Away by Jane Urquhart

body and became the skin she would wear inside her skin. She heard the rocks of lakes and oceans rattle in the cavity of his skull and then in the cavity of her own skull. A battalion of young men, their bright jackets burst open by battle, their perfect ribs shattered, their hearts broken apart, marched in his mind and then in her mind, and so she came to know all the sorrows of young men as she lay on the earth; their angry grief, their bright weapons, their spilled blood. Then across his forehead and hers sailed a pageant of all the ships, proud and humble, rough and fine, in which young men departed for the violence of the sea.
    There were any number of ways for young men to die. Some had been flung by vicious currents against granite, some had watched the ocean’s ceiling close over them while the fish they had caught swam free of the nets, some had died violently out-side taverns after singing songs of love. Some took up arms against injustice and had been killed publicly on scaffolds or privately in ditches at the hands of oppressors, the poetry of politics still hot on their lips.
    Dancers, poets, swimmers. Their distant blood ran in Mary’s veins until he who lay in her mind slipped back into the water.
    As she walked towards the cottage she looked back once. The lake was a shield of beaten brass flung down in the valley under a full sun. She lifted her basket and moved across the field.
    And yet, like the landscape, there was nothing smooth in her.

 
    S OME weeks later, Osbert, tired of views and vistas, and stirred by the mania for natural history that was sweeping like an epidemic through England, began to collect the strange, delicate life-forms that existed in the coastal tidepools. He would place these fragile treasures in a bucket of sea water, and then carry them home to his new aquarium where they would survive for almost a week while he drew and painted them leisurely, in the relative comfort of the musty Puffin Court library. After eight days or so, however, these enigmatic creatures would rise to a scummy surface and begin to smell in such an unpleasant manner that he would be forced to pitch the whole putrid soup into the rose garden and head for the shore to search for fresher specimens. Granville had responded to his brother’s new interest by writing a poem entitled “Lament for a Sea Mollusc Trapped in Osbert’s Aquarium.”
    When he was engaged in this activity Osbert paid little heed to the gorgeous small world he was disturbing. His specimens would gain significance and reality only when he got them home, put them under the microscope, and accurately reproduced them on paper. But by then, of course, they would be dead.
    Today, as always, he worked carefully, scooping the creatures out of the pool with a glass jar. He lost some, those of such fragility that they came apart when subjected to anything other than the ebb and flow of the sea water that replenished their habitat. He cursed, then, quietly under his breath, and reachedfor a larger, stronger example of the same species. The day was not warm and his hands were becoming numb from exposure to water. He thought, with great affection, of the fire he had left burning at Puffin Court, and then, intermittently, of the carriage he had left at the top of the cliffs.
    He heard the woman before he saw her. He might have missed her altogether, the hiss of the sea covering most other noise, but the knife rasping on rock was an unfamiliar-enough sound to catch his attention and he turned just at the moment when her shawl, which might have disguised her, was blown back from her copper-coloured head.
    Although she was thirty or forty yards in the distance, he knew immediately that she was the woman who had been away, and she for her part, sensing his scrutiny, held still, her knife in one hand and a dark mass of hanging weed clasped in the other. Across the sand, he could tell, she was looking steadily at him.
    Osbert was greatly excited. Granville,