Fragile beauty
SPRING has at last meant a return to the joys and challenges of gardening. For the past five years, I have been tending an extremely small plot on a green hill far away, on the east coast of Scotland, hard by the North Sea.
It is exposed to the wildest of weathers: fierce winds spray the waves high over the cliffs, and seagulls swoop round the squat stone tower of the 14th-century church of St Monans. It is the most beautiful place I know, and the site of my wife’s grave.
It’s something of a challenge to garden in such tough conditions, where a gale can destroy all you have done in less than an hour, but it’s consoling to add hope and beauty to memory. The heart lives on, the flowers return.
This is the first year (so far) that I have got the winter/spring succession planting right: snowdrops Galanthus Hippolyta, followed by Crocus Jeanne d’Arc, Iris Katharine Hodgkin, Anemone blanda, white Thalia daffodils, Tulip Cretica Hilde, and then, finally, the tulip which bears her name — Marilyn.
Chest expander
NOW, I spend most of my time in London, where I share a house with my partner, Lucinda.
Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recover’d greenness? It was gone
Quite underground. . .
writes George Herbert, in “The Flower”. I am often defensive when asked about Lucinda. I can see people thinking, “That’s a bit quick, isn’t it?” or, “Wasn’t one great love enough for you?”
But it must be possible for the bereaved to combat the devastating loneliness of bereavement with the rediscovery of companionship. A second love does not diminish the first, just as a second child may shift the balance of a family without lessening the love already known. The heart expands. Love is unlimited.
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain. . .
Herbert’s is a resurrection poem. We lament and love again, and yet it’s not always straightforward. When Herbert talks about how “grief melts away like snow in May”, I find myself thinking, “No, George, it’s a bit more complicated than that.” One emotion does not replace the other. They can exist simultaneously. They can even be reversed. We can love and then lament all over again. Emotions are not fixed.
But his abiding idea — that love is there, always waiting for us to partake of the feast on offer — does feel true. Love invites us to be happy. And it is a condition of that happiness that we embrace the transient nature of our mortality. “To make us see we are but flowers that glide.”
À la recherche
THERE are, however, adjustments to be made in a life of love after love. Discussions involving interior design, for example, require diplomacy and compromise. I never thought that I would live in a home painted yellow, because the previous regime had banned the colour both inside and out. Only daffodils were excepted.
Now, there are choices to be made. We consult design magazines, and discuss radiators and paint colours (as Lucinda tries to persuade me that tallow, hay, sunlight, citrona, and “babouche” are not, in fact, yellow).
I learn that our mutual taste, described on Instagram as “bohemian chic”, is not so very far from “1950s vicarage”: it’s worn rugs laid on to bare floorboards, beaten-up sofas, second-hand wardrobes, and the walls decorated with vintage maps, indistinguishable landscapes, and portraits of wan-looking women who turn out to be distant relatives. It’s important to get the floorboards to look distressed rather than newly polished. Everything must look as if it’s been there for years.
I am reminded of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich. The hero spends months decorating his house to get it exactly right. The project is over budget, and overruns by six weeks. Then he realises, after finishing it, that they need an extra room, “and another 500 roubles a year”. When he is finally satisfied with his curated endeavours, he discovers that his charming home looks “like all the others of their kind: there were damasks, ebony, plants, rugs, and bronzes, everything sombre and highly polished — all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class. And in his case, it was all so like that it made no impression at all.”
Types and shadows
BROWSING auction catalogues online, I notice how cheap Old Masters, particularly those with Christian subject matter, have become, in comparison with contemporary art.
I have recently acquired a remarkably affordable 16th-century wooden carving of St James, a gilt-bronze Victorian ecclesiastical pricket candlestick, and an early 18th-century Ukrainian icon of St Andrew the Greek, St John, and St Alexandria. Consequently, our home has moved away from its haute bohemian aspirations to look like an Oxford movement interior, as approved by William Butterfield.
Crucifixions, suffering saints, and penitent sinners can be had at bargain basement prices. I ask Lucinda, who works in the auction world, why this is. “I’m afraid that Jesus has gone the way of brown furniture,” she replies. “He’s very out of fashion.” Bracing stuff.
Hallelujah chorus
BUT now it’s Easter and, for me, that means Bach. After the tempus clausum of Lent comes the release of music, first in sorrow, then in joy.
When I was writing my novel The Great Passion about the composition and first performance of the St Matthew Passion, I mentioned the town musicians who would take part in the performance. There were eight members of the band, with two occasional trumpeters, and I mistakenly included them in an early draft, only to have my editor scrawl in the margin, “No trumpets in Lent”.
But in the Easter Oratorio, out they come — all fanfare, glory, and alleluia, like arum lilies or brugmansia, the extravagant trumpet flower, which announces itself in the most vivacious shades of pink, red, white, and even yellow. How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns!
James Runcie is the author of The Grantchester Mysteries, The Great Passion, and Tell Me Good Things, all published by Bloomsbury.
