STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter four                                                                                                          Part twelve



                 The sun was hot and the sky was clear.    The village watched me as I walked over its green with my hat box and bible.  I stopped at he well.  I stood beneath its peculiar conical roof and I peered down  through its calm darkness but its bottom was lost beneath its many ancient secrets and lovers' wishes that seemed to call back to me silently and wish me well.
                I strode past the duck pond. The ducks eyed me and drifted towards the edge of the water in case I carried some bread or cake, but when they saw that my pathway was to pass them by and that all I carried was my own good fortune, they quickly turned their heads away and floated back to the centre of the pool, trying to cover their foolishness by shamming their indifference.
               Once through the village I stopped at a fork in the road and I sat down to rest below a signpost that pointed to Salisbury.  A milk cart loaded up with a neat, square squadron of silver churns and drawn by two sturdy white horses, clopped towards me and stopped.
                The ride to Salisbury was cheery.  The driver was a rosy faced man, fat as butter and always laughing.  I listened to his laughter and his stories.  I made little reply to his chatter.  I had no stories of my own. My recent past was muddied and confused.  I had not experienced the contentment that chronicles time and its events.  Time and events had not crystallised in my mind, it was all behind a mist.  So I listened to my fellow traveller and absorbed.  He delighted in his world and its timing of night and day, moon and sun and seasons.  His happiness made me happy.






                  At the rail station I waited in the queue at the ticket office.  My appearance was causing interest.  I could feel the sideways glances coming from all directions.  I tried to imagine how I looked, was it my dress, my hat box, my bible, or was it just that I was alone ?  I felt no shyness, only pride and an excited self-righteousness.  I could not find fault in my action and situation.  My intuition and my instincts were guiding me and their guidance could not be doubted, to possess them at last made me powerful, untouchable.  I no longer feared the world, I had gained complete control over myself and my life.  I looked around me and met the gazes of families, couples, maiden aunts, army officers and town clerks and I realised it was not my appearance or situation, it was the way I was inside, it shone from my eyes and showed on my face.  They turned their heads aside uneasily, still disturbed but dismissive, like the ducks in the village pond.
                  I came to the head of the queue and pushed my bible through the gap beneath the window.  The mousey, bespectacled clerk looked up at me astounded.  I smiled. I told him to make me out a single ticket to a place of his choice, somewhere along the route of the next train due to leave, as far as he thought the bible was worth. He ran his hands over the leather binding and he opened it up and saw the beautiful script.  I could see that he would be proud to own such a bible, to be passed down through his family and have it known that it was he who had acquired it.  He looked up at me, his bright button eyes filled with excitement and his mouth and moustache stretched wide across his face in a smile that was wider than any smile he had ever smiled.  Suddenly monotony and routine had become quirky and daring.  He hid the bible hurriedly beneath the counter and checked over his shoulder that no other clerk or higher authority had witnessed the act.  I watched him scribble ink over a ticket. His small mouses hands were attached to white shirt sleeves held back with metal bands.  He passed the ticket under the window and winked.
                I boarded the train.
                The train raced happily through green hills, trailing its grey smoke behind it.  I sat with my hat box on my lap and looked out of the carriage window, unbothered by folks' spying glances.  I put my fingers up to my throat and touched the pearls.  I thought of my mother in law and her mother in law before her.  The scene at the dressing table on the day of my engagement came clearly to me.  I wanted to weep at my ignorance.  I recalled the broken woman  All she had was a life that longed for death, the smell of gin and eau de cologne and a chance to save me and I denied her.  But I would wear her string of tears in her memory and in the memory of the woman before her, in remembrance of their deaths and my reprieve.
                        The train ran on and I watched as my beautiful Wiltshire and its summer passed by and was gone.