The Girl Green as Elderflower (11 page)

‘Have you?’ Perry asked. ‘Have you cried?’

‘In the hospital. When they tried to make me talk about it.’

‘Try now,’ Perry said. ‘See how it feels.’

Clare was already crying. Perry’s arms went around him, and he cried on Perry’s bare shoulder, unashamed, inexhaustibly.

‘Now tell me why,’ Perry said, into his ear. ‘Cris. Why did you try to hang yourself?’

‘I thought I was mad,’ Clare said, choking. ‘I
was
mad, at the time.’

‘That’s bullshit,’ Perry said, holding him close. ‘That much I do know. You had malaria, because you were a fool and hadn’t stocked up with drugs.’

‘Half-true,’ Clare admitted. He had ceased to weep. ‘It was the first time. I didn’t know what it was, and it was frightening. Also I had malnutrition, which does something. And then there was what they called in the hospital a delayed mourning reaction. But it was worse than that. In the hospital they asked whether I heard voices. I didn’t, not imaginary ones, but I did imagine—conspiracies.’ He stuttered on the next word. ‘Calumnies. People talking too fast and too low for me to understand. And they were all I had. I’d lost the feeling of being a white man. They were all I had.’

‘And now,’ Perry said, ‘what will happen? You’re better, I think. That level-headed little Lucy said so, and I’d believe her.’

‘It’s true,’ Clare said, ‘I do feel it. In a little while I’ll go into a hospital in London for tests. Liver and spleen and so on, but mainly a test for brain damage. They’re sure there is none, but they want me to be sure.’

He tried to pull away, but Perry would not release him. ‘Tell me what happened that night on the island.’

‘I can’t,’ Clare said. He was crying again, not sobbing, merely melting. ‘Let it be, Matt.’

‘There was a storm, this man I met had heard.’

‘There was a storm,’ Clare repeated. ‘Dear God, what a storm. I was excited. I felt strong, potent, in some way. I hadn’t felt like that for so long. I thought I would do something, be decisive. Put an end to it, remove myself, because nothing else was wrong there, only me.’

‘And then?’ Perry prompted.

‘There’s no privacy there. Never, at any hour of the day. I was followed. Daibuna—a friend of mine—he’d never heard of such a thing, never seen a sight like it. But he knew what to do. He cut me down with this bushknife.’

There might have been some prowler in the wood, for wakened pheasants suddenly burst out in a cacophony of alarm, and the two young men, one clasping the other like a wounded soldier, started apart at the demonic sound, and looked to the window as if for real demons which might be hovering there.

Clare lay back on his pillow, his eyes on Perry’s face. His own face was calm, wept-out. His hand rested on Perry’s, then travelled up the forearm to the tattoed star. ‘Plenty of worse things have happened,’ he said. ‘Oh, but to be so cut adrift. Perhaps even the German Jews didn’t quite know that.’

‘You feel better, C.C.,’ Perry asked or stated, turning on him his eyes of North Sea grey.

‘So much, Matt. It’s funny. I don’t even feel ashamed about weeping all over you.’

‘You see, I am good for something.’

‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘Yes, Matt, you’re very good.’

He wondered at the protectiveness, the paternal streak, in so young a man. It was perhaps Perry’s intense, unalloyed maleness which was at the root of what he would not see as a problem.

‘We won’t mention it again,’ Perry promised. He stood up, clutching his bare hairy torso with long arms. ‘I must leave you now, this minute.’

‘Cold?’ Clare said. ‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Cold nothing,’ Perry said. ‘It’s that wonderworking Suffolk beer. Like the man said, you rent it.’

*

In the churchyard, while Perry examined the headstone of the gaffer of Hole Farm, Clare lifted his head at the sudden sound of the organ. What was it about the music, the tune woven into it? He said to Perry: ‘Would you mind, shall we go in?’

The chill of the church was dispelled a little by the great iron stove, still warm from the morning service. Taking the pew nearest it, Clare and Perry sat and listened to the unseen organist.

‘Green,’ Clare was thinking. Somehow the music was green. It elaborated itself around a tune which he could not place, something old with the word ‘green’ insistent in it. Folk tune or Elizabethan song—he could not remember. But he knew that he was listening to green music.

Perry, beside him, got up and wandered silently away. He disappeared round the screen which hid the organ.

When the music stopped, Clare wanted it to begin again. And so, after a few minutes, it did, and Perry came back with a complacent expression to resume his seat beside Clare.

‘For you,’ he murmured aside. ‘Special request.’

When the music ceased for the second time, Clare asked: ‘Who is it playing?’

‘A girl,’ Perry said. ‘A blonde girl. Very blonde. I asked her for a repeat, and she just smiled, and did. The most extraordinary eyes.’

He had hardly seen her face, Clare realized, or those eyes which had been so much noticed. There had been only that glimpse on New Year’s Day, on the snowy step of the Shoulder of Mutton with the light behind her.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘I seem to know it. Did you see?’

‘Yes,’ Perry said, ‘when she turned back to start again. It’s by Sweelinck. Called something in Dutch.’

‘It’s about green,’ Clare said. ‘Something something green.’

‘That’s it,’ Perry confirmed. ‘The last word was “
groen
”. Do you suppose she is Dutch?’

‘It doesn’t follow,’ Clare pointed out. ‘And the tune—the tune is English. “Green”. I just can’t put a name to it.’

‘Look, I’ll go and ask her,’ Perry offered, and wandered off again towards the screen. But he came back with a mystified face, and said: ‘She’s vanished.’

‘She could be in the vestry,’ Clare suggested. ‘Perhaps the vicar’s there. Let’s not pursue her.’

‘I shouldn’t mind,’ said Perry, looking preoccupied. ‘Pursuing her, I mean. What eyes. And a mouth like an unawakened angel.’

‘Is that your fancy,’ Clare said, ‘to seduce an angel? Ah Matt, you worry me.’

Perry said, with his wild man’s grin: ‘Don’t give it a thought. I’m amazingly more decent than I care to appear.’

Clare glanced at his watch. ‘I suppose we’d better start walking for that train.’

Perry, picking up his opulent briefcase, said: ‘While we’re alone, and not walking, just a word.’

In the light from the plain glass windows (for the church had been vandalized by Puritans) his eyes were of the bleakest grey. ‘You do me good,’ he said.

‘
I
do
you
good?’ said Clare, and laughed in his surprise. But he knew what Perry meant. In his weakness, without forethought, he had found a way to comfort a man made lonely by strength.

In the dusk, walking back from the station, pausing to watch the cloudlike transformations of rushes under the breeze, Clare thought he knew what he would begin to write that night. The breeze smelt salt, sweeping up the long estuary from the sea, the bleak North Sea.
Quasi spectantibus insultans
, he thought, remembering Perry’s wild grin, his changeable eyes. And as he walked along the earth dike fringed with celandine, he began from memory to rehearse the opening of the Lord Abbot’s Tale.
Temporibus Henrici regis secundi cum Bartholomeus de Glanvilla custodiret castellum de Oreford, contigit…

(De quodam homine silvestri in mare capto)

In the times of King Henry the Second, when Bartholomew Glanville was Constable of Orford Castle, it happened that some fishermen of that place discovered in their net a marvellous catch.

Squatting on the bucking boat on the chill autumn sea, a young soldier was trying not to think of his stomach. His open-air ploughboy’s face was sallow, and his fringe of hay-coloured hair damp with sweat.

‘Heave up! Heave up!’ shouted big Reynold, the owner of the boat, to his men. Then to the soldier he explained: ‘I don’t mean you, John. That warnt a very fortunate thing to say.’

It was not indeed, and John, running for the side, puked long and painfully. As he choked, Reynold gave him a hard friendly slap on the back. ‘Keep an eye on it, boy,’ he advised. ‘If you see a little brown ring, thass your arsehole.’

The men hauled on the net, calling to the herring: ‘Swim up! Swim up!’ When the rope was exhausted, they seized the meshes. Suddenly one of them yelled: ‘Reynold! Oh my Christ!’

The sick young soldier was at first too absorbed in his internal miseries to pay much attention to the hubbub all around him. But Reynold’s voice, sharp with bewilderment, called ‘John!’ and he turned with indifferent obligingness to look at the tangle of net.

Between and around the legs of the gaping men herring were escaping back into the sea. But the men had eyes only for what sprawled in the dank meshes, like a baby half struggled free from a shawl.

The man was of strong, was even of beautiful build. His wet brown hair was curled, as was the beard of the same colour which all but hid his fine lips. His powerful chest was shaggy, and water trickled down it to the arrow-like line of hairs leading to the bush where his sex drooped lax and large.

His face showed no expression, his eyes merely roving from one to another of the faces staring down at him. When they came to John, they paused. There was all at once a change, like a recognition, in that gaze of North Sea grey. The brown beard twitched, and then the wild man grinned, warmly, as white as shells.

Through the afternoon mist Reynold, John and the wild man walked from the haven to the mound where the great keep, in all its splendour of newness, raised its three turrets and handsome conical roof over the marshes, the forests and the sea. A basket slung on Reynold’s broad back dripped saltily. The wild man’s hands were bound behind him. His eyes, though taking in everything, seemed incapable of surprise, and he walked easily, athletically, unconcerned. The great height of the keep impressed him no more than the fact of his capture out at sea.

On the steps leading up to the door, under the raised portcullis, a young sentry was standing. Peering into the mist, he said: ‘That you, John? Proper boony, innit?’

‘Iss,’ said John. ‘Me and Reynold Fisher. And another chap.’

The three passed into the vestibule, and the sentinel started and stared. ‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘Who’s that?’

The wild man looked at the young sentry, and his sea-grey gaze grew fixed. The soldier was a dark youth, comely in a gypsy fashion, with long-cut black eyes and a shapely, thin-lipped mouth. There was humour in the mouth and the eyes, but humour which seemed to visit rather furtively. The wild man edged away from him, drawing closer to John.

‘He don’t like you, Robin,’ John said.

‘Fucking hell,’ the sentry said again. ‘He’s bollock-naked.’

‘He’s a wild man,’ big Reynold explained. ‘Our chaps net him in the sea.’

‘Fucking hell,’ said Robin, for the third time. ‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘Take him to the Constable,’ John said. ‘Do you know where he’s likely to be?’

‘In the lower hall,’ Robin said, and the flicker of a smile moved his secretive mouth. ‘Yeh, you take him up there, boy.’

John and Reynold, the wild man between them, went single file up the steps, and entered the great round hall, where at the great table the Constable sat. He was in conversation with a second lieutenant, a leggy youth whose bony face had not yet settled into adulthood. They paid no attention to the new arrivals, but somebody else had done so. From the stone bench encircling the room there came a feminine cry.

‘Lucy! Amabel!’ commanded the Constable’s lady, ‘close your eyes, both of you.’

‘Oh my God,’ burst out the youthful officer, and seizing his cap from the vast table he rushed to hold it over the wild man’s privities.

The wild man looked at him with slight puzzlement, but with unchanging calm.

‘Private Westoft,’ said the Constable, grimly, ‘perhaps you would care to explain what you mean by coming in here with that madman, and exhibiting him to my wife and two little girls.’

‘Please, sir,’ John said, ‘I’m very sorry, sir. I warnt aware, sir, there was ladies present. He’s a wild man, sir. Reynold Fisher here, he net him in the sea.’

‘How frightfully interesting,’ the Constable’s lady said, and she rose from the bench and came to examine the wild man, now made decent by the lieutenant’s cap.

‘A wild man,’ said the Constable. ‘I see. Does he speak?’

‘No, sir,’ said John. ‘I mean to say, he int spoke yet.’

‘And he lives in the sea?’ the Constable inquired.

‘It seem so, sir,’ said Reynold Fisher. ‘A matter of three mile out he was.’

‘I see,’ said the Constable again. ‘That is useful to know. In a situation of marine warfare, he could be of considerable value to us.’

‘Mr Clare,’ said the lady to the young officer, ‘your gallant work with that cap must be tiring you, and it does look just a little silly.’ Turning, she called: ‘Lucy, go into the kitchen, darling, and ask Mrs Kersey if she can somehow lay her hands on a pair of trousers.’