The Wall

Tea in the late afternoon, when the day was thinking about turning to dusk, and the mountains were bouncing dark green light all over the valley, the sun back over the ridge somewhere making a halo effect. The air looked watery, like a pale green jelly. Thin steam rose from the tea cups. She broke up the fruit cake packed with dried damsons from a hedge just above the last street in Garth.

"What's it all about, then, this one?"

"You'll see, you never can wait."

"I can wait."

Morgan jabbed at his arm with the blunt end of the fork, which bent and folded up in the middle of the handle. They both giggled. It was from the exchange shop, where they got stuff in a rush when they moved in. They'd left a rag rug they didn't need, and Ivor threw in some little carved seals he'd done in the evening, sitting by the fire.

"I got the wood for this one from the field up on the logging road, you know, where the logging road runs up the mountain."

Morgan took a few seconds to imagine.

"One of those big old logs left there."

She pictured it, a great hummocked field of felled trees where a patch had been cleared and the harvest not taken up, now filling in with second growth, a line of giant fallen trunks lying sectioned where they'd hit the ground.

"They must be nicely seasoned," he'd said as they came into sight of the field for the first time when they were still exploring places together, some of them spots she'd known since childhood. A long time in the seasoning, in fact, as no one had cut trees there for decades, since there were so few people to use them nowadays. And plenty of stuff lying around to use without needing more. She remembered it, then, while he stirred his tea and she pictured the scene.

"Not too old at all, but at the heart they should be perfect. One day I'll use one of those for a special job. If I can figure out how to get one down. More, if I can."

"I remember now that you said when we found that place that you'd like to get one down, for the quality of the wood. I didn't know you'd done it, mister."

She poked him with the bent fork again.

"You didn't say. More secrets, is it?"

"Too busy, weren't you, to notice. In front of your face, it was."

Now the picture came into her mind of herself, down in the great hall of the library at her carrel under the tinted glass where the light fell on her pages in lumps of blue and red. While Ivor dragged a giant log down the mountain.

She imagined him buried under the great thing, an ant carrying a twig, and giggled again.

"What's so funny then?" he said in his grumbly deep voice, pretending to frown. He was happy as he could be, loving her, sitting there, coming from his work.

"Imagining you carrying a bloody big log all by yourself. Who did you get to help you, then, the aliens come back to visit?"

"Now there's an idea. If they had stayed about instead of flitting off again so soon, maybe I could have used their ship. In fact, love, just two of the men from by the post office."