an eighty fourth story...'snakes'

The sound of children’s voices trilled up the valley.  Somewhere below the veranda where Josephine lay they were at play, splashing around in the old swimming pool, or charging in and out of the almond groves.  It was hard to tell, it didn’t matter.

Josephine readjusted her position on the recliner to avoid the direct glare of the late afternoon sun.  A lizard scurried over the hot paving stones and into a crack in the wall of the farmhouse behind.  Josephine could hear her husband tinkering on the upright piano through the open shutters in the living room.  The piano was out of tune, again it didn’t matter. 

‘Stop it!’, ‘Stop it!’ - the children once more.  And there followed a gush of giddy laughter.  Josephine smiled to herself, the sun nourishing the oils in her skin, and the weight of the last year beginning to lift from her slender shoulders.  Her husband was now playing ‘Chopsticks’ – badly – and Josephine began to laugh too, and presently her whole body was convulsing with unfettered joy, joy at being alive, joy at coming back to life.  It was working, this holiday, as her husband had promised, as the doctor had said.

Out here among the olive and almond groves, the eucalyptus trees and Mediterranean pines, out here where the sky was big and blue, and the sun warm and high, out here where the only sounds were Josephine’s children at play, and her husband tunelessly unwinding, the crickets chirping, and the occasional drone of a light aircraft, there was a natural sense things would get better.  For too long Josephine had been wearing the inside out.

On the farm, surroundings were so vivid one could not fail to be absorbed.  The sun soothed, the scent of the flora and fauna delighted, the trill of her children laughing, and her husband’s piano playing charmed.  Josephine had felt peace slowly descend since their arrival a fortnight ago.  Everything was so inviting she found she was able to forget London: the cold steel and stone, the cold people, hurrying selfish, the cold winds blowing through the hard streets, tunneling down the underground, and the tube, claustrophobic and angry.  Not to mention the round, stern face of her unsmiling, uncompromising editor.

Josephine stopped laughing and sighed.  An enormous wave of relief washed over her at the knowledge she would never have to set on eyes on that man again, except maybe in the next world.  She had always held that it takes strength to be gentle and kind, and yet so many men and women of influence seemed to possess so very little of it.  She had learned life is full of people who try and bring one down, but also that she was born to walk upright, and Josephine promised herself then and there she would do so from now on, for her children, for her husband, for her health. You’re a fighter she told herself, and a champ, the late afternoon sun on her back.

It had been wonderful to be able to bring the dogs too, and both of them were stretched out, asleep, twitching with the chase in their dreams, loyal to a fault on the veranda with Josephine.  Looking down the valley, the Mediterranean gleamed in the distance some ten miles away, beyond the jumble of red roofs and white hotels congregating along the shore.  They had walked on the beach on their second evening, and her husband had held her hand and pressed tight, as if to say things are going to be alright.

‘The mind rules the body’, Josephine’s doctor had told her back in the immaculate little consultation room of his Harley street practice, in an effort to motivate her to think more positively.  Wear long sleeves and the bruises won’t show thought Josephine.  But life had continued to beat her, until at last her exasperated husband had decided to take her out of it all.

When Josephine was a child, the south of France had been her playground, holidays were there each summer.  It was the obvious place to retreat and alleviate the pressure of London living, a place she romanticised about, a place she felt was her spiritual home, where the ever so small voice of calm could be heard and heeded, a refuge where she could rediscover the child within – the tough, fun-loving, innocent creature, who still lurked inside her, albeit cowed by the brashness and cruelty of adult life.

Josephine’s husband in his own strange way had been true, and patient; her children, she decided it were best not to let know.  Life, she remembered, up to a certain age seemed endless, full of wonder and possibility – why introduce her little ones to the real world before time?  She knew her children would find out about the glass in the grass, the bad seed, sooner, or (she hoped) later, or indeed never.  For now, however, the farm was their Eden, and as yet there were no snakes in the scrub.