by Jane Gardam
‘You’ll blow us all sky high one day, Bull.’
‘You’ve been glad of it often enough, Kass. Decent free cup of tea.’
‘You’ve a letter there unopened.’
‘It’ll keep till we’ve done the figures.’
So we gather round the far bed, the bed of the mistress, one on each side of her and one at her feet. We touch and pat her, moving pieces of her about. Gradually we grow interested. We put down our tea cups on the floor and as people sleep and wake around the spinning world we scrutinise this creature with gratitude, with love.
THE PANGS OF LOVE
It is not generally known that the good little mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen, who died for love of the handsome prince and allowed herself to dissolve in the foam of the ocean, had a younger sister, a difficult child of very different temper.
She was very young when the tragedy occurred, and was only told it later by her five elder sisters and her grandmother, the Sea King’s mother with the twelve important oyster shells in her tail. They spent much of their time, all these women, mourning the tragic life of the little mermaid in the Sea King’s palace below the waves, and a very dreary place it had become in consequence.
‘I don’t see what she did it for,’ the seventh little mermaid used to say. ‘Love for a man—ridiculous,’ and all the others would sway on the tide and moan, ‘Hush, hush—you don’t know how she suffered for love.’
‘I don’t understand this “suffered for love”,’ said the seventh mermaid. ‘She sounds very silly and obviously spoiled her life.’
‘She may have spoiled her life,’ said the Sea King’s mother, ‘but think how good she was. She was given the chance of saving her life, but because it would have harmed the prince and his earthly bride she let herself die.’
‘What had he done so special to deserve that?’ asked the seventh mermaid.
‘He had done nothing. He was just her beloved prince to whom she would sacrifice all.’
‘What did he sacrifice for her?’ asked Signorina Settima.
‘Not a lot,’ said the Sea King’s mother, ‘I believe they don’t on the whole. But it doesn’t stop us loving them.’
‘It would me,’ said the seventh mermaid. ‘I must get a look at some of this mankind, and perhaps I will then understand more.’
‘You must wait until your fifteenth birthday,’ said the Sea King’s mother. ‘That has always been the rule with all your sisters.’
‘Oh, shit,’ said the seventh mermaid (she was rather coarse). ‘Times change. I’m as mature now as they were at fifteen. Howsabout tomorrow?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what’s to be done with you,’ said the Sea King’s mother, whose character had weakened in later years. ‘You are totally different from the others and yet I’m sure I brought you all up the same.’
‘Oh no you didn’t,’ said the five elder sisters in chorus, ‘she’s always been spoiled. We’d never have dared talk to you like that. Think if our beloved sister who died for love had talked to you like that.’
‘Maybe she should have done,’ said the dreadful seventh damsel officiously, and this time in spite of her grandmother’s failing powers she was put in a cave for a while in the dark and made to miss her supper.
Nevertheless, she was the sort of girl who didn’t let other people’s views interfere with her too much, and she could argue like nobody else in the sea, so that in the end her grandmother said, ‘Oh for goodness’ sake then—go. Go now and don’t even wait for your fourteenth birthday. Go and look at some men and don’t come back unless they can turn you into a mermaid one hundredth part as good as your beloved foamy sister.’
‘Whoops,’ said Mademoiselle Sept, and she flicked her tail and was away up out of the Sea King’s palace, rising through the coral and the fishes that wove about the red and blue seaweed trees like birds, up and up until her head shot out into the air and she took a deep breath of it and said, ‘Wow!’
The sky, as her admirable sister had noticed stood above the sea like a large glass bell, and the waves rolled and lifted and tossed towards a green shore where there were fields and palaces and flowers and forests where fish with wings and legs wove about the branches of green and so forth trees, singing at the tops of their voices. On a balcony sticking out from the best palace stood, as he had stood before his marriage when the immaculate sister had first seen him, the wonderful prince with his chin resting on his hand as it often did of an evening—and indeed in the mornings and afternoons, too.
‘Oh help!’ said the seventh mermaid, feeling a queer twisting around the heart. Then she thought, ‘Watch it.’ She dived under water for a time and came up on a rock on the shore, where she sat and examined her sea-green finger nails and smoothed down the silver scales of her tail.
She was sitting where the prince could see her and after a while he gave a cry and she looked up. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘how you remind me of someone. I thought for a moment you were my lost love.’
‘Lost love,’ said the seventh mermaid. ‘And whose fault was that? She was my sister. She died for love of you and you never gave her one serious thought. You even took her along on your honeymoon like a pet toy. I don’t know what she saw in you.’
‘I always loved her,’ said the prince. ‘But I didn’t realise it until too late.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ said Numera Septima. ‘Are you a poet? They’re the worst. Hardy, Tennyson, Shakespeare, Homer. Homer was the worst of all. And he hadn’t a good word to say for mermaids.’
‘Forgive me,’ said the prince, who had removed his chin from his hand and was passionately clenching the parapet. ‘Every word you speak reminds me more and more—’
‘I don’t see how it can,’ said the s.m., ‘since for love of you and because she was told it was the only way she could come to you, she let them cut out her tongue, the silly ass.’
‘And your face,’ he cried, ‘your whole aspect, except of course for the tail.’
‘She had that removed, too. They told her it would be agony and it was, so my sisters tell me. It shrivelled up and she got two ugly stumps called legs—I dare say you’ve got them under that parapet. When she danced, every step she took was like knives.’
‘Alas, alas!’
‘Catch me getting rid of my tail,’ said syedmaya krasavitsa, twitching it seductively about, and the prince gave a great spring from the balcony and embraced her on the rocks. It was all right until half way down but the scales were cold and prickly. Slimy, too, and he shuddered.
‘How dare you shudder,’ cried La Septieme. ‘Go back to your earthly bride.’
‘She’s not here at present,’ said the p., ‘she’s gone to her mother for the weekend. Won’t you come in? We can have dinner in the bath.’
The seventh little mermaid spent the whole weekend with the prince in the bath, and he became quite frantic with desire by Monday morning because of the insurmountable problem below the mermaid’s waist. ‘Your eyes, your hair,’ he cried, ‘but that’s about all.’
‘My sister did away with her beautiful tail for love of you,’ said the s.m., reading a volume of Descartes over the prince’s shoulder as he lay on her sea-green bosom. ‘They tell me she even wore a disgusting harness on the top half of her for you, and make-up and dresses. She was the saint of mermaids.’
‘Ah, a saint,’ said the prince. ‘But without your wit, your spark. I would do anything in the world for you.’
‘So whats about getting rid of your legs?’
‘Getting rid of my legs?’
‘Then you can come and live with me below the waves. No one has legs down there and there’s nothing wrong with any of us. As a matter of fact, aesthetically we’re a very good species.’
‘Get rid of my legs?’
‘Yes—my grandmother, the Sea King’s mother, and the Sea Witch behind the las
t whirlpool who fixed up my poor sister, silly cow, could see to it for you.’
‘Oh, how I love your racy talk,’ said the prince. ‘It’s like nothing I ever heard before. I should love you even with my eyes shut. Even at a distance. Even on the telephone.’
‘No fear,’ said the seventh m., ‘I know all about this waiting by the telephone. All my sisters do it. It never rings when they want it to. It has days and days of terrible silence and they all roll about weeping and chewing their handkerchieves. You don’t catch me getting in that condition.’
‘Gosh, you’re marvellous,’ said the prince, who had been to an old-fashioned school, ‘I’ll do anything—’
‘The legs?’
‘Hum. Ha. Well—the legs.’
‘Carry me back to the rocks,’ said the seventh little mermaid, ‘I’ll leave you to think about it. What’s more I hear a disturbance in the hall which heralds the return of your wife. By the way, it wasn’t your wife, you know, who saved you from drowning when you got ship-wrecked on your sixteenth birthday. It was my dear old sister once again. “She swam among the spars and planks which drifted on the sea, quite forgetting they might crush her. Then she ducked beneath the water, and rising again on the billows managed at last to reach you who by now” (being fairly feeble in the muscles I’d guess, with all the stately living) “was scarcely able to swim any longer in the raging sea. Your arms, your legs” (ha!) “began to fail you and your beautiful eyes were closed and you must surely have died if my sister had not come to your assistance. She held your head above the water and let the billows drive her and you together wherever they pleased.”’
‘What antique phraseology.’
‘It’s a translation from the Danish. Anyway, “when the sun rose red and beaming from the water, your cheeks regained the hue of life but your eyes remained closed. My sister kissed—”
(‘No!’)
‘“—your lofty handsome brow and stroked back your wet locks . . . She kissed you again and longed that you might live.” What’s more if you’d only woken up then she could have spoken to you. It was when she got obsessed by you back down under the waves again that she went in for all this tongue and tail stuff with the Sea Witch.’
‘She was an awfully nice girl,’ said the prince, and tears came into his eyes—which was more than they ever could do for a mermaid however sad, because as we know from H. C. Andersen, mermaids can never cry which makes it harder for them.
‘The woman I saw when I came to on the beach,’ said the prince, ‘was she who is now my wife. A good sort of woman but she drinks.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said the seventh mermaid. ‘I’d drink if I was married to someone who just stood gazing out to sea thinking of a girl he had allowed to turn into foam,’ and she flicked her tail and disappeared.
‘Now then,’ she thought, ‘what’s to do next?’ She was not to go back, her grandmother had said, until she was one hundredth part as good as the little m. her dead sister, now a spirit of air, and although she was a tearaway and, as I say, rather coarse, she was not altogether untouched by the discipline of the Sea King’s mother and her upbringing. Yet she could not say that she exactly yearned for her father’s palace with all her melancholy sisters singing dreary stuff about the past. Nor was she too thrilled to return to the heaviness of water with all the featherless fishes swimming through the amber windows and butting in to her, and the living flowers growing out of the palace walls like dry rot. However, after flicking about for a bit, once coming up to do an inspection of a fishing boat in difficulties with the tide and enjoying the usual drop-jawed faces, she took a header home into the front room and sat down quietly in a corner.
‘You’re back,’ said the Sea King’s mother. ‘How was it? I take it you now feel you are a hundredth part as good as your sainted sister?’
‘I’ve always tried to be good,’ said the s.m., ‘I’ve just tried to be rationally good and not romantically good, that’s all.’
‘Now don’t start again. I take it you have seen some men?’
‘I saw the prince.’
At this the five elder sisters set up a wavering lament.
‘Did you feel for him—’
‘Oh, feelings, feelings,’ said the seventh and rational mermaid, ‘I’m sick to death of feelings. He’s good looking, I’ll give you that, and rather sweet-natured and he’s having a rough time at home, but he’s totally self-centred. I agree that my sister must have been a true sea-saint to listen to him dripping on about himself all day. He’s warm-hearted though, and not at all bad in the bath.’
The Sea King’s mother fainted away at this outspoken and uninhibited statement, and the five senior mermaids fled in shock. The seventh mermaid tidied her hair and set off to find the terrible cave of the Sea Witch behind the last whirlpool, briskly pushing aside the disgusting polypi, half plant, half animal, and the fingery seaweeds that had so terrified her dead sister on a similar journey.
‘Aha,’ said the Sea Witch, stirring a pot of filthy black bouillabaisse, ‘you, like your sister, cannot do without me. I suppose you also want to risk body and soul for the human prince up there on the dry earth?’
‘Good afternoon, no,’ said the seventh mermaid. ‘Might I sit down?’ (For even the seventh mermaid was polite to the Sea Witch.) ‘I want to ask you if, when the prince follows me down here below the waves, you could arrange for him to live with me until the end of time?’
‘He’d have to lose his legs. What would he think of that?’
‘I think he might consider it. In due course.’
‘He would have to learn to sing and not care about clothes or money or possessions or power—what would he think of that?’
‘Difficult, but not impossible.’
‘He’d have to face the fact that if you fell in love with one of your own kind and married him he would die and also lose his soul as your sister did when he wouldn’t make an honest woman of her.’
‘It was not,’ said the seventh mermaid, ‘that he wouldn’t make an honest woman of her. It just never occurred to him. After all—she couldn’t speak to him about it. You had cut out her tongue.’
‘Aha,’ said the s.w., ‘it’s different for a man, is it? Falling in love, are you?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Fräulein Sieben. ‘Certainly not.’
‘Cruel then, eh? Revengeful? Or do you hate men? It’s very fashionable.’
‘I’m not cruel. Or revengeful. I’m just rational. And I don’t hate men. I think I’d probably like them very much, especially if they are all as kind and as beautiful as the prince. I just don’t believe in falling in love with them. It is a burden and it spoils life. It is a mental illness. It killed my sister and it puts women in a weak position and makes us to be considered second class.’
‘They fall in love with us,’ said the Sea Witch. ‘That’s to say, with women. So I’ve been told. Sometimes. Haven’t you read the sonnets of Shakespeare and the poems of Petrarch?’
‘The sonnets of Shakespeare are hardly all about one woman,’ said the bright young mermaid. ‘In fact some of them are written to a man. As for Petrarch, (there was scarcely a thing this girl hadn’t read) he only saw his girl once, walking over a bridge. They never exactly brushed their teeth together.’
‘Well, there are the Brownings.’
‘Yes. The Brownings were all right,’ said the mermaid. ‘Very funny looking though. I don’t suppose anyone else ever wanted them.’
‘You are a determined young mermaid,’ said the Sea Witch. ‘Yes, I’ll agree to treat the prince if he comes this way. But you must wait and see if he does.’
‘Thank you, yes I will,’ said the seventh mermaid. ‘He’ll come,’ and she did wait, quite confidently, being the kind of girl well-heeled men do run after because she never ran after them, very like Elizabeth Bennet.
So, one day, who
should come swimming down through the wonderful blue water and into the golden palaces of the Sea King and floating through the windows like the fish and touching with wonder the dry-rot flowers upon the walls, but the prince, his golden hair floating behind him and his golden hose and tunic stuck tight to him all over like a wet-suit, and he looked terrific.
‘Oh, princess, sweet seventh mermaid,’ he said, finding her at once (because she was the sort of girl who is always in the right place at the right time). ‘I have found you again. Ever since I threw you back in the sea I have dreamed of you. I cannot live without you. I have left my boozy wife and have come to live with you for ever.’
‘There are terrible conditions,’ said the seventh mermaid. ‘Remember. The same conditions which my poor sister accepted in reverse. You must lose your legs and wear a tail.’
‘This I will do.’
‘You must learn to sing for hours and hours in unison with the other mermen, in wondrous notes that hypnotise simple sailors up above and make them think they hear faint sounds from Glyndebourne or Milan.’
‘As to that,’ said the prince, ‘I always wished I had a voice.’
‘And you must know that if I decide that I want someone more than you, someone of my own sort, and marry him, you will lose everything, as my sister did—your body, your immortal soul and your self-respect.’
‘Oh well, that’s quite all right,’ said the prince. He knew that no girl could ever prefer anyone else to him.
‘Right,’ said the mermaid. ‘Well, before we go off to the Sea Witch, let’s give a party. And let me introduce you to my mother and sisters.’
Then there followed a time of most glorious celebration, similar only to the celebration some years back for the prince’s wedding night when the poor little mermaid now dead had had to sit on the deck of the nuptial barque and watch the bride and groom until she had quite melted away. Then the cannons had roared and the flags had waved and a royal bridal tent of cloth of gold and purple and precious furs had been set upon the deck and when it grew dark, coloured lamps had been lit and sailors danced merrily and the bride and groom had gone into the tent without the prince giving the little mermaid a backward glance.
