Every Friday the Wellers started to show up too. In unison, they set about tearing up the plants that had been growing around their house until now, in order to plant others that they’d bought at a shop. It was hard to tell what logic was driving them, why they didn’t like elderberry, but preferred wisteria in its place. One time, standing on tiptoes to look at them over their enormous fence, I told them the wisteria probably wouldn’t survive the February frosts here, but they just smiled, nodded and went on doing their thing. They cut down a beautiful wild rose and ripped up some clumps of thyme. They arranged some stones to build a fanciful mound in front of the house, and planted it with conifers, as they put it: ornamental cedars, creeping pine, dwarf cypresses and firs. Utterly pointless, to my mind.
The Grey Lady was coming for longer stays by now, and I’d see her walking along the field boundaries at a slow pace, stiff as a post. One evening I went to her house with the keys and the repair bills. She offered me some herbal tea. To be polite, I drank it. Once we had finished settling the accounts, I dared to ask a question.
‘If I wanted to write my memoirs, how would I go about it?’ I said, sounding confused.
‘You must sit at the table and force yourself to write. It’ll come of its own accord. You mustn’t censor yourself. You must write down everything that comes into your head.’
Strange advice. I wouldn’t want to write down ‘everything’. I’d only like to write down the things that I find good and positive. I thought she was going to say more, but she didn’t. I felt disappointed.
‘Disappointed?’ she asked, as if she could read my thoughts.
‘Yes.’
‘When one can’t speak, one should write,’ she said. ‘It helps a lot,’ she added, and fell silent. The wind grew stronger, and now we could see the trees outside swaying steadily to the rhythm of inaudible music, like the audience at a concert in an amphitheatre. Upstairs a draught slammed a door shut. As if someone had fired a shot. The Grey Lady shuddered.
‘Those noises upset me – it’s as if everything here were alive!’
‘The wind always makes that noise. I’ve grown used to it,’ I said.
I asked her what sort of books she wrote, and she replied horror stories. That pleased me. I must definitely introduce her to Good News, they’re sure to find plenty to talk about. They’re links in the same chain. Anyone who’s capable of writing things like that must be a courageous Person.
‘And does evil always have to be punished at the end?’ I asked.
‘I don’t care about that. I’m not concerned with punishment. I just like to write about frightening things. Maybe because I’m so fearful myself. It does me good.’
‘What happened to you?’ I asked, emboldened by the falling Dusk, and pointed at the orthopaedic collar around her neck.
‘Degeneration of the cervical vertebrae,’ she said impassively, as if telling me about a broken domestic appliance. ‘Evidently my head is too heavy. That’s how it seems to me. My head’s too heavy. My vertebrae can’t hold up the weight of it, so crunch, crunch, they degenerate.’
She smiled and poured me some more of the awful tea.
‘Don’t you feel lonely here?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes.’
‘I admire you. I wish I were like you. You’re brave.’
‘Oh no, I’m not in the least brave. It’s a good thing I have something to do here.’
‘I feel uneasy without Agata too. The world here is so large, so impossible to take in,’ she said, fixing her gaze on me for a few seconds, testing me. ‘Agata is my wife.’
I blinked. I had never heard one woman referring to another as ‘my wife’ before. But I liked it.
‘You’re surprised, aren’t you?’
I thought for a while.
‘I could have a wife too,’ I said with conviction. ‘It’s better to live with someone than alone. It’s easier to go through life together than on one’s own.’
She didn’t respond. It was difficult to talk to her. Finally I asked her to lend me her book. The most frightening one. She promised she’d ask Agata to bring it. Dusk was falling, but she didn’t put on the light. Once we were both plunged in darkness, I said goodbye and went home.
Now, confident that the houses were back in the care of their owners, I enjoyed going on longer and longer walks, though I still called these expeditions my round. I was widening my estates, like a solitary She-Wolf. I was thankful to leave behind the views of the houses and the road. I would go into the forest – I could wander around it endlessly. Here things were quieter; the forest was like a vast, deep, welcoming refuge in which one could hide. It lulled my mind. Here I didn’t have to conceal the most troublesome of my Ailments – the fact that I weep. Here my tears could flow, bathing my eyes and improving my sight. Maybe that’s why I could see more than people with dry eyes.
First I noticed the lack of Deer – they had vanished. Or perhaps the grass was so high that it hid their perfect red backs? What it actually meant was that the Deer had already started to calve.
On the same day when I first came upon a Young Lady with a beautiful spotted Fawn, I saw a man in the forest. At quite close range, though he did not see me. He had a backpack with him, green with an external frame, like the ones they used to make in the 1970s, so it occurred to me that the man must be of a similar age to me. And to tell the truth, he looked it too – old. He was bald, and his face was covered in grey stubble, trimmed short, probably with one of those cheap Chinese clippers bought at the street market. His oversized, faded jeans bulged unattractively on the buttocks.
This man was moving down the road that ran along the forest, cautiously, gazing underfoot. That was probably why he let me come so close. When he reached the intersection, where felled pine trunks were stacked, he took off his pack, leaned it against a tree, and went into the forest. My binoculars showed me a wobbly, out-of-focus image, so I could only guess what he was doing there. I did see him leaning down to the forest floor and rummaging in the pine needles. One might have thought he was a mushroom picker, but it was too early for mushrooms. I watched him for about an hour. He sat on the grass, ate sandwiches and wrote something in a notebook. For thirty minutes or so he lay on his back with his arms folded behind his head and stared into the sky. Then he took the backpack and disappeared into the greenery.
From the school I called Dizzy to tell him this news – that I’d seen a stranger roaming about in the forest. I also told him what people were saying at Good News’ shop, which was that the Commandant was mixed up in the illegal transportation of terrorists across the border. Some suspicious types had been caught not far from here. But Dizzy reacted rather sceptically to these revelations. And refused to be persuaded that the stranger could be wandering about the forest in order to erase potential evidence. Maybe a weapon was hidden there?