The Pale Exile

By Julian Ashworth-Cross

I thought that if I crossed the ocean, I would arrive somewhere new. I thought the Atlantic was a line you could step across — that on the other side, the pale grey water giving way to pale grey stone, I would find a version of myself that hadn't been hollowed out by grief and longing and the slow knowledge that home was not a place but a memory you couldn't keep.

Boston in November is a city that understands exile. The wind comes off the harbor with the same ferocity it must have had when the Mayflower dropped anchor, indifferent to whether you want to arrive or not. I taught at Boston College, three years now, three autumns of red brick and falling leaves and students who asked me about James Joyce the way people ask about God — with a mixture of reverence and the unspoken assumption that I myself had been visited by grace.

I was not. I had been visited by absence.

Eleanor died in London, in our flat near Gower Street, the one with the garden that faced north and never saw proper sunlight. She died in spring, which felt cruel — spring in London is so insistently hopeful, with the magnolias putting out their pink fists and the light arriving early as if to mock those who would rather it stayed dark. I came to America because America is a place people go when they need to become someone other than who they were. The myth was seductive in its simplicity: leave the death behind, start again across the water.

But exile is not a beginning. It is a continuation, muted, like music played through a wall.

The correspondence with Margaret began almost by accident. She was a former colleague from UCL, a woman I had known only through seminars and departmental meetings, someone whose sharp intelligence and sharper wit I had admired from a distance. After Eleanor's death, when the email from the Modern Literature listserve arrived — Margaret had volunteered to guest-teach a seminar on exile and displacement — I found myself writing to her. Not about the seminar. About the nature of the thing we do, this thing of studying other people's words about leaving while being unable to leave our own lives.

She wrote back within the hour. Her letters were precise and unsentimental, and they did not try to fix me. Margaret understood, perhaps, that some people don't want to be fixed — they want to be witnessed.

We wrote for months before we spoke on the phone. Before we knew each other's voices the way you know a landscape — the familiar curves and valleys and sudden drops. When we finally talked, I was sitting in my office in the Carter Commons, and it was past midnight, and Boston was white with the first snow of the year. Margaret was in London, and she was standing at her window looking at a London sky the color of wet slate.

"You sound different," she said.

"Because I am different," I said.

"No," she said. "Because you're talking to me. There's a difference."

I wanted to tell her that I didn't believe in differences like that. That voices were just sound, and connection was a neurological event — neurons firing, chemicals crossing synapses. But Eleanor used to say that love was not a neurological event but something that happened to the nervous system of the whole world, and I had laughed at her then and thought her romantic to the point of absurdity, and now I would have given anything to believe her.

Margaret and I developed a rhythm. She would send me articles she'd found in the Bodleian — essays by Woolf, letters by Eliot, marginal notes from some long-dead scholar's copy of The Waste Land. I would send her translations of Russian poems I'd been teaching — Pasternak, Akhmatova, words about exile and snow and the particular quality of light in a city that holds its head lower than you would like.

The letters accumulated. They filled boxes in my apartment in Brighton Beach, a neighborhood whose name alone would have been a joke to anyone who understood the irony — Brighton Beach, a small Brighton, a pale echo of the English coastal town that had been Margaret's childhood. She had never been to England, not really. Her parents were Canadian, her mother English, her father Scottish, and she had grown up in a house where two coasts warred over the thermostat and the tea tongs.

"You're building a museum," Margaret wrote to me once, after I'd sent her a photograph of my bookshelves, "and the museum is you."

She was right. The exile's project is always the same: collect, catalog, preserve. Make a cabinet of curiosities out of a life so that when the life is gone — and it will be gone, that is the promise of exile — there will be something to show for the absence.

I met another expatriate in Boston, a Romanian named Danuț who taught musicology at New England Conservatory. He had left Bucharest in 1989, the year Ceaușescu fell, and he carried Romania the way some people carry a wound — not openly, but in the way they hold themselves, in the slight stiffness of the shoulder, the way they flinch at sudden loud noises.

"America is generous," he told me over coffee in a shop on Commonwealth Avenue. "But generosity is not the same as love. You can be loved by a country the way you can be loved by a stranger — kindly, distantly, without expectation of return."

I thought about this every time I walked along the Charles, watching the students ski down the narrow strip of grass between the river and the sidewalk, their laughter bright and unhurried and completely unburdened by the knowledge that nothing lasts. They were young, and youth is the only true form of patriotism — the absolute conviction that the place you are standing is the center of the world.

Margaret came to Boston in March.

I know what you're thinking. Two people who have bonded over letters, suddenly in the same city — it's the setup for a rom-com or a tragedy, and given everything I've told you, tragedy is the more likely genre. But it wasn't either of those things. It was simpler and more complicated than that.

She came for a conference on comparative literature at Harvard, and I was asked to participate in a panel. We didn't schedule a meeting. We didn't need to. The conference was three days, and on the second evening, I found her on the terrace of the Society Hill Tavern in Cambridge, looking at the Charles as it ran black and silver under the bridge.

"You came," I said.

"You came," she said.

We stood side by side, not touching, and watched the river. She was older than me by four years, with grey in her hair that she no longer tried to dye and lines around her eyes that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with the particular way she smiled — not broadly, but with her eyes first, as if the smile had to travel a distance before it reached her mouth.

"I brought you something," she said, and reached into her bag and took out a small volume of Herbert's poems. The Folio Society edition, the one Eleanor had always wanted and never found in a London shop that wasn't three times the price.

"I found it in the Bodleian gift shop," Margaret said. "I thought — you keep collecting things."

"I'm not collecting anymore," I said. And it was true. In that moment, standing beside the river with a woman I loved in a city that was not my home and might never be, I understood that the museum was closed.

We didn't sleep together. We didn't even kiss. We walked along the Charles until the bars closed and the students stumbled out laughing, and we sat in a diner on Massachusetts Avenue and drank terrible coffee and talked until dawn. We talked about everything — about the books we loved and the ones we hated, about the teachers who changed us and the ones who broke us, about Eleanor and about Margaret's parents and about Danuț and his stiff shoulder and his flinch at loud noises.

When I woke the next morning in my hotel room near Harvard Square, I knew two things with the kind of certainty that doesn't admit doubt.

First, that I loved Margaret. Not the way I had loved Eleanor — Eleanor had been passion and ordinary life braided together, the extraordinary made of grocery lists and hospital visits and the quiet heroism of staying beside someone while they died. What I felt for Margaret was different. It was quieter, more deliberate, a choice made again and again like a prayer.

Second, that I would never stop being an exile. Boston would always be a city I taught in, not a city I bled for. The Charles would always be a river I observed rather than a river I belonged to. No matter how many autumns I spent watching the leaves fall on Brighton Beach, I would always be Julian Ashworth-Cross, the Englishman who taught Joyce, the widower who came to America to escape his own life, the man who received poems about exile from a woman on the other side of the ocean.

Margaret went back to London. I went back to teaching. And we kept writing.

The letters changed shape. They were no longer essays about exile but records of its daily experience. Margaret wrote about the students at UCL — brilliant, exhausted, scrolling through their phones during seminars on Beckett. I wrote about the snow in Boston and the way it made the city look like a photograph that had been left too long in the sun, all color leached away to pale grey.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I had stayed in London. If I had not come to America, if I had not answered Margaret's email that spring. Would I have mourned Eleanor differently? Would I have become bitter, or would I have found some form of peace? These are not questions that have answers. Exile teaches you that the road you didn't take is just as real as the one you did, inhabited by a version of you that made different choices and suffered different losses and sat by a different bed and held a different hand.

Three years passed. Then four. I was offered a sabbatical, and I thought about going back to London. I thought about returning to the flat on Gower Street, the one with the north-facing garden. I thought about sitting in the park on a Sunday morning and watching the world go on without you, which is what grief ultimately becomes — not something you get over but something you carry into a world that has no room for it and learns, slowly, to accommodate.

I didn't go back. Not because I couldn't — I could have bought a ticket and been in Heathrow Terminal 5 by midmorning. But because returning would have been its own form of exile — exile from the life I had built, which was small and partial and haunted but it was mine. The pale exile does not return home. Home becomes a place in the past, and the present is a country you inhabit without ever fully belonging.

Margaret retired two years ago. She teaches now from her garden in Hampstead, a laptop balanced on her knees, the London fog rolling in from the heath like the tide. I still send her articles. She still sends me poems. Sometimes I think about writing to her and asking her to come back — not to America, which she has never really left in any meaningful sense, but to London, where I might spend my remaining years learning to be a person who belongs to a place rather than a memory of a place.

I haven't written that letter. Some choices, once deferred, become impossible. The pale exile's task is not to find home but to learn how to carry its absence with grace. And I have learned, slowly, painfully, beautifully, to carry it.

The Atlantic between Boston and London is forty-three hundred miles. It is the same distance that separates me from the life I thought I would have, from the certainty I thought I had found in Eleanor, from the belief that if you just crossed the right water at the right time, you could arrive somewhere that would take you in.

I was wrong. The water takes no one in. It only separates. And the pale exile is the person who learns, in the end, to love the separation — to see in the vast grey expanse of ocean not a barrier but a bridge, not a void but a space where two people, on opposite sides, can look out at the same pale water and understand, without words, that distance is not the opposite of connection.

It is its architecture.

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