Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Poor Gos. Poor, ragged, fearful, broken-feathered Gos. I thought of him often as I sat with my hawk. I saw him in black and white and a long way off, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope: a miniature, miserable hawk bating and twittering in distress on the grey lawns of a distant house. Gos was very real to me. But White was not. It was hard to imagine him with his hawk. Sitting with my own it was hard to imagine him at all. I looked at photographs, but they were all of different people: one was a pale-eyed man with a Shakespearian beard who’d written books under the pen-name James Aston, and another a thin young man with nervous eyes and a spare, haunted face who was Mr White the schoolmaster. There were photographs of White the countryman in an open-necked shirt and a tweed jacket, looking louche and amused. And photographs of White much later in his life: a corpulent, white-bearded English Hemingway, a woolly-sweatered Falstaff. I couldn’t reconcile these faces. I read The Goshawk again as I sat with Mabel, read it many times, and every time it seemed a different book; sometimes a caustically funny romance, sometimes the journal of a man laughing at failure, sometimes a heartbreaking tract of another man’s despair. But one White was clear to me as I manned my hawk. It was not White the falconer. It was the man who had, for the first time in his life, discovered the joys of domesticity. A man who painted woodwork the brightest of blues and reds, who arranged feathers in jars on his mantelpiece and made curries from prawns and eggs and spoons of thin-cut marmalade. I saw him boiling his laundry in the copper on the kitchen stove, and sitting in an armchair reading Masefield’s Midnight Folk with his setter Brownie sleeping at his feet. And I saw him drinking. There was always a bottle at White’s side, and his battle with Gos made him drink all the more. ‘It was not that one drank enough to become incapable or stupid,’ he wrote, ‘but alcohol now seemed the only way of continuing to live.’ As I sat with my hawk and puzzled over White I wondered if it was alcohol that obscured him, blurred him from view. I knew the notion was fanciful, but even so there seemed some deep connection between White’s drinking and his evasiveness. And I was sure that it was the drink that irrigated White’s constant self-sabotage, for it is a common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one’s broken self.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  History, and life too. It might resemble Old England here but it is not anything like the country of four hundred years ago, of one hundred years ago. I am nearly home, now, and I’m sad, and angry, and fired up as hell. I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness. And I am guilty too. I’d wanted to escape history by running to the hawk. Forget the darkness, forget Göring’s hawks, forget death, forget all the things that had been before. But my flight was wrong. Worse than wrong. It was dangerous. I must fight, always, against forgetting, I thought. And I wish I had run after that couple and explained about the deer. I wish I had stood there in the mud in the rain, waving one hand with a hawk on the other, shouting about history and blood. Later that night I find my father’s plane-spotting diaries at the bottom of his bookshelves: six hardbacked, cloth-spined exercise books. I pull one out at random. 1956. He was sixteen. The pages are divided into columns, headed with careful, inked capitals: TIME. NUMBER OF PLANES. TYPE OF PLANE. REMARKS. REGISTRATION NUMBER. I look at the first column. On the twenty-fifth of April he starts watching at 9.40 a.m. and leaves at 7 p.m. On the twenty-sixth he starts at 9 and ends at 9 p.m. Twelve hours of looking up at the sky. Good God. There are hundreds of pages and thousands upon thousands of aircraft here. Vickers V70 Viscounts, F-86 Sabres, Airspeed Ambassadors, Lockheed Super Constellations, Gloster Meteors. Here’s his report of a visit to Croydon Airport at the end of May. ‘Eight de Havilland Tiger Moths. Two Auster Aiglet trainers. Two Taylorcraft Plus Ds. One Auster 5. Three De Havilland 104 Doves.’ I have no idea what these planes are. I find a glued-in snapshot of a Tupolev Tu 104. He has written a few lines underneath: ‘This aircraft is undoubtedly a civil conversion of the Type 39 Badger but the Russians said it was a completely new aircraft.’ It has all the burning pedantry I remember from my childhood obsession with hawks. Suddenly my father seems very close. Another photograph falls out. I pick it up. De Havilland 104 Dove, Croydon Airport, 2–4–56. I cross-check the registration number against the list. G–AMYO. Morton Air Services. The edge of the runway is lost in mist. I can see a tiny profile inside the cockpit, the suggestion of a man leaning forward to wipe the canopy before the plane climbs into the grey April sky.

• From City of Night (1963)

  She fixed her eyes stonily on the deserted gray bar. At first, I had thought she hadnt recognized me; now she calls me by my name. “What happened to that kid?” she asked me. Interrupting my narration of the fight before I could get beyond the girl’s goading of her boyfriend, Sylvia shook her head wearily as if she had already heard too much. “I know the girl youre talking about,” she said. “Shes always trying to make others prove something—but shes really trying to prove it to herself.” And I think of Barbara, perhaps still somewhere in the maze of downtown Los Angeles.... Sylvia said: “I’ll take that knife from that kid, if hes still got it—he probably doesnt even know how to use it.” She shook her head again in bewilderment. “You should have taken it from him when you first knew he had it,” she said, as if I had failed in some established duty. “All of you—” she started, compelled to approach a certain dangerous subject which, barely neared, must be avoided. She was silent. I felt uncomfortable with her right now—mysteriously guilty, blame-ridden, as if I had done something to her. “Is this your bar too?” I asked her, only to fill the powerful silence. “Yes,” she answered. “It’s been closed for quite a while, though—it was too far from the Quarter. I bought that other one instead. The Rocking Times.” She added the name with deep sarcasm. “Hell, I couldve sold this place, many times. But I prefer to keep it—for a while anyway.” Like a person prepared to fight even before a hostile situation exists, she added defensively, abruptly belligerently. “Yeah, sure, this was a hustling bar too: hustlers! queens! butch homosexuals! Everything!” She pronounced each word with bravado, like a child who must prove he can use dirty words; and, as with that child, each word had sounded unconvincing. “What else?” she challenged, as if I had been questioning her. “When those bars swing, they make a lot of money, I guess,” I said clumsily, still trying to ease some of the strain I felt with her. She flashed a ferocious look at me. In the gray darkness, I could almost feel her eyes burning on my face. Predictably, she relented, changing the subject. “Usually, by this time,” she was telling me, “Im already at the bar. But what the hell? Everyone whos there now will be there later—or theyll come back.” “You know everyone who goes there?” “I see everyone,” she said. “And I know most of the regulars—the ones who stay here all year. It’s mainly during Mardi Gras that the gay scene really changes in this city.... I hate that word, ‘gay’—‘queer’ too, even more,” she said quickly. I remember the man on the beach, that afternoon in Santa Monica, with whom I had sat on the sand watching that bird Escape into the sky.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It is a neat one. The artist has filmed the view from the real hide, and is projecting it onto a screen beyond the window. It shows a soaring California condor , a huge, dusty-black carrion-eating vulture rendered nearly extinct by persecution, habitat destruction and poisoning from lead-contaminated carcasses. By the late 1980s only twenty-seven birds remained, and in a last-ditch effort to save the species they were trapped and taken into captivity so that their domestic-bred young could be used to repopulate the wild. Some people tried to stop this happening. They believed honestly and sincerely that once all the birds were captive, condors would cease to exist. These birds are made of wildness, they argued. A captive condor is a condor no more . I watch the condor for a while. It makes me impatient. My head is packed with real skies and real hawks. I’m remembering live condors I’d met at a captive-breeding centre years before: vast, loose-feathered, turkey-necked birds with purpose and curiosity; avian hogs in black feather-boas. Precious, yes, but complicated, real, idiosyncratic, astonishing. The condor on the gallery screen was nothing like them. Helen, you are an idiot , I think. That is the whole point of this exhibition. The whole point of it, right there in front of you . I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing – not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? There is a vast difference between my visceral, bloody life with Mabel and the reserved, distanced view of modern nature-appreciation. I know that some of my friends see my keeping a hawk as morally suspect, but I couldn’t love or understand hawks as much as I do if I’d only ever seen them on screens. I’ve made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me. I think of my chastened surprise when Mabel played with a paper telescope. She is real. She can resist the meanings humans give her. But the condor? The condor has no resistance to us at all. I stare at the attenuated, drifting image on the gallery screen. It is a shadow, a figure of loss and hope; it is hardly a bird at all. The other exhibit is perfectly simple.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I thought of him often as I sat with my hawk. I saw him in black and white and a long way off, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope: a miniature, miserable hawk bating and twittering in distress on the grey lawns of a distant house. Gos was very real to me. But White was not. It was hard to imagine him with his hawk. Sitting with my own it was hard to imagine him at all. I looked at photographs, but they were all of different people: one was a pale-eyed man with a Shakespearian beard who’d written books under the pen-name James Aston, and another a thin young man with nervous eyes and a spare, haunted face who was Mr White the schoolmaster. There were photographs of White the countryman in an open-necked shirt and a tweed jacket, looking louche and amused. And photographs of White much later in his life: a corpulent, white-bearded English Hemingway, a woolly-sweatered Falstaff. I couldn’t reconcile these faces. I read The Goshawk again as I sat with Mabel, read it many times, and every time it seemed a different book; sometimes a caustically funny romance, sometimes the journal of a man laughing at failure, sometimes a heartbreaking tract of another man’s despair. But one White was clear to me as I manned my hawk. It was not White the falconer. It was the man who had, for the first time in his life, discovered the joys of domesticity. A man who painted woodwork the brightest of blues and reds, who arranged feathers in jars on his mantelpiece and made curries from prawns and eggs and spoons of thin-cut marmalade. I saw him boiling his laundry in the copper on the kitchen stove, and sitting in an armchair reading Masefield’s Midnight Folk with his setter Brownie sleeping at his feet. And I saw him drinking. There was always a bottle at White’s side, and his battle with Gos made him drink all the more. ‘It was not that one drank enough to become incapable or stupid,’ he wrote, ‘but alcohol now seemed the only way of continuing to live.’ As I sat with my hawk and puzzled over White I wondered if it was alcohol that obscured him, blurred him from view. I knew the notion was fanciful, but even so there seemed some deep connection between White’s drinking and his evasiveness. And I was sure that it was the drink that irrigated White’s constant self-sabotage, for it is a common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one’s broken self. I opened the curtains the next morning. The brightness of the room made me clearer, which concerned her for a while.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For that was another change. I have spoken of the curious dimming of Walter’s brightness, of the subtle new distance that had grown between us, since Kitty and I had become sweethearts. Now the dimming and the distance increased. He remained kind, but his kindness was tempered by a surprising kind of stiffness; in Kitty’s presence, in particular, he grew easily flustered and self-conscious - and then jolly, with a horrible, forced kind of jolliness, as if ashamed of himself for being so awkward. His visits to Ginevra Road grew rarer. At last we saw him only to rehearse new songs, or in the company of the other artistes we sometimes took supper or drinks with. I missed him, and wondered at his change of heart - but didn’t wonder very hard, I must confess, because I thought I knew what had caused it. That night at Islington he had learned the truth at last - had heard that drunken man’s shout, seen Kitty’s terrible, terrified response, and understood. He had driven her home - I did not know what had passed between them then, for neither of them seemed at all inclined to discuss any part of that dreadful evening - he had driven her home, but that tender gesture of his, to place his cloak about her trembling shoulders and see her safely to her door, had been his last. Now he could not be easy with her - perhaps because he knew for sure that he had lost her; more probably, because the idea of our love he found distasteful. And so he stayed away. Had we remained very long at Mrs Dendy’s house, I think our friends there would have noticed Walter’s absence, and quizzed us over it; but at the end of September came the biggest change of all. We said good-bye to our landlady and Ginevra Road, and moved. We had talked vaguely of moving since the start of our fame; but we had always put the crucial moment off - it seemed foolish to leave a place in which we had been, and were still, so happy. Mrs Dendy’s had become our home. It was the house in which we had first kissed, first declared our love; it was, I thought, our honeymoon house - and for all that it was so cramped and plain, for all that our costumes now took up more space in the bedroom than our bed, I was terribly loath to leave it.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I’d seen signs over the last week or so. The season was turning. A bluebottle in the garden; torpid purple crocuses on the lawn. Dots of cherry blossom falling outside the walls of St John’s. And one evening last week, a host of blackbirds carrolling into the deepening sky from perches all over the city’s gable ends and Gothic spires. Spring was coming. And usually I’d rejoice at the curious bluish tint to the air and the lengthening days. But spring will mean no more Mabel. She’ll be moulting in an aviary. I shan’t see her for months. My heart hurts thinking of it. So I wasn’t thinking of it; I’d ignored the flowers and the flies. And that was part of the problem. For something was stirring in Mabel’s accipitrine heart, and perhaps it was spring. I had an hour to fly her today. I’d some freelance teaching in town that afternoon, and I knew I was cutting it fine. So I decided to head back to the old field where the rabbits are. We’ll catch a rabbit , I thought, then I’ll drop her back at the house, pick up the teaching material, and run down the road to teach it. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. She flies a rabbit half-heartedly, lights upon a hedge-line and looks about. When I call her back she takes a while to return. The warning signs are there already, but I’m ignoring them. One more flight, I tell myself. But what Mabel is doing is revelling in the weight of the sun on her back, and in the little intimations that warm air is rising into this steady, grey-blue sky. She courses another rabbit, and sails onward, away from me, pitching high up in chestnut trees, and now I realise she’s losing all interest in me. I kick myself. After the last debacle here, I swore I’d be more careful. The trees are above a road; there’s an unsettling proximity of moving cars and trucks and tractors: she doesn’t want to be here any more. She crosses the road into a belt of trees and gravelled drives. I follow her. Rabbits break all around me and the PRIVATE: KEEP OUT signs. She ignores them. And me. She’s taken stand in a tree a good twenty-five feet above me, and looks out at the prospect all around. I’m waving my glove and whistling, but this is a lost cause. She fluffs her tummy and shakes her tail: a goshawk’s signs of happiness and contentment. But on an inaccessible branch, with the seconds ticking past, these lovely signs of relaxation and calm bring a sinking feeling. And I realise I failed to bring my telephone. Or my cigarettes.

• From City of Night (1963)

  As if she had materialized from the very smoke that clouded the bar, the most beautiful queen I have ever seen appeared. If it hadnt been for her clothes—maleclothes worn to imitate a woman’s—I would have thought her a real woman; and as a woman, she would have been one of the most beautiful, too. In her 20s, with a pale perfectly featured face—the face any woman would have envied on another—she had dark-lidded eyes and long, blond, almost-golden hair, which now is tightly bunched in back to conceal its length. She is lithe, slender. There is a ghostquality about her, perhaps because of the way even the feeble light plays on her hair, so that, appearing almost translucent, she seems incandescent. She surveyed the bar slowly, as if for the first time, with a smile which is unbearably, wistfully sad. In this bar of very real faces—the studied toughness of the malehustlers, the sedulous (but largely unsuccessful to practiced eyes) madeup attempts at femininity of the queens—this youngman, this queen, standing in the midst of it, appears as unreal as an angel: a monument to the utter perversity of her violated sex. She glides through the bar now, easily, past the bunched groups; nodding to the others—not aloofly, but, rather, as if she herself is aware of the unreality of her person; and they stare at her in a kind of bewildered awe. She moves like fog, as if some invisible wind is carrying her along toward Sylvia. Now, closely, I can see the queen’s haunting green eyes. And I feel a great sadness because of the doom so inexorably stamped on that beautiful face. “How do you feel now, Kathy?” Sylvia asked her softly. “Oh, Im always all right,” Kathy answered. Even her voice has a quality of unreality. “Im fine.... Sylvia, what time is it, honey?” Without looking at her watch, Sylvia said: “It’s five o’clock.” But I knew it was much later. “I dont mean what time. Did I say that? I mean what day?” Sylvia answered. She reached out to touch the queen, but she brought her hand quickly back. “That late in the week?” Kathy sighs. “That early,” Sylvia laughed unconvincingly. “Oh, well,” Kathy said indifferently. The smile hasnt left her face. “Youre new in the Quarter, arent you, baby?” she asked me. “I dont come out very often any more.” She seemed to be looking through me, as if everyone within the span of her vision is as unreal as she herself. “New people all the time, some come back, some never do.” She asked Sylvia, “Is Jocko back in town yet?” “Yes. He was here earlier.” “Good,” said Kathy. “I like him.... What time did you say it is?” she asked again, vaguely. Sylvia answered, this time correctly. But Kathy seemed not to have noticed the difference. “Excuse me,” she breathed—and she disappeared as unreally as she had appeared. “Shes beautiful,” I said.

• From City of Night (1963)

  After being around him a few times, I began to avoid him; stifled by the knowledge of the sad, sad loss of Youth, of the terrible hints that life, perversely, may make one a caricature of oneself, a wandering persistent ghost of the youngman that was, once—the attitudes of youth lingering after the youth itself was gone, played out With Skipper, this loss was concentrated, emphasized because life had given him nothing but physical beauty, an ephemeral beauty relying on Youth.... That sense of loss had seized me acutely one day when, sitting with him and two scores, I watched him remove from his wallet a set of photographs, about six of them, all of him in different poses, showing him—almost nude, much younger—a glowing youngman of about 20. “Thats me!” he had said, almost challengingly, as he passed the photographs to the two scores. And he carried, too, mysteriously, some frayed clippings, in an envelope, an envelope which, once, I saw him replace with a newer one, with great tenderness: the frayed clippings becoming older and older—the envelope, new. There were hints, in his conversations, of closed doors behind him, doors which had opened temptingly and Slammed! with great finality; hints of painful resignation. Behind the sullen look with which he nailed the people who bought him was the unmistakable awareness that he was on the brink of facing his doom: of facing Death.... And Death for Skipper was the loss of Youth.... The years that would follow the knowledge of his premature death would be played out by him like a ghost.... Watching him rush out of a bar once, Chuck had said: “Man, that stud walks more miles in a day than I do all mammy-screwin week long!” And Darling Dolly Dane had added, sighing deeply: “Yeah, baby, but he always ends up where he started from....” Perhaps realizing this, Skipper constantly veiled his eyes. I watch the skinny man now talking to Skipper. And I see the damning smile on the fatman’s face as he motions them over. As Skipper walks toward us with the skinny man, I notice immediately that Skipper is already drunk; he stumbles, curses. His eyes are smoldering with the hinted awareness of tonight.... “Hi, jack,” he says to me. “Hi cholly,” he says to the fatman. This is Skipper’s way of putting a score down. The world is divided into “jacks”—of which he is one—and “chollys.”

• From Educated (2018)

  We laid the owl on the linoleum by the back door and, when it awoke, told Mother to stay out of the kitchen. Mother said hell would freeze over before she surrendered her kitchen to an owl, then marched in and began slamming pots to make breakfast. The owl flopped about pathetically, its talons scratching the door, bashing its head in a panic. We cried, and Mother retreated. Two hours later Dad had blocked off half the kitchen with plywood sheets. The owl convalesced there for several weeks. We trapped mice to feed it, but sometimes it didn’t eat them, and we couldn’t clear away the carcasses. The smell of death was strong and foul, a punch to the gut. The owl grew restless. When it began to refuse food, we opened the back door and let it escape. It wasn’t fully healed, but Dad said its chances were better with the mountain than with us. It didn’t belong. It couldn’t be taught to belong. — I WANTED TO TELL SOMEONE I’d failed the exam, but something stopped me from calling Tyler. It might have been shame. Or it might have been that Tyler was preparing to be a father. He’d met his wife, Stefanie, at Purdue, and they’d married quickly. She didn’t know anything about our family. To me, it felt as though he preferred his new life—his new family—to his old one. I called home. Dad answered. Mother was delivering a baby, which she was doing more and more now the migraines had stopped. “When will Mother be home?” I said. “Don’t know,” said Dad. “Might as well ask the Lord as me, as He’s the one deciding.” He chuckled, then asked, “How’s school?” Dad and I hadn’t spoken since he’d screamed at me about the VCR. I could tell he was trying to be supportive, but I didn’t think I could admit to him that I was failing. I wanted to tell him it was going well. So easy, I imagined myself saying. “Not great,” I said instead. “I had no idea it would be this hard.” The line was silent, and I imagined Dad’s stern face hardening. I waited for the jab I imagined he was preparing, but instead a quiet voice said, “It’ll be okay, honey.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Remembering. I put my hand out, drag the tips of my fingers down her teardrop-splashed front. The new feathers she will grow will be barred stone-grey and white. The tones of earth and ochre will disappear. Her eyes, when I see her next, will be the deep orange of glowing coals. Everything changes. Everything moves. I lift my hand, cast her towards the nearest perch. She flies, lands, shakes her tail, sees a branch above her and leaps upon it. She’s facing away from me. ‘I’ll miss you,’ I say. No answer can come, and there is nothing to explain. I turn and walk out of the door, leaving the hawk behind. Tony is waiting outside, his eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘Come inside the house,’ he says. He knows what I am feeling. And in I go, where the dogs lie flat on the kitchen floor, tails wagging, and the kettle is whistling, and the house is very warm. Postscript I needed to find out more about White to write this book. So I spent a week in the Harry Ransom Center, the Texas archive where T. H. White’s papers and journals are kept. Reading about muddy English winters while sitting in an air-conditioned library was a very strange experience; outside, vultures soared on tilted wings through ninety-degree heat and grackles hopped on the burning sidewalks. I turned pages, sifted through manuscripts, read through the books he had owned, returned home with stacks of notes and thoughts. But they did not seem enough. There was something else to be done. So one hot July day I drove across England to Stowe. It’s still a school, but its grounds are open to the public. I parked my car in the National Trust car park, paid my entrance fee, clutched a map, and walked up the long lane to the gate. ‘Turn left for the best views,’ the man at the sentry box said. I turned right out of sheer contrariness and set off on my quest, the vast Palladian palace bright on the horizon, everything under metallic sunlight that made the lime-leaves black and the lakewater a deep, painful blue. Water lilies glowed on it in thick constellations. Ink-black shadows underpinned the parkland trees. Swifts pushed through air so thick they hardly beat their wings against the breeze. These were the grounds of the school where White had taught, landscape gardens that had drawn tourists for hundreds of years. After an hour of walking past temples with fluted columns and painted doors, cupolas, obelisks, porticoes and follies, I started to freak out. Nothing made any sense. Greek Temples, Roman Temples, Saxon gods on runic plinths starred with orange lichen. A vast Gothic Temple in rouged ironstone. Palladian bridges, tufa grottoes and Doric arches.

• From Educated (2018)

  Dad didn’t leave his bed for two months unless one of my brothers was carrying him. He peed in a bottle, and the enemas continued. Even after it became clear that he would live, we had no idea what kind of life it would be. All we could do was wait, and soon it felt as though everything we did was just another form of waiting—waiting to feed him, waiting to change his bandages. Waiting to see how much of our father would grow back. It was difficult to imagine a man like Dad—proud, strong, physical— permanently impaired. I wondered how he would adjust if Mother were forever cutting his food for him; if he could live a happy life if he wasn’t able to grasp a hammer. So much had been lost. But mixed in with the sadness, I also felt hope. Dad had always been a hard man—a man who knew the truth on every subject and wasn’t interested in what anybody else had to say. We listened to him, never the other way around: when he was not speaking, he required silence. The explosion transformed him from lecturer to observer. Speaking was difficult for him, because of the constant pain but also because his throat was burned. So he watched, he listened. He lay, hour after hour, day after day, his eyes alert, his mouth shut.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I tie the swivel to the creance and lower her to the ground – she jumps to the grass crab-wise and looks up at me, hunched and baleful – then I put a scrap of food on my glove, raise it high in the air, and she flies vertically up to eat it. Then we do it again. And again. High-jumping like this is an old falconer’s way of manning and muscling-up a hawk in relatively enclosed spaces; it’s good exercise for the hawk and fun to do. It is also hard to do: Mabel is frighteningly fast. It is far from my walks with the hawk along twilit streets. There is something of the street performance about it, and it brings in the crowds. They stand, tonight, in a loose semi-circle twenty feet away. A mother crouches by her child, pointing at the hawk. ‘Isn’t it regal?’ she breathes. Mabel is far from regal; she’s gulping down bits of day-old chick with strange choking squeals. Next to the mother and child is a bus driver on his way to the depot, two hooded teenagers, and a girl taking pictures on her mobile phone. But they don’t bother me, because I’m concentrating on this. Grass, glove. Grass, glove. Grass, glove, grass . The rhythm becomes a heartbeat. The crowds recede. Then I come down with a fever . The sickness defeats all purpose, all purchase on the hawk. I feed her on the sofa, put her back on her perch and watch her drift into the place where goshawks go when they’ve eaten. It is very far away. I wave my hand in front of her face. She appears not to see it at all. Her eyes seem as remote from thought or emotion as a metal dish or a patch of sky. What is she thinking? What is she seeing? I wonder . I shut my eyes and guess. Blood, I am sure. Smoke, branches, wet feathers. Snow. Pine needles. More blood. I shiver . And the days pass and the fever continues. The rain continues. It dampens the house. Wide parchment stains bleed across the wall in the hall and front room. The house smells of stagnant water in the coal-cellar , hawk mutes, and dust. Nothing is moving, nothing improving, nothing heading anywhere. I am packing up boxes to leave, still not knowing where I’d live when the house was gone. In a fit of bitter misery I make a fort out of an old cardboard wardrobe box in the spare room upstairs and crawl inside. It is dark. No one can see me. No one knows where I am. It is safe here . I curl up in the box to hide. Even in my state of sickness I know this is more than a little strange.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Then she crouches, waiting for me to throw them to her again. It is as good as it gets. When I told Stuart I played catch with her for a while he didn’t believe me. You don’t play with goshawks. It’s not what people do. But I have had to, to somehow leaven the chill. Because other people with goshawks have people too. For them their goshawks are their little splinter of wildness, their balance to domesticity; out in the woods with the hawk, other falconers get in touch with their solitudinous, bloody souls. But then they come home and have dinner, watch TV, play with their kids, sleep with their partner, wake, make tea, go to work. You need both sides, as they say. I don’t have both sides. I only have wildness. And I don’t need wildness any more. I’m not stifled by domesticity. I have none. There is no need, right now, to feel close to a fetch of dark northern woods, a creature with baleful eyes and death in her foot. Human hands are for holding other hands. Human arms are for holding other humans close. They’re not for breaking the necks of rabbits, pulling loops of viscera out onto leaf-litter while the hawk dips her head to drink blood from her quarry’s chest cavity. I watch all these things going on and my heart is salt. Everything is stuck in an eternal present. The rabbit stops breathing; the hawk eats; leaves fall; clouds pass overhead. A car drives past the field, and there are people in it, held securely on their way somewhere, wrapped in life like a warm coat. Tyre sounds recede. A heron bows overhead. I watch the goshawk snip, tear and wrench flesh from the rabbit’s foreleg. I feel sorry for the rabbit. Rabbit was born, grew up in the field, ate dandelions and grass, scratched his jaw with his feet, hopped about. Had baby rabbits of his own. Rabbit didn’t know what lonely was; he lived in a warren. And rabbit is now just a carefully packed assemblage of different kinds of food for a hawk who spends her evenings watching television on the living-room floor . Everything is so damn mysterious. Another car passes. Faces turn to watch me crouched with rabbit and hawk. I feel like a tableau at a roadside shrine. But I’m not sure what the shrine is for. I’m a roadside phenomenon. I am death to community. I am missing the point. There is a point? White said that training a hawk was like psychoanalysis. He said that training a goshawk was like training a person that was not a human, but a hawk. Now I see that I am more of a rabbit than a hawk. Living with a goshawk is like worshipping an iceberg, or an expanse of sliprock chilled by a January wind.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  A man whose life disturbed me. But a man, too, who loved nature, who found it surprising, bewitching and endlessly novel. ‘A magpie flies like a frying pan!’ he could write, with the joy of discovering something new in the world. And it is that joy, that childish delight in the lives of creatures other than man, that I love most in White. He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles. ‘There is a sense of creation about it,’ he wrote, in wonderment, after helping a farmer deliver a mare of a foal. ‘There were more horses in the field when I left it than there were when I went in.’ In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either. When, on their final meeting, he confessed to the writer David Garnett that he was a sadist, Garnett blamed White’s early emotional maltreatment and years of flogging at school. ‘He was an extremely tender-hearted and sensitive man,’ Garnett wrote, who had ‘found himself always in the dilemma of either being sincere and cruel, or false and unnatural. Whichever line he followed, he revolted the object of his love and disgusted himself.’ When White took up his position at Stowe in 1932 he was already expert at hiding who he was. For years he’d lived by the maxim Henry Green put so beautifully in his public-school memoir Pack My Bag: ‘The safest way to avoid trouble if one may not be going to fit is to take as great a part as possible in what is going on.’ To gain approval, to avoid trouble, he had to mirror what was around him: it was how he had tried to win love from his mother as a child. It was a life of perpetual disguise. After leaving Cambridge with a First in English, White had decided to become a toff – that was the phrase he used. Snobbery ‘is one of the best parlour games’, he explained to Potts, with light-hearted casualness, but it was a game with the highest of stakes.

• From City of Night (1963)

  She is really a boy-elephant But he has such A Special Appeal—such Graceful Talents—as Im sure youll agree—” (Applause! —and the elephant is persuaded by the trainer to bow his great head in thanks.) “—that we think it would be a shame to waste them. And so, Folks, a Great Big Hand for Miss Pinky—the graceful boy-elephant!”... I see Dave stare solemnly at the elephant being led off the small arena, the flowered hat perched crookedly over one ear.... “It’s sad—that great big male elephant painted pink—and that hat on his head,” Dave said. Suddenly Im frighteningly moved by this youngman beside me. I feel that impotent helplessness that comes when, through some perhaps casual remark, I see a person nakedly, sadly, pitifully revealed—as I see Dave now. We were both silent as we drove to his apartment. Along the hall of that building, a door is open. Two youngmen had moved in—and the mother of one, Dave had told me earlier, had come to visit them, staying there with them, aware that her son and the other youngman were lovers. Through the open door as we passed it, I heard the voice of one, whining peevishly: “Mommee! listen to what Duane is saying to me!”... I cringed visibly. Dave noticed this. “They fight all the time,” he told me. “Duane thinks Rick is making it with other guys—and Rick’s mother always takes Rick’s side.” Inside the apartment, Dave said unexpectedly: “It sure is great to be with you!” He put his hand fondly on my shoulder, letting it rest there—the first time he had touched me even this intimately since that first night For a long moment, I didnt move, feeling his hand increasingly heavier.... I ierked away from him. The words erupted out of me: “Maybe so—but it’s all stopping!” Even when I saw the look of amazement on his face, even when I wanted to stop, even when I felt that compassion, tenderness, closeness to this youngman—even then, I knew, as much for me as for him, that I had to go on; that although, inside, I was cringing at my own words, in hammerblows I have to destroy this friendship. “I mean—well—Ive spent too much time with you—thats all.” And crazily through it all, I keep thinking about the pink elephant at the park — the ridiculous flowered hat! — the sad eyes!... And the echoing, petulant, girlish “Mommee!” that had emerged from the half-open door along the hallway.... “Im sorry, Dave,” I said at the door, which I was opening now, to clinch the Escape, to get myself away from him. “Im sorry,” I repeated, “but this scene is nowhere!” Outside in the hall, I close the door behind me. I pause for a moment, not knowing why. Then I walked out of the building quickly. Im back in Santa Monica, alone, facing the wind-tossed ocean. SOMEONE: People Dont Have Wings I HAD SEEN HIM ON THE BEACH several times before. He never wore trunks.

• From Educated (2018)

  — I WASN’T THE ONLY ONE whose feet were searching for solid ground. For six months after the car accident, Mother had improved steadily and we’d thought she would fully recover. The headaches had become less frequent, so that she was shutting herself in the basement only two or three days a week. Then the healing had slowed. Now it had been nine months. The headaches persisted, and Mother’s memory was erratic. At least twice a week she’d ask me to cook breakfast long after everyone had eaten and the dishes had been cleared. She’d tell me to weigh a pound of yarrow for a client, and I’d remind her that we’d delivered the yarrow the day before. She’d begin mixing a tincture, then a minute later couldn’t remember which ingredients she’d added, so that the whole batch had to be tossed. Sometimes she would ask me to stand next to her and watch, so I could say, “You already added the lobelia. Next is the blue vervain.” Mother began to doubt whether she would ever midwife again, and while she was saddened by this, Dad was devastated. His face sagged every time Mother turned a woman away. “What if I have a migraine when she goes into labor?” she told him. “What if I can’t remember what herbs I’ve given her, or the baby’s heart rate?” In the end it wasn’t Dad who convinced Mother to midwife again. She convinced herself, perhaps because it was a part of herself she couldn’t surrender without some kind of struggle. That winter, she midwifed two babies that I remember. After the first she came home sickly and pale, as if bringing that life into the world had taken a measure of her own. She was shut in the basement when the second call came. She drove to the birth in dark glasses, trying to peer through the waves distorting her vision. By the time she arrived the headache was blinding, pulsing, driving out all thought. She locked herself in a back room and her assistant delivered the baby. After that, Mother was no longer the Midwife. On the next birth, she used the bulk of her fee to hire a second midwife, to supervise her. Everyone was supervising her now, it seemed. She had been an expert, an uncontested power; now she had to ask her ten-year-old daughter whether she’d eaten lunch. That winter was long and dark, and I wondered if sometimes Mother was staying in bed even when she didn’t have a migraine. At Christmas, someone gave her an expensive bottle of blended

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Now I could think of my father . I began to consider how he had coped with difficulty. Putting a lens between himself and the world was a defence against more than physical danger: it shielded him from other things he had to photograph: awful things, tragic things; accidents, train crashes, the aftermath of city bombs. He’d worried that this survival strategy had become a habit. ‘I see the world through a lens,’ he said once, a little sadly, as if the camera were always there, stopping him getting involved, something between him and the life that other people had. The chaffinch was calling again. How you learn what you are . Had I learned to be a watcher from my father? Was it a kind of childhood mimicking of his professional strategy for dealing with difficulty? I kicked the thought around for a while, and then I kicked it away. No , I thought. No . It was more I can’t think that than It’s not true . All those thousands upon thousands of photographs my father had taken. Think of them instead. Each one a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death. Look, this happened . A thing happened, and now it will never unhappen. Here it is, in the photograph: a baby putting its tiny hand in the wrinkled palm of an octogenarian. A fox running across a woodland path and a man raising a gun to shoot it. A car wreck. A plane crash. A comet smeared across the morning sky. A prime minister wiping his brow. The Beatles, sitting at a café table on the Champs-Elysées on a cold January day in 1964, John Lennon’s pale face under the brim of his fisherman’s cap. All these things had happened, and my father had committed them to a memory that wasn’t just his own, but the world’s. My father’s life wasn’t about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it. He’d come home from work strangely disheartened one winter evening. We asked him what was wrong. ‘Did you see the sky today?’ he said. He’d been walking through a London park on his way back from a press-call. It was deserted but for a small boy playing by a frozen boating lake. ‘I said, “Look up, look at that. Remember you saw that. You’ll never see it again . ”’ Above them both was a vast tracery of ice-rings and sun-dogs in a wintry, hazy sky. A 22° halo, a circumzenithal arc and an upper tangent arc, the sun’s light refracting and cutting the heavens into a complicated geometry of ice and air and fire. But the boy didn’t seem interested at all. Dad was baffled. ‘Maybe he thought you were one of those strange men,’ we sniggered, rolling our eyes, and he looked embarrassed and faintly cross.

• From City of Night (1963)

  (And I remember my own longing to watch Heaven, punctured, spilling down to earth....) Now Chuck catches sight of a man standing before us, looking in our direction. “That is a cool score, man—I know him. You wanna score off im (I am feelin too tired myself)—or you wanna hear the rest of the story?” “The story,” I said, feeling, suddenly, a great closeness to him—and at the same time a huge, undefined sadness. And he seemed childishly pleased by the decision, as he continues: “An we’re in that bar jes drinkin up that beer, an Ma keeps sayin, This is what your Pa wouldda done—an dammit to hell I aim to do it for him an do it right!’... We split that bar, an the sun was going down—all red an crazy an everything—like it gets in the South.” He squinted at the hazy feeble Los Angeles sun—and again he seemed to be looking beyond it: to the memory perhaps of another—brighter—sun. “An then—get this—then Ma points to this house, an she says: ‘Cat-house.’ Thats what she said, an she says: ‘Thats where you are gonna go next, youngman.’ Hell, man, I’d been there before with my brother. In fack—but Ma didn know this—there was this real cute whoor there—she wasnt no young chick, exactly, but she looked real nice in bed—an man, she throwed a mean screw. She said she would not charge me nothin—cause I was bettern a truck-driver. An thats what she said, man—an that is the truth. She said, Them others, they are work; you are dayoff.” He said this not with the vanity, the bragging of the male exhibiting his masculinity, but with the pride of a child who has gotten an A in school and can prove it with his report card. “So, when I come outta that house, Ma’s waitin on me. She says: ‘Okay?’ I said: ‘Fine, Ma, fine.’...” He looks down at the Tattoo. “Oh, yeah, The Tattoo,” he remembers. “So we go get more juice. ‘Im gonna teach you right,’ she keeps tellin me. We’re wobblin aroun the town like a couple of drunk buddies—but Ma, like I say, she knowed everyone, an everyone figures we’re jes cuttin up some.” He chuckled. “Ma fall in a ditch, starts cussin up a mammy-screwin storm!—” and now he throws back his head laughing “—an she says shes gonna sue the city, she sprained her ankle or somethin—says shes gotta rest till the pain goes.... But I knowed she is jes high, that is all.” The score in front of us moves away, toward a youngman in an army shirt who has just strayed into the park. The youngman, recognizing the man as a score, let his hand dangle suggestively between his legs to attract the score more quickly.

• From Educated (2018)

  looked something between homeless and on vacation. The sun warmed the water; Luke began to shift uncomfortably. I returned to the chest freezer but there was no more ice, just a dozen bags of frozen vegetables, so I dumped them in. The result was a muddy soup with bits of peas and carrots. Dad wandered home sometime after this, I couldn’t say how long, a gaunt, defeated look on his face. Quiet now, Luke was resting, or as near to resting as he could be standing up. Dad wheeled the bin into the shade because, despite the hat, Luke’s hands and arms had turned red with sunburn. Dad said the best thing to do was leave the leg where it was until Mother came home. Mother’s car appeared on the highway around six. I met her halfway up the hill and told her what had happened. She rushed to Luke and said she needed to see the leg, so he lifted it out, dripping. The plastic bag clung to the wound. Mother didn’t want to tear the fragile tissue, so she cut the bag away slowly, carefully, until the leg was visible. There was very little blood and even fewer blisters, as both require skin and Luke didn’t have much. Mother’s face turned a grayish yellow, but she was calm. She closed her eyes and crossed her fingers, then asked aloud whether the wound was infected. Click click click. “You were lucky this time, Tara,” she said. “But what were you thinking, putting a burn into a garbage can?” Dad carried Luke inside and Mother fetched her scalpel. It took her and Dad most of the evening to cut away the dead flesh. Luke tried not to scream, but when they pried up and stretched bits of his skin, trying to see where the dead flesh ended and the living began, he exhaled in great gusts and tears slid from his eyes. Mother dressed the leg in mullein and comfrey salve, her own recipe. She was good with burns—they were a specialty of hers—but I could tell she was worried. She said she’d never seen one as bad as Luke’s. She didn’t know what would happen. — MOTHER AND I STAYED by Luke’s bed that first night. He barely slept, he was so delirious with fever and pain. For the fever we put ice on his face and