after Wilfred.
Ellen had no idea how to obey the injunction she had been given. She had no clue as to what the cryptic words might mean. Whatever they meant it was not – she was sure of this – that she should go about preaching to people. No being, not even one whose essence was love, would suborn her, Ellen Thomas, as a preacher in its cause. She wondered if what she was being asked was to write about the experience, but that seemed hardly more likely. Robert had been a journalist and had occasionally run stuff past her for comments; but aside from that, and the jottings she sometimes wrote in her grandmother’s recipe book, since school, where she had not excelled, she had had no practice in writing.
To be asked to tell of love is a tall enough order; to be asked such a thing when one has not even the habit of belief is awful. The magnitude and impossibility of the task she had been assigned felled Ellen.
The loss of Robert had awoken her to the innate treachery of all certainties. Her husband’s enduring sympathy had made life seem unchangeable. With Robert gone this illusion, along with all human ties, vanished too. Yet even in his absence, the knowledge of Robert’s steady love had conferred upon her a sense of life’s consistency. But the enigmatic order from the gorse bush robbed Ellen of her old self and the sureties that had survived Robert’s death. She took to walking, day and night, seeking not so much a solution to the problem she had been unwillingly set as escape.
The walks left her overwhelmingly fatigued. The friendly countryside she had once enjoyed took on a menacing aspect. The foliage in the trees became baleful, dropping leaves and icy water on her as she passed. The hedges murmured threateningly in the wind, which rushed at her, haranguing her like some invisible prosecutor. Metal gates clanged horribly, bruising the calves of her legs, or making violent grating noises, shocking to her ears. The sun, red and glowering, plunged down the sky in pursuit of her. Outside or in she felt alarmingly afraid.
Gradually, as rats are said to leave a sinking ship, her everyday capacities had begun to slink away, leaving her a remnant, a hapless passenger on the derelict wreck of her old personality, which now appeared to float on perilous and alien waters. She seemed to feel her feet sliding under her, sensed the deck shudder and tip her dangerously off balance, downwards to an icy darkness, where lurked shapeless, unformed things, and where death looked a blessed relief and disintegration easier than resistance.
With the last dregs of her failing resources, she dragged herself to sell Brook Farm, the farmhouse she had lived in with Robert for over twenty years, and move to the small, plain, characterless bungalow where obscurely she felt she might be safe. And here – after the anguish of disposing of the furniture over which she and Robert had laughed, planned, bickered, made love and acted all the multifacets of a long marriage, for there was no way the accumulation of a shared life would fit into her new home – she had hidden herself away, for what she found she chiefly could not bear was other people’s company.
From the long sofa, which, scraping the bottom of the barrel of her energy, she had made the object of a last-ditch shopping effort, she lay, unrecognisable to herself, gazing out in those moments of passionless lucidity which afflict the mortally wounded. It seemed to her, at such moments, that she might never rise again, but would simply freeze there upon her long perch, like some stray migrant bird forced to winter over in a cold and alien land.
One morning, while she was engaged in looking out – if ‘engaged’ could be the right word for something which so much resembled the loosening of all former ties – she became aware that the nature of what she saw had undergone some alchemical change.
Ellen had been a watercolour artist, and made a successful living selling her paintings at local craft shops. She had an accurate eye and a patient hand, and the world, as she was used to seeing it, had beauty and charm. But now everything she had once seen as colourful, lyrical, dramatic, even, was subsumed into a vast, unquenchable litany of light.
The months that she had by now spent lying on the sofa had brought Ellen no further towards solving the problem she had been set by the presence in the gorse bush. But the vision of the changed world, rather than diminishing her sense of inadequacy, became a reproach. She looked outside to where the trees and hills and sheep apparently continued their former existence, but in the infinitude of space around and between them, she now knew there lay the inscrutable and uncompromising powers of love and mercy, and she, Ellen Thomas, had been enjoined to make them known.
The intense and brilliant light Ellen had seen at the centre of all things probed her being like a surgeon’s knife. There seemed no safety outside herself and no refuge within. She could tell no one what had occurred – lest she be taken for a lunatic. She feared to show herself to anyone for she felt there must be a savour of madness about her.
During the day, apart from the sparest of attentions to economic necessities, she gazed out of the window, a shadow between two worlds, surveying the landscape, waiting for the awful injunction to return, for she knew that having been a prey to truth it would never leave her, but would make itself felt at any cost. At night she lay in a kind of dead-and-alive doze, apprehensive that the voice might call on her again.
The assault of love upon Ellen Thomas had been savage rather than sweet, and, like many caught in its toils, she longed to have been spared the experience.
AFTER FORTY-FIVE MINUTES OF FRUITLESS struggle Mr Golightly had reached the view that the instructions for the up-to-the-minute stove had probably been produced and marketed by his business rival. He had not admitted this to anyone at the office, but he had been troubled, lately, by recent signs that his rival’s business was beginning to supersede his own. It was a business formed upon the back of his own global enterprise, and this made its proliferation especially galling. To distract his mind from this unwelcome line of thought, he began to check out the rest of Spring Cottage’s equipment.
He found the two convector heaters, slightly chipped and rusting, in the cupboard under the stairs. Well, that was a blessing, anyway. He could afford to take a more cavalier position with the stove. In one of the Formica cupboards there was a toaster, thank goodness with a plug attached; a broken machine, apparently designed for grinding; in the cupboard beneath the stairs an iron which had seen better days, and an impossible ironing board. There had been times when he might have gone in for grinding, but not on his holiday. Nor, since his secretary was not there to pass comment, was there any call to iron. Toast, now, was a different kettle of fish: toast fingers, with a boiled egg, was something which Mr Golightly was partial to…
It was nearly nine and a walk to the shop would give the opportunity to assess what provisions were available in Great Calne. He hoped not to have to drive too far afield. The Traveller could play up and he didn’t want the bother of having to find a mechanic who could fix it. Of course, he could always send for someone to come down from the office, but it was to get away from all of that that he had come away for his holiday.
Putting on a green parka, Mr Golightly walked up the hill towards the Post Office Stores where a young man with a straggly beard was stacking oranges in the window.
‘Good morning’, said Mr Golightly. And he spoke truly for the fully risen sun was unreservedly lighting the village of Great Calne.
‘Depends who you are,’ rejoined the beard, stepping back from the window. ‘Shit!’ as the oranges rebelled and rolled down and all over the floor.
Oh dear. Mr Golightly spoke only to himself. He had selected milk, fresh and ‘untreated’ – he didn’t hold with ‘dead’ milk in cartons – half a dozen eggs, some local cheese, tomatoes and a couple of brown rolls.
‘You staying at Spring Cott?’ asked the young man, cramming too many tomatoes into a tiny paper bag.
‘Yes, indeed. A pretty location.’
‘All right for toads! Damp as hell. Wouldn’t catch me there, that’s for sure.’
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it…
As