The Hedge Maze

At ten to five, when the last coach had gone and the café was stacking its chairs, the woman at the ticket desk came out to the potting shed. A visitor, she said, had not come back from the maze. Severin put down his shears. In nineteen years as a gardener on the estate he had retrieved eleven lost visitors, two lost shoes and, one memorable August, an entire lost wedding party. He knew the routine as well as he knew the pruning calendar.

The visitor's daughter was waiting at the entrance with her husband, already pale. "She went in at three," the daughter said. "She told us twenty minutes. She's seventy-nine, and her name is Rosalie." Severin lit the lantern, though it was not yet dark, because the hedges stood three metres high and the paths between them went dim an hour before the sky did.

The maze covered most of an acre, and had been planted, according to the guidebook, by an owner who disliked guests who left too soon. Severin knew every turn of it. He searched the way he had been taught, working outward in a spiral from the entrance, calling her name at each junction and then standing still to listen. Nothing answered except pigeons. By half past five he had covered every dead end, and the thought of an old woman, a stone step and a cold evening had begun to settle in his stomach.

It was the sound of a page turning that gave her away. He was in the last passage before the centre, a place he rarely bothered with, since nobody had ever been lost there. Through the leaves came a small, dry, unhurried sound, entirely out of place. Not once in nineteen years had anything so ordinary come from the middle of the maze.

She was sitting on the stone bench beside the sundial with a paperback open on her knee, a flask at her elbow and a cardigan folded under her against the cold of the seat. She looked up at the lantern with mild interest, the way one regards a waiter who has taken a little longer than expected.

"Oh, hello," she said. "Is it closing time?"

"It's well past it," Severin said. "Your family have been looking for you for two hours. We thought you were lost."

"Lost?" Rosalie considered the word honestly. "I don't think so. I knew exactly where I was the whole time. I was in the middle of a maze, which is where one is supposed to end up." She marked her page with a bus ticket. "Getting out seemed a separate problem, and I thought it could wait for somebody with a lantern."

Severin opened his mouth to deliver the speech about signs and closing times, and found that he had no use for it. Had she called out, he would have found her an hour sooner; but she had not called out, because it had never occurred to her that she needed finding. It might well be, he thought, that she was the only visitor who had ever reached the centre in peace.

She poured tea into the cup of the flask and held it out. He hesitated, a man on duty, and then sat down at the far end of the bench with the lantern between his boots. In nineteen years he had only ever passed through the middle, never stopped in it. From here the hedges closed overhead in a dark green ring, and the evening sky showed in the opening as a single pale coin.

They stayed for the length of the cup. Then he led her out by the shortest route, left, left, right. At the gate the daughter ran forward, half scolding and half in tears, while Rosalie said again and again that she had not been lost.

"She wasn't," Severin said, and put out the lantern.