In Bed as Winter Takes Hold

IN BED AS WINTER TAKES HOLD

He slept on the left hand side of the bed as he had done with all his girlfriends. He was restless; he could not throw off the memory of the performance they had attended. It wasn’t the music as much as the story. He couldn’t leave it be, and the more he realised that the more concerned and restless he became. Pauline was sleeping. She too seemed a little uneasy. She was snoring more loudly than usual and it was less regular, almost musical in its cadences.

He felt trapped though he didn’t know why. There was nothing especially wrong with their relationship. He kept thinking of her mother which he knew was crazy. Drama queens- no not her. His racing mind was wondering whether there were drama kings. Was he one, incapable of living a normal life, always looking for the melodrama, the new thrill, the empty spaces to fill up with new adventures.

Outside all was silent. A silent night. As December began he was beginning to think about winter and Christmas. Winter was still good, Christmas less so. Christmas loses its magic after childhood. It becomes supermarkets playing the same dreadful songs every year. But “Silent Night”. He did love “Silent Night”. He should have been born in Germany; they did things better there. His thoughts were racing too fast.

Outside the parish church chimed the hour, two o’clock. He raised himself in the bed. It was time to go. Noiselessly he eased himself from the duvet. He looked guiltily at Pauline. Was he really leaving her? He slipped on his dressing gown and packed a few things into a bag. Including his passport. That was important.

He left by the front door. There was a good coating of snow on the ground. Now he heard another sound. A creaking sound, a metallic creaking sound. He looked around him. On the roof of their house there was a weathercock catching the intermittent breeze. Funny that…. But his thoughts, his impressions, were racing ever faster.

Before long he was in open country. Why had he left? He was glad he’d put that big coat on. Oh forget the coat. It was not material. Ha! Why had HE left, the other one. With Pauline it was different. She was a bit older than him. But the other one and her mother. That feeling. The way she looked at him. Was he some sort of tutor to the girl?

Pauline wanted to educate him. She took him to theatres and concert halls and then asked him to interpret the performances they had watched and heard. He wasn’t used to that. They were musical in different ways. Her Schubert string quartet was his Herbie Hancock small combo. You’ll like Schubert she promised him and then we’ll try Bach. They’re the best. Yes he had liked the string quartets, beautiful noise. But this, at the Wigmore Hall, was no string quartet.

He'd enjoyed the evening. Wigmore Street was a good place. The shops seemed to be from a generation passed, places where he might expect to see his mother, veneered shop fittings, comfortable middle-aged women, cafes serving pots of tea. A good winter street.

But it was the story not the music. Why had he left her? That was never resolved. And that was what held him in its clutches. The lack of resolution. To which his response seemed to have been… then I shall take the same journey away from another woman and try to work it out for myself.

Now he was deep into a forest. All was still once more. Only the steady plop of lumps of snow from white-shrouded trees broke the silence. He came upon a hut and tried the door. It opened freely to his arm. There was a pine table, a niche and a reredos for the exhausted peregrine. In the niche was a scallop shell, some tiny bones and a hand-written folded note as for a museum exhibit. “Ye Bones of St Iames as a Child.”

Back in bed he considered his journey. Welling waves of disappointment and relief both washed over him. Pauline had stopped snoring. He felt she was on the brink of wakefulness. As he thought his thoughts she awoke.

“You came back”

“What!”

She was staring at him. There was both fear and gratitude in her stare. And there was love.

“I dreamt you had left me”

“Goodness me. I wouldn’t do that”

The unexpected change of direction had re-introduced a certain glibness into his manner, even playfulness.

“It was so real. And I had no idea why you’d left.”

“What was I wearing?”

Her expression changed.

“How should I know? I was asleep.”

“Yes of course.”

He looked towards the bedroom door. His dressing gown hung in the usual place, next to hers.

“Does it matter?” she continued

“No. I just wondered. Did I make a big thing out of it? Pack a lot of things? Take my passport- for example?”

“You’re not listening to what I’m saying. I was asleep and when I awoke you weren’t there.”

“I am now”

“Yes, Brian, I’m awake now.

She paused.

“But I’m still not quite sure.”

“Neither am I”

“You’re in a strange mood, Brian.”

“It’s four o’clock in the morning. I always feel strange if I wake up at four o’clock in the morning.

“You were dreaming too maybe.”

“Maybe. There was snow but I can’t remember much else.

He could tell she was relaxing again.

“I do love you. You’re so important to me you know.”

“Yes I know.”

“We don’t get snow like we used to”

There was a pause in her flow.

“I know how sensitive you are to things”

This surprised him and the vagueness of “things” worried him a little as an opening.

“That concert. The way he left her. You’ve been brooding on it I can tell.”

Can she he thought. Goodness me.

“I didn’t take you there to brood. It’s just a wonderful winter recital. A winter’s journey. Die Winterreise.”

“I know” he said, But he didn’t really, Know how she could be so unaffected by the storyline. Th young man and the girl. Her mother, first approving, talking of marriage, then seemingly going into complete reverse on the subject. And then the journey, the endless, unresolved journey.

“And you’re not Schubert. He was dying you know. And anyway he didn’t write the words.”

All this at four o’clock in the morning! He struggled to break through the implicit contradictions in what she said. But he knew she meant to comfort. Abstract music, ie instrumental, was easier- Herbie and Freddie Hubbard and Ron Carter going through the satisfying symmetry of “Canteloupe Island”. Or Schubert himself with the string quartets. She interrupted his off-topic ruminations.

“I need some more sleep. Good night again”

“Good night, Pauline.”

She turned over and fell asleep again very quickly. Brian lay there. He was worried that he was too ready to lie to her. He wondered if he was a slave to expediency, or at least a slave to phrases made up to suit the passing moment. Then he felt he might fall asleep again too. But his dream, blocked by her uncannily complementary account, started to break through. Dreams reveal themselves piecemeal and that’s provided they don’t get lost in the night. He remembered asking her about the passport. A clear nod to his plans, to his dreams, waking dreams of a pilgrimage to Compostella. Not that he was in any real way religious, but he did like purposeful walking, and the thought of breaking bread with monks even though he knew they would now have modernised gites not abandoned huts in snow-clad forests.

Dreams are such a mix of odds and ends from the most recent of days to the long endless past, mesmerising mixes of theme and imagery. Mitteleuropa weather vanes in Crouch End’s London hipster suburbs. Darker visions were trying to piece themselves together into his thoughts. Images of bones and charnel houses and children trapped inside grown men. Once more he felt uneasy and afraid he would return to wherever he had been earlier on. So again (no not again he told himself but he was still not entirely sure) he silently eased himself from out of the crisp white duvet and took himself to the living room. For once he wished he had not given up smoking. It might have focused his unruly mind. Instead he poured himself a whisky, Irish always Irish.

He drew the curtain back a little. There was a thin but steady drizzle of snow again. He looked at his Jamesons. Again. NO!! There were no agains that night. They had made separate journeys but neither had travelled far. Not in one sense. But now he understood her fear and her neediness and he appreciated both as things to be first respected and then fully taken on board. She had no-one but him and he only her. And somehow he had to learn how precious that was. And think and write and love, as separate but connected things. No man is an island. Nor any place nor thought. Nor any dream.