Spent most of this morning wandering around the sands out at Holkham. I parked up on that wide drive just off the coast road and found a sandy path that zigzagged through the fir trees and came out behind the dunes. My original plan had been to walk out to the sea and have a little paddle, but the water was nothing but a thin, silver line on the horizon, so I decided just to have a stride around.
Christ, but it’s a big old beach. I’d forgotten. The sort of place where you could imagine someone attempting a land speed record. I walked up and down, trying to find the spot where Paul and I had sat, however many years ago that is now. It was autumn, but still quite warm. We must have sat there for hours. Some part of it, I’m sure, we spent kissing, and quite possibly groping each other. We may even have talked from time to time. But the majority of it we just sat there, curled up together, with Paul’s coat wrapped around us. Huddled under the firmament, with the roar of the sea somewhere way off in the distance.
If I think about it long enough I can retrieve some tiny fragment … some tangible taste of what was going on inside of me. And the best description I can come up with is that it was as if the world was suddenly a very good place to be. That I belonged here. And that, up to that point, I’d been making my way through my life on little more than a fraction of my capacity.
Well, I had no luck this morning trying to find the spot where we’d been sitting. I always thought that we’d been due north of a series of sand dunes. But I must’ve marched up and down for a good hour and a half without seeing any sign of them. I suppose it’s possible that the landscape has somehow changed in the meantime. Sand does, after all, have a tendency towards transformation, especially when it’s exposed to the wind. Then again, it’s not exactly the bloody Sahara. And it’s much more likely that I was just on the wrong part of the beach.
Not being able to find that particular spot quite upset me. I’d wanted very much just to sit there again and see if I could pick up some trace of that benevolent power. And not being able to do so had me wondering if it was possible that I’d made the whole thing up.
That same weekend we were walking along a lane a couple of miles inland and saw this great V of geese flying overhead. Then another one. And within a couple of minutes that huge blue sky was strewn with thirty or forty of these squadrons of geese – way, way up above us. And it was so still that we could clearly hear the sound of their wings pumping away at the air.
When you’re in love – or infatuated or besotted or whatever you want to call it – moments like that are a sort of benediction. My fear now, and it’s a real fear, is that when I encounter anything with even half as much wonder, what will I do with it? In the past, if I happened to be alone when I witnessed something magical I always knew that I’d be seeing John later and I’d be able to report it back to him, which, in its way, still served to validate the experience. Even if it was just some eccentric little thought I’d had. But now I worry that without someone else to share my thoughts with, all the magic will just drain away.
I thought it would help, being out on the beach. Thought it might recharge my battery. But, if anything, it’s just made things worse. And by the time I’d spent a couple of hours flailing about I felt so low that I just got back in the car and drove around, to try and distract myself. To try and clear my head.
At some point there was a programme on the radio, about a group of women who were being referred to as War Widows, but not in the conventional sense. So many young men lost their lives in the Second World War that when it was finally over there were simply not enough of them to go around. It’s one of those facts that is so blindingly obvious only after someone else has pointed it out to you. Strange also that that generation would have included my mother, but I never heard her make any reference to it.
Anyway, they interviewed some old girl who was talking with great stoicism on the subject, as if life was just some dance down at the local Alhambra or Locarno and if you were lucky some fellow might happen to come along and invite you out onto the dancefloor. But, what with there being twice as many girls as boys, she never got the chance. Of course, her resilience just made it all the more moving. And to my shame I found myself thinking that perhaps if you never happen to find a partner, you never miss what you’ve not had. Honestly, sometimes I surprise myself with my callousness.
And then the strangest thing happened. I was just puttering along down some country lane when this man – I couldn’t even say how old he was – but this man of indeterminate age crossed the lane before me, barefoot, then climbed a stile into a field.
I carried on down the road, thinking, He’s probably just strolled off the beach. But then it occurred to me that we were nowhere near the beach here. That we must’ve been the best part of five miles from it. Not to mention the fact that it was the middle of winter. Then I felt this awful sense of doom creep up my back and sweep across my shoulders – a sickening sense of everything suddenly being quite wrong.
I pulled up and reversed the car to the point where I’d seen him. And when I stopped by the stile there he was, halfway across the field. I was tempted to get out and call after him. To ask him what was with the bare feet. He would’ve almost certainly heard me. But some van came up behind me and started honking his horn, so I had to carry on.
And like everything else these days if I allow it, that merest glimpse of a barefoot man has been niggling away at me ever since. As if there’s something askew. That there is inexplicable strangeness and peculiarity all around me. And perhaps even some terrible conspiracy.
All afternoon, whenever I thought of him I kept thinking of a dead man. That’s what bare feet mean to me. And that’s not just me being loopy, surely? Think of all the to-do when Paul McCartney was photographed walking barefoot across the zebra crossing on the cover of Abbey Road. A man with bare feet signifies death. Everyone knows that.
And I began to think that if I wasn’t careful the bare feet would join the Holbein and the black heart under my thumbnail and all my other little obsessions, over which I expend an inordinate amount of mental energy, which I can frankly ill afford. Then, only an hour or so ago, it suddenly dawned on me. I suddenly worked out what was going on. That not far from where I passed the barefoot man is Walsingham – that little village with all the shrines and springs. The man I saw was, in all likelihood, a pilgrim. He was walking barefoot, the last mile of the way.