At night, owing to the neon lighting along the Queen’s Road, the sky above Cambridge flickers with burnt orange and rust and copper, not bright, but dully transparent over the black, as one imagines the outskirts of hell. For miles up the air seems to burn gloomily, but beyond this smouldering curtain there is usually a strip of genuine deep purple night. This firelight is cold; it drains faces of colour and makes eyes no more than glittering balls like glass marbles. It reduces most colours to a decayed purplish green, although certain transmuted ones stand out – a vicious lemon-white made from buttercup, an artificial limeade colour made from clear blue. Black is rusty, edges and features sharper, shadows harder and more frozen. It is a cruel light, a destroyer, and terrible that it is cheap enough to be thought necessary.
Anna came out into it with hours to kill; even if she went back to College she would have to climb in, and she had never bothered to find the places where the railings could be scaled, or make the acquaintance of anyone with a ground floor window. The rain had stopped, surprisingly, and the night was clearer but laden. She walked aimlessly for some time down into the red, towards the Queen’s Road, walking off Oliver. Cambridge dies at midnight, and was now quite dead; it seemed not so much asleep as entirely uninhabited. Anna went down West Road, past the dark hulk of the University Library, skirted Queen’s and set off into the town, along Silver Street. On Silver Street Bridge she stopped and leaned over, clinging to the stone parapet, suddenly giddy. The night was very cold and so was the stone; she shivered at the touch of it. There was no one about, and it felt as though there never would be. Anna walked from one side of the bridge to the other, peering down into the water, thinking she would stand there and make out what had happened to her, what she would do. To be out at all at this time and in this place gave rise to a kind of self-conscious expectancy; times out of step like this were what one remembered, one was more aware of things because they were unusual.
Over the Queen’s side of the bridge the water was very dark, and the river fairly narrow. A solitary punt floated, half into the shadow under the bridge, and the willows, bare against the glowing sky, brushed on the water, their trailing branches blowing together with a just audible dry clatter.
Over the other side, the river widened into the mill pond, and across the pond was the mill bridge where people perched in summer with mugs of Merrydown cider and blue cheese sandwiches. Under this bridge the water fell steeply, with frothed white curls on the edges and a smooth green slide of it, containing streamers of air, in the centre; the bubbles spread and broke in circles where the fall met the mass of the pond. To the left, below Anna, a pub had a little yard with one or two garden seats on the edge of the river. This was still lit, from high up, and the light reached out slightly, over the water, defining the arched shadows of the Silver Street bridge. This was a white light, and a kind white light; it touched paving stones and bridge softly, and brought out in the water currents of an earthy brown and a curiously vivid olive green. To Anna’s right, the pond widened and shallowed, lost itself amongst tunnels of low, damp bushes, and ran, at the edge of Anna’s landscape, into a deep silent pool. And beyond, tenting it all, wherever she looked up, the mist of orange light, limiting enough to make one imagine it tangible, possible to brush away and disperse.
Over this orange, reflecting and containing it, long pale clouds were moving, torn and elongated by the wind, multiplying quite rapidly and disclosing through ragged gaps now and then a blob of concentrated light that must have been the moon. The wind came up on the water, hurrying the surface, fetching up the edges of little currents over long weeds into sudden white lines. A large dark green bottle came down from the direction of the mill bridge, bobbing like a shadow, turning on itself in little circles, half submerged, suddenly glowing and glittering emerald in the light from the Anchor courtyard. Anna watched it under the bridge, even leaned over to follow it. As it went out of sight her attention came sharply into focus on the whole scene – as it had in the bathroom at Darton, and more uncertainly on the College lawn, the night of Peter’s party.
She thought, this is going to be important, this is one of the times when I can see, and held herself for it, still and gathered to meet it; it became easier to recognize times of this kind as one grew older, times when one was conscious of moving forwards to the event, towards a time when one could act from oneself and from knowledge of oneself, times when to be motionless and to see clearly was the deepest and most violent kind of action. This will change me, Anna thought, and waited for the sense of valuable loneliness she had known after Peter’s party; the warning and exhilarating hint that she could do anything, anything at all, and that here, to be caught if she could catch it, was the clue to how to begin.
The weather had been changing imperceptibly; the stirring in the weight of the night Anna had put down to her own internal pressures and had tried to ignore. But now the lightning began; white lightning, flickering amongst the farther trees and through the veil of rusty light, sheets of it jumping into being, there for a moment and gone again. It was low; the scalloped edges of it were below the level of the red light, which again was below the clouds and the dark night. Everything came at her with the lightning, everything insisted, bridges, surface of water, fall, trees, light from the pub, all of them bright and defined and holding their shapes against the force of the light, quivering against Anna’s sight. I must put all of myself into seeing, she told herself, holding herself to meet it; I must know what it is, this time.
She remembered something she had once read: ‘The earth still pulls at us because it is not ourselves – it is still the source for our moments of glory and our sense of brilliance; the visionary experience is still a real thing. But we have lost our certainty of God and, therefore, faced with this power which is not ourselves, we find it loose and violent. We are afraid. It is an odd paradox that in a world which we see no longer anthropocentric or anthropomorphic, a world where things are themselves to be seen, and studied, and known, our religious interests, our crises of the soul, have become more narrowly and exclusively human. The humanist morality, personal love, deep relationships, honesty, is arguably our most complete way now of arranging ourselves to meet life. But at times when we are alone with what is not human, we are terribly unprovided.’
It took Anna a moment to remember that her father had written it (it was from a preface he had written to a special edition of one of his earlier books). She was too used to denying any precise knowledge of his work. He saw things constantly violent, Anna thought, he saw all the time, and this was where what he wrote had a power, a savagery, that Forster and Virginia Woolf were unaware of or could not communicate; he saw what was overwhelming, he was with Wordsworth and Coleridge, he had found a way of being alive, alone. She was looking, into this leaping light, for what he would have seen.
And then the cutting edge of the vision melted, the mill race no longer sliced her whole landscape but was only a fall of water, the lightning was no longer the defining limit of a world to understand, but merely an aimless flickering, the horizon eased and expanded and settled and ceased to insist, and Anna knew that whatever it was was over, and that she was very cold and alone. And that she had not been stirred out of herself, she had been moved only as far as a second-hand reflection, in a literary manner, in Oliver’s manner, on a piece of prose (second-hand, reflective prose at that) about an experience that in its real, far, unimaginable depth belonged properly to her father. She was still small, and self-contained and watching, and the possible glory was gone.
She curled her arms for a pillow on the stone and put her head down onto them, closing her eyes. I don’t think I am going to know, she thought, I think I am just going to go on as I am. I can’t make it. I shall never make it.
She could not get further than that, to anything more coherent. The desolation was chilling. She began to shiver violently, and thought that this wild sense of loss would fade, she would become mildly hopeful again, and believe from time to time that nothing had been changed. But now, it was a truth, there would be no event, no transforming knowledge, and now, later, this moment of certainty would be there to remember when she thought about what she would know or not know; it would cast a shadow on things always now. She would always know it might recur. She repeated, looking out sideways over her arms at the dead water, getting used to it, ‘I can’t do it. I am not going to know. I am going to have to go on just as I am. I shall not change.’