The Fourth Pig
Page 20
“That’s all right,” I said. “I used to be well up in the old days. Evening classes: economics and all that. Though maybe I’ve dropped out of it lately. But I could pick up.”
“Well, there’s a bit of luck for me,” he said, “you mightn’t have been that sort at all for all I knew. But now I look at you, lass, why, I wouldn’t wonder if we mightn’t go to a meeting now and again, you and me?”
“I used to do all that,” I said, “and I did my bit of regular canvassing Election times.”
He stopped and took me by the shoulders and said: “We’re in luck, the two of us. Why, lass, I mightn’t have been that kind of a man at all, and you might have been just any bit of skirt. Not my sort. But you’re the kind—” He seemed to be seeking for words, frowning over them, but I didn’t know at all what he wanted to say, so I could not help him. At last he went on: “What I was meaning to say was, you’re the kind of a lass who might get herself shot. I can see you shot,” he said, “with a bullet fair through your head!” And he began to tremble, holding onto me. So I put my arms round his neck and stood close, kissing him. His skin was rough and weathered, sagging a little over the jaw; the grey stubble pricked my cheeks; he smelt of tobacco and machine oil and his own smell. In time he stopped trembling and kissed me harder than I much liked, and said: “That’s shell-shock, that was! Never you heed, it comes on all of a sudden and then it’s gone. You’ll need to get used to it. But I’ll be fair right with you.”
Evening was now closing down on us, and before us there was a little wood of larches and hazel, with the late primroses between, oh as simple and pretty as could be, and here and there mosses and sometimes fern fronds, lady fern and broad buckler fern, and the bare earth showing, old leaves and good loam. “It was hereabouts I came to cut my stick,” said my deliverer. “Sundays we’ll come. It’s bonnier than the pictures and not so wasteful.” He took my hand again and I was not unwilling to feel his strong fingers pressing on mine.
And then out of the wood with a swirl and a crying and a shining of eyes swept the returning pursuit of the Fairies, and in a moment they were all round and clutching at me. I had so utterly forgotten them that I screamed out and caught hold of my deliverer with my other hand and buried my face in his coat.
“Come back! Come back!” they sang quiveringly, softly, and the evening was full of them, tender with memories of delight and magic. Their hands caressed my hair and the nape of my neck, but I burrowed further into the coat between the flannel shirt which I knew well I would be washing next Monday and the inner coat-pocket with the pipe and matches and insurance cards. And I heard deep under the calling of the fairy people the steady mortal heart of my deliverer, the heart strained by war and work but still strong for enough years to see my children growing up and maybe a better world for them.
I lifted my head, and his head too was lifted and white in the evening light, and tough against danger. And the Fairies were gone. We walked through the wood very quietly and down the winding path between the ferns and out over the brae-side, a right bonny path, I thought, and we would go there often, Sundays and Bank Holidays. Lower down, near to the first houses, was the place where the three roads joined, though there was no choice, going this way, of which one we should take. And so we were out of the Debateable Land; and to-morrow would be a working day.
FURTHER READING
For readers interested in discovering more about Naomi Mitchison’s oeuvre, here are some references to critical writings not cited in my Introduction.
Bignami, Marialuisa, Francesca Orestano, and Alessandro Vescovi, eds., History and Narration: Looking Back from the Twentieth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011).
Hubble, Nick, “Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia,” in Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell, Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 74–92.
Lassner, Phyllis, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
Mackay, Marina, and Lindsey Stonebridge, eds., British Fiction after Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Montefiore, Janet, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge, 1996).
Murray, Isobel, ed., The Naomi Mitchison Library Series (Kilkerran, Scotland: Kennedy & Boyd, 2009–). Murray is the leading scholar on the works of Mitchison.
Oppizzi, Alessia, “Between Gender and Fictional Experiment: Naomi Mitchison’s Historical Novels,” in Bignami, Orestano, and Alessandro Vescovi, History and Narration, 56–84.
Plain, Gill, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, Resistance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).