2. Norfolk
I might remember the year or at least the month, if I were the sort of person who stores up dates. Instead I'm insensitive enough to forget, although I can remember a light summer rain beating against the windscreen, can remember the watery sunlight filtering through the trees, can't forget the smoke drifting over the lawn from a chilly early evening barbecue. Can remember what was said, and what wasn't.
It was in the early 90s, some time in the late summer, a long weekend at the end of August or more likely the start of September, and Sarah and I were happy enough for me to think about asking her to marry me. More than think about really, plan each word, each pause, each sentence, each significant look. Then reject the plan as too calculated. Instead, I thought, just enjoy the weekend, and bring up the subject on the Sunday.
We drove through the north of England on a wet Thursday night, flat, quiet coastal stretches of Northumbria giving way to snarled up-motorways, clogged with lorries, Sarah's mood drifting from easy cheerfulness into slow-lane tetchiness. I didn't drive, which she regarded not so much as a lack of aptitude as a deliberate piece of indulgence, a wilful refusal to deal with the practicalities of the world. She interpreted it as another aspect of my characteristic desire to remain detached, to sit on the sidelines (the passenger seat) and look on. It infuriated her, gently, but relentlessly. I saw it as an inability to master reverse parking, and a cavalier disregard for the Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre trinity.
She drove with an interesting combination of intense concentration punctuated by brief moments of tender panic. You could read the road on her face, black-brown fringe occasionally drifting into the eyes fixed ahead; lips pursed, teeth clenched, then, at a dubious gear change, a corner taken too fast, an ominous cranking sound from the transmission, she would wince, swear sotto voce, and, the trouble clear, smile.
Sarah liked to coast along without anything too stressful interrupting her progress, preferred a steady cruise down a quiet road to the zip and dash of a motorway. Just occasionally though she liked to be prodded out of the predictable, enjoyed a minor frisson of the unexpected.
So we bickered lightly from York to Retford, Sarah complaining when I put on music, claiming it upset her concentration, then switching on some dismal Radio Four discussion about the Conservative Party's election prospects (this may help to firm up the exact date, or may not, these discussions seeming to have lasted all my adult life). Radio talk-shows seemed designed to underline the bloodless drear of Britain, that dismal fog that settles over any attempt to understand the nation.
As we got further south I was glad it was getting dark. I remembered a friend from Aberdeen who had said in a melodramatic way that driving through parts of England during the Thatcher government had brought home to her the meaning of the banality of evil. Every trimmed hedge, every tended lawn, every suburban semi with garage had seemed tainted with a monetary stain, in a land of complacent affluence. That was over the top, but I knew the south, knew its power to dampen joy with its bland absence of history, its church fete, village green, car boot sale rhythms. Looking over the fields you'd see hearty ladies, fit and fifty, encouraging filthy dogs to chase sticks, anoraked kids waiting for a school bus, rubicund smokers popping out to the corner-shop and taking the car, all the diurnal tragedies of a life lived somewhere away from the edges, mapped in muted shades of brown and green.
Sarah's mood picked up once we'd passed through the Fens and approached Norfolk, occasional lights stabbing through the rural blackness, the names on the road-signs acquiring a familiarity for her.
She had grown up here, a country-girl for twelve years until her family had moved to West London. By then it was too late for Sarah to acquire the genuine toughness she needed to be entirely comfortable hanging out on Ladbroke Grove. Instead she had a querulous streak, a tendency to wonder whether people were attempting to deceive her. It would burst out at inopportune moments, with an overloud complaint about an inflated price in a shop; or a pert putdown to a friend who was attempting an amiable tease. Sarah was prickly, and I was very happy about it. To me, it meant there was an obstacle to anyone loving her as much as I did.
Off the motorway, on the B roads, she softened, put on a country tape, hummed along, as we got closer to her village. The chorus moaned about being a "midnight girl in a sunset town", as the sun dipped towards a flat horizon, and Sarah grinned, tapping along gently on the steering wheel, loving the twanging guitars stopping just short of schmaltz, the lyric one of those peculiarly feminist Tennessee constructions.
We arrived at her cottage, and she set about the practicalities of switching on the water and the power, wincing at the smell coming from the fridge. I sat and watched her. The cottage still had a few vestiges of summer warmth, freshened by rain dripping off the guttering. Out the back windows there was an unsullied blackness, the windows a perfect mirror reflecting back a bleary 6am-risen face. It stared back at me, and I tried to discern some traces of a person who was planning to make a life-changing progression, who was about to tip over from one state of exaggerated freedom, into another of, inevitably straitened, commitment. I may have spotted a little tic, in the left eye, or maybe I looked exactly the same.
Gradually, through a series of beam on temple collisions, I adjusted, and learned to make slow progress, with a permanent stoop, from kitchen to living-room, to bedroom, doing my obliging fetching, carrying and table-laying duties to make up for not driving. At home Sarah and I had developed a strange system of trivial debts, making each other cups of tea in strict rotation, popping out for a newspaper only if it was our turn, each credit mentally tallied, stored up as a source of future grievance. Was this score-keeping worth worrying about, or simply a determination to keep a strict degree of equality in the relationship? It was the sort of question neither Sarah nor I pondered for too long, although it could keep our friends in idle speculation for hours.
I watched her again as she lay across the bed fresh from the bath, reading an old Guardian from months before, little drops of water still clinging to her. She had the quality of Goya's Maja, lying back serene and unselfconscious. Sarah always seemed on the brink of sleep, languidness informed her every aspect. She read me the funny bits from the TV review while I kissed the insides of her thighs. Looking up at her through a little thicket of pubic hair, I knew this was the right decision.
We spent the Friday morning in an unhurried shopping trip; acquiring too much food for a weekend, too much wine for just two of us. Parking the car in the centre of Downham Market, Sarah looked at me, inviting me to smile at the headscarfed weekenders, clutching baguettes under their summer-tweed sleeves, braying questions at their husbands. "Artichokes darling" one Aga refugee yelped, with incongruous panic. Sarah's expression reminded me why I wanted to marry her.
Downham was middle England made flesh, a land of timeless quiet patriots. They believed in the sort of tolerance, liberality, decency that stopped just a little short of the point where it may affect their discreet incomes. They were a reminder of how England had deflected revolution by having its oppressors seem so mild and ineffectual. Sarah looked in the window of an estate agents, and sniggered at the attributes listed under each extravagantly-priced property. "I think it should be illegal to describe any dwelling north of Provence as a villa," she said.
Ours was a relationship founded on an enmity directed towards the outside world, a mutual belief that other people were not so much hell, as purgatory, half-finished souls with ridiculous ambitions, attitudes and tastes. To the outsider Sarah and I might have conducted our lives in much the same conventional pattern as any other comfortable, educated couple in their mid-20s; to us, each little gesture of consumerism, each excursion into the world, was buffeted by knowingness, awash with irony. We understood.
The rain was back as we headed for the sea, an autumn English rain ambling in, leisurely from the coast. We sat in the car, on the seafront, watching the queues huddled inside the chip shop, watching the scarves being tightened around purple rinses. A tea-shop's windows misted with condensation, and the steam from an eternally boiling kettle. A bus edged past the front of Dixon's, where a pimpled assistant was standing in front of his window display, smoking, happy to let the rain darken his short-sleeved shirt. England shouts out its Englishness at its edges, its perimeter a window-display of all the characteristics you'll find inside.
England ended in a shallow beach, a long mud flat waiting for the tide to come back in, a grey field of worm casts, pebbles and the familiar and only vaguely unpleasant clutter of tide-borne cans, paper, plastic bottles. Out on the horizon Europe began in black water, slowly creeping in to reclaim its English mud.
Sarah pulled me into an amusement arcade. She stood, rapt, nibbling at her bottom lip while she launched pennies onto a cascade, willing them to form a line, to array themselves in neat ranks and work in concert for her. She was exultant when a solitary greenish penny that had been teetering on the brink for ten minutes finally surrendered to gravity, and slid down the chute. Sarah grabbed it eagerly, and sent it back inside to join its brothers, adding to the back of the queue, shoving its milled edges up against the scrum.
I wondered how long this particular migratory cycle took, how long from launch to release, how many times could a penny make this journey, inching through its coppery extended family for that last plummet. Maybe five times in a particular summer? Sarah knew what I was thinking. "It must take ages for the back ones to reach the front," she said. " By the time they get out they're probably only worth three-quarters of their original value."
She frowned again, thinking about it. " I think Elvis's colon was a bit like this at the end." She saw a defunct half-pence piece lurking, neglected in a corner beyond the sweep of the cascade, and I think it made her day.
On the way back, the windscreen wipers were so loud I turned the music up to compete, and Sarah didn't complain this time. She wasn't the sort of woman who needed to cling to her childhood, wasn't sentimental about her upbringing, but the easy familiarity of the surroundings relaxed her, endowed her with a robust cheerfulness that I loved. I wanted to keep it. For myself. Forever.
"We have to be in Peterborough at six to pick up Sally," she said, turning back onto the dual carriageway. I looked at her. "I told you, Sally's coming down tonight, and then going on to London on Monday morning when we go back."
She might even have told me, I might even have forgotten, but it seemed unlikely. When this weekend attained its imminent importance for me, I would have dredged up the information, however casually received. More likely Sarah had neglected to tell me, knowing I would have protested. "It's not a problem is it?" she said, looking across at me. I gazed down the road, through the rain pelting down and cracking off the windscreen.
Not a problem normally. Sally wasn't offensive in herself. She was a well-meaning middle-class embracer of voguish liberal causes, with a penchant for over-earnestness. Or at least that was my own interpretation of her unwillingness to laugh at my more off-colour jokes.
Her most noteworthy characteristic was her bulimic tendency. At least once a week she would come round for a meal, and eat vast quantities of everything. Sarah and I would look on in mingled admiration and apprehension as Sally reached out her plate for a third slice of cheesecake. We'd watch with the nervous aspects of primitive villagers living in the shadow of a volcano. Half an hour later we'd hear the violent retching from the bathroom across the hall, and one of us would discreetly turn up the Van Morrison. It became such a regular occurrence that I began to see a symbiotic relationship between Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart and over-active bile ducts. "Mmmm, coffee," Sally would coo on her return, serene, face a little flushed, but the cheek-bones still sharp, the slight frame unweighted by any stray carbohydrates.
Sally was, right now, on a train heading south with its buffet-car depleted and a whole carriageful of travellers traumatised by the sounds emanating from the toilet just after Doncaster. "I suppose we'd better get in some more food," I said morosely, as we took the exit for Peterborough. "After all she's going to be here for two nights."
This made things difficult. This was supposed to be an intimate weekend, an escape from the world into an existence marked out by the two of us, where a proposal would have its own meaning, untainted by the cliches, comical and tragical, of the situation.
What now? Where would I get a chance to utter the words? Would I have to wait for that twenty-minute hiatus between Sally swallowing the last of the summer pudding, and emerging triumphant and purged from an irretrievably clogged bathroom? Would my proposal be punctuated by the distant beat of Sally's heaves echoing back off the porcelain? This made things impossible.
We were an hour early in Peterborough, my resentment by now building into full-blown hostility. We killed time in the shopping centre adjoining the station, a brick and glass extension jerry-built onto the side of the town in the Seventies, a miserable array of white passages leading to Lewis's, Thornton's, Eastern Electricity, and Next, architectural valium dampening every mood, throwing a bucket of muzaked boredom over every extreme emotion.
I fumed impotently at the impossibility of telling Sarah why I was so bad-tempered. Anywhere else I might have screamed out my fury. Here, in the Queensgate, it was sublimated into joyless consumerism. As an act of self-mutilation I bought a pair of baggy brown trousers from Burton's, and held them up for inspection. Sarah bit her bottom lip. "Mmm, er yes, nice," she said in the tones of somebody asked to identify a dismembered corpse.
Back at the cottage we were three, Sarah busying herself in the kitchen while Sally filled her in on gossip. Liam, an on-off boyfriend of Sally's, had behaved in a less than politically acceptable manner. "He makes me sick," Sally said. I snorted in a way that was supposed to be sardonic but that caused both women to stare at me in alarm. I opened a second bottle of wine.
My silence escaped unnoticed in the evening due to Sally's habit of filling in every quiet moment with a wash of conversational emulsion. I opened a third bottle of wine, and not long afterwards a fourth, caught between a frustrated need to ask Sarah to marry me, and a more urgent desire to ask what kind of bloody insensitive cow invites her friend on a romantic weekend away. "We're going to Walsingham tomorrow," Sarah announced. "You can wear your brown trousers."
I couldn't wear my brown trousers of course (nor would I ever). As a medium for expressing discontent they were simply too vile. Instead I sat in the front of the car, vowing to limit the entirety of my conversation to road directions, to ignore conversational overtures, and only answer direct questions with monosyllables. I was so much younger then.
The sun slanted down at us just before Walsingham, angling off the raindrops clinging to the trees and creating a light-circled avenue for us. On the cassette player, The Cocteau Twins were singing about Pearly Dewdrops. Sarah turned to me for a complicit grin at the watery beauty of it all, but I wasn't in the mood for beauty. I stared down at the road map, busied myself with a scrutiny of the B roads linking Ely and Thetford.
Sally and Sarah spent inordinate amounts of time examining icons, describing them to each other in the sort of detail that suggested that they were each languishing under the impression that the other had been struck blind. In other circumstances I would have been entranced. This was a very foreign England; a suggestion that the medieval nation enfolded Europe in a rather more generous embrace than its late twentieth century equivalent.
The last four hundred years had made a thorough job of ingraining a suspicion of Rome, High Church exotica, candles, incense, pilgrimages. In England, Walsingham seemed an implant, a brash celebration of the dubiously mystic in the midst of sensible, Barbour-jacketed rural gentility. It was a place that screamed out for an Andalucian sun burnishing the windows, or a Tuscan square outside, instead of wet English trees, a flat county settling into the uneasy four hours between the pubs ending the lunchtime shift, and first orders in the evening.
You could see it in the faces of the visitors, pink shires expressions wrapped in silk headscarves, all a little ill at ease with these ancient passions. They gave the foreign spirituality their patient attention, before turning their minds to the urgent matter of afternoon tea.
"What is wrong with you?" Sarah hissed, as Sally drifted round the cloisters. "You've barely said a word all day. Will you stop sulking?" "I'm fine," I said, attempting to instil the words with all the anguish of an ill-treated martyr (looking around me at the saints for a few tips on facial grimaces). But there's only so much pain you can cram into two syllables.
Sally returned and gave us a brief lecture on the iniquities of the Catholic Church. Her historical knowledge extended as far as the existence of an entity called the Inquisition, who, we were informed, were a less than enlightened body of men (Sally spat out the "men" bit with her customary asperity). Sarah murmured polite gratitude for Sally sharing this information, glancing over at me for a spot of conspiratorial grinning, but I was still in no mood for complicity. Sally was talking about abortion as we got in the car, but effortlessly moved on from an assertion of a woman's right to control her own ovarian functions to an enthusiastic suggestion of lunch.
The beer they served in the nearest pub had that brown, gritty quality beloved of a certain type of middle-aged Englishman, protected by all sorts of lobbyists, and generally as palatable as any other relic of a less hygiene-conscious age. It did have the advantage of being substantially stronger than is usually advisable in the early afternoon though, and my mood mellowed into a gentle fatalism after four pints. Sarah glowered at me with the sanctimonious disdain of a designated driver, Sally grinned and slurred with the reddish instability of a slight woman who had matched me pint for pint after a large helping of vegetarian shepherd's pie with a side order of chips. As she swayed off in the direction of the ladies' I warmed to her.
A couple of hours later I had softened enough to make desultory conversation with Sally as we coaxed a barbecue into life. Sarah was in the kitchen washing salad. The sun was casting early evening rays through the smoke; it was probably a bit too cool for eating outdoors, but Sarah wanted her weekend to have its proper ingredients, wanted to see off another summer sitting on a damp lawn sipping chilly red, delicately pulling charcoaled slivers off the end of her tongue.
"Why do men always drift off into a little world of their own just when you are trying to get through to them?" Sally asked. The afternoon's beer had made her bold, but she was still a little wary about my taciturn mood ever since her arrival.
She was talking about the faithless Liam, a man constantly in a state of flight from Sally's determination to make him "discuss our relationship". Of late her dogged persistence had been one side of an equation matching his increasingly lengthy sojourns in after-hours bars.
"Why do men refuse to be pinned down by words?" Sally went on. "Why do they hate to tell the truth?" Normally I would have been irritated by Sally's tendency to refer to men as if we were a single global collective consciousness moved by a central, sluggishly-bubbling core of testosterone. But that was an argument that I had been bored by a year earlier, and I didn't want to plough through its familiar patterns again. Besides, it was a topic I had been brooding on myself. Why couldn't I simply come out and tell Sarah why, in my eyes, this weekend had lurched off course?
"Don't you think there is a danger that if you put emotions into words, you lose their essence?" I said. From Sally's expression she obviously didn't.
"If you try to arrange all the complex things you are feeling, array them into little lines of grammar, hem them in with other people's adjectives, all the flawed stuff of language, the failings of verbal expression, you are left with a pale imitation of the truth," I said. "When you say they hate to tell the truth, maybe it's just that they realise that sentences, paragraphs, whole bloody hours of conversation are never going to get anywhere close to the reality of what goes on inside."
Sally, already a little rattled that I had said more in a couple of minutes than in the entire weekend up until then, interrupted me. "What you mean is that men think such foul and disturbing things, or such selfish and misogynistic things, that they know better than to say them out loud, because it would give away what monsters they are."
"That's true as well," I admitted. And just to make her point valid, I imagined what she would look like naked, all angles, sharp, ribs showing beneath pointy breasts.
"What are you smiling at?" Sarah said, emerging with a salad bowl, her voice weighted with enough relief to make me realise how oddly I had been acting, how disturbing my sustained silence had been for her.
"Me and Sally were just wondering why blokes don't talk much." I gave the last four words capital letter intonation for Sarah's benefit. It was a topic Sally liked to bring up every time we met her, its known terrain and familiar diversions meant it had become an easy aural wallpaper. "I suspect blokes don't talk much because Sally doesn't let them," Sarah had said once, and after that the subject had ceased to irritate quite as much.
"It's arrogance mainly," Sally was saying, meaning she had reached the later stages of this performance. "They think that it is up to other people to provide all the diversion, all the ideas, all the social necessities. They can just sit there being fucking silent, and pretending they are deep, when you know they are just thinking about the football scores."
"Or those really evil, misogynistic things," I prompted. Sarah looked relieved. Even if I was winding up Sally it was preferable to me casting darkly significant looks at the sky and saying nothing.
Sally talked on, I smiled, nodded agreement, put my face into a holding pattern while I gazed at a dying elm at the back of the lawn, bits of bark and decayed branch piling up tidily beneath it in a graceful, elegiac announcement of extreme sickness. There, somewhere in a flat expanse of affluent rural bliss stuck somewhere between the Waveney and the Great Ouse, an old tree, claimed and tamed long ago by that neat stone wall, that tended lawn with the tiny discoloured dents left by July's croquet hoops, was quietly crumbling back into the earth. It was having itself a very English death.
Not making a fuss.
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Monday morning's rain came, hammering off the windscreen with menacing intent, Sarah's lips tensed with irritation at the lack of visibility, giving a little twitch of panic every time a lorry splashed its way down the fast lane skimming sheets of water across the surface of the motorway.
"When are you going to apply for a driving test?" she asked me with only slightly suppressed asperity as we waited in a queue for a roundabout somewhere north of Harrogate. "This would be a lot less annoying if we could share the driving."
"I'm not sure if I'm cut out for it," I said, partly from a lingering determination to annoy her, partly because I thought it was true. How could you cast lazy stares out of a raindrop-prismed window and spend five minutes wondering whether, if you stood on the spire of Lincoln Cathedral you would be able to see all the way to Skegness, when you were obliged to consider the banalities of gear-changing, and glancing in the off-side mirror for stray cyclists? Driving seemed to demand too much attention, too much alertness for my tastes. Automatic cars weren't all the name suggested either; from what I had heard they still required the driver to start, steer and stop them.
"I'm not cut out for it either, nobody's cut out for it, it's just one of those skills you have to work at, " Sarah said, immediately realising she sounded like a stern parent. "Fuck," she added in an attempt to lose some of the austerity - and at the realisation that she had stalled.
We had a little silence then, as we drove north, into Northumbrian clouds, dark Border roads, winds whipping across the car, Sarah listening to the low drone of an afternoon radio play. It was so soporific I felt I had to watch her closely lest she drift off into sleep, lulled by the quaint 1950s intonation of radio actors, those thespian also-rans who measure their days between cranking BBC sound effects, and feel a need to amplify their presence by spitting out every sibilant.
I watched her, looking for weariness. The brown eyes flickered, alert, though, at each junction, each approaching car on a narrow road, took in the signs, Langholm, Hawick, Galashiels, steered us through the wooded approaches, edging us towards the city.
What Sarah had was serenity; a quiet, suppressed ability to cope with the world, while appearing to keep it at arm's length. She was suspicious of passions, of heightened emotions, not through fear or fastidiousness, but because she was always alert for inauthenticity, wary of the fake. Past the check-points, the filters that could provoke her to grin at the histrionic, I knew she could be moved, could give herself up to the moment.
And, the journey all but conquered, she started to speak to me. "You were behaving very strangely for a while. You were really quiet. Were you pissed off about Sally? I know she can be a pain in the arse, but she really wanted to come."
Sarah was using the mild swearing to repair the prim tone of earlier. I couldn't say anything of note. "I was fine. Yeah, I wanted it to be just the two of us, but . . . no it was fine."
"Well, next time, it'll just be us. We can go any time you know."
She left the words hanging. She knew there was something I wasn't saying, knew I was being diplomatic to cover up a grievance. She just wasn't sure she wanted to dig away until it was revealed. She knew there was a mystery. Wasn't ready to solve it.
And I had to leave it that way. The moment had slipped over the Fens, disappeared into the sea, had got itself lost somewhere in England. Little glimpses of love, devotion, possibilities had been tantalising, but just beyond the grasp. I tried to send mental messages of all the stuff I had been trying to say this weekend, the thoughts that wouldn't shape themselves into words wouldn't allow themselves to be voiced. She looked back at me, and interpreted my gaze as a sign that all was well.
We drove on. I looked across at her. She was steadily consuming the miles, her eyes fixed ahead now, staring through the headlight beam glittering off the wet road surface, happy now, nibbling at her bottom lip.
Waiting for the penny to drop.
