Amaryllis Night and Day

  As always, her face came to me half-turned-away. Probably she wouldn’t want to be taken for granted after last night’s glim. With that in mind I went to the first place where we’d seen each other in the unglim world: the Klein-bottle display in the Science Museum. There I waited as I’d done at the town library when I was fourteen and hoping for a glimpse of a girl I hadn’t yet dared to speak to. I seemed to have a lot of breath in me and I had to keep exhaling.

  In the flat unglim of this Thursday afternoon there was nobody else at the Klein-bottle display; I had it all to myself. Cindy Ackerman’s reiterations came to mind, suggesting motion in the twists and turns of the glittering glass. As before, I turned my back on the bottles and felt their presence behind me. But then her written words, only half-remembered, came up in me like mental indigestion.

  After a half-hour or so Amaryllis appeared, breathless. ‘I couldn’t get here any sooner,’ she said. ‘I have this woman in Wimbledon who insists on playing Scarlatti. She always loses but she always drags ten minutes more out of me.’ She dropped her shoulder bag and flung herself into my arms. Not knowing when or even if I’d see her again, not even knowing her full name, I hugged her as if I could imprint myself on her by main force.

  ‘You did it,’ she said, ‘you glimmed me to you,’ and kissed me again.

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’ I said with my mouth against her neck.

  ‘The bus and the Brass Hotel and Room 318? Yes, Peter, I remember all of it. I’m not alone any more.’

  I was so touched that I almost started to cry. I kissed her again and again.

  After a while I moved my face an inch or two away from hers and said, ‘So I passed the test then, did I?’

  ‘What do you mean, Peter?’

  ‘It was my glim and I glimmed you into it.’

  ‘Yes, you did, but it wasn’t a test.’

  ‘But it was important to you for me to bring you into my glim rather than be a guest in yours.’

  ‘I wanted us to have a two-way connection, that’s all,’ she said, squirming a little away from the question.

  This time her T-shirt said WALKING SPANISH. Did she remember her T-shirt in last night’s glim? I decided to let it be our unspoken thing. ‘Walking Spanish?’ I said.

  ‘It’s from a Tom Waits song,’ she said:

  He rolled a blade up in his trick towel,

  They slap their hands against the wall.

  You never trip, you never stumble,

  He’s walking Spanish down the hall.

  ‘I know the song very well,’ I said. ‘Are you walking Spanish down the hall?’

  ‘I just like the sound of it; to me it always suggests going into the fourth dimension.’

  ‘Spanish is the way to walk,’ Lenore had said once. That was the past. But this moment with Amaryllis seemed to be a flash-ahead to a scene we hadn’t yet got to, like the burning motorbike in Easy Rider. Her eyes had a somewhat foxy look and the expression on her face made me feel that the T-shirt was part of an in-joke that I was left out of. Somehow that fourth dimension got up my nose. ‘Have you got a blade rolled up in your trick towel?’ I said.

  ‘No, Peter: no trick towel, no blade.’ She was looking at me closely. ‘All of a sudden you sound different. What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. Do you ever trip and stumble?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ She put her hand on my arm and brought her face within kissing range again. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?’

  ‘Who’s bothered? Do you know Cindy Ackerman?’

  ‘Royal College of Art?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘She takes piano lessons from me. Why?’

  I could feel an abyss opening under my feet so I jumped in. ‘Ever see her outside of piano lessons?’

  ‘Now and then. Where are you going with this?’

  ‘Who knows? You said you’d gone out with Ron Hastings a few times. Did you sleep with him?’

  ‘What kind of interrogation is this? Did I ever say I was a virgin? Whom I slept with before you is none of your goddam business.’

  It was deep, that abyss, it was dark. It was full of miasmas and vapours that could damage my health. I inhaled deeply and continued to fall. ‘It sure as hell is my business if we’re going to be together from here on out. And it’s certainly my business if other people are picking up glim vibes from us.’

  She gave me a very strange look. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Ron Hastings and Cindy Ackerman are both students of mine at the RCA. On Tuesday Hastings showed me Satan in yellow, orange, and pink pyjamas. Luminous ones. In last night’s glim when we were on the bus I put my foot in his face and pushed him off the stairs. Today he showed up with his leg in a cast and his face full of bruises. And Cindy Ackerman came in with a page full of Klein-bottle action. Any idea where this could be coming from?’

  The foxy look was gone; she looked scared, the way she’d been at the bus stop in the first glim. Her voice was her small not-wanting-to-be-alone voice. I remembered the feel of her nakedness, the scent of her skin. ‘Are we together from here on out?’ she said very softly.

  In the Science Museum the light was so different from the light of the brass lamps in Room 318! All around us were big glass boxes with cards that explained what was inside. ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘This isn’t a good place to talk. Coffee?’

  ‘Maybe a drink?’ she said.

  We headed for the Zetland Arms again. All the way there she clung to my arm and rubbed against me as much as possible. Well, I thought, I don’t really like things to be too simple, do I.

  Queenie and her master weren’t there this time. There was the same quiet hubbub as before and the old clock from the Brewery, Reading, was still at its private midnight. I got our drinks and we sat there looking at each other. ‘Please, Peter,’ she said, ‘talk to me.’

  ‘You don’t just tune in to people, do you,’ I said. ‘You make things happen. When I put my foot in Ron Hastings’s face in the glim he fell off a ladder in the unglim.’

  ‘You made that happen.’

  ‘Because I was with you.’

  She nodded and drank in silence for a while. Then she said, ‘That’s something I can’t help; if I kick someone in a glim, they wake up with a bruise.’

  ‘Or worse if you really get cross, I imagine.’

  She shrugged. ‘So don’t make me cross.’

  ‘I’ll try not to. What was Hastings doing on that bus anyhow? Besides viewing your bottom?’

  ‘As I said in the glim, no knickers and Hastings were your idea.’

  ‘All right – I won’t pester you about what he’s been to you in the past, but is he anything to you now?’

  ‘No, he isn’t.’

  ‘Because I don’t need to know how many there’ve been before me but I need to know if it’s just you and me now.’

  ‘There’s no one else now. I’m not even sure it was Hastings on the bus.’

  ‘Who was it then?’

  ‘I can’t always explain everything, Peter. Is that all right?’

  ‘I guess it’ll have to be.’ I reached for her hand. ‘At least now when I touch you it’s not a glim.’

  ‘Not a glim,’ she said. She was looking at our empty glasses.

  I got us refills and when I sat down again it seemed to me there was a river between us and I couldn’t see any stepping-stones. How real, I wondered, had last night been? ‘Have you got a tattoo on your belly?’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘Show me.’

  She pulled up the bottom of her T-shirt, unzipped her jeans, and pulled down the waistband of her knickers to show me, in blue on her white skin, the yin-yang symbol.

  ‘Let’s go to my place,’ I said.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘not yet.’

  ‘“Not yet”? But you’ve already been there.’

  ‘Not in the way you’re thinking of.’

  ‘Jesus! We’ve already been
naked together and as intimate physically as two people can be. What’s the problem?’

  ‘I’m bashful.’

  ‘Bashful! That’s not the Amaryllis I remember from the Brass Hotel.’

  ‘Don’t forget – that was your glim. Which reminds me, what about that T-shirt?’

  ‘What T-shirt?’

  ‘The one that said Unnatural practices yes. We didn’t do anything that anyone could call unnatural. You glimmed the T-shirt, so tell me what it meant.’

  ‘That’s a private joke, sort of a codeword I’ll explain to you another time. You’ve pointed out more than once that what happened at the Brass Hotel was my glim. Are you saying that you were only playing the part I gave you? You had nothing to do with what we did?’

  ‘Of course I’m not saying that. Once the situation started going that way I wanted what happened as much as you did. But that was at the Brass Hotel. I’m not yet ready to do it at your place. Can you go along with that for a little while?’

  ‘Sure, I’ll take a cold shower when I get home. I know it was my glim rather than yours because you don’t want to find yourself alone on that bus. You’ve said you don’t know what’s at Finsey-Obay but I think you do. What is it?’

  She shook off the question and squeezed my hand, looking at me wistfully with her lips slightly parted. ‘Peter, will you do something for me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need you to glim something.’

  ‘What, Amaryllis?’

  She finished her whisky and looked at the empty glass. ‘I have to be quiet for a moment before I tell you.’

  I got up to go for refills. Between the glimworld and the unglim we were getting a fair amount of alcohol down our necks.

  19

  Memories of Yew

  I go somewhere, I see something, and I don’t always know what I saw until later. I know now, having consulted my tree books, that the tree that presided over the maze was a yew. Yews are either male or female and they live hundreds of years, maybe thousands. This was a male yew – you could tell by the tiny baby acorn-looking things on the leaf stalks – an old-man yew with many fissures in his trunk that was naked for ten feet or more before the crown of branches began. The trunk was tawny in the sunlight, took on reddish-purple tints when the sun went in. The crown had a sideways look, like a wizard’s cloak blown by the wind. This was a lordly tree, a magisterial tree, clearly a tree of power.

  ‘He doesn’t like me,’ said Lenore, ‘Mr Old-Man Tree, but that’s his problem.’

  ‘First of all,’ I said, ‘how do you know it’s a he, and second, how can you tell he doesn’t like you?’ I had no more idea of the tree’s gender than I did of its kind.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘There are things one simply knows.’

  Well, of course I could feel the communication between the old-man tree at the northern edge of the maze and the hollies at the southern edge which even I could identify because they had holly leaves. Hollies also have gender and I can’t avoid the assumption that these were females of a certain age; they were not young groupie hollies.

  Yews are commonly seen in churchyards, and my best tree book, published in 1842, says this is because sites of ancient Druidical worship were taken over by Christian churches. Evidently some of the Druids’ best friends were yews even though every part of the tree is poisonous to humans and animals. The longbows of the English archers at Agincourt were yew – continental, it seems, not English; but yew they were, and the power of the heartwood and sapwood in them drove English arrows through French armour, knights, and horses at ranges of up to three hundred yards. It was Henry V’s deployment of those yeoman archers that not only won the battle on that muddy field but made obsolete the idea of gentlemen’s wars. So it’s a serious tree, and Mr Old-Man Tree, though not in the arms trade, had in him the longbows of the spirit, and the effect on me was a serious one.

  This was a turf maze, 57’ by 50’. You couldn’t get lost in it because there were no hedges or walls and the whole thing was in plain sight as you walked it.

  From a sketch by O.W. Godwin 89

  The sign said:

  THIS TYPE OF TURF MAZE MAY DATE FROM MEDIEVAL TIMES. SIMILAR MAZES ARE FOUND ELSEWHERE IN ENGLAND AND IN CERTAIN FRENCH CATHEDRALS RELIGIOUS PENITENTS MAY HAVE FOLLOWED THE MAZE ON HANDS AND KNEES REPEATING PRAYERS.

  PLEASE RESPECT THIS MAZE.

  We stood there looking at it while it looked back at us. It was screened from the road by dense hedges and it lived in a quiet all its own.

  ‘Take off your shoes and socks,’ said Lenore, removing hers.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because you don’t want anything between your feet and it when we walk it.’

  The turf paths were about a foot wide. Between them was something like sand-coloured aquarium gravel. This pattern of maze is called ‘Troy Town’; in its simplest form it’s known as a shepherd’s maze and it turns up in culturally unconnected places from Scotland to Knossos. Seen from the holly trees as I looked towards the old-man tree the turf paths spread like ripples from the entry point.

  This was only a week after our Beachy Head trip; the grass was cold and damp under our bare feet; Lenore’s cheeks were rosy. She was wearing a long black skirt, black coat, a little black woollen hat with her long black hair streaming out from under it and a black scarf. At that moment the look on her rosy face framed by all that blackness made me think she might be ready to abandon the idea that I would make her unhappy.

  ‘This maze is big stuff,’ she said. ‘Are you ready for it?’

  ‘Ready for what exactly, Lenore?’

  ‘Look at it. You might think you can simply follow a spiral to the centre but you can’t. You start around it one way but then you double back and go the other way. You expect to get closer all the time but you keep passing through where you were before, passing through yourself as you inwind to the centre. And this isn’t just a matter of walking around in a funny way; this is the earth we’re walking on and it takes notice of our intention: if we do it together with the intention of inwinding ourselves to each other, then once we reach the centre that’s it for ever. Do you want to do that?’

  ‘Have you done this before?’

  ‘No. I’ve never been here before and I’ve never done it with any other maze. It’s just that I understand these things. So, do you want to do it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I’ve mentioned before this that Lenore had a fateful bottom. Obviously there was more to her than that: her whole manner in whatever she said or did was fateful and hard to say no to.

  So we did it. She walked ahead and I followed her naked feet as we went this way and that under a big and rapidly changing Willem van de Velde sky that lacked only a ship close-reefed in mountainous seas. I recalled the unfinished painting on Lenore’s easel with its single figure. Why not both of us? As we walked we crossed and recrossed that beam of awareness between the old-man tree whose name I didn’t know and the holly and each time I felt their response. I never asked Lenore if she felt it too, I kept that for myself. And she, of course, had things she kept to herself. No one tells another person everything.

  Between the turf paths were dead leaves, almost black, rags and tatters of the year that was for ever gone. In that cloistered silence we moved alternately towards the centre and away from it, passing through the same curves in smaller and smaller circuits until we came to the centre and stood facing each other. ‘For ever,’ said Lenore, emphasising the two-wordness of it.

  ‘For ever,’ I said, meaning it but wondering who or what was actually saying it. Then we kissed in a for-ever kind of way.

  ‘If we retrace our steps now we unwind what we inwound, don’t we?’ I said.

  ‘We don’t retrace our steps, we do it like this.’ She stepped in a straight line from the centre to the outside of the maze and I followed.

  ‘Walking Spanish?’ I said.

  ‘Walking straight,’ she answered.

  We put on our sh
oes and socks and looked back once before we left the maze which had already looked away from us. We must have been there longer than we thought; it was already dusk and the smell of the earth was strong. A distant crow said something and it came to us faintly in the twilight. A dog barked and there were lights in the windows of Troy Farm over the road.

  Is it life that’s so strange or is it just me? I was thinking, Well, that’s the end of the beginning. And my mind said, Is it the beginning of the end?

  ‘Are you sorry?’ said Lenore.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘of course not.’

  ‘Liar,’ she said. ‘That’s all right. It was one of those things I had to do.’

  We’d made this trip because she’d said she wanted to take me somewhere special but she wouldn’t tell me where it was. For that reason I’d taken a camera with me and that’s why I’m now able to know what we saw. Also, Lenore had broken off a bit of the needles of Mr Old-Man Tree which enabled me to make a positive identification. Obviously she wasn’t worried about offending him. She had touched the tree; I hadn’t. I’m the image-and-idea man but I hadn’t touched that tree. Sometimes, looking at myself in the morning mirror or waking up in the middle of the night, I think about that.

  Where the Ardley-Somerton road meets the B430 there’s a Norman church with a gabled tower and a saddleback roof. It’s made of Cotswold Stone and I think, having looked in my Pevsner Oxfordshire Architectural Guide, that it was St Mary’s. Were there yews in the churchyard? I’m not sure. I go through life not always knowing what I see. Troy Farm, who own the maze we walked on, is also made of Cotswold Stone. Splendid buildings and outbuildings, undoubtedly passed from generation to generation. What must it be like to own an ancient maze?