Not a good day, by any means. Christ, and I’m not even halfway through it. Went into Holt to buy my Holbein. Things got off to a bad start when I bundled into the bookshop only to discover that David and Jenny, my future best friends, had been replaced by a young man in his twenties, who was engrossed in some weighty novel and looking very stern and full of himself.
To be fair, he could have been a happy, charming young fellow and I would’ve felt the same level of animosity towards him, since he’d wheedled his way into the role of second lieutenant that I had in mind for myself. Anyway, I very nearly asked after David and Jenny by name. Which would have made me look pretty stupid. I wonder how I would’ve got myself out of that little hole?
Then I went over to the Art section and looked high and low but couldn’t find my precious Holbein. I kept thinking I must’ve got the wrong set of shelves, but I hadn’t. Convinced myself that perhaps it had slipped down the back somehow and I started pulling out great stacks of books and piling them up on the floor. And I could see that young Johnny over at the counter suddenly wasn’t quite so gripped by his bloody Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and kept peering over at me, to see what I was playing at.
I thought perhaps on my last visit I might’ve put it back in the wrong place, i.e. unalphabetically. But I checked the whole damned section without the merest whiff of it. And I began to wonder if I’d perhaps hidden it away myself, in a secret location, to avoid anyone else buying it in the meantime, although I knew that that wasn’t it. I even briefly imagined that the old duffer who’d asked about the picture on the wall – the chap that Dave and Jenny and I had all had a good old laugh at – had come back and, out of sheer spite, bought my Holbein, and was, at that very minute, feeding it, page by page, into the flames of his own little bonfire, and warming himself on my misery.
I should’ve just bought the bloody thing when I first saw it, instead of going through this stupid bloody ritual. I knew I wanted it. It cost next to nothing. True, I already have a perfectly serviceable edition of his prints at home somewhere, but I really did want a copy up here for my widow’s cottage. I would’ve put it on the mantelpiece. It would’ve been a little talisman – a touchstone. And right now I need as many touchstones and talismans as I can possibly get.
I asked young Dostoevsky if he’d happened to spot it. He hadn’t, but suggested that maybe someone had bought it since I last popped in. Well it was all I could do not to throttle him. But honestly, what exactly are the chances of one of the dozen or so people who’ve visited that shop in the last couple of days actually picking out my Holbein from the many thousands of books which line the shelves? And deciding to buy it? Unless it is indeed some awful cosmic conspiracy to try and make my life just that little bit more awful than it has been up to now.
I wandered around Holt in a state of quiet distraction. Of course, as soon as it became clear that I wasn’t about to get my hands on that Holbein it was but a hop, skip and a jump to the absolute conviction that it was the only thing in this world that I wanted/needed. And I felt myself carrying around within me this Holbein-shaped hole. Without it I would be bereft. Hang on a minute! I’m bereft already. OK. It’s not that my not having it would make me bereft. It’s the fact that if I’d actually found it/bought it/owned it, some tiny fraction of my pain might have been erased.
And it’s not as if just any old book of Holbein prints will replace it. Because now it is not about Holbein or even that particular edition, but that particular individual book. Well, I’m going to have to change the bloody subject, because this isn’t helping. My point is that it needs to be the book that I saw the day before yesterday. And if it doesn’t magically reappear in the bookshop in the immediate future, then I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.
To make matters worse I had a prang on my way home. Some of the lanes round here are so bloody narrow. I’d spotted another car coming towards me. So I did the decent thing and pulled over into one of those little passing places. And the arrogant bastard just flew straight by, without even raising a hand to say thank you. I must’ve been so annoyed, what with him and the bloody Holbein, that when I pulled away I did so with just a hint of irritation and caught the nearside wing in the hedge. And when I reversed, to try and extricate myself, I was perhaps a little cavalier with my steering and I heard the distinct clunk of car making contact with something solid, hidden away beneath the foliage. And the more I went backwards and forwards and lost my temper the more scraping and squealing I could hear as the car rubbed up against whatever was in there.
When I got back to the village I didn’t have the nerve to have a proper look at it. I just parked it right in the corner, with the damaged wing facing the bushes so that no one else could see it either. Perhaps if I leave it there long enough and do my best not to think about it, it might miraculously heal itself.
*
To try and calm myself down I went for a tramp out along the saltmarshes. I’d gone about half a mile before the whole path was blocked with bloody twitchers. I’ve spotted the odd one or two hanging about since I’ve been up here but today they were out in full force.
It’s never struck me before but they really are a sort of ornithological paparazzi, with their telephoto lenses and their waistcoats with all the little pockets and sandwiches and their little fold-up stools.
As I squeezed past them I thought to myself, I am not going to ask what all the fuss is about. They’re like children. It would only encourage them.
The other day, someone in the village told me how, not that long ago, a bunch of birders gave some tiny bird they were chasing a seizure. It’d wound up in Norfolk by mistake and before you knew it word got round the twitching community and whole minibuses of them were spilling out onto the lanes. And they chased the little thing up and down the place with such determination that in the end its poor little heart just packed in. So they all had to climb back in their minibuses and go home again.
Apparently, the really rare birds that everyone gets so excited about are just an anomaly. They’ve been blown off course by some freak wind, so they’re not even in pairs. Which means there’s no prospect of them breeding, and no chance of them being blown back from whence they came. So they’re just stuck out here, on the winter marshes of north Norfolk. A situation which has an eerie familiarity to it.