The Limits of Enchantment Read online

  The curtains were still open and the sky was full of bright stars. I saw one star moving, and I took it to be a satellite, maybe a sputnik. If ever I saw one twinkling in the sky I thought of Valentina Tereshkova the Russian cosmonaut. The Russians had put a woman into space, so why hadn’t the Americans? If they ever did successfully land on the moon it was my dear hope that there would be a woman in the team. It would be only right wouldn’t it? Valentina, perhaps, would volunteer to go in an American rocket. I even considered writing to someone in authority, but I couldn’t imagine them paying much attention to my views on the matter.

  Finally I drew the curtains, switched on the bedside lamp and settled down with my book. I’d paid only sixpence at a second-hand store for the book. It was about another planet where the planet itself was making people mad. It was very good. I was engrossed in it and getting near to the end when Mammy popped awake. She sat up and said, ‘He’ll be wanting something hot. What shall we give him?’

  ‘Mammy?’

  ‘Well you can’t just give him a sandwich, can you? Not after he’s been through all that and come all this way.’

  ‘Would you like a drink of something, Mammy?’ I got up and I touched her hand. The tips of her fingers were chilled. ‘Let me plump up your pillow for you.’

  ‘Never mind me. Ralph will be wanting something hot.’

  My hand flew to my hairgrips, and I turned away for a moment. Ralph was Mammy’s son. He’d been killed at Mons at the end of the First World War. Mammy had told me he’d been killed after the Armistice had been signed, by an enemy soldier who hadn’t accepted that it was all over. Mammy kept his regimental sword in a bottom drawer in her bedroom. I wondered if it were possible for a person to wake from a sleep, sit up, and still be dreaming.

  ‘What about you? Are you hungry, Mammy?’

  Mammy looked at me quizzically. Then she looked about the room, at the door, and then at the bedside table lamp as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Was William here?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yes. And Judith. They came to see you.’

  She smacked her lips. ‘Did William say anything about a horse?’

  ‘You’ve been dreaming, Mammy. Here, drink some water.’

  Mammy had a sip of water, and then let her head sink back. I felt so sad seeing her iron grey hair against the white pillow. At last she closed her eyes again. I sat watching her until I was sure she’d gone to sleep.

  The next morning Mammy slept very late. I wasn’t happy about her condition, not least the way her fingertips and her toes were so cold, no matter how many blankets I heaped on her. What’s more the bruise around her ribs was swelling. I put on my coat and walked to the telephone box in the village and I made a call to Bloom’s surgery. The receptionist said she would pass on the message.

  It was nearly midday before Dr Bloom arrived. He went straight up to her. Within a few minutes he was back down. ‘It’s no good. I’m going to arrange for an ambulance to come and take her in.’

  ‘But that’s the last thing she’d want!’

  ‘She’s barely coherent up there. She just asked me if I was the rat-catcher.’

  ‘But that’s a joke! That’s Mammy’s sense of humour!’

  He sat down at the table, took some papers out of his case and began writing. ‘I don’t think so. She complained about rats in the rafters.’

  ‘But we have got rats! They get inside the roof!’

  ‘She’s got to go in. What are you going to do for her?’ He pointed to the bunches of feverfew, vervain, ragwort, dill, St John’s wort, all the usual ones hanging from the cross-beam. ‘Give her this stuff, will you?’

  I said I wouldn’t allow it, and Bloom sighed. Then he said he wasn’t prepared to come out here on a daily basis just to have his advice ignored. He said if I didn’t want his advice then I shouldn’t have called him there. He told me that Mammy needed tests.

  ‘Tests? Tests for what?’

  ‘Tests so I can answer that very question. Look, you don’t seem to realise that she’s seventy-seven years old. You can please yourself: keep her here and stuff her full of stinkwort or batwing or whatever it is dripping from the roof of this cave of yours, or we’ll have her in hospital. But I’m not running back and forth every day. So make up your mind.’ And he clicked shut the clasps on his bag.

  Click-click.

  Perhaps it was the worst day’s work I ever did in letting Bloom put her in hospital. I don’t know what else I could have done. Resisted maybe. And though I hadn’t even convinced myself it was the right thing, Mammy allowed me to persuade her and the ambulance came and took her away. She looked at me as they carried her out on a stretcher: not accusingly or in a way that might make me think she was hurt or betrayed. Rather she just looked confused. They took her all the way into Leicester, where Bloom promised me she could get the special attention she needed. He still wasn’t saying what that was.

  I visited her every day and for as long as they would let me stay, even though the smell of antiseptic gave me a headache. To save money I hitch-hiked into Leicester. Getting people to stop wasn’t always easy, but I usually managed a ride. A strange thing started to happen. It seemed that no sooner was I in the passenger seat, with the driver having learned I was on my way to the Royal Infirmary, than they would pour out their history. I didn’t have to say anything, or ask anything. The men – and the drivers were almost invariably men – told me about their health problems or the stresses of their job or even their marital disasters. And they would take me all the way to the hospital. Even if I said drop me here or let me out at the lights they would insist on taking me all the way. Sometimes I would look back and they would still be talking as I gently closed the passenger door.

  Visiting time was restricted to late afternoon and early evening. Some days Mammy was coherent, chatting normally. She directed me to smuggle in concoctions she might administer to herself. Other days she didn’t even recognise me. There were occasions again where she might recognise me but not the place she was in. She seemed to have come unstuck in time, and in those moments she was in another location altogether.

  ‘Fern, untie my feet would you? There’s no need for me to have my feet tied up like this.’

  ‘What Mammy? Your feet aren’t tied up. Look for yourself.’

  ‘I don’t sleep well. The woman in the next bed keeps scratching the wall. She’s made her fingernails bleed crying out for her baby.’

  I looked, but the bed next to Mammy’s was empty, and had been so since she was admitted.

  ‘I don’t want to be here when the mistress is full and shining through the window, Fern. You should hear ’em howl. All night long it goes on. You should hear them. Could you just untie my feet?’

  Then she might cry. And she would say that she had so many things to tell me which she’d held back and which I should know. At these times she would make me put my ear close to her lips and she would whisper. Everything she knew. An entire visiting period might pass with her whispering in my ear and my saying nothing. Mammy would only break off if a nurse or other member of the hospital staff approached. Then she would resume. Though it was a strain I sat on a chair by the bed and let her talk in my ear.

  It would be twilight when I came out after these sessions. It was always more tricky getting a ride back than it was in broad daylight. One evening it looked like rain and no one was stopping for me. I tried to use mental powers to pull them in, but as usual it didn’t work. Perhaps I was too exhausted from all of Mammy’s talk, because they just wouldn’t pull over. So I rolled my skirt up my leg a way and used my hairgrips to pin it up so that it looked like one of these miniskirts these wild girls wear. I know Mammy would have been scandalised.

  The very next car that came along stopped for me. I thought: heck, the power of these miniskirts. I got in and the driver zoomed off, tipping me back in my seat. He was a kind of teddy-boy, with a premature widow’s peak and bad acne. I knew something that would have cleared up his acne but he
didn’t give me a chance to tell him. He cleared his throat. ‘How’s it goin’?’

  ‘It’s going all right.’

  He smirked at me, though I kept my eyes fixed on the road. He cleared his throat again. ‘Where you off to?’

  ‘Near Keywell.’

  ‘I go right through there.’

  ‘Great. Thanks.’

  He nudged the gearstick as we rounded bends and ascended inclines. It seemed to me he deliberately made his knuckles brush against my thigh. He cleared his throat a third time. ‘Where’ve you been then?’

  ‘I’ve been to the hospital. I’ve got a yeast infection.’

  His fingers didn’t brush my thigh any more after that. He dropped me in Keywell without another word and roared off.

  Later that night I sat outside the cottage in my coat, looking up at the stars for sputniks and drinking elderberry wine until I nearly passed out. Mammy would never have approved of heavy drinking but I was beginning to see its advantages. For one thing it doubled the number of stars in the sky. I’d also heard that the Russians had put dogs and monkeys into orbit, but hadn’t brought them down again as they had with Valentina. They were just left to die, and then to go round and round the earth for ever. I wondered if they would decompose; then I thought not, in space. Mummified dogs and apes up there, going round. The thought made me take another gulp of elderberry wine.

  I could never have guessed that Mammy’s going into hospital would touch off a landslide of events. For almost twenty years she had been my shield and my pathway through the world. Just as she had shown me the footpaths up and down the swollen-belly pastures of the rolling countryside, Mammy had laid out the map of life. I talked like Mammy, dressed like her and even walked and held my body like Mammy.

  In many ways Mammy had prevented me from being part of the changing times. I wasn’t, like most girls of my age, pulled by nineteen-sixties’ fashion fads nor did I moon over mop-headed pop-stars; I was insensitive to political changes going on and ill-attuned to all the new social rhythms. The technology I could see advancing all around me and even in the skies overhead barely touched our lives, and the astonishing rising affluence passed us by. I knew that the kind of life I lived with Mammy had barely changed in fifty years. Maybe more.

  There was only one thing that was at odds between Mammy’s and my life. I didn’t have Mammy’s belief; not quite. But she knew that. Knew it and forgave me for it. And anyway, I thought, sipping my home-made wine and squinting up at the night sky for sputniks, Mammy had told me there were as many different beliefs as there were scattered stars. And I knew that the stars were without number.

  8

  On the Sunday morning Bill Myers came to the cottage, out of police uniform. ‘Might I go in and see her? Take her some grapes?’ he asked me.

  ‘You don’t have to ask me,’ I said. ‘It’ll cheer her up if she sees you. She’s in ward twelve. She likes the black grapes.’

  ‘Ward twelve is it?’

  ‘Is that significant?’

  ‘No,’ he said, looking away. ‘No.’ And I wondered why he would lie.

  Before he went I asked him, ‘Is anything to be done about the lout who pushed her over?’

  ‘No one seems to know who it was,’ Myers said, smiling sadly. ‘A stranger by all accounts.’

  ‘Yes, it was someone who was put up to it, and we know why, don’t we? Surely we can find out.’

  Myers’ mood changed. ‘You don’t want to open this up, Fern.’

  ‘But why should he get away with it?’

  ‘You open this and other things will open up and that’s not what you want.’

  Myers was warning me off. I didn’t know how to reply.

  His manner softened. ‘Look, there are some things as have to be taken care of above the table and some things below the table.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to do something?’

  ‘I have to go. I’ll call on Mammy next time I’m over in Leicester.’

  I watched from the window as the policeman made strides down the garden path. Judith was arriving as he was leaving. He held the gate open for her. They exchanged a few words and Judith laughed at some remark he made.

  I told Judith what Myers had said. I wanted her opinion. ‘He’s right,’ Judith said. ‘Leave it be. For now.’

  Then the hippie I now knew as Chas Devaney lurched up in his van. I heard the ratcheting sound as he levered his handbrake and knew he’d come to fill his battered old milk churns with water, since Mammy had granted him permission. He jumped out and saw me in the yard. He had that scuffed leather coat on, with no shirt underneath it this time. Oh, he thought he was the cat’s miaow. ‘Still cool?’ he shouted. ‘About the water I mean?’

  Cool? I could be cool. ‘It’s all right by me,’ I sniffed.

  As he started pumping water Judith must have come out to stick her nose in. She linked her arm with mine, familiar-like, and said, ‘Who’s this?’ Then she moistened her lips and they shone with pink lipstick I swear she must have applied only a moment before. Her eyes shone, too, but for Chas. What’s more, Chas stopped pumping and leaned on the pump. I felt cross. I wanted to say this isn’t the time for all that, what with Mammy in hospital. This isn’t the time for making faces and pouting and making your spaniel eyes go moist and large. This isn’t the time to smirk and stop pumping in your leather coat with no shirt. Instead I heard myself say, ‘Chas this is Judith. I think she’s a bit of a hippie, like you.’

  He looked her up and down. ‘Schoolteacher, aren’t you?’

  ‘Take no notice of Fern’s hippie talk. She wouldn’t know a hippie if one bit her on the ankle.’

  ‘I recognised you from the school. I’m bringing my little boy in.’

  ‘Oooo,’ Judith went, hitting an infuriating note that somehow made us both sound foolish, ‘you’re not against education, then? Not about to start your own drop-out school at Croker’s?’

  ‘There’s a big long list of things I’m not against.’

  ‘A list? So you can read and write, then?’

  ‘Oh, write, yes, write, I can manage that,’ he said dryly. ‘I have a master’s degree in philosophy.’

  ‘Well,’ Judith said, tightening her grip on my arm, ‘we’d love to hear you bang on about your academic qualifications all day but we have things to do, don’t we Fern?’ And she expertly wheeled me away and back inside the cottage before I had time to protest.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said once we were indoors.

  ‘You don’t stand there gawping, you walk away.’

  ‘What? Who was gawping?’

  ‘You were. You’d gone all weak at the knees. It made us look naive.’

  ‘Us? How does me doing something make us look anything? And anyway I wasn’t weak at the knees!’

  She ignored me, watching him through the window, hanging in the shadow knowing he couldn’t see in. ‘He looks dirty.’

  ‘They’re all soap-dodgers. That’s what Mammy calls ’em.’

  ‘Not that sort of dirty. I wonder what they do at Croker’s.’

  I went across and stood next to her, to watch through the window. ‘He loves himself, doesn’t he?’ At that moment he happened to look up.

  ‘For God’s sake, Fern! Now he’s seen us looking! That was your fault!’

  After Chas had gone I went back to sorting. Judith was helping me. With Mammy in hospital I was using the opportunity to give the house a real good spring clean for when she came out. I wanted Mammy to come home and see that I could take care of her and the cottage both.

  Though Judith said the place didn’t need cleaning, it needed knocking down. At the bottom of the vegetable garden by the compost heap we made a fire and burned some very old clothes and other rags and rubbish. Judith put bistort root on the fire, goodness knows why.

  There was a lot of white smoke, and where I stepped back, eyes watering, it didn’t seem to affect Judith. She gazed into the smoke, almost transported by it. There was something w
aif-like about her, something fey, and her alert eyes would often cloud over with an inward stare. As the white smoke coiled around her, it seemed to me that there was also about Judith a frightening air of abandon.

  ‘What do you see in all that smoke, Judith?’

  ‘Passing over. Difficulty. Awe and wonder. Burning knickers.’ She tossed a pile of holed underwear on to the fire.

  That evening I walked along the A47 trying to hitch a lift into Leicester and I wasn’t having much luck. I had no intention of raising my skirt again so instead I concentrated. I saw a blue Morris Minor come over the hill so I lifted my thumb in the air and focused on getting the driver to stop, and he did. I climbed in. The driver told me he was a salesman. Before I had time to ask him what he sold he told me I was about the same age as his daughter, who wanted to emigrate to Australia and this would mean he would rarely see her again. I could see he was hurting, but I didn’t say anything. I just let him talk. At one point I saw him knuckle away a tear forming at the corner of his eye. It seemed only moments later that we were outside the hospital. Though I hadn’t uttered a single word he thanked me for our conversation which he said had been a big help to him.

  When I got to the ward where Mammy was I noticed there were screens round her bed and for a moment my heart scraped. I pushed the screen aside. A man in a suit lay on the bed beside Mammy. It stopped me in my tracks. It was William. He’d kicked off his shoes and there he was, cuddled up against her with his head on her breast. It looked like Mammy was comforting him. I didn’t even know if this sort of thing was allowed on a hospital bed.

  Mammy looked up. ‘Just give us a few minutes,’ she said, ‘and then come back.’

  I went outside and sat on the grass near the admissions for Accident and Emergency. Two ambulance men and a nurse stood about sharing a joke and having a cigarette. Someone came out with yards of bandage round their head, all holding a bloody cotton swab in place. After the ambulance crew and the nurse had gone back inside I decided to return to the ward.

  William had gone. Mammy was sitting upright, looking much better.