I meant every word I said, but neither Sandy nor Matthew were happy with my plan. Sandy simply announced I was mad to try it and left it at that; Matthew reasoned with me, as he would always do, questioned me closely and tried to understand why this staying on had suddenly become so important to me.
The night before he left, we lay awake in the moonlight after we’d made love. ‘Promise me you’ll be very careful, darling,’ he said, anxiously. ‘Promise me you won’t stick it out, if it really should go bad on you. Promise me you’ll just pack, go home and wait till I’m back.’
I turned in his arms and hugged him. Through all our time together I had suffered periods of depression, sometimes so bad I wasn’t able to work, because the simplest phone call was more than I could manage.
We did what we could ourselves, exploring old memories and all manner of painful, half-forgotten things. We’d taken advice and had real help from a close friend of Matthew’s – his contemporary at medical school. And with each year of our marriage, the depressions lessened in length and intensity. But they had never gone away completely. Matthew knew how vulnerable I still was. A word, a memory, a dream: it took so little to set the darkness going again.
‘I won’t do anything silly, love, you know I won’t,’ I reassured him. ‘You know I’ll never break my promise.’
I felt him shiver. I wished I hadn’t mentioned that particular promise. Some years earlier, in the midst of a really black depression, I admitted that often, when it gripped me, I just wanted to run out into the darkness and never come back, because the sheer pain of existing was more than I could bear. If it were not for him, I’d said, nothing in the world would stop me.
He had been quite beside himself and I’d ended up having to comfort him. It was then I had solemnly promised him that I would never, never harm myself however bad the pain.
‘Oh Matthew, my love,’ I whispered, my tears pouring down ever faster onto the bare stone beneath my cheek, ‘I promised you I’d be all right and I’ve got it all wrong. There’s no one else can help me but you and you’re far away.’
I clutched my aching head, racked by the violence of my sobs, absolutely at the end of my tether. ‘What shall I do? What ever shall I do?’
How long I lay there I don’t know, but after a time, I grew quieter and lay still, too exhausted to move, my cheek pressed to the surface of one piece of stone, my arm thrown out across the other. Quite suddenly, I had a sense that someone was watching me.
The idea was quite ridiculous. Besides, what did it matter if anyone did see me? No one could help me now. No one. But, despite my despair, my curiosity got the better of me. I rolled over and sat up, my eyes still wet with tears.
A girl stood looking down at me, her large, grey eyes full of concern. She was about sixteen or seventeen. She wore a light tunic of creamy-white fabric tied with a brightly-coloured woven girdle and she had long hair, as dark as my own but much longer. Her bare legs and arms were tanned to a warm honey colour. In the crook of her arm she carried a small pitcher and in her other hand she held a bunch of kingcups just like the ones coming into bloom a few yards from where I sat.
As our eyes met, she spoke to me, but I could make no sense of the words she used and nothing of what she said.
She went on talking to me, her voice light and pleasing, her tone reassuring. She must have thought I was troubled by her presence. But I wasn’t. Just puzzled and confused.
After a little while, she set down her pitcher, placed the flowers gently on the grass beside it and held out her hands to me, the palms spread wide to show me they were empty. I stared at her fascinated, watching every graceful movement and gesture. Everything about her – the tunic, the thonged sandals, the pitcher she had carried, the words she spoke – came out of another age, yet she herself seemed so familiar, like someone I knew well but could not for the moment place.
I wiped my eyes and told her who I was. I could see she didn’t understand me any more than I understood her, but as I watched, I saw her make up her mind about something and step towards me. To my astonishment, she put her hand on my forehead. It was so cool and comforting. Holding one hand steady on my forehead, she began to move the other gently across my neck and shoulders. She pressed lightly on the rigid muscles and worked her way down my spine to my waist.
The coolness of her hand eased the throbbing in my head so quickly I could scarcely believe it. Wherever she touched me there was a warm, tingling feeling which spread out as she went on talking to me. Although I still couldn’t understand her actual words, it was obvious she was telling me who she was and how she came to be here, today, when I had such need of her.
Sitting there, her hands on my head and back, I realised I felt perfectly calm and at ease while the pain in my head had simply melted away. I closed my eyes. Instantly, as if I were viewing a film, I began to see the girl whose hands rested upon me moving through scene after scene of her own life. As I followed the images, I grasped what she’d been trying to tell me. Not the details, of course, but enough. I looked up at her and smiled. Her life had been no easier than mine.
When she smiled back at me, it was such a gentle, warm smile, the smile of someone I felt I had always known. Looking up at her, it was just like meeting someone you know so well in a context where you don’t expect them. Once, in the Ladies at Euston Station I came face to face with a girl I’d been at school with. Instant recognition, but total puzzlement as to how and where we’d known each other.
Here and now, I just couldn’t place this girl. I could give her no name. At the same time, I was absolutely sure her presence was bringing back to me some shared experience I had somehow managed to forget.
She folded her hands together, laid her head against them and closed her eyes. When she opened them again and nodded to me, her meaning was quite clear. I ought to go and sleep. She was quite right. I was absolutely exhausted. But I couldn’t just get up and walk away when she had been so kind to me.
I stretched out my hand to touch her. To my surprise she drew back, a look of concern on her face. After a moment, she bent down, chose a bloom from the bunch of kingcups she had laid so carefully on the ground, and handed the flowering stem to me. Our fingers brushed and she was gone.
I sat quite still, alone in the quiet of the afternoon, the whizz of cars a distant mutter beyond the density of the shrubbery. I stared at the bright golden eye of the kingcup with the single unfolding bud at its side. I gazed around hopefully as if perhaps she might have moved into the shrubbery, though I knew perfectly well she had gone.
I made an enormous effort, got up and walked unsteadily back to the house, clutched the banisters as I climbed the stairs and went into my room. I must have fallen asleep the moment my head touched the pillow.
The heat of noonday burned in a cloudless sky. On the great mound nothing moved but the shimmer of haze above the baked earth which had been worn bare in the preceding weeks by the movements of men and horses. Since the Festival of Beltane it had been fine. Day followed day of warmth and sunshine with only the slightest of showers in the night to settle the dust and bring freshness to the early dawn.
Deara had loved every moment of the unexpected fine spell. After the raw chill of the previous months, the confinement to hut and storeroom, the smoke of fires, the scratch of her heavy wool cloak and the lingering odours of horses and penned cattle, she revelled in the sudden freedom like the wild creatures themselves.
In the first weeks she covered miles everyday, doing the old woman’s bidding with pleasure. Coming back each evening footsore and wolf-hungry for the evening stew, her arms and satchel full of bark and flowers and leaves, she had trudged up the dusty path to the main gate and known herself happy. It was the first time such happiness had come to her. And it frightened her. Surely such joy was not given to mortal kind. Perhaps it was some jest of the gods to make her thus so happy that they might cast her down and humble her.
Now, as she reached the edge of the wood and began