STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter four




                                                                              Part  ten






                     At Salisbury station an army car collected my husband and drove him away.  I was left to be driven to the cottage in an army lorry, along with all our boxes and trunks.  We drove through Salisbury's pretty streets and out into the countryside.  I looked back at the Cathederals' tapering spire until it was out of sight.
                   I sat happily next to my silent driver, a young soldier, as we chugged through many miles of narrow country roads.  I peered over the hedgerows and found enchantment.  Wiltshire was a hazy summer's morning swollen with dew.
                   We came to a village that was a mixture of grey-brown stone and red brick, there were thatched rooves and latticed windows.  It had a squat, norman church, a village green, a duck pond and an old well with a low, circular wall around it and a little roof like a conical hat.
                     Two miles up the road from the village was a cottage of white walls and green ivy.  It was tucked in the fold of two hills and its small, deep set windows looked out to gentle slopes of patchwork fields and red roofed farmsteads.  There was a large vegetable garden with a pathway through it to the cottage door.  Orange and yellow nasturtiums grew on either side of the doorstep.
                     I sat in the parlour on one of the trunks.  Boxes were stacked all around me.  The lorry and its driver had left and I was alone.  The flagstone floors kept the cottage cool while outside the summer's heat was rising.  The coolness grew cold and a chill shivered through my bones.  I had at last found a home but I was lost in it.  Memories of warmth were too old, I could see and touch but I could not hold, I was still lost, I was still cold.  Then Lettie came.
                  I heard her bicycle on the pathway.  I looked up and there she was, sanding before the open doorway, her hands still holding her handle bars.  Her eyes were the blue of a cloudless sky and her hair was like sunlight on corn.  She propped her bicycle against the wall and entered, bringing her sunlight with her.
                            " Ello Missus.  I'm Lettie, I'm from the village.  I'm to cook and clean for you while you're here. "
                 Her accent was west country, full and rounded and good, like orchards of shiny red apples and dairies where rich yellow butter is churned.
                                                                            " Shall we start with the boxes then missus ? "
                                                                                                                                                         She had already started to pull books from the tea chests before I could find my voice and utter a shy agreement.  It was not fear but Lettie's warmth that made me shy.  I had not felt so much warmth so near to me for so long.  I had nothing inside me to give out, nothing to return, so I absorbed what Lettie had brought to me and deep inside I felt the slow loosening of chains and the quiet slipping of bolts, a hushed and timid awakening that must not yet be heard for fear that the chains would again be tightened and the doors would again be locked and bolted.  Lettie smiled at me and her young , honest face seemed to understand.  She did not mind that I was shy, it made no difference to her.  To Lettie life was rosy and uncomplicated, her simplicity was strong and just.  Nobody could take away her warmth, nothing could deny her her goodness.
                She began stacking books willy nilly on dusty shelves, spines were back to front and titles were upside down.  I tried to tell her of my husband's intolerance of disorder and dust.  She laughed and said he could sort it out himself, why should the two of us stay in longer than we need when the sun was shining outdoors.  Her cheerful militancy elated me and my heart sang as I scooped up armfuls of books and did the same.
               Lettie found my hatbox and she lifted it gently from the bottom of the tea chest.
                                                                                                                                               " Oh missus, " she said, " This is a heavy hat. "
                                                                   I looked up at her shyly and again she could see my thoughts.
                  " Its a secret isn't it Missus: Like a secret wish. "
                                                                                                I nodded silently. I was embarrassed, but Lettie's smiling eyes told me that such secrets were precious and should be treasured.  Her acceptance of my secret made me want to share it with her, but she stopped me as I opened my mouth.
                                                                                                                                                   "No, no Missus " she said, " This is your very own and you must keep it hidden. Secret wishes don't ever come true if they're told.  When a secret is broken its magic is broken too and a life is made unhappy.  Everyone has secrets, its not normal not to have secrets. "
                                                                                              She looked down at the large hat box in her hands and her eyes were full of admiration.
                                                                             " Besides this is a powerful good secret, I can feel its goodness. "
                   Se handed it to me,
                                                  " Here, you take it !  I've got an idea.  Follow me ! "
                  I followed her upstairs, carrying my hat box and I was proud of it and the secret it held I was proud of myself for being the sole owner of such a powerful secret.  We entered the bedroom of white sloping walls and dark, heavy beams.  Lettie took a bunch of keys from the top of a chest of drawers.  At the foot of the bed there was a deep draw beneath the mattress, she found the right key and opened it.  I placed the hat box reverently inside and we both watched it disappear as Lettie closed it away safely.  She turned the key twice and then detached it from the ring.  She put the bunch back on the chest of drawers and went downstairs with the single key.  I followed her, excited by our merry plotting and our joining together in mild treachery.  I felt wonderful, I felt released.  Lettie had already taught me that to hide oneself was not bad but good, to be hidden was to be free.  My dark years in London had been dark but free, my spirit had hidden itself so well that not even I had been able to find it.  Now Lettie had found it for me and it was still whole, it had never been captured and it had never been broken.
                              I followed Lettie into the kitchen, past the scrubbed wood table and out into the larder.  There were shelves upon shelves of jars upon jars of preserves and honey.  Lettie took a large jar of honey from the back of the shelf, she untied its string and folded back its piece of muslin, she dropped in the key watched its slow sinking through thick, clear liquid bronze.  It reached the bottom, Lettie tied on the muslin and replaced the jar at the back of the shelf.  We both noted its exact position. 
                                                                                                                                            " There ! " she said, " If he's the fusspot you say he is he won't be lookin' to plunge his hands down jars of honey and gettin' them all sticky.  You just tell 'im that key's lost when he wants the drawer open, 'ee  won't be none the wiser."
                  We set about the rest of the trunks and hung clothes haphazardly in wardrobes or folded them away in drawers.  When we had stacked away the empty trunks and boxes Lettie sighed with satisfaction.  In her opinion the job was done.
                  " C'mon Missus ! Let's go and find Tom."  She took me by the hand and led me out of the back door.  We ran across two fields.  Lettie ran in front, her hand still holding mine.  She was taller and sturdier than I, her body was strong and powerful while mine was frail.  At first it was her strength that pulled me and I stumbled along behind, but then her strength seemed to feed mine and an energy was suddenly awakened and alive and I bounded along at her side, smiling wildly.  We came to a wooden shack at the far end of the second field and we stopped there and fell to our knees in the long grass, laughing and gasping for breath.
                                                                           " Who'd 'ave thought we were two grown women" said Lettie.  But of course we were not and neither did we ever wish to be.  We were still girls and I guessed Lettie was even younger than I.
                    To be kneeling in the grass, breathless and happy under a hot, yellow sun in a summer sky reminded me of the fated day I mindlessly walked away from my engagement party.  I closed my eyes and banished time so that I had never  left the man in the woods and there had been no going back to my husband's black shadow.  I heard Lettie's voice calling ,
                                                                                         "Tom ! Tom !Where are you? Come out Tom !"
               I opened my eyes to find that I had married a black shadow and lost the man in the woods.  But now it was the summer in the country and I was safe with Lettie.  I looked up and there she stood outside the shack, a tall, gangling lad at her side, his head hanging awkwardly towards his great long feet.  Lettie  had a firm grip on his elbow to stop him from running away or curling into a ball and trying to hide himself on the ground. 
                                                            " This is Tom Missus.  'Ee does the garden.  Ee takes so terrible  shy when new people come to the cottage, 'ee always goes 'n hides himself.  Ee's a deaf mute Missus.  Ee lives in this shack.  Ee stays away from the village 'cos they make 'im the idiot there.  But ee's no idiot Missus.  There aint nothin' ee don't know about the soil or what it can grow.  'Ee'll know a  frost or a thunder storm three days afore it 'appens.  There's wisdom inside this one the rest of us can't even guess at. "
              His clothes were faded and patched and his untidy hair was the colour of straw.  He would not have heard me if I had said hello, so I went up to him and reached up to touch his bristled cheek.  He raised his head a little, his hazel eyes were like saucers and as they looked at me his face widened with glee and his idiot smile reflected my own.  
                         The day passed by, Tom in the garden and Lettie and I in the house and all the while my sleeves were rolled up and my hands were busy potato peeling, washing or scrubbing and topping and tailing gooseberries and beans.  My hands moved with a speed and fever that disregarded the years they had lain in my lap, idle and sad, excluded and forbidden from work.  But then as the day drew to its close an army car drove up to the gate and my husband was home.
                        I was rolling down my sleeves as I met him at the door.  He stared at my hands, they were pink from the cold water.  His eyes bored into mine.  Then he looked at the low ceiling and the walls that closed in around him.  First he was silent and his silence was as heavy as my guilt.  Then the tantrum began and all my awakening was once again dead and all his evil was turned towards me and laid at my feet disguised as my own guilt and wrong doing.  And as always I believed myself to be the cause of all this unhappiness, I believed my hopelessness to be the cause of his rage and without ever understanding the evidence I would plead guilty and I believed my plea, and while his justice was realised my body was again emptied of everything but its crying and trembling.  As I knelt on the floor and wept I heard bicycle wheels on the path outside. Lettie had gone. 
                 I awoke alone, hazy and frail, still awash with tears and sleep.  It was late in the morning.  The sun shone in the room and over the white sheets.  It warmed me and put its strength into my body.  I remembered my hat box locked away in the drawer beneath me and that too warmed me and filled me with strength.  I threw back the sheets, I ran downstairs, through the kitchen and out into the garden and I dragged my bare feet through the cold, dewy grass.  I looked up and saw Lettie and Tom. They had been picking peas and their baskets were full.  They stood and looked at me in my  nightgown.  I grinned and they grinned back at me.  Lettie was back.  The day was here and the night was gone.                                      
                And so the days and nights passed through the summer.  The days were glorious and the sun made me strong.  I would work in the garden with Tom or in the house with Lettie and when we were not working we would run off into the fields and walk for miles up hill and down dale, down lanes, through woods and across streams, and all the time there was laughter.  Lettie showed me all my heart had forgotten.  I rediscovered the excitement and the wild happiness I had left behind me with my childhood and my brothers.  But each evening the sun went down and with it went my companions.   
                 The nights were cruel.  My husband's moods would twist and turn and my frightened responses would twist and turn with them.  He was the puppet master and the strings that attached me to him were my beliefs that he loved me and I loved him.  Yet all the while he operated those strings with his hatred and the knots were so great and the strings so taught that my thoughts and emotions became rigid and were no longer thoughts and emotions but just a rigidity that was deaf, dumb and blind and there was nothing to see, hear or say until sleep finally found its way to me and the apricot seed sent me its dreams.