Last summer I rambled through Wordsworth’s rolling landscape, where the shadows on the hills are so dark and so pronounced that the hilltops look like they are drenched in water, and the lakes are so deep that… when suddenly a fighter jet appeared and without thinking I threw myself to the ground, terror-stricken. I had neither seen nor heard the jet until it was directly above me. It wagged its wings, turned on its side and disappeared between two hills. It was so elegant, so fast and so sudden, and from that moment on I lived and breathed to see another one, preferably many more. I was lucky, because that summer RAF fighter pilots were performing training exercises there, weaving in and out of the hills of the Lake District, and perhaps they continued all the way to the Scottish Highlands before departing on a mission to Afghanistan; like predatory shadows above the endless opium fields and endless mountain ranges, ‘bearing their cargo of death’, something I repeated to myself in order to curb my enthusiasm – in any case I managed to see one or two every day. I made a few notes, this is what I came up with: ‘Typhoons, the sublime, flashing, wagging, a terrifying noise – then gone. In the very landscape where WW had one vision after the other, where in sudden flashes of insight, he looked and looked.’
As I walked around in Wordsworth’s landscape, dragging myself up his steep hills, I thought of the fighter planes as an embodiment of his inspiration, the sudden insight, a divine flash of realization, a thought like a bolt from the blue and full of load-bearing force – enough to carry a poem through. These are not words I would ordinarily use, but I do not think William Wordsworth would have shied away from them.
Though what consumed me more was that I could get so excited, so fulfilled by the sight of these fighter jets. I was not shameless. I was ashamed to sense delight at observing a phenomenon that was brought into the world to cause death and destruction. I was ashamed and I couldn’t wait till the next one arrived. The fact that the plane only appeared for a brief moment certainly played a part. I never tired of looking. I pursued my own ocular pleasure.
Perhaps I also pursued the inundation of the senses it entailed – the noise, the shock at its sudden appearance. I reminded myself that the suddenness which fascinated me… the purpose of which was so that the plane could appear out of nowhere, drop its bombs and be gone before anyone could even think of shooting it down; but it was no use. I simply waited for the next one. And they flew so low! It provided a sense of connection. The pilots might have seen me, and the one who saw me throw myself to the ground probably smiled.
The we that once existed, it no longer exists. How I loved that we. How it fulfilled me.
My husband was with me. He is tired of me never saying we any more, only I. But I forget to be mindful of that, and the next time I talk about a trip we went on, an experience we shared, I hear myself saying I again.
He was with me on my ramble through the Lake District, and Dorothy Wordsworth had rambled through these hills just as much as her brother William had; on several occasions WW wrote poems based on her notes. But regardless of whether the event was witnessed in the company of Dorothy or was Dorothy’s own unique experience, he always used the personal pronoun ‘I’ in his poems. For example, she was the first to see the daffodils, (hundreds of daffodils along a lake) and her description formed the basis for what must be his most famous poem of all, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’.
Dorothy writes: ‘… as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing.’
I don’t know whether it is a matter of fairness; a simple acknowledgement that my husband was also present; that Dorothy was present. Why would I say ‘I’ about an experience that we shared… because I felt alone during it? Or because my entire focus is on the currents streaming through my own consciousness; how I experience things – the fighter jets, for example – though he had also thrown himself to the ground.
As for William Wordsworth, not only did he write ‘I’ in the daffodil poem, he later denied that Dorothy had had any influence whatsoever on his poetry. He wrote her out of it.
When he got married, he cut her out of his heart, at least her-being-his-muse. He had to. Just like he had to get married. People talked. Bear in mind that Byron had a child with his sister. WW was known to embrace Dorothy and kiss her on the mouth when they met up in the landscape; maybe she had gone to meet him and stood there waiting. And there he was, finally he arrived – she rushed into his arms. They had been seen. They had been spied on in the hills.
He wanted to see his literature as the sovereign product of a sovereign I. He distanced himself from, practically renounced the note-method in his old age (which he had used for the daffodil poem, in this case Dorothy’s notes), and writing poems from notes altogether, including his own; he wanted to view his poetry as a more original practice, as something that came directly from his consciousness: he went into the landscape, he saw, he thought, he wrote.
But allow me not to diminish Dorothy. She had a practice that bore traces of William’s. She did not borrow words or ideas from other people. (Which during our century is taken as a matter of course as being entirely unavoidable, and had WW not denied this practice, I would have no objection.) But she did borrow people’s clothes. When she was to go on a trip where she would be away for a few days, or maybe a good while, she did not bother to pack. She relied on the wardrobe of the hostess. Even the most intimate articles of clothing, by all accounts, without any thought to the hostess, that she might have wanted to keep her underwear to herself.
While I walked at his heels or scampered off in front of my husband, (never beside, as William presumably did on his walks with Dorothy) I recited the daffodil poem to myself:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Incidentally, the verse ‘They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude’ was written by his wife, Mary Hutchinson. Three pairs of hands have played at that piano; the daffodil poem.
I heard the poem for the first time when I was seventeen or eighteen; there was a TV broadcast about Wordsworth and Coleridge, some kind of dramatized documentary, at any rate someone was romping deliriously about in a landscape reciting this poem; it was windy, the grass was like a raging sea, the clouds were sailing past. Nature sang on its own, while the actor playing WW sang about the abundance of flowers.
My husband does not believe I have a flair for words. Nor does he think I know how to move. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I went into the kitchen to fetch some water, and when I came back to bed he said: ‘Your shuffling is keeping me awake.’
I shuffle. I stomp. I shuffle & stomp & trudge about. Shuffle-shuffle-stomp-stomp-trudge-trudge.
I can’t sing, hence my husband thinks I am unable to hear music. By hear he means understand, relate to.
For years, I didn’t sing. I refused to sing. I trudged around the Christmas tree like a silent vessel.
I sing off key. And I am so unfortunate as to be able to hear it myself. I remember the few times in my life when I was able to hit a note, great and unforgettable experiences – fusion, the feeling of not being on the sidelines, but on the contrary, of belonging. Then something happens. At the time I was working as a supply teacher. To earn some extra money while I studied. I was in a nursery class that day. Working as a classroom assistant. A little girl had to go to the dentist. Her parents couldn’t go with her. I was asked to accompany her. We could take a taxi, there and back. I was happy to and the girl agreed. She sat very quietly in the back of the taxi.
The dental clinic was inside a school. We entered the building. It smelled both of school (an unfamiliar school) and of dentist. That’s almost too much for one building. The girl took my hand, or did I take her hand?
The dentist chair. The girl refuses to open her mouth. The dentist discusses the concept of free will. She says she never holds anyone down, never forces anyone’s mouth open. I say that sounds like a very good policy. The girl squeezes my hand. I encourage her to open her mouth. The dentist changes tack. She now appeals to the girl’s collective consciousness. She mentions how the girl’s classmates have already been in her chair and they managed alright. Surely she will be alright if all the others were? Apparently not. Her mouth remains shut. The dentist gets sentimental, she tells the girl how much people like her, how she couldn’t hurt a fly, how much her own children love her, would they love her if she wasn’t nice? The girl opens her mouth and says: ‘Of course they love you – you’re their mum.’ Her mouth remains open, the dentist pokes her hands inside, calls her sweetie and promises to sing throughout the long winter, and says the teacher has to join in, and the dental assistant too. They break into song. ‘I Can Sing a Rainbow’. I remain silent, they look at me sternly. The dentist somehow nudges me in the side. The girl has a big cavity and needs laughing gas. A contraption is placed over her nose. She clings to both of my hands, I am practically lying on top of her. She is close to going into a panic, despite the song. And then it happens. I do it. I open my mouth and sing. The others die down. I sing ‘I Can Sing a Rainbow’. My voice sounds wild and strange, a perfect accompaniment to all the steel instruments.
‘She who conquers herself is greater than she who captures a fortress,’ I tell the girl when we are back in the taxi, her with a filling, me with a solo under my belt.
He is full of contempt. He is plagued by loathing. He lacks kindness. He has no sense of humour. (And his flaws go beyond these.)
The thought of growing old with him is chilling. How is he going to look at me when I’m fifty-five or eighty-five and I am dragging my feet around, not out of fatigue or because I’m in a bad mood like now, but quite simply because I am no longer capable of lifting them.
Perhaps age will temper him.
‘Last summer when I was rambling through the Lake District …’ I say.
But he was there too.
‘Is there room for that ego of yours?’ he asks – and smiles for the sake of the listeners.
Nonetheless sometimes when he gets into his stride I get the sense that we were not on the same holiday; or living the same existence; enduring the same punishment. We, the anaemic shadows who drain each other’s lives of happiness. I long for a different life; for kindness and a generous body. I get the feeling that I am drying up at the age of thirty-five. And I find myself in a kind of slumber. I cannot act. When I have to cross the street, I almost hope that I will get run over – a crash and an awakening. Maybe I should dream of being shaken instead.
Every night I have to look away when he chews his dinner to death. It’s his tense jaw, I cannot stand how he turns his beautiful mouth into a waste disposal unit. He listens to classical music the same way he eats: clenched, tense, his pointy elbows on the table, his fingers gripping his skull like an iron ring: concentration, slavish discipline. I am not allowed to utter a sound during this séance. Music is sacred. ‘Can’t you try to hear the music?’ he says. I am in doubt. I have never connected it with effort. (When Dorothy pointed out nature to William – which she did by all accounts – it doubtless took place in a more friendly manner.) Why don’t I leave…? And so I will.
I wonder what my dry husband thinks? First and foremost he is preoccupied with safeguarding his own eccentricities and therefore incapable of stepping into character as a man: socially, I mean, and so he waits, shrouded in his peculiarity, downright proud of it, but in actual fact it is merely so that I will get fed up and leave him.
There is a man I can’t get out of my head. Occasionally I call him forth in my mind. He was on a ramble through the Lake District, or he was there at least. He sat beneath the clouds, on a roof. I saw him from below. He seemed like a lovely man. It was with a sense of a life wasted that I continued walking with my own man.
Well, isn’t it mad… We did not so much as exchange a single word, yet still I latch onto the thought of him. I would like to be able to fall in love, just one more time in my life; to be consumed by life and sense the abyss.
There is something about art that annoys me, I realized that last summer. Then suddenly it dawned on me what the essence of art is.
I was tired that day and had set out on a short hike. I walked along the old Coffin Trail from Grasmere to Rydal, the path the bereaved once took when they had to bring the deceased to the churchyard in Grasmere. There were several large, flat stones along the way that were used to rest the coffin on. I thought about all that effort, all the trouble they had taken, in a place I now strolled along so easily, carrying only a small rucksack.
At the Ramblers Tea Shop in Rydal I was told about a small grotto by a waterfall that I definitely should not miss out on. The grotto was a so-called ‘viewing station’, the waitress told me, the first of its kind in England. Towards the end of the 1600s, that is at a time when people were only just developing a taste for landscapes and appreciating the beauty of nature, Sir Daniel Fleming, with his interest in nature and art, had built the station just a stone’s throw from his manor house, Rydal Hall.
This little grotto, let us call it a house, a shack, a shed, a vantage point, had one window (without glass) through which the waterfall could be observed. There was a painter inside with her back to the door, facing the window; I felt it would be cheating to look at her painting. I tiptoed behind her and was sure to only look outside.
The window framed the waterfall.
The frame turned the waterfall into a picture.
The frame established a point of view to the waterfall.
The frame carved a rectangle out of the scenic view, the romantic motif, the waterfall.
Sir Daniel Fleming’s viewing post enticed (and continues to entice) many tourists and artists. One of the most famous paintings of the waterfall is by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1795 (I bought a postcard of it in the tea room). In this picture, where the falling water resembles streaks of white paint (or perhaps a well-combed head of hair with traces of the comb still visible), nature’s true wildness is found in the tree trunks around and behind the waterfall, living their own twisted, pathless lives. The water is neat and still. Both the falling water, and the pool of water formed by the rocks – the water in the rock pool is by and large unaffected by the water falling into it.
Behind the waterfall is a small bridge, a perfect wooden arch, which the demented trees will soon get the better of.
Perhaps the water is so tame because the moment it was selected as a motif it was cultivated.
I got so annoyed that Sir DF had determined how I should view the waterfall, the part I was actually able to view, that after a single glance from his perspective, I exited the small house and climbed up on the roof so that I could view the waterfall as it suited me. Straddling the roof (which cut me on the crotch, I later discovered I was covered in splinters) like some kind of Hamlet, with my legs dangling on either side of the ridge, I realized that the essence of art is to force a particular way of viewing upon others.
Yes, I know – without an angle, a choice of subject, narrowing, zooming in, focusing, there is no work. I am perfectly aware of that.
The fact that Sir DF had carved out this segment of the view using the window as a frame… how should I put it… I suddenly realized that it was an act of power; he had made himself master of the angle, he had cut into the view, and like sheep the tourists and painters had flocked (and continue to flock) into the house in order to stare out.
Fortunately for my mood, a young woman with a shapely figure in a purple bathing suit and with visible goose pimples suddenly entered my unobstructed view. She balanced delicately above the rocks in front of the waterfall and then settled into the pool of water with a gasp. A couple of strokes carried her behind the curtain of water. When she reached the rock wall, she turned and looked at me.
I was just about to wave to her – whatever that might have led to – when I spotted a man standing on the bank, clawing at the dirt with one foot like a raging bull. I felt a tad ridiculous, me, Prince Roof Ridge. I don’t know what they thought. Maybe they thought I was one of those so-called cloudspotters.
I sat on the roof and below me, inside the house, the painter made a noise. A thought entered my mind, that in a sense I was riding her. The house was a Trojan horse: place a man astride the ridge of a roof and immediately the building becomes a horse, in this case it contained a painter, and a horse filled with people – that sounds very Trojan.
Maybe they thought I was inspecting the house, looking for damage, that I was a builder; or even worse: that I was one of these sensual creatures who feels the need to touch everything – down on his knees to touch the withered leaves, up on the roof to feel it between his thighs.
There are so many deodorizers in our room that we both develop a migraine while staying there; I am worried about getting brain damage so we keep the window open, living in a constant draft, to Alma’s great irritation, and she has developed quite the cold; I keep thinking of the long-haul lorry driver I saw on the news who was forced to retire early because he had kept deodorizers in the cab where he spent most of his life, in that case it would have been far healthier to have a small plastic skeleton, as long as you don’t suck on it or touch it too often.
Naturally there is a deodorizer hanging over the rim of the toilet, no surprise there, and it has two functions, it colours the water purple and eliminates odour; but we are also met by a synthetic pong in the shower cubicle, meaning you can’t smell yourself until you turn the shower on and the problem goes down the drain. And in the wardrobe, and on the shoe rack – and in every single drawer there is one of these small poisonous thingamajigs. And today I spotted one above the bed! That reminds me of something! Once at my organic hair salon, a male stylist sprayed a fragrance into the air for a male customer to sample… When asked by the customer when the fragrance might be of use, I heard the hairdresser reply: ‘Well, when the gentleman is shagging in the morning, for example.’
The salon went completely quiet. I am certain that each and every customer, hairdresser and sweep-up-the-hair-boy thought they had been the victim of a misunderstanding. And I pictured an amorous couple, regularly refreshing the air above them, particularly the southern region, as they say, with a few puffs. My hairdresser froze for a moment, her scissors hovering in the air, then abruptly launched into some nonsense about wigs: ‘During the Renaissance,’ she said, ‘people used white lead, both on their face and in their hair, it caused large open facial wounds that would not heal, and their hair fell out, so by the time the baroque era was reached, there were very few people who still had hair, and that is how the wig was invented. Poor people had wigs made of felt, they probably looked more like hats than hair.’
And I was forced to imagine these wretched people, hairless, lingering on, era after era with large lesions, hundreds of years old, until they entered the age of wigs and found salvation.
The landlady is very fond of lime and strawberry scents. She has a rather synthetic appearance herself, and a very intense smell, also from these smelly things that she most likely has hidden in various places under her clothes. She has a slight lisp, because she has one tucked inside her mouth like a wad of chewing tobacco, she would prefer cancer to bad breath any day. Faced with all this unnaturalness… it really surprised me when the landlady told me that she held a kind of badger show in her drive every night, for her guests; there was an entire family of badgers living under her rhododendron (a very lush and extensive specimen) and every night around eleven she fed them leftovers from breakfast, bacon, eggs and fried sausages, ‘they are probably the only badgers in England with high cholesterol,’ she said, and I could tell that was a line she got a lot of mileage out of. And no sooner had she said it when, like an echo, (slightly nauseating; tell me: what became of the joy?) I hear myself repeating the line when I describe the incident upon returning home, and I pictured Alma looking away – it does not require much imagination, she often does that.
That same evening we took our seats on folding chairs as a couple of bright floodlights suddenly bathed the drive in a light worthy of a prison yard or a prison camp, and the landlady arrived wearing a pink dressing gown and offered these final instructions: ‘They are practically blind,’ she said, ‘so if you just sit completely still, they will come right up to you. But the slightest movement…’ and she made a sudden movement with her hands. Lost, disappearance, whoosh-away-they-go. Then she generously scattered leftovers across the drive and retreated into her castle of scents.
Only a moment passed before the animal poked its head out of the rhododendron bush. And a little later a plump, short-limbed creature with snake-like movements appeared, sniffing loudly, and approached us with its nose to the ground, entirely at the mercy of its sense of smell, ready to die for the titbits (I felt a stab of envy; I longed to have something to die for). It munched on the bones, and of course I was reminded of how in the past, when the woods were teeming with badgers, people filled their boots with charcoal when they were hunting because badgers bite until they hear a crunch.
Its nose guided it to the next bite, it came right up to the leg of my chair where there was a fried potato, and I glanced nervously at my sandalled foot. It munched and moaned. Then it heard something! And bolted! The air was full of galloping and pattering body parts. It sounded like a fat naked woman running. When your wife starts to take her clothes with her into the bathroom in the morning, and her nightgown in the evening, in order to avoid your gaze while she gets changed, there is something wrong. Alma is not fat, on the contrary. The bath in our room doubles up as a jacuzzi, if only she could be tempted into the waves. Hardly.
She sits watching the cat – the pink lady has one just like it. And the cat looks at Alma. She makes little sounds in a distinctive feline tone – a combination of hissing and deep, cuddly noises – the kind you learn to use on cats from an early age. And it starts to purr and rub up against the rubbish bin, the sound alone is enough, she does not need to touch it. It submits. It positions itself in her vicinity, in front of the door.
Our landlord arrives home, parks and is about to go inside – to join the pink angel of the house who has run rampant with a feather duster all day long. He greets us; he has a very masculine appearance, tweed and pipe. A pie probably awaits him in the oven. While he eats, she will kick off her slippers and place her anointed feet on his lap. He will put down the knife, eat and squeeze her sweet little toes a little. I am dying for a similar idyll. Like marzipan.
The cat is disturbed. It needs to move or the master of the house cannot get inside. It looks at him, wronged and defiant. It does not think of itself as his cat. He has long since disappeared inside the house. There is nothing to be done. Nobody to complain to.
If you did not want to be the angel of the house in the time of the lake poets, you had to climb into bed. There were plenty of illnesses to choose from and nothing to cure them other than opium and brandy. You could lie there and lose yourself in reading, in translation, in opium visions; you could write. While other people looked after the children, relatives, master of the house, housework, callers, dinner parties and churchgoing. May I introduce a breathless Sarah Coleridge:
At the hour of nine we all assembled at the breakfast table – S. his wife & two eldest daughters, myself and Sara, all well, except the good Lady of the house [Edith] who is in a very complaining way at present, (Mrs Lovell always breakfasts alone in the schoolroom & Hartley alone in his study.) A note is brought in – Sir G. & Ly B[eaumont]’s compliments hope to see the whole party to dinner including the young ladies. We promise to go – Away fly the two cousins to Shake the Pear Tree before dressing for Church – in a minute Edith arrives, breathless – “Aunt Coleridge, Sara has shaken something out of the tree, into her eye, & she is distracted with the pain.” After bathing the eye & lamenting over it, & and deprecating the folly of the poor sufferer for nearly an hour, S. raps at the door with all the children ready for church, except for one. Where is Kate? “She has such a bad headache she can’t go to church, her mother is going to stay with her to give her James’s-Powder, so I hope Sara is better & you are both ready for church.” Sara was too blind to go, but I huddled on my things and got to church as the last Psalm was reading, found our pew full, obliged to go into another, & when the communion plate was brought round, had left my purse at home, & sitting among strangers looked very foolish… On our return, Kate was in a high fever; Mama [Edith] very unhappy, poor Aunt Lovell on the couch in her very worst way, & on entering the bedroom, I found it quite darkened, and Sara in tears… We sent off for the Dr who tried with a camel’s-hair pencil to clear the lid of the eye, but made it worse; prescribed for Kate who was put to bed, and Sara lay down again in despair, & I sat by her bedside reading… I had hardly prepared myself to be with her for the night… The maid comes up – Ma’am, here are two gentlemen who must see you, they are friends of Mr Coleridge – “pray call Hartley to them, I am nearly undressed” “Mr Hartley is just gone to the inn”… Well, after sitting a full hour with these gents, I suffered them to depart without asking them to stay for supper, for which I got a trimming from S. who did not venture to ask them himself not being sure whether there was anything in the house to give them…
With a talent on a par with that of her famous father, longing for immersion and peace and with a similar opium dependency, Sara Coleridge (without an h; daughter of Sarah and Samuel) often lay down on the sofa, or once she simply disembarked the stagecoach on a journey, and pleading poor health (she truly was in a bad state), she lodged at a guest house for weeks where she wrote, until her husband, after sending numerous letters in an effort to tempt her home, appeared in person and brought her home. Maybe it was on that occasion that she wrote the poppy poem, which later, strangely enough, and despite the protests of her family, was published in an educational rhyming book for children, written by her:
The Poppies Blooming all around
My Herbert loves to see,
Some pearly white, some dark as night,
Some red as cramasie;
He loves their colours fresh and fine
As fair as fair may be,
But little does my darling know
How good they are to me.
He views their clustering petals gay
And shakes their nut-brown seeds.
But they to him are nothing more
Than other brilliant weeds;
O how should’st thou with beaming brow
With eye and cheek so bright
Know aught of that blossom’s pow’r,
Or sorrows of the night!
When poor Mama long restless lies
She drinks the poppy’s juice;
That liquor soon can close her eyes
And slumber soft produce.
O’ then my sweet my happy boy
Will thank the poppy flow’r
Which brings the sleep to dear Mama
At midnight’s darksome hour.
We left the Lake District, all the beauty, the hills and the glittering lakes, the sinewy ramblers with their silver-tipped walking staffs and long strides, and drove through Discount England; at each stop the bus grew heavier; 150-kilo teenage mothers boarded the bus with overweight children with close-cropped haircuts stiff with hair gel.
Kristian has got tar on the back of his white shorts. He tried to wipe off the worst of it with kitchen roll. Naturally the paper stuck to the tar. So now he is walking around with a large blotch on his backside with kitchen roll stuck to it. It goes without saying that it looks rather unfortunate. But he perseveres. I feel like a pubescent teenager who is embarrassed of her parents. I maintain a vain hope that people won’t think we are together, as long as I stay a couple of metres ahead of or behind him. I’m happy when he sits down; I leant my head against the window of the bus, and it felt like the landscape rolled through my left eye and out the back of my head at a ferocious speed.
Hands have seized them from below and shaken them: the gravestones are tilting, pointing in every direction. They are meant to be in straight rows, they are wild and tooth-like, it would take a strong set of braces to straighten them. The churchyard lies in the village of Haworth, we (I’m learning!) have to walk through it to reach the path to the heath. We cross the churchyard in the morning, we cross it again in the afternoon.
‘Also’ is written before the names of family members, also her, also him, also her, and one stone reads: ‘also or enough!’ yet another child lost, perhaps the exclamation mark is addressed to God; enough already! To have buried an entire family, where you have to wander aimlessly in wait, perhaps with a lock of your loved one’s hair in a locket around your neck, wound around a lock of your own hair. People were obsessed with keeping locks of hair in the 1800s. Displayed in a glass case at the Brontë museum, the hair of Father Brontë and one of the daughters is married together in a small open container. Did someone occasionally open the locket and put their nose up to the interwoven plait in the small grave? A lock from each of the deceased, that could add up over time, so much love, and so, so dry! in such a small space. The last surviving member of the family roaming around with a miniature churchyard around the neck.
I remember an entire wall teeming with hair, it was in Turkey, in a cluster of caves where the first Christians had lived in hiding, one of the caves was furnished as a bar, and the wall of the cave was covered with locks of women’s hair, thick layers of hair that you had an urge to stroke, and dangling from each lock was a note with the name of the owner. An eager Turk with a pair of scissors ran after Alwilda and me, but I do not think we yielded. Or else in the end we really did bow our heads for the short man; and two amputated Scandinavian giants boarded the waiting bus in annoyance.
At the church where Father Brontë preached, summoning all of his strength after losing his wife and over the course of the years his six children – Emily died on a sofa, I stood behind the rope barrier of the Brontë Museum and looked at the sofa and attempted to conjure up the, by all accounts, short and chunky image of Emily, possibly made ethereal by tuberculosis, a body worn down by all the coughing, but the sofa remained empty – in the church we meet a man who is in a bad way. He violates my personal space, which like most people is just under a metre, and he sticks his face right up to mine and asks about my relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. I say that I was baptized, so I should belong to his kingdom, but that was about as far as it went.
‘What’s your opinion.’
‘I suffer from violent fits of rage, yes, I suppose I shouldn’t be saying that in here.’
‘You needn’t worry,’ I said.
‘I could tear this church apart in ten minutes.’
I looked for the exit, I don’t know how we had made it so far inside, I slowly retreated.
‘That’s why I’m trying to have faith,’ he bellowed, ‘faith, faith, faith,’ the room echoed, ‘and that’s really helped me,’ he whispered.
His face glued to mine – during operation exit. Goodbye fury, goodbye sound; it is always a relief to escape such difficult people, but at the same time a tragedy, so many people, using myself as an example, whom I have left behind, standing or sitting, homeless, hungry children with lightning-quick movements in the Third World, you name it, and you always carry a little of that tragedy with you: sorrow and regret. The unfortunate person you leave behind.
Oh, all the people I should have taken by the arm and walked away with, but where would I have kept them all, all the life-sized people.
Haworth is a dark city, built from dark stone, or stone that time has darkened, the streets are narrow. Many of the houses are decorated with flowers at the front, orgies of flowers, the blue and red in particular can be gathered under the term spinster-flowers: leaves like earlobes that time has made large and loose, and in garish colours that even weak eyes can capture; dangling from the façade in pots, pots on the ground lining the wall of the house, each house an entire flower shop. The landlord at our guest house is English and the landlady is French; when we arrived, she came to greet us with open arms, I put the suitcase down, and she bonjoured and directed her lips at my cheek; somehow or other my mouth was too open, or she turned her head too much: instead of planting a kiss in the air by her cheek, I got a mouthful of her ear. It tasted of pepper. And before she managed to withdraw, I pictured (in a flash of lightning) the duchess from Alice in Wonderland stirring a huge pot.
We are staying at a guest house right by the churchyard. By cutting across the churchyard, opening a gate, following a narrow dark path for a hundred metres, opening another heavily sloping gate: you reach the heath. Haworth Moor. The fairy tale spreads out before us. We are still miserable, and again we are rambling in the realm of a powerful love: Catherine and Heathcliff. Their love was equally impossible as Dorothy and William’s, which we had just experienced, so to speak. And our own is also utterly impossible. Though for other reasons. Reasons I don’t understand. If I run my hand across Alma’s body, she shudders and says it tickles. She does not move my hand, but stops it by placing her hand over it. It feels more like a funeral than a sign of affection.
Today we visited Top Withens, a building that is said to have inspired Emily Brontë to write about the storm-battered house, Wuthering Heights, now a ruin.
The heath. Sparrowhawks circled above us. The heath was white with cotton grass. In moist areas grew bracken. It causes cancer. And I was walking bare-legged. The weather changes incessantly. The sun is shining. Then it starts to rain. The rain lashes the face, and the wind is severe. We put on our woolly jumpers. A little later we take them off again. Yesterday Alma bought a pair of long woollen knee-length stockings. From a specialist shop (regional wool) in the town. We got to chatting with the owner. He wanted to leave England. Because of the way foreigners are treated. He wanted to move to France. Alma made a few comments about how the conditions for new arrivals (wasn’t that the word the Danish queen had used in her latest New Year’s speech? A carefully selected neutral word, a proper queen word; but maybe so neutral that it lacks precision) had also become rather harsh in Denmark. He looked at us blankly. ‘No, no.’ He wanted to go home to Le Pen. Le Pen knew what needed to be done. Only a couple of days earlier I had read an article in The Independent about the prison-like conditions English asylum seekers face; about an African woman who had been forced to give birth in handcuffs so she didn’t use the hospital visit as an opportunity to make a run for it and join the mass of undocumented immigrants. By that point Alma had already paid for the stockings. Otherwise we would have left without them. Now we are using Alma’s long racist stocking as scarves. One for each of us, with the foot of the stocking smacking the middle of the chest; Alma ventures a smile; the ridiculousness unites us. That’s how cold it is.
On the way up to Top Withens, we passed through a valley that was nothing less than delightful, in a place that the Brontë sisters were fond of sitting. Steep rock faces. A waterfall. A brook with stepping stones: an invitation to joy. I removed my shoes and hopped from stone to stone. In the meantime Alma walked back and forth across the Brontë bridge and sat down for a while on the Brontë chair (also a stone).
‘I would like to return here,’ Alma said, and then we continued walking.
When we arrived at the ruin, sweaty and out of breath, we were immediately surrounded by moorland sheep, they were greyish-brown and freshly sheared. They flocked around us. One had a large growth dangling from its chin. Maybe it was from the ferns.
The ruin consisted of only a few rooms, two or three. The inside walls were so low that I could look over them. In the novel, Wuthering Heights, the building that gave the novel its title, seems to be a property of considerable size, full of corridors and dark rooms, where dogs leap out from hidden corners. The Wuthering Heights of the novel is like a fortified prison where an incredibly poor atmosphere incessantly reigns. A place that is difficult to escape from. First the adult Heathcliff keeps his son imprisoned in the house and later his daughter-in-law, the daughter of his beloved Catherine, whom you would think he would treat well out of love for Catherine; but no, on the contrary.
The violence takes place within the confined rooms.
The ruin is open. The heath, as well as the weather, has forced its way in. The building cannot hold anyone in, as the house in the novel does in abundance. Nowadays Heathcliff would have to chain his prisoners there. The only thing resembling the description in the novel is the isolation of the building; located on a hilltop, surrounded by a desolate heath. Windswept. The wind takes hold of the stocking foot and swings it over my shoulder, ‘it is very wuthering’.
Heathcliff is a savage, avaricious (he usurps two entire properties), vindictive brute, and Catherine is a hysterical, manipulative and rather violent monster. Why is their love so famous? How can two such monstrous people love? And how is their famous love represented? Is it a noble phenomenon set against a backdrop of violence (the house and a number of violent minor characters) between two equally violent people? For them love is to know no difference between each other’s souls, to believe they are one:
My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable,
Catherine says and shortly after marries Heathcliff’s opposite, a cool man.
Only in death do they become one. Heathcliff digs up Catherine’s coffin and releases the boards on one side so that it remains open; he ensures that the same will be done to his own coffin after his death – threatening the powerful anger of his ghost if he is not obeyed; thus at long last the two become one flesh.
In contrast to the true love of these two, where the truth is that one is (like) the other, the love between Heathcliff’s son and Catherine’s daughter is a love artificially created by Heathcliff, again with material gain – and revenge – in mind. It is obvious that the two lovers have different wishes, the proof that their love is false:
One time, however, we were near quarrelling. He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven’s happiness: mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but thrushes, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine and began to grow very snappish,
Cathy tells the housekeeper, Nelly.
I read the piece out loud to Alma, and she said: ‘Such an amazing piece about the heath. You could only write like that about a place you know inside out. And such an amazing piece about the joy of moving.’
She put her arms around me and said: ‘Such poetry!’ and I was just as happy as if I had written it myself and had not merely possessed it for a moment with my voice. I said: ‘Heathcliff’s son had tuberculosis, that is why he did not have the energy for all of her running and dancing, but preferred to lie about and sleep. It felt like he had burning milk running through his veins. He experienced it as though lying between heaven and earth, as though breathing through the eye of a needle.’
She looked at me suspiciously and said that sounded like something from a book, not that she had anything against it, but where was I? The last part was in fact a quote, from-god-knows-where, in any event not from Brontë. Maybe she grew tired of all the talk of illness. In any case I got a sense of having missed an important moment – it had been a long time since we had been so close, both physically, with her arms around me, and mentally – until she got up and walked over to the window. We were back at the guest house. She looked like someone who was trapped, and I felt inferior. Like the skinny cucumber on the label of the vinegar bottle.
Kristian has come down with something. Ill in Wales. Snowdonia. He has a fever and sleeps most of the day. We have taken lodgings at the Heights Hotel in the village of Llanberis. It is a relaxed location, a bit hippyish, but not outright psychedelic, you can come and go twenty-four hours a day, there are rooms and dormitories, the music is a little loud, but it is clean and tidy, and there is no danger of having your things stolen. It is a young area, in contrast to the Lake District which is mostly for the prosperous middle class. There are a lot of mountain climbers. The area, with its grey, naked mountains and Snowdon itself, the highest mountain in Wales, is a Mecca for climbers. Today I saw one being rescued from a mountaintop by a yellow helicopter, I don’t know if it was due to a broken bone, or if the person in question simply could not or would not climb back down, like the cat that has to be helped down from the roof by the fire service.
Kristian has told me to just go out as much as I like. There is no reason for me to sit on the edge of the bed watching him sleep. No, probably not. Still I felt a bit bad when I went down to the hotel bar at night. I don’t like going out alone. I don’t know what to do with my hands or where to look. When I am out at a restaurant alone, I normally read. In short: I’m afraid of someone getting the wrong idea. I tell myself how unreasonable it is that men can go out alone and feel free and at ease, own the world… in other words: I think I should do it. And so I do. But of course I can’t force myself to feel at ease.
I set foot in a room packed with people and smoke; there were evidently a lot of locals, a number who looked a little inbred; that is what the mountains do to people. I bought a beer and looked for a table. I found an empty seat at a table for three. Sitting at the table was a small, sharply-dressed, quick man, whom I estimated to be in his early forties. He could be a jockey. Weighed next to nothing. And looked wily as hell. Next to him was a very different man, far younger and heavier, with dark curls, well-built under a striped (purple and burgundy) North African hooded cloak. He had probably been to Morocco. I’ve been there. Maybe it is one of those jellabahs, or else it is some other, long, cloak-like outfit. His eyelashes were so thick and long that his eyes were veiled when he blinked. His name was Michael, and his friend was called Tony. They were both from Leeds. They were here to climb. They came as often as they could. Tony was a car salesman, and Michael a carer for the disabled. They lived and breathed mountain climbing. I was told all of this at once. Because no sooner had I sat down than they leant across the table and started to talk to me. Tony talked the most. And leant forward the most. The other one had his elbows on the table, a little stooped; but he looked at me alertly enough. My only contribution to the conversation was to tell them that I had a fear of heights. And how it came about.
Up until fifteen years ago, the time I climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I had never had problems with heights. I could choose to walk up to an edge or not. I was neither attracted to nor afraid of heights. Not one of those people who always says, oh dear, afraid of accidentally throwing themselves over the edge. Not at all. Just indifferent. But on the uppermost colonnade of the Leaning Tower I suddenly got scared that I would fall onto the sloping foundation. I got nauseous and dizzy and had to lie down. I lay close to the centre of the tower and clung to the side. You know how an old wall like that smells – almost like a well. (Tony tapped his fingers on the table, he did not have the patience for descriptions.) I was blocking the way and brought traffic to a standstill, there was not much room beforehand. I lay on my side and pressed my face against the body of the tower and felt the precipice tugging at my back – as though it was trying to tear my hands loose. Finally I agreed to be helped down. The trip down the narrow staircase was a nightmare, let me tell you. I promised myself I would never ever climb to any great height again. I sat on the ground and looked at the Leaning Tower, it looked like a chess piece from there, but I knew better, and everything was swimming before my eyes.
When I had finished, Tony said that there was only one way to cure me.
‘Don’t say another word,’ I said, ‘I can guess. Desperate diseases call for desperate remedies, right?’
‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘we’ll take you up with us tomorrow. We can lend you some gear.’
I looked at Michael and nodded. I felt exhilarated. I felt anxious. I felt intoxicated. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to be admired. By then, I think that we had already made up our mind. But I couldn’t know one hundred per cent. I felt like I was being torn apart from the inside. I had another beer and pushed the image of Kristian out of my mind and asked if we were going to climb Snowdon (1085m). No. They were going to take me to a place called Suicide Wall. The name caused me to emit some strange sounds, I had wanted to say ‘hah, hah.’
Tony reminded me of a restless bird. A tough bird, with short, sharp movements, back and forth across the table. A bright knife. With no further presence, only really present in flashes. Where did he go. Everywhere. Scanning the bar. Quick glances at every woman that stepped inside. Restless, restless, restless. Michael, on the contrary. I don’t care for the expression ‘grounded’. But that was what he was. He was anchored in himself. Present. And if there is one thing that stimulates me, that is it. To have somebody at home. And here I had found a mountain climber so firmly rooted to the ground.
There was a commotion on the dance floor, more and more people got up and stood in a circle until there was an entire throng of observers. Curiosity brought us to our feet; oh, a stripper had arrived. With bad skin and breasts like pears. She probably worked at the supermarket during the day. She stripped naked and tried to get a man to join her on the dance floor. She held out her arms and grabbed several people’s hands, but nobody dared, they held their hands behind their backs and retreated a little. Then a couple of men pushed their friend into the centre. He tried to hide in the flock, but kept getting pushed into the middle – he was now sacrificed by the entire throng, all of the people who had personally declined to dance made sure he stayed on the dance floor. As long as they kept him there, they were safe. The stripper danced up to him and tugged his shirt out of his trousers. He tried to tuck it in again. Then she started to unbutton it. He raised his hands in surrender and pulled off the shirt by himself. Then he put his hands in the air and started to dance a dance that was all about shaking his belly. Cheers from the throng. He reached for the stripper’s breasts, but she evaded his grasp and made a snake-like attack on his belt. Soon his trousers were hanging around his ankles. He was wearing red underwear. There was no end to the excitement, the shouts grew coarser, a few people threw beer on the couple. And the man on the dance floor was handed beer after beer, which he drank and poured over himself and over her. Loads of foam that disappeared down their bodies and onto the floor. It was starting to seem Prussian. He pulled off his shoes and threw them into the crowd. One shoe just missed my ear. Of course he couldn’t resist swirling his trousers in the air like a lasso before letting them fly.
Tony had pushed all the way to the front; I could see that only a small part of him was shouting, the rest of him was busy keeping his bearings. If he had only belonged to the upper class, he could have worked at an embassy. The stripper must have signalled someone at the bar, because suddenly the bartender threw a love doll onto the floor. I looked at M and he shook his head in embarrassment. The stripper held the blow-up plastic doll in front of her and got the man to touch it. He threw himself at her gaping fish-mouth and glaring eyes, and the stripper left him there, with this creation that belonged to a hot summer day at the beach in his arms. She pulled away relatively unnoticed, the man threw the doll on the floor and pulled his underwear down to his ankles and made a show to penetrate her, but something went wrong, because she burst like a balloon, and only a sea of coloured plastic remained beneath his fat hips.
Kristian was feeling no better the next morning; I forced a little yoghurt and juice between his dry lips. He managed a smile before he drifted away again. I decided that if he was not better later that day, I would fetch a doctor. And then I went down to meet Tony and M. I thought his initial encompassed him better than his full name. Maybe initials are always sexy. They hint at something more. Something that might come. Might not.
I was afraid, but I pretended I was fine and climbed into the back seat of Tony’s car with a smile. M sat in the front seat. I sat right behind his curly head. And then we drove off. Faster than I have ever driven in my life. Into the mountains. With the music at full blast, with the tyres screeching. I was in love. I didn’t care. We could die in this car as far as I was concerned. I don’t know why such powerful feelings of being alive make people indifferent to losing their life. Because you’re on top of the world? And you would prefer to go out on a high? Once in a while M turned and said something to me. I was shy and had a hard time coming up with an answer.
Half an hour later when I was hanging halfway between heaven and earth there was only one thing I could think of: survival. And of reaching our goal quickly, so I could get my feet back on the ground as soon as possible. I was hooked up to a rope, so that if I fell, I would just dangle from it. But I was still terrified. They had supplied me with a pair of soft-tipped shoes that were created to dig in and find footholds in the tiniest cracks. And it was incredible how many cracks and crevices there were in the cliff, which had looked perfectly smooth from the ground. So I burrowed my fingers and toes into the holes and cracks and pulled myself up. The first couple of metres were relatively painless. But about five metres up the terror and fear struck me. I pressed my body against the cliff while I searched for cracks. And suddenly it was like I had never seen a rock before in my life. The wall felt like the most implacable and brutal thing I had ever faced. I clung to it for a moment, breathing heavily. Tony had advised me not to look up or down. Now I looked up at the plateau, my terminus, took a deep breath and practically darted upwards. Afterwards they told me that they had never before seen anyone climb that quickly. I did not tell them that it was to get it over and done with.
My recollection has furnished the plateau, where I sat soon after, with yellow flowers; like they signified life and happiness itself; but how could they have grown there?
I climbed the wall once more. And again, and in the end I enjoyed it and started to think – maybe the rock face had not outright invited me – but… ‘I want to fall. Just to try it,’ I shouted down to the two men on the ground. Hanging and dangling from the rope, I meant. I looked up. I looked down. The sky did not make me dizzy. The ground did not make me afraid to fall. Not in that moment.
‘She wants to fall. Just to try it,’ M said to Tony in admiration.
And it occurred to me that it was just like in school – when we used to play catch and kiss. I thought for a long time it was a matter of running fast. Not about getting caught. Twenty-five years later, I was hanging from a rope and again it was my speed I wanted to be admired for. It was foolish and narcissistic. Maybe not when you were ten, eleven or twelve years old. But at the age of thirty-five? And then it was time to return to the hotel and try to force a teaspoon between Kristian’s lips again. M craned his neck back and looked me in the eyes, and something sprung forth inside me, my heart twisted and nearly stopped, it was the blood of love.