by Norah Lofts
‘Is she about?’
‘No. You can see for yourself.’
He pulled a stool near me.
‘Now you listen to this. Know what we’ve got in the house now? A witch, no less!’
‘Rubbish,’ I said, partly because his tales were so far-fetched and partly because, like almost every other old woman who was poor and looked a bit wild I’d had the word ‘Witch’ flung at me in my time. Nevertheless, when he brought out the word I thought – That’s it! That accounts for the way I feel about her, not wanting her to handle my things, not wanting to touch her.
‘Rubbish away. Only tell me this, where’d Martin say he found her?’
‘Flaxham. By the mill.’
‘Right. And what lay up-river from Flaxham? Maybe you don’t know.’
‘As it happens I do. A place called Marly.’
‘Right again. Well, Tuesday morning, yestiddy that is, a Marly man heard his dog barking early in the morning; he look out and what do he see but a young woman with long black hair, raiding his hens’ nest. He see her take two eggs, one she stuck in the front of her dress, the other she kept in her hand. Jest as he was he run out and ask for his eggs back. Shesay–Take it, and give him the one in her hand. He say she’ve got another, she say she h’ain’t, and he say all the time he can see it bulging out inside her bodice. So he go to take it, as who wouldn’t? And she say to him. “Don’t you put your hand on me,” she say, “if you do you’ll be very sorry.” But he don’t take no notice, he take the egg instead. And then what happen?’
‘His arm dropped off at the shoulder.’
‘You’re a funny owd crone, ain’t you? No, what happen is that he go out to the hay field and afore he’ve been there a quarter hour somebody unhandy with a sickle cut off two fingers for him. Now thass no good saying “Rubbish”, the man that towd me had jest brought the poor man to the Abbey Infirmary; they’d stopped the bleeding with hot tar but he was swelling up cruel. Only, here’s the point to this tale. Everybody in Marly turned out to chase the witch and by the bridge they found her. They tied her skirt round her knees and chucked her in to see do she sink or swim. And she swum! Straight down river towards Flaxham, this chap say, sailing like a swan. Now do you believe me?’
I did. It all fitted in, even to her saying that nobody would have picked up her tambourine from the river bank. Of course not. Nobody would want to touch her gear. Just as, in my unknowing way I hadn’t wanted to touch anything she’d handled.
‘Yes. For once I do,’ I said. ‘We must tell Martin.’
‘I can’t wait to see his face. Fancy him swallowing that yarn about using the water for a looking –’
He broke off and turned his head sharply and looked towards the door. I saw his colour change and he crossed himself, openly. I turned too, and there she was, leaning against the doorpost and holding something in her hands. I slipped one thumb over the other in the shape of the Cross, under cover of the table.
She said,
‘To wagging tongues things sometimes happen, too.’ As she spoke she walked in and laid what she held on the table. It looked like a ball of clay, about the size of your head, loosely covered with dock leaves.
I’ve seen some frightened people, but seldom anybody worse scared than Pert Tom. He jumped up and blurted out, stammering and blinking,
‘I shan’t say anything. I shan’t mention it,’ and he hurried into his room, where, I knew, he would ask his St. Ursula to protect him.
The girl said to me,
You cross your thumbs, but you will tell Martin what you hear?’
‘If my tongue still wags, yes. I’m so old that what happens to me doesn’t matter any more.’
She leaned against the edge of the table and folded her arms.
‘Is all nonsense, of course. Alone, on the road, as I am most times, a woman must take care. The tale is a lie. Partly. Was Monday evening, not Tuesday morning; and there was no egg. You understand me. No egg. Me, looking for sleeping place and the man, like all men. You should know, once a man has his hand, here, who is safe? So his fingers are chopped. Every day, some place, fingers are chopped.’ She leaned side-ways, still with her arms folded and laughed. ‘If I could say a thing and make it be, I am not wasting my time chopping fingers. No. I would say, Let me dance like my mother! Oh, if that could be!’ She sat up straight again and threw back her head and for a moment, in the stuffy kitchen it seemed as though the wind blew on her face.
I was old, and since I had come to live at the Old Vine I’d had a quiet life, nothing much to think about except whether to serve beef or mutton. So now, with so much, all at once, all strange and different, I was confused. Later, I thought, later, in the quiet of my bed, I’ll think it all over. Just for the moment I wanted something real and firm to seize upon. And there was this bundle on the table.
‘What is that?’
‘Is a hedgehog. Is not food for Christians you say, so I will show you.’
‘Oh no. You’re cooking no hedgehogs here. Not in my pots.’
‘He is needing no pot. He has his own. See.’ She picked up the bundle and stripped off the dock leaves. ‘We bury him, so, in the hot ash and he makes his own pot. When he is ready we crack him and his prickles all come away with the pot.’
She buried the thing at the fire’s edge, pushed it inwards a little and pulled a log over it. As she straightened up, Martin, back much earlier than usual, walked in, holding the tambourine.
‘Here you are,’ he said.
She swooped forward and took it from him, the bells jingled and jangled, the ribbons, red and yellow and blue, green and purple and pink, just like the stripes of her ragged skirt, fluttered and shook.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘is so so kind! My tambourine.’ She drummed on it lightly with the fingers. ‘Not spoilt. I was afraid, out on the grass… Is good. Now, after supper, I will dance for you.’
Pert Tom had to be called to supper, and came out like a dog with a bad conscience. Ordinarily after market day he would chatter on and Martin would grunt, and show little interest until Tom told of some mishap that had befallen some Baildon man, and then he would look up and grunt in another tone. But tonight Tom was silent, every now and again looking at the girl and if he happened to catch her eye, shake his head a little and make a secret face, trying to reassure her that his tongue would never wag. Presently Martin said,
‘What’s the matter, Tom? No gossip going round today?’
‘Not a thing. Not a thing,’ Tom said and bent over his food. He was eating what I had cooked, but Martin was eating the hedgehog.
She’d cracked off the clay and I admit that the meat left inside looked clean enough and smelt very tasty; but I couldn’t bring myself to try it, and Tom was too scared. Martin said,
‘I will. Come to think of it, if nobody had ever tried anything new there’d be precious little to eat.’
As he ate he praised it and I tried not to mind or be jealous. After all, I longed and prayed that something would happen to make him shake off the dead past and come alive again, and if it took a wild thing out of the woods, with a tambourine and a hedgehog to do it, who was I to complain? I could only hope that she would rouse him, make him feel that there was something left in life besides hard work and making money, and then go off and leave him to take up with a decent woman.
All through supper she sat, looking at the tambourine and now and again touching it. As soon as the meal was over she jumped up and asked Tom and Martin to move the table. They began to push it towards the hearth, but she said,
‘No, no. The other way. Is better the light behind me.’
When the space was cleared and we were gathered at the other end, she walked down towards the fire, keeping close to the wall and sidling along. Then she stood still, like a cat about to make a spring. And then, with a shake of the tambourine and a little hoarse cry she leaped out into the centre of the space and began to dance.
I’ve seen many dancing girls in my day. In the o
ld times, in Squatters Row, in a good summer I’ve known as many as four be there all at once, and late at night they’d dance, not for pay, but to outdo each other. Some were good and some were bad, but the best of them was only a girl dancing when all was said and done. This was something different. Dancing she really could cast a spell. What but magic could make that ragged gaudy old skirt shake out into blurred soft colours like a rainbow or the sunlight on the spray over a weir? How else could she move so that it was all movement, a bird in flight, a deer leaping, a tree swaying in the wind? The music was magic too for a tambourine has but two sounds, the thrum on the skin and the jingle of the bells; in her hands it made real music in which there was the rush of the wind, the birds’ calling, even the solemn chant of the Church.
As long as it lasted you could only sit and stare and wonder. Even I, an old woman, with all my fires quenched, could feel again the stir and the ache, not in the flesh, or for it, but for something more, that something which, when you are young, you think lies round the next corner, and when you are old you know you missed because it never could be there. Here, just for once, in the homely kitchen, against the light of the dying fire, it all was, held out for us.
When she stopped it was like waking from a dream in which you are warm and full-fed, to find yourself cold and hungry again. We all three let out our breath in a great sigh.
She went and stood by the wall, breathing quickly and lightly. Then I could move my eyes. And just for once I saw Martin’s stern thin face and Pert Tom’s fat stupid one wearing the same look of naked lust.
The girl spoke first.
‘You like?’ She lowered the hand which held the tambourine and it gave a little tinkle, like the echo of the question. She dropped against the wall, hunching her shoulders.
‘By my mother I dance like a pig. When my mother danced, when she ceased, men wept with the pain of it.’
Pert Tom got up and blundered out of the house, leaving the door open; the cool air, faintly scented with hay, flowed in.
All very well for him, I thought; he can go and find his red-haired baggage; Martin has his empty room, with tally sticks for company.
But Martin stood up and said,
‘You know, you’ve never told us your name.’
‘Is Magda.’
‘Magda.’ He repeated the name which was as strange as everything else about her, as though it pleased him. He said, ‘We could do with a breath of air, too.’ He went towards the door and it seemed to me that he moved more lightly, more freely, leaning less to his limp than usual. She followed him, I thought unwillingly.
II
That evening they weren’t out an hour, all told. I was just in bed when they came in quietly, said good night and went to their separate beds. I thought to myself – Well, that’s over; he’s had his will of her and proved to himself that he can so far forget Kate as to go with another woman and now if she’ll just take herself off, everything will be all right.
In the morning, quite early she did go off, with her tambourine; but she was back, just before supper.
‘So you’ve come back,’ I said.
‘You think I will not?’ She squinted her eyes at me. ‘Martin, he is the master here, is it not? he says I am welcome. Tonight I shall dance again.’
‘Dancing! That’s all you think about.’
‘Yes and yes and yes. I have danced today. Look,’ she held out her long hand and showed me some coins in its palm. ‘I am not needing it, no supper to pay for. You can have it.’ She walked up to me and tried to put the money in my hand. I backed as though she had offered me something red-hot.
‘I don’t want your money. Save it and buy yourself a shift!’
She surprised me by giving one of the deepest, heaviest sighs I ever heard a human being give though I’d heard the like from donkeys, already overladen when something else was added to their load.
‘A shift, a petticoat and shoes. And every night the certain supper and the bed. It is much.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Things to have. Me, I have wanted only to be.’
‘Be what?’
‘Such good dancer as my mother.’
I said, almost against my will, ‘I fail to see how she could have been better than you were last night. I’ve seen a lot of dancers in my time but I never saw anybody dance like you.’
Something lit up in her face; she flung herself at me and would have hugged me, but again I backed away, this time almost into the fire.
‘Don’t,’ I said.
‘You are not liking to be touched. Me too, but with men only.’
‘Then you go the wrong way about,’ I said. ‘Any man watching you dance is bound to want to get his hands on you.’
‘But I am not dancing for men to desire me. I am not dancing to be paid. Enough for supper and new ribbons for my tambourine sometimes. And now a new comb.’
‘Then why do you do it?’
‘Because…’ she paused, smiled, shook her head. ‘There is no because. To dance I am born, so I dance.’
‘To me that sounds daft.’
‘Must everything be because? There is a poppy, very red, beside the road for just one day. Because? Is a red poppy. No good for eating. You pluck him, he falls to pieces. Is enough for a poppy just to be a red poppy. And so with me.’
I couldn’t find an answer except – Poppies aren’t people and people aren’t poppies – and that, because it sounded quite as daft as anything she had said, I wouldn’t say.
That evening I didn’t stay to see her dance. I went and had a little gossip with Peg-Leg. We spoke of this and that, and of the girl who’d come into the house and I mentioned what Pert Tom had said about Martin being likely to marry her.
‘He might at that,’ Peg-Leg said. ‘Once I sailed with a man that had a monkey; he was more set on that monkey than most men are on their wives. Then it died and his heart broke. A month or two after we sailed into Tangier where there was plenty of monkeys, cheap. I said to him, “Why’n’t you get yourself a new monkey?” He turned white as a sheet and he said, “I’ll never have another monkey as long as I live.” But …’ Peg-Leg paused and wagged a finger at me. ‘We went into Naples and there on the quay was a cat, terrible looking, bones sticking out and mangy all over. He took to that and within a week was as fond of it as he had been of his monkey. See? We did no good with Jenny and Kitty, they was decent, homekeeping little bodies, they just called Kate to mind. This, by all accounts is quite another pair of shoes.’
‘What do you know of her, barring what I’ve told you?’
‘I seen her,’ he said simply. ‘And I was told she was dancing and prancing and shaking a tambourine in the Market Place today. Can you see Kate doing that?’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ I said,‘if I thought she’d make him happy.’
‘I don’t reckon’, Peg-Leg said slowly, ‘that men look to women to make them happy. Martin had Kate and they got on better than most, but when they wouldn’t have him in the Guild, and then, later on, you remember when he broke his leg and Webster sacked him – you couldn’t say he was happy, could you? Holy Mother, he was miserable as sin.’ He broke off and rapped his wooden leg with his knuckles. ‘Meaning no offence, Agnes, you having been a woman once, women set theirselves a bit too high. Could somebody come along to me and ask which would I rather, the Queen of Sheba in my bed, or my leg back and be at sea again, I know which I’d say.’
‘Ah, that is because you’re old.’
‘Old! God’s blood, how old do you think I am? I’m forty. I’d just turned twenty-four when I was beached.’
I’d always thought of him as being an old man.
‘Don’t you go fretting yourself over Martin,’ he said,‘He’s got his business. All he needs now is a boy to bring up in the trade, and he can as easy get that out of a slut as out of a mim little wench that couldn’t say boo to a goose.’
That at least was true, and I felt my heart lighten a bit.
/> ‘Maybe I’d better start fretting about myself for a change,’ I said. ‘Peg-Leg, if Martin should marry her, I couldn’t stay in the house. The other night she brought in a hedgehog and I said she wasn’t cooking it in my pots. They’ll be her pots. Everything will be hers, to use and handle. I couldn’t bear it. Could I come and turn in with you for a bit?’
‘I reckon so.’ He looked round the snug little hut. ‘Since I took up work again I’ve let my mending go.’ Like all sailors he’d been handy with a needle. ‘You could stitch me up. And it’d be nice to find the fire going when I got home. You’d have to bring your own bed.’
So I found myself a hole to run to if the moment of need should come.
It came, three or four days later, when Martin said to me, in his abrupt way,
‘I’m going to marry Magda.’
‘I hope you’ll be happy,’ I said; and I meant it. ‘There’s one thing you should know, Martin – or maybe she told you. …’
‘What?’
‘They say she’s a witch and was being swum that day you found her.’
‘I knew that. As soon as I’d choked the water out of her I cut the cord. I’d seen one swum before.’
‘And you don’t mind?’
‘I don’t care what she is. She’s the only woman … Who told you it was being said?’
‘Pert Tom.’
‘You can tell him to keep his mouth shut.’
‘Oh, she did that, threatened to make his tongue drop out of something.’
Martin laughed. I thought to myself, Peg-Leg can say what he likes, a woman can make a man happy or miserable, already Martin is a different man.
‘There’s one other thing. I told you some time back this was all getting too much for me. You remember? I think now would be the time for me to go. When’s the wedding to be?’
‘This day three weeks.’
‘Well now, there’s Dummy’s Mary. She’s crooked, but she’s as strong as a donkey for all that, and she often hangs around watching me work and helping a bit. If I got her in and showed her how things should be. Then there’d be a new mistress and a new maid and that is the best way.’