Django and the Lady

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also

A long time ago a man and a woman grew old. They had done well for themselves, become moderately wealthy, enough to buy an old neglected house in a small backwater town which nobody visited. It was at the end of an avenue shaded by overhanging trees and where no one could find them unless they were invited. It was made of fine red brick and constructed sometime in the ninteenth century when such houses were built to last. There was an escutcheon on the wall with the heraldry long gone and the windows were set back with simple but elegant framing. On the blank windowless side of the house was a small glass-framed recess which might, at one time, have been a reliquary containing a statue or a devotional item but was now empty. 

The gardens overlooked the road below but were shaded and secluded by trees which stood like sentinels in front of the house. The man was a poet and a novelist and an academic of the old school who had accrued a moderate success, enough to buy the ramshackle house in the trees. The woman was a painter and sculptor whose work, along with her husband’s efforts, enabled them to buy their refuge. They were unworldly; the few friends they had, upon leaving their infrequent gatherings, would  affectionally joke that they were born in the wrong century, that they should have been gentry, or at least, those few fortunate souls who would never have to work for their living but could devote themselves to what they considered a higher purpose. They never had children, perhaps they couldn’t, or didn’t want the hiatus to disturb their quietness.

In their small cottage in Shingle Street in the county of Suffolk they wrote, painted strange pictures, sculpted strange sculptures, walked on the beach past the sinister lagoon, and held each other tight in the darkening night as the waves crashed on the foreshore. The woman had a special talent; she scupted small and perfectly spherical objects which held captured time. She couldn’t make them every day in her studio at the back of the house because the trance came seldom and when it did she shone golden. Her eyes rolled back into her skull, sightless, and yet her hands flew as she fashioned another ball of time

As they were preparing to move from cottage to town the man came back from his daily walk along the sullen beach, winds blowing from the German Sea, marram grass, late samphire, sea spray, shining on his shoes. He smiled at her as she made the tea then left his body behind. Soon after she moved to the town, kept the cottage with the fittings intact, took the spheres with her. On holidays, holy days, she crushes them in her hand and the sands of time run out and spill on the floor. Distant music sounds, a shadow passes, and she dances.

I know this to be true because I live in a flat fashioned from the old hall next door. Sometimes I see her shadow as she slowly passes the window on the upper floor. I have never seen her outside her door. A car occasionally arrives in the drive, overgrown with ivy, dandelions, comfrey, and bright columbine. In the autumn the leaves falling solemnly from the chestnut trees occlude the passage to the house. In the winter smoke curls in lazy arabesques from the chimney stack. Sometimes I hear strains of Django Reinhard’s three gypsy fingers plucking phantoms from the air as I pass the hall.  One day soon she will crush the last time sphere.

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Matthew 6:19-21 KJV