the Worm i' the Bud

                                                     

A thirtieth birthday is meant to be a milestone, but Tilda wakes in the morning on that crucial first day of November, having obliviously negociated the milestone in the night. She realizes, unsurprised, that she has done so without any sort of bump, or certainly not enough to disturb her sleep. She is now - she checks her watch, which is carefully tilted and easy to view on the bedside table - seven hours into her thirty-first year. Much to her annoyance as a child, she missed by half an hour having a Hallowe’en birthday. Later she was glad of that. (though the Day of the Dead? That’s not too good, she suddenly thinks). Anyway, today she feels not one whit different from her usual self. Definitely she is unchanged and unfazed.

She is lying beside her darling husband of ten years, and Magnus of course looks his own sweet and same self. He is still asleep - but lightly snoring. Now that is a brand new phenomenon. Perhaps he is aging faster than she is: surely snoring is an old-man thing. As if he has sensed her unkind thought, he snorts and shifts his position, and thereby creates no more snores. His breath is soft as a child’s again.

His face looks as smooth, as sweetly lovable as it always has. More so, really. He actually became even handsomer since he shaved his beard. Now she can see his nicely-shaped mouth properly and his good jaw. Though, and this is odd given how she likes his new face, she sometimes misses the beard. It’s as if he slightly became a new person without it, not the boy she had married.

He is still lightly tanned from the summer sun, and she notices, peering more closely, that the tan makes visible the merest threads of white lines that ray out at the sides of his eyes. Hmm. She must check in her mirror if such wrinkles are happening to her too, but she is fairly sure they are not. She would already have noticed them on her own face. She is someone who pays attention to details.

Magnus is two years older than she so will be a bell-weather for her regarding what getting older will mean, in some ways at least. They are different, of course, physically, she being small and dark, he tall and fair. In deeper ways they are even more different. He is less complex than she is, and, because he is, is unaware of the fact.

Anyway, so far, it seems that aging is a non-issue for her. She experienced no dread in advance of this birthday, has had no sense of some alarming threshold she was about to be pushed through. As with many things, she was going to flit through this doorway without a problem and now she has. Of course thirty is not forty, or, even more serious, fifty, by which time everybody’s face, breasts, and bottom will have softened and begun to droop.

She extends her arms out from under the covers and inspects them. The loose sleeves of her nightdress fall back to her shoulders and she flexes her hands: her skin is as smooth, her flesh as firm and  her muscles as vigorous as they ever were. Then she slips her hands back under the covers and feels her breasts: they are still round, small, high. No one would guess she nursed twins for ten months.

But being thirty now is interesting all the same. She feels there may be a significance in some small inner way that she cannot quite put her finger on, or not yet. It may be just that she is no longer in her twenties. She has always had a way of vaguely seeing decades in colours: the teens were green, the twenties, a not quite-yellow, really a deep cream, the colour of her favourite roses. What shade is hovering now? Will it be something darker? Mustard? Brown? Over the next few days it will float into her mind.

What she doesn’t want to entertain yet is....that she may have to face that she is no longer a girl. Girl. That word, so incorrect these days to be applied, aloud, to anyone over about twelve, has been still, secretly, an identity she has felt to be hers.

Being ‘only a girl’ has given her a certain leeway. To allow herself to be a girl has meant seeing herself as someone still evolving, not quite jelled into a mature, adult and responsible person. A girl is still able to decide who she wants to be. A girl has not trapped herself, not really, into a final mold. A girl can leap aside from a path is on. She can easily toss away a behaviour, a way of reacting, that in a more settled-down person might have to be considered habitual. Tilda wonders if, now she is thirty, the freedom to try on different selves will turn out to have gone. Surely it need not. Not if she is careful. She is not ready for burnt sienna, indeed any bitter colour.

She has been fine with some kinds of change. It’s been part of being still fluid. Her name has changed more than once. Marrying, Matilda Moss became Tilly Stuart and cut her hair. As Tilly, she had hair that it curled tightly in a black cap around her head. Then, a couple of years back, she felt her period of being Tilly was over, and determined she was now Tilda. The sound suggested a more serious, more complex person. Someone to be reckoned with. Her hair altered too. She grew it long, began to wear it up in a tall, curly fountain of a top-knot, or tied back in a wild bush of pony tail. These styles make her look considerably more dramatic. Someone to reckon with. Maybe on some long away day she will realize she is ready for the full Matilda again, and have a long, fat, grey braid, become a witch. She’ll see. Nothing need be final.

She has always known that, whatever small (or even what less-exceptional others might consider fairly large) deviations she has allowed herself, at bottom she is a good woman, loyal, moral, and loving.

Truthfully, she relishes playing her various worthy and demanding roles. She accepted with a whole heart her responsibilities as wife and as mother, as well as her working identity as a teacher. Any breaks from that pattern of being an exceptionally dutiful person have been mere blips. Necessary, but of no very great significance. For her, they have been exceptions that prove the rule.

Exceptions that prove a rule: she has laughed about the irrationality of that empty saying when     she has been    teaching logic to her students. Yet, outside the realm of pure reason, inside            herself, she has lived it, and made it work. Yes, she truly has. From time to time she has stepped aside   from her path of simplicity and virtue, and after each episode she has returned, refreshed, to her husband, her children, and to her students and her classroom. Other people might not be     able to maintain such a skillful balancing act, but she can. She is someone who  thrives on a life that contains secrets. Variety, she finds, strengthens her. She is such an honest  person, really, that she is excellent at deceit.                                                                                                                                             

                                                         

Amongst their original academic circle of about twelve couples, eight have shifted marital             allegiances. Tilda and Magnus are amongst the solid and satisfied minority who have stuck to      their original mates and seem likely to continue in the same manner. Many envy them. Even         people who barely know them, point to them as the prime example that it is possible for a             marriage to work, and in a lively way. They are attractive and clever and there is still a spark         dancing between them. They are not simply dulled into a routine of accepting what is easy and      pleasant. They chose each other ten years ago and are still making that same choice. It is a             conscious matter, their electing to continue loving each other. Or so it seems. Or so Tilda thinks   it seems.                                                                                                                                             

Lying there beside Magnus she is cosy and will stay a moment longer. The twins are not up yet or at least are very quiet, if they are. She hopes they are not up to some naughtiness in the house. She listens hard but all is silence except for a passing car and some birds busy snatching mountain ash berries in the tree outside the open window. The leaves, after their brilliant display in early October, have almost all fallen, but the bright orange berries still hang in clumps.

The twins have promised to rake today the last of the leaves in the back yard. It would be fun to be able to have a bonfire but fires in the city have not been permitted for years.

Now she hears the children. They are whispering and giggling and they are running along the hall towards their parents’ bedroom, bare feet pounding on the hard wood floor; they both scorn slippers now.

They are in the room within two seconds of her first hearing them and they leap across the rug in three bounds like dancers, and are onto the bed. She moves her legs in the nick of time to escape their full weight. Not that they are heavy children. They are leaner than most of their friends, and not tall, not yet. Magnus and Tilda both hope that if one is to be tall and one small, each following a parent it will the right way round, with Imogen the small and Sam the tall. But the children are still very much the same shape and size. Otherwise they look quite different, Sam with Magnus’s eyes and colouring, and Imo.Who is Imo like? She has dark hair as does her mother, but hers is straight. It is thick and springs back from her brow with a kind of smooth richness of texture that is unlike either of her parents, and her eyes too are different. They are very dark and set a little aslant. Both children are handsome but they do not look particularly like brother and sister, let alone twins. People find them fascinating, in their difference, as do they themselves.

Tilda knows who Imogen looks like; she knew as soon as her daughter looked up at her on the day she was born.

                                                                     *

Magnus is aware that Tilly has been awake for a while and has been deliberately keeping his eyes closed, feigning sleep.  He has been hoping for at least the last half hour that she’ll get up and go downstairs, leaving him alone. He yearns to lie there quietly, awake, yet free of her presence. He isn’t ready to assume the self he has to be with her. And - oh God - it’s her birthday, too: special attentiveness will be required of him.

There’s something about the alert way she is lying there that seems to exude the kind of self-certainty he has long found nigh intolerable. He senses that she is aquiver with the sheer thrill of being herself, the Glorious Tilda. He tries to keep his breathing even, his eyelids from betraying him. His thought of her are cruel. So far, all he has allowed himself.

But he hates to hide in fake sleep from the children. Sam is jouncing up and down on his mother’s stomach and any second now will jump onto his father.

The children. For ages Magnus has been inching his way towards making an announcement that will bring their world down around their ears. He keeps delaying taking such an irrevocable step. There will be such a harrowing period to push through, for all of them, once he has done so.

Though when he thinks ‘for ages’ - that is, that he’s been planning this ‘for ages’-  it’s not precisely accurate. Hovering it has been for several - how many he can’t say, now - years but It’s only been over the past ten months that the situation has become starkly impossible.

Choosing and buying a present for her, to mark today, has felt wrong. It has been, is, wrong. A person should only give a present because he wants to, because it’s a symbolic expression of caring. In the case of a wife, loving.

The sad and unavoidable truth is that he no longer cares, let alone loves. Indeed it is stronger than that; he actively does not care. He dislikes his wife. He cannot respect her. He doesn’t hate her. That would be too strong and imply, at bottom, love. Despising and hating are quite different things. He’s some sort of throwback but can’t help the fact: if someone is dishonourable, he can’t like them. Honour is a dated word in the world. But lies sicken him.

                                                                                 *

Imo of course will not let him continue his pretence of sleep.  She has danced around to his side of the bed, and ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ She bounces up to lie his chest, and pulls the quilt down to fully expose his face. With her thumb and forefinger she gently prises open his tightly closed eyes. ‘I know you’re awake in there,’ she says. Her springy dark hair is tousled from her pillow and her cheeks are pink. His sweet Imo. He clasps his arms around her and pulls her down against him, and can feel her heart beating through the two layers of her nightie and his nightshirt. They all have the same kind of night wear, Swedish, ordered by Tilly from a catelogue. It’s part of her notion of them, a smiling quartet like a catelogue family, and she often orders sets of things for them.  The current pajamas are bright green and blue stripes. Permanently smiling, such a family is meant to be. Well, he has to smile at Imo.

And he watches Sam who shouts, ‘Catch!’ and throws high into the air a small round package, and laughs as his mother catches it and turns it in her hands. He has done the wrapping himself, using a lot of Scotch tape. She shakes it; she smells it. She is grinning. She has always loved presents.

‘Oh, I want to guess a little. I won’t open it till we go downstairs.’  She leans over and kisses Magnus. ‘Let’s be up! You’re awake at last. I’ve been lying here for ages while you were still sounders.’  She kisses his cheek. ‘I wanted to give you a little shake but I didn’t. Wasn’t I kind?’

Of course she’d not have guessed he was shamming. She’s not the most observant of creatures, despite her conviction, often spoken, that she is singularly so. It’s not just spoken by her, either. Other people often remark on ‘Tilda’s’ intuition, her attention to little details, her astute sizing up of a situation, not realizing that it is she who has claimed the talent rather than ever displayed it. It, somewhat blackly, amuses Magnus the way people so often will accept the statements uttered by someone with a forceful personality. Tilly is far from the only person he knows who puts about a smoke screen. In her case, there’s the added irony that she even believes it herself. So - is it even a smoke screen? ‘I do seem to notice things that others miss, just the little subtle messages - body language, tone of voice,’ she often says, or something along those lines. ‘I’m funny that way.’ She’ll add a little self-mockery, underlining the lightness with which she wears her mystique.

He staggers out of bed, Imo clinging to him. ‘You go down with Mummy,’ he says, peeling away her hands. ‘I’ll be down in a few minutes.’ Imo looks up at him frowning. And then smiles.

‘Okie-dokie.’  He and she have a tight bond: they’re never really cross at each other. Sam is a darker horse.

‘Oh, but I want to open my pressies!’ Tilly puts on a plaintive voice making Magnus wince inwardly.

‘Well, go ahead,’ he says, ‘but I have to go pee. And maybe I’ll shave. I won’t be long.’  Having indulged himself in some anti-Tilly thinking, he needs some minutes alone. Needless to say, she’s picked up nothing of his reluctance to enter a day where she is ‘special.’

Her obliviousness of others’ separate and distinct emotional worlds, specifically of course, his, will make what is coming a lightning bolt out of nowhere. She’ll have picked up no clues in advance. Such complacence as she possesses makes for terrifying vulnerability. Sad, really.

He feels pity for her. Contempt, yes, but he does have room for pity as well. He can’t help it.  One feels dread to inflict a blow, however deserved, on someone so insouciant, so oblivious of harm poised to strike. Soon. But not today. He’ll give her a day’s grace. Yet one more! He’s said that to himself many times, and again postponed having to see her incredulous face, to bring down upon his head her tears and fury. One more day, for himself, then, as well as Tilly.

He never thinks of her by the tiresome new moniker she has moved to, Tilda. ‘I am beginning a new chapter,’ she had announced.  

Her ability to move into different roles is part of her cleverness and why people find her exciting.

It is also, and more significantly, what has destroyed them.

She said, ‘I will now be Tilda,’ and thereafter assumed the appearance of a new dignity. She walked holding her head higher, moving more slowly and with longer steps. Her entrance into a room took on a new significance. People looked up.

Up to then her main role had been as Sweet Tilly, his slightly childish, adorable and adoring wife. But even then there were sometimes other lightning-swift switches of identity. There was another person that he glimpsed sometimes for a dislocating moment. Yes, he can call up those occasions of bewilderment even from quite early in their marriage. But when exactly the first time was he can’t recall. Her shifts back and forth were so sudden, her ‘normal’ mask in place so swiftly, he’d lose, till much later, the memory of what he’s seen, if only for a second or two.  Soemtimes he’d wake in the night and the most recent incident would pop into his mind, as if it were a photograph. Tilly’s face. She is coming in the door and there is a sly and amused and sensual look on her face. She is lighted up by something, and he thinks, what has happened? And then she is hers usual self again and he forgets. Until the image jolts him awake at two in the morning.

But he knows now that he was in some subliminal way aware of her betrayal of him long before he had had the full evidence before his eyes. He had not been entirely surprised and that made it easier, both to cope with inwardly, and to hide outwardly.

That had been almost exactly a year ago. His coming upon her that day was a complete surprise, a fluke.

It had taken a second or two for him to take in what he was seeing, to realize that it was actually her. She did not see him: his existance had no relevance to who she was being just then - and those moments of bemusement he’d experienced over the years all lined up. Click. He knew.

It was the purest chance, his coming into that cafe just then. It was nowhere near his work and not the sort of place he frequented, especially at lunch time. It was very French, very white-tableclothed, fussy, with the kind of fancied-up, besauced food he didn’t care for. He had only popped in because Nigel, a graduate student who worked with him, had been stuck, needed a message taken to his mother-in-law who was most probably, but not definitely, to come here for lunch today. Magnus had wanted a walk to clear his head. Walking swiftly for miles through the city was the way he liked to let an intransigent problem start to untangle itself. He would get back to his lab, sit down and his computer, and find something had been released and he could carry on. So - here he was, on the look-out for a woman he’d just met onceto give her the news that her daughter was in labour and had gone up to the hospital. The back of his mind was on his work and the forefront on Nigel, Lillian, and Lillian’s mother. He was hoping that he’d recognize her, if indeed she was within this too-warm, rather crowded restaurant. He stood just within the narrow entrance-way. It was a sunny day outside which made the place seem dark and shadowy, apart from all the white napiery.

He didn’t see any sign of the woman he was looking out for, no back-of-head was sporting her looped up golden hairstyle.

But then - he saw someone far more familiar to him than Lillian’s mother. Tilly. Tilly sitting over near the window. Her profile was at first too dark against the light behind for him to make out her expression. But then he saw how her cheek lifted in a closed-mouth smile and how she dropped her lashes looked out from under them and leaned  towards the man she was seated across from. She was holding one of his hands. She she lifted it, turned it over and pressed her lips to the man’s palm.

The man: Magnus’s eyes took in that other profile, the face so close to his wife’s. It was no one he knew. He saw dark hair, thick, worn rather long. Tousled even, and falling in a swath over his forehead. Hair that might not have seen a brush since rising from his pillow. A shadowed jaw indicated carelessness about shaving, or, again, a hasty tumble out of bed.

Was it a handsome face? He wouldn’t say that, but even he, as another man, could pick up an aura of sexuality. The wide mouth was closed, smiling very slightly. The man reached out the hand unclasped by Tilly and stroked the side of her neck, his fingers slipping a little under the edge of her loose shirt. He himself was wearing a somewhat grubby-looking fisherman’s-style sweater. The cuffs were stretched and completely covered his wrists, even part of his hands. They were narrow hands. There was something catlike, almost genderless, about him. Magnus himself was never able to stand a sweater falling over his hands like that. Or to sit in that folded over way, as this man did, leaning towards Magnus’s wife and whispering to her.

He realized that Tilly’s hair was messy too. He hadn’t taken that in at first. Curly hair can often look wild. But generally not as wild, as poking up at the back, as at this moment.                     

Magnus backed out of restaurant. The details, stared at for perhaps only one full minute, stayed before his eyes for the rest of the day.  

                                                                        *

Shaved and dressed, he enters the kitchen on this thirtieth birthday morning of hers. He sees the trio seated at the long oak table in the window where they always have breakfast, the two sweet children on the window seat, his terrible wife with back to him. Her hair is piled and pinned up and the tender back of her neck is exposed, rising above the bright blue of her dressing gown collar.   

He finds himself suddenly very clear in his head.  He cannot imagine how he has waited so long to do this.

‘Children,’ he says. ‘I need to talk to your mother and I need you both to stay here and finish your breakfast while I do so.’  They look up in surprise at his tone of voice, so serious.

But, ‘Okiedokey,’ Imo says. He knows she is thinking it is something to do with a birthday surprise, that his seriousness is of the mock variety.  Sam frowns but then waves his milk-dripping spoon. His mouth is too full for speech. For her part, Tilly leaps up and laughs, and sweeps ahead of him out of the room.

She too thinks a treat is afoot.

                                                              

‘The den?’ she asks, ‘will that do?’

He feels none of the pity he’d thought he would, when this moment was only in prospect.

It is the vivid recalling he just did while shaving that has done it. Reliving that moment in the restaurant. And other moments, other glimpses, other phone calls overheard. Many others, once he was alerted to them.

He discovers there is something satistfying about savouring incipient cruelty. He closes the door of the den behind them, slowly. Slowly he turns to her.

A pleasure delayed is a pleasure multiplied. He waits a little longer. He smiles.

And then he speaks.

But What Did It All Mean???

                                              

     There was an image which would come to her from time to time in the middle of the night. It was of a high and narrow door made of grey and splintery planks. She was moving towards it and must go through. As she approached, it opened automatically. Her imagination took her no further than just over the threshold. She was inside. And she could not go back. Nor could she see forward. Then her mind would slip back and bring her again to that moment of entry. That she tortured herself with: the door would swing wide, and, willy-nilly, her feet clamped on time’s conveyer belt she would be carried through it. The movement would be steady, slow, and inexorable and there could be no clutching at the door frame, no racing backwards against time’s pull. As in a dream, she would have no control. Once on the other side, she would find herself metamorphosed:  somehow, in a twinkling, she would have become that most despised of human creatures, an old woman.  And then?

     What would then ensue she could not guess. From the ‘life’ side of the door, the terraine beyond was impenetrably misty. Her imagination dodged offering her anything at all specific. But she couldn’t help but be aware – again only in flashes at 2 am - that the mist hid bogs, sudden drop-offs, precipices impossible to scale. The air would be cold and at the same time stuffy and foetid. Such companions as would have entered just before or just after her – Daphne, Celia, Rachel, for example, all born the same year - would soon start falling out of her sight. One by one, they would be lost to crevasses, sucked down into swamps. Or she might be first. Her friends would turn and call out to her, ‘Anna, Anna! Stay!’ as she sank. She’d try to answer, and be unable, wet clay filling her mouth and her nostrils.

     Seventy, then, was both impossible, and inevitable.

                                                                       *

     The sixties had been a pleasant plateau. Traversing its sunny upland landscape, she’d got accustomed to being at first merely in late middle age and then, very gradually, elderly. Elderly turned out to be more than just possible. It could even be considered the best yet. One was beyond the bodily urges that had created so much havoc earlier; one could actually choose, consciously choose, what one did, and with whom.

     Old age would be another matter, however, and after seventy surely one was that thing, old. Old meant one had entered the final stage. Only a dwindling, a letting go of more and more, was ahead. One would have less and less choice, and about anything.

                                                                      *

     And then a day after the fateful event, she woke up feeling exactly the same as ever.

     The so-serious birthday had been marked by a party. All her friends expected her to have one and so she did, and the preparations for it and the having of it distracted her so she’d barely so much as glanced in the mirror to see the new, now old, self. Maybe that was the point of such parties. Snatched up in the laughter and music – Grant had brought his guitar and they’d all joined in the singing, the songs of their youth transporting them back: If I had  Hammer, Michelle, Ma Belle, Lemon Tree – she felt at most twenty-six. The year she’d run away from her first marriage, driven away actually, or motored (the car was a Wolsley).

     Lying in bed the next morning, at first she even forgot for some while that she’d crossed the dreaded threshold. ‘Here Comes the Sun’ sang in her head and she hummed along, and smiled, remembering how wild she’d been, those first years when she’d been out of her first marriage and on her own. It felt not long ago at all. She stretched her legs, enjoying the feel of her new linen sheets, and then sat up, stuffing another pillow under her head so she could lean back again yet see out the window.

     It was another lovely July day. The dawn sky was pale lemon. The sea, the triangle of it she could see between oak and chestnut branches, was smooth slate. Within an hour, sky and sea would be almost indistinguishable one from another, both a strong, bright blue. She loved very early mornings, always had. Even as a little girl she had jumped out of bed before anyone else to possess the world alone.

     It was as she walked in her bare feet over the cool floorboards and entered the dimness of her living room that she remembered. That was when it came over her: she had entered her new landscape. Yet she felt exactly as she always had.

     But could that be true? How much of who she was now was really the same person as the child, the girl, the young woman, and so on up to this threshold she’d just been carried through on that conveyer belt she’d imagined? 

     She made a cup of coffee and took it back with her to the bedroom, set it on the bedside table and climbed back into bed. The sky was already a clear, skim-milky blue.

    She thought, I am seventy years old. Me!

     But who exactly was she? She had been so many people, it sometimes seemed. Her life, if it were a novel, would be a disconnected one, much too choppy to satisfy a reader who wanted some deep meaning to be revealed before the tale was over, the book closed. It lacked a coherent theme, and more important and even odder, it lacked a consistent central character. The heroine moved through so many events. Relationships swept her up and then, a few pages later, dropped her.  Or she did the chucking herself and began a fresh page with a new chapter heading. A person, or a whole set of people and a whole complicated stage set, were left behind her. Our heroine stepped into a new scene and apparently became someone else. Even her name changed, not just her surname but her first, the one most her. Anne became Anyusha, and she became Annie. Eventually Annie became Anna.

     But that central character, Anne, Anyusha (she was the most remote of all), Annie, Anna she was the same person really. In her core she had to have been. – So who exactly was she? And who is she?  Now, today?

                                                                        *

     The year she came of age….that phrase slid into her head and then she pondered it. The truth was that she had no idea what it meant, in terms of herself. What was ‘coming of age’? What age? It must mean becoming grown up, that was obvious, but she had no sense that that had ever really happened. She’d never become ‘a grownup,’ not the way her parents and their generation had been grownups, not even now. Their personalities had coalesced long before she knew them into something with a nice, clear outline. Or so it had seemed to her. They were what they were. They did not change. They married young and stayed married to the same person, whom they loved forever as they had promised to do. They loved their children steadily too, despite those children’s different, and sometimes erring and disappointing, natures.

     Of the people she had been, Anna feels closest now to her young girl self. Her joys now are the same simple ones Anne loved at twelve: scrambling over rocks – never mind much less nimbly – swimming in the sea or in a pool, watching tree tops in any season. Wind and weather. Reading, puzzles. Music: lying in bed, the light from the hall falling in a yellow band into the bedroom she shared with her sister, and listening to her mother playing Beethoven Sonatas down in the living room.  Later, playing them herself. The rapture music can bring is the same, maybe even more piercing. Laughing with her sister. Experiencing through all the years the same mixture of protectiveness and deep pleasure at seeing her brother come towards her.  And always, the enormous satisfaction of entering other lives and landscapes, in books.

     As a girl she’d been intrepid. Alone, she’d prowled the woods, sailed her boat in stormy weather. Perched high above treetops, she’d helped a carpenter she adored shingle a roof. At eighteen, she’d been the first, and quite fearless, traveler to cross a particular border into Eastern Europe.  

     She often thought that it had been her joy in reading that undid her. All that reading, combined with her heroic loneliness – all those hours in the woods, out in a boat, or all alone abroad– she had become a romantic without realizing. That the books she read were classics disguised their fateful power. They were both enlarging her and fatally reducing her. How could she be, how could she even want to be, ultimately, different from Anna, from Emma (Bovary, that is, not Woodhouse), Natasha, Tess, or, later, Lady Chatterly? She’d simply had no idea how long life went on, that a dramatic embracing of Fate would lead to a long stretch of fear and entrapment.

     The two urges – to be the lone adventurer, and to submit herself utterly, utterly to love - were irreconcilable.

      Chapters. She attempted some headings. First, and easiest, Intrepid Girlhood. And then -  Womanhood. (a round soft word like a moan) and central to that, Becoming Anyusha,  or the Balkan bride.  Then, Motherhood, and gathering the strength to flee the Slavic trap. And then – Girlhood, yes, Girlhood Again, the rediscovery of her power. The best years came at that point. Single Motherhood. Meant to be bad but not being, not for her. Instead being adventure, financial independence.  Fun. And – the loss of it again. Again! How had she done that?  And Another Escape.

     It was love that undid her every time she was undone. Reaching for it, mistaking it, blindly holding on to a chimera of it. Perhaps it had been mere lust, each and every time, and she’d had to dress it up. There had been no sexual education at the time she grew up. She’d only had books to go by. She’d assumed that being entranced by a man’s a man’s profile, or his legs running across a tennis court, meant she loved him. And would forever. She had thought that every time.

    There were too many chapters. Too many chapters and still no clear theme.

     Or perhaps there was. Perhaps the theme was that she went for it with arms outstretched, every single time – danger. Whether in the shape of a man or a landscape, or a border or a continent to cross.  The adventure of it.

     And she couldn’t be sorry. Her life had been full. Rich. Scary sometimes. But she’d done what she most wanted to do, really. The key things. Raised her beautiful children, and done it alone – so much easier. Had oodles of grandchildren to love. Written a book that was praised and won prizes. Visited many, many countries, mostly alone: a person alone notices more and connects better with new people. She still swam a kilometre every day and walked at least a couple.

     Sitting up against her pillows, Anna watched dawn life carrying on outside in the trees, birds darting.  A bee buzzed into the room and out again. She heard a car pass slowly down the steep lane outside her hedge. She couldn’t see the lawn but she could imagine how the grass would be wet with dew. It still would be wet in an hour, under the trees. She would take her breakfast on a tray to eat on the verandah. The sun hit there first and would have already dried the table top and her wooden chair.

     Something funny occurred to her: how much she was the same. Old age looming as it had, her fear of it, was just the way her marriages had loomed in the lead up to them. She’d seen them, in advance, as large and certainly fatal disasters she still planned to jump into. As if that was all there was to it. As if it would be quick, the life thereafter. Each time she forgot how long the days and years would be once life got going on the other side of the plunge.

     And she had done the same thing about becoming seventy. Her image of the door, how she would transform into a crone from one day to the next. It wasn’t going to be like that. This time, she was free. The change hadn’t been to put herself at the mercy of someone else. This time she would be making the choices. And she might live for years – perhaps twenty, as her mother and grandmother had.

     She decided she’d stick with being elderly for a while yet. ‘Old’ could wait till eighty, unless she decided then that ninety was more like it.

    

     

     

Leonard Cohen and I - Almost

 

 

 

Leonard Cohen and I almost knew each other. Our lives touched briefly several times, twice only in print.

 

I discovered many years later, after he'd long become famous, that as students we had shared the front page of the McGill Daily. My mother had saved the paper and I discovered it after she died. The headline was 'Literary Contest Winners 1954: First Place Poetry, Leonard Cohen for 'The Sparrows;' First Place Fiction, A.R. Coleman, for 'The Secret Place.' Of course, as everyone in the world knows, he went on to fame and fortune as a writer, and later, singer. For my part, I was snatched up and whirled along by life - children, teaching, marriages. Then at long last I returned to writing and published a book ('I'll Tell You a Secret,' 2004. I seem to favour telling secrets). When the French edition came out in 2007, (titled 'Sept etes de ma jeunesse') a favourable review appeared in a French paper and there, on the same page as my name, was Leonard's, whose latest book was also being reviewed.  A funny coincidence only I would recognize. Those were our connections on the page, as it were.

 

I also had a number of real-life occasions in Leonard's company. He was a friend of my best friend Judy, long ago in Montreal and North Hatley, Quebec. Whenever Leonard came home from Greece or wherever he'd been, Judy gave a party for him. Or he'd just come over to North Hatley from Ways Mills where he had a house. Thus we were often together in the same group though we never connected intimately. But one evening we almost did.

 

It was the summer of 1965. We were on the verandah of Judy's lakeside cottage, the only light a few candles, the dark water below us. I was wearing a very short little shift dress I loved. It was cream coloured with pale green flowers. We were all beautiful in those days, girls, (we thought of ourselves as girls not women, in those pre-feminist days), and slim and brown with summer sun, with long floating hair. I was talking to whoever was my love of the moment. Leonard was across a little way talking to someone else. I saw him suddenly glance across, then hold my eyes with his. He gave me a deep and speaking stare and then he stepped across to me. He placed his hand on my stomach. I could feel its warmth through the thin silk of the dress. He left it there for a moment and then stroked me tenderly. I was taller than he and I remember looking down at his intense, slightly smiling face. Then he stepped away and we both went back to our conversations. For some reason I've always remembered that moment. An almost moment.

 

Today it would be interpreted as sexual harassment perhaps. It wasn't. It was a fleeting tender connection. Something could have happened but did not. A path opened that neither of us was able to go down just then.

 

What Snow Can Do

                                   

Tilly knelt on the window seat and watched Magnus set off down the white street. Her breath misted the glass and she wiped the blur away. She could tell he was laughing, that he knew  that her eyes were following him: he was taking deliberately huge steps, to exaggerate the depth of the snow. But really no exaggerating was needed.  Tilly had never in her life seen it so deep. It lay in smooth round pillows, king-sized pillows. Bolster-sized pillows. And more was falling all the time.

Long ago, when she was a small child, snow had seemed like this: she remembered pushing through it, freshly fallen and light as feathers, waist deep. This storm had to be more extreme than any of those yester-year falls: that snow would have been barely knee-high to a tall man like Magnus.

He was making his way along in the road. The sidewalk was hopelessly buried under its smooth, gently sloping quilt, but a single car - they’d heard it - had gone by with chains as he was putting on his parka and its tread was not entirely obliterated. Magnus was trying to keep within one of the narrow, rather swerving, grooves it had created. He kept floundering out of it, into snow that was almost to the top of his thighs. Once he did topple right over. She saw only a kicking foot. But then he was up - a snowman - and he turned and waved at her. His cheeks were pink and his toque, his eyebrows, his beard, were white. His wide smile - she saw the flash of his teeth, the red of lips - made him for a moment look dog-like. A huge and friendly Pyrenese, grinning, his fur-mittened hand a paw. She waved back but wasn’t sure if he could make her out, behind the glass. But he’d know she’d be watching. Then he was gone around the corner.

The red brick of the houses opposite was muted to a fuzzy pink, the snow clinging to the rough surface. Even as she watched, the tracks of the car and of Magnus’s tumble were swiftly being erased. The world was utterly silent and she quite alone, held within some sort of magic, held within a secret. Now that Magnus was gone, it was as if she were the only creature alive.

Tilly always loved extreme weather, noisy storms when the world became something quite other, dark, wild and strange. Or, as now, blank, white and silent. Absolutely anything might happen at such a time. Anything. Something - amazing. The world was a tabula rasa. And so still. The sense of quiet was only intensified by the falling flakes. Silence sifting down into silence.

She liked the variousness of life’s moments, and the speed with which one succeeded another.  An hour ago all had been heat and colour, and fast movement, she and Magnus clutching each other under the pile of Hudson Bay blankets, his gasping breath loud in her ear. That, then, had been as real as the cold glass and the white silence, now.

One of the woollen blankets was new and bright red. That one had been a wedding present. The other was old and had been her father’s. Washed many times, it was faded and felted, more pink than red, a blanket with a history. She liked to think of her father, young, and sleeping under it,  far in the north, in the Yukon where she’d never been. Where he had died. Her mother had told her how he wore a warm woolen hat in bed, it was so cold. He’d have his Arctic sleeping bag over him too.

Tilly could call up no true memory that would allow her to know him. But there was with Magnus - sometimes, only sometimes - a faint echo of a warmth she’d forgotten and could almost catch. It was one of the many reasons she loved her husband.

How she loved Magnus!

She particularly liked making love in the mornings, as they had today, with the snow piled nearly half-way up the bedroom window, giving the room a strange polar light, a Yukon light perhaps, and it being a Saturday so she had any amount of time and a lazy day ahead. Though she knew he would almost certainly go in to the lab later. Maybe he needn’t.

But then he had sat up and started to drag on his nightshirt again, not to be cold in the chilly air of the room, while she curled around behind him and hugged him and tried to haul him back under the covers. She pressed her mouth against his bare back and inhaled his smell. But he had wrestled himself away, pulled the nightshirt down and gone leaping downstairs. She heard his bounding, descending steps and the thump as he jumped the last three and landed. He always did that and he always was the one who made them coffee. Then he’d come up and be cosy with her again. They would drink their coffee together.

Married mornings were joy. They loved each other enormously and equally, and liked to tell each other so. She had no idea which of them said it most. It seemed impossible that anyone else could have experienced love as keenly as they did. If many, if any, other people felt like this, one of them would say, the world would have to be an entirely different place. And it wasn’t. They had to be unique.

She watched him, his big hands holding his mug, his hair messy and a bit long at the back. It clumped just over the collar of the striped nightshirt and he had to toss it back out of his eyes. His hair was dark blond, his beard redder. Her hair was dark, almost black, and she liked it short, clipped close to her head and tightly curly. They both enjoyed how unlike they were, different versions of  human. They speculated how their babies would emerge - pale or dark. Tall or small. Two of each type would be best. They had large family plans. So far, she wasn’t pregnant but it was early days. They’d married in September. She certainly would like to know she was pregnant by Christmas though.

Anyway, now she would get dressed and go out into the white morning herself. She hopped across the cold floor to find her clothes.

                                                                  *

 She was only down their own block when it happened.

She was stumbling and laughing to herself at how tricky it was to keep upright. She was floundering even more than Magnus had done, being shorter and without even the car track he’d had, and - a person bumped right into her. Neither of them could have seen the other until too late. It was impossible to see a thing beyond two inches. She had been entirely alone in a world of flying flakes and now she wasn’t.

It was a mild sort of bump, both people so bundled up, but with footing so precarious, she fell. So did the other person, almost on top of her but managing not to somehow. But she could feel what had to be a leg on top of one of hers. She lay laughing: the snow prickled coldly on every side of her. Her eye lashes were clotted with it and all she could see beside her was whiteness, and above, the falling, swirling flakes.

Then a face, a man’s, loomed. The other person had struggled to sit and his face was above hers. Eyes were looking, very startled, into hers.

But she knew him!

She heard his voice: ‘Matilda!’

She had never heard him say her name before, but he pronounced it as she used to imagine he might, his accent giving the ‘i’ an ‘ee’ sound.    

                                                                    *

It was a voice from a time long past.

There was a self she had been, before, a self she had thought gone forever. She had been Matilda Quinn, Miss Quinn to her professors, a student. That was the person who had known this face and this voice. Young. Young! Another person. Long, long ago, it had been. Three whole years. She had been almost a child then.

It felt so very long ago. It was long ago, in the real and living way she had discovered that time actually worked. Time was not lived at the same pace, not in her experience. Some periods were stretched out, and passed, oh, so slowly. Whole seaons could pool, and linger. But time could also telescope on itself. There were moments - they felt like mere moments - when she leaped across a bank into another chapter, as if into a boat that then sailed away. That had been how it felt to her when she started to love Magnus: she at once stopped being a girl. Her old self, a vague and dreaming shadow, was left behind, was a dwindling figure on a receding shore. The new Tilly Stuart, a woman, seldom looked back at her.  

 It was that dwindled-away girl who had sat in the front row of this man’s classes and gazed at him. He had been her professor and she had loved him.

She had watched him and imagined things about him, even dreamed of him, but she had never known if he ever really saw her, saw her as an individual, as pretty or interesting. Perhaps he had? Sometimes his eyes would kindle a little and flash in her direction, as if he did truly see her, as if he noticed how she sat very still, always in the same place, alert to each expression of his face, each word he spoke. Is a person watched aware of the watcher? Can intensity of feeling be catching?

There were perhaps a hundred students in that class.

And now on this day of silent snow, when she had even felt something hovering - magic, transporting, secret -  his face hovered over hers.

It was not a position she was used to being in with anyone but Magnus, a man’s skin so close: she could see the wetness on it of the melting snow, how beads of moisture clung to his thick brows.  She could see that he hadn’t shaved that morning: a haze of dark stubble shadowed the lower part of his face. She could see that he had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He was wearing a dark blue knitted hat that looked home-made. ‘Matilda!’ He said her name again. ‘Mateelda.’ And he leaned down even closer. She felt his warm breath, smelled coffee on it.

He was actually leaning on her.

And then he kissed her.

Time then played tricks. Or that was how it seemed later when she tried to remember the sequence of it all. They were lying in the snow. Then they were up on their feet and he was laughing.

He was excited.

She was too.

There was running, snow being tossed by flying feet. The slamming of a door.

Then - somehow - how had time jumped to this? - they were pulling off their clothes. They were inside a house, her house.

Though it wasn’t hers really, of course. That jolt of truth brought Magnus into her mind’s eye for a dislocating second.

‘What a pleasant dwelling,’ her professor said. He was kneeling on the rose and blue patterned persian rug, glancing, as he did so, out into the hall they had hurried through, as if appreciating the polished hardwood floor and the grandfather clock. Then his eyes did that glinting flash at  her, the way they’d sometimes done in class, only this time so close that she could see a tiny reflection of herself in his pupils. He pulled off his shirt, then gripped the ribbing at the bottom of her sweater, and whirled it over her head.

‘It’s my parents-in-law’s house. They’re on sabbatical,’ she said. She had a flashing image of her father-in-law. They were in that kindly man’s study because it was the room immediately inside the front door. How puzzled he would be, were he to suddenly return. But Magnus and his father were tiny figures of no consequence at this moment.

Her professor was naked. She placed her hands on him.

He was hers at last. How amazing that life had allowed her this.

The weight of him was less than she was used to. His smell was different too, and the way he moved,  which was slow, sensual, almost langorous. He was taking his time. Past his shoulder she could see the snow still falling, piling higher and higher on the outside sill. She bit his white shoulder, gently.

                                                                      *

After he was gone, she walked slowly up the stairs, naked still and carrying her clothes. In the bath, she lay back and found she could hardly believe what had just happened. It seemed it couldn’t have. But she knew it had.

Later, she straightened the persian rug.

Making herself a sandwich, she decided not to feel guilty. What had happened had nothing to do with Magnus and her, with their life now. It was a completion of something from the past.

She ate her sandwich standing up at the window. She wanted to watch the snow filling in the double set of footprints on the steps.

She decided to picture her life as a text: what happened in the study was a paragraph that could be bracketed off. An arrow could send it safely back to that earlier chapter where it belonged. Even better, she envisaged a text on a screen and her finger tapping, one light touch on the delete button whisking it all away.

No, that was not in fact better. She didn’t want it gone, just in its proper place. It should have happened back then. She’d think of it like that. Because she did want to think of it.

                                                                            *

 By the time Magnus came home, he had assumed his normal large and lively size in her mind and she hugged him and hugged him. ‘I missed you,’ she said. ‘You were gone so long. Hours and hours.’ 

He laughed at her. ‘Not really! Tilly, it’s only two o’clock. I left the lab early. I suddenly wanted to be here with you.’  He drew back and looked at her. ‘I suddenly had such  a queer feeling. As if I might have dreamed our life. As if you might not really be here. Crazy.’ He laughed again. ‘It must have been the snow. The whole world feels unreal. It’s felt weird all day. I was the only person to go in today, too. It was kind of spooky being alone in that great big building.’

‘But I am here. I’ve been here right along.’  She kissed both his cold cheeks and then his warm pink mouth.

The whole rest of the day, the professor receded. He became a tiny hot coal.

In the middle of the night she woke with a jolt. The snow had stopped falling at last and the moon hung there, a pale, brilliant disk. Its light  fell in rectangles across their bed. It bleached the colour out of the quilt.

She thought, ‘If I am pregnant, how will I know which man is the father?’

She pictured millions of tiny sperms, wee tadpoles, battling it out. Magnus’s, the professor’s. She thought, ‘Magnus is much younger; his will be swifter.’

But she would never know for sure.

In the morning she stood in the window and stared out at the snow banks. There was no sun, for which she was glad.

She needed the blank innocence of a white world for longer.