‘Why isn’t there a bed?’
‘I took it.’
‘And the clock?’
‘Climbing up on a stepladder was completely beyond her. I used to change the battery every now and then.’
She was pleased to see him crossing the room in his socks. A man in socks, and especially a man in socks with holes in them, is hard to take seriously.
At the front door he turned and looked her over from head to toe. ‘Injured?’ he asked.
‘Bitten by a badger.’
‘Impossible.’
‘I still got bitten.’
‘Badgers are shy animals.’ Shy. He stepped over the threshold. ‘I’ll be back then,’ he said, before pulling the door shut behind him.
He doesn’t want me to see him bending to pull on his boots, she thought, and smiled. ‘Goodbye,’ she called through the door when she saw that he was reaching down. She dragged herself upstairs and lay on the divan in the study, closing her eyes. Rhys Jones tore off in his car, which was undoubtedly green. A pickup, probably, with room for a few sheep in the back. Or bales of hay. A double bed. She didn’t feel the slightest inclination to look out of the window. Two hours later she started the day again. Properly, this time.
20
The sun was shining and the grass had dried completely. There was almost no wind. She cut the bamboo poles down to bamboo posts and stuck them in the ground next to the pieces of firewood. She strung cord between the posts. The light brown cows stood in line watching her over the stone wall. The grassy field was at least half a metre higher than the field the cows were in; on their side the wall was much taller. They snorted. With her mind more or less a blank, she used the rusty spade to cut the grass along the line of the cord, then doggedly removed the grass on the path side. She dumped the sods in the wheelbarrow and pushed it along the stream to the back of the house, eventually forming a pile between a couple of shrubs. Afterwards she sat down on top of the mound of crushed slate. She panted, looking around. What could she use to line the path? The geese saw her sitting there and wandered over to the barbed-wire fence, gabbling loudly. She threw lumps of slate at them but they didn’t seem to care. She didn’t have enough strength left in her arm to make it that far.
In the pigsty she found two wooden posts, not nearly enough for the whole path. She descended the concrete steps to the cellar once again and sat down on the bottom step. The tiled floor was a pale green colour. Why was it so clean in here, so freshly swept? It was as if the room were used for something wet. She sniffed; there was nothing about the smell to give her a clue.
The Zuiderbad in autumn, the white changing booths beside the pool, the sandwich she ate on her way back home, the bare shrubs in a blanket of mist in the Rijksmuseum garden, the hum of the canal-side traffic. She thought of her parents in their upstairs flat in De Pijp, saw her mother making her swimming-pool sandwich, boiling potatoes, the window in the narrow kitchen wet with steam, everything lit brightly by the fluorescent light. They still lived there. With central heating now, smooth laminate floors, a new kitchen and a TV that was way too big for the tiny living room. And a message from their daughter. She had kept calling and hanging up until she got the answering machine — her father’s voice, giving only his surname. ‘I’m just letting you know I’m away. There’s no need to worry. Really.’ Thinking about it now, she wasn’t happy with that really. It was completely unnecessary. Homesickness was something you could enjoy, but not always. Sometimes it made you weak, so weak that five concrete steps felt like fifty.
*
Alder branches. The three trees along the stream were alders. She knew because she recognised the small, round cones. It had been a long time since the trees had been pollarded. She knew the word, pollard, even though she’d never used a pruning saw to cut any kind of wood at all. Or did thick ivy stems count as wood? After lying on the divan for a couple of hours, she carried a kitchen chair outside. The chair Rhys Jones had sat on. She set it against one of the trees and climbed onto it in her muddy clogs. It’s a shame I didn’t do this early this morning, she thought. Then he would have had a mucky arse as well as holes in his socks. The saw did its work when she pulled — she felt that — not when she pushed. She also noticed that she had to think carefully about where to stand to make sure a branch didn’t fall on her head. After sawing off five, she felt like she’d done more than enough work for one day and decided to stop. She cut the twigs and thin tops off with the new secateurs and dragged the branches over to the edge of the grass. By removing the sods, she had made a furrow along the path and now she laid the branches in that furrow, one after the other. She sat down on the step. It looked neat. The branches were thick enough to form a real border. Only now did she see that the grassy field was a lawn that someone must have mown relatively recently. The cows were gone. When she stood up, she discovered that they were quite far away. She hadn’t noticed that at all, their walking away. A beautiful way of measuring the passing time: the sun that had suddenly leapt forward and was already quite low, a herd of cows that had silently and serenely relocated. She saw this for the first time and thought of her thesis.
21
Emily Dickinson. Despite her reputation (probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, according to the back of Habegger’s biography), Dickinson wrote an awful lot of lazy rhyming quatrains, doggerel as far as she was concerned. She leafed through the Collected Poems, earth under her fingernails. It was night, pitch black outside but for the odd light in the distance. She drank a glass of wine and smoked a cigarette. Downstairs, a pan sat on the draining board with quite a bit of food left in it. The fire was burning. Never stung by a single bee, she mused. Bees everywhere: on a gentle breeze or in the clover. She thought of her university office: the cold computer containing all of her Dickinson notes and a very rough plan of her thesis, which was supposed to be about the plethora of lesser poems and Dickinson’s all-too-eager canonisation; the pot plants; the steel filing cabinets; and, through the window, which looked out on a long, narrow street, snow. Habegger’s indigestible biography — a doorstop full of question marks and nonsensical little theories (so exhaustive it even cites a coughing fit Dickinson’s great-great-uncle suffered in the spring of 1837 as a possible explanation for a certain sensibility in her poetry) — had delayed her work for months.
She screwed up the piece of paper on which she had written ‘curtains’ (the window in the small bedroom was still uncovered) and picked up the soft pencil. She imagined herself outside in the daylight with her back to the front door, and sketched the lawn, the gently winding stream, the low stone wall forming an L around the grass, the pigsty diagonally opposite the house, the new, straight path along the front wall, the three alders and the three shrubs. Pity she didn’t have any coloured pencils. There’d be a new path: from the front door straight through the grass, ending at the wall. There’d be flower beds. She tried to draw a rose arch, which proved much more difficult than she’d imagined. It ruined the sketch and she didn’t have a rubber. She screwed up this piece of paper too. Sticking a new cigarette in her mouth instead, she picked up the Collected Poems and opened it at the contents page. She’d had this book for more than a decade — there were notes in it, the pages were stained, the dust jacket was torn — and now noticed for the first time how short the section titled LOVE was and how long the last, TIME AND ETERNITY. She started to cry.