Series: 52

52: Episode 26


So I'm sitting here on a cold stone wall above the firth, above the bay, above a row of boats moored and waiting for a tide, and I'm thinking back, about before, when I was as thin and lonely as a ghost, and I didn't know it, hardly a person at all, and all I had, and I thought it was everything, was books, poems, the words of dead writers to thicken me out. I was a too-thin girl, passing between the places I lived like a sheet of see-through plastic, but the kind that you can't really see through, though it looks transparent, because if you'd tried to look through me all you'd have seen was blur.

Down on the shore as clear as this north day itself, my fiddler and our two boys are picking up stones, deciding which ones to skim, dropping the ones that aren't worth it. Across the beach Jack Mercury is taking photos of clouds. Yesterday, when the tide was in, he leaned forward and held his big flashy digital camera over the water of the firth. He saw me watching him. I'm finished with all that, he said. I've been in love with the wrong too long. The wrong what? I asked him. He smiled. Then he dropped the camera into the water.

This morning he went to the newsagent's in Fortrose and bought a disposable Kodak. So simple! he said. Look! Click! He took my photo. It'll be a nice one, I was smiling at him looking so happy. He is quite changed. We all are.

I can hear them down there, making a noise like happy dogs, and behind me I can hear Polly; funny how I used to think of her as the posh woman, a dry-clean-only. She's not. She's Polly. I wonder what people reduced me to, or the old Girls to. Look at me, even me, reducing them to the Girls. But then, they are the Girls. I wonder how they're doing. I wonder how Bea is, how Mrs Coleman is, how Mrs Cobb is. I miss them. I'll ask the fiddler. I'll ask Polly. We should all go back to the hall. We should organise a big winter party, one where the staff gets to celebrate, where the bossturd gets to sing karaoke. He'd love that. I wonder what the bossturd's first name is. Polly'd be good at organising a party like that. Strange now that I know her so well, to think of her as just part of the great bland roaring noise of poshness pouring into Hinxted every weekend. She's marvellous. She's brilliant. She's Polly. She knows everything there is to know about birds, and gardens, and Icelandic sagas, and phonographs that were made at the turn of the century, and palaeontology, and choral singing of the 19th century, and how to strip a Land Rover engine, and not just these but a whole load of other things too.

She's still arguing, in her too-strong voice - it'll cause trouble, that voice! - with the man who's the head of the council in the village. She has decided she wants to open a café here. It'll be beautiful. Organic. Luxurious. It is so beautiful here it can't help but succeed! Like a Riviera in the north of England, she keeps saying. This isn't England, Polly, the fiddler keeps saying. Don't be a wally, Polly, the boys shout in unison.

So I'm sitting here on this cold stone wall and the feel of the cold through my clothes is wonderful, like hello, you're here, and I'm watching the fiddler chase the boys right to the water's edge, then the boys chase her with a crab they've found, then she chases them back, shouting, think I'm scared of an old crab, do you?

Then I think of the way I woke up in the caravan bed in the middle of the night, the condensation on the windows from our breathing, and I saw her there and I knew, in that moment, that waking up and seeing the face you're meant to see is like what coming back from the dead would be like.

In some countries, she told me, people believe violins are inhabited by the dead, especially the dead who really loved it, being alive. I think the noise she makes when she plays a tune is as if a breastbone could speak. I think about the fiddler playing that tune, "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square". I've never been to Berkeley Square. I don't even know where it is, but when she plays it, hello, I'm here.

A razor shell! one of the boys shouts. A stone with a face on it! the other shouts. Then one climbs on to the other's shoulders, a single-double child. A sycamore double-winged seed falls right by me, right on the wall. That reminds me. Birdseed, Polly says. She's finished arguing with the council man for the day; she's come down to join me here on the wall; she picks up the seed we both saw land by my hand. It's going to be a cold winter, she says.

The boys run towards then away from the water. Polly is off to see whether the newsagent sells birdseed. She'll cause so much of a fuss when she finds out they don't stock it that they'll order it in, far too much of it, and they'll be trying to sell it for years, and for all those years all the local birds will be really happy.

Imagine a handful of seed, thrown randomly out for the birds. Imagine all the hands, all up and down the country, doing this casual, generous thing all the winter. Imagine, on every single seed, written minutely, like by those people at fairgrounds and festivals who can write your name on a grain of rice, how fine it is just to be here, "a star to every wandering bark" all the way to "the streets of town were paved with stars". A winter bird takes a seed in his or her beak, then into the bird it goes. The bird survives the winter. Then the spring song comes out of the same bird's mouth in the chill of a March morning in little smoke-rings of sound, and the birdsong passes straight into the bones of the fiddler.

I can just hear Bea saying it in my ear, the song's never over, Bloss, what did I tell you? Mark my words, that song'll never be done.

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