Still Life?

For fact fans,  Brief Encounter  - the theme of today's blog - most famous for being a 1945 David Lean film starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard with a screenplay written by Noel Coward, was actually based upon a pre-war one-act play by Coward called Still Life.

Still Life was about an illicit and ultimately doomed love affair between a suburban housewife and a married doctor, whose brief encounters took place mainly in the waiting-room/café of a railway station over a period of several months. As I recall it (maybe inaccurately), it played out the impact on two decent people of the conflict and guilt that arises when a good thing is also a bad thing (strong mutual attraction versus social mores); this in contrast to the easier-going liaison between a male and female worker on the station staff.

The film screenplay expanded the cast of characters and the story line, in particular Laura's staid relationship with her husband. It put me in mind of the opening lines from Joni Mitchell's reflective song 'Chinese Cafe' (on Wild Things Run Fast ): "Caught in the middle/ Carol, we're middle class/ We're middle aged/ Nothing lasts for long...I wonder where the time goes". Both Alec and Laura had thought they were happy with their respective lives until their paths crossed in that railway station refreshment room. Ultimately, despite what they felt for each other, decorum and destiny decreed that they must part forever. (For the movie, the station used was Carnforth in Lancashire - still worth a visit today.)

I always read the title of Coward's play ambiguously. Whether he intended it or not, I don't know (but I suppose he did). On one level, the brief encounter makes the middle-aged Laura and Alec realise there is still life in them yet, as their meeting triggers passions that maybe they have never felt before or possibly never expected they would feel again. On a second level, still life symbolises the staid and unexciting married lives of those protagonists (seemingly sterile in Laura's case). Of course, the play as portrait of Alec and Laura's affair is a still life in the third sense of it being a depiction. Finally, I read a fourth layer into its meaning: a recognition that although the lovers concede they cannot be together, still life goes on and they will treasure what they feel for each other as a submerged but sustaining force in their otherwise routine existence.

Before we go there, here's a bit of a random insert: I have to tell you about a brief encounter I had this week, all the more exciting for it being unexpected (often the case with brief encounters). I was in Fleetwood quite early on Wednesday morning when I saw my first swallow of the season perched on one of the overhead tram cables near the seafront - clearly a harbinger of the unusually warm Easter week-end we are all enjoying.


Swallow on a Fleetwood tram cable

I take it as a sign we are going to enjoy a long, hot summer in the shimmering jewel of the north. I hope so. Anyway, it was a lovely surprise and one I thought worth capturing.

Okay, back to the main thread of the blog, a brief encounter and its more enduring aftermath, when common sense, convention, decency, lack of nerve, past loyalties, self-preservation, a sense of duty or whatever combination of factors has made one or both parties step away from the liaison.

Still Life?

There are almost always consequences. I don't know how many of you have been there and I'm not asking, for that's your own private business; but if you have, or know someone who has, you might recognise some of what I've tried to encapsulate in this latest product of the imaginarium.

Afterwords
Seeking the distraction or protection
of a busy coffee-shop, you faced me down
over untouched cups of froth;
frowning, took my hand in yours
one last time and said
we should not, could not meet again,
much as it pained you to say.

By then I was drowning,
your phrases washing over me
with a sense of their finality...
distraught at the thought of being caught,
unable to bear the consequences
of losing what you already had,
heart-broken at us having to part
but time we came to our senses...

Didn't I agree? Mutely I stared,
panic and pain contending,
searching your face for I knew not what,
comprehending only
that this was to be the end.

And then there came the coda:
Think of it this way, my darling Rose -
that though we may not have each other,
we will always have what might have been...

I let you walk away that day
because I loved you and still do
but as I sit here quietly reading,
silently grieving not one loss but two,
I'm thinking
if only you knew...

Thanks for reading, S ;-)