Love is in the air and here it's even in the trees! So if champagne and chocolates have come your way, or you just fancy a cup of tea, snuggle up somewhere warm and enjoy a very unusual love story.
Dryad
In a quiet little
corner of the Botanical Gardens, between a stand of old trees and a
thick holly hedge, there is a small green metal bench. Almost invisible against
the greenery, few people use it, for it catches no sun and offers only a
partial view of the lawns. A plaque in the centre reads: In Memory of Josephine
Morgan Clarke, 1912-1989. I should know - I put it there - and yet I hardly
knew her, hardly noticed her, except for that one rainy spring day when our
paths crossed and we almost became friends.
I was twenty-five,
pregnant and on the brink of divorce. Five years earlier, life had seemed an
endless passage of open doors; now I could hear them clanging shut, one by one;
marriage; job; dreams. My one pleasure was the Botanical Gardens; its mossy
paths; its tangled walkways, its quiet avenues of oaks and lindens. It became
my refuge, and when David was at work (which was almost all the time) I walked
there, enjoying the scent of cut grass and the play of light through the tree
branches. It was surprisingly quiet; I noticed few other visitors, and was glad
of it. There was one exception, however; an elderly lady in a dark coat who
always sat on the same bench under the trees, sketching. In rainy weather, she
brought an umbrella: on sunny days, a hat. That was Josephine Clarke; and
twenty-five years later, with one daughter married and the other still at
school, I have never forgotten her, or the story she told me of her first and
only love.
It had been a bad
morning. David had left on a quarrel (again), drinking his coffee without a
word before leaving for the office in the rain. I was tired and lumpish in my
pregnancy clothes; the kitchen needed cleaning; there was nothing on TV and
everything in the world seemed to have gone yellow around the edges, like the
pages of a newspaper that has been read and re-read until there's nothing new
left inside. By midday I'd had enough; the rain had stopped, and I set off for
the Gardens; but I'd hardly gone in through the big wrought-iron gate when it
began again - great billowing sheets of it - so that I ran for the shelter of
the nearest tree, under which Mrs Clarke was already sitting.
We sat on the bench
side-by-side, she calmly busy with her sketchbook, I watching the tiresome rain
with the slight embarrassment that enforced proximity to a stranger often
brings. I could not help but glance at the sketchbook - furtively, like reading
someone else's newspaper on the Tube - and I saw that the page was covered with
studies of trees. One tree, in fact, as I looked more closely; our tree - a
beech - its young leaves shivering in the rain. She had drawn it in soft,
chalky green pencil, and her hand was sure and delicate, managing to convey the
texture of the bark as well as the strength of the tall, straight trunk and the
movement of the leaves. She caught me looking, and I apologised.
‘That's all right,
dear,’ said Mrs Clarke. ‘You take a look, if you'd like to.’ And she handed me
the book.
Politely, I took it. I
didn't really want to; I wanted to be alone; I wanted the rain to stop; I
didn't want a conversation with an old lady about her drawings. And yet they
were wonderful drawings - even I could see that, and I'm no expert - graceful,
textured, economical. She had devoted one page to leaves; one to bark; one to
the tender cleft where branch meets trunk and the grain of the bark coarsens
before smoothing out again as the limb performs its graceful arabesque into the
leaf canopy. There were winter branches; summer foliage; shoots and roots and
windshaken leaves. There must have been fifty pages of studies; all beautiful,
and all, I saw, of the same tree.
I looked up to find her
watching me. She had very bright eyes, bright and brown and curious; and there
was a curious smile on her small, vivid face as she took back her sketchbook
and said: ‘Piece of work, isn't he?’
It took me some moments
to understand that she was referring to the tree.
‘I've always had a soft
spot for the beeches,’ continued Mrs Clarke, ‘ever since I was a little girl.
Not all trees are so friendly; and some of them - the oaks and the cedars
especially – can be quite antagonistic to human beings. It's not really their
fault; after all, if you'd been persecuted for as long as they have, I imagine
you'd be entitled to feel some racial hostility, wouldn't you?’ And she smiled
at me, poor old dear, and I looked nervously at the rain and wondered whether I
should risk making a dash for the bus shelter. But she seemed quite harmless,
so I smiled back and nodded, hoping that was enough.
‘That's why I don't like
this kind of thing,’ said Mrs Clarke, indicating the bench on which we were
sitting. ‘This wooden bench under this living tree - all our history of
chopping and burning. My husband was a carpenter. He never did understand about
trees. To him, it was all about product - floorboards and furniture. They don't
feel, he used to say. I mean, how could anyone live with stupidity like that?’
She laughed and ran her
fingertips tenderly along the edge of her sketchbook. ‘Of course I was young;
in those days a girl left home; got married; had children; it was expected. If
you didn't, there was something wrong with you. And that's how I found myself
up the duff at twenty-two, married - to Stan Clarke, of all people - and living
in a two-up, two-down off the Station
Road and wondering; is this it? Is this all?’
That was when I should
have left. To hell with politeness; to hell with the rain. But she was telling
my story as well as her own, and I felt the echo down the lonely passages of my
heart. I nodded without knowing it, and her bright brown eyes flicked to mine
with sympathy and unexpected humour.
‘Well, we all find our
little comforts where we can,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Stan didn't know it, and
what you don't know doesn't hurt, right? But Stanley never had much of an imagination.
Besides, you'd never have thought it to look at me. I kept house; I worked
hard; I raised my boy - and nobody guessed about my fella next door, and the
hours we spent together.’
She looked at me again,
and her vivid face broke into a smile of a thousand wrinkles. ‘Oh yes, I had my
fella,’ she said. ‘And he was everything a man should be. Tall; silent;
certain; strong. Sexy - and how! Sometimes when he was naked I could hardly
bear to look at him, he was so beautiful. The only thing was - he wasn't a man
at all.’
Mrs Clarke sighed, and
ran her hands once more across the pages of her sketchbook. ‘By rights,’ she
went on, ‘he wasn't even a he. Trees have no gender - not in English, anyway
but they do have identity. Oaks are masculine, with their deep roots and
resentful natures. Birches are flighty and feminine; so are hawthorns and
cherry trees. But my fella was a beech, a copper beech; red-headed in autumn,
veering to the most astonishing shades of purple-green in spring. His skin was
pale and smooth; his limbs a dancer's; his body straight and slim and powerful.
Dull weather made him sombre, but in sunlight he shone like a Tiffany
lampshade, all harlequin bronze and sun-dappled rose, and if you stood
underneath his branches you could hear the ocean in the leaves. He stood at the
bottom of our little bit of garden, so that he was the last thing I saw when I
went to bed, and the first thing I saw when I got up in the morning; and on
some days I swear the only reason I got up at all was the knowledge that he'd
be there waiting for me, outlined and strutting against the peacock sky.
Year by year, I learned
his ways. Trees live slowly, and long. A year of mine was only a day to him;
and I taught myself to be patient, to converse over months rather than minutes,
years rather than days. I'd always been good at drawing - although Stan always
said it was a waste of time - and now I drew the beech (or The Beech, as he had
become to me) again and again, winter into summer and back again, with a
lover's devotion to detail. Gradually I became obsessed - with his form; his
intoxicating beauty; the long and complex language of leaf and shoot. In summer
he spoke to me with his branches; in winter I whispered my secrets to his
sleeping roots.
You know, trees are the
most restful and contemplative of living things. We ourselves were never meant
to live at this frantic speed; scurrying about in endless pursuit of the next
thing, and the next; running like laboratory rats down a series of mazes
towards the inevitable; snapping up our bitter treats as we go. The trees are
different. Among trees I find my breathing slows; I am conscious of my heart
beating; of the world around me moving in harmony; of oceans that I have never
seen; never will see. The Beech was never anxious, never in a rage, never too
busy to watch or listen. Others might be petty; deceitful; cruel, unfair - but
not The Beech.
The Beech was always
there, always himself. And as the years passed and I began to depend more and
more on the calm serenity his presence gave me, I became increasingly repelled
by the sweaty pink lab rats with their nasty ways, and I was drawn, slowly and
inevitably, to the trees.
Even so, it took me a
long time to understand the intensity of those feelings. In those days it was
hard enough to admit to loving a black man - or worse still, a woman - but this
aberration of mine - there wasn't even anything about it in the Bible, which
suggested to me that perhaps I was unique in my perversity, and that even
Deuteronomy had overlooked the possibility of non-mammalian, inter-species
romance.
And so for more than ten
years I pretended to myself that it wasn't love. But as time passed my
obsession grew; I spent most of my time outdoors, sketching; my boy Daniel took
his first steps in the shadow of The Beech; and on warm summer nights I would
creep outside, barefoot and in my nightdress, while upstairs Stan snored fit to
wake the dead, and I would put my arms around the hard, living body of my
beloved and hold him close beneath the cavorting stars.
It wasn't always easy,
keeping it secret. Stan wasn't what you'd call imaginative, but he was
suspicious, and he must have sensed some kind of deception. He had never really
liked my drawing, and now he seemed almost resentful of my little hobby, as if
he saw something in my studies of trees that made him uncomfortable. The years
had not improved Stan. He had been a shy young man in the days of our
courtship; not bright; and awkward in the manner of one who has always been
happiest working with his hands. Now he was sour - old before his time. It was
only in his workshop that he really came to life. He was an excellent
craftsman, and he was generous with his work, but my years alongside The Beech
had given me a different perspective on carpentry, and I accepted Stan's
offerings - fruitwood bowls, coffee-tables, little cabinets, all highly
polished and beautifully-made - with concealed impatience and growing distaste.
And now, worse still, he
was talking about moving house; of getting a nice little semi, he said, with a
garden, not just a big old tree and a patch of lawn. We could afford it;
there'd be space for Dan to play; and though I shook my head and refused to
discuss it, it was then that the first brochures began to appear around the
house, silently, like spring crocuses, promising en-suite bathrooms and
inglenook fireplaces and integral garages and gas fired central heating. I had
to admit, it sounded quite nice. But to leave The Beech was unthinkable. I had
become dependent on him. I knew him; and I had come to believe that he knew me,
needed and cared for me in a way as yet unknown among his proud and ancient
kind.
Perhaps it was my
anxiety that gave me away. Perhaps I under-estimated Stan, who had always been
so practical, and who always snored so loudly as I crept out into the garden.
All I know is that one night when I returned, exhilarated by the dark and the
stars and the wind in the branches, my hair wild and my feet scuffed with green
moss, he was waiting.
‘You've got a fella,
haven't you?’
I made no attempt to
deny it; in fact, it was almost a relief to admit it to myself. To those of our
generation, divorce was a shameful thing; an admission of failure. There would
be a court case; Stanley would fight; Daniel
would be dragged into the mess and all our friends would take Stanley's side and speculate vainly on the
identity of my mysterious lover. And yet I faced it; accepted it; and in my
heart a bird was singing so hard that it was all I could do not to burst out
laughing.
‘You have, haven't you?’
Stan's face looked like a rotten apple; his eyes shone through with pinhead
intensity. ‘Who is it?’
What was I to say? He'd
probably think I’d gone crazy.
‘I'll bloody well make
you tell me,’ he snarled. I smelt his sour breath as he wrenched my arm behind
my back, but the thought of The Beech's calm strength gave me courage. I heard
Daniel calling uncertainly from the top of the stairs. The noise had woken him.
‘Let me go to him,’ I
begged. Stan hesitated.
‘Please.’
He released me and
turned away. I hurried upstairs, my arm throbbing as the blood rushed back.
When I came down again,
Stan was sitting on the sofa, his face hidden in his hands. The bottom stair creaked
and he looked up at me. ‘If you want to keep the lad, you'll have to give your fella
up,’ he said flatly. ‘We'll move away.’
‘No!’ the word escaped
me like a cry of pain.
Stan looked deflated. I
thought of a picture I had once seen of Rodin's Burghers of Calais:
strong men bowed down helplessly under the weight of their manacles. I felt a
twinge of pity for Stan, but I couldn't help but compare him unfavourably with
my magnificent lover.
At last he said, ‘We'll
talk about this in the morning.’ He disappeared into our bedroom and came out
with an armful of blankets. ‘I'll sleep out here.’
I lay awake for hours in
our cold bed, tom between anxiety and elation; my fingers twisted the blue
candlewick bedspread. I knew I ought to feel guilty, but I heard the whisper of
leaves against my cheek and felt The Beech's smooth trunk clasped in my arms.
Stan and I didn't talk
the next morning, or the one after that; he was morose and withdrawn. Often, I
caught him watching me like a hungry dog at the butcher's door, but he left me
alone. My serenity seemed to baffle him.
We agreed to stay
together for Daniel's sake. After a while, Stan started to go out most evenings
after supper. I never asked where he went, but the way Brenda Whitely, who ran
the Post Office, avoided my eyes when I went in to buy something, and the
pitying glances of our friends and neighbours told their own story. When he
died I didn't marry again; I already had everything I wanted.’
The rain had stopped and
the pale blue sky looked newly varnished. I felt stiff and hungry. ‘I'm so
sorry’ said Mrs Clarke, noticing my discomfort. ‘I shouldn't be keeping you
here talking like this.’ She looked at me quizzically, but I just murmured a
polite nothing. I didn't want to discuss my problems with a stranger, even a
kind one. Yet afterwards, I thought a great deal about her strange story. There
was something inspirational about it; she had showed me that happiness can be
found in unexpected places.
Years later, happily
married for a second time and a successful freelance journalist, I had almost
forgotten Josephine Clarke, until one wet Sunday afternoon, glancing through
the papers, I noticed a photograph of an elderly lady who looked familiar. The
article was about an exhibition of her work at a Bristol gallery. The writer described her
drawings as exquisite and sensuous; food for the soul; an oasis of calm in a
frantic world. There were a couple of illustrations of her studies of trees;
they had the delicate strength of Leonardo Da Vinci's drawings of nature. The
artist's name was Josephine Clarke. I planned to visit the exhibition but I had
a deadline for a magazine feature and never made it.
On the evening of 15th October 1987, hot winds moving
up from Africa collided with the glacial air of the Arctic
and soared above it, creating a drop in pressure. By six o'clock, the pressure
gradient had risen steeply. Perhaps, said the Met Office, a strong jet stream,
caused by a hurricane moving up the east coast of the USA and across the Atlantic, had reacted with
exceptional warming over the Bay of Biscay.
Vapour condensed into clouds and released enormous energy which drove the storm
winds towards Britain.
At first it seemed as if
the storm would track along the English Channel but instead, in a famous low
point in the career of Michael Fish, it turned north and swept through southern
England,
leaving devastation in its wake. By morning, fifteen million trees lay
uprooted.
Three years passed and
the trees, but not their memory were gone, when I noticed the Bristol gallery was mounting another
exhibition of Mrs Clarke's work. The article said she had died in 1989.
This time, I was
determined not to miss the opportunity, but when I walked into the gallery, the
drawings were not at all what I had expected. There was none of the peace and
serenity I recalled, only turmoil and despair. I moved along the walls,
surprised by what I saw; each picture was a poignant cry of sorrow and despair.
Then I read the information leaflet the girl in charge of the gallery had
pressed into my hand at the door; these drawings had been done between 1987 and
1989. Of course! The October storm: it would have been cataclysmic for
Josephine Clarke.
I walked slowly back
along the line. One drawing in particular exuded so much raw emotion it was
painful to behold; it showed a beautiful copper beech tom from the earth, its
sinewy roots snapped like matchsticks. The grain of the bark had been
meticulously delineated; where the trunk had split at the bole, I could almost
imagine that the markings were shaped like a heart.
In the last room was a
graceful figure, about eighteen inches high. It was carved of polished,
honey-coloured wood. The figure was a woman, in flight from an unseen pursuer;
as I looked more closely, I saw her torso was fashioned as if it were partially
covered in thin bark. At the ends of her streaming hair, tiny leaves formed;
thick, fleshy tree roots embraced her nimble feet.
The caption read Daphne fleeing Apollo. The girl in
charge of the gallery came over smiling. ‘Quite a relief after those earlier
drawings isn't it?’ she said. ‘Apparently she suffered a nervous breakdown in
late 1987 and never really recovered. She carved this at the very end of her
life. Very beautiful don't you think? As far as we know, it's her only work in
wood. It's made of beech.’
When I got home, I
looked up the story. It told how the god Apollo saw the nymph Daphne and instantly
fell in love with her, but she, preferring to roam the woods than be in the
company of gods and men, fled from him. He had almost caught her when she
reached the banks of the river Peneus, her father. Terrified, she begged her
father for help. As Apollo was just about to seize her, Peneus transformed her
into a tree.
I went back to the
gallery before the exhibition ended and bought the figure; it still sits on my
desk to remind me of Mrs Clarke. She probably never knew how much she helped me
that day.
When I applied for
permission to put the bench with the plaque in the Botanical Gardens, the
Keeper was very helpful; I could choose the place; the only proviso was that
the bench must be made of wood or metal. On a cool, autumn afternoon, I walked
around the paths and lawns for hours until I found the right spot; a quiet
corner, hidden among Mrs Clarke's beloved trees. The bench I ordered was made
of metal, as she would have wanted.
Dryad comes from Harriet Steel's collection of short stories, Dancing and Other Stories available on Kindle at viewBook.at/danc_ing and sold in aid of WaterAid.
