News from Norfolk

 April was racing towards its end. 

Only a week or two before, the beech wood had exploded into a mist of tiny, pea-green, guileless little leaves. Beneath them, along the drive that led up the the house, the air was giddy with the scent of bluebells and alexanders, turned earth and fecundity. The hens in the walled garden had taken to laying again every day. The deer barked through the night, beyond the lawn the hares boxed in the field margins, while the rooks continued their murmured conversations long past dusk, resuming them well before dawn. The cats had returned to sunbathing on a bench above the bank where primroses bloomed. 

In short, the year had just passing that tipping point where the sheer raw vitality of the natural world could still be kept under any kind of control. 

Clarissa was out in the garden, weeding, when she heard the lorry reversing carefully up the drive. 

Clarissa was a bad gardener. She lacked ruthlessness. Truth be told, she rather enjoyed the magnificently ineluctable disorder of late April in north Norfolk — the baroque contortions of her parrot tulips, the celandines and primulas popping up in unexpected places, even the frankly goatish smell of the billowing may tree blossom. She took a permissive view of alkanet, cow parsley and dog roses. She positively welcomed the daisies and dandelions, looking forward to the point each year where both would spring into bloom amid the cheerful disorder of her lawn.

So if, on the day in question, Clarissa was sitting out in the sunshine, picking some couch-grass out of a border in a desultory way, her motivation in doing so had very little to do with checking the wildness of the season. Rather, she had reached the age where the sun’s warmth eased the pain in her bones, allowed her joints to move more easily — softened something within her that had been in real danger of seizing up over the winter. 

Also, however — and this, too, was perhaps an artefact of her six decades — she increasingly welcomed anything that endorsed a cyclical view of the world. She took refuge in the conviction that endings are never really endings and that, whatever else happens and whatever sort of mess we make of it all, spring always comes round again. 

All of which makes her sound a bit other-worldly — and perhaps that, too, was true. She had forgotten, for instance, until she heard the lorry reversing, that they were due a delivery that day. 

Slim, lithe, dark-haired, fresh-faced, Blake climbed down from the cab of the lorry. He greeted Clarissa with a handshake and beaming smile, for all the world as if delivering miscellaneous auction purchases was the most joyous activity humanly imaginable.