A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (26 page)

As she approached Goreme, after spending a night in a town that purported to be or to have been Caesarea, the landscape changed. A steep little winding valley, lined by trees hung with delicate pink bloom, led her to the strange and fantastic displays of shapes that had disturbed Giles Reader. Here there was cover, here there were hiding places. She parked the car at a tourist vantage point and surveyed the amazing panorama beyond and beneath her. And she despaired. For she could see that here a man might hide forever, here a hermit might embrace eternal solitude. Avenging armies might thunder, private detectives might track and pry, but here one could evade all pursuit. Each hollow hill, each towering turret was pierced by natural windows, by peep holes and arrow slits. Flocks of pigeons flew in and out of the thousand watching eyes of the rocks. This was the land of a myriad secrets. Where should her search begin?

She was booked into a pleasant small hotel in Urgup where her fellow guests included a couple of Bible-reading Americans, a Dutch family party on its Easter break and an Australian art historian. Over drinks in the heavily orientalized Harem Bar (surely she was far enough from home to sit and socialize incognito over a glass or two of raki) she listened to advice about sightseeing. She must visit the Church of the Apple and the Church of the Buckle and Sakli Kilise, the Hidden Church; she must see the Valley of Roses and the Red Dale; and, if not a claustrophobic, the Underground Cities where troglodytes had lived for centuries, safe from persecution.

Had Peter Elsevir become a troglodyte? Would she meet him peering at her from behind a grid in a wall in an earth-red cavern? Would he roll a stone down at her as she approached his cell?

For two or three days she explored the region, losing her
way amongst its scattered monuments, joining noisy parties with guides, eating alone in wayside cafés. Of an evening, she encouraged the barman and the hotel manageress to gossip about the tourist trade, and about the pilgrims of various faiths who came here – scholarly theologians, fundamentalists both Christian and Islamic, New Age mystics and, quite recently, an angelic choir which had travelled from Arizona to sing for the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. Had they heard, she enquired, of a sect called Icon? Did any of their visitors settle here? Were there still hermits walled up amongst those lunar mountains?

On the third evening, she was told of an Englishman who lived alone in a little village in the Valley of the Sword. She knew that this was Peter Elsevir.

The sun shone on her fourth morning. It was the hottest day of the year. Protected from the dazzle by hat and sunglasses she set off to the Valley.

Peter was sitting at a little yellow-painted wooden table on the pavement outside a small low rock-and-brick shack sticking out from the rock wall. He too wore dark glasses and an old straw hat perched on the back of his head, and he was reading a book. The bright light had brought him out of his hiding place. She parked her hired car across the road, and stared at him. Her heart thumped perilously.

He looked more beautiful than ever. How could this be true? Years of abuse and indulgence had failed to coarsen him; they had worn him thin and pale, they had refined him into an extraordinary elegance. Was this right, was this fair? His haggardness became him. His hair hung still in Sixties ringlets, its blond-grey touched gold by the sunlight. His nose was long and thin, his cheeks were hollow, his long bony hand languidly turned a page. And he smiled to himself, a secret smile. Would he sense that he was being watched? Dare she
approach? Or should she drive away? The neck of his shirt was open to receive the springtime warmth on his thin chest. He had always had smooth, dry, hot skin. Gazing at it, at him, she was overcome by a pang of memory so intense she felt faint. She could feel that skin beneath her fingers. She could smell it from here.

She opened her car door, and crossed the silent deserted little road towards him, in the blazing noon day. He looked up at her approach. She could not read his eyes through his shades. He shut his book. He smiled, a puzzled, polite, delicate smile. He rose to his feet, taking off his hat to greet her. He had always been a gentleman. How had she forgotten these things?

She saw the moment of his recognition. He stood there, holding his hat, still smiling.

‘Hannah,’ he said. ‘Is that you, Hannah?’

‘Peter,’ she said.

He shook his head slightly, in what seemed but a mild surprise, and gestured towards one of the other little chairs at the table. She sat. He sat.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You hunted me down. I tried to hide, but you hunted me down.’

She was ashamed. She could find no words. She had loved this man. The memory of the feel of his hot skin assailed and reproached her. She had to reach out a hand to touch him. She leaned to him across the table, and laid her hand upon his. He burned with a pure dryness.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I came to find where you had hidden.’

‘I wonder why,’ he said, smiling a gentle, quizzical smile.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘I had come to think I had treated you badly.’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It was I that did not treat you well.’

They sat there, drinking raki which he had brought forth
from his hut. The cloudy chalky white of bittersweet aniseed perfumed the air. They ate black olives, and slices of warm red tomato, and cubes of hard white salted cheese, and sharp dried brown wrinkled plums. Peter Elsevir said that he had embraced a life of simplicity. Not of austerity, but of simplicity.

He stared at his onetime wife, with measured appreciation.

‘You look very fine, Hannah,’ he said, as he poured her another glass of the strong clear spirit and added to it the transforming alchemy of water. ‘You look large and fine. You have done well. You look quite opulent.’

‘You too look well,’ said Hannah, thoughtfully. ‘I had not expected you to look so handsome still.’

They went indoors and lay down together, in the afternoon heat, on his narrow monk’s bed, and talked. They spoke of their adventures, their discoveries. A fly buzzed in the dry silence. Hannah laid her hand on Peter’s smooth chest, then lowered her head over him and deliberately inhaled his refined odour. He smelled of sun and salt and resin. Preserved, purged, purified. She sighed, deeply. She had done well to track down this man. He was remission, he was forgiveness, he was resurrection. She would leave him now, she would in all probability never see him again in this life, but he would remain with her, her secret virtue, her secret strength. She breathed again, and took in a deep inspiration of her youth, her love, her innocence, her hope. All these things had been good. They were not to be buried, or despised, or forgotten. They held no shame. They were a treasury of great happiness. The past forgave her, and she forgave the past. They lay there, peacefully. Nobody would ever know of this moment. No biographer could record it, no friend could mock it, no footnote could catch and snag and snap at it.

He smelled of apples and of honey, he smelled of the virtues of the wilderness.

‘Peter,’ she said, sleepily, in the afternoon heat. ‘Peter, you smell divine.’

(1999)

13

Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale

You must not imagine me as speaking to you in my own person. I speak to you as Mary Mogg, and it is her story that I tell. Imagine me as Mary Mogg, a schoolteacher past the middle of life and slowly nearing retirement. I look forward with a mixture of feelings to my pensioned years, and wonder where to spend them. Mary Mogg – a plain name for a plain person. Plain speaking, I hope I am, and reasonably plain living, though I am not a water drinker. By now I am plain of person, though I was not always so. I would not claim that I was ever pretty, but I was personable enough – had you been told I was plain, you might have found me pretty, and had you been told I was pretty, you might have found me plain. Now I look like what, in part, I am – a sensible, hardworking, somewhat solitary teacher of English Literature, who enjoys long walks in the countryside as an escape from the demands of trying to persuade restless sixteen-year-olds in a comprehensive school to appreciate Wordsworth.

The school is in Northam, in South Yorkshire, on the industrial non-Wordsworthian side of the Pennines. I am Yorkshire born, and I like the Yorkshire Dales, the North Yorkshire moors, the Peak District. But this year I had promised myself a half-term midsummer treat, an excursion to the West Country, in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Coleridge. I have been
teaching the
Lyrical Ballads
and I longed to see again those landscapes of the West. I had not been there for many years, but I remembered from my youth the Quantock Hills, the combe behind Holford, the Somerset and Devon Coast Path, the Valley of the Rocks, the steep woods below and above Culbone church, the Bell Inn at Watchet, the brook at Nether Stowey, the muddy source of the River Tone high on the Brendons. One whole summer I spent there, with college friends, when I was twenty.

I cannot paint what then I was and how glorious that faraway world then seemed to me. To my Northern eye the woods and valleys of Somerset were as luxuriant and extravagant as the riches of Guiana had seemed to the astonished eyes of Sir Walter Raleigh and his crew. Ferns sprouted like orchids from the trunks of vast oaks overhanging the rapid rivers, ivy with berries like grapes rampaged up ash and beech in tropical splendour, and hollies soared towards the sky. Primeval lichens of grey and sage green and dazzling orange encrusted bark and twig and stone, and the red earth broke into bubbles of scarlet and purple and bright spongy yellow. The lush profusion and the variety of nature had far surpassed our Northern austerities, and, faithlessly perhaps, I fell in love with the profligacy, that excess. I was utterly seduced.

I fell in love, too, with one of my travelling companions, which was a misfortune, for although at first there seemed to be a mutual sympathy, I soon discovered that he was more attracted to another of our party. Indeed, he later married her, and not, I heard, very happily, though that is not, I think, part of this story. So, to me, as you will readily imagine, that summer was one of intense emotion, and one that I have lived through in memory many times. And I never returned to Somerset, choosing instead to walk in Scotland, in the Lake
District, in France, in Germany, in Northern Italy. I too have crossed the Alps. Did I associate his loss with the places where I knew myself to be in the same season, both finding him and losing him? Did I feel that nature had betrayed the heart that loved her? I cannot say. All I can say is that until this year, I did not step westward.

But this year, I returned. I was prompted partly – and I know this is ridiculous, but my mentor Wordsworth has taught me never to be afraid of bathos – by the National Curriculum. It is commonly acknowledged that many if not most schoolteachers have been suffering from stress and demoralization over the past decade or so. I have fared better than some, but I too have felt constraints. I am getting older, and I do not understand the young as once I did. Teaching literature was once my pleasure: I felt I could at times awaken interest, catch the imagination, change lives for the better. Of late I have not felt this. A sense of defeat has been creeping over me. Literature is no longer valued, in the classroom or out of it. Literature has been relabelled Heritage – safely dead, and dressed in period costume. You can imagine my feelings when I discovered that the only poem by Wordsworth included in that government-sponsored anthology – since prudently dropped – was – you have guessed it – those ‘Daffodils’. That poem has done immeasurable harm to Wordsworth with the young. It is not a poem for children. I have had innumerable disputes with students about that poem. It stands like a tombstone on the grave of his reputation. Most of the young just shut their ears and switch off when they see it. A few of the cleverer ones, like Shakira Jagan, tell me it is politically incorrect, because daffodils are a symbol of colonial domination in India and the West Indies (she is Guyanese) – and when I try to get her to read about Toussaint L’Ouverture instead, she just laughs at me. Heritage!
None of the people who go on about Heritage have ever read a poem in their lives – or not since they yawned their way through the ‘Daffodils’ at school. I know there’s nothing new in complaints about English teaching being sterile – remember that Victorian
Punch
cartoon of the two elderly gentlemen in frock coats walking through a wood, with the caption

‘O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird

Or but a wandering voice?’

‘State the alternatives preferred

With reasons for your choice.’

But it is getting worse. What would Wordsworth have thought of a generation of children encouraged to learn his ‘Daffodils’ by rote, because they are part of ‘Our English Heritage’? Wordsworth, who with Dorothy encouraged little Basil Montagu’s insatiable curiosity by directing him towards ‘everything he sees, the sky, the fields, trees, shrubs, corn, the making of tools, carts, etc. etc. He knows his letters, but we have not attempted any further step in the path of book learning. Our grand study has been to make him
happy
 …’

Well, it is a hobbyhorse of mine, and I get carried away. I apologize for this polemic digression. It is because I grow old and out of date. But at least I still feel
something
. And these reflections are not unconnected with my excursion, to which I now come.

I decided that the time had come, after three decades and more, to brave re-entry to that magic land, and I planned to spend three days walking from Nether Stowey to Lynton. I would forget Shakira Jagan and all the rest of them – and frankly, compared with the rest of 5B, Shakira is a genius, though don’t tell anyone I said so. I would revisit old haunts,
and see if they were still there. If
I
was still there. A dangerous enterprise. By chance I found I had chosen the dates on which the Wordsworths themselves were expelled from the grand paradise of Alfoxden, on June 25, 1798, and set off towards Nether Stowey, Shirehampton, the Severn and the Wye. Nearly two hundred years had passed since they moved on from Alfoxden: and nearly forty since I moved on myself.