The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (38 page)

She picks her way slowly into the field, the track here now no more than two parallel ruts. The important thing is not to fall. She finds the spot which might be, she can’t be sure, where he lay.

‘Are you still here, Perry? Can you really hear me? I don’t mind you running away, so long as you’re safe now. Are you watching me, Perry? Are you looking back to make sure I’m following? I’m afraid I have to go slowly. I have to be so careful not to fall.’

Ridiculous, of course, but who would have thought it could be so reassuring? So liberating? I should have done this before.

‘I love you so much, Perry.’

I should have done this with Rex.

‘I love you, Rex. I miss you. I hate you.’

She bows her head, pressing her lips tight together, shocked by her own words. Not the thoughts, the thoughts never leave her, but the public utterance. Then the shock passes, and she feels euphoria.

‘You bastard, Rex!’ she says. ‘You bloody bloody bastard!’

Perhaps Rex hears her, somewhere in Maidenhead.

‘You selfish cruel bastard! I hope you rot in hell!’

She feels the tingle of her skin, and is suffused with a new vigour. She turns back towards the trees, thinking it’s time to go home. The words come of their own volition.

‘You always were a useless coward, Rex. You didn’t even have the guts to tell me you were leaving.’ And this almost thirty years ago. ‘You were supposed to love me. Why didn’t you love me?’

She’s a child again. This isn’t Rex she’s talking to.

‘I didn’t know what to do. What did I do wrong? Why didn’t you love me?’

Heavens, what must she sound like! An old woman whining in a field because someone or other let her down years and years ago. Only it’s not someone or other. It’s her mother.

She sees her clearly: those uncomprehending eyes, that tired irritable voice. What is it now, Aster? Must you be so droopy?

She talks to her mother aloud as she follows the track home across the valley bottom.

‘You never let me explain. You never listened. Why wouldn’t you listen, Mummy? I tried not to be a nuisance. All I wanted was for you to listen.’

This is a revelation. A new marvel. She can talk to anyone she wants. No need to believe, no justification necessary. It’s a matter of humility. Who is she to be so afraid of the ridiculous?

I am ridiculous. I have been ridiculous for years.

Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

She’s reached the trees now. Looking up she sees the cool white of the sky burning through the young green of the beech leaves, a green so fresh and keen and luminous that the canopy could be eternity itself, life for ever renewed. For this is May. She had forgotten about May, the one month in England when every day brings new explosions of glory.

‘Lord God in heaven,’ she says aloud. ‘Don’t leave me.’

What kind of prayer is that? Never a believer before, no comfort sought in the cold gloom of the church. But this is what she has it in her to say, to this nothing she has never known. Don’t leave me.

And wonder of wonders, her prayer is answered. No voice from the sky, no vision. But all at once there falls on Aster Dickinson an absolute and profound conviction that she is part of something immense. She sees the same bright young leaves on the same branches above; the same soft carpet of beech mast in the wheel-ruts beneath her feet; but now everything is charged with a new meaning. These woods, these fields, this sky are no more than fragments of the immensity. What we see and know is not wrong: it’s just inadequate. It’s little. There’s so much more. How absurd to seek meaning in our own tiny lives. There is meaning, but it’s on an entirely different scale. Infinitely large, eternally unfolding.

I am seen. I am heard. I am not abandoned.

This is Aster Dickinson’s revelation. She has been touched by the sublime. None of it hidden from view, but to see it takes a kind of innocence. Loss and grief have torn away her protective covers. All around her is a mighty otherness which goes on its serene way, unconcerned by Rex’s desertion or by Perry’s death.

Of course, she thinks. Now that I see it, it’s true that I’ll never die. I’m part of it too. I am held in the arms of God.

She walks home in wonder, expecting with every step that the sensation will fade, but it doesn’t. Back in her own kitchen she finds she can look at Perry’s empty chair without pain. Perry has gone, but it’s only as if he’s run out into the garden. He’s not far away. The only reason she can’t see him at present is that she’s too small, her eyes are too weak. Those that die are not truly dead. They have entered into the greatness. And she too is part of the greatness. She is in the arms of God, and Perry is in the arms of God, and all is well.

45

Carrying the picnic proves to be quite an operation. Roddy takes charge of the wine so Henry, honour-bound, heaves the enormous picnic cool-bag out of the boot. This dark-green webbed and strapped sarcophagus contains the three courses prepared by Laura’s mother Anthea, as well as plates, bowls, cutlery and condiments for six. It is dismayingly heavy. Roddy, in recognition of his lighter load, takes the roll-up table in his other arm. Laura, Diana and Anthea take two folding chairs each. John Kinross, who has a weak back, carries a rug.

‘You will be careful, won’t you, Henry?’ says Anthea. ‘The bag has to be kept upright.’

Henry does not answer.

So laden they clamber over the bed of rocks that divides the lines of parked cars, and make their way down the sloping car park to the gardens. Roddy leads, stocky and confident in his mulberry-coloured waistcoat and patent leather shoes. Diana follows, a brightly-coloured bird, walking with Anthea, who pales by her side: Anthea, always elegant, always understated, her long silver hair high on her head to show off her still youthful neck. Then John, a little stooping these days, walking with a stick; Laura by his side, looking ethereal in her new outfit, shimmering and silver-grey, cool as a waterfall, the two folded chairs clanking in her arms.

Henry brings up the rear. His shoulders hurt. He feels sweat form on his brow. A long train of men and women in evening dress, all similarly burdened, runs before him towards the red brick hulk of the opera house. This time of effort, the carrying of the picnic, a rite of passage in the Glyndebourne experience: the males of the tribe dragging the day’s kill to the home fires. Or perhaps – a rather different historical echo – they are a stream of refugees fleeing a fallen city, Paris in 1940, their worldly goods in their battered leather suitcases. And he is in his own way a refugee, fleeing his own life.

Nearer the gardens there are clusters of chauffeurs among the parked cars, smoking and talking in low voices. The chauffeurs do not carry the picnic. The essence of the evening is grandeur at play, formality on the grass,
déjeuner sur l’herbe
. Every time Henry comes here, and courtesy of his parents-in-law he has been many times, he marvels at its magnificent eccentricity. All it takes to complete the absurdity is rain, and rain is forecast.

‘Jaysus!’ says Roddy, already pink in the face. ‘I always forget how far it is.’

Diana stares sternly at the massive lead-clad fly-tower that rises above the opera house.

‘I’ve never understood why they had to make it so ugly.’

‘Oh, don’t you like it?’ John Kinross, the one-time engineer. ‘I think it’s grand.’

‘John admires grain silos,’ says Anthea.

‘I like things that do their job.’ John is unoffended, his self-esteem amiably armoured by the millions for which he sold his company.

The remark is not addressed to Henry, but as he struggles behind with his burden he hears once more Aidan Massey’s angry retort: ‘You don’t know your job.’ The failure is not of knowledge, he thinks. The failure is of desire.

Has Laura ever loved me as she loved him? Not the kind of question you can ask.

They troop over the gravel, past the glass-fronted Mildmay Hall. The tables within are already filling up with people securing their places for the long interval.

‘They all think it’s going to rain,’ says Anthea anxiously. ‘The terraces will be full.’

By the time they reach the canopied bar Henry is suffering.

‘I’ll take the lift,’ he says.

‘But it’s so slow, Henry. You’ll be there for hours. It’s the slowest lift in the world.’

‘I don’t care. You go ahead.’

He stands in line behind a party of old ladies all of whom are wearing long floral-patterned frocks, like armchairs in the lounge of a provincial hotel. They are talking about bladder control.

‘I can cope with Mozart. But Handel – remember, Janet, that
Theodora
with all the funny hand-wagging? – that was very trying.’

‘Then don’t even think of Wagner.’

By the time he joins the others on the wide brick terrace above the bar they have squeezed a pitch between earlier arrivals and have set up the table and chairs. All round them elaborately-dressed people are struggling with folding furniture and uncorking wine. John Kinross has encountered a friend who shares his back trouble. The friend, a heavily-overweight elderly man, unbuttons his dress-shirt to reveal a species of inner cummerbund.

‘Magnetic belt,’ he says. ‘Trust me. It works.’

‘I have a special light-weight support I take on planes.’

‘Waste of time. Once your spine is buggered, it’s buggered.’

Diana greets Henry with a shrill whine.

‘Where have you been, Henry? We’re all dying for a drink.’

Henry’s bag contains the glasses. They are made of polycarbonate and claim to be unbreakable. Roddy pours champagne. It’s half-past four in the afternoon.

Laura whispers to Henry. ‘Try to cheer up.’

Henry sips his wine and pretends to cheer up, but he feels detached from the proceedings. It’s been coming for days, ever since he stood before the mirror in the bathroom and thought: I’m not living the life I meant to live.

I want you to know that not one day has gone by in which I haven’t thought of you. The truth is we have never parted.

He has this sensation he’s on the point of falling and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. Nor is he sure he wants to stop it. He’s watching himself, half-fascinated, half-afraid, to see how far he’ll go.

Walking on walls and below only sky.

Their seats are in Row AA, Foyer Circle, Blue side. They command an unimpeded view of the stalls below.

‘Wonderful seats, John.’

‘They should be.’

John Kinross became a Founder Member when the new opera house was built six years ago, and has bought privileged access for life. Seat prices on top, of course. The tickets for himself and his guests will set him back £780 tonight.

Anthea has her own cushion. The lightly-upholstered blond plywood seats are too hard for her. The programme book has been appropriated by Diana.

‘Oh, it’s Richard Hudson. We met him at David’s, remember, Roddy?’

‘No. Who is Richard Hudson?’

‘The designer.’

‘All David’s friends are designers. I can’t tell them apart.’

Behind them a man is telling his party in a booming voice, ‘John Christie used to say you wear evening dress out of respect for the performers, and when it’s over you applaud for
five full minutes
!’

Henry gazes over the sea of heads in the stalls below. Then he looks up at the faces leaning out from the balcony seats, tier upon tier. Right at the top, just under the concrete dome, a closed walkway runs from side to side. How strange it would be to be up there, high above stage and audience, seeing nothing. Suppose you were taken there blindfolded, and left there to listen to the sounds. Would you ever guess where you were?

The lights go down. The conductor takes his stand. The overture begins.

The curtain rises on a pale cream set dominated by a statue of a horse. A giant radiator stands against the rear wall. A tailor’s dummy hangs on a cord, wearing a long white dress. A number of wood-framed gauze screens and doorways form insubstantial walls to notional rooms. Figaro and Susanna are in modern dress.

The familiar music, the warmth and darkness of the auditorium, the brilliance of the lit stage, cause Henry’s eyelids to droop. He doesn’t actually go to sleep, but from time to time he finds his head lolls forward and he has to jerk it up again. He does not achieve full attention until the entry of Cherubino. Cherubino’s innocent sexual promiscuity enchants him. Is it because he’s young, or is it because the part of a man is played by a woman? When she sings her first aria Henry is gripped.

Ogni donna mi fa palpitar
. ‘Every woman makes me tremble.’

The overwhelming physical impact of sexual desire.

Then a little later comes the other side of the coin, which is sexual betrayal. The Contessa sings
Porgi, amor
. ‘Give me back my loved one or in mercy let me die.’ Her loved one is the Count, a calculating and heartless lecher. How can she long for his love? And yet when she sings the emotion is authentic. The music trumps the plot.