Monday 31 October

Marta and Ivan: August 1938:
It’s the most perfect day of the summer. Marta and Ivan were up early, before mama and papa, when only the swarthy cook and the other servants were moving around the house. In the kitchen, where the two children waited uncomfortably, listening to cook’s cold monosyllables echoing in the big space while she oversaw the preparation of their breakfast, the smell of fresh bread and creamy milk combined to create an air of light and warmth. Early sunlight played on the window frames and cast yellow geometric patterns onto the warm, worn surface of the immense oak table, which is so massive that it had to be assembled in the room. On the stove, a bright blue pot contains the children’s boiling eggs: tendrils, planes and wisps of steam rise into the light, turning bright white where the sun catches them before they twist or fade off into the shadows.

After breakfast, Marta and Ivan tuck leftover eggs, apples and bread into their rucksack, and head off for the summerhouse at the top of the estate. It’s only eight o’clock, but the sun is already high and hot, and Marta feels the perspiration breaking out on her throat and forehead as soon as she steps into the light. (She’s noticed that she seems to sweat more easily these days, as she’s getting older, and Ivan has noticed that she’s starting too smell different – as if she doesn’t wash often enough. Sometimes, despite himself, he has to turn his face away as she grabs him for one of her frequent, clumsy hugs.)

The summerhouse is at least a mile from the house, up at the top of the estate, a place where the managed garden ends in a mixture of crumbling red brick walls and straggly hedges and fences, where the grass and weeds have gone wild and the foliage and the wooden posts and the old fence wires are all intertwined. Beyond the summerhouse is a dense, overgrown hawthorn hedge, then a public lane intensely green with overhanging foliage and dense with blackberries in autumn, and then the start of the forest: it’s an overgrown, organic boundary with a complex, rich variety of wild flowers, and small mammals rustling and scratching in the undergrowth.

Two summers ago, playing up at the summerhouse on her own, she had determined that she would catalogue the area immediately surrounding the summerhouse, describing and illustrating all the plants, insects, animals and birds that she could find. Wearing her favourite dress (white cotton with big printed blue flowers) and the straw hat that mama insisted she always wore in the hot months, she had crouched on the bottom-most step of the summerhouse’s porch and demarcated the first metre square search area with four corner stones. Then she settled down with her sketch book, watercolours and pencil and started to draw and annotate.

She only lasted about an hour before giving up in the face of the fractal levels of detail, her inability to capture even the simplest natural form, and the dazzling complexity of the details inside the details of every plant and leaf. The envisioned precision and order of her notebook gave way to a series of botched, scribbled out drawings and increasingly untidy lists, which started neatly and regularly before descending into impatient, hurried jottings. It was as if there was a part of her brain missing, she thought: a magical part that would give her the insight and focus she needed in order to focus on the important parts of the scene, and to see – and reproduce – the significant aspects with clarity. Her mama could do it, she knew: she’d seen her drawing delicate ladies’ faces and elegant gowns on writing paper while she talked on the telephone to the wives of papa’s business acquaintances. And she’d seen papa make his lists in his perfect handwriting, which seemed to speak of control and logic, the straight-line thinking skills of powerful adults that she so wanted to emulate. But put a pencil or a paintbrush in her hand and the inadequacy of her execution was almost instantly revealed: despite her enthusiasm for engaging with nature and her desire to capture it and understand it, to grasp it and dissect it; despite all that, she couldn’t simultaneously hold it in her hand, feel the textures, see the colours and structures and see it whole; she couldn’t seem to examine a thing – a leaf, or a flower, or the whitened skull of a shrew found in the leaf litter – without destroying it; to understand and own it you had to break it up into pieces or strip it slowly down to see how the fabric of the thing was knitted together, to see how the folded shapes merged into each other internally; whereupon the thing lost its mystery and beauty – ceased to be the very thing that had fascinated and enchanted you with its wholeness and beauty. When things are intact they are beautiful, but she can’t understand them. And when she can understand them after they’re deconstructed, they’re no longer beautiful or enchanting. [perhaps a concrete example??]

So now she just enjoys being up here, where the sun shines into the bowl of grass that drops away in front of the summerhouse, and the glittering air is scratchy and smeared with insects all through the long day. In the early morning, when the forest still casts its cool shadows on the summerhouse, the lit grass scintillates with dew, spiders’ tentative webs waver across the clearing, and the long grass is damp and cool against bare legs.

Ivan wearily sloughs the rucksack from his back and leans it against the shadowed porch wall. They brush the excess moisture from the wooden bench and pull it out to the front of the porch’s wooden decking. Then they sit for a while, cooling down after their uphill walk in the morning sunshine, feeling their sweaty skin dry, and hearing the sounds of the forest rise as their own breathing and movements fade out of conscious awareness.

Ivan bores quickly, and he soon gets up and wanders down to the bottom of the grass slope, where a planted honeysuckle has infiltrated a hedge of black-green leaves and stiff reddish thorns. Beyond that boundary there’s a grassy bank, then the stream trickling down between shaggy banks, then a steeper, wild and overgrown bank on the other side, then some boggy land, then the lower forest slopes.

Marta watches Ivan move amongst the tall grasses until only his blond head is visible. The grass shivers and jerks as he moves though it in the sun.

(c. 1110 words)