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Meeting
Demelza
by
Winston
Graham
(Copyright: https://www.scryfa.com/ )
As she came near I doubted my
eyesight, but the recognition was mutual. She was wearing a simple dimity dress
of pale blue with a darker blue silk sash and a light cotton headscarf matching
the sash.
“Demelza!” I exclaimed. “Is it...this is
strangely met.”
“I live here,” she said simply.
“So do I,” I said. “At least in...”
I was going to say “in spirit” but thought that under the circumstances this
might not be appropriate.
“Well,” she said, “you did ought to
know. You created me.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “At least, in a
way.”
“You are not quite like I
expected,” she said.
We stood there for a long time,
smiling at each other, eye searching eye, in mutual recognition of a strange
bond. I felt an extraordinary moving intimacy with this woman whom I had never
met before. I felt as if I could understand her closest feelings, even her most
personal bodily secretions, the stirring of her spirit within her, as well as I
ever had my own.
At length she said: “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you create me?”
“It’s a bit of a mystery. What I do
know is that I created you out of love, as all children should be created. And
I created you out of ambition, because I wanted you to be exceptional, unique,
successful, as all parents want their children to be.”
“And do you think I have been?”
“Successful? Surely.”
“You called me this strange name.”
“Demelza? Yes. You were half alive
already as a starveling brat at Redruth Fair, but I had no name. Nothing I
could think of would suit you. You were a wilful child even then. Then one day,
driving to London across the Goss Moor just past Roche Rock, I saw an ancient
signpost marked Demelza. I knew instantly that was it.”
“There are others called that now,”
she said. “Across a beach you will hear the name called, and they are not
calling for me.”
I thought there was a shade of
reproach in her voice and then I saw her smile.
“Well, you were the first.”
“But where did the name come from?
What does it mean?”
“I know no Cornish, but a student
of the language said the ‘de’ meant ‘thy’ or ‘the’, the ‘melza’ comes from the
same root as the French word ‘miel’ meaning ‘honey’.”
“The honey,” she said. “That sounds
a small matter odd.”
“I prefer to think of it as ‘Thy
Sweetness’. D’you mind?”
“That’s nicer...but that is just
the same, like. Where did I come from? Folks say that you copied me from your
wife.”
“Not at all. Not at all. Some
characteristics, yes...her vitality, her resilience, her warmth that made so
many people care for her, her ability always, always to find pleasure in small
things, perhaps most particularly her gamin wit. But she was not at all like
you in appearance or any other way.”
“Or that lovely girl who played me
on television?”
I was startled that she was so
up-to-date.
“No, not she either. You are dark,
she is fair. She is small, you are tall.”
“Not tall.”
“Well, taller. She created
something slightly different, something of her own. Cezanne said once that he
did not reproduce nature, he represented it. The Welsh girl represented the
Cornish girl and delighted millions.”
“Who is Cezanne? Is he a
Cornishman?”
“No, a Frenchman. Or was.”
“And the rest of me? Where did all
that come from? You must know.”
“I don’t – except that you began as
I have told you, and presently you were made flesh.”
“That sounds irreligious.”
“Not meant to be.”
I looked at her again. She was
stirring the sandy pathway with one foot. A wisp of dark hair was blowing
across her cheek.
“Where do you live?”
“Just over the hill.”
“May I come home with you?”
“I’d like you to.”
She took my hand. Her fingers were
slim but strong. We began to walk.
“’Tis queer,” she said. “You have
covered little more than thirty-five years of my life but that has taken –
what? – mebbe fifty-six years of yours. How is that?”
“I have to live in a temporal
world. When I die...”
“Shall I die too?”
“It depends. On other people.”
“But I shall not be able to grow
older.”
“That depends. It...” I hesitated.
“It is all a mystery, my dearest. I don’t understand these things. I am only
mortal.”
We began to walk, hand in hand.
“All these years,” she said. “How
have you known what I should do, what I say?”
“That’s part of the mystery. I
almost instantly know in any given situation what you are going to say next.”
“D’you know what I am going to say
now?”
“No.”
“There you are, then.”
“What are you going to say?”
“That I wish I had created you.”
This was certainly unexpected.
“Whatever for?”
“So that I could have got my own
back.”
We both laughed.
“Would I have been safe in your
hands?”
“Can’t promise.”
“Well,” I said judiciously.
“Perhaps I wouldn’t have minded.”
With the setting sun a sickle moon
could be seen riding high in the sky.
“I have minded,” she said.
“Sometimes.”
“When?”
“I minded badly over Julia and
Jeremy.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Have you any children?”
“Two.”
“Have you lost any?”
“No.”
“Well, then...how did you know how
it felt?”
“Perhaps I did not?”
“You seemed to.”
There was a good deal of feeling in
her voice, so I thought to change the subject.
“How is Ross?”
“Ross? Quite well. He should be at
home, just over this next rise.”
Gulls were circulating in the
fading sky. There was a remoteness about the land.
She said: “He complains that
breakfast comes round too quickly every day.”
I laughed. “I know the feeling.”
“Where did he come from?”
“Ross? Rather in the same way as
yourself. I took much of his appearance from an airman I met during the war.
Even to the partly-healed scar.”
“And his name?”
“I had a valued friend called
Polgreen, who died young. I chose to use that name, which is quite unusual in
Cornwall, but after a while it seemed to me that ‘Polgreen’ was a thought too
gentle for the man I was depicting. So I changed the ‘green’ to ‘dark’.”
“You made the name?”
“Yes.”
“So no one else is free to use
that?”
“There’s no copyright in a name.”
“What is copyright?”
“No matter. Demelza?”
“Yes?”
“Are you a dream?”
She smiled. “I don’t know. Maybe
you are as well.”
We climbed the winding lane
together. Darkness followed us up the hill.
“So you knew no more of Ross than
that?”
“No more than that...What is that
smoke?”
“From the chimneys of Nampara.”
“It looks like smoke from the Wheal
Grace.”
“No. They’re only cooking a meal.”
“Shall I be welcome?”
“Of course.”
“So,” I stammered, “if I come down
with you I shall meet many of my old friends.”
“Creations,” she corrected. “And
some of them, I s’pose, may have a complaint or two to make.”
“Against me?”
“Well, Jud will, anyway.”
I laughed. “He’s still there?”
“Just.”
“But you,” I said, “you have no
complaint against me?”
“Not if you look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you love me.”
“I think I do,” I said, and then
stopped. “Of course technically it is the gravest error. A writer should never
get so close to his characters – not so close as that. He has to be both
attracted and detached.”
“I don’t understand that,” she
said.
We came not so much to the brow of
a hill as a turn in the pathway. Below us, half a mile away, was a house. I
recognised it at once. Two-storeyed, it straggled, L-shaped, built of grey
stone, mostly roofed in heavy Delabole slate, but a few bits at the back still
thatched. It crouched a little, being so near the sea. A stream ran down beside
it. A walled garden had been built in the shelter of the L.
I said: “How are your hollyhocks?”
“Better this year. They had
something wrong with them last year. Dwight called it rust.”
I sighed. “Is that Ross just going
into the house?”
“Yes.”
“I am afraid.”
“Do not be.”
I turned to look up the valley to
see if Wheal Grace was still working, and she took her hand out of mine.
I blinked. In spite of the moon it
was becoming very dark. I looked back, and in place of the house there was only
some may trees, a pond, and the bubbling stream.
“It is very dark,” I said to her.
“We’ll have to go careful because of the rough ground.”
She did not reply. I looked round
and she was not there. Where she had been were waving grasses and some bracken
and hart’s-tongue fern.
I was suddenly very lonely. But the pressure of her hand in mine, the pressure of her fingers, was still warm.
On the gathering night
From the faint harmony of an errant
dream
I woke and found the moon’s quiet
light
Quiet in the gathering night
Echoing its theme.
Then in the early dawn
Sadness was mine and the desire to
stay
Lest the rich theme so young new
born
Fading in early dawn
Wither away.
Now in the clamourous noon
Nothing is left me but an empty
husk
Yet do I wait and hope for soon
Gone is the clamourous noon
Welcome the dusk.
