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.