Commencing Our Descent. Suzannah Dunn
ago, I realised how much needed to be done, and how little else there was for me to do. All the usual maintenance is taking place alongside the necessary re-conversion: when Jacqueline came to live with us, the house was converted; now that she has gone, ramps and handrails are being removed, some flooring replaced, her elaborate bathroom dismantled, and the front room – which was her bedroom – redecorated, reinstated. I am re-converting the house so that we can live without her.
The floorboards man, who came to the house this morning, was a twin; he told me that he had never had a room of his own when he was a child, because he was a twin. I had always wanted a twin: no mere sib, but a twin. He told me that his two elder brothers were twins too, and two of his own three children, one of whom had twins of her own. I was enchanted by this fairytale family, twins within twins, a Siamese version of a Russian doll.
‘I never realised that they ran so clearly in families.’
‘Children?’ he quipped.
But he had saved the biggest surprise until last: the kind of twinning that runs in families is the non-identical kind. The twins in his extraordinary family are the ordinary kind.
What then, I wonder, is the chance of such a family having identical twins? The same chance, presumably, as that of any other family having identical twins. I like to turn the puzzle around: what is the chance of being born an identical twin to such a family, of all families; to a family which specialises in the non-identical kind? Surely a tiny chance, quite spectacular.
None of this matters to Hal: he was one puppy in a multiple birth, the others unknown to him and insignificant. All that matters to him is me. And a few minutes ago, here in the park, he lost me. He was trotting ahead when he saw a spaniel, the spaniel saw him, and they were compelled to bound towards each other with the usual reckless enthusiasm. Predictably, they stopped short and stood tall before embarking on the final few cautious, mannered paces. The noses touched for a second, then glided down the other’s body. I wondered how dogs regard human handshakes. What is so civilised about the taking, holding, squeezing of a hand? Because who knows where a hand has been? Hands go everywhere; that is what hands do. How intimate, to reach for the hand of another person, to place one’s own hand into that of another person.
As soon as Hal had fulfilled his social obligation to the spaniel he was ready to return to me. He looked up but somehow missed me. He stiffened, straining to peer into the distance, but panic blinded him to me.
I called, ‘Hal!’ but he failed to hear. His outline, usually slack with contentment, was crystal clear with desolation.
I hurried towards him, yelling, ‘Hal! Hal! Here!’ My final note hit home and he scampered, but in the opposite direction.
I bellowed again, ‘HERE!’ but by then he was further away than my voice could carry. I was losing him, he was galloping away from me towards the road. I stopped, as if this would stop him too and make him turn around.
‘HALHALHAL!’
Suddenly his radar worked: he circled, skidding, to lock on to this ululation of mine; suddenly he was running fiercely towards me, doubled-up, his body tightened for speed. Nearer, he slowed down, feigned nonchalance, trotted to a tree trunk. We have suffered these panics of his on previous occasions and each time I have been aghast that he could think that I would leave him: here one minute and quite simply gone the next? Why else does he think that I am here with him but to follow him, to watch for him and take him home with me again?
Now we are winding down, meandering towards the café. The man who is sometimes still asleep beneath blankets on a bench in the Scented Garden is awake and sitting on the low wall which borders the café’s terrace. Beside him is a café cup, but no saucer: tea, no trimmings. The word for men like him, when I was a child, was tramp; a word not dissimilar in connotation to grandpa. Tramps knew their place, which was benches and ditches; they did not camp in shop doorways as homeless people do nowadays. And they were given food rather than money. George told me that the tramps of his own childhood were shell-shocked veterans of the First World War, of which his father was a fellow veteran; and that his father, not known for his benevolence, took care of them, bathed and fed them. ‘They came to their own kind,’ he said.
When I was a child, the term homeless was never used, and instead I remember talk of the open road. I was under no illusions, I knew that our local tramps were afflicted with madness of the mumbling, visionary variety; I knew that they were infested with fleas and lice; but I knew, too, that they inspired an awe that had something to do with those roads, to do with walking away from our comfortable world like saints. The awe had something to do with their return, too. I remember how people spoke of them: Yesterday I saw Hopalong in the churchyard, I hadn’t seen him for, ooh, a couple of years; Haven’t seen old Jack since that terrible Christmas. Our tramps were landmarks, even in their absence. Perhaps especially in their absence. We were touched that within their nomadism lived a homing instinct, like a weep from a wound.
This man, who has been living here for a couple of months, is a throwback, a storybook tramp: he has the bushy beard and hair, and sleeps on a bench. But the beard is dark rather than grandpa-grey, and well-kept. His clothes, too, look fairly new and clean; unstylish, but new-ish, clean-ish. Sometimes he wears a pair of sunglasses which are too small for him, the frame slightly splayed: children’s sunglasses, perhaps; perhaps given to him, perhaps found. Today his eyes are bare, he is squinting in the sunshine. Sometimes he wears a pair of startlingly white trainers; other times, his feet are bare. Today he has his back to us, he is facing the sun, so I cannot see.
We often pass each other on these paths. He walks purposefully, trainers or no trainers. During the past couple of months I have passed him so many times that these days I am unsure whether to acknowledge him. There is no one else here whom I pass daily but do not acknowledge. What I am unsure of is whether he would want to be acknowledged. I wonder what he sees whenever he sees me approaching: me, in a crisp little summer dress; following my glossy, golden hound; stepping out to savour the sunshine, circling the park, and returning home. I wonder if he wonders why I am so often in tears.
Yesterday I went to London again. There are friends who I should have planned to see; some of whom I have not seen for years. But arrangements would have required energy and forethought, neither of which I had. Philip is always encouraging me to do as I please; this time, I took him up on his suggestion. I went to London to see Edwin.
I had enjoyed the time spent with him on that train, last week, even though much of the conversation was far from fun, and the journey was hell. What I had enjoyed was his company. Time spent with friends these days, for me, is in anticipation of a return to my natural state of solitude.
I knew that the phone number that he had given me was his home number, he had told me that he was working from home for the months that he was on sabbatical.
Sabbatical: a lovely word. I would love to have a job whereby that word could apply to me.
I phoned him, said that I was going to be in London. ‘I thought that it might be nice to have that coffee.’
‘I can’t imagine anything nicer: a coffee is what we shall have.’
We settled on a time, which was lunchtime, twelve-thirty, before turning to the question of where. He started with, ‘Where would be convenient for you?’
‘Oh, anywhere fairly central.’
‘Well …’ he was thinking aloud, ‘… I’ll be in the library …’
‘The British Library? Bloomsbury it is, then.’
We agreed to meet on the library steps.
‘The only problem,’ he said, ‘is if there’s a bomb scare. The last time that there was a bomb scare, they locked us in.’
‘Out.’
‘No, in.’