This Uneasy Month

I’ve been going through an Anita Brookner phase. I read A Misalliance, quickly followed by A Start in Life, after which I watched the film adaption of Hotel du Lac. I love her. Love the odd, other worldliness of some of her detached characters, whom I fear I might, at times, resemble.

Here are the opening lines of A Misalliance: “Blanche Vernon occupied her time most usefully in keeping feelings at bay. In this uneasy month of the year – old April, long chilly evenings – she considered it a matter of honour to be busy and amused until darkness fell and released from her obligations. These obligations were in any event minimal but being self-imposed were all the more rigorous: no one else sustained them.”

‘This uneasy month’ — quite.

‘Keeping feelings at bay’ ––– hmmm.

Come April, I want to see spring soar, but it is doggedly late in arriving. Or is it that every year I forget the truth of April? The truth being that April is cruel and withholding.

The higher sun, the brighter evenings, the promise of heat: all are dangled before us like a paper mobile hung over a baby’s cot, a counterfeit spring sent to distract and beguile. Turns out April’s promise of lounging in warmth is a hollow one. In reality, April is fast-paced muddy walks, relays of showers, wool layered bodies, hats pulled low, umbrellas blown inside out.

April is the friendless month. Other months partner up naturally: May and June are the perfect couple; November and December work well together; February and March dance a certain twostep. But April hangs alone in the year, a month suspended, a month between, a month looking either way – at what has been and at what is to come. It is not quite winter; it is not quite spring.

It is the cruellest month, and if you think I am being cruel towards it, it is because, for me, April is a month of anniversaries, a month of watching the dates, the days, the hours. It’s the month of an internal voice inventorying, questioning: What happened at this moment? Was this the hour when the breath gave way to stillness? Was this the time when not knowing gave way to confirmation.

This is month that seeks to back me down a dark alley, mug me, snatch my bag, run, leave me winded.

Having recalibrated, having come to understand April, it cannot do this to me anymore. I watch it and it watches back. We circle around each other for thirty days and then we’re done. I’m only halfway there, but I am halfway there.

I once heard a story on the radio about a South African game reserve, Thula Thula. The couple who established it had adopted a herd of elephants, which were described as ‘traumatised by poaching’, and, as a result, were destructive and rampaging. The husband of the couple worked with the elephants, calmed them, formed a bond with them. He died suddenly whilst abroad. When the news came of his death, his wife and the reserve’s staff were devastated, but the bizarre reaction was from the elephants, who, in a remarkable display of appearing to know what had happened, gathered close to the lodge and cried. Elephants secret something like tears as a stress response, not in sorrow specifically, yet this seemed to be sorrow. The next day they dispersed, but their coming to ‘grieve’ him on the day of his death had comforted the deceased’s wife.

One year later, on the day of his anniversary, the same thing happened. There they were, twenty-four elephants assembled near the lodge, gathered in from the from their watering holes, from the wilderness, and again they were crying. The same happened the year after.

How could they have known? How could they have known in the first instance that he had died, and how could they have remembered – one year on, and two years on – the date? Three years on, it did not happen. The memory of the grief (if that’s what it had been) had left their body and they did not come together. They did not cry. They had let him go.

For years, I have felt grief come into my body and fester during April. It feels like the onset of an illness. It has the same feeling as ‘coming down with something’ but with a blue tinge; blue, as in, sombre and overcast. Desolate. Some internal barometer knows the date is nigh, and my body (and I am convinced my mind is not telling it to behave this way, it is a fleshy-bloody-body memory) tugs me down. I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know what to make of the elephants. I wish I could conclude that their story has taught me something. It hasn’t. It is an semi-relevant aside, a distraction, and we all need those. This is a time to wait it out, that’s all, ‘to be busy’, as Brookner puts it, until one is ‘released from one’s obligations’.