When the clouds drift across the range of hills, their shadows transform the land below: then the darkness runs through the grass.
We walk around up there for an entire day, at one point the path disappears, and Camilla walks in one direction in search of it, and I walk in the other. A moment later she is out of sight, and I sense how easily the enormous hills and the wind could swallow me up and do away with me; I am superfluous here, in this great landscape, a blot that the wind attempts to rub out.
This range of hills is called the South Downs, and they could be seen by Virginia Woolf from The Lodge, the small summerhouse where she wrote. Now the view is obstructed by trees.
‘As for the beauty, as I always say when I walk the terrace after breakfast, too much for one pair of eyes. Enough to float a whole population in happiness, if only they would look.’
— Virginia Woolf
‘Why,’ I ask the lodger at the house, whose task it is to tend the garden, ‘were trees planted at the end of the garden, so that you can no longer see what Virginia Woolf saw?’
(That is why I am here. To see what she saw. Camilla is meant to have come with Charles. But he is ill. So I am here in his place. Camilla does not have a driving licence, and she cannot find her own way around.)
‘Because the view is no longer the same,’ the lodger says, ‘it’s not attractive. It’s marred by limestone quarries and the work that takes place around the quarries.’
She is immensely overweight. And I think about the discrimination overweight people are meant to be subjected to on the labour market; but is it really wise to have chosen such a heavy lodger? Doesn’t she place unnecessary wear and tear on the place, shouldn’t someone skinnier have been chosen? She and her husband live on the first floor of Monk’s House. Meaning there is no access to it. Leonard Woolf had his bedroom on that floor. Now this giant walks around up there, perhaps the ceiling is cracking under her weight. The entire ground floor is a museum. Volunteers sit on a chair in each room and keep watch. A sign invites people to sign up for this task, knowledge of Woolf’s works is not a prerequisite. I speak to the ageing custodian of the sitting room, he thinks that her books are lacking in plot, that nothing happens in them. I feel compelled to enlighten him and say that is how modern novels are, generally nothing much happens. He laughs and says something along the lines of ‘well done’. He believes that first and foremost she was of significance to ‘feminism’. Again I feel compelled to enlighten him and say that he is mistaken, she is one of the foremost literary innovators of the twentieth century.
‘How so?’ he asks, suddenly stern.
‘By means,’ I reply, ‘of her…’ I hesitate, should I mention how she condenses time so that a day becomes a lifetime? Should I mention the emphasis she places on the life of the consciousness and the exchange between the consciousness and the world, or how easy she makes time move both forward and backward? But it is her ability to compress and saturate that makes me happy. Where is Camilla? She would be able to answer.
‘She liked to smoke cigars, at any rate,’ he says pointing at a box on the mantelpiece.
The lodger has come down from the first floor to treat the custodians to coffee and cake. She stands holding an empty plate.
And it is true that there are some white surfaces visible, and a crane and maybe a couple of other machines operating in what was once Virginia Woolf’s view, but are we not used to that these days, everywhere being so built up (back home in Denmark, at any rate), overlooking a windmill or a concrete pigsty whilst enjoying nature?
At a petrol station, in the newspaper rack, I saw something unforgettable. On the front page of what was probably The Sun, a young woman posing in suspenders and high heels. She stood with her backside in the air and was looking out between her legs. On each buttock was a rather large black beauty mark. Did the marks emphasize her buttocks? In that case, do the lime quarries not emphasize the hill? The lodger was still standing there, I could have mentioned it to her. (As time passes, and my trench coat gets increasingly tatty, I feel more and more like Columbo, seemingly naïve, but in reality with the upper hand.) Instead I said that it must be an enormous task to tend the large garden. And ‘yes,’ the lodger said, you really have to love gardening to take on such an assignment, and in addition both she and her husband had full-time jobs.
She must get incredibly winded when she has to bend down to do the weeding or reach for the pears.
In 1934 the Woolfs visited Shakespeare’s house:
That was where his study windows looked out when he wrote The Tempest,’ said the man. And perhaps it was true. Anyhow it was a great big house, looking straight at the large windows and the grey stone of the school chapel, and when the clock struck, that was the sound Shakespeare heard. I cannot without more labour than my roadrunning mind can compass describe the queer impression of sunny impersonality. Yes, everything seemed to say, this was Shakespeare’s, had he sat and walked; but you won’t find me, not exactly in the flesh. He is serenely absent-present; both at once; radiating round one; yes; in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down. And we went to the church and there was the florid foolish bust, but what I had not reckoned for was the worn simple slab, turned the wrong way. Kind friend for Jesus’ sake forbear – again he seemed to be all air and sun smiling serenely; and yet down there one foot from me lay the little bones that had spread over the world this vast illumination. Yes, and then we walked round the church and all is simple and a little worn; the river slipping past the stone wall, with a red breadth from some flowering tree, and the edge of the turf unspoilt, soft and green and muddy and two casual nonchalant swans. The church and the school and the house are all roomy spacious places, resonant, sunny today, and in and out [illegible word] – yes, an impressive place; still living, and then the little bones lying there, which have created: to think of writing The Tempest looking out on that garden: what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind.
There is a church here as well, St Peter’s Church; it is visible from the garden, old and grey, the fence surrounding it adjoins The Lodge; which would later turn out to be a source of great pleasure. Still I have not considered whether I could sense Virginia Woolf in the house and the garden – just as she senses Shakespeare. To believe that possible one would probably have to suppose that some kind of authorial spirit could be drawn from her works; an essence from her works that can be transferred to the house and retrieved there. At least when it comes to Shakespeare, whose biography is mere guesswork. For Virginia Woolf there are diaries, letters, photographs to construct a person out of – in addition to the spirit of these works.
More than anything, I have felt intrusive, an infringement on someone’s privacy. I keep thinking of a spot in one of her diaries where a man stops his car outside the house and gets out and stares, and Leonard Woolf goes outside and says to him… something along the lines of: ‘Kindly get in your car and leave. Mrs Woolf has no interest in this sort of attention.’ And Virginia Woolf takes the opportunity to air her disdain for people intruding on her life like that man.
I am afraid she won’t care for my kind of attention either, and that makes me feel ashamed. I was already beginning to be ashamed when we arrived at Rodmell (her village). We took up lodgings at a bed & breakfast ‘a stone’s throw from Monk’s House’. And as soon as we had parked and dragged the luggage into the house, we set off in search of it. The village consists primarily of stone houses. But this one is made of wood and painted white. It has no front garden to speak of, but is smack up against the road (like a story without an introduction). It offers a feeling of intransigence, of not being welcome. I stood for a moment and pictured her slim figure (I could only conjure up a silhouette) hurrying down the narrow village street where she went for many a walk, and moved at a fast tempo.
Since I started to read her diaries, I have dreamt about her on two occasions. Dreams are seldom exciting, myself I always skip them in novels et cetera, where as a rule they function as some kind of symbolic bonus material, but they don’t do that here, they are sheer curios, and I will keep it brief:
Dream 1: Virginia Woolf, ageing, naked, she presses a moist sponge over her body and stands with one foot up on a stool.
Dream 2: Virginia Woolf and I are at a social gathering and we both agree to jump out the window. She does it straight away. I dare not. I run out the door and find her in a puddle. She is near death. I am told not to attempt to save her, because that would cause her limbs to dart about madly in the water, as if she had been subjected to an electric shock.
2 x water plus death. It probably points towards her death in water, in the River Ouse. I’ll get to that.
The garden is large and consists of several sections, there is a large flower garden, ponds, a kitchen garden, an orchard, and a large lawn for bowling, something Virginia Woolf was obsessed with and used to play late into the afternoon. She was bad at losing. The large, wonderful garden makes me wistful. I’m only here for today. From her bedroom she stepped outside into that. She walked through it to reach The Lodge. It surrounded her when she wrote. She looked beyond it to the range of hills. Such a profusion of beauty to have access to, ‘what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind.’
The view from my desk (at home) is of the rubbish bins in the courtyard and, thank heavens, a rather attractive yellow wall. That is the backdrop to my thoughts. Camilla urges me to nick a poppy head, ‘because it would be funny to have a poppy from her garden back home.’ (It would have to be kept in a flowerpot.) I do so, clandestinely, but a little later I realize that I have nicked the wrong part, I mean it was not a seed capsule.
There is no admittance to The Lodge. You can only look in through the window. Her desk is there, facing the range of hills, now hidden behind trees. Lying there are three portfolios in which she used to store loose sheets of paper, and writing implements, and her glasses. Organization and nakedness. I am not really content with merely looking inside, because the literature I hold most dear has come into existence there. For example, The Waves. And in there she made an entry in her diary only ten minutes before lunch:
The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry – by which I mean saturated. Is that not my grudge against novelists? That they select nothing? The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in: yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in The Moths. It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent.
Monk’s House is only open to the public on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. We have to continue our journey Saturday morning. But I have to see The Lodge one more time. First I decide to ring the bell at the lodger’s and in my capacity as a writer who is contemplating writing about my visit, ask permission to gain access outside of opening hours, just to the garden. Earlier that day I spoke to a taxi driver who told me about a Japanese writer who succeeded (in gaining access outside of opening hours). Writers from around the world, join the queue. It is not that I somehow imagine that the spirit of Virginia Woolf will be more noticeable if there are no other visitors. I just have to see The Lodge again. It is the heart of this place, literature emerged from it. The Lodge moves me, just as the thought of Shakespeare’s small bones moved Virginia Woolf. However there is a sign at Monk’s House requesting that people respect the personal lives of the lodgers. Meaning I can’t open the gate and ring the bell, I can’t even see a door anywhere. Instead I would prefer to climb over the wall of the garden when it gets dark. I start to feel my way around the wall, it is, as mentioned, a large garden, a decent walk, which takes me across a field of cows, a cricket pitch and through the courtyard of the village school. All the while I see the range of hills (the view) out of the corner of my eye. My endeavours lead me to the churchyard, and from there I can stare across the stone wall and into the kitchen garden where earlier that day I nicked the wrong part of a poppy. I feel my way along the wall to the corner and walk under a large tree: From here I can look directly into The Lodge. It’s night. I’ve brought Camilla.
She spends most of her time on the phone with Charles, first they argue, then they coo. It is going to be expensive. Camilla has got a terrible cough, at times she is close to choking, maybe it’s false croup. When we are dining out, people move away from her, they are worried about swine flu, and Camilla coughs and waves her arms and coughs out: ‘It’s not the flu, it’s not the flu.’ I have suggested she get that printed on her T-shirt. She suggests to me that she might be coughing instead of crying (over Charles) however she does cry at times too. She is someone from whom there comes a lot of sound.
Someone (most likely the lodger) has lit a green bag-like lamp in The Lodge. It illuminates the desk and its objects. How should I (prosaic spirit) put it – yes, there is something magical about this green-lit room, seen from the corner of a churchyard at night, with my face pressed against the branches of the large fig tree that stands on the terrace in front of The Lodge, and which also stood there in Virginia Woolf’s time. The absence of someone sitting in the chair behind the desk, the near awe-inspiring absence, evokes a kind of presence. (The soul, mine, requires deliverance, I cannot live with this suspense.) Virginia Woolf is not missing from the room. She is there. Finally she is there, an X-ray-like spirit emitting concentrates or saturation. Columbo discovered her even though the chair was empty.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s urns are buried in the garden, beneath the elm trees that they named Leonard and Virginia, both of which have fallen. There is a plaque on a stone wall where each urn is buried. Leonard Woolf’s speaks of justice and tolerance; hers bear the closing words from The Waves: ‘Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! The waves broke on the shore.’
Death and water, again.
Suicide as a rebellion against death.
Camilla would like to see the place where Virginia Woolf walked into the river, and so we travelled there, to Southease. It was only a couple of kilometres from her house. It was an unassuming location she had chosen as a setting for her death. The River Ouse was narrow at that point, the sloping banks made it look like a dug-up ditch. The banks consisted of bleak brown stones. There was a bridge, exactly at that point; the bridge was supported by wooden structures – to avert collapse. She filled her pockets with rocks before she went out, in March 1941. The water must have been ice-cold. She had made another attempt a few days earlier. She came home soaking wet. Told Leonard that she had fallen in a ditch.
What does it mean to fling yourself at death unvanquished? That its essence has not penetrated you? What then is the essence of death? Abandonment and withering, resignation? Are you unvanquished if you choose it freely, death – not allow yourself to be overtaken by it? Fling yourself towards it. She flung herself towards it, she waded into it. A conclusion. And the waves broke on the shore – again and again and still today.
And then on to Devon, it is a long drive, and it is not always easy having Camilla in the car, gasping whenever she thinks a dangerous situation is about to arise, it distracts me from driving. She is afraid of lorries, and she wants to get out and walk every time we approach a roundabout, and there are a lot of them (Charles told her they are the most difficult thing to navigate when you are not used to driving on the left.) But obviously she does not get out of the car. A constant stream of messages arrive on her mobile, she and Charles are arguing via text message this morning, to save money. ‘FATIGUE KILLS / MAKE TIME FOR A BREAK’ signs dot the side of the motorway, usually when nearing a service station. Every time Camilla urges me to stop. At one of the places there is a small group of protesters with a couple of dogs lying next to them, dogs that look like miniature horses, covered with blankets. Greyhounds. The people are protesting against dog racing. ‘Why?’ Camilla asks. She has always wanted to experience that type of race. ‘Every year thousands of dogs disappear without a trace,’ one of the protesters says. The dog at her side raises its pointed head, then it falls back into a heavy slumber. I wonder if it has been sedated. These two specimens must have been rescued. ‘But what happens to the dogs?’ While one demonstrator replies by running a finger across the throat, another simultaneously holds out the collection box. Camilla squeezes twenty pounds into the opening. She has a weak spot for animals, all animals.
It is evening by the time we arrive at our bed & breakfast in North Tawton. We drive up to a white Georgian house, out scampers the landlord. He grabs Camilla’s suitcase.
‘We’re here to visit Sylvia Plath’s house,’ she says dramatically.
The landlord tells us, he’s afraid that won’t be possible; Ted Hughes’ second wife lives there now.
‘Then we’ll have to climb a tree and see it from there,’ Camilla says, they have not even crossed the drive yet, ‘you can see it from the churchyard,’ he says. She doubles up from coughing and presses her thighs together.
We pass through a hall that ends at the foot of a staircase with red runners. An imperial staircase painted white: it runs along both sides of the hall, it is perfectly symmetrical, very beautiful, like in Gone With the Wind, a staircase made for corsets and ruffled petticoats, for great activity; one person can run up, another down. In the hall there is a distinguished-looking wooden rocking horse. Resting on some kind of runner. I touch it in passing, and it does not move up and down, but forward and back, at a smooth, well-oiled gait. Hanging on the wall is a photograph of Prince Charles surrounded by a smiling family, I recognize our landlord. First floor. Our room. What a view, green, green, green and fat grazing sheep. So fat that their cheeks quiver when they lift their head. Camilla sits down on the sofa and starts to make a phone call while the landlord and I drag the rest of the luggage up. We are halfway up the stairs for the second time when a furious scream is heard from the bedroom.
‘Is there something we can do for Camilla?’ the landlord asks. Now having an unbalanced person with swine flu staying in his home.
‘I’ll find a doctor tomorrow,’ I say, ‘it’s not the flu.’
‘It’s not the flu,’ Camilla says when we step inside with the luggage, and she raises her hands in the air as though she was about to be arrested. All the same, the landlord is wearing a mask when he serves us the next morning. His wife is not, ‘she’s the healthy type,’ he says and gives her a quick and circumspect English hug. He has small feet and small hands and looks like a restrained version of Mr Bean. His wife is pale (yet composed), that same morning she was going to a meeting to discuss the erection of wind turbines that will obstruct their view. It would deprive them of guests. Wind turbines are loud. They are ugly. The energy cannot be stored as is the case with hydroelectric power (she is now speaking very warmly of Sweden). The battle is almost lost. But she will not surrender. I look at the long strokes of green outside the window, this English prairie with ample space. I imagine her exiting the hall on her steed, riding there with a fixed gaze and her sword drawn, ready to face the turbines in the battle against reflection and rotation.
Camilla is busy demonstrating that she is mentally stable and recuperating physically. She asks if she might enquire as to the occasion on which Prince Charles paid a visit to their home and was photographed with the family.
‘It was back during the outbreak of mad cow disease. He visited some of the hardest hit families in the region. And then it was decided that he would have tea with us, and that it was safe here, that we were not the types who would consider blowing him up.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh, yes.’
And what about the horse – in the hall?
It is a made-to-order rocking horse, from a factory in Dorset, you can choose the colour of the body, the mane, the forelock. It was originally a present for their riding-mad daughter, she had long since outgrown the rocking horse. (We never see her, but at one point the son passes through the dining hall, all bent-over and transparent from puberty. The cat exists only as a meow from the kitchen, a ball under the chair.) On behalf of their daughter, they had chosen brown for the body and black for the mane and tail. Very horse-like. And the long mane bears a resemblance to the Dartmoor ponies out on the heath, their long manes. The dining hall also serves as a concert hall. There is an organ, a harp, and a piano. The entire family plays, maybe they also played for Prince Charles that afternoon; in the photograph Prince Charles looks startled, the landlord fawning, the wife happy, the children empty and blank. The family organizes concerts, invites famous musicians, everyone in the region flocks there, people drive all the way from London. They fill the large house with music. We have taken up residence in a cultural hub, in the midst of all that green. Where it rains three hundred days a year – ‘that is, out on the heath,’ the landlady says.
I am exhausted. Camilla’s coughing is keeping me up at night. I give her a sleeping pill every night, in the hope that she will sleep through the coughing (Camilla loves sleeping pills, but her doctor keeps her on a short leash), she washes them down with her opium cough syrup. But nothing helps. I feel like putting a lid on her. I suspect that the sleeping pills are making her unbalanced. One minute she is crying, the next laughing. Soon I’ll be needing a holiday – from her. When we get home, I will take a good long break. No pills for her tonight.
‘Excuse me, could you please tell us which house is Sylvia Plath’s?’ I ask a man outside the church, because the churchyard is surrounded by houses.
‘Well, it’s not exactly Sylvia Plath’s house. It belongs to Ted Hughes’ second wife.’
‘I mean the house that Sylvia Plath lived in for a time,’ I say diplomatically. And then he is happy to help. (I meant her house in – let’s call it a ‘spiritual sense’. She has been dead for forty-six years. She only lived there for sixteen months, from 1961 to 1962.)
As far as I recall, Ted Hughes’ second wife also took her own life, in the same way Sylvia Plath did, using gas. Actually it must be his third wife who lives in the house. But I don’t dare ask the man about that. I later find out that number two was merely his cohabiter, they were never married, so she does not count.
The house is white and surrounded by a brand-new lath fence. Perhaps Ted Hughes’ widow is sitting inside the house observing us through a pair of binoculars, or through the sight of a handgun, exhausted from the hordes of pilgrims flocking to her house. We can glimpse the house both from the churchyard and from the road. I did not realize I was a voyeur, I think a moment later, when I am again pressed against a tree in a churchyard, squirming to catch a glimpse of a house and a garden. And why do I do that? What am I looking for? Before we departed, the idea of it almost seemed unpleasant to me…
I have to stick with it: the idea of trying to see what she saw. At any rate, standing in the churchyard is the yew tree (it may be) that Ted Hughes challenged Sylvia Plath to write a poem about (they assigned each other such tasks at times). The tree was visible from Sylvia Plath’s bedroom, and according to Ted Hughes it is west of the house. But I have no compass, and the sun is not setting. On the contrary, it is morning. Her poem depressed Ted Hughes, he found it far too bleak:
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness –
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.
It is Sunday, and the bells are bonging today as well, an infinitely long chiming that is initially beautiful and then nerve-racking as it sounds again and again. The chiming is not solely to blame – music has that effect on me, all music, it quickly gets annoying, as though someone was grabbing my soul with their fingers. I generally prefer to be able to listen to my thoughts undisturbed, no matter how unpleasant they may be. While we stand among the chiming, in the churchyard, by the yew tree, Camilla tells me about a carillonneur at the Church of Our Saviour that created the most wonderful compositions, except when she was too stoned, which was clear from the ringing of the bells. (I imagine she might have been content with only a few notes in that case, however she drew them out into infinity, like chanting monks: Oooom – if that is possible with bells.) But it was not like that, Camilla says, there was talk of particular discordant patterns, for the local residents it was as though a mosaic roof was jingling down on them.
The house is large. The garden is large. Labour-intensive. That much I can see. And just as with Virginia Woolf, a churchyard neighbours the house, death practically a part of the garden. Here Sylvia Plath walked around and attempted to be the perfect housewife and mother in the model of the 1950s woman while writing The Bell Jar, and while writing her poems. Here she was abandoned to be a single mum with two children and wrote some of her best poems from four o’clock in the morning until the infant (‘the fat jug,’ that is what she lovingly calls him in one poem) woke up around six. Everything is possible when you get up early, but perhaps exhaustion leads to death.
‘That is the socio-feminist approach,’ Camilla says.
‘What do you think?’ I ask, ‘what is the answer to the riddle of her suicide?’
‘I think that the loss of the husband reactivated the loss of the father. And I believe what she wrote in a poem, that there has to be a death every tenth year – and according to her personal mythology it was time: her father died when she was eight, her first suicide attempt was at the age of twenty, and the last one, which was successful, when she was thirty. Ten-twenty-thirty.’
If I count correctly, she wrote twenty-four poems in October 1962 alone. She was abandoned the previous month. And took her own life in February 1963.
In her zeal to be a good housewife she even decided that she wanted to make her own honey. (That was before she was on her own.) Everything had to be homemade. But maybe she also wanted to keep bees because they paved the way back in time, to her father. He was an entomologist and published a book about the lives of bees.
We distance ourselves from the house, we can barely see anything.
The bells are still ringing when we step inside the local Spar to buy some cheese. Camilla enforces a strict budget, I don’t get enough to eat; she holds the purse strings; she feeds me in exchange for my driving. My financial situation is rather fuzzy at the moment. But maybe it won’t hurt to return home a few kilos lighter. Camilla agrees. We eat in our room, something the landlord clearly does not like – he has given us a list of the local eateries – and we smuggle the rubbish out each morning.
At Spar an older man becomes erotically infatuated with Camilla, in the bread section. With my hands behind my back, I politely wait for a brief interlude in their conversation about fibre, then I jump in and ask whether the village has considered honouring Sylvia Plath in some way – perhaps a small location named after her? A bust? Alarmed, he looks in the direction of the home of Ted Hughes’ second wife, and says that would display a lack of consideration for her. The second. As recently as the other day there was something on the radio about Sylvia Plath, and it is terribly unpleasant for the second wife to be constantly reminded of the first. Besides, Sylvia Plath did not live there very long, and she was apparently rather reserved: ‘She probably wasn’t one to go out for a drink with the boys or talk to the local fishermen.’
Who are these people at the bridge to meet me?
They are the villagers –
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.
I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.
Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.
Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield.
Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.
Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat
And a black veil that moulds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
Is it some operation that is taking place?
It is the surgeon my neighbours are waiting for,
This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?
I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
With its yellow purses, its spiky armoury.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.
Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,
Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins
Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?
I am exhausted, I am exhausted –
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.
3 October 1962
English pub food is sticky as beeswax, these pies, half dissolved bread bowls with their contents heated past the pain threshold, straight from the oven, served in ovenproof dishes, and before that directly from the freezer, and before that straight from the production line, for example eel and ale pie, I can make Alma moan nauseatingly just by saying it. And for dessert, a flat cake with thousands of raisins, popularly known as ‘flies’ graveyard’. Not a meal to raise your spirits – but rather to completely rid you of them, the spirit escapes the flaccid, overfed body during a hiccup. We have stopped in Lyme Regis on our way home. We have just consumed this spirit-sapping meal outdoors, with a view of the pier where the French lieutenant’s woman (in the book, in the film of the same name) stood and kept an eye out for her French sailor. Meryl Streep, dressed in black, ostracized because of this romance, every day waiting for a ship, come back come back, but did he really exist? Or had she made him up to give her dreary life a focal point. I don’t remember. In any case a child was born – and christened Lalage, which means ‘babbling brook’ and is well suited to the sounds of the early years. In front of us the fish and chips social class is wading in the bay with rolled-up trousers. One had ‘fuck’ tattooed across his back. Several have dyed their hair colourless. A couple of tables away an overweight teenager hits his dad because he is not allowed to have two courses. He holds the menu in front of his face in defence. But no more blows come. The teenager knocks over his chair and walks down to the beach, into the sea. The beach is white, the slopes black. The waiter has a jagged scar across the throat. We could also visit John Fowles’ house, he made the city famous with his French lieutenant’s woman, but we are content with staring at the pier. And the waders there, presumably force-fed on low quality from the moment they opened their eyes, seem to enjoy the water in spite of everything. A social dystopia, does it not sound like constipation? The pier where she stood wishing for something magnificent – where tragedy was better than having a tedious life with no drama.