by Joan Aiken
Ran he did, like a hare, and she after him, down the alley, through the coconut shies, into the square, past the learned pig, between the tenpins, up the skiffle alley, and three times round the hot cat stand. Towards Myfanwy’s van he fled, meaning perhaps to hide behind her skirts, and then, gaining a bit of sense before it was too late, turned aside into Jones the Rope Trick’s enclosure.
“Save me, Jones man, save me!” he bawled.
The crowd cheered and laughed, for most of them had felt the weight of Blodwen’s tongue at one time or another, and they were on the side of the underdog. Quick as a wink Jones picked up his clarinet and tootled out “Men of Harlech.” The coiled rope stood up and begged like a hamadryad; no monkey ever climbed quicker than Ianto shinned up it hand over hand.
When Blodwen arrived, ten quick seconds later by Morgan the Turf’s stopwatch, he was out of sight into the black wet sky above.
“Gone he has, ma’am,” says Jones, very sober. “Angels are singing ‘Cwm Rhondda’ round him this minute, likely as not.”
Blodwen gave Jones one look, one, but enough to loosen every stopping in his teeth, and then she turned on her heel and started for home; she knew when she was beaten. But on her way, having lost her hake and chips in the chase, she stopped at the stand for a hamburger and tomato sauce.
Meanwhile Señor Pedro had sold his water of youth to Ariel the actress for two hundred and seventy pounds, nine shillings and ninepence. “Only to such a lovely lady as you would I part with my precious water for so mean a sum,” he mourned, handing over the gold-wrapped bottle.
“There’s crazy for you!” said Mrs Griffith. “Fancy spending all that good money on an old bottle with like as not nothing but tap water inside it.”
“Try a drop!” shouted the crowd.
“Throw it away!” begged Owen Richards the poet. “Marry me, Ariel! Forget about the moribund old theatre, is it? Stay here! Queen of the whole town you’d be.”
But Ariel looked about at the crowd, and in her voice that could sing or whisper its way up to the tiptop seat in the gallery, she called, “Who can lend me a corkscrew?”
Morgan the Turf had his whipped out a photo finish ahead of Rhys the Red Dragon, took the bottle, and opened it with a bow.
Set her lips to it, then, Ariel did, and a quick swallow with her. Then she stopped, half laughing, half scared, crying, “Dare I go on?”
“Throw it away, Ariel love,” Owen Richards begged. But the crowd shouted, “Drink up, ma’am!”
Now a law of physics there is, see, very unbreakable, which says, “All that goes up must come down.” And just at that moment what should come down but Ianto Evans like an old blockbuster plump into the middle of things. Knocked the bottle clean out of Ariel’s hand he did—lucky she’d put the cork back—and himself pretty near silly.
Soon on his feet again he was though, for when Blodwen, teeth halfway through her hamburger, loitering to enjoy a free spectacle for once in her cheeseparing life, laid eyes on him, she was after him again like an old pike after a springtime salmon, and off into the dark alleys he fled, clasping the bottle in his frantic hand. Once he tripped and fell and dropped it; Blodwen swooped on him, but it was the bottle she grabbed in her haste, not Ianto.
“Oh, but I’ll have you yet,” shouted the termagant, and while Morgan the Turf was going round laying two to one on Blodwen, the pair of them kept it up round the town, ding-dong, now here, now there.
No lie, now, for many a long year after, if a man wanted to describe something faster than mere speed he’d say, “Like Blodwen Evans the night she was after her husband, Ianto.”
Meanwhile, what of Ariel? you will be asking, and indeed to goodness there was wonder enough in the way the years were dropping off her like layers of gauze. No more than nineteen she looked now, as she stood scared and smiling, and a long ah! at her beauty trembled through the crowd. Only Owen Richards in grief turned his head away; he knew she was lost to him forever now.
“Oh! “she cried, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid of what is happening to me! Must it all begin again, the doubts and terrors of youth? Comfort me, Owen dear, tell me I haven’t changed. Owen, comfort me!”
But he in silence held up to her the little shell-bordered looking-glass. When she had looked once it seemed as if the weight of her beauty would crush her like a snowfall in May. Stepped away, she did, hanging her head, and the crowd parted in a hush as she walked to her car.
“Back to London, is it?” said Owen, standing with his hand on the bonnet.
“Back to London, indeed,” said she, sighing.
“Then good-bye, my love.”
Her tears splashed on the steering wheel like raindrops as she drove away to face her new legend of life and the harshness of being young. Owen, with a heart of lead, turned back, but with no spirit in him for the fair.
“Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of that bottle; unsettling it is,” Rhys the Red Dragon commented.
And Mrs Griffith said, “Indeed to goodness, yes!”
But Blodwen, now: breathless, with tomato sauce sticking in her gullet like china clay, she had stopped the chase of Ianto a moment to take a swig at the bottle, hoping maybe—knowing her Ianto—that it would be whisky. But no more than a couple of good gollops had she taken (“Ach y fi, it’s only water, then!”) when she laid eyes on Ianto stealing back to Myfanwy’s van behind the big roundabout.
Quick as a weasel after him, Blodwen. Over the roundabout she went, threading her way between horses and swans. “Give us a break, Alun, man!” shouts Ianto. “Start her up, then!” And Alun threw in his gears with a thrashing like an old whale in convulsions. Slow at first, then faster, spinning in a giddy gold spiral, switchbacking up and down, round went the swans and dragons, a whole glittering stableland of bucking broncos.
Well! stuck fast Blodwen was, and had to make the best of it, clinging tight to a swan’s neck. But the bottle, spun out of her hand by another natural wonder known as centrifugal force, flew off like a bullet over the heads of the crowd, and nobody’s eye followed it into the dark.
Gone, and a good riddance too, Owen Richards thought.
Back to his castle then, poor Mr Richards, to live out his final years with owls and ink, in an everlasting third act of spiderwebs. Or so he thought.
Sitting over a bottle of claret he was, late enough for tomorrow’s moon, when half the town came tapping at his door, timid but trustful, for to whom but a poet can you turn when life throws up such a problem as the roundabout had tossed them?
“See here, Mr Richards, bach, an orphan we have on our hands,” says Morgan the Turf, very solemn, and the crowd shoves forward a small girl, blackhaired, sapling-thin, fierce as a fury.
“You’re the wisest man in this town, Mr Richards, dear,” the neighbours said. “Fitting it is you should have charge of this child of misfortune. Too young she is to live in her own house alone, see; and her husband run off with the fortune-teller.”
“Husband?” said Owen Richards, and then he looked closer and recognised Blodwen Evans of forty years ago—Blodwen Pugh as she was then.
Tears of rage there were still on her cheeks, but forgetfulness had followed her plunge back into childhood. Her anger had left her, and she gazed at him with no more than wonder for an old poet and his cobwebbed castle.
“Live with me, is it, my dear?” said Owen.
And she in awe answered, “Yes, sir,” and bobbed a curtsy. Nodding approval, the town fathers withdrew to the Red Dragon.
Where, all this time, you will be asking, where is Señor Pedro, the author of these troubles?
Not a man to outstay his welcome, the little pedlar, and he was tramping out of town down the rainswept highroad with his two hundred and seventy pounds when a speeding pink van overtook him.
“Lift to Cardiff?” called a head from the window—Ianto’s.
“I thank you; yes.”
“Wet old night it is for walking,” Ianto said as the little man unslung his pac
k and shook the mud out of his turn-ups.
“Indeed, yes.”
“No more of those bottles, have you?” Ianto asked, handing over a mug of tea and a hospitable wedge of cake as Myfanwy drove them on their swift way.
Señor Pedro shook his head.
“Just as well then,” Ianto said. “More trouble in that bottle than in a whole keg of whisky, if you will be asking my opinion.”
“You do not think that to grow younger is a blessing?”
“Not for Myfanwy and me.” And Ianto looked fondly at the back of Myfanwy’s neck as she bent over the wheel. “All we wish is that we grow old together and die on the same day.”
“Ah,” Señor Pedro said with sympathy, and he thought of his own dear wife on the slopes of the Andes.
What became of the bottle? you will be wondering, and the answer to that is easy: it fell into the town reservoir, standing on its one leg farther up the mountainside.
Put up the water-rates like a shot, the council would have, had they guessed, but nobody did; though, as the years went by, and no one in the place grew a day older, people did begin to wonder why. But in a town the folk get used to one another’s faces, and nobody thought about it very deeply as they went about their business. Visitors might have wondered at it indeed; become a famous tourist centre, the place might have, but for the seeds in Pedro’s turn-ups.
Scattered some of those famous thorn seeds he had—whether by mistake or on purpose, who can say?—and almost overnight a dense thicket of brambles sprang up that soon had the town surrounded. Nobody noticed; too wrapped up in their own concerns they were, with council meetings and oratorios, weddings, and Gorsedds, all presided over by Owen the poet and his happy adopted daughter, Blodwen; Wales will hear of her, too, one day, indeed, if copies of her poems ever find their way past the thorn thicket.
So there you have them: Ariel still a lovely legend on the boards of London town; Ianto and his Myfanwy, old and wrinkled and gay as two crickets travelling the country in their fortune-telling van, with the flowers of the clematis—its roots safely bedded in a pickle-pot—fluttering like red butterflies over the roof; Señor Pedro long since back with his piano on the slopes of the Andes; the townspeople living their carefree unchanging lives till the Day of Judgment.
And what have any of them done to deserve it?
Not a thing.
No moral to this story, you will be saying, and I am afraid it is true.
Acknowledgments
On Joan’s behalf I would like to thank all her faithful readers and supporters. Special thanks must go to Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link of Small Beer Press for their ongoing commitment to publishing Joan’s work. I would also like to thank author, editor, and science fiction expert John Clute for his dedicated work in creating a bibliography of Joan’s five hundred–plus short stories, which has been an invaluable resource, and his encouragement for this project. Finally, love and enormous gratitude go to Charles Schlessiger, agent now to three generations of Aikens, for his tireless devotion and enthusiasm, courtesy, and expertise.
—Lizza Aiken
Publication History
These stories were originally published as follows:
“A Mermaid Too Many,” Argosy, November 1957
“Model Wife,” Argosy, July 1956
“Girl in a Whirl” (as by Nicholas Dee), Argosy, May 1957
“Red-Hot Favourite” (as by Nicholas Dee), Argosy, March 1958
“Spur of the Moment,” Argosy, January 1959
“Octopi in the Sky,” Argosy, December 1959
“Honeymaroon,” Argosy, September 1960
“The Sale of Midsummer,” Ghostly Grim and Gruesome, Helen Hoke, ed., 1976
“The Helper,” A Touch of Chill, Gollancz, 1979
“Introduction” and “The Monkey’s Wedding,” Night Terrors, Lois Duncan, ed., 1996
“Wee Robin,” Silent Night, Holly Street, ed., 2002
“Water of Youth” (as “Come to the Fair”), Argosy, September 1961
“The Fluttering Thing” (2002), “Second Thoughts”(1955), “Hair” (ca. 1955), “Harp Music” (1960), “The Paper Queen” (1960), “Reading in Bed” (ca. 1955), and “The Magnesia Tree” (1960), appear here for the first time.
Joan Aiken (1924–2004) was born in Rye, Sussex, England, into a literary family: her father was the poet and writer Conrad Aiken and her siblings the novelists Jane Aiken Hodge and John Aiken. After her parents’ divorce, her mother married the popular English writer Martin Armstrong.
Aiken began writing at the age of five, and her first collection of stories, All You’ve Ever Wanted (which included the first Armitage family stories, which were all gathered in a posthumous collection The Serial Garden), was published in 1953. After her first husband’s death, Aiken supported her family by copyediting at Argosy and working at an advertising agency before turning full time to writing fiction. She went on to write for Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Women’s Own, and many other magazines.
She wrote over a hundred books and was perhaps best known for the dozen novels in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. She received the Guardian and Edgar Allan Poe awards for fiction, and in 1999 she was awarded an MBE.