......From my bedroom window I could count the towers of four churches. Only they and the scattered spinneys were vertical. All else lay supine - acre after acre of barley and wheat, patched here and there with the yellow dazzle of the mustard fields. Outside The Pightle one was as exposed as the rat flattened to the narrow road by a passing car.
......Munding was what the locals called a ‘pig-village’. When the wind veered it smelled of cabbage and the sties. There was a little shop which doubled as the Post Office crammed into the converted front room of the house of its owner, Mrs Jex, a comfortably proportioned women who knew everyone’s business but mine. There was a row of council houses tacked on to the end of the street, their brick injuriously red against the cooler colours of the landscape. Most had corrugated iron shacks at the back in which chickens and rabbits were kept, and one had several cars in bits and pieces parked across the front garden. Almost all the older houses had been refurbished as commuter-homes and retirement cottages: pink-washed plaster, timbers exposed, roofs re-thatched. Unless you counted the church there was no other community centre but the pub. The primary school had been axed and sold off for conversion, so there were no sounds of children around. It was a quiet place except when the din of aircraft out of the nearby base at Thrandeston shattered its sky.
......Those first few days I slept late and walked a lot, and whenever I walked I seemed to stand at the centre of a vast circumference of space, as though the pace of my tread was matched by the turning of the earth under my feet. The margins of the lanes were laced with cow-parsley and you could smell wild garlic in the hollows. There were larks and plovers over the fields, and the tall blue days seemed amazed by their own candour. My introspection insulted them. I knew it, just as I knew that Bob Crossley was injured by my dance-step distance from his advances; but there was a thing on my mind that resisted such exposure. It needed solitude. Cover.
......I took to the little copses and the gloomy carrs, the places where starlings thronged, where willow and alder brooded over a flooded marl-pit or hankered for the river’s edge. I had the engrossed, purposive air of a man looking for something - which in a way, I was; for among the many pieces into which my life had fallen there was one that seemed to offer some rudimentary promise of renewal. It was that I was after.
......I called it the Green Man.
......Day after day the figure prowled my imagination. I could sense him there, almost smell him, in his rough green fell; yet whenever I came close he stole from shade to denser shade where the trees packed deep. All I knew about him for sure was that he was a woodland-dweller, so it was inevitable that the search should take me at last through the forbidding perimeter of barbed wire into the Great Wood to the north of the Easterness Estate.
......There noble beeches, three or four hundred years old, were ranged almost equidistant at its heart. They were still spectral in a smoky woodland mist, and not yet canopied in full summer green. Boughs dripped in the silence. The beech-mast crunched beneath my feet. Pheasants whirred away at my approach, and if the hares were crazy in the Spring then I was crazier - Alex Darken, escape-artist of the moral universe, dropped like a leveret on the run in the middle of the Norfolk deeps.
......And it was not that I expected to encounter him out there - in the flesh, so to speak, this clumsy, feral creature sired sometime in the dark between the Fifth day and the Sixth, and neither man nor beast. But this, if ever, was the season of the Green Man, and this almost medieval wood was Green Man country. If I looked long and quietly enough he might one day shiver into focus, print himself across across the page, and I would like to know then what kin he was to me, and whether he was the likliest to injure me or aid.
......Such, anyway, was the dream in which I lived those days.
......Then, one hot afternoon, I was no longer alone in the wood. From somewhere down the galleries of beech the sound of laughter echoed across the glade and stopped me short. The laughter was brief, as though a joke had been cracked - almost it felt at my expense, though I could see no one - then the air was stealthy and green and very still once more, until a blackbird chattered its indignant cry, and laughter came again, female, a little hectic, over where the ground fell away to bracken.
......It puzzled and excited me; worried me too with its reminder that I tresspassed there. Covertly I stepped between the trees.
......Pale and naked in the auburn glow of sunlight, a man and a woman were clasped in each other’s limbs, tussling and rolling in a hollow where the glade banked into mixed woodland. Beyond them a dense drift of bluebells threw their flesh into white relief.
......They were laughing as they fought, the woman over the man now, holding him spreadeagled by the wrists so that he was hidden beneath the arch of her back. Her legs were astride him as she tossed her head from side to side, teasing him with the dangle of breasts above his face.
......'All right. All right. I take it back,' the man laughed.
......'Every word?'
......'Say "uncle"!'
......'To a mere chit of a girl? Never.'
......'Say "I'm an old fool and I don't know which side my bread is buttered, and I should count my stars that I'm lucky enough to have such a hotshot intellectual as a partner".'
......'Consider it said.'
......'Say it.'
......'I can't talk with my tongue in my cheek.'
.....'Say it.'
......Then the man lurched up suddenly. The woman squealed, stretched back upright on her heels, and said, 'Dammit, Edward, that hurt.'
......She pulled herself up to her feet and turned away, one hand to a breast, rubbing the nipple. She was tall, sturdily built, the patch of hair at her groin thick and barbarous among the smooth planes of her body. Her tan was un-English and complete, except for the white flaw of an appendectomy scar. She tosssed her hair back across her shoulders, and stood biting on a knuckle as though to distract some other pain.
......Hands cupped beneath his head, the man wriggled a little in the sunlight, chuckling still. His body was scrawny, hollow-chested, the belly, rounded like a wineskin over the grizzled cloud of his pubic hair. He must have been over sixty - some forty years older than the girl who walked away from him to where her clothes were piled.
......'You can be really hurtful, you know that?' The soft, transatlantic accent to her tones was distinct now. As she slipped an arm into the sleeve of a faded purple shirt, I saw the reddened flesh where the old man must have closed his teeth. 'Sometimes I wonder about you. I really do.'
......'If you will sin in the sunshine with a man quite old enough to be your grandfather you should expect something other than the simperings of pimpled youth.' The voice was measured and resonant, picking its way deliberately among the consonants, and he was smiling still; until he realized that the girl was distanced from him' unamused. 'Are you all right, my dear?'
......'I'll live.'
......'If you hadn't jumped ... It was only in sport, you see ... ' He essayed a smile. 'Not the true serpent's tooth at all.' The face was handsome still in a punished, ruinous way, the hair shiny, iron-grey and curling to white, its wildness made wilder by the two blubells threaded through his locks. He too was tanned, but there were manifold wrinkles round his eyes and mouth, and a salt-and-pepper moustache emphasized his moue as he muttered, 'And we are feeling contrite. Do look.' He pointed down to the limp member slumped at his thigh. 'Did you ever see such a sorry-looking fellow?'
......Despite herself the girl smiled. 'You're impossible.'
......'But amorous with it.' The old man stroked the ground beside him. 'Why don't you come back? Let me tender you some comfort.'
......'No way.' Head averted, the girl resumed the buttoning of her shirt.
......He shook his head regretfully. 'You're absolutely right: I'm a perverse old fool. I don't know which side my bread is buttered and ... what was the rest?'
......'Too late,' she declared, lightly aloof, 'far too late.'
......'But such a day ... such a day,' he sighed. Time has no business here at all.'
......It was true. The girl paused in her dressing. Eyes closed, she seemed to draw in some of the sunlight with her breath. The man lay still. The two figures might have been drowsily patient under the eye of a French painter - soft impasto light, green wood-shadow, and the dreaming mist of bluebells beyond. There was nothing Anglo-Saxon here, not even a slight breeze to ripple gooseflesh on their skin. Nor, while they were silent, was the long moment of this century even. It felt closer, much closer, to Theocritus - and I, squinting like the Cyclops from the shade.
......Again the blackbird chattered its dismay. The girl opened her eyes. 'Are you asleep?'
......'Adream.'
......She bent to pick up the discarded denim shorts, then stopped, straightened herself, and stood listening, as though sensing they were watched. Her eyes - they were narrow, dark-lashed - surveyed the trees.
......I shrank into the shade of a beech, one hand against its smooth bark for support. I could have sworn for a moment that our eyes met, but the girl showed no sign of alarm. She pursed her lips slightly, stretched her neck to tilt the chin, and then brushed back a stray tress from her face. The toes of her right foot drew a segment of a circle through beech-mast and leaf-mould.
......'Do you feel anything?' she said quietly.
......'Lust?' the old man suggested lazily. 'A certain consuming nostalgia for your body. Remorse for a squandered opportunity ... ' He might have gone on but she frowned impatiently, shushed him, listening to the air. After a moment she said, 'I think she used to come here.'
......The old man sat upright, suddenly intent. 'You feel her?'
......Again the girl's eyes scouted the glade. 'I'm not sure. There's something.'
......'Close your eyes. Keep absolutely still. Let you other senses work.'
......The girl raised a hand to still his urgency. The air of the glade was glassy and brittle. She stood at the centre of a silence, radiating pure attention. The old man watched, mouth ajar, as if an untimely word or gesture might break a spell.
......'Yes, it's there,' she said softly, '- an intense yearning ... hunger ... it's everywhere here.'
......'The emotional hunger', the man said, '... the ache you described before?'
......'No, it's different.'
......'How?' The demand was a quick, clipped breath.
......Suddenly, startlingly, the girl's voice and posture changed. 'It's me,' she said, 'I'm starving. Let's go home.' She looked back at the old man and burst into bright laughter at his outraged scowl. 'Got you.'
......'God damn,' he growled, beating the ground with the flat of his hand. 'I told you never to fool about with that. Never, do you hear?'
......'Serves you right.'
......'I'll serve you right.' As he pushed himself up to his feet she giggled again, snatched up her shorts, slipped her feet into sandals, then ran, fleetly, through the bluebell drift and up the bank. From the cover of the beech I watched the old man lumber after her, shouting, and saw the girl turn between two sycamores to call, 'Better not leave your clothes. I might double back and pinch them and leave you to make your way back without.'
......'Then I'd garland my nakedness like Lear,' the old man bellowed, 'and walk home via Saxburgh bidding copulation thrive. But I'll have you first.'
......Long after they'd gone from sight I could hear their squeals and shouts, the crashing of their tracks through the bracken. Part of me wanted to laugh out loud, break cover, join the mad chase. Instead, astonished by the brief spectacle, feeling cheated, envious of the old goat, I turned a way.
......And there was a movement behind me.
......A quivering in green foliage. A disturbing of the sunlight off the leaves.
......Swiftly, I turned my head, certain for one hot moment that I too was observed. The scent of bluebells was in my nostrils, heady and raw. My own skin might have been glowing green as nettles now. I shook my head, blinked - there was nothing but the stir of light and leaf, and the flimsy swaying of a branch; but I was trembling a little.
......After a long moment, though in a different direction from that in which I could still hear the laughter of the girl, I too began to run.