Chapter OneThe Wide Lawns
We shall not cease from exploration.
T. S. Eliot
The Wide Lawns
We shall not cease from exploration.
They came down through the orchard in the last of the light, and the grass was already wet. Nobody spoke about the letter. It had been read aloud twice at lunch and there was nothing further in it that a third reading would find.1
The path bent left at the wall and then ran straight for a hundred yards under the limes, which had been planted close and had grown into one another, so that walking beneath them was like walking along a corridor with a green ceiling. At the end of the limes there was a gate, and beyond the gate the ground fell away sharply to the river.
She had come this way every evening that summer, and could have walked it in the dark, and more than once had. A gardener passed below the window with a barrow, and the sound of the wheel on the gravel came up thinly, as if from much further away.
The letter was from the county council, and it concerned the orchard: the road was to be widened in the spring, the wall would have to come down, and the compensation offered was less than half of what the trees were worth to anybody who had ever picked their fruit. She read it a third time by the kitchen window, and the light was going, and the words stayed exactly as unkind as they had been at noon.
“They can’t take the limes,” he said that night, and put his knife down before he had finished eating. “They can take the wall. A wall is only a wall. But the limes were planted by her grandfather, and a tree is not a fence.”
She said nothing, because he was right in the way that did not help, and because the council’s letter had not asked anyone’s opinion of trees. It had asked for a signature, and the signature had a date beside it, and the date was the ninth of March.
