The Glory of Nothingness

The swallows dipped and dive-bombed, feathered pilots dog-fighting across a cloudless sky. My skin was sun-kissed, burnished gold in the unexpected July heatwave. This was England. Temperatures above 21 degrees Celsius were not something we understood. There was nothing to be done but spend the long days wearing a big hat and big glasses, posing by a turquoise pool in a motif reminiscent of Golden Age Hollywood. 

This glamourous visage was in fact staged in Surrey, in a corner of lush growth tucked away in the garden of England. The only sounds echoing through the world were the rustle of grass, the chirp of unnamed birds, and the brush of wind across water. 

No. They were not the only sounds. 

There was the low hum of the pool pump and the far-off rumble of jets across the sky’s dome heading for distant lands and there were the muted melodies of the soft pop rock dancing out on the air. An orchestra of natural and artificial woven together in a chorus of their own making and observation. Roses lovingly climbed over ironwork fences and hydrangeas strained at the confines of their flowerbeds. Despite the numerous flowers, the air only smelled of heat on stone paving. 

All around me were the sounds and smells of a summer escape from the oppressive vacuum of heat that was London. The city was woefully ill-equipped to function in high temperatures, the air having no recourse, trapped by people and buildings, buried underground and ceilinged in by pollution. In summer it became a sauna of irritability, the only conversations that managed to be sweated out to other Londoners were queries of “Did they realise how hot it is going to be?” 

Of course, everyone did, but everyone would tell you anyway. 

So, not only to escape the additional ten degrees the city added to the already abnormal weather but to flee the monotony of singular social interaction, I went to the countryside. Like how Victorian ladies used to retreat to the countryside to take the waters, I shipped south to recover from the city’s tyranny in the patchwork idealism of the English landscape, surrounded by golden fields, soft breezes and chirping sparrows. Remote, sparsely populated, luscious in vegetation and stillness. Little rushed apart from the dive-bombing swallows. 

Into this epitome of English beauty, I had been placed. The supposed “fair and open face of heaven”. A Keatish ideal of city escape, a John Constable painting come to life. 

Though I was bred from this countryside soil, moulded in the woods and bucolic rolling hills, I had never felt connected to it the way I did to the fraught, grimey energy of a city. No longer was that city London. The weight of that centuries-old stone had become unforgiving and unmoving. London bent to no one, least of all me. When I had first arrived, green as the hills I grew up in, I had thrown all my efforts into chipping away at the stone of that metropolis, begging it to give way to me. It had remained cold and impassive. I wasn’t even an irritating buzz in the din roar of history and routine that was London. It had too long of a memory, and too much resilience to pay attention to the likes of me. 

London was a whirlpool, sucking you under in a drawn-out swirl of unchanging indifference. Forever going in a circle that you didn’t even realise was crushing you until you were drowning. And then it would spit you out somewhere, never remembering it had killed you in the first place.

After three years, the city chaos had left my soul feeling dislocated like a shoulder or leg. Not broken, but completely out of place, so when I moved through the world, it was with a limp, awkward and in low-level pain. A throbbing discomfort that I convinced myself was how things were supposed to be. 

This year, as the summer turned putrid, my revulsion with the mass of humanity turned with it and I segregated willingly from fast internet, instant anything and stone surroundings. A barrier of effort put between me and the city life I thought I adored and thrived in. A space to reconnect my soul into place, and pop pieces of my being into alignment. Spirit level correction.

In Surrey, there was no need for shoes, makeup or effort. My soles burned walking to and fro between the ramshackle pool house that was my hideaway for the next week, and the extra wide sun lounger that became an island and bridge to worlds in novels long wanting to be read.  

I devoured books, drank pale pink wine in the middle of the day, ignored clocks, wrote when the mood took me, and napped when I felt like it. Time was a social construct and I was removed from it. I had nowhere to be, no one to answer to, only operating at the beck and call of my fluid preferences. 

On the third day of anonymity, as temperatures surpassed the hottest day on record, I was just the right amount of tipsy. In the sweet spot of day drinking, where I could still comprehend the excellent novel I was reading but the edges of inhibition were softened and pale as the wine. Breaking away from the book for a moment, I gazed skyward, appreciating the smattering of decorative clouds wafting across the azure canopy with a renewed simplicity. Delightfully relaxed, looking up and up, lost in the glory of nothingness in a way that a fully sober brain didn’t let me. 

As I surveyed the world from the oversized sunlounger, there was a crunch of the gravel driveway and through my fuzzy rosé haze, I registered the bloom of a red van in the driveway of the main house. A black ironwork arch cut a gap in the hedgerow flanking the pool area and afforded a rose-framed view of the postman rushing up the stairs. He delivered his various envelopes and as he turned to start back down the stairs, he spotted me. 

Across the pool, on my island lounger there I was. Perfectly framed by the ironwork and roses. I watched him staring, sweat gathered in patches under his arms, likely longing to back in the cool of his van. Yet he still stared, frozen in the heat. Whether it was from the wine or the social starvation, I cannot say, but a base instinct shivered through me and quite without thinking, I fluidly, suggestively, ran one leg up the length of the other.  

He stumbled over the last step and flushed, got into his van and drove away, leaving me once again with the swallows and limited countryside preferences. 

For the rest of my retreat, I became quite a scene. The strange frisson of being seen and admired ignited a subtle change in the purpose of my escape from prying eyes and wagging tongues. I still soaked in the summer sun, followed my whims and spoke to no one. Until I would hear the hum of an engine, and pause in my reading to determine where the rare car was headed. As the sound increased and confirmed it was heading into the slopped driveway of the house, I would arrange myself. Something in the calcification of the weather had revealed an unmet vanity. I didn’t want conversation from the postman, the Amazon delivery guy, or the cleaner who came every other day; I just liked being a scene. They would crunch into the lot, music blaring, dash up the stairs to the main house with their packages and letters, dropping them on the doorstep with the ease of doing a job done a thousand times before. As they turned to descend the stairs, they would see me beside the shimmering pool and halt somewhere between surprise and intrigued. 

For I would be artfully arranged, glasses on, the brim of my hat curved just so, long legs bared to the elements, one stretched out, one bent at the knee. Book in hand, angled so the sun hit the pages perfectly and in such a way that my face was poised to show the length of my neck and sharp jawline. With the tan blush of the summer imprinted on my skin and the kiss of sun-gold woven through my hair, I imagined myself appearing straight off the pages of some glamour rag. I gave no direct indication that I was aware of their voyeurism and the soft thrill it brought. I became a focal point within the nature around me. I was the subject of the scenery, the human presence in a living pastoral landscape. I had melded into this Arcadian vision, the goddess Aestas disguised as a noble peasant in the serene, undisturbed countryside. This was the singular social interaction I had access to and I performed admirably. 

The postman on his daily visits knew to look twice for me.

All vanity projects must unfortunately come to an end. After seven meltingly hot days, I packed up my books, my big hat and big glasses and said goodbye to my verdant retreat. The swallows waved me away as a taxi crunched into the driveway and dragged my reluctant body to the train station. If I had to be rudely thrown back into the sweaty throngs of humanity, at least I was brown as a toasted pinenut. As I stood waiting for the 13:15 train, the thought flickered that the postman would be arriving about now. I wondered if he might be saddened not to find me reposed in pictorial exhibitionism. Perhaps he might feel a sliver of disappointment at life’s return to predictable interactions. 

An announcement crackled over the parochial station’s speakers. 

“Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, the next train arriving at platform one will be the 13:15 to London Waterloo. Please make sure you are staying hydrated as we are experiencing a heatwave. Do you realise how hot it is going to be this weekend?”