The Girl Green as Elderflower by Randolph Stow Page A

off the girl’s advance. On the wrist was a bracelet, of gold discs half as big as a farthing, each with a hieroglyph or symbol engraved upon it.
    ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you swore.’
    But the girl would not be stopped. ‘Oh you poor, pretty baby,’ she said, ‘how can it hurt if I give you a kiss?’ Her arm curved about the small figure and touched it, ready to draw it towards her.
    ‘No!’ cried Malkin; and suddenly she was no longer there.
    ‘Malkin!’ the girl called out. ‘Oh don’t—don’t be angry. I was silly, I was wicked. But I won’t again, I won’t break my word again.’ Slipping from her bed, standing on the mat, she watched all the space of the room for a sign.
    ‘Hush,’ said the spirit from the air, with all her old childish authority. ‘Hush now, I’m listening.’
    A low, soothing croon floated down from the shadows. The door, which was slightly ajar, stirred on its hinges. Lucy, padding after the sound, followed the dark passage, cold under her bare feet, until she had reached her father’s door.
    The door was closed. The crooning had died away. Suddenly, through the oak, the girl heard the call of a cuckoo. She listened smiling, thinking that she knew what had made it. But it came again, and then she recognized the voice of a real cuckoo, somewhere out beyond her father’s window, in the garden’s nightbound trees.

APRIL

     
     
    The cuckoo had for Clare of all touches the most magicianly, the most transforming. When he lay in his bed in the early mornings, looking out from his pillow over the clearing of the old fishponds, the cuckoo with its frail assertiveness expanded everything, till the wood grew huge as the ancient man-scaring forest of High Suffolk, and the sound was a tender green.
    At the edge of each window the apple tree, agitated by bullfinches, intruded branches of tight flushed buds. In the nearest field the combed bay earth was lined with the first spears of barley, and the poplars on the horizon had about them now a copper-coloured mist.
    He thought on one such morning, listening to the cuckoo, that his provisional happiness had put down roots, that the fact of it would endure.
    The unfamiliar sound of the telephone drove the cuckoo out of his head. Wrong number he thought, or Mikey; and made his way downstairs in no hurry, since Mikey would hang on for ever.
    ‘Clare,’ he said, and waited for Mikey Clare to say: ‘Snap.’
    ‘Clare?’ a man’s voice verified. ‘Good morning, Clare. This is somebody from your past.’
    ‘Oh?’ Clare said. ‘I don’t appear to remember you.’
    ‘Perry,’ said the voice.
    ‘Perry?’ Clare said doubtfully. ‘Perry who? Wait a moment. Do you mean Matthew Perry?’
    ‘Yes, that one,’ the man said. ‘So the old school hasn’t been blotted out of your mind entirely.’
    ‘I wasn’t there long enough,’ Clare said, ‘to be marked too indelibly. But who wouldn’t remember you, Matt?’
    ‘I want to see you,’ Perry said. ‘Is that a possibility?’
    ‘Of course it is. Where are you—London? Can you come here?’
    ‘That’s what I’d planned,’ Perry said. ‘On Saturday morning, I thought. Could you put me up for a night?’
    ‘Not too luxuriously, but I can borrow a bed. It’s kind of rough here, I warn you. I can’t cook, and live as if I was still in the bush. I don’t know what you’re used to. What do you do these days?’
    ‘I’m a financier’s punk,’ Perry said, ‘or righthand man, as he has it. We’re in minerals, oil and such stuff. Don’t worry, I know something about living in the bush, on several continents. Suppose I take the 10.30 from Liverpool Street, could you meet me at the station?’
    ‘Yes, of course. On foot, probably. It’s a three-mile walk across the fields, if you’re up to it. But how did you find me?’
    ‘We have our methods,’ Perry said. ‘Actually, I rang the only C. Clare in the book, and spoke to two children called Mikey and Lucy. Very sensible