The Living and the Dead in Winsford

20

The ninth of November. Ten degrees at half past eight. Grey and misty when we went for our morning walk, but an hour later the sun had broken through. Nevertheless I’ve decided to stay here working until noon, and then we’ll go for a walk by the sea if the weather holds.

When I write ‘working’, what I mean is reading the material from Samos and Morocco. I have the feeling that we really must make progress with that: I don’t know where that feeling comes from, but perhaps it’s just a little splinter under a fingernail that one has to get rid of. I’ve been reading so much Dickens these last couple of days that he can wait his turn now. I’ve put the packs of playing cards back in the drawer where I found them.

So I made another cup of coffee and sat down by the window with the diary from that first summer on Samos. Bit the head off every feeling of doubt and uncertainty, and started reading. Make decisions and stick to them. . When Eugen Bergman gets in touch it will be as well if Martin has at least some idea of what he’s been doing.

Three hours later I’d got as far as 1 August 1977. There is a week left before he is due to return to Sweden, and it’s possible that all kinds of things will happen then. Martin is still writing in his restrained, neutral style — as if he thinks that one day somebody else will read the text, probably a young woman with intellectual ambitions. I can’t help having that impression, nor can I help it that here and there some things that he writes are impossible to understand. But it is only occasional words, nothing of significance for the meaning overall.

The most important thing that happened towards the end of July — and there is no need to read between the lines in order to understand this — is that he pays a visit to the Herold/Hyatt house. It is not just Martin, but the whole of the so-called writers’ collective, and it evidently turns out to be quite an impressive occasion. There are about twenty people present, and they eat a succession of fancy Greek dishes prepared by the staff at the nearby taverna, who also act as waiters and waitresses, at least at the beginning of the festivities. The guests sit at a long table on the terrace with views over the pine-clad hillside and the sea. There is guitar- and bouzouki-playing, singing, poems are read in every language you can think of, animated discussions take place, a manifesto written and masses of wine drunk. ‘Retsina,’ Martin goes out of his way to stress, ‘that’s the only drinkable wine you can get down here.’ He writes that it is absolutely blooming magical, and he’s not referring to the wine. Marijuana is also smoked, but not by Martin.

The reason — if there needed to be a reason — for Herold and Hyatt inviting all the guests to their house is that the first reactions to Bessie’s debut novel have started flowing in. There is still a week or so to go before the book is due to be published in the USA, but her publisher has informal contacts and can already inform Bessie that the reviews are going to be brilliant. Not to say sensational. Tom Herold gives a speech in praise of his young wife, and declares facetiously that a year from now he will be forgotten, but Bessie Hyatt will be as resplendent as a modern-day Pheme on the uppermost pinnacle of Parnassus.

Those are the exact words that Martin wrote, and then he comments that the choice of that particular goddess is rather odd. Pheme is above all the goddess of scurrilous gossip in Greek mythology: he points out that he seems to be the only person present who reflects on that fact, and that he will take the matter up with Herold in due course. In any case, he adds, Bessie doesn’t seem to have taken the reference amiss. On the other hand, she may well not be familiar with all the details of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses. But Martin is.

The party continues until dawn. Martin writes that he eventually joins a little group discussing Cavafy, and Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. These learned discussions seem to go on for ever — with the Russian Gusov sitting in a corner and annoying everybody with his ignorance; also present are the two lesbian artists and the French poets Legel and Fabrianny. Plus the cheerful Nietzsche specialist Bons. Martin devotes over two pages to the comments and points of view expressed in these discussions, and concludes his account of this long day and night by describing how a group of eight or ten persons trudge down to the beach and bathe naked as dawn breaks. He notes once again that it is absolutely blooming magical, but then crosses the phrase out when he realizes that it is a repetition.

He also writes — in the same unemotional style — about an outing a few days later to a place called Ormos Marathokambos, if I’ve managed to decipher the spelling correctly. A trip undertaken on four Vespas. There is a driver and a passenger on each of the scooters, and on the way back home he has the one and only Bessie Hyatt sitting behind him. By now her book has appeared, and the reception was just as overwhelming as her publishing contacts had predicted. In a week she will fly over to the USA for a PR tour. Martin writes that ‘he drives along the dusty country road towards the setting sun with the young American genius’s arms around his waist,’ and that it makes him feel ‘remarkably exhilarated’. Good God! I think: but that’s exactly what he put.

It is not clear whether Herold was also present on the outing. I decide to save the last ten pages, the rest of the notes about 1977, until the evening, load Castor into the car and set off for a different sea.

We took the attractive route via Simonsbath again, and before we got to Lynmouth we stopped at a place called Watersmeet. We clambered down some steep steps into a deep ravine dug out by the River Lyn: the village gets its name from the fact that it is at the confluence of the West Lyn and East Lyn rivers. I was feeling irritated, thanks to reading Martin’s confounded diary. I kept trying to tell myself that it was about happenings thirty-five years ago, and that it was the year before we first met: but it didn’t really work. He was twenty-four years old that first summer in Samos, and he ought not to have written like a pretentious grammar school pupil. Is this what he had sounded like when we sat together at that party in Gamla Stan? I couldn’t believe that was the case. Or perhaps we were different people at that time, both of us. If I had been able to read these notes then, what impression would I have got? Would I have fallen for them? Would I have even considered marrying him? How much did Rolf’s death and my general state of fragility mean for my decision? For my life?

Good questions, I thought as I wandered along with Castor under the green arches of the trees lining the cheerfully babbling brook. There it came again, the cheerfully babbling brook, but it didn’t give me the same degree of satisfaction on this occasion. Not by a long way. There seem to be moments when one feels in harmony with Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, but this was not one of them. At the same time, however, there was something inside me that was rather pleased by my irritation. When had I last felt irritated? Not during the past month, in any case; perhaps not for six months. If I were to dress up the situation in a way reminiscent of that twenty-four-year-old I didn’t want to think about, I could perhaps maintain that a pile of rotten old junk had been set alight in a forgotten corner of my comatose soul — and there was good reason to feel gratitude for that: something had awoken.

Be that as it may, we walked quite a long way along the bank of one of the two rivers, and when we came to a bridge after about forty minutes we crossed over it and wandered along the opposite bank back to Watersmeet. We climbed up the steep steps to the road and the car, and drove to the little seaside town of Lynmouth.

We had a late lunch at one of the pubs down by the harbour without speaking to a single soul. We bought a few essentials in the neighbouring town of Lynton, including a pair of Wellington boots, then returned home over the moor to Darne Lodge.

A day in the life, I thought once again. I read the old diaries of my husband, who is probably dead. I go for a walk with my dog. I buy a few essentials.

Before long I shall regard cutting my nails or brushing my teeth as an event of significance.

I tried to rekindle my irritation once more — it seemed to have been blown away by the wind. As I had enjoyed it — the irritation, that is — and as it had no doubt been caused by the Samos diary from 1977, I decided to continue reading it. The rest of that first summer. Then a few chapters of Dickens, four games of patience, and then bed.

I duly did all that, and when I was about to let Castor out for his final evening walk, I noticed something lying there just outside the door. It was that dead pheasant again.

Or possibly another one, but just as dead. I dropped the glass I was holding in my hand, it shattered as it hit the stone paving, and I realized that once again I had forgotten to buy that torch.