“Butterflies are cold-blooded,” Reuben said. “They can’t move until the sun warms their flight muscles.” We sat until the sun had reached them all and just a few remained dancing about our heads. “They only live for two weeks. A short but beautiful life,” he said.
When the butterflies were all gone, Reuben asked, “Are you hungry?”
I was always hungry, but I shrugged. We continued walking along the side of the mountain, the narrow path disappearing after we left the scree, and the ground becoming grassy and uneven, lush tufts sprouting over hidden rocks and dips. I could hear water trickling beneath us, seeping out from the mountain, small rivulets which would gather themselves together in secret, amassing, joining forces until they found their way into the gill. When the incline became steeper, we headed downhill. I picked my way with care, holding my skirt and hopping from one grassy mound to the next, my hip complaining with each step. I tested the ground before I trod, wary of catching my foot in a hole and tumbling all the way down. Reuben, ahead of me, at first inched downward in the same fashion, but then stood up and with a whoop started to run. He leaped from one hillock to the next, his arms whirling, his body leaning out at an alarming angle as if he might spring off into the air. Well before me, he reached the grove of wintereyes and wasn’t even out of breath when I caught up with him. He stood under a tree, peering up through the leaves, and then shimmied into the branches monkey-style and came back with two eggs clutched in one hand.
“Afternoon tea,” he said, offering them to me. The eggs were balaclava blue, speckled with brown.
“I can’t eat them,” I said. “I can’t eat baby birds.”
He laughed. “There aren’t any embryos in these.” He held each up to the sun. “See, no veins—infertile. Don’t drop them,” he said, putting them in my hand, “we’re going to have mushroom omelette.”
We climbed the mountain and looked down on die Hütte with its chimney smoke rising sleepily into the air and, as always, beyond it, the land across the river.
“Do you live over there alone?” I tried again, but Reuben jumped up to collect kindling for a fire and then produced the means to light it from his satchel, together with a cooking pot, knife, and a pile of oyster mushrooms wrapped in leaves. We sat on the wide lip, our legs dangling over the drop, and ate with our fingers, watching my father, a pocket man, chopping wood, walking to the river with the buckets, watering the garden. We saw him lift his head and heard him call for me, and we scooted back from the edge into the shadow of the mountain, laughing.
That evening in die Hütte I hid the dress from my father, rolling it into a ball and stuffing it down the side of my bed. I knew that the rip in it and the purple bruise that had flowered across my hip would make him angry.
During that summer, Reuben and I met every afternoon. We hid from my father and walked the familiar paths, sat on the boulders in the rock forest, climbed the mountain, but we never crossed the river.
“Becky and I had a saying whenever something unexpected happened,” I told him one day when we were picking blackberries on the other side of the gill. “It was: ‘We used to say it was so dull, nothing happening like in books. Now something has happened.’”
That summer was a good one for blackberries. The bushes were taller than Reuben and covered in sweet ripe fruit, so that with one squeeze they slipped off the stalk that held them. I was meant to be taking them home, but as many were going into my mouth as into my basket.
“Unexpected like what?” he said, his lips stained dark from blackberry juice.
“Just silly things, like our teacher sneezing in the middle of a lesson, or realizing Jill Kershaw, in front of us in the dinner queue, had got the last serving of mashed potato.” Reuben had a crease between his eyebrows. “It was a joke,” I said. “They weren’t really unexpected things, not like this.”
“Like this,” he repeated, “picking blackberries?”
A heat rose up from my neck and I looked away, reaching farther into the bush. “It’s a line from The Railway Children. Don’t you know it? I had the record, in London. Becky and I used to listen to it all the time.”
“No, I don’t think I do,” he said.
“Didn’t you have a record player when you were growing up?”
“No, there was no record player.”
I wanted to ask him more questions, I wanted to know everything about him, but instead I said, “You would have liked Becky.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
“I don’t know. She was funny, interesting, clever,” I said, extricating myself from the brambles.
“Aren’t you all those things?” He came toward me, a pile of ripe berries in the cup of his hand.
I could feel the blush rising again.
“Here you are.” He tipped them into my basket. “Blackberries for supper.” He reached out and wiped the corner of my mouth with his finger. “Wouldn’t want your father knowing how few made it home,” he said, and smiled.
“What about at the cinema, maybe you saw The Railway Children at the cinema?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Did you know, the blackberry can be distinguished from the raspberry not simply by its colour but because the blackberry keeps its torus, the white stalk, inside it, whereas the raspberry leaves it behind when it’s picked.”
“Daddy! My daddy!” It was my best impersonation of Roberta on the station platform.
Reuben shook his head.
“What did you watch, then?” I asked.
“Not much. I was never really one for watching television.”
“What about the book? You did read books, didn’t you, wherever you came from?” We were walking through the forest, the basket of blackberries slung over my arm.
“Sometimes, not very often.”
I tried to remember the shelves in my bedroom in London. There had been rows of books, but only Alice in Wonderland came back to me.
“But you’re always writing. In that little book of yours that you won’t let me see.”
“You are the nosiest girl I’ve ever met.” He laughed, but I knew I had been warned off.
We walked in silence until we reached the trees at the edge of the clearing. I stepped out into the sunshine. When I looked behind me Reuben had already gone.
A week or so later, I showed Reuben the nest. We had been to pick blackberries again, but already they were turning—so ripe that when we touched them the soft ones fell and were lost amongst the thorns. Rain started, large droplets, sucked down by the thirsty forest floor, making the air smell of damp summer soil. When he saw the nest he was at first surprised and then seemed angry that there was a place in the forest which he knew nothing about.
The day before, I had carpeted the nest with fresh moss and woven flowers into the walls and roof, telling myself that it had needed a good tidy-up, pushing away thoughts of other reasons. With Reuben squeezed in beside me, what had seemed a large space was now cramped. He had to prop up his head at an awkward angle and bend his legs behind him; he reminded me of Alice after she had drunk the potion and grown too large for the rabbit’s hall. We were inches apart, but I was conscious of every movement I made so we wouldn’t touch, and yet his breath—smelling of blackberries—and his body, his presence, filled the overcrowded nest.