A Sort of Wisdom, by Catherine Redfern

  

It was not until this April afternoon as she was driving home from the second visit to the specialist that Anna realised old age could be completely sidestepped.  As casually as she pulled down the sun visor to shut out the bright glare, death was leaning forward into the present and was about to shutter out the rest of her life.

She'd arrived home and done the usual things: kicked off her shoes, made a cup of coffee, hesitated at the stereo. She chose Bach and the taut control of Glen Gould.  She sat with her favourite chair tilted back and watched the swaying branches of the mulberry tree.  The tree was one of the reasons they had bought this little Victorian Gothic house, had gone well beyond what they had worked out was the maximum they could afford.  Each autumn, as they squelched their way to the arched front door, Bob would say: “You realise we are treading on ten thousand pounds worth of fruit that we don’t even use.”    Like cantering horses at the circus that appear to move to the rhythm of the music, the green branches drifted and danced, interweaving with the counterpoint of Bach’s fugue.

Of course she was numbed.  That must be so or how could she be sitting here so calmly.  Or was it that, far from being numbed, her mind was racing, cunningly refusing to focus, and thus allowing her time. She even flicked through the evening paper.  There was a last minute ad for the coach trip to Brussels that Molly and she had talked of going on. After looking in her diary Molly had had to back out:” Wouldn’t you know!  There’s the school “Hamlet”.  Tommy’s the father’s ghost. Damn! Damn!  All mothers go to heaven, Anna, - even I will.”   Anna had no doubt of it, if there were a heaven.

   Not now.  This was not the moment to consider an after life, continuance in some form.  If she hadn’t been able to contemplate it for Bob, she was surely not now going to demand it for herself.  They had talked of it in his last weeks, and she had been fastidiously honest saying that she felt we live on only in the memories of those that had loved us.  Bob had smiled “A good place to live on, Anna.  If the memories are happy ones”

     “Do you doubt it?”

     “No, but perhaps they could be richer.” He had taken her hand:” Opportunities missed, things not said…”  His hand so thin, skin sunken between the bones.

     “The memories are rich, Bob.  How could they not be?  And perhaps there is more that memory.  What you’ve given me - tolerance, music, a way of looking at life – what I’ve become: a grafting of some sort.”

Later, when the leukaemia had  triumphed, and the hospital had ceased giving transfusions, Bob had said: “Memories won't be enough, Anna.  You must marry again.  Someone else should know the love that you have given me.”  Anna had held his weak body and they had wept quietly together.

She had not married again.  There had been one or two encounters, brief, tentative.  She accepted that the flesh is strong, but loneliness of body was more easily assuaged than loneliness of heart. At forty-five she felt no more than a shell, hollow, faded, full of the echoes of what had been.  How could she take when she had nothing to give?  And lately the niggling pain had started, becoming more intrusive, until she had made the appointment to see her doctor.

The phone rang.  It was Molly. “How did it go, Anna?”

     “Okay.  I have to go back in a fortnight.”  It would be Molly that she would turn to.  But not yet.  For Molly’s sake and her own she must absorb it herself first.

    “How are things with you, Molly?”

      “Don’t ask!  We could have bumped into each other at the General.  I’ve spent most of the day in A and E with Tommy.  He’s broken his ankle in a rugby match!”

  “Oh, poor boy! I’m sorry!  Oh dear!  What about Hamlet?

    “Alright, I think. The ghost is supposed to thump about isn’t it? Tommy says he’s just got one of the props ahead of time. So, you see, if we’d gone ahead with the Brussels plan I would have had to pull out.  I’ll be ferrying Tommy everywhere for weeks.”

   “I see there are still seats.”

   “Don’t tempt me.  You could still go though, Anna.  Why don’t you? In celebration of no bad news.  You were worried, weren’t you?”

And half an hour later it was settled. She had rung the coach company, a small local firm,

 given her Visa details, and was told to be at the Market Square next morning at 11.30.  It was flight of course, a false escape, an unreadiness to sit quietly and face facts, make plans.  She knew that, but she sensed too that to succumb to these few days of evasion could be a sort of wisdom

The coach left on time.  Anna sat behind Jack, the driver, who was eating wine gums, sometimes pressing in three at a time.  Wine Gum Jack.  He was keen, anxious, that they should all enjoy themselves.  Already, down the M1, lurching nonchalantly between lanes, he was laying before them the pleasures to come.

       “The trip to the battlefield is on Wednesday, folks.” This “folks” surprised Anna at first, but between announcements the menace of silence was staved off by his Country and Western tapes.

Molly and she had not planned to go on the various trips that were part of this package holiday.  It was still a bargain to be taken door to door and stay in a good hotel in the centre of the city. They had planned to wander about, window shop, visit some of the museums and art galleries, sit in cafes and eat calorie-laden cakes

          “And then, on Thursday  …” He seemed aware of the dichotomy of inviting his flock to enjoy their holiday while visiting scenes of carnage.  He stressed that it is all in the past - terrible, of course, we must never forget. No, we must never forget.

            His voice kept breaking in,, interrupting Anna’s thoughts, but feeding them too. As events recede into the past they are less painful.  It was this that Anna had resented:  Time, the great healer, muffling intensity with its scar tissue.  Well, Time was about to veer to its other pole: Time, the implacable destroyer.

And now the ferry.  A quiet crossing.  The sea was still; so calm that fog drifted over it. Engines quietened and speed slackened. The grey-white sea was segmented by three white rails and a seagull drifted by, a grey-white echo that slipped into the mist.  Muted, silent colours.  It seemed strange that calm can generate danger.  In this fog someone could slip into the leaden water unseen.  Perhaps a head might be turned a moment in idle enquiry at the sound.  Nothing more.  Anna thought of Auden’s lines on the Bruegel painting:

                                        “how everything turns away
                          Quite leisurely from disaster"

                      

She had always liked this poem, written in the contemplation of art, the poet acknowledging the voice of the painter.

                        “About suffering they were never wrong,

                          The Old Masters:  how well they understood

                           It’s human position: how it takes place

                           While someone else is eating, or opening a window or just
                          Walking dully along"
                         

  She would go and see “The Fall of  Icarus” while she was in Brussels. It might help her to accept this truth of the human condition: that suffering takes place while other lives go on. It must be so: the world cannot take on the burden of everyone’s pain.  It is universal, and it is solitary.

                            

     Anna went down below and sat at the  bar sipping her Chardonnay, thinking back.  Had she, had Bob, been uncaring in the face of human suffering?  Unexpectedly, inconveniently, the memory of a quarrel that they'd had came into her mind.  Serious in that they  had gone to bed in anger, something they had vowed never to do. And yet the quarrel's origin was so trivial.  They'd been watching the 10 o'clock news waiting for the Monty Python that was to follow.  An earthquake in Sarawak.  800 dead, more tremors expected.  She had ridiculed Bob for asking where Sarawak was. Was it in India he'd asked. “That school of yours!  They should have brought you in from the playing fields occasionally”.  He'd got his own back,  asking which way the Pyrenees ran,  Delighted that she'd said “North , south” he shouted in triumph: “Ha, smarty -pants They run east, west.  I just heard a boy of twelve get that right  so you can stop ramming your A Level Geography down my throat”.   The Monty Python was switched off.  With an attempt at casual dignity Anna had said “I don't think I'm in the mood for comedy.”

   A double bed is an  unwilling accomplice to a quarrel. .  They lay turned away from each other , fighting the pull of gravity that the centre of the bed exerted.  The brush of a foot was intrusive, the touch of a thigh, unbearable.   Anna couldn't bring herself to give the caress, or utter the words needed.  Generous, not given to holding grudges, Bob would have pulled her to him  with some murmured nonsense.  But the silence , pregnant at first, lasted too long. It  became drained of possibilities, a void. Bob slipped into sleep and Anna lay alone.

And Sarawak? The images of destruction, the rushing ambulances, the dazed, grief-stricken women rocking back and forth by the rubble of their homes.  As they lay unmoving neither Anna nor Bob gave a thought to the earthquake continuing its destruction..  Auden  was right.  We choose not to see;

     

                             “everything turned away

                   Quite leisurely from disaster:  the ploughman may

                   Have heard the splash,the forsaken cry,

                    But for him it was not an important failure.”

 

And for them the 800 dead was not an important failure. It was the events in their own lives that mattered. Anna sat motionless, absorbed by her flickering thoughts, although aware of the lurching shudder of the ship docking and of passengers moving towards the stair-wells.  Perhaps our humanity is frail, a small candle glow which reaches only those nearest us.  Was that achievement enough?

  Some-one touched her arm.  It was Wine-Gum Jack.  “Are you alright, love? Time to get back in the saddle again.”