The Girl Green as Elderflower by Randolph Stow Page A

music, the tune woven into it? He said to Perry: ‘Would you mind, shall we go in?’
    The chill of the church was dispelled a little by the great iron stove, still warm from the morning service. Taking the pew nearest it, Clare and Perry sat and listened to the unseen organist.
    ‘Green,’ Clare was thinking. Somehow the music was green. It elaborated itself around a tune which he could not place, something old with the word ‘green’ insistent in it. Folk tune or Elizabethan song—he could not remember. But he knew that he was listening to green music.
    Perry, beside him, got up and wandered silently away. He disappeared round the screen which hid the organ.
    When the music stopped, Clare wanted it to begin again. And so, after a few minutes, it did, and Perry came back with a complacent expression to resume his seat beside Clare.
    ‘For you,’ he murmured aside. ‘Special request.’
    When the music ceased for the second time, Clare asked: ‘Who is it playing?’
    ‘A girl,’ Perry said. ‘A blonde girl. Very blonde. I asked her for a repeat, and she just smiled, and did. The most extraordinary eyes.’
    He had hardly seen her face, Clare realized, or those eyes which had been so much noticed. There had been only that glimpse on New Year’s Day, on the snowy step of the Shoulder of Mutton with the light behind her.
    ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘I seem to know it. Did you see?’
    ‘Yes,’ Perry said, ‘when she turned back to start again. It’s by Sweelinck. Called something in Dutch.’
    ‘It’s about green,’ Clare said. ‘Something something green.’
    ‘That’s it,’ Perry confirmed. ‘The last word was “
groen
”. Do you suppose she is Dutch?’
    ‘It doesn’t follow,’ Clare pointed out. ‘And the tune—the tune is English. “Green”. I just can’t put a name to it.’
    ‘Look, I’ll go and ask her,’ Perry offered, and wandered off again towards the screen. But he came back with a mystified face, and said: ‘She’s vanished.’
    ‘She could be in the vestry,’ Clare suggested. ‘Perhaps the vicar’s there. Let’s not pursue her.’
    ‘I shouldn’t mind,’ said Perry, looking preoccupied. ‘Pursuing her, I mean. What eyes. And a mouth like an unawakened angel.’
    ‘Is that your fancy,’ Clare said, ‘to seduce an angel? Ah Matt, you worry me.’
    Perry said, with his wild man’s grin: ‘Don’t give it a thought. I’m amazingly more decent than I care to appear.’
    Clare glanced at his watch. ‘I suppose we’d better start walking for that train.’
    Perry, picking up his opulent briefcase, said: ‘While we’re alone, and not walking, just a word.’
    In the light from the plain glass windows (for the church had been vandalized by Puritans) his eyes were of the bleakest grey. ‘You do me good,’ he said.
    ‘
I
do
you
good?’ said Clare, and laughed in his surprise. But he knew what Perry meant. In his weakness, without forethought, he had found a way to comfort a man made lonely by strength.
    In the dusk, walking back from the station, pausing to watch the cloudlike transformations of rushes under the breeze, Clare thought he knew what he would begin to write that night. The breeze smelt salt, sweeping up the long estuary from the sea, the bleak North Sea.
Quasi spectantibus insultans
, he thought, remembering Perry’s wild grin, his changeable eyes. And as he walked along the earth dike fringed with celandine, he began from memory to rehearse the opening of the Lord Abbot’s Tale.
Temporibus Henrici regis secundi cum Bartholomeus de Glanvilla custodiret castellum de Oreford, contigit…

CONCERNING A WILD MAN CAUGHT IN THE SEA
    (De quodam homine silvestri in mare capto)

     
     
    In the times of King Henry the Second, when Bartholomew Glanville was Constable of Orford Castle, it happened that some fishermen of that place discovered in their net a marvellous catch.
    Squatting on the bucking boat on the chill autumn sea, a young soldier was trying