Aphrodite's Hat (9 page)

‘Your scenes?'

‘I wrote it.' The king stared into the patch of darkness which was the stranger's face. ‘You spoke the lines superbly, that I grant you,' the easy voice continued. ‘But the question is, where do we go from here?'

‘Mortals alone know,' exclaimed the king, thoroughly put out. He had heard himself denounced for infidelity and then had heard his own voice in turn denouncing the queen for similar indiscretions. This sort of ugly accusation was quite unlike their usual exchanges. Vicious as each could be in turn, they had always presented blind eyes to any such irregularities.

The voice of the halfling chimed into his thoughts. ‘Since you mention it, I do, as it happens, have a plan. You see, you cannot cure an obsession. You can only replace it with another one. The queen is in love with a mortal – ergo, she is, in a sense, in love with mortality. If you desire for whatever reasons that particular scrap of mortality for yourself, then you must find another mortal creature for her to dote on.'

The king, lost for words with which to meet this bizarre suggestion, said nothing.

‘No doubt you will have knowledge of some philtre drawn from the juice of a flower that will cause a body to fall in love,' the stranger went on. ‘May I suggest that you ask one of your minions to fetch it for you, anoint the eyes of the queen while she is sleeping – most likely you will find her on that bank she likes to lie on for its pleasing scent of aromatic herbs – while I arrange for some suitable – or shall we say
un
suitable –' he gave a little giggle – ‘mortal to appear and then
wham, bam, thank you ma'am
! as they will say in times to come when happily I shall not be around to wince at the words. I can easily work all that business into what I am planning for my drama. And, listen,' he added, ‘I'll write you a scene-stopper for the moment when you determine all this. In fact, I have the opening lines already:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows …
Thyme and violets bloom at quite different times of the year, I needn't tell you, but as the pair of you have fairly muddled the seasons I think I can get away with it and anyway most people know next to nothing about natural history. They won't notice, or only one or two. And those few will enjoy putting me right. I sometimes think,' the loquacious halfling continued, ‘that I owe that kind, the all-knowing ones, the odd chance to set me straight. And it saves me time and bother, having to look things up to check, you know.'

He looked down at the king, who had dwindled from the imposing lofty stature with which he had challenged the queen to a faint sliver of grey shadow. ‘What do you say?'

‘Will it work?'

‘Of course it will work,' the halfling said. ‘I will write it for you.'

The following day the king was alarmed to observe the queen, apparently in a fugue, wander past him in the woods, her arms draped dreamily about a brawny workman whose thick neck concluded in a head which seemed to be in the grotesque likeness of an ass. The hairy temples were crowned with a garland of fresh flowers on which the dew glistened like tears. Lagging behind this ill-matched couple was a small, brown-faced boy, whose eyes, under the king's scrutiny, also looked somewhat dewy.

The king stepped in front of the boy. ‘Would you like to come and live with me?'

The boy looked at him earnestly. ‘Will you teach me to fly?'

The king considered. ‘I don't know that I can,' he said. ‘But we can always try.'

‘Then I will come,' said the boy. ‘Excuse me.' He ran to catch up with the queen, addressed a few words to her and then ran back to where the king stood looking after. ‘She says that I may do as I like.'

‘And you would like …?'

‘If it please your majesty, to come with you. The queen is very kind but I am very, very bored.'

The flying lessons did not go well. The king made a desultory effort or two and then handed the matter over to Monkshood, who had not flown in years. After one or two dangerous falls he also passed Manu on to a minion who had no time for mortals. Manu did not fare well either as the king's henchman. He grew too large and his early aptitude for camouflage deserted him. If anything, he became something of a nuisance.

And for whatever reason, the king appeared to have lost interest in his trophy. He and the queen, whom he had released from the artfully induced passion for her asinine lover, were enjoying one of their erotic reunions and if they remembered the little Indian orphan at all it was with faint embarrassment.

One moonlit night, Manu, at a loose end and wandering alone in the woods, came to a circle of birch trees. The blades of grass were etched brightly in the light of the bold moon. Crouching to look at their delicate beauty the boy observed the figure of a man lolling against the trunk of one of the white-barked trees.

‘Good evening,' the man said.

‘Good evening,' Manu replied. Although he had been brought up speaking Fairy, he had learned some human speech from listening to the children playing in the woods.

‘You will be the Indian child,' the man said. ‘What do they call you?'

‘I am called Manu,' Manu said. This was the first mortal he had ever spoken to but he was strangely unafraid.

‘I am sorry,' the man said. ‘I see that I've neglected you.'

Manu frowned. ‘Neglected?' It was not a word he recognised.

‘I clean forgot you,' the strange man went on. ‘You were a problem. In the way. Holding affairs up. I sorted you out and then you drifted out of my mind. I am sorry,' he repeated. ‘One should not abandon one's creations, however much independent life one endows them with. Even the minor parts need attention.'

‘I don't understand,' Manu said. He felt tearful.

The man got up. ‘No, you wouldn't. I am sorry for that too. Look here, you know, you can never fly. It's not in the script.'

‘I don't know what you are talking about,' Manu said. And then he did begin to cry in earnest.

‘Listen,' said the man. ‘You don't belong here. They're a fickle lot, fairies. They can't help it – it's their immortal nature. They wanted you in the first place because you have something they don't have: mortality. It fascinates them because for them death is the unknown. A kind of forbidden fruit.' He squatted down beside Manu and put an arm around the boy's shoulders. Unused to the breath of mortals, Manu recoiled a little. ‘Now,' said the man. ‘See here. You've been raised Fairy and I've more than a dash of it in my veins. We two will get on. You come with me and I'll write you other parts.'

‘Shall I be able to fly in them?' Manu asked.

‘You'll be able to do any mortal thing,' the man said. ‘Flying's for immortals. Mortality has more interesting things to offer. Though before you decide …' He put his other arm round the boy's shoulders holding him tight. In the growing light of the moon, Manu met a level green-eyed stare. ‘It is midsummer now. And my mind tends towards a comic turn. But there will be winters coming and sadder tales to tell. I should warn you of this. You may also be asked to play, well, the full range. If you stay here with them, you'll grow but you'll never die.'

‘They don't fly much themselves,' Manu said. ‘Not at all, really.'

‘There you are then,' the man said. ‘My name's William, by the way. Will, if you prefer.'

They walked off together under the high yellow moon.

Laura was not too surprised when Simon asked her to marry him. But she was surprised at herself when she accepted the proposal. She did not love Simon – had never pretended to, not even to herself – and so she was annoyed to find – when he asked ‘How would you like to be Mrs Kraemer?' – herself answering ‘With wonder.'

Afterwards she felt it was too late to explain she had been mistaken in the impression she had given, although she was aware that this situation, whether it ended in her carrying out or reneging on the apparent promise of her words, was likely to lead to trouble.

From time to time Laura had thought about her reasons for having got in tow with Simon in the first place, and had concluded they were mainly physical. Simon was a good-looking man, tall above the average and, when she first met him, with a head of curly hair, which had since suffered the usual ravages of time, and a sensual mouth which had not. A friend of Laura's, when shown a photograph of Simon, had described the mouth as ‘cruel', but Laura preferred to see in it a reference to the mouths of archaic statues, which together they visited at various ancient sites.

Laura had always known there was an element of wish-fulfilment in her observations about Simon: he was dangerous, her bones told her so, and yet, perversely, she allowed the relationship to continue, to flourish even. Her reservations had taken shape when, early in their acquaintance, she had sent Simon a poem.

It is not sensible to set tests and the poem was something of a test. Poems had become stepping-stones by which she negotiated her daily life, and this one in particular: ‘The Buried Life' by Matthew Arnold.

The poem was important to her because it defined something she recognised yet had not experienced: the moment that can flash between human beings, making a home-coming of their apartness.

In general, Laura knew, life was not like that and so far had certainly not been so for her. Mostly one struggled to make oneself understood – if one struggled at all, and hadn't become accustomed to vague acquiescence in views one didn't really hold.

She had married Terence for her mother, who, as she liked to say rather often, had ‘lost' her own husband and felt that a son-in-law who knew how to fix a washing machine and run down to the shops when she was out of something was just the ticket. Laura, who had spent her adolescence in rather ordinary rebellion, succumbed to the passionate love which, despite herself, she bore her mother. Finally she married Terence because she hoped this might make her mother content with her at last.

Her mother had become content, but not with Laura.

With Terence her mother had formed an alliance which included an undeclared agreement between them over Laura. ‘Our girl's a bit of an idealist,' she had used to say, winking at Terence when Laura had suggested that abortion might not be the only solution for foetal abnormality. ‘Wait till she has to bring up a handicapped child!'

Perhaps it was the discernible threat behind this remark which had dissuaded Laura from having the amniocentesis before giving birth to Luke, her second child. Luke, tiny, wrinkled and with one perfect arm tucked under his armpit, had been born with the other tapering into a little cleft stub. Terence had taken one look at Luke and had spoken of ‘places' where the baby might be ‘helped'. Laura had spent the night in terrified tears and at six the following morning had presented herself to the staff on the ward, washed and dressed with baby Luke in her arms.

‘No thank you,' she had said when they suggested she wait for her husband. ‘I have ordered a taxi – it is quite all right.'

Arriving home she found her mother was staying. The supper things had not been washed and a bottle of whisky was on the table. ‘Celebrating, darling!' Terence had said. Later her mother found a moment to whisper, ‘He was upset, you see. Dearest girl, I hope you don't mind, but a man needs a drink at times like this.'

Laura gave up her regular job as a teacher to look after Luke. Nellie, her daughter, six years older and bright as paint, helped too, and, in time, Luke learned to be almost as able as other children. But still Laura would only work in the evenings when the children were in bed, which is how, as a teacher of adult education, she met Simon.

Simon was the local organiser for adult education. ‘Have you ever given your body in a sacred cause?' he asked after a few too many glasses of Chardonnay at the Christmas party. He had brown eyes which looked right into hers.

‘Never!' she had replied, laughing in spite of herself and he had gravely explained that to sleep with a man on first meeting was considered by certain tribes a sign of possession by the gods. ‘What a winning excuse,' she had said, still laughing and wishing that the years of maternity had left her wit in better order.

The children's annual visit to Terence's parents coinciding with the Christmas party had left Laura unusually free and she had prescribed herself the overnight stay with Simon as a restorative, hardly expecting to hear from him again. ‘I'm allegedly phoning about your class on the Nineteenth-Century Novel,' he had said on the phone the following evening, ‘but really it's to say “hurry back”.' Terence, whose infrequent meetings with his own mother made him more than usually impatient, yelled at that moment, ‘Can you get off the phone, I'm expecting someone?' which enabled Laura to say to Simon, quite properly, ‘May I call you back later?' and ‘Remind me of your number.'

Later she did call him and the evening classes she ‘taught' began gently to expand. ‘I hope they're paying you decently for all this god-awful work?' Terence had said, truculent that he had to spend yet another evening alone. ‘Never mind – it'll help pay for the French trip.'

‘I'll have to cut down on this,' Laura had said that evening, lying beneath Simon. Later, coming into the bedroom with a cup of coffee for her before she drove home, Simon said, ‘Why not come and live with me?' and then when she said nothing, ‘Marry me. I'll be fine with Luke. Look, I love your children.'

‘But you haven't met them.' Laura had pointed out. Still, his offer was seductive. Far more than the call to her body, Simon's readiness to take on a handicapped boy reached to something deep inside her.

It was this exchange which, a month or so later, prompted her to send him ‘The Buried Life'. By this time, Simon had taken a university job and had moved to London. She found reasons to visit him there – a conference on George Eliot, a visit to the National Gallery – but their meetings had become harder to arrange and perhaps this too was behind Laura's sending the poem.

‘Loved the poem!' Simon sounded breezy over the phone. A prickle across Laura's skin warned her to drop the subject, but there is a demon inside us which urges towards our own harm.

‘I love it too. What did you like in it?' She was about to add, ‘I couldn't send it to anyone who didn't understand.'

‘I read it aloud to Trish.'

Trish was Simon's flat-mate, brought in to help pay the rent. A pale girl with black-rimmed eyes, she smiled a good deal but on the few occasions when Laura had stayed the night she had caught something baleful in Trish's glance. Sometimes she had been apprehensive lest Trish get hold of Terence's phone number.

‘Oh?'

‘We thought it was a bit long-winded, but then they were, weren't they, those eighteenth-century bods.'

‘Matthew Arnold's nineteenth century.'

‘Of course he is,' said Simon. ‘Anyway, when are you coming next? My body misses yours.'

Laura had never again alluded to ‘The Buried Life'. On her next visit to London she had seen the copy of the poem she had sent, which Simon and Trish had dealt with so comprehensively, lying in the dish which acted as the flat's filing system, along with the gas and electricity bills and the tokens Simon was saving from the petrol station.

That night Simon had asked again if she would come to live with him and she knew she did not want to. But it is hard, when you have established patterns, to change them. In a world of Terence, Simon was more than an escape: and he was ardent, in a way which disarmed her.

It was not until she upped sticks and brought the children to London to be with Simon that she saw a flicker in that ardour.

Simon was as good as his word – he behaved with overt kindness towards Luke, and Luke, unused to receiving the love of more than one parent, prospered. To Laura's surprise it was Nellie who was the fly in the ointment of their new life. For, gradually she became aware, the bitter truth was that Nellie and Simon did not get on.

Used to the customary daily friction between Terence and Luke, Laura was lulled at first into a false sense of the success of her enterprise when she saw the way Simon responded to her son. ‘Come on, tiger,' he had said, when Luke had asked if he could ‘wee' the first time they all went out together to the pictures. And he had taken Luke's hand and led him to the Gents as if the boy were his own.

Laura, in the darkness of the cinema, wept tears of gratitude. But Nellie, precocious, independent Nellie, had insisted on sitting on her lap. ‘Hey, what's all this?' Laura asked. ‘Nellephants don't generally sit on laps – not that I'm complaining, mind,' she added, feeling her daughter's slight frame tense. ‘It's well known it's a privilege to have a Nellephant sit on one.'

‘She's got an Oedipus complex,' said Simon when two nights running they had woken to find Nellie in bed with them.

Nellie, who had been taken by Laura to all kinds of theatrical events, said scornfully, ‘No, I haven't – that's when a man wants to sleep with his mother. I'm not a man.'

‘Perhaps you are!' Simon had replied. ‘Perhaps you are going to grow a little penis and turn into a man.'

Laura had been horrified at this and Nellie had gone first red and then white and had vanished from the room.

‘Simon, that was horrible.'

‘It was a joke?'

‘She's ten, Simon, an age where it's perfectly normal to get into your parents' bed. You might even take it as a compliment.'

But it wasn't a compliment and Laura knew she was trying to put a false complexion on things.

Luke settled down in a local school but Nellie, formerly top of her class, fell behind. She complained of stomach aches, took days off from school and became picky about her food, until Laura began to wonder if she should take her to the doctor.

‘Do you think she's anorexic?' asked Simon one evening. Nellie had retreated to her room again and Simon was watching television with Luke on his knee. He sounded almost pleased with the idea.

‘Don't!' Laura was at her wits' end. Her daughter's strong young body had become thin and bowed, like the body of a little old woman, and her eyes had begun to gleam unnervingly in her narrowing face. She looks like a trapped vole or a hedgehog, Laura thought, compunction twisting her heart.

By the time he was eleven, Luke was able to play the trumpet, football and the lead in
Richard III
, which last he did with alacrity, leaping and grinning with an energetic malevolence which belied the sweetness of his nature. Laura, now forty, sat with Simon in the school hall and felt that perhaps she had been right to leave Terence all those years ago. Terence, too, it must be said was apparently happier. He had married a former friend of Laura's who had demonstrated her friendship by working up a steady antagonism towards her husband's former wife. Laura and Simon had shaken down together; it was true that the ardour which had so forcefully won her had abated, and over the years Simon had tended to arrive home later and later from work. Laura did not enquire too deeply into the possible reasons for this. It was enough for her that they were friends, of a kind, and rubbed along. And it must be owned that Simon had remained very attached to Luke. But Luke was not her only child.

Nellie, or Nell, as she was now known, bore no relation to the small eager girl who had once helped rear and care for Luke. At twelve she had started to smoke, covertly at first, later she was more brazen about it. Her room, once clinical in its neatness, became first untidy, then chaotic and finally, Laura in despair had to own, disgusting.

‘Darling, how can you?' she had asked in genuine bewilderment when she had found a used tampon on her daughter's floor. And Nell had just smiled her barren little smile and shrugged and gone off with ‘friends' who looked to Laura like the inmates of a detention centre.

By unspoken agreement, Laura and Simon ceased to discuss Nell. Laura, who by now held a university post, acquired the habit of racing home before Simon to tidy Nell's bedroom. Nell had placed an embargo on anyone entering her bedroom, but Laura could not bring herself to ignore the astonishing mess in which her once fastidious daughter now chose to live. Cigarette ends, used tissues, as well as other items more personal, lay littered about the room. In fact, it was through her surreptitious cleaning of Nell's room that Laura learned her daughter was no longer a virgin. She flushed the used condom down the lavatory, went downstairs and made herself a cup of coffee and smoked one of the cigarettes she had found lying in the middle of the floor.

She had not smoked for seventeen years. She found she was missing Terence.

It took a while for Laura to cotton on to the fact that Nell was taking drugs. She asked advice of a friend who had trained as a counsellor, who suggested she leave her purse lying around. ‘It's a sure-fire test,' Judy had said. ‘Don't leave too much in it. But if she's been honest in the past …'

‘Of course she has!' Laura could hardly bear that she was having this conversation about her daughter. She recalled Nell at five, slipping her pocket-money into her mother's purse – not the other way round. Later, when asked why she had done this, Nellie had replied, ‘To buy you nice things, ‘course.'