Fly Away Home

by Marina Warner

  When Judith went out to look at her garden one morning, hoping to find the first cyclamen uncurling their delicate heads, she caught a panicky flash of fur and the scramble of nails on the garden wall: an animal was writhing for a foothold on the brickwork. When Judith stood still, the creature’s first panic subsided, and she could sense – though she could not actually see – how the soft white fur in the hollows of the animal’s pricked ears quivered to pick up the human’s response. Then, hearing no reverberating anger, the creature found its centre of gravity and levered itself on narrow, orangey haunches to vault with a squirm and a shove up and over into the next-door neighbour’s garden.

  A vixen, thought Judith, and a young one, too, far smaller than a spayed hearth cat, and scrawny. The hole must be a branch exit in a lattice of communications running under the gardens adjoining one another near her, in this part of the city where she’d lived all her adult life with Iain, until one morning in tears he said he’d always love her, but that now he had to care for Amanda. Judith was so resilient and proactive, she was a woman who could manage on her own. Amanda needed him more.

  Since then, Judith found that to her own way of thinking, she was now widowed: death fixes memories, defaces the present, and fills every moment with the past, ablaze. His absence kept her mind in perpetual rewind – this is became this was, the time now the time then, this place here that place there, when he, when we did this and said that, ate this and saw that … The sequence, end-stopped, the frame frozen, flickered slightly in the light of her recall. The pictures screened out everything else, beyond the possibility of change except for paling in patches, like colour prints leaching slowly of light.

  This past mocked her as it flung at her, You just didn’t see it, did you?

  You missed the signs. You didn’t know that moment was the beginning of the end and that one the continuation of that beginning and that end.

  It pressed on, taunting: Iain is living with Amanda now, he is putting his arms around her encased bones after that crash when he was driving our car, and under the plaster cast she’s growing bigger with the baby she was starting to have with him all those months. For you, the past kept on, it was the last time for this and the last time for that. But you didn’t see it, did you?

  She was plunging through a snowstorm, flakes spinning in the darkness towards the headlights’ beam and vanishing as they hit it over and over again: everything had already happened to her that was ever going to happen, and she could re-enter the sequence again at any point and it would unfold the same, a life snowbound.

  So the vixen was an event, unexpected. The creature’s apparition was a first new thing. She had never seen any kind of fox close up before, and she found herself wanting to see this one again: cunning little vixen, she thought. Sharp-Ears. Foxy girl. My fox.

  She put out apples and she made peanut butter sandwiches with stale loaf after hearing a radio programme about mange. Foxes were leaving the countryside, now that fields were stripped of hedges and woodland cover and poisoned with sprayings, said an expert on a nature programme. No more hencoops and wild birds’ nests – they were evolving, abandoning their traditional habitat for the spilling dustbins of the new cafés, restaurants and fast-food outlets.

  At first Judith felt a twinge of annoyance – jealousy? To hear so many others talk about their foxes. But the feeling passed, to yield to a sense of belonging, just as, soon after her widowhood started, she found comfort in the solitude of others like herself.

  ‘You’ll adapt,’ her friend Gail said. ‘You’ll begin to like living alone. No more short and curlies in the plug-hole.’ But Judith waved away her friend: ‘I’m too old for that – my mind’s not wired for change, not any more. I can’t pick up Chinese as if I was four years old or start balancing a basket full of stones on my head, like women building roads in India. I can’t even remember the names of flowers the way I used to, and I wish the catalogues wouldn’t keep changing the botanical names.’

  Gail taught English at the local school, Judith Music. But in her new widowhood, when boys and girls on secondment from Biology or Media Studies came to class, she found herself scorning their utter lack of talent for the piano or the recorder, or, where it really stung the budding rock stars, for the guitar. Yet, before Iain went, she would throw herself into the school concert with relish, conducting till the players steamed. Before then as well she’d write, ‘Very promising. Fame calls …’ over and over again in her end-of-term reports, assuring her income. Now she had visions of slamming the lid down on a hapless aspiring musician when yet another mangled chord, rhythm, tempo, key, struck her newly sensitised ears. She began to think she must find something else to do, something solitary to suit her state.

  After the fox appeared, something in her loosened and stirred and, as she’d always given advice from her work on her own patch of garden, she put a card in the local sub-post-office window, offering:

  Garden Design & Maintenance

  Planting Pruning Clearing Weeding Trimming

  Ideas and Advice

  Organic methods only.

  She gave her email and a telephone number.

  Soon afterwards, there was a message on her voicemail: her caller had seen the ad in the post office and needed help. ‘Garden? Well, that might be the word for it …’ he began. The voice was melancholy, with the timbre of someone who might at one time have been able to sing. ‘Could you come and give a quote? It’ll have to be done from scratch.’

  She rang the number; left a message.

  That evening, the voice rang her:

  ‘I was surprised by your call,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, why’s that? You said …’

  ‘Yes, I know, but I didn’t expect a lady gardener.’

  Judith wasn’t sure how to respond to this; she missed her moment as conflicting feelings arose and jeered at her for failing to choose between them – scorn of that old-style gallant condescension, and – yes – a glimmer of curiosity about someone so apparently out of sync with the times and the customs of the country. Instead she told him she worked weekends only until the holidays; the appointment was made for the following Saturday.

  Sean Barbel’s house stood on the lane leading to the village churchyard by the river, part of the tangled waterways that connected her part of town via the canal to his. On the Saturday morning when Judith cycled there along the towpath, the chestnut tree was tipped in auburn: a giant redhead standing and spreading limbs against the light. From the street, the house looked like a worker’s cottage, with small deep-set windows in the tawny local stone, and, on both sides of the front door, grooves for a floodgate that was no longer there: so the house had been built before the canal was linked to the river to take the overspill. Which made it very old, thought Judith.

  Her caller opened the front door and stood against the light from the garden at the back; turned without lingering; took her straight through, down a stone-flagged passage into a kitchen at the back, an extension from the Seventies, slatted pine and roof lights and faded druggets, and slid the garden door across. She followed him out and they stood in the first scatter of leaves under a large bedraggled cherry tree. He sighed as he kicked at the mantling weeds. As he waved – shook – his hand at the knotted thickets of ground elder, nettles, and brambles, wound around with convolvulus and dying into a sodden pile of something unrecognisable left behind by a departed builder – carpet underlay? insulating lagging? – she let a small chuckle escape her.

  ‘It makes you laugh, does it? I suppose that’s good,’ he said. ‘It seems a hopeless task to me. Augean stables.’ He paused. ‘You don’t do crosswords? No, of course not.’

  She bridled. ‘If you’re worried that a woman isn’t capable …’ She stopped. ‘If I’m not, I’ll tell you – we might have to arrange a pick-up by the council – of the waste.’ She paused, then added, ‘I like digging.’

  The
first day, looking for tools, she found that the door to the garden shed was secured with a sturdy combination padlock. It wasn’t rusty, which surprised her, as the wooden structure had grown into the damp and weedy tangle that had once been, Judith discovered as she began to work, a hedge well-planted to deliver colour each season, with crimson-stemmed cornus, winter jasmine, dark spiky juniper and red-hipped hawthorn. The threshold was trampled and the undergrowth less dense on the approach to the locked door; the small window, with its quartered pane, was curtained; she couldn’t see in.

  The sodden mass by the door turned out to be bedding, and crumpled wet inside the cold matted sludge that had been a duvet, lay a nightie – with rotting lace insets round the neckline. Judith kicked a fold of the bedding over it and a stab of ammonia rose from the mess and caught her by the throat; she clapped her hand over her mouth and nose and backed off fast.

  When Sean Barbel returned that afternoon, he found Judith still hard at work, stretching her back as she contemplated with satisfaction the enormous pile of dead plants, living weeds, cuttings and prunings she had cleared.

  ‘We’ll let it settle and then, you can have a bonfire night, or, as I say, we’ll call the council.’ She gestured to the gunge piled by the door. ‘You must have had a squatter?’

  He didn’t answer. He was wearing a suit and he pulled the tie loose and drew it through and rolled it in his hands, and nodded approvingly at the heap she’d made.

  ‘Crumbs, you certainly get down to things.’

  He sighed and turned, then turned back and asked her in.

  Leaving her boots standing outside the back door, she asked him for the combination of the padlock.

  ‘Oh, you don’t want to go in there. If you think the garden’s a mess …’

  ‘I thought I’d keep my stuff there – save coming through the house.’ He’d shown her his garden equipment, such as it was, stowed in the broom cupboard under the stairs.

  ‘No need.’ He shook his head.

  ‘Well, I bring most of what’s necessary with me, I suppose.’ It wasn’t ideal, as she couldn’t come on her bicycle with large tools.

  ‘I had a wife,’ he said. ‘Everyone says “partner” now, but I still think of her as my wife though we weren’t official, but even so. She lived here, and it’s her things in the shed, you see.’

  Finding a man living on his own, Judith had him down as gay; and there was something a little gay about the way he picked so carefully around his house and possessions, setting out china cups and saucers for tea. He had been russet-haired, she could see, from the silver cockatoo crest springing from his forehead where a few freckles drifted; his hands were very white as he straightened the trivet on which he’d placed a good porcelain teapot with a pattern of forget-me-nots. Looking at his fingers, she had a sudden flash: the image of these same fingers laid on her own darker flesh flickered up in her mind, weakly, hesitantly, then abated as quickly. She almost missed it, but it was something alive inside her moving, the single disturbed blade that tells the tracker something has passed this way.

  The second week she was working on his garden, he returned in the early evening and asked her, with stiff good manners, if she liked going to bed with men, and if so, would she consider going to bed with him? He did not add anything more.

  He was standing near her in the garden where she was still hoeing by the light of a big lamp she’d looped over a branch. Judith told him she was out of practice; then, gesturing at her state, asked if she might use the shower first. He gave her a towel, and then, calling through the door, offered her a dressing gown. She kept her mind on not slipping, not splashing too much, and cleansed herself with a cat’s assiduity. No, she was not going to think of the possible condition of Sean’s bed.

  The dressing gown was silky, with embroidered panels, Chinese. When she came out he didn’t say anything to her as he busied around her barely dried form. He was eager; she found herself surprised: a feeling of festivity, a flash over her limbs. He patted her and said, ‘You don’t seem to have forgotten how to do it.’ He laughed then, and added, ‘I have to say, I thought I had.’

  Back in her own house, Judith went out into her own garden and put down food for her fox; she wanted the animal to be there, for though her sleeping with Sean had surprised her, it didn’t lift the solitude.

  On the radiator shelf in the hall at Sean Barbel’s cottage, there some piles of small change, a few old business cards, drawing pins and paper clips and rubber bands from postmen’s bundles, peppermints and receipts accumulated in various chipped saucers; also, keys. Sean showed her how they were tagged to identify them: cellar, garden door, side door, front-room window locks; and a slip of crumpled paper with ‘garden shed’ written in felt tip, and a number. She did not mean to take it in, but the digits impressed themselves as if they had spoken aloud.

  She was making a rockery on the south-westerly slope at the end of the garden, where she’d collected together the old bricks and rocks she’d dug up in the rest of the plot, and as she worked, her back was to the garden shed with its mute door and small blind window with the gingham curtain tucked against it on the inside and the combination lock on the hasp across the entrance. But she felt its presence behind her; one ­afternoon she peeped in again through the gap where the curtain, on its wire, sagged in the centre of the window, and saw that a postcard which she felt sure hadn’t been there before was propped up against the pane, its picture side turned inwards, the message and the address legible on her side of the glass. It was addressed to Daisy Sulter, and came from Turkey; the caption identified the image, as ‘Suleimanye mosque. Beautiful worship place’. It was old, postmarked something something 197-something, as far as she could decipher it. The message read,

  Conference boring but have played truant and tried to find the carpet shop where we bought ours – they all looked the same and when I asked, two merchants at least fell on me like an old friend. Need your eye, but shan’t say wish you were here,

  Love, Sean.

  PS Back before this reaches you, probably!

  Judith revolved the cogs on the padlock to the number still clear in her head; the interior was in shadow, and she took a moment or two to see what the garden shed held. It was full of stuff, as Sean had warned. But whereas Judith had expected a stack of tea chests, and perhaps a shelf of rusting antifreeze and some hardened sacks of fertiliser, she found she was looking at a tiny, neat bedroom.

  The shed was a Wendy house, with a narrow, low bed, tucked in and covered by a satin eiderdown stitched in a floral design; one pillow set straight; a low cupboard, doubling as a bedside table; a pair of chemist’s reading glasses lying there, next to a china ewer and basin with cabbage roses; on the floor, a round tatting mat, variegated, and a pair of Wellingtons with mud on them; hanging on a hook beside the window, the slippery silk dressing gown, Chinese sprays of embroidery on glowing crimson panels.

  Judith drew back, slid the hinge of the lock and lifted the hasp with fluttering fingers, her heart pumping blood to her temples.

  ‘Daisy turned against me, for some reason she wouldn’t give,’ Sean explained under some constraint the following week. He resisted Judith’s attempts to turn over the past. ‘Perhaps she didn’t know it herself.’

  ‘But …’ Judith wanted to object, but fell silent, not to give away her trespassing.

  ‘I could see I irritated her,’ Sean went on, ‘that my very presence set her teeth on edge, that my touch repelled her.’ He sighed and turned towards Judith, and put a fingertip to her shoulder above her breast. ‘You are different, you see. You rather like sex. At least you seem to – with me.

  ‘I used to think she had a lover, someone else,’ he said. ‘Though she wouldn’t ever admit it. So one night, after a terrible time, when she rejected me and said she would never sleep with me again, I rushed out into the garden and went to sleep in the shed. After that, it became
a kind of habit – injured pride, that kind of thing. Then one thing led to another – you know the rest.’

  Judith didn’t; except that Daisy, his first wife, had left him eight years ago, and that afterwards there had been a potter called Sylvie.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ he said, again.

  She tucked herself closer in to his body, thinking of the garden shed. His limbs, in which something had leaped a short while ago, now felt damp and chill.

  ‘Then, after Daisy moved out, she sometimes came back without warning. She still had keys. Once she arrived when I was … Well.’ He turned on to his back and lifted himself up the bed a little to laugh. ‘Her appearance for all intents and purposes as if she still lived here … it did not please my guest, as you can imagine. But as for Daisy, she didn’t turn a hair.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Meriel, that was her name. Pretty. Her name, I mean. She was only middling good-looking. But a fine viola player. We played together in the quartet I …’

  Now there were too many paths: the memory map was lifting into new land masses, trackless wastes, and new creatures of unknown feature and behaviour were roaming its unknown expanses.

  Judith ignored Meriel for the time being. For now, she’d keep to another track:

  ‘Where is she now? Sylvie?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘North Carolina, she has a husband there – she met him through one of her courses. She liked taking courses: Buddhism one year, caning another.’ He laughed. ‘Basketwork. Not the other sort. A broker husband. And children. She doesn’t write. Of all the women … Ouch.’ He broke off, as Judith pinched him. ‘Well, we’re not so young that we have to pretend, surely – she is the one I’ve most lost contact with.’ He turned Judith’s face with his hands to look at her. ‘I’m being tactless.’ It was his turn to pinch her, gently. ‘Aren’t you speaking to me any more?’