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.