Three rivers
Funny story, but I was nearly in this portrait of Lytton Strachey by Henry Lamb. I was in the park just ahead of the couple walking their dog. I remember I was on my way to the faculty, my pipe clamped between my teeth (as always), enjoying the summer turning to autumn and the day turning to dusk. It was that point in the year when you first feel a chill in the air. The leaves were beginning to turn – ochre, russet. I’m probably just being nostalgic, but it felt as if I had more purpose back then; like the air itself was expectant, the way it feels before a thunderstorm. But there were too many nights spent in the smoke-filled Hare and Hounds, boasting to friends of what I hoped to achieve, and then – time passing imperceptibly by the furlong – mourning what I could have achieved. All those unwritten articles and books. And now it’s getting so late. Anyway, I’d left the path when Henry started the painting, so he just missed me; but it’s important to focus on the here and now and not dwell on what might have been.
Clara and Robert are retired teachers. They live in Redland, Bristol. They go to the Watershed when they can. They make trips to London to see the odd exhibition. They go to Hay-on-Wye. They like to stay on top of things, culturally speaking. And yet. The Saturday Review brings with it yet another author they have never heard of. It seems to be happening more and more these days. Just who is George Saunders? Greatest living American novelist? Shouldn’t they have heard of him? Sometimes the afternoons are very long. Radio 4 talks to itself in every room. The plants on the windowsill grow almost grotesquely large – dusty and dominating. A window is always open, even in the winter, for ventilation. In the evenings there is red wine and Nordic noir – both of which give them bad dreams. The Digibox isn’t working. They still watch DVDs. Are they really as on top of things as they thought they were? They seem to find themselves watching films everyone else saw years ago. They’ve only just started on Breaking Bad (too violent). Robert is still halfway through The Goldfinch. Is it still OK to talk about that with friends, at dinner parties (not that they have many of those)? Clara has only read the first of the Ali Smith seasons novels, but she couldn’t keep up. They just sort of kept coming out. The world grows stranger and stranger; the news like a TV drama that you can no longer follow because you missed a key episode. There are times when they catch a glimpse of another kind of life though. Like last summer at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Charlotte Square. They had just attended a reading by Alasdair Gray, and the bar in the marquee had stayed open, it seemed indefinitely. They were drinking gin and tonic, and lager, icy cold in its plastic glass – when they found themselves surrounded by people from a different world. Young writers, fresh out of uni, bespectacled, looking like Angry Young Men from the 50s, all tweed and brogues. Is that how people dressed now? Were they on drugs? Young women, were they writers too? They seemed to be drinking a lot, talking a lot. Their eyes sparkled like frost. They had an aura of bohemian sophistication. They talked ecstatically about books they had read, and made each other laugh by recalling passages from an Elizabeth Taylor novel, a book Clara had actually read – but a long time ago; she had forgotten almost everything about it, and had never realised how funny it was. And outside, it was a warm night, but with a mist of rain. Classic sweating-in-a-cagoule Edinburgh weather. And they left the square, crossed the road, and went to The Cambridge Bar (The Oxford Bar being too busy). Hot pub with burgery air. Had they been taken under their wing? They seemed to listen to what they had to say. One of them had an article to file for the Saturday Review. One of them had published a chapbook, a free verse account of her time on the west coast of Ireland. In the blur of drunkenness she talked to a sweet graduate with kind eyes. They had a conversation she wouldn’t remember in full, but passages from it would come back to her with cold-blooded clarity in the following days; her repeating the words, ‘It never goes away!’ – she forgot why – while tears sprang to her eyes. They woke up in their hotel room, their lips blackened by wine. Walking to Waverley to go back down south, they didn’t talk about the night before. On the long train journey home she looked out of the window and he listened to hours of rain on his noise-cancelling headphones.
She dances to June Tabor in the kitchen and remembers too many ciders at Cambridge Folk Festival. Steam from the spag bol misting up the windows. She sings along to the bawdier lines. Teaching Year 9 today she had looked across the school field at the sky darkening with rain. Smell of spag bol drifting out into the lane behind the house. My husband’s got no courage in him. Kids on their way to the rec with a football.
Superb.