The Girl Green as Elderflower

by Randolph Stow

‘How old?’ Mikey insisted, a tantrum brewing in his voice.

  ‘Sixty-one,’ Mark said. ‘Poor old boot, she shouldn’t be standing about. Come and park your rheumatics on the settle, gal.’

  They lined up on the settle, the three adults and Mikey, like birds on a wire. When Lucy and Amabel had poured the tea and handed sandwiches they joined them. There was plenty of hard shiny room, but the settle did not make for conversation. Mark, at one end, leaned forward and said to Clare, at the other: ‘’Scuse me, squire, is this the line for Hammersmith?’

  ‘I wondered what was missing,’ Alicia said. ‘No advertisements to read.’

  The adults made do instead with the flames which were mounting, revived, about a new pile of long logs. But the children were restless, hurried in their courtesies with sugar or cake. At length Alicia said: ‘All right, Lucy. Get out that silly game, as your heart is set on it.’

  Instantly the table was cleared, and the board was conjured from somewhere by Amabel. Mikey seemed to have very precise ideas about the placing of the chairs. Lucy’s final touches were even more precise, measurable in millimetres.

  ‘Now, Crispin,’ said Mikey, standing lackey-like by a chair.

  Clare rose, but hesitated. ‘Who is the other person? Amabel?’

  ‘I think,’ Lucy said, ‘it’s best if you start with someone who’s really bad at it. That means Marco.’

  Mark, getting up, slouched to another chair, collapsed his long legs and grinned at Clare. ‘One does feel a charley,’ he said. Confronted by him, Clare noted that a term of university had already matured and fined down his face, with its sharply angled jaw. He seemed likely to inherit a share of Alicia’s faintly pre-Raphaelite looks.

  ‘What do we do?’ Clare asked him.

  ‘Well,’ Mark said, ‘we each put a finger on the little tea-trolley thing, and wait. Thank you, Mikey.’ For Mikey had also precise ideas about the placing of their fingers.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ Clare said. And went on waiting. Because there was nothing else to look at, they looked at one another, which began to get on their nerves.

  From the settle, Alicia remarked: ‘You two have the most fed-up expressions I’ve ever seen on you.’

  ‘I just don’t find Cris all that interesting,’ said Mark. ‘I mean, he’s normal—he’s got a mouth-shaped mouth and a nose-shaped nose. But there’s nothing you want to linger over.’

  ‘I’m keeping my mind occupied,’ Clare said, ‘by counting the acne.’

  ‘Oh you sod,’ Mark muttered.

  ‘Marco,’ said Lucy, patiently, ‘you ought to say something to it.’

  Mark cleared his throat. Then he said in a Goon Show voice: ‘Hullo, folks, hullo, folks, calling all folks. Is there anyone there?’

  Immediately the little wheeled indicator came to life. It said, firmly and emphatically: NO.

  ‘Marco!’ yelled Mikey, with rage.

  ‘You fraud, Marco,’ Lucy said. ‘Oh well, no harm done, I suppose. Let Amabel have your chair now, see what she can do with Crispin.’ Mark’s long shape reared up, shadowing the table, and almost at once Clare saw the uncanny child materialize in the place opposite him.

  Her finger was tiny. To see his own near it made Clare feel like a caveman, and none too clean.

  She said: ‘Will you ask the questions, Crispin?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you do it, you’re practised.’

  The little voice, so oddly precise, asked: ‘Is anybody there?’ And with no great speed, but effortlessly and inevitably, the board answered: YES.

  ‘Is the person there,’ Amabel asked, ‘who wanted to speak to Crispin?’

  YES.

  ‘What is your name?’

  The board spelled out three letters, then stopped. M-A-L.

  ‘Mal,’ said Mark. ‘Cris, you’ve hit the jackpot. Mal. I should think that was something slow and terminal.’

  ‘Marco, belt up,’ said his mother quietly. ‘It’s not his fortune, it’s a name.’ She left the settle and came to stand with the others around the card-table.

  The message had seemed to come to an end, but with a jerk the indicator darted towards another letter.

  ‘E,’ said Lucy, scribbling on the pad in her hand.

  All at once the thing was full of purpose; it swooped across the board. What it wrote meant nothing to Clare, yet he was somehow alarmed by its assurance. When it was still he looked round at Lucy.

  ‘Any sense?’ he asked her.

  She frowned over the pad. ‘Not that I can see. Here, you look.’ She tore off a sheet and laid it beside him.

  At first it was a jumble. Then the letters separated into words. ‘Good God,’ he said.

  A log fell, and the light flared around the edges of Amabel’s hair, shadowing her pointed face.

  He pushed the paper towards her. ‘Do you understand that?’

  For a moment she gazed at him, with her ambiguously coloured, very beautiful eyes. Then she studied the paper, wrinkling her forehead under the pale hair.

  ‘This isn’t anything,’ she said, ‘is it? It isn’t English.’

  ‘Could you pronounce it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘It’s Latin,’ Clare said. ‘You don’t know any Latin, do you?’

  She only laughed at the question.

  ‘Mark—could you read it?’

  ‘I was good at Latin once,’ Alicia said, ‘let me try.’ She reached for the paper, but Mark had taken it. Standing together, flame outlining them, they turned so that the firelight fell full on the sheet.

  ‘Oh,’ said Alicia after a moment, ‘I’ve no patience with this sort of thing.’ She relinquished it to her son. ‘It’s gibberish.’

  ‘If it’s Latin,’ Mark said, less confidently, ‘Cardinal Wolsey wasted our money on educating me.’

  ‘It splits up into words,’ Clare said. ‘Can you see?’

  ‘His Latin was always terrible,’ said Alicia. ‘Even worse than Lucy’s writing. Tell us what you think it is.’

  Clare said: ‘The first word is a name. It says: ‘Malekin me vocitabam.’ It means: “I used to call myself Malkin.”’

  All the time he was watching Amabel’s face, which showed no surprise or interest. ‘Ask her,’ he said, ‘another question, Tinkerbell.’

  ‘Her?’ repeated the child, and the lovely eyes changed just a shade.

  Clare explained: ‘She’s a little girl. Use her name to her. It’s Malkin, remember.’

  Amabel bent her head and spoke into the centre of the board. Her tone was gentle. ‘Your name is Malkin?’

  The board said: YES.

  ‘Where do you live, Malkin?’

  The board spelled out a rapid word. Lucy tore off a sheet of her pad and slapped it on the table.

  ‘Suthfolke,’ Mark read. ‘Is that supposed to be Suffolk?’

  ‘I can spell Suffolk,’ Mikey let everyone know.

  ‘She’s very young,’ Clare excused. ‘Amabel, ask her where she was born.’

  Amabel, imperturbable, asked in her fairy television presenter’s voice: ‘Where were you born, Malkin?’

  This time the board was not so fast that Clare could not follow. His finger tensed and relaxed as each expected letter came. He knew what would be on the sheet which Lucy planked before him.

  ‘Lanaham?’ said Mark, doubtfully. ‘There’s no such place. Not in Suthfolke.’

  ‘She means Lavenham,’ said Clare.

  Mark revolted. ‘Oh, come off it, Cris. What gives you the right to twist any jumble of words that crops up into what you want it to look like?’

  Clare was very calm, indeed cold. ‘She was born in the twelfth century. That’s how they wrote it then.’

  He was not much aware of the others, he was so intent on Amabel’s supernatural, seven-year-old beauty.

  ‘I refuse,’ Alicia said, ‘to listen to any more of this rubbish.’ She began to load tea-things noisily on to the trolley.

  Mikey asked: ‘How old is Malkin?’

/>   ‘You heard the expert,’ Mark said. ‘Eight hundred odd.’

  ‘Then she’s dead.’

  ‘I reckon. Probably the Minister for Pensions shot her.’

  ‘I don’t think she is dead,’ said Clare. ‘I don’t think she ever died or got any older.’

  ‘What a lovely person.’ Mark was enthusiastic. ‘Sort of like Lucille Ball.’

  Clare grew aware of Amabel’s grave little face turned full on him. She said: ‘Crispin, we haven’t finished.’

  ‘No?’ he said. ‘Has she got a message?’

  ‘I don’t know. You speak now.’

  He concentrated on his forefinger, which had coaldust in the nail. He heard Alicia’s trolley rattle away, and a bang of the door. ‘Malkin—are you still there?’

  YES.

  ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’

  NO.

  ‘Is there somebody else who wants to speak to me?’

  YES.

  ‘What is the message?’

  The letters came slowly, hesitantly. He saw each one approach, with dread. GALA BU KU SAKAPU.

  Two logs fell in, in a flurry of sparks and flame. The fever struck him in an instant. Every tendon was drawn tight, as at the worst times.

  The thing went on writing. A SISU.

  He cried out: ‘Ku sasopa! Bogwo a sakapu. Avei tau yoku? Amyagam?’

  The board wrote: KULISAPINI.

  He stood up, and his chair fell to the floor. He was falling after it, but Mark’s bony body stopped him. Later he was half sprawled on the settle, his face against Mark’s pullover. There was a hot hand on his forehead.

  ‘A katoulo,’ he muttered. ‘A katoulo sitana. Igau bi bwoina. O, kagu toki, so.’

  ‘Lu ku kaliga,’ Mark murmured. Or so he thought for a moment. But Mark had said: ‘You fainted.’

  ‘E,’ he agreed. ‘My head fainted.’

  ‘My fault. It’s much too hot in here.’

  ‘I livala—’ Clare began.

  ‘We don’t understand that language.’

  ‘It said it was me.’

  ‘What did?’

  ‘That thing. It said its name was Kulisapini. That’s my name. It said: “You’ll never escape.” It said: “I’m still here.” It means I died there.’

  ‘Easy, easy,’ Mark said, rocking him. ‘It was just the heat. Now take it quietly. You know, you’re frightening the horses, so to speak.’

  Through his self-absorption Clare felt the guilt of his lapse, and looked at the children. Amabel still sat at the card-table, her back to the fire. She watched him with the detachment of a robin. But Lucy’s inexpressive face, in spite of herself, had taken on expression, and Clare could read it. Lucy knew that adults, the most familiar and loved and irreplaceable of them, might faint and take to their beds and die. And at his very knee, so that he had to look down, was Mikey. He could not think how to atone for Mikey’s wonder and terror.

  ‘Crispin?’ Mikey said. It was a question, faint as a breeze. A midget hand reached out and took a handful of Clare’s trouser-leg, and gently tugged at it. ‘Crispin, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing, Mikey,’ Clare said. ‘I just came over funny.’ The small face revealed too much: Mikey had meant it when he said: ‘I love Crispin.’ He did love the real Crispin; not the misadventure being dealt with by his brother.

  ‘Crispin passed out,’ Mark said. ‘It happens.’

  All at once Mikey’s face was full of enlightenment. ‘Oh,’ he exclaimed, ‘is he drunk?’

  The feeling of Mark laughing against him made Clare laugh too. Even Lucy, considering what would be for the best, willed a smile. ‘Yes,’ Clare said. ‘It happens.’

  ‘Marco was drunk last night,’ said Mikey, reassured. ‘He went to sleep in the kitchen.’

  ‘Flippin’ hell,’ Mark muttered. ‘As Genghis Khan said, the basis of the police state is the family.’

  ‘You don’t smell drunk,’ said Mikey, critically.

  ‘That,’ said Mark, ‘is going to be attended to. What do you say, Cris? It would cheer Lucy up to be doing the St Bernard thing with a whisky bottle.’

  The Tarot cards which the children had placed on the settle for tidiness had fallen and were scattered over the floor, face-down except for one. By Mikey’s foot, which must have kicked it, lay the Hanged Man. Calm and content, hands behind his back, he dangled. Clare, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, tried to make sense of it.

  Lucy had come nearer. ‘Would you like that, Crispin? A glass of whisky, or something?’

  ‘No, nothing, thanks,’ he said, absently. ‘This card is very odd.’

  Mark, beside him, leaned to look. ‘Odder than the rest?’

  ‘It’s the wrong way up in every kind of way. He must be upside down, because of his hair. But that doesn’t look like a gibbet. He seems to be hanging from the earth, between two trees.’

  Mark said: ‘You’re not making it any clearer to me.’

  ‘Oh well, these things don’t set out to be scrutable,’ Clare admitted. ‘I just had a thought about what it might have been, originally. I suppose there’s nothing in it, but it reminded me of things I’ve been reading lately. Things they thought they knew, in the Middle Ages, about the Antipodes and their land.’

  ‘Oh-ah,’ said Mark, abstracted. He had begun to hum fragments of a tune. ‘Well, it’s an idea.’

  ‘Your mother hasn’t come back. Do you think she’s fed up with our games?’

  ‘You go and ask her,’ Mark suggested. ‘You know where she’ll be.’

  Through the dark rooms of the old house, which had become again so familiar, Clare made his way to the newer, eighteenth-century wing. That was the part which Alicia preferred, and he found her in the high whitewashed kitchen, where he was used to seeing her, straightbacked in a basket-chair in front of the stove. She acknowledged him with her quick smile.

  ‘We’re all abject for boring you,’ he said. ‘The seance is over now.’

  ‘I wasn’t avoiding it,’ she said. ‘I suddenly noticed Mikey’s gloves and thought I must mend them. Sit there, and make some adult conversation.’

  ‘I can’t think what about,’ he said. ‘It’s a quiet life I lead.’

  Alicia said: ‘Sometimes I envy you that cottage. If I lived there, alone, I’d paint and paint.’

  ‘Are you working on something?’

  ‘I hope. Oh, but one does let oneself down. Yesterday it was exciting. Today it looks like a Christmas card.’

  ‘That means snow,’ he said. ‘You like white, don’t you?’ He thought that that was why the tall pale room, with its plain wood and plain crockery, seemed especially her place, after the firelit antiquity of the hall.

  She finished a darn and put the small glove down. ‘I hope I didn’t seem a killjoy over the ouija board. But it does annoy me. It was you, of course, who were writing the Latin.’

  ‘I think that’s true,’ he said, ‘but I don’t understand. I didn’t fake it. Nor did Amabel. She was somehow getting messages from me. Unnerving child.’

  Alicia said compassionately: ‘If you find that, it’s probably to do with her home life. I think that’s not much fun.’

  ‘I can’t believe in Amabel’s home life. I imagine her living with a witch, and going home to a hollow tree. I can’t believe in her name. Anyone called Amabel ought to be a hundred and twenty years old, with a cameo brooch.’

  ‘Actually, she lives in a house which is rather grand. Her father is very rich. And also very respectable. I deduce that from the fact that he has custody.’

  ‘I see,’ Clare said. ‘Is she the only one?’

  ‘Oh, doesn’t it show? I think she’s really awfully lonely. And intensely observant of people who are not.’

  ‘That’s what I remembered,’ Clare said: ‘your knowing way with waifs and strays.’

  She faintly smiled, but he felt that she too was reassured by what she provided for others. The soberly ticking cottage clock, the jar of dried honesty and ac
hillea, the ropes of onions hanging from a high beam, were all tributes to rural restfulness in another time.

  ‘It’s snowing again,’ she remarked, and at the thought moved her chair nearer the stove. ‘I noticed when I drew the curtains. Isn’t it miserably cold down there? You ought to give a thought to pneumonia, as you’re not used to it.’

  ‘It’s bracing,’ he said. ‘Indoors and out. I feel pretty fit on it.’

  ‘I suppose those malaria things,’ she said, ‘can’t survive it. Oh, did Marco tell you what the Indian said to his lecturer? No? Well, this man who lectures Marco felt sorry for the dark-looking people he saw freezing in the London streets, and he said so to this Indian. And the Indian said: “Oh, good gracious me, sir. When you pass us shivering at a bus-stop, you are not to be feeling sorry for us. You are to be saying to yourself: For the first time in their lives they are losing their amoebic dysentery.”’

  She leaned forward and, reaching down, rattled with something which Clare believed was called a riddle. When that sound stopped, he thought he could hear a distant guitar.

  ‘Marco,’ noted Alicia. ‘In his room. Isn’t it silent today? I haven’t heard one car go past.’

  Though it was faint, Clare thought he recognized what the guitar was playing as something by Bach, something favoured by Segovia.

  ‘Things go fairly well,’ he said, ‘with Marco, so I gather.’

  ‘I suppose they do,’ Alicia said. ‘It’s rather soon to tell.’

  He thought he knew what she had been thinking about, sitting alone in the kitchen, but the time had probably passed for speaking of it. Twelve months before, Charles Clare had not yet been aware of his illness. He guessed that Alicia, at the first turn of the year without him, had willed herself to think only forwards.

  Abruptly she asked: ‘Is the sun over the yardarm?’ and craned her neck to see his watch. ‘Oh good. Now I shall have one cigarette and two gins.’

  ‘What a crazy expression,’ Clare said, ‘to use in this climate and weather. To me it means O.P. rum with coconut-milk, and that sort of purple light that comes just before dark.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say,’ remarked Alicia, ‘that I don’t know Worthing.’

  He got up, ready to open the door for her, but she still sat in the basketwork chair. She asked: ‘Have you found anything to do yet, Cris?’