Fly Away Home

by Marina Warner

  Mélusine is my niece. Her mother found Arthur alone and palely loitering by a lake one winter morning during his questing days – you know the rest: she saw a lily on his brow and he shut her eyes with kisses four … When he woke up he remembered nothing, only the bliss of it, and the unappeasable longing that a faery encounter trails in its aftermath. Mélusine was the result.

  I was happy to be seeing her again – though she only ever comes to see her aunt when there’s a crisis – and I began gathering together some light ingredients for our supper – a crab from my fish-pens and some samphire I’d surfaced to pick from the dunes.

  Mélusine’s appetite could be coaxed, I knew.

  She arrived in a new car, which didn’t surprise me. She has a tremendous flair for such things, and this one was a vintage model she’d come across in a wrecker’s yard; its previous owner – a seahorse from the Gulf, a notorious coke head – had turned it over. Mélusine replaced the original canopy with a giant scallop shell, harnessed six fresh young langoustines in traces of seed pearls, placed two lithe mottled carp on the rear axle, and settled herself on a cushion of sea-thrift to drive herself at top speed to visit me and pour out her woes. The effect was charming, utterly charming. She sprang from the high seat before the vehicle had alighted, tossed aside the reins to the postilions (the youngest caught them, I noted, with an adoring look) and dashed herself against my breast with a small and terrible cry.

  Holding Mélusine in one’s arms is like standing under a waterfall on a very hot day. I stepped back, almost crushed by the force of her passionate proximity and looked at her.

  ‘My dear girl.’ I couldn’t help marvelling. ‘Despair agrees with you. I’ve rarely seen you look so … so splendid.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that!’ she wailed. ‘You’re just saying it to make me feel better. I’m old, I’m getting to look old, which is worse, and I want to want to be able to be my age and for someone to cherish me in spite of it. I’m eighty next birthday, after all,’ she howled.

  I couldn’t help snorting. That’s around a hundred and fifty years younger than me, and I am still who I am, Morgan, Morgan Le Fay, and when I choose I can raise to the surface of the sea a vision of my fairy castle in the depths and mirror it on the clouds from one end of the horizon to the other. A sailor passing overhead in his ship will long only to dive down into the turquoise, then into the emerald, then into the dark purple of the sea’s depths in search of my mirage. I’ll draw him on and look from my kitchen range and say, as I am doing now, ‘I’ve some nice fresh crab for supper,’ and sit him down, just as I am now trying to settle the cascade of Mélusine on one of my mother-of-pearl-inlaid chairs. And I’ll say, ‘Welcome to my palace under the sea, wayfarer.’

  Only these days I have so many other things on my mind, frankly, so many friends’ lives to follow, so many repairs to oversee in my ramifying castle – though of course, when I was Mélusine’s age, I didn’t notice when a twig of coral was breaking loose.

  She was still flowing in my arms in her torrent of grief, shaking her tumble of hair with its tangle of seaweed and little shells – she hadn’t used a comb in a while, that was clear, and I reached for mine and began smoothing her head automatically, admiring the moiré glitter of her special shade of greeny gold. She quietened and pulled away from me and exclaimed, half-choked with emotion.

  ‘Love is a complete disaster – and I’m an accident waiting to happen …’ (I couldn’t help smiling.) ‘I don’t know why I try. I thought this time, everything would be different,’ she was sobbing.

  Mélusine needed no encouragement to tell me what had happened: ‘You remember, darling Morgan, how it is with me: my dad, dear sweet Dad who I love and will love for ever, far more than any other man …’

  ‘Why, yes.’ I was being patient.

  ‘You know that the poor old thing was mortal.’ I raised an eyebrow: this was hardly news to me. But Mélusine is a performer, and I was being granted a special, private performance. ‘Of course you know that as a result of my special inheritance from Dad I can become mortal too – when I want.’ She gave me a triumphant look. I nodded.

  Personally, I have no desire to be human.

  ‘I discovered that it’s so fun – I just float in to shore, and walk up the beach a little way, and there I am, usually on the Lungomare where the townspeople are strolling and I fall in with a group of boys and girls and we have ice creams and then I borrow a bicycle or take a ride on a scooter and we’ll all go dancing … It’s wicked being mortal!

  ‘Gianni was one of our gang. He seemed different from the others, though. I wanted him to notice me. I wanted him to love me.’

  I tutted at this: mermaids should act responsibly, I feel.

  ‘I loved him, I really did – and wanted Gianni to love me back …’ Here she began crying again. ‘It’s not like you think, because when I’m a girl I’m not so very different from other girls, except that I don’t have any family and I have to make up a story about where I come from. Gianni was suspicious, he kept asking me this, asking me that.

  ‘One night, I decided to give him a glimpse of who I really am.’

  I checked back a groan.

  On certain days every month, mermaids need to take back mermaid form: like a pearl oyster in the shoals of a tidal estuary, Mélusine can survive out of her element for a while – at the very limit, from one new moon to the next. But periodically she must return to the water.

  Mélusine was rushing on. ‘I said to Gianni, “Come, I’ve something I want you to watch.” I thought it would excite him, and the risk of doing it there, on land, excited me, too. I took him into our little bathroom. I kissed him on the lids once, twice, and then again, both sides, and told him to keep his eyes tight shut till I said he could open them …

  ‘I ran a bath and added a whole bag of salt to the water and lay down in it. Then I began humming to myself my own transformation music …’

  ‘Mélusine!’ I couldn’t help interrupting – everybody knows a mortal can’t survive hearing the sirens singing. ‘You didn’t!’

  Till now her story was like every story of a summer love affair. But now I was truly curious – had Mélusine been the death of this young man?

  ‘First my hair sprang out in its full mane from my head, then my scales began to grow from my waist downwards, tingling me with their cool and pointed tips, and I whispered to Gianni, “You can have a peep now.” My fins were pushing out from my ribs and my tail fin unfurling even fuller and glossier than before … I was in mid-metamorphosis …’

  Mélusine stopped: she could see my dismay. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her boyfriend, who’d done nothing except pick up a pretty girl at a party.

  ‘Oh, Morgan,’ cried Mélusine, ‘don’t look like that! Gianni was staring at me in the bath with his eyes bulging and making all these noises. I thought he was having a heart attack, he had such an avid look on his face. I told him he mustn’t do that … He was scaring me, but I thought it was love, pure human craving, hot human love, the kind we mermaids don’t usually know, which Gianni and I had been having all through the days and nights in our little summer apartment with the bay outside sparkling. But no …’

  Mélusine dashed the tears from her eyes and blew her nose hard.

  ‘He began laughing and leering and he said to me, “Well, two can play at that game!”

  ‘Bloody hell! There I was, lying all vulnerable in the bath, dreaming to myself about the sea so that I could come back in my natural shape, trusting him to see who I really am, and he meanwhile was turning himself back into whatever it is he really is – some kind of loathsome demon, with fangs and spikes and horns and things. And he was slavering …

  ‘I’d no time to discover more. I needed every bit of my powers to magick myself back down to the sea and safe into the depths again.’ She sniffed. ‘It was a close-run thing. I’m telling you.’
She recomposed her face and cursed furiously, then dissolved again and sobbed, ‘I thought he really loved me. He’s the only one I really wanted to stay with. I didn’t want to come back – to this life, this aloneness under the sea where there’s nothing to do, no-one to hang out with.’ She checked her iShell, and shook her head sadly.

  I was frowning at her, and she shot back, ‘It may be all right for you down here.’ She pouted. ‘But I just can’t get over his pretending all that time and that when I was doing my meta­morphosis – just to give him pleasure and show how much I cared – he only wanted to eat me.’

  ‘Oh, darling, surely not.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Mélusine, glumly. ‘After he said to me, “Two can play at that game”, do you know what he added?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He had a nerve! He said, “Besides, I just love sushi.”’ She cracked a crab feeler and sucked at it vaguely. ‘I do miss him – I miss Gianni, the Gianni I knew. You don’t know about this kind of feeling, do you?’

  I shook my head, I nodded, I shook it again – I did and I didn’t after all.

  I tucked her up in my best spare room, the one with the suite of mussel-shell furniture that Circe gave me for my centenary party. The next afternoon, she got up and ate a little breakfast of miso and crumbled wakame on toast, stepped up into the vintage car and turned her pale mother-of-pearl face to me, all sorrowful. Then all of a sudden she brightened. ‘Oh I must show you something,’ she cried out. ‘It’s really excellent!’ She dived down and urged on the carp postilions to open two cigar-shaped containers on either side of the driver’s seat. Then, with great flailings and leapings, they began to pump up bouncy balloon-like things on either side of her chariot.

  ‘Stabilisers!’ cried Mélusine with delight. ‘For use in stormy weather – my own invention – you’ll note they’re adapted from the flotation bladder of my clever old great-grandmother!’ She looked pensive for a moment. ‘Darling Medusa!’

  She followed the car, swimming up swiftly with strong strokes and swivelled into the driving seat and took up the reins. As she began to recede, I felt the light suddenly dimming around me, the rhythm slowing and a drop in temperature. She turned and saw me waving, and waving back sang out, ‘Oh darling Auntie Morgan, you’re wonderful – thank you for last night!’

  I saw her disappear against the surface of the ocean and the hazy summer sky into the sparkle and glitter and streaming bubbles, and the old desire was suddenly back with a vengeance.

  I would conjure again, and with the vision of my fairy palace under the sea, capture a passing sailor and bring him down to be with me and be my love.

  My foolish niece is such a mischief. I never expected to have such stirrings again.

  Brigit’s Cell

  ANNIE O’FLAHERTY, SCHOOLTEACHER, St Chad’s, Norwich, 2011:

  – The mini-bus is stopping here because there’s no parking nearer as the town centre’s been pedestrianised. Then it’s a short walk to Friday Market Square. It’s called that because for hundreds of years the fruit, flower and veg market has happened here on Fridays … since the days when Friday meant Freya’s day … Friday, Frigg, Freya, the Venus of the North. Anyone know the gods the other days of the week are named after?

  Thor, Thursday, that’s war. Yes, Jason, it’s true, thunder and war. The Vikings sailed across the North Sea to this part of England, and landed here and imported their gods and goddesses. But there’ve been traces of human activity since the Stone Age, as well as Romans and Anglo-Saxons and Normans and, nearer our times, Dutch.

  Brigit Torval, anchorite, St Bartholomew’s Church, King’s Lynn, 1211:

  – Summer and winter sounds are as different as flowers in their seasons – as dog rose from holly, meadowsweet from yew … They used to call me the flower maiden. They said I was made of broom and loosestrife and cornflowers and poppies …

  Annie:

  – We’re lucky today’s Friday – it wasn’t planned as the Farmer’s Market only takes place once a month. The driver’s going to let you off and then he’ll be coming back for us – when? in two hours, and he can’t wait so don’t miss him! Over there are the old Hospice and Alms-houses – the Heritage Lottery Fund gave a lot of money to convert them into a Centre to bring back the past so we can all experience it as it was. To see how everything was different then. And here’s the statue of the local benefactor who made a fortune and put up the fountain and the cattle troughs – why? Stephen! Why do you think he did?

  Yes, good, quite right, farmers drove their stock to market then. No, they weren’t any veggies then. If you were vegetarian then like you, Emma, it was because you couldn’t afford to eat meat.

  Anyhow this local boss generally beautified the town, which he pretty much owned lock stock and barrel.

  Watch out for the traffic – market vehicles are allowed and they’re a law unto themselves and I wouldn’t want to lose any of you and have to tell your parents – or the school governors – that there had been a nasty accident with a white van.

  Now look carefully at the wall of the church and see – there – where the brickwork changes … no, Katie, up a bit – as high as you could reach standing on tiptoe, at that horizontal slit – it’s really narrow. That’s where the cell of a woman used to be. They walled her in and she lived there for … See if you can find out how long – there’s a plaque as well with her name. I’m not going to say any more. You put down your answers on your sheets – where it says ‘anchorite’. I’m interested to hear what you discover … It’s one of those weird stories, the kind you can’t believe, but it happened, it’s a real living tomb and she was a real person. They fed her through the slit that you could only reach by stretching on tiptoe. You couldn’t see in and she couldn’t see out.

  Brigit:

  – I was so sweet in perfume that honey made by the bees that sipped at me was prized above all other honey.

  Annie:

  – They say an owl has haunted the chimney there ever since.

  No, Ben, of course it’s not the same owl. Just the place has stayed a favourite haunt. Birds often go back to the same nest, you know, generation after generation.

  Sometimes in the daytime you can hear an owl scuffling and shifting in its roost – they only come out at night: have any of you see one fly?

  Yes, they’re not exactly inner city birds: you have to come out to the country like here to find one! (sotto voce, to herself:) Brigit’s cell really belongs in one of those stories that are old and plain and get inside your head from when your Nan used to tell them to you, the kind of stories I’ve always known but never seem to think about until something like this, when it involves someone who’s part of real life … Nan used to mind there were so many that began with the mother dying or disappearing. ‘Why for the love of God,’ she’d say, ‘couldn’t there be more about all those fathers who do a runner? Like yours, my pet, like yours.’ That’s why we all came over to England – I was born soon after – all on the quiet –

  Brigit:

  – After I was taken to meet him, meet the man I was to be married to, we were left together in the main bedroom of his house on one of the side streets off the Friday Market. He was a merchant from Flushing, across the sea in Holland: my father had met him in the bulb trade. He was renting a pretty house with gabled windows at the back and the front, and the sunlight slanted across the floor through shutters and dappled his body – I laughed at the sight of him and he caught me up into the patch so I was dappled too.

  Annie (to herself):

  – I came across the plaque about Brigit on the school trip five years ago; that was the first time I’d taken Year Eight. I was standing near the wall where it says, ‘The Dutch anchorite Brigit Torval retired to this cell inside the cavity wall of this church and lived here in penitence and the love of God for five years. She died aged 23 in twelve hundred and something �
�’ And I’m standing here thinking of Brigit’s shame, during those times when you couldn’t take off onto the boat for Liverpool, not like my mum …

  And I swear to God I can hear Brigit whispering to me from inside the wall.

  Brigit:

  – They said I was made of wild flowers, of clover and honey­suckle, dog rose and cornflowers, loosestrife and stitchwort and lady’s bedstraw as well as poppies, picked in the meadows and the wildwoods, from along the edges of streams and the tangled hedgerows – and they presented me like a bouquet to the man I was to be married to, the one my father chose for me.

  He was my first love – for a time we were happy, we were very happy, he could not have enough of me, sinking his face into my body. ‘Oh, the scent of flowers, the flowers!’ he’d say.

  So I can’t tell why what happened later happened or why I did what I did except that I was young and curious: was the happiness we enjoyed like the happiness of others? Did other couples feel love differently? Could I experience the same things in another way?

  Annie:

  – Have you all got your entries for the Museum? Those of you who want to, stick with me. But the rest of you can go off on your own as long as you’re back, remember, at the bus at twelve o’clock. You’ll know when it’s time because the bells will start ringing for the daily service.

  Now you’ve all got your sheets, so fill in as much as you can – remember there’s £10 top-up on your phones donated by your long-suffering parents for the best journal kept on the trip.

  You’re off to find:

  a stone arrowhead

  the sole of a Roman sandal that was preserved in the bog outside the town

  a pair of donkey baskets – creels – made from reeds cut on the marshes between here and the sea

  the meaning of ‘anchorite’

  the name of the person who was shut up in the wall