Ellie and The Harp-Maker by Hazel Prior

Author:Hazel Prior
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473562097
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

25

Dan

Ellie the Exmoor Housewife was wearing a woolly hat, green, when she came to the barn this morning. She took it off and her hair crackled with electricity and stuck out sideways. She ran her fingers through it and it calmed down a little and allowed itself to be tucked behind her ears.

‘Morning, Dan,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

I told her I was very well, thank you. I said this because it is what you are supposed to say, not because it was strictly accurate. If I had been strictly accurate I would have said my leg was full of grinding pain and my hands were numb. The numbness was due to the fact I had just come in from a frosty walk (or actually, a frosty limp) and I had collected twenty-three pebbles from the stream. The water of the stream is sparkly clean but ice-cold, not designed for finger-comfort. They were nice pebbles though. They were mottled, red-brown and silver-streaked, the colour of rainclouds, the colour of autumn sycamores, the colour of dolphins. Some smooth, some rough. Some flat, some rounded, some jagged. Each will be assessed in due course and viewed against different types of wood to see which ones will end up embedded as jewels in the bodies of harps. The others will just be used for admiring independently.

Ellie didn’t seem to appreciate them at all when I showed her. Neither did she go up the stairs to her harp, but instead she did her pacing, hovering, shuffling thing. I left the pebbles on the end of the workbench and started to plane a piece of apple wood for the Fifi harp.

Ellie stood by my shoulder. She lingered. And lingered. Seldom have I seen so much lingering. I stopped planing and turned to look at her. She opened and shut her mouth a couple of times. Eventually words started trickling out in a random monologue.

Roe Deer. She brought up the subject of Roe Deer. So I held up a hand to stop her and I told her Roe Deer was not my girlfriend any more. I wanted to be clear and I wanted Ellie to know the Truth of the Matter. (I like things to be clear, and I very much don’t like the fact that it took me so long to find out the Truth of the Matter myself.)

‘Oh!’ Ellie said on receiving this information. Her voice was stiff and fragile like a beech twig. ‘Oh.’ The corners of her mouth looked as if they couldn’t decide whether to go up or down. ‘So … so when did that happen?’

I told her that it had apparently happened five years ago but that Roe Deer had only informed me about it last week. Possibly, if I had not asked her about it, she would never have informed me at all. If Ellie had not requested confirmation on this matter, it would never have occurred to me to question it, but she had, so I did, so there we were.

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