Possession (83 page)

In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful.

T
here are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

Two people met, on a hot May day, and never later mentioned their meeting. This is how it was.

There was a meadow full of young hay, and all the summer flowers in great abundance. Blue cornflowers, scarlet poppies, gold buttercups, a veil of speedwells, an intricate carpet of daisies where the grass was shorter, scabious, yellow snapdragons, bacon and egg plant, pale milkmaids, purple heartsease, scarlet pimpernel and white shepherd’s purse, and round this field a high bordering hedge of Queen Anne’s lace and foxgloves, and above that dogroses, palely shining in a thorny hedge, honeysuckle all creamy and sweet-smelling, rambling threads of bryony and the dark stars of deadly nightshade. It was abundant, it seemed as though it must go on shining forever. The grasses had an enamelled gloss and were connected by diamond-threads of light. The larks sang, and the thrushes, and the blackbirds, sweet and clear, and there were butterflies everywhere,
blue, sulphur, copper, and fragile white, dipping from flower to flower, from clover to vetch to larkspur, seeing their own guiding visions of invisible violet pentagrams and spiralling coils of petal-light.

There was a child, swinging on a gate, wearing a butcher-blue dress and a white pinafore, humming to herself and making a daisy chain.

There was a man, tall, bearded, his face in shadow under a wide-brimmed hat, a wanderer coming up the lane, between high hedges, with an ashplant in his hand and the look of a walker.

He stopped to speak to the child who smiled and answered cheerfully, without ceasing her creaking swinging to and fro. He asked where he was, and the name of the house in the narrow valley below, which he knew, in fact, very well, and so went on to ask her name, which she told him was May. She had another name, she said, which she did not like. He said perhaps that might come to change, names grew and diminished as time ran on: he would like to know her long name. So she said, swinging more busily, that her name was Maia Thomasine Bailey, and that her father and mother lived in the house down there, and that she had two brothers. He told her that Maia was the mother of Hermes, thief, artist and psychopomp; and that he knew a waterfall called Thomasine. She had known a pony called Hermes, she said, fast as the
wind
, she could tell him, and she had never heard of a waterfall with a name like Thomasine.

He said, “I think I know your mother. You have a true look of your mother.”

“No one else says that.
I
think I look like my father. My father is strong and kind and takes me riding like the
wind.”

“I think you have a look of your father too,” he said then, and put his arms around her waist, very matter-of-fact and brief, so as not to frighten her, and lifted her down onto his side. They sat there on a hummock and talked, in a cloud of butterflies, as he remembered it with absolute clarity, and she remembered it more and more vaguely, as the century ran on. Beetles ran about their feet, jet and emerald. She told him about her pleasant life, her amusements, her
ambitions. He said, “You seem extraordinarily happy,” and she said, “Oh yes, I am, I am.” And then he sat quietly for a moment or two, and she asked him if he could make daisy chains.

“I will make you a crown,” he said. “A crown for a May Queen. But you must give me something, in exchange.”

“I haven’t got anything to give.”

“Oh, just a lock of hair—a very fine one—to remember you by.”

“Like a fairy story.”

“Just so.”

So he made her a crown, on a base of pliant twigs from the coppiced hedge, and wove in it green fronds and trails of all colours, ivy and ferns, silvery grasses and the starry leaves of bryony, the wild clematis. And he studded it with roses and honeysuckle and fringed it with belladonna (“but you know that you must never
eat
this,” he said and she replied scornfully that she knew
all
about what she must not eat, she had been told often enough).

“There,” he said, crowning the little pale head. “Full beautiful, a fairy’s child. Or like Proserpine. Do you know

She looked at him, proud and still a little scornful, holding her head steady under its burden.

“I have an aunt who is always telling me poems like that. But I don’t like poetry.”

He took out a little pair of pocket scissors, and cut, very gently, a long lock from the buttercup-gold floss which fell about her shoulders in a great cloud.

“Here,” she said, “I’ll plait it for you, to keep it tidily.”

Whilst her little fingers worked, and her face frowned over her work, he said, “I am sorry you don’t like poetry, as I am a poet.”

“Oh, I like
you,”
she hastened to say. “You make lovely things and don’t fuss—”

She held out the finished plait, which he wound in a fine coil, and put into the back of his watch.

“Tell your aunt,” he said, “that you met a poet, who was looking for the Belle Dame Sans Merci, and who met you instead, and who sends her his compliments, and will not disturb her, and is on his way to fresh woods and pastures new.”

“I’ll try to remember,” she said, steadying her crown.

So he kissed her, always matter-of-fact, so as not to frighten her, and went on his way.

And on the way home, she met her brothers, and there was a rough-and-tumble, and the lovely crown was broken, and she forgot the message, which was never delivered.

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