The Woodwitch

by Stephen Gregory

  There was a lull. What more could he do?

  He wandered into the bathroom and inspected his face, having ignored it first thing in the morning in his enthusiasm to be busy with the stinkhorn. He filled the basin, although the water was cold, and he attacked his chin and the skin around his eyes to try and remove some more of the ink. It was fading fast, and more vigorous rubbing dissolved it more. There remained nothing more disfiguring than what looked like the darkening of bristle, a four o’clock shadow, which appealed to Andrew; his face needed shaving only seldom to remove the fine golden down from his pink cheeks. Now, looking and feeling more rugged than usual, pleased with the effect of the smudging as he turned his head from side to side and examined himself in the mirror, he decided there was no reason to be coy about his appearance. He’d go to the hotel and return the rug, he’d reclaim his spectacles too. In the condensation which formed from his breath on the mirror, his eyes were blurred. There was only a hazy image of a red, featureless face, big and soft and bland, like an old carp staring through the slime-covered glass of an aquarium. His hair was longer and more unruly still, strands of golden weed which masked the fish’s face. It was only his glasses which had given definition to his features, and now they were missing, so that he was altered, rubbed out, shifted out of focus in the same way that the watercolour of Phoebe had been changed by the running damp . . . After a few weeks in Wales, he was a different person from the one whom Jennifer had liked and favoured and finally humiliated . . .

  He fetched the rug from the cupboard, where he had wrapped it around the tank of the immersion heater. It was dry and clean, smelling of disinfectant. Certainly, he thought, it was cleaner than it must have been before, as he remembered the state of the mangy spaniel which had scratched and gnawed itself raw on it. Folding it, he put on his jacket and wellington boots.

  ‘No, Phoebe, this time you’re staying here. Maybe it’s a bit more tactful if I take this back on my own.’

  The dog, seeing him step into his boots, had begun to uncoil herself from her basket, but now she wound her warm body once more into the blankets. He bent over her. After her frolics in the sea, she smelled good again and her coat was glossy. Not a whiff of her sickness rose with the unmistakable staleness of damp.

  ‘Good girl. When I get back I’ll give you another blanket. You stay here . . .’ He left the cottage and walked down the hillside towards the river.

  There was no heron that afternoon. Instead (and he wondered whether they were mutually exclusive on this stretch of the river) there was a cormorant fishing. It was half-­submerged in the smooth water, only its head and neck and the very top of its back above the surface. The bird cruised about, black and lethal, its sinuous neck and the up-tilted beak giving the impression of a silent submarine which had lifted its periscope for a while before resuming some murderous business underwater. When the cormorant dived, its entire body cleared the surface for a split-second and then it entered the water as smoothly as a pin through the meniscus of oil. He did not see it re­appear, nor did he know what fish it might be hunting so many miles upriver in early November. As always on these occasions, he found himself thinking of Jennifer, who would without doubt have been able to inform him of the cormorant’s tastes in freshwater fish, as well as knowing whether the heron and the cormorant were compatible as far as sharing a beat was concerned. He walked on. From the blackened remains of the bracken a pair of pipits faltered into the air, and their feeble voices reminded him of the sound of a rusty pair of scissors opening and closing . . . And the rest of the walk was passed in a blank, he noticed nothing more as he racked his brain about the truth or the origin of that image, the rusty scissors, as he puzzled whether it was something he had once read in a book, whether it was something that Jennifer had said to him, or whether it had just occurred to him quite spontaneously. A pair of pipits . . . a pair of rusty scissors . . . ? He was still undecided, unable to accept that he might have conjured the idea himself, when he wandered distractedly up to the hotel and found himself standing on the gravelled drive outside the front door, with the rug folded under his arm.

  Someone was playing the piano again, not a few random scales and strummings as he had heard once before, but stepping gracefully through the sparse phrases of a nocturne by Erik Satie. It gave Andrew a thrill of enormous pleasure, both to recognise the piece and to hear its stylistic elegance ring from the building into the still air of that afternoon. In all the wilderness he had encountered since coming to the cottage, not only in the sense of the wet inhospitable countryside but in respect of its inhabitants too, who smelled of sweat and whose idea of a joke was to drop a live cockerel down the chimney and into a lighted fire, there was only Mrs Stone who had any of the qualities of grace and reserve which he prized in his friends in the south of England. To be fair, he admitted, he had not met many local people. But as soon as he had first seen her, behind the hotel bar, he recognised in Mrs Stone’s weary smiles that she held herself just a little apart from the people she served with drinks, that she played the aloof and haughty heron to the dark, voracious, oily cormorants whose beat she had come to share. Heron and cormorant managed to live side by side, theirs was an uneasy, untrusting relationship . . . and here, in the gloomiest valley of the wettest mountains in Wales, Mrs Stone had chosen to roost. Tall and grey, elegant and spare, she stepped coolly among the cormorants. Andrew Pinkney listened to her music, the Satie which was as spare and refined as she was, and he imagined her long fingers on the keyboard. He had stumbled on an oasis here in the dark valley, where such music cut straight through the smother of the mists. It was so human, and civilised . . . it sliced the afternoon into ribbons, it humbled the barbaric ugliness of the wet slabs which rose sheer behind the hotel. He waited and listened until the piece was finished, then he rang the doorbell.

  Mrs Stone came to the door. For a second she looked puzzled, as if she could not recognise the young man who stood there with his bundle. Before he could speak, she said, ‘Oh, it’s you. I couldn’t place you for a moment. You look different . . .’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Stone,’ he began. ‘I’ve brought back that rug I took away with me the other night. You know, on Hallowe’en?’ Nonplussed that she said nothing in answer to this but was looking quizzically at him to continue, he went on, ‘I’m very sorry about what happened. Not just the dog, of course. She couldn’t help that, I suppose. She was sick. I really shouldn’t have brought her with me.’ He cleared his throat. ‘No, I mean all that unruliness afterwards. Lost my temper a bit, I couldn’t stop myself . . .’ Still she said nothing, offered nothing to ease his awkwardness. ‘So here I am, Mrs Stone, to apologise for all the trouble and to bring back the rug which got messed up.’ Holding it out to her, seeing her step back with distaste from the folded rug, he quickly added, ‘Oh don’t worry, it’s perfectly clean now. I’ve given it a really good cleaning and doused it with disinfectant. Perfectly dry too . . .’

  She listened to this with her fingers clasped together in front of her, a tight, lipless smile on her face. ‘Right,’ she said, unclasping her hands, ‘well, I’ll take it then.’ She accepted it from him and lifted it to her face, to sniff it. ‘Certainly smells all right anyway. It’s probably a lot cleaner than it was before, with my mangy old spaniel on it.’ At last she brought a little warmth to her smile. ‘How’s your dog now? Recovered?’

  Andrew relaxed, seeing that his apology was accepted. He remembered not to shift from foot to foot, to keep his hands out of his pockets, as he had been told quite forcefully by the irritable old headmaster who sat on the bench in Lewes magistrates’ court, and he recounted to Mrs Stone his theory that the dog must have bitten into a toad he had found near the cottage and must have swallowed some of its poison. Mrs Stone nodded and smiled, holding the rug as if it were a baby. As soon as he paused, she put in quickly, ‘Oh, I’ve just worked out why you’re looking different today! Glasses! You’re not wearing your glasses. Makes your face look quite different somehow . . .
’

  ‘Well, that’s another reason I’ve come down, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘To pick up my specs. You know, when those lads dragged me out of the toilets, when Phoebe was . . . when she was ill, I left them there, on the wash basin. I was in the middle of trying to get all that ink off my face when they came in and manhandled me out. So I left my specs behind.’ He managed a foolish laugh. ‘I’ve still got some of the ink on my face now, as you can see! Have you got my glasses, Mrs Stone?’

  It turned out that she had not. No one had handed them to her, on Hallowe’en or the following night. She had personally cleaned the toilets, both ladies’ and gentlemen’s, as she was obliged to do most of the time off-season, and there were no glasses left on the wash basin. Andrew was puzzled. ‘Well, that’s very strange. I wonder where they’ve got to. I can just about manage without them for the moment, while I’m still on holiday up here, although things are a bit blurred, you know . . . But I’ll really need them when I drive all the way back to Sussex. Six hours, that’s what it took me on the way up. I need them for work too. Wonder where they’ve got to . . .’

  To his great surprise, as he stood there and scratched his blond curls in puzzlement, as the woman waited politely for him to add something or to retire down the drive, the piano playing resumed. The clear, simple notes of another Satie piece (this time Andrew’s favourite, ‘Le Piège de Méduse’) came lilting from the open door. Astonished, he frowned and glanced up at Mrs Stone, who was smiling absent-mindedly, a distant look in her pale eyes. ‘What lovely music!’ he said gently, so as not to disturb the limpid sound. ‘Who’s playing?’

  ‘Yes, it is nice, isn’t it?’ the woman replied. ‘It’s young Shân. You know, from the kennels. She’s a nice little pianist. She quite often comes over to use the piano. Such a waste otherwise, because I can’t play a note myself. Lovely to hear the old piano being . . .’

  Andrew pushed roughly past her, into the hotel. He ignored the woman’s look of indignation and strode through the door, following the sound of the music. He trod down a darkened corridor, hearing behind him Mrs Stone’s fluted ‘Excuse me?’, he turned the handle of a heavy panelled door from behind which the music was coming, he burst into the room. The music stopped. There was the girl, sitting at a grand piano, jerking round to stare in amazement at Andrew. For a second the man and the girl gazed in silence at one another, while Mrs Stone breathed heavily over the man’s shoulder. Andrew was petrified with disbelief. He saw the little girl dwarfed by the bulk of the piano, tiny and frail in the high-ceilinged room, he had heard such delicate music from her fingers . . . She looked as saucy and as brittle as a sparrow. Her hair shone, her face was flushing pink with surprise. But Andrew experienced a nightmarish flashback, to her grunting black mask and the limbs of her boyish body splayed beneath him, to the sensation of her hot wet skin slipping and sliding on his . . . ‘Oh . . .’ was all he managed to say, and then he articulated the single word ‘Shân . . . ?’ to express somehow his bafflement, his embarrassment and the upsurging of renewed desire in that one syllable. Then, before she could say anything, he covered his confusion by asking in a strangled voice, ‘My glasses? You didn’t know where my glasses were, did you?’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t!’ the exasperated tones of Mrs Stone burst out. ‘What would she be doing in the men’s toilets? That’s ridiculous!’

  But the girl spoke up, her voice as clear and as measured as the music she had been playing. ‘Oh yes, Mrs Stone, in fact I do know where Andrew’s glasses are.’ The man and the woman listened to the kennel-maid. ‘My brother’s got them, Andrew. He picked them up from the toilets after you’d left with the dog. We were going to drop them off at your cottage on the way back home, but somehow we . . .’ And her voice trailed off to nothing. ‘We were going to stop by, but . . .’

  She looked back to her sheet music and pretended to study it, her face and throat hot with her memory of Hallowe’en, and Andrew again felt that melting sensation in his stomach as he remembered how he had washed her little body, how she had slept so deeply while he turned her and sponged her and dried her before enfolding her in blankets in front of a flaming fire. Without looking at him, she added quietly, ‘Come up to the kennels tomorrow, Pinkie, in the afternoon. You can get your glasses back then.’

  Having said this, she turned to him and smiled, showing her white pointed teeth, running the tip of her tongue across her lips. For just that second, long enough for Andrew to feel a chill like an icicle piercing his chest, she was the little witch-bitch once more . . . For just one second . . . Then she spun round to the piano, resuming the piece in the middle of a phrase as though she had never stopped, as though Andrew had never come into the room. The music picked up, rounded and true. In a daze, he negotiated the figure of Mrs Stone, who was still holding the rug to her narrow chest, he passed down the corridor to the silver light which beckoned outside and left the hotel without speaking another word.

  He walked down the drive and across the river. The sky was already beginning to darken by the time he was unlocking the front door of the cottage to release Phoebe. All the way, he heard the hypnotic threads of the kennel-maid’s music weaving through his mind, weaving a curious pattern which linked him with the girl and the Welshness she embodied, and which linked with his life in Sussex too, where he was accustomed to hearing such music. It reminded him that, different though he had found things in Wales during the past few weeks, he remained of course only hours away from all the routine trappings he was used to in the south: the people and the places, his bed-sitting-room, his involvement with Jennifer, his daily tasks in the office. The music traced him back there as directly and as simply as the river had connected him back to this bog of a valley when he had tried to escape to the coast. The little witch was wielding another of her spells, just as she had mesmerised him in the firelight and defeated the antidote he had attempted to apply in the form of the rowan. That night, she overcame his counter-charm, sucked him down to her level, blackened him and smeared him with her occult daubings. Now, her spell was in the music she wrought from the piano. It said to Andrew, more plainly than words could have said: ‘This is the kind of charm you’re accustomed to! Return to it, and leave us to our ravens and our mists and our packs of hounds. Leave us to our mud and our smells of sweat. Go back to the music you know, which is ordered and cool, which has discords which are easy to resolve, which is limpid, calm and cerebral. It makes sense to you, Andrew Pinkney. Return south and pick up the piece where you left off, as though you had never been here. This is the kind of charm you’re used to, this music. Not the stinkhorn! You’ll never understand the stinkhorn! Don’t tinker with the stinkhorn! Go back, while you can still recognise yourself . . .’ That was what the witch was saying this time.

  Yes, he could go home perfectly easily, this very evening if he chose to. It would take him less than an hour to pack his things into the car, to leave the cottage at least as tidy as he’d found it, and then he could drive cautiously south (without his spectacles) and be turning the key to his bed-sitter in New­haven in six hours’ time. Why not? After a night’s sleep in his familiar bed, he’d wake up in Sussex as though everything that had happened in Wales had been a bizarre dream! There was no badger and no swan and no maggots; there was no clammy cottage engulfed by cloud; he’d never heard the melancholy baying of those hounds and the echoes of the crater; he’d never really seen that black choking thing drop from the chimney and leap out of the flames; the caveman and the witch-bitch had not danced in the firelight, their bodies anointed with wet soot . . . and most importantly of all, he had never worshipped the stinkhorn! He would awake to the sounds of a piano being played in the next room, cool delicate music, the same music he’d been listening to when he had drifted off to sleep the previous night, before his long and complicated dream. What a dream! How he’d been changed in it! But now he was restored to himself, to his cool clean sheets and the cool calm music . . .

  He watched Phoebe
bolt from the cottage. She squatted by the privet bush and trickled her golden stream. The evening was getting dark. There was no moon, it was buried somewhere deep inside the blue-black clouds. No stars. Not even the scalpel-light of Venus cut through. No sounds. Not even the hounds. All there was in the world, in the entire universe, was the man and his dog, enveloped by the night. Stepping into the cottage, he stood silent and still in the darkness. Then, he might almost have decided to start packing, as again he heard, running through his head, the simple strains of the music which the kennel-maid had played. But he did not.

  He set about lighting the fire, rolling up a few sheets of newspaper into the grate and then going into the kitchen with the hatchet. In no time he had taken down a shelf from inside a cupboard and, in the living-room again, he split it into splinters with which to kindle a fire.