by Hazel Prior
‘Have your birch trees grown yet?’ she asks.
‘No, of course not! They take time to germinate. But Dan and I do go and look at them most days just in case. That is, we go and look at the seed trays and the compost and we hope that the seeds are OK. And we keep them well watered.’
‘We, we, we!’ she chants. ‘Dan and I this, Dan and I that!’
‘Christina, stop it!’
‘OK, OK! Untwist your knickers! I’ve stopped. So, you want me to lie to Clive. And I’ve cut my hand on a tin-opener, have I?’
‘Yes, you slashed it really badly. Just in case he ever answers the phone and asks how you are.’
‘Can I elaborate? Say I got gangrene and nearly had to have an amputation—’
‘NO!’
‘Spoilsport!’
‘This is serious. I’m relying on you,’ I tell her.
‘Calm down, Ellie! Clive won’t suspect anything. What sort of tin was it?’
‘I don’t know. Baked beans?’
‘No, let’s go for chickpeas. More realistic.’
‘Chickpeas it is, then! And, Christina, something else. You find it really difficult to manage shopping bags and stuff like that. So I have to come and visit you and help out with things every day, OK? Saturdays and Sundays included.’
‘Right you are. It’ll be nice to see you.’
‘But actually I’ll be at the Harp Barn, helping Dan.’
‘Message received and understood. It would be nice to really see you some time though.’
Christina can put on a good act but I sense a bout of depression looming. I gather Alex has stopped coming home every weekend and when he does his treasured visits are mostly used up in phone calls to his new girlfriend rather than quality time with his mother.
‘We’ll get together soon, I promise. So sorry to put you in this position. Sorry about everything. And, Christina – thanks for being such a star.’
When I replace the receiver I feel urgently in need of fresh air. I scramble into my jacket and pound along the road. At the far end I veer off on to one of the footpaths that leads steeply up the fields alongside the wood. A strong wind is buffeting the trees and scooping leaves up from the ground. I can’t take my eyes off those frantic leaves. They’re scurrying like gnats, spinning wild patterns with every gust.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive.
I just can’t shake those lines out of my head.
I’m kicking myself. Why didn’t I just tell Clive how much I wanted the harp in the first place? Now everything’s escalated and I can’t see a way out. The two most important things in my life – my husband and my visits to the barn – are clashing. Clashing like different tunes played in different keys at the same time.
Clive is my rock. Clive is my rock.
I must hang on to that. It’s true, so true. I don’t know how I’d manage without Clive. The other day when he came home from work he saw at once that I’d been crying, even though I’d washed my face four times.
‘Ellie, Hon-pun, what’s wrong?’
‘It’s nothing,’ I’d said.
‘Clearly it isn’t. Hon, tell me what’s the problem. I’ll try my best to fix it, whatever it takes.’
‘It’s just – Mum, again. I phoned her today and she didn’t know who I was. Not for ages. Then, when she finally clicked that it was me, she said, “Ellie? Oh, Ellie!” in such a scornful way. Then she muttered, “Useless!” I know I shouldn’t let it get to me, but it did.’
Clive held me tight. I breathed in the comforting bergamot and leather tones of his aftershave.
‘C’mon, El. Your mother has no idea what she’s saying. You know that. The “useless” was probably referring to something else altogether.’
‘It wasn’t,’ I sniffed. ‘She’s always thought I was useless.’
‘Well, she’s always been wrong.’
Once I’d recovered he went out again, even though he must have been exhausted from his day’s work. He returned three-quarters of an hour later with a spray of chrysanthemums and a beautiful little pair of silver earrings for me, ‘just because’. Then he lit the fire, made me sit by it and massaged my feet. We ended up making love on the hearthrug, the firelight glowing on our naked skin. How precious it is to be loved.
I don’t deserve Clive.
Yet the harp-playing is crazily vital to me. It isn’t just the dreams-coming-true thing, or even my strange bond with Dan. I’ve made an astonishing discovery: I can make music. It’s like a rich seam of gold inside myself that I never knew was there before. If – when – I tell him, Clive is going to resent the fact he has nothing to do with this new seam. I know him: he’ll take it personally, see it as an act of rebellion. He may even try and make me stop.
I can’t stop now. I won’t stop now.
Dan submits to my peeling off his dressings, cleaning the wound and rebandaging him without complaint every day. Torn flesh, seeping blood and pus – not something I’d normally relish. In this case, though, I don’t mind at all; it feels deliciously intimate. I’m flattered that Dan puts his trust in me, even while he winces with pain. He’s not as patient as I would have expected, though; he’s in a hurry to get better. I suppose he’s missing his daily walk.
It’s just as well Dan has Phineas for company. He seems to have bonded with that bird in an extraordinary way. Phineas sleeps in the barn every night. He comes and goes through his new pheasant flap. Great big bird though he is, he even leaps on to Dan’s knee at times, when Dan is resting on one of the wooden chairs. Dan wraps his arms around him, talks to him and strokes his feathers. It’s a surreal sight, the two of them cuddling up together so tenderly, surrounded by harps.
It struck me that Dan might be interested in Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Puzzled Game-Birds’, so I took a copy up with me and read it out to him last time I was there.
They are not those who used to feed us
When we were young – they cannot be –
These shapes that now bereave and bleed us?
Dan nodded sagely. ‘That’s the thing exactly! Those are the exact words Phineas would say to the Hooray Henrys if he could speak – and if they would stop shooting for a moment and listen.’
He petted Phineas on the head and Phineas nestled into him, smiling as much as a bird can smile.
Later, after I’d finished my harp practice, I watched from the window as Dan hobbled around the orchard on his crutches. He gazed up at the trees and the golden smudges of clouds, and heaved a great sigh. Doubtless he was missing Rhoda. I sighed too.
‘How do you feel about Dan’s new pet?’ I asked Rhoda during our last lesson at her house in Taunton.
‘Oh, that!’ She laughed in a way I didn’t quite like. ‘Yes, he told me about the pheasant.’
‘So you haven’t met Phineas yet?’
She shook her head. ‘Nope. Nor do I want to, particularly. I’m not megaly keen on birds.’
‘I’m surprised you haven’t even seen him though,’ I said. ‘Phineas is hard to miss. He virtually lives in the barn.’
She flicked a lever on her harp. ‘Well, I don’t get out there that much.’
Hasn’t she even been to visit Dan since his accident? I know for a fact that he can’t drive at the moment, so it’s up to her if she wants to see him. Surely she’ll want to check he’s all right? Comfort him, bring him treats?
I looked at her curiously. She continued fiddling with harp levers, her lips pressed tightly together.
I wanted to slap her. However unbelievably good-looking and talented she is, she shouldn’t take Dan for granted.
‘Dan’s still really suffering with his leg, isn’t he?’ I said. ‘It’s a horrible injury.’
‘Well, if he must run out in front of guns, what does he expect?’
17
Dan
I Juggle with two crutches, a bag of birdseed and a harp. It is important to carry all these at the same time. Into the
orchard, whatever the weather, four times a day. I am getting quite good at it. Sometimes I also manage to bring a peanut butter sandwich, as a special treat for Phineas. I’ve discovered he has a penchant for them.
Phineas and I have become firm friends. I don’t speak his language and he doesn’t speak mine, but we’ve worked out a very satisfactory means of communication. When it’s time for his meals I use the smallest lap harp (the Lapwing) and I play a chord. For breakfast I play a B flat major, for lunch I play an F minor, for supper I play a C7 and for his evening snack I play a G arpeggio. Phineas knows exactly what they all mean. He comes running each time, bounding across the grass with his wing (the uninjured one) unfurled and his beak open in a great flurry of excitement. He likes the harp so much I am beginning to wish I could play it properly. But I have never learned to play because making harps takes all my time and energy. Perhaps I could get Ellie to play for him sometimes as she’s here so much. She is quite good on the harp now. When concentrating on technique she stops and starts a lot, but when she knows a piece well she pours expression and feeling into each note. She and the cherry wood harp are as one. Through it, she sings. I love it when this happens. I think Phineas must love it too. I feel he is a musical bird. Hugely brainy, no; musical, yes.
Ellie and I could be like a mother and father to Phineas. Except that we’ll never tell him what he’s supposed to and supposed not to do. Phineas is a free agent and if he wants to flap his wings and make strange noises that’s fine by me.
Phineas is also welcome to poo in the woodshed if that’s what makes him happy. Washing pheasant poo off my carefully seasoned harp wood is no chore. In fact, I find it quite soothing.
I think I will name my next harp the Phineas. He can select which wood it is made from in his own inimitable manner.
Roe Deer rang this morning, just after I’d given Phineas breakfast. ‘Dan,’ she said.
‘Roe Deer,’ I said.
‘Are you any better?’
‘Better in what sense?’ I asked.
‘Your leg, you lemon!’
I told her my leg was much improved and called her a banana. Two can play at that game.
She gave a huffy sound down the phone. ‘Are you up to making harps?’
I said of course I was.
‘Good, glad to hear it,’ she said. ‘Dan, you haven’t phoned Mike Thornton yet, have you?’
I confirmed that I hadn’t.
‘Dan, I try to help you, but honestly! He is really, really keen for you to make a harp for his wife, for Christmas, but you do actually have to ring him and talk about it.’
I am not good at phone conversations with anyone, let alone people I’ve never met. I pointed this out to Roe Deer, even though I would have thought she knows it already.
‘Yes, but Dan, Dan, Dan,’ she said. She does that repetition of my name thing sometimes. ‘You have to make an effort. I was the one who recommended you, so it’ll reflect badly on me if you don’t. And unless you get on with it soon, Christmas will be over and my student still won’t have her harp.’
I can be pretty quick making harps if need be. Still, perhaps she had a point. It was now the ninth of November, which left only six weeks and two days until the Christmas deadline. So I promised I would ring the man straight away, without further ado.
‘Hang on a mo!’ she said before I could put the phone down. ‘Have you actually got his number?’
I reminded her that indeed I did. She had told it to me when she first mentioned the subject. ‘I suppose you remember it still after all these weeks, do you? Tell me what it is.’
I told her. She laughed and said I was dead right. She said I was super-efficient in some ways and completely hopeless in others. She said to be sure to ring him straight away. So that is what I did.
Mike Thornton wants me to make a harp for his wife Fifi out of an old apple tree that was cut down three years ago and is now sitting in chunks in a shed near Bridgwater. That is fine. What is not so fine is that he wants me to carve the word ‘Fifi’ on the side of the harp. I informed him that this was not a good sort of name to carve into a harp. He said what did I mean? I said it was not a musical and mellifluous name, not a name suited to harps. He said in a much louder voice that he considered it to be a very musical and nice name, it was his wife’s name, and if I took that tone with him he would take his custom elsewhere. I told him it was up to him to take it where he liked. I was about to put down the phone when he said well, perhaps I could make the harp first and then after that we could talk about the issue of the name. There was no hurry to decide. But there was a hurry to get a harp made out of the apple wood by Christmas. I said all right, I could get a harp made out of the apple wood by Christmas. But in order to do this I would need the apple wood. My leg was not yet OK to drive, otherwise I would drive in my Land Rover to collect the apple wood from his shed near Bridgwater the following day. He asked what was wrong with my leg, so I told him a Hooray Henry had shot it. He said was I joking? I said no, I wasn’t. He said well, that was damned inconvenient. There was a gap in the conversation, so I waited for him to fill it. At last he did that and he did it in a voice that sounded as if he was trying to swallow a hedgehog, and what he said was this: ‘I suppose that means I have no choice. I am going to have to bring the wood over to your workshop?’
I said I supposed so too.
‘Hi, Dan, what’s up?’ Ellie said the next time she came. Her cheeks were pink and her hair was windswept. She was wearing her blue scarf. One of the tassels had got loose and tangly.
‘Is something up?’ I asked her.
‘Well, yes, presumably. You look traumatized. And your hands are twitching.’
I said that was maybe the look that I wore and the twitch that I twitched when I had just met a stranger and the stranger was called Mike Thornton and Mike Thornton had come to the barn with a load of apple wood and Mike Thornton wanted me to make that wood into a harp by Christmas and Mike Thornton also wanted me to carve the word ‘Fifi’ into the harp and Mike Thornton was being pushful. I did not mind the apple wood, but I did mind Mike Thornton.
‘Dan, you should get out more,’ is what Ellie then said to me.
I replied that it’s difficult to get out with my leg bandaged up, but I will certainly get back on to my daily walk as soon as I can.
‘No, that’s not what I mean,’ she said. She sat on the bottom step of the seventeen steps that lead to the upstairs of the Harp Barn. I came and sat next to her. It took some time to do this because my leg didn’t like it, and it would take even longer to get up again because my leg would like that even less, but it was what I wanted to do so I did it. Ellie budged up to make room for me but we were still close, very. We sat for a long while without speaking. Then the closeness began converting itself into a hotness and a trembliness, so I asked quickly what she’d meant when she said I should get out more.
‘What I mean, Dan, is that maybe you need a bit more variety in your life.’
I informed her that my walk gives me all the variety I need. Even though it is always the same walk, it is always different. How the trees and the bracken are always changing. How the sunshine, shrinking behind a cloud, suddenly mutes the colours but then it sails out and sets them ablaze again. How I like it especially in autumn when the leaves are all painted in copper and bronze and scarlet and ochre and rust. Even if I limit myself to looking down at the path there are different worlds to explore. Sometimes a pattern of pebbles, sometimes a procession of ants, sometimes a chip of eggshell from a tiny egg, sometimes a shiny green beetle, the skeleton of a leaf, a slip of silver water snaking through the stones.
‘Dan Hollis!’ she cried, and her eyes were bright with a brightness that made me want to dive into them. ‘There is so much poetry in you.’
I was pleased when she said this.
But after that she said: ‘Still, it’s good to go to lots of different places and see lots of different people. You can’t really expand your horizons on ju
st that one walk every day. You hardly see anyone except for Thomas the postman and me … and Rhoda.’ She then patted my arm. ‘Not a criticism, just a thought.’
I pointed out that every so often I also see my sister Jo, and the people who buy harps.
She glanced over at my cork board. ‘But that’s not exactly a huge variety of people. And you do need variety, Dan; it’s the spice of life. Don’t you long for a bit of spice sometimes?’
I had to think about this.
‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘As your leg’s so bad and you can’t get out much at the moment, I’ll take you into Minehead or Lynmouth to see a show or something.’
I said no thanks.
‘OK then, how about somewhere different in the countryside? I could drive you up one of the moorland roads. I’m sure you wouldn’t regret it.’
I told her I almost certainly would regret it as new things never feel right to me, especially en masse. They make me short of breath. A long time later they might begin to be right, but by then they are not new things any more, they are old things.
She sighed deeply. ‘You have a lovely life, Dan, but it’s not real.’
How is my life not real? To me it is very real. I didn’t say this though. I looked at her shoes, which had a small shred of mud on the toe, and her socks, which were olive green. It occurred to me that maybe Ellie thought I was boring. I didn’t want her to think this.
‘Dan,’ she said, stirring to action. ‘I’m insisting. We’ll just go for a short drive. You need to get out.’
She helped me to my feet. We walked outside together and she put my crutches in the boot of her car. I got in. She was insisting, so what could I do? She got in too.
I asked where we were going.
‘Not far. I want to show you the local church. It’s really pretty, with some gorgeous stained glass. Nobody will be there. It’s a lovely, peaceful place. I’m sure you’ll like it.’
I watched the scenery sliding by. The hills were smooth and pale. The trees were bare and spindly. The bracken was ragged, nice, brown and orange. The sky was blue with little bunches of grey and white cloud.
