She turned, looked up at him, and smiled. Except time seemed to slow as she did so. Or perhaps it was his brain, incapable of taking in such a sight all at once.
Or perhaps it was the bacon. Perhaps he had choked and was dying.
But, no, his legs were moving, carrying him toward her. As he descended the crumbling stairs from the terrace, he suddenly understood what had been wrong with him all these days, why he had been so restless and unsettled.
It had to do with there being two versions of Clementine. He had thought, earlier, about the difference between the girl he remembered and the woman he’d met on this trip. That difference had been disconcerting. But he saw now that the real, more fundamental difference was between Indoor Clementine and Outdoor Clementine. He had been interacting only with Indoor Clementine. Mostly, anyway. He supposed there was also Rooftop Clementine. Perhaps the roof was a liminal locale, a place where they had been suspended, literally, between the staid trappings of society and the green wilderness where Clementine truly belonged.
This Clementine, this woman before him,wasn’ta distinct creature from the childhood version of her. Shewasthat same wild, happy girl of his youth. That girl had had both qualities in excess: happiness and wildness. He understood now in a way he had not when he was a boy that for Clementine, one quality depended on the other. She had to be wild to be happy. The girl had grown into the woman, yes, but that part, the essential inner core of her had not changed.
He had missed her so.
And having her here, under the same roof, but not havingher, had been maddening.
“Arch!” she called, moving toward him as he moved towardher.
He was seized with the notion that he ought to spit out the bacon. He looked around almost frantically, a kind of panic rising through him. There was a decaying stone pot, overgrown with weeds, that he could detour past for the purposes of expelling the now unwanted pork.
Why, though? What would that accomplish? He swallowed guiltily.
But, again: Why? There was no call for guilt. Their meatless day was tomorrow. Still, the bacon was overly dry and caught in his throat, and it was an effort to get it down.
Clementine’s cheeks were pink, her smile was wide, and she was hatless. The freckles dusted across her nose popped in the sunshine. Her hair was braided, but, as was typical for Clem, there was more of it out of the plait than in it. It was a windy morning, and loose hanks whipped around her head like airborne serpents. Perhaps she was Medusa. Perhaps she was about to turn him to stone.
That didn’t feel right, though. If anything, the reverse was true. He felt as if something inside him had been slowly ossifying, without his consent or even his awareness, and the sight of Clementine in her natural habitat was softening him, making him supple where he had been hard, allowing for breath where there had previously been only restriction.
As they approached each other, both grinning, he felt alive, reprieved, an insect unexpectedly freed from a spider’s web, testing wings he’d thought irreversibly immobilized.
He had no idea what had come over him. What he had been thinking. Hehadn’tbeen thinking, clearly. If he had, surely his mind would have stopped his arms from grabbing Clem, picking her up clear off her feet, pulling her into an embrace, and twirling her around.
But it was all right: she laughed.
He did, too, relishing that sweet herbal smell of her.
She slid down his body as he released her, and his prick was back to betraying him. He had to push her away.
A sudden, impossible thought entered his mind like a bolt of lightning on an otherwise sunny day: Clementine should marryhim. He might even have impulsively suggested it, had she not been, on several occasions, so vehement in her objection to the institution itself. While he felt no pressure to marry, from his perspective, marriage to Clementine would be convenient. She was his dear friend. One of his favorite people. And apparently he could no longer deny that he found her attractive.
He shook his head. He was being ridiculous. Even if Clementinehadwanted to marry, the idea of her groom beinghimwas preposterous. He knew where this flight of fancy had come from. Clementine—and Olive—had just come back into his life, and he wanted to hold onto them this time. Make sure she—they—didn’t slip away.
But he was being daft. She wasright here, with her copper eyes and her unkempt hair and a brilliant yellow shawl draped haphazardly over her blue-muslin-encased shoulders. Effie ought to writea poem about her.
“You’re up early,” he said, noting the telltale muddy hem that suggested she’d been out and about already.
“Yes. I’ve been putting Hermes through his paces. Now that I know your friends have wagered on the outcome of the race, I feel some pressure to perform.”
“Where are you keeping Hermes?”
“He lives in an enclosure I’ve fashioned and submerged in the pond in such a way that he can choose to be in the water or on land.” She pointed at a pond that abutted one side of the ramshackle garden. “I feel poorly about it, though. I grew overexcited when I learned of the races in the village and signed up without thinking about how I would have to keep my contestant confined until after the race. I might have had a mind to let him go and bow out, but now everyone is so invested, sentimentallyandmonetarily.”
“Well, you can free him the day after tomorrow.” It was sobering to think that the races would happen that soon. After that, they would have to go home. At least he and Clem were finally outside together, roaming as they used to. As they were meant to, it felt like. He cleared his throat. “Perhaps you can use some of your prize money to buy Hermes a . . . large portion of whatever it is turtles like to eat.”
“Oh, I’m giving my prize money to . . . I have plans for my prize money, should I be lucky enough to win any,” she finished almost primly, and he intuited that she did not want to speak on the matter. A companionable silence settled as they set out across the garden toward the forest. It was a beautiful day, and it was spread out before them like a feast.
There was a bright quality of watchfulness Clementine always had while out for a ramble. He recognized it because he had it, too. It was the same nimble attention required for a successful hunt. One had to be alert but at ease, watching the path ahead and the trees around while remaining firmly aware of one’s more immediate surroundings. It was a kind of split attention, where one watched even as one watched oneself watching. At the best of times, it felt almost reverent, mystical. Akin to the way one was meant to feel at church, he gathered, though he never did, church requiring too much of the kind of singular concentration that had made his school days such a struggle.
It was such a respite from the way his mind usually operated, all jumpy and fragmented.
When Clementine slowed, he knew what had drawn her attention because it had drawn his, too. A grass snake, wriggling at the side of the path. She moved closer. He followed. It was actually three grass snakes, one large and two tiny.
