Part 3

He raises his eyebrows, shrugs.

Are you making that up? she says. Take the piss out of a townie?

Nope, he says. I’m a townie myself.

Funny, she says leaning against an unexpected warm place in the stone on the threshold of the church and liking the feel of it on her arm. Like, how we overload summer most out of all the seasons, I mean with our expectations of it.

Nah, he says and nips the end of his rollie with a finger and thumb till it’s out. Summers can take it. That’s why they’re called summers.

He tucks his smoke back behind his ear, smiles at her.

Is it out? he says. More than once I’ve set fire to myself.

It’s out, she says. I think.

Want a coffee? he says. There’s Nescaff in the back, and a kettle.

All right, she says.

I’m John, he says.

Grace, she says.

Meet me at the old tomb shaped like a table, Grace. There’s just one like it, can’t miss it, round the back there, he says.

Okay, she says.

It’s got a skull on it, he says, but it’s quite friendly-looking. Just warning you. Case you’re squeamish.

I ain’t fraid of no skull, she says.

See you there, then, he says.

His name’s John Mison. He’s a joiner and specialist carpenter. That’s what it says on the side of the van parked at the gate; she can read it from here. She goes round the corner, walks between the curves in the grass, sits beneath the leaf dapple on the old flat-topped tomb.

He comes out carrying two mugs in one hand. He does have very nice hands. Workman hands. She takes the mug he gives her, turns it in her own

hand. It’s a red straw design, a Humphrey mug. Drink it quick. Humphreys are slick. He sees her turning it and reading it.

Gave you the best mug, he says. Hope no sugar’s okay.

No sugar’s fine, she says.

Good, he says.

A butterfly goes past, a white one. Then another.

It’s a very preserve of butterflies out here, she says.

Sorry, a what? he says.

A very preserve of butterflies, she says. They only live a day. At least, that’s what my mum used to say about them.

A very preserve, he says.

That’s a line from a play I’m in, she says.

Pretty clever, that, to be preserved and only live a day both at once, he says.

That’s Charles Dickens for you, she says. His words, not mine. His very preserve of butterflies has preserved the butterflies in his book David Copperfield for, uh, a hundred and forty years or so.

That what you do? he says. Student?

Graduated, she says. I’m a bona fide actress.

Sorry, a what kind? he says.

She tells him she’s touring the region.

By yourself? he says.

She laughs.

I wish, she says. No, in a company. With a company.

He sits down in the grass with his back against the tomb, squints up at her.

Nice, to have company, he says.

Sometimes, yeah, she says.

Plays like what? he says.

She tells him about the Copperfield and the Shakespeare.

And in the Shakespeare I’m a queen whose husband goes mad and is convinced I’m having an affair with his childhood friend when I’m not, and because he’s a king he banishes his friend, puts me in prison, throws his baby daughter away, inadvertently kills a son with his bitterness, and then I die too, she says.

God almighty, he says.

And at the end, sixteen years later, I get wheeled out as a statue of myself, and lo and behold I come alive and I’m not dead after all, she says.

What about the dead kids? he says. Do they come back too?

Only one of them, she says. It’s a very uneasy play, really. Pretending to be a comedy.

So, were you alive all along then, and just faking being dead? he says.

That’s not completely clear from the text, she says. It’s possible. But it’s also supposed to be possible that a wonder of wonders is happening and a statue that’s been carved to look like me in later life comes to life, and is me in later life, though I’ve been dead for all those years. More magic than deception.

More magic than deception, he says. I like that.

Me too, she says. It feels pretty fine to act it. It’s powerful.

Like that story about the man who makes clay models, brings them alive, gives them knowledge and art and all that, teaches them how to use law, how to be fair with each other, he says.

I don’t know that story, she says.

Yeah, he’s kind of a flash trickster, he makes humans out of clay, then steals the powers of the powers that be to give to his clay people. Then the powers that be get angry with him giving their powers to his mere creations, so they chain him to a rock and every day he gets pecked by the beak of an eagle, here, he says.

He touches his side.

Or maybe here, he says.

He touches his other side.

Which side’s your liver on? he says.

Not sure, she says.

Both sides, to be safe, he says.

I’m getting pecked on both sides now, she sings. From up and down and still somehow.

They laugh.

Good voice, he says.

Thanks, she says.

I thought the Shakespeare play for the summertime was meant to be the one about fairies. Midsummer dream, he says.

Oh, the fairies, she says. The Winter’s Tale’s all about summer, really.

It’s like it says, don’t worry, another world is possible. When you’re stuck in

the world at its worst, that’s important. To be able to say that. At least to tend towards comedy.

He opens his arms wide to the leaves and the sky.

Can’t even imagine a winter right now, he says.

I bloody can, she says. Every second night I age years, winter summer winter summer. By the time I’ve finished this tour I’ll be a bloody hundred years old.

My dad swears that if you don’t wear your jacket inside out at midsummer out of respect to the fairies, the fairies’ll cause you mischief all year, he says.

Uh huh, she says. Right.

He does it every year, says his dad did it and his dad did it, and his dad before them, and that we have to respect the lore, he says.

See, that’s what I don’t get about old customs and the like, she says.

Because, why would fairies want anyone to wear a jacket inside out? What’d be the point?

So they can steal your wallet more easily, he says. He’s got a market stall in town, my old dad. Fruit and veg. And if anyone comes to buy from him, and they’ve a bicycle, and they lean their bicycle up against his stall, well, he used to say to me, nip under there John when you see anybody doing it and give the bike a push so it falls over. Then he’d say to the person, now then, that’s the fairies telling you not to lean your bike up against my stall. His mate does it for him now, crawls under the tarp from the back of the boxes and gives the bike a push. Over it goes. The fairies. His mate’s seventy.

An old fairy, she says.

He laughs.

They can have my wallet if they want it, the fairies, he says. I don’t care.

Don’t you? she says.

Everybody’s on about money these days, he says.

He shakes his head.

And all you want from life is to make new wood look like old, she says.

You’re a saint. Or a fool.

Neither, he says. Money always comes. Money isn’t what matters.

Very unfashionable, she says. A man out of time.

I know all I need to know about time, me, he says.

He points upwards.

What? she says.

Listen, he says.

Right then the bell in the church tower tolls three times.

How did you do that? she says.

Inner clock, he says.

He starts singing, to an old tune she recognizes: There will be sunshine. And lots of sunshine. The polar icecaps. Are melting down.

She laughs.

That’s quite good, she says.

Get sun tan lotion, he sings. Here comes the ocean. We won’t have to go to Spain to get brown.

You could join our theatre group, she says.

No thanks, he says. I like being me, me.

He stretches out on the grass next to the old tomb with his head on the humped part.

Hope whoever’s under here won’t mind, he says. Hope they had a few good summers, whoever they are. Too poor for a stone. Or just didn’t need one, maybe. In the old days people didn’t. Because, who’s going to forget where your beloved’s buried? Nobody, not while it matters. You know, back in your, what’s his name, Dickens. Back in his time, there was a summer, middle of the 1800s, that was every bit as lovely as this one. But because it was just after they put the sewage system in, in London town I mean, and people all had toilets in their houses for the first time, water closets they called them, and the system took all the sewage straight into the river, and it poisoned the river, thousands and thousands of people, well, died.

They both laugh.

They hold themselves and laugh.

They laugh like anything, till they cry with laughter.

They get their breath back. She stretches herself out all along the top of the tomb. She knocks on it with her fist.

Sorry for laughing, she says as if to the person in it. Couldn’t help it.

Don’t know why it was so funny. But it was, he says.

Who looks after this place? she says. The roses smell amazing.

No idea, he says. Lovely here, though. Have to say it’s nice working here.

Then lying in the grass John Mison simply says what sounds at first like a poem or an incantation but is just a list of the names of flowers. Flower after flower. Plant after plant.

Ragwort. Ramsons. Meadow buttercup. Chickweed. Stitchwort.

Cranesbill. Vetch. Nettle. Dove’s foot cranesbill. Ivy. Sweet Robert. Sweet violet. Meadowsweet. Willowherb. Cow parsley. Cowslip. Primrose.

Goosegrass. Forget-me-not. Yellow archangel. Speedwell. Valerian. Daisies.

Mayweed. Lords and Ladies. Groundsel. Dandelion. Not forgetting dandelion clock.

Yellow archangel, she says. Pretty. Sweet Robert.

The archangel’s over there at the wall, he says. Flowers in spring, just looks like nettles now. But it won’t sting you. They call it aluminium, and artillery. Because of its silver colour. The Robert’s there too. Pretty little flowers, red, pink, cranesbill. It’s a healer. Good for skins and wounds, good apparently for where there’s been radiation, they should plant it round Chernobyl, sweet Robert, helps clean out the soil, good for oxygen. Smells horrible though. Which is why its other names are things like stinking bob.

Crow’s foot.

You know a lot about flowers, she says.

I like them, he says.

Then they stop talking.

They lie there for a while, her up on the tomb, him down on the ground.

Collared doves occasionally flurry and call in the trees above them.

She closes her eyes.

They say nothing for whole minutes, several complete minutes.

She has never been as happy as she is right now.

Then she hears him roll over and get up.

Hey, he says. Come with me. I found the grandest little thing day before yesterday, on an old stone, when I was having my break.

She follows him round to the back of the church where he bends to the ground.

In among the bramble bushes right at the back of the plots there’s an eaten-away stone. It’s got words written on it.

They both have to get quite low to the ground to read the words, which are greened and yellowed with moss.

Listen to this, John Mison says.

The tree in me shall never die. Be I ashes be I dust. That is the tree that joins the sky. To earth and us. The tree in me shall never die. No lovers sleeping breath compare. With her shy music in the sky. Of leaves and air.

They both sit back on their haunches.

How pretty, she says.

Shy music, he says.

What a lovely poem, she says. Someone really loved someone. Is there a name? A date?

Just the words, he says. Who needs a name or a date when you can be remembered by something like that? Hope I will, when I go.

You can’t go. You can’t go anywhere, she says. It’s not allowed.

He laughs.

I won’t if you don’t, he says.

He leaps to his feet.

I’ve to finish that pew, he says. You can put the stain on for me, if you want. Then we’ll both have changed the course of history.

They walk back round, collecting the coffee mugs up off the top of the tomb-table as they pass it.

It’s a self sacrifice, this, by the way, he says. My favourite part of the whole job. Putting the woodstain on.

I’m honoured, she says.

You are, he says.

—

What Grace remembered three decades later was that there was a fine summer’s day back when she was in her twenties and on the Winter’s Tale /

World As It Rolled eastern counties tour when she’d gone on a walk, found a church with a man working in it, had a nice uncomplicated afternoon in a summer that’d become way too complicated, one when she’d made matters worse for herself by sleeping with too many people, not eating enough and not looking after herself well enough, and that she’d left that churchyard feeling more free, more herself, more hopeful than she’d felt for a long time.

Here are some of the things she didn’t remember from that time: She didn’t remember that after it she’d walked back to the cinema.

Rehearsal was over. Nobody was there.

She’d had to go and find them all in the pub garden, where she ate a baked potato with beans and cheese in it without it being complicated, being anything but delicious, which was, for her, at this point in her life, when it came to food, quite a feat. The World As It Rolled cast was angry with her for not turning up. She’d laughed at their anger and hugged every one of them, Jen and Tom and Ed and whoever. She’d even hugged Claire Dunn, they’d all looked a bit stunned when she did. Life’s too short, she’d said to Claire. Stop

it. Life’s too short, she’d said to Jen and Tom together too. If you want me, you’ve both got me, for now anyway, and that’ll have to be enough. If it’s too unsimple for you, then tough.

Jen and Tom both disappeared from her life after that summer. Possibly even together.

It had been something of a relief.

She also didn’t remember how that evening in the cinema she’d stood at the front of the stage and said the lines about remembering a mother’s face in a way that made the whole show pivot on those lines, lending The World As It Rolled a real depth it hadn’t yet acquired. The audience had given them a standing ovation, and afterwards the whole group, pretty much, approached her with their eyes shining, and hugged her, because something real had happened, and the next day strangers, people from the town, or holidaying in the town, had stopped her in the street over and over again to say thank you, and their eyes shone like the group’s eyes had shone at her the night before.

It’s like you literally were another person, Ed had said that night.

But thirty years later? she’d forgotten being that other person for ever.

She’d forgotten, too, that one of the people who stopped her in the street the next day was a West End casting agent who took her by the hand and said, you were so good about mothers tonight, and you were so good as the mother in The Winter’s Tale, and I’ve got a role that’d suit you down to the ground in an upcoming commercial if you’d like to call me on this number and arrange a screen test.

Walking along in the future looking for an old English church she visited once three decades ago and vaguely remembered as a special place, what she came to instead was a massive wire fence that seemed to block off most of the common.

The fence was a double fence. In between the two was a newly tarmacked road. A notice on the outer fence said: THESE PREMISES PROUDLY

PROTECTED AND PATROLLED

24 HOURS A DAY BY

SA4A

CAUTION

THIS FENCE IS ELECTRIFIED

ALARM SYSTEM

CCTV RECORDING

IS IN OPERATION

FOR THE PREVENTION AND

DETECTION

OF TRESPASS AND CRIME

—

She walked alongside these fences for a while hoping she was going in the right direction.

When she met a woman out walking a scruffy little dog she asked her if there was a church anywhere near here with an old graveyard round it.

The woman shook her head.

Then she said,

oh, maybe you mean the Armour?

Very possibly, Grace said.

It’s disused, I mean it’s a discontinued church, what’s the word? the woman said. Disestablished. You can’t get through this way any more. You used to be able to.

Why so high? Grace said. Is it a prison?

It’s a government place for people who don’t belong in this country, the woman said. But you can get to the churchyard if you double back. Take the road at the end there, go down the cul de sac and up the pedestrian lane, cross the field when it ends and follow the cliff walk.

Grace asked the woman, who was bending to pick up dogshit in a bag, how long it’d take her to get there.

Half an hour at the most, the woman said.

Then the woman threw the bag with the shit in it as if to get it up over the fence. The bag caught in the razorwire on the outer fence and hung there torn open.

Bullseye, the woman said.

Grace looked at her in astonishment.

She thought about asking the woman why she’d just done that.

She decided she’d rather not – better not – get into it.

She turned and walked back the way she’d come.

She headed towards the coast.

Britain was a confusing place these days.

Was Bullseye the name of the woman’s dog, maybe?

Or did she mean she’d hit a bullseye by throwing the dogshit on to the razorwire? Like kids did with each other’s trainers on power lines?

So did she do it because she didn’t like immigrants?

Or didn’t like SA4A?

Did she do it for fun? for no reason at all?

She’d looked like a respectable person.

Let it go.

Grace did.

Look at her now, walking along the eroding edge of eastern England, in the future and the present and the past all at once. She was keeping to the new footpath and away from the dangerous edge like all the signs told her to. As she walked, more pieces of the Dickens show they toured back then came fully formed up from wherever they’d got buried inside her head.

Can I say of her face – altered as I have reason to remember it, perished as I know it is – that it is gone, when here it comes before me at this instant, as distinct as any face that I may choose to look on in a crowded street?

Grace had no memory, none at all, of herself on the cinema platform standing in the dark and the light saying these words David Copperfield says about his dead mother.

But that night back then, with such a channelling of her own mother’s long-gone face entering her in the moment she said these lines, it so happened that several people in the audience burst into tears, were pierced by the brightness, the vividness, of the return inside them of what they’d thought they’d lost and forgotten.

She didn’t remember.

She was thinking, instead, as the lines from the past fell away and she walked along, about what it was, the commerce between people.

What was it that people wanted from each other?

What had her mother and father wanted that had gone so wrong?

What had she wanted from Jeff?

What did he ever want from her, or for her?

What did Ashley give him that Grace hadn’t or couldn’t?

What had they all wanted from each other in that vote, say, the one that had split the country, split her own family as if with a cheesewire, sliced right through the everyday to a bitterness nobody knew what to do with, one so many people used to hurt people with, whichever way they’d voted, a vote that could now be so anathema to one of her own kids and so like a permission to be foul to others for the other, so important to her, but so much

old hat to a bright young person like that girl Charlotte that she could call it a fly on a corpse?

And if it were all to be taken away from us, she thought. Say Sacha and her apocalyptic instinct, the thing that wakes everyone in both houses in the middle of the night because Sacha is shouting so loudly in her sleep again, the vision of the world on fire, blight on her daughter’s mind – say it really was real after all.

Well, don’t be stupid. It wasn’t.

Nothing like that was really ever going to happen.

Nothing really disruptive to life as they knew it.

The blight was all in the mind, not in the world.

But say, just say it was. Say it did.

Then what would have been the point of it all?

What were we here for?

To make as much money as possible?

To have all those people shouting your name at you, or even a name that’s not yours, like famous Claire Dunn faking it on the TV?

Was being on this earth really all about who owned a tree in a garden?

About whether it gave you satisfaction and pleasure and fulfilment when you looked at a tree because it was yours, but when you thought it wasn’t yours you longed to remove that tree?

She saw a church tower, off to the left.

She turned inland. She slid herself down a dog-path between bushes towards the bare trees round that tower.

But when she got there she didn’t recognize the place as anywhere she’d ever been before.

Was this it?

She was a bit disappointed.

Well, it was a long time ago.

Summer, then.

Church of the Armour of Light. What a strange name.

In days of old, when knights were bold.

Her mother turning to look at her, laughing, but with a hurt look on her face.

The churchyard gate was locked. So she climbed over the little stone wall. She crossed the graves in the winter sun and sent a scatter of birds from branches. It was beautiful here, even though it wasn’t anything like she

remembered. So it had been worth coming for that, very pretty, even in winter, even though there was nothing here but a lot of old graves and dead leaves.

She tried the church’s door.

Locked.

She stood on one of those metal boxes that has electricity stuff inside it.

She peered through the bottom of a latticed window.

There was nothing at all inside the church. It was just an empty stone space.

I wonder where the seats went, she thought.

As she did, it came vividly into her head that she had, of all things, actually helped mend a church seat in there.

So I did!

He’d replaced a bit of wood in the seat, the man, and he let me paint it for him.

(She stepped down off the metal box.

She was smiling at the thought.)

He was restoring it. He let me paint it so it’d be the same colour as the rest of the wood it was made of.

She leaned against the side of the church and looked round her at all the sunken stones, the bared structures of the trees.

There was a grave that was a kind of box shape, wasn’t there? I sat on it, or lay down on it.

Did I even fall asleep on it in the warm?

She pushed herself off the side of the church and went round to the side of the graveyard. More graves, more bushes and grass. But there was one of those box graves there under the branches, as big as a table or a high single bed.

She went over to it and read the words on it.

It was the tomb of Thomas Lummis, and of his wife, Anna, and other members of the Lummis family including a baby, Marjorie Lummis, who only lived eight months.

Dates. A skull relief, with what looked like draped veils, theatre curtains, above it.

She didn’t remember any of that.

But wasn’t there a poem?

She walked all the way round the stone slabs.

No, there was no poem here.

She leaned on the tomb and she put her hands over her eyes.

A small beautiful stone, with a poem on it. Somewhere round the back, by a compost heap. Was that right?

But the back of the Armour of Light church was all fenced off.

The wire was broken open, though, at dog height, fox height. She pushed herself through the gap. She poked a hand through some overgrowth. She could feel something deep inside it. She snapped some of the twiggy stuff away. She pushed the rest back. It sprang back at her in turn.

But there definitely was a stone, back then, with a poem carved into it.

And an incredibly nice man, I met him for, what, two or three hours, he was a joiner, I can’t remember his name. James? John? and we talked, we just talked, about nothing much, and we did nothing much, we just hung out, lay about in the graveyard like friends though we didn’t know each other, we’d only just met, and we never even thought about keeping in touch, and he let me help him paint a church seat he was mending so it looked, well, not good as new. Good as old. He showed me an old gravestone he’d found with no name on it, no date, obviously a hundred, couple of hundred years old. And we both got right down on the ground to be able to read it.

That’s what she remembered.

Here was the stone. Still here. It was old and curved, eaten into by weather and plants. She pulled the growth away from its front. She got as close to the ground as she could to read its poem. She followed the words on it with her finger.

Such a pretty verse.

She held her phone down low and took a photo of it to show the kids.

She stood back up. She was late.

There was a train to catch. In ten minutes there’d be two irate kids standing on a pavement.

She got herself back through the hole in the fence. She got a move on.

It wasn’t till she was halfway back to town on the cliff path, walking in the sea air with the sky so wide all round her, that she looked at the photo she’d taken and saw that though it was still a beautiful picture you couldn’t see any of the words on the stone to read them, and all she’d actually got a record of was a blur of twigs, a surface of old stone, some bright lichen.

So, Art says, this is how we’re going to get through this time.

It’s nearing the end of the month of March. Charlotte and Art are on different coastlines of the same country. He’s east, she’s west.

They haven’t been this far apart, and for so long, for a couple of years now so are both finding it odd.

Or maybe it’s just her who’s finding it odd.

Given that what Art’s found is love, and so on. Partner. Art doesn’t like the words girlfriend and boyfriend. Art and Charlotte have been not-partners for more than three years now. Deciding to be not-partners is one of the best things they ever did.

But it’s still weird, to Charlotte anyway. A bunch of strangers he only met last month have magicked themselves into becoming his family. Equally weird, she’s now living with his aged aunt at his dead mother’s old house in Cornwall, a house so huge that it feels pointless. What also feels a mixture of too-meaningful and pointless is how he’s not here but most of his stuff is. His books, notebooks, are scattered round the house splayed open page-down as if he just left the room for a minute. The mug he likes best is still upside down on the kitchen draining board. A T-shirt that smells of him is still on the back of that chair here in her bedroom. In his own bedroom that old plastic water bottle he always keeps next to the bed to drink from if he wakes up in the middle of the night has water in it from the last time he filled it. His bed still has the dip in the pillow where his head last was, covers folded back like he got out of it ten minutes ago, because the last time he was in this room he didn’t think for a moment he’d be anything other than back in that bed a couple of days after they’d done their Worthing work and gone to Suffolk to meet the old man.

Things can change fast. They just do.

The whole world’s learning that lesson simultaneously right now, one way or the other.

One of the things that has changed is that this is the first day they’ve spoken for about a fortnight.

Charlotte is trying not to feel resentful. But it was so love at first sight that since that moment of first sight he hasn’t come home. He spent the first weeks away travelling into London and staying there with his new love, when university teachers were still going to work, then travelling back with her to her mother’s at the weekends. When lockdown happened he’d made his choice.

You listening? he says.

We’re speaking on the phone, Charlotte says. What does that tell you about whether I’m listening or not?

Actually not that much, Art says. Though since you’re on your stupid James Bond phone that’s about all you can do, so I suppose you must be.

Art is irate because at the turn of the year Charlotte reverted to a Sony C902 from 2008, a phone that came with a special set of decade-old Quantum of Solace tie-ins ready-installed, some preview stills, screensavers, a ringtone she’s never listened to. Charlotte bought it before Christmas so the net would neither own her nor succeed in its mission to become her new phantom limb or brain.

You can access the web on it.

But she told Art you can’t, that it’s too old.

Charlotte’s non-web, Art said when she told him this.

If you’d a smartphone, he says now, we’d be able to see each other. I’d be able to see where you are. Where are you?

Sitting on the stairs, she says.

It’s a lie.

If you had a smartphone I’d be able to see which stairs you’re on right now, he says.

And why would you want to? she says.

(It cost you more than my phone, Art said when the box arrived from eBay and she unwrapped it and set it up and first phoned him on it.

She was in the bedroom looking out at the garden. He was in the piece of garden they’ve turned into an allotment. They waved at each other while they spoke.

I can’t believe you paid that much for a phone that won’t do things, he said.

Negative capability, she said. I don’t want all those old shed-skin selves following me everywhere putting their footprints all through the good clean new-fallen snow of my life.

More proof of how cold you are, Art had said.

I think you mean cool, Charlotte said.

No, I definitely mean cold, he said.

Then he told her it was a particularly dyspeptic thing for an internet artist, writer and publisher to do.

Dyspeptic? she said.

Ornery, he said.

Or – ? she said.

Irascible, he said. Waspish.

Are you looking up adjectives on your phone while we’re having this conversation? she said.

Maybe, he said.

See? she said. That’s why.)

Anyway, he says. I’m phoning because listening and communicating and staying in touch with each other is how we’re going to get through this time for sure.

Not that this time’s going to be over for any of us very soon, she says. I have a feeling this time’s here to stay, one way and another.

She sits on her bed, stares in the little light there is at the chair shoved up against the door of her room.

No, Art says. Times do pass. They do. But we have to choose to live through our times as mindfully as we can.

Pff, Charlotte says.

Which is why I had this idea about the structure of our day that I wanted to talk to you about, he says.

Our day, Charlotte says.

Well, your day, Art says. And mine. And to some extent, yes, everybody’s.

If this, Charlotte says, is going to be you telling me what to do even though you’re four hundred miles away and officially someone else’s boyfriend –

Partner, Art says.

Instructing me, Charlotte says, about me structuring my days with regular mealtimes and being up by 8am and not letting my day lose its shape and doing exercise etc. Well I know all that stuff already inside out. Being just as self employed as you. Isolation’s what our everyday life is like. No?

She hopes she sounds blithe enough.

But I don’t mean just you and me. I mean all of us, Art says. You know.

All of humanity.

You want to talk to the whole of humanity about the structuring of its day?

she says. Ambitious.

We’re all in the same boat now, he says.

Yeah, albeit with an awful lot of humanity still stuck in, you know, steerage, she says.

So, he says. One of the ways we can get through this is every day for you and me to just say hello. Like we are right now, I mean personally, intimately, on the phone.

Us phoning each other, she says. That’s your eureka?

Calling each other expressly every single day, he says, just for a few minutes, no pressure. But also, get this. We make it an aesthetic practice. We tell each other expressly, consciously, something we’ve happened to see or experience that day.

Expressly, Charlotte says.

Yes, Art says.

How else would we tell each other? she says. By not saying it?

Uh, Art says.

And if that’s what you’re saying, Charlotte says. Does your Elisabeth know about you phoning me right now asking me to be personal and intimate every day with you?

That’s not what –, Art says.

How is Elisabeth, by the way? Charlotte says.

She’s fine. And that’s not what I mean, and you know it isn’t, Art says.

And how’s the old man? she says.

He’s fine, Art says. Thank God. Thank God he’s here, because the care home he was in this time last year has a lot of people very sick in it.

Nobody’s been tested there. His carer told us. His carer comes in every day, she sees quite a few people in the course of a day, not just him.

Has she got masks and gloves? Charlotte says. Nobody seems to.

She bought herself some masks on Amazon, Art says. She has to put them on secretly at the front door because her work bans the carers it employs from using anything since nobody’s been given it officially and their line manager’s been told to avoid accusations of inequality and not to report shortages.

Christ, Charlotte says. Christ almighty.

I know, Art says. For some reason the government wants them all equally in danger. Plus the people they visit and care for.

How’s Elisabeth’s family? Charlotte says.

Everybody’s fine, Art says, Elisabeth’s mother’s fine. And her partner, she’s fine. But it’s quite a small house now for all of us. So Elisabeth and I

have converted the front room into a bedroom. I best not stay on the phone too long. Anyway. I was saying. We could, I mean you and me, Art and Charlotte, do this every day, just as a token, a little door open into each other’s day.

I hear you, she says. You’re saying I’m token.

No I’m not, Art says.

You’re asking me if it’ll be okay by me if you phone me or I phone you every day, she says. Yes?

Yes, Art says. But. Then we listen to the thing each of us tells the other, and we go away and write up the thing the other person’s told us. I tell you something I’ve thought or seen or whatever, then you tell me something you’ve thought or seen or whatever. Then I go away and write what I remember or took from what you told me, and you do the same with what I told you. Then we put it online, and people, anyone, can join in with their own comments or thoughts if they want. Like giving a gift out to the rest of the world from our own isolation every day. To keep the days going. To help mark them, for you and me, and not just for you and me.

Charlotte looks at the line of light coming in at the edge of the blind.

Charlotte? Art says. You there? Hello?

So what gift are you going to give me from your isolation today, then?

Charlotte says.

Okay. For instance, he says. I just saw a pigeon fly past the window and it had a long piece of twig in its mouth, and it was so long, the twig, it was so much bigger than the bird, that it was sort of unwieldy for it to fly with it. But the pigeon still did. It kept having to correct its balance, adjust to being pulled lopsided. But it did.

Silence.

Then:

is that it? Charlotte says.

Uh, Art says.

The sum total vision of your day? Charlotte says. The pressing thing you saw and wanted to tell me?

Yes, Art says. But. Obviously. Because, because from seeing this, I knew, I know, don’t I, that that pigeon’ll be making a nest with that twig. And that’s really meaningful right now in this world where everything is so surreal and seems to be coming apart at the seams for so many people, especially people who are stuck at home. Whereas, in nature, creatures are rushing to make

themselves homes. It is meaningful. It is. It’s hopeful, and natural. You can’t deny it.

Right, Charlotte says. And you think this is worth telling the lockdown world about, because?

Why are you blocking my benign analysis of what I’ve experienced and my determination to connect through it with others and let them connect with me and you? Art says.

I’m not, Charlotte says.

You’re being quite chippy, Art says. I’d forgotten how unromantic you are.

Unromantic’s better than being a clichéd and stupefied-by-love romantic any day, Charlotte says.

Are you jealous? Art says.

No, Charlotte says.

I feel a bit better, Art says. It’s quite like bodily being with you, you being this grouchy. Anyway. Now. You tell me something you thought or saw.

And then we go away and write down our take on each other’s moment, and then we post both versions, our own and the other person’s. And then – do you think we should post it online via the Art in Nature site?

Charlotte winds the drawstring on her pyjama trousers round and round her finger really tightly till her finger starts to pulse. Then she whips it off again very fast.

I’ve been thinking, she says. I’m not sure I want to keep going on our Art in Nature platform much longer.

Silence.

I’ve been meaning to say, she says.

Right, he says. Okay. Well. Yes. You’re right. It has to change. It has to meet the new situation head on. So. Would, would we maybe call it something else, something new? How about Art in Nurture?

How about Art Inertia? Charlotte says.

Ah, Art says. I see.

What I’m saying is, I don’t want to do the Art in Nature project at all any more, she says.

You mean you’re leaving the project? he says.

(He sounds hurt now.

Good.)

And anyway, she says. If we were to do what you’re suggesting, what we’re doing wouldn’t exactly be art. Would it? Not what you’re proposing.

How do you mean? Art says.

It’s just not what art, lower case a, is about, she says.

Charlotte sitting in the dark picks at the already red raw side of a fingernail with her thumbnail.

How about you tell me again one more time in our lives, like I’m not allowed to know for myself or decide, and you’re the only authority, what art lower case a is about, then? Art says.

Art lower case a, she says, is, is, it’s uh about the moment you’re met by and so changed by something you encounter that it uh takes you both into and beyond yourself, gives you back your senses. It’s a, a shock that brings us back to ourselves.

If that were true there’s enough shock happening all across the world to make the whole of the world right now the biggest ever art project there’s ever fucking been, he says.

Well, she says, well. Well, art lower case a always was about our getting to grips with concepts like mortality, and randomness –

And are we really going to have a lockdown argument about art? Right now? he says.

Randomness, she says, and contingency, and –

She picks again at the place on her finger, which now seems to be bleeding.

Uh huh, he says. Okay. You keep finding the big words for what’s happening to us all so that you won’t have to think about what’s happening to us all, yeah? And I’ll sit and contemplate how my pigeon with a twig just wasn’t striking enough to count, and how here I was, thinking wrongly all along that art lower case a was something to do with coming to terms with and understanding all the things we can’t say or explain or articulate with help from something which we know will help us feel and think then articulate those things, even at times like this when feeling and thinking and saying anything about anything are under impossible pressure.

Except, she says. That art lower case a isn’t ever about helping anyone.

Oh really? he says. Who amputated your ethos?

What art does is, it exists, Charlotte says. And then because we encounter it, we remember we exist too. And that one day we won’t.

At the other end of the phone Art yawns.

He has a tendency to yawn, she knows from her years of living with him, when he’s particularly angry.

Then Charlotte yawns too.

I just caught your yawn, she says. So much for isolation.

Yeah, he says. Tell you what. I’m feeling a bit rattled now. Maybe we’ll talk about this another day.

Okay, she says.

Okay, he says.

And thanks for phoning, she says. And forgive me for being a bit, you know.

I’ll forgive you if we finish this phonecall with you telling me something you saw or heard, he says.

I can’t, she says. I’ve got to go. I want to uh go and help Iris with the rooms. Or she’ll do it all herself.

I was just about to ask, Art says. How’s she doing?

Great, Charlotte says.

(She hasn’t actually seen Iris for three days.)

She’s amazing, she says. She’s been cycling to town and back, delivering bags of food and things to people thirty years younger than she is, and yelling hello at everyone she passes, asking them if they need anything or if she can help. I couldn’t, can’t, persuade her not to go out. I tried. There’s no stopping her.

Can’t tell old Iris what to do, he says. Nobody can. You’re so alike.

Charlotte’s heart sort of folds in two. It hurts inside her.

I came in from the garden and caught her dragging one of the mattresses up to the third floor, you know, up the spiral staircase, she says. I said, can I help you with the others? and she said, no, darling, this is the last one. Which means she’d already got the six other mattresses up there. By herself. On her own steam. Without even telling me. She’s actually in great form.

Great form, Art says. Now there’s a good name for a web page like the one I’m talking about. Talk tomorrow? When do the people all arrive?

This is the precise point at which Charlotte takes the phone away from her ear and presses the hang-up button.

She puts the phone in her pyjama jacket pocket.

She is close to tears.

Why is she nearly crying?

Because of something quite unexpected. The bright sides of graffitied trains and the smudges on the insides of train and bus windows where people have pressed their noses.

She is now crying because she is missing these things so much.

Just thinking about it. Thinking about a pigeon. And Art seeing it with a twig in its beak, and about a smudge on a window on a train they were on not that long ago, though in truth it’s a different life ago. And some orange-jacketed workmen in the sidings of a station they passed through. She fills with love for everything and everybody, every single human being, young, old, all of them, who’s ever thought about or not thought about seeing a pigeon fly past, or ever left an oily nose or mouth or finger smudge on a public transport window.

The feeling fills her so full that it has to come out at the eyes. There’s nowhere else for it to go.

She cries with love for Art.

She cries for their intrepid selves, for their travelling around, Art sitting next to her on a train, on a bus, for them both slamming the doors on the new car and heading off out into the world, her in the driver’s seat, Art lying flat out on the back seat, which he likes doing because it reminds him of when he was a kid.

The level of love has blocked her nose now.

She sits in the bedclothes, breathes through her mouth and misses her mother, who died in 2012, and her father, who went the year after.

Dear God.

She is now completely without family.

She is living in the house of someone else’s family, not hers.

She puts her hands over her face and cries soundlessly into her hands.

Come on.

Get a grip.

Thank God they’re dead now and they missed this and you’re not sitting here worrying about them.

Get up. Go downstairs.

Help Iris.

She doesn’t move.

Outside the day is happening regardless, full of birds doing things in the air etc.

Charlotte sits in the dark.

She looks at the side of her finger but it’s too dark to see what’s bleeding and what isn’t.

She looks at the line of light still getting in at the edge of the blind.

If she had some gaffer tape she could stick the blind to the window frame and stop that light getting in.

There will be gaffer tape downstairs.

But that would mean going downstairs.

Okay. There are two chairs. One is jammed up against the door. She could use the other one, balance a pillow on the back of it and let it rest against the blind so the blind presses back against the window. Then that line of light will disappear.

She gets up, takes Art’s Pussy Grabs Back T-shirt off the back of the chair, throws it into a corner of the room. She picks the chair up. She moves it over to the window. She takes a pillow, positions it.

The light lessens.

—

Charlotte. Yes. Charlotte.

Who used to think herself quite revolutionary.

Everything’s got to change. Everything.

Now? Everything has.

Though Iris isn’t so sure.

Christ but there’s so much you should be blogging about, Iris had taken to saying every time she saw Charlotte anywhere near one of the computers.

Charlotte had sent the three other people in the Art in Nature team home before the lockdown.

Why did you do that? Iris said.

They’ve got families to be with, Charlotte said. And anyway, we shouldn’t be cohabiting with so many people.

We need them, Iris said. Can they work from home? You should all be writing about the PPE shortage. About a too-late response from a useless and distracted government who never thought for a minute they’d end up governing anything. Whose only thought about state was how to dismantle it as fast as possible. Who thought it was all going to be such a blast, being in power, making lots of money for themselves and their pals.

Uh huh, Charlotte said.

You should be writing about how many people have died and are going to die in this country because of this government’s rank carelessness, Iris said.

They’re saying twenty thousand deaths will be good. Good!

(Iris has friends in Italy who’ve kept them in touch with the speed of catastrophe.)

Get on to the team, Iris said. Get them writing. About how the hedgefunders have made billions already out of what’s happening. Billions going into their accounts from other people’s losses, while nurses and doctors and cleaners have to wear binliners. Binliners. A government treating them like rubbish. The NHS is not happy to let people die. That’s the difference between them and this government, happy to count the heads of their so-called herd, like we’re cattle, like they think they own us and have the right to send thousands of us to slaughter to keep the money coming in.

Peevish. Too focused on their infantile Brexit obsession to accept offers of help and equipment from our neighbours. I bet you anything they’re getting their data scientist pals and advisers and their friends at Google to model pandemic data while they talk a lot of Dunkirk spirit shit to a public they’re selling down the river.

Uh huh, Charlotte said.

Write about how the people who’ve never been properly valued are all holding this country together, Iris said. The health workers and the everydayers, the deliverers, the postmen and women, the people working the factories, the supermarkets, the ones holding all our lives in their hands.

Write about that. The mighty Etonians brought low one more time and the meek revealed as the real might after all. Because believe me, it can go either way from here, we need to think about it, and fast, and we need to get united just as fast, because in my experience the mighty don’t like it when the meek get elevated.

United in what, though?

In isolation?

Charlotte shook her head.

Imagine. She used to call herself an online activist, Charlotte, who knew now she was never anything but a revolutio-lite, a sort of Good Life Bless This House sitcom revolutionary, a nostalgia-revolutionary. Who, even though she was born two decades after the 1970s happened, and even though that decade, as she knows from reading countless books and watching countless films, was one of the most fiercely politicized and prescient and fragmented in history, had focused at length, in her dissertation about culture and the 1970s, on why Gilbert O’Sullivan, though he was a grown adult, had