It was getting towards Christmas. The day had been bright in London, but by the time Fran reached the house in the wood, the air was freezing.
The house in the wood was her mother’s house and her mother’s name was Peggy, and Peggy was becoming old and angry and rude. Fran didn’t want to be there, but she had no choice. Peggy had broken her right arm, when she tripped over ‘some bit of dreadful metal dumped in the wood’. She’d said to Fran: ‘It could have been a gin trap! I could have been cut in half.’
She wasn’t cut in half, only made helpless and cross by the plaster cast and the pain. She said to Fran the moment she arrived: ‘I can’t do a thing. I’ve got no balance. I can’t even walk properly. You’ll have to take over.’
Fran went to embrace her mother, but Peggy fended her off. ‘No, no,’ she cried out, ‘I can’t be touched. You’ll crush me.’
So Fran left her and went upstairs to her room, which was the room she’d always had, right from when she was ten years old and the family moved to Norfolk, to the house in the wood. It was cold in here. Fran turned on a little two-bar electric fire. Then she went to the window and looked out and saw the December sun declining behind the oaks and sycamores and putting a light like moonshine on the narrow river that skirted the wood, known as ‘The Trib’. Long ago, Fran and her brother James had paddled down The Trib in a canoe and pretended to be Tahitians, and Fran now remembered that pretending to be Tahitians had made them so stupidly happy that it had been difficult, in all the years since then, to come by such gladness again.
Right now, all that Fran could see in her life was a possible route to happiness (or what politicians liked to call a Road Map), but the truth was that this road map, like so many others in the wider world, had been in place for two years and hadn’t yet led to its destination. This destination was to become the wife of her lover, David.
Disappointingly for Fran, David, who was a professor of English and a part-time poet and a person with a velvet voice, remained with the wife he already had, a parliamentary lobbyist called Maeve. He trembled always on the precipice of leaving Maeve, but he did not leave. And it was now Fran’s belief that, to make David leap from his present life to a future life with her, something was needed that would make her suddenly stand out in magnificence in his mind. David prized achievement above anything else, and what held Fran back from winning him, she knew, was her own lack of it.
‘You’re not far off fifty,’ Peggy was fond of reminding her, ‘and what have you done with your life? Made Christmas decorations out of sacking.’
‘Sacking,’ Fran had responded, ‘is an honest and lovely fabric, but you’re not being honest, Mother. I’m a working partner in a successful gift shop, which happens to specialise in homecrafts.’
‘Well,’ said Peggy, ‘if you want to glorify a bit of sewing, that’s up to you.’
Fran unpacked her clothes and put them in her old wardrobe, which used to creak and grumble in the night, like something alive. Then, she sat down on the single bed and took out her BlackBerry and emailed David. She told him that she almost wished Peggy had been sliced in half by the gin trap; she told him that the moonshine on The Trib had made her long to be a Tahitian again; she told him that her love for him was as dark and familiar as the wood. When she signed off and contemplated her evening alone with Peggy and the TV, she experienced thirty seconds of wanting to be dead.
In the night, came a harsh winter storm, blowing out of nowhere, tormenting the trees, sending a month’s rainfall in six hours to swell The Trib till it flooded over and swept the debris of the wood down into Peggy’s garden.
Tired from her drive from London, Fran slept so deeply that she didn’t hear the storm, nor her mother crying out from her bed. Then, she was woken by something beating on her shoulder, and it was Peggy’s walking stick pounding her, and she saw Peggy as a huge shape in the dark, like the shape of a horse and rider that had come into the room.
The electricity was out. Fran got up and groped for her dressing gown. She helped Peggy into the single bed, still warm from her own body, and covered her gently, as she might have covered a child. Then she went down to the kitchen to find candles and a torch. She stumbled about in the dark, shivering, violently confused by the arrangement of the kitchen units and the arrangement of her life. She yearned for David.
She found two candles in silver candle-holders and lit these and carried them up to Peggy, who turned her terrified face towards them and said: ‘Not those! They belong in the dining room.’
Fran set down the candles and said nothing. She took an old blanket from the wardrobe and covered herself with this and sat in a chair, and they waited for morning. By Fran’s chair was a bookcase and Fran took out a book at random and saw that it was called The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories by Robert Penn Warren, published in 1947, and she said, ‘I’m going to read to you, Mother. It’ll calm your nerves and help time to pass.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Peggy. ‘Not unless you read very well. Reading aloud is a lot more difficult than sewing.’
Fran ignored this and said: ‘This is a story called Blackberry Winter. Are you listening?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Peggy. ‘I have no choice.’
‘Right. Here’s the story: It was getting into June and past eight o’clock in the morning but there was a fire – even if it wasn’t a big fire, just a fire of chunks – on the hearth of the big stone fireplace—’
‘Chunks of what?’ interrupted Peggy. ‘Chunks of what?’
‘Peat,’ said Fran. ‘That’s my guess.’
The morning revealed the devastation.
Rotting leaves, moss, beech-nuts, toadstools, broken branches, tangles of briars and stones had been swept out of the wood by the swollen Trib and were piled up like trash all over Peggy’s lawns and flower beds. In between the piles, were pools of water. The Trib flowed on in its new wide path. The wind had died.
Fran didn’t want her mother to see this. The only thing, animate or inanimate, Peggy loved was her garden. Fran told her to stay put in the bed, but she refused. She had to be helped to the window and she stood there, leaning on the stick and cursing.
‘Where’s Thomas?’ she said at last. ‘Where the hell is he? Go and get him and tell him to start putting everything straight. The sight of this will kill me.’
Thomas lived alone in a bungalow beyond the wood, and, since losing his wife, had scraped a living tending other people’s gardens. But he was old now, and as stubborn as Peggy and forgetful and sad.
When he opened his door to Fran, he was wearing his pyjamas. In his mouth was a thin cigarette. On his kitchen table was a colander and a muddy stem of home-grown Brussels sprouts.
He lit a small gas burner and made Fran a cup of tea. Then, he started picking off the sprouts and said: ‘Listen to me, Miss Fran, and don’t take umbrage. Your ma, she’ll be the death of me. Crikey, she will. The miz’ry she give me, you wouldn’t believe.’
‘I would believe,’ said Fran.
‘I know why you’ve come – to ask me to put everything right. Your ma wants all that muck swept back into the wood. But some things can’t get back to where they were. Crikey, no. So you tell her this: it’s beyond me, Miss Fran. I know we’ve got Christmas soon, but I can’t help that. I’m an old man. You tell your ma Nature’s done her job and that’s the end of it.’
‘So you won’t be coming any more, Thomas? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No, I won’t be coming any more. I’m saying it. That storm talked to me loud and plain.’
Fran walked back slowly through the wood. Pale sunlight fell in thin cascades along her path and the air felt suddenly warm, like spring air, when the winter has come and gone. She felt tired, strangely peaceful, content to drift. When her BlackBerry bleeped, she was startled, and her heart began to beat faster, as it always did when she saw that there was an email from David.
Are you OK up there? he wrote. What a fantastic storm! Replicated here at home when Maeve found your poem on my BlackBerry. Never mind. I think it has the makings of a good poem. What d’you say to becoming a two-poet household? I love you. David.
Fran sat down on the grey roots of a beech tree. It seemed to her that few moments of her life had been as beautiful as this one.
She sat without moving for a long time, imagining all the future Christmas Days she would spend with David, walking by the Thames, visiting friends, drinking mulled wine or champagne, exchanging presents at twilight. Then she scrolled to her Sent Messages on her BlackBerry and stared at the mail she’d sent to David the previous evening, describing the moonshine on The Trib, her longing to be a Tahitian again and her love for him ‘as dark and familiar as the wood’. And she saw that, as occasionally happened, the BlackBerry had broken up her lines in peculiar places, so that what had been prose had suddenly, fraudulently, taken on the density and seeming economy of a poem.
Fran laughed. Perhaps, she thought, if you live with someone you love, everything becomes easy and accessible to you – even writing poetry. She replied to David’s mail with the one word, Yes. Then she walked back to the house in the wood and made breakfast for Peggy on an old camping stove, whose blue flame threatened always to flicker and die, but never did.
While she spooned eggs into Peggy’s mouth, she told her that Thomas was too ill to work today, but that she, Fran, would spend the day clearing the garden and that by evening, everything would be better.
‘Don’t be so stupid,’ said Peggy. ‘You can’t do it. You don’t know a thing about gardens. I’ll wait for Thomas.’
‘Thomas isn’t coming back,’ said Fran.
‘Of course he’s coming back.’
‘No,’ said Fran. ‘He’s not. The storm talked to him. He’s made up his mind.