The Limits of Enchantment Read online

  The window by her bed stood slightly open to the spring air. There were no bars. ‘Mammy I love you so much.’

  ‘Have I give you the list?’

  ‘The list?’

  ‘That’s why they put me here, isn’t it?

  ‘Don’t forget to prepare an incense for burning the night before if you favour a dawn path, or for burning through the day should you go for the dusk. Though you may have to walk the same path many times, because yours will not always come on the first time of Asking, unless you’re lucky. Patience, patience, Fern.’

  I don’t know when she stopped talking like this, because I must have drifted off to sleep myself. I might even have dreamed half of these things she said. I was stirred by a nurse who shook my arm. ‘Visiting time’s over,’ she said gently.

  Mammy was snoring. I stroked her fingertips. The hospital light aged and yellowed her skin. The lines in her face appeared to run deeper than ever, and the dewlaps sagged at her throat. She used to say each crease in her face was a babe delivered safely: a joke that, not a belief. Even though I rejected so many of her wild beliefs I somehow always felt that she was strong enough in her powers as to cheat death. Now I doubted it altogether. I leaned across her and kissed her weathered brow.

  I gathered up my leather jacket and the crash helmet. ‘I’m ready, Mammy,’ I said before leaving. ‘I’m ready to Ask.’

  14

  A crow woke me, cawing outside the window, so I got up early to do some essential gathering of meadowsweet, which Mammy always called queenie and which works the same as aspirin amongst other things. I pulled on my coat to go out, then took it off and put on Arthur’s leather jacket instead. I was getting to like the way the soft, battered leather shaped itself to my curves. It was warmer than my own coat and anyway I didn’t have to look at what was grinning on the back of it.

  A fine mist hovered above the grass of the meadow, torn from the land like scraps of chiffon. I was raking the hedgerows when I stumbled across some birthwort – Mammy wouldn’t grow it in the garden not just because it is poisonous but also because it points the finger back with its midwifery uses so well known. With meadowsweet you collect the leaves before it flowers, but the birthwort is of course no use until the little yellow flower winks. I was making a mental note of the spot – birthwort being rare in the county – when I heard voices. I scrambled to hide in the hedge, something Mammy and I often did when we didn’t want to be seen, and I was surprised to see it was Chas and two of his friends from Croker’s. They were trawling the field, just as I was, looking for something in the grass.

  Were they rival gatherers, these people? Surely not, I thought. I stepped out of the hedge and on sighting me they made straight for me.

  Chas called out from twenty yards away though I could barely understand him. ‘Fern it is! Letta-me intro the juice to Greta. Here is. And this fine champion the wonder horse rides the nimrod Luke.’

  Either I had hedge cobwebs stuffed in my ears or he was drunk. When he drew up close his eyes were boiling in his head. This friend Luke he pointed at was a sleepy giant of a man with an astonishing mass of tightly-permed hair and a wispy beard dyed blue. Or maybe purple. His trousers were striped like pyjamas and he had a huge brass buckle on the belt to hold them up. I felt like I’d seen him before in a nursery tale book I’d had when I was a child. His eyes too were boiling. He put his hands on his hips and treated me to the most wide-mouthed smile I’d ever seen in my life.

  This Greta was also out to dazzle me with a sunbeam of smiles. She was some kind of Spanish gypsy, with a cotton headscarf and long, lacy skirts. She danced up to me – and I mean danced – and stroked my arm without saying a word. It was all very queer.

  ‘You’re up early,’ I said.

  ‘Haven’t been to bed, old bean!’ Chas said, way too loud. ‘Up up up all night busy bee been!’

  The other two laughed heartily as if this was funny. When they stopped laughing they all beamed at me, full-on, but as if it was my turn to speak or say something funny. I suspected they must be drunk but it was six o’clock in the morning, which is a fine time for it. The expression on their faces – but for the smiles – was like that of sailors struggling against a high wind, but there was no wind. Greta continued to stare at me with an imbecile grin painted on her face. Luke stroked his beard now, looking towards the rising sun, but with an expression suggesting he’d mislaid something important. Then he said, ‘Later.’ Or perhaps it was, ‘Letter.’

  ‘Oh,’ Chas said, rolling slightly on his ship-in-a-storm. ‘Those bar-star-hards? Sense me a postie man up the path a-whistling, good morning says, plop on the mat. Reads. Hmm: can’t use of your pump sayeth he. Or writeth rather. For water, get me?’

  I gazed at him, trying to muddle it out. ‘What? The estate told you not to use my pump?’

  Chas nodded, seeming to find my reaction a matter of mirth. He giggled. ‘Out-bloody-rageous!’

  ‘While it’s still our pump you can ignore ’em, can’t you?’

  ‘Swat Luke says.’ Chas laughed. Then Luke and Greta laughed too. But a barking laugh, like hyenas. I began to suspect it was me they were laughing at.

  I noticed that Greta had with her a cotton bag. ‘What are you collecting there?’ I asked her.

  Greta opened her bag for me to see, but with great and delicate ceremony as if she were unwrapping collected fragments of the Holy Grail. Inside the bag was a sorry mess of fungi. There were field mushrooms, St Georges, ink caps, morels and, to my utter astonishment a vivid red fly. Way, way out of season.

  ‘You can’t eat that!’ I shouted at her. ‘You shouldn’t even pick it!’

  ‘Yes,’ Greta said. She had a husky voice, like someone who has smoked too many cigarettes. ‘But scrape off his white spots and eat the red meat you can have a yummy fine old time.’

  I couldn’t believe they had one of these. At this time of the year. Today of all days. ‘You’ll all be sick. You’ll get the shits.’

  ‘Oh,’ Luke said, nodding vigorously. ‘Yes. By crikey.’

  I turned to Chas. ‘Was that what was wrong with you when I found you in the outhouse?’

  ‘In the shout-house. No. Yes. Maybe.’ Chas laughed again.

  ‘The red one you should put back where you found it,’ I said to Greta sharply. I was cross. ‘And I don’t mean throw it away. I mean exactly where you found it. It’s not a joke.’

  ‘What?’ Luke said.

  The smile vanished from Greta’s face. She nodded solemnly. ‘Know what? I am so tuned in to this lady. Going to do exactly what she says.’ Greta turned with her bag and made long loping strides towards the woods.

  ‘Where going Greta?’ Chas shouted. ‘Hey, nice jacket, Fern. Swear that skull just blinked at me. Ha.’

  ‘What?’ Luke said.

  Suddenly Luke and Chas looked like two naughty schoolboys. ‘Phew!’ Chas said, as if he had just run a race. Now his face looked very flushed. He ground his teeth.

  ‘What?’ went Luke, running his fingers through his massive, wiry crown. ‘What?’

  I wanted to get away from them. I know it was the kind of thing Mammy would say, but they each had some kind of a shadow, a spirit mounted on their back. Whenever I was afraid I retreated into thinking like her. ‘Beware the toadstool,’ I said, and I swept away. Either they were drunk or insane, but I wasn’t staying. I felt disturbed and upset. I’d gone about thirty yards before I heard Luke’s voice calling after me:

  ‘That is so fucking far out!’

  On the same afternoon I was planting late sets. I turned a trench with my spade, composted it from the heap in the corner of the garden and dropped my sets in a line, eighteen inches apart. Then I raked soil over them. I looked up and saw a figure hovering at the gate. It was Greta, the hippie woman I’d met in the field that morning.

  I leaned on my garden fork. ‘Come for water?’

  ‘No,’ Greta said shyly. ‘To see you. Can I come in?’

  ‘Nothing stopping you
, is there?’

  The gate snapped back after Greta passed through it. ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Planting taters.’

  ‘Is it the time? Maybe we should be doing that at the farm.’

  ‘You’re a bit slow. These are lates. You should have put ’em to bed before.’

  ‘So why are you putting them in now, then?’

  ‘Well if you plant ’em at the same time they all come at the same time, don’t they? You can’t eat them all at the same time. Anybody knows that. Who don’t know about planting potatoes?’

  Greta admitted she didn’t know the first thing about planting potatoes. They hadn’t taught her that at university, she said. Greta was a talker. She told me how she’d been to study law at Durham University. Law, my word. Greta also explained that after that she’d worked in an office but she hated it and then she’d met Chas and the others and they’d all come to Croker’s Farm to live off the land. Except that none of them knew anything about the land. Nothing in all those law books about it, apparently.

  ‘Then you’d better find out about her,’ I said, ‘if you expect to live off her.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here, really.’

  ‘Is it?’ I turned away, tidying up my gardening tools and making myself busy, because I didn’t like where this was leading.

  ‘I think you’re a wisewoman,’ Greta said.

  ‘A whatnow?’

  ‘You’re younger than I am, and yet there’s something about you. I think we could learn a lot from you.’

  ‘And listen to you! From the University of Durham! Well I’ll not be here much longer because I’m being thrown out of this cottage. So that’s not very wise, is it?’

  ‘So why are you planting potatoes? If you won’t be here much longer?’

  Sharp enough, I thought, this one. ‘Because it’s what I’ve always done. It’s what Mammy showed me. So I keep doing it.’

  ‘Next Saturday,’ Greta said, ‘is Chas’s birthday. We’re having a party at the farm. Will you come?’

  I nearly dropped my rake as my hand flew up to the three iron grips in my hair. ‘I’ve no party dress,’ I said. It wasn’t a joke but Greta laughed. When Greta realised her error she covered her mouth. She had a slight overbite and I could see it made her self-conscious.

  ‘It’s a come-as-you-are party. We don’t dress up. We’ll have a big dinner. Then a bit of music. We’ve got some good musicians. I’ll come and fetch you at six o’clock, if you like.’

  I had no intention of being the butt of their party jokes, or going along there as the village idiot just so they could make remarks about my clothes or about the way I parted my hair. ‘No, I’m not one for parties. I’ve too much to do.’ I clattered my tools into the lean-to and retreated inside the cottage, slamming the door behind me.

  I was angered and upset by this invitation. Perhaps it was all too much, what with Mammy in hospital and the estate trying to evict us from the cottage. But I sat down in Mammy’s old chair by the fireside with my arms folded. Then after a good while I found myself crying, and calling for Mammy as I did so, but knowing that she couldn’t help me.

  Rarely was I invited to parties as a child. Living with Mammy had put me on the edge, and other children shrank from me. Not dramatically, not as a torment, but in a tiny hesitation, in the briefest of pauses before they quietly rejected any overtures of friendship. It was never done with name-calling, nor with a scene, but their withdrawal, their quiet and firm rejection slowly and surely made a stone out of me.

  I attended school, but my main education there became mastering the art of invisibility. I saw that the teachers only ever responded to the clever, the dull or the depraved, so I resolved to be none of these and in that way went unnoticed. Occasionally I suffered agonies if teased by other girls over the shabby quality of my school clothes. So I learned quickly how to dye and to shorten or otherwise disguise the poverty of these garments. It almost worked. I saw that any deviance from standard, however small, marked me out for attention. So whenever a teacher asked me a question I always had the answer, though I never volunteered it.

  Neither did I offer surplus information about my life at home, and when called upon I hid behind the blandest of accounts, the thinnest of reports. I stopped seeking out friends and they never sought out me. In life’s lesson of going unnoticed I was top of the form. In the eternal playground wars I took no sides between bullies and their victims, and discovered a bearing and body posture which would avoid me ever becoming one of the latter. Perhaps they feared me, a little.

  Thus the party invitation was a rare bird winging in. Mammy had been my only childhood friend, and celebration had been confined to the experience of Mammy’s way of doing things, or contact with the few. When I slammed the door on Greta it was fear I was trying to shut out. Had I genuinely not wanted to accept Greta’s surprising invitation, I might simply have said so. But the idea of being asked to go along and have some fun in the company of people my own age excited and terrified me; because after all these years without I was in sore need of company; and because after all these years without I didn’t know if I was worthy of it.

  After a while I got up and went to the window. Greta had gone and I felt ashamed. Whatever are you doing? Mammy would have said. Come away from that window and stop making a fool of yourself while yourself is watching. Because if you don’t know your own mind, your own mind will want to find a home somewhere else.

  ‘I’ve no party dress,’ I said again, but this time to myself. And I cried again.

  15

  ‘Are you going to Ask?’ Judith persisted. ‘Are you or not?’

  Still bothered by Greta’s invitation, I had called in at Judith’s tiny terraced house one evening after visiting the hospital. I had found Judith marking school exercise books while watching television. Her vacuum cleaner stood upright in the corner as if permanently at the ready, but it was the television screen that pulled me in again. It hypnotised me; it was like sitting watching a stream of water, and when called upon to say what you’d just seen you almost couldn’t answer. The only distraction was in Judith’s repeated sighs of exasperation as she corrected the blotched schoolwork of the terminally thick.

  There were reasons, though, why I resisted answering Judith. Firstly I wasn’t taken in by her trick of asking me while she was doing two other things at the same time. I knew my answer was important to her. Secondly I didn’t want to confess that I had so little in common with her in the way of belief. It would have seemed a betrayal not only of her but of many other people, too, and worst of all to have made it concrete would have seemed a betrayal of Mammy.

  Thirdly, I was afraid.

  Some contradiction, yes. If I didn’t believe, then what was I afraid of? But it was not so simple as that. To do the Asking demands preparation, mental preparation. It also requires the use of certain decoctions. Whatever I believed or didn’t believe, I was afraid that going into this with negative thoughts or doubt in my heart might cause me harm. Whatever is done should be done with a pure heart. By which I mean a committed heart, a wholly committed heart. An act of war or even of malice can be done with a pure heart. But it must have no trace of doubt.

  And doubt I had, and purity of heart, not. ‘Judith, I can’t be thinking of these things when I’m about to get slung out of my home!’

  She knew it was true. To do something so radical required a time of no distraction. ‘You’re right,’ she conceded. And that was when Judith started up again with her plan for me to seduce Arthur McCann.

  Had I known more about men, and about their ways, I would never have agreed to the idea. But I allowed her to talk me into it. She was confident it would buy me a few more weeks. ‘It’s simple. He’s got influence up there. Let’s find out what he knows. He just needs a bit of pressure on him. Plus it’s all you’ve got going,’ she said pointedly. ‘That Arthur McCann is your only hope.’

  Her idea wasn’t subtle. I should allow Arthur to get me into bed in
the hope that he might feel beholden, or ‘pressured’ as she put it, and that might buy me some time with his employers. Outrageous and whoring as it at first sounds, according to Judith I wouldn’t have to give up anything. That was the trick of it.

  ‘Saltpetre,’ Judith said. ‘And to make certain, a decoction of black willow buds is mighty powerful. And there’s sweet waterlily.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘And hops, of course. We’ll get him to drink beer.’

  ‘Beer?’

  ‘Brewer’s droop on top of the other stuff. It’s just a matter of disguising all of it. You can bake him an egg and bacon pie. He’s a bloke, isn’t he? Beer and bacon pie: he’ll think his ship has come home.’

  ‘You’re completely mad, Judith.’

  ‘Please yourself, don’t do it. But you’ve only got two weeks left.’ And she went back to marking her schoolbooks with her red pencil, suddenly doling out – with effortless largesse – sensuous, long-stemmed ticks to the slow and the obtuse alike.

  I gazed glumly at the flickering television screen. Then I muttered something about my invitation to a party at Croker’s Farm. This news made Judith break the lead in her red pencil. She gazed at me as if I’d shown her a hole in the wall of a prison cell we’d shared for twenty years.

  ‘Take me with you or you’re dead meat.’

  ‘I said no.’

  Judith flung herself face down on the rug, thumping the floor, kicking her feet and shrieking. ‘She said no! She said no! Keywell’s first promise of a wild party in over a millennium and she said no!’

  Anyway I had other, more serious plans. Though it wouldn’t serve to deal with my immediate housing problem I had taken steps to secure a longer-term income by enrolling for a diploma in midwifery.

  Certification of midwives had been around since the turn of the century but many poor and working people had ignored the regulations. If an unlicensed midwife was no good, word of mouth gave her warts or stinking breath or otherwise killed her off. Mammy’s services, by contrast, were highly prized by the women who reported to each other on her abilities. But now the state provided free, trained midwives, and in that way women like Mammy lost most of their livelihood. I knew if I was going to recover the work for myself I would have to get what Mammy called the damned ticket. ‘That damned ticket has been the ruin of me,’ she would rail. ‘They’ll not give me a ticket.’