Two more weeks went by before the awful news was confirmed: never again would she see her boys.
Then the woman made a terrible wish: that neither wind nor flood should cease till her sons came home to her, in flesh and blood just as they had been.
All summer and autumn storms raged, both at sea and on land, till about Martinmas, when a calm descended; and home at last to the wife came her sons.
They wore hats fashioned from birch bark, a wood that is said to protect the dead from the living. But the tree from which that bark came grew in neither bog nor ditch on this earth, but at the gate to some other world.
Joyfully the woman ordered a feast to be prepared. The house was swept and cleaned, and fires lit. And there was a servant girl, shy and lovely, who had been fond of the youngest son, and he of her, and he caught her eye again as she worked, and again her heart was softened.
The mother prepared a bed for her boys, long and wide enough to take all three. And through the deep night, as they lay sleeping, she sat with her cloak about her, watching over them.
Weariness at last overtook her. While she dozed, the dawn broke. The eldest son stirred. ‘Time we were away,’ he said.
The youngest son sat up. ‘Time indeed, brother,’ he said. ‘I hear the cock crowing, and the fretful worm turning in the earth. We must return to the place we came from, before we are missed.’
Softly they made their way from the room, out of the house and past the steading. And all three, as they went, cast a fond last look at their sleeping mother, and the youngest bit his lip as he thought of the girl who had kindled the fire.
12 April
The Demon Lover
from an old ballad
She wondered if her heart would burst. Seven years! Love, desire, grief and fear surged through her.
‘Where have you been? After all this time?’
‘Does it matter? I’ve come for you, for the promises you made.’
She was enraged. ‘Promises? Who made promises? You left me! And now I’m a married woman.’
He turned as if she had struck him in the face. Tears welled in his eyes. ‘I’d never have come back but for you. Never. But for you,’ he continued bitterly, ‘I might have had love in another land. I might have had a princess.’
‘And it’s my fault?’ she cried. ‘If you had the chance, you should have taken it. Fine well you knew no princess was waiting for you here.’
‘I don’t give a damn about princesses. It’s you I want.’
The way he looked at her – she felt the old, fierce passion. She thought of her husband, kind and dull and bloodless, the children who exhausted her, the grinding poverty of her life.
‘What can you possibly offer,’ she said, ‘that would make me leave my family?’
But she knew, as soon as she asked it, that she would go.
‘My ship is in the bay,’ he said. ‘My crew and every comfort you can imagine await you.’
So she kissed her babies for the last time, and went with him, and he took her out to the beautiful ship.
No crew greeted her when she set foot on deck. The sails filled of their own accord, and he steered the ship unaided, and in cold silence.
The land faded from her sight. ‘Who are you?’ she wept.
‘Save your tears,’ he said. ‘You’ll have plenty to cry about soon.’
On the horizon – soft green hills bathed in sunshine. Hope rose in her. He saw her looking and shook his head, laughing.
Another mountain rose from the sea, vast, black, covered in ice. She turned to him, and he nodded, and laughed again.
Then with one push of his hand he toppled the topmast, and with his knee he cracked the foremast, and he broke the ship in two, and sank it beneath the shadow of that terrible mountain.
13 April
The Two Magicians
from an old ballad
There she stood in her finery, taking the air, tall, handsome, proud. Think you’re something, don’t you? the blacksmith thought.
She hardly glanced at him outside his forge, grimy, sweaty, thick as a bull. Coarse brute, she thought.
‘Aye, lady,’ he called. ‘Red suits you. Are you waiting for a ride? I’ll give you one.’
‘Go to hell, pig.’ She bent to the ground and came up with a pinch of dirt. Tossed it away. ‘You’re not worth that! I wouldn’t go with a blacksmith for anything. I’d sooner be dead and buried.’
‘And I wouldn’t pay a button for you, and if I did it would be too much. But I’ll ride you, lady, see if I don’t.’
No ordinary souls, this pair. Sparring was their entertainment. The rest of the town kept well clear of them. Rumour was they were witch and wizard – magicians anyway. She threw him one last look, and turned herself into a turtle dove. Up she flew. Ride me now if you can, she thought.
Suddenly another dove was with her. They banked and wheeled as he tried to force himself upon her. Enough of this, she thought, diving rapidly. At the last moment she changed into an eel, and slipped into the burn with hardly a splash.
A speckled trout was at her side, herding her in under the bank. The blacksmith’s glint was in the eye of the fish. Still here? she thought. She surfaced as a duck and flapped across to the millpond.
Seconds later a drake with a big red comb was lunging at her rump. You’re determined, she thought, but I’ll be rid of you yet. Swiftly she switched into a hare, and loped off up the hill.
She heard panting at her heels. A greyhound was after her, the same wicked gleam in his eye. Right, she thought, that does it. She transformed herself into a grey mare and gave the dog a good hard kick, sending it skyward.
Something thumped down on her back, a black saddle, with stirrups and pommel all pointed and gilded. She felt the girth tighten under her belly. Bastard, she thought. She took off at a gallop.
14 April
Orfeo and Isabel
from an old ballad
There is an old saying: Where the wood greens early, there the deer goes.
Long ago there was a King famed for his skill at piping. One day he went hunting, but while he was away a servant came looking for him.
‘You must come back at once. The Lady Isabel is very sick.’
‘What happened?’ the King demanded as they rode. ‘What is wrong with her?’
Nobody knew. One minute she was fine, the next she collapsed. The physicians were at a loss.
‘They’re saying it was the fairies,’ the servant said. ‘They’re saying the Fairy King has wounded her with one of his little arrows.’
An ominous silence greeted their arrival.
‘Where is my Lady?’
‘She is dead.’
They had laid her out, as beautiful and unblemished in death as in life. The King’s grief was terrible to see.
‘They’ve taken her soul from me,’ he said, ‘but they’ll not have her body.’ So guards were posted to watch over her, but the guards slept, and in the morning her body was gone.
The King set off in pursuit, but the trail ended in the greenwood, by a great, grey stone. He sat down and waited.
Seven years he sat, and his hair grew and covered him over like moss.
Then he heard a great company approaching, some on foot, some riding, and among them the Lady Isabel. The grey stone opened like a door into the earth. In they went, and the King followed.
He brought out his pipes and began to play: first a lament, then a march, and finally a reel so wild and joyous it would have cured the sickest heart.
A servant approached. ‘They’re impressed. Come into the hall, will you?’
Deeper in he went. Strange, inhuman folk they were, the foremost among them not half his height.
‘You played well,’ the creature said. ‘What will you have for your playing?’
‘I will have my Lady Isabel.’
The one looked at the other. ‘Take her. Go home. What’s yours is yours, what’s mine is mine.’
So he and she depar
ted. And that old saying was ever in his mind: Where the wood greens early, there the deer goes.
15 April
That Face
You see that face everywhere these days. You know the one. The dead-set look that goes with the trudge. A woman – it’s very often a woman – is making her way along the street, carrying two or three bags, and it seems every other person on the pavement is going in the opposite direction. So she has to lean, weave, shove her way against the tide, and each step is exhausting her. You can see this from the way her back is bent, her head lowered as if into a wind, but there is no wind. And the face is on her, the one sculpted by that invisible wind. I have to keep going, it says, if I stop I’ll never start again. If I think about everything that’s looming up to hit me I’ll collapse in a heap right here.
A man – it’s often a man – is pushing a buggy through the shopping centre. Everything about him looks poor: his clothes, his shoes, the pallor of his skin, the thinness of his arms as he pushes. He might be the father or the grandfather, it is hard to say, but he’s got the child on a weekday morning and maybe you’re making assumptions but you guess that this is his job, his only job, and that he’s been doing it since the child was born. He has the same face as the woman: the one that says, This is what I do, this is all I do, this is my horizon.
And the child in the buggy is crying, fretting: not a cry of alarm or pain, just a constant, anxious fret. Already the invisible wind is having its effect, the hard climate of circumstance is shaping and sculpting.
It strikes you later, when you’ve seen the face a hundred times during the day, that it’s nothing new. How could it be, when the face can pass so easily from generation to generation? It is centuries old. It’s the face of resignation, of being on the receiving end, of being oppressed. The face of poverty. You feel the waste, but not the pity. You feel the shame, but not the responsibility. You feel the anger.
16 April
A Favour to Old Age
Then the sun came out. As if by accident, as if it didn’t mean to but forgot itself. Twenty minutes earlier the sky had been a big grey leaking blanket and everything was wet. It had been like that for days, weeks: long enough, anyway, that you couldn’t remember the last sunny day. Cold too – miserably so. Even when it wasn’t raining the air had felt heavy, full of chill moisture. Damp eating into your bones, rotting your skin. But then, by miraculous chance, the sun came out.
Twenty minutes was all it took, and you felt that bone-destroying, skin-sapping process thrown into reverse. Bright blue holes appeared in the blanket, joining up to make bigger expanses. Soon there were just a few grey rags remaining up there. The roads and pavements were being steam-cleaned. Steel and glass on buildings gleamed and winked. People stretched themselves, pushed back hoods, lowered and shook and folded umbrellas. They smiled. Everything was going to be dry again. The heat on your shoulders – how soon you remembered the goodness of that! You wanted to be a lizard, flat out on a stone, absorbing, making the most of it.
You ate your sandwich on a bench in the public gardens. The wooden slats were dry and warm. An old man sat down at the other end. You glanced at him, but he was oblivious to you. He had a newspaper. He folded it carefully, brought his face down to within two or three inches of the page, and started to read. The intensity of his concentration was fascinating. When he reached the bottom-right-hand corner of the section of page he was on, he refolded the paper and started again from the top-left-hand corner.
You had to return to work. You sensed that the old boy wouldn’t be shifting as long as he still had some news left to read. And you hoped that, for as long as he had, the sun would stay out. A favour to old age: I’m here now so I’ll stay. You were envious of him sitting on, of his reading every word, even of his shortsightedness. You stood up to leave. He did not notice.
17 April
The Painter
Every morning she steps out of the back door and makes her way to the spot a few yards beyond the cottage, at the edge of the field. She likes the fact that she can get there without being seen. The route gives her that seclusion, that invisibility – no one knows she is there, so if someone knocks at the front door of the cottage and gets no answer he or she will assume she is away. This means she can paint all day, undisturbed.
Sometimes she catches herself in the middle of her work. What is it she is trying to grasp? A feeling? Yes. The feeling of the light, the sea, the earth – elemental things. She doesn’t need to go anywhere else for this. She doesn’t need grand subjects – in fact grand subjects would be a distraction. They would get in the way of what she is looking at, reaching for. Here, this unremarkable place by the sea, is enough. Nor, in truth, is it unremarkable.
One painting leads straight on to another. All day she’s there. She leaves her paints and brushes and easel out overnight, a studio in the open air. While she works the wind blows things against the canvas – insects and bits of grass. They stick to the paint and she removes them or she leaves them but either way they become part of what she is doing. The tough, huddled wee tree buds, puts on leaves, loses them. She digs and scrapes at the paint with the pallet knife, the brush-end. Last year the field was barley, this year oats. She presses seeds into the paint. Wildflowers bloom and fade, grasses lengthen. Everything is the same, but every day different. It seems silly to shift about, so she stays put.
There is an urgency about that – staying in one place, capturing it over and over. Thoughts flock in like gulls, or one hovers like a solitary gull. She isn’t well. She is in pain. She wants to write a letter to the woman she loves but more urgent is the need to paint. What is it so close within her grasp, so impossible to hold? It is life.
18 April
The Little Fever
Scott’s heart burns a little this morning. He was out to dinner last night and it is probable that he had a glass or two more than he should have. Now middle-aged, and a man who seriously overworks himself, he knows he should drink only in moderation, and usually he does. (He remembers the old judges of his youth – no moderation on their part when a case before them was protracted! Strong black port and biscuits sustained them – and little attempt made to disguise the fact.)
He eases the discomfort with a dose of magnesia. While it settles he glances over his sheets from yesterday, and is pleased to find that the deadlock has released overnight, the tangled trap of incident and character he had written himself into has unknotted itself. All the threads and colours separated and ordered – as if by magic! How that happens he does not know, but it does, it still does. He goes to bed clueless as to how to extricate the plot and wakes up with a workable plan. God knows he needs that to keep happening!
It’s as if, when the body sleeps, the intellect goes to work, unhampered by conscious effort or willed direction. He suspects this mechanism is triggered by the little fever an extra glass of wine produces. Can’t prove it, of course – and excess kills the process stone-dead – but when he thinks back over all the novels he believes the theory is correct. Were there any that he wrote into the middle of with the least notion as to how he was to get out at the other side? None that he can recall. It’s a perilous way to ride – not one he’d recommend to aspiring young authors – but it’s the only way he knows. He prays for strength to stay in the saddle a while longer. Four thousand pounds for each three-volume novel. The account comes down – slowly, but it comes down.
He scribbles these thoughts in the journal. He could stay with the journal all day, but it is wageless labour. No, not labour, it is talking to a friend, the best he has. Writing novels is labour now, but it pays.
19 April
The Accusation
‘How long have you known me, Brent?’ Douglas asked, as he handed out the drinks from a silver salver. Malt whisky for them, gin and tonic for Aileen. They were in the conservatory. All very civilised. Brent relaxed into the big, soft armchair.
‘Twenty years,’ he said.
‘Twenty-two, actually.
And Aileen for seventeen. You were my best man, and you married the chief bridesmaid, Aileen’s best friend. Isn’t that right?’
‘Statement of the obvious, Douglas,’ Brent said. ‘Yes, I married Sophie.’
‘Poor dear Sophie,’ Aileen said. She was staring out into the garden.
‘Yes,’ Douglas said. ‘Poor Sophie. What I’m saying, Brent, is that we’ve been friends a long time, all of us. Haven’t we?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You probably know me as well as anyone does. Wouldn’t you say?’
There was something tight in Douglas’s voice. Brent didn’t like it.
‘Probably,’ he said.
‘You see,’ Douglas said, sitting down at one end of the big sofa, ‘we have a problem, which I’d like to sort out. The problem is, Aileen thinks I’m having an affair. She thinks I’ve been playing away from home.’
Brent took a mouthful of whisky. ‘Oh,’ he said.
‘And I thought, because you know me so well, you could tell her how absurd that idea is.’
Aileen turned her head towards Brent, her face blank. Help me out here, he thought.
‘You’re my character witness,’ Douglas said, watching Brent very intently. ‘You know I wouldn’t do that, don’t you?’
‘No, I don’t think you would,’ Brent said cautiously.
‘Of course everybody’s capable of doing stuff behind someone else’s back,’ Douglas said. ‘And no doubt I’ve flirted with some stranger at a party now and again. But an affair? Why would I have an affair? I mean, look at her. My Aileen.’
Brent said, ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘I’m asking your opinion,’ Douglas said. ‘Do you think I’m having an affair?’
‘No,’ Brent said.
‘Good,’ Douglas said. ‘That’s settled then. Marital bliss is restored.’
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