Free Sheer Blue Bliss by Lesley Glaister Page A

Sacha’s sake, that he might return home safe.
    But mostly Connie couldn’t get past her own pain to wish or hope for anything. Patrick was kind too. He didn’t know what to say to her but he would bring her things: a fat white hyacinth in a pot, a branch of fir cones, brown acorns, scarlet butcher’s-broom. He wanted her to take some mixture he’d made from plant essences but Sacha absolutely forbade it. When he came to her room he’d stand awkwardly wringing his hands, his beard wild, his eyes bright with sorrow till she wanted to tell him it was all right. But it was not all right. It never would be right again.
    And then one day the windows were opened and there were daffodils, daffodils everywhere. Such yellow and a soft greenness in the air. Walking then on legs that had grown weak, sometimes with Sacha, sometimes with Patrick, spotting the way the bracken grew curled up in tight foetal buds; leaf spears everywhere; green sparks igniting on twigs; bird-song, she felt the spring in herself.
    One day feeling the hot roll of a tear down her cheek é why? Oh something Alfie would have liked, a grass-snake perhaps or a bird’s nest, she felt bored. Bored with tears, impatient.
    New again, a new feeling like one of the bracken fronds beginning, just beginning, to unfurl and then the tickle of a smile that started in her diaphragm, a tickle stretched by her lips curving up, the tilting of her eyes, a rush of pleasure. The first moment she forgot and smiled, chuckled, laughed: she was walking with Patrick that day, they paused by a pond in the wood and were confronted by the shocking, hilarious, preposterous sight of frogs, dozens of them, hundreds, clinging and clambering and croaking. ‘Mating,’ Patrick said and to her horror and delight scooped up a ball of frog, a female sandwiched between two males. ‘See how they grab on,’ he said, trying to disengage one but it was impossible. ‘Only the first one gets it, but still this other fellow won’t give up. Sometimes they’re so desperate for it, the males, that they drown the female, drag her under in their struggle to mate.’ He crouched and replaced the frogs at the edge of the pond. He lifted and held out to her a clotted mass of jellied spawn that made her shudder, then smile. ‘Touch,’ he said, and her smile turned to a chuckle and then a laugh that almost hurt it had become so strange to her. Not funny, nothing funny really, but it was the breeding frogs that first made her laugh.
    The day of the frogs, the day she laughed again and her heart started to mend – not mend entirely because a heart will always bear scars – was the day Connie began to experience a new guilt. Her grief had been threaded through with guilt that she had lived while they had all died. She should have gone back to London with them and died too. Or at the very least she should have persuaded Alfie to stay with her, when really she’d been glad that he had gone back, glad to be left to start her new life alone. She remembered the white handkerchief fluttering from the car, Alfie’s farewell. That guilt was such a staggering weight to bear. And guilt that she was rich too, not rich but comfortable, had benefited , all Father’s investments and what have you, hers.
    But with the spring and the gradual lifting of her spirits a new guilt grew. Not something she could ever voice to a soul, not a worthy or explicable guilt like those she’d gulped out one dark night to Sacha. This was a sneaky feeling of exhilaration that caught her now and again, caught her unawares: that she was free . Free to be who she wanted. Young and free and happy, alive in her lovely body. This feeling she weighed down as if she was piling stones on a light puff of silk that wants to rise in the breeze, weighing it down with deliberate sadness, focusing on all that she had lost until she caused the breeze to drop, the silk, her