The poem ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ by Keith Douglas, who was killed at twenty-four in the Second World War, flowers across borders of notional nationhood with its description of the words in the notebook of a dead young man, in his Gothic German script, telling his girl, Steffi, not to forget him. The myosotis around the door of the church at Balbec are what the enraged Charlus upbraids Marcel for failing to recognise—‘Ne m’oubliez pas!’
When I looked out through the flawed glass of the windows in the evening of Friday, as well as through my own already flawed gaze, I saw the shadow of the house thrown out on to the waving, shimmering leaves of the big trees. Three chimneys measured themselves along those wide trees, and the long line of the roof offered its shadow along the lawn and the lower reaches of the trees whose individual leaves were still holding sparkling doses of light.
It is unusual to see a solid thing made insubstantial against a moving surface, but shadow had its say. Nothing lasts. There are as many ways of looking as there are of seeing. Do not think you have seen it all, just because your own sight is changing. The new leaves of the copper beech were almost transparent to the late sun, rippling, moving at a different rate from the leaves on the smaller more susceptible trees, the beech’s leaves rhubarb green and pink under the plain blue sky.
At three floors, the house is lower than the trees. The trees and the house have different rhythms of regeneration; that is all. The lengths of their watches differ. The trees measure by the life of their leaves and fruit, the house measures by the years between the birth of one human generation and another. Between the trees and the house, pups lollop then dash into dogdom, go grey, stiffen, settle, stay by the stove to dream of dash and lollop and at last die, each taking a human childhood to make their life’s full circle.
On the mainland, Angus’s heart is beating itself better, under observation.
Why lead my life if someone else can do it better?
Most of my experience of the last ten years is not undergone but envisioned, prefigured, particularly so, and I say this without regret, since I came up here to the island to separate myself from my own various forms of incapacity made worse by blindness. My experience has been not precisely second-hand, but often vicarious.
What is the opposite of a stalker? I do not mean the one who is stalked. I mean the one who seeks to be consumed by the fire in the lives of others, the one who is made more shadowy by others’ lightness, as opposed to one made more real by their glaring lack of substance.
It is all too many of us, since this unholy loss of self and rampaging, insecure, hunting down of reasons to be unhappy is probably what makes people buy magazines.
Yet Fram and Claudia, unlike film stars, whose sway and revenues depend upon it, do not want to be lived through. They live through one another.
The magaziney vicariousness is a decadent state in which to wish away a life. On the weekend in Oxford when I cleaned the silver and Fram cleaned the oven, I thought that something was repairing itself, or, perhaps better, something new was knitting itself.
You could interpret what happened next as the necessary consequence of thinking too much in terms of metaphors. Claudia had a quiet friend staying, I’ll call her Antonia.
Our son had two friends for dinner. They both had dead fathers and mixed backgrounds: American, Russian, Israeli, British, Chinese, Filipino. They had the unforgiving beauty of the very young, but the company was good and I hardly felt odd. Minoo was enjoying his ‘two mothers, one father, one father’s girlfriend’s twins’ father’ caperings. I thought I was taking things pretty lightly and not coming over humourless at the scene. The happy table stretched, as it does, to embrace whoever comes.
Everyone over thirty was quite tired. Fram and Claudia had been working all day. I am always tired. Living with my hot big not quite mended leg and half-cut eyes tires me out.
But everything was going well. I hoped Minoo’s friends were enjoying their look at his family.
At one point Fram said, with the weight of a gnat, not even of a gadfly, ‘If Claudia dies, I will marry Antonia.’
It was just a sally. I saw then that he really is free of me. The thought that he is married, in fact, to someone else didn’t occur to him.
Not a feather fell from the dove I felt had been taken by a hawk not five feet above our heads at the table. No one noticed a thing, nor thought it. Only I, and I had best get over it.
There was no reaction save within me. They were modern youth and we were modern adults. There was nothing to notice. But I collected it and swelled inside from the allergic reaction, the anaphylactic shock, of the midge-bite that I took as hawk-strike.
That’s it. I have it. Anaphylactic shock is what I go into when there is talk of marriage, of husband or wife. I carry a syringeful of Adrenalin to restart my heart in case of being stung by a wasp, but it is quite as important to carry a syringe of thought within my mind for these occasions that will go on for the rest of my life, when marriage or something relating to it comes up.
By the time everyone went, I was red inside and swollen and finding it hard to breathe. When I spoke to Fram, trying to implement a new version of myself, one who spoke up when trodden on, he was angry and bored by what I had to say and said that it had been meaningless, that the terms had no weight and he was tired and wasn’t thinking, least of all about that old stuff, that had no meaning. None of it meant a thing. It was very late, he had been working on papers till four the morning before and was exhausted.
All fair and reasonable.
I took myself to my bed in Minoo’s room among the memorabilia of his parents and grandparents and settled with Proust and the machine that makes him possible.
Claudia said, ‘Don’t present him with despair he can do nothing about. It is horrible for him.’ She is good at him like some people are good at croquet or, more seriously, chess. It is difficult in every dimension, but those who love it rise to the difficulty and wish only for more dimensions through which to engage with this completely absorbing game of systems, traditions, feints, tactics, glamour of thought and an infinitude of reciprocities, as many as those grains of rice my mother-in-law once told me would fill the world if you factored them up on the squares of one single chessboard, moving by a certain mathematical sequence that I now forget, or was it she who never knew, and each grain inscribed countless times itself with the name of the beloved, like the rice grain she was allowed to look at as a child in a dark family house in Bombay, the grain taken from its precious casket kept in a cabinet, a single white grain that bore, she was assured, the thousand thousand names of God written upon it with a diamond nib; and how could she ever know that this was not so?
It decided matters that the grain was small, white, much like any other grain, yet it looked, in its silver-hinged, leather, velvet-lined case, taken from the cabinet, in the dark room in the big dim house in the enormous city of Bombay, to the small girl, like no other rice grain at all in the history of the world, being alone, and, in contrast to all about it, so very small, so very white, so intensely only itself and apart from all other grains of rice ever.
So what is to be my syringe against the sting and swell when I try to contemplate my state with clear eyes? How to make a net with plenty of holes and quite a dearth of string?
It has to be words, after all and not the mathematical equation I was struggling for in Hampshire when grounded by my leg. I love the idea of mathematics, but I can’t seem to carry arithmetic with me, so that I relearn principles again and again and fail to make them part of my equipment.