by Hazel Prior
‘The guy’s a nutter!’ Clive declared. ‘Or else he fancies the pants off you. Either way, it would be wrong to keep the thing.’
I promptly removed my hand from his arm. All that remained of the magic had now been shattered.
‘I don’t think my pants come into it!’ I snapped. ‘But you’re right, I should return it.’ I slammed the boot shut. Clive is a big man and I am used to him towering over me, but at that moment I was feeling exceptionally small. ‘I’ll take it back now. There’s no point in even getting it out of the car really, is there?’ I was struggling to control the bitter twang in my voice. ‘Are you coming?’
He shook his head again. Sometimes his lack of curiosity amazes me.
‘No, I think I’ll leave it to you. If I go with you, it might look as if I forced you to take it back. It’ll make me look like the wicked ogre. You go, Hon, and don’t forget to make it clear it’s your choice, and you’ll have nothing more to do with it. OK, love?’
The ‘OK, love’ did not make it any easier. I was in no mood to be OK-loved. But I got into the car and I drove up the hill and back the way I’d come, to the Harp Barn.
3
Dan
She brought it back. I was sad. I guess giving away a harp is one of those many, many things you are not supposed to do.
Why can’t I give her the harp? She likes the harp. She wants the harp. Isn’t it my harp to give? I made it with my own hands, with my own wood, with the help of my own saws and glue and planer and sander. I want to give her the harp. She seems to think I must want money for the harp and says she is so sorry but, much as she’d love to, she really isn’t in a position to buy it. I don’t want money for the harp. Not at all. If she gave me money for the harp it wouldn’t be a gift, would it? She would not value it as much. I want it to be valued. I want it to be valued by her, the Exmoor Housewife, because she has harp-playing on her before-forty list and what’s the point in having a list if you don’t do the things written on it? It is a good harp, made of cherry wood. Cherry is not her favourite tree, birch is her favourite tree, but I do not have any harps made of birch. Still, I think she likes cherry too. It is a warm and friendly wood. And she was still wearing those cherry-coloured socks.
‘Thank you, Dan … for your incredible kindness. I’m really sorry. I’ve been so stupid, so unreasonable.’
I wished she would stop shuffling her feet about.
‘I’m sorry to mess you around and change my mind. I’m sorry I took the harp in the first place.’
I wished she would stop saying she was sorry.
‘It was very wrong of me.’
It wasn’t. It wasn’t. It wasn’t wrong. No.
But what could I do?
I carried the harp back to the barn from the boot of her car. She followed me in. I placed the harp on the floor, in the middle patch of the three patches of light cast by the three windows, in the centre of everything. She put herself beside it, sniffing and shuffling. The other harps stood around, hushed and pale.
‘I only took it because my head isn’t working properly,’ she told me.
I glanced at her head. It looked all right to me.
‘You see, it’s an important anniversary today.’
I wished her a happy anniversary.
‘No, not that sort of anniversary. It’s actually, well … my father died a year ago today.’
I said I was sorry about that. It is a sad thing when your father dies. I should know.
She cleared her throat. ‘I still miss him so much.’
I asked if she’d like another sandwich.
She shook her head. ‘We were very close,’ she said. ‘Even closer when he got ill. I used to sit and read to him when he couldn’t get out of bed any more, and I remember him lying there, listening and looking into my face. Then one day, towards the end, he said something to me that I just keep on thinking about.’
It was hard for me to look at her face so I focused on the socks. But out of the corner of my eye I could see her left hand. Her palm was creeping up the back of the harp, stroking it with the lightest touch. Then it moved away slightly and floated in the air. Her fingers hovered beside the strings like a restless butterfly.
It seemed to me that the thing her father had said must be very important or she would not be acting so strangely. But I didn’t need to ask what it was because that was exactly what she told me next.
‘He said I sometimes gave him the impression I was drifting, just drifting along. And he said that wasn’t surprising, as he’d done a good bit of drifting and dreaming himself. But it might be an idea to clarify and think about what I wanted. I should pick a dream, any dream, any one of the hundreds, and just try and see if I could make it come true. Just one. Realistically, one could be possible, if I tried hard enough. Because he didn’t want me to come to the end of my life full of regrets. And I shouldn’t leave it too long, because you never knew when … He was talking about himself, you see … So after that I made my before-forty list because I had a whole load of dreams and needed to narrow them down a bit. I was remembering and pondering it this morning, and then, just as I was thinking about the list and how I hadn’t done a single thing on it … I stumbled across your lovely barn.’
Her voice sounded odd, as if she had stuffed rags down her throat. ‘I probably won’t call in again,’ she said.
Sometimes I do the things I am not supposed to do. Sometimes I say the things I am not supposed to say, even when I realize.
I pointed at the harp. ‘Play it,’ I said.
‘I can’t,’ she murmured. But her hand stayed hovering by the strings.
Harps each have their own unique voice and I knew that this one was a powerful one. It could charm and enthral, it could plead and it could command. People say that certain sounds can melt a heart of stone. If there is anyone who has that sort of a heart – which I doubt because as far as I am aware hearts are made of fibrous materials, fluid sacs and pumping mechanisms – if anyone does have a heart composed of granite or flint and therefore not at all prone to melting but just conceivably meltable when exposed to very beautiful sounds, then the sounds made by my cherry wood harp, I am confident, would melt it. However, I had a feeling the heart of Ellie the Exmoor Housewife was completely lacking in stony components. I had a feeling it was made of much softer stuff.
‘Play it!’ I repeated, and I managed another quick glance at her face. Her eyes looked soft and dewy. She stretched out her index finger and ran it across the strings. They rang out with a cry, pure and wild, just as they had done the first time from the boot of her car.
I waited. An echo of the notes shimmered in the air between us. But Ellie the Exmoor Housewife still seemed to need persuading. Persuading is not a thing that I normally do, but I set myself the challenge of doing it.
I carefully addressed her socks. I told them that I didn’t mind if she went away and came back later because sometimes it takes time to make decisions. But, whether she came back or not, the harp belonged to her, Ellie Jacobs, the Exmoor Housewife. It was her harp, and always would be. I never took back a gift. The harp would sit here in my barn and wait for her. It would sit and wait until all the cows had come home. This did not sound like a very long time, so I made it longer. The harp would wait, I promised her, until the sea dried up (which some day it would if you gave it long enough) and the stars dropped out of the sky (which some day they would if you gave them long enough), and even if she never came this harp would never, ever belong to anyone else. I would never, ever permit another person to play it. So if she did not come back it would sit here unplayed until the world ended (which some day it would, but it was likely to be rather a long wait). Which was a sad thing. However, if she did come back and did play it, that would be a lot less sad. I added that she could even play it here if she liked, if that was better for her and she did not want to take it home. Perhaps, I reflected, a harp does not fit into the home of an Exmoor Housewife all that well; perhaps it gets in the w
ay of the dusting and hoovering. Harps do that, sometimes.
I have a little room upstairs which is quite comfortable and warmer than the rest of the barn. I suggested that, if she saw fit, she could use that little room to practise her harp while I was busy making more harps. I would not even hear her from downstairs. I have a few books on learning to play the harp, which I could lend her. I knew a harp teacher and I could lend her too. All the right ingredients were there. I had made my choice about giving her the harp. She only had to review her choice about accepting it. I hoped she would think again. I would be so happy if she would think again. I had now said what I wanted to say. So I stopped talking.
The socks were very still. I could hear the rumble of a distant tractor and the chattering of swallows as they flew over the roof of the barn. The sun shone through the middle window a little brighter than before. It shone on to the harp, so that the cherry wood glowed.
Finally, Ellie Jacobs said: ‘If the harp stayed here and I came to try it out once in a while … there would be no harm in that … would there?’ It sounded as if she was talking to herself, not to me. So then I did look into her face, properly, to try and work out if she wanted a reply or not. She had little water droplets stuck along her eyelashes. I decided that a reply was possibly required and might even be helpful. I decided to do that thing where you ask a question to which the answer is so obvious nobody needs to give it. Only she’d already done that, really, so all I had to do was repeat certain words, just to make it quite clear.
‘Harm?’ I said. ‘In playing a harp?’
She smiled then, and turned, and without another word she walked to her car. She got in and drove away.
But I had a feeling she would be back.
4
Ellie
The car jolts down the track. The world reels. I’m all over the place; full of streaming tears one moment and bursts of manic laughter the next. I’m driving completely on autopilot. I probably shouldn’t be driving at all.
This isn’t the kind of thing that happens to me. I must have fallen through a magical portal into somebody else’s life. My existence has somehow transformed itself into something bright and light, filled with frolicking colours. Life was nothing like this when I woke up this morning.
There’s no way I can go home yet and face Clive. A walk in the wilds is what I need. Somewhere high up. High places always help me think, which is what I need to do right now. I put my foot on the accelerator and launch on to the road that leads up to Dunkery Beacon. I leave the car in a lay-by and stride up one of the rocky paths to the cairn at the top. The wind whips my hair and sweeps across the purple tufts of heather. I breathe in cool sea-tang and the fresh, peaty scent of moor.
If I’ve decided what I think I’ve decided, how can I possibly explain it to Clive? I love Clive, of course, and Clive loves me, but there are lots of things we don’t quite get about each other. I don’t get his fascination with football or with finance. He doesn’t get why I take myself off onto Exmoor with my jotter pad and write poems – poems that nobody will ever read – about bark and clouds and spiders’ webs and running water.
Clive likes things to be straightforward. Clive likes things to fall within certain guidelines. My poetry doesn’t really fall within those guidelines. My current predicament – being given a harp by somebody I’ve just met – is way outside them.
I walk faster and faster, swinging my arms. I reach the summit in record time. The views on every side challenge me with their rugged beauty: green pastures alternating with patches of tawny moorland; stubby hawthorns; distant hills that melt into the sky; jags of coastline that climb, fall and reach out to the sea. Today the sea is slate-grey, laced with a thousand dancing threads of blue and silver. It seems to reflect my overwhelming sense that wonderful things are possible in this world after all.
My mind flits from Clive to Dan, from Dan to Clive. Back to Dan, trying to make sense of it all. Dan seems such an innocent, but something I saw in his workshop tells me I should be wary.
I speak his name into the air, trying it out on my tongue: ‘Dan.’
I listen to the sound of the word as it is carried out to sea.
‘Dan, the Exmoor Harp-Maker!’ I assert, a little louder. But the sound echoes back into my skull with an edge of doubt. Slowly, as it continues echoing, I realize it has transmuted itself: Dan, the Exmoor Heart-Breaker.
Clive meets me at the door with a concerned kiss. ‘You took your time. Everything all right?’
‘Fine,’ I reply. ‘I went up to Dunkery for some fresh air.’
‘No wonder you’re looking so wild.’
I prod my hair.
‘So you managed to return the harp?’ he asks.
‘Yup.’ I make sure my eyes meet his. This much, at least, is true.
He gives me a pat on the back. ‘That’s my gal! I know you liked the look of it, but it would’ve been wrong to accept it – you said that yourself!’
I push past him into the kitchen. He follows me.
‘And it wasn’t exactly practical, was it, Hon-pun?’
‘No, not really.’
‘I expect the guy was pretty glad to see it again, once he realized how silly he’d been. Now he’ll be able to sell it.’
‘Mmmmm.’
‘And he’ll get a good price for it, and someone else will appreciate it. Someone who can make the most of it, someone who can actually play the thing. Like a properly trained musician.’
I’m not enamoured with those last three words.
Can I really see myself playing the harp? If I’m honest it was only on my before-forty list because it was a pleasing idea, an exotic image. One of those dreams that remains hazy and amorphous because you assume it will always stay just that – a dream. But now, if I’m not careful, that dream might just somersault into reality. And I have to say, I really, really don’t want to be careful. I’m fed up with being careful.
‘You should be careful, you know,’ Clive comments. ‘Wandering about on the moor by yourself. Meeting strange men with strange propositions …’
‘Yeah, I know I’m a bit crazy. But you wouldn’t love me if I was normal, would you?’
We’ve had this conversation before. And I know exactly what comes next.
‘I’d love you whatever, El.’
‘Love you, too, Hon,’ I say quickly.
He helps himself to a beer from the fridge and opens it with care, savouring the prospect of pouring it down his throat during the highlights from Bristol City’s latest game. I examine his profile: his long, aquiline nose, powerful jawline and sparsity of sandy-brown hair. His shoulders are square, his arms gym-toned. His blue sweatshirt strains tightly against the muscles of his chest. He looks younger than his forty-one years. He is an attractive man. There’s a determination and strength about him that has always drawn me. He is my rock and I am his … well, his limpet …
I need to broach the harp topic. Why is it so hard? Why is it that out on the open moor I was fizzing with joy yet now I’m at home the whole situation seems fraught with problems? It should be easy to drop it into the conversation now: ‘Hon, I’ve decided to go up to the Harp Barn every so often to have a go at playing the harp. The harp-maker’s quite OK with it – in fact, he seems to think I should.’
But no. The words don’t make it to the surface.
The Telegraph is lying on the chair by the window. The leading story is all about terrorist attacks. I listlessly pick up today’s post that’s lying on the table. Bills – I’ll leave those to Clive – and a begging letter from a charity. The begging letter is plastered with pictures of pale children behind bars and horror stories of people-trafficking. I hold it up for Clive to see.
‘No, El, I’m sorry. We just can’t afford to give to any more charities.’
I stuff the letter into the recycling bin but the terrible images stay with me. Suddenly I’m weary. I switch on the radio for some light relief. Only to be regaled by a story about female genita
l mutilation. Clive makes a face. I switch the radio off again.
All those people suffering in the world. And here I am fretting about an overly generous gift.
I picture the harp, the beautiful harp, my harp. Dan was adamant. He vowed it would sit there unplayed for ever.
Unless I came back to play it.
Decisions stress me out. It’s much easier when I’m in a situation where I can just mould myself to somebody else’s will. But now Clive’s will and Dan’s will keep pulling me in opposite directions.
I think about my parents, whose iron rule dominated my life for so many years. In the days when she understood such things, my mother would have disapproved, there’s no doubt about that. She disapproved of pretty much everything. And my father, who died a year ago today? What would he have made of my harp quandary? The earlier version of himself would have been strict and sensible, but the later, iller, more pensive, more lovable version – the version who told me to pick a dream and follow it? I can’t be sure.
Perhaps it’s not so much the harp as Dan himself who is the issue.
Because Dan is a man. What manner of man, I ask myself. A startlingly handsome one – I could hardly fail to notice that. But what sort of person is he? Certainly not the sort I’m used to.
While Dan was busy making sandwiches, I’d taken the chance to nose around the Harp Barn. As well as the harps themselves, the place was overrun with sawdust – mounds of it on the floor and little fragments floating around in the air. Bits of lichen, fir cones and feathers also seemed to be scattered around in random places. Shining pennies were laid out on the windowsills in long, snaking lines. Behind them were glass dishes filled with pebbles. The workbench was stacked with tools and finely pencilled diagrams. I’d also noticed, hanging above the workbench, a large cork board covered with photos. Photos of women. They were all attractive and mostly young. Some were posing with harps; all were very much posing. In the centre was a blonde with a low-cut top and stunning blue eyes.