The Girl Green as Elderflower (10 page)

‘Oh God, yes. Old Pickers and his country pieties. He’d be proud of you. Well, Clare, I did say I wouldn’t keep you.’

‘On Saturday, then,’ Clare said. ‘Matt—I’m very glad you rang.’

‘So am I,’ said Perry. ‘It’s been æons, C.C. In case you’ve forgotten me, I’ll be wearing the
Financial Times.
Till then.’

Putting down the receiver, Clare stood watching the little rabbit in the new grass and the weeds. A jay, with a flash of blue from its wing, swooped threatening near, and the bundle of fur threw itself up in fright, then vanished into the lilac hedge.

When he had washed and breakfasted, Clare went out into the pigeon-moaning garden. In its rough meadow-grass daffodils were beginning to fade, and a few tulips were fiercely agape. The one part of it which he tended was crammed with wallflowers, and their scent came almost violently to his reformed smoker’s nose.

A tractor came racketing down the hill on the road leading to the farmhouse, and John waved and bawled: ‘How do.’ The farm’s Alsatian was loping beside, but with a change of interest made off to see Clare, leaping the gate which was closed against ponies. Clare bent to pat the hard body squirming against his legs, and said as his face was flannelled with a tongue: ‘Dead soppy, aren’t you?’

With the big dog prancing ahead, he crossed the stream and took the farm track towards the marsh, between the green-misted wood and a hedgerow frosted with blackthorn flowers. At the edge of the wood, leaning out over the green road, a tall wild cherry caught the breath with its drifts of white bloom. He stood and stared up at it, the sight of its smooth limbs like a tactile pleasure, while now and again a papery flower fluttered down.

There was a crash in the hedgerow, and turning, he saw among primroses the Alsatian’s rear-end, violently absorbed. Then the dog bounded back, and he caught a glimpse of crimson, a flash of metallic viridian from the neck-feathers of the pheasant. Before he could think, the bird was crunched down, bolted, gone. Only a wing remained, hanging hideously from the dog’s jaws.

‘Oh, you horror,’ he groaned. ‘Oh, you shuck-dog, you.’

He was afraid that the dog would choke, and moved to help her. But she gulped a few times, and the wing with its coarse feathers disappeared. She stood for a while with an air of thoughtfulness, then ambled off preoccupied towards her home.

Clare walked on to the marsh, where the dank green was yellow-starred with celandine, white-starred with stitchwort, and where catkins hung from the willows. It had been his own cock-pheasant, he felt sure, the constant visitor which had marched so masterfully under his windows. What at one time would have sickened him he could now once more take with calm. It was the way of the green god.

That evening he walked with Alicia through the dusk for an early drink at the Shoulder of Mutton. As they took the path through the churchyard he noticed a woman standing among the headstones, and even in the dim light recognized her by the ghostly fairness of her hair.

In a low voice he asked Alicia: ‘Do you see that girl? Do you know who she is?’

Alicia glanced as they passed her, but said: ‘No, I don’t. Of course, her back was turned, but her figure wasn’t at all familiar. I should have remembered that hair.’

‘Mark thought she was an au pair at Lady Munby’s.’

‘I’m sure she’s not. I noticed the current au pair because she’s Swedish and she’s dark, which surprised me. But she might be the au pair’s chum. And then, other people besides Lady Munby have them.’

‘She made a definite impression,’ Clare said, as they passed out at the other gate, ‘on Jim-Jacques.’

‘Oh, Jim-Jacques,’ said Alicia enthusiastically. ‘That dishy man. Lucy was besotted with him. We missed him sorely for a while. Do you hear from him?’

‘Yes,’ Clare said, ‘he’s written once. He’s living in a shack in the woods in Maine. Everything’s still under snow there, and he gets about on skis. He hasn’t a car. We’ve met a prodigy: a penniless American.’

‘I wish he’d come back,’ Alicia said. ‘Lucy, and Mikey too, found him very comforting. Tell him that.’

‘He’d like to know,’ said Clare; and they strolled on towards the pub’s welcoming windows, which stared Old Shuck-like through the twilight, hellfire-red.

On the station’s breezy platform, with a wide view over the fields, Clare ran into John. ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘have you taken to travelling?’

‘I suppose this is how you dress when you go up to Lunnon,’ said John. He was wearing muddy blue overalls tucked into his Wellingtons, and his hair, which always looked as if it should have straw in it, did have some. ‘I’m meeting my sister,’ he explained. ‘You know, Mildred, she work in the Post Office.’

‘Is she your sister?’ Clare said. ‘It would take me years to sort out the Swainstead families.’

The signals changed, and the train rattled in, to halt at the opposite platform. Doors slammed, but nobody could be seen until the whistle sounded and the train was off again. Then a handful of people began to cross the walkway over the lines, and among them Clare recognized Mildred, with two small children at her skirts. Behind her walked a man in a leather jacket and cavalry twill trousers, carrying an incongruous and expensive briefcase.

Clare went down the platform, giving Mildred a greeting as he passed, towards the man in the leather jacket. The man’s face had a respectable gravity, it was a face designed for strangers. All at once it was split by a crazy white grin.

‘Clare,’ Perry said, and crushed the hand which was offered to him. Clare remembered the bleak grey of his eyes, and how suddenly they could come alight.

There were people who thought Matthew Perry a handsome young man. With the adolescent Perry Clare’s own mother had been somewhat smitten. To Clare himself it had always seemed that there was something faintly simian about his friend, about the long-armed athletic body and the almost too expressive features. Matthew Perry was a nutter, his contemporaries said, sensing in him uncomfortable reserves of emotion. But to his elders, paradoxically, it had always been his control which impressed, his relentless working towards any object he had chosen.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘here we are, old Clare.’

‘Yes, here we are,’ said Clare, inanely, and wondered what else to say. Nothing had changed, only faces had firmed, perhaps hardened.

‘Cris,’ John called out, ‘do you want a ride hoom, boy? The gaffer lend me the Landrover today.’

‘No, thanks, John,’ Clare called back. ‘We’re going to get some exercise.’

Perry’s gaze was sharp and amused, watching John and Mildred depart. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘I fancy that blue-eyed ploughboy.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Clare, puzzled, and then realized. ‘Oh Jesus. I thought you’d have grown out of that.’

‘I cause no scandal,’ Perry promised him. ‘Come on, let’s go “hoom”, as he calls it.’

Out of the shadow of the station the sun was palely bright. The yards and the embankment were tangled with flowering periwinkles, an elusive blue fleeting into mauve. They walked by a line of poplars, whose translucent new leaves overhead glowed auburn. Across a field of young beans were the outbuildings of a substantial farm, and the patterned brickwork of their walls stirred a memory in Clare, until he remembered his prep-school days in Western Australia, where the early settlers had seemed to have a passion for such games with bricks, which he thought he had heard called diapering.

They climbed a stile and took a footpath skirting raw cornfields, beside hedgerows white with blackthorn and may. Then they were out in a marshy field, being stared at by lumpish Friesian cattle, some of which strayed after them to the earth dike bounding the river. There a breeze, smelling of the sea, bent the rushes, and as they crossed a short bridge a great cob-swan hissed at them haughtily.

Plodding up a hill, growing short-winded, Perry said: ‘Someone spread a rumour that Suffolk was flat.’

‘That int,’ Clare said. ‘I ride a pushbike, so I know.’

At another stile, near the top of the rise, he paused and said: ‘Take a breather, Matt.’ From where they stood a footpath ran diagonally down a new barley field to the level of the valley again. ‘You can’t see the farm yet,’ he said, pointing, ‘but it’s around the corner of that wood.’

The trees below would later darken and have, in the humid summer air, a tinge of blue, almost black. But now all was softest green and silver, except where, far off, there flared the chrome yellow of a mustard field. Between willows, the distant river meandered towards the next village, whose high church tower was flying a huge flag, a vermilion cross on white. ‘St George’s Day,’ Clare realized. ‘Happy birthday, Shakespeare.’

Perry pulled out cigarettes, then slapped his sides. ‘Got a light, C.C.?’

Clare felt in the pocket of his donkey-jacket, then remembered that he did not smoke. ‘Sorry,’ he said. But Perry had found what he wanted, a gold Dunhill lighter, and leaned on the stile ebbing blue clouds.

Clare stared at what he had found in his pocket. Of course, a pack of cards could not stay intact for long in a household containing Mikey.

‘What’s that?’ Perry asked, hoisting himself on to the stile. When he was settled, Clare handed it to him.

A man with a staff in one hand, the other gripping a bundle on a stick, was making his way across what looked like an ill-prepared beet-field. A dog was clawing at his rump, and seemed already to have destroyed his breeches. Beneath was written: LE MAT. THE FOOL.

‘Mikey,’ Clare said. ‘He must have slipped it into my pocket. His way of telling me I’m a charley.’

‘That’s my card,” Perry said, studying it gravely.

‘Yours?’ Clare said. ‘Do you mean because you’re called Matt?’

‘No,’ Perry said. ‘The Fool is the Wild Man. Therefore me.’

And he could be, too, thought Clare, surveying him. A wild man’s smile. A wild man’s elsewhere-looking eyes.

‘You also have a card,’ Perry said. ‘I’ll tell you some day what it is. May I keep this?’

Clare shrugged his assent, and Perry slipped it into his pocket. Out of the sky, invisible, a bird was singing. It brought to Clare a memory of Malkin. A chirruping, a lilting, a celebration. The English countryside, he reflected, was so insistently literary. As if following his thought, Perry murmured: ‘Hark, hark, the lark.’ He twisted about on the stile, and looking at the far bold flag, added: ‘Yes, indeed; happy birthday, Shakespeare.’

Clare, lying sleepless, heard Perry’s bedroom door open, then sensed a stir of his own door, which was ajar. He switched on his lamp, and saw Perry’s head looking in at him.

‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘That bed too hard for you?’

‘I drank too much beer,’ Perry said, ‘or not enough. There’s a highly intelligent graffito in the bog of that pub of yours. It says: “You don’t buy the beer here, you rent it.”’

He roamed from window to window, looking out at the moonlit wood, the moonlit field. He was wearing only his cavalry twills. It gave Clare gooseflesh to watch him.

‘Didn’t you even get as far as putting on your pyjamas?’

‘What pyjamas?’ Perry said. ‘I took the trouble to pull on some trousers, in case you should leap out of the window and break a leg.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Clare muttered. ‘Matt, that subject doesn’t make me laugh.’

‘I like to set your teeth on edge,’ Perry confessed. ‘Sorry, I eat dirt.’ He came to sit on the end of the bed. ‘Your friend John and I had a jolly evening.’

‘He was impressed,’ Clare said, ‘that you beat him at darts.’

‘I play a lot,’ Perry said, and looked enigmatic. Clare had a vision of rough and packed city pubs, like one he had strayed into near Spitalfields, where a friendly regular had told him he would not find it quite his style. On Perry’s forearm, he noticed, there was an elaborate tattoo. A snarling dragon was coiled about a screaming eagle.

‘That must have hurt,’ he said, pointing at it.

‘Not much,’ Perry said. ‘I’ve another one.’ He twisted his arm, and Clare saw near the crook of the elbow a star of David.

‘Why that?’ he asked.

‘Solidarity. In memory of Auschwitz. Did you know I’m a Jew?’

‘You!’ Clare exclaimed. ‘Ah, come off it, Matt.’

‘I am,’ Perry said quietly.

‘But—’ Clare began to say.

‘You mean I was no different from anyone else at school. But one can be C. of E. and a Jew. My mother was. Her parents, and my father too, had this urge to belong.’

‘Then you do belong,’ Clare said. ‘You don’t
look
Jewish, not remotely.’

‘Innocent old C.C.,’ Perry remarked. ‘In a moment you’ll be telling me I haven’t a Jewish accent.’

‘Well,’ said Clare, uncertainly, ‘it doesn’t seem to matter. Except to you, apparently.’

‘And my parents,’ Perry said. ‘You see, the Hitler-time made them have a lot of second thoughts. And then there was Israel. My father feels very involved with Israel. And wants me, one of these days, to marry a Jewish girl. I probably shall.’

‘From the way you’ve been talking,’ Clare said, ‘I didn’t foresee marriage.’

Perry said: ‘For a student of the science of man, there are an awful lot of books, old Clare, that have been closed to you.’

In the trees outside a roosting pheasant honked, and Perry flinched at the sound. ‘The eerie noises here,’ he said. ‘Owls, and pheasants, and I heard something I thought was a fox. Don’t you get the jimjams all alone down here?’

‘No,’ Clare said. ‘Down here was what I wanted.’

‘Clare,’ Perry said, leaning nearer to him. His eyes in the lamp’s weak light were North Sea grey. ‘I came in here for a reason. Let’s have a talk, Clare.’

‘What about?’ Clare asked guardedly.

‘About you. I met a man on leave from out where you were. He told me as much as he knew.’

The tension began in Clare’s neck and spread downwards. Suddenly all his miseries came back, with memories of endless nights when he had lain as if crucified in the double-beds of foreign hotels, his arms outstretched, his body almost arched with rigidity. The freedom he had snatched, against advice, had been in fact a torment of insomnia, broken by nightmares in his fits of sweating sleep.

‘Matt,’ he said, his voice cracking, ‘I can’t. Can’t talk. I’d burst into tears, and you’d wish you’d never started it.’