waves breaking upon shingle, but also rather isolated, leaving Phoebe with only our housekeeper – a kindly woman, but no conversationalist – for company during the day. Within weeks of our arrival, we knew that she was with child, a joy tempered by her increasing homesickness, which she tried in vain to conceal. Arthur came to stay; a relief on the one hand, but his visit also cast a shadow, for he plainly thought me cruel in keeping Phoebe from her family. And so we decided that she should spend the last months of her confinement at Orchard House,little imagining that they would be the last months of her life. I let the cottage go and returned to my father’s house, fully resolved to leave the firm and seek a situation in Aylesbury as soon as the child was born. But my father was so pleased to have me at home again that I could not bring myself to tell him, and there matters stood until late one winter’s evening I had a wire from Orchard House urging me to come at once. Phoebe’s confinement had begun prematurely, and continued all that night, while she grew weaker and weaker until a surgeon was sent for. She died, and our son with her, an hour before I arrived.
Useless to dwell on that extremity of grief, or upon its terrible sequel, which is quickly told. I remained at Orchard House a week after her funeral, until the unspoken thought in all our minds – if only I had never crossed their threshold – became too painful to endure. Five months later, in August of the same year, Arthur went climbing in the Welsh mountains and was killed in a fall.
Returning to Aylesbury for the burial was the hardest thing I had ever done. Useless to say to his parents – so ravaged by suffering they were scarcely recognisable – that I would sooner have cut off my right hand, sooner have died; it would not bring Arthur or Phoebe back, or answer the questions that hung like daggers above our heads. Why had Arthur, in the depths of mourning, left his parents alone to go climbing on a whim? His companions swore that he had slipped while prospecting a rock-face, but I saw in them the shadow of my own suspicion: that whether or not Arthur had deliberately chosen to end his life, he had embarked on that fatal ascent without caring whether he lived or died.
In the long darkness that followed, the thought of ending my own life was constantly at my elbow. I could not shave without being gripped by the impulse to draw the blade across my throat. Guns beckoned from gun racks, poisons from shelves, and always there was the sound of the sea, and the image of myself swimming out into the icy deep until my strength failed and I sank beneath the waves. But the thought of what it would do to my father – haunted as I was by the memory of the Wilmots’ravaged faces – always restrained me; that, and as Hamlet says, the dread of something after death: the lines were often in my mind. Gradually I became aware of how heavily the spectacle of my grief was weighing upon my father, and so to emerge from black night into a grey twilight of the spirit. I resumed my place in the office, and began, almost unwillingly, to take notice of the world around me, and then to draw again, mere pencil sketches at first, until I found myself roaming further afield in search of new subjects. But my life, or so I imagined, was effectively over, and another four years would pass before anything happened to disturb this melancholy conviction.
Perhaps it is only the indelible impression left by the story of Peter Grimes in
The Borough
, but I have noticed that many visitors find something oppressive, even sinister, about the country to the south of Aldeburgh, to which I was drawn, I think, for that very reason. The keep at Orford, especially when framed against a louring sky, was one of my favourite subjects, and from Orford it was only another three miles across a lonely stretch of marshland to the edge of Monks Wood. You can walk that way many times without
Useless to dwell on that extremity of grief, or upon its terrible sequel, which is quickly told. I remained at Orchard House a week after her funeral, until the unspoken thought in all our minds – if only I had never crossed their threshold – became too painful to endure. Five months later, in August of the same year, Arthur went climbing in the Welsh mountains and was killed in a fall.
Returning to Aylesbury for the burial was the hardest thing I had ever done. Useless to say to his parents – so ravaged by suffering they were scarcely recognisable – that I would sooner have cut off my right hand, sooner have died; it would not bring Arthur or Phoebe back, or answer the questions that hung like daggers above our heads. Why had Arthur, in the depths of mourning, left his parents alone to go climbing on a whim? His companions swore that he had slipped while prospecting a rock-face, but I saw in them the shadow of my own suspicion: that whether or not Arthur had deliberately chosen to end his life, he had embarked on that fatal ascent without caring whether he lived or died.
In the long darkness that followed, the thought of ending my own life was constantly at my elbow. I could not shave without being gripped by the impulse to draw the blade across my throat. Guns beckoned from gun racks, poisons from shelves, and always there was the sound of the sea, and the image of myself swimming out into the icy deep until my strength failed and I sank beneath the waves. But the thought of what it would do to my father – haunted as I was by the memory of the Wilmots’ravaged faces – always restrained me; that, and as Hamlet says, the dread of something after death: the lines were often in my mind. Gradually I became aware of how heavily the spectacle of my grief was weighing upon my father, and so to emerge from black night into a grey twilight of the spirit. I resumed my place in the office, and began, almost unwillingly, to take notice of the world around me, and then to draw again, mere pencil sketches at first, until I found myself roaming further afield in search of new subjects. But my life, or so I imagined, was effectively over, and another four years would pass before anything happened to disturb this melancholy conviction.
Perhaps it is only the indelible impression left by the story of Peter Grimes in
The Borough
, but I have noticed that many visitors find something oppressive, even sinister, about the country to the south of Aldeburgh, to which I was drawn, I think, for that very reason. The keep at Orford, especially when framed against a louring sky, was one of my favourite subjects, and from Orford it was only another three miles across a lonely stretch of marshland to the edge of Monks Wood. You can walk that way many times without
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