That was what she’d just written when Mrs. Davies called up. “Your young man is here, dearie!”
“He’s not my young man,” Evelyn muttered under her breath. She set aside the notebook, threw on a cardigan—having found that a cardigan was always a necessity in Cornwall—and ran down the stairs.
“Ready?” he asked. He was standing at the bottom of the staircase, holding a picnic basket. He does have nice hair, Evelyn thought. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, having a “young man,” as Mrs. Davies had called him.
“Ready! Let’s go visit the dead.”
The church was more interesting than she’d expected, and they did find some Morgans in the graveyard. “Gwynne Morgan, Morwenna Morgan, Trevor Morgan. They’re great names. I should write them down in case I ever have kids.” She walked among the gravestones. “Nothing after the nineteenth century. Well, that’s when they went to America, I guess. My great-grandfather arrived before World War I.”
“I’d like to go to America someday,” Brendan said.
“Would you? Why?”
“For the adventure of it. It must be fascinating, living in a country where everything is new. Here, we’re still talking about Gawan and Elowen. I hope you like the book, by the way.”
“I do. Lots of gory bits, giants being disemboweled and all that. You know, if you ever do come, you could stay with me in Boston.” She felt almost shy saying it. After all, she’d known him less than a week. But he just smiled in a way that made his eyes crinkle at the corners. She was starting to like how he smiled, as though the smile were a secret he was sharing with her.
That week, they went out with one of the boats and watched the men catch fish in enormous nets, with gulls wheeling overhead. She was proud that she threw up only once. They took long walks around Clews, visiting farms where they tried different cheeses. She helped him catalog books, and he laughed at how dusty they both became. As the days passed, she became increasingly conscious that her visit was ending, that she would have to return to Oxford and then fly home. She didn’t want to leave Cornwall … or Brendan.
On her last day in Clews, they went to the nearby town of Pengarth, where there was an old fort. The next morning she would be taking the bus to Truro. Evelyn wondered if she could stay another week. But the airplane tickets had been bought long ago, and what would her parents think? She and Brendan spent the morning clambering over the stones and then had lunch at the hotel.
Afterward, she asked if, instead of taking the bus, they could walk back to Clews through the forest. She didn’t want this day to end.
“There’s a path I used to take when I was a child,” he said. “It’s easy enough, although there are roots in places. But are you sure, Evelyn? It’s a matter of seven miles. I don’t think you’re used to walking so far.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, bridling. Did it look like she didn’t exercise? She did the treadmill and the Stairmaster in the gym at Harvard.
When they started back, she was sure they’d made the right decision. The forest was filled with sunlight filtering through the canopy of leaves. It was like walking in a great, green cathedral.
They didn’t walk particularly quickly, and they took rests to look at acorns with interesting shapes, a red squirrel that chirred at them from a branch, a robin that stared at them for a moment and then flew off.
By the time Brendan announced they were approaching Clews, it was beginning to get cold. “Here, take my jacket,” he said. She wrapped it around her. It smelled like him, like old books.
“Evelyn, there’s something I want to say. Can we sit down for a minute?” They sat on a fallen tree covered with moss.
“What is it?” she asked. He looked almost concerned. He was silent for a moment, then said, “These last couple of days, I’m not sure I can describe—”
He looked at her as though unsure how to go on. Suddenly, he put his hand on her cheek, leaned down, and kissed her. The kiss was long, so long and sweet that she felt as though her heart had stopped, or as though it had started beating with the forest itself.
She could feel the trees above her, their roots beneath the soil. She could feel the moss growing, the earth stirring with whatever animals lived underground. Idly, she wondered if she were still breathing or if her breath was now part of the forest, part of its life.
She could feel him pulling back, slowly, reluctantly, his hand still on her cheek. She opened her eyes.
And looked into a face of leaves. There were leaves growing over his face, vines sprouting from his shoulders. In front of her, touching her, he was becoming a tangle, a thicket of oak and elder and ash. She felt a tendril on her cheek and saw that his hands were made of ivy. But his eyes were still the eyes of Brendan Thorne, green with brown flecks. They looked back at her, enigmatic and suddenly inscrutable.
It was happening again. The world—the real world—was slipping away from her. She felt a terrifying sense of panic.
“Evelyn,” he said, but his voice sounded deep, hollow, as though it were coming from the bottom of a well.
She screamed.
She jumped up from the fallen tree and stumbled backward. The man of leaves and vines rose and followed, his arms reaching for her. He was all greenery now, except his lower legs, where she could still see jeans and sneakers. But the vines were reaching there, too, and soon he would be not a man at all, but a part of the forest, following her, trying to catch her.
She turned and ran. She didn’t look back or stop running until she reached the Giant’s Head. Her suitcase was already packed. She quickly checked the bus schedule; there was a bus to Truro in half an hour. She threw the rest of her clothes into her backpack. By the time she paid her bill, the bus was waiting. She boarded and didn’t look back as it drove away from Clews. She tried not to think about what had happened until she was on the airplane to New York. And when she did think about it, she went into the plane’s lavatory and cried, sitting on the toilet seat, sobbing into a balled-up paper towel as quietly as she could. From fear, and for Brendan Thorne, who had kissed her and then changed before her eyes into … what?
She didn’t know.
Evelyn Morgan, Ph.D., glanced at herself in the rearview mirror. Hair pulled back, lipstick a professional shade of mauve. In her briefcase were extra copies of her CV and the chapter she had submitted with her application. She had been right to wear the gray suit. Her mother had insisted on buying it for her. “You’ll look so professional,” she had said, and Evelyn had to admit she’d been right.
She was grateful for the interview at Bartlett College. She’d been teaching for two years as an adjunct at Columbia, ever since finishing her doctoral degree. She knew she wasn’t the easiest sell: a medievalist who had chosen to write not about Chaucer or another author who would actually be taught in medieval literature classes, but on the legend of the Green Man. The Green Man in Medieval Europe had taken her eight years to write, and now she didn’t know what to do with it. She’d already gotten an article out of it, which probably explained why she’d been granted an interview at Bartlett. But she didn’t think the dissertation itself was publishable. It was too strange, too idiosyncratic. And her only other publication was the book of poems she’d written years ago. Green Thoughts.
She’d written it the year after that week in Clews, where she had met Brendan Thorne—she still remembered his name—in a bookstore. Where she’d had that—incident. She’d always felt bad about that, always wanted to apologize. Tell him it wasn’t his fault. He must have wondered if he’d done something wrong. You’re fine, she’d wanted to tell him. It’s me. I’m a nut case, that’s all. Although Dr. Birnbaum wouldn’t appreciate her describing herself that way. Once, several years afterward, she’d sent Brendan a letter, apologizing. She hadn’t known where he was living, so she’d used the address for the bookstore. But she had never heard back.
After she’d come back from Cornwall, she’d been on the medication again for a while, but there were no m
ore incidents, and Dr. Birnbaum had told her that she finally seemed stable. Her life had been stable for a long time now. Even her one serious relationship had been a model of stability. David Aldridge had been working on a Ph.D. in art history at Columbia. A friend had introduced them at a party benefitting the Metropolitan Museum of Art that she’d attended reluctantly, after her mother had insisted on sending tickets. His father was a client of Morgan & Leventhal, and his family owned a house on Cape Cod, right on the water. She had brought him home for Christmas, and her parents had obviously approved. All their friends had assumed they would get married. But one morning, shortly after his dissertation defense, while pouring a cup of coffee in the apartment they’d shared for several years, he said, “Evelyn, I don’t think this is going to work out. I want to be with someone who’s in love with me, and you’re not. Are you?” He’d looked so vulnerable, standing there in his pajamas holding his coffee mug, that she had wanted to say yes but hadn’t been able to. Instead, she shook her head. A week later, he’d joined the Peace Corps. The last time she’d heard from him, he was somewhere in Central Africa building an irrigation system.
She pulled into the parking lot. At least the buildings were attractive: old brick with white columns and ivy growing up the walls. She had some doubts about moving to Virginia, but so far it looked perfectly civilized. Her father hadn’t wanted her to move so far away. New York had been bad enough. He’d been willing to pay for graduate school, even to finance a Ph.D. in English literature, if she agreed to stay in Boston, attend Tufts or Brandeis. But she’d earned that full scholarship to Columbia—it had been her accomplishment. She had insisted on going, and now she might move even farther away, if she got this position.
All right, was she ready for the interview? As ready as she would ever be, she decided. She got out of the rental car.
“What I realized, when I started looking at all the different myths and stories of the Green Man, was that they always included what I call the Magical Woman. The basic story, the story that we can trace back to folklore, involves the Green Man and this Magical Woman. And it’s a love story. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, Gawain is a double, an alter ego, for the Green Knight. This becomes even clearer when we look at older stories, such as the Cornish Tale of the Green Knight, in which the knight in green armor is Sir Gawain himself. The implication, I believe, is that such stories date back to pre-Christian fertility rituals, although of course that research was beyond the scope of my study.”
He entered late, closing the door quietly behind him and moving toward the back of the room. It couldn’t be, she told herself. Am I seeing things? Please, not here, not in the middle of my presentation. But she could tell it was him, even in profile. And, suddenly, it was as though she was back there—in the forest again, after all these years. With Brendan Thorne.
She couldn’t continue. Once again she felt the terrifying panic, the urge to turn and run.
Her presentation had been going so well. I have a real chance at this position, she’d been thinking. But now she stood frozen at the front of the room, unable to speak. He turned and saw her, then sat down as though he didn’t recognize her. Above him, she saw the clock; it felt as though time was standing still, but only a few seconds had passed.
“Any more questions?” she heard herself saying. And then she was answering them, sounding as though she knew what she was talking about even though all she could think of was him, sitting at the back of the room, not asking questions. It was as though her mind had split in two: half still involved in the presentation, half consciously not looking at him. Wondering what he was doing here, at Bartlett College.
Afterward, the department chair, Michael Fitch, took her to lunch at the faculty club. It gave her a chance to calm down, to ask, “Is Brendan Thorne teaching here? I met him once, years ago. I thought I recognized him at the back of the room.” Yes, he was a tenured professor in the department. It seemed impossible.
Finally, Michael shook her hand. “Well, you know how this goes,” he said. “Through the department, up to the dean, and so on. You should be hearing from us in a couple weeks. But as far as I’m concerned you’re a very strong candidate.”
So that was good, wasn’t it? she thought as she walked back to her car. Where Brendan Thorne was waiting.
“Evelyn Morgan,” he said. “You know you’re going to get this position, don’t you? Not because of your qualifications, although they’re quite adequate, but because the department is desperate to have someone in place by September.”
She didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry that, when you kissed me years ago, I ran away screaming. I have a tendency to do things like that. Just ask my shrink.
“I know, it’s been a long time. More than ten years since I met you in Clews, I’m thinking. Shall we start over?” He held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Morgan. I’m Brendan Thorne.”
She laughed with relief and shook his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Dr. Thorne.” Thank goodness. No apology would be necessary.
“I didn’t tell you, did I? That week, when we met. I was at Oxford, too, studying toward my doctorate.”
“Oxford!” she said, astonished. “You knew I was at Oxford. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He laughed. “Oh, I was enjoying playing the local boy. You know, when I was a kid, I used to go out with the fishermen. I thought I wanted to be one myself someday. I was never interested in running the bookstore. My father was disappointed, but I couldn’t stay in Clews. Too much of the world I wanted to see. Although I never thought I’d end up at Bartlett College, in the crown colony of Virginia.”
“Why did you?” He seemed incongruous here, with his accent, although it was less pronounced than she remembered. The brown hair was still thick, although there were a few gray strands running through it, and the green eyes still crinkled at the corners when he smiled.
He was smiling now. “Fate, perhaps? Allowing us to meet again? Listen, assuming you get this position, which you will, can I take you out to dinner to celebrate?”
“Um, sure.” She smiled back. That was one thing they’d never done together in Clews: go out on an actual date.
“Terrific. I’ll see you in September.” As she drove back to the Richmond airport, she felt a sort of warm glow. Why does the thought of having dinner with Brendan Thorne make me so happy? she wondered. And yet it did.
Evelyn rented a house in Coleville, where Bartlett College was located. Slowly, she settled into her new routine. It was completely different from teaching at Columbia. In the mornings, she woke to the sound of birdsong and drank her coffee on the front porch. Then she drove to the college. No subway, no picking up a quick breakfast at the diner. At Columbia, her students had come from New York, California, Singapore. Here they came from Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee. Many were the first in their families to go to college. She liked their accents, their earnestness.
Her office, in a building that had stood there for a hundred years, looked out onto a courtyard with an ancient oak tree and a lawn where undergraduates made out. She looked at them wistfully. It had been so long since she’d been romantically involved with anyone. There hadn’t been anyone in her life, not in a serious way, since David. She’d been so focused on writing her dissertation, on being a good teacher, that she had entirely neglected that part of herself. Perhaps she shouldn’t have? She thought of brown hair and green eyes that crinkled at the corners. She’d been at Bartlett for a week but had heard nothing from Brendan Thorne.
“Dr. Morgan, I presume?” And there he was, standing in her doorway, dressed in corduroys and a Fair Isle sweater, looking not much older than he had in Clews. “I believe I invited you to dinner.”
“You did. And where in Coleville are you planning to take me?” She had learned on the first day to pronounce it Covil, although it still confused her that Talliafero Hall, where the English department was located, was pronounced Tolliver.
“Surely you jest, my lady
. I’m planning on driving you to Richmond, so we can have dinner at a proper restaurant, not the Pancake House. And, by the way, would you do me the honor of signing my copy of Green Thoughts?” He held out her book. “I had no idea you’d written this, E. R. Morgan. Every third poet is named Morgan in Cornwall. I bought it when it was first published. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for years.”
She laughed. “Well, thanks. I’m glad you like it.”
“What does the R stand for?”
“Rose, actually. It was my grandmother’s name. Terribly sentimental, isn’t it?”
“It’s rather nice,” he said. “Evelyn Rose. It suits you.” She blushed and opened her book. On the flyleaf she wrote, To Brendan, with love. Evelyn. And then wondered what in the world had possessed her to write something so personal. But it was too late now. She’d written it in pen and couldn’t simply cross it out.
“How are classes going?” he asked.
“All right. I like the students. They’re quieter than the ones at Columbia, less willing to raise their hands. I feel as though they’re afraid they’ll give the wrong answers.”
“Yes, as if in literature there were any right answers.” He sat on a corner of her desk. “You know, I worried that you’d find it boring here, Evelyn from Boston by way of New York. But Bartlett seems to suit you.”
“It’s … comfortable. And I’m not just teaching literature this semester. They’ve given me an advanced poetry workshop.”
“Advanced being a euphemism for ‘slightly less terrible than what you would get in introduction to poetry.’ ”
She laughed. “Well, I did get a poem on plumbing yesterday. It rhymed, too. But what I wanted to say is, I’m going to try writing poetry again, myself.” She felt almost uncomfortable telling him. No one, not her parents, not Professor Lambert at Oxford, not her adviser in the doctoral program at Columbia, had ever encouraged her poetry. Fanciful nonsense, she still heard in the back of her mind whenever she tried to pick up a pen and write a poem. Why don’t you focus on the real world? Those were the words she’d heard all her life.
The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story Page 2
