‘I want people to notice me,’ he says. ‘The parents haven’t a clue.’
‘But you stole my poems, David. You made a mockery of them.’
He looks at me gently, with your eyes, and he says, simply, ‘I just want someone to see me, Q. See who I really am.’
It is what we all want, in the end; to be seen.
‘Those poems you were reciting weren’t yours. So how can anyone see you in them? If they’re seeing anyone, it’s me.’
He laughs briefly, then speaks again, and it is with the same disarming honesty: ‘That’s it, though. You are seeing me, Q. You’re seeing I’m a fake.’
The anger I have felt, the sense of betrayal, melts away. I want to help this boy. I really do. ‘You have to show your heart, David.’ I place my hand on my own and I feel it throb against my palm.
After a moment he asks, ‘Is that what you were doing in your poetry? Showing your heart?’
This time I don’t answer.
David reaches for his bottle, untwists the cap and refills the green teacup with Southern Comfort. He wipes the bottle’s neck very carefully with his sleeve. I end up heating a Christmas pudding (for one) and sharing it with him by the fire. We eat it from plates on our laps. He tells me a little about his summer in Europe, and it’s only as the light goes that he asks, ‘Who were they for? Your poems?’
‘No one you know. I wrote them years ago.’
When I look up, he is watching me very carefully and smiling. He believes me. He does not realize I love his father. David pours me a cup of Southern Comfort, and I drink so fast the alcohol spikes my throat. ‘I just wanted to know for sure,’ he says.
Over the next few weeks, David rings a few times. He reverses the charges, of course, and tells me how he’s getting along at Cambridge. Since our conversation, he assures me, he’s been feeling better. More grounded. He’s started writing his own poetry, he says, and he’s really pleased with what he’s done. It’s not funny any more; do I think that’s OK? I assure him that if he’s really expressing who he is, that is good. It’s really good. ‘Can I send them to you, Q?’ he asks.
Apparently there is someone he’s met at Cambridge who knows someone else, and the someone else has read the poems and thinks David has a big future. He’s got the ability to take a subject and push it to the edge. The first poems arrive the following day: a thick wad of them in a brown envelope.
I am going to be honest with you, Harold. David’s poems aren’t up to much. They’re full of clichés. Mostly unfinished. There is also a darkness to them that makes them appear self-indulgent. I write notes in the margins. Where his imagery is loose, I suggest new ideas. I am trying to do what I can to help. More poems arrive. They are more bleak. They talk about death, the black hole. Often he writes at the bottom, ‘For your eyes only!!!!’ He urges me not to tell the parents or he’ll never trust me again. ‘Your secret’s safe,’ I reassure him. Nevertheless I am concerned, and I don’t know how to tell you.
Easter comes and goes. I remember hiding small foil-wrapped chocolate eggs in your car for a surprise Easter egg hunt, but you go and sit on one and so we spend a long time in a café trying to clean off the mess.
David is home very briefly. When he goes back for the summer term, the poems start arriving again. I continue to help with new phrasing, and sometimes, I admit, I use the opportunity to make other suggestions too. Perhaps he should join a poetry group? Is he eating properly? If anyone had asked me what I was doing with David, I would have explained: I was helping you by helping your son. I, too, had been an Oxbridge student. I, too, had parents who were in awe of my intelligence. I hoped David would find his feet; then I would casually drop into our conversation the whole truth about our dancing and my sending him cash, the poems and all the other things I had failed to admit to you. Told in hindsight, none of those things would seem so big because they would be safely in the past and David would be happy.
And so we continued to drive together, you and I. I watched you, brought you chocolate bars, little things to show I was there. And sometimes you took the long road home and pointed to the birds. We stopped once, do you remember, because you said you thought I looked pale. (I was. David had sent me a poem that morning about ‘the blue beasts’ in his mind.) We sat beneath a fig tree, but I was too miserable to speak. After a while, you began to collect figs and line them carefully along the empty lay-by. Had I ever played fig ball? you asked. When I said that no I hadn’t, you expressed surprise and told me it was very simple; it was like bowling, really, only with figs. ‘You can play it anywhere. I don’t know why it’s not an Olympic sport. And if you can’t find figs, you can do it with conkers.’
I was unexpectedly good at fig ball. ‘You see,’ you said. ‘You’re smiling again now.’
‘One day I will come here with my son.’
We are sitting outside the pub at Slapton Sands. I have sherry. You have a pint of lime-and-lemonade. A packet of crisps sits on the table between us. It must be summer – the end of David’s second year at Cambridge. The sea is very still, like polished glass, and the sky shines silver too, broken intermittently by the flash of light from Start Point. ‘We’ll have a beer,’ you say. ‘Me and David.’
A beer? I think. Are you sure? As if reading my thoughts, you smile. ‘Or maybe a lemonade. We’ll talk. You know.’ Your blue eyes mist. ‘Man to man.’
‘That would be good,’ I say.
‘When you’re young it’s not so easy to talk with your father. But one day. One day he’ll be old like me. It will be easier to talk when we are old.’
I picture David wearing my mittens. I laugh. ‘I can’t imagine David in driving gloves, Harold.’ You look so sad, so unsure, I am trying to make you feel better but even before I get to the end of the remark, I realize what I’ve said. I wish I could cram the words back into my mouth. Instead I down what is left of my sherry.
‘I don’t understand,’ you say into the silence. ‘Have you met David?’ Very quietly the sea brushes the shore.
It would be so quick to say yes. Yes, Harold; yes, I have. You give it to me on a plate. We danced a few times, I could say. He telephones. Asks for money. It is not too late to come clean. It’s never too late – and then I think of my poems, the poems he lampooned, and I have no idea how to explain that I love you.
‘No,’ I say. I say it again, just in case the first one isn’t big enough. ‘No. I haven’t. I’ve never met him.’
You give a smile with a noise. Not big enough for a laugh, but warmer than a mere smile. ‘I think you’d like him. He’d definitely like you.’
It is all becoming too much.
Fire alarm
WE WERE woken very late by the fire alarm. One of the new patients was smoking and had caused a minor explosion in his oxygen tank. The night staff and the nuns wheeled us outside into the Well-being Garden and covered us with blankets, though it had been a warm day and the air was surprisingly mellow. I could smell the earthy sweetness of the hawthorn, the cow parsley, and the very first of the elderflowers.
‘The idiot could have killed us,’ complained one of the night staff. She looked cross and tired, on the verge of tears.
‘Yes, but he didn’t,’ said Sister Philomena, smiling. ‘It’s all right, Barbara. No need to get up. Sit still now. Hold my hand.’
The patients’ faces glimmered against the lights from the dayroom. Nothing had substance in the dark. The people, the trees, the pagoda, the stones of the rockery, the silvery stars of astrantia and the cascades of laburnum. They were pale in the stillness.
‘It’s like Watership Down out there,’ said Sister Lucy. ‘All peaceful.’
‘Are you joking?’ barked Mr Henderson.
Sister Lucy said she wasn’t. It didn’t matter she had skipped the beginning; she thought it was a lovely story. She had just finished reading it to Barbara.
‘All those rabbits? Being run over and traumatized?’
Sister Lucy covered her mouth with her hands. ‘Rabbits?’
she repeated. ‘Where are the rabbits?’
‘They’re all rabbits,’ said Mr Henderson. ‘That’s the whole point.’
‘What? All of them?’ Sister Lucy looked devastated. ‘But they talk. I had no idea they were rabbits. Oh no.’ She sat in silence, taking this in, and sometimes her face buckled and she said, ‘Oh no,’ again. ‘That’s terribly upsetting,’ she murmured.
Why did you have to go and tell her they were fucking rabbits? hissed Finty. And Mr Henderson said he was sorry. He thought everyone knew they were rabbits; there was even a picture of them on the front cover. He wished he’d never mentioned the rabbits. ‘Oh no,’ sobbed Sister Lucy. Sister Philomena wrapped the young nun in another blanket. I reached for her hand.
A little later someone said, ‘Look, Reverend Mother. Look at the moon.’ When Sister Philomena saw it, she asked for the staff to wheel us to a place in the garden where we might enjoy it too.
The moon hung low in the sky, the colour of a clementine. All around, the stars flickered and pulsed. Mr Henderson pointed to the Plough and my father’s favourite constellation, the little batch of stars called the Seven Sisters. ‘Do you see, Sister Lucy?’ he asked. ‘Miss Hennessy, do you see too?’
I thought of my sea garden. The figures glowing in the moonlight. The chimes calling in the wind. I pictured Embleton Bay in snow and wind and sun; all the different ways I have come to know it. I saw the winter waves rising in slate-black walls, and I saw the sea on a July morning, like a stretch of pink silk. In reality Embleton is not so far away, only thirty miles, but the space between me and my garden feels a light-year.
After all the emotion of the oxygen tank and the rabbits, I didn’t want to cry and make a fool of myself. So I said in my head, Think of something else. Think of Harold Fry. He is under the orange moon and these stars too.
Ways of loving
‘PEOPLE CAN love in different ways,’ I told David. ‘You can love full on, with a lot of noise, or you can do it quietly, over the washing-up. You can even love a person without them knowing.’ I was careful to turn away.
It was the Christmas of David’s third year at Cambridge, and things had got worse. Whenever he came to visit, he sat in my chair by the electric heater, hunched in his black coat, smoking a joint. If I questioned this, he said it helped him to relax. Apparently he was still writing poetry, but he didn’t want to show me any more. When I asked about the coursework, his eyes glazed over. It was the same when I enquired about friends. He often complained about the cold, and I was forever fetching him blankets. I asked if he would see a doctor, but David only scoffed. It was the same when I suggested that he should talk to you.
I had promised myself that I would be a bridge between you and your son, and I was out of my depth.
Perhaps in order to distract me, he took me back to the debate we’d been having about love. It was the idea of loving over the washing-up that appalled him. How could I be so trivial?
‘Sometimes you have to think in an ordinary way, David,’ I said. ‘Sometimes life is not what you expect.’
‘I’d rather die than be ordinary, Q,’ he said. He lifted his head and fixed my eye, and there was so much trouble in his face, I had no reply.
I understood what David meant, though, when he said he wanted to be more than ordinary. When I was a student, I’d felt the same. I fell in love, over and over, with tall, dark, handsome boys. The tall boys took me on dates in order to ask about my tall friends. I wrote love letters, beautiful things, on their behalf. Afterwards the dark, handsome boys and my golden, beautiful friends called me a good sport or a rock but that is the same as saying You are kind, or You have nice feet. It is being supportive. I didn’t want support. I had hosiery for that. I wanted love.
When I began to find it, it was only in ways that came to nothing. I chose people who would let me down. And when I didn’t choose people who would let me down, I was chosen by people whom I would let down instead. There is no need to say very much about those affairs. It is a hard thing, this learning to love. I knew, for example, that the Shit in Corby was the wrong choice, and so I had to do a lot to distract myself from the truth. When you know a thing is wrong, you have to work very hard to stick with it. And really, I should stop calling him the Shit now. He is probably a good husband. A good father and grandfather. A good neighbour. All that.
Then I met you and I fell in love with you, and for once I would have stayed. I had saved enough money in my bank account to buy a small house. But there followed the terrible tragedy of David, and so it was the same old story. I delivered my message to your wife and the next day I fled. I went north, off to the east, until I met the sea (damn this small island), and once again I had to stop.
What I discovered when I stopped was that it was not so easy to do the same with love. It doesn’t finish just because you have run away. It doesn’t even stop when you decide to start again. You can look at the North Sea and you see only the English Channel. You can look at the Northumberland sand dunes and you recall those in South Devon. There is no getting away from the fact that your love is still alive and you must do something with it.
I had no plan when I began my garden. No experience of plants. It evolved slowly. Just as love does. Every day I walked alongside the dunes and the shore and observed what grew among the rocks and paths. I took notes. In Craster, I watched how other people dug and planted. I studied the gardens that front the fishing harbour and are made with stones. When I returned to my beach house, I dug and planted my own garden. Every year it grew bigger. Every season it established itself a little more.
Over time, my garden was tested in many ways. There were my own mistakes, plenty of those. There was the weather. There were gulls. People too. Sometimes they offered help and inadvertently their help got in the way. Sometimes they challenged me. How could I give my life to a garden? How could I stay in one place and not travel? I answered them all. It gave me pleasure to talk about my garden. One summer, I was interrupted by three young women on a hen party. I remember because one of them was wearing a BRIDE-TO-BE sash and carrying a giant inflatable plastic penis. It’s not the sort of detail you forget.
The women were wearing shorts, bikini tops and silver tiaras. Their skin was plump, their shoulders and chests bitten with sun and salt.
Nice garden, said one.
Nice suntrap, said the second.
But too near the cliff edge, said the bride-to-be.
So I put down my gardening fork and told the usual story. My garden was a tribute to a man I could not have. It was my atonement for a terrible mistake. I showed the young women the rock pools with the anemones and the tiny blue fishes I had carved from mussel shells. I showed them the driftwood figures and the seaweed banners and the garlands of coloured pebbles, each with a hole bored by the sea. I showed them the spires of agapanthus and angelica (I always favoured the taller flowers), the white foxgloves, and my favourites, the blue poppies and irises. The seasons came and went; the plants died back and reappeared. Every part of my garden had a story, I said. It reminded me of what I’d learned or left behind.
But how could a garden make up for a man? asked the bride-to-be.
‘Trisha’s getting married next week,’ said her friend.
‘Tonight we’re going clubbing in Newcastle,’ said the other. ‘To celebrate her last days of freedom.’ The three young women laughed.
Couldn’t she be free and married as well? I asked.
‘Not if you know my fiancé,’ said the bride-to-be.
I told the young women that in my garden I’d had to learn there were times to intervene, and there were also times when, however much I loved it, I should leave a plant alone. My garden was not about possession, and neither was it about my sublimation.
‘I’d still rather have a wedding,’ said the bride-to-be.
‘You should see her frock and her veil,’ said her friend. And the other one said, ‘A woman has to have her special day. She has to be a princess.’
/> I considered my life. There had been no party, no speech about my kindness, no special dress, no confetti. Nobody had sat with me every evening or woken every morning at my side. And even though I told myself it was my choice, that instead I had a garden and my solitude, I felt cold even in the sun and could not eat.
A year or so later, the bride-to-be returned. She’d lost weight. She told me the marriage had not worked. She asked if I knew any plants that would be nice in her window box, and I gave her cuttings. She’d met someone new, but she was taking it slow this time. ‘No wedding,’ she said. We watched the sea, and I think we both smiled.
I never heard about David’s poems again apart from once at the end of his third year, when he said how hard it was to be told you were something and then dropped as if you had been nothing all along. He was back at home, supposedly preparing for his finals. It would have been better, he said, to live without expectation.
‘But what did you expect?’ I asked. ‘What did people tell you that you were?’
‘A poet. They said I could be famous.’
‘Why do you need someone else to tell you what you are? Why can’t you just write for the sake of writing? You don’t have to be famous to do those things.’
He shook his head angrily. He lit another cigarette. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But I would like to.’
‘It’s no good being a fucking poet if no one knows that you are one. I’d rather be a nobody, like Father. I’d rather know I was nothing and get on with it.’
‘You’re not a nobody, David,’ I said. ‘And neither is your father.’
With an impatient grunt, he staggered up from my chair, as if I had become unbearable. He left my flat with his coat slung over his shoulder.
Sometimes I remember David wanting to be famous. I remember him saying that he was a failure because the world didn’t sit up and notice. I think of the waste, and, I tell you, Harold: I want to hurl things. It is a hard thing, as I said, this learning to love. But it is an even harder thing, I think, to learn to be ordinary.