Authors: David Park

The Poets' Wives (10 page)

BOOK: The Poets' Wives

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And this is also the shiver of what must inevitably come as creeping up silently like a hunter there arrive the years when time’s hand begins to rest more heavily on him and wound with longer periods of illness. Then in the knowledge that his race is almost run he gives himself to his final watercolour illustrations of Dante with renewed vigour and concentration and the colours are as bright as anything his hand has ever made. And I give him back his own words and tell him that everything he has created from the world of the spirit will live long after he has gone and that pleases him. He has reached three score and ten, the allotted span, and we are married almost forty-five years. So many years; the days rush in against each other until it feels a lifetime is but a single day shaded in a host of different colours.

I think of it all now in this my final house – sometimes I get confused about the houses and what took place under which roof. I do not think of it as a home but somewhere I must wait and hold myself in readiness. This is not a house he ever lived in so at first I worried that he wouldn’t be able to find me but he is surely guided by love and there is scarcely a day when he doesn’t come and then it feels like all the homes we shared and everything in the past is somehow here in this one place. The pages of two lives that are one life and sometimes I am that young bride again in Battersea with flowers in her hair and sometimes I am the learner of words stepping into what seemed like a foreign country that I thought was forever barred to me but which opens itself until I step into its open garden. I like to think that it is the garden of love in which I have lived and while all things wither and fade, my hair brittle and grey, my body shrivelled, my heart is able to sing that there is no diminishing of love, no fading of the light.

He still ventures forth as best he can and continues to draw and work with all the strength he can muster and I watch him and see that what burns there is untouched by age and ill-health. There is a miracle in that and it makes me think of Moses seeing the burning bush and there are times when I think I too stand in a holy place. It is the world’s loss that they do not see what I see and a prophet is always without honour in his own country. I try not to think of the hardships that accompanied all our days, how many times we had to scrape and struggle to live, but can’t stop recalling with both a smile and a little shame when as a young wife I once served him an empty plate for his evening meal and told him that while his head was in Paradise our bodies needed food and the wherewithal to buy it. I was angry then, telling him that none of the shopkeepers would accept payment in dreams and visions. And so for a while at least he turned his hand more fully to making the money we needed to live.

His body grows ever weaker and he has to take to his bed but continues to work. These are dark days to recall and the colours I paint them are muted with sadness. I am increasingly filled with a dread of him leaving me, the selfish thought leading me into a fearful confusion about how I shall be able to live the first and every following day without him. He likes me still to read to him and sometimes I think he feels a pride in it as if I am his best pupil. And sometimes too I sing a little and all the old agitations and furies seem to have worn away from him so what is left is a calm, the still small voice of holiness.

On the final Sunday evening, the weather mild and the city itself as if becalmed into a final rest before the returning world of labour, he continues propped up in bed to work on the Dante drawings. When I ask him how he is he speaks of being ‘very weak but not in spirit and life, not in the real man’ and he smiles and reminds me again of the imagination which ‘liveth for ever’. I look into his eyes and see the light flicker and am afraid, think of turning away because it is more than I can bear, but then he stops his work, all the brightness flooding back, and says, ‘Stay, Kate, keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.’ He draws me as best his trembling hand can manage and it moves and quickens my heart more than anything else to know that I am his final image and as he works he tells me we shall never be parted and when he’s finished he holds my hand and tells me not to cry because soon he will throw off all the fetters and cares of this world that is not our true home and exchange it for the gardens of paradise. His voice holds no fear even though it slips slowly into a whisper so I have to lean in close to hear him and as I do so he lays his hand briefly on my cheek before it falls away again and then he is gone into glory.

I am a ghost to myself, barely existing at first, moving through the house as if I have no corporeal presence and without need for food or sleep. Sometimes I get up in the night and sit at his table and wait for him to come and start his work but there is only his empty chair and the unused press. Soon he will tell me to sell everything, give me instructions on what I must do with all that remains, but during these first days there is only a solitary emptiness that nothing seems able to end. I feel shut out from him just like all those years ago when I held his letters I couldn’t read and just as I felt that time by the sea in Felpham when he had his visions. I try to find comfort in telling myself that he will find our lost child and together at last they are waiting for me to join them. But in truth there is nothing that can salve the sorrow that feels as if it will crush what is left of me so that I breathe and move only through what feels mechanical.

Sometimes I spread what remains of William’s pictures carefully on the floor under the window and look at them even more closely than ever and there are so many questions that I regret not asking. I like too when the sun streams through the window and makes the colours freshly new but not even the light can reveal the full mysteries of these worlds and yet I have to believe that in time all will be known to me and the dark glass through which I view them now will be removed for ever, my immortal eyes open, and I shall see the eternal world in the way he saw it. I know that only in that moment shall I stand beside him as his equal.

At intervals there are those who arrive to buy his work and although reluctant and wanting often to say they should have come when he was living I have been told by William that I am to sell everything but when they ask me the price I tell them they must return in a day or so after I have had a chance to consult with Mr Blake. And if there are those amongst them whose manner or character are not to my pleasing I refuse their money. And the sketches he did of me are not to be bought for any price but are destined to stay close to me as long as I breathe.

I stand and watch the light illuminate all the holy images carefully spread on the floor and for a moment the world seems to fall silent and the noise from the street below is stifled and borne away to some distant place. Then by the rustle of some watching angel’s gossamer wings the paintings stir a little and raise themselves as if touched by celestial hand and I hear the still small voice of the Divine and everything is burnished brighter than earthly colours could ever fashion. The whole world turns silently and there is nothing but my breathing and then to shield themselves from the bright intensity of the colours my eyes blink and in that moment the noise of the street flows back into the room and all is changed once more.

The first time when he returns to me is when I am at my lowest and he comes one morning without warning, as if made from particles of light, his black suit shining, and he takes his seat once more as if he has returned from one of his walks through the city’s streets. I blink and wonder if I am still in some dream but when I open my eyes he is there and the light from the window shines both around and through him and when he speaks his voice is gentle and full of love. He tells me I must be patient and that soon he will come and take me home. But as he will do so many times in the future he answers my impatient questioning by telling me that it must be in the fullness of time when everything is ordered and ready.

He talks to me of the past and then he reminds me of that morning when we first baptised ourselves in the sea and how I was frightened that it would swallow me up. And I try to tell him that a lifetime later grief threatens to do the same. When I look up he has slipped away but I speak to him anyway and try to find and colour the words so that he will understand. Gradually the sharpness of the pain is replaced by a dull ache that is only made bearable by his frequent visits. And the pains are in my body as well as my heart and increasingly as the years slip by I feel the slow fade of my strength and am grateful for it, glad that the long struggle is coming to an end. I venture out only as is necessary but am mostly confined to this place that sometimes seems like Green Street, sometimes Fountain Court and at others like Lambeth. So there are times when I look from the window and imagine I see the Thames in the morning light and others when I look out on the courtyard where children played and it is as if I hear their voices rising up again and darting across the glass like swallows.

It is four years since he first departed, each one the longest expanse of time, dragged out as if by the tardy hands of a slowing clock. I am consumed by a great weariness and then at last there is the slow beginning of letting go and everything in anticipation finally given its truest colour, but for a moment, just for a single moment, I am frightened that I shall be swept into the eternal forests of some distant, starless night until my soul lays stronger claim to its inheritance and my eyes are clear enough to read, my heart strong enough to rejoice in Solomon’s words:

Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?

Whither is thy beloved turned aside? That we may seek him with thee.

My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies.

I was married with wild flowers in my hair – rose, daisy and the sweet scented honeysuckle. For my posy I carried bluebells – I have one still, its faded blueness pressed between the pages of my Bible. Now this poor bed with its threadbare blankets is no longer of this world but that bed of spices and soon my beloved will come to gather what is finally his and then I too shall be dressed in light and all the infirmities and afflictions of old age shall surely fall away. Such colours then, already spreading in wonder across new worlds, and I shall see the visions that were denied to my mortal eyes, my head and heart freed for ever from their earthly limitsk, and I shall be as the woman clothed with sun, no longer ‘the shadow of delight’. And as we did when we walked in the lanes and field of courtship I shall teach him the names of what grows in Paradise.

But how will I know he’s come and will my going be like that sphere of fire we watched burn itself across the sky or will it be in the slow unveiling of early-morning light as the city stirs and wakens, this city that is the human awful wonder of God? As always impatience makes me restless and I calm myself by thinking of Eve who is waiting for me and how he will take me to her and she will be safe inside my embrace and never lost to it ever again. And now it’s as if all the city is singing with the voices of angels echoing through every street and stilling the clamour and chaos into one holy song and then as it falls silent again he’s standing there at last and he gently calls my name. The Bible slips from my grasp, the bluebell falling out into new colour in the light that flows about him, and he’s whispering my name and holding out his hand. His hand that has no stain or mark. He’s telling me that the pure soul will cut a path into the Heaven of glory, leaving a track of light for men to wonder at. He’s calling my name. I can barely raise my arm but I reach out and take his outstretched hand. Then we step into the other room together.