Greenwitch (5 page)

Mrs Penhallow: now there was a mystery. Jane thought again of the moment that afternoon when she had been alone in the living-room, flipping through a magazine, waiting for Simon. She had heard a nervous clearing of the throat, and there in the kitchen doorway Mrs Penhallow was standing, round and rosy and unusually fidgetty.

“Ef you fancy comin' to the makin' tonight, m'dear, you'm welcome,” she said abruptly.

Jane blinked at her. “The making?”

“The makin' of the Greenwitch.” The lilt of Mrs Penhallow's Cornish accent seemed more marked than usual. “It do take all the night, 'tes a long business, and no outsiders allowed near, generally. But if you feel you'd like . . . you being the only female close to the Perfessor, and all . . .” She waved a hand as if to catch words. “The women did agree it's all right, and I'd be happy to take 'ee.”

“Thank you very much,” said Jane, puzzled but pleased. “Er . . . can Mrs Stanton come too?”

“No,” Mrs Penhallow said sharply. She added more gently, as Jane's eyebrows went up, “She'm a furriner, you see. Tisn't fitting.”

Up on the headland, gazing at the fire, Jane remembered the
flat finality of the words. She had accepted the pronouncement and, without even trying to explain the situation to Fran Stanton, had come out after supper to the headland with Mrs Penhallow.

Yet still she had been given no idea of what was to happen. Nobody had told her what the thing called the Greenwitch would be like, or how it would be made, or what would happen to it. She knew only that the business would occupy the whole night, and end when the fishermen came home. Jane shivered again. Night was falling, and she was not over-fond of the nights of Cornwall; they held too much of the unknown.

Black shadows ran over the rocks around her, dancing and disappearing as the flames leapt. Instinctively seeking company, Jane moved forward into the circle of bright light around the bonfire; yet this too was unnerving, for now the other figures moved to and fro at the edge of the darkness, out of sight, and she felt suddenly vulnerable. She hesitated, frightened by the tension in the air.

“Come, m'dear,” said Mrs Penhallow's soft voice, beside her. “Come by here.” There was a hint of urgency in her tone. Hastily she took Jane by the arm and led her aside. “Time for the makin',” she said. “You want to keep out of the way, if you can.”

Then she was gone again, leaving Jane alone near a group of women busying themselves with something not yet visible. Jane found a rock and sat down, warmed by the fire; she watched. Scores of women were there, of all ages: the younger ones in jeans and sweaters, the rest in sturdy dark skirts, long as overcoats, and high heavy boots. Jane could see a big pile of stones, each the size of a man's head, and a far higher pile of green branches—hawthorn, she thought—too leafy to be intended for the fire. But she did not understand the purpose of either of these.

Then one tall woman moved out before the rest, and held
one arm high in the air. She called out something Jane could not understand, and at once the women set to working, in a curiously ordered way in small groups. Some would take up a branch, strip it of leaves and twigs, and test it for flexibility; others then would take the branch, and in some swift practised way weave it together with others into what began very slowly to emerge as a kind of frame.

After a while the frame began to show signs of becoming a great cylinder. The cleaning and bending and tying went on for a long time. Jane shifted restlessly. The leaves on some of the branches seemed to be of a different shape from the hawthorn. She was not close enough to see what they might be, and she did not intend to move. She felt she would only be safe here, half-invisible on her rock, unnoticed, watching from a little way off.

At her side suddenly she found the tall woman who had seemed the others' leader. Bright eyes looked down at her out of a thin face, framed by a scarf tied under the chin. “Jane Drew, it is,” the woman said, with a Cornish accent that sounded oddly hard. “One of those who found the grail.”

Jane jumped. The thought of the grail was never fully out of her mind, but she had not linked it with this strange ceremony here. The woman, however, did not mention it again.

“Watch for the Greenwitch,” she said conversationally. It was like a greeting.

The sky was almost black now, with only a faint rim of the glow of daylight. The lights of the two bonfires burned brightly on the headlands. Jane said hastily, clutching at this companionship against the lonely dark, “What are they doing with those branches?”

“Hazel for the framework,” the woman said. “Rowan for the head. Then the body is of hawthorn boughs, and hawthorn blossoms. With the stones within, for the sinking. And those
who are crossed, or barren, or who would make any wish, must touch the Greenwitch then before she be put to cliff.”

“Oh;' Jane said.

“Watch for the Greenwitch,” said the woman pleasantly again, and moved away. Over her shoulder she said, “You may make a wish too, if you like. I will call you, at the right time.”

Jane was left wondering and nervous. The women were busier now, working steadily, singing in a strange kind of wordless humming; the cylinder shape grew more distinct, closer-woven, and they carried the stones and put them inside. The head began to take shape: a huge head, long, squarish, without features. When the framework was done, they began weaving into it green branches starred with white blossoms. Jane could smell the heavy sweetness of the hawthorn. Somehow it reminded her of the sea.

*   *   *

Hours went by. Sometimes Jane dozed, curled beside her rock; whenever she woke, the framework seemed to look exactly as it had before. The work of weaving seemed endless. Mrs Penhallow came twice with hot tea from a flask. She said anxiously, “Now if you do feel you've had enough, m'dear, you just say. Easy to take you along home.”

“No,” Jane said, staring at the great leafy image with its court of steady workers. She did not like the Greenwitch; it frightened her. There was something menacing in its broad squat shape. Yet it was hypnotic too; she could scarcely take her eyes off it.
It.
She had always thought of witches as being female, but she could feel no
she
quality in the Greenwitch. It was unclassifiable, like a rock or a tree.

The bonfire still burned, fed carefully with wood, its warmth was very welcome in the chill night. Jane moved away to stretch
her stiff legs, and saw inland a faint greyness beginning to lighten the sky. Morning would be coming soon. A misty morning: fine drops of moisture were flicking at her face already. Against the lightening sky she could see Trewissick's standing stones, five of them, ancient skyward-pointing fingers halfway along Kemare Head. She thought: that's what Greenwitch is like. It reminds me of the standing stones.

When she turned back again towards the sea, the Greenwitch was finished. The women had drawn away from the great figure; they sat by the fire, eating sandwiches, and laughing, and drinking tea. As Jane looked at the huge image that they had made, out of leaves and branches, she could not understand their lightness. For she knew suddenly, out there in the cold dawn, that this silent image somehow held within it more power than she had ever sensed before in any creature or thing. Thunder and storms and earthquakes were there, and all the force of the earth and sea. It was outside Time, boundless, ageless, beyond any line drawn between good and evil. Jane stared at it, horrified, and from its sightless head the Greenwitch stared back. It would not move, or seem to come alive, she knew that. Her horror came not from fear, but from the awareness she suddenly felt from the image of an appalling, endless loneliness. Great power was held only in great isolation. Looking at the Greenwitch, she felt a terrible awe, and a kind of pity as well.

But the awe, from her amazement at so inconceivable a force, was stronger than anything else.

“You feel it, then.” The leader of the women was beside her again; the hard, flat words were not a question. “A few women do. Or girls. Very few. None of those there, not one.” She gestured contemptuously at the cheerful group beyond. “But one who has held the grail in her hands may feel many things. . . .Come. Make your wish.”

“Oh no.” Jane shrank back instinctively.

In the same moment a cluster of four young women broke away from the crowd and ran to the broad, shadowy leaf-image. They were shaking with giggles, calling to one another; one, larger and noisier than the rest, rushed up and clasped the hawthorn sides that stretched far above her head.

“Send us all rich husbands, Greenwitch, pray thi'!” she shouted.

“Or else send her young Jim Tregoney!” bellowed another. Shrieking with laughter, they all ran back to the group.

“See there!” said the woman. “No harm comes to the foolish, which is most of them. And therefore none to those with understanding. Will you come?”

She walked over to the big silent figure, laid a hand on it, and said something that Jane could not hear.

Nervously Jane followed. As she came close to the Greenwitch she felt again the unimaginable force it seemed to represent, but again the great loneliness too. Melancholy seemed to hover about it like a mist. She put out her hand to grasp a hawthorn bough, and paused. “Oh dear,” she said impulsively, “I wish you could be happy.”

She thought, as she said it: how babyish, when you could have wished for anything, even getting the grail back . . . even if it's all a lot of rubbish, you could at least have tried. . . . But the hard-eyed Cornishwoman was looking at her with an odd surprised kind of approval.

“A perilous wish!” she said. “For where one may be made happy by harmless things, another may find happiness only in hurting. But good may come of it.”

Jane could think of nothing to say. She felt suddenly extremely silly.

Then she thought she heard a muffled throbbing sound out at sea; she swung round. The woman too was looking outward,
at a grey streak of horizon where none had been before. Out on the dark sea, lights were flickering, white and red and green. The first fishermen were coming home.

Afterwards, Jane remembered little of that long waiting time. The air was cold. Slowly, slowly, the fishing-boats came closer, over the stone-grey sea glimmering in the cold dawn. And then, when at last they neared the wharf, the village seemed to splutter into life. Lights and voices woke on the jetties; engines coughed; the air was filled with shouting and laughing and a great bustle of unloading; and over all of it the gulls wheeled and screamed, early-woken for thievery, eddying in a great white cloud round the boats to dive for discarded fish. Afterwards, Jane found herself remembering the gulls most of all.

Up from the harbour, when the unloading was done, and lorries gone to market and boxes gone into the little canning factory—up from the harbour came a procession of the fishermen. There were others too, factory men and mechanics and shopkeepers and farmers, all the men of Trewissick, but the dark-jerseyed fishermen, shadow-eyed, bristle-chinned, weary, smelling of fish, led the long crowd. They came along the headland, calling cheerfully to the women; no meeting could have been less romantic, Jane thought, up there in the sleepless cold under the dead grey light of the dawn, and yet there was a great light-heartedness among them all. The bonfire still burned, a last stock of wood newly blazing; the men gathered round it, rubbing their hands, in a tumult of deep voices that sounded harsh in Jane's ears after the lighter chattering of the women all night.

High and low in the sky the gulls drifted, uncertain, hopeful. Amongst all the bustle stood the Greenwitch, vast and silent, a little diminished by light and noise but still brooding, ominous. Despite all the raucous exchanges tossed between the men and women there was a curious respectfulness towards
the strange leafy image; a clear reluctance to make any fun of the Greenwitch. Jane found that for some reason this left her feeling relieved.

She caught sight of Merriman's tall figure at the edge of the crowd of Cornishmen, but made no attempt to reach him. This was a time simply to wait and see what might happen next. The men seemed to be gathering in one group, the women moving away. All at once Mrs Penhallow was at Jane's side again.

“Come, let me show 'ee where to go, m'dear. Now, as the sun comes up, the men do put the Greenwitch to cliff.” She smiled at Jane, half earnest, half offering a self-conscious apology. “For luck, you see, and for good fishing and a good harvest. So they say. . . . But we must keep our distance, to give them a clear run.” She beckoned, and Jane followed her away from the Greenwitch to the side of the headland. She had only half an idea what this was all about.

The men began to crowd round the Greenwitch. Some touched it ostentatiously, laughing, calling aloud a wish. For the first time, in the growing daylight, Jane noticed that the square, leaf-woven figure had been built on a kind of platform, like a huge tray made of boards, and that this platform had a heavy wheel at each corner, carefully wedged with big stones. Calling and whooping, the men pulled the stones from the wheels, and Jane saw the figure sway as the platform moved free. Greenwitch was perhaps half again as high as a man, but very broad for its height, with its huge square head almost as wide as its body. It did not look like a copy of a human being. It looked, Jane thought, like a single representative of a fearful unknown species, from another planet, or from some unthinkably distant part of our own past.

“Heave, boys!” a voice called. The men had attached ropes to all four sides of the platform; they milled round, holding,
steadying, gently pulling the swaying image towards the end of the headland. Greenwitch lumbered forward. Jane could smell the heavy scent of the hawthorn. The blossoms seemed brighter, the green boughs of Greenwitch's sides almost luminous; she realised that inland, over the moors beyond Trewissick, the sun was coming up. Yellow light blazed out over them; a cheer rose from the crowd, and the platform with the green figure moved almost to the clutter of rocks at the edge of the cliff.