Angels and Insects by A. S. Byatt Read Free Book Online

time he enjoyed the outings. All three elder girls sometimes came and sometimes did not. Sometimes he did not know whether Eugenia would make one of the party until the very moment of setting out, when they would assemble on the gravel walk in front of the house armed with nets, with jam-jars on string handles, with metal boxes and useful scissors. There were days when his morning’s work became almost impossible because of the tension in his diaphragm over whether he would or would not see her, because of the imagination he lavished on how she would look, crossing the lawn to the gate in the wall, crossing the paddock and the orchard under the blossoming fruit trees to the fields which sloped down to the little stream, where they fished for minnows and sticklebacks, caddis grubs and water-snails. He liked the little girls well enough; they were docile, pale little creatures, well buttoned up, who spoke when they were spoken to. Elaine in particular had a good eye for hidden treasures on the undersides of leaves, or interesting boreholes in muddy banks. When Eugenia was not in the party he felt his old self again, scanning everything with a minute attention that in the forests had been the attention of a primitive hunter as well as a modern naturalist, of a small animal afraid amongst threatening sounds and movements, as well as a scientific explorer. Here the pricking of his skin was associated not with fear, but with the invisible cloud of electric forces that spangled Eugenia’s air as she strolled calmly through the meadows. Perhaps it was fear. He didnot wish to feel it. He was only in abeyance, until he felt it again.
    One day, when they were all occupied on the bank of the stream, including both Eugenia and Enid, he was drawn into speaking of his feelings about all this. There had been a great fall of spring rain, and various loose clumps of grass and twigs were floating along the usually placid surface of the stream, between the trailing arms of the weeping willows and the groups of white poplar. There were two white ducks and a coot, swimming busily; the sun was over the water, kingcups were golden, early midges danced. Matty Crompton, a patient huntress, had captured two sticklebacks and trailed her net in the water, watching the shadows under the bank. Eugenia stood next to William. She breathed in deeply, and sighed out.
    ‘How beautiful all this is,’ she said. ‘How
lucky
I always feel to live just here, of all spots on the earth. To see the same flowers come out every spring in the meadows, and the same stream always running. I suppose it must seem a very
bounded
existence to you, with your experience of the world. But my roots go so deep …’
    ‘When I was in the Amazons,’ he answered simply and truthfully, ‘I was haunted by an image of an English meadow in spring—just as it is today, with the flowers, and the new grass, and the early blossom, and the little breeze lifting everything, and the earth smelling fresh after the rain. It seemed to me that such scenes were
truly
Paradise—that there was not anything on earth more beautiful than an English bank in flower, than an English mixed hedge, with roses and hawthorn, honeysuckle and bryony. Before I went, I had read highly coloured accounts of the brilliance of the tropical jungle, the flowers and fruits and gaudy creatures, but there is nothing there so
colourful
as this is. It is all a monotonous sameness of green, and such a mass of struggling, climbing, suffocating vegetation—often you cannot see the sky. It is true that the weather is like that of the Golden Age—everything flowers and fruits perpetually and simultaneously in the tropical heat, you have alwaysSpring, Summer and Autumn at once, and no Winter. But there is something inimical about the vegetation itself. There is a kind of tree called the Sipó Matador—which translates, the Murderer Sipó—which grows tall and thin like a creeper and clings to another tree, to make its