In the Springtime of the Year Read Free Page B

now, she had to know about that death, every detail, to discover all the things she had shut out, by pressing her hands over her ears and screaming, so that they would not make her listen. Well, they had not. In the end, they had gone away. She knew nothing except that a tree had fallen in Helm Bottom, and Ben was dead.
    Potter, the man who had been with him, lived a mile away, across the common. Tomorrow, she would go there. Tomorrow.
    She slept again.

PART TWO

2
    THE DAY BEFORE , she had been into the market at Thefton and bought a present for Ben there, a small, rough chunk of rose quartz crystal, from the one-eared man who set up his stall with jewellery and china ornaments, bits of this and that picked up from houses around the country. There was always something new and strange, she loved to stand, looking, imagining where things had come from and the people they had once belonged to, though she had never bought before.
    The stone was grey and pitted on the underside, like a piece of lava, but where it had been cut, the quartz glittered like chips of ice flushed through with pink, in the sunlight. And suddenly, standing there among the fruit barrows and corn bins, in the middle of the street, it had seemed the most important thing she could do, to use some of the money left from Godmother Fry’s gift, spend it extravagantly, like the woman who had poured out the jar of precious ointments. She had to give something to Ben, and not a useful gift, just an object to touch and keep and wonder at. Though, on the way home, she had been worried, for fear that he might scorn her and care nothing at all for the stone. Perhaps she had bought it only for herself, her own pleasure. She kept putting her hand down to where it lay at the bottom of the basket, wrapped in newspaper, feeling the hard peaks, like a cluster of tiny needle mountains.
    The weather had changed, it was like early spring, and even warm, as she walked the two miles up from the road in the late afternoon. There were aconites and celandines just pushing up through their green sheaths on the banks. Too early, Ben would say, the snow might come again yet, even in March or April. The woods and coppices were still leafless, branches open-meshed, or else pointing up, thin and dark against the blue-white sky; she could see all the way down between the wide-spaced beech trunks, to the fields below.
    But there was something in the air, something, a new smell, the beginning of growth, and, as she walked, she had felt a great happiness spurt up within her, and the countryside had looked beautiful, every detail, every leaf-vein and grass-blade was clear and sharp, it was as though she had been re-born into some new world. There was a change in the light, so that the dips and hollows of the valley that she could see between the gaps in the hedges, as the track climbed higher, up to the common, had changed their shapes, and the colours changed, too, the bracken was soft moss-green and the soil gold-tinged like tobacco. Yesterday, it had been dark as peat.
    She wanted to sing. Because she had all she could ever want, the whole earth belonged to her, and in the end, seeing the cottage ahead, she had had to shake her head to clear it, she was giddy with this happiness. She had to remind herself that nothing had really happened, had it, it was still winter – there was only the last of the warmth and light of the sun, over Laker’s Wood.
    She unpacked her basket slowly, but it stayed with her, this light-headedness, her eyes saw everything in the house itself as if for the first time. And then there was the rose-quartz lying on the wooden table.
    Ben had not been scornful. He had examined the crystal, without touching it, for a long time, and then gone to the desk to find the magnifying glass his grandfather had given him years before, and together, standing near to the window, they had looked at each of the glittering points and smooth slopes.
    ‘Jo would know about it. Where