Helen knew we’d reached our destination before I announced it, a visible haven amidst the farmland, an oasis of babbling water and rock, edged with mature trees. The brook dipped sharply in this spot, tumbling over the ledge to form a miniature waterfall, from which it danced across the shallows and the pebbles before snaking its way through the trees. This place was a suntrap, catching a perfect sliver of daylight before the sun dipped behind the hill. The trees whispered overhead, as though they were talking about us. About me. About the bulge in my trousers and my tenuous grip on morality.
My usual perch was waiting. A slab of slate, positioned like it had been designed for me, and had always been that way. It was perfectly flat on top and big enough for two, and once upon a time there had been two. I never sat in Anna’s space, even now. Sometimes I liked to close my eyes and pretend she was still beside me. Sometimes I even convinced myself I could hear her voice on the wind. I sat myself down and watched Helen soaking in the scenery with a smile on her face.
“Wow,” she said, and took a few steps along the brook, turning on the spot over and over, taking in the whole vista. “Mr Roberts, this is beautiful… really beautiful…”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“…it’s like something from a novel… something secret and wild… and magical…” She ran her fingers over the bark of my favourite old oak tree. “Yes… magical… that’s it… this place is so alive…”
“Yes, it is.” I took out a cigarette, cupped my hand against the breeze to light it.
“Is it yours?” she asked. “Is this your place?”
“Technically not, no.” I beckoned her closer, until she was at my side, then patted Anna’s space with a lurch in my stomach. Helen took a tentative seat, and she was close, just like Anna would have been. I pointed to the brow of the hill opposite, through the trees, where you could just make out the corner of my studio jutting from the foliage. “That’s my place, but I’ve been coming here ever since I moved in, and nobody’s ever argued it.”
“Then it’s a secret.” Her eyes were smiling. “A secret place.”
“This place has heard a lot of my secrets.”
“And you’ve heard a lot of mine…” She looked away, and there was that little bloom of her cheeks again. A delicate shyness that only stoked the flames. “Maybe one day I’ll hear some of yours, now that we’re… friends… maybe… I guess we’re friends, right? Are we really friends, Mr Roberts?”
Brave, brave little Helen Palmer. Even in the face of her nerves she had spirit. I was coming to love her little outpourings, the beauty in her sweet little confessions. Her eyes were brimming with reverence, and it made me feel good, made me feel wanted, made me feel like a man again.
“You don’t know me, Helen. If you did, then maybe you wouldn’t be so keen to be friends,” I laughed to lighten my words. “Maybe I’d bore you. Maybe you’d find my ways to your distaste.”
“I would still want to know you,” she said, unfazed. “Maybe I don’t know things about you, not in the way I know Lizzie, or Katie, or my mum and dad, but there is more to knowing someone than that.”
I felt chastised, and it amused me. “What makes you so confident you want a man like me?” I shocked myself with my choice of words, and Helen’s eyes widened. “To be friends with a man like me,” I corrected, but it was too late. The corner of Helen’s lip was pinched between her teeth, the expression of concentration I knew so well from class. Her gaze drifted towards my cottage as she formulated her response.
“It’s more than knowing things,” she said. “Do you believe in the soul?”
“In a form, yes, I think so. Do you?” I offered her my cigarette and she took it from my fingers like a hummingbird. I barely felt her touch.
I watched her take a breath, and the light breeze curled the smoke from her mouth to mine. I breathed it in, tasted it.
“Yes,” she said. “I believe in the soul. Not in a churchy way or anything like that, I just… I feel things… moods… people… not in my mind, but deeper, in my heart, or sometimes my stomach…” She took another drag. “I feel things, and I see things, and through them I feel like I know them… things that I paint… things that I sense…” She handed back my cigarette and watched me place it between my lips. “I guess I’m not making any sense.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “You’re making sense. Perfect abstract sense. You’re talking about intuition, and instinct, and that ethereal perception of the world us artists are often blessed with.” I smiled. “Or cursed. It depends how you look at it.”