Seven

IT HAD BEEN LATE October, and only three days after seeing her at Roxburgh’s, that David had seen Anna again in Pembroke Street. Before the lily. Before Wilson. David had been cutting through toward St. Aldgate’s when she came out of the Museum of Modern Art, and he saw her pause on the steps, a hair tie held in her teeth while she twisted her hair on top of her head.

“Hello again,” she called. “You look busy.”

His arms were full. “It’s a project,” he said.

“Remind me,” she said. “I forgot what you’re reading.”

“Botany,” he said.

She stood looking at him. She was not beautiful; perhaps she was not even pretty. But she had an unusual, appealing face: green eyes, and a broad smile, and the shoulder-length red hair. He noticed, for the first time, a little arc-shaped scar above one eye.

“You don’t remember me,” she said. “I talked to you in Roxburgh’s. I was painting.”

“Oh, I do remember,” he told her.

She inclined her head toward the museum. “I work in the café,” she said. “Just a couple of hours.”

He looked up at the frontage, a white block that he had never really taken much notice of before. “I’ve never been in,” he told her.

“You haven’t?” she said. “Come and look.”

He followed her. He didn’t know how to interpret her easy manner. He didn’t know if it meant she were being friendly especially toward him or that she was like this with everyone. He kept stealing sideways glances at her as she talked.

After a minute, he realized that she was telling him about the next exhibition. “It’s going to start in January,” she said. “It’s called Northlands. Scandinavian artists.”

He looked dutifully. He hadn’t taken in a single word.

“This is called ‘Book of Forms,’” she told him. “And this is ‘A Sun.’” He looked at a photograph of Martii Aiha’s mahogany sculpture, laid before a mirror-still lake.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

“Do you like it?” he asked her, doubtfully.

“Yes, it’s exciting,” she said. “It’s wonderful.”

“But why?”

She stopped, considering. “It makes me look.”

“But so does anything. A traffic jam. A dog barking.”

She laughed. “But to look three or four times; or even twenty times, and still be interested.”

“Or confused.”

She laughed. “But that’s it exactly,” she said. “While you’re confused, you’re still working things out.”

He shook his head. They were now looking at a dark oil on canvas, by a different artist, for another exhibition. “It’s dull,” he said.

“But look at how the paint…”

“I don’t want to look,” he said. “If I look long enough at that, I’ll run out in the street and throw myself under a bus.” He grinned at her.

In return, she gave him a lingering, wry expression. Then, her face broke into a smile. “So what’s this?” she asked, and she tapped the top book in the pile he still had balanced in the crook of one arm.

He looked down at what he was carrying. “It’s a stone memorials project,” he told her.

She prized the topmost book from his arm, and looked at the title. “Characteristic Churchyard Species of Lichen,” she read out. She raised an eyebrow at him, and this time it was her turn to grin: a broad, open smile that made his heart hitch.

“Churchyards are the most important sites for lichens growing on stone,” he said. “There are over twenty thousand churchyards in England, and each one takes up roughly an acre of land. So that’s twenty thousand—”

“Acres of lichen,” she said, pretending to be breathless. “Really?”

He smiled back at her. “OK,” he said. “But it’s not dull, I promise you. Lichens are very old. And they’re really resilient.”

She had taken a fact sheet out of the book. “‘Guidelines for completing the mapping card,’” she intoned. She sighed heavily. “David,” she said, “on a scale of dullness…”

“It’s a pollution study,” he explained. “For determining the levels of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere.”

“Ah,” she said. “Determining levels. And what’s this thing here?”

“A ten-times magnification lens.” He pretended to be wildly proud of it, saying the words as if she were holding something of incredible rarity.

“My pulses quicken,” she laughed. “Sulphur dioxide again?”

“Yes.”

“Now I’m really excited. And this?” She was peering in his open rucksack now. He had to crane his neck to see what it was she was pointing at. He caught her scent: vanilla, rose. The scent of flowers. The skin of her neck was smooth, not downy: fine, sinuous. Smooth muscle under flesh. He watched the tilt of her head. Then, “Careful,” he said.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Calcium hypochlorite and potassium hydroxide.”

“For doing what?”

“Some lichens change color when they get zapped.”

She was holding up something she had taken from the bag. “Ah—this is more like it,” she said, triumphantly. “A razor blade.”

“If the medulla reacts, a bit of the cortex has to be scraped away.”

“You have to cut it?”

He made a mock-leering face. “You have to cut—cut—cut,” he whispered.

She put the blade back, and let the top of the rucksack down, nodding and smiling. “Of course,” she said, “with a kit like that, you could cease being fascinating, and just get to be a run-of-the-mill serial killer.”

He raised his hands. “Goddamn!” he exclaimed. “Found out!”

They smiled at each other. As other people came in, they drifted over toward the catalogues on display. She flicked through the pages. Then, someone passed them—a boy—and called her name. She looked up and smiled. “Traggs. Eight o’clock tonight,” he said. “Don’t forget.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she replied. “Maybe.”

The boy gave a thumbs-up signal, looked at David impassively, and then ran down the steps outside, and along the street.

David had the sudden conviction that Anna was not going to see this boy that night, or any other night.

“Would you come for a drink with me?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “Well, I dunno,” she mused. “When were you thinking of?”

“Tonight,” he said. “Eight o’clock.”

“Ah,” she responded, nodding. “I see.” She scratched her neck, and looked him up and down. He wanted to take hold of her. A quick, urgent impulse. But she had already taken a step away from him. “Only if you promise to bring your calcium hypochlorite,” she said.

“I never leave home without it,” he replied. “And I could tell you all about cudweed if you like.”

“Have you ever been slapped in a public place?” she asked.

That night, she mortified him by buying the first round in the Turf, and also by knowing the barman, with whom she kept up a casual banter. At David’s insistence, they went over to the corner, to the smallest and most inaccessible table. He tried to take his eyes off the jacket she wore: a complicated quilted pattern, which looked hand sewn. It had all kinds of symbols woven into it—birds, clouds, trees.

“It’s Indian,” she said.

“American Indian?”

“No,” she smiled. “Indian Indian.”

“You’ve been there?”

“No,” she said. “But I’d like to go. The colors, for one thing.”

“Are you reading fine arts?” he asked.

“I’m studying history.”

“I thought you were an artist,” he said. “The drawings and caricatures…”

“I learned from my mother,” she said. “But watching her trying to sell stuff, I decided from age six I was going to be a teacher.”

“History teacher?”

“Maybe.”

A silence fell. He looked at the upturned mouth. It was a slightly crooked expression, a repressed smile. He wondered what it would be like to kiss her. To taste that mouth.

“So,” she said. “You’re doing this project.”

“Just in my spare time,” he said.

“This lichen stuff is part of the course?”

“No.”

“But you’re doing it in a group?”

“No,” he said. “I just go off at weekends.”

She considered him. “You go off by yourself?”

“That’s right.”

“You go off by yourself counting lichens in churchyards?”

He saw the crookedness increase.

“It’s better than beating up old ladies,” he said.

“I guess.”

She leaned on the table, arms folded. Now, she smiled. He liked that better. Out of the crookedness came that big, broad grin. She put her hand on his. Electricity swarmed through him.

“I could come with you,” she said. “What do you do, take a tent?”

“Why would you want to do that?” he asked, amazed. He watched as she turned his hand over, and ran a lazy finger across his palm. “Long life,” she murmured. “Loyal heart.”

“What?” he asked, mesmerized.

“Here on your hand,” she said. “You’ll live to be an old, old man.”

He grasped her own fingers, and raised them to his lips, and looked at her over their joined hands. She leaned forward, and touched his face. He had his wish then, the taste of that mouth. A roar of exultation in his head. A rushing sensation, as if the world were racing over him. The jolt of a journey’s end, a journey’s beginning. Opening his eyes, he saw her fair lashes, the lowered lids, and the pale skin.

“You know what I did after I saw you today?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “What?”

“I went and looked up cudweed in Flora Britannica.”

“You did?” He shook his head, started to laugh.

She smiled again. “Marsh cudweed,” she intoned, “is a gray, woolly-leaved annual of damp or compacted soils on arable and new grassland, especially cart-tracks and footpaths.”

“Latin name?” he asked.

She pretended to recall. “Gnasher ugliflorum.”

He laughed again. “Well, close. Gnaphalium uliginosum.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “Take two after meals until the symptoms clear up.”

“It’s part of the daisy family,” he said. “Like thistles, and chamomile, and ragwort.”

“Am I going to get a botany lecture?” she asked.

“Ragwort is all over the country now,” he said. “It started from the Botanic Garden, here in Oxford. By 1830…”

“OK. I am going to get a botany lecture.”

“Listen, this is interesting.”

“Yeah, I’m transfixed.”

“By 1830, it had reached Oxford Railway Station, and it spread out from there, all along the tracks of the Great Western Railway, all over the country. Now it’s, like, this really tough weed no one can get rid of.”

She seemed to be studying his face. “What else?” she asked.

“It’s called squalidus.”

“Try to concentrate on the real world,” she said. “I meant, what else interests you?”

He shrugged.

“Music?” she suggested.

“Some.”

“Play a sport?”

“No.”

“But I thought all English guys liked soccer.”

“Not me.”

“Rugby, then. Rowing. Tennis.”

“No, no.” He spread his hands.

“Unicycle hockey player,” she decided. “I met somebody in September, first week I was here. He plays unicycle hockey.”

“He must be a laugh a minute,” David replied. “But I haven’t even got a bike. Sorry.”

She sighed. Her fingertip described a circle in the spilt beer on the tabletop. “So,” she said, “it’s, like, lichens on gravestones, or nothing?”

“And trees,” he told her. “I like trees.”

He went to Salisbury that weekend, alone.

But two weeks after that, she came with him to the New Forest. It was the last weekend of the summer; the leaves were turning. They got a lift as far as Fordingbridge, and they walked through Godshill and up Godshill Ridge, and out across Ditchend Brook toward Island Thorns. It was warm, and there was a haze, as if the landscape had been merely sketched, and then erased with the edge of a thumb, so that shapes bled into one another across the heathland, and all the enclosures, the woodland—North Oakley, and Knightwood; Amberwood, Sloden, Holly Hatch and Beech Bed—ran in mottled green shadow over the horizon. They reached the hilltop, and stood and looked out, south; and there, just at the foot of the rise, was a pool, looking like a piece of glass, reflecting the white sky.

They went down to it, and pushed off their rucksacks and stood looking at the water for a while. Anna sat down and took off her boots, and cooled her feet, stepping off the gravelly edge. The bottom of the pond, saturated peat, sank under her almost at once, and he caught her just as she lost her balance. They stood at the edge, arms around each other, and he saw the ripples spreading out over the surface, unhurried dark lines in the white.

They were headed for Fritham, and the campsite beyond it at Long Beech Hill, but they lost their way somehow. They never even found the narrow lane leading down to Fritham, and the evening light faded, and the night came on, and they pitched a tent on a slope above Latchmoor Brook. They hardly spoke; an absolute darkness came down. When he got into the tent, he asked her for the nightlight, because he couldn’t see anything, not even a distinction between shadow and half-light, not even her face. She took his hand and guided it to her. She was naked. He kneeled down and took her in his arms, and couldn’t have spoken then, not at all, not a word.

Sometime in the night, he woke, and heard her breathing, and the trees moving overhead. At once, he wondered what had brought this girl to him, and he thought about what she had told him about herself, the few and sketchy details. He sensed her deep privacy, and put it alongside the ease of her lying in his arms; and he felt a curious danger about her. Her unexpectedness, her sudden convictions.

In the end, he gave up trying to work it out.

He listened to the movement of the oaks for a long time, to their soft and beautiful conversation, lying on his back, holding her hand tightly over his heart.