Already have a subscription? Log in
In the beginning, we lived by the seasons, by the river, by the wood, by the field. Such seasons. A blade of grass and a sheaf of wheat. Ice breaking. A leaf falling. The past coming. Such a river. Such a wood. Such a field. In the beginning, we lived by the turning day, the unfolding night. Our week began when three stars appeared in the sky. We lit candles in the window. The wind blew in the pines. In the beginning, we were replete, like a reaping at the full moon. In the beginning, an elsewhere. A silence. In the beginning, we were happy.
How did we get there? There came a time when we sought the earth life. It happens. So what. Does it matter why? The distance between oneself and the world can grow and grow and grow. And words get in the way, language too can get in the way, the language of policy, of the law, of everyday life. How does the hare feel, for instance, standing still in the tall grass?
\/
At first we did not know about the big house. Or if we knew about it, we did not think of it, hidden as it was from our cottage by the woods that, running up the side of the valley, surrounded it. When we thought of it, which was infrequently, it was to think of the formal gardens, late Georgian, laid out with such care and intention but left long untended, grown wild, one might imagine the thickets of briar and bramble, the nettles, the wet leaves underfoot, and the house itself, triangular in shape, or so it was said, isosceles rather than equilateral or scalene, as for the rest, the angle, whether obtuse or acute, I never could say for certain however steadfastly I applied my mind to such calculations in the schoolrooms of my youth, and in any case, had we taken it into our heads to seek out the house, which we did not, or at least not at first, the woods and gardens had grown so close to the house it was impossible to get an unbroken view of any part of the building, neither left to right, neither up nor down. Each morning in those first few weeks, Emil went to work, visiting different parts of the estate, meeting people, making plans, and I went into the garden, where I was building raised beds. I would start small, I would live local, I would control the rising panic, I would focus on what was in front of me.
\/
I was at that time preoccupied by the state of the maerl beds on the west coast, where until recently we had lived. Maerl, I had learned in a presentation delivered by one of my now-former colleagues, is a collective name that refers to rhodoliths, a word which then and to this day evokes in me nothing, of marine calcified red algae, whose branching thalli bind together in a lattice-like structure, forming a reef. (On the screen were healthy maerl beds, pinky-red, holding herring, holding scallops, crabs, lobsters.) They are, moreover, my former colleague continued, important nursery grounds for these and many other species, but they are very susceptible to the impacts of human activity. Old footage of farm runoff, new footage of trawlers. Today, she said, maerl is a biodiversity action-plan habitat, and a protected feature of – here I lost the thread. In spite of this, continued my colleague, who really had a very nice voice, a really very soothing, soporific sort of voice, the boardroom hosting the presentation was warm, I had slept badly, I was beginning to doze, in spite of this, she went on, the government has allowed the expansion of fish farms all along the west coast, whose intensive salmon farming generates an overabundance of algae and sediment, which, falling on the maerl beds, smothers them. They cannot recover. Here, footage taken by divers, the maerl beds white, the seabed white, the crabs, where they had gulped down the salmon faeces and choked, lying inert and white. The herring gone, the scallops, lobsters, everything, all life, gone. The barren sea. The beds, said my colleague, grow at a rate of one half or one millimetre a year, or one centimetre every ten to twenty years. In short, these habitats, once damaged, are lost for generations. (Here the audio crackled, my colleague’s voice becoming slightly garbled, too quiet and then too loud, finally resolving.) Soon, said my colleague, we would be left with a sea that did nothing but disgorge its dead. Dolphins, lines of gulls. Hardly worth mentioning.
\/
After her presentation, my colleague, making reference to my two years at art school prior to the degree in environmental science, asked if I would build a human-scale model of a maerl bed for educational purposes. She imagined at one end a living landscape, that deep pinky-red, replete with sea creatures, a colour and life which, dwindling in the middle, would end in a ghostly, white emptiness. Six feet by eight feet, she said, very clearly, turning me around so that she could use my back to scrawl something on a piece of paper. On the paper she handed to me was a sketch of the maerl bed with rough dimensions and the words the barren sea.
I undertook this endeavour without much comment, using papier-mâché and chicken wire, education was, after all, one of our charitable objectives, and as to the question of whether the children, who were between the ages of six and eight, might be frightened by the exhibition, which was accessed through a curtain into a dark room, with only the maerl bed illuminated, accompanied by a soundscape emulating the undersea noises of the fish farm, the generators running day and night, the incinerators, the feed-delivery systems, the motor boats, the constant repairs, as to this question, my colleague would not have her efforts derailed by the mollycoddling instincts of the bureaucratic class, she would not be deterred. I left the organisation before she executed the final stages of these plans, so I never did find out how it went.
\/
Now, I told myself, one can only focus on what’s in front of one, it was the only way one could find it in oneself to go on, and so I went outside each day, into my garden in the middle of the country, far from the sea, making plans for this little patch of earth. I kept myself busy and yet, at times, straightening up from my labours, hammer in hand, nails in mouth, my eyes would fall on the woods to my left, sloping gently up the valley, behind which stood the big house. At times, it is true, the house played upon my mind. So little information was available about the building online, and my searches turned up only a single sketch dating from the time the formal gardens were planted. It showed the house’s face, looking like any other stately home of the period, and then, in an inset, the house and gardens from above, which showed the shape of the triangle repeated in cunning ways in the garden’s design. One could see, from this drawing, that the sides of the triangle followed the lines of a promontory, so that the triangle’s peak coincided with the point of the cliff. On both sides, the land fell steeply into a wooded ravine that ended in the river, flowing swiftly around the bend, running deeply. Though I tried not to, though I committed myself to being well, to being in the present, to our life together, in short to life, sometimes the image of this bend in the river came to me, so deep and dark. How to explain this inclination? Who knows why we dream of the dark? Who knows why we carry a scrap of it with us wherever we go? At night, in our bed, I held on tightly to Emil.
In the beginning, we were happy. Why say I deserved what I got? I had hurt no one. Why say I asked for it? I could not have foreseen it, could not have foreseen how a silence lay on that house, how silence grows. It grows and grows. It covers over. No, I could not have foreseen it. Except, perhaps, by reading the past, except, perhaps, by forgetting myself, forgetting that my time was the time of eternity, getting away from me. A certainty as old as the road. It is not that one wants to be free. But one dreams of it.
In 2023, Sarah Bernstein was named by Granta as one of the best young novelists in Britain. Born in Montreal, she now lives in the Scottish Highlands, where she teaches literature and creative writing. In 2015, she published Now Comes the Lightning, an acclaimed collection of prose poems. Her debut novel, The Coming Bad Days, was published in 2021 and her second, Study for Obedience, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023.