This has been a year of strange events: some wonderful, some terrible.
In the autumn a great wind swept through my garden one night, and toppled two oaks, three maples and a chestnut tree, all top-heavy with wet leaves, rooted in sodden earth. Had the gale come a week later the leaves would have been gone and the trees no doubt survived: a week earlier and the earth would have been dry and the roots steadier, and all would have been well. As it was, the chestnut crashed through the conservatory and set off all the alarms, which joined with the sound of the gale to frighten me out of my wits, so that I would have telephoned Carl, my ex-husband, and forthwith begged for his forgiveness and the restoration of his protection, but as the chestnut had brought down the wires I couldn’t. By the morning the wind had died down and I, Joanna May, was my proper self again, or thought I was.
I went out into the garden and studied the sorry fallen giants, their earthy boles pointing unnaturally skyward, their scuttling insect population stricken by sudden cold and light: and wondered if there was any way of yanking them to their feet again, resettling them in the soil, making good what had been spoiled, but Oliver, my gardener and lover, told me there was not. The truth had to be faced – the trees were finished. That was the end of them: now all they could do was slowly die. I found myself weeping and that was very strange, and wonderful.
And that evening when preparing for bed I looked into my mirror and saw the face of an old woman looking back at me, and that was very strange and terrible. I attended to this apparition at once with astringent masks, moisturizing creams and make-up, and by the time Oliver padded into my bedroom on bare young feet with earthy nails, I, Joanna May, looked almost myself again; but there is no avoiding this truth either – that the task of rehabilitation will get more difficult year by year. Most things get easier the more they are done – but not this. The passage of time makes fools of us all.
I said as much to Oliver and he replied, ‘Well, you’re sixty, and should be used to it by now,’ which is easy enough to say when you are twenty-eight, as he was. Personally I had expected to live for ever, frozen in time at the age of, say, thirty. ‘I don’t mind how old you are,’ said Oliver that night, ‘let alone how old you look. It’s you I love.’
‘Love’ I could understand, but what did he mean by this ‘you’? Small children (so I’m told) start out by confusing ‘me’ with ‘you’. Addressed so frequently as ‘you’, their clever little minds work out that this must be their name. ‘You cold,’ they say, shivering, as the wind blows through the window. ‘Not you,’ comes the response, ‘me.’ ‘Me cold,’ says the child, obligingly. Presently the little thing progresses to the gracious ‘I am cold.’ But is the ‘me’, the ‘I’, really the same as that initial ‘you’ with which we all begin; the sudden bright consciousness of the self as something defined by others? Perhaps we did better in our initial belief, that the shivering cold is jointly experienced, something shared. I wonder.
Well, well, we will see. And as so often happens, the events that ensued ensured that I did see. Any enquiry, however primitive, this ‘you’ of ours manages to formulate in its mind as to the nature of reality, is met at once by such an eager response from that reality, such a convulsion of events, as to suggest that its only function is to provide us with examples, illustrations, of propositions that occur to the mind. Like Directory Enquiries, existing only to be asked, there to be consulted.
By the end of that year of strange events, I can tell you, when I looked in a mirror, I saw a face that would need a great deal more than a jar of wrinkle-cream and some exfoliator to bring it back to order. I was indeed old. Having children makes you old. It is the price we pay for immortality. God’s last laugh, imposing this extra penalty on mankind before he flew off, leaving time the murderer behind, just waiting.