Bigger-Picture

Bigger-Picture

Windows on the world

Short Stories & Other fiction

Dryad

JOANNE HARRIS: DRYAD

1

Joanne Harris was born in Yorkshire in 1964, the daughter of a French mother and an English father. She was a French teacher at a boys’ grammar school in Leeds when her first novel, The Evil Seed, was published in 1989. Since then she has written Sleep, Pale Sister, the Whitbread-shortlisted Chocolat (now a major film), Blackberry Wine, Five Quarters of the Orange , Coastliners, and Holy Fools. She has also written a cookery book, The French Kitchen, with Fran Warde. Her first collection of short stories, "Jigs & Reels," has just been published. Joanne Harris gave up teaching four years ago to write full-time and lives with herhusband and young daughter in Yorkshire .

JOANNE HARRIS: DRYAD

2

IN A QUIET LITTLE CORNER of the Botanical Gardens, between a stand of old trees and a thick holly hedge, there is a small green metal bench. Almost invisible against the greenery, few people use it, for it catches no sun and offers only a partial view of the lawns. A plaque in the centre reads: In Memory of Josephine Morgan Clarke, 1912-1989. I should know – I put it there – and yet I hardly knew her, hardly noticed her, except for that one rainy Spring day when our paths crossed and we almost became friends.

I was twenty-five, pregnant and on the brink of divorce. Five years earlier, life had seemed an endless passage of open doors; now I could hear them clanging shut, one by one; marriage; job; dreams. My one pleasure was the Botanical Gardens; its mossy paths; its tangled walkways, its quiet avenues of oaks and lindens. It became my refuge, and when David was at work (which was almost all the time) I walked there, enjoying the scent of cut grass and the play of light through the tree branches. It was surprisingly quiet; I noticed few other visitors, and was glad of it. There was one exception, however; an elderly lady in a dark coat who always sat on the same bench under the trees, sketching. In rainy weather, she brought an umbrella: on sunny days, a hat. That was Josephine Clarke; and twenty-five years later, with one daughter married and the other still at school, I have never forgotten her, or the story she told me of her first and only love.

It had been a bad morning. David had left on a quarrel (again), drinking his coffee without a word before leaving for the office in the rain. I was tired and lumpish in my pregnancy clothes; the kitchen needed cleaning; there was nothing on TV and everything in the world seemed to have gone yellow around the edges, like the pages of a newspaper that has been read and re-read until there’s nothing new left inside. By midday I’d had enough; the rain had stopped, and I set off for the Gardens; but I’d hardly gone in through the big wrought-iron gate when it began again – great billowing sheets of it – so that I ran for the shelter of the nearest tree, under which Mrs Clarke was already sitting.

We sat on the bench side-by-side, she calmly busy with her sketchbook, I watching the tiresome rain with the slight embarrassment that enforced proximity to a stranger often brings.

I could not help but glance at the sketchbook – furtively, like reading someone else’s newspaper on the Tube – and I saw that the page was covered with studies of trees. One tree, in fact, as I looked more closely; our tree – a beech – its young leaves shivering in the rain.

She had drawn it in soft, chalky green pencil, and her hand was sure and delicate, managing to convey the texture of the bark as well as the strength of the tall, straight trunk and the movement of the leaves. She caught me looking, and I apologised.

"That’s all right, dear," said Mrs Clarke. "You take a look, if you’d like to." And she handed me the book. Politely, I took it. I didn’t really want to; I wanted to be alone; I wanted the rain to stop; I didn’t want a conversation with an old lady about her drawings. And yet they were wonderful drawings – even I could see that, and I’m no expert – graceful, textured, economical. She had devoted one page to leaves; one to bark; one to the tender cleft where branch meets trunk and the grain of the bark coarsens before smoothing out again as the limb performs its graceful arabesque into the leaf canopy. There were winter branches; summer foliage; shoots and roots and windshaken leaves. There must have been fifty pages of studies; all beautiful, and all, I saw, of the same tree.

JOANNE HARRIS: DRYAD

I looked up to see her watching me. She had very bright eyes, bright and brown and curious; and there was a curious smile on her small, vivid face as she took back her sketchbook and said: "Piece of work, isn’t he?" It took me some moments to understand that she was referring to the tree.

"I’ve always had a soft spot for the beeches," continued Mrs Clarke, "ever since I was a little girl. Not all trees are so friendly; and some of them – the oaks and the cedars especially – can be quite antagonistic to human beings. It’s not really their fault; after all, if you’d been persecuted for as long as they have, I imagine you’d be entitled to feel some racial hostility, wouldn’t you?" And she smiled at me, poor old dear, and I looked nervously at the rain and wondered whether I should risk making a dash for the bus shelter. But she seemed quite harmless, so I smiled back and nodded, hoping that was enough.

"That’s why I don’t like this kind of thing," said Mrs Clarke, indicating the bench on which we were sitting. "This wooden bench under this living tree – all our history of chopping and burning. My husband was a carpenter. He never did understand about trees. To him, it was all about product – floorboards and furniture. They don’t feel, he used to say. I mean, how could anyone live with stupidity like that?"

She laughed and ran her fingertips tenderly along the edge of her sketchbook. "Of course I was young; in those days a girl left home; got married; had children; it was expected. If you didn’t, there was something wrong with you. And that’s how I found myself up the duff at twenty-two, married – to Stan Clarke, of all people – and living in a two-up, two-down off the Station Road and wondering; is this it? Is this all?"

That was when I should have left. To hell with politeness; to hell with the rain. But she was telling my story as well as her own, and I could feel the echo down the lonely passages of my heart. I nodded without knowing it, and her bright brown eyes flicked to mine with sympathy and unexpected humour.

"Well, we all find our little comforts where we can," she said, shrugging. "Stan didn’t know it, and what you don’t know doesn’t hurt, right? But Stanley never had much of an imagination. Besides, you’d never have thought it to look at me. I kept house; I worked hard; I raised my boy – and nobody guessed about my fella next door, and the hours we spent together."

She looked at me again, and her vivid face broke into a smile of a thousand wrinkles. "Oh yes, I had my fella," she said. "And he was everything a man should be. Tall; silent; certain; strong. Sexy – and how! Sometimes when he was naked I could hardly bear to look at him, he was so beautiful. The only thing was – he wasn’t a man at all."

Mrs Clarke sighed, and ran her hands once more across the pages of her sketchbook. "By rights," she went on, "he wasn’t even a he. Trees have no gender – not in English, anyway – but they do have identity. Oaks are masculine, with their deep roots and resentful natures. Birches are flighty and feminine; so are hawthorns and cherry trees. But my fella was a beech, a copper beech; red-headed in autumn, veering to the most astonishing shades of purple-green in spring. His skin was pale and smooth; his limbs a dancer’s; his body straight and slim and powerful. Dull weather made him sombre, but in sunlight he shone like a Tiffany lampshade, all harlequin bronze and sun-dappled rose, and if you stood underneath his branches you could hear the ocean in the leaves. He stood at the bottom of our little bit of garden, so that he was the last thing I saw when I went to bed, and the first thing I saw when I got up in the morning; and on some days I swear the only reason I got up at all was the knowledge that he’d be there waiting for me, outlined and strutting against the peacock sky.

JOANNE HARRIS: DRYAD

Year by year, I learned his ways. Trees live slowly, and long. A year of mine was only a day to him; and I taught myself to be patient, to converse over months rather than minutes, years rather than days. I’d always been good at drawing – although Stan always said it was a waste of time – and now I drew the beech (or The Beech, as he had become to me) again and again, winter into summer and back again, with a lover’s devotion to detail. Gradually I became obsessed – with his form; his intoxicating beauty; the long and complex language of leaf and shoot. In summer he spoke to me with his branches; in winter I whispered my secrets to his sleeping roots.

You know, trees are the most restful and contemplative of living things. We ourselves were never meant to live at this frantic speed; scurrying about in endless pursuit of the next thing, and the next; running like laboratory rats down a series of mazes towards the inevitable; snapping up our bitter treats as we go. The trees are different. Among trees I find that my breathing slows; I am conscious of my heart beating; of the world around me moving in harmony; of oceans that I have never seen; never will see. The Beech was never anxious; never in a rage, never too busy to watch or listen. Others might be petty; deceitful; cruel, unfair – but not The Beech.

The Beech was always there, always himself. And as the years passed and I began to depend more and more on the calm serenity his presence gave me, I became increasingly repelled by the sweaty pink lab rats with their nasty ways, and I was drawn, slowly and inevitably, to the trees.

Even so, it took me a long time to understand the intensity of those feelings. In those days it was hard enough to admit to loving a black man – or worse still, a woman – but this aberration of mine – there wasn’t even anything about it in the Bible, which suggested to me that perhaps I was unique in my perversity, and that even Deuteronomy had overlooked the possibility of non-mammalian, inter-species romance.

And so for more than ten years I pretended to myself that it wasn’t love. But as time passed my obsession grew; I spent most of my time outdoors, sketching; my boy Daniel took his first steps in the shadow of The Beech; and on warm summer nights I would creep outside, barefoot and in my nightdress, while upstairs Stan snored fit to wake the dead, and I would put my arms around the hard, living body of my beloved and hold him close beneath the cavorting stars.

It wasn’t always easy, keeping it secret. Stan wasn’t what you’d call imaginative, but he was suspicious, and he must have sensed some kind of deception. He had never really liked my drawing, and now he seemed almost resentful of my little hobby, as if he saw something in my studies of trees that made him uncomfortable. The years had not improved Stan. He had been a shy young man in the days of our courtship; not bright; and awkward in the manner of one who has always been happiest working with his hands. Now he was sour – old before his time. It was only in his workshop that he really came to life. He was an excellent craftsman, and he was generous with his work, but my years alongside The Beech had given me a different perspective on carpentry, and I accepted Stan’s offerings – fruitwood bowls, coffee-tables, little cabinets, all highly polished and beautifully-made – with concealed impatience and growing distaste.

JOANNE HARRIS: DRYAD

And now, worse still, he was talking about moving house; of getting a nice little semi, he said, with a garden, not just a big old tree and a patch of lawn. We could afford it; there’d be space for Dan to play; and though I shook my head and refused to discuss it, it was then that the first brochures began to appear around the house, silently, like spring crocuses, promising en-suite bathrooms and inglenook fireplaces and integral garages and gas fired central heating. I had to admit, it sounded quite nice. But to leave The Beech was unthinkable. I had become dependent on him. I knew him; and I had come to believe that he knew me, needed and cared for me in a way as yet unknown among his proud and ancient kind.

Perhaps it was my anxiety that gave me away. Perhaps I under-estimated Stan, who had always been so practical, and who always snored so loudly as I crept out into the garden. All I know is that one night when I returned, exhilarated by the dark and the stars and the wind in the branches, my hair wild and my feet scuffed with green moss, he was waiting.

"You’ve got a fella, haven’t you?"

I made no attempt to deny it; in fact, it was almost a relief to admit it to myself. To those of our generation, divorce was a shameful thing; an admission of failure. There would be a court case; Stanley would fight; Daniel would be dragged into the mess and all our friends would take Stanley ’s side and speculate vainly on the identity of my mysterious lover. And yet I faced it; accepted it; and in my heart a bird was singing so hard that it was all I could do not to burst out laughing.

"You have, haven’t you?" Stan’s face looked like a rotten apple; his eyes shone through with pinhead intensity.

"Who is it?"

/cont

HARVEY TORDOFF: DRYAD

6

My scalp was tingling and I could hear leaves shivering. I watched the bird of freedom fly away and closed my heart. Daniel came first.

”Yes, Stanley ” I said, wearily, “I am in love. But if you promise never to ask for his name we can sell up and go live in that nice little semi and I promise I’ll never see him again.”

Stan probably didn’t want to know who it was; scared that he might have to do something about it. Well, we had a bit of a go at each other, moved into the semi and neither of us ever mentioned it again.”

Mrs Clarke sat there, eyes fixed on something far away in the past, and I knew there was more. I reached out for her hand.

She started. “Let me show you something,” she said, getting up. We pressed our bodies against the beech tree, arms wrapped as far round as we could. After a few minutes she whispered: “He’s breathing in. One breath will last all day. Then he’ll breathe out all night, giving us oxygen. We couldn’t live without him, you know. But if you want him to take any notice of you, you have to be patient, slow right down.“

My mind wandered, but I found I was relaxing. The row with David faded, my baby stopped kicking and pushing, and I almost nodded off, standing there. Mrs Clarke broke the spell. “Nice, isn’t he. He has so much to give.”

We met several more times. We chatted, hugged the tree in the Botanical Gardens, but she didn’t mention The Beech again. Then my pregnancy took over. After Rebecca was born I intended going back but somehow other things got in the way. We exchanged Christmas cards, and I suppose I went back to being one of Mrs Clarke’s laboratory rats. Funny thing, though, Dave and I never had another serious row. The inner peace that came in pregnancy never left me, and eventually his ambition ran out of steam and he realised that there was more to life than a career.

HARVEY TORDOFF: DRYAD

7

It was Daniel who brought me the news. And a package. There were two paintings and a letter. One of the paintings was ‘our’ tree. The other was a copper beech in a small garden that I had never seen before, and I burst into tears. Daniel patted my hand helplessly. But there was something I had to do for Mrs Clarke before I read the letter. It was three months after the funeral before I sat on the new metal bench in the Botanical Gardens. I polished the plaque with a tissue, smiled at the tree, then opened the letter.

“You know I didn’t tell the whole story,” Josephine began. “Thank you for not intruding. But Stan is dead, my turn soon, and I want someone to know what happened. I couldn’t tell Daniel, and Johnny senses it all, he doesn’t need to know the facts. Johnny is my second boy. ‘Johnny Appleseed’, they called him at school. Went off to South America to help save the rain forests. I miss his hugs, of course, but we are always in touch.

”It’s about the night when Stan found out. Remember? I had been outside for hours. As usual, I let my fingers trail over the bark, still warm after the day’s sunshine, but that night it wasn’t enough. I tried to put my arms around his trunk, but he was too big. Before I knew it, I had climbed into the fork where the first big limb thrust outwards and upwards. I stretched out on it, nightdress hitched up, naked skin pressed against naked bark. Now my arms went all the way round, and I felt the big branch hard between my legs.

”I closed my eyes and became aware of a slight movement in The Beech, perhaps in response to the slight breeze; perhaps his natural rhythm; perhaps in response to me, I thought, dreamily. I moved slightly in return, almost like making love.

”There was a jumble of images and sensations. My heart rate seemed to slow down. I felt dizzy. I could just feel the beat of his pulse, minutes apart. It was so clear why trees don’t notice humans: we are separated by time. But now he noticed, my Beech! I could feel the moon shining on my leaves, the dark earth holding me, protecting me, nourishing me.

”I had been in this spot for centuries, and would be for centuries more. I was one with the earth and the air. There was something else. My heart opened to the others . . . other trees! I could feel the wind in branches that weren’t mine. Our roots went deep into the earth in the wood across the road.

”When I finally tried to move, my arms and legs were so stiff I couldn’t prise myself away, as though The Beech was reluctant to let me go. If I had glimpsed immortality, what had he glimpsed through me?

”After I owned up to Stan he hit me. Quite a few times, to tell the truth. Then he raped me. I felt detached from it all, looking down at my body, Stan spitting out obsceneties with every thrust, and the branches swishing in the trees. He never touched me again. And after we moved I never saw The Beech again.

”During labour, when the pains came, sharp, gut-wrenching, they seemed to pass through me, and I was vaguely aware of the pain travelling down through solid trunks. The dark earth received it all, uncomplaining. When the baby was born they handed him to me and I held him, naked skin to naked skin. I could sense the wind in my leaves. And I could feel my roots, going down deep into my baby. Joy radiated from us and we felt it reflected back, magnified, and the leaves shivered excitedly. And would you believe it? The Beech was proud! I smiled and reflected back his pride, and it rippled through the other trees.

”Then I felt something else. Distress, bewilderment. The baby in the next room. I forgot about the people around me and hummed gently, soothing, and the trees joined in. The baby settled. But there were other babies, down the ward. And outside the hospital. My heart opened to them and the leaves shivered. The babies grew calm.

”I held my baby at arms’ length and looked into his unblinking, coppery eyes.
”Johnny,” I whispered. “We are going to live for ever!”

I put the letter in my pocket and hugged the tree. I thought of Josephine Clarke, and all the babies she had calmed, like Rebecca, now grown up and calming their own babies. She was right. Some part of us would live for ever.

Written for 'End of Story' competition hosted by the BBC