The Girl Green as Elderflower

by Randolph Stow

  ‘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 o
n 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.’

  ‘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…