"Frank didn't ring when he returned but then she had particularly asked that he shouldn't. Nevertheless, very few of us really want even our most ardently phrased requests obeyed."
Photograph: ©Trent McMinn
The Fall of a Sparrow by Salley Vickers
'I think I may die,' Rebecca said aloud one morning. She did not mean she intended to kill herself. Only that things seemed suddenly more than she felt she could bear. It was to a single sparrow out on her small, slightly dingy balcony, that, quite undramatically, she addressed these words.
Years ago, Rebecca had fallen in love with Frank. Frank Butler was her university tutor, who taught the class on Romantic poetry which Rebecca had attended, as a mature student, when she first moved to London. The class had read Keats, on whom Rebecca had written an essay, commenting on the poet's untimely death, which had found favour with her tutor.
Frank was older than Rebecca, married with a young family. It was not he but Rebecca who had insisted that he mustn't leave his wife until the children were old enough. He had been the one who had wanted to fly off with her. 'You will feel guilty,' she had told him. 'And regret it. And then you will regret me, and that I would mind.'
They had waited; but as anyone who has been in this situation discovers, children are never 'old enough' for their parents to split up safely. And, however irksome, the claims of marital responsibility tend to foreclose over time.
After ten years, Rebecca asked, tactfully, whether or not Frank envisaged their ever moving in together. He had answered not exactly shiftily but it was impossible not to register the lack of the first fine careless protestations. During the early years of knowing Frank Rebecca had turned down other promising alliances. One in particular, Tim Robbins, who had emigrated to South Africa, she thought of at this point. She even went so far as to email him. Tim replied with news of his family, explaining that his wife, a former ballet dancer, was training to be a doctor. Rebecca deleted the pictures of the blue swimming pool and laughing children and did not repeat this experiment.
By the time the Butler children were at university, Rebecca felt the moment had arrived for a straight talk with Frank. Samantha, Frank's daughter, had recovered from the anorexia which had set her back during her first year, and Keir was well on his way to a doctorate in chemical engineering. 'Are we ever going to live together?' she asked one afternoon.
They were in bed having made love. The lovemaking was more of a ritual by now. But perhaps it is sentimental to expect passions to retain their initial force. 'I don't know,' Frank had said, with unusual candour.
This was the first time any doubt on this matter had ever been voiced and Rebecca's chest tightened. 'Don't you love me any more?' she asked, and cursed herself. She knew better than to ask this question. But like it or not, it is not always our 'better' selves who speak for us.
'Of course I do,' Frank said, in something like his old tone.
'Not enough to live with me though?' She had got her voice back under control.
'I don't know,' he said again. 'It's not that I don't love you.'
'You love Evelyn more?'
He frowned, and again she felt sorry for him. She rarely pushed, and she was aware that this was a crucial element in her appeal. 'Not the way I love you. But where would she go if I left her?'
Rebecca did not ask: 'Where will I go if you and I part?' She got out of bed and put on her dressing gown and went to wash up the lunch. When he came to say goodbye she was in the kitchen staring out of the window of her high mansion flat.
'What are you thinking?'
'I was wishing I was a bird,' she said, watching a solitary seagull which had strayed inland.
'So you could fly away from me?'
'So at least I could fly somewhere.'
That autumn, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as he had once written to her on a postcard, Frank explained he was taking Evelyn to Venice for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Venice was where he and Rebecca had always planned to go, when they were free. Rebecca found the card which for all those years had been stuck in her volume of Keats to mark the famous ode - a drawing of a naked woman whose torso Frank had flatteringly compared to hers - drank most of a bottle of gin and wrote a letter. She carried it around in her bag for three days before finally dropping it into the post box.
Frank didn't ring when he returned but then she had particularly asked that he shouldn't. Nevertheless, very few of us really want even our most ardently phrased requests obeyed. After waiting by the phone all weekend, she woke on the Monday, looked out the card and then tore it into little bits and dropped it over the balcony outside her flat. She delivered her bleak pronouncement to a sparrow which had flown down and perched on the balcony rail beside her. 'I think I may die,' she had said.
Keats had liked sparrows. If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel, he had written. It was the same letter where he had asserted, I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections.
Keats had brought her into this hopeless situation. But he died in pain believing he was unloved.
On an impulse, Rebecca booked a holiday in Rome.
It was raining when she arrived at the sequestered so-called Protestant Cemetery just outside a remainder of the old walls of ancient Rome. She wandered along the grassy paths in the rain-dark light till she found what she was looking for, Keats's gravestone on which was carved his own forlorn epitaph: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. The words he wrote and requested be his final memorial just before he died far from home, and his beloved, in humble lodgings on the Spanish Steps.
She stood there, astonished that there was nothing more to indicate the abiding genius of the twenty-seven-year-old poet who believed that his poems would be as ephemeral as his life.
The rain had begun to fall more heavily when she heard a voice.
'You will catch cold.' A pale young man had apparently followed her to the graveside. 'Come under the tree.'
He gestured towards a tall pine and they stood together, he holding his coat over their heads. He was smaller than Rebecca and slighter, so that to cover her head he had to stretch. His coat was rather worn and of an old-fashioned cloth and cut.
'Why have you come here?' he asked. He looked as if he might have suffered a long illness.
'I saw a sparrow,' she said. 'It made me think of Keats.'
'You like Keats?' His dark eyes in his thin face were brightly enquiring.
'He liked sparrows. He wrote to a friend once, If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.'
'Yes,' the pale young man agreed. 'You are right. He did love birds.'
'There aren't many sparrows left in London these days. I thought how he might have minded.'
'So you came here?'
'I wanted to die,' she said. 'So I came here.'
'Oh, you mustn't die,' he said. And he looked at her with such urgency in his eyes that she had to look away. 'Believe me. No one is worth dying for.'
Side by side they stood, so close that she felt the shadow of his breath on her cold cheek. As the rain eased, a sparrow fluttered down and perched delicately on the tombstone.
'Look,' she whispered to her companion. Turning to him, she found there was no one beside her but the pine tree and the only breath a faint stirring of wind.
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Salley Vickers is the author of six bestselling novels, including The Other Side of You and most recently, Dancing Backwards. The Fall of a Sparrow is from her new collection of short stories, Aphrodite's Hat, published by Fourth Estate.
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Thursday, 25 November, 2010
In Character studies
- The Fall of a Sparrow by Salley Vickers
- Imtiaz by Sunjeev Sahota
- Alec Demeter by Seymour Clare
- Gail by Rowan Somerville
- Dirty Norma by Samantha Hunt
- Miriam by Robin Black
- Glen Williams of Robinsville, PA, USA, Night Janitor by Matthew Quick
- Charlie Boat by Ben Ockrent
- Freemason by Andrzej Bursa
- Aaliya by Rabih Alameddine
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