The Limits of Enchantment Page 7

  ‘Where’s William? What was he doing?’ What I meant was: who is he?

  ‘We’ve known each other for a long, long time, Fern. A long, long time. What about you, are you coping at the cottage on your own?’

  ‘Me? I’m fine! What are they doing with you in here? When will they let you out?’

  ‘Nobody tells me anything. They poke me with this, they stick me with that. They’ve had my blood and my pee and my bone marrow. They’ve had their heads up my back passage, these doctors. I said it’s no mystery what you’ll find there. But they tell me nothing.’

  I apprised Mammy of everything I could think of to keep her entertained, though it wasn’t easy, since my life consisted mainly of coming to visit her. I told her about the soap-dodger coming for his water, and Judith making eyes at him.

  ‘Flighty,’ she said of Judith again.

  I didn’t tell Mammy that she’d read the smoke, though Mammy probably knew that. I was telling her about my ride in when a staff nurse came by and whisked the screens open. ‘Who put these screens here?’ she said to me, looking very cross.

  I blinked at her.

  9

  The following day I cleaned the house thoroughly. I scrubbed, I washed and I swept in a thrilling kind of fever. I propped open the front and back doors and all the windows and let the breeze drive through. I said, ‘Out imps! Out!’ I did all that daft stuff she would do. Shortly after midday someone rapped his knuckles on the open front door.

  Coming through from the back of the house, I saw immediately that it was a bailiff from the Stokes estate. They have a uniform look, of a long raincoat and a cloth cap. But I had to look twice because inside the set of clothes was Arthur McCann. He looked like he wanted to run away. Instead he handed me a letter.

  ‘Are you working for the Stokes estate now, Arthur?’

  ‘Read that, Fern. You’ll not like it.’

  I took the letter and tore it open. It contained a bill for unpaid rent. ‘But it’s so much!’

  ‘Rent’s not been paid for over a year.’

  ‘But doesn’t Mammy take care of it?’

  ‘I know nothing about it. As it says there, you’ve four weeks to find it and pay it.’

  ‘Four weeks! But where will we find that sort of money? This can’t be right.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Fern. When I heard about it I offered to bring it to you. But if you don’t pay it you shall be evicted.’

  ‘Four weeks.’

  ‘They seem to think that’s generous up there at the house.’

  ‘Generous! They waited until Mammy was in hospital to do this, did they?’

  ‘It stinks Fern, and it’s not my way of doing things, but that’s how it stands. I don’t know why but I thought it would be better if I brought it. Seeing as how I know you. A bit.’ He puffed out his cheeks, then let the air pop: pffff. After that he touched the peak of his cloth cap in an old-fashioned gesture before retracing his path down the garden. The hinge on the garden gate sang out in protest, like a hurt thing as it opened and shut.

  With the arrival of the letter I understood, possibly for the first time in my life, how unprotected I was without Mammy. Although I wasn’t afraid and I had the capacity to work hard, Mammy had stood like a door of oak and iron between me and the outside world. I knew there was a rent to square on the cottage to the estate, but I didn’t know how much, nor whether Mammy found it hard to pay; nor how often it should be paid. Moreover I had little idea of the consequences of default. As a child I’d once seen bailiffs pile furniture outside another cottage on the estate, but had always assumed that to be the penalty paid by the feckless, not the hapless.

  Mammy had always counted the pennies. If I wanted something I asked Mammy for it, and if Mammy could do so she granted it; if not, I learned not to ask again. Any small earnings that I made with the sewing were instantly turned over to Mammy. I knew the value of things: that wasn’t the issue. I would never go short-changed. But I’d never been put to manage what I had, or even to thinking about it. Until now.

  I would have to ask Mammy how we stood eventually, but this was the worst possible time. This would come as a hammer blow. I resolved to see if I could fix the problem myself. On the shelf we kept a tin tea caddy with pictures of the Queen’s coronation. I reached it down and spread out on the table four ten-shilling notes and what few coins were in there. I calculated what I might raise if I took in some extra sewing and some more washing. I looked again at the figures on the paper, but staring at them didn’t make them come to any less.

  Then I ransacked the house, looking for keepsakes I might sell if push came to shove. Of course I’d have to get Mammy’s permission, but even then there wasn’t much. There were the mementoes from the War. There was Mammy’s gold locket chain; and her silver snuffbox. Though there was very little else besides, I had a notion these things might fetch something at the pawnbroker’s in Market Harborough.

  Things looked up, just a little, when a lovely mouse of a girl with piercing brown eyes knocked on the door and asked me to bake her a cake. Her name was Emily Protheroe, though her name was soon to be Emily Cross, and what she wanted was her wedding cake.

  Another of Mammy’s skills was in baking, and in the baking of wedding cakes she was peerless. Not that any woman worth the name in the district was unable to bake a cake; but this was not just any cake. This was a wedding cake, this was the cake of life. And when it came to a wedding cake, everyone said, it was what went into it that counted, and not everyone had what was needed.

  Word was that Mammy Cullen’s cake got a young couple off to a good start on the winding road of a long marriage. It would sustain you in times of shortage and feed you in times of trial, it was said. At that time there were in the locality well over a hundred women who preserved, wrapped in paper and stored in a tin away from mice and weevils, a single slice of cake from their own wedding day to be halved and sewn into the grave clothes of the first in the partnership to go over. Because in those days one married not just for life, but for death, too.

  That’s all gone, that way of thinking.

  But for the cake Mammy Cullen’s rule of thumb still applied. One tier kept for the first christening party. Then to every guest at the wedding a slice. To the bride and groom each a slice. To any at the wedding who were not guests but who served at the table or who helped dress the bride, a slice. To the minister a slice, even if he were sour like most of them are. And one slice kept back, to be divided later, for the long journey into dark. Because, said Mammy’s rule of thumb, where you have love to share it should be spread as far and as wide as it might go.

  Mammy loved to be asked to bake a wedding cake. She was paid for her labours, but she poured all her love into the mix. So when Emily came knocking, even though I trembled at the challenge of matching one of Mammy’s glorious cakes, I said Mammy will be back in a few days, and I said yes, we will.

  ‘Only my mam had Mammy Cullen bake her cake when she were wed, and they have been ’appy and good to each other through some rough times,’ Emily said, sitting by the hearth, wringing her hands out of shyness and nervousness, ‘and it did upset me to hear of Mammy being in hospital because I thought, well, no cake – oh! that sounds so selfish! Now you’ll think I’m a terrible person! But then I thought of you and I thought well you may depend Mammy has taught her some if not all of what she knows and—’

  I put a hand on the girl’s arm, to stop her from chattering out of nerves. ‘It’ll be my very best one,’ I told her. I didn’t add: it will – to date – be my only one.

  I’d watched Mammy bake the wedding cakes often enough. If it were merely a matter of knowing the recipes, the quantities, the stirring, the mixing and the oven time then there wasn’t much more I needed to know. But Mammy had never let me bake one. If the cake turned out badly then the marriage might too. The responsibility! And there’s the matter of belief. Would my doubts run into the mix? Would a bit of scepticism make the cake too light or too heavy?


  Emily brought me out of my thoughts. ‘There’s a little one, too,’ she said.

  ‘Oh! How far gone are you?’

  ‘Not long. I wondered if you’d give me something to feel less sick.’

  ‘Ginger, have some ginger, and I’ll give you avens to make a decoction.’

  ‘Avens is good. Mammy used to call it haresfoot.’

  That made me smile as I got to my feet. ‘She did.’ I shook a little twist of ground ginger into a packet, and the same for the powdered root of avens.

  ‘Will you knit the first booties? Mammy did mine and my mam says I was walking at one.’

  Goodness, I thought, she believes in it all more than I do. ‘I’ll do ’em for you.’ I handed the small packets to Emily, but the girl wouldn’t take them.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Mammy always says you must pay before you accept the package. That’s what Mammy says.’

  I felt an unaccountable flush of anger. It was true that Mammy had complicated rules for how they were to pay for different things, upfront, afterwards, backhand. All nonsense. ‘I do things a bit different to Mammy, understand?’

  The girl looked down at her feet. It made me soften, so I said, ‘Not much different, just a bit. I find it works better.’ I held out the packets again.

  This time Emily took them. ‘I’m sure you know. How much shall I pay you then?’

  ‘For the cake I shall have to reckon on it. Two tiers? I’ll tell you next time I see you. For the other things it’s just as before. Leave what you can afford on the mantel.’

  At this Emily looked pleased. Then she said, showing me her thumb, ‘There’s another little thing. I’d be so pleased if I could get rid of this before my wedding day.’

  Hell in a bucket, I thought. I nearly told Emily I didn’t do those, but she would have only said that Mammy did them. ‘Did you bring a bean?’

  ‘Of course!’ Emily twinkled with pride and produced a haricot bean from her pocket.

  I shuddered inside but I didn’t let her see that. ‘Hold it up to the light, then.’ She angled her thumb and I touched the wart on it with my index finger for a count of three; then I took the bean from her and touched the bean for a count; then I took the bean outside and buried it and told it to perish with the wart. Emily came out and I walked her to the garden gate before she remembered anything else. I promised to stitch her a charm bag, which is a little magical sachet with herbs inside it, to guard her unborn. She seemed pleased with that, chattering away nervously, but my mind was on the cake. I was going to have to ask for help. Returning inside, the first thing I did was to check the mantelpiece.

  Emily had left a two-shilling piece. I sighed, and tossed the coin in the caddy.

  I liked the chime on Judith’s doorbell at her terraced house in Market Harborough. There seemed an age between the dying of the first note and the fall of the second. I could hear the motor of a vacuum cleaner, so I rang again. Finally Judith answered. Her eyes flared on seeing me and I was glad. The door admitted directly into her sitting room. The television was running.

  Judith took my coat. She lived alone, and I was amazed at how spotless her house was. She made me tea and gave me some Garibaldi biscuits. I always think Garibaldis look as though dead flies have been baked into the biscuit and I feel queasy when I see people eating them. ‘I have to finish vacuuming,’ she said, and proceeded to switch the machine on, running it painstakingly along a carpet on which I swear there was not a particle of dust.

  I didn’t mind. I sat down. Since we didn’t have a television I found it mesmerising, and I listened above the sound of the vacuum cleaner. There was a hospital drama playing. The hospital looked spotless, too, unlike the one where Mammy was.

  Eventually, after Judith had slowly passed back and forth in front of my vision vacuuming with a kind of passionate focus, she switched the machine off. It was as she wound up the flex that she said, ‘William thinks you shouldn’t have let her go in.’

  ‘I couldn’t do anything else.’

  ‘He thinks she won’t come out.’

  ‘He doesn’t know that,’ I said sharply.

  She put the vacuum cleaner away in a cupboard and came to sit beside me. We watched the television in silence. A nurse was in love with a doctor. You could hear if one of us blinked. Then I announced – as if it were nothing – that the estate was going to evict us from the cottage. Judith turned to look at me. I told her about the back rent.

  ‘Well,’ Judith said at length, ‘You have to do what we do, and work. Women alone can’t have it easy.’ She snapped a Garibaldi in two and dunked her dead-fly half-biscuit in her tea with such vigour that the tea splashed over the rim of her cup and into her saucer. It was then that I thought: Judith I could slap your face for a whole day and not stop even for lunch.

  ‘I work. I do everything. I wash, I sew, I bake.’

  ‘You’ll find that’s not enough,’ Judith said. ‘In the meantime we’re going to have to think how we can help you.’

  I looked back at the drama on the television screen and pursed my lips. ‘Anyway,’ I said, not wanting her to think I was flinging myself on her mercy, ‘I was asked to bake a wedding cake, and that will earn a little, though the girl is poor—’

  ‘They always are,’ Judith put in, ‘or otherwise they go to the baker.’

  ‘I’m afraid I won’t be a patch on Mammy—’

  ‘A wedding cake, is it?’ Judith interrupted. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘I have to do it myself. It’s another way of earning for one thing. I just want to be as good as Mammy.’

  ‘Okay. But you don’t want to take chances on someone’s wedding cake. It’s a responsibility. Though you must have seen Mammy do it enough times.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it’s what’s unseen, isn’t it? It’s the whisper.’

  Easy. Too easy. But Judith went silent at that. Then she said, ‘You know, it’s a pity that it all isn’t written down somewhere. Then when someone dies it isn’t lost with them. Wouldn’t that be the thing?’

  I don’t know why but I heard myself mouthing Mammy’s words. ‘What’s only in our heads they can’t take away from us.’ I told her about that chap Bennett from Cambridge University who’d come to our door with a feather up his arse.

  ‘Really?’ Judith said. ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Oh we chased him away.’

  Judith returned to her idea that things should be written down, and I let her talk. Then the thing between the nurse and the doctor came to a head so we abandoned the conversation. Not having a television myself I didn’t mind. You could just watch it and your head would empty, and what with all the anxieties I had at the time I didn’t mind that either. Then the news came on and there was an item about the Gemini rockets and an astronaut making a space-walk.

  ‘I’d like to do that,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Judith.

  After the news was over we watched a programme called The Outer Limits. There were small plants like a clump of sage but from another planet, and these plants leaped on to people’s faces. It didn’t spell out exactly how these plants leaped: that was left unexplained. Then the people would be somehow changed, but no one would know.

  It was very good.

  10

  The next day brought a hard driving rain clattering on the roof and with it a knock on the door from Arthur McCann. The rain, stinging, silvery and bone-chilling struck at such a harsh angle that it ran between the slates of the cottage roof and coursed down the corner of the room. I was setting a saucepan to catch the drips.

  ‘Let me in, Fern!’ I heard him shout. ‘I’m getting a leathering.’

  I hurried to the door and opened it. He slammed the door behind him, falling back against it, blowing out his cheeks as if he’d been chased in by a bull. He took off his cloth cap and wiped water from his brow. His face was a riot of freckles and water droplets, like a freshwater trout.

  ‘Stand by the fire,’ I said. />
  Arthur shook the water from his waxed coat and some of the drops landed on me. Then he stood with his back to the fire, steam rising from him, his face flushed. I took his saturated cloth cap from his hands. ‘Not on that blooming motorbike in this weather, are you?’

  ‘I walked here.’

  ‘What for? Is that Lord Stokes up in his big warm mansion still in a hurry to get my leaky cottage?’

  ‘Lord Stokes is ga-ga, Fern. It’s the Norfolk Eel who is after you.’

  The Norfolk Eel was everybody’s name for Venables, the Estate Manager, a sleek and slippery character with a pink complexion and soft, rosy cheeks. I suddenly recalled his face looking at me from the doorway of the Bell the day Mammy was pushed into the gutter. ‘Makes no odds who it is wants me out.’

  ‘I feel bad,’ Arthur said. ‘I wish there was a way I could help you.’

  And for a second I looked at him with an expression of hope, but he met my eyes steadily, his coat steaming around him. Then I let the hope die. I didn’t know whether there was much if anything he could do in his position. The rain was pinging into the saucepan and it drew his attention away from me. ‘The roof’s a sieve,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll get up there and fix it for you when the rain gives over.’

  ‘Before you throw me out you mean? Why would you do that?’ But I knew why.

  ‘Eh?’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard. Arthur stuck his forefinger in his ear and jiggled it about, as if trying to dislodge a plug of water and wax. He stepped under the leak, gazing up at it. ‘You should have a chap to take care of these things for you, Fern.’

  ‘Chaps eat too much,’ I said.

  He looked at me sideways, and then went back to conducting his survey of the roof. ‘I wonder if I can swing another few weeks for you. Hold them off a bit.’

  ‘How?’

  He seemed to be talking to the leaking roof. ‘Norfolk Eel’s got a lot on his mind right now. Got his attention on other things. Not promising I could do anything, mind. But I could try.’