Love on the Edge Pt. 02

A year had passed.

Alec looked up hard at the quarry wall then down to his canvas. Something wasn't quite right 'And,' he thought, 'anything which isn't quite right in painting makes the whole thing wrong.'

Usually he could see straight away what needed to be changed. Today he couldn't. It was as though the essential wrongness lay not in any detail or mark but, instead, it pervaded the canvas. He stared at the scene in front of him, the dark pool which stretched from his feet to the rock wall. The shadows where water met wall were so dense he sensed rather than saw the transition point from horizontal to vertical. He looked back at his painting and thought, 'At least I've got that right.' On the canvas he had managed somehow, he wasn't sure by what means, to suggest one plane meeting the other.

'So what the hell is wrong?' he said aloud.

He had noticed from the moment he set up his easel that the rock face projected a slight echo. 'Ong,' it said.

'Not "ong", "wrong",' he shouted and then felt foolish as a slight tremor ran through the air about him, whispering, 'Ong, ong...'

On the edge of his vision he thought he saw not a movement exactly, more a reconfiguration of some kind, in the bushes on top of the cliff. He looked sharply upwards to where the brow of the quarry met the trees and scrub which fringed it like green, spiky hair. Two or three times he had felt a presence, as of someone watching him, but when he looked there was no one there.

'I've had enough of this,' he thought. 'I'll try again tomorrow or perhaps I'll give this one up as a bad job and go somewhere else.'

When he got home Mike was still not back from market where he was selling some cattle. Alec saw that Mrs Mundy, Mike's housekeeper, had left a steak and kidney pie for them to heat up and that she had prepared the vegetables, so they would just need to put a light under them and place the pie in the oven. They would follow the pie with cheese and fruit as usual.

Alec showered and started on the transformation which usually gave him so much pleasure. Today, however, the disquiet he had felt in the old quarry spoiled his mood and he worked almost negligently at becoming his husband's wife. He shaved and moisturised and began to change Alec into Anna. She enclosed her clitie in a wisp of silk, pulled on her stockings and attached them to the garter belt her husband liked so much, fastened her bra and applied her make up. She was brushing her hair to fall softly about her face when Mike walked into their bedroom. He smelt of the outdoors and Anna leant back onto the massive column of his thighs and torso as he covered her breasts with his large hands and kissed the top of her head.

'How's my sexy wife been today?' he asked as he slid his hands inside her bra and tweaked her nipples.

'Ouch,'

'Sorry, sweetheart, couldn't resist,' he murmured as his hands travelled southwards into her panties and she automatically opened her legs to him.

Anna stood and turned towards her husband. She unbuttoned his shirt and ran her fingers through the mat of hair which covered his abs and pecs. She bit his left nipple and he swore quietly as he picked her up and laid her on their bed. They were now adept at removing each other's clothes and soon they were naked and Mike was pounding into his wife's cunt, sending her into paroxysms of delight as his mighty cock brushed back and forth against her prostate. Anna's back arched and she shot her milk across her husband's heaving stomach as he came in gust after gust into her womb.

Later Anna sat again at her dressing table whilst Mike showered and changed. They heated up their meal and Anna asked after Mike's day at market. Sales had started slowly but heated up by the time it came for their cattle to be auctioned and most had made a good price. They had arrived at desert when Mike asked, 'What's wrong, love? Something is. You know I can always tell.'

Anna looked lovingly at her massive hunk of a husband. 'I feel a fool telling you. It all seems so trivial now we're here together.'

Mike took her hand, turned it over and kissed her palm. 'Nothing is trivial which worries my little girl, 'he said. 'Tell me, please.'

She retailed to him how she had gone to the quarry, wanting to paint the rock formations and the pool which had formed to fill the old workings below. She told him of her unease and the sense she had of being watched from the fringe of trees high above and of her dissatisfaction with the work she had produced.

'The thing which really annoys me is that I can't tell what's wrong. I usually know, even when there's nothing I can do about it and just have to give up and start again.'

'You say you sensed someone watching from the trees?'

'Yes, but there couldn't have been. There's no reason why anyone shouldn't watch me painting if they want to, though I'd prefer they didn't. So I must be imagining it. I hope I'm not becoming one of those tiresome people who think they're so interesting everybody wants to know their every move.'

Mike laughed. 'No fear of that. If anything you're too unaware of your own importance.'

He became serious. 'Would you let me see the painting?'

'Of course. I've put it in the studio.'

They walked across the yard and into the new studio which Mike had created for her from a disused outhouse. The canvas stood on its easel, starting the long process of drying needed by oil paint. They stood looking at the picture in silence for a moment or two.

Anna said, 'I think I'll have to scrape it off and start again.'

'That would be a pity,' said Mike. He gestured to the centre of the picture. 'You've caught the raking light on the planes of the stone-face beautifully.'

'But do you see my problem? It lacks focus. Is there something missing which ought to be there or,' she shuddered slightly and asked shame-facedly, 'Is there something there which I can't see and which shouldn't be there?'

Mike wrapped his arms around her from behind and kissed her neck.

'I'll make you a cup of coffee and we'll sit and talk about it,' he said.

They walked back through the kitchen, where Mike made the coffee, then took it into the big, shabby sitting room with the wonderful paintings. They sat either side of the hearth, where they kindled a small log fire, more for the companionship of the flames than from any need for heat.

'Drink your coffee and I'll tell you a story of sorts, 'said Mike. 'Would you call me a fanciful man?'

Anna smiled and said, 'I'm sure you have as much imagination as the next chap but, no, if by fanciful you mean neurotic.'

'I know I'm not neurotic and I don't think I'm fey,'

Anna bust out laughing. 'Fey, you?' she said. 'Never, what makes you ask?'

'Just wanted to be sure. Then perhaps you'll believe me when I tell you that people avoid the quarry and the wood above it. They think there is something there which hates man. So far as I know, and I would know, no one has ever seen anything but many have felt its presence.'

Anna started to laugh again but stopped. She could see that her dear, down-to-earth Mike was deadly serious.

'I think they are wrong. It is not inimical to man; it just doesn't privilege us at all and we're not used to that. Think of all the gods we've invented to pray to. Historically we seem to have needed to believe we are so important that God or Nature or whatever we call the creating spirit is interested in our little concerns. I think that, to whatever really inhabits nature, we have made ourselves an irrelevance and it shuns us, except when we harm it or, on rare occasions, when one of us is astonished to realise we are simply part of it. I call it the spirit of the wood and I have lived beside it all my life.

When I was a child the village children never entered the wood. Their parents and their grandparents likewise. It is on our land but it doesn't belong to us. We are stewards of it but at a greater remove from it than we stand as stewards of the fields and meadows. The wood which begins at our back door is one of only a few remnants of the ancient forest which, five thousand years ago, covered the land. Most woods hereabouts are plantations made in the last five hundred years. They are children compared with the ancient wood. We are learning all the time about the complexity with which trees interconnect and ferry information to one another underground. Is it strange that over millennia whole ecosystems should have developed a personality and a common awareness?

'When I was eight years old I decided to explore the wood. I walked in and was immediately struck by the silence. No bird sang. I felt that I should not make a sound either and I almost tiptoed. I found myself in an enfilade of beech trees. Their dead leaves of many years lay thick on the ground and nothing grew beneath them. It was spring and the canopy was full of bright, pale green light but where I walked, below, the mood was sombre. I could feel no movement of the air but I became aware of a slight suspiration as though the wood were breathing. I wasn't frightened. I found my breathing keeping time, inadvertently, with the breathing I sensed about me and I experienced an overwhelming sense of the oneness of all things.

'Suddenly I reached the lip of the quarry. I looked down at the black water far below and I felt a deep and abiding anger well up from the earth against the hands which had torn out the land's entrails to build our walls and houses and which had felled the forest to grow our corn and feed our cattle. My eyes were drawn to my right and I could swear that the wood looked back at me. The only way I can describe what I felt then is to say that the wood's anger surrounded me but, after a moment of panic, I realised that it was not directed at me. The wood had accepted me.

'I rarely go into the trees, except to make sure that the wood is healthy. The wood seems to know that I am not a threat but I do not trespass on my welcome.'

Anna sat looking at this man she thought she knew and felt ashamed that she had presumed that, because they adored each other, everything about him was apparent to her. She knelt before him, rested her hands on his knees and said, 'Forgive me.'

Mike looked shocked. 'What for? My darling girl. Would you like us to go into the wood together? It might even help with the picture.'

'Would you take me?'

'Anytime,' he said mischievously and she giggled contentedly as he proceeded to do so.

The following morning Mike and Alec walked over the narrow strip of grass which separated the house from the wood. As they passed the outer line of trees they entered a silent world. Farm noises hardly penetrated here and there was a complete absence of the sounds of birds or beasts. Mike took Alec's hand and Alec squeezed it in return, glad of the human contact. Soon they found themselves among the great beech trees. The lack of sound here became oppressive. There was not even the hum of insects you would expect in the August heat. A leaf fluttering down from the canopy was a startling event. Alec began to feel he was intruding where he had no business to be and was about to suggest they go back when just the hint of a breeze found its way between the trees and the atmosphere lightened.

'It accepts you,' whispered Mike. 'Do you feel it.'

'Yes,' murmured Alec. 'It's wonderful.'

Their hearts sang in the silence as they walked forward, still hand in hand.

When they reached the edge of the quarry even the black pool fifty feet below them seemed less dark and then, somewhere far above them but out of sight, a skylark sang.

When Alec returned, later that day, to the quarry with his canvas, the composition seemed to paint itself. He called the work 'The Spirit of Place'.

...

That night Mike lay asleep. Anna rested her head on her husband's left breast; her arm was thrown over the broad expanse of his chest and her fingers brushed against his magnificent bicep. He half woke and smiled. He opened his eyes and looked down at the love of his life cradled in the crook of his arm and he moved slightly to be able to slide his hand down the crack between her buttocks and lightly touch her pucker. She raised her head so that they could kiss, then took his balls in her hand. His cock started to rise and she descended lower to take him between her lips. Slowly, but gathering speed, she massaged his cock until he pulled from her, turned her over with one practiced movement and rammed his cock into her waiting cunt. She gasped with delight and responded to his thrusts by impaling herself on the glorious hardness of his fuck pole. The surge of his baby batter took them both by surprise. Mike yelled his triumph and Anna wept with joy at the entirety with which her husband took possession of her. They lay entwined, his cock still held tight in her womb, until they fell asleep.

Pale moonlight flooded the meadows and the horse-chestnut trees cast long shadows over the grass. The house stood defined softly as though submerged under liquid light. The woods lay sombre below a shell of moon-glow on the tree tops.

Somewhere out in the dark a fox barked. Mike and Anna slept on. Then very softly there came to them in their dreaming the call of an owl close by the house, followed by his mate's reply from deep in the trees, where no birds had been during the day, and it was as if the owls were acknowledging them as fellow visitors to a wood which was simultaneously enchanted and real. Anna moved slightly and Mike's arm tightened protectively about his wife. In their sleep they smiled.