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what? I said but a couple of community police officers were strolling up the street towards us and she was busy tucking away her sprigs of
heather into her many coat pockets, in fact it looked like her coat was more pocket than coat.
    Give it a few hours of sun every day if you can, she called back over her shoulder as she went, stay well hydrated and just occasionally you’ll need to add some good well-rotted manure and cut yourself back hard, but always cut on the slant, my lovely. All the best, now.
    What did you say it was, again? I called.
    But she was well gone; it wasn’t until a bit later when I chanced to be whiling away an early spring afternoon wandering around in the park that I saw what I was looking for and found the right words for it. Meanwhile the letters from the clinics arrived, the first, then another, then another, then another, and as they came through the letterbox I piled them unopened on the hall table. Meanwhile the pairs of little stubby antlers grew and greened and notched themselves then split and grew again, long and slender, as high as my eyes, so that putting on a jumper took ten very careful minutes and I began to do a lot of improvisation with cardigans and V-neck vest-tops. There were elegant single buds at the ends of thin lone stems closed tight on themselves, and a large number of clustered tight-shut buds on some of the stronger thicker branches. My phone went off in my pocket and as I reached in, took it out, pressed Answer, arched my arm past the worst of the thorns and got the phone to my ear
pretty much unscratched, the whole rich tangled mass of me swung and shifted and shivered every serrated edge of its hundreds and hundreds of perfect green new leaves.
    Hello, a cheery voice said. I’m just doing a follow-up call after your visit and your tests earlier this month, so if you could just let us know whether there’ve been any changes or developments in your condition.
    Yes, I said, a very important development, I know what it is now, it’s called a Young Lycidas, it’s a David Austin variety, very hardy, good repeater, strong in fragrance, quite a recent breed, I was in Regent’s Park a couple of days ago and I saw it there, exactly the same specimen, I wrote down what the label said and when I got home I looked it up, apparently they named it only a couple of years ago after the hero of Milton’s elegy about the shepherd who’s a tremendous musician but who gets drowned at sea at a tragically young age.
    Em –, the voice said.
    Then there was a pause.
    The other thing about Milton, I said, is that he was a great maker-up of words, and one of the reasons they named a rose after him, not just because it was an anniversary of his birth or death, I can’t remember which, in 2008, is that he’s actually the person who invented, just made up, out of nothing, the word fragrance. Well, not out of
nothing, from a Latin root, but you know what I mean.
    I waited but nobody spoke, so I went on.
    And gloom, I said. And lovelorn, and even the word padlock we wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for him just making it up. I wonder what we’d call padlocks if we didn’t call them padlocks.
    Then the voice began saying something serious-sounding about something. But I wasn’t listening, I had seen a bird above the green of me, a swift, I saw it soar high in the air with its wings arched and I remembered as if I were actually seeing it happen again in front of my eyes something from back when we were first married, on holiday in Greece having breakfast one morning in our hotel.
    It’s a warm windy morning, it must be very windy because the force of the wind has grounded a swift, the kind of bird that’s never supposed to land, a young one, still small. In a moment you’re up on your feet, you drop your knife against your plate, cross the courtyard and scoop the bird up in both hands; it struggles back against you and a couple of times nearly wings itself free, but you cup it gently back