We were away for a few days, and for various reasons we were quite quiet, not wittering on to each other as we usually do, but just being together in companionable silence. Maybe because of that I found I was observing various things with perhaps more concentration with more intensity than usual. As I’ve mentioned before, I do observe things and remember them and use aspects of what I’ve seen in my writing. However, this gazing was more intense, more focused, more absorbed, and later when as usual I jotted down what I’d been looking at, my memory was extremely vivid – my mind-pictures almost three dimensional.
- The man was at the next table in the dining room and from where I was sitting, I could see him clearly. He reminded me of the reporter from our local newspaper, the Mercury. He looked to be in his sixties, but his hair still dark. At dinner each evening he sat, reading a book laid flat on the table. He read with concentration, stopping every so often and raising his eyes from the page to think about what he’d read. After a while he closed it so it was face down in front of him. He looked at it for a moment, then seemed to press on it with splayed fingers, staring at the condiment set. After some thought, he picked it up from the table and standing, slipped it into his pocket and left the dining room. At breakfast, the book was on the table beside his plate but he didn’t open it.
- On the third night he did not appear, and a woman sat at the table, looking at her iPad. She was in her thirties maybe, late thirties perhaps. Sleek, shiny, below shoulder-length hair, expensive cream woollen, turtleneck sweater, dark chocolate slacks, brown leather boots, no doubt very expensive. She was reading her iPad, and like the man the day before, she stopped reading, touched it with splayed fingers, as if pressing it down. She put her napkin to one side, then stood up gracefully, her iPad hanging cross-ways from a cord which matched her cream sweater. She left the dining room with long confident strides.
- Sitting in the narrow wooden seats in the wooden “chapel” at the green memorial ground, we looked out through the glass wall behind the coffin. There was staging outside as if in better weather the service might be held out there. Dry autumn leaves, gold and tan, were scattered across it, as if for effect, no doubt blown there from the orchard behind. The orchard rose up the slope and beyond it a meadow on the hillside. On top of the hill, beside a few dark trees was a building and a tower. Maybe it was a church, a farm building or store, or something else. It looked grim and imposing, a sinister watchtower – or maybe I have been reading too much Alan Garner, and thinking of Tolkien.
Lois Elsden 