ANNIVERSARY
"How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere."
(Shakespeare, Sonnet XCVII)
He stood isolated, desolate, immobile, as the steady drizzle whipped up by the gusting wind stung his already icy cheeks. It was 7 am – so not exactly a cenotaph moment; not exactly a year to the minute, but it was close enough to the time for silence, for reflection, for pain. Sadness hung over him and clung to his sagging figure like a damp fog, paralysing his limbs and choking his lungs. Harry didn't believe in negativity and yet he lived it; he didn't believe in living in the past and yet regret followed him around like an unwanted stray dog. It shadowed his waking thoughts and shaped his disturbed sleepless nights, whispering "… she is gone, she is gone.."
Seagulls glided and swooped over the grey horizon of glass and concrete. The London skyline waited patiently for the weak sun that was struggling to break through the threatening dark cloud cover; a gloomy sleeping beauty, awaiting the magical restoration of life and colour. A pathetic fallacy reflecting and amplifying Harry's despair. Already at this early hour traffic crawled over the bridges, seeping corrupting fumes into an atmosphere already leaden and heavy; the only sign of life in an other wise desolate urban miasma.
" I've become the most forgetful of all the forgetful,
Quietly the years sail by.
Those unkissed lips, unsmiling eyes
Will never return to me."
(Anna Akhmatova, Instead of Wisdom)
"Gloomy, miserable, wallowing bastard. Pull yourself together. You're not the one who had to leave everything behind and build a false life" – but of course that was part of the problem: thwarted sacrifice. He had been determined, like some latterday Sir Galahad, to surrender to Oliver's machinations, to uncover his chest ready for ritual execution, but she had turned the knife on herself – for the greater good she had insisted – but he had known otherwise. The same intense feelings of love, respect, desire that continued to haunt him had triggered without hesitation her self-propelled extinction.
So he continued to linger on that bleak spot with grey water slapping against the wooden struts of the quay. To move away was to draw a line where there was no line to draw. His heart ached as raw and unbearable as that last moment he had stood close to her rigid body, looked into her exhausted, troubled face and felt her, hesitantly, finally, reach out and touch him; bringing her cold hands and colder lips to his face. Acknowledging the unbreakable connection, the pent-up longing, emotion and desire. As always with them, restrained and understated and yet never had he felt greater affinity, greater passion or intimacy with another living soul.
"She hath left me here all alone,
All alone as unknown,
Who sometimes did me lead with her self,
And me loved as her own …
But true Love is a durable fire
In the mind ever burning;
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning."
(Walter Ralegh, Walsinghame)
Harry's arms stiffened by his sides as despair washed over him again. He felt neither the lash of the increasingly insistent rain nor the tears that ran silently down his face, only the soft sensual touch of her lips seeking his, declaring her past commitment and her future loneliness. Harry's legs buckled under his weight as he leant heavily against a stone bollard and placing his hand over his face shielded the outside world from his trauma and gave into the despair that was welling up like bile in his throat.
"We can't just sit here watching him Adam, we've got to do something."
"There's nothing we can do, he loves her, he'll never see her again. What can we possibly say to remedy that? We just have to leave him alone to fight his own demons."
A higher pitched voice interrupted from the rear seat:
"I can't bear it, he's crying for God's sake. One of us has got to go to him!"
"No Jo, it would humiliate him when he's vulnerable and exposed. Believe me, no one and nothing can help except your own will to fight it."
The three figures sat on in silence in the shadows, watching their mentor and protector as he tried to reconcile despair and pragmatism: life goes on, he had a job to do, a country to protect, Ruth had left so that he could go on fighting for security and moral authority in a world of half-truths and veniality; but the squat toad of grief sat on his shoulders and pushed him down onto the wet, soiled oppression of his surroundings.
"This man is quicked so with grief,
He wanders god-like or like a thief
Inside and out, below, above,
Without relief seeking lost love."
(Robert Graves, Lost Love)
If this was a fairy-tale rom-com, a slight figure would appear at that moment in the distance, run with open arms and kiss him joyously and triumphantly; but neither the three hunched figures in the Lexus or the solitary grieving figure by the dockside believed in fairy-tales. Grief could only feel truly at home in a soul devoid of hope and Harry had known in his constricting, shrivelling heart as he watched the barge pull away and her wan, tormented face gaze unflinchingly at him, that he would never see her or touch her or hear her call his name again. There was no way back from such finality, only to have the courage to get up and face the world every day, to find solace in a job well done and comfort in the deceiving blanket of fantasy; but for now despair had dominance. A less emotional man would have coped better by caring less, but the romantic soul that Ruth had recognised and loved could not be assuaged or comforted. Harry had always been a positive character, but over the past 12 months he had come to appreciate that an expressed longing for the tranquillity of death was not necessarily romantic excess. He know it was irrational – just a chemical imbalance in the brain that would eventually adjust, but he didn't know what was the worse prospect at that moment: a life of pain and loss thinking always of Ruth or a life of dulled senses and absence of feeling with her memory faded by time. A soft low moan escaped his lips:
"..Ruth, Ruth, I need you … I love you…."
No sun broke through, no bird sang in that dank sodden gloom and no answers came to the lone, broken man, slumped in despair with a future of absence and unrequited longing stretching out before him. He resolved that next year he wouldn't come back and in the next heartbeat acknowledged that it was all he could cling to to keep him sane. A ritual of remembrance but without the wreaths, because she wasn't dead; no matter how much his conscious brain urged him to accept her death as a point from which to move on and he was certain now that his feelings for her would never die, so these anniversaries would continue to be half celebration, half wake, but hopefully in the future without the loyal spectators. So no closure then – God, how he hated these Americanisms creeping into the language – nor acceptance, but an acknowledgement of what had been, what was and what was never likely to be. Time to get up then, wipe the tears away, shake off the rain and pretend he hadn't noticed three concerned faces watching him in the distance – places to go, people to fight with; but the squat toad wasn't ready to release him just yet.
Just one more sensation of her lips pressed against his, one more fleeting vision of her soft, pale eyes glistening with affection, one more wave of nauseating, gnawing longing to wash over him and claim him without hope of salvation – a Gethsemane moment without the promise of resurrection and redemption; and yet …….
I have to believe
That you still exist
Somewhere,
That you still watch me
Sometimes,
That you still love me
Somehow.
I have to believe
That life has meaning
Somehow,
That I am useful here
Sometimes,
That I make small differences
Somewhere.
I have to believe
That I need to stay here
For some time,
That all this teaches me
Something,
So that I can meet you again
Somewhere."