Carrie had gone up to the meadow to catch John. He usually came when she whistled, but today he stood staring at nothing with his ears lopped sideways, as if he were blind and deaf, and made her come to him. From the wood, a squirrel chittered. It wasn’t a squirrel. It was Lester. He climbed over the brass bedstead which mended one of the gaps in the hedge. ‘Look what I found.’ It was a perfect round pink stone, like a wren’s egg. He unscrewed the knob of the bedstead, put the egg into the hollow place and screwed it up again. He was storing things here for posterity. Thousands of years hence, a traveller from the planet Uranus would unscrew the knob with the strange instruments which were his hands, and marvel at these treasures which spoke to him through the centuries. The stone egg, an old farthing, a gold filling from Lester’s mother’s tooth, a dog’s dew claw, a piece of Liza’s red hair tied with cooked spaghetti gone hard again, and a twist of paper with a two-line poem by Carrie: When the last car on earth has crashed and the last plane has fallen from the skies and the last rocket satellite has run its course, There will still be the galloping wonder of beauty.
