The Seeds of Time

Then there was the flush-colour again, powder-stippled at first, then reticulated, then solid as it narrowed into the trumpet, but split by white spurs of the centre veins. There was just a suggestion of orchis about it, perhaps, but it was no kind of orchis she had ever seen, alive or pictured. The petal curves were sweet natural roundings, like limbs, or water cascading, or saplings bent in the wind. The texture was ciepthlessly soft.

Felicity leaned closer, gazing into the velvet throat. Little crescent-shaped stamens faintly dusted with pollen trembled on green, hair-like stalks. She caught the scent of it, A little sweetness, a little sharpness, a little earthiness, blended with a subtlety to make a perfumer’s art vulgar and banal.

She breathed in the scent again, and looked into the flower hypnotized, unable to take her eyes from it, loving it in its brave delicacy with a sweet, longing compassion.

She had forgotten the room, the eyes that watched her, everything but the flower itself.

A fidgeting somewhere brought her back. She lifted her head, and looked unhurriedly along the rows of faces.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s a beautiful flower. What is it?’

Seemingly, no one knew.

‘Who brought it?’ Felicity asked them.

A small, golden-headed child in the middle of the second row pinked a little.

‘I did, Miss Fray.’

‘And you don’t know what it is, Marielle?’

‘No, Miss Fray, I just found it, and I thought it was pretty, and I thought you’d like it,’ she explained, a trifle anxiously. Felicity looked back to the flower again.

‘I do like it, Marielle. It’s lovely. It was very kind of you to think of bringing it for me.’

She loitered over the flower a few seconds more, and then moved the vase decisively to the left of the desk. With an effort she turned her eyes away from it, back to the rows of faces.

‘One day,’ she said, ‘I’ll read you some William Blake “To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower …” But now we must get on, we’ve wasted too much time already. I want you to copy out what I write on the board, in your best handwriting.’

She picked up the chalk and thought for a moment, looking at the flower. Then she went over to the blackboard, and wrote:

‘Their colours and their forms, were then to me an appetite; a feeling and a love …’

‘Marielle. Just a moment,’ Felicity said.

The child paused and turned back as the others streamed out of the room.

‘Thank you very much for bringing it. Was it the only one?’ Felicity asked her.

‘Oh, no, Miss Fray. There were three or four clumps of them.’

‘Where, Marielle? I’d like to get a root of it, if I can.’

‘On Mr Hawkes’s farm. In the top corner of the big field, where the aeroplane crashed,’ the child told her.

‘Where the aeroplane crashed,’ Felicity repeated.

‘Yes, Miss Fray.’

Felicity sat down slowly, staring at the flower. The child waited, and shifted from one foot to the other.

‘Please, may I go now, Miss Fray?’

‘Yes,’ said Felicity, without looking up. ‘Yes, of course.’

Feei scuttered out of the room.

Felicity went on looking at the flower.

‘Where the aeroplane crashed.’ That had been almost a year ago-on a summer’s evening when all the world was quietening and settling down for the night. ‘Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, and all the air a solemn stillness holds.’ Then the aeroplane, wheeling its droning flight, destroying the peace. It was a silver-paper cross up in the sky where the sunlight was still bright. Unusually, Felicity looked up. She tried to ignore the noise and her prejudices, for the craft had, undeniably, a silver-moth beauty of its own. She watched it turn, the sunset glistering the undersides of the wings as it tilted. Then, suddenly, amid the silver there had been a flash of rose-red fire, and the silver moth ceased to exist. Pieces of glittering foil were spreading apart and falling. The largest piece trailed smoke above it, like a black funeral plume.

A great crack slapped at her ears.

The pieces twisted and flashed in the sky as they came, some fast, some slower. The biggest of all seemed to be falling straight towards her. Perhaps she screamed. She threw herself on the ground, arms clutched over her head and ears, willing to sink herself into the earth itself. There were interminable second-fractions of waiting while the silver wreckage came hurtling down the sky, and Felicity and all the world about her held their breath.

The solid ground bounced under her; then came the crash, and the shrieking of metal.

Felicity looked up, biting fearfully on her hand. She saw the silver body, a crumpled fish-shape, less than a hundred yards away, and in that moment petals of flame blossomed round it.

Something else fell close by.