Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn French Page B

that’s how I feel. OK. Silv, I’m going to take your hand in mine, alright? Try not to mind too much, love, I don’t intend anything inappropriate!’
    He alters his position by her bed so that with his right hand he can take her left, almost as if they are walking side by side. He is lanced by a ferocious sudden shard of memory as he entwines her long fingers in his. His hands are rougher and dirtier these days because he uses them to work outside more than he ever did. These are hands that now know how to chop and saw and hammer and rake and drag and pull. They are battered by rain, sun and wind, and this winter’s chills have chapped his fingers ’til they have bled and rutted in some places, but he doesn’t care.
    Her hands feel the same as they always were, satin-smooth and graceful. They aren’t small, Silvia is not a petite woman, but they are classically elegant and he always loved to hold them. He is savouring this moment. He doesn’t desire Silvia any more, that particular longing has finally abated, mercifully, but it doesn’t prevent him from finding pleasure in this rare instance. There is an added sensuality in it, because his hands are rougher, hers feel smoother in comparison.
    He looks down at the two hands. Adam and Eve. Yin and Yang. Black and white. They melt together the way mercury would on corrugated iron. The oppositeness makes it a biterotic and heightens the aesthetic kick. It’s a small but unforgettable vignette of how to be male and female. Together. He can’t get over how marbled and sculptured her long fingers appear clasped in his.
    ‘Your hands, Silv, they’re lovely still. Very … Junoesque. No, I won’t shut up, it’s liberating to be able to say it out loud, and you can’t stop me. The way your fingers lay against each other and the perfect ovalness of your utterly unbitten nails is … bloody thrilling. I always liked them, but the difference now Silv, is that I’ve learned to look up close. To notice. Imagine that! So, with that in mind Silvia Shute, pin yer lug ’oles back, take my hand and come with me to Foy Wood. I hope you can remember it a bit, to help you get there.
    ‘It’s at the far end of a huge pasture meadow so you see it from some distance. The field is on the flat whereas the wood is on a ridged incline, so it looks like a great army of huge old trees advancing towards you, a bit alarming. What’s unusual, and you don’t really notice at first, is that the huge warlike tribe is almost exclusively beech.
Fagus sylvatica
. It’s very rare to see that. There’s usually a few oak or sycamore or ash in there somewhere. The Romans usually planted them all together, to nourish and protect each other, but Silv, I have had some pollen dating conducted on my oldest ladies and it’s possible they first came to life in the Iron Age, isn’t that bloody amazing? So , this mammoth stand of beeches looms up from the distance, and dares you to approach them. Asyou get closer, the magnificence of them can start to overwhelm you.
    ‘There’s something about trees that’s too much bigger and older than all of us. We’ve all felt it one time or another. We have an instinctive reluctance to feeling so small and insignificant, so pathetically young. We all want to count, don’t we?’
    Ed is loving this rare freedom to elegize and is on a roll.
    ‘We need to be making our mark and whilst near these old veterans, it’s easy to feel pointless. But we mustn’t feel that, because it’s all about spans and lifetimes, and our relevance to that. A tree may live for hundreds of years but what if the tree, for instance, compared its lifespan to that of a stone? Compared to the thousands and millions of years it takes for a stone to erode and change and move, a tree’s lifetime is a flash. It’s important to just remember that we certainly belong in it somewhere, that’s all, and if we constantly belittle ourselves in comparison with the trees, we’re missing the