Edwin almost forced the house on me once we had convinced each other it was a good idea. It was worrying him while it was empty, he said, and houses were made for living in. He would fix up with a local builder to come in and repair the plumbing, and do some rewiring, but if I wanted to feel I was earning my stay I could do as much of the work as I wished. There was only one proviso: Marge would want the garden done a certain way. They might come down and visit me at weekends, to lend a hand.
In the days that followed this meeting I began to act positively for the first time in several weeks. Edwin had given me the spur, and I moved forward with purpose. Of course I could not move down to Herefordshire straight away, but from the moment I left him everything I did was directly or indirectly towards that end.
It took me a fortnight to free myself of London. I had furniture to sell or give away, books to find a home for, bills to pay and accounts to close. I wanted to be unencumbered after my move; from now on I would have around me only the minimum of things I would need. Then there was the actual move; a rented van and two return trips to the cottage.
Before finally leaving London I made several renewed efforts to locate Gracia. She had moved, and her former flatmate almost slammed the door in my face when I called round to the old address. Gracia wanted never to see me again. If I wrote to her the letter would be forwarded, but I was told not to bother her. (I wrote to her anyway, but no reply came.) I tried the office where she had worked, but she had moved from there too. I tried mutual friends, but either they did not know where she was or else they would not tell me.
All this made me deeply restless and unhappy, feeling that I was unfairly treated. It was a stark reminder of my earlier sense that events were conspiring against me, and much of my euphoria about the cottage was dispelled. I suppose that I had subconsciously imagined moving to the countryside with Gracia, that away from the stresses of city life she and I would not argue, would develop the mature love we had for each other. This buried hope had remained as I organized the details of my move, but with her total repudiation of me at the last minute, it was brought home to me that I was totally alone.
For a few exciting days I had seen myself at a new beginning, but by the time I was finally settled in the cottage all I could think was that I had reached an end.
It was a time for contemplation, for inwardness. Nothing was what I wanted, but all of it had been given to me.
2
The cottage lay in agricultural countryside, about two hundred yards down an unmade lane leading off the road between Weobley and Hereford. It was secluded and private, being surrounded by trees and hedges. The house itself was on two storeys, slate-roofed, whitewashed, mullion-windowed and stable-doored. It had about half an acre of garden, running down at the back to a clean-flowing brook. The previous owners had cultivated fruit and vegetables, but everything was now overgrown. There were small lawns behind and in front of the house, and several flower beds. By the brook was an orchard. The trees needed pruning, and all the plants and flowers would have to be cut back and weeded.
I felt possessive of the cottage from the moment I arrived. It was mine in every sense except legal ownership, and without meaning to I began to make plans for it. I imagined weekend parties, my friends driving down from London to enjoy good country food and rural peace, and I saw myself toughening up for the rigours of a less civilized existence. Perhaps I would get a dog, gum-boots, fishing equipment. I determined to learn country crafts: weaving, woodwork, pottery. As for the house, I would soon transform it into the sort of bucolic heaven most townsmen could only dream about.
There was much to be done. As Edwin had told me, the wiring was ancient and inefficient; only two power-sockets worked in the whole house. The pipes gave out a loud knocking whenever I ran the taps, and there was no hot water. The lavatory was blocked. Some of the rooms were damp; the entire place, inside and out, needed repainting The floor in the downstairs rooms showed signs of woodworm, and upstairs there was damp-rot in the roof beams.
For the first three days I worked hard at settling in. I opened all the windows, swept the floors, wiped down shelves and cup boards. I poked a long piece of wire down the lavatory, and afterwards peered cautiously under the rusting metal lid of the septic tank. I attacked the garden with more energy than expertise, pulling up by its roots anything I thought might be a weed. At the same time, I made myself known to the general store in Weobley, and arranged for weekly deliveries of groceries to be made. I bought all sorts of tools and utensils I had never needed before: pliers, brushes, a putty-knife, a saw, and for the kitchen a few pots and pans. Then the first weekend arrived. Edwin and Marge came to visit me, and at once my energetic mood vanished.
It was obvious that Edwin’s generosity was not shared by Marge. When they arrived I realized that Edwin had been made to regret his friendly offer to me. He stayed apologetically in the background while Marge took control. She made it clear from the outset that she had her own plans for the cottage, and they did not include someone like me living there. It was nothing she said, it was just implicit in her every glance, every comment.
I barely remembered Marge. In the old days, when they had visited us, it was Edwin who had been dominant. Marge then had been someone who drank tea, talked about her back trouble and helped with the washing up. Now she was a plump and prosaic person, full of conversation and opinions. She had plenty of advice on how to clean the place up, but did none of it herself. In the garden she did more, pointing out what was to be saved, what to be sacrificed to the compost heap. Later, I helped them unload the numerous pots of undercoat and paint they had brought in the car, and Marge explained exactly which colours were to go on which walls. I wrote it all down, and she checked it through.
There was nowhere they could stay in the house, so they had to take a room over the pub in the village. On the Sunday morning, Edwin took me aside and explained that because of a strike of petrol-tanker drivers there were long queues at the motorway filling stations, and if I didn’t mind they would leave soon after lunch. It was the only thing he said to me all weekend, and I was sorry.
When they were gone I felt dispirited and disappointed. It had been a painful, difficult weekend. I had felt trapped by them: my gratitude to Edwin, my awkward realization that he had got into hot water with Marge because of it, my continual urges to justify and explain myself. I had had to please them, and I hated the unctuousness I heard creeping into my voice when I spoke to Marge. They had reminded me of the temporary nature of my residence in the house, that the cleaning up and repairs I was starting were not in the end for myself, but a form of rent.
I was sensitive to the slightest upset. For three days I had forgotten my troubles, but after the visit I rehearsed my recent preoccupations, particularly my loss of Gracia. Her disappearing from my life in such a way—anger, tears, unfinished sentiments—was profoundly upsetting, especially after so long a time together.
I started to brood about the other things I had left behind me: friends, books, records, television. I grew lonely, and acutely aware that the nearest telephone was in the village. I waited illogically for the morning mail to arrive, even though I had given my new address to only a few friends and expected to hear from none of them. While in London I had been extensively aware of the world, through reading a daily newspaper, buying several weekly magazines, keeping in touch with friends and listening to the radio or watching television. Now I was cut off from all that. It was through my own designs, and yet, unreasonably, I missed it all and felt deprived. I could of course have bought a newspaper in the village, and once or twice I did, but I discovered my needs were not external. The emptiness was in myself.
As the days passed my gloomy preoccupations intensified. I became careless of my surroundings. I wore the same clothes day after day, I stopped washing or shaving and I ate only the simplest and most convenient food. I slept late every morning, and for many of the days I was plagued by headaches and a general stiffness in my body
. I felt ill and looked ill, although I was sure there was nothing physically wrong with me.
It was by now the beginning of May, and spring was advancing. Since I had moved into the cottage the weather had been mostly grey, with occasional days of light rain. Now, suddenly, the weather improved: the blossom was late in the orchard, the flowers began to open. I saw bees, hoverflies, a wasp or two. In the evenings, clouds of gnats hung around the doorways and under the trees. I became aware of the sounds of birds, especially in the mornings. For the first time in my life I was sensitive to the mysterious organisms of nature; a lifetime in city apartments, or uncaring childhood visits to the countryside, had ill prepared me for the commonplaces of nature.
Something stirred inside me, and I felt restless to be free of my introspection. Yet it continued, a counterpoint to the other gladness.
In an attempt to purge both the restlessness and the depression, I made a serious attempt to start work. I hardly knew how I should begin. In the garden, for instance, it seemed that no sooner had I weeded one patch than what I had done a few days before became just as overgrown and untidy. In the house, the work of redecoration was one that had apparently endless ramifications. It would be a long time before I could start painting, because there were so many preliminary repairs to make.
It helped me to imagine the results. If I could summon an image of the garden, pruned, tidied, blooming, then it gave me an incentive to start. To visualize the rooms newly painted, made clean and tidy, was in a sense half the work already done. This was a discovery, a step forward.
In the house, I concentrated on the downstairs room where I had been sleeping. This was a long, large room, running the depth of the house. At one end, a small window looked out towards the garden, hedge and lane at the front; at the other end, a much wider window gave a view of the back garden.
I worked hard, encouraging myself with my imaginative vision of how the room would be by the time I finished. I washed the walls and ceiling, repaired the crumbling plaster, scrubbed down the woodwork, and then applied two coats of the white emulsion Edwin and Marge had brought. When the woodwork was painted, the room was transformed. From a dingy, temporary hovel it had become a light, airy room in which one could live in style. I cleaned up the paint-splashes thoroughly, stained the floorboards and polished the windows. On an impulse I went into Weobley and bought a large quantity of rush matting, which I spread across the floor.
What most excited me was the discovery that what I had imagined for the room had come to be. The conception of it had influenced its execution.
I sometimes stood or sat in that room for hours on end, relishing the cool tranquillity of it. With both windows opened a warm draught passed through, and at night the honeysuckle that grew beneath the window at the front released a fragrance that until then I had only been able to imagine from chemical imitations.
I thought of it as my white room, and it became central to my life in the cottage.
With the room completed I returned to my introspective mood, but because I had had something to do for the last few days, I now found that my thoughts were more in focus. As I pottered about the garden, as I started the decoration of the other rooms, I contemplated what I was doing with my life, and what I had done with it in the past.
I perceived my past life as an unordered, uncontrolled bedlam of events. Nothing made sense, nothing was consistent with anything else. It seemed to me important that I should try to impose some kind of order on my memories. It never occurred to me to question why I should do this. It was just extremely important.
One day I looked in the bloom-spotted mirror in the kitchen and saw the familiar face staring back at me, but I could not identify it with anything I knew of myself. All I knew was that this sallow, unshaven face with dull eyes was myself, a product of nearly twenty-nine years of life, and it all seemed pointless.
I entered a period of self-questioning: how had I reached this state, this place, this attitude of mind? Was it just an accumulation of bad luck, as the ready excuse seemed to be, or was it the product of a deeper inadequacy? I began to brood.
At first, it was the actual chronology of memory that interested me.
I knew the order of my life, the sequence in which large or important events had taken place, because I had had the universal experience of growing up. Details, however, eluded me. Fragments of my past life—places I had visited, friends I had known, things I had accomplished—were all there in the chaos of my memories, but their precise place in the order of things had to be worked at.
I aimed initially at total recall, taking, for example, my first year at grammar school, and from that starting point trying to attach the many surrounding details: what I had been taught that year, my teachers’ names, the names of other children in the school, where I had been living, where my father had been working, what books I might have read or films seen, friendships made or enmities formed.
I muttered to myself as I worked at the decorating, telling myself this inconsequential, rambling and incoherent narrative, as muddled then as the life itself must have been.
Then form became more important. It was not enough merely to establish the order in which my life had progressed, but the relative significance of each event. I was the product of those events, that learning, and I had lost touch with who I was. I needed to rediscover them, perhaps relearn what I had lost.
I had become unfocused and diffuse. I could only regain my sense of identity through my memories.
It grew impossible to retain what I was discovering. I became confused by having to concentrate on remembering, then retaining it. I would clarify a particular period of my life, or so I thought, but then in moving on to another year or another place I would find that either there were distracting similarities, or I had made a mistake the first time.
At last I realized I should have to write it all down. The previous Christmas Felicity had given me a small portable typewriter, and one evening I retrieved it from my heap of possessions. I set up a table in the centre of my white room. I started work immediately, and almost at once I was discovering mysteries about myself.
3
I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need, and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I became what I wrote.
It was not something I could understand. I felt it on an instinctive or emotional level.
It was a process that was exactly like the creation of my white room. That had been first of all an idea, and later I made the idea real by painting the room as I imagined it. I discovered myself in the same way, but through the written word.
I began writing with no suspicion of the difficulties involved. I had the enthusiasm of a child given coloured pencils for the first time. I was undirected, uncontrolled and entirely lacking in self-consciousness. All these were to change later, but on that first evening I worked with innocent energy, letting an undisciplined flow of words spread across the paper. I was deeply, mysteriously excited by what I was doing, and frequently read back over what I had written, scribbling corrections on the pages and noting second thoughts in the margins. I felt a sense of vague discontent, but this I ignored: the overwhelming sensation was one of release and satisfaction. To write myself into existence!
I worked late, and when eventually I crawled into my sleeping bag, I slept badly. The next morning I returned to the work, letting the decoration stay unfinished. Still my creative energy was undiminished, and page after page slipped through the carriage of the typewriter as if there was nothing that could ever obstruct the flow. As I finished with them I scattered the sheets on the floor around the table, imposing a temporary chaos on the order I was creating.
Inexplicably, I came to a sudden halt.
It was the fourth day, when I had upwards of sixty sheets of completed draft around me. I knew each page intimately, so impassioned was my need to write, so frequently had I re-read my work. What lay unwritten ahead had the same quality, the
same need to be produced. I had no doubts as to what would follow, what would be unsaid. Yet I stopped halfway down a page, unable to continue.
It was as if I had exhausted my way of writing. I became acutely self-conscious and started to question what I had done, what I was going to do next. I glanced at a page at random, and all at once it seemed naive, self-obsessed, trite and uninteresting. I noticed that the sentences were largely unpunctuated, that my spelling was erratic, that I used the same words over and over, and even the judgements and observations, on which I had so prided myself, seemed obvious and irrelevant.
Everything about my hasty typescript was unsatisfactory, and I was stricken by a sense of despair and inadequacy.
I temporarily abandoned my writing, and sought an outlet for my energies in the mundane tasks of domesticity. I completed painting one of the upstairs rooms, and moved my mattress and belongings in there. I decided that from this day my white room would be used solely for writing. A plumber arrived, hired by Edwin, and he started to fix the noisy pipes, and install an immersion heater. I took the interruption as a chance to rethink what I was doing, and to plan more carefully.
So far, everything I had written relied entirely on memory. Ideally, I should have talked to Felicity, to see what she remembered, perhaps to fill in some of the minor mysteries of child hood. But Felicity and I no longer had much in common; we had argued many times in recent years, most recently, and most bitterly, after our father’s death. She would have little sympathy for what I was doing. Anyway, it was my story; I did not want it coloured by her interpretation of events.
Instead, I telephoned her one day and asked her to send me the family photograph albums. She had taken in most of my father’s possessions, including these, but as far as I knew she had no use for them. Felicity was undoubtedly puzzled by my sudden interest in this material—after the funeral she had offered the albums to me, and I had said no—but she promised to mail them to me.