When I got up again I was restless and could not settle to anything. I knew he would not come at night, but still I tried to kill time by measuring my every move in little units of anticipation, awaiting his return. I stripped his bed and changed the sheets, smoothing my hands over the pillow just where his head would, very soon I prayed, leave a soft dent. I opened the bedroom window with some funny idea that he had flown away and now he’d be able to get back in, like Peter Pan; if I were to go down to make tea, he would alight on the floor above me in the moment between my filling the kettle and opening a bottle of milk. If I counted the strokes as I brushed my hair, he would be here before I reached a hundred. If I started to sing to myself in a low voice, affecting a nonchalance I didn’t feel, it would summon him back, and the opening of the door would be the first sound to interrupt this meandering, patient song of mine.
By the next morning I was worried. I spent all day in the attic, unable to sleep. So I heard everything as I lay there: the arrival of a car, the front door opening, people talking, and after a few minutes a woman’s voice more insistent than the rest. In all the noise and movement I could not make out a sound from Arthur himself. After a while the house grew quiet again, and I slept. When I woke, I guessed it was around three o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe they had put him to bed. I thought of him in his room, wakeful, curious, perhaps still afraid. I willed him to turn over and close his eyes, not to fight sleep, and I fancied I heard a little whine, the kind an animal makes when it knows that the time for choosing to fight or to give in has passed, because either it is already defeated, or it is safe. Then I fell asleep again.
27 Cardigan Avenue
Dear Ruth
I’m back. I couldn’t wait to get back.
I’d forgive you for thinking me slow to catch on-well, I have been slow-but I’ve got it now. I’m getting to the crux of it now. I can think clearly here. You’re here, but only here. You’re nowhere else. Not in the hospital. I missed you terribly.
The hospital-it’s a zoo in there.
The ward was hellish. I came to thinking how could this get any worse-then it did. Mrs. M swooped in and perched like buzzard refusing to budge because, she said, somebody had to catch the doctor and explain the situation. She said the nurses don’t pay attention to anything these days much less pass it on to the doctors-all this according to The Great Tony. I was lucky, she said, to have an NHS insider like Tony on my case. You need somebody who can get to the right people, knows their way around the system.
She brought a book for me, something somebody had given her but it wasn’t her kind of thing. An anthology. She didn’t know till recently I was a poetry fan, she was surprised to find the house swimming in it or she’d have passed it on before.
Doctor didn’t come all morning, so finally she went. I had a squint at the book, it didn’t do anything for me either.
Poetry isn’t like water or air. You actually don’t need it to live. I can hear you disagreeing, but it’s a fact. Poetry’s more like the wine or perfume in a life. It’s nice to have, but you can get along all right without. You can manage with just having everything plain, or at least you can until you’ve acquired the taste for the more rarefied, then it’s harder. But as long as you’re getting along without anything fancy, you don’t see that you’re missing much.
All right, you’re frowning at that. But that’s me. Ordinary and plain. It’s my history, I suppose. There are some histories you couldn’t squeeze a poem into sideways and that was mine, not that I’m complaining. Good people, my parents, though of course you only knew Dad and he wasn’t the same man after Mum died. All that’s history, too, in the background-nobody really remembers.
Funny word-I’m thinking about words-the background. My background-when was it? Where is it now? Overdale Lodge? Or before we met? Or after? When does anyone’s background stop and their foreground begin? We were married all those years, isn’t that a background in itself, does it blank out what came earlier, does whatever comes after meld into it and get lost, or does it stand out sharper? Maybe we’re just a fuzzy pair of figures somewhere in a painting, so small and on the edge that only we know we’re there at all. Nobody else really sees us.
But it’s still ours, our life-no matter it’s just a collection of dots in one corner of a picture, no matter we’re background figures, no matter how many people miss that we’re even there.
But you can’t set it down, not even our little life, nobody can-not in a picture, not in words.
I just wish I could.
I remember the kind of pictures you liked. The ones you said were like film sets if only they’d known how to make films then. In the Renaissance. We watched that thing on TV, remember, about how they painted them to make your eye go straight to the little golden figures cavorting about in flowers without a stitch on, and next onto the tumbling green cascades and ruins and peacocks, and then to the blue distant forests and mountains and sky. Was the order of the colours meant to calm you down or something, make you think deep thoughts? Maybe that’s the kind of background you need for poetry. Or for cavorting.
I’m no poet and I never was a cavorter. Obviously. I see now I may have let you down there.
I’ll think further on it all, now I’m back safe. Finally saw a young fella purporting to be a doctor about five o’clock yesterday, told him I was taking myself off home for some peace and quiet. He looked terrified, clearly couldn’t deal with me, he went and fetched a nurse at least twenty years older than he was.
Two against one-VOICES RAISED in objection-and they told me I was shouting!!! Leg condition needs to be stabilized, hospital best place, support yet to be arranged for return home etc etc.
In the end I had to mention most important point-ie getting back to you, dear. I said all support necessary was waiting at home, thank you very much, and further interference neither required nor welcome, please give your time and attention to those in greater need, I’m aware there’s pressure on resources.
Predictably this threw them quicker than you could say Psychiatric Assessment, in fact it proved to be a proper old poke into a hornets’ nest. People wandered through with clipboards and forms-not about me, it was all about a Care Programme, social services, community nurses, meals on wheels, whole shooting match. And that was only the start, there was this or that or the next thing they couldn’t do till tomorrow or day after or until so-and-so got back from holiday. I got so tired hearing them go on and on I fell asleep. I’m sure they slipped me something.