The Limits of Enchantment

by Graham Joyce

  At exactly one in the morning William and Judith arrived. Judith was tight-lipped and wouldn’t make eye contact. William refused to say where we were going. He told me to put on my coat. I climbed into Arthur’s leather jacket with the death’s head on the back. William glanced at it and said, ‘For God’s sake.’ Judith looked slightly pained.

  I followed them in silence along the field path and into the woods. The moon was struggling into its last quarter, but was muffled by clouds and its light was weak. The grass underfoot was wet and the night air served up a bone-invading damp. I was shivering and clasping my coat and scarf at my throat as I followed a well-known track deep into the woods. The bluebells were in shoot, not flowering yet but already exhaling a sweet perfume. White moths were also out everywhere, flitting from the new ferns and the trees, disturbed by this passing cortège, flitting and resettling.

  We came to a small clearing guarded by oak and ash trees and shielded by holly bushes. Several other figures, perhaps a dozen in total, had already assembled there, though at first I couldn’t recognise any of them in the darkness, and I doubt if broad daylight would have helped. William went amongst them, dispensing gruff greetings. Though they had battery-powered torches, someone had set flickering candles burning in jam jars at the foot of an oak.

  To my astonishment I saw that a deep grave had been dug near the candles. A thrill of horror flashed through me as I thought they were going to kill me and bury me in the woods. Then I saw a military-style medical stretcher drawn up near the grave and I realised they already had their corpse. The body was draped in a sheet of muslin cloth.

  ‘Mammy!’ I breathed. ‘Oh Mammy!’

  William immediately came across to me. He gently cupped his leathery old hands around my face. His soft eyes peered into mine. ‘You understand?’ he said. ‘You understand?’

  I couldn’t speak. I nodded, and he stepped back from me and went to join the others by the yawning grave. Large clumps of green bluebell shoots had been carefully lifted with their root-soil intact and set aside in neat slabs. More white moths flitted around, excited by the candlelight and the odours of the disturbed ground. I approached the grave. I wanted to look into the black earth, into the soil pit where we all go. If I could have done I would have lighted Mammy’s journey.

  It was too dark to see even to the bottom. Someone had dug with a wonderfully sharp spade, so precise and sheer were the sides of the fresh pit. There was a beautiful efficiency in the cutting of the earth. The spade had sliced through a tangle of white, cotton-like plant fibre and tree root. The black soil at the lip of the grave gleamed with moisture. The smells rising from the hole were yeasty and strangely sweet. I looked up from the grave and saw, on the other side of the hole, Judith. She tried a sympathetic smile.

  ‘Stand aside,’ a stranger’s voice said, and I realised he meant me. The men had lifted Mammy from the stretcher and were waiting to get on with things. Then the voice said, ‘Stone the crows. What the hell are you wearing?’ William looked at the man and shook his snowy white head in disgust.

  The men had four ropes looped under Mammy’s body. The ropes were new, bleached white and elaborately knotted at intervals. They tossed the ropes across the grave and the other mourners stepped forward and took them up. Judith motioned to me so that I might go and share her rope end. I recognised another woman whom I couldn’t place at the time. She was sharing her rope end with yet another woman who was sliding her dentures out along her bottom lip. Others were strangers to me. I counted heads. There were thirteen mourners, myself included.

  Mammy was hoisted into position and carefully lowered into the black hole. The shuffling feet around the grave kicked up the scent of leaf-mould and released dozens of white moths that flew up or settled on the muslin sheet covering the body. When the body touched the floor of the grave we all let go of the ropes, letting them fall into the hole.

  William cleared his throat and said simply, ‘Mammy Cullen has come back to you.’

  I didn’t know if we were supposed to repeat the words, as in a church catechism, but no one added anything. All that happened was that everyone stepped back, as if William’s words had been a cue. If so it was lost on me. Perhaps I expected more, but there was nothing. One man with his spade filled in the grave as everyone watched in silence. When it was filled, he and William took up the clumps of shooting bluebells and carefully transplanted them back into the disturbed earth, and as they did so the white moths streamed from the plants in a small cloud, each like a tiny point of light, so many that I was astonished.

  ‘The moths!’ I couldn’t help myself.

  William stopped in his work of replanting the bluebells and looked glumly back at me. Then he continued. When the job was done it seemed that only very careful inspection of the earth would reveal any sign of the grave. William got up from his knees, his joints cracking, and wiped the dirt from his hands. It was over. The mourners began to filter away through the trees.

  William approached me, still brushing soil from his hands. I think his leg had gone numb from the kneeling, because he wove towards me like a drunk. ‘Don’t you know when Mammy is talking to you?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I’m wasting my breath, aren’t I? You know nothing about it.’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Judith said. ‘She’s grieving.’ Judith took my hand. Her own was warm. ‘I’ll walk home with you, and sit up. You won’t want to sleep the rest of the night.’

  I looked round to see what William and the others were planning to do. They had already gone, slipped through the trees. There was neither sound nor sight of any of the other mourners who, moments earlier, had been gathered around the grave. They had vanished like spirits. The candles were gone, too. The shooting bluebells looked as if they had never been disturbed. Even the moths had settled. The only sound was of the huge oak at the head of Mammy’s grave, creaking slightly in the breeze.

  The sound of that tree creaking has never left me.

  Judith did walk me back to the cottage, but when we got there I persuaded her that I wanted to be on my own. There were things I wanted to do and there was already too much distance between us. She kissed me lightly on the cheek and left.

  Once inside I switched on the lamp and I took out a notebook. I put that ‘Green Onions’ disc on the record-player and left it playing quietly, with the arm off so that it might repeat over and over. Then I sat at the table and I wrote. I wrote everything. Everything that Mammy had told me about everyone I knew, and about those I didn’t know. At first I just wrote notes, filling up several pages with names. Then I started again and wrote in full sentences and proper paragraphs.

  I started with the names of those higher up and worked my way down. And I had such a lot to say. Such a lot.

  I wrote on into the night, with ‘Green Onions’ for company. The moon going into her last quarter shone clear and cold through the window. I heard, above the muted music, the owls screeching outside as I wrote. I heard the dog fox barking and the badger coughing in the lane. I filled three notebooks with my tight, small scribbling. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to write for so long without a break. I paused only to massage my aching hand or to answer a call of nature. I wrote when it all went still and I continued writing through the first birdsong and past the trailing off of the dawn chorus.

  My pen whispered to the page. It poured out like heartache. And though I was writing, writing in a kind of fury, in a fever, with my pen stroking at the leaves of the notebook, it felt to me like a running, a kind of sudden freedom, a haring through the fields in which my paws left imprints and trails of signs in the grass and earth underfoot, from which the meaning spoke itself.

  Ultimately after my writing marathon I fell asleep in my armchair and I was awoken by the sound of someone knocking on my door. It was Greta. I struggled to my feet.

  She was smiling again, damn her eyes. ‘Gosh Fern, you look like you’ve only just woken up.’

  ‘I have.’
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  ‘But it’s the middle of the day!’

  ‘Really. I suppose you’d better come in.’ I remembered my notebooks on the table. I swept them up and placed them on the hidden shelf behind the tea caddy, next to the secret jar of Mammy’s hair and nail clippings.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Greta beamed at me. I grunted, and she said, ‘Wisewoman things?’

  I’m not sure what she meant by that but I wasn’t going to encourage her. I was still half coiled in my mid-morning sleep. I also had the afternoon’s ‘funeral’ to think about. I asked her what had brought her to me.

  ‘This is not going to be easy to say,’ she told me.

  I suspected instantly that Chas had sent her to do his pleading. She would let me know what a decent man he was, how he was above that kind of behaviour. She would appeal to me that I’d made some sort of a mistake. ‘Spit it out,’ I said.

  ‘Right. Okay. I’m going to say it with no beating about the bush. I’m going to tell you, straight off the bat—’

  ‘Greta!’

  ‘Okay. I’m pregnant. I want you to get rid of it.’

  Suddenly I woke up. I’d got her wrong. Maybe I was slipping in my ability to see through people. But here she was, smiling at me as if across a cake full of lighted candles at her birthday party and telling me she wanted an abortion. ‘You didn’t have period pains the other day did you? How far gone are you? Don’t lie.’ I said this automatically.

  ‘Ten to twelve weeks,’ she said. I thought, stop smiling will you!

  ‘It’s Chas’s?’ I thought, this complicates my feelings. But she shook her head.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Luke.’

  ‘You’re certain? I thought you said Chas was … also your boyfriend.’

  ‘I did. Well, I said he was also my lover. But it’s not Chas’s.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘A woman can be sure, Fern.’

  Her smile was starting to look goofy, and deeply irritating. I suspected she had some airy-fairy mystical notion of when she conceived. Women always say this and it’s rot. About these things Mammy would always say you can’t trust yourself and you can’t trust your heart, because your heart will only tell you what your heart wants you to be told. I knew that the only way a woman can be sure in such circumstances would be a blood test, and I told her so. The smile, at least, dropped from her face and I wanted to shout Hurrah!

  ‘In some ways you’re very clever, Fern,’ she said sharply, ‘but in other ways you’re like a little girl. It couldn’t be Chas’s child because he has problems in that department.’

  ‘What?’ I said, genuinely shocked.

  ‘He can’t get it up. Can’t get a hard-on, how plain do you want me to put it?’

  I felt dizzy. This couldn’t be possible. I had to get out of my chair, turn my back on Greta for a moment. I tried to conceal my bewilderment by putting to her a number of questions about Luke. Did he know? What was his opinion on the matter? Though I barely listened to the answers Greta offered.

  Luke knew, she said, and wanted to keep the child. But Luke already had two children at the commune by different women, and another two offspring in other parts of the country. He was wonderful yet irresponsible, she said; decent but feckless.

  It was a woman’s right to choose, she said. I agreed with that sure enough. It always has been and it always will be. Then she said she hated to get rid of this baby but needed to because she had had enough of the commune life. She said she was sick of the drugs, tired of the aimless living, hurt by the emotional debris of the promiscuity and angered by the way these hippie guys trailed their ‘chicks’ and their babies around the commune free from the most basic of duties and emotional obligations. It’s not enough just to grow your hair long, she told me. She wanted another kind of life, not one of conformity, no, not going back to winding the machine, she said, but on to a life where she could build what she called a ‘new ethos’. No longer one of the outsiders, it would be ‘in and against’; it would be radical and challenging; it would be a new bohemian alternative that would bring out the best in people.

  It was quite a speech. She sounded like Joan of Arc. And she never smiled while she said all this. And though in one way I loved hearing it, I couldn’t keep my mind off what she’d told me about Chas.

  ‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘You seem miles away. Are you going to help me or not? I know you can.’

  It didn’t occur to me to ask how she knew I might be able to help her. It was dangerous information. Many of the women in the village and around knew what Mammy did, and many would guess I could do it too. Few of them would tell the men. It was a half-secret, if there can be such a thing. But I set to work right away.

  Greta watched me as I mixed the herbal abortifacients. I said, ‘Mammy never liked doing this and I don’t either. I don’t want you to think I do it lightly.’

  ‘I don’t. I’ve sworn to myself I’ll never be so careless again.’

  I’m sure I sniffed at that, but I think she meant what she said. When I’d gathered together the ingredients I instructed her how to use it and to come to see me if she got terribly ill. ‘The last one we gave this to died,’ I told her.

  She looked at me. Well you would, wouldn’t you?

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ I told her. ‘Anyway it’s either that or the Leamington dwarf with his knitting needles.’

  ‘Are you angry with me about something, Fern?’

  ‘No, not you. It’s just that I think I’m going mad. And there are people in the world who would like to see me go mad. You’d better leave now. I don’t want you telling Luke nor Chas nor anyone else what I’ve given you there. You can tell Judith, that’s all.’

  ‘Credit me with some sense! And have you heard about Judith?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She might be suspended from the school.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Being seen with undesirables, no doubt.’

  I didn’t know whether by that remark Greta meant me or the folk at Croker’s Farm. My mind raced. ‘Now if you don’t mind I’ve got to get myself ready for Mammy’s funeral this afternoon.’

  ‘That’s another thing,’ Greta said. ‘Can Chas and I come?’

  29

  It was very odd, watching the burial of a coffin you know to be empty. That and listening to the rites and obsequies, though the Reverend Miller presided over this emptiness beautifully. I felt bad that he’d gone to all this trouble, paying for a plot and ordering a simple headstone just to bury a box of bricks.

  William was there, and Judith who of course managed to make herself look sexier and juicier than ever in her mourning clothes and coal-black, broad-brimmed hat and black nylons. There were others whose faces I recognised from the previous evening, though they never gave any signal. I was still amazed by it all. It was not as if I didn’t know that Mammy wouldn’t have wanted to be buried in a churchyard; that she felt no affinity with the local church; that she thought her proper resting place would be somewhere in what remained of the old forest. It was the degree of the organisation that surprised me, the machinery of the deception, the dedication to the alternative by the few.

  And of course there were many others there who didn’t know either. Bill Myers in his police uniform and holding his cap under his arm, and Peggy looking sombre. The Cormells, with Bunch red-faced and openly weeping. Emily Protheroe who would soon be eating her wedding cake, and her mother. One or two other families were represented, too, though not nearly so many as the number of families Mammy had helped over the years. Not nearly so many. But of those who were there, I let everyone know that Venables and the estate hadn’t wanted Mammy buried in the churchyard. That even in 1966 this was how these people behaved. I wanted everyone to know how spiteful these people were.

  But there was Greta, smiling beatifically and Chas, too, shirtless, having made no concession to the funeral dress code and wearing a leather waistcoat under a corduro
y jacket. Though Bill shuffled uncomfortably whenever Chas drew near to him I was glad they were there to swell the numbers and show their respects.

  But it was when the Reverend Miller said ‘my days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle’ that something started to happen to me.

  I started to come undone.

  Then later when he read from the psalm: ‘As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone.’ I know it’s so ridiculous because it wasn’t as if Mammy was there at all and I hadn’t shed a single tear during the night at her real burial, but it began to flow and I felt myself swaying and unable to reconcile the thought of Mammy in the ground and astronauts in space and Judith with her arm linked in Chas’s, and I know if Bill Myers hadn’t stepped over and caught me by the elbow I might have fallen in with the box of bricks, and then Peggy held me by my other arm.

  The people came up to me after it was over. Bunch Cormell, still weeping, hugged me dearly. Bill and Peggy kissed me. Others shook my hand. Greta kissed me. Chas came up gingerly and said, ‘I’ll always think of her whenever I’m on the loo.’ Then Judith tried to hug me, but I said yes you’re faster than a weaver’s shuttle, what? she said, yes I said, how could you be so careless, careless? She said you’re the one who hasn’t taken enough care and with that I grabbed her hair and I swung at her and my fingernails flailed at the skin on her neck and she lashed back at me and then there was Bill and Peggy and Chas between us.

  ‘Feelings are running high!’ the vicar shouted with stunning obviousness. He lifted his arms in the air. ‘Feelings are running high!’ And then I was led away from Judith and the graveside and finally I let go and cried so very hard I thought every drop of moisture in me was shed and I had become so brittle I might crack and break.