t the end of the village, just before the road bends and becomes engulfed in hedges and fields, there stands a solitary cottage. Inside the solitary cottage lived a solitary woman. Nobody saw her from one week to the next. Occasionally she appeared, tending the garden, visiting the shops, just walking. She held herself with dignity, a little stiff, a little still. People in the village didn’t know what to make of her. She had an air of authority without exercising any. Her name was Polly, she was probably in her thirties; her age, like everything else about her, was indeterminate.

I caught her eye once and she looked right through me. I could feel her gaze pierce me like a sliver of ice. It took my breath away. It made me fear her and think of her, keep thinking of her, as I do now.

That was years ago. I was a young man. I didn’t know better. What did I know of the world? The world was school and family and holidays and the future—something vague and indiscernible.

 

The first time I saw him, the first time I noticed him there was something about him. I don’t know what. A kind of fragility, a lostness, a hopelessness, perhaps. I don’t know. But something I could relate to. I suppose I stared at him. I have a habit of doing that. Staring at people. They don’t like it. It makes them feel nervous. I wanted to say, ‘Don’t worry, I understand.’ But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything. Instead I went home.

Home is a small, somewhat dilapidated cottage on the edge of Ambourne. It is very old, at least I think it is, I don’t really know but it has those thick stone walls that look like they’ve been there forever. And it’s always cold inside, no matter what the weather, cold like a cave, my cave, a place where I can go and lick my wounds. I like to sit inside the cottage and listen to the silence, which isn’t silent, of course, but full of noises, background noises, the noise the earth makes when there is life in it.

 

Her garden was overgrown. As I walked up the path long trailing weeds tried to snag my ankles. It was like a wilderness planted in some fairy story, to keep outsiders outside, to protect the sleeping princess. That was what I thought. I was always a romantic. But there were no sleeping princesses in our village. It wasn’t that kind of village.

The summer before I went to university was long and hot. Time seemed to stand still and I with it. I had nothing to do. I had earnt a respite after passing all my exams. I read a lot of novels, went for long bicycle rides and lay in the sun, thinking about the future in an unfocused way. The air was heavy with heat and moisture and it sapped my energy. My mother, who didn’t believe in doing nothing, started to invent tasks to occupy me. One of these was to collect donations for a charity rummage sale she was helping to organise. I had already visited a number of houses in the village, collecting artifacts of dubious saleability, when for some reason I decide to try the mysterious newcomer’s cottage; so, with some hesitation, I walked up the path to her door. After a moment spent searching for a non-existent doorbell I knocked. When she answered the door I explained my mission and she let me in. For some reason I hesitated, but she just kept walking down the narrow hallway and, feeling foolish at being left stranded on the doorstep, I followed her inside.

 

About a week later, he knocked on my door. Nobody knocks on my door. They all think I’m strange and they’re right, I am strange, I know I’m strange, and I don’t care. I didn’t come here to worry about what people think. I didn’t come here for people at all. I came here to get away from people. I answered the door and there he was, the boy, the young man, the one I stared at. He was collecting for something, so I told him to come in.

I said it would take me a while to find something, he said he would wait. I made some tea and he drank it and I kept staring at him. You know the way one watches an insect and can’t stop watching what it’s doing and wondering, does it know what it’s doing, moving so purposefully but appearing to do nothing, to wander around aimlessly stumbling over dead leaves and clods of soil? I could see he was uncomfortable so I asked him what he did. He said he didn’t do anything, at the present, he was waiting to go to university, in the autumn. The summer before university. I remember that. A time between times.

As I looked at him I could tell he was like me. Oh I don’t mean like me, of course, just similar, just a little too uncertain, it gave him away.

It was hard to find things to give him. I hadn’t been there long so I hadn’t accumulated any things that needed discarding. When I’d moved I’d promised myself I wouldn’t accumulate any more things. They weigh you down, things, they impede progress; they trip you up.

 

She gave me some clothes, old books, and a pair of candlesticks. I said she shouldn’t give me the candlesticks because they were bound to be worth more than anyone would want to pay at the rummage sale. She told me to take them anyway.

‘Keep them for yourself,’ she said, ‘if you like. Though I shouldn’t think you need candlesticks.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t.’ But I kept them anyway. I have them still. They sit on the mantlepiece of our trendy Victorian house in North London. My wife thinks they’re a family heirloom.

It was only while we were talking that I realised she was beautiful. I don’t mean beautiful the way people are on television or in films. It wasn’t a manufactured beauty, it wasn’t calculated or fashionable, it was natural, it was just there. I wondered if other people thought she was beautiful or if it was just me, and then I decided I didn’t care.

She had that effect on me, she made me not want to care what other people thought. All my life I had been brought up to worry what other people would think and sitting in her presence made me realise how stupid that was.

 

I found him some things and we chatted. It was quite hard work. He wasn’t a natural conversationalist. I thought he looked lonely. He kept looking at me. And I kept looking at him, which slowed down the conversation. I asked him what he was going to do at university. He said, ‘Philosophy, Politics and Economics.’

I said, ‘Most people who study PPE want to rule the world. Do you want to rule the world?’

‘No,’ he said, looking defensive. ‘I’m just interested in those things—they go together.’

‘Well, you won’t be bored doing that little lot,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Still I expect you’ll take it all in your stride.’

‘I hope so.’ He looked at his watch, it was an old watch. ‘I must be going,’ he said. ‘I have to get back to the village hall by four o’clock.’ He got up and I walked him to the door.

‘See you around,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Take care.’

 

After that day I kept looking out for her and I often saw her walking by the sea. I went for a lot of long solitary walks that summer and so did she. She walked along the shore, pacing the narrow strand of darkened sand left behind by the retreating sea. She would peer at the ground, looking to see what gifts the sea had brought, and occasionally she would stoop to retrieve something. She would examine it for a few moments and either drop it back onto the sand or put it in her bag.

I followed her progress by walking along the cliff-top path. High up I could watch her as she paced the division between the earth and the sea. Sometimes she would look up and gaze at the cliffs. Then I would be afraid she would see me. Would she recognise me? From that distance? Would she think I was spying on her? I could be anyone, walking along the cliffs, but I could recognise her, and if I could recognise her, well then, she could recognise me.

 

I liked to walk along the shore. I was interested in finding what the sea brought up. There were all kinds of things, constant surprises. Jung said the sea represents the subconscious and the beach the conscious mind and the artists’ territory is the tide line, the place where the two merge back and forth. I liked that. It was where I wanted to be. I picked up a lot of things and took them back to my cottage where I rearranged them, combined them, tried to make them into something. If you just sit and look and listen they’ll tell you what to do. And I kept rearranging them, finding and discarding harmonies, their harmonies, my harmonies.

 

After a few days of watching her walk the beach I thought I’d hang around there then, when she came along, we could meet by accident. We could walk together. It would be nice.

I waited around for quite a while but there was no sign of her. I’d keep looking along the beach and there’d never be anybody there. Then I started watching the sea and it sort of hypnotised me. I just watched it and it was like it was breathing in and out, very calmly and steadily, its breath was beating the shore, endlessly. And I just stood there watching it.

‘Hello,’ she said and I jumped a mile. I really did. I’d become so absorbed in the sea I was totally unaware of her approach.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I startled you. Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. I was just watching the sea.’

‘I love to watch the sea.’

‘So do I.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Yes you are.’ I said it without thinking. It just came out. I thought it and I said it. There was nothing I could do. There was an awkward pause and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.’

‘Don’t take it back,’ she said, smiling. ‘It was a lovely thing to say.’

Her smile made her even more beautiful.

‘I love walking by the sea,’ she said. ‘I walk here almost every day; seeing what the tide has brought in.’

‘Yes, I know, I’ve seen you. From the cliffs. I usually walk along the cliffs. The view, you see, you get a lovely view - from the cliffs.’

She looked up at them, almost as if noticing them for the first time, and said, ‘You must show me the view some time.’

 

I knew she knew more about the world than me and that was part of her attraction. In truth, at the time, I thought it would be hard to find somebody who knew less of the world than me. I was hungry for experience. Most of my experience, up to that point, had been derived second hand, from books and films.

I suggested we go for a picnic. It sounded like a romantic idea, the two of us sitting on the headland, admiring the view. I made a chicken salad and brought a bottle of white wine. I could see she was pleased by my elaborate preparations. We ate and drank the wine and watched the sea. It was a breezy day and things kept blowing away, but it didn’t matter, we laughed at things like that.

And I watched her, the way the breeze played with her hair, taking hold of strands and curling them about her face, veiling her profile, her jaw, her lovely cheek bones. She smiled. Her smile was beautiful, stretching her lips into a long luscious curve, making her cheek bones rise high and clear.

‘It’s so hot,’ she said. ‘Let’s go down to the cove.’ A short distance from our picnic place was a spot where you could follow the cliff path down a steep incline to a small cove, a sheltered place where the sea intruded into the land. We followed it and were soon standing by the shore.

‘Let’s have a swim,’ she said. ‘It’ll cool us down.’

‘I haven’t got a costume,’ I said, feeling foolish as I spoke.

‘Neither have I,’ she said, smiling cheekily. ‘Don’t worry I won’t look if you don’t.’ And saying this she started stripping off her clothes.

After a moment’s hesitation I started to undress and followed her into the water. Despite the heat the water was still cold and gave an icy kiss to my burning skin but I soon got used to it as we swam about the little bay. She was a good swimmer, better than me, I kept stopping to admire her firm steady strokes. After a bit she just lay in the water floating on her back, her hair fanning out on its surface. She lay perfectly still letting the sea hold her in its hand and gently move her up and down and from side to side. I could see her breasts flattened against her body, half submerged by the water, the sea lapping them as if it wanted to taste them.

It was wonderful swimming in the nude. It felt so free, to be in the water with nothing but one’s body, the sea’s cooling touch sending little sensual currents flickering over my flesh.

‘Don’t you just love being in the water?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, it’s very nice. Very free.’

We swam back to the shore until we could stand on the bottom. The water was very clear and looking down I could see our bodies stretching into the depths. I was becoming hard, I couldn’t help it. I rested my hand on her shoulder and we kissed. We moved closer and my penis knocked against her thigh.

She broke away and said, ‘There seems to be some unusual fish around here.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, blushing.

‘It doesn’t look like anything to be sorry about,’ she said, and ran her hand along the length of it.

We embraced in the water and kissed long and deeply as the water rose and fell, sliding up and down our flanks, warm, then cool, then warm again.

 

We went for a picnic. It was a lovely day. Bright, sunny, hot, but with a pleasant cooling breeze. The sky was so blue, clear and bright and luminous, a blue that you could wish for but never capture in a picture. Gazing at the sky you could believe it went on forever, being forever blue. And the food was good. He certainly knew how to make a stylish picnic. I was surprised.

Sitting on the grass, in the sun, eating, drinking, talking, made me forget. I forgot to be sad so I became almost happy. In the company of this handsome shy young man I wanted to act as if freedom existed, as if happiness was round the corner, and once found would stay.

We talked about everything and nothing, the way you do, our thoughts wandered this way and that, pleasantly aimless. I’m sure I said a lot of stupid things, but he listened to everything, he drank it all up. I could see that he wanted companionship and it made me think, Yes, it’s not so bad after all, this being with others.

But at a certain point, for no reason, no reason I could fathom, I started to feel sad again. I started to feel the earth drop away beneath me and my heart sank, my stomach lurched, as if I was dropping down a hole. To distract myself I suggested we go for a swim. We walked down to the beach, it was a fairly inaccessible place and there was nobody about so we just stripped off our things and jumped into the water. With each stroke, as I swam out, as I pushed the water away with my arms and legs, I thought I was pushing the sadness away. And it worked. I just concentrated on my movements, on the mechanics of motion in water, stretching my arms, my legs, breathing in time. When I felt calmer I just floated. I love to float, that weightless feeling, that feeling of being buoyed up, held effortlessly.

As we waded back to the shore I kissed him. He looked so sexy with his chest covered in little droplets, the water trickling down his muscles and slicking down the hair on his skin. He tasted nice. His tongue was soft, like his manner, and he got excited. Looking down I could see his penis through the water, it looked strangely disembodied projecting urgently from his body as if it wanted to get away from him.

 

After we made love I held her in my arms and felt sad. I should have felt exhilarated, and all the way through, all the way through, I did. But afterwards I felt sad; sad and awkward. She was no longer a mystery. This woman. The mystery woman. I was stupid to think that at the time. She was as great a mystery as she had always been. I was foolish and thought that just because our bodies had touched, touched all along our surfaces, just because we had been joined at the pelvis, just because of that, I knew her better than anyone else I had ever known. How silly. How foolish. How sweet, she would have said.

 

We went back to the picnic spot and made love. Had sex. He was quite good at it, not clumsy like some. But I couldn’t help thinking, Is this wise? It rather put me off, that thought. It rather spoilt the moment, though I don’t think he noticed, he was too absorbed in what we were doing. I worried that he was too sensitive, too impressionable, I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to make him hate me. But it was too late. I should have thought of that before we had sex. He looked at me differently now. He looked at me with eyes that said, Now I possess you, now you’re mine. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t anybody’s. I wasn’t even mine.

 

I saw her frequently after that day. I could hardly stay away. The merest thought of her got me hard. I suppose I was obsessed, a bit too enthusiastic. I’d always been enthusiastic about things, toy soldiers, meccano, books; and now her.

When I kept on visiting her she said, ‘Why do you want to see me?’

I hesitated for a moment, taken aback by her forthright question, then I said, ‘Because you’re interesting and I can talk to you.’

‘Is that all?’

‘And you’re beautiful.’ She smiled. I loved it when she smiled. When she smiled I knew all would be well. I didn’t think she was laughing at me, though she might have been.

 

I said to myself, I should leave him alone. I’m not good for him. I’ve got too much history. I’m the poisoned cup from which the fool drinks. But am I poison? Do I really think of myself that way? Maybe I’m the one who's been poisoned - poisoned by the past.

I came here to get away from the past. But forgetting is hard work. After Martin I swore I’d never let another man in the house.

One time he was upstairs, in the bathroom. We were getting ready to go out and he had to pay a visit. As he left the bathroom he slammed the door and it sounded just like Martin, just like that slam in the middle of the night, when he would come home drunk and I was instantly back there. I started trembling. By the time he had come down the stairs I was in tears. I couldn’t stop; the tears just kept coming, he couldn’t understand what was wrong, of course he couldn’t, the poor dear, he didn’t know, he didn’t know anything.

Sometimes I think we’re all haunted by the past. We carry our ghosts around inside us. We can’t get away from them, they follow us around wherever we go.

When I was living with Martin I became convinced I was fat; I was fat and that was why everything was going wrong, so I stopped eating. And the thinner I got the happier I was but I was never thin enough. When you don’t eat the world gets thinner; thinner and sharper, day by day. Events jut into you like projecting hip bones. I could see clearly through my hunger. I could see the genuine smiles on fake faces. If you can see your ribs you know you’re thin. The space between us gets larger everyday as we are all carried remorselessly forward, together, like steerage passengers.

Here is a slice of tomato. Here is a leaf of lettuce. Here is a stick of celery. Here is an orange segment. Here is a phallic banana. Here is a slice of apple. Here is a lemon. Squeeze me.

When I gave up eating I saw the world so clearly. Bright and clear and pure. My eyes got bigger everyday as I grew thinner in every way. Spirit. I was becoming pure spirit. Insubstantial. Transcendental. Who needs a body? What are they for? These cumbersome loads we carry around with us, day by day, these layers of fat, of flesh, of muscle, of gristle, this, all this. I could do without it, I thought. At a certain point I stopped having periods. The rhythm of the month, and the promise of life, had abandoned me just as I had abandoned it.

When you reach that state; when your body has shrunk, and your face has given away all its smiles, and your eyes are bigger than the eyes of the cutest little bush-baby, you can see with angel’s eyes. You can see the world with all the brightness and clarity and piercing gleam of an angel’s eyes. And you’re half-way there. You’re half way to heaven, half angel already.

But when your bones jut through your back and make it painful to lie down. When your bones want to punch holes in your skin, like a little bird escaping from its shell, then you ask yourself, Why be an angel, after all? It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And that’s when you come back down to earth, hand in your wings, put back on the flesh, and assume again the weight of worldliness.

 

Mother said, ‘How old is she?’

I said, ‘I don’t know. Not old.’

‘Why don’t you find a girl your own age?’

‘There are no girls my age.’

‘If you like her so much why don’t you invite her to tea?’ I felt doubtful about this. ‘It’s not as if we’re unfriendly,’ she said.

‘No, of course not, Mother,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask her. But she probably won’t want to come.’

‘Why not?’

‘She’s shy.’

‘Shy?’

‘Yes. You know. She doesn’t like talking to people.’

‘How peculiar.’

Later I didn’t ask her and just told Mother she couldn’t come. I didn’t want her to cross over from her world into ours. I didn’t want her to be sullied by the mundanity of home. I didn’t want to hear her making polite conversation over the tea cups; small talk for small minds. I wanted her to stay the way she was; different, mysterious.

When we meet somebody usually we say, What do you do? We want to put them in their box. Homo sapiens is the categorising animal. Everything has to have its place and be put in it. People included, people in particular. We define one another by what we do rather than what we are; and we mistake one thing for the other. I do it just as much as anyone else, so one day I said to her, ‘What do you do all day?’

She stopped what she was doing and looked at me. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Just curious. That’s all. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

She smiled at me and said, ‘I compose. You know, music. I compose. When I’m not doing other things. I assume you don’t want me to say I clean the cottage, wash my clothes and myself, cook food, eat it, shit it out, go to sleep, go for walks, all that stuff. You want to know something which defines me, so I say, I compose music. I’m writing a string quartet, as it happens, first one I’ve done, for the Cheltenham Festival.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘Don’t tell anybody,’ she said. ‘Or they’ll be asking me to play the church organ or something.’

‘I had no idea,’ I said. ‘I never see you with an instrument.’

She tapped her head and said, ‘They’re all in here. And in here.’ And she reached for a thick book sitting on the little bookcase. It was a book about instrumentation.

‘Does it make money?’ I said.

‘Not much. I used to teach, before I came here. I made more money from the teaching, but I had to give it up. I had to get away.’

‘Oh.’

‘Let’s go out,’ she said. ‘Let’s get away from here.’

We went to Dudbury Rings, a prehistoric earthworks which consisted of a series of concentric rings, the weathered remains of the large earthen ramparts of an Iron Age fort, the steep banks of which had been smoothed out by time and weather. We wandered around the deserted earthworks, which were partly overgrown with wild raspberries. It was a quiet place, a mysterious place, a little eerie, it felt like it held secrets. Secrets under the soil.

 

I could eat him up. Swallow him whole. Suck all that vitality inside myself. That’s what I thought when I looked at him. He looked so eager, like a dog waiting for the stick to be thrown. He scurried up and down the grassy embankments of Dudbury Rings like a child, standing triumphantly at the top looking around. I followed, feeling older by the minute. He reached out his arm and heaved me up the steep slope; his grip was surprisingly firm. The sun was in his eyes and it made them blue like the sky, like the sky was living behind them. I remembered those lines: Your eyes, it’s a days work looking into them.

We made love in the middle of the fort. It felt very pagan. I wanted to eat him up. A sacrifice. I wanted a sacrifice.

What was it about my upbringing that led me to suppose I was worthless? That my opinions did not matter? I had so little self-esteem I always believed the bad things people said about me and always dismissed the good things. In this way I could perpetuate my belief in myself as bad and worthless.

Perhaps Martin was merely playing a role I had created for him; acting out my internal script of self-loathing, lashing out at me as if under orders from myself. You see, I can even believe another’s violence towards me is my fault.

Martin taught English Literature at the College but thought of himself as a poet. It was only later that I realised he was a very bad poet. Perhaps he knew all along and that was the problem. But at the time I thought it was very romantic to be in love with a poet. It’s laughable really, the cheap tricks we fall for. Why should being a poet be any different to anything else? It should be more like being a carpenter, a joiner, fashioning things, but out of words rather than wood, shaping them, fitting them together in such a way that one can’t imagine them any other way, as if the world was just like that with those things in it. That’s a poem. But Martin’s poems always had rough edges, they always displayed the effort of their making more than the thing made. They gave you splinters.

He was a bad poet and it gave him a bad temper. If things didn’t work out right I was always to blame, I was being selfish again, or stupid, again, or just malicious. And poems don’t come easy, they are hard things and only look easy after a lot of work.

And he had affairs. He was always fucking his students. He couldn’t keep his hands off them and, since he was better at posing as a poet than actually getting down to the tedious details of being one, they couldn’t keep their hands off him. I decided to ignore it. I ignored a lot of things in those days; mostly my own feelings.

When someone who loves you hits you, you don’t know what to do. You don’t hit back. Of course you don’t hit back, you love them. Love; a word full of bruises, just like you, just like you. Painful to touch, but touch it you must, arnica for the soul.

If you hit me, strike a blow, hurt my flesh, it blossoms, it blossoms into a bruise, something we can all see, see it there, there it is. A bruise grows, it emerges, like a shy young thing it comes out gradually, by degrees, it flourishes and changes colours. It assumes colours, different colours, blue and yellow and greenish hues, always changing, changing back to you, back to normal, and then it’s gone; yes then it’s gone.

But a psychological bruise, a psychological bruise isn’t like that. It goes deeper, deeper, deeper than a bruise on the bone. It’s a bruise on the soul. Nobody can see it. Nobody knows it’s there; not even you. But it never heals. It’s colours never grow and change and merge into the normal hue of healthy flesh, oh no. It stays. And who can bruise our soul better than the one we love, whose blows can find their mark, deep inside ourselves.

When he told me I was ugly, I believed him.
When he told me I was stupid, I believed him.
When he told me I was fat, I believed him.
When he told me it was my fault, I believed him.
When he told me it was pointless, I believed him.
When he told me I needed him, I believed him.
When he told me I didn’t deserve him, I believed him.

Hammer blows nailing my heart shut.

And now, nothing can get in, nothing can get out. That’s the way it is.

When I look at people I wonder, what bruises do you have? The kind that don’t show. The kind that no amount of arnica oil can soothe.

A girlfriend of mine, she once said to me, I have sex with men to prevent anything meaningful from happening. I think I know what she means. Sex doesn’t have any meaning, it’s just there, physical, urgent, demanding, there. Easy. Sex is easy. It’s people that’s hard.

 

The day before I went to university I went round to the cottage. She was sitting reading a philosophy book by G.E.Moore.

‘I didn’t know you read philosophy.’ I said.

‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘It calms me down. This kind of philosophy seems to say, in its style, everything is all right, all we have to do is look at things calmly and quietly and think carefully and everything will be all right.’

‘I’ve never thought of it that way. I’m always too busy thinking about the problems - looking for solutions.’

‘Oh, well, that’s where we differ. I’ve given up looking for solutions. I just want to be persuaded things aren’t as bad as I suspect they are. Of course they’re wrong. You can’t solve all the problems by sitting down quietly and thinking about them.’

There was a long pause. I didn’t know what to say.

‘I’m open to persuasion,’ she said, putting the book down. She stood up and ran her hand through my hair; it sent a sudden shiver of pleasure through my scalp. ‘You’re the best proof I’ve seen so far,’ she said and silenced any reply by planting her lips firmly across mine. She took me upstairs and we made love in a big bed in a little room.

 

There was no phone at the cottage so while I was at university I wrote her letters; the usual thing, telling her what I was doing, telling her I missed her. She never replied. She had told me she wouldn’t and she didn’t. When I came home at the end of my first term at university the first thing I did was go round to Polly’s cottage. When I got there I didn’t notice anything wrong at first. I strode up the path and hammered on the door, glad to be back. In my mind nothing had changed. I’d been away but thought that everything would be the same. But there was no answer. It was then I realised there were no curtains at the windows. The garden was even more unruly than usual. I stood back and looked at the upstairs windows. They stared back blank and empty, like dead eyes. I refused to believe what I could see and hammered on the door again. But there was still no answer. The thick wooden door absorbed my blows and fell silent. I walked around to the back, still refusing to believe what I knew was the case, that she had gone and the cottage was empty, hollow, a vacant shell, like the ones we used to find on the beach. I peered in through the kitchen window. There was no clutter, no food, no signs of habitation.

I hurried back home and said, accusingly, to mother, ‘She’s gone!’

‘I know,’ she said.

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘You didn’t ask.’

‘But you must have known I needed to know.’

‘I didn’t want to upset you.’

‘Upset me?’

‘Yes.’

‘When did she go?’

Mother thought about it for a moment. ‘A few weeks ago, I think.’

‘Weeks ago!’

‘I think so. She didn’t exactly announce her departure. She just went. She left without any warning, just as she arrived. She didn’t tell anybody she was going. Nobody’s exactly sure when she did leave. I thought she might have told you, though.’

‘No. She never contacted me at College.’

‘She was a very odd woman. I always thought she was odd. Right from the start.’

I got up and walked out again. I didn’t know where to go so I went to the beach and walked along the tideline, following the path she had trod so many times, as if by doing so I could retrieve her, ravel back some lost skein of the past in order to capture the future. But the past isn’t like that, it’s never there when you need it. It began to rain and the rain spotted the sand leaving dark brown stains on the pale ground. I just stood there looking down and watched it darken.

 

I said to myself, If I stay I’ll ruin things. Better to go. Cut it short. That’s what I said to myself. I didn’t want to hurt him, and I didn’t want to hurt myself and I knew sooner or later it was bound to end and I didn’t want to face all that bitterness again. Better to nip it in the bud before it had time to grow, to get old and sickly and wither. I got an offer of a residency at Tanglewood music festival in the U.S. It was too good to turn down and I wanted to go and it would be good for my career. I needed to think about myself; be good to myself.

 

I thought she would write to me, tell me what she was doing, tell me she was all right, that all was well, but she didn’t. I never heard from her again. She left no forwarding address. There was nowhere I could look for her, she had vanished into the world. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, missing her, wishing there was some way I could talk to her.

I went back to University and tried to immerse myself in my studies, but I could never succeed in getting her out of my mind. And the girls at college all seemed so uninteresting compared to her, their lives weightless, their attitudes banal. And I always compared them to her, I did it automatically, without thinking. Friends paired off but I could never find a replacement for her.

The following summer I got a temporary job working for a local estate agent, answering the phone, showing people around vacant property, photographing houses, that kind of thing. One day I noticed the cottage in Ambourne was on their books. In their opinion it would be difficult to let, so they weren’t trying much. They had the key. I said I wanted to show someone round it and took it and drove to Ambourne.

It was very quiet inside the empty cottage. Quiet and hollow; it was full of emptiness; hers, mine, full. I went up to the bedroom. It was just an empty room. It seemed a lot bigger with nothing in it, no bed, no passion. There was no indication that it had once contained such joy as I had known, resting in the arms of the woman who was no longer there. Standing in that empty room in that empty cottage I became more and more angry. I took off my clothes, sat on the floor in the middle of the room, and masturbated feverishly. There was no pleasure, only the tension and then the lack of it. I came on the floor and then I started to sob. My tears splashed onto the boards and mingled with the semen.

 

At the end of my university course I came away with a fairly decent degree; not good enough to set me upon an academic career but good enough to get me into a big name accountancy firm, from which I eventually moved into management consultancy. I made a decent living and kept my brain half awake. I met my wife through work and we have a couple of children. She’s working part-time until they’re both at school. I get on well with my colleagues, and some I would even count as friends.

One evening, not long ago, I attended a concert with my wife. It was at the Wigmore Hall. She had booked the tickets. I had to hurry from work in order to get there in time and only just made it before the start. I collapsed into my seat feeling uncomfortably sticky in my suit. I only had the vaguest notion of what we were going to hear so I borrowed my wife’s programme to see what was coming up. It was a string quartet from Vienna called the Anthropos Quartet. First they were going to play Shostakovich’s 3rd quartet, then a new quartet, her 3rd also, by Polly Watkins, and finish up with Beethoven’s quartet in E flat, opus 127. When I saw 3rd quartet by Polly Watkins I couldn’t believe it, that after all these years I was going to sit down and listen to a piece of music by my first love, my mysterious love, who had vanished as quickly as she had entered my life. When I knew her I had never heard a note of her music and she didn’t like to talk about it; she said she could only talk about music in a technical way and since I knew next to nothing about musical language it was a topic closed to us.

The Anthropos played the Shostakovich with great vigour, the mad swirling notes were flung out at the audience in an exhilarating way. They played with such intensity at the end of the piece I felt quite exhausted. After a brief pause while they shuffled scores and re-tuned their instruments they launched into Polly’s quartet. In contrast to the Shostakovich it began with a series of long melodic lines which gradually wove together and then split apart becoming progressively more discordant.

It was midway through the piece that I suddenly recognised myself. It was the strangest of sensations, to find myself represented so accurately and vividly in an abstract medium; but there I was, but as I was then; a younger, more naive self, with more charm but less knowledge than the self who sat and listened. The music was by turns tender and abrasive, playful and serious, and as I listened to it I couldn’t help but mourn the self I had lost, a self laid before me with such painful clarity in sound; a self I had lost forever without even being aware of it - until now. And it all became too much for me, tears sprang into my eyes, filling them, overflowing and trickling down my cheeks. And once they started I couldn’t stop them, they just kept flowing, as if they had been waiting a long time for this moment to escape.

My wife looked at me in surprise and said, ‘I had no idea music moved you so deeply.’

 

[END]

© 2005 Colin Pink - Contributor's Bio

[index] [archive] [spotlight] [guidelines] [editor] [subscribe]