The Girl Green as Elderflower by Randolph Stow

Perry asked. ‘Have you cried?’
    ‘In the hospital. When they tried to make me talk about it.’
    ‘Try now,’ Perry said. ‘See how it feels.’
    Clare was already crying. Perry’s arms went around him, and he cried on Perry’s bare shoulder, unashamed, inexhaustibly.
    ‘Now tell me why,’ Perry said, into his ear. ‘Cris. Why did you try to hang yourself?’
    ‘I thought I was mad,’ Clare said, choking. ‘I
was
mad, at the time.’
    ‘That’s bullshit,’ Perry said, holding him close. ‘That much I do know. You had malaria, because you were a fool and hadn’t stocked up with drugs.’
    ‘Half-true,’ Clare admitted. He had ceased to weep. ‘It was the first time. I didn’t know what it was, and it was frightening. Also I had malnutrition, which does something. And then there was what they called in the hospital a delayed mourning reaction. But it was worse than that. In the hospital they asked whether I heard voices. I didn’t, not imaginary ones, but I did imagine—conspiracies.’ He stuttered on the next word. ‘Calumnies. People talking too fast and too low for me to understand. And they were all I had. I’d lost the feeling of being a white man. They were all I had.’
    ‘And now,’ Perry said, ‘what will happen? You’re better, I think. That level-headed little Lucy said so, and I’d believe her.’
    ‘It’s true,’ Clare said, ‘I do feel it. In a little while I’ll go into a hospital in London for tests. Liver and spleen and so on, but mainly a test for brain damage. They’re sure there is none, but they want me to be sure.’
    He tried to pull away, but Perry would not release him. ‘Tell me what happened that night on the island.’
    ‘I can’t,’ Clare said. He was crying again, not sobbing, merely melting. ‘Let it be, Matt.’
    ‘There was a storm, this man I met had heard.’
    ‘There was a storm,’ Clare repeated. ‘Dear God, what a storm. I was excited. I felt strong, potent, in some way. I hadn’t felt like that for so long. I thought I would do something, be decisive. Put an end to it, remove myself, because nothing else was wrong there, only me.’
    ‘And then?’ Perry prompted.
    ‘There’s no privacy there. Never, at any hour of the day. I was followed. Daibuna—a friend of mine—he’d never heard of such a thing, never seen a sight like it. But he knew what to do. He cut me down with this bushknife.’
    There might have been some prowler in the wood, for wakened pheasants suddenly burst out in a cacophony of alarm, and the two young men, one clasping the other like a wounded soldier, started apart at the demonic sound, and looked to the window as if for real demons which might be hovering there.
    Clare lay back on his pillow, his eyes on Perry’s face. His own face was calm, wept-out. His hand rested on Perry’s, then travelled up the forearm to the tattoed star. ‘Plenty of worse things have happened,’ he said. ‘Oh, but to be so cut adrift. Perhaps even the German Jews didn’t quite know that.’
    ‘You feel better, C.C.,’ Perry asked or stated, turning on him his eyes of North Sea grey.
    ‘So much, Matt. It’s funny. I don’t even feel ashamed about weeping all over you.’
    ‘You see, I am good for something.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘Yes, Matt, you’re very good.’
    He wondered at the protectiveness, the paternal streak, in so young a man. It was perhaps Perry’s intense, unalloyed maleness which was at the root of what he would not see as a problem.
    ‘We won’t mention it again,’ Perry promised. He stood up, clutching his bare hairy torso with long arms. ‘I must leave you now, this minute.’
    ‘Cold?’ Clare said. ‘I’m not surprised.’
    ‘Cold nothing,’ Perry said. ‘It’s that wonderworking Suffolk beer. Like the man said, you rent it.’
    *
    In the churchyard, while Perry examined the headstone of the gaffer of Hole Farm, Clare lifted his head at the sudden sound of the organ. What was it about the