by Jane Gardam
He put the drum inside the flour crock for the moment and went off to the fields, where he stood planning the year in the March weather.
The Green Man can make mistakes, for he is a man.
3 THE GREEN MAN GOES TO THE SEASIDE
Usually the Green Man keeps away from the ocean. He likes the drains and dykes and goits and runnels that water his land and the green rushes that spike them. He watches the arrows of the water voles, the mirror the water makes for sailing swans or flying geese. The eyes of these creatures watch the Green Man as he passes. None of them comments.
But beyond the dykes and the marsh is the sea, which is not the natural element of the Green Man. Sometimes when a sheep strays to the strand he has to go down there looking for it, but the sea feels hostile and full of anachronisms.
Most of all the Green Man detests mermaids. Whenever he is forced to go anywhere near the sea he keeps his eyes off the rocks.
‘Yoo-hoo, coo-eee,’ call the mermaids, giggling and twiddling their golden ringlets through their fingers. ‘Who can’t swim, then, Lover-boy?’ Two of the mermaids are called Ermentrude and Cayley.
‘Coo-eee, Green Man, you don’t dare touch us.’
‘Half-and-halves,’ mutters the Green Man. ‘No sense of their element.’ He watches his dog, and only his dog. His dog is flurrying the sheep home. ‘Neither wet nor dry,’ snarls the Green Man. ‘Beyond my understanding.’
But one day the mermaids are so provocative and insolent that the Green Man turns and walks right into the sea.
Ermentrude and Cayley are so surprised they forget to slither away, and sit with their pouty little mouths each in an oh! They throw up their hands, ooh la! Ermentrude’s golden comb decorated with limpets falls into the sea.
The Green Man seizes the two mermaids, one under each arm. Abandoning the sheep and his dog, he marches back over the dry land, leaving marsh and dykes and drains behind him. Two gliding swans behold him from the water and raise their eyebrows.
‘Help, help,’ squeak the percussive mermaids and wave their little white arms out front, their tails wagging, slap, slap, behind.
The Green Man goes into his house and tucks both mermaids under one arm for a moment while he fills up the bath-tub from the keg. Then he slings the pair of them in.
‘Sit there,’ he says, ‘till I think what to do with you. Each to his element. Find what it is.’
He goes off to dig his potatoes.
‘He’s coming back again,’ say the water voles. They had caught sight of his retreating figure and thought he had been very successfully fishing.
‘He’s coming back again,’ says the next-door farmer (Jackson), who is the grandson of Sadie-long-ago. He has seen the Green Man pass, but only from the front. ‘He’s abducting women now,’ he says. ‘This might be nasty.’
Jackson goes into the Green Man’s house and sees two girls’ heads looking over the edge of the bath-tub. When they see the next-door farmer they begin to giggle and sing, so that he says, ‘Well! So you were willing, were you? I’m disgusted,’ and slams off.
The water voles tell it all to some seagulls. Seagulls think they are nobody’s fool. They take nothing on trust. They fly to the bathroom window and look in. Twirling fishtails whirlpool the water. ‘Couple of fish,’ they report. ‘No worries.’
The four daughters of the Green Man happen to be visiting that day and they are surprised to see the mermaids in the bath-tub. By this time the mermaids are growing tetchy and needing salt.
‘There’ll be big damages for this,’ screeches Ermentrude.
‘It’s a scandal,’ squawks Cayley. ‘It’s a threat to the environment. Haphazard. Erratic. He’s a danger to the community. Green Man, my tail!’
The daughters found a small tin hip-bath, filled it with tank water and took the mermaids, one at a time, back to the sea. The tide had gone out and they had a long walk. Each mermaid delivered a separate scolding all the way, protesting that it was dangerous for them to be separated, and similar rubbish.
‘Shut up,’ said the daughters, ‘or we’ll drop you in the shallows and you’ll have to wriggle off like eels in an ungainly way.’
‘Stuff you all,’ said the mermaids as they each glided quickly into the deep.
The daughters noticed the Green Man digging his potatoes as, carrying the empty hip-bath, they returned from the sea for the second time and they were so cross with him that they passed him by without speaking. When they were back in the house, though, they made tea and caught each other’s glance and couldn’t stop laughing.
‘You should have sliced them in half,’ said the Green Man coming in; ‘I was thinking of it. Mermaid-tail fillet is a little-known delicacy, too sensible a concept for fairy tale.’
‘It is a fairy tail,’ said the most amusing of the daughters, but all the others—and the Green Man—groaned.
‘And you thought to be a conservationist!’ said the eldest daughter.
‘I don’t know why,’ said the Green Man. ‘Most of it’s guesswork. Folklorists. Folk-laureates.’ (Now the amusing daughter groaned.) ‘Each to his element,’ said the Green Man. ‘No messing.’
The mermaids were no bother to the Green Man after this. Ermentrude’s golden comb with the limpets was washed up at Ramsgate and sold at a boot fair.
4 THE GREEN MAN GOES WITH THE DEVIL TO THE MOON
It was one evening in early summer when the Green Man met the Devil under an apple tree in the orchard.
‘I’d heard you favoured fruit,’ said the Green Man, offering him a Worcester Pearmain.
‘Good evening,’ said the Devil, with a charming, quizzical look; ‘I’d been hoping we’d meet.’
The Green Man looked hard at the Devil and thought, ‘But this must be a looking-glass. He is just like me.’
The Green Man walked all round the apple tree and examined the Devil from every side. It could not be a looking-glass, because the Green Man could see the back of the Devil’s neck, which was creased with lines as deep as the bark of an old tree. He felt the back of his own neck and found them there too.
Coming round in front again he watched the Devil picking his pointed teeth with a twig, and saw that the Devil’s eyes were his own eyes at certain times or phases of the moon. They were watchful and knowing and on the hypnotic side.
‘We have not been introduced,’ said the Green Man defensively.
‘Oh, yes, we have,’ said the Devil. ‘We’re reintroduced every day of our lives.’
‘Your place is in hell,’ said the Green Man. ‘Each to his element.’
‘My place is with you,’ said the Devil. ‘I’m in my element with you. Every minute of the day. You can’t get away from me. Look at those mice and those mermaids.’
‘I spared the mice and the mermaids,’ said the Green Man.
‘Only just,’ said the Devil. ‘And your daughters did the clearing-up. And what about your twelve sons?’
The Green Man fell silent. ‘They are grown and flown,’ he said. ‘We are part of one another, therefore I have no guilt. I cannot go searching for them specifically. It isn’t my destiny.’
‘I have things to show you,’ said the Devil. ‘Perhaps you will accompany me to the moon and find your destiny?’
On the moon the two twins sat side by side upon a rock and looked down upon the beautiful blue planet, so small in the sky.
‘Yours,’ said the Devil.
‘It’s been said before,’ said the Green Man. ‘Are the conditions the same?’
‘Yours,’ said the Devil again. ‘Here’s a zap. Zap it.’
‘No,’ said the Green Man.
‘Why not? The earth has never been good to you. Look how you’ve worked for it and loved it. Do you imagine that places love you back? A landscape doesn’t hesitate to destroy you. Your fate has been predicted since humanity could predict.
You are touched with death. You are strangled by the living green. Look at the old carvings of you in all those churches and ancient palaces. In the end you will vanish from the earth.’
‘I keep away from carvings.’
‘The Greeks and Romans made stone effigies of you and the Christians made copies. Over half the world there are images of you with vines growing like moustaches out of your nostrils. Then from your ears, and even your tongue. Sometimes they even grow from your eyeballs. Your beautiful face is the face of grief. You are born to die. It is eternal sorrow that stares through the leaves. Sad and bound is the Green Man.’
‘There is Christ,’ said the Green Man.
‘Is there?’ asked the Devil.
‘Go on, zap them,’ said the Devil. ‘Zap them all, down there. You could.’
‘They are my sons and daughters.’
‘They don’t care for you. You are nothing but a nuisance to them. You embarrass your sons. Your death would be welcome. You are a burden and a reproach.’
‘They are part of me, my twelve sons. And my four daughters.’
‘I’m part of you, too,’ said the Devil. ‘Let ’em go.’
The Green Man sat silent.
‘The moon is clean and free,’ said the Devil, ‘untainted as yet by human wickedness. You with your green fingers could bring here the first new shoot, which would break into grasses and flowers, crops and forests. You could create a new world, perfect in God’s sight. You yourself could be God. The wilderness would flower like no earthly paradise. Let the old world go.’
‘I’d need the earth for back-up,’ said the Green Man, weakening; and as he said it, some moss that had become caught in his hair—from a low branch of the apple tree—slid out of his leafy curls. A spider that had been living in the moss began a hasty thread from the curls to the moondust.
The Green Man watched the spider, which went tearing about here and there and bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. The Green Man held out his finger and tweaked the spider back, and for want of anywhere better flicked him up into his hair again. ‘I cannot leave the greenwood,’ he said.
‘Almost everything else has,’ said the Devil. ‘And what do you mean “greenwood”? D’you think you’re Shakespeare or something?’
‘I’m something,’ said the Green Man.
‘You’re nothing at all,’ said the Devil. ‘You don’t know who you are or what you are. All this about elements, you don’t know your own. Nobody believes in you. You’re kids’-book stuff. They don’t even call pubs after you any more. They change them to something from Walt Disney. The only ones who go on about you now are black-magic freaks who think you’re something to do with me.’
‘Not quite the only ones,’ said the Green Man.
‘Well—who else? The has-beens, the hoi polloi, the folk historians?’
‘Sadie and Billy believed in me,’ said the Green Man, ‘and Patsy. And the corn chandler.’
‘Who he?’ asked the Devil, commonly.
‘The water voles, the geese, the mice and the mermaids believe in me.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ said the Devil.
‘Oh, what?’ said the Green Man.
The Devil stirred up the moondust with his finger, gently, so that the pressure didn’t bounce him away. He seemed unenthusiastic about answering.
‘D’you really think Christ cares about you?’ he said at last. ‘Think what a world you live in. Think what a wonder it could be and what he’s allowed you to do with it. I tell you—forget him. Zap it. And him. Create the moon.’
‘The moon is created.’
‘Re-create it. Clothe it. Beautify it above the earth. Look at the potential, man. Look around you. A pure new architecture, rivers of silver, mountains of gold. After you’ve moved the space-trash of course.’
‘I would spawn more.’
‘Technology, man, technology. Enlightened clearances create a world of light. Get the straw from your hair. You spend whole days, whole years, scything the grass of an orchard nobody needs. You can get bags of apples half the price in the supermarket. And think of the space on the moon. You could do it. With my help. All you have to do is believe in me.’
The Green Man tried now, seriously, to consider the Devil’s rational good sense and to analyse what the earth and the moon really meant for him. He thought of the moon’s calm light as it sailed above the branches of the orchard.
‘It’s not for me to change it,’ he said.
‘I’m disappointed in you,’ said the Devil.
‘I’m disappointed in you,’ said the Green Man.
‘But why?’ asked the Devil with his sweet and loving smile.
‘You’re nothing but my shabby self,’ said the Green Man. ‘You’re the dark side of my soul. You’re déjà vu.’
The Devil then threw a rock at him and vanished and the Green Man in an instant was back in the orchard, under a Ribston Pippin. It was cold and raining and the fruits above his head looked ungrateful and sour. He found himself weeping and weak.
‘I must sleep,’ he said, ‘here in the grass and the rain. When I wake perhaps I won’t feel that it’s been a defeat,’ and he fell asleep in the grass that would be cut for hay on Saturday.
The spider walked out of his hair and spun a beautiful web across his tired eyes.
5 THE GREEN MAN ATTENDS A PLACE OF WORSHIP
At harvest festival, like many farmers since its ancient institution and maybe only out of pagan habit, the Green Man sometimes goes to church. He goes to the early morning service, where there are few people. The church has always been lovingly decorated for harvest with flowers and vines and bines and trails of hops. There is bread, plaited or covered in cobnuts or marked into gold squares. There are no sheaves of corn these days, but tins of baked beans that are later taken to patients in hospital. Patients in hospital would be bewildered by sheaves. They are rather bewildered by baked beans and usually hand them over to their visitors. The visitors take them home and give them to their children when there has to be a contribution to the next school fête. The baked beans bought at the fête will be half-price and often come back to church for the next harvest festival. This is country life.
The Green Man is hard to discern among the hop bines and the baked beans in the church at harvest, but he is there if you look hard enough. He doesn’t sit in the body of the church but tends to be up in the chancel, leaning against a pillar, peering through the decorations of harvest green and gold. Up above him on a corbel (c. 1220) his own effigy looks down. It is his own head, wrapped in vine leaves like a Greek dinner.
The Green Man’s head, so beautiful, passionate, tormented, ardent, is being eaten up by oak leaves. He stares down at the living Green Man—who is listening gratefully to the Collect—and around the church which is his prison.
‘I see myself everywhere,’ says the living Green Man. ‘First in the orchard,’ he says, ‘then on the moon. Good likenesses, though by no means exact. And I’m supposedly defunct. I am seldom noticed and when I am noticed everyone sees someone different: a tree, a scarecrow, a saint, a devil, or “That old guy on the farm; bit out of his element these days. Belongs to the past.” They do not peruse my face. Sometimes they see me, sometimes they don’t.’
‘The fruits in their season,’ intones the parson.
At the Gospel the Green Man turns to face the east end of the church, as has been his medieval way. This brings him to face his companions along the pew. It is the choir-stall pew of Transept Manor. Lord Transept and Lady Serena Transept, their cheerful cousin and the dog, stand in a row. All remain face forward in the aristocratic low-church way except the dog, who decides to face west and wag its tail at the Green Man. The cheerful cousin waves her handkerchief.
After the service Lady Serena Transept—tall, flat and slender as her ancestor who lies on top of a nearby tomb in wimple, camisole and lo
ng stone robe and who looks much like her except that Lady Serena has a long hooky nose. The ancestor had one too, but it was snipped off into a Cromwellian pocket—Lady Serena Transept turns to the Green Man and lays a long-fingered paw upon his Sunday-best green tweed arm. ‘Come to breakfast,’ she says.
So they all set forth to Transept Manor, Lady Serena driving fast, through the swishing puddles of the mile-long avenue of dead elms. Lord Transept broods alongside and the cousin sits in the back humming hymns with the dog, who looks delighted. In the manor kitchen they drink tea and eat toast and the cousin selects the numbers for her lottery ticket and the dog lies ecstatic in the Green Man’s lap. His lordship hangs in looming thought and Lady Serena strokes the back of the Green Man’s hand.
‘I never thought to meet you,’ she said. ‘I’ve looked up at you for years on the corbel.’
‘Corbels and capitals, tympana and misericords,’ says the Green Man: ‘I’m all over the place yet nobody knows who I am. I am not all stone. I come to church for all the great festivals.’
‘I know. I have seen you. So has my dog, but we never dared speak. I feel that I know you. I know that I know you. One knows a lot about the person one prays next to.’
‘Marmalade,’ says his lordship.
‘Tootle-oo,’ sings the daft cousin.
The dog sighs.
Outside, the rain has stopped and the drops on the bumpy diamonds of the window-panes turn the day to wet gold. Sunshine breaks across the cauliflower fields and lights a lanternyard of fruit trees, ten miles of hop-gardens, three needle spires and a stretch of Roman road on the horizon, where big lorries and tractor-vans roll along like toys.
The beams in the manor-house kitchen are made from oaks that may have dropped acorns on legionaries. Whoever decided to make a kitchen of them didn’t bother to take off all the bark. There are bumps and sawn circles where branches have been trimmed off to be slung on to fires to roast oxen. The Green Man, surveying these timbers, reflects that there is nothing like them on the moon.