Amelia is working in her garden when I arrive, enjoying herself and quite content to be watched, not helped. Her sense of gardening is lenient and inclusive. Being in it is its essence; to stand respectfully on the windpicked soil in bare, chill sunlight, revering with reddened hands the grey, shaked handle of some plain earthtool. In this manner she is now regarding with a mixture of pride and affection the crinkled fans of curly kale and cabbage-heads with drooping yellowed leaves. These remaining autumn-stalwarts present themselves like dignified gnomes, standing proudly back from a years craft, while she to whom they show their work ^___nosetip and earlobes glowing from the air's nip, hair falling with the same innocent disorder as the bleached brown vegetation she rakes away^___ seems half gracious royalty, half rough goose-girl.

I stare at her so intently sometimes that I make her selfconcious. I revel so in the amazing fact that she seems to accept, and even like, my admiration that I go too far and become entranced. Now she sends me indoors to make us both some tea so that she can finish what she is doing without the pressure of adoration. Even then I take frequent glances through the window.

The sight of Amelia doing the most ordinary things amazes me. How can such an exquisite being so freely lend herself to such mundane activities, and lend so much of herself? Because to everything she does she gives such a wealth of attention, of seriousness, even of love. Her uniqueness consists of an inner perfection; a quiet radiance of soul that enriches all her movements, her words and silences, and extends outwards to make her home, and all the objects that she daily uses, stand out from themselves with an immanent vivacity to answer her beauty.

When she comes into the kitchen a few minutes later, alight and happy with coolskinned health, peeling earthy woollen halfgloves from numbed hands and unwinding a wool scarf, removing Wellingtons, heel against instep, balanced one-legged like a dancer, shrugging herself out of a colourful tartanwool jacket, she herself seems like something grown in wild surroundings, husking itself of its coarsest coverings to reveal a vulnerable, proportioned interior; this demi-goddess of growth and abundance. She shows only the slightest shadow of irritation to find me staring at her again, empty teapot in midair, held.

Amelia is, for me, incontrovertible proof that body and soul are one. The soul is not the inhabitant, nor the rider or owner, nor is it only represented by the body ^___because look at her! Her body is her soul, moving through this gnarled, moronic stuff called matter, just as ice is water at certain temperatures. Such beauty, perfuming every pore, must be the cause, not an accidental result. I wish I were a better person; more confident, more knowledgeable about how to behave with people. I get so stupidly tongue-tied and mentally confused. I know I must bore her terribly compared with people she knows at the university; I've written her one or two poems but that's nothing ^___silly things, dogtricks. But she always astounds me with the simple profundity of her thoughts, and the fluency with which she can express what I struggle to even think.

Sitting together at the table, and I am trying to find something intelligent ^___or even just acceptable^___ to say, but the blood is pounding suffocatingly in my ears and there is so much tension I'm afraid the air will crack. I think I will have to go, am thinking of going, when ^___wonderfully, slowly, with such courageous deliberation^___ Amelia reaches out and slips her hand into mine; her warm, gentle hand, with its quick fingers, its intelligent palm, so soft and of such delicacy. Tears come into my eyes, and three juddering sighs force themselves out of my lungs at the same time.

My eyes are important, they have heavy bars over them, fortifying them against intrusion so that I may look out ^___as I must^___ but nothing unsolicited gets in. Now there she is, smiling directly into my eyes like the sun. It reduces me to a rubble of embarrassment and inadequacy inside, but also makes me love her and want to hold her violently close, to bandage the breach she makes. Her lips say, wordlessly, that they wait for a kiss.

Reciprocation is the magic of love; to find that what you want, the Beloved also wants; that in those eyes you are not deformed or repulsive. Quasimodo steps forth, the tallest, straightest, most beautiful man on earth. Unrequited love must be an unbearably bitter thing; an insufferable affliction that would kill the heart if it was real. But I am not unrequited and when I am encouraged and allowed I can be strong. She tells me she had given up hope; that she was ashamed and angry at her own blatancy, and I say no...no...I have to be sledgehammered into seeing the obvious...I fold under the weight of my own desire. By then we are in her small garret bedroom where, to the occasional skip against the window of a leaf blown by on the autumn wind, we step from our clothes with a shy haste.

It is the crofty thickness of the walls, the old sloping weight of the roof, or the rustic simplicity of the door's design. Or perhaps it is the deep molten gleam of the brass bedrail, or the soft, serpentine shapes of the India-prints that decorate the room. Most likely it is all of these, melded by the bliss-thickened light that flows through the dormered window, filling the room with a heady ambrosial brooding. Whatever the cause, including the bodies own tactile joys beneath the mounded moling shift of bedclothes, I enter a state of ecstatic porosity; a timeless, surrendered, adorative condition by which we rise and float as one. 0h, Amelia!

O this love.

IV

Some of you may be curious to know what it is like to be brought to life by a magic spell. You may think it would be like escaping the one who is 'it' and running to base to win the game. Or that it is like waking up to a long-promised day of presents. It is a bit like both, but not quite like either. There was nothing dramatic or sudden for the Lion that day. Apart from the wind, which was canting his board over to one side, it was a rather ordinary day, like hundreds of others. Neither was it a different world, like the difference between dreaming and being awake. It was the same world he'd always known, stretched out below him from skyfoot to skyfoot; the same hills and spires, the selfsame rivercourse a-twist and glitter in the distance. No, being brought to life was rather more like hatching from a thick crystal egg. The Lion had always been able to see and hear quite accurately, but now, as his shell softened and melted, the whole world touched him, pressing against him in an extended, flowing pang of actuality. He found that this is a world of grace and depth; that life, being everywhere, is utterly still; that ^___for example^___ the clouds rolled and tumbled above him silently, benificently, and with wonderful humour, migrating energetically through his own interior space.