As Anna dreams regretfully of lost love, along the road at Eaton Cottages an old woman recalls a day in high summer just after the war, when her legs were long and slim and tan in the meadow grass behind the common. Between the stalks of poppies and scabious, she can just see the clock tower of the village church. Her lover’s eyes are as blue as the cornflowers they lie among, and it is only in her dreams that she can visit him, now. Even so, she can still feel the hard muscle of his arm under her head; hear the beating of a heart returning to its steady pace after exertion. In the distance, a dog barks, on and on and on, as if barking is all it has left to it. She shivers. A cloud has passed across the sun, and she reaches out among the sheets for her lover, but he is gone, long gone.
*
At the vicarage, France Baynes finds himself flying far above the village. Down below, there is a football match. He knows all the players, and their wives and daughters and brothers and aunts, but the further he soars, the less attached he feels himself to his parishioners, until at last he is gliding among wisps of cirrus, his cassock belling in the cold winds of the stratosphere. He opens his mouth with a great shout of exhilaration and arrows towards the sun.
Nearer, my God, to thee.
*
Down on the narrowboats at the canal, dreams are flying thick and fast. They seem more tangled here, harder to decipher, flowing in tides of imagery, as mutable as the water on which their originators live. Here: a locked door in a darkened hallway; there, a multi-headed creature rises from a shining pool; flames lick at a pile of photographs – their edges char and curl, releasing the bright figures within like fireflies into the night air; a black cat twines around and around a man’s legs, in and out, silky fur against naked skin. At last, the man lies down, and the black cat sits heavy on his chest.
*
Along Allbright Lane, dreams are forming, too.
A woman toils up a steep hill, her breath escaping in great clouds of steam. A man walks behind her. His face remains averted and in shadow. She is talking, laughing; animated: he does not respond, which makes her angry.
When she reaches the top of the hill, she turns to him, and trips. Her skirts – long, old-fashioned – suddenly blossom like some immense exotic flower, engulfing her head and trapping her arms. She spins, helpless, wrapped in shimmering colour. Below the fabric her body is naked. Pale and etiolated it seems a sickly stem for such a bloom. The man stares and stares, hands hanging limply at his sides.
The skirt gathers size, begins to fill with air. Soon, she is aloft. Her legs kick. Revealed between the pale skin of her thighs, her genitalia are as bright as blood, vivid as the reddest rose. It beckons to him, but deep in his private shadow, the man turns away and starts to walk back down the hill.