The Stories of Jane Gardam

by Jane Gardam

  The garage was locked.

  Nothing for it but to get down the drive somehow and wait for the taxi under Veneering’s yews.

  On his tiptoe way he passed the heap of snow that had fallen off the roof and sounded like a slithering car. ‘I’m a bloody old fool,’ said Filth.

  At the gate he looked out upon the road. It was a beautiful gleaming sheet of snow in both directions. Nothing had disturbed it for many hours. All was silent as death. Filth turned and looked up Veneering’s drive.

  That, too, was untouched; unmarked by birds, un-pocked by falling berries. Snow and snow. Falling and falling. Thick, wet, ice-cold. His bald head, ice-cold. Snow had gathered inside his collar, his cardigan, his slippers. Ice-cold. His hands were freezing as he grasped first at one yew branch and then another and, hand over hand, made his way up Veneering’s drive.

  ‘He’ll have gone to the son,’ said Old Filth. ‘That, or there’ll be some house party going on. Golfers. Smart solicitors.’

  But the house was dark and seemed empty, as if it had been abandoned for years.

  Old Filth rang the bell and stood in the porch and heard the bell tinkle far away, like Betty’s at the rosewood dining-table in the Mid Levels.

  ‘And what the hell do I do next?’ he thought. ‘He’s probably gone to visit that fellow Christopher and they’re carousing in the Peninsular. It’ll be—what? Late night now. They’ll have reached the brandy and cigars and all that vulgarity. Probably kill them.’

  ‘Hello?’

  A light had been switched on and a face looked out from a side window. Then the front door opened and a bent old man with a strand or two of still-blond hair peered round it.

  ‘Filth? Come in.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No coat?’

  ‘I just stepped across. I was looking out for a taxi. For the White Hart. Christmas luncheon. Just hanging about. I thought I’d call and . ⁠. ⁠.’

  ‘Merry Christmas. Good of you.’

  They stood in the drear, un-hollied hall.

  ‘I’ll get you a towel. Better take off your cardigan—I’ll get you another. Whisky?’

  In the brown and freezing sitting room a huge jigsaw puzzle only one-eighth completed was laid out across a table. Table and jigsaw were thick with dust. The venture had a hopeless look. ‘Too much damn sky,’ said Veneering as they stood looking down at it. ‘I’ll put another bar on. You must be cold. Maybe we’ll hear your cab from here, but I doubt it. I’d guess it won’t get through.’

  ‘I wonder if I could use your phone? Mine seems to be defunct.’

  ‘Mine, too, I’d guess, if yours is,’ said Veneering. ‘Try, by all means. I scarcely use it.’

  The phone was dead.

  They sat down before two small red wire-worms of the electric fire. ‘Some sort of antique,’ thought Filth. ‘Haven’t seen one of those in sixty years.’ In a display case by the chimney-piece he saw a pair of old exotic earrings. The fire, the earrings, the whisky, the jigsaw, the silence and the eerily falling snow made him all at once want to weep.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about Betty,’ said Veneering.

  ‘I was sorry about Elsie,’ said Filth, remembering her name and her still and beautiful Chinese face. ‘Is your son—?’

  ‘Dead,’ said Veneering. ‘Killed. Army.’

  ‘I am so very sorry. So dreadfully sorry. I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘We don’t hear much these days, do we? Maybe we did too much hearing. Too many Hearings.’

  Filth watched the arthritic, stooped figure shamble across the room to the decanter.

  ‘Not good for the bones, this climate,’ said Veneering.

  ‘Did you never think of staying on?’

  ‘Good God, no.’

  ‘It suited you so well.’ Then Filth said something very odd. ‘Better than us, I always thought. Betty was very Scottish, you know.’

  ‘Plenty of Scots in Hong Kong,’ said Veneering. ‘You two seemed absolutely welded there. Betty and her Chinese jewellery.’

  ‘Oh, she tried,’ said Filth, sadly.

  ‘Another?’

  ‘I should be getting home.’

  It dawned on Old Filth that he would have to ask a favour of Veneering. He’d already lost a good point by coming round for help. Veneering was no fool. He’d spotted the dead-telephone business. It would be difficult to turn this round—make something of being the first to break the silence. Maturity. Magnanimity. Christmas. Hint of a larger spirit.

  He wouldn’t mention being locked out.

  But how was he going to get home? The cleaning lady’s key was three miles away and she wasn’t coming in until the New Year. He could hardly stay here—good God, with Veneering!

  ‘I’ve thought of coming to see you,’ said Veneering. ‘Several times, as a matter of fact, this past year. Getting on, both of us. Lot of water under the bridge and so on.’

  Old Filth was silent. He himself had not thought of doing anything of the sort, and could not pretend. Never had known how to pretend. But he wished now . ⁠. ⁠.

  ‘Couldn’t think of a good excuse,’ said Veneering. ‘Bit afraid of the reception. Bloody hot-tempered type, I used to be. We weren’t exactly similar.’

  ‘I’ve nearly forgotten what type I was,’ said Old Filth, again surprising himself. ‘Not much of anything, I expect.’

  ‘Bloody good advocate,’ said Veneering.

  ‘I’m told you made a damn good judge,’ said Filth, remembering this was true.

  ‘Only excuse I could think of was a feeble one. We’ve got a key of yours here, hanging in the pantry. Front-door key. Your address on the label. Must have been there for years. Some neighbours being neighbourly long ago, I expect. Maybe you have one of mine?’

  ‘No,’ said Filth. ‘No. I’ve not seen one.’

  ‘Could have let myself in, any time,’ said Veneering. ‘Murdered you in your bed.’ There was a flash of the old black mischief. ‘Must you go? I don’t think there’s going to be a taxi. It’ll never make the hill. I’ll get that key unless you want me to hold on to it for an emergency?’

  ‘No,’ said Filth. ‘I’ll take it and see if it works.’

  On Veneering’s porch, wearing Veneering’s (frightful) overcoat, Filth paused. The snow was easing. He heard himself say, ‘Boxing Day tomorrow. If you’re on your own, I’ve a ham shank and some decent claret.’

  ‘Pleasure,’ said Veneering.

  On his own doorstep Old Filth thought, Will it turn?

  It did.

  His house was beautifully warm but he made up the fire. He started thinking, of all things, about shark’s-fin soup. There was a tin of it somewhere. And they could have prawns out of the freezer, and rice. Nothing easier. Tin of crab-meat, with the avocado, and parmesan on top. Spot of soy sauce.

  Extraordinary Christmas.

  THE GREEN MAN

  An Eternity

  The Green Man is no enemy of Christ.

  Ronald Blythe

  1 THE GREEN MAN

  The Green Man stood in the fields. In the darkness of winter he was only a shadow.

  People going to the tip to throw away their Christmas trees noticed the shadow as their cars sped down the lanes. ‘That shadow,’ they said. ‘Over there.’

  Later, in January, the shadow looked like a stump or a post. ‘Tree struck by lightning over there,’ they said as they rushed along to work at the power-station across the fields. ‘Unsightly-looking thing.’ If they were local people who had lived here some time they said, ‘Look, there’s that stump thing again. Strange how you never seem to notice until it’s back.’

  When blowy March came and the days seemed to lighten over the dunes, and you could hear the sea tossing and see it spouting up, people on their way to early holidays across the water and beyond the Alps would sa
y, ‘Well, someone’s been planting seeds. There’s a scarecrow. Spring will likely come.’

  For the Green Man would now be standing with arms astretch and head askew and all his tatters flying, blustering grey and black and dun against the dun fields and the grey sky and the black thorn-bushes. There was beginning to be something rakish and reckless now about the Green Man.

  Then in April the Green Man stood forth in cold sunshine, his hands folded over the top of his hoe and his chin on his hands, and in the dawn light of Eastertime people talking or jogging or riding by, eating things and laughing, quarrelling, shouting and singing, saw him there clearly, and bright green.

  His old black clothes looked green and his winter skin looked bronze-green like a Malay’s. His eyes were amber-green and one minute you saw him, and the next minute you didn’t.

  ‘Did you see that Man!?’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘That Man over there in that field. No—too late. It’s gone now. Like a statue. Gold. No, green.’

  ‘It must be advertising something.’

  ‘Did you see that man?’ the children cried, looking backwards from car windows, and the grown-ups went on talking or didn’t bother to answer.

  The old country people would say, ‘Maybe it’s the Green Man.’

  ‘What’s the Green Man?’

  ‘Nobody knows. He’s some man that’s always been around here. I used to see him when I was little. I’d have thought he’d be dead by now.’

  ‘The Green Man?’ the granny would say. Then: ‘Never! It couldn’t be. I used to see the Green Man when I was a child and, even then, there was talk of him being as old as Time. He had other names, too. He lived hereabouts somewhere.’

  Then a leery, queery old voice from somebody wrapped up in the back of the car among the babies—it would be something after the nature of a great-grandfather—would say, ‘I seed the Green Man wunst when I were in me bassinette in petticoats. We called him Green Man or mebbe wildman. And my old pa, he said his old pa seed the Wild Green Man one day. It was the day my old greaty-greaty-grandpop went marching long this lane in his cherry-coloured coat, to the field of Waterloo.’

  ‘The only Green Man I know,’ the Dad would say as he drove the car, far too fast, round corners of the lane that, after all, were once the right-angled bends round the fields, ‘is a pub,’ and he’d rush them along towards the motorway that joined up with the Channel Tunnel or the ferry.

  ‘If it was the Green Man,’ the children would sometimes say as they stood on the deck of the ferry and looked back at the sparkling white cliffs with their grass-green icing, ‘however old can he be? He could be a hundred.’

  Nobody knew.

  And nobody knows.

  Under different names the Green Man may be a thousand years old. Or ten thousand. But his eyes are young and bright and by the time it’s midsummer he is looking dangerously attractive and permanent. He has never had a grey hair in his head. In his sea-green eyes of July is a far-away magical gaze, if you can get near enough to see it. But it is hard to get near. Now you see him, now you don’t. The field is empty and you’ll be lucky to catch a glimmer of a face between branches, down the coppice. Did you see a figure at work with a bill-hook by the blackthorn in white bloom? Maybe you didn’t.

  Or he may pass you silently on the dyke above, when you’re fishing the field drains. In the warm dusk at the top of summer he is like the nightingale and gone for deep woodland places. At dawn he is like the skylark, a speck on the blue sky.

  Do not imagine that the Green Man is soft and gentle on his land. For all his stillness he is given to rages. He likes to observe and see things right.

  ‘Get off your backsides,’ he has been known to roar. ‘Keep to your element.’ He shouts this at seed-time and harvest, yells at those—there aren’t many—who know him well.

  Sadie and Patsy and Billy, the next-farm children, know him well, and they hang around him and huggle his legs and ankles. They tickle the bare place between his boots and his trouser bottoms, they tease him with teazles.

  ‘Get off your backsides and out of this drill,’ yells the Green Man at these babies. ‘This drill!’ he yells.

  A drill is a long straight furrow in the earth into which the seeds are trickled and then covered up. The Green Man makes thousands of drills across the earth until it looks like corduroy cloth. The seeds grow and turn into one thing or another. They whiten with tendrilly peas, they turn green-gold with barley. Barley whiskers are the colour of a princess’s hair.

  ‘Get off my land,’ bellows the Green Man as he sees the cat coming, on tiptoe, paddling and playing, chewing at the barley stalks in the heat. ‘Get off my back,’ he thunders next, as the cat comes lapping and weaving and purring and winding around him, growling like a motor, springing up, all claws, to land like needles on the Green Man’s shoulders and even his head. Very bad language follows then. ‘Get off, you filthy scat-scumfish cat. Each to his element.’

  The cat drops off the Green Man and lies on its back and shows the Green Man its fluffy white stomach and grins up at him. All animals are interested in the Green Man, but he by no means treats them like pets. And he doesn’t treat people like pets.

  As the year passes, the Green Man keeps away from people more and more. In high summer, deep in the trees he watches, very stiff and silent.

  He will watch in secret. You can see carvings of him in churches like this. Watching you. It has always been so. He has always been there. Sometimes he is a leaf-mask on a frieze. Sometimes he looks like leaves only.

  2 THE GREEN MAN MOUNTS A MOUSE HUNT

  The Green Man keeps a house for comfort, but he’s seldom inside it. He has had wives in his time, maybe hundreds, and they have tried to care for it. One wife cannot have been long-since, for he has twelve sons and four daughters living, very sturdy. Of course they may be much older than they look.

  The twelve sons are scattered about the world, as sons tend to be, but the four daughters visit regularly, as daughters are more likely to do. The house is like a lark’s nest lying low in the fields. The doors and the windows of the house are always open until the daughters close them. They visit, bringing bread and milk and lamb chops and shortbread, cleaning fluids, dishcloths and porridge. They flick about with feather dusters and say, ‘This place gets no better. Lord, how it smells of mice!’ They go looking for their father in the flicker of the poplars and down the marsh and across the fields near the sea.

  The mice are not in the house at all on these occasions. Mice can smell daughters as daughters can smell mice. When they hear the daughters’ cars arriving, their noses twitch and they’re off into the bushes.

  But when the daughters have gone away again, the mice creep greedily back.

  The mice are fieldmice, but this is a misnomer. They should be called pantrymice or cupboardmice or pocketmice. They run in the Green Man’s chests of drawers and armoires, in his bags of meal and flour. They run among the dishcloths and in the Green Man’s little-used blanket. They lie, fat and lazy, in the fold of his folded deck-chair. They nestle in his boots and nest in his woollen cardigan and in the pocket of the mackintosh that hangs on the back of the kitchen door.

  Do not imagine that the Green Man is a saint to these mice.

  The weather one spring was cruelly sharp and perhaps the Green Man was feeling the weight of his two or three thousand years. He was using his house for sleeping every night. He was even occasionally lighting his dangerous paraffin stove which lit with a pop and a blob.

  One day he lay down on his couch in the daytime, sneezing, with his cushion and his rug. He felt heavy with years and he coughed as he slept. And awoke to the mice running across his face like rain. He felt them running about in his blanket and snuffling at his toes. There was activity in his green-gold hair. With a roar he lit the lamp and found a mouse making off with a green curl to her nest in hi
s boot.

  ‘This must end!’ cried the Green Man. ‘The time has come. Each to his element.’ And the next day he set off down the lane with his cheque-book and confronted the corn chandler’s in the High Street of the nearest market town. The corn chandler’s stands between the supermarket and the popso-bar, but it does a good trade.

  How very strange the Green Man looked, holding out his cheque-book, demanding a writing implement. ‘Mouse poison,’ cried the Green Man: ‘a quantity.’

  Someone ran out into the yard and called in others. ‘There’s a right one here.’

  ‘Who is it? What is it? Where’s it from? Is it human? Why’s it green?’

  The old pale-faced corn chandler sat by the fire in the back of the office. ‘It’ll be the Green Man,’ he said.

  ‘Is it the Council? Is it political? Is it trouble?’

  ‘It’s the Green Man.’

  ‘He’s for killing mice. He’s no Green Man. Is he out of a fairground?’

  ‘Don’t thwart him,’ said the corn chandler. ‘Don’t thwart the Green Man,’ he said, poking the fire.

  The Green Man walked back along the ice-rutted lanes and the cold air puffed from his mouth like a dragon. ‘Mice,’ he muttered, ‘mice. Each to his element.’

  When he reached home he called, ‘This is to fettle you. Back to your fields,’ and he lifted the lid of the flour kist and saw fat, snoring, distended mice from weeks back lying like drunken skiers in the snow. They looked comfortable and in bliss.

  These were the ones who were still sleeping and hadn’t realised yet that the more flour they ate, the less likely they would be to get out. There were a number of dead ones. The Green Man tipped the whole brigade out into the grass. The ones who could still snore woke up and made off, looking foolish.

  The foolish look of the released mice amused the Green Man, and he liked them after all as they ran away. Then he looked with shame at the mouse poison in the great drum he had bought from the corn chandler. Where to put it for safety until he could take it back and swap it for seed?