51

The portrait of Dickinson was facing the wall again. With a sigh she turned it round. For weeks the boy had been sleeping in the most beautiful room in the house, the only room with windows on two sides. ‘Dual aspect,’ the house-hunters on Escape to the Country would say contentedly. ‘So light and bright and airy in here!’ For weeks now the open volume of poetry had lain on the oak table with the blank sheets of paper next to it, pen and pencil waiting. Habegger’s much-too-thick book didn’t even mention the poem, let alone discuss it. Suddenly she was furious, not just at the biographer – the old gossip – but at Dickinson too. A puling woman who hid herself away in her house and garden, wordlessly insisting with everything she did and did not do that people should just ignore her, yet fishing for validation like a whimpering child, scared to death that the affection she showed others, mostly in letters, would remain unanswered. A bird of a woman who made herself small and can only have been fearful, signing letters ‘Your Gnome’, and staying timorously in her room during the memorial service in the entrance hall for her dead father, but keeping the door ostentatiously ajar to demand the lion’s share of the attention for herself. ‘I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her,’ wrote one of the men with whom she corresponded. A woman who took to wearing the white of a virgin. Only now did she realise that it had been this anger that had motivated her to write a thesis, subjecting what she saw as the many overrated poems to a critical investigation. Almost as a day of reckoning. ‘Not good,’ she said softly. ‘Not good at all.’

She picked up the biography and the Collected Poems and clomped down the wooden stairs in her boots. Before going out, she threw the biography in the bin on top of the empty anchovy tin. Even worse was that it still enraged her here and now. She laid the poems on the table, sat down on a chair and pulled her laces tight.

She crossed the stream, trying not to think of the distance she had to cover. Taking her own path step by step. She had pulled an alder branch out of the pile to use as a walking stick, one that came up to just past her waist, and now she swung it forward, put it down and swung it forward again. At the stiles she needed to use her hands more than ever: she didn’t let go of the pole or the top board until she was standing on the ground on the other side. It was quiet in the oak wood, a thin mist rising from the lichen-covered trunks and branches. No animals anywhere. No cows, no sheep, not even grey squirrels. She could imagine squirrels hibernating; she could imagine any wild animal with a shaggy coat hibernating. She was getting hot. A familiar smell rose from the neck of her thick coat. The smell of old Mrs Evans.

At the stone circle she felt like sitting but decided to walk on. The rocks were dry; the lichen pale grey and brownish yellow. Around the gorse bushes there was a very vague smell of coconut. She followed the natural embankment between the tufts of stiff grass. There was no trace of the black cattle, she couldn’t hear any birds. She was completely alone, as if she too were not there. She crossed the field to the reservoir, passing the standing stone, which she whacked with her stick. Today the water wasn’t like a silver tray that had just been polished; an almost imperceptible breeze was rippling it. In the distance it was surging through the small brick building. She shuddered to think that not so long ago she had stood in this reservoir, seeing her body bent by the refraction of the light, air bubbles in her pubic hair, tiny fish around her toes. She walked to the big rock she had laid her clothes on last time, sat down and lit a cigarette. A car drove along an unseen road. She stirred the water with the stick, making wavelets that pushed out through the wind’s ripples. She followed one until it died on the opposite bank. When she tried to suck on her cigarette, she noticed that her mouth no longer closed. She panicked, pushing her lower jaw up with her hand, but she still couldn’t suck; it felt like the time an oral surgeon extracted a wisdom tooth from her upper jaw and left a hole that connected to the nasal cavity, breaking the vacuum you need to smoke. She threw the cigarette in the reservoir and breathed in deeply through her nose a couple of times, something she could only manage by pressing her tongue up against the roof of her mouth. Her tongue was still working and a little later she managed to close her mouth. She stood up, felt her knees wobble and, leaning heavily on the stick, walked towards the standing stone, where she rested, laying a hand on its cold top and looking at the trees lining the rolling field.

Before starting the climb, she imagined the dull red tractor with a shrewdly smiling Farmer Evans sitting on it. And chains, deep tracks in the grass. Maybe Mrs Evans – not yet widowed – had helped him to stand the stone upright, leaving the basket with the bread rolls, two pears and a bottle of lemonade at the water’s edge. Maybe they’d laughed, run, rolled in the grass.

She hadn’t wanted to know a thing. She’d resisted the temptation to look it up on the Internet. She’d left. Like an old cat that wants to be left in peace. Not that she’d ever experienced anything like that herself; they’d never had a cat in the narrow house in De Pijp. Her uncle had cats. ‘If they’re gone, they’re dead,’ he said and her aunt nodded. She looked back once again at the water and thought of him. Why didn’t anyone ever say ‘Go on. Go ahead’? Why had every last member of the kitchen staff done their best to get him out of the pond and into dry clothes, putting his shoes on the oven? To give him a chance to do a bit of carpentry? ‘A wall unit,’ she said and walked on.

By the time she reached the stone circle the second time, the light had changed. The gorse flowers were a darker yellow, the stiff grass a different green. She sat down on the big rock and dared to put a cigarette in her mouth, even though her hands were trembling and she dropped the lighter after lighting it. There was still an enormous silence. Badger lady without a badger, she thought. She felt her legs grow leaden, her back stiff, her arms heavy. It wasn’t coming. Maybe it was hibernating. Aren’t badgers a kind of small bear? Slowly she covered the last stretch to the house. She stood on the beams over the stream for a long time, looking at the water flowing downhill. It bubbled and foamed. Clear, ice-cold water.