The Girl Green as Elderflower (2 page)

For the reader, the gravestone detail is a portal, a miraculous entry into a different kind of time; it’s the first of many moments in the novel when time seems to have collapsed into itself, and the past comes alive in the present. The framing story of Clare and his convalescence is set within a precise period, the first six months of 1961: although Stow doesn’t spell this out as such, the time of year is identified in the novel’s first paragraph—‘the new year’s astonishing first white light’—and the specific year in a fragment of conversation between two members of the family:

As well as Alicia and her three children, Clare’s intermittent companions in Swainstead include his old school friend Matt Perry and a Canadian former priest called Jacques Maunoir. Clare uses his family and these two men as models for the characters in the mediæval tales he is rewriting, with the result that the twelfth and twentieth centuries merge in a seamless and often very funny way. The first of these stories is about an invisible Latin-speaking sprite called Malkin, who appears in Ralph of Coggeshall’s original chronicles. In Clare’s version, Malkin reveals herself in the middle of a game of Monopoly being played ‘in the time of King Richard’ by the children of the manor, who are immediately recognisable as Clare’s young cousins Mark, Lucy and Mikey. Malkin intervenes by bringing the Monopoly game alive: ‘Then a tiny racing-car of lead, which was Mikey’s counter, began to tear about the London square which had been created. It changed gear rapidly, passed each corner with screeching brakes, and at last crashed into a hotel in Mayfair.’

The ‘wild man caught in the sea’, from the second story, has some of the attributes of Clare’s friend Matt, who is clever, reckless and a little feral. The wild man, apparently a merman ‘in the times of King Henry the Second’, finds himself in the presence of a transistor radio: he ‘was enchanted, was rapt. The disc-jockey’s voice made him grin with delight. A look sentimental almost to tears was on his face as he listened to the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest.’ In the final mediæval tale, ‘Concerning a Boy and Girl Emerging From the Earth’, Jacques Maunoir appears in his priestly guise under his own name, in a scene of great beauty.

The rewriting of these tales seems to be Clare’s way of ordering and containing the otherwise chaotic and frightening collapses of time, place and language that occur in his fever-dreams and trance-like states. In what is obviously a lingering after-effect of his illness, he can’t always control the voices he hears or the languages they speak in. Mediæval Latin and the contemporary Kiriwina language of the Trobriand Islands, Ouija-board messages and twelfth-century histories all jostle for space in his consciousness in a way that’s both exhilarating and disturbing. By far the most sinister are the voices Clare describes to doctors during his illness: ‘“In the hospital they asked whether I heard voices. I didn’t, not imaginary ones, but I did imagine—conspiracies.” He stuttered on the next word. “Calumnies. People talking too fast and too low for me to understand.”’

The mixing-up of place and time that is a recurrent feature of this novel suggests that while such confusions in human experience might be contained and endured, no time and no place can ever be a true home. There’s evidence for this belief in Stow’s own life and his other work, and it is borne out again by the beautiful scene at the end of the third mediæval tale, in which Christian imagery and nature mysticism sit peacefully side by side when the Green Girl lies dying and the priest is summoned to her bedside. ‘Our home is not here,’ he says to her,

The Girl Green as Elderflower

To C. in Suffolk

Even such midnight years

must ebb; bequeathing this:

a dim low English room,

one window on the fields.

Cloddish ancestral ghosts

plod in a drowning mist.

Black coral elms play host

to hosts of shrill black fish.

My mare turns back her ears

and hears the land she leaves

as grievous music.

‘OUTRIDER’ (1960)

Quite how to go about doing it Clare could still not see, but the impression was strong with him that the doing would be important, might even be the rebeginning of his health. That idea of health was all but novel to him, he had sunk so deep, and it presented itself with an urgent attractiveness in the new year’s astonishing first white light.

Through a window to his right the old unpruned apple tree which had gathered wreaths of snow in its mossy twigs was being shocked free of them by the spurts of little dun birds. The two rising fields behind, one pasture and one plough, were today unbroken by any tussock or ridge of conker-coloured earth, and lay so uniformly white and unshadowed that it seemed that they must be uniformly level. In the distance, across the river, a line of bare poplars on a ridge was caught in an odd spotlight of sun, and stood out against the heavy sky with an unEnglish sharpness, shining through air from which all moisture had frozen and fallen.

The other window was directly before him as he lay in bed, and indeed he had aligned the bed, in the summer, so that by moonlight he could look down the clearing of the abandoned fishponds, with their nettle-choked sluices, to the
Sylphides
-like wood which closed the view. When he had come to the cottage it had seemed that his stay would not be long, and for furniture in that room he had brought only a bed, a table, a lamp and a painting which Alicia had done. It hung on the pale yellow wall like a third window, giving a view of what would have been seen from such a window in August, when chickens went scratching about the barley-stubble. In the snow-light so much gold and green was almost garish. His eye strayed from that down the nettle-borne humps of snow to the black and white wood, in which an occasional holm oak, holly or clump of tree-ivy was only slightly green in its darkness.

A morning-after thirst was on him, and he slid out a hand for water. The flexible plastic beaker was rigid. What was in it was ice. He found himself laughing at this exotic turn, and sitting up in bed crushed the beaker between his hands until he had freed some water from its centre.

His pyjama jacket was damp. It had been another fever-night. In the freezing room the jacket seemed likely to turn to ice on his back, and he tore it off and buried himself again in the warmed sheets.

On the low table beside him a fat book was propped against a squatter one, a dictionary. His eye drifted over words he had been reading before going to sleep, and began pleasantly to unfocus. Rolling over, he tried deliberately to bring back the dream which must have had to do, somehow, with that page: the fever-dream. In his room full of icy light, its open windows (for he had grown unused to white men’s houses) commanding a leafless landscape, he tried to recreate the face which had appeared to him: a face made of summer leaves, not sinister but pitilessly amused. When he had woken, it had been with the Green Man’s voice in his ears, actually within the bones of the ear, supernaturally loud. Though he could not recapture the voice, he felt again his vague affright, for it was internal as sound never was. And it had spoken to him, he thought he now remembered, in that language in which he so often dreamed, and would not hear spoken again. But the sense of the speech eluded him. Only the tone reverberated, amused beyond the reach of pity.

The dawn of a new year. He caught himself groaning: ‘
Avaka bavagi baesa?
’ and mentally, with embarrassment, translated. It half-woke him, that slip. It was a question, in English, of plans for the future, of picking up pieces which had been broken desperately small.

When he had almost descended into the world where the voice belonged a bell rang in the bowels of the earth. Downstairs the telephone was clamouring through closed doors, and the unaccustomed urgency of the noise shocked him out of his bed and had him halfway down the breakneck stairs before the cold fastened about his bare torso. At the foot of the stairs he grabbed a donkey-jacket, and was struggling into it as he burst into the room which served him as a study. He seized the clangorous telephone.

It said nothing. After a moment, still shivering and writhing in the jacket, he ventured: ‘Clare.’

A child’s voice said: ‘Is that you?’

‘Is that who?’ Clare asked. ‘This is Sandringham 123, Duke of Edinburgh speaking. She can’t come to the phone, I’m afraid, she’s making a snowman at the moment.’

Suddenly he saw a snowman with a face of frost-ferns, ruthlessly entertained.

‘I know it’s you, Crispin,’ the child said.

‘I knew it was you, Mikey,’ said Clare. ‘Does your mother want to speak to me?’

There was a pause, then Mikey said: ‘Well, she says yes. But it’s Fred really. He’s the one who wants to talk to you.’

‘And who is Fred?’ Clare inquired.

‘The one on the ouija board,’ Mikey said. ‘You know: Fred.’

‘Oh, him,’ Clare said. ‘People as boring as Fred shouldn’t be allowed on the ouija board. This is a funny time of day for that, anyway.’

‘It was last night really,’ Mikey explained, ‘but we did it again this morning, and he said the same. We asked him if there was someone he wanted to talk to, and he wrote C-R-I-S, both times. We rang you last night to ask you to come and talk to him, but you were out getting sloshed.’

‘Fred knew that?’ Clare marvelled.

‘No, Marco said. He saw you in the White Hart. He’s sick today.’

There was some faint agitation on the line, then a girl’s voice, older than the boy’s, said: ‘Crispin?’

‘Yes, Lucy.’

‘He wanted to be the one to ring you up, but he really doesn’t understand. Stop it, Mikey. It’s different, because of Amabel.’

‘That fairy-child,’ Clare said. ‘I can believe it’s different. I suppose she wouldn’t be faking it?’

From the silence at the other end he guessed that Amabel was in the room, and answered himself: ‘No, she’s too young.’

‘It’s not that silly old soldier any more,’ Lucy said. ‘I don’t know who it is, but it writes ever so fast for Amabel. Even with Marco she’s got some sentences, and Marco’s thick that way.’

‘And your mother?’ Clare asked.

‘She won’t touch it, not with Amabel. I think she’s changing her mind about it.’

‘Aha,’ he said. A saying of Alicia Clare’s was: Things probably
are
what they seem. Finding her daughter’s friends using a ouija board as a toy, she was pleased to think that they had got its measure. Now she was being tested by uncanny, elfin Amabel.

‘Do come,’ Lucy said. ‘Amabel’s father is fetching her after supper. Mummy says come to tea.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Clare. ‘Thank her. Or the ouija board. Is something wrong with Mikey?’

Mikey’s sister puffed a sigh and muttered daringly: ‘
Bloody
child.’

‘I see,’ Clare said. ‘Or no doubt shall.’ Oddly, the exercise of freezing to death was starting rivulets of ice water from his armpits. ‘Lucy, I’ll perish if I don’t light a fire in here. So goodbye to you for now.’

On the hearth stood a brimming bucket of coals; there were logs and kindling. In a minute flamelight was dancing over him. He crouched, waiflike, among his sticks of secondhand furniture, his spirit disciplined by the formalities of a wallpaper chosen, in another age, by a stockman’s wife as suitable for Sundays. In that room both windows were filled with the spun-glass intricacies of a lilac hedge, as pure and chilling, to his eye, as a map of veins and arteries in a textbook. But even that deathly complexity seemed less inimical to man when the coal released its gases and the light began to change colour.

He sat on the mat with his knees drawn up inside the jacket. So Mikey was throwing his pygmy weight around, and one could understand that, poor kid. But another worry for Alicia, a worry with no sure term to it.

But he, for the moment, could only think of the happiness of his body, his fibres unclenching in the warmth. Fire, the ancestral god. And as the kindling spat at him and he stirred, he seemed to glimpse once more the god’s face, the smile unchanging, whether sketched by leaves or by flame.

At the top of the hill he turned, breathing deep and white, and looked back, down the pits of blue shadow which were his footprints, to the smoking cottage at the heart of the curved waste of white and grey. All the light in the landscape was drawn to its red bricks. Modest as it was, it imposed by its colour, seeming to tower. Except for the hedgerows, it was the only sign of man.