The Amber Flower

Blythe put the crooked amber flower behind a taller stem, looked at it, and put it back.

She was not preparing the garden for an inspection. She was preparing it for a man who had kissed her beside a stolen mustard pot. These ought to have required different arrangements.

She moved the taller stem into the workshop before she could change her mind.

Keir arrived carrying a paper bag.

“Is that restitution?” she asked.

“Buns. I thought you might be less likely to steal something if fed.”

“I see that one evening has given you a thoroughly inaccurate idea of my character.”

“It has given me a hopeful one.”

He closed the gate behind him. The narrow passage between gate and garden door held neither kind of light. Blythe had scrubbed its flagstones that morning for no defensible reason.

“May I?” he asked.

She liked that he asked while looking at her mouth and not the door.

“Yes.”

The kiss was brief because she made it brief. She wanted to show him the garden while she was still capable of naming its parts.

“Later,” she said, when he looked at her.

“That is becoming my favourite word.”

“Your cap.”

He showed it to her, securely closed.

She led him through.

In daylight the flowers looked faint, the colours held deep inside the glass rather than spread around it. She had always liked the garden best at this hour. The night visitors wanted wonder. By day a person had to look.

Keir looked.

At the second turn, he bent to see the copper strip under a leaf.

“If this closes?”

“That bed stands apart. I have to tend it separately, but it no longer answers the rest.”

“Then you can take a flower out.”

“Yes. The thing taken out loses its place in the whole. A separate flower can keep its own colour if I hold it. The composition changes.”

“People talk as though the first moving thread through the gate would ruin everything.”

“If I left all the connections open and you released your whole course, it probably would. So I won’t, and you won’t.”

“Agreed.”

She liked the matter-of-factness of that. Neither a warning about his nature nor a boast that she could withstand it. Two people declining to be fools.

He followed her along the path. At the amber bed she stopped.

“I hide this one when Nerida comes.”

He looked at the flower, then at her.

“Why tell me?”

Because she wanted someone to know the small dishonest thing before they found it for themselves. Because his mouth had been warm against hers and she had kept thinking of it while maintaining a composition everyone called cold. Because he had seen which flower she loved without making her explain why she had not given it pride of place.

“I didn’t want you mistaking me for courageous,” she said.

He did not smile.

“I wasn’t making a list.”

For a moment she had nothing to say.

Then the kitchen door opened and Nerida stepped out carrying a narrow clear vessel in both hands.

Blythe’s stomach sank. She had forgotten the Thursday delivery.

“I knocked,” Nerida said. “Tamsen let me through.”

“Of course.”

Nerida saw Keir and stopped. The vessel remained steady in her hands.

“Mr Aveling.”

“Keir is enough.”

“I brought the trial vessel for the conservatory arrangement,” she told Blythe.

It was beautiful. Clear as water held still, tall enough to lift a central bloom above the crowd. Blythe had seen its shape in her mind for months. Now it existed, and she was annoyed to feel grateful while Keir watched.

“Thank you.”

“The selectors will want to see the entire circuit together, naturally. The closed form is the point.”

“I know.”

Nerida glanced at the amber flower in its unhidden place.

“This might sit more easily behind the blue.”

“It sits here.”

The words came out too quickly. Nerida looked at her, surprised.

“For the trial,” Blythe added, then wished she had not.

Keir turned toward the kitchen. “I’ll put the buns inside.”

He left them without waiting to be thanked. Blythe could not decide whether she was relieved or abandoned. She was irritated to discover that either was possible.

Nerida set the vessel on the stone bench.

“You are fond of him.”

“I have had supper with him.”

“That was not a denial.”

Blythe folded her arms. “Was it meant to be a question?”

Nerida sighed. It made her older than the gloves and the precise hair ever did.

“I am not interested in forbidding you supper. You are a grown woman. I am interested in this work. You have spent eighteen years making something nobody else could make. A person who values movement may sincerely like you and still not understand what it means to keep it.”

“I have met people who value stillness and don’t understand me at all.”

“Yes. So have I.”

Blythe had not expected agreement.

Nerida touched the rim of the vessel with one finger.

“The conservatory is for a complete maintained work. If you alter the circuit, it ceases to be the submission we shortlisted. That isn’t a punishment. It’s a different piece.”

“Nothing has altered.”

“Good.”

Blythe heard herself dislike the relief in the word, and knew she was being unfair. Nerida had come with a gift, not an edict. She had no authority over Blythe’s house. She did have authority over an exhibition Blythe wanted with an undignified fierceness.

“Thank you for bringing it,” she said again.

Nerida nodded and went indoors. A moment later the front door closed.

Keir returned with a plate of buns.

“Did you hide in the kitchen?” Blythe asked.

“I ate half of one. It seemed more useful.”

She took the plate. “You could have stayed.”

“You could have asked me.”

That landed. She had been willing to make him guess, then annoyed when he guessed wrong.

“Stay now,” she said.

He did.

· · ·Scene break

They ate on the kitchen step, safely outside the garden’s closed inner door. The window behind them reflected ordinary sky. Blythe watched Keir brush sugar from his thumb and tried not to turn looking into an occupation.

“What does she think will happen?” he asked.

“That I will damage the garden.”

“Will you?”

“I haven’t decided to.”

“That’s not the same as no.”

“I have discovered that you are very attentive to distinctions when they might annoy me.”

He smiled. “Only then?”

She handed him a second bun.

He told her about the course. Eleven years of changing light, first made when he was thirty, never entirely banked since. Every evening he walked it through a new turn. The old turns stayed beneath the new ones, not visible as separate pictures but present in the way the light moved.

“Like a tune you cannot sing the same way twice,” he said.

“And if you stop?”

“The thread goes quiet. I can begin again. It won’t be that course.”

“How long does it take? Each night?”

“An hour. Sometimes three. More when it won’t settle.”

“Mine takes two.”

“I know. I watched the light through your wall last night.”

She turned to him.

“I was walking past,” he said. “Not lurking.”

“Did it look nice?”

“It looked as though you were busy.”

She laughed, but there was something beneath it she did not want to name yet. Both of them had arranged their lives around an evening task that could not be shared. They had done it gladly before meeting. She was not prepared to declare it a tragedy after two kisses.

“Show me the moth,” she said.

“Out here?”

“The door is closed. The copper is whole.”

He uncapped the coil. The gold thread slipped out and made its lopsided wings above the plate.

Blythe broke a crumb from her bun and held it out.

Keir stared at her.

She looked at the crumb, then at the moth.

“I know,” she said.

“Do you?”

“It seemed inhospitable to offer nothing.”

His laughter bent him forward. She put the crumb on the plate with great dignity.

The moth landed on it.

“You did that,” she said.

“Possibly.”

She leaned into his shoulder while they laughed, and stayed there after. He rested his cheek against her hair. It was the smallest closeness of the afternoon, and the one she would remember while walking her seven turns that night.

“Come tomorrow,” she said.

“To the garden?”

She looked at the closed door.

“To me. We’ll find somewhere to put the rest.”