Tonight there is a competition at the camera club on the theme of “British Nature.” Pete comes into my dark room, and sits on the bed beside me to tell me about it.
“All the people who like taking pictures of insects will come out of the woodwork,” he predicts. “There will be lots of close-ups of long-bodied chasers, and that sort of thing.”
A long-bodied chaser is a kind of dragonfly. “What are you going to enter?” I ask.
Pete is more into landscape than nature, so he will not have a lot of choice. On his camera he shows me a very fuzzy highly abstract close-up of indeterminate green things, shimmering against a darker background—for a short time my skin can tolerate these slideshows in miniature, these private illuminations.
“What on earth is that?” I ask.
“It’s beech leaves,” he says indignantly, “in the spring.”
“But it’s completely out of focus.”
“It’s supposed to be out of focus. That’s Art, that is.”
“If that gets anywhere in tonight’s competition,” I say, “I shall be extremely surprised.”
“Right,” he replies. “Do you want to have a bet on that?”
I love bets. He knows I won’t be able to resist. In the life before, I bet on all sorts of things—on the outcome of general elections, on who would win Wimbledon, on whether there would be snow before Christmas. Usually my bets were with friends and family—only once with Ladbrokes, when I was unable to get satisfaction elsewhere. A bet is a tribute to the unknowability of the future, an act of faith that the course of events may be probable, but is never fully determined. More than ever, now, I need them, I need that itch of hope.
“OK,” I say, “let’s have a bet. If that gets anywhere in tonight’s competition, I’ll … I don’t know, what should the stake be?”
“After what you’ve said about my fine image, I think you should abase yourself.”
“Hmm, that’s a new one. OK, if you win, I undertake to abase myself. What about if I win?”
“I’ll get us fish and chips at the weekend.”
“Right. It’s a deal.”
Pete goes off to camera club. I pass the evening in the company of Agatha Christie, restlessly shifting position, trying to resist doing what would be most comfortable and natural, which would be to lie down on the bed. Finally I push the button on my little alarm clock and a small light illuminates its face. I see with relief that it is ten o’clock. I get washed, undressed and climb under the quilt.
At half past ten Pete knocks on the door and wakes me from my doze. “Hello,” I say sleepily. I have forgotten all about our bet.
“Well, darling,” he says, kneeling down beside my pillow, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to abase yourself. My picture was highly commended.”
“WHAT?” I roar, shooting upwards out of the bed. “But that’s outrageous. Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“What on earth was the judge thinking?”
“The judge was a highly discerning individual with excellent taste.”
“Well, really,” I snort. “That’s completely bonkers.”
“Perhaps he was glad to see something that was not a long-bodied chaser. Anyway, I still win.”
“OK, OK, I’ll do something about it tomorrow.”
Actually, as it turns out, I do something about it sooner than that. Despite my efforts to mark out a boundary between day and night, to persuade my body of a qualitative difference between similar periods of blackness, I wake, as so often, in the empty early morning, and cannot find sleep again.
I decide to compose a “Song of Self-Abasement,” and it absorbs and infuriates me, for hours. I push and shove words into lines, but they refuse to fit, bulging uncontrollably in the middle or drooping unaesthetically off the ends.
I am on the point of giving up when there is an audible “click” inside my head and suddenly everything has fallen into place. My words are standing neatly to attention, and none of them is mucking about. I open my eyes wide with surprise, and recite the whole thing through twice, to make sure I am not imagining it:
My darling and Lord of my heart
I accept that you know about Art
Or at least that you know
What a Judge in a Show
Might consider as looking the part.
My darling I’m down on the ground
Confessing your judgement is sound
And your eye for a pic
Is both subtle and quick
And your nose as acute as a hound.
I smile to myself in the darkness, and sleep slips over me at last, like a smooth incoming tide.