The Limits of Enchantment Read online

I had tipped off Mammy, when I touched my left ear, that I heard it was a girl. That had confirmed it for Mammy enough to take a chance and tell Gwen, and I was pleased because after dozens and dozens of these I was getting nearly as good as Mammy, who’d taught me not to go by how they were carrying but by the heartbeat, because a girl will beat slower than a boy and after a while you can tell them apart long before you get to look what’s between their legs. Though we hadn’t known what you can never know, that in this case the slow heartbeat was caused by another thing altogether. But they – that is, Gwen and Clarrie and all the rest of them – never knew how we did it because it was just one of the many things we few kept to ourselves.

  And we mostly did keep to ourselves. Which was why I was so surprised the next day.

  Blowing up for a gale it was, rough February weather, though fine enough for washing, and the corner of a pegged-out sheet flapped at me, like having a bite at my leg, so I snapped back at it and put it in its place. You don’t let them talk at you, those flapping sheets. My tiny Hitachi transistor radio softly broadcast the pirate station Radio Caroline from the doorstep. Though the batteries were a price just to keep it going, I liked it on while I worked and sang along where I could. Not that Mammy liked the pop tunes. Not at all. Rubbish she called it. Rubbish and rot.

  But I was singing away when there was a rustle behind a cotton sheet, and a dark shape, and I stopped singing and took a step back. I suddenly wished that Mammy were there. Then the sheet was snatched away to reveal a face, deadpan yet humorous under a head of soft copper-coloured curls. It was Arthur McCann, so tall he slouched in his black leather motorcycle jacket. His drainpipe jeans were so blue I wondered how he got them so.

  I turned my back on him and carried on pegging out. ‘You frit me. I was going to grab that garden fork.’

  ‘Take a joke, Fern. No harm meant.’ I remembered Arthur from school. His eyes were as blue as his jeans, and he blinked at me with delicate eyelashes. I checked the three iron grips holding my hair back, and from there my hand went to the hole in the elbow of my cardigan. ‘You’ll catch it if Mammy finds you here. She’ll be back from the village any time now.’

  Arthur stepped from behind the sheet, and it flapped in the stiff breeze. ‘Can’t keep hiding behind Mammy Cullen, Fern.’ He inched closer. I could smell beer on the wind. ‘Got to give some bloke a chance.’

  Arthur was a tough from the neighbouring village of Hallaton. That’s a mad place. There are things I could tell you about that village. I had a wooden clothes-peg clenched between my teeth. ‘Chance? What chance?’

  I reached up for the clothes-line knowing my waist, hips and buttocks were all displayed for him. Though my back was turned I could feel his ghost arms wanting to settle on my hips. Hussy, Mammy would call me, but I bent over my washing basket, flapped another sheet, stretched again as Arthur breathed over my shoulder. I sensed the moment when he was going to step nearer, so I blocked it by turning. ‘I don’t want a Hallaton barmy. Anyway you’re almost the same age as me, Arthur. I want an older man.’

  ‘What do you want an older man for? I’m in me prime, I am.’

  ‘You’re twenty-one. That’s not your prime. That’s a boy. I want a man who can teach me things.’ I knew what he would say back to that, and Mammy would call that teasing, no mistake.

  ‘I could teach you a thing or two.’ Arthur scratched his chin and blinked his white lashes.

  I spun my back on him again, pegging out. Do I want him to touch me? I remember thinking. Do I?

  ‘Youch!’ went Arthur.

  I turned quickly to see Arthur grasping the ham of his leg, up near the buttock. Behind him stood Mammy Cullen with her ash-stick raised, threatening him with another blow. ‘Who said you could come in my garden?’ Mammy roared, squinting at the boy with her slate-grey eyes. ‘Who said as you could?’

  ‘We was just talking!’

  ‘Courting! You was courting!’ I could see Mammy’s huge bosoms heaving inside her coat. Her fat jowls manufactured a comical twitch but her tobacco-leaf brown eyes were a-boil. ‘And you don’t court a gal by sneaking up when her back is turned! We can do without that sort of courting. And you don’t court without my say so!’

  ‘We was just talking, Mammy! No need to take a stick to me!’

  ‘I’ll fetch you another blow my lad. And you wasn’t talking, you Hallaton barmy! You was reaching out your hand and I saw you from the gate there.’

  He rubbed the ham of his leg, but he was laughing. It hadn’t stung him at all, and we all understood it. Though I knew from when I was a girl that Mammy didn’t usually let fly with her stick with half-measures. This was a game, lucky for Arthur, but she could turn. ‘Give a young bloke a break, Mammy.’

  ‘What!’ Mammy roared. ‘You come in my house and garden and I’ll break my stick over you!’

  ‘Mammy!’ I shouted, laughing too. She was too handy with that ash-stick, and I didn’t want this to go any further.

  Arthur was nimble and strong, and he grabbed the stick off her and vaulted the garden gate. Mammy was old but she could shift, and she was after him. ‘Bye Fern!’ he shouted, taunting, leaving the stick by the gate. He leaped on his motorbike and kicked it into life. Mammy picked up a clod of earth and let fly at him, but he was long gone, the drone of his bike already diminishing. ‘Get out of my garden you Hallaton ginger-arse, and don’t come back!’

  After she’d retrieved her stick, Mammy sat down on her garden bench, getting her breath back. I said nothing and finished the job of pegging out the washing. When I was done I sat beside Mammy on the garden bench. We stared ahead in silence. After a while Mammy’s shoulders began to tremble. I stayed tight-lipped. Then Mammy snorted. ‘Ginger-arse,’ she guffawed, and I shrieked. ‘Hallaton barmy!’ I said, and Mammy’s broad shoulders quaked. ‘Ginger Hallaton barmy hare-chaser!’ she said, and then she hooted and slapped down her own knee as if it was rising of its own volition, and I howled with her and I was glad we lived far enough from the village so that no one would hear us.

  You couldn’t help it. Not really. Not when you thought about it.

  Old Mammy Cullen was not my natural mother, but had taken me on after my own mother had died. So Mammy had told me, I had arrived as a mistake to a woman whose other children were already mature; and they in turn had no interest in taking on a child whose father was, in any event, not the same as their own. I never met my half-brother and two half-sisters. Mammy Cullen had lost a child of her own long, long before and that left a hole in her life that yawned and howled until Mammy, already a long way into her fifties, saw a need to fill it again. That was in 1946. With the war just over Mammy had slipped the event past all registration. As I understand it, there was no authority at hand that considered it of enough significance to record the deed. It was a time when finding a warm hearth for a child barely weaned was more pressing than writing names in some leather-bound ledger.

  ‘I brung you in from the hospital,’ she told me, and I never questioned it.

  Mammy had a hole to fill and Mammy took me in. That’s all it was. She loved me and treated me no better and no worse than if I had been her own. Which was to fight to make a warm house, with enough food on the table and clean clothes; and just one or two remembered thrashings with the ash-stick; and love that came in the form of as much time as could ever be lavished on a child.

  Mammy listened, Mammy answered, Mammy interpreted the universe for me. She had a habit of briefly rolling her eyes before offering her report on the world, always carefully explaining where that version might touch her neighbours’ and where it might not. And since the day of my first period she had been plain with me what it was all for, and had fought to save me from the boys who appeared at the garden gate. Arthur McCann wasn’t the first to be chased away by Mammy Cullen. Though again I thought Mammy had been too interfering, and said so.

  ‘I can look after myself, Mammy.’

  ‘I know that. But one of them will come along and you’ll fa
ll on your back for him. I can’t hold them off for ever. It’s against nature. You’ll just fall over.’

  ‘No I shan’t.’

  ‘You shall. Don’t matter how tough you think you are. He’ll stand there and he’ll find a cotton loose in your apron and he’ll pull it and pull it and you’ll let him and the next thing you know you’ll be shivering and on your back in the grass, and you’ll love it and think yourself clever for what’s done. That’s how it works. Just don’t get yourself knocked up. And I’ve shown you how.’

  She had shown me, too. But then Mammy had the skill of reckoning in a way that left me for dead. Take away the upper of the eleven-to-eighteen rule from the number of days in the shortest o’ your last six bleeds and take away the lower from the number of days of the longest of your prior six bleeds. If your last bleeds were twenty-six to thirty-one days in length, keep your man away with a stick between the eighth day (which is twenty-six take away eighteen, ain’t it?) until day twenty (which be thirty-one take away eleven, ain’t it?) on month seven. There. And you should be safe enough. Though you might also use your bit of sponge and vinegar.

  ‘Arthur’s got no bad in him.’

  ‘I know that, too. But what will you do when I’m gone?’

  ‘You’ve got plenty of juice left.’

  ‘You say that, but I was in the village paying the damned electricity bill this morning and I had a jolt all up my spine and through my chest. Turned me over, it did.’

  ‘Electricity?’

  ‘No you soft lump. Old age. I’m seventy-seven years old and I know when I’m being called.’

  I stood up, and turned away. I didn’t want her to see the tears squeezing. But you could hide nothing from Mammy. Nothing. Never ever ever.

  ‘You’ll be all right, my little chaffinch,’ she said.

  For a while there wasn’t a breath of wind in the air. Then a breeze got exercised from nowhere, whipping the sheets high on the washing line, snapping them at us viciously. We both listened to it for a moment.

  ‘You shall have to be,’ Mammy said.

  2

  I heard the rain before I felt it as together Mammy and I turned off the road and took a path across the fields. It was a mid-February morning and it was cold to be up at the crack of dawn like that. Mammy pulled her old-fashioned shawl around her head and I had a transparent plastic fold-away headscarf to wear until it gave over. The fine spray of rain had the leaves winking on the evergreens. We walked in silence, and my shoes were polished by the wet grass. We’d been out gathering. Riding the rolls, Mammy called it, because the land undulated like a great green ocean, and we could get swallowed up and forgotten in the troughs of its waves.

  Although my eyes were trained on the country path before me, my mind was elsewhere. Even Mammy walking three steps behind me must have heard my brain clacking like an abacus.

  ‘Out with it,’ said Mammy.

  ‘Oh,’ I sighed. ‘Only what I’ve told you before. Only that I don’t believe half of it.’

  ‘That’s between you and your head. Anyway, you’re too much in the head. It makes no difference what you think.’

  That was Mammy’s way. It made no difference what anyone thought. She had an idea that they did what they must, and behaved as they must, and that everything in the world of words had no true bearing on the world as it actually was. She believed that people often spoke against their true nature, said one thing and did another, claimed to be this when really they were that, and tricked themselves to the point where they didn’t know whether they were the hare or the hound.

  She was against talking, Mammy was. ‘What little you know, keep to yourself.’

  We’d done gathering so we returned through the woods and round the outcrop of rock, where the woad grew thick and tall, beyond Keywell. The way up was very steep, and Mammy had to lean on my arm, puffing and blowing and cursing her arthritis. But as we made the bend in our quiet lane Mammy tapped my leg with her ash-stick and whispered, ‘Hey up! Strangers!’

  There were not usually many people about at that time of the morning, other than those on their way to work somewhere. So it was a surprise to see a battered old transit van parked not a hundred yards from our cottage, its bonnet yawning open. An odd couple squatted on the grass verge, smoking cigarettes and looking on vacantly while another man hid his face in the guts of the engine, grunting and fiddling with wires.

  No fashion-plate myself, it did seem to me they were oddly dressed. A rum crew. The woman wore a long skirt mud-stained at the hem, and a cheesecloth blouse under an army coat with brass buttons. She played with her long, unkempt hair and smiled at her predicament. Her partner, rolling himself a cigarette, wore a battered leather coat and a white shirt with no collar, which you never saw any more. His skin was unusually tanned for that time of the year, and I could see his nose had been broken and reset. His hair was long, well over his collar, like a woman’s, but he wore a felt hat with a broad brim. Of course no one wore hats any more, either. Around his neck was a bell on a chain, just as you might have expected to see on a favoured cow.

  I let go a little gasp. I didn’t know whether they were a travelling circus or early-morning visitors from the fairy-folk.

  ‘Beatniks,’ Mammy whispered.

  Perhaps the man had extraordinary hearing, because he looked up from constructing his cigarette. ‘Greetings,’ he said, twinkling his eyes first at Mammy, then at me.

  ‘Grrn,’ said Mammy. She had this noise she made, halfway between a greeting and a growl, leaving you at liberty to take it either way.

  I said nothing. I haven’t been far but I can’t be doing with mockery and I didn’t like the look of him. ‘Greetings’ indeed! Unshaved, dishevelled, the leather of his coat scuffed and distressed in patches. Just as I was thinking you can keep your greetings, the man jumped up theatrically to let us pass by on the grass verge. He smiled at me and ran his tongue lasciviously along the gummed edge of his cigarette paper.

  The man with his head in the car engine looked up at us. ‘Ain’t got a spare distributor cap, have you?’ he shouted.

  I didn’t really know what a distributor cap was. I didn’t know what a beatnik was, either. A gypsy with an electric guitar was how I saw it at the time. I put my nose in the air and we passed by.

  Listening behind me I heard one of them say, ‘I think that was a no.’

  The gate to our cottage whined on its hinge. I always said why don’t we put a drop of oil on that gate but Mammy said it let her know when someone was coming, so that’s how it stayed. But that morning Mammy mentioned that she’d seen a jenny wren busy in the hedge. ‘Mark it?’ she said. ‘We shall have visitors.’

  And we did. A gentle rap on the open door heralded the first of two male visitors before the week was out, both uninvited. I was busy cleaning the hearth, and I looked up to see a dark-haired gentleman in hiking boots. He had knee-length socks secured outside his trousers, but I didn’t giggle. He held his sporting trilby aloft in an attitude of exaggerated politeness, and a silver-topped cane in his other hand. An emerald green feather was tucked into the hatband of the trilby. ‘Good morning!’ he cried cheerily. ‘Forgive me for disturbing you on such a day as this.’

  The man smiled excessively: something that always unnerves me. And neither was I accustomed to the extreme formality. His accent was BBC radio, and his politeness signalled not warmth but social superiority masked by extreme cordiality. I got to my feet and stood wiping my dusty hands on my apron.

  ‘Might I come in?’ he asked.

  ‘Not until you’ve told me what you’re after.’ For all his airs, it’s still bad manners to leave someone guessing about your business. I stooped to pick up the ash-pan from the grate and stepped towards him, to make him jump. He did too: leapt back as I swept past him before emptying the ash on to the garden soil. Some of the ash swirled in a naughty breeze and a fleck went in his eye.

  After rubbing his eye he placed his hat and stick across his heart and held
up the palm of his free hand in a placating gesture. ‘I do apologise. I was looking for a Mrs Megan Cullen. I thought perhaps you might be her daughter. Though I never expected to find one so charming.’

  I had to stop a smile at that. I went back indoors and fitted the ash-pan back in the grate with a rattle. Does this soft-soap really work on people in the city? ‘But I haven’t been charming,’ I said.

  He smiled again. ‘I see I’m no match for you.’

  ‘Are you going to say what you want?’

  He blinked at me. Perhaps the speck of ash in his eye was still troubling him. ‘My name is Bennett. I’ve driven quite a way. From the university, in fact. Cambridge. That’s my car over there. I’ve come in the hope of interviewing Mrs Cullen.’

  ‘Interviewing? You want to interview Mammy?’

  ‘Formal term. More of a chat really. Make a few notes, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Mammy’s out at market.’

  Bennett scratched his head. ‘Really? Do you know when she might be back? Of course I could simply sit in my car until she returns.’

  I softened a little, thinking I should invite him to wait inside. He seemed harmless enough. But before I’d decided a shadow moved behind him.

  ‘Mammy’s already back,’ she announced. ‘And who be you?’ Mammy brushed past the man, affecting disinterest, but keeping her good ear cocked as he repeated what he’d told me.

  ‘Get that kettle boiling,’ she said to me, ‘and don’t you know it’s bad manners to keep a visitor standing on the threshold?’

  ‘You’ve always said—’

  ‘Never mind that.’ She turned to our visitor. ‘Well are you coming in or not? Find a seat, no not that one, that’s my place. Over there, that’s it.’ She hung up her coat behind the door and settled into her chair beside the fire. ‘I like to keep my eye on the door.’

  ‘Indeed, Mrs Cullen,’ the man said, at once amused and chastened. ‘Indeed you would.’

  ‘Who told you to come and speak with me?’

  Bennett fumbled in his pocket for a business card. ‘This gentleman,’ he said, handing it over.