The Evil Seed Read Free Page B

half-awakened stones.
    Watching the students
now, Alice felt old. She remembered herself, slimmer then and with long, untamed
hair, wearing cut-off jeans and baggy pullovers, Indian skirts and beads.
Riding her bicycle in the rain. Sneaking over the gates at night. Sleeping with
Joe in his narrow bed. She tried to remember. Had they felt it then, she
thought, that sense of destiny? The brevity of their time rushing past? That
terrible awareness of death?
    Alice closed her eyes,
uneasy, and tried to think of nothing at all.
    Suddenly, in the muted
hubbub of the crowded tea-shop, she recognized a voice and her eyes snapped open
in surprise, something tightening like a wire inside her heart, in spite of
herself. She knew that voice well, with its northern accent, and remembered
sitting there in the Copper Kettle listening to Joe talking to her about his
many enthusiasms: Jaco Pastorius and Roy Harper, and how Marxism was going to
change the world…
    She looked round,
wondering whether she had imagined it. She had not seen him for three years,
not since he had moved out. Ridiculous that she should still feel that sorry
little jump of the heart. Ridiculous that she should look round, furtively, as
if it were him. And if it were, then so what? He’d probably be with some girl.
    She had almost persuaded
herself that she had been wrong, that it had not been his voice at all, when
she finally caught sight of him. He was sitting at a table in a corner of the
room, his familiar face bent at a familiar angle which denoted attentiveness, a
cigarette cupped in one hand, shoulders bent, hair falling messily over a
narrow face, round wire glasses over piercing blue eyes. So he had started
smoking again, thought Alice, remembering the smell of his cigarettes, how it
used to get everywhere, in his clothes, in his hair.
    Her heart sank. He was
not alone. There was a girl with him and, though much of her face was in
shadow, Alice could guess at a small, graceful frame, the curve of a perfect
collar-bone beneath a sheaf of bright-red hair. Well, what did she expect, she
thought? So what if he had found someone else? Surely, after all this time— She
caught the sound of his voice again as she pushed back her chair to go, and the
wire in her heart twisted again.
    She could not
distinguish actual words, but the tone was enough. Smoke from his cigarette
obscured his face, giving his features a disturbing transparency, but in the
semi-darkness she could guess his smile.
    A memory, long-stored in
Alice’s mind, flipped over like a dead leaf. Suddenly the busy little tea-shop
was nowhere near crowded enough and, trying not to catch his eye, Alice fled
into the sunlight, tight-lipped and hating herself for caring, but caring
anyway. Impelled by an anger she dared not admit she quickened her pace, making
her way out of the town, so that more than an hour later she found that without
meaning to she had walked as far as Grantchester. Alice was barely even
surprised. Walking was her way of dealing with stress. In the weeks and months
following the break-up with Joe, Alice had done a great deal of walking. She
slowed down and looked around.
    There was a church in
front of her. A little round tower rising up from the trees. It was not a place
Alice knew well, in spite of visits to Grantchester — but now the little church
drew her, and the shady trees looked inviting. The grass in front was neatly
cut, the graves well-kept and orderly. Around the church and its grounds stood
a curving, solid-looking old wall. A little path twisted here and there between
headstones and monuments, touching this one and that one, gently, like a
friend. Alice followed the path a little way, reading the gravestones. Some of
them were even older than she expected: under a tree she found one dated 1690,
though most of the others seemed more recent. On reaching the other side of the
church, Alice found the path leading her into the second churchyard, even more
enclosed than the