How is it possible to remember a moment when nothing actually happened? I don’t know, but such moments are the ones I remember most vividly.
There were some major works being done on the railway line which affected the bridge above, in the middle of the village’s main street. In consequence, traffic on the bridge was restricted to one-way, controlled by traffic light, and pedestrians were diverted to a curving path fenced off by solid boards about eight foot tall on either side. So when you walked down this footpath, you were cut off from everything but the sky.
It was an intimate way to encounter a stranger, an alchemic crucible for the momentary exchange of souls in broad daylight. That may account for the odd impact this young woman made upon me, but I’m not sure. I can’t even remember whether I overtook her in the same direction, or we crossed from opposite directions. I just felt I knew a lot about her, from that few seconds. I was taken back in time. She was the kind of young woman I encountered in 1960, when I went up to university. I was sure she was going up soon to college—Cambridge, I guessed—perhaps as a fresher, perhaps for the second year; or she might even have taken her finals, without yet knowing the result. So she comes home to stay with her parents. They live in a big house—most houses here are big. So long as her parents live, she’ll have her own bedroom to go to, kept just as she left it; perhaps unchanged since childhood. She can stay free, and pretend that adulthood never hit her. The village, too, withstands the ravages of time. In truth, she has outgrown it. There is nothing to do here, except look up an old friend from schooldays. They can meet for a coffee. That is where she’s bound now, in fact.
Her future is unknown, like a book which nobody has read; a book which hasn’t even been written. A wild surmise persuades me she’s reading Russian Literature at Cambridge. She thought she knew where she was heading after graduation, but that hope was dashed. Now it’s all in the melting pot again..
It isn’t even a story, it’s just my guess, a momentary feeling. Later I saw her again, with a girl friend, chatting on a street corner. Plainly our encounter had a resonance for me, but it wasn’t her looks. There was no erotic element. It had a different kind of significance, making me conscious of many things, especially my own life at that age. To keep the same room, in the same house, throughout one’s childhood and teenage years; the safety of nurturing parents: these were luxuries I dared not wish for. How different things would have been. So this girl from Gerrards Cross, in a moment when our souls swapped bodies, represented an unfulfilled longing. And who knows? Perhaps a mutual soul-exchange, all in a moment.
If I were a short story writer I might be able to capture the feeling of it, and even put a twist in the tale; wherein she too remembers that encounter, but can’t understand why. Something strikes her about this boy she glimpses striding on the path. For some seconds she thinks it’s a boy because she’s been thinking about boys, or at least that’s how she explains it to herself. Then she catches sight of his face and sees he could be two decades older than her father; and yet not like anyone she’s ever seen. She imagines him as someone intensely involved in ideas, and literature. Perhaps a character from literature: from Dostoevsky—Raskolnikov! It’s a foolish notion: good thing no one will ever know her private thoughts. But she still can’t quite explain it.
She senses a young man following her on this winding path which curtains off the entire world, but she doesn’t feel unsafe. It’s broad daylight and she’s seconds away from the main street. He passes her at a brisk pace and she sees from his profile that he’s not the boy of her age that she imagined a few seconds ago, from the sound of footsteps. When she returns to Gerrards Cross she often recalls her teenage years, thinking about boys, and their scarcity. Such is the price of being sent to a girls-only private school. Now she sees that this imaginary “boy” must be older than her father—unless his face is merely a weather-beaten mask on a boy’s soul. What can he have been doing for the last fifty years? She imagines him as the student Raskolnikov, serving time in Siberia for a terrible crime, till at last he achieves redemption, and release. Or perhaps he is Prince Myshkin, confined for decades in a Swiss sanatorium, now finally cured of his world-sickness.
She wonders briefly if she might find her vocation writing sequels to famous Russian novels.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Maybe she is more romantic, and imagines him as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.
There was a time Russian novels made a lot of sense to me. I read many of them, from various authors.
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funny. we all bring our own perspective to such things – and I say that to ask your forgiveness in advance, for potentially hi-jacking your mystery. Yet I can't resist. This weekend was filled with identifying just those sorts of moments: dreams, brief 'waking visions', moments that adhere in the memory and will not leave easily. The theory du jour was that magic is afloat in those moments, although the word magic is far too fey for our discussions. The word 'power' is bandied about with frequency, however. And it's not the power of wall street, but something more ineffable, more about potentials and energy.
so now, with my own set of eyes viewing your story, I keep returning to it and asking… 'what was the underlying energy here?' and wondering if she was quite 'real' as we know the word. Twice you saw her, you say? Surely that is unusual? Or is it a thinly populated area where such things are common?
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For me, the underlying energy was to be shown something in a mirror, and revisit a certain time of my life, a year or two before the commencement of my long sentence in Siberia, or if you prefer, a long stay in a Swiss sanatorium.
Was she real, you ask. This is not an easy question to answer.
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I enjoyed this very much, Vincent. I felt swept away into your musings, into the voice of the narrator and the character of the girl. I feel that the girl is relatable and I like how you show that she has choices, she has warmth, comfort of a home to go to. I appreciate the nostalgia that she represents for you. I like how you show a certain bridge of time that occurs and as time moves on the bridge stretches further and further, yet still within reach and changes view.
You say, “It isn’t even a story, it’s just the expansion of a momentary feeling.” But don’t some stories begin here? I like your style of telling stories, even better when you get out of your own way and let the story tell itself. What I’ve read so far of this story, of this “momentary feeling” leaves me wanting to read more and to learn more about this “skinny young woman with dark hair and glasses.”
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Thanks Rebb. Unfortunately, there is no more to the story, unless you write a continuation . . .
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To maintain its internal integrity, perhaps the story had to end itself when it did. And of course readers, such as myself, who yearn for it to continue, are also part of this internal integrity.
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but – is it purely the love of story that led to the writing of this — or is it some ineffable recognition that something about this event wasn't quite what it seemed to be?
Do certain dreams – certain moments – certain places – contain a power of their own? (Understanding 'power' as leashed energy)
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The power was in that, to unleash something bottled up: my despairing rootlessness at her age, which strongly influenced the next forty years, causing me to spend them as an exile to my own self.
That was the significance of the moment. So from that point of view, it doesn't exist as a story, which has movement; but rather a tableau. My angelic encounters often take the form of tableaux, acting as mirrors and pointing out possibilities.
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Are you trying to do me out of a job Vincent? Would it also be sad to say that, through you, I'm kind of infatuated by this girl. Maybe on the way to falling in love with her. Perhaps its the notion of her studying Russian literature in Cambridge. The appeal of a Cold War femme fatale.
Oh, and you simply must allow me to use the line “an alchemic crucible for the momentary mingling of souls” at some point in the future. I'll promise to get all my apostrophe's in the right place!
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ps The advertisement isn't strictly true…I think there's a beer in it somewhere for you!
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Listen Lehane, as that girl's pimp I have to tell you it'll cost more than a beer. She's mine, do you hear? I keep her on a tight leash.
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(laughing at the comment thread!)
“So from that point of view, it doesn't exist as a story, which has movement; but rather a tableau. My angelic encounters often take the form of tableaux, acting as mirrors and pointing out possibilities.”
fascinating description, Vincent. I hadn't thought of it this way, but YES. Many of these moments – the ones I'm coming to think of as having a certain power – ARE tableaux. They are suspended in time, images rather than movies.
It's specifically in the revisiting, through intention, of those frozen moments that the power can be tapped. If it is there, and the moment properly identified.
Thank you for this. It's provided a clarity I was lacking.
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I like the way Burton shows his dark imagination. He keeps it in its place: fiction. In fact, I'm a big fan of horror stories. Poe, Lovecraft, even Stephen King. The deeper layers of a horror story tells us a lot about ourselves.
Anyway, as for the girl who reads the Russians, maybe you should watch her, Vincent. Women who read Russian novels won't tolerate tight leashes… 😉
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Luciana, you saw through my subterfuge. Or should I say you sawed through it? You are right. She has me on a tight leash. But in these fantasies (I include fiction and all the arts) one can play all parts, just as you do in your dark tale To Poe with Love.
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[…] 10/09/26 at 3:13 pm […]
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