The Accidental Woman Part 8

If your father's not going, her mother said, I think I'll stay here with him. They were in the kitchen. I'm going to bake a cake, she said, a birthday cake for his birthday tea. And some scones. I don't fancy climbing that great hill in this heat. Why don't you and Bobby take the car and go by yourselves, you could have a lovely walk together. All right, said Maria, we will.

Bobby was sitting in the garden, under the shade of the sumac tree, out of the sun. Maria brought him a gla.s.s of lemonade, with ice, and one for herself, and then sat down on the gra.s.s beside his deck chair.

'Are you coming to the park with me?' she asked.

'Wouldn't you rather go by yourself?'

This conversation takes place slowly, by the way. Don't rush it.

'Not really. I'm tired of doing things by myself.'

'No, I think I'll stay here. I've had a lot to eat, and I feel sleepy.'

Maria sipped her drink, disappointed.

'What did you mean just now,' she asked, 'when he told you that it was about time you got married, and you said '

Bobby's laugh interrupted her, quiet though it was.

'You love to build up mysteries around me, don't you? Do you remember that time in Oxford? When I went out to get something to eat, and didn't come back till the morning?'

'Now you're going to tease me again.'

Bobby smiled. 'Only because I think you like it.' He touched her with his foot.

'Yes,' said Maria. 'Yes, I do like it.'

And so it transpired, as we might all have guessed, that Maria drove to the country park alone. She drove in her father's car, with the radio tuned to Radio Three. It was a broadcast of Prokofiev's F minor violin sonata, always one of her favourites. At the end of the first movement, its quiescent harmonies and wandering melody seemed especially in keeping with her own thoughts. She turned into the car park at the foot of the hill and found it almost empty. The sky was a cloudless blue. She locked the car and began to climb.

On her way to the summit the sound of the wind was, at first, the only sound of which she took any notice. Then she started to hear others, the distant cars, the songs of birds, the cries of children. 'Cathy! Cathy!', a child was calling, thus: But there were very few people on top of the hill, that afternoon. Two men were playing with a model aeroplane, and an old couple were walking their dog. Otherwise Maria, and the birds, and the cows, had the place to themselves.

She pa.s.sed by a huge electric pylon which she remembered well, and then found herself at the very crown. Here some thoughtful person, paid no doubt to do such things, had erected a toposcope. There will be those among you to whom the word means nothing, probably, so I should explain that this is a kind of round map, carved in stone. What a gift for explication. It informed her, much to her interest, that the towns of Stafford and Lichfield lay due north, Coventry and Rugby due east, Cheltenham and Gloucester due south, and Ludlow due west. This will incidentally enable the curious to reconstruct her position with some accuracy. She turned her gaze, for the time being, to the east, but all that she could see were the tower blocks of outer Birmingham in a blue haze, and, prominent among them, the green-tipped tower of Rubery asylum. She tried to calculate how long it had been since she had last seen that view.

Maria had come to this hill for a specific purpose, and an unashamedly nostalgic one. She had hoped that it would remind her of the day when a small girl, whose name had been Maria, it now seemed, by no more than coincidence, had come there with her family, and had lost them, and had cried and fallen into the long gra.s.s. And indeed it could hardly do other than to remind her, or at least to make her think of it, but the recollection was regrettably pale, on the whole. The countryside around her called attention to itself, rather than to the memory of that long-lost other afternoon. While she wandered around, then, in a vague search for the exact spot where she had fallen, she could not help being distracted by the colours of the gorse, the rustle of holly bushes in the wind, the sight of a jay darting before her, by hawthorn. Hawthorn. Her mother had once taught her to sing, A little bit of bread and no cheese, like the chaffinch. What was that doing in her mind, all these years on? She felt suddenly and savagely sad to have seen her parents looking so old. But even this moment pa.s.sed, and in its wake Maria felt, now, a curious lack of emotion. All at once the park appeared to have nothing to do with her memory, it belonged neither to her youth nor to her middle age, neither to remembrance nor to hope, and this was good, because from now on Maria would be leaving all of these things behind.

She could hear a lark singing nearby. The bird was perched on a branch of the hawthorn bush, and was looking at Maria with intense interest, fascination, you might say. She returned its stare, and for a while these two creatures stood quite still, watching one another. I find the thoughts of both, at this point, equally impossible to divine. It is even hard to say with which, of the two, I feel more in sympathy, but let us for the sake of this story cast our lot with the lark, for whom the sight of Maria's quick unmoving eyes eventually became too much. He flew off the branch and launched himself into mid air. On the ascent, he took another look at her, saw her dwindle, spiralled, saw her move, saw her smaller and smaller still, climbed, looked again, saw her little figure on the hillside, climbed higher, and higher again, and then saw only the hillside, where we must leave her, leave her to her last calm, Maria, a speck in the unseen, homeward bound, alone, and indifferent, indifferent even in the face of death which who knows may be the next thing chance has in store for her.

end.