Dancing Girls and Other Stories

The Grave of the Famous Poet

There are a couple of false alarms before we actually get there, towns we pass through that might be it but aren’t, uninformative stores and houses edging the road, no signs. Even when we’ve arrived we aren’t sure; we peer out, looking for a name, an advertisement. The bus pauses.

“This has to be it,” I say. I have the map.

“Better ask the driver,” he says, not believing me.

“Have I ever been wrong?” I say, but I ask the driver anyway. I’m right again and we get off.

We’re in a constricted street of grey flat-fronted houses, their white lace curtains pulled closed, walls rising cliff-straight and lawnless from the narrow sidewalk. There are no other people; at least it isn’t a tourist trap. I have to eat, we’ve been travelling all morning, but he wants to find a hotel first, he always needs a home base. Right in front of us there’s a building labelled HOTEL. We hesitate outside it, patting down our hair, trying to look acceptable. When he finally grits up the steps with our suitcase the doors are locked. Maybe it’s a pub.

Hoping there may be a place further along, we walk down the hill, following the long stone wall, crossing the road when the sidewalk disappears at the corners. Cars pass us, driving fast as though on their way to somewhere else.

At the bottom of the hill near the beach there’s a smattering of shops and a scarred, listing inn. Radio music and hilarious voices from inside.

“It seems local,” I say, pleased.

“What does ‘Inn’ mean here?” he asks, but I don’t know. He goes in to see; then he comes out, dispirited. I’m too tired to think up solutions; I’m scarcely noticing the castle on the hill behind us, the sea.

“No wonder he drank,” he says.

“I’ll ask,” I say, aggrieved: it was his idea, he should do the finding. I try the general store. It’s full of people, women mostly, with scarves on their heads and shopping baskets. They say there is no hotel; one woman says her mother has some rooms free though, and she gives me directions while the others gaze pityingly, I’m so obviously a tourist.

The house, when we find it, is eighteenth century and enormous, a summer residence when the town was fashionable. It offers Bed and Breakfast on a modest sign. We’re glad to have something spelled out for us. The door is open, we go into the hall, and the woman emerges from the parlour as though startled; she has a forties bobby-soxer hairdo with curious frontal lobes, only it’s grey. She’s friendly to us, almost sprightly, and yes, she has a room for us. I ask, in a lowered voice, if she can tell us where the grave is.

“You can almost see it right from the window,” she says, smiling—she knew we would ask that—and offers to lend us a book with a map in it of the points of interest, his house and all. She gets the book, scampers up the wide maroon-carpeted staircase to show us our room. It’s vast, chill, high-ceilinged, with floral wallpaper and white-painted woodwork; instead of curtains the windows have inside shutters. There are three beds and numerous dressers and cupboards, crowded into the room as though in storage, a chunky bureau blocking the once-palatial fireplace. We say it will be fine.

“The grave is just up the hill, that way,” she says, pointing through the window. We can see the tip of a church. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”

I change into jeans and boots while he opens and closes the drawers on all the pieces of furniture, searching for ambushes or reading matter. He discovers nothing and we set out.

We ignore the church—he once said it was unremarkable—and head for the graveyard. It must rain a lot: ivy invades everything, and the graveyard is lush with uncut grass, succulent and light green. Feet have beaten animal-trail paths among the tombstones. The graves themselves are neatly tended, most of them have the grass clipped and fresh flowers in the tea-strainer-shaped flower holders. There are three old ladies in the graveyard now, sheaves of flowers in their arms, gladioli, chrysanthemums; they are moving among the graves, picking out the old flowers and distributing the new ones impartially, like stewardesses. They take us for granted, neither approaching nor avoiding us: we are strangers and as such part of this landscape.

We find the right grave easily enough; as the book says, it’s the only one with a wooden cross instead of a stone. The cross has been recently painted and the grave is planted with a miniature formal-garden arrangement of moss roses and red begonias; the sweet alyssum intended for a border hasn’t quite worked. I wonder who planned it, surely it wouldn’t have been her. The old ladies have been here and have left a vase, yellowish glassware of the kind once found in cereal boxes, with orange dahlias and spikes of an unknown pink flower. We’ve brought nothing and have no ceremonies to perform; we muse for an acceptable length of time, then retreat to the scroll-worked bench up the hill and sit in the sun, listening to the cows in the field across the road and the murmur of the ladies as they stoop and potter below us, their print dresses fluttering in the easy wind.

“It’s not such a bad place,” I say.

“But dull,” he answers.

We have whatever it was we came for, the rest of the day is our own. After a while we leave the graveyard and stroll back down the main street, holding hands absent-mindedly, looking in the windows of the few shops: an overpriced antique store, a handicrafts place with pottery and Welsh weaving, a nondescript store that sells everything, including girlie joke magazines and copies of his books. In the window, half-hidden among souvenir cups, maps and faded pennants, is a framed photograph of his face, three-quarters profile. We buy a couple of ice-cream bars; they are ancient and soapy.

We reach the bottom of the winding hill and decide to walk along to his house, which we can see, an indistinct white square separated from us by half a mile of rough beach. It’s his house all right, it was marked on the map. At first we have no trouble; there’s a wide uneven pathway, broken asphalt, the remains or perhaps the beginning of a road. Above us at the edge of the steep, leaf-covered cliff, what is left of the castle totters down, slowly, one stone a year. For him, turrets are irresistible. He finds a scrabbly trail, a children’s entrance up sheer mud.

He goes up sideways, crabwise, digging footholds with the sides of his boots. “Come on!” he shouts down. I’m hesitant but I follow. At the top he reaches his hand to me, but, perpendicular and with the earth beside me, afraid of losing my balance, I avoid it and scramble the last few feet, holding on to roots. In wet weather it would be impossible.

He’s ahead, eager to explore. The tunnel through the undergrowth leads to a gap in the castle wall; I follow his sounds, rustlings, the soft thud of his feet. We’re in the skeleton of a garden, the beds marked by brick borders now grass-infested, a few rose bushes still attempting to keep order in spite of the aphids, nothing else paying any attention. I bend over a rose, ivory hearted, browning at the edges; I feel like a usurper. He’s already out of sight again, hidden by an archway.

I catch up to him in the main courtyard. Everything is crumbling, stairways, ramparts, battlements; so much has fallen it’s hard for us to get our bearings, translate this rubbish back into its earlier clear plan.

“That must have been the fireplace,” I say, “and that’s the main gate. We must have come round from the back.” For some reason we speak in whispers; he tosses a fragment of stone and I tell him to be careful.

We go up the remnants of a stairway into the keep. It’s almost totally dark; the floors are earth-covered. People must come here though, there’s an old sack, an unidentifiable piece of clothing. We don’t stay long inside: I’m afraid of getting lost, though it’s not likely, and I would rather be able to see him. I don’t like the thought of finding his hand suddenly on me unannounced. Besides, I don’t trust the castle; I expect it to thunder down on us at the first loud laugh or false step. But we make it outside safely.

We pass beneath the gateway, its Norman curve still intact. Outside is another, larger courtyard, enclosed by the wall we have seen from outside and broken through; it has trees, recent trees not more than a hundred years old, dark-foliaged as etchings. Someone must come here to cut the grass: it’s short, hair-textured. He lies down on it and draws me down beside him and we rest on our elbows, surveying.

From the front the castle is more complete; you can see how it could once have been lived in by real people.

He lies down, closing his eyes, raising his hand to shade them from the sun. He’s pale and I realize he must be tired too. I’ve been thinking of my own lack of energy as something he has caused and must therefore be immune from.

“I’d like to have a castle like that,” he says. When he admires something he wants to own it. For an instant I pretend that he does have the castle, he’s always been here, he has a coffin hidden in the crypt, if I’m not careful I’ll be trapped and have to stay with him forever. If I’d had more sleep last night I’d be able to frighten myself this way but as it is I give up and lean back on the grass beside him, looking up at the trees as their branches move in the wind, every leaf sharpened to a glass-clear edge by my exhaustion.

I turn my head to watch him. In the last few days he’s become not more familiar to me as he should have but more alien. Close up, he’s a strange terrain, pores and hairs; but he isn’t nearer, he’s further away, like the moon when you’ve finally landed on it. I move back from him so I can see him better, he misinterprets, thinking I’m trying to get up, and stretches himself over me to prevent me. He kisses me, teeth digging into my lower lip; when it hurts too much I pull away. We lie side by side, both suffering from unrequited love.

This is an interval, a truce; it can’t last, we both know it, there have been too many differences, of opinion we called it but it was more than that, the things that mean safety for him mean danger for me. We’ve talked too much or not enough: for what we have to say to each other there’s no language, we’ve tried them all. I think of the old science-fiction movies, the creature from another galaxy finally encountered after so many years of signals and ordeals only to be destroyed because he can’t make himself understood. Actually it’s less a truce than a rest, those silent black-and-white comedians hitting each other until they fall down, then getting up after a pause to begin again. We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction. I wonder if they ever came here while he was still alive.

Right now though there’s neither love nor anger, no resentment, it’s a suspension, of fear even, like waiting for the dentist. But I don’t want him to die. I feel nothing but I concentrate, somebody’s version of God, I will him to exist, right now on the vacant lawn of this castle whose name we don’t know in this foreign town we’re in only because dead people are more real to him than living ones. Despite the mistakes I want everything to stay the way it is; I want to hold it.

He sits up: he’s heard voices. Two little girls, baskets over their arms as though for a picnic or a game, have come into the grounds and are walking towards the castle. They stare at us curiously and decide we are harmless. “Let’s play in the tower,” one calls and they run and disappear among the walls. For them the castle is ordinary as a backyard.

He gets up, brushing off bits of grass. We haven’t visited the house yet but we still have time. We find our break in the wall, our pathway, and slide back down to sea level. The sun has moved, the green closes behind us.

The house is further than it looked from the village. The semi-road gives out and we pick our way along the stoney beach. The tide is out; the huge bay stretches as far as we can see, a solid mud-flat except for the thin silty river that cuts along beside us. The dry part narrows and vanishes, we are stranded below the tide line, clambering over slippery masses of purplish-brown rock or squelching through the mud, thick as clotted cream. All around us is an odd percolating sound: it’s the mud, drying in the sun. There are gulls too, and wind bending the unhealthy-coloured rushes by the bank.

“How the hell did he get back and forth?” he says. “Think of doing this drunk on a dark night.”

“There must be a road further up,” I say.

We reach the house at last. Like everything else here it has a wall; this one is to keep out the waves at high tide. The house itself is on stilts, jammed up against the cliff, painted stone with a spindly-railed two-decker porch. It hasn’t been lived in for many years: one window is broken and the railings are beginning to go. The yard is weed-grown, but maybe it always was. I sit on the wall, dangling my legs, while he pokes around, examining the windows, the outhouse (which is open), the shed once used perhaps for a boat. I don’t want to see any of it. Graves are safely covered and the castle so derelict it has the status of a tree or a stone, but the house is too recent, it is still partly living. If I looked in the window there would be a table with dishes not yet cleared away, or a fresh cigarette or a coat just taken off. Or maybe a broken plate: they used to have fights, apparently. She never comes back and I can see why. He wouldn’t leave her alone.

He’s testing the railing on the second-storey porch; he’s going to pull himself up by it.

“Don’t do that,” I say wearily.

“Why not?” he says. “I want to see the other side.”

“Because you’ll fall and I don’t want to have to scrape you off the rocks.”

“Don’t be like that,” he says.

How did she manage? I turn my head away, I don’t want to watch. It will be such an effort, the police, I’ll have to explain what I was doing here, why he was climbing and fell. He should be more considerate. But for once he thinks better of it.

There is another road, we discover it eventually, along the beach and up an asphalt walk beside a neat inhabited cottage. Did they see us coming, are they wondering who we are? The road above is paved, it has a railing and a sign with the poet’s name on it, wired to the fence.

“I’d like to steal that,” he says.

We pause to view the house from above. There’s an old lady in a garden-party hat and gloves, explaining things to an elderly couple. “He always kept to himself, he did,” she is saying. “No one here ever got to know him really.” She goes on to detail the prices that have been offered for the house: America wanted to buy it and ship it across the ocean, she says, but the town wouldn’t let them.

We start back towards our room. Halfway along we sit down on a bench to scrape the mud from our boots; it clings like melted marshmallow. I lean back; I’m not sure I can make it to the house, whatever reserves my body has been drawing on are almost gone. My hearing is blurred and it’s hard to breathe.

He bends over to kiss me. I don’t want him to, I’m not calm now, I’m irritated, my skin prickles, I think of case histories, devoted wives who turn kleptomaniac two days a month, the mother who threw her baby out into the snow, it was in Reader’s Digest, she had a hormone disturbance, love is all chemical. I want it to be over, this long abrasive competition for the role of victim; it used to matter that it should finish right, with grace, but not now. One of us should just get up from the bench, shake hands and leave, I don’t care who is last, it would sidestep the recriminations, the totalling up of scores, the reclaiming of possessions, your key, my book. But it won’t be that way, we’ll have to work through it, boring and foreordained though it is. What keeps me is a passive curiosity, it’s like an Elizabethan tragedy or a horror movie, I know which ones will be killed but not how. I take his hand and stroke the back of it gently, the fine hairs rasping my fingertips like sandpaper.

We’d been planning to change and have dinner, it’s almost six, but back in the room I have only strength enough to pull off my boots, Then with my clothes still on I crawl into the enormous, creaking bed, cold as porridge and hammock-saggy. I float for an instant in the open sky on the backs of my eyelids, free fall, until sleep rushes up to meet me like the earth.

I wake up suddenly in total darkness. I remember where I am. He’s beside me but he seems to be lying outside the blankets, furled in the bedspread. I get stealthily out of the bed, grope to the window and open one of the wooden shutters. It’s almost as dark outside, there are no streetlights, but by straining I can read my watch; two o’clock. I’ve had my eight hours and my body thinks it’s time for breakfast. I notice I still have my clothes on, take them off and get back in bed, but my stomach won’t let me sleep. I hesitate, then decide it won’t do him any harm and turn on the bedside lamp. On the dresser there’s a crumpled paper bag; inside it is a Welsh cake, a soft white biscuit with currants in it. I bought it yesterday near the train station, asking in bakeries crammed with English buns and French pastries, running through the streets in a crazed search for local colour that almost made us late for the bus. Actually I bought two of them. I ate mine yesterday, this one is his, but I don’t care; I take it out of the bag and devour it whole.

In the mirror I’m oddly swollen, as though I’ve been drowned, my eyes are purple-circled, my hair stands out from my head like a second-hand doll’s, there’s a diagonal scarlike mark across my cheek where I’ve been sleeping on my face. This is what it does to you. I estimate the weeks, months, it will take me to recuperate. Fresh air, good food and plenty of sun.

We have so little time and he just lies there, rolled up like a rug, not even twitching. I think of waking him, I want to make love, I want all there is because there’s not much left. I start to think what he will do after I’m over and I can’t stand that, maybe I should kill him, that’s a novel idea, how melodramatic; nevertheless I look around the room for a blunt instrument; there’s nothing but the bedside lamp, a grotesque woodland nymph with metal tits and a lightbulb coming out of her head. I could never kill anyone with that. Instead I brush my teeth, wondering if he’ll ever know how close he came to being murdered, resolving anyway never to plant flowers for him, never to come back, and slide in among the chilly furrows and craters of the bed. I intend to watch the sun rise but I fall asleep by accident and miss it.

Breakfast, when the time for it finally comes, is shabby, decorous, with mended linens and plentiful but dinted silver. We have it in an ornate, dilapidated room whose grandiose mantelpiece now supports only china spaniels and tinted family photos. We’re brushed and combed, thoroughly dressed; we speak in subdued voices.

The food is the usual: tea and toast, fried eggs and bacon and the inevitable grilled tomato. It’s served by a different woman, grey-haired also but with a corrugated perm and red lipstick. We unfold our map and plan the route back; it’s Sunday and there won’t be a bus to the nearest railway town till after one, we may have trouble getting out.

He doesn’t like fried eggs and he’s been given two of them. I eat one for him and tell him to hack the other one up so it will look nibbled at least, it’s only polite. He is grateful to me, he knows I’m taking care of him, he puts his hand for a moment over mine, the one not holding the fork. We tell each other our dreams: his of men with armbands, later of me in a cage made of frail slatlike bones, mine of escaping in winter through a field.

I eat his grilled tomato as an afterthought and we leave.

Upstairs in our room we pack; or rather I pack, he lies on the bed.

“What’re we going to do till the bus comes?” he says. Being up so early unsettles him.

“Go for a walk,” I say.

“We went for a walk yesterday,” he says.

I turn around and he’s holding out his arms, he wants me to come and lie down beside him. I do and he gives me a perfunctory initial kiss and starts to undo my buttons. He’s using only his left hand, the right one is underneath me. He’s having trouble. I stand up and take off, reluctantly, the clothes I’ve so recently put on. It’s time for sex; he missed out on it last night.

He reaches up and hauls me in among the tangled sheets. I tense; he throws himself on me with the utilitarian urgency of a man running to catch a train, but it’s more than that, it’s different, he’s biting down on my mouth, this time he’ll get blood if it kills him. I pull him into me, wanting him to be with me, but for the first time I feel it’s just flesh, a body, a beautiful machine, an animated corpse, he isn’t in it any more, I want him so much and he isn’t here. The bedsprings mourn beneath us.

“Sorry about that,” he says.

“It’s all right.”

“No, shit, I really am sorry. I don’t like it when that happens.”

“It’s all right,” I say. I smooth his back, distancing him: he’s back by the deserted house, back lying on the grass, back in the graveyard, standing in the sun looking down, thinking of his own death.

“We better get up,” I say, “she might want to make up the room.”

We’re waiting for the bus. They lied to me in the general store, there is a hotel, I can see it now, it’s just around the corner. We’ve had our quarrel, argument, fight, the one we were counting on. It was a routine one, a small one comparatively, its only importance the fact that it was the last. It carries the weight of all the other, larger things we said we forgave each other for but didn’t. If there were separate buses we’d take them. As it is we wait together, standing a little apart.

We have over half an hour. “Let’s go down to the beach,” I say. “We can see the bus from there; it has to go the other way first.” I cross the road and he follows me at a distance.

There’s a wall; I climb it and sit down. The top is scattered with sharp flakes of broken stone, flint possibly, and bleached thumbnail-sized cockleshells, I know what they are because I saw them in the museum two days ago, and the occasional piece of broken glass. He leans against the wall near me, chewing on a cigarette. We say what we have to say in even, conversational voices, discussing how we’ll get back, the available trains. I wasn’t expecting it so soon.

After a while he looks at his watch, then walks away from me towards the sea, his boots crunching on the shells and pebbles. At the edge of the reed bank by the river he stops, back to me, one leg slightly bent. He holds his elbows, wrapped in his clothes as though in a cape, the storm breaks, his cape billows, thick leather boots sprout up his legs, a sword springs to attention in his hand. He throws his head back, courage, he’ll meet them alone. Flash of lightning. Onward.

I wish I could do it so quickly. I sit calmed, frozen, not yet sure whether I’ve survived, the words we have hurled at each other lying spread in fragments around me, solidified. It’s the pause during the end of the world; how does one behave? The man who said he’d continue to tend his garden, does that make sense to me? It would if it were only a small ending, my own. But we aren’t more doomed than anything else, it’s dead already, at any moment the bay will vaporize, the hills across will lift into the air, the space between will scroll itself up and vanish; in the graveyard the graves will open to show the dry puffball skulls, his wooden cross will flare like a match, his house collapse into itself, cardboard and lumber, no more language. He will stand revealed, history scaling away from him, the versions of him I made up and applied, stripped down to what he really is for a last instant before he flames up and goes out. Surely we should be holding each other, absolving, repenting, saying goodbye to each other, to everything because we will never find it again.

Above us the gulls wheel and ride, crying like drowning puppies or disconsolate angels. They have black rims around their eyes; they’re a new kind, I’ve never seen any like that before. The tide is going out; the fresh wet mud gleams in the sun, miles of it, a level field of pure glass, pure gold. He stands outlined against it; a dark shape, faceless, light catching the edges of his hair.

I turn aside and look down at my hands. They are covered with greyish dust: I’ve been digging among the shells, gathering them together. I arrange them in a border, a square, each white shell overlapping the next. Inside I plant the flints, upright in tidy rows, like teeth, like flowers.