To conjure these flimsy apparitions from the past was work that kept her no less busy than her knitting did; she knitted, I now think, for more than the comfort of repetition. I think she knitted so that her skipping fingers might somehow impart some of their agility to her mind, to help it go on sifting through its gallery of imperfect and far-off images. There was perhaps something of a grimace of concentration about her smile.
Because how unimaginably tiring it must have been for her, every day, to summon from the dark a faith that the world though invisible to her was benign, finally, and had been all this while busily fashioning out of the uncoloured fragments of everyone’s defeats and little pleasures, not just consequences, but parables. Or perhaps, spared every smear and crease on the surface of events, every blank glare on her daughter’s devastated face, my grandmother found it easier than I did to believe that nobody’s life was ever so blighted as to be wholly without point, that memories never were thin and useless but bloomed out of experience to some good end, to become stories that would stand for something greater than themselves.
Dear Ruth
I remember that story of yours in the Save Overdale Campaign Newsletter but that was back in the Eighties, when we were trying to stop them from closing it. I knew you had your writers group, Della & her cohorts, and there was that booklet of poetry and whatnot you got printed up that one time. All well and good.
But I never saw anything you wrote. You never showed me a word. You called it all “work in progress.” You always made it sound as if you were just practising. You most certainly did not mention a novel and here it is popping up all over the house.
The Overdale photo, I keep it on me now. I don’t remember if it was taken before or after the juice carton incident but we all look well, if not cheerful. You can’t smile nicely into a force five gale, not even for some lad’s Duke of Edinburgh Award Special Photography Project.
But Ruth, see, the picture. It’s what’s not in it. It’s got 1969 on the back. It looks about late April so it must have been Easter. You can just see lambs there with the ewes in the field miles away on the right, little white blobs close to the big dark ones, and look at the state of the bracken, it’s certainly not October. Which means it must have been just after. Might even have been the very morning after! Funny how you can’t tell from our faces. You’d think it would show.
Remember, Ruth? 1969 Easter at Overdale, only a few weeks after the February half-term when we first met there. The night we arrived, the Thursday before Good Friday, when we sneaked out and we talked in the dark? You told me you’d been the first person at your school to put your name down to bring the Easter party to Overdale. You’d made yourself a bit unpopular in the staff room because you’d just been at half-term, but it was first come first served. And that was all because I’d happened to mention at half-term that I’d likely be back at Easter with another of my lot?
I was pleased when you told me that, Ruth, but I couldn’t say so. I couldn’t tell you I hadn’t “happened to mention” coming back at Easter. I’d worked it into the conversation just so you’d know. Shaking with fear in case I was making it obvious. It seemed important I wasn’t obvious, can’t think why now. Not able to do the direct thing and just tell you I had to see you again. Dropping a hint instead of saying what I wanted and then making it happen. Calling it being shy when all it was was weakness. Weak with words.
I’d spent that Thursday travelling with the kids on the bus. The usual mayhem-three vomit stops-and my insides lurching, wondering if I’d see you. Getting ready for a big letdown in case you weren’t there.
But you were. Your brown hair in a single long pigtail right down your back and some pendant made of pottery on a leather thong- you looked like a squaw. I couldn’t wait to get the kids’ tea and the first round of the darts and table tennis tournaments over. We postponed picking the Snakes & Ladders teams, and let them skip showers, remember? Thought we’d never get them settled. The first night’s always the worst, they’re high as kites, been cooped up on the bus half the day. And first night there’s always one or two feeling lost and homesick, the silent weepers you have to watch out for. The dorms didn’t go quiet till nearly eleven, and by then it was well after dark.
That stumped me! I’d thought of asking you to come out to see the sunset to get you away from the others, and it was already pitch dark and I didn’t know what to do.
But you said, So, Arthur, you’re the ornithologist, do you get nightingales hereabouts? I’ve always wanted to hear a nightingale.
And I nearly said, Nope, no chance this high up, or this far north, or this time of year.
Then I saw your eyes, and I said, Oh, uh… well maybe, and it’s a fine clear night. Care to venture out?
So out we went to listen for a nightingale. I saw the others, Bill What’s-his-name and Mary Dixon, smirking, didn’t care. All they cared about was getting a few beers open and the ciggies out. Who else was there that year, I can’t remember, can you?
I remember I initiated you to the unofficial spare key system that night-the set Bill had made and we kept hidden outside in the porch so any of the staff could slip out after lockup? With Bill and the others it was most often down to the pub or the fish and chip shop. In our case, into the hills, to be alone.
Ruth. The way the wind dropped, and we lay in the shelter of a rock under the hill’s curve. The stars-candles seen through pinpricks in a black velvet curtain according to you (you see, I remembered!) and the moon over the reservoir and not a sound except the wind higher up on the peak, a sighing sound. No nightingale, no night birds at all. My parka on the ground and the smell of the reeds and heather. Like old vines and honey you said, this must be what ancient Greece smells like. I didn’t comment, to me it was just dried and rooty, plus that muddy smell off the parka.
I’ll never forget that time, Ruth. We never did talk about it. You were lovely that night.
And here’s another thing I never said. Thank you. What happened was heaven on earth. Never mind ancient Greece, heaven on earth. I was thirty-two years of age and it was my first time. You told me about your ex-fiancé and you asked did I mind I wasn’t the first. And all I said was, no I don’t mind. Did I add something like, well, this is 1969 after all?
Why didn’t I say I already loved you so much you could have come to me with the smell of a hundred men in your hair and I wouldn’t have cared, as long as you stayed with me?
With love
Arthur
PS Did it mean as much to you?
PPS I ask because I think you forgot about the parka, significance of-you didn’t understand why I held on to it, “Oh, THAT smelly awful old thing” you called it, the first time I looked for it after you’d put it in the rubbish. Must have been twenty years later.