Authors: Jim Powell
‘I think I will take it amiss,’ I said. ‘Yes, in fact I’ve made a definite decision to take it amiss. I’m up to here with bloody psychiatrists. I don’t need
another one.’
‘That’s strange,’ said Ernest. ‘I am a psychiatrist. A psychologist, in fact.’
‘Do you have any pills?’
‘No. Why should I?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’d have thought you would. Psychologist. Psychiatrist. Psychoanalyst. Psychotherapist. Psychobabble. Psychobollocks. And no bloody pills.
Trickling around the country with your bicycle clips, poking your nose into other people’s business. Are you trying to tell me I’m ill?’
‘No, no. Not at all.’
‘Implying I’m one stick short of a rhubarb patch?’
‘Certainly not,’ he said.
‘It sounds like it to me.’
‘No. I wasn’t suggesting any such thing. Well, it’s been very nice meeting you, Mr . . . Mr?’
‘Marrow,’ I said.
‘Very nice meeting you, Mr Marrow. I ought to be going now.’ He drained his glass and walked swiftly out of the pub. I went up to the bar.
‘Another pint, please.’
‘Sorry. We’re closed.’
‘What do you mean you’re closed? I’m standing here talking to you and I want a drink.’
We stopped serving at two-thirty.’
Something snapped. The brake cable, possibly.
Well, I didn’t stop drinking at two-thirty. Give me a pint.’
‘Out.’
I thought about clambering over the bar to get a drink, or to head-butt the landlord. I decided it would be wiser to go round it. The landlord was practised at dealing with awkward customers. He
grabbed my arms.
‘You. Out. Now. Or I’ll call the police.’
This was a fight too far. ‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ve no intention of staying in this rhubarb patch a minute longer.’
I wandered back to the car park in a roundabout way. No, there wasn’t a roundabout, I don’t think. There were traffic lights. It was raining heavily by then. I had no umbrella and my
car was at the far end of the car park. My head felt a little fuzzy, goodness knows why after one pint. I decided I needed some shelter until the rain eased off. I was by the barrier at the time.
It seemed to be extraordinarily wide. Several feet wide, I should say. Quite wide enough to shelter me. Definitely fit for purpose. I lay under it for a while.
A few minutes later, maybe half an hour, I don’t know, a man drove up and asked me to move so he could get out. I ignored him.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll use the other exit.’
The way things were, I felt I might use the other exit too.
I tried to imagine Judy lying where I was lying and found it impossible. She would never, in any circumstance short of dementia, consider doing such a preposterous thing. It would not cross her
mind as an option, any more than it would cross her mind to headbutt a pub landlord. That was the problem with her. No imagination. I would like to say that these things would not normally cross my
mind either. It wouldn’t be true. Extreme behaviour crosses my mind frequently. I’ve machine gunned endless world leaders with my car headlights.
I realized that I was cold, wet and uncomfortable. The barrier seemed to have got narrower, telescoping itself into a thin bar. It obviously had some mechanism to deter people from lying
underneath it, which was quite understandable, but irritating. It was no longer protecting me from the rain. I got up and returned to the car, focused on looking normal. I sat and shivered in the
driver’s seat, wondering how to rescue my weekend, my life. I think I fell asleep. When I awoke, and for want of a more appealing alternative, I decided I’d better do what I should have
done that morning.
I drove back to what I thought was roughly the area in which Anna lived, stopped at a cottage and knocked. A woman came to the door. I asked her if she knew where Anna Purdue lived. She did not.
I was not surprised, because it seemed more than likely that Anna had married at some point and would now have another name. After more explanations and descriptions, it turned out that Anna was
now Anna Halfyard and lived a couple of miles away. Not an easy place to find, the woman said. I knew that already. Armed with fresh and precise directions, which the woman wrote down for me when
she saw I was making no move to do so myself, I set off once again.
In my mind, Anna had always been an urban creature, designed for a metropolis. Not necessarily London: New York or Paris would have suited her equally. Probably not Watford, I should think. If I
was going to run into Anna anywhere, Tate Modern was the type of place I would have expected to run into her. She belonged in art galleries, in boho coffee shops, basement venues, wine bars and
junk shops. She did not belong in fields. She might have grown up in the Home Counties, but no one could call those the country any longer. Alt country perhaps, but not country the way this was
country. Something, or someone, had made metropolitan life a danger to her. She had come to this place as a refugee, was now a native.
I knew the roads that I was driving. I had driven most of them that morning, in one direction or another. I was a world-champion expert at these particular roads. Eventually I found a track that
I must have overlooked, or dismissed as an absurd candidate for her drive, and half a mile later I pulled up in front of a small Victorian cottage in the middle of fields. The sign on the gate said
Shangri-La. I couldn’t imagine Anna calling her cottage Shangri-La. Pinned to the front door was a note, addressed to me. I unpinned it.
‘Dear Matthew,’ it said. ‘I’m so sorry. I have to be somewhere else today. Genuine emergency. Promise. Couldn’t ring because you didn’t give me your number.
Will be back late tonight, if you’re still around tomorrow. If you feel like a cup of tea, the door’s open. Really sorry. Love, Anna.’
I pinned the note back on the door, not yet sure what reply I would write, or whether I would write one at all.
It is a Saturday afternoon in July 1967. I am lying in the long grass with Anna Purdue, close to her, not touching, a hand’s width from paradise.
It is a cloudless day, comfortably warm, almost hot. We are in a field near the top of Blackdown, a few miles south of Haslemere. The counties of southern England sprawl around us, shimmering in
the haze. A tractor crawls across a distant field. Under sail, it appears, because the noise of the motor does not reach us. We are lying in the long grass, buried in its wilderness. Swallows dart
in the sky above us. Around us, butterflies weave through tall stalks of buttercup and cornflower. Bees hum among the clover. Somewhere, a church bell rings. Someone, somewhere, is getting married.
Someday soon, it will be me.
We talk of many things: serious, trivial, ludicrous, pretentious. Not much about our feelings, at least not towards each other. A transistor radio, secreted in the grass, fills the gaps in the
conversation, apposite in its punctuation. ‘Waterloo Sunset’. ‘Night of the Long Grass’. ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. ‘Take Me in Your Arms and Love
Me’. Broadcast from some pirate station, now under the government’s sentence of death. We are feasting on a condemned man’s last banquet.
I have an oxeye daisy in my hand and am slowly pulling off the petals, one by one. I do this casually, silently, not wanting to make a big deal out of it. Anna watches me, does not say anything.
It ends with ‘she loves me’, but I may have pulled two petals off at once.
I don’t know why I’m doing this, because I don’t believe in things like this any more. I suppose I believe that moments like these portend something: that they can be bottled,
and that the vintage will mature for years. I suppose I believe that this moment will endure, even when we stand up, in one hour’s, two hours’ time; even when the key turns in the
ignition.
I no longer believe any of these things. Yet I do still believe that, without moments like this, life would be barely worth living.
I’ve gone down to the Surrey–Sussex border for the day to see my old friend Simon, the friend with whom I was staying when I’d first seen Anna. He is now working in Birmingham.
I’m in London, waiting to go to university. We haven’t seen each other in months. Out of the blue, Simon has rung me. He will be in Lurgashall the following Saturday, playing cricket
for the village team. Why don’t I come down? We arrange to meet in a pub.
I arrive at the Noah’s Ark in Lurgashall at about twelve-thirty. The pub is already full. People are spilling out across the road and onto the playing field. Simon is amongst them, beer
glass in hand, not about to let the athletic requirements of the afternoon stand in the way of a liquid lunch. We drink and chat, and chat and drink, for an hour or more. Then I see Anna in the
distance.
‘That’s Anna Purdue, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ says Simon. ‘Not the first time you’ve asked about her, is it? Still fancy her?’
I smile.
‘Come over. I’ll introduce you.’ We walk twenty or thirty paces across the mown grass. Simon throws his arms around Anna and kisses her.
‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ asks Anna.
Not to me,’ says Simon. ‘I’d run a mile from you. To him. This is my old mate, Matthew. He’s hopelessly in love with you. At least, I’ve told him it’s
hopeless.’
‘Idiot,’ says Anna, to one or other of us.
‘I’ve got to go and get changed,’ says Simon. He wanders towards the pavilion. Anna’s friends have melted away, are standing a few yards off.
‘Do you live near here?’ I ask.
‘Over there.’ She waves in the direction of some trees. ‘Are you really in love with me?’
‘Madly’
‘Oh good. I like it when people fall in love with me. Especially when I don’t know them.’
‘And when you do?’
‘Not so much. They always disappoint. Have we met before?’
‘I saw you at Simon’s dance,’ I say. ‘I was staying with him.’
‘Did we talk?’
‘Wouldn’t you have remembered if we had?’
‘The only thing I remember about that evening was that two men were chasing me and I didn’t want either of them. So I spent most of the time at the bar with them both. Which was the
worst of both worlds. And I think I may have been a little tipsy. Sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘We didn’t talk. You seemed rather engrossed with them. I didn’t like to interrupt.’
‘A loss for both of us,’ says Anna. ‘That’ll teach you to go by appearances.’
‘What else does one go by?’
‘Anything but.’
‘So, if I said you appeared to be quite nice, would you say I should ignore that?’
‘Entirely.’
‘It’s just as well you look like the back end of a bus, then.’
‘Good,’ says Anna. ‘Now you’ve got it.’
I look at her. ‘You’re weird,’ I say.
‘Thank you.’
‘How do you know it’s a compliment?’
‘Well it is, isn’t it?’
We both smile.
Simon returns to us in his whites. ‘We lost the toss and they’re batting,’ he says. ‘I’ll be in the field till teatime.’
‘See you at teatime,’ I say.
‘That’ll be boring,’ says Anna. ‘Why don’t we go somewhere?’
‘Where?’
‘Have you got a car?’
‘Yes.’ My parents have lent me their Austin for the day.
‘I’ll show you.’
We drive for five minutes or so. The roads become lanes and the lanes become smaller, hemmed in by burgeoning hedgerows and rampant cow parsley, as we climb Blackdown. Anna asks me to pull in to
a short track with a gate at the end of it, securely locked. I climb it first, helping her down on the other side. Anna stumbles slightly, falls into my arms. It is all I can do not to kiss her.
She laughs, pulls herself quickly away. We walk with giant steps through the long grasses of the meadow, Anna searching for some idyllic spot. When she finds it, she dives headlong into the grass,
as if into a swimming pool. I dive next to her. We lie on our stomachs, looking at each other.
‘How did you find this place?’ I ask.
‘I can’t remember now. It was ages ago.’
‘It’s a long walk from Lurgashall.’
‘I know. I usually come by bicycle. I’ve been doing it since I was thirteen. It’s where I come when I want to be on my own.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You should be flattered. It’s my private place. I’ve never brought anyone else here.’
‘Do you often want to escape from the world?’
‘Always. From other people’s worlds, that is. Not from my own. Don’t you?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Where do you escape? Somewhere like this?’
‘Impossible. I’ve always lived in London. So I walk the streets. In a manner of speaking.’ Anna smiles. ‘Preferably in the rain.’
‘I like the rain too. I like it here when it’s raining.’
‘What else do you like?’
‘I like silence,’ says Anna. ‘And autumn. And the Kinks.’ A few seconds later, we hear the opening bars of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ on the radio.
‘You’re psychic,’ I say.
Yes. Sometimes. At other times, I’m an idiot. And I like reading. And France.’
‘I like those things too.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes, all of them. Why do you think you’re an idiot?’
‘Because I know everything except how to be happy,’ she says.
‘You don’t seem to be unhappy.’
‘I’m not. That’s not the same thing. But I’m not happy. I never have been, really. I don’t expect I ever will be. It doesn’t seem to be in my
nature.’
‘What is your nature?’
‘Contrary. What’s yours?’
‘The opposite,’ I say.
Anna is matter-of-fact when she speaks about herself. There is no emotion in her voice, at most a mild regret that she should find happiness elusive. She seems to regard herself with the same
detachment as she views the distant tractor, crawling across its field far away. I wonder if she feels that way towards everything, and everyone. We turn over onto our backs, resting on elbows. I
pick a buttercup and tickle her chin with it.
‘What do you do?’ I ask.
‘I’m going to university in October.’
‘Where?’
‘Exeter.’
‘To read?’
‘English. You?’
‘Southampton,’ I say. ‘History.’
‘What A-levels did you get?’
‘An A and two Bs. You?’