Elizabeth Guilt reads and writes stories to make her daily commute on the London Underground in the United Kingdom more enjoyable. She has fiction published, or upcoming, in Luna Station Quarterly, Straylight Literary Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. She can be found on www.elizabethguilt.com and on Twitter @elizabethguilt.

 

 

“I can’t believe how warm it still is.”

“No, must be that global warming they’re always on about.”

They roll me backwards and forwards between them, smoothing the new sheets onto the bed with a practised lack of attention.

“The seasons are all over the place. When is autumn supposed to start, anyway?”

The September equinox. It fell on September 23rd this year.

My voice comes out as the faintest wisp of sound and the uniformed nurse looks as surprised as if the pillows had tried to join in the conversation.

“What was that, Mr Peters?”

The equinox. The 23rd.

Even I can barely hear my words.

“I’m sure that’ll be lovely,” she says loudly, patting my shoulder. They tuck in the final sheet corner and bustle on.

I gaze out of the window, where the trees are dancing their green-gold leaves against a cloudless sky. The window is shut, but I can imagine the dry and rustling chatter of the branches.

 

* * *

 

I can still hear the deep, hearty crunch of the drifts of leaves I waded through as a child. Golds, reds, browns; I loved the colours of autumn. The gorgeous, glowing scarlet of the acer tree in the churchyard and the shining gloss of a conker newly popped from its shell. I came home with my pockets stuffed with leaves and horse chestnuts, and was soundly scolded by my mother.

“Why are you bringing those dirty things into the house? Look at the mess!”

I gazed dismayed at the crumbs and crackles of dead leaves that lay around my feet on the pale grey rug.

“Get back outside and put all that rubbish where it belongs!”

I trooped dutifully into the garden, heading behind the trees to the compost heap where the gardener threw the grass clippings, windfall apples and raked leaves. I emptied my pockets, stroking my fingers over the fiery colours and trying to ignore the heart-breaking wrench of throwing such beauty away.

The three biggest, shiniest, newest conkers I hid in various pockets and resolutely turned my back on the neat row that now lined the edge of the compost heap. My mother shook her head as I slunk into the house.

I smuggled the conkers up to my room, and in bed that night I took them out to gloat over them. By then they were already beginning to dull, and by morning they were simply the pleasant brown of the table in the dining room downstairs.

I never tried to bring autumn home with me again, but each year I roamed through the woods, rustling through the giant piles of leaves and glorying in the colours. I could never resist picking up conkers, cracking them damply out of their spiny shells. I took beeswax polish from the kitchen, and varnish from the tool shed and even my mother’s face cream from the bathroom cabinet, but nothing could preserve their beautiful sheen.

 

* * *

 

“Come on, Mr Peters, nearly finished.”

She lifts the spoon up to my mouth, tilting in the soup. Carrot soup, I think, though I can’t be sure.

She follows my gaze out of the window, where the sun is setting behind the trees, and for a moment she puts down the spoon and smiles at me.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

 

* * *

 

As I got older, my walks strayed out of our grounds and into the wilder woods beyond. The bare trees were noble in the frosts and snows of winter, and each spring I watched for the acid, stinging green of the new beech leaves. Late summer saw me eating wild blackberries until my lips were stained and my fingers scratched and torn. But it was in autumn every year that I spent every hour I could outside.

My mother frowned and sniped about my long walks, but so long as I kept ahead in my schoolwork and got home in time for meals, my father nodded his permission. Daily I raced through Latin declensions and algebra, determined to have an hour or two of daylight to walk the narrow paths before supper.

That September I had been watching a hare, hoping to catch a glimpse as she returned around sunset to feed her last litter of the summer. I crouched half behind a tree, watching for the reddish fur and black tail in the long grass, wondering when the leverets would be left to fend for themselves.

I turned my head to one side, trying to ease my cramped neck, and gasped as I saw a girl my own age lolling easily against the base of a huge oak. The afternoon sun fell on her brown hair, hitting pure notes that sang like new chestnuts. She smiled at me, and her lips looked berry-stained even though I knew the last of the blackberries had fallen weeks ago.

I straightened up, holding my hand out to pull her to her feet. I wanted to gather her into my arms, run my fingers through her shining hair, kiss her berry lips. I reached towards her, then snatched my hands back, shocked at my own rudeness.

“I’m sorry! My apologies, miss.” I felt my face burning, probably an unpleasant brick red compared to the delicate apricot flush that spread across her cheeks.

She laughed and swung easily to her feet, put her arms around my neck and leaned against me. She smelled of late, golden sunshine and bonfire smoke, and when I put my hand on her arm her skin was as soft as the furred inside of a beech husk. She kissed me, and she was every shining autumn colour I’d ever seen and every ripe fruit I’d ever tasted.

I ran away every evening to meet her, skimping on homework and scrambling recklessly through the forest. My feet dragged deep scars in years of decomposing bark and leaves as I took the shortest routes down steep banks to reach her. The sun set earlier each day, and after a few weeks the failing light made her hair seem plainer and her lips less red.

But each day we fell into each other’s arms, kissing and laughing as the leaves turned brown and dry around us.

One evening, around the time I was regretfully thinking that I must head home, she shivered a little against me.

“I won’t be here tomorrow.”

“Won’t be here? Why not? Where will you be?”

“It’s time for me to move on.”

I was sixteen, and in love for the first time, and I couldn’t bear to think of losing her. I cried, I begged, I even shouted at her in a rage, but she simply held me, told me she loved me, and that she had to go.

I tried to persuade her to come back to the house with me, to meet my parents. “My mother will be delighted!”

“Will she?” she asked.

“Of course,” I began. But then I looked at her beautiful hair, tangled and threaded with dry leaves. At her arms, bare and scratched and marked with loam where we’d rolled on the forest floor. Her skirts were torn and muddy and she wore no shoes.

I tried to imagine her sitting at the dining table in my parents’ house, holding silver cutlery in the flickering lamplight and making polite conversation, and realised that she was right.

I asked if I could come with her, but she kissed me into silence.

“Let me go. I’ll see you next year.”

 

* * *

 

“Hello? Are you awake?”

Stephen sits on one the tubular grey chairs, uncomfortable as visitors always are in hospital rooms.

I smile, and nod a little. I barely have enough breath left for words.

“How are you feeling? Are they looking after you well?”

I nod again. As well as can be expected.

He fiddles with his shirt cuff. “It’s surprisingly warm for the time of year. The maple trees you planted still have all their leaves. They’re looking particularly splendid.”

He’s a good lad, this Stephen. I know he’s balding and portly, old enough to retire, but to me he’ll always be the boy who ran to show me his pictures. Once he’d finished art school and found his own style he enjoyed some success; mostly hard, blue cubist paintings that meant nothing to me. But he still took the time, one October, to paint my favourite view of our woods.

“Don’t tell anyone it’s mine,” he joked, showing me a painting in the most conservative and classical style. It hangs in pride of place on my study wall. He lives in London, most of the time, and never shared my interest in watching the seasons turn. I appreciate that he thought to tell me about my maples.

I’d like to see them again.

“Sorry?” He leans closer, bringing his ear almost to my face.

I’d like… to see them. Again.

“Maybe when you’re a little stronger.”

 

* * *

 

The August of my seventeenth birthday dragged by. My schoolfellows complained and griped about the end of summer freedom, the return to school, but for me it couldn’t come quickly enough. Each day I waited, squirrels scurrying to and fro along tree branches and starlings swooping in seething clouds overhead.

She didn’t come, and I began to grow bitter at the thought of the promises she had made, faithlessly. I raged at her, shouting at the sky and kicking over fat clumps of fungus to leave broken, white scars behind me. I cried embarrassed, stifled sobs when I thought that I would never see her again.

But still, every day, I waited and then suddenly she was there beside me, her hands on my shoulders and her lips to mine. She stayed for a little over a month, and then began to talk of leaving. I clung to her, as I had the previous year, begging and promising. I talked, wildly, of imprisoning her, anything to keep her with me. She shook her head, and I saw how tired her eyes were, how pale her cheeks, and I let her go.

I waited more calmly the following year. Not patiently, but with more hope.

For a few, painful years I barely saw her, snatching all the days that I could before the world caught up with me and swept me back to Cambridge for the start of the university term. As soon as I graduated, I settled back into the family home and vowed to arrange my life so I would never be away as the leaves began to turn.

Each year I waited, and each year she came. And slowly I learned to feel the moment of stillness when the earth hangs poised, its axis ready to tilt away from the sun, sending us all towards winter and me headlong into her arms.

I aged; she did not. And suddenly I was too old to roll on the forest floor with her, and too embarrassed by what someone would say if they caught me with a girl who looked more than thirty years my junior.

“Come to the house,” I suggested. “There’s no one there to disapprove of you now.”

She shook her head. “Houses are not for me.”

We compromised, slowly. I fixed up an old, tumbledown cottage on the edge of the woodland. It was just a single room, with bare stone walls and a little fireplace, and I furnished it with the simplest things I could find. Wooden chairs, made cosy with sheepskins, and a bed with wool blankets. When the sun began to set I would sit there with a glass of wine and wait for her to blow in on the breeze. She always left the door open, and until she grew to trust the place, always looked nervously at the walls.

Two years ago, I was fighting a chest infection, and on only one evening felt well enough to walk down to the cottage. I found her waiting, curled up on a sheepskin with the firelight dancing in her eyes. We shared the flask of hot chocolate I’d carried down, and she lay with her head in my lap as I tried to tell her that I might not see her again. I stroked her red-brown hair and failed to find the words.

The following September I knew I couldn’t walk to the woods. The carers who came night and morning fussed and flapped if I so much as sat near an open window. But one evening, as I stared at the rich tapestry of colours across the hillside, I saw her. She eyed the house warily, and I could see the lines of strain in her face deepening as she approached. I stuttered to my feet, fumbling with the lock on the French doors and stepping haltingly into the garden.

She had stopped, half-hidden by ivy on the wall of the kitchen garden. I smiled at her, raised my hand, and shuffled across the lawn towards her. She flew towards me, hands cupping my face as she kissed me on the lips.

We talked, briefly, and once again I didn’t tell her that I wouldn’t see her next year. She felt me shaking in the evening air, and helped me back to the house, turning away towards the woods as I locked the French doors against the cold.

 

* * *

 

“Are you his son?”

I hear the stern voice of the ward sister outside my room.

“No, he never married. I’m his next of kin, a second cousin.” When Stephen was little he called me uncle, but the relationship is more distant.

“It’s quite out of the question, of course.” The sister’s tone was final. “Mr Peters’ health is failing rapidly, the chill of the air…”

“It’s remarkably mild.” Stephen is polite, but I can hear irritation. “Unseasonably so.”

“Nevertheless, he’s not strong enough to make a trip like that. He needs to conserve his strength as much as he can.”

Stephen drops his voice, and I imagine he thinks I can’t hear him. “I think the question, at this point, is what is there for him to conserve his strength for?”

 

* * *

 

The woodland paths are not meant for wheelchairs, and I bump and jolt as Stephen pushes me along. He pauses, solicitous, every few steps to check on me, to tuck in the blanket more tightly, and I do my best to smile even though every bone aches.

We admire the sweep and dip of the woods against the hillside, the drying leaves still clinging to the branches.

“I can’t believe it looks like this in December.”

December?

A sweep of panic runs through me. December? I hadn’t realised it was so late in the year. I can feel my blood pounding in my head, grey clouds rolling in at the edge of my vision.

She will be long gone.

A blast of wind hits the trees, shaking them angrily, asking them why they will not bow to the oncoming winter.

And there she is. Her face is lined, and her clothes even shabbier than usual. There are threads of grey in her chestnut hair, but her smile is the same as ever. I leap to my feet, arms outstretched, and pull her to me.

“My Autumn,” I whisper against her hair. “I thought I’d missed you.”

“I’ve been waiting,” she whispers back. “Come with me.”

She takes my hand and leads me towards the setting sun.