Two months in the life of miserable old, me: Part 5

Thursday 29th January

We went to an historic castle today. Though my wife got next to no sleep last night and looked so this morning, having looked forward to this visit for some time, she was able to shake off her feelings of tiredness.

But as we stood at the starting point of what was to be a guided tour, waiting for other tourists to arrive, the guide, a tall, middle-aged man with spectacles and a big nose, tactlessly remarked to my wife, whom he’d never met before, that she looked terrible and as though she needed to lie down. It was done half in jest, yet there was a meaningful inflexion in his words, an undeniable look on his face which suggested he was in earnest, and that he had been unable to disguise his feelings of displeasure.

Understandably my wife was upset. Admittedly she does have one of those faces, those sensitive, sweet faces that look so radiant when lit up, but so deflated and irritating when tired, moody and depressed. She said nothing but looked huffy, irritated and angered by his words. Which unfortunately made her look like even more of a sourpuss.

Later on however things got worse, as my wife, nervous and bumbling now, her confidence all drained away, and evincing a cold, silent anger toward the guide, kept wandering off from the group to which the guide responded ‘oh? Where are we going now then? Have I lost one?’ I have to confess to not liking this semi-educated man, perhaps a retired history teacher or something, clearly a man of some learning, but all the same obnoxious, supercilious, unhappy in heart and soul, and tactlessly unable to control his thoughts and feelings. By this time he had gotten the other dozen or so followers onside, with a few cheap jokes and the way in which he lightly, and as an aside, made comments about Anna wandering off. He seemed especially keen to get the good will of a few middle aged, yet fairly sophisticated women, including two sumptuously dressed Americans, one in a green top, yellow cravat and stylish beret, the other in a white jumper, blue jeans and glittering in golden jewellery. And as much as he was tactless with my wife, he was submissive and respectful to them, kissed their backsides and tried to joke with them, and they, seeing how limp and weak willed he was and feeling flattered not only by the respect accorded them, but by the way he indirectly and subtly put my wife down, were more than happy to flatter him, and asked him questions which he bowed and scraped to answer.

Then at one point, my wife, angry, silent and really feeling disliked, happened to wander off slightly as the guide spoke, and started fondling some books and pottery resting on a table. To which the guide quickly shouted at her, telling her it was forbidden to touch things. At which point my wife, dejected and humiliated, walked off out of the room we were in, and as I and everyone watched her unhappy, downtrodden, dumpy little figure walk off, the guide, this time with a slight inflexion of genuine regret in his voice said ‘oh, I think I have lost her’ and the rest of the group laughed lightly.

A few minutes later, looking out of a window of the castle, I happened to look down upon the figure of my unhappy little wife, walking along the grassy bank of the riverside, shaded by a line of trees. And as I saw her walk slowly, dejectedly along, a sorry, outcast figure next to the river and trees, I knew I should have felt some profound sense of sympathy and love for her, for her predicament, after all we’ve been through: knew that I should’ve ran after her and consoled her. And yet for all that, I just felt utterly annoyed by her, as if it were all her fault, as if she’d brought it on herself; and as much as I tried to rouse my sympathies, thinking of how much she once meant to me and how much she’s done for me, I could only feel contempt for her.

After the tour finished, I went back to the car and sat waiting for her. I started wondering where she might have got to, or what she might have done, but eventually, after an hour or so, she resurfaced.

I now expected a long, bitter argument with her and to be berated for not following her, and I expected she would be sore, miserable and annoying. However she was in fact very calm, settled.

‘Where have you been?’ I asked slowly, a little taken aback by her cool return.

‘Oh, just having a look around’ she said calmly ‘it’s better that way, more relaxing. I had tea and scones in the refectory.’

‘Oh’ I said calmly. I had been all ready to discuss the events of the morning, to try and placate Anna, to justify myself. She surprised me by her demeanour.

We sat there awhile in silence, Anna’s calm, serious mood infecting me. She wouldn’t make eye contact with me, but looked ahead into the distance. I, sitting next to her, looked at her, seeking her eye contact. Eventually she spoke.

‘I first came here with the school when I was ten or eleven’ she started up.

‘Oh?’ I said, ready to listen.

‘Although it was something of a boring excursion for us children, lots of memories of it remain in my mind, not least that we saw horses and cattle mating in the fields along the country roads our bus took, and that we were in stitches of laughter as we crammed to the windows watching the stallions and bulls, strangely upright and on two legs, mate with the females. The trip and the castle were totally boring in truth, and I remember how annoyed my teacher Mrs Shaw became on this hot and sticky excursion, and how later, as we children sat in the sunshine of the courtyard, we all gossiped about what an old witch she was, and Jennifer Kerr said ‘shut up would you!’ really tactfully, ‘you can’t say that, not when her husband’s just sitting there.’

‘Her husband, an oldish looking man with grey hair and black glasses, had accompanied us on this trip, and we were all a bit scared of him, and thought it weird that Mrs Shaw had a husband. And as we criticized crusty old Shaw and Jennifer Kerr butted in, I remember looking at his face, to see how he responded to this; and instead of being angry or annoyed, he just sat there unconcerned, with sange froide, a look of calmness and forgiving on his face. And that’s the thing I most remember about the trip.

‘He was, in his calm, quiet, bearing, quite the opposite of Mrs Shaw, who spent the whole day tired and irritable, shouting at us children, eternally dogged by headaches and the heat, and forever at the end of her tether. In his calmer constitution, he must, I guess, have provided some solace for her. She was the archetypical school mistress, constantly annoyed, bad tempered, short on energy, never in a good mood, overworked, sick of children. And she was so slight of frame, so small, skinny and anaemic, her hair was grey and her teeth stuck out a bit and were crooked and she spat as she spoke sometimes, a trait which we children never ceased to pick up on. In every way she seemed unhappy, a dissatisfied, raging, angry little Napoleonesse, and yet for all that, she possessed a fine, keen intelligence, a highly-strung sensitivity, a desire for something more. She was special and on occasions we really loved her and warmed to her.

‘English was one of her favourite lessons, and she always picked great books for the class to read, and we would all get into the story and she would spend hours seemingly, talking about it and what we thought would happen. That was when she was at her best, when liberated from all the palaver of disciplining and shouting, of meeting targets and following the rules. That was when she was in her element, when free simply to talk and philosophise at leisure, to capture our imaginations, to spellbind us in awe and silence. I remember reading the Runaways, a book about a boy and a girl who run away from their foster home. And she would take us off for drama as well, in the quadrangle, and there in the summer sunshine and the freedom of youth we would enact little parts from the book and she would guide us and instruct us. Another thing I remember were the Faberge eggs. She really had a love for art and craft, and for a few weeks she set us to work on designing and then executing a display of painted eggs. I spent hours making the drawings and then finally I set to work on the eggs themselves. And at the end, I had this lovely basket full of them, patterned in a sort of tortoise shell design, with black outlines and the regions inside painted damask red, blue, green and purple. It was such a sight and Mrs Shaw and I were both so pleased with them.

‘And I was something of her favourite. Even before I got to her class, there was an assembly taken by her in which she talked about her dogs and how she had needed to weigh them and how that had presented a problem because they wouldn’t stand on the scales, and you could only get them on by taking them in your arms and standing on the scales yourself. And she asked us, if anyone knew how it was possible then to determine the weight of the dogs. And I put my hand up and told her the answer, and she was so impressed. And the next year, I entered her class and there was an immediate bond between us, I was her head girl so to speak and I told her how I wanted to be a vet, and she was pleased by this, for she always wanted us girls to become doctors and lawyers, scientists and prime ministers, she didn’t want there to be any limits to our horizons. And she recommended a book to me, especially for me, lent me her copy of it in fact, the Peppermint Pig, such a delightful book, about a young girl who tries to save a little piglet, the runt of the litter from being slaughtered. And I so enjoyed it and would come in everyday and talk to her about it.

‘Well anyway, she was often angry and run down, easily irritated and annoyed and one day when the head teacher decided that as part of the school’s jubilee celebrations, there would be a football tournament between the classes, she took exception to it and had an argument with him, asking why it shouldn’t be a netball tournament, why the boys were being favoured. Even though she was married and had two sons of her own, she often got irked with the boys and favoured the girls, and trusted them more and always felt aggrieved if the boys were favoured. Anyway her argument with the head fell on deaf ears, and worse than this was that miss Zuckerman, another teacher, sided against her. Miss Zuckerman was a young Jewish teacher with lustrous black hair, a magnificent, beautiful face, and such a wondrous body, tall, rangy, athletic, buxom. Everyone loved her, both boys and girls, and we used to watch her play tennis on a Saturday, on the grass courts, and we would sit spell bound and in awe and cheer her on, enraptured by this women, her grace, her beauty. Well as a rule, Mrs Shaw and Miss Zuckerman got along and were friendly, but on this occasion Miss Zuckerman took the side of the head, saying it didn’t really matter, since the girls would be allowed to play in the football tournament just as much as the boys.

‘Well that was that. Poor Mrs Shaw was having a bad day of it, but later that afternoon she perked up somewhat as she took us for a lesson on farms and animals, wildlife and nature. And at the very start she turned to me and asked, with a pleasant, sensitive look on her face, what did I want to be when I grew up, believing I would say a vet. But at the time I was going to dancing classes and was quite into it and so I said I wanted to be a dancer. And I remember the look of surprise and dejection on Mrs Shaw’s face when I said this, and I felt I’d let her down and hurt her. And she said ‘oh I didn’t know you could dance?’ And I told her how I went to lessons with some other girls, and she couldn’t hide a feeling of disappointment, it was a final blow to her, she had thought she could rely on me, but now she’d found out that I was into dancing and wanted to be a dancer. And that seemed to be the final straw for her on that woeful day, her voice betrayed a hurt, an anger, a feeling of dejection, and she talked without enthusiasm, withdrew into herself, and shortly after, abandoned the talk she was going to give and told us to get on with some book work and went and sat at her desk and did some marking. And I recall feeling so terribly guilty and sad that I’d hurt her, and at the end of the lesson I looked at her, and smiled lovingly at her, but she just looked angered and peeved and wouldn’t respond.

‘And so that was that. She retired about five years ago now, but poor soul, only a year after that her husband died of cancer. Well, as I was touring around the castle, I came across this room on the ground floor, next to where the kitchen is, which is set out as in Tudor times. It was virtually empty, very peaceful, there was music playing and I just walked in slowly and had a look around at the old furniture, the old bookcases, the chairs, the paintings on the wall. Then when I’d walked to the far end, I turned around. On the right there was a blazing fire, and two women dressed in Tudor style sat doing needlework. At the far end sat other old women, bedecked in Tudor garb, one playing a harp, another a lute, and a third, a little old lady with grey hair sat playing the flute. I recognised her immediately as Mrs Shaw. She hadn’t really changed at all. And as I watched her from a distance, saw that little old woman, oblivious to passers by, move her fingers on and off the flute, and heard the melancholic strains, I felt she really captured all the sadness, all the misery of her life, it was like poetry to see and hear her. As though she told her life story through the flute.’

‘Did you speak to her?’ I asked.

‘No’ said my wife. ‘What good would it have done. I didn’t feel like it. Better not to spoil the moment. But it’s funny how someone else’s life, the life of poor Mrs Shaw, a life spent irritated and angered, shouting at stupid and spoilt children, craving for something more, intelligent and bright, yet meeting only with the harsh reality of a senseless world; an unfulfilled life I imagine, a frustrated life, a life unable to express itself, its passion, its energy, a misspent life you might say; it’s funny how viewed from afar it appears so poetical, how in a sad and cruel world, that old woman and her mournful flute somehow portray a meaning and a sadness, a tragedy that would not have been possible, had she have led a more fulfilled, enjoyable life. And it’s funny that I can find myself so full of sympathy for another person, when my own life is so incomplete.

‘It’s just in my nature I guess, to be sympathetic. No matter how awful my own life is, even though I’ve got nothing to live for, am miserable, depressed most days, even though I know I’m a nobody, and nobody is interested in having my sympathy, even so I just can’t help feeling such immense sympathy for Mrs Shaw. Her life has been one long, unremitting series of stresses and strains, disappointments and bitterness, rarely relieved by the pleasures of this world. For her, her life must seem woeful, depressing, not profound, a meaningless and worthless existence, spent being unhappy, just like I know my own life to be. But for myself, looking on her life from a distance, looking on that grey-haired, intelligent old woman playing the flute, I see only the tragedy, the sorrow, the poetry of her life, I see in her woe something profound and magnificent, as if her story, her journey through life was worthy of note.’

We sat there a few moments in reflection and thought, just looking out the front window.

‘Do you still fancy going for fish and chips’ I said after a few minutes to my wife.

‘Yes’ she replied.

Friday 5th February

When I read over my entry of last week I see I am guilty of portraying myself as a calm and cool headed individual who puts up with all life throws at him, whilst portraying my wife as a neurotic, who runs off and makes a fool of herself, on the slightest of pretexts. Although I am often like that, it is also true that I am, from time to time, infected with pathetic moods of rage and anger, childish, petulant behaviour when the bully in me shines through, and that often my wife is the cool and rational one, able to cope with life far better than I. It’s been a disastrous few days, and only now, after tennis, am I in any frame of mind to write about it.

It began on Tuesday evening at a dinner party at my brothers. I don’t really like him or his raucous wife and children that much, and they in turn regard Anna and I as bores and intellects. They especially dislike Anna, as all my family do, and consider her a dour-old fuddy-duddy, a prude, a fumbler, a sour puss. And they do little in there behaviour, and false, supercilious way of speaking to her, to dispel this notion.

I spent the evening brooding and keeping my mouth shut, not particularly showing my dissatisfaction, but not being overtly nice either, annoyed by the senseless laughter and stupidity of my two teenage nieces and teenage nephew, and the annoying behaviour of my brother’s wife. My brother himself loves to moan, ceaselessly putting people down, decrying the injustices of the world and deluding himself that his spiritual dissatisfaction is down to other people, when in fact, given so much in life, it’s his own fault for lazily squandering his opportunities. He thinks Anna a toff and southerner, a naïve, inexperienced woman, and Anna knows he despises her, but she, always trying to get along, tries to placate him, by decrying the world as well, and deliberately bringing up topics such as rising house prices or gun crime in the hopes of getting in his good books and showing herself a cynic. I can’t and couldn’t stand to see her lower herself like this.

Afterwards when we got home and got inside our dark, lonely, cold house, just the two of us now, we didn’t speak a word to each other, and fell into that dismal but truer state of being, after having put on false and frankly despicable faces at a dinner party we didn’t want to be at. There was a tension in the air, as we fell into our real persons. We felt moody, angry, and dissatisfied, tired after all that acting. Sick in heart and soul. We said not a word to each other but were simply gruff and terse.

I woke up at one, unable to sleep. Anna not lying next to me, I went downstairs to the kitchen and found her sat in a chair. Angered and irked with myself, I was overcome with loathing at seeing her person there, a tired, worn out old hag, clearly unable to sleep, exuding a silent, nasty anger, perceptibly irritated as she read. I saw her stupid, stupid face, her tired face looking especially dreadful, her eyes smaller, her nose seemingly bigger and redder, her clunky reading glasses on her face as she sat and read, an awful, annoying sight; her person bristling in a bad temper that manifested itself in angry and persistent sniffs – she being too out of humour and lazy to go and blow her nose. As I poured myself a glass of water, I wanted to scream and shout at her, to beat her to a pulp. But I controlled my temper, and in my pyjamas, walked off upstairs and back to bed.

But I couldn’t sleep, and returned downstairs again, this time with the intention of having it out with my wife. When I got there, she turned her stupid, bespectacled face to me, the glasses perched ridiculously on her nose, so that she glanced over them at me, and in this gesture, this one and single annoying gesture, she really lit the tinder of my bilious and belligerent soul. She returned her glance to her book, persisted in reading and said nothing. I’ve never been overcome with such hatred of her, and her tired worn out face and I went over to the arga, on top of which stood a cauldron of half eaten casserole filth, my wife had made two days earlier.

I had wanted to tell her at the time how disgusting it was, but had held my tongue. Now I stood over the arga, spoon in hand and stirring it, and overcome with psychopathic loathing, shouted out ‘slop-slop-slop’ in savage imitation of somebody eating.

My wife looked up at me. And in the irked glance she gave me I read that she saw precisely that I was spoiling for a fight, that I was trying to precipitate an argument. She looked at me steadily, and there was meaning in her eyes as if to say, she couldn’t be bothered, wouldn’t rise to the bait, and that I should go away and leave her alone. She stopped looking at me, and, ignoring me, returned to her book. But I was determined.

Stirring up the casserole once more I again repeated the ‘slop-slop-slop’ and when she happened to sniff, I mimicked this too. But not rising to it, eventually I simply walked over to her and with evident peevishness and anger in my voice asked

‘Why did you have to be so false tonight, talking the way you did. You know they all hate you, Ronnie especially, so why did you try to lick up to him? And why on earth were you going on about rising house prices and gun crimes? As if that has any bearing on you, as if they were to blame for all the shitiness of your life?’

‘Well what do you want me to say?’ she responded ‘At least I make the effort. Do you think I like any of your family? They’ve never once gone out of their way to be nice to me, not once, not once in the twenty years we’ve been married.’

‘I know. They don’t like you at all, and never have. So why do you have to act like such a despicable dog, grovelling and contemptible, licking their boots and whining for a biscuit, fetching their sticks to try and ingratiate yourself? And why did you have to say that about some people never having experienced true poverty, or having to work for a living – when you know fine well they consider you to be exactly such a person – and then linking that in with orphans in Africa and ‘these silly people spending millions on cosmetic surgery.’ That was an embarrassing little comment you made.’

As my wife, attempting to ingratiate herself with Ronnie had made this remark – he and his wife, never go out of their way to make people feel listened to – the two of them had expressed in their body language a feeling of contempt for Anna, and she, embarrassed and unsure of herself, had faltered as she made this trite little social comment. Whilst I, a look of true loathing and contempt in my eye had looked on her with scorn. She had noticed this at the time. And the memory of this, and the fact that I’d so callously brought it up again now, mortified her.

‘How dare you!’ she shouted, genuinely hurt, deeply wounded ‘how dare you ever look like that at me! Don’t think I didn’t see your look, I did. How dare you! How dare you treat me like some piece of scum, look at me like I’m a worthless piece of rubbish! Do you think I enjoy talking to Ronnie? I hate him, I hate all your family.’

‘Well just don’t act like such a lowly dog’ I said, coolly, oh so coolly, deliberately in response to seeing how mortified, embarrassed and ashamed she was, how much of a lowly dog she felt herself to be, how I’d treated her as such. And there and then bursting into an outpouring of upset emotion, hating to be treated like a cur, she stood up and shouting, screaming and breaking into tears, hurled a tea cup from off of the dresser, right at me. It hit me ‘bop’ straight in the face, fell to the floor and smashed.

The anger, the massive anger that I felt as the thing hit me, hurt me, and truly pained me, the anger inside me exploded, and as much as I had instigated this fight, I now, as though I had been wronged and aggrieved set about retaliating.

And so a fight set in, a fight between two middle aged, diminutive figures, man and wife in their pyjamas, at one o’clock at night, in the kitchen-dining area of their lonely, isolated farm house, situated as it is three miles out in the sticks, the two of us fought, devoid of anyone else, or anything else in our lives, anything more than just each other. Just the two of us, at each others throats, finished, nothing more to live for, no one at hand to help us, no God, no nothing, nobody: just us, fighting each other. We grappled, we wrestled, I was in the ascendancy. Our pathetic, ageing bodies writhed and fought, my wife screaming, emotional, crying, slapping; I, more aggressive and stronger, holding her in submission, venting my pent up psychopathic rage. And as the two of us played out this tragic, theatrical farce on the kitchen floor, this lonely, spectator-less, empty fight, our dog Harry, saddened, depressed and alarmed to see us so viciously at each others throats, ran around the kitchen floor, whining and barking desperately, terribly upset to see us like this, going crazy, terrified of the flying, smashing crockery, of the wrestling, running around in a circle, yelping, screaming, frightened and upset, and reproachfully whining at us to stop: exactly like a child of ours it was too much for him to bare to see us like this, as though his world had ended. He was the only witness to this shameful debacle.

‘Look at poor Jack, look what it’s doing to him’ pleaded my wife, sobbing as I held her in submission now. ‘Look at him!’ But I ignored her. We had wrestled for five minutes or so on the floor, but now I had her, holding, as we lay down, her hand behind her back, as policeman do when they arrest a suspect. I held her like this for a few minutes, recovering, she too, after the fight. Then

‘Get up!’ I shouted, and as she did so, now my prisoner, I angrily force-marched her over to the arga.

‘Now listen to me!’ I screamed at the top of my voice. ‘Don’t you ever dare make me this casserole filth again. Do you hear me!’

In response she just whined pitifully and seemed ready to cry.

‘I hate it, it’s like cow poo, you’ve just shovelled in from the farm’ I shouted. ‘If you ever dare feed me this again I’ll kill you.’

At this point my wife swore angrily in her tear soaked voice and threatened to break loose; and in response, I now tightened my grip, and, my hand on the back of her annoying head, forced her to bow down, bend to place her head in the pot of casserole. She screamed as I did so, and I rubbed her face around in it, that cold mince, and said ‘you eat those disgusting slops, slop-slop-slop!’ And then finally my energy spent, and suddenly overcome with a torrent of regret, I raised my wife’s sorry, sad, pathetic little face from the casserole, saw how pitiable and sad it was, how silly and contemptible, smeared in the thick gravy as it was, the stuff on her cheeks, on her chin, mouth, and on her turned up pretty little nose; and when I saw all this I was so overcome with sadness and regret, I knew the fight was over, I released my wife, she burst into tears, an outpouring of endless tears, and we both dropped to the floor exhausted, and lay on the cold kitchen tiles.

And in that state we both lay on the floor, resting, hoping someone, God for example, would miraculously extend his hand down toward us and help us out, give us comfort. I in my pyjama top and underpants, she in her nightgown, both of us lost, confused, desperate, at a loss, on the cold, kitchen floor, in a big house in the middle of nowhere, in a Godless, spiritless, empty world. And as I lay there I recalled not only the beatings my brute of a father occasionally dished out to me when he was in a bad mood after work or drunk; but more poignant than this, I saw before me again the sad, little face of Joanna, her sad little face so like her mother’s, when she came to me crying, with dog poo all over her face, and especially on her turned up, pretty little nose, and how I comforted her and wondered how on earth anyone could ever do such a thing.

Later we went up to bed and I slept in the spare bedroom alone. I slept for an hour or so. A peculiar sleep, a mixture of regret and sadness colouring my heart, but also indifference and coldness; also strangeness in my new position in the spare bedroom; especially sterile not only because of the bland bed and walls, the guest-room aspect of the place; but because I was alone, estranged from my wife. A strange sleep, a vague sense of sadness that I was alone pervaded my heart, a half-regret at my actions rebuked me. But by and large a simple icing over of my emotions, a coldness and emptiness stole upon me. And it was with this empty feeling that I awoke after an hour or so, my dreaming unhappy, stilted, and halted with a recollection of our previous dog, Rocky, a Border Terrier like Harry, who had to be put down after hurting his leg through excessive walking.

Unable to sleep I got up and went down to the kitchen to see Harry. I opened the door and saw him sleeping in his basket, and suddenly overcome by tenderness, bent down, and lovingly and with real emotion said ‘hey boy’ and stroked him. And he, he roused his sleepy head, opened his eyes, and though tired and somnolent, was pleased to see me, and made a sad puppy face for me, a mixture of tiredness, wisdom and genuine heartfelt love for me in his mien, a look of wisdom that tired dogs posses, as if he were a human in a previous life, and knows all about the ups and downs of it, and is glad now to be living the happy, indifferent, sleepy life of a mongrel. He comforted me and I recalled with sadness how probably I was to blame for killing poor Rocky. Senselessly overwalking him as I did, in my pursuit of the countryside.

We went out for a walk, through the lonely, deserted, dark night. Everywhere in slumber, sleepy at that hour. Even the motorway which we arrived at, was empty and silent, save for the occasional nocturnal car or lorry. And as I walked through the silent, dead night I was overcome by a feeling of deadness, dullness, a coldness, a frigidness, as if I really, really don’t care for anything anymore. I wasn’t depressed or deeply saddened. Just cold, indifferent. I remember that when I was younger, I read of a man whom on his death bed, announced coldly that his heart was empty. And though I’ve always been a cold and cynical man, I remember thinking how could anyone die with such dismal words upon their tongue, and that for all the gloom and misery of the world, there is something else out there, something more, something profound, special and magnificent, something of the otherworld, and that in death one finally experiences this, one is exalted to a higher state of consciousness, one feels the mystic, the religious, the esoteric. Yet here, feeling only cold and numbed, my brain, my senses dulled, dimmed, almost switched off, feeling indifferent, careless of everything I not only have no interest in the higher side of life, the mystical, the spiritual, the necromantic, but I also feel I will die with an empty, tired, indifferent heart, colder and more emotionless than any man’s.

Being an amateur admirer of art, I know something of the painter Constable, a man of these parts and how badly he took it when his wife died. The early, sunny, joyous scenes of pastoral life that he depicted, were in later life, when he lost his dear wife to tuberculosis, and his heart was ploughed asunder with sorrow, replaced by equally impressive evocations of the countryside, this time portraying a more barren, bleak, lonely world; dismal, sad, lonely scenes reflecting the desolation that had taken root in his heart. And having been acquainted with his story and viewed his paintings, I always felt such a deep understanding of his predicament, of how he loved his dear wife, how she meant everything to him, and how her premature death caused immeasurable heartache to him; the sadness that she was gone forever, and wouldn’t ever return, quietly assailing a heart that she had made so tender. And I always felt such sympathy for this story, for the fate of Constable, as if I shared it, knew of it, understood it. And yet for all that, what feelings of utter antipathy do I have for my wife, what coldness and indifference is engendered in my heart toward her. Love was long ago dead between us.

Ironically that very same day, in the nighttime we went off to another dinner party, having to put an act on once more, to bury and hide the fact that we fought so horribly during the night. Yet this dinner party was different, as spent in the company of Derek and Sheila – a retired couple, their children long since gone, who are and were Anna’s friends primarily, and knew her well before I ever came on the scene – I saw how my wife acted completely differently to the other night at Ronny’s, how she was quiet, calm, intelligent and at home, so sweet and gentle, lovely in the presence of her friends, and especially the tall and gracious Derek, who treated her as though she is still the young girl he once knew. Yes, that is the effect of other people: it was a major transformation. And as I watched on, as the tall, manly and gentlemanly Derek, graciously walked around the table as my wife and I were seated and Sheila was at the cooker, as I watched as he stopped to fill up Anna’s wine glass, a bottle of red in one hand, and resting his other hand lovingly on Anna’s shoulder, as if he was happy to see her, and glad of this opportunity to reminisce with her; as I saw the serene, kind face of that strong, manly man look down on her and ask her to say when, and saw how Anna beamed back up to him, and saw how they made a joke of saying when, saw the genuine, heartfelt merriment between them, I was overcome with a feeling of shame for my own despotic, tyrannical, little person, my unmanliness, and reminded that Anna could’ve had a life without me, a better one perhaps, and that I have over the years, to some extent brought her down to my level, moulded her into an opposite of me, never allowing her to be anything more or something else, something else that the likes of the tall, strong, Derek, allows her to be. He sees something in her that I don’t.

When we got home that night, my wife informed me that she would be going off to her mother’s for a while, to spend some time with her sister who is home from France. My wife spoke coldly with me as if all is over, and I was left to feel regretful, like a naughty boy. She didn’t speak to me all day until the dinner, and had spent the afternoon on the telephone arranging something, which I later learnt was her trip down to her mother’s. There was an air about Anna, a cold, distant air, and she hinted to me that her sister, who is now living in France, was interested in asking Anna to join her out there. I think she is only trying to frighten me. I don’t think it will come to divorce. But she wants some time apart.

So she left this afternoon, and before, during, and after tennis, a thought was brewing within me to do the same. My sister up in Newcastle has gone to France for a month and won’t be unhappy if I go and do a spot of house-sitting for her. I need a break. So then, to Newcastle it is.