The Vanishing Hours Read online

  The Vanishing Hours

  Barney Norris

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  BARNEY NORRIS was born in Sussex in 1987. Upon leaving university, he founded the touring theatre company Up In Arms. He won the Critics’ Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright for his debut full-length play Visitors; his other plays include Nightfall, which appeared in the inaugural season of the Bridge Theatre, and an acclaimed adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. He is the Martin Esslin Playwright in Residence at Keble College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been named by the Evening Standard as one of the 1,000 Most Influential Londoners.

  He is the author of Turning for Home and the critically acclaimed Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, which was a Times bestseller and won a Betty Trask award. It was also shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards. The Vanishing Hours is his third novel.

  By the same author

  FICTION

  Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

  Turning for Home

  THEATRE

  Plays One

  (Visitors, Eventide, While We’re Here, Nightfall)

  What You Wish For in Youth: Three Short Plays

  (At First Sight, Fear of Music, Every You Every Me)

  Echo’s End

  The Remains of the Day (after Ishiguro)

  NON-FICTION

  To Bodies Gone: The Theatre of Peter Gill

  The Wellspring: Conversations with David Owen Norris

  For Charlie

  Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.

  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

  One

  Poor folk mun get on as they can.

  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

  This is not my real life and I don’t think now that it ever will be. It is probably time for me to accept that my real life will never happen. It would need to have started already to have any chance of lasting much more than a moment, of growing into anything. I should content myself with having this much instead.

  I can never eat much before the appointments. Too apprehensive. I sat in the kitchen looking out of the window at my square of back garden, and drank a cup of decaf tea. I don’t go anywhere near caffeine now. Breakfast was a piece of toast with butter and strawberry jam. I supposed it was breakfast – it might just as easily have been lunch. Afterwards I left my plate and my cup unwashed by the sink, and went into the garden, and inspected the woodbine, and inspected the rose. There was a frost last night. Is the woodbine in the right kind of pot for it to make it through the winter? I spent more time over the rose. A month ago, I cut it back to its very base when the last of the leaves died, because it had been sprawling all over the place for years. Will that have worked? Did I go too far? I will have to wait till spring to find out, but all the same I watch for signs, I watch for clues of what’s going to happen.

  ROSE. Something that dies. Something that needs to be cut down to nothing from time to time. Something that lives twice, in summer and autumn. A smell like a memory, black spot always nipping at the leaves.

  The masterpiece I thought I was going to weave into the world would have been an encyclopedia of every word I’d ever fallen in love with. It would have been the climax of the Open University degree I started working towards when they told me I was well into the swing of my latest recovery. The fifteenth or sixteenth attempt I made of starting again. It went the way of all the others, before and since. There have been so many now, life after life that never happened; almost seventy years of dreams that came and went, and another birthday crawling closer as I turn steadily into the old woman I never believed I’d be. But I would have liked to write my encyclopedia. Of all the dreams I never made happen, I’m sorriest about that one being stillborn.

  I wanted to do something for people who had forgotten that the world, as well as being a terrible and frightening and dark place to spend time in, was also filled with things worth remembering. Things that anyone would be glad to have seen and done. I thought if I could record all the beauty that I had witnessed, every image that had made me feel like my days were worth having, then maybe others in the same kind of dark would be encouraged to look at their own lives differently too, to see past the things that beset them and look out for beauty. I would have loved to have found a book like that while I was deepest down in my own trouble.

  People would be able to read it like a dictionary, from A to Z, but also to follow other paths through it, other stories, if they chose. Because that’s the way you fall in love with things – they don’t just come at you one after the other; they sidle up, reach you slantwise. Days worth living fall on us like the sun coming in through windows, making unexpected angles. That is how I’ve met the words I’ve loved. I wanted to capture the fact that things aren’t only beautiful in their own right – they’re beautiful because of what they’ve meant to people, and what they mean to you. So this would be an encyclopedia you could get lost in, with every entry cross-referencing to other entries, so that you could wander through everything beautiful that the author had ever encountered, take whatever path you fancied, and never leave, if you didn’t want to.

  Not much of the draft I prepared survives now, but I can show you how it would have worked.

  APPLE. When I was young I went with my family on a holiday to WALES, and while we were there we climbed up a mountain. When we got to the top, DAD took some apples from his rucksack and we ate one each. I took a few bites of mine till it looked like the kind of apple you see in the Snow White film, and then I threw the core away. My uncle became suddenly angry with me. He asked me why I had thrown away the apple when I’d barely eaten half of it, after my dad had taken the trouble to carry it all the way up to the top of this mountain. He didn’t understand why I’d be so careless after all that trouble. At the time I was upset, but ever since that day I have eaten every bit of an apple, leaving nothing but the stalk and the pips and the last of the core, and every time I finish an apple I think of my dad, the trouble he took for me, the things he carried to help me out.

  DAD. [This would be a long entry in the full book, but I will sketch a shorter story here.] I don’t have as many memories of my dad as I would like, but I can tell you about the DANCING TREE. When I was small, MUM and Dad would take us out for walks in the woods near where we lived, to visit the Dancing Tree. Dad always walked too fast, so I couldn’t keep up with him and had to break into little jog-trots. But for as long as I could keep up, he used to like to tell me little stories. He would teach me the history of the WARS OF THE ROSES, for example, and tell me about kings who had risen and fallen right where we were walking now in times gone by. In this way I learned many beautiful things that no one else knew at the school I went to, and I felt proud, because keeping up with Dad had made me special; it had given me access to secrets that made the world bigger than it had been before.

  DANCING TREE, THE. In the middle of the woods near our house was a tree that looked like we had caught it dancing. Its branches twisted and turned in such a way that it seemed to be trying to get away from itself, or move along to some MUSIC that had stopped just moments before we got there. We thought the tree stayed very still in its ridiculous pose in the hope that we wouldn’t notice it and laugh at it, and that we might leave it alone. But we saw it, all right, and used to like to dance beneath it, especially when there were LEAVES in autumn that we could kick up in the air.

  LATIN. I never properly learned Latin, but at school the way I found to be popular was to be good at acting, and that meant I had a reputation as a good speaker. The Latin teacher got to hear about my control of Shakespearean verse, which I think was good for my age, and asked me to compete in an inter-school Latin-speaking competition that was being held across the county. I entered, and won the competition, though I had no idea what I was saying except that it was by Pliny and it was about a town. But I liked the feeling of winning enough that I entered the competition once more the following year, and was delighted to retain my title.

  LEAVES. When I finished school I moved to the city, and when I married my husband it was there we made our home. At that time, in the year after my marriage, I became very conscious of not having come from that environment, and not feeling at home there. London in the eighties was a place of dust and buses, engines like hornets everywhere, elderly men who walked the pavements while the pubs shut for lunch as if they were on patrol; thin men, their clothes held up sometimes with belts of rope and string, and for a young woman who didn’t belong to that world, it seemed very alien.

  For the first time, I became interested in the world where I had grown up at a conscious level. Throughout my childhood, I had simply lived; I’d never really thought about what I was doing. Now I started to collect books about the natural world. I wanted to identify more consciously with having come from the wild. The first challenge I set myself was to learn the names and shapes of the leaves that one might come across on trees in England. I would look at pictures in books and memorise the English and LATIN names, then go to parks and test myself. I wasn’t working at that time. I was looking for a job and looking after my husband while he went to work and we decided whether or not to start a family, and the leaves
became my happiest project then. I felt like I caught glimpses in among them of the person I wanted to be.

  MUSIC. [This again would be a very long entry. I will just touch on one aspect of it here.] I never enjoyed my music lessons at school, but I kept doing them because what I did love was performing in concerts. I got quite good at the violin so I was allowed to play in the school orchestra. What I found intoxicating was the way that performing long pieces there reminded me of the THEATRE, my favourite place of all. There was the same sense of telling a story, of spinning feelings out of thin air. That taught me something important about the theatre, actually. I learned that it wasn’t the words actors said that audiences listened to, just as people didn’t really listen to the notes played by musicians. What everyone is listening for all the time is the thing beneath that, the real thing, the feelings that another person is feeling just a heartbeat away from you. I used to like that vivid feeling of entering into a game with the audience of mums and dads who were listening, where we would try to move them, and they would listen to these things we chose to play, but half an hour after we had finished, no one would be able to tell that the game had ever happened. All the music would have disappeared as if it had never existed. That was the joy of the gossamer game of trying to share a feeling with another person – that none of it was real, you couldn’t put your finger on any part of it, so it all felt like a secret you were sharing.

  THEATRE. The first theatre I remember visiting was a place for children somewhere at the edge of London. I was only very young, and my eyes hadn’t yet seen very many things, so I couldn’t see where the set was hinged together, or where the paint needed touching up. I couldn’t see the bored usher waiting at the back to count us all out at the end again – anything like that was invisible to me. I only remember this woman, her face wide in amazement, taking us through a forest of tall trees and introducing us to the animals there.

  WALES. We always used to take our holidays in Wales. What I remember most of all is a New Year we celebrated in a converted pigsty up near Conwy, where the world’s best ice cream is sold just off the quay. It was freezing and we wore our pyjamas under our clothes all day. No one has that kind of holiday any more – everywhere has central heating – and I miss the campfire, the making do, the shivering teeth, the cups of tea and raisin porridge. I didn’t make it to New Year that evening, but I did stay up late, playing a board game with my parents that was based on the WARS OF THE ROSES.

  WARS OF THE ROSES, THE. A few months after DAD had taught me the story of the Wars of the Roses, he took me on a very special trip to the site of the Battle of Naseby. There was nothing much to see, but I felt very close to the people I had learned about, standing in the place where some of them had died. Dad took a photo of me standing there, and on the way home in the car we ate an APPLE.

  You can see how my encyclopedia would have worked, and how quickly it would have proliferated and flowered and grown a thousand heads, become a huge and overwhelming chorus of stories about the beautiful world, the beautiful words. I thought if someone were willing to publish it then it might do people good. But as I said, the work was never completed. The Open University told me it wasn’t a legitimate academic activity. But it had become too important to me for me to be willing to write anything else. If I couldn’t do that project, I decided I’d rather do nothing at all. So I withdrew from the degree, and abandoned the work.

  I often think that, had I found strength to complete the encyclopedia, to gather together a lifetime’s words and wonderings, the truth of my story would become clearer than any list of facts and dates and places. It would have been a way of seeing to the heart of me, so people could have looked beyond the smallness of the facts and glimpsed the secret truth that my life felt big too, under the surface. My days felt unique to me. That’s a harder thing to convey when I say only that I was born at the start of the fifties, was old enough to see all the excitements of the decade that followed but too young to take part in them; that my childhood and youth in the backwater country meant I carried on singing in a church choir long after I realised I didn’t believe in God, and missed out entirely on the pleasures of punk and 1976, though it was my generation who made it; that I got away to London when I could, when I was finished with home economics classes and honouring my mother and father, but that the experiment of making my way in the big world failed and before long I found myself drifting back into the west, to a series of small jobs – secretarial work at a college, then at a dentist’s, followed by a move to the complaints counter of a supermarket because the regular hours of those other jobs had become too tiring. The occasional breakdown when things got too much for me. And the purchase of this bungalow a decade ago, and all the time alone in it, no one to share it with. What does that list show you of the heart of a person? Even if I shared what I did with my spare time – the reading of Emily Dickinson poems, painting by numbers, jigsaws, a little crochet, once or twice a year a trip to London to hear a band play somewhere – that still doesn’t touch the sides of what it really felt like. All of the containers we pour our lives into seem so small, when you set them against the feeling of being, the way the light hit you, the way things struck you when you stared out of a window in the mornings. It takes something more ingenious to let anyone into what that was like. That would have been my encyclopedia.

  ASYLUM. A shelter from violence. A place of rest. A way of hiding. An act of charity. Understanding passed from one person to another. A place where people are given permission to believe in the seriousness of their predicaments, the importance and onceness of their lives, and not to talk themselves down, not to deflect sympathy or medical attention, not to disappear under the weight of stories the newspapers would rather cover. A place where people are told that they deserve to grieve, to hurt, to heal. A place where those who cannot heal will at least be looked after, so that they can still experience slow life as its petals fall, one meal, one breath, one glass of cold water drained down the throat after another, as the simple beauty of rain on glass or walking in the dawn reveals itself, morning after morning, even to those who will always have to suffer to be able to enjoy the glories they are given.

  In the garden, the blessing I find is that I don’t have to think. I can be a living and a breathing thing, like the honeysuckle, like the rose. And like them, no more is required of me; I need not speak, nor think about anything at all. We are all simply taking in the light. In the summer I watch how the stems grow, and in the winter I look for the way that things die back, and all of the phantoms that attend our human lives, the fevers and imaginings, those go away for as long as I’m watching. No one talks to me out there. No one asks for anything.

  It was cold today though, so once I’d been over the rose and seen there was no rot setting in, I went back inside, shivering. Old lady now, or soon enough. I suppose that was why I was feeling the cold. Soon it will be time for my bus pass. But I’ve learned things from hanging around so long. I’ve learned how to find peace in the garden, for one thing. And I’ve learned enough to know it would snow today, before the radio told me – I’d seen the signs for myself. In the garden, I could feel the day clearing space for its show, its dance, its dazzle. The temperature dropping to prepare the ground.

  I went back inside and saw my breakfast things by the sink, and sighed, and went and washed them up. I ran the hot tap till it stung the back of my hand, then put the plug in and squeezed a bit of Fairy into the sink. I scrubbed the plate and the knife and the cup with the washing-up brush, then rinsed them under the tap that was still running and put them on the drainer. Then I picked up a tea towel and dried each object, and put them back in their rightful places in the correct drawers and cupboards. I watched the garden through the window all the time I worked, and was rewarded not just by its stillness and silence, but by the arrival of a robin, who hopped down from the holly tree in the corner and made his murderous, tentative way across the lawn. I wondered whether he thought I’d left him something. Perhaps I should have done. I returned the clean cutlery to the drawer and stepped back to survey the kitchen, shipshape again. It was almost as if I’d never been there. When I looked back out of the window, the robin had gone.