Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (26 page)

Daisy didn't smile.

“And later, when we were older, for those moonlit strolls...”

“You were older,” Daisy said, with a sniff that wasn't entirely her cold this time. “I was still a child.”

“It was so romantic, Ann , you can't imagine,” Eleanor said. “Just the fairylights and the stars and moon shining on the ocean, the warm sand and a friend you'd known since childhood suddenly so very intensely interesting. Of course, when the war broke out, we couldn't have our fairy lights anymore. In fact, we...”

“We stopped coming altogether then. I remember you cried for weeks when father said it was too dangerous,” Daisy said, and began coughing hard. “Oh, dear. This wind is aggravating my cold I'm afraid.”

“I'm becoming rather tired myself. You must excuse two old ladies, Ann. I understand there's some sort of historical exhibition here now--there--that Millineum thing. You'll probably enjoy that. And do try to see the main part of the town. It's a bit of an arts colony these days, I understand. But now I think we must go back and rest.”

A taxi was passing then and I insisted on putting them in it and paying the fare in advance, thanking them for their company.

“Perhaps we'll see you at dinner,” Eleanor said.

“I'll try to see the exhibition before closing time, that is, if it's still open,” I told her. “I'll probably be going down for dinner about six.”

“Lovely,” she said, and their taxi drove away at a neck-breaking speed, as if the driver was so glad not to have to manuver his way through crowds that he celebrated by pushing the edge of the envelope.

The exhibition was far down the beach, away from the rest of the attractions. Halfway there I was picked up by a shuttle bus with bright slogans and no passengers at all. The driver, a middle-aged man, looked profoundly bored, but in answer to my question said in a thick Yorkshire accent that aye, the exhibition had not closed and I might find someone there if they hadn't gone to tea already. We sped far down the beach, past all the businesses and the cliff containing the skeletal remains of the castle, to a fake tudor cottage with its atmosphere destroyed by a large sign saying Millineum.

The door was open and I poked my head in. I didn't see anyone to sell me a ticket, and called out. Someone called back from the bowels of the building, “Go on round then and I'll catch you on the way out.”

It wasn't exactly Disney World or even Madame Toussaud's but it was more interesting than I would have expected from what I'd seen of the town so far. Apparently we Scarboroughs had a Viking in the woodpile--one Skardi, as he was nicknamed for his harelip. I was glad they hadn't translated his affliction when they named the town. He founded the village, which became a center for pottery, a medieval seaport and a meeting place for tradesmen--the origins of the fair. There was more about the castle, though they didn't mention the murder of King Edward's gay lover there, an interesting tidbit I'd picked up in an English history class. A particularly vivid diorama featured the slighting of the castle by the Roundheads during the Civil War (I kept seeing boys in blue and gray even though I knew it was a different Civil War).

There wasn't too much about the fair after that, except that they said it continued. The most recent history all concerned the healing waters of the spa and the bombardment of the town by the Germans in 1914. It was rebuilt then and the posh clientele of the spa were joined by middle and working class people on holidays. The ladies were probably from a fairly well off middle class family, I thought. I paid on my way out and bought a few souvenirs, and could not stop humming the Simon and Garfunkle tune all the way home. I wondered if they had researched the original ballad, as I had, to know how appropriate the very old song was for an ancient Viking settlement.

It was dark out by the time I emerged from the exhihit and the wind was wilder and colder, so I popped back in long enough to phone a cab--I got a better dispatcher this time. I arrived just in time to go to my room, deposit my souvenirs, and rest my feet a moment before dinner.

Eleanor was engaged in a heated discussion with a waitress when I arrived. “That's ridiculous,” she was telling the woman. “No one was seated at this table when I arrived, there was no reserved sign and I wish to look out at the sea.”

“You were assigned a seat by the wall over there, madam,” the woman said.

I clucked my tongue as I arrived and pulled out a pad and pen, “Oh dear, my editor failed to mention this,” I said, ostentatiously flipping over a page as if I couldn't believe what I'd read before. “A three star hotel that assigns seats to its guests as if they were school children. I don't think so! That's probably worth the loss of two stars at least.”

The waitress turned and glared at me and I gave her my biggest most American smile. “Hello, I'm Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. I've been traveling around England for the New Yorker Fine Dining supplement but there seems to be some mistake. I certainly don't think the New Yorker would give a high rating to a restaurant that denies the best seats to its diners when the dining room is entirely empty. And it might also appear to some critics that your wish to make this lady take a less desireable and visible table might smack of discrimination against her as a person of disability. The New Yorker would frown on that. A lot.”

I said this in my loudest, ugliest American tones, throwing my not insubstantial weight around, and as I suspected, another woman, older than the one I faced and not wearing a uniform, hurried forward to say, “Is everything to your satisfaction, Miss Scarborough?”

“If I'm not to be arbitrarily assigned a table not of my choosing in this empty dining room.”

“You may, of course, sit anywhere you like.”

“Then I believe I'll sit here, and enjoy the lovely view at the table my companion has already selected. May we have our menus please? And some bottled water?”

They left and the older woman returned with both the menu and the water. When she'd gone again Eleanor and I both allowed the giggles we'd been suppressing to sputter forth.

“Jolly well done,” she said, patting my hand approvingly.

“Will Daisy be down soon?”

“No, poor dear. She came here to help put me in care and she could do with some herself. She feels much worse than I do.” She picked up the menu and browsed. “I'm ravenous. Let's see, the lamb or the veal?”

“I'm sort of in the mood for anything with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,” I said, half singing the last as in the chorus of the Simon and Garfunkle tune. She didn't react for a moment.

“What dish would that be then?” she asked when she had finished scanning the menu. “Sounds appallingly overseasoned. Rather like tossing in the whole herb garden.”

“It was a joke,” I said. “You know, like the line in the song.”

“I'm afraid I don't know,” she said. “What song would that be?”

“Scarborough Fair,” I said.

“There's a song about it? How lovely. You must sing it for me sometime.”

That was perhaps the wrong thing to say, since I'm a shameless extemporaneous a cappella singer. However, I have always maintained that singing in conversational tones should be every bit as acceptable as conversation in conversational tones and no more intrusive to adjoining tables. Since there were no other diners at adjoining tables anyway, I sang her the song.

She brooded all through the soup course without saying anything, leaving us to sip and slurp in silence. Finally she patted her lips with a napkin and said, “I've been trying to place that song. It sounds so very familiar. Wherever did you learn it?”

“It's vintage Simon and Garfunkle! A monster hit in the sixties. I loved it because after it came out, everybody could pronounce my name. I'm surprised you haven't heard it before.”

“We never listen to popular music, only classical. Perhaps it's only the tune I know and it was taken from something in a larger work ?”

“Could be. Although actually, a lot of classical pieces have bits that were adapted from popular folk songs of the day.”

“Is that so? How very interesting,” but she sounded vague and she was staring into the distance again, as if ours was a three-way conversation. Then suddenly her eyes were back on me, and she was smiling, though her tone was surprisingly cautious, as if testing its weight on a shakey looking ladder rung, when she said, “A pity, really, that they put such modern words to it. They make no sense at all, do they?”

“Actually, they do,” I said, warming to one of my favorite topics and pleasantly surprised to find such a sympathetic listener. “It's not really a modern song at all, just a modern version of a much older ballad that's collected in the Child Ballads as one of the Riddles Wisely Expounded. The original version was called The Elfin Knight--and various other things. And Scarborough isn't always the town, or even usually. But the theme is the same. The man asks a woman to do an impossible thing if she wants to be his true love and she thereupon asks him to do an even MORE impossible thing if he wants to be hers. Which didn't make much sense until I read about it in Wimberly's folklore book. Am I boring you?”

She had been looking out to sea again and could have been halfway to New York from the far-off expression on her face. But at my question, she returned her attention to me with a troubled-seeming smile. “Not at all, dear. I'm simply reflecting on how people are always putting riddles between themselves and their true loves. Not just in ballads either. People do that in real life all the time, don't they? ‘If you
truly
care for me you'll do or won't do thus and so.' Tests, I suppose. Is that what your song is about? Because it's all rather sad. You can lose someone very precious by expecting them to jump hurdles that are too impossibly high.”

I nodded. “The song about the Lady of Carlisle always struck me that way. She wanted her boyfriends to fight a lion to get back her fan. I'd have told her to take a flying leap if I'd been them.”

“Yes, I can see the temptation. You've made quite a study of these songs then, have you, Ann?”

“It's a lifelong interest. I've written three books about the story songs, actually. And I promise not to go on and on about it until I make your eyes glaze over. But, since you really love this place and may end up spending the rest of your time here, I thought you might like to know the rest of what Wimberly had to say about the Elfin Knight.”

“I would indeed. It had never occured to me that the words might be riddles for that purpose, but it makes sense. When times are uncertain, as they so often are, bloody minded young people feel they have some sort of right to ensure their mates are suitable. Possessed of the proper survival characteristics. Rather cold, that. But romantic love wasn't quite the consideration it is now I suppose, and it's quite practical to know if someone is loyal enough to play one's game, intelligent enough to understand the puzzle, and ingenious enough to solve it.”

“That's true of some of the riddle songs--early versions of the False Knight of the Road have answering verses that are actual solutions to the problems so that the person answering wins the prize--either a lover or staying out of hell, depending on the version. And the Riddle Song I know from when I was a little girl has solutions in the song. But the riddles in The Elfin Knight are so hard they would have been impossible back then. And they're answered not with solutions, but with other riddles.”

She laughed. “A bit like life then, always answering a question with a question. And so typical of people unsure of their ground. Throw up impossible obstacles and if your love can somehow magically overcome them, then you can be sure. But one never can be sure really, can one? Not until it's much too late. Why, oh why, are we so afraid of each other?”

Die-hard enthusiast that I was, I wasn't listening to the nuances in her voice, the longing, the regret, the sadness. Insensitive as any fan telling me what was wrong with one of my books, I took the opening she gave me and plunged ahead. “In the original of the Elfin Knight, fear definitely entered into it. The Knight in the song is a supernatural figure who wants to carry a girl to the underworld. Wimberly says that according to another expert named Baring-Gould, this dates back to an old Norse or Teutonic tradition during a time when plighting a troth was such serious business that a girl owed her loyalty to her lover even after he was dead--so much that he could drag her back to the grave with him if she couldn't answer his riddle with a harder one. So she wasn't
trying
to be his true love, she was trying to escape being drug back to the grave with him. Kind of a Fatal Attraction sort of thing.”

“Ah,” she said and seemed to be giving it so much thought that I was wondering if I had a real folk music convert on my hands.

“It's really those impossible riddles that stay pretty constant in all the versions of the song,” I told her. “And that's the difference between the Elfin Knight riddles and those in other riddle songs.”

She sighed, deep and shuddering and looked very tired. I wondered if she was beginning to feel unwell again. “Pity,” she said. “That the riddles are so impossible.”

“Well, they were when they were dreamed up. These days I don't suppose they would be. What with new technology and so forth. If you just fudged on the interpretation a little. The shirt for instance.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You could make a shirt pretty much like it says in the song. Mind you, not an Armani or anything, but a rough upper garment by getting a length of cloth--I suppose that's what cambric would be and still available readymade and tear it or cut it with a laser tool instead of a knife or scissors ...”

“And what would you hold it together with? Staples, perhaps?”

I shrugged. “Hot glue. Then you could have it dry cleaned and it wouldn't have been watered or had wind blow on it--suppose you'd have to provide the cleaner's with the thorn yourself.”