Aphrodite's Hat

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Your majesty, it is the usual request. You have heard it many times. Too many times, I sometimes fear.’ Monkshood judged that a slight disloyalty towards the king was worth the risk of his displeasure should he hear of it.

  The queen smiled. It was a cold smile and might have brought goose flesh to a human skin. To Monkshood, however, it was moonshine on water.

  ‘Quite so. Your king is well acquainted with my views. His mother was a votaress of my order; and, in the spiced Indian air, by night, full often has she gossiped by my side; and sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands.’

  The queen looked dead at Monkshood with long eyes that had darkened to a forbidding black. ‘But she, being mortal, of that boy did die. And for her sake do I rear up her boy and for her sake I will not part with him.’

  Monkshood sighed. It was as he had predicted. But it was his duty to have one more try. ‘Is there nothing you can give me to tell the king that will give him hope?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said the queen. ‘I am afraid you must return to your king empty of words of comfort.’

  Manu had been taken from the human world before he was a day old, but he was perfectly aware that he was a mortal boy. He was not a changeling – that is a child who has been swapped at birth for a fairy child. He was an orphan who had been abducted by the queen perhaps out of her much-vaunted love for his mother or perhaps, as the queen’s consort had snidely suggested, as a mere fancy. That she was prone to fancies Manu, who was a quick child, was well aware.

  Since he could remember, she had taken him into her bed to cuddle and caress him but these days he preferred to be put to his own bed by Rowan, the queen’s lady-in-waiting. Rowan was relatively young. Not that anyone could ever determine a fairy’s exact age, since fairies evolved, rather than being born, in a process somewhat like the life-cycle of plants – moving from seed to husk immensely slowly over aeons of time yet never dying. The queen, he knew, was very old, even for a fairy. Her consort was slightly younger by a couple of thousand years. This information could not have been gleaned from their appearance, which never altered; or, if it did, so gradually that no mortal reckoning could register the change.

  Manu had no absolute measure of his own age but over the years, when he could escape the vigilance of his carers, he had been in the way of finding a route from the thick of the wood to its verge, where human children sometimes came to play. Most often, it was the wilder boys who ventured there. They came in excited trepidation since there were still wild animals which, at times of dearth, would come foraging and were capable of savaging a child or even eating one alive. Manu crouched in trees above the playful children’s heads, concealed by his dark skin and the capacity learned of his adopted kind for camouflage, watching fascinated the mortal children. From these forays, he had worked out that he must now be about the age of the older boys, which was ten or eleven years old.

  It was hardly possible for him not to be aware that he was the subject of a struggle between the queen and king. The king having at first indulged the queen over the adoption had conceived a fancy for her mortal prize himself and had demanded Manu be handed over to become his henchman. But the queen had consistently refused to surrender up her charge. In consequence, all the seasonal workings of nature, in correspondence with their rulers, had been at loggerheads: roses bloomed in snow, birds built their nests in fog and ice, and the whole natural world was topsy-turvy and in stasis.

  Manu, suspecting that the arrival of the visitor had something to do with this dispute, had followed the ambassador to the queen’s quarters and had seen him emerge with an expression that suggested that his mission had failed.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the boy said, approaching. ‘May I talk to you?’

  That same evening Monkshood spoke to the king.

  ‘That there was no joy from her majesty will hardly surprise you, sir, but I did meet the boy and we conversed.’ The king’s expression brightened, but he waited for his ambassador to continue. ‘He has conceived a desire to fly. I explained this is hardly possible.’

  ‘But he wishes to learn?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the king, ‘then perhaps we are in business.’

  As a frail moon lifted itself above the darkening trees the king set out, unattended. He made these solitary excursions from time to time. Unlike the queen, his nature craved occasional solitude. Moving soundlessly over the dense undergrowth, he arrived at his destination, a circle of birches enclosing a patch of grass silvered by the wasted moon. But the glade was not, as the king had been expecting, unpeopled, for leaning against the peeling white trunk of one of the trees sat a shape.

  The king moved swiftly back into the night shadows but the shape stirred and resolved into the figure of a person who spoke to him.

  ‘Well met, your majesty.’ So he was one of those that could see. He must then be a halfling, that is a mortal with a degree of fairy genes. ‘Forgive me if I am trespassing on your territory,’ the mortal continued. For all his respectful address, he appeared quite at ease at the encounter.

  ‘Not my territory,’ the king said, moving into the moonlight.

  ‘Perhaps, then, your wife’s?’

  ‘She is not my wife.’ The king, who felt caught out, spoke with a certain chilly stiffness.

  ‘I beg your pardon. Your –’ the mortal broke off, conveying that he lacked the proper term.

  ‘My queen,’ the king offered, more amicably.

  ‘Indeed, your queen,’ the mortal agreed.

  ‘I came here,’ the king began and halted. He was visited by an odd inclination to confide in this halfling but his customary hauteur held him back.

  ‘You came to intercept her,’ the mortal suggested. It was a statement rather than an enquiry.

  ‘That is so,’ the king admitted.

  ‘To try to reach agreement over the Indian boy?’

  The mortal appeared to have surprising insight, but then maybe he was one of the very rare halflings with a stronger strain of fairy than mortal in their makeup. There were a few, the king had heard, though to this date he had never met one.

  ‘You know of the boy?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the mortal said. ‘I know all about him. In a manner of speaking, you could say he is mine.’

  ‘Your child?’ This would put an altogether different complexion on the matter. ‘I had thought, have been advised, that he was the son of an Indian prince.’

  ‘Not mine in that sense,’ the mortal said. ‘But I invented him. So you might say he is more mine than if he were spawned by my own seed. He is rather the seed of – what shall we say? – my imagination. And now he threatens to disrupt my play. Not that that in itself matters – I am in fact rather in favour of disruptions – but with the consequent problems between your royal selves it leaves things stuck. And the groundlings simply won’t stand for that.’

  ‘I see,’ said the king, who did not see at all. But at that moment the moonlight intensified and then guttered like a mighty candle.

  ‘The queen, I suppose,’ said the halfling. He moved behind his tree.

  The king, left alone and caught off guard, drew himself up to his greatest height. Quite what that was would be hard to quantify but it had the effect of his seeming to tower above the queen when she swept into the glade followed by her extensive retinue. The king had wanted this advantage since he was not sanguine that his speech would carry weight. But to his surprise he found that words came to him easily.

  ‘Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,’ he declaimed.

  The queen with her teeming train of followers halted and looked up at him with long darkening eyes.

  ‘What, jealous Oberon? Fairies, skip hence; I have forsworn his bed and company.’

  The row was predictably intense and prolonged but on both sides unusually articulate. If, in the end, unproductive. The king tried one final time. To assert his claim – ‘Give me that boy’ – and the queen refused him yet again, ‘Not for thy fairy kingdom
’ before commanding her followers to retire.

  The king stood watching their departure until the quiet accent of the halfling in his ear made him jump. ‘One of my better scenes.’

  ‘Your scenes?’

  ‘I wrote it.’ The king stared into the patch of darkness which was the stranger’s face. ‘You spoke the lines superbly, that I grant you,’ the easy voice continued. ‘But the question is, where do we go from here?’

  ‘Mortals alone know,’ exclaimed the king, thoroughly put out. He had heard himself denounced for infidelity and then had heard his own voice in turn denouncing the queen for similar indiscretions. This sort of ugly accusation was quite unlike their usual exchanges. Vicious as each could be in turn, they had always presented blind eyes to any such irregularities.

  The voice of the halfling chimed into his thoughts. ‘Since you mention it, I do, as it happens, have a plan. You see, you cannot cure an obsession. You can only replace it with another one. The queen is in love with a mortal – ergo, she is, in a sense, in love with mortality. If you desire for whatever reasons that particular scrap of mortality for yourself, then you must find another mortal creature for her to dote on.’

  The king, lost for words with which to meet this bizarre suggestion, said nothing.

  ‘No doubt you will have knowledge of some philtre drawn from the juice of a flower that will cause a body to fall in love,’ the stranger went on. ‘May I suggest that you ask one of your minions to fetch it for you, anoint the eyes of the queen while she is sleeping – most likely you will find her on that bank she likes to lie on for its pleasing scent of aromatic herbs – while I arrange for some suitable – or shall we say unsuitable –’ he gave a little giggle – ‘mortal to appear and then wham, bam, thank you ma’am! as they will say in times to come when happily I shall not be around to wince at the words. I can easily work all that business into what I am planning for my drama. And, listen,’ he added, ‘I’ll write you a scene-stopper for the moment when you determine all this. In fact, I have the opening lines already: I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows … Thyme and violets bloom at quite different times of the year, I needn’t tell you, but as the pair of you have fairly muddled the seasons I think I can get away with it and anyway most people know next to nothing about natural history. They won’t notice, or only one or two. And those few will enjoy putting me right. I sometimes think,’ the loquacious halfling continued, ‘that I owe that kind, the all-knowing ones, the odd chance to set me straight. And it saves me time and bother, having to look things up to check, you know.’

  He looked down at the king, who had dwindled from the imposing lofty stature with which he had challenged the queen to a faint sliver of grey shadow. ‘What do you say?’

  ‘Will it work?’

  ‘Of course it will work,’ the halfling said. ‘I will write it for you.’

  The following day the king was alarmed to observe the queen, apparently in a fugue, wander past him in the woods, her arms draped dreamily about a brawny workman whose thick neck concluded in a head which seemed to be in the grotesque likeness of an ass. The hairy temples were crowned with a garland of fresh flowers on which the dew glistened like tears. Lagging behind this ill-matched couple was a small, brown-faced boy, whose eyes, under the king’s scrutiny, also looked somewhat dewy.

  The king stepped in front of the boy. ‘Would you like to come and live with me?’

  The boy looked at him earnestly. ‘Will you teach me to fly?’

  The king considered. ‘I don’t know that I can,’ he said. ‘But we can always try.’

  ‘Then I will come,’ said the boy. ‘Excuse me.’ He ran to catch up with the queen, addressed a few words to her and then ran back to where the king stood looking after. ‘She says that I may do as I like.’

  ‘And you would like …?’

  ‘If it please your majesty, to come with you. The queen is very kind but I am very, very bored.’

  The flying lessons did not go well. The king made a desultory effort or two and then handed the matter over to Monkshood, who had not flown in years. After one or two dangerous falls he also passed Manu on to a minion who had no time for mortals. Manu did not fare well either as the king’s henchman. He grew too large and his early aptitude for camouflage deserted him. If anything, he became something of a nuisance.

  And for whatever reason, the king appeared to have lost interest in his trophy. He and the queen, whom he had released from the artfully induced passion for her asinine lover, were enjoying one of their erotic reunions and if they remembered the little Indian orphan at all it was with faint embarrassment.

  One moonlit night, Manu, at a loose end and wandering alone in the woods, came to a circle of birch trees. The blades of grass were etched brightly in the light of the bold moon. Crouching to look at their delicate beauty the boy observed the figure of a man lolling against the trunk of one of the white-barked trees.

  ‘Good evening,’ the man said.

  ‘Good evening,’ Manu replied. Although he had been brought up speaking Fairy, he had learned some human speech from listening to the children playing in the woods.

  ‘You will be the Indian child,’ the man said. ‘What do they call you?’

  ‘I am called Manu,’ Manu said. This was the first mortal he had ever spoken to but he was strangely unafraid.

  ‘I am sorry,’ the man said. ‘I see that I’ve neglected you.’

  Manu frowned. ‘Neglected?’ It was not a word he recognised.

  ‘I clean forgot you,’ the strange man went on. ‘You were a problem. In the way. Holding affairs up. I sorted you out and then you drifted out of my mind. I am sorry,’ he repeated. ‘One should not abandon one’s creations, however much independent life one endows them with. Even the minor parts need attention.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Manu said. He felt tearful.

  The man got up. ‘No, you wouldn’t. I am sorry for that too. Look here, you know, you can never fly. It’s not in the script.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ Manu said. And then he did begin to cry in earnest.

  ‘Listen,’ said the man. ‘You don’t belong here. They’re a fickle lot, fairies. They can’t help it – it’s their immortal nature. They wanted you in the first place because you have something they don’t have: mortality. It fascinates them because for them death is the unknown. A kind of forbidden fruit.’ He squatted down beside Manu and put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. Unused to the breath of mortals, Manu recoiled a little. ‘Now,’ said the man. ‘See here. You’ve been raised Fairy and I’ve more than a dash of it in my veins. We two will get on. You come with me and I’ll write you other parts.’

  ‘Shall I be able to fly in them?’ Manu asked.

  ‘You’ll be able to do any mortal thing,’ the man said. ‘Flying’s for immortals. Mortality has more interesting things to offer. Though before you decide …’ He put his other arm round the boy’s shoulders holding him tight. In the growing light of the moon, Manu met a level green-eyed stare. ‘It is midsummer now. And my mind tends towards a comic turn. But there will be winters coming and sadder tales to tell. I should warn you of this. You may also be asked to play, well, the full range. If you stay here with them, you’ll grow but you’ll never die.’

  ‘They don’t fly much themselves,’ Manu said. ‘Not at all, really.’

  ‘There you are then,’ the man said. ‘My name’s William, by the way. Will, if you prefer.’

  They walked off together under the high yellow moon.

  THE BURIED LIFE

  (i)

  Light flows our war of mocking words

  Laura was not too surprised when Simon asked her to marry him. But she was surprised at herself when she accepted the proposal. She did not love Simon – had never pretended to, not even to herself – and so she was annoyed to find – when he asked ‘How would you like to be Mrs Kraemer?’ – herself answering ‘With wonder.’


  Afterwards she felt it was too late to explain she had been mistaken in the impression she had given, although she was aware that this situation, whether it ended in her carrying out or reneging on the apparent promise of her words, was likely to lead to trouble.

  From time to time Laura had thought about her reasons for having got in tow with Simon in the first place, and had concluded they were mainly physical. Simon was a good-looking man, tall above the average and, when she first met him, with a head of curly hair, which had since suffered the usual ravages of time, and a sensual mouth which had not. A friend of Laura’s, when shown a photograph of Simon, had described the mouth as ‘cruel’, but Laura preferred to see in it a reference to the mouths of archaic statues, which together they visited at various ancient sites.

  Laura had always known there was an element of wish-fulfilment in her observations about Simon: he was dangerous, her bones told her so, and yet, perversely, she allowed the relationship to continue, to flourish even. Her reservations had taken shape when, early in their acquaintance, she had sent Simon a poem.

  It is not sensible to set tests and the poem was something of a test. Poems had become stepping-stones by which she negotiated her daily life, and this one in particular: ‘The Buried Life’ by Matthew Arnold.

  The poem was important to her because it defined something she recognised yet had not experienced: the moment that can flash between human beings, making a home-coming of their apartness.

  In general, Laura knew, life was not like that and so far had certainly not been so for her. Mostly one struggled to make oneself understood – if one struggled at all, and hadn’t become accustomed to vague acquiescence in views one didn’t really hold.

  She had married Terence for her mother, who, as she liked to say rather often, had ‘lost’ her own husband and felt that a son-in-law who knew how to fix a washing machine and run down to the shops when she was out of something was just the ticket. Laura, who had spent her adolescence in rather ordinary rebellion, succumbed to the passionate love which, despite herself, she bore her mother. Finally she married Terence because she hoped this might make her mother content with her at last.