The Width of a River

The laws of physics dictate that the length of a river can only be ten times its width before it is forced to meander. If it does not do this, it is evidence of human interference.

Not all rivers reach the sea. There are some which die of fetid boredom long before they mingle with the salt. The river she walks along now is one such failure, a pathologically idle flow which has written its destiny as a puddle some five miles distant. She cannot stomach this lack of purpose, this dwindling of responsibility. She is looking for her place, and it is plain that it cannot be here.

When her husband died she felt herself sinking under the stifling weight of his loss. The process of survival had been long and solitary, but it was eased by the money he left behind. They say that it's a curse, and perhaps for fools it is, but for her it secured release from her dull and comfortable life. In the absence of anything particular to strive for, she chose to invest in her dream.

It is dull to talk of dreams, but not necessarily to follow them. In her own dreaming, she is walking through an English village, or a market town, where a river runs through it. Not a wide river - not a Mississippi or an Orinoco, but a wide enough brook, cheerful and glinting in the light. Babbling, as the poets would say. She is walking down a lane where there is an open gate, revealing a Georgian manor with pressed and striped lawns. Upon these lawns are people, drinking tea, or perhaps sherry. Their laughter tinkles. The women are wearing the latest fashions with an English accent, and the Savile Row men are courteous and dashing. The trees surrounding this garden are shaking under the scuffed and bloodied limbs of savage children - the Lost Boys - who are free to behave - in this golden moment - as their feral nature dictates. They will grow up one day because there is no choice, but for now they behave as children should.

In the verges of this butterscotch village are poppies, their seeds sown in honour of the glorious dead; all those poor boys who once tested the patience of trees. And there is harmony here, because everyone is much the same. Their origins and skin tones may vary, but they are broadly variations of a unified theme.

That is the essence of her dream, which in waking moments she is not allowed to think, least of all to say: that she aches for the past. For Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle. For cucumber sandwiches and China tea. For the cotton mills and the factory holidays to the coast. For hop picking in Kent, charabanc trips and cider with Rosie. In her dream, these are people who understand the vagaries of human nature and will, quietly and without fuss, make good what is wrong. They may gossip, but they will not betray.

It is so hard to describe how vivid this scene is; the emotional yearning it brings, beyond that green gate set in the butterscotch wall. Here, where the wild forget-me-nots and the careful, cultivated hybrid roses reach an entente cordiale. You will do your thing and we will do ours. We are equally decorous in this earth, this realm, this England.

*****

This early morning, with Arthurian mist rolling across the vales of Avalon, she met a man fishing on the opposite bank. She asked him how to get to the other side, for the path here was hard-going. He told her that she was already on the other side.

This is a strange place, she thinks. Not home, not my butterscotch wall. She crosses it off in a journal she keeps in her pocket. This river will not be revisited.

In the near distance is another man, also elderly, divesting himself of clothing and clacking like the corvids who follow her path like debt collectors. She approaches him without haste and longs for a bridge to carry her away from him. She has spent a lifetime going sideways, but never once backwards. Naked, he slides down the muddy bank and steadies himself so that the water comes midway up his thighs. His flat, old-man’s buttocks are smeared with river ooze. He has something in his hand which looks like a weapon, so she breaks into a stumbling canter until she is at his right shoulder. If he notices her he doesn’t acknowledge it, but puts a pair of pliers (for that is what they are on closer inspection) into his mouth and manipulates the pincers until they extract a large, bloodied molar. ‘Aaaaagh,' he breathes.

‘What on earth?’ she says out loud.

‘Toothache,’ he explains, without turning round. It seems pointless to enquire about a regular dentist, but yet she queries the method. The old man sighed, as though it were all very obvious.

‘I took off my clothes so that I would feel self-conscious enough to hurry up, in case someone like you came by. I stand in the water because, shallow though it is, it is fearsomely cold, which will retract my gums and stun my senses. And I use these electrical pliers because they have the perfect aperture. Now do you see? And now would you kindly bugger off!'

*****

She is now but two miles from the village where the river meets its end. There is a growl of hunger in her stomach, which audibly rumbles in this quiet place. She hopes for a cafe where she can eat. In the distance she sees a wooden bridge. Not a Pooh-stick bridge for there is barely a current, but perhaps a stickleback bridge. She imagines children with long nets on dappled days, losing their shoes in the sucking sludge of the banks. If there are children here, not simply crows and old men. It seemed like a disappointing kind of Brigadoon.

She talks to herself a lot these days, since John died. All along the various river banks, she engages in an endless monologue. It is unsettling how loneliness can smother a person so efficiently, just a little at a time, and so imperceptibly that one doesn’t notice that your course is leading towards a stagnant pool where the pond weed will inevitably take you down and make sediment of you.

She can see the village in the distance. This is where she will leave this long cut, this shallow reen, and pick up another, thirty miles to the north-east, which has the spleen to reach the coast. And if home is not there, then she will find it elsewhere because it is calling to her, like the Lorelei calls to the sailor. She imagines a robin leading the way, perkily guiding her to utopia. That is fanciful, of course, because life is never that simple, although often she thinks it ought to be.

And of course, it really should be nailed down that one person’s utopia is another’s hell. That is why there is a middle earth, and that is why she looks for it.

She is not a poetic woman, nor an imaginative one, but crows, she has come to understand, are harbingers of ill-omen. With each side-glance from their obsidian eyes, they tell her that this is not home, not her place. She feels those eyes upon her as she approaches the village.

There is a church just within the parish boundary which is visible for miles. It glows sandstone orange in the morning light. The tower is disproportionately tall, like a castellated warning, although against what or whom she has no idea. This land is so flat one could see an enemy from miles distant. Even a short woman need only stand on tiptoes to see an encroaching hoard.

She opens the lych-gate just as the morning mist begins to lift, rising from the tombstones and burning away in the sun. There are crows here too, but less incongruous. This is where their black, judgemental souls belong.

She spends a small token of her ample time reading epitaphs, curious to note that no one appears to have died here since 1972. Propped against the eastern wall is a tombstone telling the legend of an apprentice murdered by his master in 1827. It is rhyming plea for vengeance, although she assumes it must have been satisfied by the rope, since the master is named and shamed in stone. Unless he escaped across the levels and was never seen again. Did no one climb the tower, raise the hue and cry? Stand on tiptoe? He could not have got far. Not here.

By the porch is a slanting tombstone deeply engraved with the skull and crossbones and the legend PETER BLACK. A pirate who died in a village with no water. There is no further information. No dates.

She does not have the gothic’s dark heart for this place.

As she was leaving, wondering whether an English breakfast might involve the flayed flesh of humans, a loud, sonorous bell rang once from the tower’s depth. It startled her, and when her heart had corrected itself, with her hand on the warming wood of the lych-gate, she reckoned it for a death knell.

In her childhood she was fascinated by it. She recalls sitting on her grandfather’s knee when they first heard the passing bell for Mrs Ackerley, who was decorously dying in the terrace two doors along. This first bell, her grandfather said, announced that Mrs Ackerley was not gone yet, but it wouldn’t be long. The single strike is designed to catch the attention; to warn you to dust down your funeral weeds and hang them out to air.

The second bell is the death bell, when the dying is done. It may ring an hour, a day or several days after the first, and in those times, people would listen for it and take their caps off in respect. This is her green gate in the butterscotch wall, when human life was worth something. Before we got all crowded up and clamorous: before people forgot there were two sides to everything. Now, no one is right any more.

The third bell is the corpse bell, which announces the funeral. Death once honoured by three single strikes, morbidly spaced, a British poke in the eye for rococo exuberance.

This sharp nostalgia for her grandparents pierces her, those whom she has not thought of for so long. Would it have been unseemly to tell them just how much she loved them when they were still alive? The roads we don’t take play so hard on the imagination.

Along the lane towards the village, where there was a thicket of bulrushes on the fast diminishing riverside, she saw an old woman approaching. Are the young people currently elsewhere, or do they not exist here at all? The crone had a walking stick and carried a basket where she imagined no other content but a red, poisoned apple.

'You heard it, then? the old woman asked.

'Yes, I’m sorry if someone is unwell.' (Or dead, because it might have been the second bell she heard). The old woman laughed and then barked out a rattling, consumptive cough.

'No one is dying,' she said, and she leant forward, as though about to impart a secret in a crowded room.

'Thirty years ago, Tanner Goodman got married. Soon as they came back off honeymoon, he paid the church to ring the death knell on the anniversary of their wedding. There’s always more than one way to be dead,' she winked with a cloudy eye.

She walked a little further and stared at the puddle in the middle of the village. The end of the river where tadpoles butted against the debris. Soon there would be a plague of frogs. It is clear that youth has flown this place of eternal dotage. There were no savages in the boughs. No Never-Never Land, no young girls in blue, pinafore frocks falling asleep by the river and dreaming of white rabbits. No sense of anything at all but the decaying odour of sloth.

She did not have breakfast, although the eerie custodians beckoned her from the frontage of a twee, half-timbered cafe. She instead called a taxi to take her to a coach, to take her to a river’s source, along which she would walk towards the sea. If she did not find her green door in the butterscotch wall, she would begin again, with another river, looking - always looking - for the poppy-strewn lane. Whatever the compass point, the door was there. In the clairvoyance of her dreams, it was too specifically described to not exist at all.

It was England before the second war. It was America between the second war and Vietnam. It was any place where life had since changed so irrevocably that, like a newborn blinded by hospital lights, it wishes for nothing more than to return to the womb, where the tenor of the days is marked by a steady and predictable pulse. This haunting nostalgia ached, and would not let her rest.

She would abandon all rivers which did not reach the sea. There was no merit to them; they had disgraced themselves by failing in that one simple task, their only job. One does not embark on an odyssey for it to end with a puddle.

As she waits for the taxi, a robin alights on a sandstone wall and watches her intently. Humans must walk a linear path through time, only aware of what is behind them. But a bird, given to loftier aspirations, sees the whole path, that which went before and that which lies ahead. He knows where her place is.

If only he would guide her there.