by Jenny Diski
My father threw a desperate look at me as I rode away, perched on the back of some flunkey’s horse, as if begging me not to let him down now that his life depended on me. Brilliant! All I had to do to keep us both alive was spin straw into gold. Why hadn’t he made up something really difficult for me to accomplish? In fact, it seemed to me that straw into gold might be relatively easy: I only had to join the ranks of magicians and alchemists and tinker with potions of this and that, and perhaps, given a lifetime of esoteric study and all the luck in this world and the next, come up with the philosopher’s stone to realise my father’s boast and achieve the King’s dreams. The real problem facing me, however, was a great deal more fundamental: I didn’t know one end of a spinning wheel from another. I’d been far too busy being prepared at school for my social climbing to learn anything useful like how to spin. I was, quite frankly, absolutely useless with my hands.
I was installed in an out-of-the-way room in the castle. Up everlasting winding stairs, to a room at the top of a turret. Since it was circular, it had commanding views of the whole area. I suppose looking down on the world I had previously been a part of was what my father had intended for me, but, quite honestly, I had other things on my mind than the view.
Half the room, a semi-circle as it were, was filled with a great mound of straw; the other half was empty except for a spinning wheel, and me standing staring at it. The deal was, I spin all the straw into gold by morning, or else. Some deal. Also I knew my way around stories of this kind, being of them as well as in them. I knew as well as anyone about the rule of three. Once never does in this kind of tale, and I was certain that I’d have to perform my miracle times three. Frankly, it didn’t matter this time, since I couldn’t do what I had to do, anyway. But in general, it’s a most dispiriting law. Knowing you have to do everything three times takes the sense of achievement away before you’ve even started. One might be thrilled to have done something brave, or clever, or impossible the first time, but knowing you have to do it twice more takes immediate gratification away. Even having three wishes loses its charm. You can be sure you’ll get one of them wrong and lose the benefit of the other two.
However, that was all rather theoretical as I stood in the turret room staring at the spinning wheel without the faintest idea how it worked. I grant you, it was an interesting piece of psychology, worrying about not knowing how the spinning wheel worked, as though if I’d known everything would be all right. But if you’re going to die, you have to pinpoint a single, simple reason. The fact that I didn’t know how to turn straw into gold seemed an absurd reason for dying, so I transferred it all on to the spinning wheel. It seemed more acceptable somehow to die because I didn’t know how to do the simplest, rather than the most difficult, thing.
The question I held in my mind was: did I really mind about dying and leaving a world where fathers and kings (and, it ought to be said, ineffectual mothers) caused one to be in such a predicament? Put that way, my fate seemed less unacceptable. Still, I was young, barely fourteen, and I had not used up all my optimism about what might lie ahead for me. So, quite honestly, I was not quite reconciled to my forthcoming fate.
I perched on the wooden stool attached to the spinning wheel and identified a sticking-up thing in front of me as a spindle. That’s education for you. What I was supposed to do with it, I had no idea, but I knew it by name. I pushed the wheel around listlessly listening to its wobble and creak with growing interest. It had in some way a relationship to the pattern of sound made by my father’s grinding stones. Not surprising really, both being circular and designed to go round and round. The rhythm was a comfort to me. By morning, and the end of my life, I thought, I’d be quite consoled.
I can’t say how long I’d been doing that when I heard a gratingly high-pitched voice coming from behind me.
“Quite a pickle you’re in, isn’t it?”
And there, of course, was a skinny little man with a most unpleasant leer on his wrinkled, disagreeable face. Well, I don’t need to tell you that he said he could help me, but that there would be a price. My ring, I said. All right, he said. And he set to work.
But knowledge is a terrible thing. How could I be delighted with my magical escape when I knew that tomorrow the same scenario would occur, and that the night after that I would have run out of ornaments to barter with? Yes, yes, I thought, so the room is filled with gold where there had been straw, but was I really any better off? At best I would become the Queen of this King, and what kind of compensation would that be for my suffering and anxiety? Riches, power even, if I played my cards right. Nice frocks, and servants to take care of them, but I had an intuition that all those things would pall before long, and when they did I would still be married to a pig of a man whom I disliked almost as much as my father.
On the third night, in the unwavering way these stories have, I’d promised the firstborn of my marriage. Things will sort themselves out, I thought, in the way things do. And I concluded it was, on balance, better to be alive than dead. More opportunity.
And then the marriage announcement, the wedding, the raising of my father to his earldom, the wedding night. Each of those events, and in particular the latter, filled me with disgust. Best leave it at that. Suffice it to say that kings do not necessarily carry their royalty into the bedroom. Once the fur and finery were off I might as well have been at it with the local shepherd boy. As a matter of fact, having been at it with the local shepherd boy for several months before my new life began, I can tell you I missed him that night—and for a good few thereafter.
That shepherd boy was no slouch in the carnal knowledge and skills of love department, and he taught me a thing or two, but His Majesty had such a depressing effect on me I could not bring myself to practise any of the interesting tricks I had learned. Eventually, my Lord and Master tired of ploughing into me while I lay there limp, with nothing more than my fists clenched, and went on to entertain himself with some of the likelier lasses from the village (all of whom, it must be said, had also learned everything they knew from that delightful young shepherd—how he had learned these things, I wouldn’t like to say, but I wager the sheep could tell a tale or two if they had the power of speech).
Nine months later, as sure as fairy tales are fairy tales, I gave birth to a young son, heir to the throne. Huge celebrations, and the return of the wizened little man. Now, I wasn’t all that attached to my offspring. Frankly, I would have given him away—I hardly ever saw him in any case, he was nannied and wet-nursed and kept in isolated splendour in the nursery wing of the castle. But I didn’t fancy explaining to the King that I’d swapped his son for a load of old straw, even though he would have had only his own greed to blame for it.
“Very well, then,” said the little old man, predictably. “I will give you a chance. If you can guess my name within three . . .”
“Oh, please,” I interrupted. “Don’t you get tired of this nonsense? ‘Guess my name. Three days.’ And what would you want with a baby, anyway? Listen, I have an alternative suggestion.”
The wizened little man was not pleased to have been stopped in mid cliché. He stood staring at me open-mouthed, and was, I’m sure, about to ignore what I said altogether and simply carry on with his pre-programmed deal. I daresay he was unable to consider even the possibility of an alternative. I carried on before he could.
“I’ve got a better idea. More interesting for both of us. Why don’t you give me three days to make you forget your name?”
He was flabbergasted, and screwed up his face in confusion, trying to think out this new angle on an old story.
“But . . .” he spluttered eventually. “That’s not the way it’s done. You have to discover my name. You’ve got to find it out. Names. It’s about names.”
“But actually it’s not very interesting, is it? All that happens is that I send out my servants who creep about and listen in doorways, and eventually—though, granted, at the last minute—you can be sure one of them wil
l come across you in a wood cackling your name to yourself in premature self-congratulation, and the game will be up. What’s clever or amusing about that? A rich and powerful woman uses her servants to find something out. Big deal. Now, what I’m suggesting is another thing altogether. Think of how difficult it is to make a person forget his name. Especially someone with as rare and interesting a name as I’m sure yours must be.”
Still bemused, he scratched his head. “How would you do that?”
I smiled at him.
I’d better explain something about myself. Just as I wasn’t your archetypal beauty of a miller’s daughter, I also did not have the same hankerings after pretty golden princes as my peers were universally supposed to have. Don’t ask me why. A matter of personal taste. The King, as handsome as a former fairytale prince must be once he’s stopped being a frog, left me cold. I had always been attracted to—how can I put it?—the unusual. The shepherd boy was no one’s idea of an Adonis; he suffered badly from the after-effects of chickenpox, and had a body which at best could be called weedy. But once he did the things he did, I came to love each and every pock mark on his pallid cheeks, and lay in my bed at night entertaining myself with visions of his skinny thighs and thin, unmanly, rounded shoulders. It’s fascinating how human desire can find all manner of things exciting once it’s been given a push in the right direction. Beauty, muscularity, height and thick manes of hair didn’t do a thing for me. There it was. Apart from the pock-marked shepherd, I had had another regular liaison with the girl at the dairy—a blowsy, bulbous, ruddy-cheeked creature, bovine like her charges, but as lusty and lewd as any you might hope to meet in a cowshed while collecting the milk in the early dawn. I did not know what to call what the two of us did in the hay together every morning, but I enjoyed it no end, and our frolics added nicely to the detail I was accumulating with my shepherd lad. My tastes were, therefore, catholic, and desire was to me to be found where it may. I did not dismiss the possibility of lascivious, unwedded bliss with someone simply because they did not conform to the current form of beauty dictated by our fairytale existence.
The little man, as stringy as a newborn foal and half my height, with a face so wrinkled that his wrinkles had wrinkles, intrigued me. All that nervous energy, hopping about from one foot to another, his wide thin lips all aquiver, and violent cornflower-blue stark-staring eyes. Everybody has something about them which can be found attractive.
“Come here,” I said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
For the statutory three nights he came to my queenly bedroom, and I did indeed show him such things as he’d never even dreamed about. Each morning, at dawn, he’d stagger from my royal room, moaning and murmuring things to himself as if he were trying to lodge impossible truths in his brain. I used and passed on everything I’d learned during my glorious times with the shepherd and the dairymaid, and the scrawny, twisted little man trembled and mewed, night after long, slow night, with the results of my expertise. Each morning, as he limped, his muscles wrenched and ragged, away from my bed, I stopped him and asked him: “Little man, what is your name?”
On the first morning he stopped his muttering and turned achingly towards me on the bed with a wild look in his eye. After a moment of enormous effort, he managed to raise his voice enough so that I could hear what he said.
“My name . . .” he croaked. “My name is . . . Rumpel-Stilts . . .”
And then his eyes went vague as something disappeared into the mist that was his mind. I smiled and said how much I was looking forward to the coming night.
On the second morning, I asked him the same question as he was leaving. Again, he turned, but this time it took much longer to bring the words out into the world.
“My name . . . My name . . . is . . . My name is . . . Rumple . . .”
And he fell silent. I bid him a warm Good day.
On the third morning, he was barely able to reach the door, his thin little legs were shaking so much. Great sighs came from him as each foot touched the floor and sent a shuddering memory of bliss and agony shooting through him.
“Little man, what is your name?” I asked him gently.
A strange, almost strangulated sound came from his depths and stuck fast in his throat. His mouth worked and his eyes rolled while he quivered from head to foot, as if every ounce of himself were involved in the effort to think what I could possibly mean by my words. But nothing came.
“What is your name?” I said again.
But the little man had given up, and merely shook his head in wonder and confusion as he disappeared from my room, like a shadow slipping beneath a door.
And so my life is just as my father had dreamed. I am a rich and powerful woman. The Queen of all and everything. I am respected, even revered for my wisdom and carefully-considered decisions. The King, these days, is too busy to attend to matters of state, so I make sure that everything runs well and for the benefit of all the people. My father, the arriviste Earl, assists the King in his never-ending task, so he also doesn’t have much time to visit his royal daughter, nor to attend to the mill, and I have placed it in the safe and talented hands of the shepherd boy, who says it makes a nice change from tending sheep. In order to maintain this satisfactory state of affairs, I arrange for the turret room with the spinning wheel (I still have not learned how to use it—just as well, considering the risk and result of pricking one’s finger on the spindle, in a world such as ours) to be filled every day with straw-spun gold.
So the King is in his counting house most of the time, these days, along with my father, counting out his money. There’s so much to count, I’m afraid they will never get to the end of it. And while they are thus engaged, I run the country, dispensing just law, and keeping the millstones grinding, and all the necessary circles turning. And for entertainment? For entertainment, I have my milk delivered fresh to the castle every morning, and at night I summon my little man from his day’s spinning, and, over and over again, make him forget his name.
Short Circuit
It was Lillian’s habit to take a walk every lunchtime. It got her out of the office, she avoided having to eat with the colleagues she already spent most of her week with, and gained a daily dose of fresh air. A nonsense, of course, in an inner-city park with traffic racing and fuming round its perimeter, but the landscaped greenery and docile duck-life in the man-made pond gave at least a symbolic justification for Lillian’s feeling that it was good for her. Anyway, it didn’t do any harm.
Lillian felt also that her daily walk was good for her mind, though if thinking was a deliberate consideration of particular matters about which one came to a judgement, then that probably wasn’t the right word for what went on in her head as she walked the winding path that took her back to where she had started, in just the right amount of time to begin the afternoon’s work. Her thought processes didn’t seem to function in the deliberate, one-step-after-another way of her daily walks, on their defined route.
This really didn’t matter since she was not a professional thinker. She supposed, though she wasn’t sure, that philosophers and scientists thought in an orderly, arranged way. First there was a problem, then the pros and cons of a possible solution and finally a decision which might mean the end of that particular thought, or the choosing of a new solution to be mentally tested. Even if this were an accurate picture of that kind of mind—and she wasn’t convinced it was—her life didn’t require such an orderly approach to thought. She didn’t think she thought about anything very much during her lunchtime walks.
At least that was how it had been, until a couple of months ago. But then she reminded herself as she reached the part of the path which looped itself around the oval duck pond, everything had been the way it had been until that time. Since when, her lunchtime walks had lost their pleasantly pointless flavour, her mind seeming blank enough to do no more than notice the recurring influence of the seasons: leaf-fall and the stark silhouettes of naked branches; new growth and the str
ange, almost hallucinatory suggestion of pale green like the fuzz on the chin of an adolescent boy; male mallards in their bright mating colours; ranks of ducklings struggling to keep up in the race for the bread Lillian threw to them, but which their mothers always seemed to get to first. That had been what the walks were for; just noticing the same things as the years rolled by—now this is happening again, now that. She valued them for the relaxation that repetition offered. Like the path which led, in space, always to the same sequence of landmarks, the changing seasons provided a similar comfort in time. All Lillian did, or wanted to do, was effortlessly to notice. But although it was now palpably winter—her heavy overcoat and scarf, and the slap of cold air against her cheeks telling her it was so—her mind was too preoccupied to benefit from the pleasure of here it is again. She wondered, though, if what went on in her mind lately would be counted as “thought,” either.
This morning, as she put up with the daily crush on the tube getting to work, a memory of part of a conversation before dinner last night had come into her mind, gleaming and sharp, like a bright, lethal blade.
“I’ll be a bit late this evening. I’m having a drink with Rory.”
“Who?”
“Rory, from God-knows-when in my life. He phoned out of the blue, this morning.”
“How do I know that’s true?”
The sentence had slipped out in spite of Lillian trying to hold it in by sinking her teeth into her bottom lip.
“Because,” the voice calm, without emotion one way or the other, “because I say so.”
End of conversation. Time for a drink before dinner.
On the tube, surrounded by damp, overheated bodies which Lillian would smell on her clothes from time to time during the day, there were two passes from the gleaming, double-edged knife. The memory of having tried and failed—again, always again—to bite back useless words that couldn’t possibly resolve the question constantly paining her, made her almost faint with anger at herself. Until she remembered how deliberately he’d said, “He phoned me out of the blue . . .” The emphasis on he hadn’t been there as he spoke, but that was what the sentence was for. Allay suspicion, leave no room for it. Rory. He.
