The Limits of Enchantment Read online

  I had the transistor playing softly while Mammy was out. ‘Radio Caroline,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is Mammy going to help me?’ Jane blurted at last.

  ‘She will. She’ll ask you some things first.’

  Jane’s clear blue eyes widened. ‘What things?’

  ‘She’ll ask you if you consulted the mistress about whether this is the right thing to do; and you must say that you did and that the moon was fighting east, which has nothing to do with where it was in the sky, but if Mammy should ask you what that means you say it was a left-hand cup.’

  She held the teacup an inch from her lips. ‘Left hand?’

  ‘Yes, and that will satisfy her that you looked properly, which I know you didn’t but that’s not my business, that’s between you and your soul. And then Mammy will ask who is the father and you should tell her.’

  ‘I can’t tell her that!’

  ‘You’d better, or she won’t help you.’

  ‘But isn’t that between me and my soul, for goodness sake?’

  ‘You can try to keep it back but Mammy will tap her nose and say ‘‘knowledge’’. And if you lie she can tell and she’ll send you packing, and then you’ll be off to that gnome in Leamington Spa with his spikes, so please yourself. Don’t cry, Jane. Here, wipe away your tears because Mammy has no sympathy for tears. You’ve got to be strong or she won’t even consider helping you.’

  Jane sniffled, and brushed back a tear with a knuckle. ‘What will she do?’

  ‘She’ll give you a tea and it will taste like peppermint, and you drink it as she tells you and that’s it. And I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no, it’s not a potion, it’s not magic. It’s a herbal is all, one that brings it on, and you’ll get the sweats and you’ll bleed and that’s it.’

  ‘Oh God! Oh God!’

  ‘Look Jane, if your mind isn’t made up then take yourself off. Mammy definitely won’t help you if she thinks your mind isn’t made up. Go back to the man you did it with and see if there’s another road out of this.’

  ‘No, I am made up. I am. I’ve brought this with me, look.’ Jane produced an envelope from the pocket of her miniskirt.

  ‘Don’t mention that, and don’t try to give it to Mammy. Just leave it quietly on the mantelpiece and don’t mention payment.’

  The hinge of the garden gate squealed and we both knew Mammy had returned. I gave Jane a nod of encouragement and I sat upright to model for her a better posture with which to greet Mammy.

  Mammy bustled in, hung her walking stick on a coat-peg and closed the door behind her. ‘Good morning, Jane.’

  ‘Good morning, Mammy.’

  I got up to help Mammy take off her coat.

  ‘Ain’t you cold with your skirt up the crack o’ your bum like that? And did you ask the mistress about our matter?’

  ‘I did Mammy, and she was fighting east, by which I mean she was in her left-hand cup.’

  Mammy turned and raised an eyebrow at me. I tried hard to fight the blush that came flooding up from my neck to my ears.

  ‘What cobblers,’ Mammy said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

  After Jane Louth had scurried away with her herb tea Mammy sat down to her snuff. She took it every day, and she mixed the commercial stuff with the grey-green leaves of sneezewort from the woods. She had a silver snuffbox someone had given to her out of a deep gratitude. Engraved with flower heads the snuffbox curved to her hand, so much time had it spent there. Mammy could flip the lid open with her thumb, dip, and bring the snuff to her nostril at the same moment as clasping the lid shut. And as the snuff hit the back of her nasal cavity, I noticed – though I detested the habit and would never partake – how it always made Mammy’s eyes gleam. Mammy avowed that it put a fresh complexion on the moment.

  ‘A silly wench,’ Mammy said, her eyes watering with pleasure as she tossed back her head to relieve the trickle in her sinuses. ‘She wasn’t listening to what I said. She were too keen to get away from here.’

  ‘You scare ’em, Mammy. They’re frit.’

  ‘So they should be frit. If they gave a little more thought to what lay under things then they would be frit. But she told me she’d only missed the one flow and I thought she was lying.’

  ‘Why would she lie?’

  ‘The poor things always lie, my pigeon.’ The snuff stimulated and softened Mammy at the same time, and when she softened she always called me her pigeon or her leveret or her flower. ‘They hang on thinking it can’t be right, then another flow is missed and then another and they tell themselves it’s the first. They lie to themselves. And anyway in all things there is generally more lies told than truth.’

  ‘That can’t be so.’

  ‘You’re very young.’

  ‘You gave her the birdlime and the pennyroyal, though.’

  Mammy didn’t answer, which was answer enough. She seemed to be thinking of other things. In any case I knew exactly what Mammy had pressed into Jane Louth’s hand, and in what proportions, and could prepare it myself, though Mammy wouldn’t allow me ever to administer it. The berry of the mistletoe, which we called birdlime, is too dangerous. One of the best abortifacients, it stimulates both bleeding and uterine contraction. The pennyroyal does more than cloud the tea with the taste of mint; it also stimulates heavy uterine contractions. The herbs excite the active ingredients of each other, but in the case of the brilliant pearl of the mistletoe berry the quantities need to be exact. A small miscalculation in the dose might cause giddiness, hallucinations, paralysis and eventually death. In the prescription of abortifacients, Mammy called it the devil’s game, and kept me from it at arm’s length.

  Mammy had warned Jane Louth of the ravages of the prescription: she would sweat; she would vomit; she would feel aches and giddiness. Mammy instructed her to disguise these symptoms. She told the girl to let everyone know she had collected morel or St George’s mushrooms from the field the next morning, and to blame her sickness on a harmful fungus.

  ‘When would I go collecting mushrooms?’ Jane had said. ‘I’m not some kind of a bloody nun singing in the meadow. I mean it’s a bit out of character!’

  ‘That’s why you’d make a mistake then, isn’t it? Get yourself up and go one morning as if you’ve come over all giddy like one of them beatniks up the road. And tell everyone you’re full o’ the joys o’ spring.’

  When Mammy’s back was turned, Jane had laid her payment on the shelf without a word, took her jar of tea and left.

  When I asked Mammy to confirm the contents of the herbal, it was only to see Mammy’s intentions. If Mammy were certain of the course of action, she would offer the most effective abortifacients, as in the case of Jane Louth. If Mammy was uncertain, or if the girl herself seemed unresolved, she would prescribe a milder herb such as marjoram, beet or valerian, stimulators of bleeding but less reliable. Mammy explained to me that sometimes she preferred the river to choose her own course. This was Mammy’s way. She said you couldn’t push the river. It might do. It might not.

  But there was another thing I knew about. A factor in this decision of which kind of abortifacient might – just occasionally – lie in what Mammy knew.

  ‘She told you the father then? I thought she might not.’

  ‘They have to. They look in my eyes and they can’t help themselves. That’s why it’s good they’re a bit afraid.’

  ‘Were you surprised?’

  ‘No, that one’s name has been spoken here before,’ Mammy said, looking cross. She picked up her poker and cracked at a log in the fire. ‘Likes to get the girls on their backs, does that one.’ Then she chuckled, laying down her poker. ‘And they likes to let him!’

  5

  A robin redbreast trilled from a branch, suddenly and with thrilling penetration. Sometimes I had a notion that it was the same robin following me over the rolling hills, bursting with excitement every time I disturbed the soil and helped him unearth a meal. For a moment I was caugh
t up in his song, until Mammy’s voice dragged me back.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ Mammy said. ‘It’s been playing on my mind, and I’ve got to speak or I’ll burst.’

  It was three days later and we were out getting some early coltsfoot, which Mammy sometimes called horse-hoof and is good for asthma and bronchial complaints and coughs; and as a compress it’s always good for ulcers and varicose veins. We would regularly get up early in the morning to ride the rolls of the green fields on Shanks’s Pony, collecting. That morning a fine mist came roiling out of the stream near where we gathered. Mammy said the herb was best taken before the flowers opened. Mammy was also fond of powdering the leaves – though they would come later – to make a snuff good for blocked sinuses. Sometimes she even smoked it. Coltsfoot grew easily in our garden, but she could never get enough of it to dry and parcel out for the coughs and colds of winter or summer. ‘It’s been playing on my mind about how much you ought to know. I mean, what if I were to drop down dead in my shoes?’

  I wasn’t paying attention. The scent of the morning carried my spirits away, as did the sound of the fast-running stream, as did the robin’s song. I felt the chilly mist condensing on my cheeks and my nose; that and the sound my long coat made on the grasses, and the skid of my leather boots on the wet underfoot. I adored it all. Black slugs were out, ascending the green stalks, and snails, seduced upward by the damp.

  ‘You’re gone, gal!’ Mammy cried. ‘Gone! You’re like a fairy on a dandelion seed! You’re lost to us!’

  ‘What’s that, Mammy?’

  ‘All the things I know that you don’t!’

  Even if I was too easily seduced by a spring morning I knew exactly what she meant. ‘Well, perhaps you’d better tell me the names and I’ll write them down.’

  ‘You’ll write nothing down,’ Mammy said sharply, plucking the coltsfoot heads. They fell into her cupped hand with a slight popping. ‘Then no one can find the paper on which it’s written.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that.’

  ‘You’d better not. You must commit it to memory. Because it’s important to know what’s what.’

  There was another reason why I wasn’t paying attention. It was that Mammy was always threatening to tell me what she knew, but then always drew back. I’d heard it so many times I’d stopped listening to her promises. She said the knowledge was too dangerous for me to carry.

  Mammy would always tell me – as she did again over the collecting of coltsfoot that morning – what the information was about. She just wouldn’t ever part with the details proper. It was what she referred to as the names of the fathers. This was a long list she kept in her head, comprising information divulged to her by every woman in the town and neighbourhood, young and not so young, who had come to her for help. It included the names of fathers of illegitimate children whose mothers had come too late, or without firm intention; the names of fathers who weren’t, because of Mammy’s intervention, to be; the names of fathers who did not know their sons and daughters; and the names of fathers who could not father. It was, Mammy was fond of telling me, a great deal of knowledge for one woman to carry. Perhaps too much. But it was the kind of knowledge that could mean power, so Mammy impressed upon me the need for secrecy and reserve. ‘You never know when it will come in,’ she said. ‘You never know.’

  ‘Yes Mammy,’ I said, ‘and you’ll tell it me all one day.’

  I gathered a lot of coltsfoot that morning, but not a lot of knowledge. It was amazing how much Mammy could talk about it without actually revealing anything. Some of the names were of people long dead and unknown to me, she said. Others I might guess from a weak chin or a high lip, but some would come as a complete surprise. As I listened to all this non-information it did seem to me that fornication was a very popular activity in this dark corner of the English Midlands. More popular than the theatre, or study, or football, or church.

  ‘Are they at it all the time, Mammy?’

  ‘Well, there’s some as have a rest in between.’

  I supposed if they weren’t all at it there would be no past and no future either. But I remember saying, ‘But is everyone at it, Mammy? Everyone?’

  ‘All except thee and me,’ Mammy said. ‘Thee and me.’ And this she seemed to find extraordinarily funny.

  Gathering from the hedges – and from the ditches, streams, woodlands and rocky outcrops – was one of my favourite activities. Mammy had introduced me to the hedgerows from the moment she’d taken me in, carrying me at first in a sling made from a crochet blanket and later letting me toddle behind. Riding the rolls. My earliest memory was of the sweet odour of the elderberry. It had been an apprenticeship to the hedgerow of twenty years. Though I knew otherwise, Mammy often pretended there were very few things left for me to learn.

  Dawn and dusk, Mammy said, were the proper times to gather, times when the door was open just a crack. What door? I often thought, but never dared ask. Perhaps because in my heart I knew what door, and it being ajar made me afraid. I sensed, too, that there was another important reason to go about gathering at dawn and dusk and that was because there were fewer people around to notice what we were doing. Not that there was anything menacing or even illegal about the sight of two women gathering plants from the hedgerows, but it did blow in all that whispering, and I would sense the local comment: the Cullen woman and her girl is out there again I see.

  Let them, I always thought. What did it matter? But Mammy was more circumspect. I was young, and didn’t know what Mammy knew. About how fickle were the people you helped. Keep silent as the sacred oak, Mammy said, and don’t you write things down.

  But I was never ashamed to be seduced by mysteries of gathering. Where did it all go, all the plants and roots and berries? Dried and cured, bottled and pressed, shredded and steeped. Thrown away, much of it. All sorts of stuff never called for, lost its efficacy, deemed collected on the wrong quarter of the moon, or with an inch of dusk too settled. I parroted all that, followed it all faithfully, yet doubted often.

  But the dawn in the damp fields with the mist piping from the earth! When just passing through the wet grass was like intruding on some other person’s dream! And then at dusk when it seemed what we were gathering was not berries or leaves, but the cottony stuff of twilight itself. You could wind it on a spool, so thickly did it come in. White stuff in the morning, black stuff at night.

  That morning as we made our way back to the cottage with our coltsfoot gold, Mammy stopped and leaned on her stick. ‘My arse is itching. What do you think that means?’

  She was always saying that. ‘No idea.’

  Now as she leaned on her stick she only appeared to be looking across the field. ‘Of course, there’s more.’

  There was always more. And why did I know this one would scare me? More even than when Mammy showed me to the mistress when I was thirteen. Maybe it was the way she leaned on her stick and would not look me in the eye but at the middle distance when she said there was more. ‘What have you got in mind for me, Mammy?’

  ‘It’s not what I’ve got in mind for you. It’s fate. It’s what fate has in mind for you.’

  ‘Sometimes they seem like the same thing.’

  ‘Do you know you’re getting insolent, girl?’

  ‘Just tell me what it is, Mammy.’

  ‘You’ve got to do the Asking one day. What if I were to die before you’d done that? And no me here to help you?’

  ‘What’s this talk of dying all of a sudden, Mammy? You’re as fit as a flea.’

  ‘I feel like we were of a time, we few, and it’s a time done.’

  ‘You’re being morbid, Mammy.’

  ‘Maybe. But who’s that at our door?’

  I looked up and saw a woman waiting outside the cottage. She wore a cloche-style black straw hat pulled low over her head, as if she didn’t want to be recognised, but I didn’t know who it was. ‘No idea, Mammy. Wonder what she wants?’

  ‘Oh! I think I know that young l
ass. This doesn’t bode well.’

  The woman shifted her weight from one foot to the other as we approached. ‘Mammy, Fern,’ she said. She looked anxious. ‘I’m Judith, Doll’s daughter.’ It was then that I realised I knew her vaguely after all, and Doll too. Doll was one of the few, but she and Mammy had had a fall-out over something when I was a child, so over the years I’d seen almost nothing of either the mother or the daughter. Judith wore huge hoop earrings, a long corduroy skirt and spike-heeled boots. She nodded at me, as if she knew me. Her eyes seemed to be in a permanent state of flare, and I didn’t know if this was her natural condition or caused by the predicament.

  ‘Yes I know who you are,’ Mammy said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I thought to go inside and wait, but I didn’t know if you’d think it right. So I waited here until you got back.’

  Mammy never locked her door. Usually when she went outside she even left it ajar to indicate that she would be back soon. She pushed her way past Judith, and beckoned us in behind her. ‘Stop your prattle and come inside. What is it? What have you come for?’

  Judith couldn’t meet Mammy’s eyes. Instead she looked at me to deliver her news. ‘It’s Jane Louth. Mammy, she’s died.’

  6

  Mammy sank heavily into her chair by the hearth. She let her stick clatter to the floor but I recovered it and hooked it on a coat-peg. Mammy’s face was the colour of the cold ash in the grate. She touched her temple with the middle finger of her left hand. Her other hand lay on her lap, bunched. I saw for the first time the frailty of Mammy’s age. This woman who would stand up to anyone, who would fight men with her fists if need be, was made giddy by this news.

  I looked into the startling honesty of Judith’s eyes, noticing how the blue iris of her left eye was compromised by a cloud of green. ‘What’s being said?’ I asked her.

  ‘That she ate mushrooms, that she must have found a poisoned one amongst them. She’d been collecting mushrooms from the field, and she’d made breakfast with them.’