the time I reached the farm. For the next mile, there was nothing but fields on both sides. The silence was heavy and thick, like velvet, broken only by an occasional splash in the ditch beside the road, or a car swishing by on its way to Weston. There were no lights on that stretch of road, but that did not bother me till I got to Laurel Cottage, about half a mile from home. I never saw lights at Laurel Cottage, but I knew the foreign woman was there,watching me the way she did in the summertime. That bothered me. The people in the village said the foreign woman was mad. Nobody knew how she lived. Sometimes she would be sitting in her garden when I passed by, and she would be knitting, or reading a book. People who had seen inside the cottage said she had hundreds of books, all piled on the floor in the sitting room. Once I saw her standing at her door, eating an apple, and I plucked up the courage to say good afternoon. She looked at me and smiled, but she did not reply. I was intensely curious about her. I wanted to know where she had come from, and what it was that had made her mad.
She wasnât mad all the time. The people in the village said she took fits because of something that had happened to her in the war. I had seen her myself, on occasion, standing in her garden, talking to the trees, when the fit was on her. She would walk round in circles, talking in some language that no one else understood. At first I thought it was Polish or German, because people in the village said she had come from Germany as a refugee after the war. Later, Mother told me it was not a real language at all, but something the woman had invented. As far as I knew, she only ever spoke this language to the trees in her garden.
Her fits would last for hours at a time. To begin with, she seemed excited, even happy: she walked quickly around the garden, sometimes reaching out and brushing a tree with her fingers as she passed. She would talk constantly in a kind of singsong â there was no structure, no syntax. The words seemed to merge, one into another, yet there was no doubt that they meant something to her, that she intended something by them. Then, about an hour after she began, her voice would change. Now there were spaces between one word and the next, everything began to collapse inward, into a kind of slowmotion. Eventually she turned her back on the tree she had been talking to, and walked away. Whenever that happened, she always looked disappointed, as if she had failed in some task. Once, when I was out hunting for animals, I hid in a bush near the cottage and watched the whole thing. It was beautiful in its way, and I was curious about her private language. I wanted to know what it meant to her, what it was she thought she was saying.
Once I was walking home in the springtime. It was late afternoon, still light; the rain had been falling all day, heavy and loud on the windows at school. Now it had stopped but the fields and gardens were still wet. The world seemed abnormally still, after the violence of the rain. As I approached Laurel Cottage, I thought I saw something move â or rather, I had the feeling that someone, some person had moved a moment before I looked, and was now standing amongst the bushes, hushed, waiting for me to pass. Nothing was visible, but I had that sensation you sometimes get, playing hide and seek, when someone gives himself away by trying too hard to stay hidden. I knew it was not an animal I sensed there, but a human being, though I could not have said why. Then, just as I reached the front gate, the foreign woman stepped out from amongst the leaves and stood there, stark naked, streaming with rainwater, and laughing softly to herself. She was so close I could almost have touched her. She was looking straight at me, but I do not think it was me she saw. She was playing a game with someone else, perhaps with someone who had died years before, or it might have been someone she had invented,
She wasnât mad all the time. The people in the village said she took fits because of something that had happened to her in the war. I had seen her myself, on occasion, standing in her garden, talking to the trees, when the fit was on her. She would walk round in circles, talking in some language that no one else understood. At first I thought it was Polish or German, because people in the village said she had come from Germany as a refugee after the war. Later, Mother told me it was not a real language at all, but something the woman had invented. As far as I knew, she only ever spoke this language to the trees in her garden.
Her fits would last for hours at a time. To begin with, she seemed excited, even happy: she walked quickly around the garden, sometimes reaching out and brushing a tree with her fingers as she passed. She would talk constantly in a kind of singsong â there was no structure, no syntax. The words seemed to merge, one into another, yet there was no doubt that they meant something to her, that she intended something by them. Then, about an hour after she began, her voice would change. Now there were spaces between one word and the next, everything began to collapse inward, into a kind of slowmotion. Eventually she turned her back on the tree she had been talking to, and walked away. Whenever that happened, she always looked disappointed, as if she had failed in some task. Once, when I was out hunting for animals, I hid in a bush near the cottage and watched the whole thing. It was beautiful in its way, and I was curious about her private language. I wanted to know what it meant to her, what it was she thought she was saying.
Once I was walking home in the springtime. It was late afternoon, still light; the rain had been falling all day, heavy and loud on the windows at school. Now it had stopped but the fields and gardens were still wet. The world seemed abnormally still, after the violence of the rain. As I approached Laurel Cottage, I thought I saw something move â or rather, I had the feeling that someone, some person had moved a moment before I looked, and was now standing amongst the bushes, hushed, waiting for me to pass. Nothing was visible, but I had that sensation you sometimes get, playing hide and seek, when someone gives himself away by trying too hard to stay hidden. I knew it was not an animal I sensed there, but a human being, though I could not have said why. Then, just as I reached the front gate, the foreign woman stepped out from amongst the leaves and stood there, stark naked, streaming with rainwater, and laughing softly to herself. She was so close I could almost have touched her. She was looking straight at me, but I do not think it was me she saw. She was playing a game with someone else, perhaps with someone who had died years before, or it might have been someone she had invented,
Similar Books
