The thrush took flight. Vanessa laughed and drew her son towards her. ‘When you shout, honey, you frighten the birds away.’
This consideration had not occurred to him. He pondered for a moment, amazed at the prospect of such responsibility. Then he shrugged his body clear of his mother’s embrace and went in search of the snail, bending to it, gathering its broken shards into the palms of both hands.
‘Snail!’ he giggled in an ecstasy of delight. ‘Can I have him?’
‘That depends on what you want to do with him, Marley.’
He stared at his mother and then at the morsels of dead life. ‘Try to fix him.’
We found the tiniest of voles, Marley and I, keeping itself cool on the top step of the pool where the gentle wave motion lapped against its miniature underside. When I went near, it dived like an Olympic medallist into the water, submerging itself, kicking small back feet, moving at a rate that astounded me. And another time, across the grass a russet hare with her leveret. Mother, stock still, waiting, and then they bounded off, slipping artfully beneath the fence, disappearing into undergrowth that belonged to our neighbour, the hunter. The boy at my side kept shush while the dogs took no notice. They did not even seem to have registered the quivering presences. Bassett, our little hunting hound, I recollected with a stab of grief, would have been a bullet on their heels, but I took great pleasure, comfort, too, in the company of this boy, in sharing his wonder at the living beings around him. I would have found great joy in teaching a child of my own and part of me yearned for him to be mine.
Our mightiest of pines was a great vertical being with branch spread only at its crown. Possibly the tallest tree on the estate, it bore the scars of its history. Several of its branches hung, ripped and torn, creaking gothically in the wind; callused witnesses of past storms. Limbs that would never heal. I had christened him ‘The Aboriginal’ because he bore a beaten brown trunk, a coat of weathered, crevassed skin, and he watched out to sea without a word and within his upper echelons tawny owls made their nests. I watched their comings and goings from our bedroom. The Aboriginal was a silent, damaged soul who knew the lie of the land, kept his counsel and was gentle and generous towards his nocturnal lodgers.
A loneliness, an isolation, that I think I have carried all my life was lifting, or perhaps I was accepting of it, no longer perceiving it as negative. Beyond ‘Carrot’, the little girl I never gave birth to, whose beaming smile still paid occasional visits, though less frequently now because I was letting her go – her unborn spirit had moved on to another dimension – beyond her I had found a family here, speaking the tongues of the world, the tongues of Nature, too. Footsteps fording through the fields, through the seas of growth, I encountered insects everywhere, grasshoppers, tiny triangular chaps in bright green that resembled miniature tanks, a rare sighting of a praying mantis, pop-eyed and graceful. I scratched my scalp and found a beetle with a brown posterior rumbling about in my hair. As busy as the earth was, so, too, was the air. Flitting with life, motes, seeds, variants of midges swimming about in the warm sultry days. Life was returning to the farm. Not a controlled human vision of what this should look like, but the life of Nature in all its glory and harsh realities.
I stood within all of this, this harmony and chaos, listening to it breathe, its whisperings among itself, sharing secrets between bird and bee and stalk and flower head, and a tear rolled softly, silently, down my bronzed, summered cheek. I had been foolish, unwittingly so. Foolish to wish that Marley was mine. This farm was not mine. It was not ours or mine or anyone’s. I was simply a passenger on this swelling geoponic sea, sailing through for a time, dislodging the plants as I passed on my way. I was curator of the Olive Farm, an honourable role, but, once I was gone, out of sight beyond the horizon, having disappeared between invisible doors in the sky, drawn inexorably from beyond when my time came, through those blue-tinted doors, this hillside would forget me. It would continue as though my passage had been nothing more than a heartbeat, nothing but an evening sprint of the dogs bounding across the terraces.
And then?
Spring would return once more to the Olive Farm and the flowers, the buttercups and dandelions, golden orbs of the fields, all would bolt skywards with glad hearts, laughing at the extravagance of their own gay, irresistible colours. And beyond, after the shedding of those shy, delicate, white-laced olive flowers, a trillion, million tiny green nubs would nudge forth like dozy slow-worms, heralding the arrival of the olive, which would evolve, fattening up its ovalness until Dacus reappeared, to pierce those delectable fruits and lay its eggs. Deep within the chocolate-brown silky silence of the pulp, the larvae would hatch, feeding, sucking, guzzling, diminishing the fruit’s life, destroying in its propagation the oleaginous being that was feeding it.
And even I, were I still here, could do little. Together, they must find their balance. Dacus had been my enemy; it was the olive’s enemy, too, but to Psyttalia, for example, it was food, the next meal. A natural battle for survival. A symbiosis that had little to do with me, a rectification beyond the poisoning of the earth.
We had lost the map, the chaos that gave life to all things, that named no names. Is the earth’s mystery slipping away from us? Have we lost sight of its power, its mythology, the stories that it carries in its belly and heart? The ever-unfolding narrative of a landscape, of the details of its topography, an exploration of its botanical components. History, literature, myth, folklore, botany, geology, language. A pilgrimage across the earth.
My life had become a world of small things, a story of minute details, of the earth’s growing. I found joy in minute observation. It was about looking, seeing and hearing the sounds of the land. Salamanders or newts at the pool’s edge, a pure white egg, broken, now abandoned, birthplace of a woodpecker or owl? Buzzards circling overhead in the columned blue silence of summer. Painted Ladies poised on bay tree sprigs, delicately flapping wings of arabesque beauty. Bats silhouetted against a heliotropic light, emitting their high-pitched keening, their echo-sounding.
Returning; the creatures were returning. The changing moments, from break of day throughout my waking hours into evening, night. My mind was growing quiet. It was growing still, accepting of all that was around me. Such quietude, flowing like mercury through the troubled spaces in my head.
The tragedies, battles, heartbreaks of former years had receded from view, from memory, but I knew that, like storms far off on the ocean, they would return in unknown guises. This intermission was a gift, a blessing to be treasured. To take simple delight in the yelp of a daisy, to bask in a rose’s silken caress, the dew’s song, the dawn’s blues, the trefoil’s tiny giggles. Lullabies or reckless screechings that shattered the sky’s tranquillity.
The sky was bluer, more azure-deep, than I ever recollected it. Craning my head, peering up into it, gulls flying high, luminous in the bright midday sunlight, wheeling, turning, they cast sweeping black shadows across the olives’ canopies. Feet on the ground, I stood gazing out to sea or spun and peered inland into the petal-soft lilacness of the distant mountains and I felt immeasurably happy. Yes, immeasurably joyous. During my travels, I had sometimes felt a stab of fear, anxiety at the prospect of returning. Dare I return, dare I? Returning is what they say travellers should never do. But I had had nothing to fear. This traveller had not returned to the Olive Farm.
Not at all. She had just arrived.
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