The Seven Gifts (4 page)

and remained a while with
his thoughts

in the lonely tower at the
end of the beach

And the Angel watched over
him

o ------------------------
o

Country Garden

THE ANGEL looked up and smiled as the boy
approached. She was on her knees raking out a patch of soil near
the far end of her cottage garden.

“How do you think the garden is looking?"
she called out. The boy sighed ruefully. Nothing in life is ever
straightforward, he thought. First the story; now the Angel. Why
approach something directly when you can go round the houses; or
perhaps the garden in this case. Any faint hopes he had held of the
whole business being cancelled when he couldn't find the gift
vanished. The Angel would coax it out of him if it took all of
Eternity. The gift was in the story somewhere and she would make
him find it. The thought was faintly amusing, almost.

“Very nice," he replied noncommittally. He
glanced around. It was actually a rather interesting garden:
untidy, unstructured, but curiously beautiful; with an air of
something slightly mysterious about it; almost magical. He couldn't
figure out why.

There seemed to be no order to the garden.
Everything was just stuffed into the ground here and there, with no
attempt at creating patterns of flowerbeds or complementary sweeps
of colour. It was a shambles really, and yet strangely attractive.
Some subtle structural notion of the Angel's no doubt lay behind it
all. But he couldn't for the life of him see what it was. He walked
over to where she was still grubbing around in the soil.

“What are you doing?" he asked. Keep cool,
he thought. Let her raise the subject of the gifts.

“Someone gave me a geranium," she said, “and
I thought I'd plant it over here where it'll get the sun." She
pointed to a little red-petalled flower in a pot by the wall.
“Pretty, isn't it?" The boy nodded.

“I think this will be a good place for it,"
she continued, “don't you?"

It was a casual question, such as anyone
might lob into a conversation about plants. But the boy knew the
Angel better than that. She was throwing him a line - and he caught
it.

“So long as Coalhole Custer doesn't come
along and blow it all to bits." He thought he detected the glimmer
of a smile on the Angel's face; but she carried on raking the soil
and spoke to him over her shoulder.

“Do you think he would?" she asked.

“Well ... I can't think of any reason why he
should. But then I couldn't see why he wrecked the Snow Queen's
palace either."

“But he didn't," said the Angel. “Why would
he go to all that trouble when he could have simply put a bomb in
it? And walked away unscathed."

“Well alright," the boy muttered, “he
didn't; but his music did. He was responsible."

“Oh yes," agreed the Angel, “he was
certainly responsible. But he had no idea of the effect his music
was going to have. He had played there before without all that
happening - during the time he had lived in the city. And by the
time he found out, it was a bit late: his music had grown a life of
its own. It responded to the feelings he had put in it.

“But," she finished off, “I think he half
expected something to happen."

The boy agreed: “I think he did." Then he
took the plunge. “But I don't know what the gift is."

The Angel was unperturbed. “You will," she
said. Then she stood up and, taking his hand, walked him off down
the garden past the vegetables and fruit trees, the flowers, herbs
and shrubs that all mingled in an unexpected harmony.

“Doesn't it look lovely?" she said.

“Why does it look so nice?" he asked her. He
sensed a clue here somewhere.

“I don't know," she said. “Look at it. Trees
here, bushes there; flowers and vegetables all over the place and
in amongst each other. It's a tangle of odds and ends, all mixed up
and higgledy-piggledy. There's no order to it at all. I don't know
why it looks so nice."

“Mmm," the boy muttered pensively. “There
must be some sort of order to it. Order doesn't necessarily mean
regimentation though, does it?"

“No," answered the Angel.

“Then presumably you have a good reason for
putting everything where you have, even though it all seems
haphazard and disorganised." He looked around for an example. “That
celandine for instance. Why have you got it growing in amongst that
old rubble by the pig sty?"

“That is the best place for it," said the
Angel. “Besides, nothing else would grow so well there. The
celandine likes rubbly old ground."

“Well, that's a good enough reason I
suppose," said the boy. He looked around for more clues. “How about
those herbs in under the wall there? It's a bit stony for plants,
isn't it?"

“The thyme and the sage? They like stony
ground and must be sheltered from the north winds. They don't like
the cold."

“I see," said the boy thoughtfully. And he
thought he was beginning to see. “You haven't planted the garden to
suit yourself, you've planted it to suit itself." He paused and
looked around to confirm that he was on the right track.

“It suits all of us," said the Angel. “It
suits the garden for obvious reasons, and it suits me because I
like to see it all grow to its fullest potential. Every individual
plant in my garden is more important to me than the garden itself;
yet if I care properly for each individual plant, they all seem to
care for the garden. The result is most effective, as you have
observed. You should remember that, because it doesn't work only
with gardens."

The boy could see it now: the order in the
way that the Angel had put her garden together. Everything was in
the place best suited to it, regardless of tidiness. Snowdrops were
spread in a white blanket under the trees; a mass of giant burdocks
clustered closely around the manure heap and mustard had been
planted all about the beehives. Or perhaps the beehives had been
set down near the mustard. No matter; the principle was there. Now
the new geranium was going in the sunshine.

Everything was in the right place and,
because of it, the whole garden prospered. That was what gave the
Angel's garden its strange and indefinable beauty. And a thought
occurred to the young boy, which he immediately voiced: “Coalhole
Custer's music wasn't in the right place, was it?"

The Angel smiled and said: “Go on.”

“Your garden is beautiful,” the boy
continued, “and lives in harmony with itself, simply because
everything is in the right place. The Snow Queen's palace was the
wrong place for Coalhole Custer's music, and the imbalance
generated some sort of destructive discord between the two. In the
end Coalhole Custer's music was presumably the stronger because it
grew out of spirit rather than matter.”

The Angel nodded her head slowly. “His music
was born in the mountains," she explained. “It was created for the
mountains out of the spirit of the mountains, and it should have
stayed in those mountains where it belonged. In the right place it
would have grown strong and beautiful, for it was honest music. It
would have inspired and enriched itself and everything and everyone
around it, for its honesty gave it great power. In the wrong place
its energy was confined and frustrated, and ultimately
destructive.

“Now I think you have found the first gift,"
she concluded.

“Space," said the boy confidently. “The
right part of it. The guardian put the Earth in exactly the right
place; and every thing on it - every rock, plant and animal - was
given its own rightful place in the overall scheme of things. That
is why and how the Earth works, isn't it?"

“Yes," affirmed the Angel.
“
SPACE
was the
first gift to the Earth."

o ------------------------
o

~
The Second Gift
~

Seven Days in the
Death

of Nellie
Matilda

IN A small grimy industrial town, far
removed from the splendours of the Snow Queen's city, an old woman
lay dying in a hospital bed. Further along the corridor, and from
which the old woman was equally far removed in a somewhat different
sense, a much younger and very pregnant woman was going into
labour. Whether there is any connection between these two scenarios
I leave you, my long-awaited reader, to decide as the story
progresses.

For all that it was a small grimy industrial
town its hospital had the very latest equipment and first rate
medical staff. The Senior Consultant was greatly respected by his
peers throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom and he had
brought together into this nondescript little hospital a team of
doctors and nurses that was second to no other in the land. Just
why this should have happened has no relevance to the story so we
shall not pursue it. Suffice it to say that the hospital was the
best; and that does have some bearing on the matter in hand.

The old woman's name was Nellie Matilda
Johnson, although she had been born an Arkwright. William Johnson,
her much beloved husband, had died some two years previously at the
very respectable age of ninety-two. Nellie was now eighty-six and
very lonely as she had outlived even her children, who had both
died sadly young.

But Nellie was not sad as such. She had had
a good and happy life with no regrets, and now that the time was at
hand for her to depart it she was ready. Not everyone in the Snow
Queen's kingdom believed that death was just a doorway to a new
world, in fact very few did; but Nellie Matilda Johnson was one of
the few. Religion no longer reigned in this kingdom since the
onward march of Science had gradually relegated it to the realms of
peasant superstition. The development of science under the auspices
of the Snow Queen had followed a rather interesting route, having
somehow circumvented the discovery of that great watershed in the
oh-so-slowly-unfolding synthesis of science and religion that lies
buried deep in the destiny of all people. I speak, of course, of
Quantum Physics. Without this particular ghost clogging up their
materialistic machinery, the Queen's scientists had continued
happily along the reductionist road that even dear old Descartes,
that doyen of doubt from some other distant Universe, had grown
away from since waking from his deathbed to find that he was
somewhere else: the blueprint, it seemed, was not in the big toe.
One of the results of this scientific sidestep provides us with our
story.

We begin on a Monday morning, a no more
inspiring time for the denizens of this land than for those of any
other. Even for Cartesian Reductionists the weekend is the weekend
and, weekends being what they usually are, Mondays for them are
much as Mondays are for anyone, whichever particular Universe they
may inhabit. So Sonia, the nurse who tended Nellie Matilda in the
daytime, was not at her best.

"Come on, Nellie!" she grumbled. "You've got
to take these pills."

"I don't want any pills," said Nellie
wearily. "Just leave me in peace please."

"But you must take them," said Sonia.
"You'll die if you don't."

"I'm quite happy and ready to die," Nellie
said calmly. "I've lived my life and it is over. There is nothing
left for me here, and it is time now for me to move on."

"Move on?" queried Sonia. "What are you
blethering about? I said you'll die if you don't take the pills; I
did not say you would move on. What is wrong with this place
anyway? You won't find a better hospital in the land. Now be a good
lady and take your pills."

Nellie sighed. "You don't know what I'm
talking about, do you?" she said, knowing well what the answer
would be.

"No I don't!" snapped Sonia, "and if you
don't take your pills I'll call the doctor and he'll make you, like
he did last week. You should know better at your age, causing all
this trouble to those who are trying to help you." And she scowled,
with the smug disapproving look of one who knows best.

Nellie resigned herself to her pills and
said no more. The prospect of being force-injected by that arrogant
and ignorant old doctor was too much on a Monday morning. But when
Sonia had gone she lay back quietly on her bed with her arms down
along her sides and closed her eyes. After a moment or two's
concentration she climbed thankfully out of her painful old body
and set off to find her husband.

“Oh, Nellie," William Johnson groaned, when
he saw his wife approaching with that damnable silver cord still
attached to her body, “haven't you got away yet?"

“No dear," she replied. “Those maniacs are
determined to keep me alive, come what may. You would think they
would have something better to do with their time. I can't stop
long; it is the middle of the morning back there and the doctor
will be doing his rounds shortly. If he turns up and thinks I'm
dead, heaven only knows what he will do to me. You know what those
types are like if you don't do what they know is good for you. I
thought I would just pop over and see how you are; I'm finding it
difficult to get out at night now with all these drugs inside
me."

“I'm fine," said her husband. “I've got
plenty to do, but all the same I am looking forward to you joining
me."

“So am I," said Nellie with real feeling,
just before the approach of the doctor caused her to disappear,
back to whence she came.

Nellie Matilda woke up as the doctor came
into her room. She felt that almost irresistible desire to fall
back into her dreams that she knew from past experience signified a
visit to the new world that she longed so much now to be a part of.
Not yet though, it would seem.