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.