Authors: Jim Powell
‘You don’t like the outside world?’
‘I like my bubble and I don’t like to leave it. I seldom do, except to go to London.’
I liked Anna’s bubble too. We all need a bubble, somewhere to be ourselves. Some people cross oceans on a whim, hoping to find one. It seldom does much good. My bubble was Barnet,
Leadenhall Street and the Northern Line.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Years.’ I thought she seemed a little jumpy, had done since I arrived.
‘And before?’
‘Various places. Mostly London.’
‘Why did you choose Somerset?’
‘I liked the idea of it,’ said Anna. ‘As far as I know, there are only two counties in England that have escaped the last fifty years and Somerset’s one of them, this
part of it anyway.’
‘What’s the other?’
‘Lincolnshire. I didn’t fancy Lincolnshire. Too far north for me. So I came here.’
‘What’s the matter with the last fifty years?’
‘I’ve lived them,’ said Anna. ‘That’s the matter with them.’
‘So it’s back to Woodstock. Back to the garden.’
‘Something like that. How does it feel to be in the boondocks?’
‘Great.’
‘I expect you’d get bored with it after a while. Most people do.’
‘Have you ever been bored with it?’
‘You go through stages,’ said Anna. ‘For the first few months, it was fabulous. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t come somewhere like this a long time before. It was
spring and summer, and I was still in love with the idea. I hadn’t got to grips with the reality. That first winter I froze. Nothing happened from November to March. All I could do was wait
for the spring. When it came, it wasn’t as good as the first time, nor the summer. I missed the theatre. I missed the galleries. More than anything, I missed the conversations. If I’d
been able to go back to London, or somewhere near it, I would have been on the first train. That wasn’t an option, or I didn’t think it was, so I had to stick it out. For a while after
that, I hated this place. I loathed everything about it.
‘I loathed it because it didn’t meet my requirements. You can’t ask that of places. They are what they are. They have their own requirements, and they demand that you meet
them. Gradually I learnt to do that, and I adjusted to the rhythms and absorbed the habits. Now this countryside feels like a home to me and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. But you have
to know who you are, to live here. I’m not sure my previous life equipped me to know who I was.’ A hesitation. ‘What about you, Matthew? Do you know who you are?’
‘Good question.’
‘Does it have an answer?’
‘There’s this character called Matthew Oxenhay,’ I said, ‘whom I’ve been impersonating with some success for nearly forty years. Naturally, I know him well.
He’s not hard to know, because he’s predictable. He’s consistent even in his contradictions. Whether that character is me is debatable, even though I am Matthew
Oxenhay.’
I threw my surname into the conversation deliberately, to see if Anna would react to it, to gauge how completely she had forgotten me, or was pretending to have forgotten me. We hadn’t
exchanged surnames when we met in London, and my email address featured only my initials.
‘I think you may be a little older than forty,’ said Anna, delicately.
‘For my first twenty years, the dichotomy did not seem to exist. No impersonation was required.’
‘And since then there have been two Matthew Oxenhays?’
‘That would be one way of putting it.’
‘Who at some point became detached from each other.’
‘Not detached. Sinews still bind them. Semi-detached.’
‘Do they share a heart?’
‘No. I think not. I think they share most things except a heart.’
I hadn’t meant to say anything like that, not so soon. I changed the subject quickly.
‘Did you call the cottage Shangri-La, or was that already its name?’
Anna smiled. ‘It didn’t have a name when I arrived. It got this one in a fit of irony, in the middle of that first bad winter. The irony has since evaporated. Do you want to have a
look around the garden, or did you do that yesterday?’
‘I did it yesterday. I’m happy to do it again.’
Anna exchanged slippers for Wellington boots. A type of footwear, an unfinished monument, an unauthenticated recipe for beef: not much of a legacy for a war hero, a Prime Minister and a duke,
but more than mine would be. I had only my city shoes to navigate the mud. We walked outside and trod the narrow grass paths between the beds. To see Anna as a tour guide of her smallholding,
explaining its foibles and challenges, was not to see a woman out of context or out of character. Yet I still thought of her as a metropolitan woman. She had seemed equally in context in London.
The move to Somerset had not contracted her life. It had expanded it.
‘It’s very organized,’ I said.
Anna laughed. ‘None of my old friends would call me organized. Normally I’m one of the least organized people you could meet. But when I put my mind to it, I can do it.’
‘Presumably it’s all organic,’ I said.
‘Certainly not. Do you take me for some Home Counties wuss? I have a minor laboratory in my shed. Do you want to meet the hens?’
‘I met them yesterday.’
‘Not properly,’ said Anna. We strolled over to the compound. I was introduced to each of them by name: Simone, Gertrude, Emmeline, Germaine, Vanessa and so on. And Virginia, of
course. She hadn’t yet acquired a hut of her own.
‘What happens when they’re too old to lay? A nice retirement home and a generous pension?’
‘No. That’s what’ll happen when you’re too old to lay. The hens get eaten. There’s no sentiment in the countryside.’
‘Nor in the City,’ I said.
‘Have you always worked there?’
‘Always.’
‘Buying futures?’
‘Trading them, yes.’
‘And what did you trade yours for?’ We wandered back to the house and settled into the sofa and armchair again.
‘For a pile of money, a house in Barnet and the usual.’
‘Was that a good decision?’
‘Why do you ask such difficult questions?’
‘Because they’re the only ones worth asking,’ said Anna.
It seemed typical of her to ask the question. I’d never met anyone who would ask such an absurd question. Was it a good decision to have become filthy rich? What I had done was what any
normal person aspired to do, and the fact I had done it successfully ended the debate as far as the rest of the world was concerned.
‘I don’t know if it was a good decision.’
‘But have you been happy?’
‘I haven’t been un-happy.’
‘Not the same thing,’ said Anna.
‘Not to start with. Perhaps it becomes the same thing.’
‘Does it have to, do you think?’
‘Not for everyone, possibly,’ I said.
‘For you?’
‘I don’t know. And for you, Anna?’
‘I don’t know either.’
‘Well, what do either of us know?’
‘I know how to make do,’ said Anna. ‘I know how to get by. I know how much money I’ve got to spend this month and how to get to the end of it fed, clothed and roofed
without spending more. I know what things hurt and upset me and how to avoid them. Mostly I know how to avoid them. I know everything about what I’ve got, very little about what I
haven’t got and nothing about what will happen. I expect to die with the little things secure and the great questions hanging suspended.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I think that’s right. I think that’s what I know too.’
‘Not much, is it?’
‘Less than it was.’
‘So is that why you’re here?’
‘Probably,’ I said. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that, after all these years, what is left, all that is left, are the questions I asked myself at twenty. Life
hasn’t managed to answer them yet.’
‘That’s probably because they have no answers,’ said Anna. ‘Did you really have a meeting in Dorset?’
Yes. It happened several weeks ago.’
Anna absorbed this information. ‘So do I take it that you’ve driven all this way purely to see me?’ I said nothing. ‘Quite flattering, I suppose, but it suggests you have
an agenda.’
‘Why do men usually want to see women?’
‘To have long intellectual conversations,’ said Anna. ‘At least, that’s what I’ve always assumed.’
‘Thank goodness for that. I was afraid you were going to say something else.’
‘There’s a limit to how long a situation can be prolonged by facetious remarks.’
‘You should know.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘I do know. It’s all right. I don’t mind what you tell me or don’t tell me. We all choose how we want to present ourselves to other people,
don’t we? None of us parades an unvarnished truth, assuming there is such a thing.’
I paused. ‘There’s something else I haven’t told you.’ I weighed which card to lay on the table. ‘I don’t really have a job any more.’ I gave her a
brief résumé of the previous months. She burst out laughing.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. It’s mean. It was the image of you standing outside your office and saying “good morning” and “good night”
to everyone. I think it’s wonderful.’
‘None of it leads anywhere,’ I said. ‘I can’t go on like this for ever.’
‘When I go to London and see my friends,’ said Anna, ‘they’re envious of me. One or two of them have been to stay down here. They look at this place and the life I lead
and think how lucky I must be, while they’re trapped in the rat race in London, or think they are. When I met you, I thought how lucky you must be, with a good job and plenty of money, and
all of London at your fingertips. It isn’t just self-deception that’s the problem. We deceive ourselves about other people too. I think I mostly learn about reality from works of
fiction.’
‘Do you read a lot?’
‘Constantly. There’s not much else to do in the evenings here, as you can see. And television’s rubbish these days.’
‘Modern novels?’
‘Yes, usually. Some old ones.’
‘There seem to be mostly old ones on your shelves.’
‘That’s because I can’t afford to buy new ones. I get them from the library. Don’t you read modern novels?’
‘Not really. I don’t read very much.’
For many years, in my early working life, I was an acquisitor. I accumulated a wife and two children, a house and a garden and their furnishings, expensive hi-fi systems, the latest technology
of all kinds, the friends that Judy made, luxury holidays, a cuddly toy. I accumulated the inconsequential miscellanea that my status on the conveyor belt demanded that I should acquire, far more
than I ever had a use for. I played my generation’s game. All these things were added. I never noticed the subtractions.
I stopped reading difficult books, the ones that had given me a frisson of superiority when I had read them with a calculated indifference on the Underground. The books I now bought were
middle-brow. No one was surprised if I read them on the Underground. Eventually even middle-brow became too much like hard work. I read only on holiday, and only the books that Judy bought. Camus
and Kafka had been consigned to our attic. The bookshelves boasted Robert Ludlum and Jackie Collins.
Other cultural interests had gone the same way. Once, the first thing I would do in a new city was to find the art gallery and a spare morning to spend in it. Now, prints from Athena decorated
our house and, until the visit to Tate Modern, I couldn’t remember when I had last stepped inside a gallery. When we went on holiday, we lay on beaches in the day and ate at Michelin-starred
restaurants at night. We didn’t explore towns and cities, or their histories, or peoples, or architecture. We didn’t lie under a night sky and wonder at the stars. We were too civilized
to do things like that.
Then there was music. In my teens and early twenties, music had consumed my life. I liked rock, but my real passion was for folk music and the lyrics that went with it. Politics had led me to
Pete Seeger and thence to Dylan. I knew the
Paul Simon Songbook
by heart before anyone in England had heard of Garfunkel. Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Judy Collins were regular visitors to my
bedroom in the small hours. Where were they now? Their albums were in the attic, keeping company with Camus and Kafka. And who had replaced these giants? Successively, Fleetwood Mac, Chris de Burgh
and Shania Twain. Those had been Judy’s choices too. I no longer much cared.
Politics had gone the same way as the rest, although I pretended otherwise. I told myself I had not settled into the materialistic torpor of the world around me, but I had. The conceit of voting
Labour could be maintained only because now it was new Labour. I was preconditioned to buy anything with the word ‘new’ stuck in front of it. I had paid extortionate taxes in the
’70s and had believed there was a moral purpose to it. Now, if there was talk of increasing the top rate from 40%, I was outraged. Somewhere along the line I had lost confidence in the
ability of politicians to make a difference, or the sort of difference I wanted to see made. I railed at the corporate world, while performing moral gymnastics to pretend I was not a part of it. It
no longer mattered how I voted.
So many things in which to have lost interest.
Perhaps the greatest loss was in conversation. Once it had been fearless. I would plunge without hesitation into areas that the wise would consider dangerous, and found them thrilling. I was not
afraid to reveal any part of myself and, because of that, attracted similar revelations from others. I never appeared to be emotional, but I was a magnet for the emotionalism of others, unafraid of
where that might lead.
Now I went to those places no longer. Judy had never been to them. In fact I had never had a single conversation with her that fully explored such terrain. I have wondered whether that might
have been a subconscious reason for marrying her, whether some fear of the toll those conversations might one day exact if I pursued them, with a wife or with others, had not driven me away from
them and towards Judy. Yet, until my marriage, I did pursue them. Then, gradually, my old friends faded away, and our new friends were not the same. They were new for a start, and they were all
couples. None of them seemed to have any emotional curiosity or depth or, if they once had, they’d forsaken them. The women wanted to talk about children and schools, the men about business
and football, and if I had dared to ask them about their lives and their feelings they would have wondered why, what I was trying to suggest. So the conversations changed. Life dumbed down. And the
better part of what life was about, or had been about, took its leave and was absent.