Trick or Treat by Lesley Glaister Page A

the books, rest their wine glasses upon the books, make love among the books sometimes when the mood caught them. They’d move them round, flick through the tops of piles, rebuild. She would untidy and Arthur would neaten. They would turn things up they might otherwise have forgotten. She rubs her eyes.
    Arthur returns with a little stack of books. ‘Are you comfortable?’ He puts the books beside her, and helps settle her against a cushion. He turns down the gas fire for the room is warm. He switches on the lamp: ‘All right?’ He picks some toffee papers up from the floor. ‘I’ll have to run Ewbank round in here,’ he says.
    Olive watches him patiently. She does not want to read. There is something the matter with her eyes nowadays and she cannot read for long before the words jump and jumble, and her temples throb. She probably needs glasses but she doesn’t want them. She looks awful enough and the world looks awful enough without them both springing into focus. What with the words jumping and the way one idea won’t connect with the next, reading is a miserable business, and she gave it up long ago – as Artie well knows.
    â€˜Won’t be long.’ Arthur squeezes her shoulder and leaves her be. She hears him going out of the passage, talking away to Potkins. She listens to the quietness. The gas fire hisses and pings, a car drives past, a child shouts. She looks at the books beside her. What has he chosen? Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley – and Arthur’s book, the one by Kropotkin that was practically his bible. She opens it and in the lamplight sees that the edges of its pages are furred with dust. Arthur is slipping up. He used to mind about dust; funny that he was so finicky, so particular. And he used to know the book by heart. She has a memory of him standing on the allotment, just a young man, red in the face from digging, a sharp exciting smell of sweat coming from him, making her want him right there. His cupped hands were full of earth. ‘Kropotkin talks about the making of earth by gardener,’ he said. ‘The earth became his, through his work. Do you know that in renting contracts of French allotments, gardener can carry away soil he’s made?’ Olive remembers shaking her head and squeezing her thighs together as she watched the brown earth trickle between his fingers. Sometimes she’d cycle to the allotment just to make love to him in the shed, quick, hot, grubby love that left earthy fingerprints on the skin under her dress, and then she’d cycle home, pressing her soft wetness against the hard of her saddle, an enigmatic smile upon her face.
    She chuckles and shakes her head. They were happy, and they were in love. They were not approved of but nobody could say that they were not happy.
    She puts Arthur’s book down and picks up Under the Greenwood Tree . There is her name in the front: ‘Olive Owens, September 1943’, in her own handwriting. The book was a birthday gift from Arthur. He had sent it to her from Norfolk. She remembers unwrapping the brown-paper parcel, and opening the book to begin reading immediately and finding that Arthur had underlined the first paragraph.
    To dwellers in the wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the notes of such trees as they shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality .
    Olive reads slowly, frowning, her lips moving with the effort. It meant something once. In the war Arthur had sent it to her because it meant something to him. Arthur had had to go away during the war because he refused to fight. Brave man. And how she had loved him and respected him. He worked on a farm in Norfolk