Free Learning by Heart by Elizabeth Cooke Page B

often .
    There is a room in the new house that runs almost the entire length of the ground floor, and the workmen are making large windows there, almost all windows, so that you may sit in the sun for hours at a time and watch the water .
    I am waiting for you, Cora, as you asked me to. Six weeks have passed. It is like six centuries .
    I am waiting, and I think of that terrible day when Richard came here to reclaim you, and I think of the expression on your face as you told me that you would return with him to England. But I believe your promise to me. I believe that you will come back to me soon, very soon. Before this year is over you will be here, in the cottage near Syracusa, and all the waiting will be over .
    Remember our place, darling. Keep it in your mind. Think of me there. I shall try to be patient, though every day is long. It is our house, that cottage, our place, with its single room and the broken-tiled floor. I have thought of you so many times sitting beside me there, lying in the bed, and I cannot put down on the page what my heart carries. I feel it too much, you would say .
    You will be surprised to know that I have planted the rose. It is so funny to see an English rose in this garden. It will flourish in the spring but I am afraid that it will be burned to ashes in the summer. I have planted it, nevertheless, in the shadiest part. I have asked the woman on the farm if, when her sons are passing, they might water it. She nodded, but she thinks I am crazy. I can almost hear her sons laughing. ‘To water a rose? A rose? He thinks we have time to water a rose ?’
    ‘ Roses that sicken …’ I have been reading as you taught me. It is not easy to find English poetry here. But I have the books, and I have been reading them all. I have read John Gray. Why is he not more known? I have found ‘the roses, every one, were red … ’
    It is a poem just like us. It is a poem about this country. Did he ever see this country? ‘The sky too blue, too delicate: too soft the air, too green the sea …’ The sea is sometimes green when a storm is coming, or in the morning, occasionally, where it touches the land, green under the bridge to Ortigia. I stand on the bridge and think, She put her hand on this rail. I put my hand over her hand. Do you ever think such things, Cora? Will you ever think of the rose trying to grow by our house on the road that runs south from Syracusa ?
    The roses are not like Gray’s. They are white. There were no red roses, though I asked for them. Will you think of them, perhaps think of me planting them? They say I am possessed by madness .
    I walked six miles with the rose to plant it .
    So perhaps they are right, after all .

Five
    Cora stood in the doorway of the abbey, waiting to catch her breath. For the past five minutes, no one had passed her in the shadowy entrance, although she had made a great show, when she had first stepped inside, of reading the announcements of services, flower rotas and lectures that were pinned to the notice-board, in case anyone should come. She didn’t want people to think that she was there with no purpose. She didn’t want people to see her as an old woman who needed a seat, an arm, any kind of help.
    So she stood by the great door and gazed at the times and places of events that she had no intention of attending, waiting for her heartbeat to slow, and the narrowing, choking sensation in her throat to subside.
    She had been married in this ancient place, where the first kings of Wessex were buried; so lovely with its subtle, honey-coloured walls and arches, and great soaring roof. She had stepped over this threshold forty-five years ago on Richard’s arm, at midday on a beautiful September morning, over this very stone where she was standing now. She had been a girl of nineteen with a husband of forty.
    Suddenly a man strode in from the abbey green, tutting to himself, complaining at the cold. ‘Oh,’ he said, brought up short when he saw her.