Where Can We Live But Days

early winter and Larkin's back

There’s an orange on the wooden chopping board in front of me, along with a cracked eggshell, a white glazed ceramic bowl, shaped last winter to fit my hands, a box grater and a scoop. In the bowl to my right, flour: spices, dark brown sugar, melted butter, an egg; on the stove to my left, the chicken carcass begins to boil. The boys eat their porridge with cinnamon and frozen summer fruit stirred into the warm oats, they sit at the wide window by the table with carved, twisted legs I thrifted from the street earlier this year, outside, the sky is red but a soft one, soon it will clear to blue, the frost on the leaves will melt, but not yet. The house smells like a memory.

It is 8am.

An inset day. A child off school with a cough. Me, beset by work. Later, I will have a zoom meeting with my writing partner, we are both enraptured by our new project. The morning feels like a long wait.

Yesterday, I woke in Cambridge after dinner at a college the night before. I left the hotel, the streets cut white with frost, walked down to the river. Warm air turning white as it left my mouth to meet the cold outside. Everything quiet and calm, a house boat with washing fringed with ice, hard as board if I dared to touch it, moored by the side of the water. A lido, I hadn’t prepared for, steam rising from the water. Heated! A luxury. Next time. The spires of Christ’s College rising as the river’s meander rounds. Cygnets turned nearly fully swan, with the last vestiges of their recent babyhood brown against their fresh white feathers, a mother with her wary black eyes close enough to keep me at a distance. A morning I would keep forever.

Later, the train pulls us through East Anglia, the flatlands stretching on, mile after monotonous mile turned beautiful now by the frost, the green, the soft pink sky. I know these mornings, I’ve lived them up close when on the farm in Scotland. So beautiful they’d steal your heart for a long time. Even Stevenage looks passable like this, London’s industrial hinterlands glittering with rime as we near Kings Cross.

And The Christmas Truce in my head, we read it every year, my son fell in love with it when he was five at most, and it comes, as beloved poems often do, unbidden as I look at the passing fields as the morning seems to ‘open itself and offer the day like a gift’, but I do not write this down, instead I write, ‘what are the ceremonies of forgetting’, the epigraph to my next novel. After Ava Anna Ada, I swore I’d keep away from expensive poetry, but we all have our vices, and Nick Laird’s Up Late has recently been the worst of mine.

Some things, I call progress.

Underground at St Pancras, I miss their tree and Emin’s I Want my Time with You, in these tunnels, the weather could be anything, the season seasonless.

This morning, after the muffins come out the oven, the fruit inside dangerously warm for impatient tongues and after the coffee run, I send a voice message to a friend as I walk through the woods. The frost’s worn off and the leaves are damp. I tell her about the day, and the day before, and the night before that. About dinner at Churchill College, and how perfect it was, maybe I mention the teak panelling or maybe I leave that for her to fill in, maybe I tell her about his paintings, his archives there, how desperate I am to rummage through them, not because I’m a Churchill fan but I cannot leave the past alone. I cannot leave papers and diaries and letters in peace, I will be elbow deep searching for a different story of a man history thinks it's got pinned. I don’t tell her about the velvet dress I wore and how I love the word velvet. How I love how it rolls around my tongue, how fat and delicious a word it is. How I have loved it and the fabric it denotes since I was a little girl and my mother’s bedroom curtains were deep red velvet, and every time I drew them to shut the dusk out, I’d think of Jane in the red room, perhaps the most delicious and disturbing passage in literature, certainly the most influential on me. Velvet and dusk, my two favourite words, and velvet my favourite material to wear at dusk this time of year. When the curtains became worn and we took them down, I made a hat and a skirt from them. Thought myself the height of cool at the age of 12.

I do not tell her this. Together, via these voice notes, we are working things out, or so it seems, a conversation forming over what might seem a one sided medium. In the future, messages like this will be stored in archives. Strange to think, what we consider private, will be picked over by carrion similar to me. I tell her about the days, and I tell her I don’t know what it means to live a small life or a big life. These are phrases I see online, and like much online vernacular, they feel flimsy and grasping towards a point of little meaning. I am not sure if my life would be classed as a big life or a small life. What I do know, is that these times, of chicken bones boiling on the stove, of muffins fresh from the oven, of the sound of my keyboard, the sight of a roll of lining paper with different ideas connecting and growing, scrolled along the dining room table, is that I don’t care what anyone would call this, if it’s big, small, medium, XXS, XXL is immaterial: they’re just days, and damn Larkin, I never liked him all that much, but still, where do we live but days.