She stands before him, shadowless in the high light, her apprehension rising, floating bloated and vulgar like the drowned, suddenly and vividly aware of the final moments of Ted’s dream, his inadmissible escape. Another moment free of her, just another moment more, asleep among the reeds and the grasses that bind the dunes, the sand that grain by grain blows away.

26. “Getting There”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Getting There”

APRIL 22, 1962

EASTER SUNDAY

COURT GREEN

Finally, on Easter, the clouds rolled back and out, at last, ascended spring.

Spring light. Perfect light. Light silvered and tender, stirring the black, drenched, amnesiac earth. Young lush of spring, dew beading at the tip of every blade, in the ruffled trumpet of every quivering, golden-eyed star on the hillside. Velvet of petals, of calyx, of sepals. Jeweled light. April light clear and shadowless, the sun writhing like a god past winter.

Ted’s family is hardly waved out of the cobblestone court and down the gravel lane and out into the street for their long journey back to Heptonstall, soporific with Sylvia’s midday dinner of cloved ham and scalloped potatoes and pineapple upside-down cake, when she and Ted charge back through their house and outside to stammer over their acres of glorious daffodils, their garden shuddering to life, the splendor of the flawless afternoon, their sheer fantastic luck. The distant ringing of cowbells, voices, birdsong floats by on the clarity of the thin, green weather as the Hugheses gloat over their land, their whitewashed manor, bowing to the whorls and fairy rings of their volunteer flowers, cutting armload bouquets of daffodils and narcissi to sell at the Monday morning market.

In her haste for the sun-soaked garden, Sylvia has not bothered to change out of her girdle and best cotton blouse; she’s unsnapped her stockings and rolled them off to save them, pulled on her Wellies barefoot, thrown her mackintosh—not quite believing in the sudden shirtsleeve warmth—on top of everything. The damp grasses brush the hem of her gray flannel skirt as she bends over the daffodils with her sewing shears, snipping a half dozen at a time, holding them sheathed in their pliant green blades. The very relief of spring, oh god, at last! As her bucket fills, she meanders alongside the garden’s front path, parallel to the orchard slope where Ted is harvesting, the daffodils so thick there they close like the sea after his cutting, leaving no trace of the loss.