Away by Jane Urquhart Page B

“I do that,” he answered finally and emphatically, “because I like to do that.”
    “Oh,” she said.
    “It passes the time,” he added, feeling foolish and then slightly piqued that he needed to justify himself to her. Not oneof his tenants had ever questioned him like this. “Well, then,” he said, again, most anxious now to be gone, “I suppose –”
    She interrupted him again. “Sir,” she said, “I’d like to see them, the creatures you are talking about.”
    He was almost annoyed. “Whatever for?” he demanded.
    “To see why you search for them and look at them there in the water.”
    Osbert had a brief, inexplicable memory of himself as a child, standing in a large, cold room with a smoking fire at one end, holding up a single sheet of paper towards his mother who was giving it but cursory attention. “What has Granville been doing?” she had asked. The drawing had been of a tenant’s cabin with a corpulent chicken dominating the roof. His mother, he now realized, was interested in neither the subject matter nor her child’s rendering of it. “Why,” she had asked, “have you not been drawing your Cave Walk?” There was something in the open, questioning face of the woman before him that brought to mind the child that he had been then.
    “There are many different kinds,” he said, “and they can be very difficult, sometimes, to see.”
    “Yes,” she said, as if in agreement.
    They squatted together on the sand within a rocky enclosure, whispering and pointing to things that were almost invisible, this strong communication between a peasant woman and a gentleman being so nearly impossible that neither thought consciously about it until later. Osbert told the woman, whose name he discovered was Mary, the Latin names for the many species that he knew, and she listened attentively, then asked, to his great private delight, if the Romans themselves collected and drew tiny sea creatures. He wondered how she, a poorwoman, knew about the Romans at all, but he answered that there was one, the first great natural historian, who would have been interested.
    “It’s lovely,” she said, “a garden like this. Colours I’d never thought about. See how calm and clear … like a mirror with our faces in it, except that behind our faces there’s a whole world of things alive and being beautiful.”
    Osbert decided that he would remember that line about the mirror and the worlds for Granville. Then, uncharacteristically, a desire came over him to keep the knowledge of the line to himself.
    The silences between them as they looked into the pool were comfortable now. The woman, it seemed, was enchanted by the fragility and gracefulness of what she saw so that words came to her slowly. “See how that one moves,” she said, once, “as if it were unfolding some great secret there in the water.”
    Osbert looked, and it was true, the anemone was unfurling itself, tentacle by tentacle, its movements a slow dance, as if it were revealing each mysterious aspect of itself ceremonially, and for the first time. The landlord was on his hands and knees now beside the pool where he could see, not only his face and that of the woman reflected, but also the shadow of her hand passing back and forth along the floor of the tiny pond. “It’s remarkable,” he agreed.
    “Small weeds,” she said, moving her hand, here and there, tentatively across the top of the water now, “in the same current. They know each other, I think, these weeds and these creatures.”
    Osbert smiled at this suggestion. The rough weave of a shawl such as the woman wore had never been in such close contact with Harris tweed, but Osbert did not think of this. Everything about him had been manufactured somewhere else, in another country; everything, including his bones and the cellularconstruction of his flesh. She, however, had been built out of the materials of this country. She’s like a child, he thought, the way she looks at