Encounters

by Barbara Erskine

  But she didn’t want him to be a fantasy. That would be a weakness on her part; an admission of defeat. She wanted him to be real.

  There was only one way to find out the truth.

  Liz laughed. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? We throw out that bath, and you make it so nice that you can invite people to come along and try it!’

  ‘Only while your new bathroom is still disconnected,’ Cathy said, all innocence. “I thought it would be a change from the plastic bowl you were telling me about!’ She had tidied the bathroom, laid out fresh towels, put a small bowl of roses on the windowsill.

  Of course, it might not work. He never appeared when she was actually taking a bath, but sometimes afterwards, when she was drying herself …

  And Liz did have, when one came to think about it, a rather buxom figure beneath her habitual overalls. The kind of figure a rake and a ladies’ man might appreciate. If he were real …

  Liz took her time. Cathy could hear her singing cheerfully. There was a lot of splashing and afterwards the sound of water running away. Then there was a long, long silence.

  When she reappeared Cathy looked at her hard. ‘Was everything all right?’ she asked as casually as she could.

  ‘Fine.’ Liz smiled. But what on earth was that fantastic exotic smell up there as I was getting dry?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Cathy with a smile. ‘I’ve been wondering that myself …’

  A Private Ceremony

  She had slept in the room for nearly three weeks before she noticed that one strip of wallpaper was upside down. A spider showed it to her.

  Lying gazing at the wall she saw the sunlight in the fine lace web. Behind it a rose hung stem upwards, its petals drooping. Lazily her eye followed to see leaves and buds and further blooms suspended as though by invisible wire over the creamy void. It hurt her to see the flowers thus. It seemed incongruous and cruel; a stroke of fate which left them for ever vertiginous, outcasts among their fellows on the wall.

  Now she could no longer come into the room without her eyes immediately straying to this corner by the window. When someone moved the spider’s web she was really very angry. It seemed the flowers’ only redemption that they had been selected by the spider as the nearest thing to nature in the room. Now nothing distinguished them any more, save their own oddity.

  Sitting at her mirror, brushing out her long hair, she heard again in her head the voice which haunted.

  ‘The trouble with Samantha is of course that she is a teeny bit different from the rest of us, haven’t you noticed?’

  Her eyes as she gazed at them were a pure expressionless blue. They saw much. The silver-backed hairbrush made her arm ache. It was too heavy. But she kept up the endless strokes, listening to the crackle, watching the fine floating strands as her hair took on a life of its own around her head.

  ‘Never, but never, brush your hair a hundred times, darling. It’s death, positively death, and so Victorian.’ She heard in her head the voice of the posturing little man who tended her hair and she brushed on harder than ever. This hairbrush had been made to brush hair a hundred strokes. It would be mortified if used to do less. When she had finished her hair then she would polish the brush. It seemed only fair.

  In the mirror, in the corner where the silvering had gone in tiny freckles, she could see the angle of the room behind her. The casement window stood wide and she could see a fine mist of rain drifting over the garden below. The window still shone with wet and the pale green carpet beneath it darkened slowly as it grew damp. She could smell the grateful earth as its fragrance rose up in response to the rain.

  Her roses, the upside down roses, could never smell like roses. But then they would never rot and grow black and die either.

  She slammed her silver brush down on the dressing table glass and reached to clasp a bracelet around her slim wrist. Flinging off her dressing gown she stood naked on the carpet, throwing back her head and feeling the silky weight of her hair on her shoulders. It was strange that one was not allowed to appear naked before the world, even when one knew that one was beautiful.

  She stood before the open window and felt the icy mist of rain on her warm skin.

  A man stood outside in the garden, in the rain, his hair plastered blackly to his head, his tweed jacket heavy with moisture. He was standing looking up at her, not noticing the rain any more.

  She smiled down at him and raised her hand. Then she moved away from the window and zipped herself dreamily into gold and embroidered chiffon. The spider was spinning again, she noticed suddenly, slightly further down the corner but still carefully, precisely, on the misplaced wallpaper. She watched fascinated.

  She knew the man in the rain. In less than three weeks he would be her husband. His ring was on her finger; his kisses in her hair. Was it those she had been trying so hard to brush away?

  The moth, its delicate finely traced velvet wings whirring ecstatically, stood no chance. Samantha put out her hand to ward it off, but she stayed the gesture in mid air, arrested by the sight of the diamond ring on her finger. It mesmerized her with its rainbow prisms and when she looked again the moth was caught. The spider’s paralysing jaws were ready, and the straitjacket of fine spun silk. The spider embraced its victim tenderly, lost in caressing the silky fur on the tiny quivering body. How quickly beauty and freedom and life itself were lost.

  She turned away, revolted and suddenly afraid.

  The days passed. Showers of rain swept the gardens and terraces. From time to time she saw the man again standing beneath her window. In the corner the web was deserted, the moth no more than a frail dust caught in the still-sticky threads. The spider had gone.

  Now when she stood at the window she kept her dressing gown on, clutching it to her, shivering.

  Then she left the house in a haze of goodbyes. When she returned she would be its daughter. The web would have closed around her and the time for dreams would have gone.

  In the taxi she looked into the mirror in her powder compact and saw that the haunted blue still shadowed her eyes. Where was their expression and their life? Her soul was shut down, secret, protected. It must be kept separate now or he would possess it as he must possess her.

  She could not understand, suddenly, why she was afraid now. She recognized him as her friend. He was kind and gentle. He had not tried to rush her, had carefully controlled his own swelling waves of emotion. He recognized her fragility. He would treasure and protect her as a piece of fine porcelain. Again the voice spoke in her head:

  ‘Samantha is a teeny bit different from the rest of us …’

  ‘I’m not, I’m not,’ she screamed silently. ‘I am the same. I feel, I need, I fear. But I am trapped within myself. I am Rapunzel within the tower. He stands in the garden, at the foot of the wall, but he will not climb. He does not know that I have let the ladder fall. He strokes my golden hair, but he does not grip it, does not climb.’

  The train carried her back to London where the rain smelt of soot and the plane trees wept in their concrete prisons, here and there their roots breaking free of tarmac and flagstone only to shrivel and waste in the dead air.

  Her flat was dark and empty, a refuge she had always thought, for her soul. But her soul would not be comforted. It sought a mystic union now and would be satisfied with nothing less. Here where the wallpaper was immaculate, where no spiders dared to defile, where no mists of rain could spatter through the window glass, she had built for herself a temple of virginity. And she knew now what must be done. She picked up the telephone and dialled his number.

  ‘Meet me at the station,’ she said. Her voice was smiling. This time she needed no luggage; no gold bangles; no chiffon. No hairbrush save the wind.

  He did not understand. He thought she had forgotten something. Never before had he seen her smile like this. His heart grew warm as he met her eyes. Now, she saw, he understood at last.

  They drove up onto the moor. Still the rain surrounded them, misting the windows of the car, s
oaking the bracken and heather, filling the upturned bells of tiny flowers till they hung their heads beneath the weight of the water, and spilt it, nectar-like upon the ground.

  Once more she felt the weight of her hair on her shoulders, the cold rain upon her warm body. She saw in his face delight and hope as she turned to him, her arms outstretched, at one with the soft wet earth, the grass and the heather. She felt his hand gently, hesitatingly on her golden hair.

  Her eyes as she scanned them anxiously in her mirror in the train going home had a new depth of violet in the iris. She tore open the windows of the flat, bought armfuls of roses and trimmed her pure white wedding dress with blue.

  She took her hair, tangled from the wind and heather, to be restyled and giggled as the voice said, ‘But darling, the wind is death, positively death.’ The posturing little man wanted her to wear her veil, but now she insisted on a garland of rose buds, entwined with the white moorland heather.

  In the church the carol of gladness soared up into the vaulting and her heart with it. With him at her side and their own vows already made this formal binding no longer held any terror. It blessed the bond they had pledged in the rain with public ceremony. Her eyes and his held one another and knew their own secrets.

  As she changed in the room with the rose wallpaper she drew apart from her attendants. While they fussed and gossiped over tulle and silver she looked for a new web. There was none on the wall, but outside, where a watery sun shone on marquee and grass, she saw in the angle of the window, a new, more delicate web, hung with diamond raindrops. It had ensnared nothing but a wisp of thistledown.

  Satisfied, she returned to the voices. Let them say what they will, she and he were one; he did not find her different. He understood the way she thought. He had not laughed when she told him about the spider and the roses, but caressed her hair with his lips, wondering and gentle. Sympathetic to her needs he had made her glad by cancelling secretly the tickets for the south of France, people and society, and planning instead for a continuation of their private ceremony.

  Soon, entertaining done and friendship appeased, they would leave for the far, empty north. Among the mountains the deep, reflective lochs and the purple heather they would find one another again. There they would nurture too the first foetal moments of the child she knew would be conceived. This room, she vowed, would be its nursery.

  The Green Leaves of Summer

  Grass the colour of young beech leaves stood high in the valley when the young man came to Cae Coch. Megan, her eyes blue with the freshness of forget-me-nots, would go quietly through the wood, down the way the brook went and peer through the hazel brakes to see him. He was tall and his skin was pale. She had never seen a man with pale skin before and her eyes rounded at the whiteness of it. The men of the hills had their faces reddened by the wind and tanned, young, into coarse leather. This man was smooth and she imagined his skin silky and cool like the keys of Dai Morgan’s new piano.

  Each morning Jeff would come out of his grandmother Lewis’s cottage and sniff the sweet air with disbelief. After a city childhood and youth he had not dreamed such air could exist. He sometimes sensed the eyes watching from the wood beyond the brook and would peer into the undergrowth, wondering what small animal was hidden there. Never did he see a movement, save where the wind stroked the leaves and made them dance.

  ‘Jeff, his name is,’ Megan whispered to herself as she watched him. Raymond the Post had told her mother that, winking, as he put the parcel from Swansea on the scrubbed wooden table.

  Today, as she watched, Jeff was wearing a dark green jersey, warm and soft. He must be cold inside himself she thought, to need the warmth of lambswool in the summer sun. She crouched lower and took a step forward.

  It was shy she was or she could have taken eggs to Cae Coch, or warm bread from her mother’s oven. She did gather roses once from the mossy ramblers on the back wall and tried to dare to take them down to the old lady, but then she gave them instead to her mother.

  Often she sat with her books in the warmed stones of the ruined farm over the valley. It was quiet there. She felt secure, the crumbling wall with its curtain of ivy at her back. She did not look up as the shadows of the clouds chased one another over the hillside and a buzzard soared, mewing, out across the empty air.

  The pony’s hoofbeats must have been muffled by the grass for when he spoke she dropped her book with the fright of it.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What a lovely place to read.’

  The ride in the wind and sun had whipped a delicate shade of rose into his ivory cheeks.

  Megan felt her hands begin to shake. Stupid it was when she had dreamed so often he would speak to her.

  ‘May I sit with you for a moment to rest the pony?’ His eyes were dark and secret like the eyes of the romany folk over by the town. Without waiting for her answer he lifted a long leg easily over the pommel of the saddle and slid to the ground. The pony dropped its nose to the sweet grass and blew gustily. ‘Are you Megan?’ he asked, sitting next to her.

  She nodded shyly. ‘How did you know my name?’

  ‘Raymond the Post told me.’ He smiled. ‘I’m staying here for a few months’ convalescence. I’ve been ill.’

  ‘Are you better?’ Her enormous blue eyes were turned to gaze at him, full of sympathy and concern.

  ‘Much, thank you. The air is so good I’m eating like a horse now.’ They both turned as the pony tore up a mouthful of weeds and stood champing them on her bit. Then they laughed.

  ‘Is it buttercups you eat then?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Even buttercups.’ Unnoticing he had put his hand on hers. It was warm and dry and friendly. Without speaking they both gazed out across the valley towards the distant mountains to the west.

  ‘My parents are coming over next weekend. You and your mother must come down and see them.’ He looked down at the glossy curls of the girl beside him. ‘I dare say your mother knew my mother when they were children.’

  ‘Mam never said.’ She screwed up her nose to think. ‘She goes to Cae Coch sometimes, for a chat like, but she never said.’

  There was silence again. Then he rose and went to take the pony’s rein. ‘Will you walk with me a little way, back to the stables?’

  She shook her head, suddenly shy again and took up her book. ‘I’ll stay here a while if you don’t mind, to read a bit.’

  He shrugged and smiled and mounted the pony which laid back its ears and took a last defiant mouthful of buttercups. The small hooves made no sound on the grass as he went.

  ‘Oh yes, I knew Sarah Ann,’ her mother said thumping the dough with a floury hand. ‘A fine madam she was. Got into trouble she did with one of the Jones boys from Llangoed, then she went to Birmingham. I never heard from her after that. Granny Lewis never talks about her and I never asked.’

  ‘Will you go down there Saturday and see her?’ Megan ran her finger round the edge of the jam pot on the table and licked it delicately.

  ‘Take your hands away, girl.’ Her mother slapped at her, scattering flour. ‘Indeed I will not. I doubt if I’ve anything to say to Sarah Ann Lewis after all these years. And you’ll not talk to that boy again, Megan. Like mother, like son, no doubt.’ She snorted and turned the dough again, punching it.

  For three days Megan took her books to the ruin, sitting, the pages blowing on her knees, her eyes fixed on the track at the edge of the wood. But Jeff never came. The fourth day she crept down the wood to the back of Cae Coch and waited to see him come out and breathe the fresh air.

  A car was parked in the yard. When he came out there was a girl with him. She was tall and slim and had stylishly cut red hair. Megan could hear the sound of her laughter from across the brook. It was English laughter: strident, confident; and as she laughed the girl slipped her arm through Jeff’s and clung to him possessively. Megan, in spite of herself, looked down at her own thin brown hands. She could almost feel the warm touch of Jeff’s fingers again.

 
That girl would wear nail varnish and have smooth oval nails without a crack. Megan knew that. Her jeans were elegantly cut and her shirt immaculate.

  Jess glanced up at the trees as though he felt the eyes watching him again, but already Megan had slipped back into the dark of the wood, her sandals making no sound on the leaf mould beneath the trees.

  She went back to her books, and back after two days of rain to the ruins of the farm. She sat on the stone wall to be out of the damp and wrapped herself tightly in her jacket against the wind.

  Although she did not watch for him any more she knew when he came out of the trees. It was a different pony. Behind on his sorrel came the girl, her head tied in a headscarf, her stirrup leathers too long.

  Megan hunched her shoulders. He should not have brought the girl here. This was her place.

  ‘Hello, Megan.’

  She did not look up.

  ‘Megan, I want you to meet my fiancée, Rose.’ She heard him slide from the saddle. ‘Aren’t you cold up here in this wind, Megan?’

  ‘I’m used to the wind, Jeff, thank you.’ She looked up at last.

  The girl, Rose, had not moved from her saddle. Her face was wary. Megan could see she had light blue eyes and gingery eyebrows. So the colour of her hair was real then. The slim fingers holding the rein were manicured. The nails were coloured; she had been right. They glowed a delicate shade of plum. Megan noted the sapphire with bleak satisfaction. So she hadn’t got a diamond then.

  There was no talking today; no need to rest the ponies. The sorrel pawed the ground, impatient to be gone. When they were out of sight, Megan closed her book. Quietly she slipped down into the wood to make her way home.