Help

Music:

Max Richter: Vivaldi's Four Seasons Recomposed, Winter; 3

Charles Villiers Stanford; Organ Prelude in F major

Vivaldi: Four Seasons, L'Inverno   Mv. II: Largo

Content Warning:

Mental Illness Theme

Transcript

Help

It was the third Sunday in November, the month of the dead. Advent was approaching and the altar would soon be robed in the  purple of preparation, the priests and deacons apparelled in the same. There was a darkness about the world, a gloom, especially at that hour of the morning. It could not have been later than 8.15 AM when Julia Hazlitt drove by the station and picked up John Driscoll, the church’s organ scholar.

            She was always very punctual and for that he was glad. John stood outside the train station in the bitter morning, by a towering, naked tree, just having arrived into Exmouth on the first train from Newton Abbot. The dark skies were unpeaceful, pregnant as though with bad temper. Winds wailed, swirling in cautionary jets across the grim, grey waters and the moody moors where no avocet could be seen standing. John heard lapwings and godwits, wigeons, crakes, and the occasional bellowing brent goose, all cry out their various cries, in protest and despair, against the impending adversity. The town itself, let alone the slouching people within it, looked hungover, weary, and ailed. In the considerable wind, detritus blew across the bleak and sparsely populated square. John watched, variously, pages of newspapers, aluminium cans, polystyrene cups, plastic shopping bags, big brown envelopes, and many capacious sheets of raucously flapping fish and chip paper, dejectedly cross the roads and the pavements. 

Julia’s beige mini materialised around the bend and she pulled into the station layby with a slight chirp of the horn. She opened the front passenger door, leaning farcically to the left, still bound to the driver’s seat by her seatbelt. A double violin concerto, which John knew was by Vivaldi though he couldn’t remember the number or key, rolled in jarring, jocund measures from the radio. He got in, greeting Julia politely as he put on his seatbelt, and off they drove towards the church, for the second of John’s two monthly services. He noticed, as usual, that the back of Julia’s car was full of bags, bulging binbags filled to capacity. He wondered what was in them. It clearly wasn’t refuse, though there was, he couldn’t help registering, a slight stink, a staleness in the car. It made him slightly uncomfortable. But he didn’t wish to point it out. He found no way of asking for a window to be opened, or of opening one himself.  

            St. Michael’s, where John was the sole organist at mass on the first and third Sundays of the month, was several miles from the train station, and over two miles from the nearest bus stop. John liked Julia but he slightly resented the fact that the church was so difficult to get to, that he depended upon lifts to and from the church. He kept telling himself that one day he’d tackle the distance between the church and the station on foot, one day when the weather was warmer. 

Julia was a stout, short-haired woman, never without her set of thin-framed bifocal spectacles on a beaded chain. Her body was hedgehog-like; her face was owlish, quizzical, lined with laughter, sadness, tacit wisdom. She often wore shirts and blouses of alarming shade or loud design, but her cardigans were normally calmer in colour, lavenders, sage greens. She had, also, quite a substantial bust, and a skin that was beginning to wrinkle. Her age was a little difficult to determine from looking at her. John often thought that she might be anything from fifty-seven to seventy-one. She spoke very quickly and softly, rather bashfully, as though keeping the syllables to herself, reluctant to share or part with them. Though her eyes were not so good, and she often squinted or seemed to be looking elsewhere while talking to you in a way that made her seem rather absent, she was in fact scrupulously attentive, and had incredibly incisive hearing. Her ears missed nothing. She was also a very able driver. John wondered if she’d driven professionally. He should have just asked her really. But John wasn’t very good at asking questions, nor at holding conversations. Julia seemed to respect that though, she seemed unbothered by his silence. 

            As they drove through the town to the outskirts where the church was located, cresting its hilly graveyard, John noticed that Julia’s manner seemed a little different to normal. Though nothing she said caused him any alarm, he felt himself mysteriously disquieted by her demeanour. She seemed a little panicked, or preoccupied. He should have just asked her if she was alright, but the question, the words of enquiring concern were halted in his throat by that typical social constipation of his. He’d been diagnosed with autism in September of that year. He suspected that Julia also might be on the spectrum. Maybe that explained their mutual ease with one another’s silence, their mostly wordless rapport, despite all their obvious differences: sex, generation, region of origin, class. From his satchel, John took out the Widor Passacaglia he intended to use for an exit voulantry and fingered the first system on the glove compartment. With his eyes, he followed the repeating four bar phrase around the texture, from the pedal line to the manuals and back again. 

            He was roused from his contemplations when the car stopped abruptly. The double-yellow lines that ran most of the length of, what he noticed was called, Garibaldi Terrace stopped after a few houses and in the first space available, Julia parked her car. She seemed intensely pensive, she seemed to ponder, very deliberately, what she did next. For that protracted and significant moment, she gave off the energy of an alcoholic on the edge of relapse, agonising over whether to take that perilous sip, or make that fateful purchase from the off-license. John didn’t say anything, though he wanted to howl the question that was brimming inside him: Why aren’t we moving? He looked at his watch, a little demonstratively; then fiddled with the strap, pretending to adjust it so as not to seem pushy, rude.

            Julia said she would be right back. She undid her seat belt and got out of the car with amazing speed. She ran up the street, and then ran back. The boot opened and there was a miniature commotion as she bundled something, in fact a number of things, into the over-filled space. She grunted with effort, even whined in consternation, and quietly cursed once or twice. She squashed and squeezed and finally got the boot to close. She re-entered the car, dropping into the driver’s seat in ecstasy and relief, panting hard, practically hyperventilating. She said she was sorry for the brief delay and re-started the engine. They drove on.

            Six or seven minutes after that, John reacted with stiff discomfort and offence to the news that Julia needed to stop by her house briefly. She was adamant that it was necessary and that it wouldn’t take long. “Flying visit” was the phrase she used. The phrase annoyed John, its imagery, its ambiguity. He was upset and disorientated by this change to routine. But he could not find a way of asserting himself, of reasonably and forcefully protesting Julia’s unpopular “flying visit”. It was more or less on the way to the church, anyhow, it wasn’t much of a detour. They arrived. John read the signpost: Nicaea Drive. 

Julia parked the car at the top of a cul-de-sac and hectically exited the vehicle. She moved with an ashamed urgency. From the boot of the car, she took something, presumably what she had just put in, John thought. He watched, with irritated curiosity, as she hurried towards House No. 3, a cardboard box in her arms. The box was open, the two lids flapped about as she ran. 

Number Three was a detached, nondescript, and yet somehow morose property. It had a baleful quality about it, something ominous too. All the curtains were drawn. John eyed every moment of the procedure through the windshield. He noticed that the windshield was dirtier than he had first thought. He saw Julia set down the box- she did everything at tremendous, mortified speed. Then she opened the green front door, picked up the box, and elbowed the door open with some difficulty. There was some kind of resistance, as though she were battling a door-sash or a blocking cluster of shoes. Her sullen struggle seemingly concluded, she disappeared into the building. The door appeared to shut behind her, as if it were automatic, sealing her within. She seemed to have pushed the door to, but apparently it was on the latch, and hadn’t locked. It began to creak slowly ajar again. John continued to watch with flustered interest.

He expected her to reappear promptly and return to the car. But she didn’t. The time ticked on. He liked a good hour in which to ready himself before 9.30 mass. It was 8.36. There were always a number of fiddly jobs to do. The church wasn’t far but time was of the essence. And every further second that it was squandered, needlessly, quite needlessly he thought, so was produced a further pang of that forlorn fury and anxiety within him. 

At last it was too much, and he got out of the car, hurried down the slope of the cul-de-sac to Number 3, and rapped indecorously on the front door. He waited for a response from Julia, some kind of reassurance, a shout or a sign. When there was nothing, he entered the house, calling out Julia’s name as he pushed on the wood of the door. 

            Beyond the angle at which it was currently ajar, the door could not open without resistance. John felt the resistance, and he smelt a strange smell, and he immediately clocked that something was off, that there was something strange and surprising on the other side of the door. He called out Julia’s name again, louder. When there was still no reply, he shoved the door as hard as he could. It succumbed to his irritation, reluctantly, and he went inside. 

In the hallway, the walls hung with too many pictures and photographs, there were boxes and boxes and boxes of VHS tapes, stacks of dusty magazines, their gloss long gone. None of the lights were on and the darkness inside the house was suffocating and gloomy. There was, also, dampness, a smell of mould, and a sharpness about the must pervading the air that wasn’t normal. John didn’t understand what he was confronting. And then, suddenly, he did, when he passed the downstairs bathroom. The door to the bathroom was open and unclosable. The room was seemingly unusable. Within it massed further towers of magazines, carefully stacked, unreadable, as well as mountains of unused, or unusable towels, pyramids of charity shop clothes, clothes that had never been worn by their current owner but which reeked, not of the human body but of this house, jerkins, cardigans, sweaters, pullovers, blouses, shirts, every sleeve length, every trouser length, every kind of skirt, dress, women’s clothes of every lewdness, male clothes of every formality, cascading ties and bow ties, and collared shirts, and jackets, and denim denim everywhere. And the towels: blue towels, red towels, bright towels, dull towels, towels of every green, every polka dot pattern imaginable, towels with moon and sickle, swastika towels, marijuana themed towels, beach towels, towels that said I heart Barcelona, I heart Philadelphia, I heart rimming, I heart big cocks, I heart my friends, towels of every purple and every pink, turquoise in disproportionate quantity.   

Everywhere else there was detritus, junk, hoarded items, articles, appliances, objects, wretched and fragile towers of newspapers, letters, magazines, columns to the ceiling of ordnance survey maps, plethoras of unopenable stamp collections and photograph albums, a hundred phone books, nearly two hundred London A-Zs, over a thousand take away leaflets, three hundred recipe books. Whole rooms with too much erotic literature to look at, dirty calendars and pornographic photobooks. Rooms with every inch of wall plastered in letters- John tried to read them as he ventured deeper, more agog with each step he took, deeper, into the copious forest of this woman’s hoard. Out of the letters on the wall, he discerned irrelevant passages, random and shorn of context. He couldn’t piece together any kind of story at first. Had she been married? Perhaps. Somehow, without knowing how, he shakily intuited the notion of a child, a child to whom Julia had given birth, who had then been taken away…?

There was a second storey which John didn’t see. He never went upstairs. There was a cellar: the wooden, damaged steps, cluttered with tile and curtain samples, led down to a bolted door. John could only envisage what was inside. He believed that elsewhere the mess might be more sordid, that, in the places he didn’t look, this woman’s anality might extend to whiskey bottles of stagnating urine, or bags for life full to the brim with used tissues. He imagined the worst in order to arm himself against it, should he discover it. But downstairs, among this interesting, miscellaneous, dizzyingly encyclopaedic hoard, there was decay and foulness, putrid elements hidden from view by the collection’s sheer accumulation, but which announced their presence through alarming odours, and disturbing sounds. There were rats. John could hear them scuttling. And there were dead rats: John could smell them rotting. He passed a spare room containing six washing machines, the defunct units stacked with ragged rugs and quilts. The film of dust on everything was thick and stubborn and purple.    

Strange, creatively rendered chains hung from the living room ceiling: wire necklaces of milk carton tops, beer bottle tops on string, twine-lines of long expired pasta shapes: penne, farfalle, rigatoni- each one old, brittle, diseased, discoloured. The living room was almost impenetrable. But through the stacked boxes, through the mountainous mess, there was a path and John followed it, in curiosity, grateful that he didn’t have to forge his own. There were children’s toys in ridiculous profusion, holocaustial piles: teddy bears, dolls, rag dolls, hand puppets, string puppets, rod puppets, mechanical toys, wind-up toys, buckaroo horses, lego cubes, cludo bricks, jenga blocks, animal heads on sticks, wooden snakes, tin soldiers, acrylic fishes. The content of thirty households lay deposited in what was barely recognisable as a living room. 

In another part of the room, thousands of records, 33 RPM LPs, 45 RPM EPs; despite their groupings, the separation of toys from records, records from items of clothing, the illogic in these collections, the absence of any unifying principle was always poignantly evident. The records had no value, they pointed to no musical zeal at all. She had ransacked the bargain basements of charity shops. John knew that everything earned its place through its being an object, everything that was there was there in tribute to the stuffness of stuff. Abbey Road or Pet Sounds or George Solti’s Ring in mint condition were of no more value to her than any other record. John saw obscure world music records, Andy Williams albums, a compilation of Elvis impression covers, a Royal Hospital School Year 11 End of Year Concert 1987, a Clare College organ recital.     

In another part of the room there was a farcical pillar of hats: woolly hats, Panama hats, trilbies, flat caps, deer stalkers, picture hats, fascinators, even skullcaps, yarmulkes, zucchettos, and barettas. On the window-ledges, and the mantle piece, were scores of candles, everything from valueless tealights to gift-value items, wax candles with sequins and gubbins, artisan candles in cylindrical grates. Amongst the forest of candles were occasional ceramic curiosities: a lighthouse, a flamingo, a windmill, a Turkish coffee pot. Delft tiles.

            There was a sofa, in the living room, every inch of which was occupied. On the sofa were various table lamps which hadn’t been unboxed, a few toasters and kettles- the boxes they came in opened but the units themselves still inside. What space remained was taken up by Naxos catalogues. Where volumes were piled, in most cases homogeneity could only be assumed, but in this case, John could see the spines: he could see that it was a tower of nothing but Naxos CD catalogues. The traces of especially scrupulous organisation, the islands of very specific categorisation within the general pandemonium of the hoard, intrigued John. He had somehow managed to temporarily forget his organ duties, the task ahead, the reason that he was here in this house in the first place. He didn’t fear Julia, it didn’t even occur to him to fear her, to fear how she might react to discovering him in her house, uninvited, prowling about its material chaos in curiosity.

Behind the sofa, something was writhing. Something was producing a continuous pattering, a racket of spasmodic slaps. John approached and looked into the gloom. It looked like a plucked turkey, a bald, pitiful, headless thing, its sentience a kind of miracle, throwing itself against the closest surfaces. In fact, it didn’t look sentient. It looked animate, but insentient, as though electric current were animating it, reanimating it, as though it were a dancing squid. It went splat against the base of the sofa, thump against the bottom of the ludicrously stuffed bookcase, and plop on the filthy carpet. John withdrew in revulsion. Whatever that thing was, he couldn’t stomach it, he couldn’t face its reality. He didn’t want to think about it. Then he heard footsteps on the ceiling. He heard the waltzing thud of dancing feet. He heard vocalisations, female sounds of laughter, or perhaps despair. He couldn’t believe that it was Julia up there. It was.  

            Penetrating this private and busy world, these engrossing and pathological halls, the main thing John felt was a kind of awe, the kind of wide-eyed-ness that comes of discovering something extraordinary. The sheer scale of the accumulation dwarfed him and impressed him. He even felt, and more keenly the deeper he ventured into the unhinged copiousness, that he understood something of the compulsion, the addiction. There was majesty and grandeur in the sheer megatonnage of stuff, value in the valueless when it amassed in such authoritative quantities as these. Didn’t galleries sometimes convey what this household’s trove was perhaps attempting to convey? John thought, curtly, of Tracey Emin’s famous bed.

            What John felt was a glimmer, a disturbing, beautiful glimmer that profoundly connected him with the woman who drove him to St. Michael’s church from Exmouth station every first and third Sunday of the month. He felt, walking through her captivating hoards, that he understood the satisfaction that she must surely have felt in the beginning, the safety, the contentment. He felt full of the fervour at the root of her addiction, which she probably hadn’t felt in decades but was condemned to chase, all the time, for all time. He found part of himself participating in the spell of her hoardings, succumbing to the spell more enthusiastically than a different part of himself thought wise.

            It also puzzled him. The sheer miscellany. One found oneself in specialisation, in elimination, in specification. The everything-ness, the diseased eclecticism and hysterical volume of what was in her house was something offensive and alien to him. At last, it was too much. Feeling like he was losing the ability to breathe, he stepped outside, and he almost cried when he smelt the outdoors, the clean, unburdened air. He felt the return of objectivity, as though he had been delivered from some insane abyss. He looked at his watch. Barely four minutes had passed since he had stepped inside Julia’s house, since he had pushed aside those boxes of video tapes. He stood, in the bleak, and ordered, and disarmingly clean, disarmingly uncluttered world, gazing at the front door to this terrible house, its brass number 3, its green paint. 

            Julia abruptly appeared. She noticed John standing outside and was immediately, hectically contrite. She exited her house hastily and apologetically, and shut the door sharply behind her. 

            They drove to the church, which was only five minutes away from the house. John and Julia were both very silent, and tacitly thankful, one to the other, for the lack of intrusion. There was parking space right by the church, on the other side of the street, in front of a cluster of dormant-looking houses. 

The mass didn’t go as John had hoped. His playing was insipid and inconsistent. As the final chord of the exit voulantry died away, and a wayward applause rippled around the church, he felt dejected and angry. The sense of confoundment and spectacle he had felt before the vast accumulation of clutter in Julia’s house was all but gone; the awful curiosity was replaced with a feeling of annoyance and self-chastisement, self-disappointment that he had allowed himself to be sucked in and awed by her mess. But, of course, it wasn’t his fault. It was hers, Julia’s, he repeated to himself, aloud even. He was ready to hate her; ready to confess to her how furious he was with her for delaying him, that she had ruined everything. 

He found Julia, among the milling crowds of congregants, those who decided to stay for refreshments rather than leave immediately by the front portal where the clergy were stationed with tranquil, friendly faces. As soon as John met the odd, familiar face, the anger and resentment he felt was complicated. His sullen feelings weren’t eradicated; but they were complicated, to an extent that took him by surprise. He felt burdened, facing her. He knew something about her, something that was secret. She didn’t know that he knew her secret. Her secret was a very large thing to know, it was a very serious thing. Observing the people around him, the faces and souls and bodies, some of them very well turned-out and respectable, others more complicated, he wondered what else might lie secret among this congregation, how cluttered and chaotic the lives the people kept from each other, that people in general, often, keep from each other. Julia acknowledged John. She held up a cup of tea, and made a gesture to the effect that she would be with him as soon as she could.

And John realised that he had to inform someone about Julia. It was a betrayal of her, of the secret life he had learned about only incidentally. But he knew from Christianity that betrayal could form part of the architecture of salvation, that remedy might come of betrayal. He had seen in through the rarest window, and gained some precious insight. To hoard it was criminal. He knew himself, if he didn’t tell someone about it right away, one of the clergy perhaps, someone with some kind of pastoral responsibility, or someone who could pass on the information to a person with pastoral responsibilities, he feared he might never disclose it. The chance to act would pass him by and he would let it. Someone else would have to stumble upon the hoards, the cluttered contents of that house. Indeed, it amazed him that he had been the first to do so. Or so it seemed. Her house would fill and fill, and more things would die amongst the mess, and the stench would only increase. He could not believe that she felt any pride, any satisfaction about her hoard. The volumes, the towers, the sheer level of accumulation, had a wretchedness about it. A wretchedness.

            Before long, Julia had finished her tea, and she and John were walking past the clergy, leaving behind the stone portal and the stoop, and advancing into the grey and chill of November. Clutching his satchel, John climbed into the car. The car was redolent with its miniature, acrid hoard, with whatever was in those bags in the back and in the boot. Tat, bits and bobs, odds and ends from charity shops probably. Clutter, clutter standing by. They began driving off.

            “Sorry for the delays this morning, John,” she said in her rhotic South-western voice. “Won’t happen again.”

            John wanted to tell her that she had ruined everything. He couldn’t, of course.

            “Not a problem” he grunted.

            “Someone was giving away a box of Discworld books. They were just there, on the doorstep, marked “Free” in felt-tip. I felt I had to grab ‘em before someone else beat me to ‘em. Sorry it took me so long to put ‘em away. Also, I did have to…erm…pay a visit. I been feeling a bit off colour of late.”

            John didn’t immediately understand what she meant by “pay a visit”. West-country people’s use of idiom was, in general, touched with a little more archaism than their South-eastern counterparts. 

            “Stop, Julia,” John cried out, abruptly. “Stop the car.”

            “Everything alright?” 

            It took him a moment to reply.

            “I’m really sorry,” he began. “But I’ve left something on the organ. I need to go back and get it.” 

            Julia reparked the car. John, apparently, did what he said he needed to. Julia watched as the grey mouth of the church swallowed him up again. She was thinking, hungrily, about charity shops. She was trying to remember which of the four or five charity shops in the town were open on Sundays.

“Father,” John said, as soon as he was inside the sacristy. He closed the old oak door behind him. It closed with a clunk.   

The priest in charge was standing underneath a picture of the pope. He was neatly folding up his chasuble. The thurible of incense swung from its holder and the air was suffused with the burnt aroma of its final embers. The priest turned around, in a sharp, startled motion. He didn’t say anything, just waited for John to begin. He offered a kindly, expectant face. 

“Father, I need to tell you something, something in confidence. It’s about Julia. How…” John looked around, to check that no-one was there, that no-one was listening. “How much do you know about her?”

The priest wasn’t sure whom John was referring to at first. Julia? Julia Hazlitt. Ah! He said that he knew very little.

“I think… I think she needs help…” John felt awkward and uncomfortable, he wasn’t used to playing this role, to speaking up on people’s behalf. The words came out of him distressfully, and his own voice became that of a stranger. The priest listened with saddened interest. “She’s a hoarder,” John said. “She’s got a hoarding problem. I think she’s quite seriously unwell.”

The words of the revelation left his lips with an unbearable feeling, a feeling of worried significance. It was betrayal: he had no doubt about it, what it felt like. It felt like betrayal and he hated the feeling. He wanted to help, he believed that by breathing aloud her secret she would be helped. At least, he hoped she would. He imagined that it was a thing of shame for her; he imagined that Julia felt considerable shame about her hoard. He felt that to divulge it to the priest was a kind of necessary violation. The priest heard what John had to say, registering it with his full attention. He allowed it to sink in, not reacting for a while. At last, he said:

            “How did you find this out, John?”

            John answered:

            “Well, you know that she drives me from Exmouth station to the church on all the Sundays I play here? And, basically, she stopped off by her house this morning…I can’t remember the address. Something drive. Anyway, she went into her house with a box that she picked up on the way from the station. The time was ticking and she was taking ages and ages. I got…” He was about to say Frustrated. “Concerned. I got very concerned…you know, the time was ticking.” The priest nodded, only a little. John sought, but did not receive, more confirmation, further confirmation in the face of the listening priest that he was doing the right thing by telling him about all this. John pressed on: “And…erm…when I went inside the house, I could see that…there was clutter everywhere. It was obvious. She’s a hoarder, she has a hoarding problem. Hoarding’s not just an eccentricity, it’s an illness, it’s a compulsion.”

            The priest said: “Are you sure about this? You’re sure she wasn’t just reorganising or…I don’t know…moving out…or, perhaps, moving in… I mean…are you…are you sure, John?”

            John felt the importance of his being sure, it was of such paramount importance that his concerns were justified that, for a moment, he almost wasn’t.

            “I’m sure,” he said, with finality. “I’m absolutely sure. I didn’t look upstairs but downstairs there was stuff,” Stuff: the word was swollen with the volumes it described. “Stuff,  everywhere. Everywhere. VHS tapes, magazines, newspapers, books, leaflets, letters, maps, appliances, washing machines, clothes…just towers of everything you could think of. I could smell mould, and mildew, and decay, and dead- I mean really sharp, unpleasant must. I could smell dead rats, I could hear living rats, mice maybe, scurrying about. I saw…I even saw a…”

“Yes?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m really worried about her.” He felt himself beginning to cry. He realised the care he had for her, the regard. He didn’t allow himself cry, it wasn’t the right moment to do so. “Do you think you can help?”

            “I think so. I promise that I’ll try,” said the priest. “Leave it with me, John, but please remain contactable in case I need you to confirm or relate again any of what you’ve just told me. Thank you for telling me. I’ll get onto…erm…” he struggled to think of the name for a moment. “…er…Mike and we’ll reach out to Julia and see what we can do about this situation.” 

            John couldn’t put a face to the name: he didn’t know who Mike was, but he didn’t ask.

He left the church. It was oddly embarrassing to re-enter and re-exit a church. He ran down the hill, passed under the brief shelter of the street gate. He got into the car. Something very different and very unfamiliar was playing on the radio, something messy that was opposite to the shrill order of Vivaldi. It felt odd being close to Julia, sharing so small a space with her, hearing that smelly, unamused music. 

The voice of the broadcaster put a merciful stop to all that, its good humour and levity made the music’s angst seem almost a waste, the most wanton of enthusiasms. An alienated reality was restored for a while. For the duration of the journey from the church to the train station, it was a feeling of deep discomfort and unease that John endured. 

They left behind a particular street, and John remembered that from there it wasn’t very far to Julia’s house. He was full of a longing to revisit that place, to rediscover its sorry magnificence. Was it that he wanted to turn back time? He had some illusion, felt some blinkard and fanciful belief that the morning could be rewritten if he went back there. He imagined the horror and mercy of going back there and finding no hoard. He found it difficult to look at Julia. He didn’t see her anew exactly. She was unchanged in his eyes, almost stubbornly unchanged. But this knowledge he now had of her was toxically potent. 

Indeed, as he said goodbye to her and watched her drive off in her little, anaemic-coloured mini, full of pity and revulsion at the world he knew she inhabited and to which she was returning, he felt little more than the latest contributor to the brimming shame that massed at the heart of her life and which was now overflowing, overwhelming what guards of sanity had kept it hidden for so long. He dreaded the next time he would have to see her, the next time he would have to enter her ripe, little car. She disappeared from view, as simply as if she had never been there at all, and John’s heart ached. Following with his eyes the rubbish items that swept the square, their traversing dirtiness, he couldn’t believe how clean and empty the world now seemed. His heart ached, with November, with this sense of an ending. He hoped Julia would receive, or accept, the help  that she required. He felt no satisfaction with himself for the part he’d played in helping it reach her.

He drank heavily that night, though he had a class at 9 AM on Monday morning. 

About an hour into his belated and fitful sleep, he had a really strange dream. He dreamed that trees, many very thick, leafy trees, were growing, inexorably, out of his bedroom floor.