She sipped her gin and tonic and wandered through the long grasses in the cool of the evening. A deep, healing peace possessed her. She stood on the little triangular point of her island, where the two streams met, and stood on a tree root at the end of her promontory, gazing at a view that could not have altered much in a thousand years. A field of wheat glowed golden to her left, rising steeply to a dark purple wood. Long shadows fell. A small, steep view. The small scale of her little kingdom was peculiarly comforting. A few hundred yards of modest wilderness. She would sit here, perhaps, in the afternoons. Perhaps she would sleep a little, on a rug, under a fruit tree, in the sun, listening to the sound of water. Pleasant plans formed themselves in her imagination as she wandered slowly back and over the little bridge, plucking as she went a spray of blue forget-me-not. She would look it up, after her supper, in the flower book. How impatient Philip would have been with such a plan! It’s obviously a forget-me-not, anyone can see it’s a forget-me-not, Philip would have said, and anyway, who cares what it is? But he would have put it more wittily than that, more hurtfully than that, in words that, thank God, she did not have to invent for him. For he was not here, would never be there again.
Later, reading her flower book, examining the plant more closely, she discovered that it wasn’t a forget-me-not at all. Its leaves were all wrong, and it was too tall. It was probably a borage, hairy borage – and after a while, she settled for green alkanet. Anchusa sempervirens. ‘Small clusters of flat white-eyed bright blue flowers, rather like a forget-me-not or speedwell…’ Yes, that was it. Rather like. Rather like, but not identical. Similar, but not the same. This distinction delighted her. She would forget it, she knew, but for the moment it delighted her. She was not very good at flowers, and forgot most of the names she so painstakingly established. At her age she found it difficult to retain new information, almost impossible to enlarge her store of certainties from the hundred names she had learned, half a century ago, as a brownie in the Yorkshire Dales. But the inability did not diminish her pleasure, it increased it. Philip had never been able to understand this. The safety, the comfort of the familiar well-thumbed pages; the safety, the comfort of the familiar process of doubt, comparison, temporary certainty. Yes, there it was. Green alkanet.
Her dreams that night were violent and free. Horses raced through dark fields, waterfalls plunged over crags, clouds heaped ominously in a black sky. But when she woke, the morning was serene and blue and filled with birdsong. She made herself a mug of coffee and sat outside, watching the odd car pass, the village bus, an old woman walking a dog. She planned her day. She would walk the mile and a half into the village, do a little shopping, visit the church, buy a newspaper, wander back, read her novel, eat a little lunch, then go and lie on a rug on the long grass in the paddock. The next day, she would be more ambitious perhaps, she would go for a real walk, a mapped walk. But today, she would be quiet. The luxury of knowing that nothing and no one could interfere with her prospect made her feel momentarily a little tearful. Had she really been so unhappy for so long? She saw the little long-tailed finches fluttering in the tree. They had returned to charm her.
Philip, she reflected, as she sat on the wall reading, would not have approved her choice of novel. She was reading a Margery Allingham omnibus, nostalgically, pointlessly. Philip had despised detective stories. He had mocked her pleasure in them. And indeed they were a bit silly, but that was the point of them. Yes, that was the point. After lunch, she took Margery Allingham into the paddock, with a rug and her sunhat, and lay under an apple tree. Impossible to explain, to the young, the satisfaction of sleeping in the afternoon. How can you enjoy being asleep, her children used to ask her. Now they too, parents themselves, were glad of a siesta, of an afternoon nap. Elsa lay very still. She could hear the moorhen with its chicks. She lifted her eyes from the page and saw a little brown water rat swimming upstream. A fringe of tall plants and weeds shimmered and blurred before her eyes. Sedges, reeds, cresses… yes, later she would look them all up. She nodded, drooped. She fell asleep.
After an hour she woke, from dreams of grass and gardens, to find her dream continuing. She was possessed by a great peace. She lay there, gazing at the sky. She could feel her afflictions, her irritations, her impatiences leaving her. They loosened their little hooks and drifted off. She would be redeemed, restored, forgiven.
The day passed smoothly into the evening, and gin and tonic, and the identification of long-tailed finches, and a reading of Pevsner. She marked churches she might or might not visit, and smiled at Pevsner’s use of the phrase ‘life-size angels’. Who was to know the life size of an angel? Had it not once been thought that millions of them might dance on the point of a pin? Might not an angel be as tall as an oak tree, as vast and powerful as a leviathan?
She slept like an angel, and woke to another blue uninterrupted day of laziness. She decided not to make a long excursion. She would spend another whole day in the delights of her new terrain. She repeated her walk to the village of the previous morning, she returned to a little lunch, she took herself off again to the paddock with her rug and her Margery Allingham. Already she had established the charm of routine, of familiarity. She felt as though she had been here forever. She read, nodded, dozed, and fell asleep.
When she woke, half an hour later, she knew at once that she was no longer alone. She sat up hastily, guiltily, rearranging her hat, straightening her cotton skirt over her bare knees, reaching for her glasses, trying to look as though she had never dozed off in an afternoon in her life. Where was the intruder? Who had aroused her? Discreetly, but with mounting panic, she surveyed her triangle of paddock – and yes, there, at the far end, she could see another human being. An old man, with a scythe. She relaxed, slightly; a rustic old character, a gardener of some sort, annoying and embarrassing to have been caught asleep by him, but harmless enough, surely? Yes, quite harmless. What was he up to? She shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun.
He appeared to be cutting the long grass. The long grass of her own paddock.
Oh dear, thought Elsa Palmer to herself. What a shame. She wanted him to stop, to go away at once. But what right had she to stop him? He must belong to the Mill House, he was clearly fulfilling his horticultural obligations to his absentee employers.
Slowly, as she sat and watched him, the full extent of the disaster began to sink in. Not only was her solitude invaded, not only had she been observed asleep by a total stranger, but this total stranger was even now in the act of cutting back the very foliage, the very grasses that had so pleased her. She watched him at work. He scythed and sawed. He raked and bundled. Could he see her watching him? It made her feel uncomfortable, to watch this old man at work, in the afternoon, on a hot day, as she sat idling with Margery Allingham on a rug. She would have to get up and go. Her paddock was ruined, at least for this afternoon. Furtively she assembled her possessions and began to creep away back to the house. But he spotted her. From the corner of the triangle, a hundred yards and more away, he spotted her. He saluted her with an axe and called to her. ‘Nice day,’ he called. ‘Not disturbing you, am I?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ she called back, faintly, edging away, edging back towards the little wooden bridge. Stealthily she retreated. He had managed to hack only a few square yards; it was heavy going, it would take him days, weeks to finish off the whole plot…
Days, weeks. That evening, trapped in her front garden, on her forecourt, she saw him cross her bridge, within yards of her, several times, with his implements, with his wheelbarrows full of rubbish. She had not dared to pour herself a gin and tonic; it did not seem right. Appalled, she watched him, resisting her impulse to hide inside her own house. On his final journey, he paused with his barrow. ‘Hot work,’ he said, mopping his brow. He was a terrible old man, gnarled, brown, toothless, with wild white hair. ‘Yes, hot work,’ she faintly agreed. What was she meant to do? Offer him a drink? Ask him in? Make him a pot of tea? He stood, resting on his bar
row, staring at her.
‘Not in your way, am I?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘On your own, are you?’ he asked. She nodded, then shook her head. ‘A peaceful spot,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I’ll be back in the morning,’ he said. But, for the moment, did not move. Elsa stood, transfixed. They stared at one another. Then he sighed, bent down to tweak out a weed from the gravel, and moved slowly, menacingly on.
Elsa was shattered. She retired into her house and poured herself a drink, more for medicine than pleasure. Could she trust him to have gone? What if he had forgotten something? She lurked indoors for twenty minutes, miserably. Then, timidly, ventured out. She crept back across the bridge to inspect the damage he had done at the far end of the paddock. Well, he was a good workman. He had made an impression on nature; he had hacked and tidied to much effect. Cut wood glared white, severed roots in the river bank bled, great swathes of grass and flowers and sedge lay piled in a heap. He had made a devastation. And at this rate, it would take him a week, a fortnight, to work his way round. To level the lot. If that was his intention, which it must be. I’ll be back in the morning, he had said. Distractedly plucking at sedges, she tried to comfort herself. She could go for walks, she could amuse herself, further afield, she could lie firmly in her deckchair on the little front lawn. She had a right. She had paid. It was her holiday.
Pond sedge. Carex acutiformis. Or great pond sedge, Carex riparia? She gazed at the flower book, as night fell. It did not seem to matter much what kind of sedge it was. Carnation sedge, pale sedge, drooping sedge. As Philip would have said, who cared? Elsa drooped. She drooped with disappointment.
Over the next week the disappointment intensified. Her worst fears were fulfilled. Day by day, the terrible old man returned with his implements, to hack and spoil and chop. She had to take herself out, in order not to see the ruination of her little kingdom. She went for long walks, along white chalky ridges, through orchid-spotted shadows, through scrubby little woods, past fields of pigs, up Roman camps, along the banks of other rivers, as her own river was steadily and relentlessly stripped and denuded. Every evening she crept out to inspect the damage. The growing green diminished, retreated, shrank. She dreaded the sight of the old man with the scythe. She dreaded the intensity of her own dread. Her peace of mind was utterly destroyed. She cried, in the evenings, and wished she had a television set to keep her company. At night she dreamed of Philip. In her dreams he was always angry, he shouted at her and mocked her, he was annoyed beyond the grave.
I am going mad, she told herself, as the second week began, as she watched the old man once more cross the little bridge, after the respite of Sunday. I must have been mad already, to let so small a thing unbalance me. And I thought I was recovering. I thought I could soon be free. But I shall never be free, when so small a thing can destroy me.
She felt cut to the root. The sap bled out. She would be left a dry low stalk.
I might as well die, she said to herself, as she tried to make herself look again at her flower book, at her Pevsner, at her old companions. No others would she ever have, and these had now failed her.
Worst of all were the old man’s attempts at conversation. He liked to engage her, despite her obvious reluctance, and she, as though mesmerized, could not bring herself to avoid him. It was the banality of these conversational gambits that delayed her recognition of his identity, his identification. They misled her. For he was an old bore, ready to comment on the weather, the lateness of the bus, the cricket. Elsa Palmer had no interest in cricket, did not wish to waste time conversing with an old man about cricket, but found herself doing so nevertheless. For ten minutes at a time she would listen to him as he rambled on about names that meant nothing to her, about matches of yesteryear. Why was she so servile, so subdued? What was this extremity of fear that gripped her as she listened?
He was hacking away her own life, this man with a scythe. Bundling it up, drying it out for the everlasting bonfire. But she did not let herself think this. Not yet.
It was on the last evening of his hacking and mowing that Elsa Palmer defeated the old man. She had been anticipating his departure with mixed feelings, for when he had finished the paddock would be flat and he would be victorious. He would have triumphed over Nature, he would depart triumphant, this old man of the river bank.
She saw him collect his implements for the last time, saw him pause with his wheelbarrow for the last time. Finished, now, for the year, he said. A good job done. Feebly, she complimented him, thinking of the poor shaven discoloured pale grass, the amputated stumps of the hedgerow. For the last time they discussed the weather and the cricket. He bade her goodbye, wished her a pleasant holiday. She watched him trundle his barrow through the gate, and across the road, and on, up the hillside, to the farm. He receded. He had gone.
And I, thought Elsa, am still alive.
She leaned on the gate and breathed deeply. She gathered her courage. She summoned all her strength.
I am still alive, thought Elsa Palmer. Philip is dead, but I, I have survived the Grim Reaper.
And it came to her as she stood there in the early evening fight that the old man was not Death, as she had feared, but Time. Old Father Time. He is the one with the scythe. She had feared that the old man was Death calling for her, as he had called for Philip, but no, he was only Time, Time friendly, Time continuing, Time healing. What had he said, of the paddock? ‘Finished for the year,’ he had said. But already, even now at this instant, it was beginning to grow again, and next June it would be as dense, as tangled, as profuse as ever, awaiting his timely, friendly scythe. Not Death, but Time. Similar, but not identical. She had named him, she had identified him, she had recognized him, and he had gone harmlessly away, leaving her in possession of herself, of her place, of her life. She breathed deeply. The sap began to flow. She felt it flow in her veins. The frozen water began to flow again under the bridge. The trout darted upstream. Yes, Old Father Time, he is the one with the scythe. Death is that other one. Death is the skeleton. Already, the grass was beginning to grow, the forget-me-nots and green alkanets were recovering.
Rejoicing, she went indoors, to her flower book. It glowed in the lamplight, it lived again. She settled down, began to turn the pages. Yes, there they were, forget-me-not, green alkanet – and what about brooklime? Was it a borage or a speedwell? She gazed at the colour plates, reprieved, entranced. Widespread and common in wet places. She turned the pages of her book, naming names. Time had spared her, Time had trundled his scythe away. Philip had been quite wrong, wrong all along. Elsa smiled to herself in satisfaction. Philip was dead because he had failed to recognize his adversary. Death had taken him by surprise, death unnamed, unrecognized, unlabelled. Lack of recognition had killed Philip. Whereas I, said Elsa, I have conversed with and been spared by the Grim Reaper.
She turned the pages, lovingly. Carex acutiformis, Carex riparia. Tomorrow she would get to grips with the sedges. There were still plenty left, at the far end of the paddock, in the difficult corner by the overhanging alder. Tomorrow she would go and pick some specimens. And maybe, when she went back to Cambridge, she would enrol for that autumn course on Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture. She didn’t really know much about iconography, but she could see that it had its interest. Well, so did everything, of course. Everything was interesting.
She began to wish she had not been so mean, so unfriendly. She really ought to have offered that old man a cup of tea.
The I of It
A. M. Homes
A. M. Homes (b. 1961) is an American writer, known for her controversial novels and unusual stories. She released her first collection of short stories, The Safety of Objects, in 1990. In 2013 she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction with her novel May We Be Forgiven.
I am sitting naked on a kitchen chair, staring at it. My jeans and underwear are bunched up at my ankles. I walked from the bathroom to here, shuffli
ng one foot in front of the other as though in shackles.
This has been a terrible week. I have been to the doctor. It is evening and I am sitting at my table staring down. I half wish that it had done what was threatened most in cases of severe abuse and fallen off. If I had found it lying loose under the sheets or pushed down to the bottom of the bed, rubbing up against my ankle, I could have picked it up lovingly, longingly. I could have brought it to eye level and given it the kind of inspection it truly deserved; I would have admired it from every angle, and then kept it in my dresser drawer.
I have an early memory of discovering this part of myself, discovering it as something neither my mother or sisters had. I played with it, knowing mine was the only one in the house, admiring its strength, enjoying how its presence seemed to mean so much to everyone. They were always in one way or another commenting on its existence from the manner in which they avoided it when they dried me from the tub to the way they looked out the car window when we stopped on long road trips and I stood by the highway releasing a thin yellow stream that danced in the wind.
This stab of maleness was what set me apart in a house of women; it was what comforted me most in that same house, knowing that I would never be like them.
From the time I first noticed that it filled me with warmth as I twirled my fingers over its top, I felt I had a friend. I walked to and from school and noisily up and down the stairs in our house, carrying it with me, slightly ahead of me, sharing its confidence.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 61