Lifting the reading glasses and staring out at our university town’s altered skyline, its pale yellow frontages of once smut-grimed sandstone now delicately contrasting with the grey-blue roof-slates, the wide tree-planted spaces between thinned-out rows of terraces, I found another coincidence coming back to mind. Again at Victoria Coach Station, taking the bus for Cornwall with you that New Year, I’d looked out of the window at another one leaving for the West of England—and there inside it, making me blush with shame, was Alice’s face. She was evidently absorbed in a book or magazine and didn’t, thank goodness, look up or look round. It was by no means the last time we saw or spoke to each other, but, as her coach pulled out ahead of ours, it couldn’t help but revive the confusion of our previous partings.
In London one early February night just after we came back from the trial in Milan, two Courtauld MA students who were to become friends for quite a few years invited us round to their flat for dinner. The kitchen was a low-roofed extension from the main rectangle of a terraced house in Hackney. Phil and Molly, another apparently inseparable couple, rented the downstairs flat. Beyond the dark window lay an indeterminate space of yard and garden, then the back wall of a similar arrangement in reverse. The heads of our two hosts, glancing and nodding, were two bright ovals in the un-curtained rectangle of the kitchen’s rear window.
You had curled yourself up on the sofa in front of an electric fire. Again you seemed to be worrying about your appearance, feeling at some slight roughness on your chin and cheeks. Your skin was always sensitive, and reacted visibly to anything upsetting. Your feet, in thick red socks, were tucked up underneath you, your legs curled in close fitting jeans, matching a thick winter shirt decorated with small pieces of bright-coloured material cut and sewn like a quilt onto the rough blue ground. You had just closed the curtains for Molly and settled back onto the sofa. The only sound was the regular, mechanical click and jump of the needle in the record’s run-off groove.
‘And what would anyone like to hear?’
‘Anything,’ you said, ‘anything at all.’
Flicking through the vertical stacks of LPs at the bottom of their bookcase, I dug out a collection of Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions.
Now Molly was stirring the cheese sauce, made with chopped ham and peas that Phil was tipping into the pan. Stretching across her boyfriend, one hand on the salt, the other holding a spatula, Molly turned her neck slightly, pointing her face with its side-fall and natural wave of blonde hair, upwards into Phil’s; his face, clean-shaven yesterday, with a stubbly emphasis of chin and smiling mouth, moved to meet Molly’s. As they kissed tenderly, my envious eyes were deflected to the red clay tiling of the kitchen floor, where tiny flecks of onionskin lay preserved in its more remote corners.
The grey metal pan with darker heat marks around its sides exhaled a gust of steam and seasoning as Molly carried it over to the table. A bottle of wine from Frascati had been placed at its centre, the cork removed and then partially reinserted. There was a brief hesitation among us about where each should sit.
‘No formalities,’ said Phil. ‘Put yourselves anywhere.’
After we’d complimented them on the food, the talk momentarily faltered.
‘So what have you been doing with yourselves?’ asked Molly, as if to save the situation. ‘Wherever have you been, dropping out of sight like that?’
‘Nowhere much,’ you replied.
Neither of us had any desire to spoil the evening. But then Phil would have to say he didn’t believe it, adding that my absence from the seminars had been noticed. I told them we’d been on a flying visit to Italy, to see the Bernardo Luini in the Brera.
‘Only for that?’ Molly asked. ‘What are you, made of money or something?’
Which obviously wasn’t the case. But finding it impossible to talk with friends about what happened had the unintended effect of making them seem so much the less friends. Just as in Bristol, everything beyond us took on a somehow weightless air: in Hackney on that first occasion when it happened, you smoothed over the silence by coming up with the more or less plausible tale that the Italian police had caught the man who snatched your bag in Rome. When Molly looked slightly puzzled and then exclaimed how it must have been exciting, you said it was simply a bureaucratic formality, identifying the man, boring really, and changed the subject.
‘You’re right. I’m left. She’s gone,’ Elvis sang.
In among the glasses, cutlery, Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper pots, and a half-empty bottle of wine, the sound of his yodeling voice came filling up the silence between us, matched the twang of Scotty Moore’s guitar—
‘You’re right. I’m left. She’s gone.’
‘Come on, if you’re coming,’ you repeated, your hazel eyes bright, as you opened the flat’s front door. You had obviously slept soundly and were eager for the exercise.
‘Why not let’s see what the old square looks like?’
We were walking beside the rough-hewn walls of the park. Inside were its couchant lions, their sandstone smutted and scratched, begrimed with bird-droppings and smoke. There was a lake as well, but back then it had been silted up and used for dumping rubbish. Pram chassis, bed springs and frames protruded from what remained of the water. As we approached its glistening, renovated surface, a flotilla of ducks came swimming in close formation, then they veered left to the bank and one by one waddled out onto the grass. The ducks were familiar enough with the habits of humans to expect a bag of crusts and crumbs. They were to be disappointed. Neither of us had any bread, but still we stood surrounded there in silence for a moment.
‘I wonder if they pitied us,’ you said, ‘the neighbours who used to take us to feed the ducks on Southsea Common?’
‘Pitied? Why?’
‘Because we were brought up so strictly and strangely,’ you went on. ‘They must have known what my parents are like, and given us treats when we played with their children.’
‘Don’t you think everyone feels that way about their parents?’
‘No, I don’t—and, anyway, it’s nonsense to think everyone feels the same, because they can’t possibly have all had the same reasons for feeling what we felt.’
Fair enough, I thought, learning one more lesson as I did.
On the stone beside the park’s other gates I could make out that daft bit of Sixties’ graffiti: ‘Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life’.
The wind was picking up as we walked along the moor side, crying through the high branches of trees. You were fastening the top button of your blouse as you walked.
‘That September when we were packed off to Dorchester by my parents,’ you said, ‘you know it wasn’t the first time it had happened to me.’
‘Really, when else?’
‘Remember that time we had a day out to Kingsdown, so I could show you my grandparents’ house, Pine Cottage? Mum and dad sent me there when Katie was about to be born.’
The pinewood and orchard had mostly disappeared when we went there, its croquet lawn of fond memory divided into building plots. Where you used to play, bungalows, chalets and holiday-haciendas had been erected. Pine cottage itself stood separate behind a beech hedge in a surround of gravel that wasn’t there in your grandparents’ day. The two-storey house had been imported in kit-form from Scandinavia—the first of its kind anywhere in England, you said. It had a decorated frame, with deep eaves, and was clad in cedar-wood shingles. We had trespassed onto its more recent pebbly drive, beyond the name Pine Cottage—just as it had been, but repainted on a different plate. That had seemed an idyllic day, you happily revisiting a place so replete with memories; but as you looked from the drive and waved I had the sudden piercing sensation of being no more than a vague phantasmal presence in your life.
‘I’ll have been just four when it happened,’ you were saying. ‘Both my mother’s pregnancies were difficult. You see she was very ill before my birth, and when Kate was due, granny came over to collect me. I was probably only in Pine Cottage for ten days or a couple of weeks, but it seemed much longer. Mum must have stayed in hospital quite a while after the delivery, because I also remember going with dad in a taxi to collect her and Katie from the hospital. I can still hear myself being told she was my sister.’
‘Don’t suppose it’s that unusual … or maybe wasn’t. It happened to my grandma on my mother’s side.’
‘You know, most people in my class had a holiday relaxing after their A-levels but not me, oh no, I was packed off for the whole summer to work at a religious community—thirteen miserable weeks of putting on weight.’
‘And what was the brilliant thinking behind that?’
‘It got me away from my boyfriend at the Poly, didn’t it? I never saw Simon again.’
‘Which is why you were “available”, I suppose, when we bumped into each other at that student disco.’
‘Perfectly true,’ you said, with a mysterious conjuring gesture of the fingers after a moment’s silence.
We had reached the bridge above a disused railway cutting. Gazing down at its trackless shale, wild grasses and willow herb indicating where the lines had been, I recalled that it was exactly the spot one blustery night Alice had said that if she stayed here it would ruin her complexion.
‘Can’t you see how it’s finished off everyone else’s?’ she said.
But even if we were allowing ourselves this bit of a nostalgic looking round, it was surely better not to let her name drop from my lips. Adapting Dorothy Parker’s witticism, you would now and then comment on the gamut of emotions from A to M; but really you preferred not to hear more of her name than your own faintly sardonic allusions to its initial letter. It seemed clear enough I would never really be forgiven for that, but then why should I be? Did I deserve it? So in silence once more, and parallel with that disused railway, we continued along the moor-side road.
There had been so many moments like this one when it felt as if you would never really forgive me, let alone forget. You might be standing on the bathroom scales or looking into the washbasin mirror.
‘Have I lost any weight?’ you’d ask. ‘Is my face improving?’
And your questions would sound curiously like the sessions of trial and judgment to which your parents used to subject their daughters’ boyfriends. It was impossible to say the right thing. I would always be weighing my words, attempting to make amends for that ever more far off mistake.
Perhaps a return to our student flat would help put that sort of thing behind us once and for all. No such painful thoughts had naturally crossed my mind back then: the world was all before us. But now we were heading in the direction of the past, towards St Luke’s Square in fitful September sun. First, though, we must walk in front of the church that gave its name to the place, and then cross over towards what was the old workhouse. Later the great stone edifice had been converted into a municipal hospital. As we cut through behind the back of the building, its rows of ward windows glinted in the sun. You could imagine patients wanting to move nearer to the stove in winter, nearer to the air in summer, hoping they could change to the beds nearer the door—the ones that meant you would soon be discharged. Those rows of apertures, gas-lit in a foggy Victorian dusk, looked like a glimpse into other people’s nightmares, their fears of euthanasia.
To enter the Square we crossed the cobbles of Fairfax Terrace, closed at the higher end by a blank wall, alleys leading to left and right, at the lower, by a row of house-fronts on the far side of the road. One side of the street had been sandblasted too, and closed to traffic by laying some flagstones over the cobbles. Bollards prevented cars from crossing the pavement, and there were three enormous concrete bowls for flowers that either had never been planted, had long since failed to take, or had been unable to survive the younger inhabitants of the place.
‘Remember when you threw out your old paintings? The kids from the houses around must have always been rummaging in our rubbish, only this time they found your masterpieces. Weeks after, coming home from the health centre placement, I used to find those old self-portraits of yours caught in the nettles and dock.’
The terrace house with our tiny flat on the first floor was in the furthest corner of the square. We walked round behind and down the alley with weeds pushing between its cobbles, a shrub turning yellow in the corner of one backyard. The past ten years hadn’t improved it at all. Faded net curtains still hung behind the rotten frames of what had been our student flat. Some of the panes were broken, patched with pieces of cardboard and tape. A great swathe of wallpaper was hanging from the wall you once painted a warm ochre emulsion with cream gloss skirting boards.
Gazing up at what were kitchen windows, I could just about picture the bedroom where the best of those daubs, as Dr. Green had called them, were hung on the walls. How little we’d had to do with the place. In a brief parenthesis, as if before our lives, we two had grown and then moved on, leaving, or so it appeared, absolutely nothing behind.
‘Difficult to imagine we ever lived here, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ you said.
During our time, just a few doors down, there’d been a brutal murder, a man stabbed to death in his bed. The police made house-to-house inquiries, but when they came to us, we were no help to the officers who called. It was the son, enraged by a family inheritance quarrel, who, it turned out, had committed the crime.
‘They don’t keep it as tidy as we did,’ you said, hardly able to conceal a shiver. ‘Could the place really have been this bad back then?’
In the years since I fluked, as you would put it, my lecturing job at the Art College, Winchester had become our home. It was there we spread sideways and put down roots. The decade spent in a comfortable Hampshire town had certainly mellowed and altered us. I had even got used to the idea of living in a place where the leaves came out in spring like wallets flourishing old one pound-notes, notes which would turn into ten shilling ones come September.
Two little Asian girls had stealthily tiptoed up behind us while we were staring through those windows at the musty nothing that was once our student home. When we turned round and looked at the little sisters, we found ourselves stared at in return. The children couldn’t have been more than four and six, dressed in a combination of traditional sari and British kiddy clothes. Despite the mortgage, the overdrafts, the credit card bills, those girls made me feel too comfortably off, too uncomfortable, as we intruded into their different existences. What’s more, those two girls had produced a twinge of sorrow, our story overlaid with other hopes and disappointments.
‘Probably never seen anyone like us down their street before,’ you were saying, as we stepped back across the uneven cobbles of Fairfax Terrace. Yes, over those ten years you had stayed with your sense of social injustice. Entirely able to keep your intimate anxieties and public concerns in different boxes, you had changed jobs at regular intervals through the decade. You’d remained in health care management, though, the latest move taking you to a senior post in the Regional Health Authority teaching hospital. Now you were working to have the government guidelines implemented in the traumatic stress and bereavement counseling services. A couple of years later, you would edit a collection of papers on the subject.
Hands in pockets and the last of a smile on your face, you were leading the way across Ireton Road, through towards Jean’s college flat in the Halls of Residence. Now the streets were quite deserted. No one lived here any more. The area had been badly run down a decade earlier, but now there were just the shells of buildings, some without windows and roof, the floors caved-in, walls stripped or scorched from fires.
‘It’s as if a bomb had hit the place,’ you said.
We were walking along Mount Pleasant, its large houses set back from the road, and in what had once been the front gardens of wealthy people’s homes were only the burnt out shells of cars under trees scorched and blackened. Surely these buildings could not be saved.
‘Was there a riot or something here?’
‘One of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims was discovered in Mount Pleasant,’ you said.
‘So had they started before we left?’
‘I’m sure they had. There were notices warning the students never to go out unaccompanied in the evenings.’
The paving-slabs were hollowed-out by weathering and footsteps. They were unevenly cracked and fissured. A puttying of moss had swollen out from between the flags.
‘Why?’ I asked, aware of the surface being broken. ‘That’s the question they never seem to answer.’
‘Denial. It’s denial. You know, the people at Belle Vue House didn’t believe it had happened, even after we went back for the trial. They thought I was drawing attention to myself. At least that’s the line the psychoanalyst at consultation took. You see it couldn’t have been a rape, as if even a girl like me must have been asking for it. I was speechless; I couldn’t believe a professional like him would have had such an archaic attitude. Sometimes it strikes me the responses I got were harder to cope with than the rape itself.’
Not that long before, you had mentioned, almost with equanimity, how for years after coming back, you half-wanted to have been killed. You would find yourself imagining that the night’s events were running like a film projected on your face—so that people who glanced at you in passing could see exactly what had happened. Flinching at your saying ‘the rape itself’, I also saw how my objectless affections had attached themselves haplessly and without hope of response to near-strangers. Reactions to small failures and criticisms would incapacitate me for months. They would make the outer world of sunlight, ruffled grass and shifting clouds almost an irrelevance, like a dying ember, a seeming affront or token of what was lost, now perhaps forever. The detail and sequence of events, occasional phrases, glimpses in darkness one September in the rain, and its residual feelings remained trapped inside me. And there was the decisive moment of our lives, formed like an unspeakable absence, a social embarrassment, an apparent affront to others’ sensibilities. Even the concern for my poor mother’s moods had prevented me confiding in her. Her entire ignorance of what happened that night was one she would take to her grave.
‘You know, I’ve never been able to talk about it to anyone …’
You were waving your hand to suggest we take a left at the corner, round towards the university campus.
‘Maybe it was easier for me,’ you said. ‘After all, I was the “victim”, the innocent one. No, I’m not suggesting you were guilty. You weren’t. But, anyway, you know what I mean. You have to let it go.’
A stiff wind was rustling the leaves surviving on the branches of the badly scorched trees. Your short-cut dark hair, a few traces of grey in its fringe, lifted slightly in the quickening breeze. The last of your smile seemed to come back more warmly. Mortar had crumbled away between stones of the wall we were walking beneath. It bulged unnervingly. The capstones, not sandblasted, leaned away above. A patch of dust had appeared on the toes of my shoes.
‘Somehow it’s like it could have been me. Even wanting to make amends, you feel like an aggressor.’
‘No, no,’ you said. ‘No. The motives are different. It couldn’t be the same. You know you shouldn’t hang yourself up on that hook now.’
The campanile of the Mill reappeared on the skyline. But just which Italian town was that bell tower supposed to recall?
‘More ruined lives, more wasted, ruined lives,’ I said, thinking out loud.
The distant moors were variegated with large patches of shifting shadow, the sky overcast in that direction, the wind quicker, clouds moving rapidly towards us. Now a layer of slate grey cloud covered the whole township. The temperature suddenly dropped. Separate spots of a darker tone began to pattern the pavement all around. There was a faint whispering in the foliage. But, as we approached the university area that day, the rain was no more than a passing shower. We were quickening our pace as you reached out a cupped palm.
‘Just spitting,’ you said.
And already the clouds were breaking up, their edges tinged with sunlight, patches of blue about to re-appear. Relishing the cool spots hitting my cheek, I could almost touch just how much that September in the rain had made us what we were. Coming back to England that time all those years before: it hadn’t been anything like melting away because you couldn’t stop crying, or being transformed into birds as if a relief from unendurable suffering. Death had cuffed us across the cheek; it had let us both go with a warning.
The cloudburst was already over. Refreshed, the air hung still again, the street silent and deserted.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever said this,’ I started.
We were almost at the stairs to Jean’s block.
‘But, you know, I’m grateful.’
The shower over, grass around our friend’s flat was a deeper, glistening green. You moved closer and curled your fingers around my arm.
‘For what?’ you asked.
‘You saved my life. The worst thing that ever happened to me, well, it happened to you.’
‘But,’ you said, knocking on Jean’s flat door, ‘you know very well it happened to us both.’
The tramway was creaking and grinding up a sunlit moor-side. It was a short chain of open carriages rattling on their rusty, uneven track. The frayed cable slid along rollers that guided its movement up the centre of the rails. Some of the rollers were rusted solid and the wire scraped stiffly across them. The cable would tauten, and then inflexibly go slack. The lines ahead were almost enveloped in grasses and rosebay willow herb. The cable disappeared into a bower of sunlight and undergrowth towards which the insecure transport was noisily moving.
‘Relax,’ said Jean, ‘I’m sure it’s quite safe.’
She was wearing her uniform of green dungarees and cowboy boots, her frizzy red hair alight in the wind and sun.
‘Can’t think why we never came here before.’
‘Probably wasn’t working,’ the playwright suggested. ‘I bet it’s got a preservation society. They’ll have come along after your time and got the thing running again.’
From the tracks up to the hilltop the tenuous line of the cable ran obscurely through patches of shade ahead. It beckoned, as if drawing us further on towards the young people we once were, people for years thought far better dead. The train slowed into its upper station. Between simple wooden souvenir booths, we followed the hilltop path through woods. Brief bursts of a heavily distorted music came echoing through the September leaves.
‘By the way, what happened round Mount Pleasant?’ you asked. ‘I don’t mean the Ripper. But wasn’t there some kind of riot?’
‘There could have been, things being that bad round here,’ said Jean. ‘Actually a garage pump exploded and set the whole area alight.’
Now we were approaching a tiny, run-down fairground. There was something attractive in the roundabouts’ amateur paintwork: long since faded through the bitter northern winters, these bright swirls and curlicues were like a child’s dream of immediate pleasure. And in fact there was one little boy, about three or four years old, playing among the attractions. He was kicking a soft yellow ball with black patches painted onto it, like a World Cup football. The child, with chuckling face, would get something into his head and toddle off in an inexplicable direction, then turn and run back. Toppling over on the cinders, he would pick himself up, his face on the point of tears, decide he wasn’t hurt, and then zigzag back over towards his parent.
‘Just kick the ball to your dad, son,’ the half-attentive man called out.
I was sitting on a flaked wooden bench. Its green paint had been chipped away to show the rutted, weathered-grey wood underneath. You were studying the boy with a curious look. It was almost a smile, with wrinkles at the corners of your eyes, but your top teeth were biting slightly into your lower lip, as if you were trying to imagine a possibility but couldn’t. Then you had glanced across at the father and practically scowled.
Jean came over and began to tell us about how Heathcliff, an orphan discovered in Liverpool, as she said, might well have been an Irish tinker’s child. We had driven out late that morning and looked around the Brontë parsonage straight after lunch.
Not far off, a couple of lads were fiddling with a loudspeaker on one of the rides. Suddenly it started up, rumbling distortedly: ‘The leaves of brown came tumbling down, remember …’ But the sound cut out once more. There was a small wooden hut at the end of the fairground. It was a refreshment kiosk, where a woman sat knitting. On the counter stood a row of large glass domes. Inside were a few stale cakes and scones, hermetically sealed for eternal preservation as if in some bizarre experiment.
One of the amusements was a toy train on its circular track. And there was the same little boy seated inside the engine driver’s cabin. His father was resting against a low wall on the far side of the rails. The man was making smoke rings for a minute’s peace. The boy was absorbed in the circular motion of the train. It was how he was steering it caught my attention, for however much the little boy turned his wheel, the train just kept going on round and round.
Now he was restlessly glancing and twisting to where his dad stood smoking. But the father seemed caught in a dream of his own. The boy had quickly reached the point of boredom, and began to shout at his parent, calling to be released from the seemingly endless reiteration. At his shrill cries, his crescendo of anguish, I suddenly felt a terrible nausea like that lost desire, rising as if in sympathy with the little lad, to be anywhere else but here, to be hurrying home across the park and going in through the back door under the washing line.
‘Why don’t we go and look round Saltaire?’
‘In a minute, we’ve only just arrived,’ you were saying, both women evidently wondering whatever had got into me.
‘They’re planning a motorway link that will cut this place in two,’ said Jean, stepping down from the lower station.
You had finally agreed to leave the fairground, and after descending by the Shipley Glen Tramway with postcards and souvenir pencils, we were crossing parkland behind council houses with their lines of washing fluttering in the direction of Saltaire itself.
‘One of the proposed routes,’ Jean went on, ‘goes right through the middle of Salt’s village. There’s a preferable one that would circumvent it, passing not far from these fields right here.’
‘And an ideal one would be not to build it at all,’ you said. ‘Has a decision been made?’
‘No, I think they’re still at the planning stage, or it may have got to the public inquiries, the petitions, re-applications, all that. You might have seen the Saltaire Defence Committee’s posters: Over Our Dead Bodies!’
Gazing down towards the village, its mill and canal, a habitable space removed from careering cocoons of cars and lorries, I could imagine the carriageways with their steep scrub slopes, the rumble of continuous wheels, an isolated hurrying mobile world, its flickering mirages of glass and lights, the service stations with their cuddly toys in plastic bags, and lay-bys and emergency phones. A question began to form itself. It hung suspended in the air. You and Jean were pursuing the line of your conversation, getting onto environmental damage and air pollution, passing close by a family engaged in a game of French cricket.
Now we were entering the groves of rhododendron bushes that formed a part of Titus Salt’s parkland. And here was the statue they had raised, some time after his death, to commemorate the work of this philanthropic industrialist. Surely there was much more graffiti bespattering it now than when we had visited the place all those years before? Yet there he was still, the frock-coated Victorian dignitary with his eyes uplifted towards the moors.
From whence cometh my help … and the memory of that psalm brought back one more lost picture of mine. It was a large canvas, five feet by three, completed during the last summer at university. Titus Salt’s stone eyes, which gazed up away from his mill and village, were painted as if yearning after a more anarchic life than the one that he had set apart from those Yorkshire moors through his organizational skills, the power of accumulated capital, and a commitment to civic virtue. Salt, in the lost canvas, was gazing towards a landscape of impossible fulfilment, the sodden mildewed cobbled streets of Howarth, just a short journey by car from here. There was a deep satisfaction in the rocks beneath over-furred with slippery moss, but in the painting Salt’s civic order was played off against the allure of Bramwell Brontë’s emotional chaos. Though we might feel an affinity with the graveyard atmosphere of the parsonage, it was to Titus Salt’s world we would always be obliged to return. That was what the picture had meant to convey.
Those years before, the paternalism of Saltaire had seemed to suffocate its inhabitants: a life regimented around the little streets of worker’s cottages, the enormous Nonconformist chapel, the mill, and, across the river, a playing field in which, at this very moment, a school cricket match was in progress—the warm afternoon had brought people out to picnic and relax. But why did my landscape have to dramatize such mutually exclusive and equally self-thwarting opposites? Saltaire seemed far less restricting now than it did those years before. Why had it turned out this way? True, things were going better now for me at the College. Soon our weekend up North would be over; the working week ahead was already beckoning. In less than an hour, we would have to drive back south to King Alfred Terrace as fast as we dared, making enough time to finish your various presentations for that Monday morning.
How many years was it now since I stopped carrying round an artist’s sketchbook? Those untouched white cartridge pages were the last stage in the fading away of that youthful ambition. There was always going to be time to work up the studies, the bits and pieces cut from magazines, which might one day make a canvas or a collage. Artists made time. They stayed up all night retouching their pentimenti. But it hadn’t happened for me. For so many years, after what had been witnessed, the minutely detailed appearance of things no longer seemed to matter. It was unbearable to look and look so hard, to gaze hour after hour at some marks on a flat, textured surface trying to fathom how they might be amended. Those days in the living room at Belle View House, trying to paint the Little Venice Basin and the flats beyond, I could feel the old impulse drain away. Besides, studies at the Courtauld required so much time and concentration. As the months went by, I got used to the habit of absorbing information about provenance, digesting theories of representation, mugging up the history of aesthetics, checking the sizes and materials in catalogue raisonnés, deciphering pre-war x-rays and the like.
You and Jean were continuing on while I hung back under Titus Salt’s statue staring blankly at the well-supported cricket game. Still deep in conversation, you were heading around the far end of the pitch, passing behind a small group of players and parents who were avidly watching the innings. Slow left-arm round the wicket bowling was regularly foxing the young batsman, probably a tail-ender. Or perhaps not, for at that very moment the receiver made contact and with a loud crack the polished red ball flew off towards the boundary nearest the scoreboard.
‘Nobody’s going to reach that one,’ a voice said from somewhere.
The scoreboard frame, on which the black plates with large white numerals were hung, was now being manually updated. There came some well-deserved applause. The boys had run a three. You and Jean were strolling on together by the river. As I was about to catch up at the bridge, two girls came walking past me from the opposite direction. They were dressed in what seemed ethnic peasant costume. One was pushing a light baby carriage, a child inside the transparent plastic canopy. The other was carrying a bat, ball, and other playthings. Each wore a straw hat fastened underneath the chin with thin white elastic, and each had on a maroon pinafore-style dress over an embroidered white blouse. From the snatch of conversation passing between them, it seemed they weren’t British. But whatever were they doing here? Could the child be one of theirs?
Crossing the grey-painted wrought-iron bridge across the Aire, it felt as if something had suddenly made itself apparent. But was it only one more hankering, another restless yearning to be anywhere else but here? Or did it perhaps promise some miraculous change, as if there were still someone else inside me calling to be allowed into the light? Suddenly here again was the need to relive it all, to have the entire thing happen inside, the events unfold once more with a meaning and sense of their own.
We stepped down towards an old boathouse on the riverbank. It had recently been converted into a café and restaurant, its white-painted bargeboard gleaming there in the afternoon sun.
‘Shall we have a pot of tea?’ Jean asked.
‘Why not a cream tea?’ you suggested.
‘Go on, be a dear, and order us one,’ Jean said to me.
You were sitting at a table outside on the terrace when I returned, and had started on a different theme. Jean’s drama residency would come to an end at Christmas—but, ever resourceful, she already had quite a few irons in the fire.
‘Keep this to yourself,’ she said, ‘but last week I was interviewed by the Bolton Octagon for the post of writer-director.’
‘How did it go?’ you asked.
‘Well, they certainly expressed an interest in all my ideas for revitalizing the place: community workshops, travelling shows for clubs and schools, that sort of thing, and they seemed impressed by the need for fresh scripts with a more up-to-date flavour, picturing the multicultural realities. I’m thinking of doing something about the motorway proposals,’ said Jean. ‘And I can bring in the northern tourist industry.’
Everyone has a book inside, as they say; Jean, it seemed, had a library in her. She was just then complaining about the innumerable scripts she would have to turn down about happy miners off to the seaside in a charabanc.
‘I can well imagine,’ you said. ‘And did they offer you the job?’
‘Haven’t heard yet. It would ease things if they did. How about you?’
You were as busy as ever. There were the complaint procedures you needed to reorganize. You were putting the finishing touches to a consultation document about the matter, and would have it done that evening. Back over the river, people were climbing in and out of boats. On the far side, in the distance, under Salt’s statue protruding from the trees, the cricket match continued, and a sudden burst of clapping and cheering let on that an innings had come to an end. Nearer, circles of friends were settling themselves on the grass, playing games of catch with family and offspring, chatting together, eating picnic food. Further removed, there were couples lying intertwined.
The two girls dressed in what looked like their national costumes had also settled themselves in the grass and were throwing the ball for their toddler to chase. A larger group, gathered in a ring nearby, fell into talk with the two maroon girls. Perhaps these two were from the Trentino or Ticino, the areas south of the Alps that we travelled through to reach Italy, and then managed to get home across all those years before. Perhaps they would be speaking in faintly imperfect syntax about the boy’s age, where it was they came from, the Alto Adige perhaps, how long they were planning to be in Yorkshire, when they expected to go back home.
The tea had arrived. Jean leaned forward, being mother. You were helping yourself to a piece of scone with jam and cream, taking a large bite and, rocking back on your chair in the sunlit afternoon, allowing your eyes for a moment to close. Yes, you were right. You were right enough again. It was time to let it go.