I was coming down the hill and I saw them, how close they were around me. At first, not seeing them, for there were only trees and leaves and paths of shadow, but then making out from amongst the darkening branches small delicate shapes that were moving in between the thickets of elm and oak and ash, taking form and particularity that was animal.
I look back now, on that moment, of something becoming apparent to me in the gathering darkness and it doesn’t seem to be evening at all but rather a time of growing light. As though, as the colour left the summer sky and as I criss-crossed my way down the hill, lost and confused and unable, I thought, to find my way out of the wood, I was actually coming into some kind of illumination, an understanding. I see... I remember thinking quite clearly as the foxes darted before me on the path and then came to stand, like ghosts or children all around me: I see.
For sure it was that time of day when anything could happen.
I’d been up in the park at the top of the hill, the one with the high black and gold railings around it and two ornate gates through which you enter and leave. The grass there is kept clipped close as a carpet, and in the middle of the green is set the beautiful gold bandstand like a crown. We’d been watching an open-air opera, sitting there on the grass with the singers before us slipping in and out of and around the ornate iron pillars like they were creating a sort of dance. One lover passing to the next, the music like ribbons winding around them, binding them to their story of desire and inevitability, their fate: Don Giovanni and his loves. Don Giovanni and his way down to hell. It was a perfect early summer’s evening, high and blue and golden as though it could never get dark, and lovely, I think it was. To be out on the grass with this filigreed piece putting itself together on the stage in front of us—the singers with their brightly painted faces and their feathers, and the tiny silvery orchestra with its flutes and violins playing off to one side. As I say, it was lovely, I think. It looked lovely, I mean. Being there in that park Andrew used to take me to all the time, up above the woods... Sitting on the shining grass with Andrew and his friends, champagne in our long-stemmed glasses... It may have looked like I belonged there. Like I had a place amongst that group of young men and women I seemed to be a part of then. “Friends,” I might have called them, only they were Andrew’s friends—turning to each other and whispering, with a sense of intimacy, collective knowledge, bound together as the singers were bound to the music that wove around them and drew them to the stage...
“Isn’t the soprano there on the right just like that girl you used to go out with?” somebody said. Turning to Andrew, then looking at me.
“Don’t be mean,” someone else whispered. “She was awful, that girl. None of us liked her.”
“Don’t whisper,” another whispered herself. “We’re supposed to be watching.”
“Yes but we’re talking about what’s-her-name, that girl Andrew used to love.”
Words like that, you see, close up, knowing words. “How can you talk that way,” I said to them. “In front of me...” Like I knew them well, had been friends with Andrew’s friends for such a long, long time when really I hadn’t known Andrew for more than six months but still he and those people he knew... They had gathered me in. So, intimacy—yes, it is the right word for the group of us brought together on our picnic rugs, sipping our champagne. It even looks like a word that could have whispered in my ear that night and had me believe in it, put its arms around me and hold me for ever.
For it was the night Andrew had decided that we were to tell our friends that he and I were going to get married, that he’d asked me and that I had said yes. It was like a beautiful secret that had been between us for the past few days, he’d said, this knowledge of what he wanted us to do, but now it was time to announce it to these people that he loved—before his parents knew, or anyone in his family. Before they could “get to it” as was Andrew’s phrase. For his family were like that, Andrew was always describing them. The kind of family who could “get to things,” change them, enter in. The kind who made decisions and spoke in loud voices and did what they had to do when they wanted to do it. The kind of family that made me feel I could never say a single word.
“My mother will want to get to it,” Andrew had said to me and I’d laughed and kissed him then, though the feeling I had was like a little wrench, a twist somewhere deep inside me where you were, my love, where you were first beginning. If I’d known myself at all I would have stepped away from him that moment, Andrew, poor Andrew... But I didn’t know. All I had for certain was the knowledge of this other secret, the one Andrew didn’t know about, uncurling itself cell by cell inside me in the dark. And even as I reached up to kiss him and felt the wrench I knew for certain, too, that this other secret was the one I mustn’t tell.
In the meantime there was this plan, he and I together in the park, the friends, the picnic rug. All laid out beneath the golden bandstand on the grass. There would be champagne, champagne, then down the hill and back to the flat for supper and Andrew would make the announcement about our wedding and wouldn’t everyone, wouldn’t everyone just love to come...
And I was to leave early, that was part of the same plan. To go on ahead, make way, prepare... As Andrew had said I should go ahead to get everything ready and that’s what I’d fully intended, in my usual frightened way, to run quickly home, taking the shortcut path Andrew and I knew so well, be back at the flat in time to get the barbecue on and the salads and dishes arranged, more champagne and an ice bucket and the glasses on the table for when they all got back and Andrew would say, “We have a surprise announcement to make!” So down I went through the wood. Leaving them all to the part just before the Don reads out his list of lovers and begins his descent to hell. Taking no more than ten minutes, I thought, ten minutes to get down the little path through the trees, down on to the street and back up our road, to be there before the rest of them, the table laid outside and perfect in candlelight when Andrew and his friends arrived.
But the time was not, after all, the summer afternoon I thought would go on for ever. It was later than I thought, and the light was nearly gone from the sky when I was halfway down the hill and I lost my way. Somehow I had taken a wrong turn, and then another, and now I was confused, disorientated, running faster and faster this way and that way but getting nowhere, following one path after the next and terrified, terrified of where I might be...
When I became aware of that movement in the trees ahead, a flickering like shadows but then I saw it was the foxes crossing my path, and as I slowed down they too seemed to still themselves, stepping away from the growing shadows then and coming towards me, delicate and wild, not frightened at all.
And when you grow up I’m going to tell you this story. Of how you came to be. And why we live the way we do, you and I, set apart and with our own secrets, in our own world and no one knows about us really, and they may never know. For by the time I had gone through the wood that night everything had changed. I see... And there would be no wedding announcement. No champagne toast. No visit to a clinic as there most surely would have been a certain visit to a clinic, for Andrew’s mother would “get to it,” before her only son’s wedding would ever be allowed, would have got to you, for sure, my love...
For there was something about those slips of form in the twilight changed things, made of blood and bone, their steady eyes upon me, but as though they were magic, faerie... When of course it was me who was not real. I understand that now. Running down through the trees when I thought I knew the way, in that place between the road and the park that kept such wildness in, that meant I was lost, for a time I was lost with nowhere to go but in the end found out I was not lost at all.
Because, of course, I never told. I kept you safe. Inside like a secret and the foxes showing me the way, finally down through the wood. So when I got to the street again, the twilight had worked its spell. Taking me from day to peaceful dark and I was running up the street to pack a bag to leave in minutes the house, the life I thought I was going to step into as surely as one of the players on that park stage had taken their steps through Mozart’s score. Becoming instead like a fox myself, slipping out of everything that was known and planned and calculated, disappearing into leaves and trees and you and I, darling, we’re gone.
I look back now, on that moment, of something becoming apparent to me in the gathering darkness and it doesn’t seem to be evening at all but rather a time of growing light. As though, as the colour left the summer sky and as I criss-crossed my way down the hill, lost and confused and unable, I thought, to find my way out of the wood, I was actually coming into some kind of illumination, an understanding. I see... I remember thinking quite clearly as the foxes darted before me on the path and then came to stand, like ghosts or children all around me: I see.
For sure it was that time of day when anything could happen.
I’d been up in the park at the top of the hill, the one with the high black and gold railings around it and two ornate gates through which you enter and leave. The grass there is kept clipped close as a carpet, and in the middle of the green is set the beautiful gold bandstand like a crown. We’d been watching an open-air opera, sitting there on the grass with the singers before us slipping in and out of and around the ornate iron pillars like they were creating a sort of dance. One lover passing to the next, the music like ribbons winding around them, binding them to their story of desire and inevitability, their fate: Don Giovanni and his loves. Don Giovanni and his way down to hell. It was a perfect early summer’s evening, high and blue and golden as though it could never get dark, and lovely, I think it was. To be out on the grass with this filigreed piece putting itself together on the stage in front of us—the singers with their brightly painted faces and their feathers, and the tiny silvery orchestra with its flutes and violins playing off to one side. As I say, it was lovely, I think. It looked lovely, I mean. Being there in that park Andrew used to take me to all the time, up above the woods... Sitting on the shining grass with Andrew and his friends, champagne in our long-stemmed glasses... It may have looked like I belonged there. Like I had a place amongst that group of young men and women I seemed to be a part of then. “Friends,” I might have called them, only they were Andrew’s friends—turning to each other and whispering, with a sense of intimacy, collective knowledge, bound together as the singers were bound to the music that wove around them and drew them to the stage...
“Isn’t the soprano there on the right just like that girl you used to go out with?” somebody said. Turning to Andrew, then looking at me.
“Don’t be mean,” someone else whispered. “She was awful, that girl. None of us liked her.”
“Don’t whisper,” another whispered herself. “We’re supposed to be watching.”
“Yes but we’re talking about what’s-her-name, that girl Andrew used to love.”
Words like that, you see, close up, knowing words. “How can you talk that way,” I said to them. “In front of me...” Like I knew them well, had been friends with Andrew’s friends for such a long, long time when really I hadn’t known Andrew for more than six months but still he and those people he knew... They had gathered me in. So, intimacy—yes, it is the right word for the group of us brought together on our picnic rugs, sipping our champagne. It even looks like a word that could have whispered in my ear that night and had me believe in it, put its arms around me and hold me for ever.
For it was the night Andrew had decided that we were to tell our friends that he and I were going to get married, that he’d asked me and that I had said yes. It was like a beautiful secret that had been between us for the past few days, he’d said, this knowledge of what he wanted us to do, but now it was time to announce it to these people that he loved—before his parents knew, or anyone in his family. Before they could “get to it” as was Andrew’s phrase. For his family were like that, Andrew was always describing them. The kind of family who could “get to things,” change them, enter in. The kind who made decisions and spoke in loud voices and did what they had to do when they wanted to do it. The kind of family that made me feel I could never say a single word.
“My mother will want to get to it,” Andrew had said to me and I’d laughed and kissed him then, though the feeling I had was like a little wrench, a twist somewhere deep inside me where you were, my love, where you were first beginning. If I’d known myself at all I would have stepped away from him that moment, Andrew, poor Andrew... But I didn’t know. All I had for certain was the knowledge of this other secret, the one Andrew didn’t know about, uncurling itself cell by cell inside me in the dark. And even as I reached up to kiss him and felt the wrench I knew for certain, too, that this other secret was the one I mustn’t tell.
In the meantime there was this plan, he and I together in the park, the friends, the picnic rug. All laid out beneath the golden bandstand on the grass. There would be champagne, champagne, then down the hill and back to the flat for supper and Andrew would make the announcement about our wedding and wouldn’t everyone, wouldn’t everyone just love to come...
And I was to leave early, that was part of the same plan. To go on ahead, make way, prepare... As Andrew had said I should go ahead to get everything ready and that’s what I’d fully intended, in my usual frightened way, to run quickly home, taking the shortcut path Andrew and I knew so well, be back at the flat in time to get the barbecue on and the salads and dishes arranged, more champagne and an ice bucket and the glasses on the table for when they all got back and Andrew would say, “We have a surprise announcement to make!” So down I went through the wood. Leaving them all to the part just before the Don reads out his list of lovers and begins his descent to hell. Taking no more than ten minutes, I thought, ten minutes to get down the little path through the trees, down on to the street and back up our road, to be there before the rest of them, the table laid outside and perfect in candlelight when Andrew and his friends arrived.
But the time was not, after all, the summer afternoon I thought would go on for ever. It was later than I thought, and the light was nearly gone from the sky when I was halfway down the hill and I lost my way. Somehow I had taken a wrong turn, and then another, and now I was confused, disorientated, running faster and faster this way and that way but getting nowhere, following one path after the next and terrified, terrified of where I might be...
When I became aware of that movement in the trees ahead, a flickering like shadows but then I saw it was the foxes crossing my path, and as I slowed down they too seemed to still themselves, stepping away from the growing shadows then and coming towards me, delicate and wild, not frightened at all.
And when you grow up I’m going to tell you this story. Of how you came to be. And why we live the way we do, you and I, set apart and with our own secrets, in our own world and no one knows about us really, and they may never know. For by the time I had gone through the wood that night everything had changed. I see... And there would be no wedding announcement. No champagne toast. No visit to a clinic as there most surely would have been a certain visit to a clinic, for Andrew’s mother would “get to it,” before her only son’s wedding would ever be allowed, would have got to you, for sure, my love...
For there was something about those slips of form in the twilight changed things, made of blood and bone, their steady eyes upon me, but as though they were magic, faerie... When of course it was me who was not real. I understand that now. Running down through the trees when I thought I knew the way, in that place between the road and the park that kept such wildness in, that meant I was lost, for a time I was lost with nowhere to go but in the end found out I was not lost at all.
Because, of course, I never told. I kept you safe. Inside like a secret and the foxes showing me the way, finally down through the wood. So when I got to the street again, the twilight had worked its spell. Taking me from day to peaceful dark and I was running up the street to pack a bag to leave in minutes the house, the life I thought I was going to step into as surely as one of the players on that park stage had taken their steps through Mozart’s score. Becoming instead like a fox myself, slipping out of everything that was known and planned and calculated, disappearing into leaves and trees and you and I, darling, we’re gone.
