In the clear light of morning, an October morning, at the beginning of this properly autumn month, he had felt sad: that he’d broken a promise to himself the afternoon before. It was her voice on the phone, and then that text. He had promised he would no longer write intimately, about their intimacy, remembering what has passed between them, which had so marked him. All it took was this flavour of her voice, a slowness in her diction, and he could not help himself: such a rush of images, of moments, sensations. He knew it was unwise to linger over any of these things because he felt sure she did not. That was no longer her way, if it ever had been her way, and he imagined that, with her accustomed kindness and generosity, she had quietly put such things aside. So on this gentle morning, he was upset that he had once again visited that box of treasures in the white room that he kept for her in his imagination house. This was not the route to happiness. He would throw away the key.
He needed consolation. Once he had turned to her letters, to catch that flavour of her, those things that surrounded her, a kind of aura that held within it her secret self. Now, there was a print above his desk that he loved (Spurn marks: seaweed #4), her origami bird, the print of a painting of an African woman and child given to him on his birthday (when he had first kissed her, tentatively on her left cheek,) and her dear photograph, dear because he knew he looked at it more times in a day than he could possibly admit to.
It needed to be a book, a passage he could read to remind him there were so many other joys in life alongside the joy he felt at the thought of her, a joy he felt he might never consummate. He took Ronald Blythe’s Word from Wormingford off the shelf and turned to the essay for the beginning of October. Ronnie had been watching the late September clouds, those armadas sailing across the skies. In a moment he was somewhere else, in a life he recognised so acutely, those East Anglian places of his early manhood. In this present time, in North Yorkshire, he would sit and watched such clouds from a bench above Filey Bay, clouds that David Hockney celebrated in his paintings of the Wolds.
Yesterday afternoon there had been a break in the weather after a week of mist and rain. It had found him gazing at a drama in the skies above the trees in his park. He had walked to the Rose Garden with its redundant conservatory and paired Pelicans atop its gateposts, where once he’d sat with his infant children as they’d slept. There were roses still, a little tattered, but colourful. Like Ronnie he had spent time cloud watching, until the geese from the nearby lake erupted into flight. Always a marvel of movement !
Blythe’s essays were always so rich in the sheer breadth and content of their meditations. There was always some new knowledge to be had, things to Google or better still ‘go to the book.’ This was when he loved what few books now remained from his library. He had Luke Howard’s essay on The Modification of Clouds. A Quaker, Howard was admired by Goethe (they corresponded) and Shelley, John Constable and John Ruskin (who used Howard’s cloud classifications in his Modern Painters). He then went to find Shelley’s The Cloud (and in so doing uncovered several books that he’d forgotten he owned). He read the last verse that once he had learnt by heart . . .
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die --
For after the rain, when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of Air
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, live a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again.
Hmm, he thought, such rhyme and rhythm. And, via Blythe recalling the Chinese, he then pictured the official from the emperor’s counting house bringing guests home after work to gaze at the cloudscapes over the Tai Mountains from his humble balcony. Nothing was to be said, an hour of silence was the convention. In a blink he remembered the autumn poem by Lai Bai where ‘floating clouds seem to have no end.’
I climb up high and look on the four seas,
Heaven and earth spreading out so far.
Frost blankets all the stuff of autumn,
The wind blows with the great desert's cold.
The eastward-flowing water is immense,
All the ten thousand things billow.
The white sun's passing brightness fades,
Floating clouds seem to have no end.
Swallows and sparrows nest in the wutong tree,
Yuan and luan birds perch among jujube thorns.
Now it's time to head on back again,
I flick my sword and sing Taking the Hard Road.
He had to take a deep breath not to think too deeply about The Clouds and Rain, that metaphor for the arts of the bedchamber. But Ronnie’s 500 words sent him back to Wormingford and the bedbound old lady he describes who spent her days watching the clouds.
As he closed the book he felt a little better, ready to face the day, and more important ready to place his thoughts in a right place, a comfortable and secure place, quiet and respectful, however much he might seek to possess each night her Lotus pond and make those flowers of fire blossom within
