Authors: Helen Humphreys
We travelled a lot together when we were young. When I was in my early twenties, I went to live in England. It was my plan to spend a year there, writing a novel in a disciplined way, and if I could do that, I felt, I could dedicate my life to being a writer.
It wasn’t a bad plan, really, inspired no doubt by tales of the American and British writers who went to live in Paris in the 1930s. It seemed romantic to be heading overseas to become a novelist, even though my situation was a great deal less romantic than Hemingway’s or the Fitzgeralds’.
I went to live with Dad’s mother in Forest Row, a sleepy little village filled with the elderly at the edge of the Ashdown Forest near East Grinstead.
It seemed a good fit as Granny was getting old and wanted someone in the house to keep an eye on her, and I had very little money, not enough to pay the rent on lodgings of my own. I lived with Granny for free, in exchange for doing errands for her and some light cooking, and generally making sure that she didn’t have a fall and lie, undiscovered, in the house for weeks.
The house was Dad’s childhood home. It had a name, remember—Ashcroft—and it was a large, Tudor-style house on an acre of grounds, with a massive green hedge at the front that flopped over and lay in the front garden like a great, green whale. You never spent much time in that house, just the odd afternoon for the obligatory visit when we were over in England as a family. Granny did not particularly like children and we were often bored there, escaping the house whenever possible to go up the road to the Ashdown Forest and kick a ball through the bracken.
I slept in Dad’s old room, which was part of the attic, a room full of angles and corners. There were three large windows that opened out over the garden and I would sometimes sit on the sill at dusk, smoking, one leg dangling outside because there were no screens on the windows; they simply opened out
into the soft English air that often smelled of burning leaves.
The bed was cold and damp. I was never warm enough in England, even in good weather. I remember in your house in Staines you used to place hardcover books upright at the end of the bed to hold all the bedclothes up. Otherwise, when you were lying on your back, the weight of the blankets and eiderdown were too great.
I slept in Dad’s room, and I had the dining room, which was directly underneath, as my study. It too overlooked the back garden. It had a dark blue carpet and an old sideboard that rattled when I walked past. I wrote at the massive oak dining table that was no longer used to eat from as Granny now had her meals on a tray in the living room. I wrote with my back to the garden so I wouldn’t be distracted and I faced a large oil painting on the far wall of Dad when he was a child. In it he was meant to be sitting on a bench, but he had one leg stretched towards the floor and I could tell he was in the process of trying to escape while the painting was being made. It was much more distracting to look at that painting than it would have been to gaze out the window at the garden.
In the corner of the room was a small fireplace where I burned the great heap of coal that had been
in the cellar since the Second World War. It was always freezing in that room, even with the fire going.
I was lonely in England. Granny and I had an alliance of sorts, but she was not a sympathetic companion. She preferred silence to talk, her own company to anyone else’s. She read
The Daily Telegraph
from cover to cover every morning. If it was sunny, she read the paper in the solarium at the side of the house, which overlooked the small orchard. If she was feeling energetic, she went out and dead-headed the roses. In the afternoons she liked to watch horse-racing on TV. Sometimes she was visited by a neighbour, and the moment the woman left, Granny would make disparaging remarks about her. I remember one woman, a widow from up the road (there was a large number of war widows on Ashdown Road in those days), coming into the living room one morning and dancing about, saying, “I’ve been up on the forest, Marjorie. Feel my hands,” and thrusting her arms towards Granny and forcing Granny to do something she felt awkward doing, to touch another human being. After the neighbour had gone, I remember Granny saying, “She’s completely off her head. Quite mad. Don’t let her in next time she comes.”
All morning I worked on my novel. In the afternoons I went out into the world and walked, doing
errands in the little village, or walking three miles up the hill to East Grinstead, or out on the forest. There seemed to be old people everywhere in that village, no one my age, and I was too shy to talk to anyone even if there had been. Some days I didn’t speak at all. Once a week I went up to London and wandered around, went to galleries and bookstores. Once a week I took a bus the ten miles to Tunbridge Wells and visited Mum’s parents—the “good grandparents,” as we called them—in their rented house in Langton Green. I used their typewriter to type up what I had written on my novel that week. They fed me supper and we watched something on TV, and then they drove me back to Ashcroft.
Most nights I made supper for Granny and myself and wheeled it in from the kitchen on the two-level gold-coloured metal tray that she kept parked by her chair in the living room. Supper was always a variation of the same thing—potted meat on toast or a boiled egg, with an apple for Granny at the end and a pear for me.
I read a lot. I smoked a great deal. I wrote letters home and waited for the mail with a fierce hopefulness. At Christmas I went to visit Mum’s sister and her family, where I saw a giant chicken out back of their house and thought I had drunk too much wine
until I realized it was a neighbour’s amateur topiary effort.
You and I made plans to travel through Europe after your school year ended, and I counted down the days until I was able to go and pick you up from the airport in my rented blue Ford Cortina. I hadn’t been able to sleep at all the night before you arrived and left ridiculously early for Gatwick, scraping the frost from the windshield of the car in the dark with a spatula.
I was probably happier to see you walk through those arrival gates than I’ve ever been to see anyone.
I had run out of money by the time you got to England, and so we travelled through Europe on your student loan, which we then spent the next few years paying back. You wanted to visit the composers’ houses and gravesites, and so this is mainly what we did, discovering a multitude of apartments in Vienna where Mozart or Beethoven had lived, going to Wagner’s house at Tribschen, standing by the Danube where Schumann had thrown himself in to drown out the voices in his head. We slept in youth hostels, and on the train as we were travelling from place to place. Sometimes, to save on accommodations, we slept on park benches in the day. We ate bread and cheese, and gorged on hostel breakfasts
that often included cold meat and hard-boiled eggs. In France, on the way back to England, you got food poisoning and threw up continually into the flowered wastepaper basket in our rented room. You asked me to go and find you a doctor, but I told you that you’d be all right without one, because my French was so poor that I had no idea how to go about finding a doctor, or, if I did find one, how we would pay for it. I was awake all that night, worrying that you would die because I hadn’t gone in search of medical aid.
We were cavalier with our itinerary, staying only a couple of nights in most places, figuring that we’d be back to the larger cities many times in our adult lives. With the exception of Paris and Vienna, I haven’t returned to a single place we visited all those years ago.
A good friend of mine says that one should do what one most wants in the morning, because a day always gets away from you. Life is like that too, and if you don’t do things when you’re young, it gets harder and harder to do them as you accumulate responsibilities and ties. I wish I’d known that then.
We finally went to Paris together again the summer before you received your diagnosis. I had to go there to research my latest novel and, on a whim, I asked you to come with me. You had just arrived in Toronto and I hadn’t seen much of you. My life had become so busy that it had been hard to factor you back into it. I think you were finding this with many of your friends, that you’d been gone from the city for thirteen years, and in that time people had just got on with their lives.
The geographical space for those thirteen years between your life and mine had made us distant. I presumed our old intimacy, but I don’t think it existed in the same way. We had both turned towards the people in our lives who were present, and so
your life was largely the one you had made for yourself in Vancouver. We still talked on the phone, and I still felt that I could say anything to you and you would understand, but not having regular physical contact meant that we were not as close as we once had been. Often you would call me just as you were on your way out, which would completely exasperate me, but I can see now that although you still wanted the connection, you didn’t want to spend any time on it. And frankly, it was the same for me.
But Paris was good. It felt easy to travel with you, so familiar that it didn’t require much thought or negotiation. We had a sweet little hotel room with twin beds on a quiet street in the area of Paris where my novel takes place. Your side of the room was a heap of clothes and pieces of paper. (You always overpacked.) My side was neat—a small pile of books and my knapsack. I didn’t unpack. You unpacked immediately and used up all the drawers.
Every morning we went around the corner to a café for breakfast. Then I headed off to research a building, or an area, or a street, or visit a museum—I had a careful list of all the places I needed to see in the two weeks we were there—and you walked over to the Louvre. You had decided to spend all your time there, visiting a different room every day.
In the evenings we would sometimes meet up, but you had friends in Paris and would visit them as well. When we did go out together you were distracted, as you often were, not listening to anything I said, or talking right over me, never making eye contact. If I wanted to tell you anything important, I had to say it all in a burst, so that there might be a chance of your hearing some of it. This was wearying, and once I was standing on the street near our hotel and I saw you hurrying past, and I didn’t call out to you. It seemed easier in that moment not to, and I watched you as a stranger might—a tall, thin man with long, dark curly hair, dressed in loose black jeans and an old T-shirt, walking briskly back to the hotel with a painting under your arm that you’d just bought from a street artist near Notre-Dame.
But we slept in the same quiet way, awakened at the same time in the morning. From our twin beds we talked as we used to. You told me a secret you’d been carrying around for years. I told you how I really felt about the relationship I was currently in.
In a tiny shop near the Métro, I bought a bronze sparrow. It was the only thing I wanted and I placed it on the table beside my hotel bed so that the still, round bird was the first thing I saw every morning. The plumpness of it reminded me of the middle-aged
figure of Sainte-Beuve, the poet I was writing about in my novel.
One of your friends from Paris called me the day you died, having just heard that you were in hospital. I held my phone up to your ear so that she could talk to you, and I could hear her crying. The nurses had given you a lot of sedation because you fought if you weren’t completely knocked out, tried to get rid of the tubes and the needles and the ventilator that tentacled your body. You were young and strong and when you struggled it was in earnest.
This was the day you were going to die, the day we were going to let them unhook you from the machines, because we had been told that you likely had brain damage from liver failure—a direct result of your compromised liver having to process the drugs they used to keep you sedated.
But when I held that phone to your ear and your friend talked to you from Paris, you thrashed your head back and forth, strained to open your eyes, pursed your mouth and flexed it, not unlike the way the fish you’d caught when we were children looked when they were out of water for a few moments and gasping for breath.
It was clear you were trying to communicate. It was clear you wanted to say something back through
the phone line, but I could do nothing to help you. I took the phone away from your ear.
“He heard you,” I said to the sobbing voice on the other end. “He heard everything you said.”
I’m in Italy, at a literary festival, in a small northern Italian town surrounded by three lakes and with a small river running through the centre of the town. It goes without saying that you would like it here, Martin, but I’ll say it anyway.
The bed and breakfast where we’re staying is sixteenth century. My room is huge and has windows that open above a busy street. This morning there was a market and I awoke to the sounds of people bargaining at the stalls. The boards on the floor of the room are two feet wide, and the windowsill is so deep that I have to stand on tiptoes to lean over and see into the street below. In the big reception room that is next to mine, the ceiling is covered
with frescoes—entwined leaves and the garlanded heads of classic Roman men. There is also a huge chandelier that droops down into the centre of that room. All the decoration is from the top down and there is nothing but a simple tiled floor below. Out back there is a little courtyard with trees and birds, a glimpse of sky between the branches. The back wall of the house is open to this courtyard and at night, when the lamp is turned on in the hallway, bats fly in to circle the light.
My event today was, strangely enough, at a music conservatory. I was interviewed outside, in the courtyard, and all the while that I was listening to my interviewer speak in Italian on one side of me, or my translator whisper in English on the other side of me, I could hear music tumbling from the windows behind me—strings, and then later, a piano. I wonder if there will come a day when that will not make me think of you.
It was hard to remain calm on the first bumpy flight over from Canada, and the second bumpy flight from Frankfurt to Bologna. I am both more and less afraid of dying since you died. I am less afraid of the actual event, but more afraid that it will happen sooner than I want it to—as was the case with you. Being in a strange place makes me feel untethered
to my life back home, and that in turn makes me feel nothing but panic—which is the feeling I had all fall when you were dying. It is easy now for one state to echo another.
Last night we went to the restaurant in Mantova where Virginia Woolf ate when she was here in 1921. I had the local specialty—tortellini stuffed with pumpkin and amaretto. It was very good. Apparently Virginia Woolf also liked it when she ate there, all those years ago.
I was thinking today about how, when you travelled, wherever you went, you used to have to find a piano to practise on. European cities were good for this because there was always a church or a theatre or a music school that would let you use theirs. That was not an unusual request for them. It could easily have been your piano that I heard behind me when I was talking at the conservatory today. Sometimes, when we were together in another city, I wrote for a few hours while you went off and practised on some borrowed piano. I liked meeting you after you’d been playing because you were always happy and ready for adventure.
Later on today we went to visit the palace that is on the edge of one of the three lakes. Again, the decoration was top-heavy, all those ceiling frescoes and
nothing on the walls. But someone explained to me that there had been decorations on the walls once—tapestries, leather hangings—and they had, of course, been removed by various owners who had wanted to hang other artworks in their place. It’s harder to change the thing you cannot reach, so the ceiling decorations have largely remained untouched.
In one of the rooms hornets were boiling in the loins of the entwined plaster lovers on the vaulted ceiling. In another room—the most important room of the palace, where the prince entertained visiting dignitaries—on each of the four walls there were life-size portraits of the prince’s favourite horses. One was called
Gloriosa
. They all looked plump and happier than any of the people in the palace paintings. And in the room with the frescoes of giants that started at the floor and covered all the walls there was graffiti dating from the sixteenth century. Apparently all we ever want to do is affirm our presence, as the graffiti was just names carved into the plaster walls. And there was your name,
Martinus
, and the date,
1730 AD
, on a giant’s white thigh.
This afternoon I went to hear Virginia Woolf’s niece speak. She’s ninety-three, has the vacant stare of the elderly. Dad has that expression these days, especially since you died—a look of innocent confusion,
almost childlike. The niece was on a panel with two academic experts on her aunt. They both talked for a long time about the importance of Virginia Woolf as a writer. Then they asked the niece to talk about this too. All she could say was that Virginia Woolf was a good aunt, and that she hadn’t read all of her books because, when she was young, her family never thought her aunt was a very good writer.
It’s hard to be objective about someone you know. And really, how could the niece of Virginia Woolf talk about the writing without going through the filter of her relationship to her aunt? Maybe the more real thing is simply to say what she said, that Virginia Woolf was
amusing
, that she was
nice
.
It was almost a day coming home, what with the various flights and a layover in Munich. The jet lag was bad, although it was hard to even recognize it as jet lag because it felt exactly like grief—complete exhaustion and a kind of dislocation from my surroundings. It’s how I’ve been feeling pretty much every day for a year and a half now. It’s strange that jet lag and grief should feel so much alike, although it makes a kind of sense too.