‘There was a time when I was almost happy …’

      There was a brittle splintering as her foot slipped on the ridges of the cart track and the ice shivered delicately across the ruts in a labyrinth of crystal slivers. She hadn’t been concentrating; she had been gazing into the distance where on either side of her the fields stretched like dull brown hessian towards the hedges. In the summer, when she had been here before, they had been a ripe, rich gold; somehow she had not expected them to have changed so much.

      With a little shiver Jacie dug her hands deeper into her pockets and walked doggedly on. She had to get there before the mist-shrouded sun disappeared behind the hills and left her in the cold darkness. She almost wished now that she hadn’t come at all. Perhaps it was a mistake to come back – to try and recapture those memories which haunted her. She hesitated for the first time, but already in front of her she could see the dark outline of the ruined arches rising starkly from the earth amongst the bare winter trees and irresistibly she was drawn on.

      She stood for a while in the shadows, feeling the wind teasing her hair from the scarf around her head, gazing down at the patch of rimed grass where her feet and Brian’s had stood, so close together. It had been like another lifetime then, in the summer, that time when she was almost happy.

      She shrugged suddenly, shaking the loosened hair out of her eyes and pulled her collar up closer. The cool sun had gone now and night was coming faster than she had expected, moaning softly in the wind amongst the crumbling stones, darkening the fields. Suddenly, irrationally, she was afraid. She glanced over her shoulder, pressing back against the green damp of the stones, smelling their dankness, listening as she had that last time to the story they seemed to cry out of sorrow and pain. Her heart was beating fast somewhere high in the back of her throat and she pressed herself into the corner of the walls which had once formed the nuns’ chapter house. It was then, glancing sideways, forcing herself to be calm, that she saw the web.

      The spider had thrown its net across the corner between the rough stones, a hexagonal of perfect diamanté, glittering with frost even in the near dark. Jacie raised her hand in wonder and then swallowing a sob of relief held back, remembering the summer. Was it the same determined little creature which had returned and made good the wreck of its web which her clumsy fingers had torn into ashy fragments that last day? The sticky silken threads had been caught up and retied. She gazed at it until the dusk faded into darkness and she could no longer see even the frosty outlines of the shape. Would it be the same for her? Could the wreck of her own happiness be made good too? Would he come back to her and rescue her from herself again? Pressing her hands deep in her pockets she gave the dark corner where the web hung one last look, then she turned and slipping and stumbling in the dark she began to run back down the track towards the farm.

      Ever since her childhood Jacie had felt different from other people. Partly, she now accepted, it was the way she was; partly it had been her mother’s fault for not understanding.

      ‘Jacie Stacey

      Her silly vest is lacy!’ the children at school had sung, dancing around her as they changed for gym and the teacher had sent a note home to her mother: ‘If Jane could wear something a little less elaborate … broderie anglaise is not really suitable for school wear …’

      Jacie had looked up fearfully as her mother tore open the envelope, waiting for the explosion she was sure would come; somehow feeling herself to blame for the unacceptability of the trimming on her liberty bodice. There was an explosion, but not of anger; it was of laughter. Her pretty unpredictable mother had hugged her. ‘Oh darling, I must buy you woolly vests and make you a conformist,’ she had gurgled delightedly and Jacie had breathed a sigh of relief. She wanted nothing more than to conform in a woolly vest. It embarrassed her when her mother tried to make her different; it embarrassed her when her mother laughed and talked with the other mothers at collecting time and pulled her pigtails, saying, ‘this one is mine’. All she wanted was to disappear and be wholly invisible. The more her mother drew attention to her and made her pretty – and she was pretty, there was no getting away from that – the more she hated it. If a teacher looked at her she trembled.

      Later it had been the same. As she grew up she had hidden away from the other girls her own age, taking refuge in drawing which she found was the only way to express her feelings. She would hide in her bedroom, ignoring her mother’s pleas to come out, endlessly sketching the roof tops and the trees which she could see from her window and putting into the strokes of her pencil all the pent-up emotion which she felt but did not understand.

      ‘You’ll grow out of it, darling. It’s a phase. I was shy at your age,’ her mother reassured her time and again, but Jacie could see the puzzled hurt in her mother’s eyes and knew in her heart that her mother had never felt the way she did. She had never known the agony of not belonging and, worse, of not wanting to belong in spite of the ache of rejection, as first schoolgirls and then college contemporaries formed close circles which seemed to exclude her.

      ‘What’s wrong with me?’ she asked in anguish, talking in the end in desperation to the same apple tree in the garden which she had addressed so often as a child. She received no reply.

      Once she began working it was perhaps a little better. She gained confidence because she was good at her job. She was a designer; sometimes freelance, sometimes working for long periods for one firm and always, when she moved on, they were sorry to lose her. She was deft, competent and quietly efficient and managed to blend mutely with the grey carpet and beige wall, only occasionally being subjected to agonizing blush-making notice. Once or twice she went out with the men she met in these offices, but her terror and the rigid formality of her shoulders held them at bay. They never asked her a second time although long ago she had realized, catching sight of herself unexpectedly in a mirror, that she had inherited her mother’s beauty.

      There was one man she had liked a little; the partner in charge of her department at the last job but one. He was a rugged solidly built man with strangely flecked Irish eyes and enough shy charm to lull her into allowing a lunch hour break to drift on into the early afternoon, and they had gone for a walk in the park. They had stood side by side at the edge of the lake, watching the grey froth which lapped at the tarmac path beneath their feet.

      ‘I like it here; it’s so quiet.’ She glanced up at him shyly with the half smile he found so intriguing glimpsed over the rim of her drawing board. Then avoiding his eyes she looked back towards the ducks, glossy in the plumage of early spring.

      ‘I like quiet places too.’ His voice took on a deeper note than usual as he moved little by little until, almost imperceptibly their elbows brushed. He had sensed her isolation;