In Time: A Correspondence by Erica Wagner

From Sea Stories: New Writing from the National Maritime Museum

They had stopped in the bandstand; he rested his bike, a mountain bike, against a bench. This was their third meeting, and the April day was generous to them, spreading clear light on the tufty grass like a blanket. Later she would remember this day like something held in a glass sphere; it would seem apart for everything else, as if it should be preserved, a marker of something, a beginning or an end. But then an end is always a beginning and a beginning is always an end; two for the price of one. Anyway, they had stopped in the bandstand.

Later she would consider how strange it was that everyone (by which, she wondered, one meant exactly whom?) wrote about love, or what was called love, when love was not mysterious at all. Love was simple, or at least the form of love that one most often found in stories was simple. This was usually, in fact, desire, but love has a better ring to it. Love is a bullet from a gun or a thrust from the hilt of a sword: love has a clear trajectory, an arc from point A (he feels his heart move) to point B (she feels her heart break). Nothing to it.

This was not that.

And so she began to tell him a story. An old story, here at the beginning of the 21st century. It didn’t come out of nowhere, this story, it arose from the juncture in their conversation when she realised how much of what they said was somehow aligned, although they had, she would have said, not very much in common (only one peculiar thing, the thing they never talked about). She began to tell a story about a boy who walked through the cold to find the woman he’d met in his dreams, a woman black as coal, red as blood, white as snow. He left his home, his mother, his life; he carried nothing with him except five gold coins left to him by his father, a father who died long ago. She’d never told it before, but it came easily from her mouth, and he listened to this story of a journey, a story of ice, of death and hope. It was what she had to give him, though it did not belong to her.

Early afternoon, late afternoon; her phone peeped and she ignored it. The green dome of the Observatory on the hill had become a rising moon.

— Are you cold? she asked.

— Maybe, he said. Maybe it’s getting cold.

— Well, she said, we could get something to eat.

— Okay, he said. That sounds like a good idea.

There was something in the story that had made them both

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