STARSHINE , THE SEA AND THE UNICORN.
Chapter Four                                                                                                           Part six




                ..........White marshland of wet, chalk mud and pale reeds that rattled like dry bones in a soft breeze.  Through the marsh ran a great river, slow and wide, its water clouded white like thin milk.  I saw a figure swimming down the centre of the wide river and seeing that the figure was me I then became the swimmer.  I stopped swimming and looked around me, gently treading the warm, fetid water.  My dress and petticoats billow up around my shoulders while my underwear dragged at my body.  The air was moist and heavy to breath.  The sun, though hidden in the bright white of the sky, scorched my face and a hot wind rippled the surface of the milky water.
                    I saw I was the same distance from each far shore.  I had to choose, but the more I tried the more a choice escaped me.  The harder I tried to think the more vacant my head became.  My mind emptied and numbed.  Time slowed and distorted, long minutes stretched by before I moved and when I did it was fear that chose my direction.  My powers of mind and spirit had been paralysed and taken from me, in their place was fear.  Fear filled me, it poured itself into me and weighed me down.  I sensed evil in the water.  I swam towards the marshes.  I swam hard and fast though my fear pulled me down and the water thickened.  The whiteness of the river concealed the evil, I was blind to its whereabouts and in my panic I sensed it to be all around me and beneath me, gaining on me all the time.  I swam with an insane strength in a frenzied attempt to escape it, though I held no belief    that I could.
                    I turned my head quickly to look back and I saw the crocodile in the middle of the river where I had been treading water, before fear had pushed me on.  I was paralysed by its cold, reptilian stare.  I knew the crocodile to be the bearer of my husbands soul.  The crocodile and my husband were one and the same.  Its vast body darkened the water, only its wicked eyes and long nose stood out above the surface and I knew that beneath the water it was grinning as it faced me.  Its stillness was absolute and so was mine.
                     After my panicked swim there was some distance between the crocodile and myself, but I was scared to continue my race for the marshes because if I moved so would the crocodile and as soon as my back was turned, in two flicks of its massive tail I would be its victim, snapped and crushed in its jaws.  Although I could already see my blood spilling and turning the white water pink as I died, fear again chose for me and I did turn and swim for the marshes.  With every stroke my body became heavier and the water thicker, but still I swam with a speed that came from madness.  I dared not look behind me for I knew the crocodile to be swimming slowly at my heels to prolong my agony, to tease my futile desperation and to ridicule my need to survive.
                   Exhausted I reached the marshes.  I clutched a the reeds and slid from the mud.  I scrabbled and I screamed, waiting for my legs to be torn from my body.
                   Time escaped me and without knowing how or why, my body was still whole and my legs were standing on firm ground.  Only then did I look back and see that the crocodile had not moved from its spot in the middle of the river.  Its evil eyes and ugly grin still faced me.  I stared back.  My fear turned to rage and my rage filled my body and made it strong.  I tore off my wet silk and lace and stood naked before the crocodile and when it saw that my naked body was a strong body it sank beneath the white water and when its dark shape disappeared the water cleared and reflected the sun in a cloudless sky.  I looked down and saw that the earth beneath my bare feet was dark brown while the reeds bore leaves of vivid green............. 


























 
























    
























  

ew           house                                  STARSHINE, THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN
Chapter four                                                                                                                 Part five






                    After our honeymoon I moved into my husband's town house, number seven Devonshire Street, off Portland Place.  It felt grand to live there.  It felt grand to walk up Portland Place, so wide and regal, lined on either side with a long terrace of solid, regal houses, tall and proud, deep and spacious, each containing its stairways and airy rooms of luxury and comfort.  I would hold my head and spirits high as I walked to the door of one of the same, as lady and mistress of such a house.  And it was so, that I walked to the door after each outing, whether I had been to a lady's for lunch or a friend's for tea, to a department store, a jewellers, a milliners, a furriers or a dress shop, I always walked proud and happy back to the door of number seven Devonshire Street.  Pride and happiness were appearances for myself, not for others, they were beliefs I carried right to the door and even beyond, where it was dark and I was humble, and nothing was mine.  The furniture was not mine, the food I ate was not mine, the clothes I wore were not mine, all were gifts for which I had to constantly show my gratitude.  The thoughts I thought and the words I spoke were not mine and for those too I had to be grateful and I was always in great debt to my husband for his guidance.  I thanked him, I honoured him and I obeyed him, but the debt was never paid and I was always humbled.  I fought every instinct and voice that cried inside me, I battled to stay numb and empty, so that I could continue to smile, to sparkle and to love and I succeeded with my hard held beliefs of pride and happiness.  My beliefs deadened truths and killed mistakes.  My beliefs locked and barred me, and condemned me to serve long years of pain and penance.  I suffered those years and was emptied and broken before truths were resurrected and mistakes came back to haunt.
                      It was dark inside my husband's house.  The ceilings, walls and carpets were all deep shades of brown.  The chairs were darkly upholstered and tables and cabinets were of the darkest woods.  If ever the sun managed to slant its way through the window the maid would quickly draw the curtains to keep all the darkness from fading.  The nights were sullen. I moved from one low gas glow to another, from the dimness of the drawing room to the darkened dining room where we ate our evening meals at a table, dimly lit with two small candles.  After dinner my husband would often go to his study and leave me alone as I had been left all day.  A strip of intense yellow light would shine out from beneath the study door, but I was locked out.  Sometimes I would wait a while in case I was invited in, but I never was, so I would retire to bed and each night in the pitch black hallway I would pass the mirror and think I was passing a ghost at the foot of the stairs.
                  The days passed and sometimes I felt like a hidden child whose existence was so secret that even her presence in a room was ignored, she could stand or sit or lie down and only ever be space and air. My husband had no need of me as the tall, grey man, his chauffeur and valet attended to his every need.  The grey man would sweep past me in the house, without a look or a word.  Only once did he look in my direction and I looked back at his grey uniform, grey skin and grey hair and I smiled , but he did not see because he was looking at the hat stand that stood behind me.
                            Every morning at nine o'clock sharp the grey man would start up the motor car and drive my husband to the university.  My husband was an important man of science, a doctor of chemistry and he led the way in important research.  I knew no more than that, all I knew was that every day I lost him to his laboratory and that I was left alone with the cook and the maid.
                      The cook was fat and ugly and the maid was thin and sharp.  I was frightened of them both.  They ran the house with no help from me.  My help was forbidden. Sometimes I would battle against my fears and summon up the courage to request a certain dish be served at dinner or that a vase be placed elsewhere and each time they would quickly turn aside and not hear me.  Like the grey man they had no voices and went about their tasks in silence.  Every meal was served to the minute, breakfast at eight, lunch at twelve and dinner at nine.  There was no tarnished silver and no speck of dust.  The house was perfect, ordered and exact.  Every picture, every ornament and every piece of furniture, everything had its place but me.
                   I was a loose end, a misfit.  I grew pale and anguished and would often take to my bed with sickness and fever.  I would think I was pregnant and in spite of my illness I would eagerly await the doctor's prognosis.  I longed to have children to nurse and to love, so that they could love me and know my worth.  I had failed as a wife and was desperate to prove myself as a mother.  But each time the doctor's prognosis was otherwise and on the last of his many visits he took my hand in his and told me gently that I would never bare a child.  His voice trembled and his words seemed to  cause as much pain in him as they did in me.  He was a plump man with a kind, ageing face and lots of fluffy white hair on his head and down the sides of his face.  His sad, dark eyes looked into me through my own as I wept and begged him not to tell my husband.  He read me as I could not read myself and there were tears in his eyes.  It was not clear to me why my husband's knowing of my sterility should terrify me so, but it was clear to the good doctor.  He left me to weep, I cried into the pillows, tears streamed and my heart screamed at my hopelessness and my failure.  I could hear
through the bedroom door as the two men met on the stairs.  They stopped and talked, my husband's voice was loud and confident, his spirits seemed high.  The doctor was terse with him as he spoke of my nervous disposition.  He told my husband that I was suffering from a severe melancholia and needed plenty of rest, but he kept his word and said no more.  I heard the front door close as the doctor left.  I was still weeping when my husband knocked at my door and then entered without being bidden.  His smile was broad, he sat on the bed and patted my hand, he seemed to be in ecstasy.  My stomach turned at his obscenity, but once again I pushed my intuition to the bottom of the well where it was lost deep in the darkness and I hated myself for having such cruel thoughts towards him when all he was trying to do was to lift up my spirits with a show of happiness and warmth.
                        Through my illness he lavished me with gifts and caresses.  He would sit in my room with his wide smile on his face and he would talk to me as though I was a five year old child.  I listened to banalities he thought I wished to hear and I listened to his servile flattery.  Then when I was tired he would tuck the sheets tight beneath my chin and kiss me on the forehead, before leaving me to sleep.  His obsequious warmth left me cold, but still I believed that to be no fault of his but the fault of my illness, and my illness was me.
                       I blamed my illness on my infertility, but it was my whole being that was barren.  Many weeks I lay in bed, stupefied, too scared to look inside or out.  Inside was black and hollow and outside was the empty life I had led, both were sterile. I would lie with my eyes wide open and staring, petrified like a creature of the forest so trapped by a predator I became senseless and unable to absorb my own danger as it rushed towards me.  My wide eyes would see my sickroom, but see nothing and sometimes they would glance inside down the deep, dark well but quickly look away again when memories of a past happiness would echo upwards from far down where it was black and sightless and out of reach.  Dark sensations rushed at me while my body lay ossified, turned to white stone.  My thoughts became wordless and my mouth became dumb.
                    A doctor was called, a young sallow faced man with thin brown hair and half moon glasses.  He was solemn and unmoved, he parted my lips and administered a tonic and he told me to buck up my ideas.  I immediately obeyed without question and seeing my obedience the doctor immediately left, leaving my husband at my bedside.  He stood over me, victorious.  His face quivered between a sneer and a smile.  I saw how tempted he was to lift the mask and reveal my defeat, but he was too wise, he knew the campaign must continue a while before his final victory was certain.  He masked his contempt with the sweetest of smiles.  I was overwhelmed by his ugliness, just as I had been once before, across a restaurant table in Paris.  I was not afraid of an ugly face, for an ugly face can be full of goodness.  It was my husband's soul that was ugly and he carried his soul on his face.  There was a darkness that shone from him, there was a menacing light in his eyes and each expression was a false contortion.  His trickery, his malice, his disdain and his dark wizardry were carried on his face, always, for all to see, but I chose not to look.  Once again I banished all traces of his ugliness from my thoughts because I had made a choice of acceptance and defeat.  I now accepted my life, its sterility, its emptiness and its defeat.   My acceptance and my defeat were official, they had been witnessed by both my husband and the young doctor.
               My husband sat on the bed and took my hand.  I could see nothing but kindness and caring in his wide smile.  He waited for me to speak, I could think of nothing so I broke my silence by asking why the old doctor had not been able to come.  He explained patiently that the old doctor was a fool and the younger one was the man that would cure me, had that not just been proved.  He tucked me up and kissed my forehead.  He told me to sleep tight as in the morning I would leave my sickbed and breakfast with him.  He turned out the lights and left me in blackness.
                            Exhaustion flooded me.  My head sank through the pillows while my body was so weak it seemed to float.  As I drifted towards sleep, faint echoes from inside me cried out at my folly and I knew I had done wrong.  I had let the young doctor dissuade me from a journey I should have faced.  A journey that would have led me through thick forests and dark floods, down slopes and valleys, across mountains and plains, much  climbing and falling and all in the deepest black of starless, moonless night and always stumbling and crawling under my heart's heavy burden of sorrow, horror and shame.  And then at my journey's end I would have found what I had lost and finding myself destitute, starving and mad I would accept my humiliation and therefore align myself  with the truth and step through the doorway of bright light.  But I knew nothing of  this, for my husband was too clever, the doctor too terse and I, too weak.  I had been recalled from the dark road and the terrors it held for me and there would be many dark nights with no moonlight or starlight to guide me, before I would again embark and complete the journey.  All I knew was that I wished sleep would wash over me and then drown me in the depths from where I would never wake and never breakfast with my husband.
                  I did wake.  It was in the early hours when night fades into a dull, leaden grey, heavy and oppressive.  I awoke from a dream, I was gripped in its urgency and there were long minutes while I struggled to separate the vision from the coming dawn.  The dream and the dawn would not be parted.  The feint echoes from deep inside had sent me a message in a dream.  I knew the message was of great import and must be kept at all cost, though its meaning was not yet clear.  I had not been released from the dream state and it was my subconscious that controlled my sleep-walking body as I wandered through the house in my nightgown, like a white ghost, in search of pen and paper.  The drawing room was dark grey with black shapes for furniture.  I sat the black shape that was the writing   desk and I turned the key.  I drew a sheet of white paper from a pile, dipped a pen in ink and began to write.  My hand and mind flowed with the vision but in the gloom my eyes were blind to the words I had written.  
























    
                














































































































































  

                                           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.   


























    


























         
























 
















































    















































             

                                             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.




























  






















                   









































































              
























  

                                      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.           



































































































  
























 


































































                                         

                                           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.                       
























      

                                      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.
























     
                   


























    




























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