The Widow's Tale (3 page)

W
oke up last night about four o'clock, feeling profoundly rotten. Sometimes, if I have a sip of water, or a pee, and get my head back down pretty sharpish I'll slip back off to sleep. But if I allow myself to start thinking as I did last night then I'm basically screwed.

To be fair, half the reason I woke up in the first place was the amount of white wine I'd ingested a few hours earlier. My whole body felt as if it'd had a good, long marinade. It was quite clear that there was no earthly chance of me nodding off again. But I gamely lay there, in the dark, fretting and panicking, for what felt like hours.

An old woman went by the window just now, pushing a bicycle which was laden with bags of shopping. She looked like a refugee. There was no way in the world that she'd ever be able to pedal that bicycle, even without the two hundredweight of shopping. It was essentially a sort of zimmer frame with wheels. Anyway, she kept on putting one foot in front of the other and on the whole seemed quite pleased with her progress.

T
his morning I just about managed to convince myself I had the necessary stamina to venture out beyond the village, if only for an hour or two. I’d read somewhere about a church a couple of miles down the road with what are said to be sixteenth-century graffiti of ships. So I climbed into the Jag and headed out past Cley, along that lonely stretch of road where the creeks come right up to the tarmac on one side, and on the other there’s nothing but the occasional little row of houses looking out towards the sea.

Someone once observed how I’m drawn to places that are half in and half out of the water. At the time, of course, I thought she was completely crackers, but as I drove along this morning that innocent little remark came back to me and, not for the first time, I felt a twinge of guilt which suggests that she might have had a point.

The actual church is a solid-looking piece of architecture, not particularly pretty – or particularly modest, considering the location. But I suppose north Norfolk was a fair bit busier and more God-fearing when they built it. I parked the car on a patch of grass right beside it and marched up the steep little path.

The actual ‘graffiti’ is on the back of pews which have all been arranged for viewing quite close to the main door
– essentially just a series of scratches etched into an earthy wash of ochre, which makes the whole thing feel quite primitive, as if there might be the odd drop or two of ox blood mixed in with it. The ships themselves are pretty rudimentary – skeletal and quite fragile, with a little rigging and rectangular flags. Before actually setting eyes on them I’d somehow assumed that they’d been done by grown men as they struggled to stay awake through some interminable sermon – predecessors of Alfred Wallis, drawn in the naïve style. But, of course, why on earth would someone who spent his working life out on a boat return home and scratch ships into the furniture? The moment you see them it’s fairly evident that it was the handiwork of children, or more specifically, young boys. The galleons they aspired to one day climbing aboard.

There aren’t that many of them – maybe four or five ships in total. The sort of vessel a stick figure would sail. But I found myself inordinately moved by them. Perhaps it was the thought of a child’s crewless ship drifting through the murky ochre for four hundred years or more.

Certainly, they’re far more touching than any number of stained-glass windows or spires or communion tables. In a way it’s a shame that they’ve been dragged out of their original position. I would have quite liked to have got down on my hands and knees and peered round a corner to view them where they’d been secretly scraped into being.

The old rood screen is also on display, in various sections. Eight pairs of saints, or possibly apostles,
standing around, doing that beatific thing with their hands. What’s shocking is that all their faces have been scratched out, presumably in the Reformation. Strange, considering the mutilation is only done to an image, but one can’t help but imagine the physical sensation of the knife on one’s actual face.

I dropped a few coins into the wall as a donation, then smoked a cigarette out in the graveyard. And on the way home I made a bit of a detour and called in at Holt, principally in search of a better bottle of wine than those on offer in the village shop. Wandered into a second-hand bookshop to have a quick nose about. I hadn’t gone in there with any particular objective, but perhaps because of my little visit to the church in Salthouse, I found myself loitering around the Art section, and within a couple of minutes had found a rather lovely collection of Holbein prints.

I was still leafing through the book when some old chap approached the counter. The couple who run the shop were sharing the duties – about my age, perhaps a tad younger. And they’d just about finished totting up the bill for the bloke’s books and putting them in a bag, when the old chap spotted some etching on the wall behind the counter. It was some wide open landscape, which could’ve been any old place (I had a quick glance at it myself a little while later as I left the shop) – the South African veldt as easily as the Fens. But the old fellow seemed quite taken with it and became highly animated. And asked the shop owners where it was.

Without missing a beat they both said, ‘Where would you like it to be?’ in unison. Which struck me as wit of the highest order.

Needless to say, the old duffer didn’t think it half as clever as the rest of us. And once he’d got his change he gathered up his books and limped off in a bit of a grump. But his lack of humour didn’t appear to diminish the shop-owners’ spirits, and they went back to their newspaper and their pricing, or whatever it was they were up to. And I carried on leafing through my Holbein.

I honestly don’t know why I didn’t just buy it. It’s some weird superstition, whereby I have to return it to the shelf and leave it a couple of days, and in the meantime gauge how much I want it. And if I decide I really do want it and I go back and it’s still there then it was meant to be.

Anyway, I started to think to myself how this couple – let’s call them David and Jennifer – given the right circumstances, could quite easily become friends of mine. Judging by the quality of books on their shelves they’re pretty sophisticated. And, as has already been noted, in possession of a biting wit which is a prerequisite for anyone I’m going to respect enough to call a friend. And I began to imagine me and David and Jenny laughing and drinking in some rural boozer. Me and David and Jenny having dinner at my widow’s cottage and talking deep into the night.

I even imagined myself working in the bookshop a couple of days a week – just, you know, to get me out and about. And my being party to the bookshop banter – arguing, in a light-hearted manner, about whose turn
it was to make the tea or coffee, or pop out to buy the biscuits (‘… and this time get some
proper
bloody biscuits – the sort that have chocolate on the top’).

Perhaps that’s another reason I didn’t buy my Holbein. I wanted the excuse of going back. They had one of those portable gas stoves that make such a racket when you light them. I could think of a lot worse places to spend my Tuesday mornings than a cosy little shop like that, with decent people, surrounded by books.

But I wasn’t halfway home before I started having my doubts – and began to pour cold water on my little fantasy. What if Dave and Jenny didn’t want an odd number at their dinner party? What if I didn’t quite fit in – numerically or otherwise – with their mah-jong evenings? Wasn’t sufficiently bohemian for the Jazz Night out at Cromer? Or sufficiently scruffy for the Folk Club at King’s Lynn?

I’d parked up, locked the car and turned around before I realised that something was the matter. That the line of trees before me had a gap in them. More significantly, that when I looked to my left the original gap had been miraculously replanted, only for a new gap to appear along the way.

It always takes me a moment or two to work out what’s happening – that these tiny omissions are the mad little outriders bringing news of even greater ocular failings and visual fireworks. I was in my mid-twenties before I understood that it was some sort of migraine. Giving things their proper name can sometimes make them
less threatening. All the same, I now simply know what’s coming – that very soon it will feel like I’m looking out at the world through a frosted window, or have been staring at the sun.

It’s that initial moment of realisation that’s always the most alarming. If I can get to a tap pretty quickly and splash cold water onto my face and over my neck and shoulders I can occasionally nip it in the bud. To be honest, I’m not convinced it makes the slightest difference, but it’s something to cling onto. The alternative is just to surrender and let it ride roughshod over me.

Whatever – the whole thing is deeply distressing because … well, because blindness, even temporary, partial blindness, is bound to shake you up. And today, when I finally worked out what was happening I suddenly felt incredibly insecure and alone up here, without anyone near me that I could call on, just to hold my hand.

I know that every previous episode has passed and that my sight has always been fully restored, but that doesn’t stop me worrying that this one might prove to be unshakeable. By the time I was back at the cottage, half my vision was gone. I almost clattered into a couple of people on the high street and only succeeded in getting the key into the lock on the front door by looking off to one side in order to line it up in my periphery.

I should probably just be thankful that I don’t have those real head-banging, debilitating three-day migraines that some people suffer. For them the flashing lights are just the beginning. Like the flashing lights at a level
crossing. The barriers come down and they know that it’s going to be one very long and uncomfortable wait. With me, it’s usually over within forty-five minutes. In the meantime I can keep my eyes open and watch as the blind spots slowly evolve from fizzing little chains into great blocks of oblivion – and gradually recede from the centre of my vision. But it’s a show I’ve seen too many times already. So I tend to put a damp cloth on my neck and lie down in a darkened bedroom and listen to the radio, or try to doze for a while.

Now, here I am an hour or two after the event, and my thoughts are still a little jumbled. If I’m in company I often experience some difficulty arranging a sentence, as if caught up in a mildly dyslexic fog. A bit like being hungover, but rather disconcertingly, without having had a drop to drink.

This morning, as I desperately splashed cold water over my face up in the bathroom, in a futile bid to head it off, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. What I saw was not unlike those vandalised saints I’d seen earlier on at Salthouse, with their faces completely obliterated and all their features gone.

T
hose first couple of years we used to have the most incredible arguments. Proper plate-smashing, snarling, spitting, cat-and-dog sessions. Like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
. For some reason Friday nights used to be our preferred evening for a bit of a dust-up. We’d spend an hour or two loading ourselves up with booze, then off we’d bloody well go.

Of course, I can’t for the life of me now remember what it was that so exercised us. Quite possibly just the uncontainable rage of two people suddenly confronted with the fact that this was it. This spouse, with their infuriating little habits and boundless ignorance. God, no! we must’ve been thinking. Not fifty years of this. Let me out!!

After two or three years our scraps died down a little. I’d like to say that we learned how to properly appreciate one another, but it’s just as likely we simply resigned ourselves to our miserable lot. We would still have the odd set-to now and again, just to keep our hand in, but we tended not to go in for so much of the histrionics – the whole yanking-down of curtains/upending of tables/etc. Why bother, when a couple of choice words or a well-timed grunt could do just as much damage? And by then
we weren’t necessarily trying to provoke another round of screaming and shouting. All we wanted was to gently rake over the coals of deep despair.

If, five years into a marriage, you still don’t know how to get under the skin of your spouse – how to plug straight into one’s loved one’s battery of insecurities – then you really haven’t been paying attention. Similarly, when you’re on the receiving end, you learn soon enough how to tell real rage from rage’s impersonation. Real tears from the am-dram equivalent.

By the time we celebrated our tenth anniversary we barely fought at all. And I have to say I rather missed it. I missed caring that much, either way.

Speaking of Richard Burton, they had some idiot on the radio the other day being supremely dismissive about him. I can’t remember who he was. Some thrusting young critic, I imagine. But it rather struck me how it’s apparently quite acceptable these days to be perfectly pissy about Burton’s films and performances, which rather depressed me. I mean, did you have to be around at the time to appreciate the man’s talent? If you watch those films now, out of context, are they completely meaningless?

There’s no doubting that when you see a film with Burton in it you know pretty much what you’re going to get. But that’s why people bought their tickets. He had that ticking internal mechanism which meant you couldn’t take your eyes off him. James Mason was the same. You never hear people singing the praises of him
either these days. And it makes me feel dreadfully old to be sticking up for actors who, not that long ago, were generally considered to be gods.

I have a cassette of Burton reading
Under Milk Wood
at home somewhere. I should’ve brought it with me. I never was that big a fan of Thomas’s poetry – all that maudlin, sub-Yeatsian babble rather gets on my nerves. But I do like some of his prose. And
Under Milk Wood
definitely works, in its own weird way. Thomas and Caitlin were another pair of proper scrappers. I once read someone’s account of visiting them out in the sticks. And how at dinner, after a couple of drinks, Thomas started picking on Caitlin, and she started having a go back, until finally the two of them dragged each other off to the kitchen and proceeded to knock seven bells out of one another. Caitlin finally emerged, triumphant, and limped back over to the table, pinning her hair in place, and said to their guest, ‘Well, thanks very much for coming to the aid of a lady.’ A minute or two later Thomas reappears, with a split lip and a black eye, and carries on where he’d left off. No doubt telling everyone what a genius he was.