The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  Heavy droplets of water broke in trickles down the panes and ran into the rotted woodwork of the frame. The walls wept. The ceiling, a botched affair of plasterboard and paper, began to sag: big bubbles inflated themselves behind the paper as the moisture gathered and loosened the adhesive, occasionally a few drops of water wobbled from the ceiling before landing with a click on the carpet. Since its last coat of whitewash, slapped willy-nilly on top of the existing growth of fungus, the room had blossomed again. At first there was a spot of green on the white wall, a spot which grew overnight to the size of Andrew’s hand, and then it became a crumbling powder of rot, a mixture of new moss and decayed whitewash which spread like blood on tissue paper. Like ink on blotting paper, the blooms grew. At night, Andrew slipped reluctantly into a cold bed, where he slept without moving a muscle lest he turn his head on to the clammy cold of his pillow. He would wake to find himself curled up like a foetus, huddling the warmth of his own body, exhausted from the effort of sleeping. The rooms were not cold, but they were damp, and the damp was harboured in the sheets of the bed and in the clothes which Andrew hung in the wardrobe. Flecks of grey mould appeared on any clothing he left for a few days. There was a smell of decay, in spite of his efforts to air the cottage in the day and to heat it at night.

  Now that the sun had fallen lower in the sky, it never touched the building from morning to evening, but passed it by, travelling its course behind the ridge of the mountain which loomed above the fir forest. There would be no more sun until the spring, but five months of the year when the cottage clung dankly to the dark side of the mountain and never felt a touch of warmth, never saw a beam of light. Andrew shuddered when he thought of this. He thought of the open sunshine of Sussex, where there were no great slabs of glistening, slime-covered rock to blot out the light. There, even in the deepest gloom of January and February, he and Jennifer could find some air, some dry air which did not cling like a rot to the insides of their mouths, there was somehow always a glimmer of light on the downs or the tingle of frost on the levels. Now, near the end of October, in Wales, he was festering sweatily in a cottage which had seen the last of the sun for nearly half the year. It had crawled like a toad under the rock, a toad in the sweltering clamminess of its own body, or a slug under a brick, where no light or air could get in. Warm and damp, the cottage withdrew beneath the blanket of the fir plantation, cowered against the wet walls of the crater. It was shunned by the sun.

  Phoebe spent more hours in her basket. In the first week in Wales, when they had enjoyed an Indian summer as compensation for a poor summer in Sussex, she had cavorted like a puppy through the bracken and through the woods. For hours, afternoon after afternoon, she had been hurling herself into the streams and tumbling through long, unfamiliarly scented grasses. But now she retired earlier to her basket, to rummage violently in the blankets which had started to chill with damp. She lay for hours and licked her paws. When Andrew went to bed he carried her basket into his bedroom, for she was used to sleeping in the same room with him, and before he dozed fitfully between the cold sheets, he listened to the rhythmic slapping of her tongue on her feet. She would not, however, allow him to inspect her paws, but would snarl with the venom of a stoat when he tried to take a closer look. Andrew watched her, and he wondered that she was changing in the darkening atmosphere of the mountainside. She had bitten him once and had attempted a second bite. Now she skulked in her basket, lifting a quivering lip when he knelt to comfort her. Still she came to his dangling hand when he was sitting in the armchair, reading or listening to the radio, to nuzzle her fine face into his fingers, and on their walks she was as buoyant as ever. Only, when he approached her in her basket, or when she felt the encroaching shadows of the forest press tightly around her, Phoebe reeled off that buzzing snarl and wrinkled her muzzle. There was a growing germ in her mind which triggered this reaction, more and more often, as though, with the spawning areas of damp on the walls of the cottage, with the enveloping darkness which was earlier each day, she too was infected by her surroundings.

  Andrew studied the watercolour of her which hung over the fire, above the four jars on the mantelpiece. In Jennifer’s painting, Phoebe was beaming affectionately, showing her teeth in a disarming smile. There was no spark of ill-temper in her eyes. But, when he looked closely at the picture, Andrew was alarmed to see that a few droplets of condensation had formed behind the glass. And, peering also at Jennifer’s landscapes, he saw the mist of moisture there as well. It clouded over the sunshine of her views. They were no longer so clear and bright . . .

  *

  By the end of October, Andrew Pinkney and Phoebe had been in the cottage for three weeks. During this time, the man had stocked the woodshed with more than enough timber to last throughout their stay in Wales, he had stumbled on the stinkhorn and planted their eggs into jars which he arrayed on his mantelpiece, and he had suspended the decomposing corpse of a badger above his stacks of logs, with the intention of cultivating flies for the continued promotion of the stinkhorn. His interest in the stinkhorn had really eased his brooding. He spent less time reflecting in his hermit’s cell, that shallow cave on the hillside. At night, notwithstanding the dampness of his bed, he slept tolerably well without thinking too long about Jennifer, although he awoke each morning as torpid as a toad. He pondered less on the subject of his impotence, which was surely temporary: he knew that it was not such a rare occurrence for a man to fail like that if he was nervous or preoccupied, that the normal thing was a complete recovery, that he would be able to consummate a sexual relationship perfectly satisfactorily in future. To be sure, it had never happened before, in his student days. He must have been unduly apprehensive, after many long months of hesitation and the repeated fumblings with Jennifer in the car. If only she had not laughed at him! If only he had not struck her! Certainly he was not the first man to react with violence under such provocation, as he thought again of Bedder and the Director of Public Prosecutions. Thinking this, he brooded less. Soon he would return to Sussex, invigorated by his weeks in Wales, to laugh off the pettiness of his failure by presenting the stinkhorn, to resume life as though nothing odd had happened.

  As for human company in those three weeks, Andrew had had none, apart from a few chance conversations in the village shop. Twice a week, no more, he and Phoebe walked down from the cottage towards the river and then followed it upstream to the village. It took them about a quarter of an hour, depending on whether the heron was there or not. If it was, then Andrew watched it until it flapped off, which departure coincided with the limits of Phoebe’s patience; for she quickly tired of waiting while the man peered through his binoculars at a scrawny bird, and she would only have to jump and bark for a moment to have the heron flee. Andrew bought supplies in the little shop; they were more expensive than they would be in a Caernarfon supermarket, but he did not want to trail into town for shopping, opening and closing all those gates to reach the road, wading across the flooded river. The lady shopkeeper, a gently courteous little soul, asked where he was staying, when he had been into her shop a few times over the course of a fortnight. He told her the name of the cottage. ‘Clogwyn Ceiliog,’ he said hesitantly, wondering at his pronunciation and expecting her to laugh. ‘It belongs to my boss down in Sussex. He’s just letting me use it for a short while, for a month or so.’ The lady smiled, but did not laugh, such was the tender old-­fashioned politeness of the young Englishman. She waited as he continued. ‘I’ve looked up the name of the cottage in a dictionary,’ he said, ‘so I know what it means. Something about a cockerel, a cockerel in the cliffs. Is that right? Where does the name come from? Do you know?’ And he smiled his labrador smile, all blond and ruddy, awaiting her reply.

  The little Welsh lady pursed her lips and pushed back a strand of greying hair. ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I know what it says on the sign outside your front door. But it’s a mistake. I’ve met your boss in here several times, he comes in for his news­papers, but I never wanted to p
oint out his mistake. I didn’t want him to think I was being impolite or anything.’

  ‘A mistake?’ said Andrew. ‘But what’s wrong with it? What should it say?’

  ‘Well, you’re right in your translation,’ the shopkeeper went on. ‘ “Ceiliog” does mean “cockerel”. Your boss must have misheard or misread the correct name somewhere and got a few letters wrong. It should be “cellog”, that’s c-e-l-l-o-g, which means “cells” or “caves”. Nothing to do with cockerels at all!’ This time she laughed. ‘You see what a difference a few letters make to the meaning! But once your boss had had that slate sign made up, quite expensive, no one in the village wanted to tell him he’d made a spelling mistake. Nothing to do with cockerels at all! What it really should be is “Clogwyn Cellog” . . . something like, “the caves in the cliffs” or “the cells in the cliffs”. It’s difficult to translate it directly into English, you know.’

  Andrew joined in with her laughter, remembering the coalman’s laughter too. ‘I’ll look forward to telling my boss when I get back,’ he said. ‘No, don’t worry, I shan’t let on where I found out! But, the caves, or the cells . . . I think I’ve found them already. Those slits and holes high up in the rocks, in the woodland? Is that what the name refers to?’

  And the lady smilingly confirmed this. She liked the young man, so polite and friendly, not at all stand-offish like his employer, not at all like the snooty Sussex solicitor who only used the shop as a convenient place for his mail and the newspapers. She hoped other people in the village would be friendly with him too.

  Along the road from the shop, facing across the river, there was a hotel which Andrew’s employer had mentioned as a place to have a drink in the evenings. It was big and white, not a pub, but a family hotel with an ordinary drinking licence for non-residents. From the road, it looked to Andrew like an old-fashioned prep school, with rolling lawns in front and a number of horses standing like statues under a chestnut tree. The building itself seemed somewhat weary with wear. The season was over. There would be no more residents until Christmas and the New Year. Looking around at the few houses which made up the village, at the shop and the derelict chapel, Andrew wondered where the custom would come from, to drink in the hotel lounge over the dreary months of autumn and winter. He and Phoebe walked from the shop to the foot of the hotel drive. Yes, he thought, just like a prep school, the day after the end of term: empty and echoing, the corridors scented of floor polish and the whiff of old dogs; maybe from upstairs the humming of a vacuum cleaner, or the maid’s transistor radio . . . and from the headmaster’s study there would float some idle tinkerings on the piano, the audible expression of someone’s loss now that the term was over. Indeed, Andrew heard a random arpeggio as he and Phoebe turned and walked away.

  The same evening, he decided he would end his self-imposed retreat, with a visit to the hotel for a drink or two.

  He left Phoebe behind in the cottage. She had been playing an annoying trick throughout the evening, while Andrew was bathing and changing. Every quarter of an hour, heaving a colossal sigh, she would drag herself listlessly to the door and sit there, as if she wanted to be let out. ‘All right, Phoebe, want to go out? Go on then . . .’ he muttered as he tugged open the door, but by the time he had done this, the dog would have slunk back to her basket, where she lay in her most craven pose, rolling those desperate eyes and splaying her legs. Andrew shut the door. ‘Don’t go out then. Just stay there . . .’ When, the first time, he good-humouredly crossed the room and bent to caress her exposed belly, for that was surely what she was inviting, she writhed up at his hand, snapping and snarling. ‘Bastard!’ he exploded. ‘What the hell do you want then?’ And periodically she padded to the door, from where she gazed out at the drizzling darkness and snuffled at the draught which came through the rotten woodwork. She whimpered like a child. But, before Andrew could reach the door and open it, she returned to her basket, tail between her legs, ears flattened against her skull. Henceforth, she started her high-pitched snarl whenever he passed by her corner, as he went from bathroom to bedroom and back again. ‘You’re bloody well staying here on your own tonight, Phoebe. Make sure you’re in a better mood when I get back . . .’ Out he went, with his anorak and wellingtons and torch, to go down the hillside to the village.

  He was quite wet when he walked up the drive to the hotel. It was the first time he had been down there in the dark and he was surprised how easy it had been to lose his way across the fields with only the torch to guide him. Occasionally he had blundered into the bracken, or rather the blackened remains of it, and then it was hard to find his bearings again and return to the track. His trousers were soon wet and he felt the drizzle clenching its cold hand around his scalp. From time to time he paused to wipe the raindrops from his glasses. But, having stumbled to the river, from there it was a simple thing to follow its course upstream. He was astonished to see, around a bend in the darkness, that the white hotel was brilliantly floodlit, so brightly that he was forced to shield his eyes from it while he felt his way over the uneven path. His boots slapped against his calves as he splashed through the sodden meadows of the riverside. He was glad to be walking on the road through the village and past the shuttered windows of the shop, through the pitch-black shadows of the chestnut which had been thrown into greater relief by the glare of the floodlit hotel, and across its gravelled drive. Standing outside for a moment, he flicked some water from his hair and wiped his glasses again. There was one vehicle parked there, a dilapidated black van, its wheels and its sides spattered with mud. Andrew looked down at his boots. He wondered whether he could go into a hotel lounge in such a state, so he went to the verge of the drive and drew the boots repeatedly backwards and forwards through the long grass. Then he stepped into the hotel.

  There were three people and a dog in the little bar. The dog, a spaniel with a raw bald patch on its rump, was lying in front of a blazing log fire, not asleep but watchful, for it flicked its eyes up and down, from Andrew’s smeared boots to his dripping blond hair, as he entered the room. Satisfied, it thumped its tail twice and closed its eyes. ‘Hello,’ said Andrew quietly, flashing his instinctive smile at the three people. He stood foolishly at the door. ‘Sorry about the boots . . . Are they all right or shall I take them off?’

  The woman behind the bar peered sternly over, following the dog’s example by examining Andrew from head to foot, before smiling and saying, ‘You’ll do. Come on in and take off your coat.’

  He struggled out of the wet anorak. The woman, he thought at the same time, was the image of that headmaster’s wife he had conjured up when he had been looking at the hotel that morning; she was tall and finely built, and he thought of Jennifer’s heron too. He imagined her sitting at a piano in her husband’s study, her long languid fingers stroking a melody from the keys, he could imagine her feeling sorry that another term was over . . . Meanwhile, he took out his wallet and paid her for the drink she put on the bar for him. She smiled an elegantly exhausted smile. Andrew watched the cords in her hands and in her throat. She was fifty, he thought, as grey and as thin and as dignified as a heron, but she smiled wearily as though she was relieved that he had come in. Her other two customers sat on stools at the bar. They were a teenage couple, spectacularly untidy in matching denim jeans and jackets and wearing high black leather boots. Their clothes were frayed and dirty, smudged with oil, mud and other indistinguishable stains, and Andrew smelt the odour of stale sweat as he reached forward to take his drink. The youth grinned at him, gulped his lager and smirked at the girl. They were both small and dark, with dirt in their fingernails, but it was the boy who smelled more strongly. The girl’s hair was clean at least, and when she looked at Andrew her smile was less overtly insolent. She had small, white, very pointed teeth. She also was drinking from a pint glass of lager, snorting with laughter when the boy said something in Welsh, laughing so explosively that she had to wipe her mouth and nose with the back of her hand. When she could control her o
utburst, she slapped the boy playfully on the shoulder and replied in Welsh, with a gesture of her head in the direction of Andrew’s boots. Andrew smiled gently at her. She blushed and looked down, running her hands up and down the tight denim of her thighs. ‘Bit wet out there,’ he suggested, which made the couple laugh again, but the woman behind the bar said, ‘Where have you walked from? Are you staying in the village?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he answered. ‘About a quarter of an hour’s walk away, up on the hillside, across the river. A little cottage with a peculiar name . . .’ and he went on to explain how he had found out about the spelling error from the lady in the shop. ‘I’m just staying for a month or so, a bit of a break from work. I’m really from the south of England.’

  ‘Bit isolated up there, isn’t it? Are you on your own?’ the woman asked. The teenagers had listened in silence to his description of the cottage, exchanging glances as he spoke.

  ‘Well, there’s me and the dog. She’s good company most of the time, but I thought I’d leave her this evening. I’m up here to do a bit of walking and otherwise relaxing, getting away from the office,’ and he told her in his gentle, humorous way about the confines of his bed-sitting-room in Newhaven. ‘A lot more space up here, isn’t there?’ he smiled, including the young couple in his remarks. ‘You live here, I suppose?’ he said, raising his eyebrows at the girl.

  ‘Not far from your place,’ she replied, addressing her half-empty glass. ‘In fact, we’re probably your nearest neighbours, the farm on the other side of the forest. Seen you walking up there a few days ago, I seen you with your dog a few times.’ Glancing up at the boy, she added with another snort of laughter, ‘I suppose that is a dog anyway . . . more like a daft little toy to me . . .’ And the two of them continued in Welsh, their banter punctuated with staccato sniggering.