Nineteen
Mary climbed over the low wall of the graveyard. Her blue and white cotton dress caught on a sparkling edge of warm stone and a fine shower of dusty earth spilled over into her sandal.
Willy was a little way ahead of her, moving slowly over the bouncy interlaced ropes of the ivy. He moved with a rhythmical dancer's motion, his limp imperceptible, the mysterious pliancy of the ivy floor entering into his body.
Mary leaned back against the wall. She was in no hurry to catch him up. The hot afternoon was silent with a thick powdery fragrant silence which Mary breathed ecstatically up into her head. A very very distant cuckoo call endorsed the silence like a mark or signature. Mary thought, I am lazy, I am in no hurry. She thought, today I have him on a lead. She smiled at the thought.
From this part of the graveyard nothing was visible except the whitish grey monuments, their tops tapering into invisibility in the over-abundant light, and the octagonal church, up whose walls Mary noticed the small-leaved ivy was beginning to climb. At some later time perhaps the church itself would simply be a mound of ivy, as so many of the gravestones had already become. Beyond the shimmering forms of the graves the afternoon sky was empty, a pale colourless radiant void.
Mary began to move, not following Willy but going parallel to him. Her sandalled feet touched the woven surface of the springy ivy, which yielded but with no sense of touching the ground below. Walking on water would be rather like this, Mary thought, one would feel the water as thick yielding stuff pressing up against the soles of one's feet. She paused and touched the iron railing which surrounded one of the obelisks, streaking her hand with brown. She was conscious of Willy near to her, moving. The substance of the summer afternoon joined their two bodies so that when he moved she felt her own flesh very gently tugged at. Today we are like Siamese twins, she thought, only we are joined together by some sort of delicious extensible warm ectoplasm.
Now Willy had thrown himself down on the ivy, falling straight back on to it in the way the children did. Mary approached and seeing that his eyes were closed sat down quietly nearby, leaning her back against one of the stones, the one from which Pierce had so carefully stripped the ivy to reveal a fine carving of a sailing ship upon it.
Willy, who had felt the ivy-tremor of Mary's coming, said 'a.''.'
Mary was quiet for a while, looking at the whiteness of Willy's hair fanned out upon the ivy. His face was so small and brown, his nose so thin, his hands so dainty and bony. She was reminded suddenly of the feel of a bird's claws as it perches on one's finger, a tender frightening feeling.
'What are you thinking, Mary? T 'Just about the graveyard.' She could not tell him about the bird.
'What about it?'
'Oh, I don't know. I feel these people must have had peaceful happy lives.'
'One cannot say that of any people.'
'I feel their presence – and yet it's not hostile or troubled.'
'Yes, I feel their presence too. But the hosts of the dead are transformed.'
Mary was silent. She did not feel them as hostile or troubled, and yet the graveyard did make her afraid, with a not too unpleasant fear, especially on these afternoons which had the density of midnight. What are they transformed into, she wondered.
She had no images of skulls or rotting bones. She saw them all as sleepers bound about in white with dark empty eyes, open-eyed sleepers.
'You're shivering, Mary.'
'I'm all right. I think I've just got a touch of the sun.'
'Let me cure you of it with my magic stone. Here, catch.'
Mary clasped quickly at something green which was flying through the air. For a second she thought it was going to fall into the dark interior of the ivy matrix, but her hand nimbly deflected it on to her lap. It was a piece'of semi-transparent green glass, worked by the sea into an almost perfect sphere.
'Oh how lovely!' She put it to her brow. 'And how cool too.'
'You caught it so prettily in your skirt. You know the story about the princess who discovered the prince who was hiding among her waiting women by throwing a ball to each woman.
The women all put their legs apart so as to catch the ball in their dress, but the prince put his legs together.'
Mary laughed. She felt the connexion between their bodies like a strong soupy swirl of almost visible substance. Willy was moving now, propping himself up against a grave, and Mary thought, oh how I wish he would lean over and lay his head in my lap.
'You mustn't let the twins see this piece of glass,' she said. 'They would want it so much you would have to give it to them!'
'But I've given it to you.'
'Oh, thank you!' She closed her eyes, rolling the cool glass over her brow and down the side of her nose to her cheek. She said, 'Oh Willy, Willy, Willy.'
'What seat?'
'Nothing. I feel so strange. I wish you'd talk to me more. Tell me something about you, anything, any small thing, a toy you had when you were a child, your first day at school, someone who was your friend once, just anything.'
'Well, I shall tell you – I shall tell you the most terrible thing that ever happened to me.'
'Oh!' She thought, now it's all going to come out, all of it, everything, oh God can I stand it.
'I was six years old.'
'Oh.'
'We were on a summer holiday,' Willy went on, 'at a seaside place on the Black Sea. Every morning I went with my nurse into the public gardens and she sat down and knitted and I how to play like that in pubic and 1 was trlgtltened of Other children. I knew I was supposed to run about and I ran about and pretended to pretend to be a horse. But all the time I was worrying in case someone should look at me and know that it was all false and that I was not a happy child playing at all, but a little frightened thing running to and fro. I would have liked just to sit quietly beside my nurse, but she would not allow that and would tell me to run about and enjoy myself. There were other children in the public gardens but they were mostly older than me and went about in groups of their own. Then one day a little fair-haired girl with a small black and white dog came to the gardens. The little girl's nurse sat near to my nurse and I began to play with the dog. I was too shy to speak to the girl or even look at her properly. She had a blue velvet coat and little blue boots. I can see those blue boots very clearly. Perhaps that was all I let myself see of her in the first days. She was just a blurred thing near to where I was playing with the dog. I liked playing with the dog, that was real playing, but I wanted much more to play with the little girl, but she would go
