On an Overgraown Path
Peter Newall
After Leoš Janáček
It was fully thirty years since he last walked this path. Thirty years in which he had lived in several countries, worked in various occupations, made many friends, had even been married for a time. But those thirty years, and everything contained in them, seemed to recede into a small closed cabinet of time, put away in a drawer somewhere, now that he was walking along this narrow country path once more.
He had once known this track almost as well as his own face. Twenty minutes it took, walking briskly, from one end to the other. He had walked it late at night, with only moonlight or even starlight to guide him, too many times to count. Then, he had walked confidently, not needing to see his way, knowing it by the feel of the trodden-down earth hard beneath his feet. But now he found himself uncertain. The path had become overgrown, with grass and vines dragging at his legs, and the trees flanking it seemed much taller and denser. He remembered a wide span of stars showing between the black lace of their branches, but now just a narrow ribbon of night sky, in which a few stars flickered, wound above him.
The path led through the forest which stood between his lodge and his neighbour’s house. The memory of what happened there had revived itself as soon as he entered his old home, and now hovered around him, summoned up by every aspect of the place. During the years of absence, that memory had compacted, reduced itself to a simple story. An affair he absolutely should not have had, the loss of a valued friendship, and pain for everyone involved, foolish, regrettable, and entirely his fault, the product of his selfishness.
But now, walking again along the path, scenting the night forest, hearing the occasional scrabbling of small animals in the undergrowth, he remembered more and more of what happened then, more and more layers of it. In truth, it had been far more complex, far more ambiguous, than that parcelled summary. It was not just a casual affair. There had been love, or at least real, unfeigned passion, between them, and that passion was its own justification. It had been wrong, in the structure of things as they were, but he could also say it was right, even necessary. In fact, it would have been wrong to suppress this love, which they both so desperately needed. And his neighbour, his friend, he saw it, he knew, he turned his face away, it seemed it suited Pavel to have his young wife both distracted and happy.
He emerged from the forest onto the edge of the open meadow. Now he could see the waning moon in the eastern sky, a tired white crescent low above the black horizon. It was cold, even through his overcoat and gloves. The scent of green water came from the lake a hundred metres away, but no sound of frogs, which he always associated with that once-familiar water smell. In summer, under the bright white moonlight of the deep countryside, the frogs had croaked endlessly through the night, calling and responding around the lake’s edge in a syncopated cycle.
Now, though, at the blunt end of winter, they were silent, hibernating, he supposed. Imagining frogs asleep, their rough, clammy skin buried in tunnels dug into the clayey mud, made him feel even colder. He shivered. His breath clouded in the ray of his torch. The spear of light illuminated the ground before him, but it also attracted moths, big whitish pulpy moths. One barged into his face, next to his mouth. Disgusted, he switched off the torch, but the blackness around him was too dense to continue. He turned it on again, holding it lower to the ground.
Julia was a startlingly beautiful woman to find living in this remote place. He had wondered at first whether their isolation here had made him think her more beautiful than she was, but decided it was not so. Tall and slender, with well-shaped hands and a high forehead, she wore her dark brown hair twisted in a long thick plait. She was well read, spoke knowledgeably about art, and played the piano perhaps not perfectly, but with vigour and emotion. He could not understand how she was content to live out there, away from what was surely her natural environment, the theatres and galleries and salons of the city.
For all the fondness he had for Pavel, who had been a wise counsellor to him in his student days, he’d been surprised such a woman had married him. Pavel was, for all his intelligence, essentially negative; he was critical of everything and everybody, and his conversation dealt largely in sarcasm and ridicule. And at his age, he was set in his pattern of life. Still, he welcomed his friend’s good fortune. After all, a woman might know a man better, or differently, than his friends knew him.
Julia’s life there seemed uneventful, so far as he observed it. She ran the kitchen, tended the garden, read extensively, and played the slightly erratic Bechstein in the music room at the east end of Pavel’s low-ceilinged, uneven old house.
That house! He’d known it so well. He’d had the freedom of the place, he’d sat in every chair, wandered through the rooms examining the slightly clumsy paintings on the walls. He’d searched through the dusty wine cellar, idly taken down books from the library shelves, stood looking out at falling rain through the warped glass panes of the enclosed verandah.
They had hovered around each other for months, he and Julia, recognising the attraction, but saying nothing, not even allowing themselves to look directly into the other’s eyes. He had at first worried that Pavel would sense this energy. In the end he decided Pavel was aware of it, because he could not have failed to be, but had chosen to ignore it, or stand aloof from it. Perhaps he was entirely confident in his wife, or perhaps he didn’t care.
The day she had asked him to turn the pages of the sheet music while she played; that was when he knew she had decided. She cared about music more than anything else, and this was an invitation to enter her world. So he stood at her shoulder – was there perfume? He couldn’t remember now. But there was her thick brown plait and the ivory skin at her neck and her long-fingered hands playing the piece – Chopin, or perhaps Liszt. He could not remember that either, now.
But there had definitely been a crystal ashtray on the piano top. A vase of irises on a low table. Sunlight hesitantly entering through a net-curtained window. And he’d felt rather foolish, turning these pages, which he knew she turned by herself every other time she played the piece. But the knowledge that after this, something more would certainly happen, hovered in front of him. His heart had beaten fast.
When she rose from the piano, in her white lacy blouse and long skirt, he’d taken her cool hand in his, presenting the gesture as a tribute to the music, how well she’d played. She had not resisted; instead, keeping hold of his hand, led him through a green baize covered door and along a corridor, endless it seemed to him in his excitement and wonder, until they reached a room, her room, he realised as he entered it, with a four-poster bed decked in white muslin, and carved wooden furniture standing around the walls. There, almost as a rite, they consummated their affair. It was almost too dignified, their lovemaking; his wordless endearments, her small cries.
It was deceitful, of course, but this was not just some stupid adultery arising out of boredom; they were meant to be together. ‘I needed you so much, I waited so long for you,’ she said once. He had accepted this without question, almost as his due, at the time, and was certain he returned her fervour equally.
‘You know I can’t have you here again,’ Pavel had said, standing at the front door. Not ‘I never want to see you again,’ or the much harsher words he might easily have used. He’d shrugged, nodded, and turned to walk back, back along the path. They were Pavel’s last words to him. He didn’t see Julia at all. What exactly had been discovered, what said, what admitted, he never knew. He accepted Pavel’s verdict. It was his home, his wife, after all.
Then, three years later, Pavel’s death. Julia sent him notice of the funeral, but he was in the Kimberley, out on the diamond fields, and he received her letter well after the appointed day. And that was her last communication with him, a short impersonal note announcing her husband’s death. Should he have written back saying, ‘at last we can be together’? Did she want that? He certainly did want it, but it was so very difficult, so far away. He could not bring her here, to the diamond camp. Everything in his life would have to change. He decided to wait a year, out of decency for her widowhood, he told himself, then write to her and ask. But that letter was never written.
Within that year he had become manager of the whole diamond works. He couldn’t leave, and just possibly, his feelings had cooled, or perhaps he was simply unable to imagine how they might manage their lives together. The idea of going back to the old country, living there in that repressed, bourgeois atmosphere, repelled him now. He had become used to the freedom of South Africa. He had simply let the whole matter recede into the past with every day; there were twinges of pain when he thought of Julia, and shame when he knew he ought to have done something more, but they also receded. And after a time, he concluded that surely she would have made another life for herself, without him.
But now, walking and thinking, remembering, he began to recast the whole thing.
He’d never thought deeply about why Julia had married Pavel. He knew nothing of her circumstances before the marriage; had she been fleeing from something? Perhaps she had been forced to bury herself in the country, be married, against all her wishes; she had been seeking release, and he had simply happened to come along to disturb this sterile rural solitude. Perhaps they were not destined lovers, justified by passion, after all. Perhaps she’d just needed an interlude, a distraction. It was no great love, but a run of the mill affair, conducted out of boredom on her part, and greed on his. No, he couldn’t accept that. His memory couldn’t be wrong about the strength of their desire, their delight in each other.
He reached the gate. He hesitated, then opened it. The mown lawn within was dewy, wetting his boots. The old apricot orchard was gone, replaced by a children’s playground, with swings and a see-saw. Who lived there now? Strangers? Her children, hers with Pavel, or with another man, with in turn their own children? Or, he thought with a lurch in his stomach, is she still there, a grandmother, living out her time in a room at the back of the house?
The sky above the roof was purple. A barn-owl hooted once, then again. The dogs at the house began to bark. He stood for a minute; the dogs continued to bark. He turned back.
He found the return path easier than the way out. Soon enough he was at the door of his lodge. He had aired out a couple of rooms when he’d arrived yesterday, that was all, he hadn’t brought the place back to life. Tomorrow, or the day after, he’d lock it up and leave again. It was unlikely, he thought, that he would ever return.
