The Woman in the Garden
"A woman is walking in the garden. Clematis scrambles over the gate. She follows the path around the edge of the lawn, deep in thought, a small figure below the wall. She is carrying an alabaster box. A late rose hangs from an archway. From time to time she stops, looking at something that catches her attention: hellebore in flower, a wren hopping into the undergrowth, a puddle left by night rain. From somewhere the words of St Augustine had come into her mind: my questioning of the Heavens and the Earth is my thought, and their answer is their beauty.
It’s early in the morning on the first day of the week. She has just come from the grave. He has gone, he has been taken from her, from them all. A page has been brutally torn from the book of her life, mutilating it. A raindrop hangs from the tip of a sycamore leaf, ready to fall. She remembers the look in his dying eyes, of resignation, of grief beyond words, of desolation. The grey lips, the swollen eyelids, the cold skin. The mangled feet blue with death, ripped skin, exposed sinews, raw muscle, the blood, the blood. The spilling of love, so beautiful and so pure, the love he taught her, mocked by the learned people who sneered that such beauty is an ornament of a bourgeois mentality. They, the clever who have forgotten how to love, dare not believe in beauty because its naked truth demands too much courage. They are afraid, because love and beauty demand surrender, and to surrender you must be brave enough to give up everything you thought you had. The beauty of the unwashed corpse, lying alone in the tomb, thin and caked in blood, had moved and possessed her. All she could think to do was to dress the wounded feet with the ointment she had brought with her, and to wipe them tenderly with her hair, mixed with her tears...."