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.