Leverets in Spring

I woke in the middle of the night again last night. There was a sound outside the window that I couldn’t quite distinguish, and it troubled me. I knew that I should recognise it. I did recognise it, but I couldn’t remember where from.

In the morning over a breakfast of cornflakes and cold soggy toast, Ange from the room next to mine was complaining about it.

‘That bleddy owl,’ she said. ‘Hootin away all night. Kept me awake for blummin hours.’

‘An owl?’ I murmured, spoon paused towards my mouth, milk spilling on the plastic tablecloth. An owl. I delved back through the catalogue in my mind, trying to find an image. Trying to remember the sound. An owl. Of course.

‘Didn’t you hear it?’ Ange asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t.’ Better not to tell her that I’d heard it and didn’t know what it was. She already thinks I’m batty and she’s a terrible gossip.

After breakfast I went to sit in the day room. There’s a chair by the window that I like, that looks out over the garden. It’s the furthest chair away from the television, so it gives me space from the other residents. They all like to sit around, watching it all day from their armchairs. They watch people sat on sofas talking to one another about all kinds of nonsense. Then other people cook food they would never dream of eating. Afterwards they complain that the programmes are all rubbish.

I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I’d have rather gone back to my room, but they don’t like us to do that. They want us to stay sociable. It’s good for the mind and the spirits they say. They clearly haven’t spent much time socialising with Ange. There’s nothing good for the spirits about that.

It bothers me when I can’t remember things. When a picture or a word is on the edge of my memory, but I can’t quite catch it. Better just to forget completely, but the knowledge that it’s there somewhere just out of my reach is what troubles me. An owl. How could I forget an owl?

William and I went to Devon on our honeymoon. It was May. We stayed in a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere. Went for long walks every day. We would sit in the little garden in the evening and that first night we saw the ghostly face of a barn owl sat on a fence post, staring back at us. I could have sat and watched that owl for hours, but it spread its majestic wings and flew away. I felt that the owl was some kind of omen, but I couldn’t quite work out at the time if it was a good one or a bad one.

William told me that spring was his favourite season.

‘There’s just something in the air Lottie,’ he said. ‘It’s a time for new beginnings, fresh starts. It makes me feel so hopeful.’ We were different in so many ways, William and I. I was the pessimist to his optimist. I always felt that spring was the harshest of seasons. A time for false promises and cruel contradictions. The bulbs shooting up through the earth, flowers bursting into life. Then within weeks those same daffodils and crocuses are dying, their dried out husks a mockery of their former beauty. I think about that now, sat here, with my papery hands rested on my lap and spring seems harsher to me still.

Ange is talking again. Will she ever shut up? It annoys me that I can’t remember the plot to a film anymore and yet I can’t seem to forget the sound of her voice. She is so very loud, and I don’t like her clothes. She wears a perfume that makes her smell like an old woman. I hate being surrounded by all these old people.

A family came to visit and they ‘oohed’ and ‘ahhed’ over the spring lambs they had seen in a field on the way here. I’m not sure why they were sat telling me. They seemed to think that the lambs were the most precious things, but I bet you five pounds that by Easter Sunday they would gladly be tucking into one of their legs and not give it another thought. Yet another reason why spring is so cruel. It is a season of hopes being cast aside, of sprouting dreams that die and turn to mulch. It is a season of lies and deceit.

There was a little girl in the family, and she sat with a picture book of animals. She pointed to the pictures like she expected me to name them, but I couldn’t remember them all. Those fuzzy words again on the edge of my brain. Need to claw them back before they disappear forever, before they fall off the edge like in old drawings of boats sailing towards the end of a flat earth.

She showed me some pictures that she said were rabbits and I knew that was wrong, but I wasn’t sure what was right, so I smiled and nodded and hated myself for not knowing the word, for being no better than a stupid little girl. The man who was with them looked terribly sad. His face confused me as he looked so much like William and yet so different as well. A facsimile of him, a distorted image in a hall of mirrors. His ears stuck out too much and his hair was dark like mine. Or at least how mine used to be.

‘I don’t like your ears,’ I told him as he left, wiping away the kiss he had placed on my cheek. Why would he do that? It disgusted me.

They were hares! That’s it, they were hares. Pull that word back from the edge, save it stamp it, it’s mine. We saw them when we were walking across the fields, back towards the bed and breakfast.

Ange looks over at me and asks why I am smiling.

‘There were hares,’ I say. ‘In the field.’ Ange just stares at me questioningly.

‘Oh, right? Hares was it, Charlotte?’ she says, and she turns back to the television. She likes this one. It’s a quiz show. She likes to show off how much she can remember. ‘God she’s a funny bogger that one. Poor owd dear.’ I hear her mutter under her breath.

I’d never seen a hare before. I’d grown up in the city and never had much cause to leave. I’d only ever seen the sea a handful of times. Day trips to Skegness, hitching our skirts up to paddle in the brown-grey water it felt like we had walked for hours across the beach to get to.

In Devon the sea was bluer. And vast. So wonderfully vast. We walked along the cliff tops on those crisp spring mornings, and I felt like I was in a foreign land. I’d never before seen rocks that colour, seen a sky so open, felt so much possibility. The pessimist in me began to quieten down. Maybe William was right about hopefulness and new beginnings. This was the start of our marriage after all. The future lay ahead of us open and unseen. Now the future is a black spot, a dead end, and the past? The past is a pesky creature not always within my grasp.

I wish that they would turn the television down. The noise from it invades my thoughts, makes it more difficult to remember. Ange is laughing now, chuckling with the man sat next to her. She’s always either with him or the other one, laughing at something or another. They’ll be playing cards next. They seem to think that they’re on holiday. I prefer to just look out the window and pretend that they aren’t here.

We were taking a walk through the fields after dinner one evening. The sun was beginning to set, but it was still just light. I’d seen a flash of brown out of the corner of my eye.

‘Lottie, look,’ whispered William. ‘It’s a hare. Oh, look at that, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.’

It was just on the footpath ahead of us, ears stood up, the white of its belly quite vivid against the brown. Like the owl had before, it darted off when it saw us, but then it circled back and waited. We could see three brown shapes in the grass.

‘It’s got babies,’ William said. ‘Leverets. Let’s walk over that way and let them be.’ I couldn’t help but look back over my shoulder and I saw the hare dart away again.

When we walked through the field the following evening, there was no sign of the hare. We reached the point where it had waited and there were three empty grooves in the ground, then lying to the side was the carcass of one of the leverets. It had been gnawed at by some creature. The sight of it made me sob. It makes me weep a little now.

‘It’s just nature,’ William said. ‘You can’t do anything about it.’

The day passes by. We have lunch in the dining room. I sit by the window some more, watch the blossom blow off fruit trees in the wind. There is a woman talking loudly by the television and she looks over at me every now and then, but I do not catch her eye. Then before I know it, it is dinner again. Stew and peas. It does not taste good. After dinner I go back to my room, put my bed things on and climb into bed. It has been a good day, I think.

When we got home from our honeymoon, the wedding flowers that had been left on our windowsill had wilted, pollen and petals falling and staining the paintwork. For some reason, it saddened me that the flowers had not lasted beyond those few days of our honeymoon, and we had not enjoyed them as a married couple. They had been dying as we celebrated, as the owl looked at me and flew across the field, as the hare bounded away, abandoning its young.

It is time to go to sleep again. There are books in my room, so I think that maybe once I liked to read, but that seems such a difficult, unlikely task to me now. I will settle down, try to sleep. I hope that I won’t be kept awake by noises in the night again. I am not sure what they are.

A month or two after we got back from our honeymoon, I found receipts for jewellery that wasn’t mine, for hotel rooms that I hadn’t stayed in. By that time, I was already pregnant with our son.

‘It’s just nature,’ William said. ‘You can’t do anything about it.’

I will say it again. Spring is the cruellest season.

by Nicola Varley

Nicola Varley is a short story writer who lives in rural Leicestershire with her family and one-eyed cat. She graduated from The Open University in 2023 with a 1st in English Literature and Creative Writing and her work has been featured on Litro Online.