The Girl Green as Elderflower (6 page)

Clare rummaged in his jacket pocket and found a crumpled note. ‘Here, have ten bob,’ he said. ‘And I don’t need a drink.’

‘You’ve got one,’ Mark said, ‘in the stable,’ and he went back to Robin.

Maunoir said: ‘If your family’s extinct, it won’t lie down. That was done like a brother. On his side, I mean.’

Clare said: ‘You sound like a brother.’

‘Oh yeah,’ the big man said, ‘there’s a whole bunch of Maunoirs where I came from.’ Suddenly he seemed to have something faintly saddening on his mind. ‘Even the younger ones always figure I need a dollar.’

‘What do you do?’ Clare asked. ‘Sorry, I take back that question. Only, I wondered whether you might be something interesting, like a starving genius.’

‘No, sir,’ Maunoir said, and flashed his candid smile (his Joe College smile, thought Clare, who had been a film-goer in his student days), which his light-coloured eyes contradicted by seeming to be shadowed over. ‘All I am is a retired teacher.’

‘Retired?’

‘Temporarily retired. This fall I took off.’

Clare wondered, because of the shadowy sadness, about divorce, or widowerhood, or even a scandal involving a pupil. But he wanted no more information about Jim Maunoir, who would surely expect some return.

And Maunoir expected already. ‘You wouldn’t be a starving genius yourself?’

‘Shut up about starving,’ Clare said. ‘No, I’m—’. He saw that a brief dash would do it best. ‘I’m also retired. I was a very raw anthropologist, working for one of the colonial governments. About eighteen months ago I was bowled over by tropical diseases, some way from a doctor. I took leave, but it turned into resignation.’

He began to notice a change in Maunoir’s demeanour, a change which made him more familiar, though Clare could not think why. It was partly that he listened and looked so intently.

‘You people are casual about that word “colonial”,’ he remarked.

‘Just then,’ Clare said shortly, ‘I used it correctly.’ At once he regretted the shortness, though it had made no impression on Maunoir’s rather commanding, grave face. ‘But if you mean I’m a relic of the past, I admit it. I am.’ It ocurred to him that a deluge of personal details would be likely to kill unwanted questions. ‘I was born in South Africa, of a New Zealand mother and a father born in India. My mother and I sat out the war in New Zealand. After that, my father was in Malaya, and I went to boarding school in Australia. Then he was in Kenya, and I went to school in Devon. The end of the Empire was pretty confusing to families like mine.’

He had been fiddling with his pint-pot, printing circle on circle with a little beer which he had slopped. When he looked up, he understood with sudden, amazing clarity the expression of Jim Maunoir. What he had taken for a kind of wistfulness was a kind of bargaining. The eyes said: In return for what I admit of the sadness of myself, have confidence that I won’t fail to understand you.

Clare could not take his own eyes off the man. ‘You’re a priest.’

Maunoir did not answer, and his face did not change.

Something happened inside Clare’s head, something which had happened before. It was as though his brain fell backwards a short way. Afterwards, he asked: ‘Who sent you?’

Maunoir gave his Joe College smile, but his eyes were the same. He said: ‘What a question, Cris.’

‘Oh, I thought it was over,’ Clare muttered, in despair. ‘The priests. The psychotherapists. I thought it was all over now.’

Maunoir asked: ‘Are people sent here often, Cris?’

‘Not here,’ Clare said. ‘Not in this country. Oh Jesus, I don’t want it spoiled in this country.’

‘Listen,’ Maunoir said. ‘No, look at me, Crispin.’ His shadowed eyes were offered like a vow. ‘No one will be sent to you in this country. And I am not a priest.’

‘No?’ said Clare, doubting. ‘Would you lie to me, Jim?’

‘I was a Jesuit,’ Maunoir said. ‘I’m not one now.’

Clare put his head down, and breathed deep. He looked at the toes of his Wellingtons among the fag-ends. He started to laugh.

‘What’s the joke?’ Maunoir asked.

‘I’m paranoid,’ Clare said, still laughing. ‘Paranoid. It
is
a joke.’

Maunoir said genially: ‘It wouldn’t take much to convince me you were psychic.
Non psycho sed psychico.
A fatherly funny. Here comes the beer from your cousin. Sit up straight now and drink it like a man.’

Clare pushed aside his emptied pot and looked at the circles on circles stamped in drying beer over the shining wood of the bar. So inside atoms. So in all space. The everlasting terror of a process without term.

‘How did you know?’ asked Maunoir, his glass at his mouth.

‘I notice things. I’m a trained voyeur. Like you, Jim.’

‘Try again,’ invited Maunoir. ‘That hardly got through my hair shirt.’

Saluting Mark, drinking Mark’s beer, Clare thought to ask: ‘What does it feel like, for you?’

‘Maybe you know,’ said Maunoir. ‘It feels like being lost in the woods.’

‘Yes,’ Clare said. ‘Yes, I do know.’ He thought of his dream, of how he had looked up out of his hole, his pit, his wolf-pit, and seen the foreign leaves, which had formed themselves into a face, invulnerably amused.

Jim Maunoir had grown remote, gazing beyond Clare’s shoulder. His eyes were clouded over. He had the mouth of a good little boy, the priest’s favourite.

Clare thought of Alicia’s voice. He said: ‘Don’t go away, Jim; I should be sad.’

Walking with Clare to the top of Hole Lane, Mark said: ‘I’m glad we went out and met Jim. He’s such a young sort of bloke for his age. Some of the things he says are really funny.’

Mark sounded a little elevated. While Clare had been playing dominoes with John, Jim Maunoir must have poured several whiskies into him.

‘The accent,’ Clare said, ‘helps him to be funny.’ He himself had felt the charm of Maunoir’s laconic manner when he relaxed, the stylishness of what Clare thought of as backwoods suavity. ‘Why is it that Americans, if they’re not idiots, can make us feel bumbling? Americans like Jim, for God’s sake, who only got an education because there were enough hands in the cow-shed already.’

‘It must be the space,’ Mark said, with a note of yearning, ‘and the way they move around, and talk to anybody, like Jim. You feel about someone like Jim that he’s in charge of himself. So he doesn’t care where he goes.’

That described so fairly the Maunoir they had just parted from that Clare wondered at his own insight into the man. It occurred to him that they must have met at a moment when Maunoir was shaken. And the reason they had met would have been that Maunoir saw in him, standing companionless, someone to ask about the green-eyed girl.

Head down, kicking at snow, he began to whistle ‘La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin’. After a moment Mark joined in. They made an intricate thing of it, lifting a ringing net towards the icy branches at the head of the lane, and the small far moon and the stars like holly-leaves of light.

‘Did you know,’ he said, when a last chord had died for lack of breath, ‘that the title is translated from Burns? “The lassie with the lint-white locks”.’

‘Huh,’ said Mark. ‘Funny you should say that.’

‘Did Jim ask you about her?’

‘Yes, he did. And I decided that what I told you was wrong. I don’t know who she is.’

The white lane, even in the moonlight, was a gloom under its bare arching trees.

‘He’s made me restless,’ Mark said. ‘I’d like to go and be Beat, and try mescalin, and Vedanta, and be a fire-watcher in the Rockies.’

‘I suppose,’ Clare said, ‘there’s no way of combining all that with medicine.’

‘I suppose not,’ Mark said. ‘No, I’ll read about it. I’ll be like bank-clerks who live on cowboy stories, and fish-and-chip-shop ladies who think a nurse’s life is glamorous. Well, booy, I must now be gooin’.’

‘Thanks for your company,’ Clare said. ‘That was a wild night for me.’

‘We’ll do it again,’ Mark said. ‘Christ, who’d have thought it could get any colder? Cheerio, dear booy—I’m orfft.’

Clare turned and plodded away down the tunnel of coralline trees. The snow, with a glaze on it, cracked and crunched under his boots, which echoed. He remembered one warm, pitch-black night of late summer when he had been sure that other footsteps were following him, and had crossed his fingers because he did not dare to turn. It infuriated Alicia, his crossing his fingers, touching wood. He told her his meaning was profound. He himself was seen by some thousands of people as a warning against the dangers of taking sorcery lightly.

Fumbling with the catch of the farm gate, he looked out over the vale. Under the sky which had cleared, and the moon which had grown so distant, the white and the black had no qualification. In that stark expanse, the lights which he had left on in the cottage asserted themselves weightily.

He made long strides down the steep field, following the path which his feet had worn through the rough pasture. At the garden gate the snow had been churned up by wistful ponies. The cottage had only one door. When it was closed behind him, he stood for a moment with his back to it. The drawbridge was up. There was nothing he loved more than the little print, from a book of voyages in the Pacific, which was there every time he returned to his castle.

In the study he crouched and shivered, reviving the grey fire. He would need more coal for the night he saw ahead. Out in the old brick privy, deep in evergreens, which he used for a coal-shed, his resident wren met him with panic, like a stranger.

When the flames were high, he climbed to his freezing bedroom and fetched down the book. Coat and boots still on, thawing in his decrepit armchair, he found the passage.

Tempore regis Ricardi apud Daghwurthe, in Suthfolke…

His eye leapt to the last words on the page.

…ac se Malekin vocitabat.

‘Malkin,’ he said aloud, gently, as if to a pet. Without surprise, he scanned the next page for a name.

Confessa est quoque quod nata erat apud Lanaham…

‘Ooh-ah,’ he said. ‘So you was born in Lavenham, gal.’

He got up and took the book to the table, and sat down on the hard chair there. Skimming the words, he pulled paper towards him and fumbled for a pen.

Outside, the screech owl which so often visited the oak tree trailed a long, strangled agony across the sky. At the top of the blank sheet he printed carefully: THE LORD ABBOT’S TALES.

‘Malkin,’ he said, ‘we’re birds of a feather, gal. Come and play your games with me, give me something to do.’

She spoke to him from the page.
Loquebatur autem Anglice secundum idioma regionis illius.
He laughed aloud at her voice, and began to write.

(De quodam fantastico spiritu)

In the time of King Richard, at Dagworth in Suffolk, in the house of the lord of the manor Osbern Bradwell, there appeared a fantastic sprite.

At that time the master lay in the chamber above the hall, where he had watched over the waning of the winter day, and where his death, he thought, would soon come to find him. He was a man in middle life, whose brown hair showed no grey, and whose face was made paler by the shadowing of beard which he had allowed to cloud his lean jaw. In the little light of the room his eyes were hollow, and looked before him with an expression of patience in which there was also a lessening bewilderment as he grew to feel at home with his fate.

In the hall below a log-fire leaped, and on the table one lamp cast a yellower light over the game which engaged the sick man’s children. There sat the master’s younger son, a child of six years, with the blue eyes of his father and with fair hair which would darken in time to his father’s colour. Beside him was his sister, a girl of ten, brown-haired and brown-eyed, her child’s body promising buxomness before many years. Opposite them sat their brother, the young squire, an adolescent wonderfully tall but ungainly as a foal, with the eyes of the dying man, and in his hair a ruddiness coming from his mother.

By the side of the youth sat the playfellow of his sister and brother, a girl of seven years, the motherless daughter of a neighbour. The hair of this child was fair as flax, and her eyes were of a tint between sparrow-brown and green.

The children and the young man had not been silent over their game, for there had been many treaties and parleys, and not a few hot disputes. But all that was quietness beside the difference which presently arose.

The daughter of the house spoke to her smaller brother, and said: ‘You rotten cheat, Mikey; I counted then. You landed on Northumberland Avenue, and I want my rent.’

The little child, with the look of a warrior about his chin, responded: ‘I did not, Lucy, and if you can’t count, you can go and boil your head.’

At that the tall youth spoke, and said peaceably: ‘You threw five, Mikey.’

The little fellow regarded his brother with a face swelling with rage, and cried in a great voice: ‘I did
not,
Marco; I threw four.’

‘Oh, let it go, Lucy,’ sighed the longlegged young man. ‘He knows that blackmail pays.’

‘But then he’ll buy Whitehall,’ objected Lucy.