No Season but the Summer

NO SEASON BUT THE SUMMERMATILDA LEYSER read English Literature at King’s College, London and then ran away to join the circus. She trained as an aerialist, working up a rope, collaborating with dance and theatre companies, making her own work, and performing in diverse venues, including the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Royal Opera House. After ten years in the air, she decided to come down to earth and take up the far more dangerous act of writing on the ground. She has two children, and is the founder and director of an international movement for creative mothers and carers called M/Others Who Make: https://www.motherswhomake.org. She also works as an associate director with Improbable, a world-renowned theatre company: https://www.improbable.co.uk. Scribe Publications2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia 3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USAPublished by Scribe 2023Copyright © Matilda Leyser 2022All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.The moral rights of the author have been asserted.Excerpt from ‘The Trees’ by Philip Larkin from High Windows, 1974. Used by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.978 1 911344 91 9 (hardback edition)978 1 922586 97 1 (ebook)Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.scribepublications.co.ukscribepublications.com.auscribepublications.com For my mother, Henrietta. The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief.From ‘The Trees’, Larkin. 1PersephoneIt is dark down here. Not bright night dark. Thick through and through dark. I scramble up tunnels, squirm through crevices, and crouch on boulders in the blackness. I feel the fine grain of the limestone under my hands — soon it will soften into soil and I will know that I am near the surface. No sound but my breath and the rush of the stream, which I have followed, against its downward flow, since I left the river far below. I brace myself, arms out against the tunnel walls as the slope steepens, and press on. At last, it levels. I pause inside the hug of the rock. When I arrive, I will again become fair-haired, grey-eyed, tall, slight — an identity of colour, height, weight, which I left up in the light. Down here, I am as dark as stone. I never understood how luminous the night was as a child. I used to fear it — the dark that was not truly dark — yet now, for years, I have recoiled from the light on my return. Each spring creation blooms, the birds sing, and I have migraines. No one was ever meant to travel this way, climbing against the gradient of ground and spirit. None of them considered this when the deal was made. I have often thought it would be best if I could stay down with the dead. But not this year.The river has been rising. This year it was higher, wider, swifter than ever before. It burst its banks. It slapped and crept its way into my husband’s cave. He had to rescue his tools — hammer, chisels, tongs. There is a sculpture of me with emerald eyes — one of many he has carved out of the limestone — she lies, reclining between rocks, near the entrance to his workshop. This year the waters covered her. We had to wade past her to reach the ferrywoman. Water over our ankles, calves, knees. Up to our thighs by the time we stood where the shoreline used to be.We waited — the boat was a speck of light out across the water, unsteady, and distant as a star. ‘It isn’t safe to cross this year. You’ll have to stay here,’ my husband said. He squeezed my hand. I should have pressed his hand back, soothed him. But I was surprised by the panic that flashed through me. For nine thousand years, I have feared crossing that river. I have climbed up to the earth, bringing spring, but feeling like winter. I have dreaded the keen blue sky, the hopeful green. Most of all, I have dreaded the return of hunger.I do not feel hunger under the earth, but I know it from the world above. I know how deep it can bore into your body. I know the hunger that hunches like an animal in your stomach, gnawing at you from the inside. I know the kind that makes you shrill, translucent as glass, and as fragile. I know the kind that slits you like a fish, from head to tail, leaves you raw, exposed. And I know the kind that seals you like a secret no one can reach, not even you. I hate how hunger seeps into me as I cross back up to life. But this year, thigh-deep in that wide river, I was hungry for hunger. I have never felt this before. Or if I did, if I ever have, it was more than nine thousand years ago. That time, it led me the other way, down, underground, and nothing was the same again. And now there it was, amid the flood, that feeling, this time tugging me up. The wild water made me want to cross it. So I said it, before thought could catch it back, already with the edge of hunger in my voice: ‘No. I have to go.’Hades, King of the Dead, let go my hand. I tried to reassure him. I turned and lifted my hands to find his forehead, cheekbones, jawline. This is what we do, what he first taught me to do — how to feel for the rock in each other. How to reach underground, even in the body, to what will last forever.