We went back to work then. I heard her granny's laughter rising over the meadow, and by some mysterious process that awful noise was transmuted into an audible expression of the excitement which was making my hands tremble and my heart race.
So at every noon we drew a little nearer to each other, treading our way like swimmers toward that bright island which we did not reach until the last day of the harvest, when the weights were totted and the wages paid, and under cover of the general gaiety she sidled up to me, stood for a long time in a tense silence, and then abruptly said,
‘I made sevenanatanner.’
She opened her fist and showed me the moist coins lying on her palm. I pursed my lips and gravely nodded, and gazed away across the fields, trying to look as though I were struggling with some great and terrible thought. At our feet Michael sat with his back against the wheel of the cart, slowly munching an enormous sandwich. He glanced up at us briefly, with a faint trace of mockery. Rosie stirred and sighed, trapped her hands behind her back, and began to grind the toe of her sandal into the grass. Her knees were stippled with rich red scratches, crescents of blood-beads.
‘That's fourteen stone,’ she said, and added faintly, ‘and two pound.’
That was more than I had picked, and I was about to admit as much when abruptly Michael bounced up between us, coughed, hitched up his trousers, and grinned at the horse. The shock of this apparition made our eyes snap back into focus, and the others around us materialised again, and the wave of jabbering voices and the jingle of money swelled in our ears. Rosie blushed and sadly, slowly, paced stiff-legged away.
I helped Nockter to dismantle the scales, and we loaded the pieces on the cart while Michael harnessed the horse. The pickers drifted off into the lowering sun. We followed them across the meadow and then turned away toward home. Nockter clicked his tongue at the horse and rattled the reins along its back. Michael and I walked in silence beside the rolling cart. He was wearing Nockter's hat pushed down on the back of his head. We reached the lane. I was thinking that if Michael had not popped up between us like that, the clown, I might have, I could have, why, I would have-Rosie stepped out of a bush at the side of the lane ahead of us, tugging at her dress. My heart! She gaped at us, greatly flustered, started off in one direction, turned, tried the other, stopped. The cart rumbled on. Nockter grinned. Michael began to whistle. I hesitated, doing a kind of agonised dance in my embarrassment, and finally stood stilL She smiled timidly. A massed choir of not altogether sober cherubim burst into song. I felt ridiculous.
‘You're gas,’ said Rosie.
She came to me at Cotter's place that evening with a shower of rain behind her. The drops fell like fire through the dying copper light of day. All of the wood was aflame. She had wanted me to meet her in the graveyard, like any normal swain. I drew the line there.
13
WHEN I WAS with Rosie it seemed enough simply to be there- if one can ever be anywhere simply-but time complicates everything. Over the years the memory of our affair, that aching fugue of swoons and smiles, has dwindled to a motionless golden point whose texture in the surrounding gloom is that of sunblurred skin redolent of crushed grass and flowers, which Alessandro di Mariano knew so well, the texture of seraphs’ wings. Beside all this, the actuality of my peasant girlchild with her grubby nails and sausage curls seems a tawdry thing, and I suppose it is not her but an iridescent ideal that I remember. Try as I will, I cannot see her face. Her other parts, or some of them, I vividly recall, naturally. That evening, or another, in the wood, we talked for a while with excessive gravity and great difficulty and then, glumly, surrendered to the silence. Things were looking very bad when I played what turned out to my surprise to be a trump. I told her about algebra. She stared at me with open mouth and huge eyes as I revealed to her the secrets of this amazing new world, mine, where figures, your old pals, jiggers, yes, were put through outlandish and baffling exercises. Let x equal whaa…? Ah yes, I won her heart with mathematics. She was still pondering those mysterious symbols, her lips moving incredulously, when I delved between her chill pale thighs and discovered there her own, frail secret. She snapped her legs shut like a trap and scuttled out of my clutches, sat back on her heels and gazed at me with moony eyes, distraught, reproachful, shocked, aye, and tumescent.
‘You dirty thing,’ she whispered.
Our affair, then, was founded on mutual astonishment at the intricacy of things, my brain, her cunt, things like that. Affair, that word again. I must not exaggerate. We parted virgins. Still I do not deny, I do not deny what she meant to me. I wandered about the house and garden in a mad mist, blind to everything but the hands of the clock which, with their agonisingly slow semaphore, dragged the evening toward me across the ticking dry bones of the day. Birchwood and its inmates were disintegrating around me, and I hardly noticed.
Papa's jaunts to the city had become rare, and lately had ceased altogether. He displayed a new and, to me, disturbing interest in the house, almost an obsession. One day he announced a plan to have the place repaired. He would pay the builder with an acre of timber. Capital notion! He went into town to see about it, and came home drunk, in great good humour, the renovations forgotten. That very night the schoolroom ceiling collapsed, and when Michael and I went to investigate with Mama, the swaying light of our candles showed us, up in the rotten cavity, a decayed hanging forest of rank green growths stirring like seaweed in the swell of crossdraughts. We locked away that horrible aquarium, and in the morning Papa's headache would allow no mention of catastrophe. Two boards in the lavatory floor crumbled to dust under him on a silent Sunday morning, leaving him perched on the bowl, instantly constipated, his feet and crumpled trousers dangling above an abyss.
‘Nockter! Jesus Christ almighty. Nock-there you are. Get me a hammer, nails, a couple of planks, hurry up, we have a job to do. I could have been killed. Like that! Jesus can you imagine the laugh they'd have. Broke his arse on his own lav, ha!’ He glared at us darkly, daring us to laugh, but in spite of all his fierceness I noticed again now what I had noticed for the first time recently, that he had begun to shrink, I do not mean in my estimation, but in his own stature, as if something inside him, some of his stuffings, had fallen out, and I could not help thinking of a sucked brittle carcase of a wasp, neatly parcelled in paste, enmeshed in a spider's web. ‘This will have to stop, have to,’ he cried. ‘The bloody house is coming down around our ears.’ But before the tools were brought he had taken his gun and stalked off into the wood, running his hands through his hair and muttering under his breath, and I had slipped away to meet my love.