STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Four Part four
My wedding day was a cold, cruel winter's day following the hot summer of my engagement. I wore my pearls. I had put away his mother's mad, sick words likening the pearls to tears. They were beautiful and I was blissfully happy. My wedding day was the day my father and I walked beneath an archway of dead, graveyard trees that stood to attention in two, proud lines and frowned down on my meekness and the whiteness of my silk and lace. The bleak sky tried to persuade me by spreading its greyness to each horizon and a bitter wind tried to dislodge my veil and its blindness. But I entered the church willingly and gladly. A heavy oaken door closed me in and I walked the aisle. I openly humbly confessed my love for a man, before a witnessing congregation and before God. I was pronounced a wife, the ring slipped easily over my knuckle and tightened on the soft flesh of my finger.
The reception bubbled and babbled with guests and champagne. Sleek, brilliantined, penguined men stood with their chins in and their beaks and tails out. Ladies' satin gloved hands tipped crystal glasses to painted lips.
I felt myself receding. There were no thoughts in my head, no words in my mind for my tongue to find, so my tongue was still, I stood quietly, emptied like a china doll that might break and show the dark hollow inside. But no tear were painted on my cheek, so nobody could know, least of all myself. Only my family looked back at me with the same dark cavity in their eyes, as they watched me fade. It was the last thing we shared. My mother, my father, my two brothers and myself were all empty with a blackness where our instincts shouted their fears but were crushed with disbelief and the blackness was quiet and blank and ignorant, left wide and gullible, waiting to be filled and easily convinced by my new husband's fussing and clucking and self assured, overflowing generosity. So my family smiled, believing their hollowed insides to be filled with relief and joy at the sheer perfection of my future. And I believed my hollowness to be the dazed and crazed euphoria of love, so I smiled too and stayed close to the man I loved. And still I found no words from my head for my tongue, so I stood quietly next to him, never wanting to be so far away that I could not reach out to touch him if I needed to, because suddenly I was afraid of the world and I knew that he would protect me.
How could I know that it was then that the tears began to fall inside the dark hollow of the china doll. They trickled and echoed down to the bottom of the black well. The china doll was my own making, I made her when I chose to love him and sad, slow years would have to pass before the water rose to become heavy in her chest, choke at her throat and spill from her eyes where she would see the tears and they would tell her that her fear of the world began with the man she tried to love. She would see that it was not her, but the fear that he had placed in her that he had gone to such lengths to protect. She would see that with great care he had planned every wall he built around her and had devoted much time to assessing and preventing breaches in the stonework and unlocked gates through which her fear might escape. Me and my mindless, impotent, incapable life were fortressed in and the drawbridge was up. And my husband laid himself around me like the thick, green unmoving water of a stagnant moat I never dared to cross.
We honeymooned in Paris. Snow fell like slow feathers and lay down like soft pillows over roads and high slate rooves. We took a ride in a carriage. The horse's misty breath danced around its nose at it stomped and snorted impatiently while we wrapped ourselves in fur muffs and hats and spread a heavy blanket over our knees. The driver took our silver coins and the horse pulled away. Its hooves were silenced by the snow and we floated noiselessly through the city in the drift of a dream that was white and grey, snow white and stone grey, pure white and Parisian grey. We were drawn through streets wide and narrow where every wall and railing was topped with a soft white ridge and every iron streetlamp wore a solid, white crown. We went up an avenue of marching trees, carrying snow on the upper edges of each pruned and nobbled branch and over the Seine where we watched the slow, grey river flow beneath its many bridges.
The evenings were spent at the opera or the theatre where we sat in the dark and watched the players walking the stage in lighted circles, their voices singing or calling out unnaturally to the darkness where many invisible people sat abreast in many invisible seats, until the curtain fell and the light moved outwards over the orchestra and then the audience who rose to meet it, applauding.
After the performance we would have dinner in a fine restaurant where pianists sat at a
grand piano and filled the air with their gentle playing. A crystal chandelier hung from the high ceiling like a massive jewel. The carpet was deep red and the heavy velvet curtains were looped and draped from ceiling to floor with gold braid and gold cords. The upholstered chairs were round backed and bow legged, ornately carved and painted with gold leaf and the table was set with silver. It was fit for a princess and the princess was me. She sat with her prince at a table for two and the flame of a slender candle danced between them.
While we ate, the princess sipped at her deep, purple wine and listened to her prince speak of his kingdom and its rules. It was a fairy tale land of gentility, comfort and generosity, and her prince would love and care for her and grant her every wish. Then one night he talked of the other kingdom, a lesser world he had defeated and rescued her from. He spoke of her family's kingdom with contempt and he told her she must discard it to be the princess he knew she wanted to be. She would learn anew, he was willing to be her teacher, because she deserved no less, because she was very beautiful.
I looked across the table and my husband's face was an ugly face. His eyes were high and haughty, the lids were half closed with disdain and a vile taste drew his mouth downwards at one corner. He leered at me and I was frightened. An anger shone deep inside his eyes. The same anger I had seen in the garden when my hair was loose and tangled and my hands full of brown soil. In the restaurant my hair was clean, pinned up and beautifully curled and my hands were dainty and manicured, but his anger was still alive. I felt shame and guilt for causing his ugliness, for being so bad as to twist his face with a disgust that pained him so. The moment passed and he smiled again, as though he had been smiling all the while with no wish or thought to do otherwise. I smiled too, but I was awash with panic and the tears were building. My childhood raced around my memory. My mother, my father, my two brothers, everything had been free and unfearing, there had been wild laughter and unashamed crying. Now it was all wrong and wasted. Eighteen years had been wrong. My whole life had to be relearnt. My husband saw my panic and his smile, already wide, broadened. He put a finger to my cheek and caught a tear. He told me that I was beautiful and that no other man would tell me so the way he told me. He spoke as though it was he who had bestowed my beauty upon me. Once again my soul wept and tried to break me from him. I remembered my father when I stood before him in my wedding dress before we left for the church, I remembered my older brother one time when he came home from school and I met him at the station to surprise him and I remembered the man in the woods, George, his silence and his blue eyes told me. All these men had told me I was beautiful and their words and their eyes had filled my heart ad yet my husband's words were directed at my face and they did not go beyond, I recoiled from them. I was a girl, too young to understand, poor china doll, poor princess. How could I tell those words were real, how could I tell a spurious smile. Any fear and distaste that I felt on my husband's part, simply made me feel guilty for feeling it. My soul drew away from him while I drew closer. My confusion was a whirlpool and in it I lost myself. I lost my powers of thought, I lost my reason, I lost my powers of speech, I was struck dumb. I tried to speak across the table, I tried to speak to my husband and then I cried because the words would not come. The more I cried the more he smiled. He took me back to our grand, palatial hotel and there he praised my soft, silly sentimentality and he comforted me as a grandfather would comfort a grandchild that had grazed its knee. Then we made love on a soft, feather bed. I needed him to comfort the tears he had caused. And so it was to be time and time again through our marriage. Afterwards we lay in each others arms and I held him so close and so tight that I left no doubt in my mind that he was my prince and I would follow him to the ends of the earth. I was a china doll, I was a hollowed out princess. I pushed my tears and my past to the bottom of the well and stored them there, leaving my head empty, a blank space for my prince to fill as he saw fit.
Sunday 25 October 2015
Saturday 24 October 2015
STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN.
Chapter Four Part Four
I felt the first hints of evening in the long shadows and the deep, low gold of the sun as I climbed the last hill to the garden wall. I reached the gate that broke the line of piled, dry stones. I was breathless but not weary. My pretty clothes were dirty, my hair was loose and wild and I glowed with a quiet, happy madness that had forgotten time and place and right from wrong.
The party was over , the guests had disappeared and all that remained was the debris. A long trestle table stood on the lawn, bankrupt, with only the pale, water-colour stains of spilt drinks, toppled glasses and the willow patterned punch bowl left in its possession. The edges of its white table cloth stirred slightly in the breeze.
I walked over to the table and took the punch bowl and its china ladle and carried it to the flower bed of mauve and yellow black-eyed pansies where I emptied out the sour dregs and the sodden mush of sliced citrus fruits. Then I ladled rich brown earth into the blue and white bowl. There was neither sight nor sound or sign of another living soul. Maybe it was simply that I did not look or hear or heed any other living soul but my own. There was only me, closed in with my own sightless and soundless presence, in its own heavy cocoon of excitement, like madness and magic as I planted the dark almond seed in the very centre of the cool, moist earth, in the very centre of the willow pattern punch bowl.
Then the magic was gone. I felt it draining from me and being taken away by a shadow that stood over me, stern and fierce and correcting. I turned to my fiancé, I saw his anger shining from his eyes and I turned my eyes to the ground in shame, not realising that his expression of rage was also his expression of victory, while my shame and my destruction were one and the same.
He was smaller than his shadow and darker. His green grey eyes bored into me and his face that I had thought kindly though not handsome was now leering and ugly with disdain. I fought my mind and instincts in order to find him beautiful and to know that his anger and his hatred of me were justified. Guilt flooded me with thoughts of my childish excitement over the man in the woods, his blue eyes and the apricot seed, while my fiancé spoke of appearance, humiliation, correctness, femininity and common sense. His voice was quiet with contempt, his words escaped and rasped through his tight, thin lips. He asked if my hair and dress would be so at our wedding and if I would then too disappear when the fancy took me. All my guilt mounted and confused until my senses were heavy and numb but for the hot tears that fell from my eyes. Then he took me in his arms and smiled as to a child who is lost and ignorant to the world and the ways of adults. He comforted me and clucked over me like a silly mother hen. I pressed close to him and so exchanged his humiliation for my own. I believed that my meekness was my love for him and that his clucking was his love for me. This desperate interpretation made my tears fall still harder but I misunderstood their message and their warning went unheeded.
The tears still fell as I sat alone at a dressing table, seeing a smeared face, tangled hair and all my thoughtless, unforgiveable cruelty reflected. The face broke again and cried, convinced that its sadness had been brought upon it by itself and none other.
I washed my face, brushed my hair and I wiped away my weeping with new resolve of selflessness and obedience. I pinned up my brushed and shiny auburn hair and saw a new face in the mirror. The mouth and the eyes were stern, their smiles had been stolen. The face was alert, ready to correct any folly it might commit before it was committed. I can see the face still in my mind's eye and its a frightened face, too lost to see its own fear. All that had been soft and round was now hard and thin with anxiety and the deep brown eyes were quick and nervous like the eyes of a mouse that senses the wing beats and waits for the talons to strike. And behind the new face all that had been free was now under lock and key. I had discarded all that had been me and I was so full of pain that I was numb and unable to sense or recognise it as pain, instead I believed that I was happy. This unclear, unadulterated, undeniable held belief of happiness began in front of the mirror and was witnessed and misled by my own reflection.
The door opened behind me, his mother came into the room. I saw her in the mirror, a stranger in her own house. She stood behind me in her cloud of eau de cologne, edged with the bitter scent of gin. Her pale eyes were glazed and watery. They were directed at me in the mirror, but they looked nowhere. She moved her mouth silently, trying to find words and when she found them they fell from her mouth all jumbled and scattered,
" Run....I thought you had run, run away......run, run, run, run away, run, run ......" she repeated the word over and over, her voice shuddered, she was commanding me to run, she was begging me to run. But I misunderstood her madness, it repulsed me. Her drinking had shamed her entire family and caused my future husband much suffering. He hated and despised her, and therefore so did I. I did not doubt that her gin soaked mind had turned topsy-turvy and was stuck at the wrong end of reason over the incident of my leaving the party to go for a walk. I tried to turn it back round for her. I politely explained that she need never worry, I loved her son more than I loved myself and I would be at his side until death parted us. The wateriness of her eyes began to trickle, she said
" Then let death come soon. If you love one such as he, love for yourself will be forbidden and then forgotten. I was young once like you and I was full. His father emptied me. And when at last he died it was too late, I was too empty".
I did not understand her words, I did not even try. I would be older and wiser before I would understand that her drunkenness was not blind but clear sighted. She unclasped a single strand of pearls from around her neck and gave them to me. She said,
" If you won't run , then take these as a gift. I wanted to give you such much more but I have failed. "
I took the pearls, I thanked her, I thought them very beautiful and I told her so. She looked at me sadly, then she stiffened as if I were her enemy and said,
" Then keep them and wear them. My mother in law to be gave them to me when I was engaged to her son. They held no beauty for her when she gave them to me and they hold no beauty for me now. The pearls are tears. They were hers, they were mine and now they are yours. "
Her bitter words and the beauty of he gift confused me. She turned away from me, the door opened and closed and she was gone. And I was left with a string of solidified, immortal tears cupped in my hand.
I wore the pearls from that day on. They were the most beautiful and the most precious of my possessions, I treasured them. Every night as I unclasped them from around my neck, I would hold them in my hand and look at them a while and a soft, creamy light would shine from them and move over my palm. And in the day I would often put my hands up to my throat where I could touch them and feel their smooth, rounded elegance.
Chapter Four Part Four
I felt the first hints of evening in the long shadows and the deep, low gold of the sun as I climbed the last hill to the garden wall. I reached the gate that broke the line of piled, dry stones. I was breathless but not weary. My pretty clothes were dirty, my hair was loose and wild and I glowed with a quiet, happy madness that had forgotten time and place and right from wrong.
The party was over , the guests had disappeared and all that remained was the debris. A long trestle table stood on the lawn, bankrupt, with only the pale, water-colour stains of spilt drinks, toppled glasses and the willow patterned punch bowl left in its possession. The edges of its white table cloth stirred slightly in the breeze.
I walked over to the table and took the punch bowl and its china ladle and carried it to the flower bed of mauve and yellow black-eyed pansies where I emptied out the sour dregs and the sodden mush of sliced citrus fruits. Then I ladled rich brown earth into the blue and white bowl. There was neither sight nor sound or sign of another living soul. Maybe it was simply that I did not look or hear or heed any other living soul but my own. There was only me, closed in with my own sightless and soundless presence, in its own heavy cocoon of excitement, like madness and magic as I planted the dark almond seed in the very centre of the cool, moist earth, in the very centre of the willow pattern punch bowl.
Then the magic was gone. I felt it draining from me and being taken away by a shadow that stood over me, stern and fierce and correcting. I turned to my fiancé, I saw his anger shining from his eyes and I turned my eyes to the ground in shame, not realising that his expression of rage was also his expression of victory, while my shame and my destruction were one and the same.
He was smaller than his shadow and darker. His green grey eyes bored into me and his face that I had thought kindly though not handsome was now leering and ugly with disdain. I fought my mind and instincts in order to find him beautiful and to know that his anger and his hatred of me were justified. Guilt flooded me with thoughts of my childish excitement over the man in the woods, his blue eyes and the apricot seed, while my fiancé spoke of appearance, humiliation, correctness, femininity and common sense. His voice was quiet with contempt, his words escaped and rasped through his tight, thin lips. He asked if my hair and dress would be so at our wedding and if I would then too disappear when the fancy took me. All my guilt mounted and confused until my senses were heavy and numb but for the hot tears that fell from my eyes. Then he took me in his arms and smiled as to a child who is lost and ignorant to the world and the ways of adults. He comforted me and clucked over me like a silly mother hen. I pressed close to him and so exchanged his humiliation for my own. I believed that my meekness was my love for him and that his clucking was his love for me. This desperate interpretation made my tears fall still harder but I misunderstood their message and their warning went unheeded.
The tears still fell as I sat alone at a dressing table, seeing a smeared face, tangled hair and all my thoughtless, unforgiveable cruelty reflected. The face broke again and cried, convinced that its sadness had been brought upon it by itself and none other.
I washed my face, brushed my hair and I wiped away my weeping with new resolve of selflessness and obedience. I pinned up my brushed and shiny auburn hair and saw a new face in the mirror. The mouth and the eyes were stern, their smiles had been stolen. The face was alert, ready to correct any folly it might commit before it was committed. I can see the face still in my mind's eye and its a frightened face, too lost to see its own fear. All that had been soft and round was now hard and thin with anxiety and the deep brown eyes were quick and nervous like the eyes of a mouse that senses the wing beats and waits for the talons to strike. And behind the new face all that had been free was now under lock and key. I had discarded all that had been me and I was so full of pain that I was numb and unable to sense or recognise it as pain, instead I believed that I was happy. This unclear, unadulterated, undeniable held belief of happiness began in front of the mirror and was witnessed and misled by my own reflection.
The door opened behind me, his mother came into the room. I saw her in the mirror, a stranger in her own house. She stood behind me in her cloud of eau de cologne, edged with the bitter scent of gin. Her pale eyes were glazed and watery. They were directed at me in the mirror, but they looked nowhere. She moved her mouth silently, trying to find words and when she found them they fell from her mouth all jumbled and scattered,
" Run....I thought you had run, run away......run, run, run, run away, run, run ......" she repeated the word over and over, her voice shuddered, she was commanding me to run, she was begging me to run. But I misunderstood her madness, it repulsed me. Her drinking had shamed her entire family and caused my future husband much suffering. He hated and despised her, and therefore so did I. I did not doubt that her gin soaked mind had turned topsy-turvy and was stuck at the wrong end of reason over the incident of my leaving the party to go for a walk. I tried to turn it back round for her. I politely explained that she need never worry, I loved her son more than I loved myself and I would be at his side until death parted us. The wateriness of her eyes began to trickle, she said
" Then let death come soon. If you love one such as he, love for yourself will be forbidden and then forgotten. I was young once like you and I was full. His father emptied me. And when at last he died it was too late, I was too empty".
I did not understand her words, I did not even try. I would be older and wiser before I would understand that her drunkenness was not blind but clear sighted. She unclasped a single strand of pearls from around her neck and gave them to me. She said,
" If you won't run , then take these as a gift. I wanted to give you such much more but I have failed. "
I took the pearls, I thanked her, I thought them very beautiful and I told her so. She looked at me sadly, then she stiffened as if I were her enemy and said,
" Then keep them and wear them. My mother in law to be gave them to me when I was engaged to her son. They held no beauty for her when she gave them to me and they hold no beauty for me now. The pearls are tears. They were hers, they were mine and now they are yours. "
Her bitter words and the beauty of he gift confused me. She turned away from me, the door opened and closed and she was gone. And I was left with a string of solidified, immortal tears cupped in my hand.
I wore the pearls from that day on. They were the most beautiful and the most precious of my possessions, I treasured them. Every night as I unclasped them from around my neck, I would hold them in my hand and look at them a while and a soft, creamy light would shine from them and move over my palm. And in the day I would often put my hands up to my throat where I could touch them and feel their smooth, rounded elegance.
Sunday 18 October 2015
STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Four Clare's story Part Three
I walked away from the party. The punch was fruity and fizzy and too much of it had gone to my head. The talk and laughter was too fast and it met my smiling face without making any sense. It was the summer before the Great War. The day was beautiful and the sun fell like gold on the young faces, making them happy as young faces should be and the girls wore wide brimmed hats decorated with summer flowers. Fields of corn and green meadows rolled away beyond the garden wall, and I walked towards them leaving the sounds of laughter and the wooden tapping of croquet mallets behind me. I walked away from the party. It was an engagement party, my engagement party.
I was a girl who used to watch her reflection in a looking glass and who saw her long hair was the colour of rich chestnut and her eyes were a deep brown. She knew that she was beautiful and she thought that she was a woman. One day there was a man who saw the same reflection and said that having seen it he could not live unless it was his. So he proposed and I accepted. I was eighteen.
I walked from the party, down a cart track between two fields, one of tall yellow corn and one of green grass, paled by the hot sun. Some cows gazed there and my child's mind made their straggled line of black and white into a game of dominoes. The track was rough and stony, the ruts where the cart wheels ran were deep and a ridge of coarse grasses ran down the middle, covered in fine dust of dry, light brown earth. The same light dust danced in little clouds before my footsteps and soon covered my white shoes and the lace of my petticoats and then the hem of my cream satin dress. I didn't know where or why I was walking. Reasons and answers spiralled through my mind and disappeared. It was the drink, too much drink. The heads of corn nodded in agreement as a summer breeze drifted through their ranks. I took off my hat and unpinned my hair and let the breeze drift through me.
The track rose up and fell down again over hills and through different fields of different crops. I walked the up hills as easily as the down hills, as if everything was on the flat. With no thoughts in my head but that I was happy. Happy that I was engaged, happy that my life would be ordered and safe. I stopped at the top of a hill and looked down over a field of lettuces that covered the slope and the curve of a hill. The lettuces curved round the hill in long, juicy green lines and between each line was a thin line of dark soil and I decided that I was standing at the very top of a giant peppermint humbug and I laughed. I stood there, my straw hat in my hand, my hair all ruffled and disorganised and my dress, petticoats and shoes all dirty, and I laughed and I laughed. Then I stopped laughing. I was not a woman, I was still a girl, I was scared and there were tears in my eyes. I walked on to stop the tears, but the faster I walked the faster they came.
The track led me to a wood. It was cool out of the sun and peaceful and my tears seemed to recede. I looked up at the roof of the wood where the sun filtered through the trees so that sunlight and shade were dappled in the shapes of leaves. I could hear birdsong and the sound of a running stream. I walked towards the ringing of the water, weaving my way between the trees and stepping carefully over their roots. The ground was soft and springy, ferns grew and primroses and the air was sweet. The wood was like a family, generations of trees. The eldest were gnarled and had thick trunks of dry, creviced bark. The younger trees stood tall and slender, their barks all smooth and shiny, and the youngest trees were barely taller than me and I wished I could be one of them and stay there, a sapling protected by an acreage of family. But it would have been cold in the winter and had the woodcutter come I would not have been able to run.
I was getting nearer the stream, the water's call was louder and with it came laughter. It was merry laughter followed by chatter. I could not hear the words but the tone was flippant and the voices rose higher into more laughter. I drew closer to where I could see the stream and the people with the voices. I stood as still and quiet as the tree that hid me and watched through its' leaves.
Gay young things all dressed in white. Two men of flannel and three girls of lace. A rich spread of delicious foods flowed from a wicker hamper over a red, chequered cloth and champagne was sipped from wide glasses. The scene was idyllic, the dappled summer cool and the sound of the stream over stones was happy like the laughter and their smiles. They had not a care in the world. No cares and no world but their picnic.
A twig snapped behind me. I turned sharply to the sound and caught my breath. He stood there. The third man in flannel, but his face was sad and his eyes were full of questions and I knew that my face and my eyes held the same sadness and the same questions and like his they were yet unrealised, unfounded and unformed.
I stood and looked, silent as the trees and so did he. His hair was jet black and his eyes were blue, clear and shining like sunlight through water. He was tall and aristocratic but for the self doubt in his face and his unkempt, curly black hair. He was eating an apricot. He bit softly into its pale, velvety flesh and chewed slowly.
A girl's shrill voice broke the spell.
" Where's George ? " she whined.
It was George I was looking at. He ate the last of the apricot and reached out to hand me its almond stone. I took it in the palm of my hand where his fingers touched me as he left the clean, dark seed there. I stared at it for a while and then closed my fingers around it to keep it safe. I looked up but he was no longer there. The girl's voice shrilled again,
" Oh George, there you are. Where did you run off to ? "
I waited to hear his voice, but he made no answer, so I left still feeling his touch on the palm of my hand.
Chapter Four Clare's story Part Three
I walked away from the party. The punch was fruity and fizzy and too much of it had gone to my head. The talk and laughter was too fast and it met my smiling face without making any sense. It was the summer before the Great War. The day was beautiful and the sun fell like gold on the young faces, making them happy as young faces should be and the girls wore wide brimmed hats decorated with summer flowers. Fields of corn and green meadows rolled away beyond the garden wall, and I walked towards them leaving the sounds of laughter and the wooden tapping of croquet mallets behind me. I walked away from the party. It was an engagement party, my engagement party.
I was a girl who used to watch her reflection in a looking glass and who saw her long hair was the colour of rich chestnut and her eyes were a deep brown. She knew that she was beautiful and she thought that she was a woman. One day there was a man who saw the same reflection and said that having seen it he could not live unless it was his. So he proposed and I accepted. I was eighteen.
I walked from the party, down a cart track between two fields, one of tall yellow corn and one of green grass, paled by the hot sun. Some cows gazed there and my child's mind made their straggled line of black and white into a game of dominoes. The track was rough and stony, the ruts where the cart wheels ran were deep and a ridge of coarse grasses ran down the middle, covered in fine dust of dry, light brown earth. The same light dust danced in little clouds before my footsteps and soon covered my white shoes and the lace of my petticoats and then the hem of my cream satin dress. I didn't know where or why I was walking. Reasons and answers spiralled through my mind and disappeared. It was the drink, too much drink. The heads of corn nodded in agreement as a summer breeze drifted through their ranks. I took off my hat and unpinned my hair and let the breeze drift through me.
The track rose up and fell down again over hills and through different fields of different crops. I walked the up hills as easily as the down hills, as if everything was on the flat. With no thoughts in my head but that I was happy. Happy that I was engaged, happy that my life would be ordered and safe. I stopped at the top of a hill and looked down over a field of lettuces that covered the slope and the curve of a hill. The lettuces curved round the hill in long, juicy green lines and between each line was a thin line of dark soil and I decided that I was standing at the very top of a giant peppermint humbug and I laughed. I stood there, my straw hat in my hand, my hair all ruffled and disorganised and my dress, petticoats and shoes all dirty, and I laughed and I laughed. Then I stopped laughing. I was not a woman, I was still a girl, I was scared and there were tears in my eyes. I walked on to stop the tears, but the faster I walked the faster they came.
The track led me to a wood. It was cool out of the sun and peaceful and my tears seemed to recede. I looked up at the roof of the wood where the sun filtered through the trees so that sunlight and shade were dappled in the shapes of leaves. I could hear birdsong and the sound of a running stream. I walked towards the ringing of the water, weaving my way between the trees and stepping carefully over their roots. The ground was soft and springy, ferns grew and primroses and the air was sweet. The wood was like a family, generations of trees. The eldest were gnarled and had thick trunks of dry, creviced bark. The younger trees stood tall and slender, their barks all smooth and shiny, and the youngest trees were barely taller than me and I wished I could be one of them and stay there, a sapling protected by an acreage of family. But it would have been cold in the winter and had the woodcutter come I would not have been able to run.
I was getting nearer the stream, the water's call was louder and with it came laughter. It was merry laughter followed by chatter. I could not hear the words but the tone was flippant and the voices rose higher into more laughter. I drew closer to where I could see the stream and the people with the voices. I stood as still and quiet as the tree that hid me and watched through its' leaves.
Gay young things all dressed in white. Two men of flannel and three girls of lace. A rich spread of delicious foods flowed from a wicker hamper over a red, chequered cloth and champagne was sipped from wide glasses. The scene was idyllic, the dappled summer cool and the sound of the stream over stones was happy like the laughter and their smiles. They had not a care in the world. No cares and no world but their picnic.
A twig snapped behind me. I turned sharply to the sound and caught my breath. He stood there. The third man in flannel, but his face was sad and his eyes were full of questions and I knew that my face and my eyes held the same sadness and the same questions and like his they were yet unrealised, unfounded and unformed.
I stood and looked, silent as the trees and so did he. His hair was jet black and his eyes were blue, clear and shining like sunlight through water. He was tall and aristocratic but for the self doubt in his face and his unkempt, curly black hair. He was eating an apricot. He bit softly into its pale, velvety flesh and chewed slowly.
A girl's shrill voice broke the spell.
" Where's George ? " she whined.
It was George I was looking at. He ate the last of the apricot and reached out to hand me its almond stone. I took it in the palm of my hand where his fingers touched me as he left the clean, dark seed there. I stared at it for a while and then closed my fingers around it to keep it safe. I looked up but he was no longer there. The girl's voice shrilled again,
" Oh George, there you are. Where did you run off to ? "
I waited to hear his voice, but he made no answer, so I left still feeling his touch on the palm of my hand.
Tuesday 13 October 2015
STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Four Part Two
Downstairs Joe put more logs on the dying fire and they turned black and glowed red from their insides before Clare awoke. She did not stir or yawn, she simply opened her eyes and was awake. She looked at Joe and saw a change in him. He sat on one of the faded pink chairs and stared deep into the fire. He knew that Clare was awake without having to turn to look back at her gaze.
" What's the picture on the jigsaw puzzle ? " he asked.
" I've no idea. What difference does it make ? " and Clare knew that it was the round room that had started the change in him.
" I don't know. " he answered.
Nothing more was said for a while and as Joe kept his eyes and his thoughts on the dancing flames in the hearth he could feel Clare's impatience grow.
" I want to be left alone to die. " she said.
Joe heard her words but made no sign of having heard them.
" Why are you leaving everything to me ? "
" Why not ! "
" Don't you have children ? "
" No."
Clare got up from the chair. Her joints were stiff and her face tightened with the pain a she walked across the room. She opened the ornately carved doors of the drinks cabinet and reached inside for a bottle, a glass and something else. She moved over to Joe and put the bottle of brandy, the glass and a corked phial half filled with a cloudy moss green liquid on a table beside him. Joe looked at it.
" Go and get me my glass ! " she said. He fetched it from a table beside the window where she had been sitting. Clare poured brandy into both glasses. Joe sat down again and picked up the phial. He held it in front of the fire, but no light could be seen through the dark, murky green. He looked at Clare.
" It's a poison. " she said. Joe put the phial carefully back on the table, looked at her again and she answered all his questions.
"It's for me. George prepared it. He knew he was going to die, he thought hat my following him might be easier this way. It's a death potion, leaf of henbane and root of hemlock. A gentle stupor, a numbness and then a sweet and painless death. So I have a choice to sleep or to starve. And you have a choice too ! "
Joe knew that he could put the poison into her brandy now and she would sleep and die peacefully without any pain and he would inherit the house and three million pounds.
" But I don't want you to die. " he said
"But I will die and I want to be alone to die."
" I don't want you to go."
" It was only ever Joe and I. "
" I don't want to go."
Joe was speaking quickly from somewhere inside that did not let him think first, somewhere that spoke the truth, a place Joe did not understand, but Clare could see his heart and wondered whether he was part of everything and was meant to stay.
" Why didn't you take the poison when George died ? " he asked.
" I wanted this time to remember him, to remember my life. "
" So tell me, " said Joe and again his words were fast like a plea. There was a need in him to know and Clare could no longer turn him away.
So Clare and Joe sat with the night, the fire and the brandy and her story began.
Chapter Four Part Two
Downstairs Joe put more logs on the dying fire and they turned black and glowed red from their insides before Clare awoke. She did not stir or yawn, she simply opened her eyes and was awake. She looked at Joe and saw a change in him. He sat on one of the faded pink chairs and stared deep into the fire. He knew that Clare was awake without having to turn to look back at her gaze.
" What's the picture on the jigsaw puzzle ? " he asked.
" I've no idea. What difference does it make ? " and Clare knew that it was the round room that had started the change in him.
" I don't know. " he answered.
Nothing more was said for a while and as Joe kept his eyes and his thoughts on the dancing flames in the hearth he could feel Clare's impatience grow.
" I want to be left alone to die. " she said.
Joe heard her words but made no sign of having heard them.
" Why are you leaving everything to me ? "
" Why not ! "
" Don't you have children ? "
" No."
Clare got up from the chair. Her joints were stiff and her face tightened with the pain a she walked across the room. She opened the ornately carved doors of the drinks cabinet and reached inside for a bottle, a glass and something else. She moved over to Joe and put the bottle of brandy, the glass and a corked phial half filled with a cloudy moss green liquid on a table beside him. Joe looked at it.
" Go and get me my glass ! " she said. He fetched it from a table beside the window where she had been sitting. Clare poured brandy into both glasses. Joe sat down again and picked up the phial. He held it in front of the fire, but no light could be seen through the dark, murky green. He looked at Clare.
" It's a poison. " she said. Joe put the phial carefully back on the table, looked at her again and she answered all his questions.
"It's for me. George prepared it. He knew he was going to die, he thought hat my following him might be easier this way. It's a death potion, leaf of henbane and root of hemlock. A gentle stupor, a numbness and then a sweet and painless death. So I have a choice to sleep or to starve. And you have a choice too ! "
Joe knew that he could put the poison into her brandy now and she would sleep and die peacefully without any pain and he would inherit the house and three million pounds.
" But I don't want you to die. " he said
"But I will die and I want to be alone to die."
" I don't want you to go."
" It was only ever Joe and I. "
" I don't want to go."
Joe was speaking quickly from somewhere inside that did not let him think first, somewhere that spoke the truth, a place Joe did not understand, but Clare could see his heart and wondered whether he was part of everything and was meant to stay.
" Why didn't you take the poison when George died ? " he asked.
" I wanted this time to remember him, to remember my life. "
" So tell me, " said Joe and again his words were fast like a plea. There was a need in him to know and Clare could no longer turn him away.
So Clare and Joe sat with the night, the fire and the brandy and her story began.
Saturday 3 October 2015
STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter Four Part One
STARSHINE
So Clare sat and Joe stood and they were silent.
" I'm not dead yet. You'll have to come back another day. " Her voice was penetrating.
" That's not why I came. " said Joe, but he was unsure why he had come. He knew he did not want her to die. But to have driven there without knowing he would arrive there. And to arrive there without knowing what it was he wanted. He wanted some kind of response, a recognition by Clare of him that would be solid and real and something like love. But all she had was bitterness and Joe was lost again.
" Why did you say that ? " he wanted Clare to apologise, he wanted her to see some other reason why he might be there. She turned her head to look at him.
" I thought maybe you were someone else, but you weren't." She spoke quietly, her voice was weary, her words were sad.
" Who ?"
" George, I thought you were George. " Her disappointment filled the room. Joe stood motionless, unable to move away from her rejection. There was more silence and Clare's eyes did not move away from his. Then she broke the spell, she was suddenly brusque and demanding like a tired, twisted old lady that needed his help.
" Build up the fire ! I'm cold. "
Joe obeyed, there was a pile of logs next to the hearth, chunks of rich,fresh wood coated in a grey brown bark that crumbled on his hands as he lifted them and balanced them carefully over the lightly burning ashes. There was a spitting and a crackling as the fire met the moistness of the logs and pale flames licked around their edges. Joe watched a while as the flames ran further over the logs, rose and darkened to a deep orange. He turned to Clare wanting her thanks but the old woman had fallen asleep, her hands relaxed over the curled ends of the chair arms and her head to one side. Joe looked at her sleeping face in the late sun. Her hair was like thick silver drawn back, her veined eyelids were closed on dreams of the past and her face was peaceful and beautiful beneath the dry lines of the many years she had seen. He wished he had seen all her years and could know the peace she felt, but his young life seemed to be destroyed as fast as it was lived in a chaos and fear he could not control. He left her sleeping.
Joe sat for many hours in the round turret room. He sat in the middle of the floor facing the window where night had fallen and a full moon had risen. Joe faced the moon and the moon faced Joe. And Joe tried hard to think about his life, but all his thoughts and all his life came to nothing and his mind was blank but for the many scars from many wounds whose unclear memories still haunted him. He looked at the grey scars on the moon and they too were fuzzed and unclear, but the moon was full and bright and a strong blue white light shone from it. Joe had no light. The moon sat high in its kingdom of black velvet and a million stars. Joe had no kingdom. He was empty and sitting cross legged on a floor. The light of the moon fell over him and he bowed his head to it, closed his eyes and listened to the moon's deep silence. Then he opened his eyes again and the shadows and shapes of everything in the room stood out in the blue white light and he looked at them all and was filled with their strangeness and the mystery of the round room took away his emptiness.
He saw the opened Russian doll and all her toppled daughters, the blue and white willow patterned punch bowl filled with dark earth, and the broken faced, hollow china bride. He saw the old school desk under the window and the shells, elaborate and beautiful, looking lost on the floorboards where there should have been the soft sand of the sea bed. It was too dark to make out the painting on the wall but Joe remembered the dark waves and the stars that shone from both the sky and the ocean. He saw the Noah's Ark and all the wooden animals around it two by two. Last of all his mind fixed on the jigsaw puzzle and he recognised himself and his life in the thousand pieces piled and scattered on the floor, unlinked and disordered and making no sense. He spread the pile with the flat of his hand, turned all the pieces picture side up and made a separate pile of the edged ones. He found the four corners and held them in the palm of his hand.
"
Chapter Four Part One
STARSHINE
So Clare sat and Joe stood and they were silent.
" I'm not dead yet. You'll have to come back another day. " Her voice was penetrating.
" That's not why I came. " said Joe, but he was unsure why he had come. He knew he did not want her to die. But to have driven there without knowing he would arrive there. And to arrive there without knowing what it was he wanted. He wanted some kind of response, a recognition by Clare of him that would be solid and real and something like love. But all she had was bitterness and Joe was lost again.
" Why did you say that ? " he wanted Clare to apologise, he wanted her to see some other reason why he might be there. She turned her head to look at him.
" I thought maybe you were someone else, but you weren't." She spoke quietly, her voice was weary, her words were sad.
" Who ?"
" George, I thought you were George. " Her disappointment filled the room. Joe stood motionless, unable to move away from her rejection. There was more silence and Clare's eyes did not move away from his. Then she broke the spell, she was suddenly brusque and demanding like a tired, twisted old lady that needed his help.
" Build up the fire ! I'm cold. "
Joe obeyed, there was a pile of logs next to the hearth, chunks of rich,fresh wood coated in a grey brown bark that crumbled on his hands as he lifted them and balanced them carefully over the lightly burning ashes. There was a spitting and a crackling as the fire met the moistness of the logs and pale flames licked around their edges. Joe watched a while as the flames ran further over the logs, rose and darkened to a deep orange. He turned to Clare wanting her thanks but the old woman had fallen asleep, her hands relaxed over the curled ends of the chair arms and her head to one side. Joe looked at her sleeping face in the late sun. Her hair was like thick silver drawn back, her veined eyelids were closed on dreams of the past and her face was peaceful and beautiful beneath the dry lines of the many years she had seen. He wished he had seen all her years and could know the peace she felt, but his young life seemed to be destroyed as fast as it was lived in a chaos and fear he could not control. He left her sleeping.
Joe sat for many hours in the round turret room. He sat in the middle of the floor facing the window where night had fallen and a full moon had risen. Joe faced the moon and the moon faced Joe. And Joe tried hard to think about his life, but all his thoughts and all his life came to nothing and his mind was blank but for the many scars from many wounds whose unclear memories still haunted him. He looked at the grey scars on the moon and they too were fuzzed and unclear, but the moon was full and bright and a strong blue white light shone from it. Joe had no light. The moon sat high in its kingdom of black velvet and a million stars. Joe had no kingdom. He was empty and sitting cross legged on a floor. The light of the moon fell over him and he bowed his head to it, closed his eyes and listened to the moon's deep silence. Then he opened his eyes again and the shadows and shapes of everything in the room stood out in the blue white light and he looked at them all and was filled with their strangeness and the mystery of the round room took away his emptiness.
He saw the opened Russian doll and all her toppled daughters, the blue and white willow patterned punch bowl filled with dark earth, and the broken faced, hollow china bride. He saw the old school desk under the window and the shells, elaborate and beautiful, looking lost on the floorboards where there should have been the soft sand of the sea bed. It was too dark to make out the painting on the wall but Joe remembered the dark waves and the stars that shone from both the sky and the ocean. He saw the Noah's Ark and all the wooden animals around it two by two. Last of all his mind fixed on the jigsaw puzzle and he recognised himself and his life in the thousand pieces piled and scattered on the floor, unlinked and disordered and making no sense. He spread the pile with the flat of his hand, turned all the pieces picture side up and made a separate pile of the edged ones. He found the four corners and held them in the palm of his hand.
"
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