Visitations
I can’t quite get to the walls to pace the circuit of them but if I pace back and forth, up and down in the middle of the room (and I sometimes do), I would estimate about 18 paces around — half the number of de Maistre’s, meaning one quarter of the size. Aside from the pacing and some occasional exercise I don’t move around much. There’s a sofa and a desk chair and I move between these two, often without any fixed intention, finding myself in one or the other location. The room is painted a dark brownish red that I’ve always been in two minds about. It’s one of two rooms that aren’t the kitchen, bathroom or bedroom, so it has several uses, but now it is mainly my workspace. I push everything to the sides to jump around and then pull it all back to work. It’s roughly square and south facing, with a patio door. In summer, when the door is open, I can smell the honeysuckle, the air from the small paved garden — though mostly it is closed against the noise of building work, and the room is stifling. In winter it is freezing and my hands get colder and colder as the hours of not moving around draw on. At my desk I face the corner, and occasionally turn my stiff neck to see: the white wall of the garden, the high walls of the houses behind and their blank windows; the daylight falling slantwise.
Pinboard next to the monitor full of ideas that won’t cohere. I have looked at it unseeing for more hours than I’ve noticed. Postcards of paintings. Pieter de Hooch: a woman receiving a letter, sitting at a window on a raised dais, looking out at the street. The light beyond the dim room. Annunciations by Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Simone Martini. I am not a Christian, I have never been and will never be pregnant; nonetheless there is something here that compels me. The differently weighted stillness of each rendition. Arrested time. The moment, the momentous pause of it. I love (respectively) the quiet grace, the angel’s intensity, the stream of golden words and how annoyed the Madonna looks.
Only now does it occur to me that these spatial arrangements mirror my own. This space is not quite sequestered. Time runs through it. The schedules of others come through it. The seasons pass through it. But something strange has happened to time, in the many hours resembling any other hour spent staring into this corner and, via camera and screen, out at the room behind me. I have not to my knowledge been visited by an angel, and I have certainly been at home and available for visitation, this last year. Not that I would welcome that particular blessing, thank you. De Maistre writes of an ‘angel who distributes thoughts’ (rather than babies), of the ‘disconnected thoughts he showers upon me at every moment’. I miss that angel, who has left me disconnected, thoughtless.
There’s a picture taken in Pompeii which I had printed and framed, above and to the right of the pinboard: a succession of squares and rectangles, a stone table, geometric murals, a doorway, a sunken bath, a brightly-framed aperture through to another space at the back of which is a black rectangle, a completely black opening into absolute darkness, and in idle moments I find myself staring at this until I can’t stand it.
Amy Sackville writes fiction, and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent.
Twitter: @AmySackville