The Limits of Enchantment

by Graham Joyce

  But I did stop crying, and eventually they all drifted away and, having rejected their invitations, I was left alone. I thanked the vicar. He was very kind and allowed me to use the vestry to straighten myself up a little before I went on, because I had important things to do.

  Still in my black mourning clothes I walked up to the mansion. The ugly Jacobean pile. Along the leafy gravel driveway, past the festering duckweed pond, slipping between the match-flare rhododendrons, like a shade. This time I didn’t go to Venables’ offices behind the house. I deliberately went to the front door, where I was confronted by a flunky, one of Lord Stokes’s stooped and crusty retainers. The man hadn’t a hair on his head. He looked like he wore his master’s cast-offs. I swear I saw a dead fly fall from him as he shuffled forward.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ he asked, kindly enough.

  ‘Tell him I’m Mammy Cullen’s daughter and I have some information he needs.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ the wizened flunky said, ‘but his lordship won’t see you. If you have business you must take it to the Estate Manager.’

  Just then Arthur McCann was passing. ‘Fern, here you are again.’ It was a kind of question. Then he said, ‘I’ll deal with it, Geoffrey,’ and at this the front door was closed in my face. Arthur led me away. ‘They wouldn’t let me off work to come along this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Or I would have.’

  ‘I know that. It’s all right, Arthur.’

  ‘You know your name is mud up here, Fern. Mud.’

  ‘I know that, too. I’ve got to see Lord Stokes. I found something in the cottage he needs to know about. Something Mammy left behind. Information about people. I need his advice on what I should do with it.’

  ‘What kind of information?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, Arthur. But it’s really serious.’

  Arthur blinked his white eyelashes. ‘Wait here but stay out of sight. I’ll see if I can get you five minutes.’ With that he darted through to the walled garden behind the house.

  A few moments later he returned. ‘He’ll see you right now. It had better be good, Fern.’

  ‘Oh it is,’ I assured him.

  Arthur led me to a glass door admitting to a wonderful library at the rear of the house. He opened the door and ushered me in, closing it after me while he remained outside.

  Lord Stokes sat on an elegant couch, one leg drawn up on the upholstery and an elbow hooked over the back of the couch. Even though it was a warm day a log fire roared in the hearth. A newspaper was on the couch, open at the racing pages. His lordship regarded me steadily with bloodshot eyes, sucking the ragged ends of his nicotine and white moustache. His pink jowls quivered slightly.

  ‘Mffffffff,’ he said.

  I didn’t know if this was a command or an expression of contempt. I knew I should wait until asked to sit down, but no such invitation seemed forthcoming. The minor aristocracy are amongst the rudest of all people.

  ‘Mffffffff,’ he said again.

  ‘I don’t know what ‘‘mffffffff’’ means,’ I said.

  His face darkened. His white eyebrows moved in opposed directions. ‘Wha’ d’ye wan’?’

  ‘I’ve come to ask your advice.’

  ‘’Vice? Wa’ ’vice?’

  ‘You knew Mammy Cullen, I think. Lived in your cottage by the wood?’ He nodded. ‘I’m her daughter by adoption. When she died I had a clean-out. I found some old writing of her ideas.’ I brandished my notebooks.

  ‘Wha’s got to do wi’ me?’

  ‘It has sensitive information. About people in the entire district.’

  Without offering to get up he raised a liver-spotted hand. ‘Give a look hya.’

  I crossed the room and offered him one of the notebooks. His nostrils twitched and he patted the sofa, evidently looking for his spectacles. As he did so I noticed a small silver ring on his little finger, just like that worn by the doctor who had tricked his way into my house. Eventually he found them on an occasional table drawn up by the sofa. It took him an age to clip the wire around his ears. Then he fell back in his sofa, reading the page at which I had opened the notebook.

  I watched him closely. His lips moved slightly as he read. The light from the fire shone yellow in his rheumy eyes. He made tiny incomprehensible sounds as his reading progressed. ‘Mm … eh … ffff … mmm.’

  At last he let the notebook sink to the sofa. Then he looked at me across the top of his spectacles. ‘Gibberish,’ he said.

  ‘But what about the names?’ I insisted, but quietly.

  ‘Names?’

  He picked up the notebook and scrutinised it again. He shook his head slightly. Then he read some of it aloud in a voice that might have stripped the oils from the ancestral portrait over the fireplace. ‘ ‘‘The best way to make a cake is as follows. Lord knows how many folk get this wrong. Has the recipe never been written down before I wonder? A few tips on preparation first. Love must go into the baking of any cake. Child or grown-up, infant or adult, who doesn’t know this? Mammy Cullen knows this above all things. Also, mind your mood. Rid yourself of all mean thoughts before baking this cake. Of this, more later. Another tip is to look at the position of the moon before commencing …’’ What is this rot about names, girl? What’s it got to do wi’ the price of potatoes?’

  ‘You have to look harder.’

  ‘Damnit girl!’

  ‘You have to read the first word of each sentence. The first word only.’

  He looked at it again, reading silently this time. Twice. Dim, very dim, but he got it. Oh yes. Put that on the three-thirty at Ascot, I thought. Then he was staring hard at the page, no longer reading any of it. The silence was unbearable. I shifted my weight on to my other foot. A beautiful antique clock on the mantelpiece whirred into life and struck the hour with delicate, almost faint chimes.

  ‘Did I do right in bringing it to you?’

  ‘Mffff.’

  ‘Only I didn’t know what should be done with it.’

  ‘Mffff. Other chaps mentioned? Eh?’

  ‘Lots. The doctor. The chairman of the Conservative Party. The head of the Chamber of Commerce. The—’

  ‘Nuff o’ that. Got the drift. Mmm.’

  ‘It’s not on every page. You have to know where to look.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  I bit my lip. ‘So is it all right?’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘You see there’s this man from Cambridge University. A Mr Bennett. And he didn’t notice it. And even someone as clever as yourself didn’t notice it. So that must mean it’s all right to go ahead and publish it.’

  ‘Publish? Publish?’

  ‘The man from Cambridge. He’s interested in all this herbal medicine. Hedgerow cures for ailments. Folk medicine. Which is what the notebooks are about. He wants to publish them.’

  Lord Stokes turned his attention on me as if truly seeing me now for the very first time. And for a change he spoke clearly and emphatically. ‘Are you completely blithering insane? Well? Are you?’

  I was completely cried out from the afternoon. But I manufactured a crestfallen look. I made my lip tremble. I forced fat tears to appear in the corners of my eyes. I even impressed myself. ‘But you yourself didn’t notice and the man from Cambridge said if we published it he would pay me enough to cover my rent for your cottage – and – and – and—’ My sobs were just about stopping me from getting it out.

  His face turned puce with anger and puzzlement. It made his white eyelashes and moustache appear to flare, and his forehead was cracked with lines like a dried old riverbed. ‘Cottage? My cottage? Never mind the bloody cottage! You can’t damned well publish this wretched thing, you silly little sop!’

  ‘But Mr Venables wants to evict me!’ I whimpered.

  ‘Geoffrey!’ his lordship roared. ‘Geoffrey!’ After an age the flunky from the front door appeared. ‘Get me Venables, Geoffrey, and quick abite it.’

  The idea of this old cadaver Geoffrey being quick about a
nything almost made me giggle. I restrained myself and dabbed my eyes with a tiny handkerchief. Lord Stokes glared at me evilly. When Venables appeared, Stokes said, ‘D’you know this girl?’

  ‘Yes. She occupies one of your cottages by the—’

  ‘She’s to be left alone. Rent free. All that. Until I say different.’

  ‘But we already—’

  ‘Never mind that. My cottage, my decision. That’s that. Off you go.’

  Venables turned and went without looking back at me.

  Stokes waved the notebook at me. ‘This the only copy?’

  ‘I’ll check around the cottage to make sure.’

  ‘You do that. And be sure to let me know. Good girl. Now then, be off with you and if you see that bastard from Cambridge sniffing round you know what to tell him, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, your lordship.’

  ‘On your way, then.’

  I slipped out of the library the same way I came in. I heard another roar from the library. Arthur was hanging around outside, smoking a cigarette, waiting for me. He stamped out his cigarette and came to usher me away, taking me by the arm. ‘What are you up to, Fern?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? Sparks are flying round here. I’ve just seen Venables raging.’ Arthur walked along the gravel drive with me, between the rhododendrons. I thought he was going to shout at me, but then he said, ‘Look, can I drop by some time?’

  I told him I’d like that. I felt a little afraid after what I’d done, and I knew I needed friends now. We left it vague. He promised to come by one evening.

  30

  I had a good ear, Mammy had always told me. ‘You’ve got a good ear, which is why you’ve got a good voice. You’re a chanter sure enough.’

  She used the old word ‘chanter’, where she said that she was merely a singer. She knew so many songs but she admitted she couldn’t sing half so well as I. ‘You’ll never want, really want, if you’re a chanter,’ Mammy said. ‘You can chant for your supper. You can chant a man to want to sit beside you. You can chant people to do your bidding, if you’re careful enough.’

  ‘Can you show me?’ I’d asked her.

  ‘Not on your nelly! Like all these things, it can go off wrong. Anyway, I’ve told you before as I’m no chanter. I’ll teach you the songs, and you find for yourself how to use ’em.’

  Oh Mammy, I thought, I will miss your songs, and the trembling voice in which you used to pass them on! Then I thought about that song of the hare on the day of Asking, and I couldn’t remember Mammy giving me that one. I wondered whether she had in fact given it to me; or whether I’d simply picked it up elsewhere, with my good ear. Sometimes, at a stretch, you could hear what other people were thinking. Other times you didn’t need to be in earshot to hear what people were saying.

  Sometimes in order to listen I could make my ears grow tall. I thought I could hear all of those who paused along the way, or in the market place or in the High Street. I could hear gossip unspool from their lips and tongues into the shell of another’s ear. Gossip set up a vibration around the district, quite beyond words, like the waves that fed my battery radio; a disturbance in the ether; an air current. But one which I felt even from behind the walls of my little cottage. I could hear it from beyond its range. The gossip, fanning out.

  I could also hear the chirrup of the tiny wren in the hedge, which meant visitors. Venables came early.

  I’d got all my washing out. The sheets hung wet and heavy on the line and the spring sunshine filtered down on my cottage garden. I sat on the front step, peeling potatoes in a bowl of water. I heard the gate hinge warning me of his approach, but I didn’t look up. Only when he stood over me, blocking the sun behind him, did I do so.

  ‘Not clever,’ he said. ‘Not clever at all.’

  I picked up a large potato from the bowl. It had sprouted an eye, so I cut it out before peeling it.

  ‘Whatever you think you can achieve by doing this, you’re wrong.’

  I squinted up at him from my seat on the step. ‘I asked his lordship for some advice, and I got it.’

  ‘He’s not as stupid as you think.’

  ‘How stupid do I think he is?’

  ‘You wrote that notebook yourself. All of it.’

  ‘Did I? Did I write your name in it all those times, too?’ I took my kitchen knife and I began to whet it on the granite step near my haunches. I went back to the potato and I got its jacket off in one long coiling string of peel. I held it up for him to see.

  He had half a smile – no a quarter, no, not even that – fixed to his face. ‘You’ve succeeded in making things worse for yourself.’

  ‘Worse? Come after my cottage, will you? Send me the doctor, will you?’

  He stooped down, so that his soft eyes were level with mine. Then he leaned in and spoke quietly, confidentially, the movements of his lips barely stirring the air close to my face. ‘You think you’re clever. But you made one stupid mistake. Old Mammy Cullen didn’t write it. She couldn’t even write her own name. She was an ignorant, illiterate old woman.’

  My hand closed over the handle of my potato knife, but he saw it. He clasped his own over my knife hand. With his other hand he grabbed me by the ear and knocked my head against the angle of the wall behind me. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Do you hear that?’ He knocked my head against the wall a second time. ‘That’s the sound of your own head hitting the wall of a padded cell. Listen to it again. You’re already there, in that padded cell. This conversation isn’t happening. You’re already there. You’re just remembering this.’

  ‘Jane Louth,’ I said, twisting away from him.

  But he was gone, slipped away between the white shrouds of my drying sheets.

  Oh it was a day for visitors. Bill Myers came in the afternoon, parking his panda car in full view outside of my cottage and taking off his peaked hat as he walked up the path. He’d had a bad haircut and it made his ears look pink and glowing. Though I shouldn’t criticise people’s hair.

  He tapped gently on the open door. I was pouring off last year’s elderberry wine into individual bottles. ‘Got a lot of washing on the line, Fern.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ I stopped my bottling and wiped my hands on my pinafore apron. He refused the offer of a cup of tea and placed his soft policeman’s hat on the table.

  ‘What you been up to, Fern?’

  ‘Up to, Bill?’

  ‘Yes, up to. Went to the big house, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t deny that.’

  ‘You threatened Lord Stokes with certain information.’

  ‘That’s not true I—’

  ‘Stop it.’ He was sharp in cutting me off. His face hardened. ‘Now just stop it Fern, this is very serious. The word being used is ‘‘blackmail’’. Do you know what that is?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You can’t go round making threats to people. It’s a serious criminal offence.’

  ‘But they can break the law, Bill. They can do what they want. They can get girls in the family way and pay them off to get an illegal abortion and wash their hands of it, and then they jump up and down and say the law, the law and what are you going to do about that, are you—’

  ‘Fern.’

  ‘—going to put them in prison for buying abortions? No you won’t, you’ll just let that go or you’ll prosecute the ones who do the abortions not the ones who buy them, and if you do you’re just as bad as them or even worse, because you jump up and down for them. Is that what the police are for, to jump up and down for those who are powerful?’

  ‘Stop it, Fern.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Now listen. I’ve always had a soft spot for you, but it’s come to an end. I know what you did that time at Croker’s Farm, too, but I let that go, didn’t I? Well I ain’t letting it go no more. I can’t. I’ll tell you one thing about Lord Muck at the hall: he may look stupid and may even be stupid. But he’s got power. And if he says I’m to charge you, I shall charge you and y
our feet won’t touch the ground.’

  ‘Is he saying you’re to charge me?’

  ‘He hasn’t made up his mind.’

  ‘He daren’t risk it, that means.’

  Bill got to his feet and made a big show of fixing his cap on his head, just so. ‘You’re out o’ your depth, Fern. I can’t help you no more. You ought to ask yourself whether this village is the place you want to be, now that Mammy’s gone.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  ‘You’re not a policeman, Bill. You’re a ticket-collector.’

  He shook his head with incomprehension at my remark. Then he showed himself out, making bold strides down the garden path. I watched him from behind my drying sheets. Watched him switch on his motor, check his mirror and steer his panda car out into the road.

  It was a day for men. My third visitor was a sour-looking William. He was dressed in a collar and tie and a dark suit with a gold fob-chain hanging from his waistcoat. His black boots were polished to a high shine.

  ‘What are you looking so glum about?’ he said, finding me in the garden.

  ‘I might say the same of you.’

  ‘I always look glum. Glum’s my stock-in-trade. What’s your excuse?’

  He said he’d had to come into Keywell on business, though what kind of business he didn’t reveal. I groped at my laundry on the line. It was dry. ‘Make yourself useful. Help me fold these sheets.’

  He cracked a smile at that and took hold of the corners of the sheet I held out to him. ‘Now that sounds like Mammy.’

  ‘What have you come for, William?’

  ‘I want to see what this nonsense is about between you and Judith.’

  ‘I’m angry with her because she took sides with someone against me. She’s gone over to the soap-dodgers.’

  ‘Judith’s under threat of being put on List Ninety-nine. Do you know what that is? A list held by the Department of Education and Science naming teachers with criminal records or those suspected of gross moral turpitude.’