The Stories of Jane Gardam

by Jane Gardam

  ‘Soon we shall all go to the moon,’ says the jolly cousin.

  His lordship says, ‘These days I’m only able to put one foot in front of another.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ says his sister, ‘you can’t even do that.’

  This scene in the manor kitchen the Green Man finds very comforting.

  Lady Serena Transept walks with the Green Man part of the way home. He pushes his bicycle beside her along the avenue and she jumps the puddles like a giraffe (and she all of ninety), her spindle legs in thick, lace-patterned stockings.

  ‘We are both old things,’ she says: ‘antiques. I and His Lordship and the Manor will soon be gone, and all our kind.’

  ‘And, no doubt, I,’ says the Green Man.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘I’d doubt that very seriously.’

  6 THE GREEN MAN AND THE LOSS-ADJUSTER’S WOMAN

  The Green Man is in the coppice, lean as a sapling, pausing with his axe, peering from his deep-set eyes through the silver branches. Who is this walking over the meadow towards his house? She disappears in a fold of the field where the house lies, and after some time she re-emerges and walks towards him. She has passed through his house, front door to back, for both stand open. Here she comes on her high heels, a snake, very thin, smoking a cigarette, which she throws away into the coppice. The Green Man is invisible in the bouquets of the ash clumps, his face dappled so that leaves seem to flicker and caress his cheeks, to sweep out of his eyebrows. Who’s this then?

  He watches carefully to make sure that the cigarette lies dead in the wood-chippings and the wood anemones. There is no glow.

  She passes. She has a mean look. She wears town clothes, not warm enough, but quite respectable. She places her feet with care and they take her out of sight down to the great May trees and beyond; beyond the struggling elms and the whispering poplars, over the marsh. There she goes. Only a dot now. Over the marsh to the seaside.

  Now, she is returning, and she passes through the coppice again and he sees her little watchful face. It is a closed face.

  This time she side-steps his hidden house and soon he hears a motor starting up and driving away. The silence flows over the land again to be broken before long by the Green Man as he flings his axe against the sapling stalks in rhythmic chopping.

  He works until nightfall and the wind has changed and comes off the sea and he feels cold. He walks home thinking, I shall sleep indoors tonight. He has his axe over his shoulder and he whistles for the dog, but the dog doesn’t come. He thinks of hot porridge and hot tea and maybe whisky before bed.

  But there is no bed. There is no couch. There is no table. There is no chair. Gone is the small wooden-handled herb-chopper of ancient design, the barometer given him by the peripatetic academic folklorist, the hat that once belonged to Oliver Cromwell, willed him by a former Lord Transept. Gone are the books from the shelf, the lustre jug from the dresser, the gold comb with the seashells he bought at the door and has never liked. Gone is the black iron kettle on the chain and the iron griddle that hung from the rafters, the great court-cupboard mysteriously carved in Bremen and the jerry-pot of Meissen. Gone is the dog.

  The Green Man walks in the east wind, calling for the dog. When at last he returns, he makes porridge, but not in the black pot, which needs both hands to be lifted to the fire and is lined with heavy silver; for that is gone.

  There is a very old hearth-mat made of coloured scraps of cloth from God knows which countries and the Green Man wraps himself in this and sleeps upon the floor.

  In the morning, or perhaps several mornings later, come some daughters lovely as lilies, early, and see upon the floor this long roly-poly with head and feet stuck out at either end and all the tufted patches of old garment-scraps in between. There is the scrap of an eighteenth-century smock, a nineteenth-century bloomer, a snicket of liberty bodice with a very small pearl button, the edge of a milkmaid’s petticoat and a glimpse of lavender silk from the wedding dress worn by who knows who in the Green Man’s history, and all the women in it. His green feet are sockless for his socks are gone. His green hair floats about, for gone is his limpet-covered comb. The Green Man in his bedding roll is like a multi-coloured almond-slice in the window of an eccentric pastry cook.

  The dog, all burrs and sorrow, lies close beside him on the floor.

  Mugged! Dead! Police! Robbers!

  Certainly robbers.

  Retribution! Revenge!

  But the Green Man sits up on an apple box and takes a mug of tea and picks burrs off the dog. The dog cannot stop shivering.

  ‘Oh, we’ll catch them all right,’ says the policeman—a fishy, flashy fellow who has a past and doubtful friends. The Green Man has often heard him, sniffing about. ‘We’ll soon get the Loss-Adjuster in.’ The Green Man is unaware of loss-adjusters and presumes them to be philosophers.

  ‘You might also like a counsellor,’ says the young policegirl, overweight and gorgeous. I could counsel you, her eyes say to the exotic animal-eyes of the Green Man, after hours.

  ‘I have suffered no loss,’ says the Green Man. ‘I shall miss the little herb-chopper. And my socks, for they were knitted by someone close to me.’

  ‘He enjoys frugality,’ say the daughters, putting up a new bed and couch, setting stainless steel on the shelf. ‘He’s in his element away from plenty.’

  The Green Man strokes his dog.

  ‘Do you bring a charge then?’ asks the policeman.

  ‘Yes,’ say the daughters.

  ‘No,’ says the Green Man. ‘No charge, free for all.’ Then, looking at the policeman, he says, ‘I shall lose nothing.’

  ‘I’d not count on that, Grandad. There was a big antiques fair at Newark last week and all will be gone to Holland in containers by now. You’ll be insured of course? The Loss-Adjuster will see to you.’

  The Green Man is not conversant with details of insurance policies.

  Each to his element.

  The policegirl can’t keep away. She calls early and late, but after a time she does not find the Green Man at home. She shouts to him across the marshes, but there is no reply. He sleeps out in the coppices among the wood anemones and relies on Indian Take-Aways from the next-door farmers, old and young Mr. Jackson. ‘Hello?’ she calls. ‘Are you there? It’s me, Pearly.’ She thinks of him all the time. She will never forget him. She is never to meet such another. She wanders, dreaming through the coppice, in her black police shoes, over the dykes. The long wet grasses brush her strapping legs. She leaves a daring note one day on the new plastic table in the kitchen, with a box of chocolates and a dozen pairs of socks marked ‘Nylon Rich’.

  The Green Man doesn’t understand the note and feeds the chocolates to the dog. The socks revolt him.

  One day, comes the first woman again on her high heels over the meadow. She looks to left and right and smokes her cigarette and when she gets to the coppice this time her eyes have become accustomed to the light and she sees the Green Man standing there. She makes to throw away the cigarette but then rubs it out on the sole of her shoe and puts it in her pocket. ‘Hi,’ she says. She seems uneasy. He does not speak.

  ‘My partner is the Loss-Adjuster and he’s down in the car, waiting.’

  ‘I have not suffered loss.’

  ‘You have been victimised. By someone who knew everything about you.’

  ‘Everything about me?’

  She blushes, and pretends to be bored. ‘He’s come to make an assessment.’

  ‘An assessment of me?’

  ‘He’s the policeman’s twin brother.’

  ‘Ah.’

  There falls a silence until the Green Man walks across to her in the whispering wood-chips that scent the air among the wood anemones. There are bluebells now, too. Such bluebells! Smoke on summer eves. The scent of bluebells lasts for one week only.

 
; The Green Man carries his glistening axe over his shoulder and comes close to the woman and looks down, down into her troubled eyes. He takes the axe from his shoulder with both his hands and holds it high.

  She cannot move.

  Then he places it in the woman’s stained hands with their chipped red nails and says, ‘Take this, too.’

  She throws it to the ground and runs away, stumbling back across the meadow.

  As she passes the house the dog shoots out and goes for her heels, snap, snap. He remembers her. He remembers, too, the Loss-Adjuster who is sitting in the car.

  The Loss-Adjuster is not keen to get out of the car.

  ‘He won’t take money,’ says the woman, falling into the seat beside him, the dog raising merry hell.

  ‘Why you all over ’im? Let ’im be,’ says the Loss-Adjuster. He smells of guilt and sweating fear that glistens on his cheeks.

  ‘He could get us caught,’ squeals his woman.

  ‘Get on, ’e’s a lunatic.’

  ‘I don’t know what he is,’ she says, crying.

  The Green Man stands now on a rise behind the invisible house, watching them. The evening sun flames on his woodland limbs, his axe gleams, his hair blows green in the wind.

  ‘’e’s from the sixties. ’e was a drug-addict,’ says the Loss-Adjuster. ‘There’s stories about ’im. Forget it, can’t you?’

  ‘We’ve got to get it all back to him. He’s bad news.’

  ‘’e doesn’t want it,’ says the Loss-Adjuster. ‘Pearl said. She’s gone soft on ’im.’

  Then the Loss-Adjuster’s woman is filled with a raving jealousy and she tries to get out of the car. ‘I must go back and be with the Green Man,’ she cries, and the sweaty Loss-Adjuster socks her and starts the car and tries to drive it away down the lanes where sometimes farm machinery passes along, each machine the length and height of a street of houses. One of these in a moment meets the Loss-Adjuster and his Moll on the corner of a flax field, oh, such a colour, more gentle, more shadowy blue even than bluebells, blue as a tender morning sky and now splattered all over with scarlet.

  The policegirl is back soon to try to counsel the Green Man all over again in his double tragedy, but he looks over her head, far, far away.

  ‘Don’t you care about anything?’ she weeps then. ‘Why can’t you need comfort?’

  So he takes her home for a time, then makes her some tea in a tin mug and sends her away with the multi-coloured rug of paduasoy and glazed linen and sprig-muslin snips, of velveteen and taffeta and tussore, a shred or two of hair shirt but much point d’ésprit and threadwork and black work and bead work and hedebo, and rich lazy-daisy and faggoting and Venetian toile cirée. The old rug is backed with flour bags, and she keeps it all her life.

  7 THE GREEN MAN MEETS HIS MAKER

  The gold-and-rose-coloured autumn is gone and in November come the wind and the rain and the Green Man’s twelve sons in a minibus. He sees it from his kitchen window, and closes his eyes. In they all stream. ‘What a disgrace! You look ill! You look haggard! Who looks after you? Where are our sisters?’

  ‘They are on a short holiday in the south of France.’

  ‘Lucky for some. They don’t work like we do. We can’t afford holidays in the south of France. And how stupid, too, the south of France at this time of the year. You are living so poor. You need paint and wallpaper. Your roof is full of holes. You will shame us in the neighbourhood. What’s for dinner?’

  ‘I’m afraid I no longer eat dinner. I no longer need it.’

  ‘You are undernourished. You have leaves in your hair. Let me get on the blower for supplies, carpenters, painters. Amenities.’

  ‘Amenities?’

  ‘The electricity board, the telephone centre, the television and video shop.’

  ‘And to the Authorities,’ says the eldest son. ‘There are excellent homes for the elderly.’

  ‘I am not elderly,’ says the Green Man, ‘I am the Green Man.’

  ‘Hello? Hello? Yes, he needs help. He is alone. Practically unfurnished. We think it has affected his mind.’

  ‘Out!’ shouts the Green Man. ‘The lot of you. Back to your element,’ and he picks up a flail that leans by the back door and begins to strike out about him, clubbing some of them on the head.

  They scatter in their sharp suits, clutching their mobile phones. All except the youngest, who turns back and says, ‘Sorry it’s been so long, Dad. It’s easy to forget the passage of time.’

  ‘I’ve stood so long in the passage of time,’ says the Green Man; ‘it is my home sweet home.’

  ‘Can you manage?’ asks the youngest son (and another one, possibly Number Six, who’s not as bad as most of the rest, peeps round the door and fingers his club tie). ‘Have you enough money?’

  ‘Money has never been a trouble to me.’

  ‘Have you enough food?’ and he lifts the lid of the flour crock and sees the drum marked MOUSE POISON.

  ‘Mouse poison in the flour crock!’ cries the eldest awful son with his blow-dried hair, coming back into the kitchen. ‘That does it. Not fit to live alone.’ He picks up the drum and makes off with it to the minibus, where the rest of the brothers are glaring through the windows.

  ‘We’ll take it back to the corn chandler and get him to send you some bread,’ says the kindly, though feeble, youngest son.

  ‘He doesn’t deliver.’

  ‘I’m sure that he would.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ says the Green Man, stern as Ulysses.

  He watches the minibus depart, driven erratically and bad-temperedly by the eldest son. The youngest son waves from the window.

  ‘Thank God,’ says the Green Man and lies down on his old couch and listens to the silence. After a time, edging into the silence, a wind begins to blow across his fields, a soft wind but whispering of winter. The Green Man sleeps.

  Then the Green Man has a dream. He dreams that the wind has strengthened and is tearing at his house in the fold of the fields and that he hears branches and sheds come crashing down. He dreams that he goes to fasten the clattery window in the kitchen, and there outside, beneath a leafless tree in the apple orchard, stands a figure who looks as if he owns the place. Before shutting the window the Green Man shouts, ‘Get off my land.’

  Then he wraps himself in an extra sack and goes outdoors.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing in my orchard?’ he cries.

  ‘I’m standing on next year’s daffodils,’ says the man.

  The man’s clothes do not blow in the mighty wind. Otherwise his figure is similar to that of the Green Man. He is tall and lean and wears something much like a sack. This time it is certainly not the Devil.

  The Green Man thinks again, ‘I must be seeing through a looking-glass,’ and he walks right round the man. The man’s hair is longer than the Devil’s so that the Green Man cannot examine the lines in his neck. Nevertheless he thinks, ‘This is myself.’ But when he has come full circle and looks into the man’s eyes, he sees that the man is Christ.

  The Green Man falls to his knees, but Christ raises him up.

  ‘Your troubles are over,’ says Christ.

  ‘You mean I am about to die?’

  ‘I mean that there is no Death,’ says Christ. ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’

  ‘But I’m the Green Man. The earth is my element. This is my tragedy. You know this. I am bound and tied. The very meaning of me is not known. You do not include me.’

  Christ said, ‘The Green Man is no enemy of Christ.’

  The Green Man woke from his dreams and the wind was not the soft wind to which he had fallen asleep: it was shrieking and howling as it had done in the dream orchard.

  It was daylight, and he went to fasten the clattering window, outside which nobody stood under the trees.

  ‘I shall eat some
bread,’ said the Green Man. He felt very tired. ‘And I shall drink some water.’ Then he remembered that the flour crock was empty. The water down in the field dyke felt far away.

  So he thought, ‘I’ll rest a bit longer,’ and lay down again on the couch. Soon he began to feel peaceful. ‘I shall wait here for Death,’ he said. ‘Here it comes.’

  Soon, far away down the lanes, he heard the sound of Death approaching. It was a great black Yamaha. Its rider sat astride it, a black figure in black visor and black armour. Black gauntlets grasped the black handlebars. The noise of the great bike seemed to silence the wind.

  ‘It is here,’ said the Green Man as the motorbike shuddered, surged and stopped at his gate. He walked to his front door and opened it on the black day.

  Death pushed his steed right to the Green Man’s threshold. Fastened to its flank was a box with a lid and a strap.

  ‘Too small for a coffin,’ thought the Green Man. ‘Maybe it’s for my ashes.’

  ‘Can I bring it round the back,’ asked Death, ‘in case it gets nicked at all?’

  ‘Nicked?’ said the Green Man. ‘I don’t think Nick’s here any more. He’s gone. You needn’t fear him. This is a good place now, and I am ready to die.’

  ‘To die?’ said Death. ‘Oh, come on now!’ And Death removed the black helmet and unzipped the black leathers.

  Out stepped a girl like a spring flower, and all of sixteen. ‘I am the corn chandler’s daughter,’ she said, ‘and I’ve brought you some bread.’

  They looked, and they loved.

  ‘It is a miracle!’ said the corn chandler’s daughter in the Green Man’s arms.

  ‘It is heaven!’ she said on the Green Man’s couch.