Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

What amazed and affronted Penelope Hinton most about her husband’s death was that the fortune-teller had been right. Dragged reluctantly to a small upstairs den off Oxford Street by a talkative and desperate friend one Saturday morning, she had been told by a pale-eyed woman with a dusty bang that ‘a sudden shock awaits you, dear’, and did she not believe that loved ones preceded us to the Other Side? If not, she should prepare herself for what comfort the world could give, for she would need it.

     Penelope had not mentioned this to Jamie, because she was ashamed of allowing herself to be taken to such a place with its dubious certificates round the walls, and its signed, yellowing photographs of obscure comedy actresses (‘I never make a move without consulting Yella’) frozen into sauciness and swathed in feathers. How dared that woman see so clearly the summer crowds streaming out of Lord’s, the tucked evening paper under Jamie’s arm, the nudging buses? It was a damnable intrusion into one’s privacy, this stranger’s peephole glimpse of future grief and loss. And anyway, it seemed the woman s fault that Jamie had died so absurdly, putting an absent-minded foot in front of a lorry, the day’s scores still buzzing in his head, and the third day’s play to go. That last thought worried her long after the funeral was over. He would never know the result of the match. She had cut it out of the paper the following day, and noted that the promising young county player had made the century Jamie had prophesied for him. But — and here was the nagging unquietness — perhaps he did know. Perhaps even now, peering across from that Other Side Yella had talked about so glibly and familiarly, he was preparing to follow the season’s play, unimpeded by having to buy tickets, able at last to glide — a not-body — into the Members’ Stand without the benefit of that hideous tie.

*     *     *

The autumn was terrible.

     It was the first time that loneliness came to mean more to her than a word read, an emotion other than intellectually felt. She seemed to be the walking embodiment of it, the smell of it was sharp on her and she developed an extra awareness. She could smell it on other people, like a secret illness, see the hollowness and fear behind walking, talking shapes, however clothed. A bare signal, an inarticulate call we are of the same blood, thou and I. It frightened her nearly into madness. It pursued her on buses, into shops, into comfortable restaurants where women sat immaculate behind coffee or ice cream, down shabby streets where old women or limping men tramped the hours away, staring at workmen or the cut-price goods in the sleazy windows. It dozed on park benches, feet on the gritty gravel. It was like a second layer to the London she had known all her life. Tall blocks of flats knew it, nurtured it, here it was locked behind walls, secured by doors; the muted scream of it doused by the radio or the whine of a lift. It was shut in behind the curtains of small houses in the suburbs; it hovered most mutely and fiercely in public places.

     Of course, she had friends. But they were friends she and Jamie had shared. ‘We shall have to ask another man to make up the number if Penelope comes, she imagined them saying as they wrote her their kind invitations. She had done the same thing herself in similar circumstances, and she knew how difficult it was to dredge up the odd bachelor or widower from a narrowing, ageing circle of acquaintances; one seemed to make fewer friends as one grew older. For this reason she had refused to stay with Sybil Matthews, who lived in Flintshire and had always been a close friend. Sybil was a widow like herself, although she never said the word ‘widow’ even in the privacy of her own mind. But Sybil was gay and bouncy, full of innocent flirtatious nonsense towards retired colonels; and not at all averse to the furtive pinch in the churchyard after morning service, the sherry-laden laugh of emancipated canons, blowing jokes and gallantries into her face at the safe and outwardly decorous get-togethers at agricultural shows and point-to-points.

     ‘Going to Sybil’s is like visiting tipsy Trollope-land,’ Jamie had once said, as they drove home after spending one hectic Easter in Sybil’s comical Victorian house with its façade like a public baths and veneered panels in the billiard room. Her grandfather had built it, and it suffered from too many afterthoughts as the succeeding generations made more money and cultivated curious tastes. The water-tower, for instance, with its games rooms for Sybil’s twins — twins ran prolifically in the family — had been such an after-thought. Logically, there should have been two water-towers, for the family thought in pairs. There were two tennis courts, two summerhouses, two rowing boats; books, pictures, jigsaw puzzles, guns: everything was bought in duplicate, it was a family law.

     Jamie had delighted in Sybil and her boys, and openly called the water-tower, which should have done something to stop the weir flooding, but never did, Matthews’ Folly, waiting with ill-concealed patience for it to fall down. But it had outlived him and now it was a poor joke.

     ‘Give me time,’ Penelope had written to all these kind, well-meaning people. ‘Perhaps when spring comes . . .’

     What she wanted to be able to say was ‘When, if ever, I am a person in my own right again, I will be glad to see you. But it will have to be on different terms, for I will have changed — if I survive.’ Such a statement was too melodramatic for them to take from her, she saw that, and was content to allow them their own interpretation of her neglect.

     In the meantime she tried to learn how to live another person’s life. The life of a woman alone, having to make her own decisions, form her own opinions. Completely bound up with Jamie as she had been for twenty-five years, it seemed absurd and pointless to go anywhere or do anything without him. She had always known what the poet meant by ‘a singing rib within my dreaming side’, and was now torn from that side, bare and cast away as a bone in a desert. Days lost their landmarks and only a spark of animal instinct drove her up from her bed, where on some black mornings she lay, a puppet in a puppet box, its master gone, to manipulate her own strings.

     How did London cater for its drifting souls with time to fill in between noon and dinner time? The very words ‘dinner time’ became archaic even as they formed in her own mind. Yet she held on to them, aware that they were like the markings on a post, an ancient stone pointing the way in a wasteland. For to a person alone, what difference did it make what time one got up, took breakfast, or simply didn’t bother? Ate at midday or slept the day away? Night could be turned to day and who would care? Or even know? The terrible thing was that now she could do everything, anything at all; walk across the Alps, cycle to Samarkand, learn Judo or take a course in Russian . . . what did it matter? Luckily, at forty-four, civilized living had left its mark. She was not by nature rebellious and was not conscious of having missed anything in her life — on the contrary, it had been filled by one man and enriched and enlarged by mutual experience. Habit saved her in the early days and weeks so that on most mornings she got up and dressed on waking, however early that might be, laid her breakfast, ate it. Read the papers and letters and went out.

     It was this going out that made her falter. She might have been in reality crossing the Sahara. So she planned her moves like a chess-player. To the British Museum one day, past the Roman heads, more alive in their chipped immortality than those who gazed indifferently at them, fresh in from the breezy Bloomsbury streets. To the Natural History Museum, a place one somehow never went to unless accompanied by a child, and into a lantern lecture on invertebrates at the dog-hour of three in the afternoon; the thick voice exactly matching the grey screen where worms or centipedes wriggled in their disgusting primitive blindness. Into numerous little art galleries where new pictures hung so hopefully in their brazen shriek for attention.

     She felt nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing. Yet she must exist, for bus conductors asked for her fare. Nothing revived her. Not even the marvellous ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the tiny miracles of the jewelled watches and snuff boxes. Nor the compassion and depth of Rembrandt’s paintings at the Wallace Collection, although the spaciousness and cold elegance of the house itself eased her, by enclosing her in its own mood of petrifaction.

     She tried the parks. But Regent’s Park was spoiled for her because she lived there anyway, overlooking the opulent houses that faced on to its green acres; it had always been a place for her and Jamie to walk in, whatever the season. But this year the smell of decay and the light blown smoke of the bonfires burning up the year’s bounty, the distant sound of whistles as the keepers rounded up stragglers at the ‘All Out’ call, pursuing them on bicycles, the flushed faces of the lacrosse players over the tired yellow grass, merely depressed her. Her first real feeling since Jamie’s death was one of savage joy as she stood watching the gardeners dig up the faded dahlias which had blazed since last August. Those dahlias had been planted on the last day of June; she and Jamie on one of their walks had watched them go in and wordlessly noted the beginning of the end of summer. That was the trouble, of course, that was the core of her loneliness.

     Everyone but Jamie needed words.

     Penelope had always found communication difficult, being of a precise and agonizingly honest nature. It was sometimes impossible for her thoughts to filter through into words that were exact enough to please her, and it had not been until she met Jamie (on one of those marches earnest young people were always undertaking in the thirties, in this case Arms for Spain, behind a magnificently bearded Mr Gollancz) that she found someone who had instantly apprehended what she was trying to say. Jamie was so much in sympathy, he worked so exactly on the same wavelength, that he had no difficulty in flying over the stumbling words and alighted at once on what was valid and true. He caught every nuance of meaning she had despaired of transmitting.

     One thing was bad about this. She became lazy by this total comprehension, and over the years had gradually acquired the habit of reticence, simply because it was not worth trying to reach other people anyway; no one mattered except Jamie. In effect, they carried on a special kind of communication which excluded other people. Even the birth of their children had not interrupted this lifelong conversion; politely enduring them, they had never been deeply touched by them, and now, with Jamie dead, Penelope still felt that she had nothing to say to her married daughters. Death she needed to discuss with Jamie, no one else.

     Months passed, and she continued to be enclosed in this hard shell of unspoken emotion and undelivered comment like a rose drowned horribly in an inverted glass globe, or a bird frozen to its singing branch. Or a ghost in search of its own identity. Then, one day, in the sharp spring weather, she found herself walking along Oxford Street, hurrying, as she had not hurried for a very long time. The people who passed her were less real than the frozen figures of the dummies in the shops, dressed in the fashions of the coming year. A man passed, tall, thin, in an old mackintosh and involuntarily she called out to him. But as he turned an astonished, shocked face to her, she shook her head in apology and turned away. So many men in this desert of a town, one or two with his look, the set of shoulders, the swift walk, but never Jamie. Where was he, then? Again the desperate desire to find out, the dangerous need to know. But how does one get to know — how does one discuss death with the dead? Was the so-called majesty and mystery men tacked on to the body’s putrefaction only explainable by a priest — or by a woman with a dusty bang listening to voices no one else heard? Each confessional was an admission of the paucity of faith on the part of the one left behind who, by a quirk of fate, still possessed that elusive spark which drove the living body about its legitimate business in the material world.

     What of that other world, then?

     Penelope stood quite still on the pavement, then turned abruptly, nearly knocking over a large and voluble woman heading for the Corner House. With a feeling of acute self-distaste, but filled with a painful urgency, she found herself once again mounting those narrow lino-covered stairs which led up, secret as sin, to Yella’s sanctuary out of the tidal roar of Oxford Street. It was the strangest meeting place she and Jamie had ever devised.

     Yella obviously did not remember her. She was tired and had a cold. The crystal ball was covered with a pile of yellow knitting, and a half-drunk cup of tea stood on the little table. One client had just left, weeping, and the room held a stable chill.

     She handed a pack of cards to Penelope, sniffing, and watched her trembling hands as she shuffled them, then picked out twenty-one.

     ‘Ah,’ she said, disinterestedly, ‘you’ll have to pull yourself together, dear. If I were you, I’d see a doctor. I see mine regularly, he keeps an eye on me, see? I shouldn’t have all these colds.’

     ‘You should put some draught-excluder round the window,’ said Penelope, looking at the sloping ceiling, the ill-fitting panes.

     ‘Practical, that’s what you are. The cards say it too,’ replied Yella without rancour. ‘But you’re letting a bereavement get you down, dear, and that’ll never do. You’ve had a shock. Lost someone dear to you. Close, very close. Your husband? Well, he’s near to you now, he’s concerned about you. Wait . . .’ Yella laid her hands together and closed her eyes. Penelope watched her with helpless fascination and humiliation. There was a look of affront on Yella’s face, as if she were hearing words she did not want to repeat. But all at once she said, with difficulty, ‘I’m happy.’ Then in a rush, ‘No, I’m not. Go away, Penelope. Go away at once. I’ll tell—you—later. You’ll—know-later. Not now.’

     Yella opened her eyes, breathing heavily, and looked at Penelope, glazed, unknowing. ‘Did he come through, dear?’ she asked at last, reaching for a handkerchief. ‘Did anything happen? Did he say he was happy? They usually do.’

     Penelope had got to her feet, was looking keenly at the other woman. She gripped the table. ‘Don’t you know what you’re saying, then?’

     Yella picked up the crystal, gestured for her to sit down. ‘Oh no, not always. I was right off that time. Sometimes I’m taken deeper than others.’

     ‘Couldn’t it be telepathy?’

     The woman shrugged, ‘You can call it what you like, dear,’ she said. ‘Now do you want a crystal reading or don’t you?’

     ‘No, thanks,’ said Penelope. ‘I’d rather work out the future for myself.’

     She paid and left.

     The name, her name, and the impatience in the voice. It was all there, all characteristic. Go away, Penelope. It was as if by her very obsession with him, her paralysing unhappiness, she was doing him harm. But it was all madness. How could Jamie speak to her out of that sleazy woman’s mouth? But a tiny tick of conviction told her he had. His message, if message it could be called, was clear enough. Leave me alone. Let go. And the promise of later.

     That word later did it. Whether it was Yella, or Jamie, or her own thought returned to her from another person’s mouth, that was what she had to remember. Now was the time for the living, later the time for the dead, for explanations, for the immortal life or the final snuffing out.

     All the same, she thought, as she caught a bus home, I’ve got to live in the now, whoever said it, Jamie, or that woman, or me. I’ve to try, God help me, and that’s all I can do. It was a small enough crumb of comfort to filch from the desert of days, an added mystery — perhaps — to delve into. Wherever they were, the dead should be left in peace, for the living had work to do.