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By Root 562 0

strangers, the words waiting to be said, but soon it would be different, she was quite sure of that. She wished he could catch a fragrance from her hair or the folds of her sensible dress, that he would hold her hand as he had done so fleetingly in the wardrobe, that he would look at her searchingly; she was so anxious for the love story to begin. The gates were still there, set back from the road, the carved griffins on their stone posts beside the entrance, the lodge through the iron bars, windows encircled by ivy and a tree growing close to the wall. But when she ran to look through the gates into the house she couldn’t see into the room. In some way the lodge had retreated further into the trees.

‘There was a stuffed hen,’ she cried, ‘with a yellow beak.’

‘Hens,’ he said, ‘are cunning birds. Why, we had a hen at home that sat on a chair by the fire and never gave up. Not if you poured water over it.’

‘Have you got pets at your house, then?’

‘No, we have a dog and a goat and a mare, but we don’t have no pets.’

She was mad for the way he said ‘dawg’, like he was a movie star, larger than life.

‘I had a rabbit called Timoshenko. I kept my nightie in it.’

‘You what?’

‘It was a bag with ears, for me nightie. Auntie Nellie made it me. When I got the measles she sent it to a children’s home in case it was infected.’

He shook his head, either in sympathy or because he didn’t understand. He stood, scuffing his feet on the gravel, watching the cars as they drove past. After a moment he said, ‘What we going to do now – now that we’re here?’

‘Just walk,’ she said. ‘We can’t get in there, it’s private.’

She tried to think where the cornfield grew, in which direction, beyond the woods or up the road. She didn’t want to go ahead of him lonely any more, so she ran across the road and scrambled down into the ditch, climbing up on to the far bank with her shoes soaked and her stockings splashed with mud.

‘It’s a helluva place to go,’ he said, looking at her across the ditch.

He stayed on the path, separated from her, as she tore a trail through the puddles of water and patches of bramble. She was amazed at the amount and variety of plants that grew in the woods, quite apart from the trees – the quantity of thorn bush and briar that assailed her on every side. It only made her the more determined; she wasn’t put out.

‘There’s a cornfield,’ she cried, keeping up with him as he sauntered along the pavement with his hands in his pockets. ‘My dad took me when I was little for a picnic.’

He stopped quite still to look at her.

‘Your dad?’

It had slipped out, it wasn’t any part of them. She dragged her feet through the mud and wondered what Auntie Nellie would say about the state of her stockings. I fell off a tram, she thought, and a dog got at me. In spite of the worry, she began to laugh. It was daft to try and get away with it. She could see her aunt’s eyebrows slanting upwards like a Chinaman, bewildered: ‘You fell off a tram?’ Her eyebrows, grey like her hair, save at the tips which were tinged with brown, inscrutably raised in disbelief. ‘I was pushed from behind, Auntie Nellie, and then this spaniel worried me.’ Like in the English lessons at school, finding the most suitable word for the occurrence.

She gave little high-pitched gasps for breath, on her side of the ditch, treading the blackberries underfoot, her hair sliding down out of the brassy Kirby grips, and he said: ‘You gone crazy or something?’

‘I’m thinking of me Auntie Nellie and what she’ll make of the state I’m in.’

‘You look fine to me.’

He had said it, he had noticed her. The journey on the bus, when he had so cruelly closed his eyes to shut her out, no longer mattered. The trees ended: ahead, splayed out under the weak sunshine, three acres of corn, uncut because of the bad weather, pale brown under a sky filled with frayed white clouds.

Marge had asked Nellie to call at the corner shop on Breck Road for her ciggies. She was going to have a bite of tea with a girl from work and the shop would be closed by the time she came home. Nellie thought it