Encounters. Barbara Erskine
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he went on almost in a whisper. ‘I’d like to show you somewhere really quiet. Why don’t we take a drive down to the country at the weekend? Perhaps have lunch at a pub somewhere?’ He too had been staring hard at the ducks as he spoke but now he turned to look at her. He found she was looking straight at him, her eyes wide, the pupils pin points in the light of the sun. Her face had drained of colour.
‘It’s awfully nice of you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Why not?’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘You hardly know me. You’d be bored. I’m not …’ She was floundering unhappily. ‘I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I’m going to see my mother.’
She had drawn away, every muscle tense suddenly, resenting and fearing the brush of his elbow, the intimacy of his glance.
‘Hey, I didn’t mean –’ he found to his embarrassment that he was blushing too, disconcerted by her reaction. But already she was walking back across the grass, her shoulders squared beneath her coat.
‘We’re late for work,’ she called behind her with a tight apologetic smile and she almost ran in the direction of the park gates.
Later in the week she half hoped, half feared that he might ask again, but although his smile was just as friendly and his good morning relaxed and warm, he saw to it that they never found themselves alone together again.
And so the years passed. Time brought in the end a kind of serenity. Her shyness crossed the invisible road which turns it to reserve and she ceased to mind when her rejection of people led inevitably to their rejection of her. Or if she minded, she buried the hurt so deep that even she no longer noticed. Only her mother reminded her, and so now she seldom saw her mother.
Sketching, still her only passion, gave her the excuse for long lonely holidays in lonely places. There was one farmhouse in particular on a moor among the hills where she found solace and quiet dour friendship from the farmer and his wife. Once or twice a year, sometimes for long periods when she had saved enough, she made her way there, laden with sketchbooks and easel, to sit in the wiry heather with the wind teasing her hair and no companions save the sudden bulge-eyed hare and the distant wheeling, wheedling buzzards. It was a contented, restful time, for while she was there she forgot her inadequacies and her loneliness and found refuge and total confidence in her art and with the quiet couple with whom she stayed.
She had been going there for three years before she found the abbey. So often her footsteps retraced automatically the same paths through the heather and close-cropped tangled bilberries, taking her to landmarks of her own invention, that she rarely explored more distant valleys and dips in the rolling moors. There the fields, bright with ripening corn, encroached on the wildness of the landscape, reaching out to tame it with the richness of the fertile farms and thick growing woodlands. The ruins were hidden in a wooded valley of ancient trees, guarded by nettles and fierce sprays of thorn and bramble at the end of a cart track through the fields, and there she first met Brian.
She stumbled on him, almost literally, not seeing him until it was too late to turn and flee as he lay sprawled behind a low wall, field glasses pressed to his eyes, focused on a high fir growing out of the very stones themselves, or so it seemed. He turned furiously on her, mouthing silent curses and pulled her unceremoniously down beside him before turning once more to his watching. He never looked at her.
She lay trembling, her face pressed into the sweet grass, not daring to move although a nettle brushed her bare leg. Only when the great golden and russet bird which he had been watching lazily raised its wings and flew unperturbed away through the wood did he sit up and smile at her, obviously suddenly conscious of the formalities.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, his deep voice softened slightly by the gentle lilt of the hills. ‘She’s nearly hatching her eggs you see and it would be a terrible crime if she were to desert the nest now. I’ve been watching her since she first laid.’ He had a gentle quiet about him that reassured the scaredness within Jacie and allowed her to pull herself up to her knees, straightening her jacket and pushing the hair and grass and bracken tips from her eyes. The movement angered the nettle and she flinched as it rasped her skin.
‘Hey, you’ve been stung – and it’s my fault, I’m sorry.’ His gaze had missed nothing and she sat wondering as hardly seeming to search for it his hand reached instinctively for some dock and soothed it against her skin.
‘Do you know about birds?’ he went on, as gently he replaced his salve with a fresh leaf. ‘That was a kite. They’re pretty rare round here and very timid.’
Jacie found herself smiling at him, reassured. ‘I don’t really know very much, but I sketch birds sometimes.’ Her glance went to the sketchbook lying in the grass where it had fallen with tumbled pages. He reached for it and slowly turned them, pausing here and there to look longer and nod. He came to sketches of birds – buzzards cleaving the sky on their arched golden wings; curlews, a pheasant – and she saw his face soften into something which was almost a smile.
‘You’ve a good eye,’ he said quietly and she found herself smiling, ridiculously pleased by his admission.
She was almost disappointed when he said suddenly, ‘You’d best go now, before the other bird comes to sit his turn on the eggs,’ but obediently she had taken back her sketchbook and half wriggled, half crept away from the ruins. Preoccupied again with his glasses he had not even raised his hand to say goodbye.
But he had found her two days later on the moor. And he smiled for the first time properly, his eyes matching the wash of ultramarine sky she was laying on the heavy-grained paper and for the first time in her life she was completely unembarrassed and at her ease with a man. The faint golden blush which he detected on her skin was put there by the wind and the green moorland sun, not by her realization that he was looking no longer at her picture but at her face. He had seen at once the beautiful eyes she had inherited from her mother.
It was then that he calmly asked her her name and told her that his was Brian. He stopped and picked up a discarded sketchbook from the heather and flipped through the pages. Then he set it down without comment, sitting easily beside her on an outcrop of slaty rock, one knee updrawn, clasped by his strong sun-burned hands. He watched as she bent once more to her paints, unselfconsciously continuing to work on the landscape. Their silence was companionable, uncommitted and she took his attention and lack of comment as a quiet compliment on the competence of her work.
She saw him several times after that; sometimes in the distance when he would lift a hand and stride on, making no effort to come over to talk and sometimes they would meet and would smile and walk together, falling naturally in step and talking of plants and birds and painting and sometimes of farming, but never of themselves. She thought he must be a farmer of some kind, but she never asked and he never told her what he did.
Nor did she see at first the quiet contentment in his face when he glanced in her direction as they walked together down the mossy tracks. When, almost imperceptibly, their hands touched she didn’t draw away.
Then, once, turning to him, her face full of laughter as they talked she glimpsed suddenly the warmth in his eyes and the smile that was especially for her. Her laughter died for a moment on her lips and then she found herself smiling again, at him.
‘It’s good to have someone to walk with, Jacie,’ he said quietly. That was all. But she understood.
It puzzled Jacie that she was at ease with him. One night she sat down in the dim light of her bedroom and tilted the flower-painted plastic shade on her dressing table lamp to throw a clear unflattering light on her face and gazed earnestly at herself in the mirror. It was an old glass, black-speckled with the image distorted slightly on one side, making her temple and hair ripple and move oddly. She smiled involuntarily and was amazed at the vivacity which suddenly lit her face.
Why, she was asking herself, was she not shy and embarrassed with Brian? Why should this man be the only man with whom she had never felt afraid – save her father, who had gone away so long ago and left an aching void in her life? She leaned forward to look more closely in