The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story (2 page)
Read The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story Online
Authors: Theodora Goss
Tags: #Literary, #Romance, #Fiction, #Fairy Tales; Folk Tales; Legends & Mythology, #Fantasy
She’d focused on the real world of high school, and then
Harvard. When she’d told her parents that she wanted to study literature, her mother had stared at her with obvious disapproval, and her father had asked if she’d considered international relations. But there had been no incidents since. Dr. Birnbaum had even taken her off the medication again. She’d never tolerated it well. It had always given her nausea, and she was glad not to have to take it anymore, glad that the whole ordeal was over. “If you’re under stress, come see me,” he had told her. “Otherwise, live a normal life. All right, Evelyn?” That’s what she was trying to do, live a normal life. She just wished people would stop worrying about her.
Brendan had given her a copy of
The Tale of the Green Knight
, the Victorian translation of the story of Gawan and Elowen. The book had a green cardboard cover with a pattern of vines embossed in gold. The translator was the Right Rev. Ewan Tregillis, and on the title page was the date 1865. Brendan had been right, it wasn’t exactly great poetry. But it was fun to read, or at least more fun than the other books in her room: the King James Bible and
Bird Watching in Cornwall
.
She found herself reading it when she wasn’t out with Brendan. One morning, while waiting for him to pick her up for a tour of the Norman church and its graveyard, she opened a notebook she’d brought with her, jotted
GREEN THOUGHTS
at the top of the page, and began to write.
For the first time since Gerard Lambert, poet laureate, had told her that her poetry was fanciful nonsense, she was writing a poem. A rather long poem in the form of a dialog: Gawan speaking to Elowen, and Elowen speaking back. About being reborn at different times in history, coming together but never being able to stay together. Always, something would separate them. Always,
they would long for each other, call to each other across the years.
(Gawan) When my hands reach
into the darkness, do they find your hands?
Or do they close on air?
(Elowen) Reach into the darkness
,
my beloved. I am there
,
even if you cannot feel that I am there
.
That was what she’d just written when Mrs. Davies called up. “Your young man is here, dearie!”
“He’s not my young man,” Evelyn muttered under her breath. She set aside the notebook, threw on a cardigan—having found that a cardigan was always a necessity in Cornwall—and ran down the stairs.
“Ready?” he asked. He was standing at the bottom of the staircase, holding a picnic basket.
He does have nice hair
, Evelyn thought. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, having a “young man,” as Mrs. Davies had called him.
“Ready! Let’s go visit the dead.”
The church was more interesting than she’d expected, and they did find some Morgans in the graveyard. “Gwynne Morgan, Morwenna Morgan, Trevor Morgan. They’re great names. I should write them down in case I ever have kids.” She walked among the gravestones. “Nothing after the nineteenth century. Well, that’s when they went to America, I guess. My great-grandfather arrived before World War I.”
“I’d like to go to America someday,” Brendan said.
“Would you? Why?”
“For the adventure of it. It must be fascinating, living in a country where everything is new. Here, we’re still talking about
Gawan and Elowen. I hope you like the book, by the way.”
“I do. Lots of gory bits, giants being disemboweled and all that. You know, if you ever do come, you could stay with me in Boston.” She felt almost shy saying it. After all, she’d known him less than a week. But he just smiled in a way that made his eyes crinkle at the corners. She was starting to like how he smiled, as though the smile were a secret he was sharing with her.
That week, they went out with one of the boats and watched the men catch fish in enormous nets, with gulls wheeling overhead. She was proud that she threw up only once. They took long walks around Clews, visiting farms where they tried different cheeses. She helped him catalog books, and he laughed at how dusty they both became. As the days passed, she became increasingly conscious that her visit was ending, that she would have to return to Oxford and then fly home. She didn’t want to leave Cornwall … or Brendan.
On her last day in Clews, they went to the nearby town of Pengarth, where there was an old fort. The next morning she would be taking the bus to Truro. Evelyn wondered if she could stay another week. But the airplane tickets had been bought long ago, and what would her parents think? She and Brendan spent the morning clambering over the stones and then had lunch at the hotel.
Afterward, she asked if, instead of taking the bus, they could walk back to Clews through the forest. She didn’t want this day to end.
“There’s a path I used to take when I was a child,” he said. “It’s easy enough, although there are roots in places. But are you sure, Evelyn? It’s a matter of seven miles. I don’t think you’re used to walking so far.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, bridling. Did it look like she didn’t exercise?
She did the treadmill and the Stairmaster in the gym at Harvard.
When they started back, she was sure they’d made the right decision. The forest was filled with sunlight filtering through the canopy of leaves. It was like walking in a great, green cathedral.
They didn’t walk particularly quickly, and they took rests to look at acorns with interesting shapes, a red squirrel that chirred at them from a branch, a robin that stared at them for a moment and then flew off.
By the time Brendan announced they were approaching Clews, it was beginning to get cold. “Here, take my jacket,” he said. She wrapped it around her. It smelled like him, like old books.
“Evelyn, there’s something I want to say. Can we sit down for a minute?” They sat on a fallen tree covered with moss.
“What is it?” she asked. He looked almost concerned. He was silent for a moment, then said, “These last couple of days, I’m not sure I can describe—”
He looked at her as though unsure how to go on. Suddenly, he put his hand on her cheek, leaned down, and kissed her. The kiss was long, so long and sweet that she felt as though her heart had stopped, or as though it had started beating with the forest itself.
She could feel the trees above her, their roots beneath the soil. She could feel the moss growing, the earth stirring with whatever animals lived underground. Idly, she wondered if she were still breathing or if her breath was now part of the forest, part of its life.
She could feel him pulling back, slowly, reluctantly, his hand still on her cheek. She opened her eyes.
And looked into a face of leaves. There were leaves growing over his face, vines sprouting from his shoulders. In front of her, touching her, he was becoming a tangle, a thicket of oak and elder
and ash. She felt a tendril on her cheek and saw that his hands were made of ivy. But his eyes were still the eyes of Brendan Thorne, green with brown flecks. They looked back at her, enigmatic and suddenly inscrutable.
It was happening again. The world—the real world—was slipping away from her. She felt a terrifying sense of panic.
“Evelyn,” he said, but his voice sounded deep, hollow, as though it were coming from the bottom of a well.
She screamed.
She jumped up from the fallen tree and stumbled backward. The man of leaves and vines rose and followed, his arms reaching for her. He was all greenery now, except his lower legs, where she could still see jeans and sneakers. But the vines were reaching there, too, and soon he would be not a man at all, but a part of the forest, following her, trying to catch her.
She turned and ran. She didn’t look back or stop running until she reached the Giant’s Head. Her suitcase was already packed. She quickly checked the bus schedule; there was a bus to Truro in half an hour. She threw the rest of her clothes into her backpack. By the time she paid her bill, the bus was waiting. She boarded and didn’t look back as it drove away from Clews. She tried not to think about what had happened until she was on the airplane to New York. And when she did think about it, she went into the plane’s lavatory and cried, sitting on the toilet seat, sobbing into a balled-up paper towel as quietly as she could. From fear, and for Brendan Thorne, who had kissed her and then changed before her eyes into … what?
She didn’t know.
E
velyn Morgan, Ph.D., glanced at herself in the rearview mirror. Hair pulled back, lipstick a professional shade of mauve. In her briefcase were extra copies of her CV and the chapter she had submitted with her application. She had been right to wear the gray suit. Her mother had insisted on buying it for her. “You’ll look so professional,” she had said, and Evelyn had to admit she’d been right.
She was grateful for the interview at Bartlett College. She’d been teaching for two years as an adjunct at Columbia, ever since finishing her doctoral degree. She knew she wasn’t the easiest sell: a medievalist who had chosen to write not about Chaucer or another author who would actually be taught in medieval literature classes, but on the legend of the Green Man.
The Green Man in Medieval Europe
had taken her eight years to write, and now she didn’t know what to do with it. She’d already gotten an article out of it, which probably explained why she’d been granted an interview at Bartlett. But she didn’t think the dissertation itself was publishable. It was too strange, too idiosyncratic. And her only other publication was the book of poems she’d written years ago.
Green Thoughts
.
She’d written it the year after that week in Clews, where she had met Brendan Thorne—she still remembered his name—in a bookstore. Where she’d had that—incident. She’d always felt bad about that, always wanted to apologize. Tell him it wasn’t his fault. He must have wondered if he’d done something wrong.
You’re fine
, she’d wanted to tell him.
It’s me. I’m a nut case, that’s all
. Although Dr. Birnbaum wouldn’t appreciate her describing herself that way. Once, several years afterward, she’d sent Brendan a letter, apologizing. She hadn’t known where he was living, so she’d used
the address for the bookstore. But she had never heard back.
After she’d come back from Cornwall, she’d been on the medication again for a while, but there were no more incidents, and Dr. Birnbaum had told her that she finally seemed stable. Her life had been stable for a long time now. Even her one serious relationship had been a model of stability. David Aldridge had been working on a Ph.D. in art history at Columbia. A friend had introduced them at a party benefitting the Metropolitan Museum of Art that she’d attended reluctantly, after her mother had insisted on sending tickets. His father was a client of Morgan & Leventhal, and his family owned a house on Cape Cod, right on the water. She had brought him home for Christmas, and her parents had obviously approved. All their friends had assumed they would get married. But one morning, shortly after his dissertation defense, while pouring a cup of coffee in the apartment they’d shared for several years, he said, “Evelyn, I don’t think this is going to work out. I want to be with someone who’s in love with me, and you’re not. Are you?” He’d looked so vulnerable, standing there in his pajamas holding his coffee mug, that she had wanted to say yes but hadn’t been able to. Instead, she shook her head. A week later, he’d joined the Peace Corps. The last time she’d heard from him, he was somewhere in Central Africa building an irrigation system.
She pulled into the parking lot. At least the buildings were attractive: old brick with white columns and ivy growing up the walls. She had some doubts about moving to Virginia, but so far it looked perfectly civilized. Her father hadn’t wanted her to move so far away. New York had been bad enough. He’d been willing to pay for graduate school, even to finance a Ph.D. in English literature, if she agreed to stay in Boston, attend Tufts or Brandeis. But she’d
earned that full scholarship to Columbia—it had been her accomplishment. She had insisted on going, and now she might move even farther away, if she got this position.
All right, was she ready for the interview? As ready as she would ever be, she decided. She got out of the rental car.
“W
hat I realized, when I started looking at all the different myths and stories of the Green Man, was that they always included what I call the Magical Woman. The basic story, the story that we can trace back to folklore, involves the Green Man and this Magical Woman. And it’s a love story. In
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, for example, Gawain is a double, an alter ego, for the Green Knight. This becomes even clearer when we look at older stories, such as the Cornish
Tale of the Green Knight
, in which the knight in green armor is Sir Gawain himself. The implication, I believe, is that such stories date back to pre-Christian fertility rituals, although of course that research was beyond the scope of my study.”
He entered late, closing the door quietly behind him and moving toward the back of the room.
It couldn’t be
, she told herself.
Am I seeing things? Please, not here, not in the middle of my presentation
. But she could tell it was him, even in profile. And, suddenly, it was as though she was back there—in the forest again, after all these years. With Brendan Thorne.
She couldn’t continue. Once again she felt the terrifying panic, the urge to turn and run.
Her presentation had been going so well.
I have a real chance at this position
, she’d been thinking. But now she stood frozen at the front of the room, unable to speak. He turned and saw her, then
sat down as though he didn’t recognize her. Above him, she saw the clock; it felt as though time was standing still, but only a few seconds had passed.
“Any more questions?” she heard herself saying. And then she was answering them, sounding as though she knew what she was talking about even though all she could think of was him, sitting at the back of the room, not asking questions. It was as though her mind had split in two: half still involved in the presentation, half consciously not looking at him. Wondering what he was doing here, at Bartlett College.
