Stories (70 page)

For weeks she was riding across fields and woods where his grandmother, whose incarnation he had said she was, had won the admiration of a county. But gentleman John had gone abroad with his broken heart, taking the coffin and the manservant with him. Mary did not enquire, for to tell the truth, she hardly thought of him. As she said in a television interview, when she was emotionally involved in a part, she had no time for anything else. As for him, since he hates films as much as he hates the theatre, he will probably never see this film at all.

But she was observed, while taking a fence, by a local country squire. She married him, briefly—but as she said when it was all over, for long enough. She changed her style, on her way to becoming what every leading actress is doomed to become, a grande dame of the British theatre.

Which reminds me of the grande dame who was acting in what she critically described as a kitchen sink play—there were few of the other kind available at that time. Throughout the rehearsals she complained of the disgusting immorality of the words she was forced to speak. At lunchtimes in the pub, at the top of a voice trained to carry, she described her views about current morality. At the top of the same voice she told the following story. She was on tour somewhere in the North. To her dressingroom came a man she did feel she had known. This feeling was so strong that she could not bring herself to say she had no idea who he was, and she agreed to go to dinner with him. Dinner over, she was still in the dark, although she hadn’t been able to enjoy a mouthful for racking her brains for some clue. She at last confessed her predicament. He was rather put out, she said.

She didn’t remember the restaurant, at least?

Well, there was something about it….

“You don’t remember that we came here every night for that
marvellous week before I robbed you of your ever-so-precious virginity, darling?”

“They must have redecorated it! Besides, that must have been 1935—I haven’t been here since—I think. And besides, you must know that was before I became a Roman Catholic….”

Which reminds me of that actress who, playing a nun in a stormily religious play, used to take the habit home with her—with the connivance of the dresser, who understood her feelings. The play, she explained, lacked a true Christian insight. She wore the habit for ironing, washing-up, rinsing out her underclothes—tasks which she called “my little hair shirts.”

L
ast year was out of ordinary from the start—just like every other year. What start, January? But January is a mid-month, in the middle of cold, snow, dark. Above all, dark. In January nothing starts but the new calendar, which says that the down-swing of our part of the earth towards the long light of summer has already begun, is already stimulating the plants, changing their responses. I would make the beginning back in autumn, when I “found myself possessor”—I put it like that because someone else is now in possession—of a wild, very long, narrow garden, between mellow brick walls. There was an old pear tree in the middle, and at its end a small wood of recently sprung trees, sycamores, an elder, an ash. This treasure of space was twenty minutes’ strolling time from Marble Arch, on a canal. The garden had to be prepared for planting. By luck I found a boy up from the country to try his fortune in London, who hated all work in the world but digging. He chose to live in half a room, which he curtained with blankets, carpeted with newspapers, then matting, and wallpapered with his poems and pictures. He was, of course, in the old romantic tradition of the adventurous young, challenging a big city, but he saw himself and the world as newly hatched, let’s say a year before, when he became twenty and discovered that he was free and probably a hippie. He lived on baked beans and friendship and, when he needed money, dug people’s gardens. Together we stripped off the top layer of this potential garden, which was all builder’s rubble, cans, bottles, broken glass. Under this was London clay. It is a substance
you hear enough about; indeed, London’s history seems made of it. But when you actually come on tons of the stuff, yards deep, heavy, wet, impervious, without a worm or a root in it, it is so airless and unused, you wonder how London ever came to be all gardens and woodland. I could not believe my gardening book, which said that clay is perfect potential soil for plants. I, friends, and the boy from the country, made shapes of the stuff, and thought it was a pity none of us was a sculptor—but that wasn’t going to turn the clay into working earth. At last, we marked out flowerbeds, and turned over the clay in large clods, the weeds and grass still on them. The place looked like a ploughed field before the cultivators move in. But even before the first frosts, the soil between the flinty-sided miniature boulders was showing the beginning of a marriage between rotting grass and clay fragments. It had rained. It was raining. As London does, it rained. Going out to inspect the clods, each so heavy I could only pick one up at a time, I found they had softened their harsh contours somewhat, but I couldn’t break them by flinging them down or bashing them with a spade. They looked eternal. Steps led up from the under-earth—the flat was a basement flat—and standing at eye-level to the garden, it all looked like a First World War film: trenches full of water, wet mats of the year’s leaf, enormous clods, rotting weeds, bare trunks and dripping branches. All, everything, wet, bare, raw.

That was December. Around Christmas, after several heavy frosts, I went up to see how things went on, kicked one of the clods—and it crumbled. The boy from the country who, not being a farming boy, but a country-town boy, and who therefore had not believed the book either, saying the garden needed a bulldozer, came on my telephone call, and about an hour of the lightest work with a hoe transformed the heaving scene into neat areas of tilth mixed with dead grass. Not really dead, of course: but ready to come to fife with the spring. But now we had faith in the book, and we turned the roots upwards to be killed by the frost. This happened. Each piece of stalk or root filled with wet, and then swelled as it froze, and burst like water mains in severe cold. Long before spring the earth lay broken and tamed, all the really hard work done not by the spade, or the hoe, or even the worms, but by the frost. The thing is, I knew Africa, or a part of it, and there you can never forget the power of sun, wind, rain. But in gentler England
you do forget, as if the north-slanting sun must have less power than a sun overhead, as if nature itself is less drastic in her workings. You can forget it, that is, until you see what a handful of weeks of weather can do to smash a seventy-by-twenty-foot bit of wilderness into conformity.

It rained in January, and in February it did not stop. If I set one foot off the top of the steps that came up from the flat, I sank in clay to my ankle. The light was strained through cold cloud, but it was strong enough to drag the snowdrops up into it. I walked in Regent’s Park along paths framed with black glistening twigs which were swelling, ready to burst: the shape of spring, next year’s promise, is exposed from the moment the leaves fall. The park was all grey water, sodden grass, black trees, and the waterfowl had to contend for crumbs and crusts with the gulls that had come inland from a stormy sea. In March it rained, and was dull. Usually by March more than snowdrops and crocuses are showing from snow or mud; and already the paths are loaded with people staking claims in the spring. But it was a bad month. My new garden was calling forth derisory remarks from friends who were not gardeners and who did not know what a month’s warmth can do for water-filled trenches, bare walls, sodden earth. April wasn’t doing anything like what the poet meant when he said, “Oh, to be in England”—certainly he would have returned at once to his beloved Italy. April was not the beginning of spring, but the continuation of winter. It was wet, wet, wet, and cold, and it all went on the same, day after day. And in the park, where I walked daily, only the lengthening evenings talked of spring, for in spite of crocuses everywhere, the buds seemed frozen on the bushes and trees. It would never end. I don’t know how they bear it in northern countries, like Sweden or Russia. It is like being shut inside a caul of ice, when the winter lengthens itself so.

And it was so wet. If you took one step off the paths you squelched. No air, you knew, could possibly remain in that sponge. There was so much water everywhere, tons of it hanging in the air over our heads, tons falling every day, lakes underfoot.

Suddenly there were some days of summer. No, not spring. Last year was without spring. In no other country that I know is it possible for things to change so fast. And when one state
holds, then the one just past seems impossible. In the garden, from which baths of steam flew up to join the by-now-summer-like clouds, bluebells, hyacinths, crocuses and narcissus had sprung up, and if you turned the earth, the worms were energetically at work. Weeks of growth were being concentrated into each day; nature did overtime to catch up; and if things had gone on like that, we would have been precipitated straight into full summer, with fruit blossoms and spring flowers flying past as in a speeded-up film, but no, suddenly we were in a cold drought. And it went on for weeks. A cold sunless drought, a dry dull cold, with sometimes a cold withdrawn sun. In the garden the water sank fast in the newly turned, loose earth, and you could walk easily over the clay. The pear tree hung on the edge of blossom, but did not flower. The trees at the bottom of the garden had a look of green about them, but it was like the smear of moss on soil soaked and soaked again. When I turned a spade of earth, the worms were sluggish. The birds, dodging plentiful cats, snapped off each new blade of grass as it appeared, and slashed the crocuses with their beaks. In the park, the black boughs had frills of leaf on them, but walking along the shores you could see the ducks and the geese sitting on their eggs on leafless islands. The waters were still tenanted by adult birds, who converged towards their providers on the lakes’ edges and climbed out on the banks with coloured beaks open, hissing and demanding. Soon, off the little islands would tumble nestfuls of baby birds, who would learn from their parents to follow the stiffly moving shapes along the banks with their expectations for bread. But not yet. And the blossoms were not yet. Everything was in check in that no-spring of last year where first it rained without sun, and then held a chilly drought for weeks. Yet we knew that spring must have arrived, must be here. Slowly, the chestnut avenue unfurled shrill green from each stiff twig’s end. The catkins were dangling on branches inhibited from bursting into leaf. The roses had been pruned almost to the earth, but very late. The fine hair-lines of the willow branches trailing into the water had become yellow-green instead of wintry yellow-grey. And everywhere, on hawthorn and cherry, on plum and currant, on whitebeam and apple, the buds of that year’s flowering stood arrested among leafbuds. The park’s gardeners bent heavily sweatered over flowerbeds that had a cold dusty look, and the grass wore thin
and showed the soil, as often happens in late summer after drought, but not often so early in the year. The evenings had already nearly reached their midsummer length—for just as spring stands outlined in black buds on empty branches in November, so the lengthening evenings of April, May, then June, spread summer light everywhere when the earth is still gripped with cold, and you are clutching at summer before it has begun, marking Midsummer Day as a turn towards the dark of winter before the winter has been warmed from the soil. The earth is tilted forward, dipped completely into light, light that urges on blossom, leaf, grass, light which is more powerful for growth even than warmth. The avenues are filled with strolling people until nine and after; the theatre is open; the swings in the children’s playgrounds are never still. England’s myriads of expert gardeners visit the rose gardens to match those paragons with the inhabitants of their own gardens—but last year found that the cold was still holding the roses, tightening their veins and arteries, and giving the long reddening shoots the pinched look of a person short of blood. And it all went on and on, the dry cold, just as, earlier, the wet winter had extended itself, and the park seemed like a sponge that could never dry.

And then, the year having swallowed spring whole, the sun and rain came together, and all at once, the whole park burst into flower, as did the pear tree in my garden, and the laburnum over the wall.

In each year, there is always a week which is the essence of spring, all violent growth, bloom, and scent, just as there is one week which is quintessential autumn, the air full of flying tinted leaves.

But last year, trees whose flowering is usually separated by their different natures, flowered at the same time; the cherries, currants, hawthorns, lilacs, and damask roses were out with bluebells, tulips, stocks, and there were so many different kinds of blossom that it seemed as if there must be hundreds of species of flowering tree instead of a couple of dozen. We walked over new grass under trees crammed with pink, with ivory, with greenish-white flower; we walked beside lakes where crowds of ducklings and goslings swam beside their parents, minute balls like thistledown tossing violently with every wind-ripple, and threatened all the time by the oars from rowing boats launched
into the waters by spring. It was all spring and all summer at the same time, with flying, rolling, showering clouds, and lovers lay everywhere over the grass, rummaging and ravishing, while the squirrels leaped about like kittens after cotton reels, up and down the trunks of the chestnut trees that had belatedly achieved their proper summer shape, pyramidal green with pink-and-white candles. The squirrels were as fat as housecats, fed full from the litter baskets, and their friends’ offerings.