Read In the Springtime of the Year for Free Online

covering each picture. They were tinted engravings, with all the fine details of feather-patterns and colours. They looked for a long time at the drawing of the hoopoe.
    ‘I mayn’t see one again,’ Jo said, ‘never in my life. They hardly ever come. But I did see it, that once. It’s not a thing you could forget.’
    Jo knew where there were kingfishers, too, in the stream that ran through the farthest edge of Rydal’s woods, he had taken her there, one hot, still afternoon and taught her how to move, without disturbing anything. The blue of their wings caught the sun, reflected off the surface of the bright water.
    ‘I don’t tell people where they are,’ Jo said, ‘I come here by myself.’
    ‘But you brought me.’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    ‘Aren’t you afraid I’d tell someone?’
    Jo looked away across the stream, to the far bank, where it sloped upwards, ‘Not you,’ he said, ‘You wouldn’t.’
    It had been the first secret between them, and Ruth had wanted to say something to thank him, but could not find the words. And that was three years ago, Jo had only been eleven, a small boy, his hair cut short as hay-stubble, and yet there had been even then this wisdom in him, and a confidence about the world.
    He finished the eggs, washed and dried the plate. Ruth stood beside the table. The memory of the walk home from the market, and of the last evening spent with Ben, lay like a beam of sunlight over the darker things in her mind. She felt oddly suspended, separate from the world. Time had stopped, at the moment in the garden when she had known about Ben’s dying. She could not imagine how it would begin again.
    Joe was touching the piece of crystal with the tips of his broad fingers.
    ‘Rose-quartz.’
    ‘Yes. I got it in Thefton. It was a present for Ben.’
    ‘There’s yellow quartz, like butter, you can find that, too, and white and blue. But blue’s rare.’
    Ben had said that Joe would know all about it.
    ‘It might get knocked off there. It would be damaged. You could put it up on the desk.’
    ‘No. I want it there.’
    Nothing must change, nothing. She realised that Ben might have died a day sooner and never seen the crystal, never known that she wanted him to have a gift. But it was all right.
    As soon as the range was hot, she went for a bath, pulling off her clothes in a frenzy, because she had been wearing them all the previous day and night, she felt unclean in them.
    When the hot water came up and over her body, she felt that she might melt, or else be carried a long distance away, on this gentle, buoyant tide, and that was what she would have liked; it soothed her to soap her arms and legs and stomach and rinse the skin. It was like being bathed by someone else, as a child.
    She thought, ‘As long as I lie here, as long as this water is all around me, nothing bad can come about.’
    She closed her eyes and saw colours behind the lids, limpid greens and blues, and then a light, pale and silvery as a star in the far distance. Her legs were weightless, floating on the water. Perhaps this was drowning, and if it was, she would welcome it, there would be no fear or pain, no struggle. She was aware of Ben, very near to her, and he was frowning slightly, not angry, but puzzled. She tried to stretch a hand out to touch his face but he moved away, just out of reach. It did not alarm her, she was content to lie here in the water forever, to wait for him.
    ‘Ruth…’
    The voice came from somewhere else.
    ‘Ruth.’
    And then a tapping on the door. She opened her eyes, and could not think who it might be. Nobody must come here.
    ‘Can’t you hear me? Are you all right? Ruth?’
    Jo.
    The water had gone quite cold, with a cloudy scum filming the surface. The skin of her fingers was white and crinkled.
    ‘I’m all right.’
    ‘I’m just going to take some water to the donkey.’
    She had forgotten the donkey’s existence.
    She got out of the bath, fully awake now, and cold. The white walls