And as he sat under the cruel hills, he heard a voice that was in him cry out: ‘Why did you bring me here?’

He could not tell why he had come; they had told him to come and had guided him, but he did not know who they were. The voice of a people rose out of the garden beds, and rain swooped down from heaven.

‘Let me be,’ said the idiot, and made a little gesture against the sky. There is rain on my face, there is wind on my cheeks. He brothered the rain.

So the child found him under the shelter of the tree, bearing the torture of the weather with a divine patience, letting his long hair blow where it would, with his mouth set in a sad smile.

Who was this stranger? He had fires in his eyes, the flesh of his neck under the gathered coat was bare. Yet he smiled as he sat in his rags under a tree on Christmas Day.

‘Where do you come from?’ asked the child.

‘From the east,’ answered the idiot.

The gardener had not lied, and the secret of the tower was true; this dark and shabby tree, that glistened only in the night, was the first tree of all.

But he asked again:

‘Where do you come from?’

‘From the Jarvis hills.’

‘Stand up against the tree.’

The idiot, still smiling, stood up with his back to the elder.

‘Put out your arms like this.’

The idiot put out his arms.

The child ran as fast as he could to the gardener’s shed, and, returning over the sodden lawns, saw that the idiot had not moved but stood, straight and smiling, with his back to the tree and his arms stretched out.

‘Let me tie your hands.’

The idiot felt the wire that had not mended the rake close round his wrists. It cut into the flesh, and the blood from the cuts fell shining on to the tree.

‘Brother,’ he said. He saw that the child held silver nails in the palm of his hand.

The True Story

The old woman upstairs had been dying since Helen could remember. She had lain like a wax woman in her sheets since Helen was a child coming with her mother to bring fresh fruit and vegetables to the dying. And now Helen was a woman under her apron and print frock and her pale hair was bound in a bunch behind her head. Each morning she got up with the sun, lit the fire, let in the red-eyed cat. She made a pot of tea and, going up to the bedroom at the back of the cottage, bent over the old woman whose unseeing eyes were never closed. Each morning she looked into the hollows of the eyes and passed her hands over them. But the lids did not move, and she could not tell if the old woman breathed. ‘Eight o’clock, eight o’clock now,’ she said. And at once the eyes smiled. A ragged hand came out from the sheets and stayed there until Helen took it in her padded hand and closed it round the cup. When the cup was empty Helen filled it, and when the pot was dry she pulled back the white sheets from the bed. There the old woman was, stretched out in her nightdress, and the colour of her flesh was grey as her hair. Helen tidied the sheets and attended to the old woman’s wants. Then she took the pot away.

Each morning she made breakfast for the boy who worked in the garden. She went to the back door, opened it, and saw him in the distance with his spade. ‘Half past eight now,’ she said. He was an ugly boy and his eyes were redder than the cat’s, two crafty cuts in his head forever spying on the first shadows of her breast. She put his food in front of him. When he stood up he always said, ‘Is there anything you want me to do?’ She had never said, ‘Yes.’ The boy went back to dig potatoes out of the patch or to count the hens’ eggs, and if there were berries to be picked off the garden bushes she joined him before noon. Seeing the red currants pile up in the palm of her hand, she would think of the stain of the money under the old woman’s mattress. If there were hens to be killed she could cut their throats far more cleanly than the boy who let his knife stay in the wound and wiped the blood on the knife along his sleeve. She caught a hen and killed it, felt its warm blood, and saw it run headless up the path. Then she went in to wash her hands.

It was in the first weeks of spring that she made up her mind to kill the old woman upstairs. She was twenty years old.