It is morningtime in the hour that the day’s light shows its hem in the East. It is that time when dream and memory are replaced by invention and desire. Desire to invent, to feel the words form on the page: messages from the heart, an imagined landscape, a different time freshly peopled.
The mind’s eye, as though a flying sprite, enters the privacy of home, alights on a child’s pillow, marvels at the untroubled face, the easy limbs still resting in half-sleep before rising. In an adjoining room his parents, aware of night’s echo, stretch and touch, delighting in the comfort of those known places where love and desire visit, made precious through stroke and caress. Her dear head fast into the pillow, his right arm resting lightly across her body, his left folded into her back. He inhales her as though a most delicate incense slowly burning on the mantle shelf, on the altar of this gathered home; beside his glasses, her simple jewellery, the once jasmined vase, cards ascribed with the love of friends and family, endearments, a child’s gay picture, a photograph of a cottage in silhouette against sea and distant mountains, and five stones from different shores, each a talisman, a gateway to a memoried story.
Still this still time, this fragile cushioning of quiet before the necessity of movement, the need of thought to plan the must of the day, the have to in this hour or that, the when and then, the care to this and there. Another day beckons in a sharp noise from the street, a car starts, a door slams, away in the vallied distance the hoot of a train.
It is warm for a late December day, but against the possibility of damp and cold he takes the necessary gloves and scarf, though wears a lighter coat. He will walk purposefully, though unbreakfasted, through the grey streets, past houses where the lit opaque windows of bathrooms shine, onto the heath land and then into the woods of oak and birch and alder. The trees therein are pilloried hands stretching their gaunt fingers to the whitening sky, still in the still air, almost silent but for the change of the air’s resonance, that particular quality in a wooded space where sounds’ reflections have a confused trajectory: a bird rising at your footfall, its wingbeats echoing a cascade of almost touched finger strokes on a wooden drum.
Here in this dank wood the mind is restless; it moves ungraciously between what the senses tell of the now and the interventions of imagination and memory. Her fatigue at the dinner table, the dull green of unberried holly, the description of a woodshed its contents delightfully named, and that short paragraph about the similarity between books and trees (he makes a mental note to learn this: to keep this warm thought close in times of stress). This is why we read he thinks: to gather to ourselves a temporary safety, the consolation of another’s voice, an antidote to loneliness. She is waking he thinks. He can ‘see’ inwardly her movement as she shakes off sleep, raises her eyebrows before opening her eyes, sitting on the bed now (eyes still closed), she stretches her right hand for the juice he brought silently to her bedside, that little action of love borne up two flights of stairs, every footfall carefully tiptoed, to place very slowly, silently next the clock, her bedtime book, a pile of his letters, a scribbled address on a notebook’s torn out page. She will never be so tenderly beautiful as in that moment he so rarely sees but knows and thus imagines. This image reverberates over his moving body and he stops to calm himself, to enjoy for a few seconds this almost-presence of her in an imagined touch of skin to skin, his fingers stroking her naked back as she gathers herself to move.
