Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (16 page)

It was surprising that the young man had decided to go swimming in her pond, in the nude, on this bright Sunday afternoon in June, but Isabel was broad-minded when it suited her. She was a spinster (a word she detested for its connotations of age) and almost a virgin (a word she rather liked for its undertones of youth) having only once yielded to a man who had loved her passionately for at least several minutes following a New Year’s Eve party. That was a long time ago, twenty years, but remained a treasured souvenir from that other country of which L.P. Hartley spoke.

Despite her best efforts to wake him the youth remained dozing in the late afternoon sun. Isabel remained with him on the lawn, dressed in her old-fashioned shirt-waister and broad-brimmed hat. She tried studying the wide pond’s yellow flags, waving in the breeze, then her quite grand 16th Century cottage at the end of the sweeping lawns, restored to a former ambiguity now that the beams had been stripped of black paint, but each time her eyes were drawn back to the wonderful creature whose drying arm rested on her lap.

Finally he woke, and smiled at her, stretching his arms and legs, revealing webs of skin between his fingers and toes. She rather liked this imperfection, which only reached as far as the lower finger joints in any case. It made him more human to her, less of a sun god. His eyes, she noted, were of the deepest green, the colour of a temperate ocean. He reached out to touch her cheek and she drew back.

‘Why, whatever is the matter?’ he asked her. ‘Do you not want me now that you see me?’

‘Want you?’ she asked, faintly. ‘For what?’

‘Why, for your lover, your man, your husband.’

She looked around her then, suspecting a joke. Some of her friends were perhaps teasing her? Or some television programme was happily making a fool out of an innocent woman in her own garden?

‘Where are you from?’ she asked, since she could think of nothing else to say. ‘Are you visiting the village?’

‘From there,’ he waved a hand generally over the garden, ‘and I want to live with you always.’

‘Do you have a name?’ she said, smiling at this game.

‘No, but you can give me one.’

‘We’ll think of one later. In the meantime, why not come up to the house for tea?’

And so they went into the cottage. She found for him a pair of
shorts which
Special-Friend Frank had left there on one of his occasional visits, and a T-shirt with SAVE THE TIGERS on the front. Then she made them Lapsang Suchong tea, with scones, blackcurrant jam and cream. Sometime before the flush of twilight had left the face of the sky, she found herself in bed with him.

His aromatic hair smelt of hay left baking in the sun as he gently entered her. Gradually he eased his hard pole into the crevice in the soft mossy bank between her thighs. She kissed his shoulders, licked his textured skin, which tasted faintly muddy. Later he used his own tongue, that long beautiful tongue, in a variety of wonderful
ways which
had her biting the pillow to prevent herself from screaming. Never had Isabel experienced such physical joy and she cared not whether it lasted an afternoon or an eternity.

He remained at the house, seemingly happy just to be in her company. If they ever did go out, it was in her little green car, which she taught him to drive. They would simply cruise the byways of the countryside, staying clear of towns, with him perched happily behind the wheel. She sat in the back, navigating for him, giving him instructions. He became, as well as her lover, her most reliable chauffeur.

Special-Friend Frank, who had never shown the slightest sexual interest in Isabel, suddenly after many years of sporadic stays, began brushing against her in the greenhouse, and accidentally pressing his elbow against one of her breasts while he read ‘Lochinvar’ to her. True to the contrary nature of men, now that someone else wanted her, Frank wanted her too. She might have lived to be a hundred and Special-Friend Frank would still have been visiting the cottage only to prune her plum trees and do her accounts.

‘Marry me?’ Frank murmured one day. ‘I’m an accountant—I earn lots of money.’

‘No,’ she replied, flatly.

‘Why?’ he asked, angrily.
‘Because of him?
Because of that
boy
?
Who is he anyway? Where did he come from? He doesn’t even have a name. I’ve been coming here for years, helping you with your tax returns, sorting out your plumbing, digging over the difficult bits of your garden. He’s done nothing for you.’

‘I don’t care,’ she said, lifting her chin defiantly. ‘He’s lovely.
He’s loving
. He’s
love
. He spends too long in the bathroom, but nobody’s perfect. I want
him
.’

Thus Isabel married the golden youth, who smiled all the way through the ceremony. The wedding took place at the little 11th Century minster, built by the Viking King Knut, on the hill above the river. The choir and altar boys wore scarlet cassocks, because it was a church connected with royalty. When it came to the part where the youth needed a name, he turned to Isabel.

‘I shall take
your
name and be known as Fairfax!’

‘And the given name?’ asked the vicar with a little cough.

‘Prince,’ said the youth without hesitation. ‘Prince Fairfax.’

‘No, that won’t do at all,’ Isabel chided, this offending her sense of taste. ‘You’re not a pop
star,
after all, you will be my husband. Some simple name would be best—John—John Fairfax.’

And so they were wed in the season of the daffodils. Isabel was viciously happy, snatching at every precious moment with her young sun prince and swallowing it whole. She had one, two, three children, just like that—two boys and a girl—and they were all very pretty babies. They sat in a row in the back of the car, while their father drove around the country lanes and their mother murmured instructions.

They lived, self-contained and blissfully happy, in the Tudor cottage. She would read to him poems under the lamplight and he would sit enwrapped by her low voice spilling out the words, staring up at the standard lamp. When she asked him why he was always looking at the lamp he told her that to him it was a kind of totem whose deistic duty it was to miraculously attract creatures like damselflies, or dragonflies, or even multi-hued moths.

‘Why, what a lovely thought, dear,’ she said. ‘But would you like to see such creatures flying in your room?’

‘Of course, they are the closest
thing
we have to pretty newts,’ he replied, enigmatically, ‘swimming around one’s head in the deepest part of the pond.’

It was in their fifth year that Isabel first discovered things were going wrong. She entered the
dining-room
of the cottage one day to find John with his face close to the bulls-eye window panes. She watched, fascinated, as he studied a fly while it buzzed, infuriated, in the corners of the window, wondering why there was this invisible wall in front of it. Then to her horror out shot John’s tongue and the insect was gone, down his throat. Afterwards he straightened and made a strange sound not unlike a burp.

‘John?’ she said, faintly. ‘Whatever are you doing?’

‘What?’ he spun round, looking
guilty.
‘Why nothing, Isabel.
Nothing at all.
I was simply—peering through the glass, trying to see out into the garden.’

‘You ate that bluebottle!’

‘No, no, you’re mistaken, Isabel. Why should I do a thing like that?’

He sounded so sincere that she thought that perhaps she had been mistaken in what she had seen, that perhaps she had perceived
something which
had not actually taken place. It was in her nature to blame herself before others, for any error of judgement or observation. She stopped taking the ginseng tea, believing it responsible.

Yet, three weeks later, as they were walking around the garden after a shower of rain and she was chatting about how lovely the lilacs smelled, John absently reached out and picked a small snail from the leaf of a shrub. He popped it in his mouth, crunched and swallowed it, still lost in some reverie. She said nothing to him this time, but later while sitting in the
summer house
on her own, she began to recall the several strange habits of her husband.

There were those times when she had found him squatting in the corner of the room, apparently asleep. There was his obsession with cold baths. There was the eerie delight he took in drawing water lilies for their children, as if they were some kind of icon for future happiness. There was his dread of herons, his phobia of grass snakes, his intense dislike of French restaurants. Finally, there were those condemning webbed toes and fingers.

It was true he still liked to drive the car, but she was sure that came from some other hidden lake of his personality, some other well of his psyche.

Afraid, but wanting to know the truth, she found an encyclopaedia and read all it had to say about frogs. Everything was there, even the
snails
, which formed a part of the common frog’s diet. With increasing anxiety she decided to give John one last test. In order to put him off his guard one evening, she read him Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, knowing he loved the lines:

‘Annihilating all that’s made

‘To a green thought in a green shade.’

When he was safely locked in that dream world into which he slipped at times, she placed before him a dish of live garden slugs and earthworms. He ate them absently with apparent relish, not pausing to consider what kind of fare she had given him, and whether it was seemly for a youth to gobble such creatures. She knew then that he was from the pond, beside which she had first found him, damp and weed-strewn.

‘Never mind,’ Isabel told herself. ‘He’s my husband now and we can still live a good life.’

Nevertheless she read a version of
The Frog Prince
from a red book of Grimms’ tales published by Grosset & Dunlap of New York, one of a boxed set of two volumes, the other a green book of Andersen’s stories.

It told how the frog changed into a prince not with a kiss, but when the princess threw the frog violently against her bedroom wall, and how the faithful servant Henry had his heart bound with three iron bands to stop it breaking when his master had become an amphibian, and how those bands snapped as his heart swelled with joy when the princess married the handsome returned prince.

Isabel looked up from her reading under the pale light of the lamp.

Not a kiss then, as the romantics would have it, but a sudden sharp shock! What if the frog had been out of the pond that day, hopping by Isabel’s sleeping form, when she suddenly thrashed in her dreams, struck out and hit the passing frog a blow, causing it to change into John?

But where would a frog have come from, in the first place, which had a human form locked inside it?

Isabel was no slouch when it came to puzzles.
She had intelligence
,
she had the patience
. Slowly she unravelled the mystery to her own satisfaction.

What if the frog
who
turned into the prince, all those centuries ago, had been with another frog before his transfiguration? What if the female he had held in amplexus in the pond in the palace
garden,
had spawned her three-thousand eggs and he had fertilised them all? There would be, even after his elevation to kingship, thousands of frogs with the genetic code of a human being locked in their DNA, awaiting a sudden sharp shock to release it.

And those frogs would mate with other frogs, the females spawning the males fertilising, thus over the centuries laying millions of little hopping, swimming time bombs ready to burst into mortal form at any moment.

It was an amazing and breathtaking thought that all you had to do was go down to the pond in the garden, pick up a few dozen frogs, and throw them at the nearest hard surface to produce a youth or maiden. It would be like looking for pearls in oysters. Loneliness would become obsolete, for each Jack would find a Jill, and every Sheila a Bruce. Even better, collect a jar of tadpoles, put them in the blender and hand out children to childless couples, to be loved and cherished and grow into beautiful people.