by Wendy Jones
He felt excitement race through him. Wilfred knew that when he was an old man, like his da, and he looked back, it would be these months, these weeks, these days, these moments that he would remember most. This was the time of his life, the most exciting and charged his life would ever be. He couldn’t imagine there would be anything in the whole of his life to match these moments and these feelings, he was certain of it.
He continued to follow Flora down the hill. It was her beauty, her shoulders, her straight back, the slight swing of her hips, but most of all it was her dignity that drew him in. This woman, who had both humility and dignity. He knew, too, it was her full breasts and long waist as well, and the outline of her thigh against the linen of the dress she wore. That was what made him desire her strongly; it distracted him and made him ache, almost powerfully sometimes, with his need to be with her. Her beauty attracted him, but it was her humility and dignity that made him love her.
When they reached the top of the boulders, she stopped.
‘Here,’ she said, and gestured. The blackberry bushes were laden, the fruit untouched. Many of the berries were no longer red, hard and sharp, but large, lush and almost perse. Flora was already reaching forward, picking them and placing them in her basket. The blackberries did not resist but came willingly from their branches. Wilfred looked around him. He didn’t know where to start, there were hundreds, thousands, of blackberries – a glut. He began picking one at a time and placing them in the palm of his hand, and when his hands were full he went to Flora and placed them in her basket.
They worked calmly, side by side. Flora would be making jam, he thought, for the winter. And blackberry and apple crumble. This woman, the woman by him, was intelligent; she had known, Wilfred realized, that there was so much feeling between them that a simple, natural task would help them navigate themselves through the sea of emotion. She was making them both calm, despite the near drowning and Wilfred’s marriage.
As Wilfred picked the fruit, he moved nearer to Flora until he was standing next to her. She was taking the waist-high ones while he pulled the berries that were growing higher up on the bramble, the ones beyond Flora’s reach.
It was very warm now; the sun was beaming in a cloudless sky. They had been eating berries as they went along, the most succulent ones they had found at the perfect moment, as ripe and as perfect as they would ever be, only a night away from spoiling. Their fingers were stained magenta and Flora’s lips, Wilfred saw, were also stained. It looked like she was wearing lipstick.
We are working together, Wilfred thought. We are side by side. He felt himself very alive – the preciousness of it enervated him. Flora’s basket was filling up. Wilfred wondered at the abundance of fruit, the sheer endlessness of berries, more than they could ever pick; even if they picked all day from the green bushes they could never take all the fruit that nature offered them.
The silence between them deepened and became more charged. I will speak now, Wilfred thought. I will speak now.
‘It was annulled.’
Flora stopped mid-gesture; she was poised to pick a berry.
‘The marriage,’ he added.
Flora stopped, her hands by her side, her basket hanging loosely by her leg. She looked straight ahead of her at the thorns, the leaves and berries. She felt the enormity of what Wilfred had said and the opportunity now open to them. She felt as wide and free as the cove around them. Annulled!
After a moment she asked, still looking straight ahead, ‘Unconsummated?’
‘Yes,’ Wilfred said.
They could have turned to each other, chattered excitedly, asked questions, jumped up and down, grasped each other and hugged. Instead, Flora sat down on the grass, collapsed almost, her legs to her side, her hand going to the earth for support. Her basket knocked against the path and rocked. Wilfred understood: a world had fallen around her – the life where she loved Wilfred but he was married, that painful, over-illuminated sphere with its relentless truth of unfulfilled love from which she – and he – had thought there would be no escape ever, had cracked apart, its order broken and a world had passed away. Many things were different now.
Wilfred sat down beside her; he waited until she seemed more composed, then took her hand.
This time it was Wilfred who led the way back to the cottage. The shade of the leaves protected them somewhat from the sun. Inside, he took one of the plates and put some of the fruit on it, opened the water bottle and gave the plate and the bottle to Flora. Wilfred felt calm and certain. They sat down together and ate the berries they had picked. He reached out and touched her forearm, and said, ‘You lost your camera in the sea.’
She nodded.
‘I’m sorry. I would like to replace it for you.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ and her eyes lit up. He took her hand.
‘There is something I would like to ask you,’ he said.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Sandra Newman, Helen Fox, Blake Morrison, Stuart Proffitt, Panos Karnezis, Peter Ayton, Kate Mays, Nicky Forsyth, Johnnie Moore, Philippa Perry, Julie and Colin, Austin Price, Christina Hopkinson, Rachel Watson and Neil Shashoua.
My warmest thanks to Peter Straus, Jenny Hewson, James Gurbutt and Sam Evans for their professionalism, advice and sense of fun. I owe particular thanks to Gwyn Thrussell and friends for their suggestions and guidance. I would also like to thank Isabel Clementine Evans.
About the Author
Wendy Jones was the first person to do an MA in Life Writing at UEA and is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, where she teaches. She is also the author of a biography of Grayson Perry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, and hosts Interesting Conversations, a literary programme on Resonancefm. She lives in London.
Copyright
Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the UK by Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2012
Copyright © Wendy Jones 2012
The right of Wendy Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978–1–78033–472–1