn’t blink. I stared through its gauzy whiteness. The sun from the skylight glimmered through, a cloudy bright rectangle in the flat, milky shadow of the sloping ceiling. I breathed in and pretended I was in the countryside in a field full of flowers, looking up at the sun just after it has rained. Over the white nylon I ran a finger down my nose and over my cheeks and across my lips, which were smiling now. My musty smooth curtain was a new white skin come to cover me up so nobody would know what I was like underneath. I fell asleep, and the day passed.

When I got up again I was restless and could not settle to anything. I knew he would not come at night, but still I tried to kill time by measuring my every move in little units of anticipation, awaiting his return. I stripped his bed and changed the sheets, smoothing my hands over the pillow just where his head would, very soon I prayed, leave a soft dent. I opened the bedroom window with some funny idea that he had flown away and now he’d be able to get back in, like Peter Pan; if I was to go down to make tea, he would alight on the floor above me in the moment between my filling the kettle and opening a bottle of milk. If I counted the strokes as I brushed my hair, he would be here before I reached a hundred. If I started to sing to myself in a low voice, affecting a nonchalance I didn’t feel, it would summon him back, and the opening of the door would be the first sound to interrupt this meandering, patient song of mine.

By the next morning I was worried. I spent all day in the attic, unable to sleep. So I heard everything as I lay there: the arrival of a car, the front door opening, people talking, and after a few minutes a woman’s voice more insistent than the rest. In all the noise and movement I could not make out a sound from Arthur himself. After a while the house grew quiet again, and I slept. When I woke, I guessed it was around three o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe they had put him to bed. I thought of him in his room, wakeful, curious, perhaps still afraid. I willed him to turn over and close his eyes, not to fight sleep, and I fancied I heard a little whine, the kind an animal makes when it knows that the time for choosing to fight or to give in has passed, because either it is already defeated, or it is safe. Then I fell asleep again.

27 Cardigan Avenue
Dear Ruth
I’m back. I couldn’t wait to get back.
I’d forgive you for thinking me slow to catch on—well, I have been slow—but I’ve got it now. I’m getting to the crux of it now. I can think clearly here. You’re here, but only here. You’re nowhere else. Not in the hospital. I missed you terribly.
The hospital—it’s a zoo in there.
The ward was hellish. I came to thinking how could this get any worse—then it did. Mrs. M swooped in and perched like buzzard refusing to budge because, she said, somebody had to catch the doctor and explain the situation. She said the nurses don’t pay attention to anything these days much less pass it on to the doctors—all this according to The Great Tony. I was lucky, she said, to have an NHS insider like Tony on my case. You need somebody who can get to the right people, knows their way around the system.
She brought a book for me, something somebody had given her but it wasn’t her kind of thing. An anthology. She didn’t know till recently I was a poetry fan, she was surprised to find the house swimming in it or she’d have passed it on before.
Doctor didn’t come all morning, so
finally
she went. I had a squint at the book, it didn’t do anything for me either.
Poetry isn’t like water or air. You actually don’t need it to live. I can hear you disagreeing, but it’s a fact. Poetry’s more like the wine or perfume in a life. It’s nice to have, but you can get along all right without. You can manage with just having everything plain, or at least you can until you’ve acquired the taste for the more rarefied, then it’s harder. But as long as you’re getting along without anything fancy, you don’t see that you’re missing much.
All right, you’re frowning at that. But that’s me. Ordinary and plain. It’s my history, I suppose. There are some histories you couldn’t squeeze a poem into sideways and that was mine, not that I’m complaining. Good people, my parents, though of course you only knew Dad and he wasn’t the same man after Mum died. All that’s history, too, in the background—nobody really remembers.
Funny word—I’m thinking about words—the
background.
My background—when was it? Where is it now? Overdale Lodge? Or before we met? Or after? When does anyone’s background stop and their foreground begin? We were married all those years, isn’t that a background in itself, does it blank out what came earlier, does whatever comes after meld into it and get lost, or does it stand out sharper? Maybe we’re just a fuzzy pair of figures somewhere in a painting, so small and on the edge that only we know we’re there at all. Nobody else really sees us.
But it’s still ours, our life—no matter it’s just a collection of dots in one corner of a picture, no matter we’re background figures, no matter how many people miss that we’re even there.
But you can’t set it down, not even our little life, nobody can—not in a picture, not in words.
I just wish I could.
I remember the kind of pictures you liked. The ones you said were like film sets if only they’d known how to make films then. In the Renaissance. We watched that thing on TV, remember, about how they painted them to make your eye go straight to the little golden figures cavorting about in flowers without a stitch on, and next onto the tumbling green cascades and ruins and peacocks, and then to the blue distant forests and mountains and sky. Was the order of the colors meant to calm you down or something, make you think deep thoughts? Maybe that’s the kind of background you need for poetry. Or for cavorting.
I’m no poet and I never was a cavorter. Obviously. I see now I may have let you down there.
I’ll think further on it all, now I’m back safe. Finally saw a young fella purporting to be a doctor about five o’clock yesterday, told him I was taking myself off home for some peace and quiet. He looked terrified, clearly couldn’t deal with me, he went and fetched a nurse at least twenty years older than he was.
Two against one—
VOICES RAISED
in objection—and they told me
I
was shouting!!! Leg condition needs to be stabilized, hospital best place, support yet to be arranged for return home etc etc.
In the end I had to mention most important point—ie getting back to you, dear. I said all support necessary was waiting at home, thank you very much, and further interference neither required nor welcome, please give your time and attention to those in greater need, I’m aware there’s pressure on resources.
Predictably this threw them quicker than you could say Psychiatric Assessment, in fact it proved to be a proper old poke into a hornets’nest. People wandered through with clipboards and forms—not about me, it was all about a Care Program, social services, community nurses, meals on wheels, whole shooting match. And that was only the start, there was this or that or the next thing they couldn’t do till tomorrow or day after or until so-and-so got back from vacation. I got so tired hearing them go on and on I fell asleep. I’m sure they slipped me something.
Fooled them, however! Was awake nearly all night as usual and up and dressed and ready to be off when staff were changing over this morning. There’s even a taxi line outside, I didn’t have to navigate the bus routes.
Couldn’t escape the welcoming committee, though, Mrs. M and Co—taxi not home two minutes and there they were. They must’ve had the place staked out. But now I’m back I’ll go on thinking about it all. The pictures, the words. Where your life gets put, if you’re not very careful, by other people. What you’re meant to do with all the things you remember. Should I be worrying that maybe I remember some things that aren’t true, and forget others that are? Does it matter, if nobody would know but me? I only want you to know. I want to talk to you.
I’ll have a sleep now and think about it all later, toward the time when the sun’s setting. That’s when I wake up and that’s a good time for thinking. Thoughts pop up out of the dreams I have, though I don’t remember the dreams.
I want to hear from you on these and other subjects, when I’m more myself.
When I’m less myself, is what I should be saying.
Affectionately
Arthur

Where’s the harm in it? By staying here I can give him, in this discreet way, the help he needs. If I’m now Ruth, does it matter? He’s happier, and he’s clean and eating again. Considering what I’ve taken away from him, some small measure of well-being is little enough to be giving back. And since that’s all I do give him, how could I take that away again?

I can’t risk an appearance so I can’t do much about all the visitors. I feel like writing to the damn nurses and the neighbor to say that while he may seem to them to be losing ground, actually he is being restored to life. But why would I owe them any explanation? And would they understand it? No; I would have to write it like a sick note composed to veil the whole truth. “Please make allowances for Arthur if he does not seem quite himself but he is more himself than ever and should be excused.”

It can’t be done. I would have to puzzle over it, pondering what it was they needed to know and how they needed it said, and concoct some version of his condition that would both satisfy and conceal. I would have to write with insincere respect for an established belief that I have long known to be false, which is that when people die, they depart; I would have to write it as someone other than Ruth, and that’s impossible.

27 Cardigan Avenue
Dear Ruth
Your Della phoned. This story of yours, am only now appreciating the scale. Of your ambition, I mean. Della wonders if time is now right to ask if I would let them put some of it in their next “Work in Progress”collection, they do one every two years.
What do you think of that?
She also said you had just about finished it. Well I haven’t come across anything beyond Chapter 4 so where did she get that idea from? She said you were planning to read something from the second half to the writing group, they thought you might have had it ready for them that day. You know, the day it happened.
Also I keep finding poems. Folders and envelopes marked with year of composition. Wish you were a more meticulous filer. I claim, if I may, a little credit for meticulous filing, and like it or not you have to admit it would have done you good if a little of my example with check stubs, bank statements, and paperwork generally had rubbed off on you.
I’m no fan of Della’s as you know, and common sense prevailed just in time, the phone was still in my hand. I was on the point of telling her about all the poetry I still haven’t gone through, but I stopped myself just in time. Nearly said would she come round and be here with me when I read them, as if poems were a bit of a hazard, too risky to read on my own. Most of them I won’t understand anyway. I banged down receiver just in time.
By the way I like the story. At least I understand it.
I suppose you would have told me about it once you’d got a bit further on.
Re: poems. I do like this one. When did you write it? What else did you think that day, what else did you say that day, and where has all that gone?
Green bird sits
Looking at me
From the green shelter
Of the lilac tree.
Doesn’t it know
Doesn’t it see
How much I wish
That I were he?
Shouldn’t that be “was him”in the last line, strictly speaking? I can see it wouldn’t rhyme then, but Della says rhyming’s not necessary.
Couldn’t fathom what bird you were describing, either. I finally tracked down the big bird book. When did you stick that and other works of ornithological reference in the attic, by the way, because I don’t recall so much as a by-your-leave.
Now don’t take this the wrong way. I’m just trying to help. Only I don’t see what harm it could do to know what bird we’re talking about. “Green”isn’t much to go on. I’m skeptical, moreover, that you were sure it was a “he,”but it would narrow it down a bit. Male and female plumage differ, as I know I have pointed out to you in the past.
Main possibilities are these (in order of likelihood acc. season, distribution of species, and population numbers, figs. as calculated by RSPB survey 1988):
Greenfinch
Willow warbler
Wood warbler
Goldcrest
Siskin
I grant you’re the poetry buff but you’d concede I have the edge where ornithology’s concerned.
Do you remember, many’s the time at Overdale Lodge I was first to get the binoculars out? It became a bit of a joke! Mr. Mitchell and his binoculars!
I still maintain that as long as a teacher commands respect then he can take a little friendly standing joke against himself, in fact it shows he’s human.
Education by stealth, we used to say, remember? Give the opportunities to all, and some will partake. Oh, we didn’t expect to convert the kind of town kids we took to Overdale in the space of a week, but many’s the hardened case was interested in learning how to use the binoculars. Many’s the tough nut who was pleased to learn something about the lesser-known native species. Education by stealth.
At least in those days we managed to get them as far as Overdale. All that’s gone and it makes my blood boil. Give the opportunity to all and some will partake, that was a good enough philosophy in our day and it still should be. Horses to water.
Overdale has been on my mind, since looking out photos etc etc from old times. I put one up, where Della’s memorial left a hole in the wall.
Class 3C Aug 1973
it says on the back in your writing. Our fourth year, a year after we got married.
The kids in that picture are nearly fifty now. I wonder who that lanky fellow with all the dark hair and the sideburns was, he looks oddly familiar!? Clue—the one with the binoculars round his neck!!
You don’t look any different.
I was looking for the lilac tree in the garden, thinking of your poem. It’s over by the shed. It’s the white kind, not the lilac lilac. No bird in it of any color in the middle of the night, but I looked at the blossom for a while. It’s turned brown, as if it’s been under a grill. I do notice some things.
Your touches around this place, I notice them, too. Thank you. You don’t know the difference you make. I never have been much good at telling you, have I? Maybe that’s something that will change.
With affection & gratitude
Arthur