My Former Heart

‘Well, thank you,’ said Iris, smiling.

‘If you care to examine the specimens, you will note that there are several types of iris among them,’ Michael went on, as if he were a teacher and Iris his pupil.

‘Really? I wouldn’t have known. I only know the blue kind that you get in England. Oh, and those rather ugly tall brownish ones with yellow bits. I never care for them much; they look like dead leaves.’

‘These are Mediterranean ones. And wild. They’re quite different.’

‘This looks like a cornflower.’

‘Good girl! It is a close relative, yes. And this one is of course a kind of daisy.’

Iris held the flowers to her nose, inhaling their trace of scent, not floral as much as like hay and blackberries: the smell of faraway English fields in autumn.

Back in the car Michael leant forward from the back seat, telling them things. He said that one of the gorges leading down to the coast was where Adonis had lived, by the source of the river which bore his name. This was where the story of Venus and Adonis came from.

‘It’s terribly romantic, don’t you think?’ he asked Iris, his nose level with her ear so that she could feel his breath, slightly damp, tickling her neck just below her ear lobe. Iris smiled and carried on looking straight ahead.

They stopped at the crusader castle and clambered up, disturbing flicking lizards and fat black beetles as they climbed. The mossy walls were covered in honeysuckle, the honeysuckle busy with sparrows.

‘What will you do when the war’s over?’ Digby asked her, the first question he’d put to her all day.

‘I don’t know. Go home, I s’pose. Carry on as before.’ She was aware of how ungracious she sounded, but a sudden lurch of feeling made her monosyllabic: even as she spoke the words, she knew that she would not be able to continue with her old life. The idea of that life filled her now with panic. There was nothing terrible about it, it was pleasant enough: she had a kind husband, a comfortable house, a child. But to Iris it all felt terribly wrong, as if she’d caught the wrong train and was now speeding, unstoppably, towards a destination miles and miles away from where she was meant to be. She could feel the colour coming to her cheeks and hoped her companions would not notice her blushing. ‘What about you?’ she said.

‘I’d like to travel. I’ve met some super fellows from New Zealand. Might go there for a time, see if I can help out at a hospital.’

‘Nonsense!’ Michael interjected. ‘I know you, Digby. You’ll be tucked up safe and sound up north, same as ever. It’ll be a local practice: elderly ladies in narrow-brimmed hats with varicose veins, farmers with bunions. Anything for a quiet life.’

Digby grinned. ‘We’ll see.’

After the picnic she barely saw Digby for days. Two hundred Greeks arrived at the school, as well as a detachment from the SBS. The doctors had plenty to do, giving them all the once-over before they were sent out to train in the snow, and there was a lot of paperwork for Iris. When Digby appeared at the door of the room she used as an office, to ask whether she’d like to make up a four at bridge after dinner that night, she felt inordinately pleased to see him, as if they’d known one another for years. There was something very endearing about him, she found: his almost absurd height and the prominent bone in the bridge of his nose made him resemble a rather solemn wading bird. She liked his voice and his rather shy sidelong smile. She was fond of Jimmy, but he was always so busy and caught up with running things and anyway he was really from Edward’s past life more than hers. It was nice to find a new friend. This was the first time Iris had made a friend of a man: although she knew men, and liked them, they were generally friends of her husband’s or the husbands of her friends. Or else they hadn’t been friends but boyfriends, which was quite a different thing. Digby was the first man she’d ever made friends with on her own account. Most evenings after that they played cards, and when they had days or afternoons off they went down to the sea somewhere or to a café in a town. Occasionally Michael joined them, reminding Iris what it was like to be flirted with.

‘Has anyone ever told you what marvellous eyes you have?’ Michael asked her, one afternoon.

‘Now, what would you think?’ she said.

‘I think yes. But I bet no one’s told you what colour they are.’

‘No?’ She smiled.

‘Aventurine.’ He looked very pleased with himself, as if he’d produced a winning hand at cards.

‘But that’s cheating!’ exclaimed Iris. ‘I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what it looks like.’

‘It looks like your eyes is the thing. It’s tawny-coloured glass, with flecks of gold in it.’

‘Sounds lovely.’

‘It is. You are.’

Iris blushed.

As the spring went on, the snow around the Cedars began to shrink back, exposing ever wider strips of bare, rocky ground. The school was to remain open for the early part of the summer at least, training men in other aspects of mountain warfare, such as rock climbing. One morning, when Iris was at her desk, Digby came in without knocking.

‘Quick! You absolutely must come at once!’ he told her.

She stood up, flustered.

‘Where? What’s happened?’

‘It’s nothing to worry about. Not anything like that, but you must come. Outside. Quickly.’

She followed him along the corridor, out into the courtyard and round the side of the building to a spot where they could see straight down the valley, which sloped away towards the sea. There were already a number of people standing about, looking. And then Iris saw what they were staring at: below them, suspended in the air, hung a great dark cloud which writhed and tumbled in the cool air.

‘Look,’ said Digby, pointing.

‘Goodness!’ said Iris. ‘What on earth is it? Not locusts surely?’

‘If it’s a swarm of bees we might be well advised to get out of the line of fire,’ someone said.

‘They’re too big to be bees.’

‘You don’t think they’re bats, do you?’

‘I hope not.’

‘Are they wee birds?’ someone asked.

‘They must be,’ someone else said.

Everyone stood still as the cloud danced closer and closer, until it was possible to discern individual shapes among its mass. Spots of colour on their wings flashed as they caught the sunlight; others were only white, fluttering upward like handkerchiefs blown from a washing line, caught in a current of air.

‘Butterflies!’ Iris laughed, delighted.

There must have been hundreds of thousands of them, some flying only a few inches above the ground, others as high as a three-storey house. They flew up onto the plateau and then on, up towards the pass. It was as if some invisible dam had burst, and the butterflies were flooding the sky in a swollen river of flight. Almost as remarkable as the sight of them was the silence: they moved as soundlessly as a great shoal of fish. By and by, everyone in the building came out to look. Some of the men were holding out their hats, catching the butterflies in them as easily as if they had been shrimping nets, dangled in a shallow rock pool. Iris put her arm through Digby’s and they stood looking together.

The butterflies kept coming for two days. Everyone talked of little else. Teams who ventured up towards the col said the upper slopes were littered with dead butterflies, their wings darkening as they blotted the moisture from the ever-retreating snow. Iris and Digby collected several from the ground in the courtyard and put them in cigarette boxes, to take to Michael. He’d be able to identify them, they were sure.

‘You don’t mind, do you, the way Michael goes on?’ Digby asked her, as they drove down to the coast, a week after the butterflies had stopped, with the specimens on the back seat. ‘I mean, you don’t find it tiresome the way he …?’

‘Heavens, no,’ said Iris. ‘It’s all quite good-natured. Anyway, he’s amusing.’

‘But you’re not …’

‘Oh no. Absolutely not.’

‘Because of your husband?’ asked Digby. It was the first time in their friendship that he had mentioned her marriage.

‘Not actually.’ Confiding didn’t come readily to Iris; she preferred to live than to talk, but she felt she could trust Digby, that there was an understanding between them.