‘Well, you need say no more,’ said Mrs Burrows, with a grim mouth. ‘I shall answer the question you come here to ask. Yes, I did have Malkin baptized, though it went against the grain, knowing that “baseborn”, or worse, might be written in the register. Do that contribute to ease your curiosity?’
‘It does, very considerably,’ replied the priest. ‘But if you’ll bear with me just a little longer, I’d like to tell you of another case, reported by someone well known to us, Gervase of Tilbury.
‘This case took place in Catalonia, in the diocese of Gerona, at a village called La Junquera. In that region there is a high and difficult mountain, its summit containing a lake whose bottom cannot be seen through the almost black water. This is said to be the gate to a dwelling-place of demons, and if a stone is dropped into the water there is immediately a storm, as if the demons were enraged. On one part of the peak there is perpetual snow and ice, for the sun never reaches there. At the foot of the mountain is a river, whose sands contain gold, which the local people call palleol.
‘Lately, reports Gervase, an agricultural worker called Pedro Cabina, who was attending to domestic matters in his house, was driven to distraction by the continual and implacable howling of his little daughter, and exclaimed: “May the demons fly off with her!” This ejaculation was heard, and immediately a crowd of invisible demons made off with the child.’
Mrs Burrows’ face was stricken. Her eyes, avoiding the priest, tried to find comfort in her carefully tended hyacinth, while her fingers played with a fold of her dress.
‘Seven years from that time,’ continued the priest, ‘a neighbour of Pedro Cabina’s met, near the sinister mountain, a man who was running along, crying in a lamentable voice: “Woe’s me, ah wretched me, how have I deserved to be crushed with such a load?” Pedro’s neighbour asked the cause of his distress, and he answered that for seven years he had lived in that mountain, at the disposal of demons, who used him every day as a beast of burden. When the other showed incredulity, he added that in the same mountain the demons held in servile bondage a girl, the daughter of Pedro Cabina of La Junquera. But the demons were tired of training her, and would freely restore her to her curser, if the father would reclaim her from the mountain.
‘Though still incredulous, the neighbour sought out Pedro at La Junquera, and found him even then lamenting the long absence of his daughter. When the reason for her absence was explained, the neighbour told the father what he knew, and suggested that Pedro, under the protection of the Divine Name, seek his vanished daughter in the mountain.
‘Pedro, though amazed, decided to take his advice. Having climbed the mountain and reached the lake, he sought out the demons, and begged that they restore the girl. Thereupon, as if carried by a sudden blast, his daughter came forth: long of stature, dried-up, noisome, with wandering eyes, with bones and nerves and skin scarcely hanging together, horrid in aspect, speech and intellect, and knowing and understanding hardly anything human.
‘Having received her, the bewildered father sought the counsel of the bishop of Gerona; and that good man exhibited her before his flock, exhorting them never to commend anyone to the demons. For the Devil our adversary, as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, destroys some, namely those given to him, whom he then holds imprisoned without hope of redemption; while others, such as those cursed, he merely torments and afflicts for a time.
‘I will not, Mrs Burrows,’ continued the priest, ‘detain you with what exactly was seen in the dwelling-place of the demons by the man they used as a beast of burden: an intelligent man, later released through the agency of Pedro Cabina. Suffice it to say that those who are casually sent to the Devil by others may find themselves, if the wrong ears hear, in a sense half damned, though kept apart from those devoted to eternal perdition. And sadly, those commendati, as we call them, are usually children. I have cases here from Sweden, from Serbia, from Germany. A happier story, the German one. Though both parents cursed the child, the Devil, who happened to be there, remarked: “They wouldn’t take two thousand pounds for it, really.” There are numerous such cases in Russia, of which Tooke writes: “The beings so stolen are neither fiends nor men; they are invisible, and afraid of the Cross and holy water; but on the other hand, in their nature and disposition they resemble mankind, whom they love, and rarely injure.”’
The priest paused; but seeing that the young woman kept her eyes stubbornly on the window, he resumed: ‘A moment of temper is not blamed by anybody, Mrs Burrows. But from the story of Pedro Cabina’s daughter, and from something said by Malkin herself, I believe that you might have reclaimed her recently, and that she expected it.’
‘Oh-ah,’ said the woman. ‘Something said by Malkin. Sin her, have you?’
‘Not seen, Mrs Burrows. Malkin is invisible to us. But I have spoken with her. She is a naturally happy child who will not show her misery. But I feel her homesickness, and I know that she hopes in seven years’ time, fourteen years after your unfortunate expression, to come home to you.’
The woman rose, and going to the window ledge made some small adjustment to the position of the pink flowers. Looking out into the street, she said: ‘She won’t never come here. Never.’
‘I see,’ said the priest.
‘What I said that day,’ said the woman, ‘I meant. There was I, a mother of fifteen, working my guts out for a brat I never wanted, without decent clothes to my back, without even much hope of a husband. When she started yelling, I say to myself, quite loud: “Mischief take the squawling bastard.” You ask if I sin anything. Well, I did. I sin that little bundle lift off the ground and disappear, and my heart was as light as a feather. I got my husband in the end, I got my house and my clothes, and I shall keep them. My husband know there was a child, but there int one now and there int no trouble between us. If she come, but she won’t, I should bolt the door against her.’
The priest carefully closed his book, and sat drumming with his fingers on its cover. ‘But after all, Mrs Burrows, flesh and blood—’
The young woman laughed harshly. ‘There int no happy memories for me in that flesh and blood. She come of a rape, and by someone I hate like you hate the Devil.’
‘I see,’ said the priest again. ‘Perhaps someone related to you?’
‘Like you say, you see,’ said the woman.
The priest got up, and stood uneasy in the room, whose low beams oppressed him. ‘Then I must take up no more of your time.’
‘Let me show you to the door,’ said Malkin’s mother, going past him.
On the step, in the breezy cold sunlight of the street, the priest said: ‘There is a point on which you may feel easy, Mrs Burrows. I can’t admire your later conduct, but by having Malkin baptized you have probably saved her from being lost eternally.’
‘I should have undone that,’ said the woman, ‘if I could. There it stay now, in black and white, for any nosey vicar or clerk to look at. I shall kick myself for that one day, I know. But you see, I warnt so sharp at fourteen as I hope I am now.’
The priest watched as the heavy door closed, with a clash of oak and iron.
For weeks there had been between Malkin and Lucy something from which the others, aware of silences falling suddenly when they entered rooms in which the two were, felt excluded. For the brown girl, who still cherished her dolls, was of a motherly mould, and something in the spirit-child, things which were never said, had touched her as she had not been touched before by anything but her pony. So whispered confabulations took place, and gifts were exchanged, of choice spring flowers and special titbits of food, such as Lucy’s homemade toffee, and the facetious sprite was at home with the rather solemn girl as she was with no one else.
There came a morning, as Lucy on her pony ambled down a ride through Lady Munby’s woods, where the spirit spoke to her from a budding chestnut. Her voice was a little sad, as though with resignation. She said: ‘Lucy, I have been thinking of what you want, and you shall have it. When you are in y
our bed tonight, I shall come.”
As soberly, the girl said: ‘Thank you, Malkin,’ and rode on in silence under the trees swelling with promise.
But the matter occupied her thoughts all day, and she went early to bed, and waited with a grave expectation, a small nightlight faintly infiltrating the shadows of her room.
When the sprite came, her voice seemed to rise almost from the floor, as if a very small child stood by the bed. She said: ‘You won’t touch me, Lucy? You won’t grab me, promise?’
‘No, Malkin,’ said the girl, ‘I’ve promised you already.’
‘Will you swear it, gal, by the Holy Trinity and all the persons of it?’
‘I swear,’ Lucy said, ‘by the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’
‘Then look where my voice come from,’ said the spirit, ‘and you shall see.’
Beside the bed a luminosity began to shape itself. Its outlines cleared, and Malkin was within reach of Lucy’s hand.
She was in form a child of twelve months old, dressed in a white frock, smiling uncertainly but with a beseeching sweetness at the girl who leaned from her bed towards her. Her hair was fine and black, her eyes so light in colour that they seemed silver. With a timid movement she raised one miniature hand, as if to ward off the girl’s advance. On the wrist was a bracelet, of gold discs half as big as a farthing, each with a hieroglyph or symbol engraved upon it.
‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you swore.’
But the girl would not be stopped. ‘Oh you poor, pretty baby,’ she said, ‘how can it hurt if I give you a kiss?’ Her arm curved about the small figure and touched it, ready to draw it towards her.
‘No!’ cried Malkin; and suddenly she was no longer there.
‘Malkin!’ the girl called out. ‘Oh don’t—don’t be angry. I was silly, I was wicked. But I won’t again, I won’t break my word again.’ Slipping from her bed, standing on the mat, she watched all the space of the room for a sign.
‘Hush,’ said the spirit from the air, with all her old childish authority. ‘Hush now, I’m listening.’
A low, soothing croon floated down from the shadows. The door, which was slightly ajar, stirred on its hinges. Lucy, padding after the sound, followed the dark passage, cold under her bare feet, until she had reached her father’s door.
The door was closed. The crooning had died away. Suddenly, through the oak, the girl heard the call of a cuckoo. She listened smiling, thinking that she knew what had made it. But it came again, and then she recognized the voice of a real cuckoo, somewhere out beyond her father’s window, in the garden’s nightbound trees.
APRIL
The cuckoo had for Clare of all touches the most magicianly, the most transforming. When he lay in his bed in the early mornings, looking out from his pillow over the clearing of the old fishponds, the cuckoo with its frail assertiveness expanded everything, till the wood grew huge as the ancient man-scaring forest of High Suffolk, and the sound was a tender green.
At the edge of each window the apple tree, agitated by bullfinches, intruded branches of tight flushed buds. In the nearest field the combed bay earth was lined with the first spears of barley, and the poplars on the horizon had about them now a copper-coloured mist.
He thought on one such morning, listening to the cuckoo, that his provisional happiness had put down roots, that the fact of it would endure.
The unfamiliar sound of the telephone drove the cuckoo out of his head. Wrong number he thought, or Mikey; and made his way downstairs in no hurry, since Mikey would hang on for ever.
‘Clare,’ he said, and waited for Mikey Clare to say: ‘Snap.’
‘Clare?’ a man’s voice verified. ‘Good morning, Clare. This is somebody from your past.’
‘Oh?’ Clare said. ‘I don’t appear to remember you.’
‘Perry,’ said the voice.
‘Perry?’ Clare said doubtfully. ‘Perry who? Wait a moment. Do you mean Matthew Perry?’
‘Yes, that one,’ the man said. ‘So the old school hasn’t been blotted out of your mind entirely.’
‘I wasn’t there long enough,’ Clare said, ‘to be marked too indelibly. But who wouldn’t remember you, Matt?’
‘I want to see you,’ Perry said. ‘Is that a possibility?’
‘Of course it is. Where are you—London? Can you come here?’
‘That’s what I’d planned,’ Perry said. ‘On Saturday morning, I thought. Could you put me up for a night?’
‘Not too luxuriously, but I can borrow a bed. It’s kind of rough here, I warn you. I can’t cook, and live as if I was still in the bush. I don’t know what you’re used to. What do you do these days?’
‘I’m a financier’s punk,’ Perry said, ‘or righthand man, as he has it. We’re in minerals, oil and such stuff. Don’t worry, I know something about living in the bush, on several continents. Suppose I take the 10.30 from Liverpool Street, could you meet me at the station?’
‘Yes, of course. On foot, probably. It’s a three-mile walk across the fields, if you’re up to it. But how did you find me?’
‘We have our methods,’ Perry said. ‘Actually, I rang the only C. Clare in the book, and spoke to two children called Mikey and Lucy. Very sensible girl, Lucy. She says you’re much better, whatever she meant by that.’
‘Yes, I am,’ Clare said. ‘So you must know any news I have.’
‘Not from you,’ Perry said. ‘You’ll be at the station, then, on Saturday? I think I remember that station. Stuck out in the fields, with no reason you can see for being there.’
‘That’s the one,’ Clare said, and hung fire, wondering how to keep up a conversation with a man he had not seen since their teens. ‘Well, Matt.’
‘Well, Clare,’ Perry said, ‘I won’t hold you up. But what is it like where you are?’
‘Through the window, from where I’m standing,’ Clare said, ‘I can see a mass of lilacs, not in flower yet. On the lawn, as you might call it, there’s an infant rabbit nibbling. There’s also, usually, a magnificent cock-pheasant strutting about, and a stoat of a very tender age which seems to want someone to play with it. The birds never let up from first light, but what seems to fill the house is the noise of wood-pigeons. If I held the receiver away you could probably hear them. “Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods”—remember?’
‘Oh God, yes. Old Pickers and his country pieties. He’d be proud of you. Well, Clare, I did say I wouldn’t keep you.’
‘On Saturday, then,’ Clare said. ‘Matt—I’m very glad you rang.’
‘So am I,’ said Perry. ‘It’s been æons, C.C. In case you’ve forgotten me, I’ll be wearing the Financial Times. Till then.’
Putting down the receiver, Clare stood watching the little rabbit in the new grass and the weeds. A jay, with a flash of blue from its wing, swooped threatening near, and the bundle of fur threw itself up in fright, then vanished into the lilac hedge.
When he had washed and breakfasted, Clare went out into the pigeon-moaning garden. In its rough meadow-grass daffodils were beginning to fade, and a few tulips were fiercely agape. The one part of it which he tended was crammed with wallflowers, and their scent came almost violently to his reformed smoker’s nose.
A tractor came racketing down the hill on the road leading to the farmhouse, and John waved and bawled: ‘How do.’ The farm’s Alsatian was loping beside, but with a change of interest made off to see Clare, leaping the gate which was closed against ponies. Clare bent to pat the hard body squirming against his legs, and said as his face was flannelled with a tongue: ‘Dead soppy, aren’t you?’
With the big dog prancing ahead, he crossed the stream and took the farm track towards the marsh, between the green-misted wood and a hedgerow frosted with blackthorn flowers. At the edge of the wood, leaning out over the green road, a tall wild cherry caught the breath with its drifts of white bloom. He stood and stared up at it, the sight of its smooth limbs like a tactile pleasure, while now and again a papery flower fluttered dow
n.
There was a crash in the hedgerow, and turning, he saw among primroses the Alsatian’s rear-end, violently absorbed. Then the dog bounded back, and he caught a glimpse of crimson, a flash of metallic viridian from the neck-feathers of the pheasant. Before he could think, the bird was crunched down, bolted, gone. Only a wing remained, hanging hideously from the dog’s jaws.
‘Oh, you horror,’ he groaned. ‘Oh, you shuck-dog, you.’
He was afraid that the dog would choke, and moved to help her. But she gulped a few times, and the wing with its coarse feathers disappeared. She stood for a while with an air of thoughtfulness, then ambled off preoccupied towards her home.
Clare walked on to the marsh, where the dank green was yellow-starred with celandine, white-starred with stitchwort, and where catkins hung from the willows. It had been his own cock-pheasant, he felt sure, the constant visitor which had marched so masterfully under his windows. What at one time would have sickened him he could now once more take with calm. It was the way of the green god.
That evening he walked with Alicia through the dusk for an early drink at the Shoulder of Mutton. As they took the path through the churchyard he noticed a woman standing among the headstones, and even in the dim light recognized her by the ghostly fairness of her hair.
In a low voice he asked Alicia: ‘Do you see that girl? Do you know who she is?’
Alicia glanced as they passed her, but said: ‘No, I don’t. Of course, her back was turned, but her figure wasn’t at all familiar. I should have remembered that hair.’
‘Mark thought she was an au pair at Lady Munby’s.’
‘I’m sure she’s not. I noticed the current au pair because she’s Swedish and she’s dark, which surprised me. But she might be the au pair’s chum. And then, other people besides Lady Munby have them.’
The Girl Green as Elderflower Page 7
