Turtle Diary

50 Neaera H

I didn’t know how lonely I’d been until the loneliness stopped. Now when I looked at my flat it seemed to have been cleared of invisible wires criss-crossed in patterns of pain that had been there for years. I saw myself in days past, years past, stepping carefully and trying to keep my balance. There were the kitchen, the bathroom, the sitting-room, the bedroom, the spare room. There were the books, the drawing-table, the typewriter, Madame Beetle, the clutter, all the spaces and places where I stood or sat or lay down, all the things that I touched and used in my daily effort to piece together an eggshell life from broken fragments.

George had given me so much that even if there came a time without George I could bear it now and not step carefully nor build my broken eggshell with mad patience. He hadn’t done anything special, it was simply his way of being. Like him I found that I no longer minded being alive. And the turtles were swimming, there was always that to fall back on.

It was extraordinary, the whole turtle affair. Nothing was ever said about it in the press, there was no furore at the Zoological Society, George wasn’t sacked. He let it be known that he’d set the large turtles free and would be replacing them with smaller specimens and that he would do the same again when the two remaining turtles were larger. That was all there was to it, he wasn’t even reprimanded.

The two turtles in the tank looked different to me now, seemed less dozy, and more as if they had something to look forward to:

And every one said, ‘If we only live,

We too will go to sea in a Sieve, –

To the hills of the Chankly Bore!’

I went to the British Museum again with my envelope full of blank paper. I felt friendly towards the coaches, cars and motorcycles in the forecourt, the people and the pigeons. I sat on the porch with the paper in my lap, sunlight again on my closed eyes.

I was waiting for something now and the waiting was pleasant. I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less quiet and more dangerous, life is risky on the borders. Gillian Vole and Delia Swallow live in safer places.

Come, I said to the self inside me. Come out and take your chance. After staring at the blank paper for a very long time I wrote:

The fountain in the square

Isn’t there.

Well, I thought, it’s not much but it’s a beginning.