by Alan Hunter
‘You know, sir,’ he said. ‘This is what I reckon. Neither one of those two is going to get off, really. He’ll have a dicky arm for life, and she can see where it happened from her bedroom window.’ He stared at the muffin. ‘And they’ve both got to live with it. What she was telling us just now. I can’t see them staying on in Grimchurch, not with memories like that around the place.’
‘But she’s a tough one, sir,’ the policewoman said. ‘She won’t be bothered by the view from her window.’
‘She isn’t tough,’ Aspall said. ‘She’s cool. The sort it hits hardest underneath.’ He kneaded the muffin. ‘What do you reckon, sir?’
‘I reckon she’ll write a poem,’ Gently said.
‘Well yes, I daresay, sir . . .’
Aspall bit the muffin. A moment later, he was reaching for his handkerchief.
And it was dark again over the reserve, where the chopper had not disturbed the avocets, and dark along the shore, where the makers of footprints had departed. And the two cottages, they were dark, and dark the trackway through the wood, along which, like the sound of silence, brushed the phantom of a churchyard owl. It rowed across the garden of one of the cottages and through the unleaved elms beyond; then, white and large, it flickered along hedges where the mice squeaked and hedge-pigs roamed. Alone among birds it waked and hunted, alone: it had no mate.
APPENDIX
Ka’s sonnets
1
As one, as two, our gypsy hearts together
Sing kindly part-songs on a holiday,
Plucking from frosty month green summer weather,
And chiding longest hour for his brief stay.
The brown field smiles, the rusting heath makes merry,
The wasting boughs new-woven garlands win them;
The croaking field fare dotes upon a berry;
I have your eyes, you mine, and a world in them.
No after or before, no sun or season,
No wish beyond, no asking or receiving;
The trembling leaf that falls falls without reason;
The flower keeps faith, though never yet believing. Meeting bright joy is, parting our shared sorrow: So much do hearts from hearts their own grace borrow.
2
When through the columned woods we softly went,
Where auburn brocade chambered in the sky,
Where antlered kings their gold and copper spent
In resinous air, sweet-musting drifts to lie;
When, by the ling’s last flower, and weeping pine,
And mossy hassocks where the quick thrush feeds,
Came we, to watch beneath us dully shine
The sea-swelled river, bending through her reeds;
Then seemed I in some richer self to grow
And clearer being, borrowed from young time,
As though these blazon trees and current slow
My dreaming, unsung blood began to rhyme. Foundlings are we, strayed children of forgetting, But souls not single, nor of single setting.
