Sheer Blue Bliss (15 page)

‘Yes.'

‘Think I'm a bit pissed.' She looks up at him, a teasing sideways look, ‘only a
bit.'

So now, if he wasn't Tony, what would happen? They would make another date. Presumably this counts as a date. They would both go off home, looking forward to next time. Or would she want it now, tonight, might she invite him back for coffee and kiss him while the kettle boils, take him to her bed, let him see and feel her naked skin? Would she do that? Stupid stupid girl when there are such monsters about. Tony is beyond it now but knows the danger. Sex. That is what it is about, sex or a promise, or sex and a promise or sex as a promise.

They have reached the tube station. They stop. ‘Well …' she says. ‘I'd better find a cab.' He doesn't look down but he can feel her eyes on his face. The top of her head comes only just above his shoulder, she's smaller than he thought and slight in that big coat. The thing that tightens his chest is almost tenderness, but tenderness shrivelled immediately by a blast of anger. Because he can't.

‘I'm … going away for a bit,' he blurts, ‘if not I'd …' What,
what
would he do?

‘Where?' Her voice is small, a sinking in it as if she's disappointed.

‘Norfolk,' he says.

‘Well, that's not the end of the world!'

Somehow she is in front of him now, somehow she has got his arms to go round her back. Her hair still smells – through the cling of smoke – faintly of almonds. It's like hugging a toy, the thick fake fur quite safe. Her arms tighten round his back. He has an idea.

‘I'm going to see Constance Benson … in connection with, you know …'

‘Your book? Lucky you. She's wonderful.'

He nods his face against her hair.

‘Trouble is, I'm not sure where I put the address, the directions …'

‘Driving?'

‘Train.'

‘But it's
miles
from any station – the back of beyond. Can't think what the nearest station … King's Lynn?'

‘Did you say you'd been there?'

‘Give us a minute,' she says. She lets him go and fishes in her bag for a notebook and pen. ‘Turn round.' She leans the notebook against his back and scribbles something. ‘There. Directions from the village anyway.' She comes round in front of him again, tears the page from her notebook and gives it to him. He puts it in his inside pocket. She waits for his arms again and he does it, grateful, relieved he's got what he wants, he gives her a hug.

‘Ring me when you get back?' she asks. And then, ‘Oh no!'

‘What?'

‘I've left my flowers … I put them down by the table … oh
no
…'

‘I'll get you some more,' he says into her hair, ‘next time.'

She's quiet for a minute. Can he feel her heart or is it his? ‘So there is going to be a next time?' she mumbles against his shoulder. ‘I thought …'

‘Next time,' he repeats, a sinking in his heart. A promise made and he hates to break promises, that's why he hardly makes them. Before he knows what's happened she's reached up and kissed him lightly on the lips. Soft brush of dry lips, barely warm, a pause when he could have kissed back, kissed properly, but didn't. She must have been on tiptoes, sinks down again. An empty cab comes round the bend. She leaps out, hand up, and it stops. Likes the way she did that, assertive, confident. As the taxi carries her away her fingers might have gone to her lips, she might have blown a kiss.

On the tube he takes out the scrap of paper. There's an address and instructions, go through Wisborough, past shop and straight down unmade-up road by sea, about one and a half miles. PS I fancy you! the exclamation mark fat as a balloon with a flower for the dot. So girly. So much the sort of thing his wife the nurse would do. Folds the note carefully and puts it in the breast pocket of his shirt. So. That is done, the test is passed and he is on his way. Need never see her again. Shuts his eyes.
Thanks, mate
, he mouths.

TWENTY-FIVE

On the 1st of May Connie rose with the sun. It was her sixteenth birthday. She pulled a sweater over her nightdress and tiptoed down the stairs of the still slumbering house. The clock in the hall tick-tutted, not five o'clock yet. She crept past the sleeping dog and slid her feet into Sacha's Wellingtons, cool and gritty inside to her bare feet. She opened the door and stepped outside. It had rained overnight and the world was clean rinsed for her, the bird-song in the shadowy trees rose to a crescendo as she stepped on to the soaking lawn and her heart lifted as if it too would sing.

She liked her birthday being on the 1st of May, a special day. Her mother used to tell her the story of how she had woken with labour pains at dawn on that day, how she had crept up and out and walked in the garden while father was still asleep, holding her hands around her big hard belly and talking to the baby that moved in there, the soon-to-be-born stranger. And when her mother had told her that Connie had felt that she almost remembered it, absurd of course, how could she? But it would have been just such a morning.

Connie pressed a hand on to the flat space where her womb was. Unbelievable that a child could ever grow in there.
We nearly called you May
, Mother used to tell her every year, but Father thought it too indefinite. May? Like a question. So they christened her Constance May.
Constance is definite, don't you think? And it suits you
. Constance would nod but privately wished she had been May, a taller girl, fairer, less serious, less constant. Only now, now that everything had changed, she wondered if she was different. She wondered if she knew herself at all.

She walked through the garden to the trees which were alive with the rustle and song of birds. She stopped and looked back at the house. The windows flashed in the rising sun. From the open door a trail of her own green boot marks was printed on the silvered lawn. This is my home, she thought. And I am Constance but not constant. I am more
May?
Patrick and Sacha are – not quite my family but my
people
now. What was the feeling that flooded her at that thought? Not sadness or loss or joy. Not even regret or gratitude. It was more a sort of hunger, but not a hunger for food or anything she could imagine.

She walked on between the beech trees. Up through the wood, spellbound by the stillness of it. Filaments of spider's web spun between the trees broke across her face. She stopped in a clearing beneath a great beech, her favourite tree. She looked up at its smooth grey trunk. There was a hole for an owl and dark tracings, too, that looked, if you wanted them to, like eyes. She put her face against the bark, not as smooth to touch as you'd think, pleasingly rough and cool. The sensation of the tree-trunk against her forehead and the flat of her palms filled her with calm. She stood for several moments like that pressing against the tree, in a daze or reverie, no particular thought in her head. And then she heard Patrick's voice: ‘Conn-ie, Co-on …'

Her first reaction was to hide. Why hide? Oh just that she was relishing her solitude. She turned her back to the tree and there he was, striding towards her up the path, pyjama trousers tucked into boots, shirt open, beard halfway down his chest.

‘Happy birthday,' he said. There was a dewdrop on the end of his nose.

‘How did you know where I was?'

‘Got up early. Glorious …' He gestured around him. ‘Door open … looked out … what do I see but a trail of little footprints? What could I do but follow?' She felt uneasy at the brightness of his eyes. ‘Follow a maiden into a wood at dawn on her sixteenth birthday and who knows what might happen. The 1st of May at that!'

‘Nothing will
happen,'
she said.

‘Sit down a minute.' He hunkered down beside her, his back against the tree. She looked down at the top of his head where the hair was thinning a bit, then lowered herself down beside him. ‘Don't worry,' he said.

‘I'm not.' They sat for a while, listening to the sounds of the woods, watching the sun strengthen enough to begin to penetrate between the leaves. Patrick moved himself far enough away from the tree to sprawl full-length. Connie drew her knees up to her chest, her nightdress pulled tightly over her knees. If she looked at his chest she could see the throb of his heart in the tender place below his breast-bone where the ribs splayed apart. Milk-pale skin, a scatter of freckles, the copper edge of a nipple fringed with black hairs. She wished she had not come out alone, wished she was in the kitchen with Sacha getting breakfast ready.

His eyes were closed. She was beginning to think he had fallen asleep but then he said, ‘When I was a child, I had a revelation.'

‘Oh?'

‘A chestnut tree struck by lightning, split … outside my bedroom window.' Connie waited for more, used by now to Patrick's ponderous way with a story. A breeze stirred the leaves above them.
I
am sixteen
, she thought, lifting her chin.
I
am a woman
. If anything the skin of Patrick's chest was blue and the leaf shadows rippled so lightly he could be underwater. Imagine that in paint. ‘I felt its distress,' he said, ‘as plainly, as obviously, as if it spoke to me in words. As if it cried.'

‘How did you?' Connie asked. Thinking, If I am a woman why do I feel just like a little girl?

‘Just felt it,' Patrick continued, ‘and knew that plants are sentient beings. Sentient beings. I have become convinced, of a higher order than the animal kingdom – in which I include
Homo sapiens
.'

‘Oh?'

‘Yes, Con, do I hear disbelief in your voice?'

‘No.'
Connie was glad his eyes were closed, she could let herself grin up at the dancing leaves. ‘Go on then.'

‘Our senses, for instance, take our five senses … discounting the others for now …' Connie settled herself more comfortably and stifled a yawn.

‘Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell … crude,
crude
mechanisms, Con.'

‘But,' she could not help herself, ‘they are the only way we … we know the world.
Know
it. How else can we know? And plants … Patrick! Plants don't have eyes, ears … they can't feel.' She saw that he was smiling, his eyes still closed, a small spider struggling in his beard.

‘I would submit,' he said, ‘that the five senses by which we … how did you put it?
Know
the world are precisely what stop us knowing it.'

Connie sighed and recognised in her own sigh the long-suffering note her mother had sometimes … when? … oh it is so sad the way the memory slips. Maybe when she was getting Alfie to explain how he had ripped the knees out of yet another pair of trousers. Her heart contracted and she lay down, let gravity draw her close to the earth.

‘These senses are but crude interpretations,' Patrick said. ‘They catch the most obvious blunt manifestations of existence, light … within a certain spectrum: colour … within a certain spectrum: sound … again within a certain spectrum. So we exist only within a certain spectrum. Doesn't mean that's all there is.' He waited but Connie said nothing, felt the hardness of the forest floor against her back, a twig digging into her hip. ‘Our senses are a primary method of perception only and limiting because most human beings are content with that much, that small amount of what there is. Most feel no need to search deeper for the whole
being
on a cellular level.'

‘I don't understand what that's got to do with plants,' Connie murmured, ‘but don't say more.'

‘The human brain is pathetically primitive in comparison with even the simplest of single-celled plants,' Patrick continued. ‘How much can your brain know at once? How much can it see, think, experience at once? Two things, three, fifteen? No matter. A single plant cell can know far more in one instant than you can ever hope to know in your entire life. That is why I am endeavouring to utilise the wisdom of plants in my elixirs … what I am doing, Connie, will revolutionise the way mankind experiences its world.'

‘Oh Patrick, how can you know what a plant knows?' Connie jumped up, impatient, brushed bits of leaf and twig off her sweater. ‘I'm going back for my breakfast. Coming?' She looked down at Patrick. He was wonderful, of course, in his original way – but he did go on a bit.

He opened his eyes. ‘I've bored you,' he said, getting up. ‘Bored you before breakfast and on your birthday, too! How can I repair the damage?' He put his hands together as if in prayer.

Connie laughed. ‘Not bored
exactly
.'

‘You little witch.'

‘I'm starving. Let's go.'

Patrick held her arm. ‘
Hush, wait
,' and as he spoke, the air rushed with silent wings, and there like a ghost looming through the trees towards them was a huge white bird. ‘Owl,' Patrick whispered, ‘snowy owl.' Connie waited with her mouth open as it flew, almost floated, by. They stood in silence for a moment, looking at the place where it had disappeared. ‘There's a birthday present for you,' Patrick said, his voice soft with awe. ‘I've heard that fellow many times but never seen him.'

‘Beautiful,' Connie said.

‘Yes.' Patrick turned and put a finger under her chin. ‘Sixteen,' he said. ‘How does it feel?' He had sleep in the corners of his eyes. She wondered if she did too, blinked. How oddly fascinating to be so close to another person, close enough to smell him, to see every pore in his skin, every separate hair in his long soft beard, the hairs all black or white, none of them grey. And suddenly she felt very naked underneath her nightdress.

‘Don't know yet. No different.'

He let her go. Her gaze fell to his belly, the soft hairs that grew there and a stiff slant under the striped material of his pyjama trousers. She could not pull her eyes away.

‘Yes?' The thing twitched. Her face flooded with dark blood. ‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘I wouldn't touch you for the world, not without your say so. But you can see what it thinks of you.'