‘I need to check the rooms before closing up,’ the lady said to Catherine – ‘would you care to join me?’ They both withdrew.
Chris stepped forward, took Jean’s hand. Her cool palm pressed against his… no rings. He’d found her. He was 25 now, she was 31. She was probably still an English teacher – but not his. He loved her. So far so good – on his side.
But what about hers?
He took a deep breath. ‘I am half agony, half hope.’ She smiled. ‘You’re late,’
she said. ‘But not too late.’
My inspiration: In Jane Austen’s Persuasion I love the idea of finding again a love you thought was lost and wanted to recreate Captain Wentworth’s ‘half agony, half hope’ in a modern context. Captain Wentworth and his impassioned letter to Anne inspired the idea of a male viewpoint in my story. I also thought it would be fun to base the action at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton – albeit not Chawton House itself.
BROKEN WORDS
Suzy Ceulan Hughes
‘So, how are things?’ he said.
She held the lead rope loosely in one hand and scurried the fingers of the other through the pony’s mane. As he lifted a foot to remove the old shoe, the pony leant into her and rested its muzzle against her arm.
‘Life is good,’ she said. ‘Though I’m not sleeping very well.’
At night, in the long hours, she was beset by ghosts and poisonous regrets. Why are they called the small hours, she thought, when they are so very long? To sleep, she had to turn her back to the north, to feel the weight of the mountain behind her, protecting her.
‘Have you tried counting sheep?’ he said.
She gazed across the fields to the ridge of hills on the north side of the Dyfi. In the foreground, the grass dazzled green in the sunlight, polka-dotted white with sheep.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear them. I’ve tried counting stars, but there are too many of them and I soon give up.’
Her mother used to talk about stars. ‘You should count your lucky stars. Wish upon a falling star and your dreams will come true. It’s all in the stars.’ The star sayings went along with others. ‘You’ve made your bed, so you must lie in it. You can’t have your cake and eat it. When your time is up…’ It all made life seem rather hopeless. As though you occasionally had the power to choose and create bad things for yourself, but never anything good.
Frost was lying in shaded pockets and on north-facing slopes. The pony’s feet steamed and its breath hovered in the air. In the village, smoke from the chimneys hung heavily, drifting in curling waves over the rooftops.
‘Perhaps I’ll try counting waves,’ she said. ‘I’ve always loved sleeping on boats, though it’s something I haven’t done for years.’
Her father had had a boat. He had always had boats but, for a while, he had one with a proper cabin and sleeping berths. They would sail out to the islands and moor up for the night off one of the beaches. She had loved to swim in the ink-black sea, to watch the phosphorescence play around her barely visible legs. Her father never swam at night. He said somebody had to stay on board just in case. She had sometimes wondered about that. Just in case of what? At the time, it had never crossed her mind that it might be dangerous. To swim at night, out there.
‘I’m not sure I’d fancy that,’ he said.
He stood at the pony’s left shoulder, his back towards its head, and bent over to lift its left foot and slip it between his legs, so that the back of the pony’s knee rested against the back of his, and its foot was cradled in his hand. The clipped horn fell to the ground like crescent moons.
A dozen seagulls had joined the polka-dot sheep, skimming low, strutting their stuff on the green baize, searching for food. Perhaps there was a storm out at sea. Wasn’t that what they said? That seagulls inland meant bad weather at sea?
Her parents had inhabited polarised worlds. All air and water, she thought. Not a scrap of solid ground between them. Even their languages were not translatable from one to the other. It was a simple question of semantics. Neither of them had any vocabulary for taking responsibility. So, she’d had to find her own piece of solid ground, her own shoes to walk away in.
‘I’ll put new shoes on the front,’ he said. ‘The hind ones can go back on this time.’
The small furnace roared in the back of the van. The red-hot shoes would hiss with seeming fury when they were plunged in water. A cloud of steam would rise and disperse. This much she knew.
She and her parents had stopped speaking. It was for the best. Her new language had words with meanings that simply could not exist in theirs, like love and solid and rock. She had her own clichés now. The man she loved was as solid as a rock. He had once wondered, out loud, who would look after her if something happened to him. “Who would look after you if something happened to me?” he had said. She had supposed she would look after herself.
Again, he drew the pony’s leg between his thighs and placed the shoe. He held the nails between his lips, taking each one as he needed it. They had flat, rectangular heads, and the shaft tapered to a fine point.
‘Do you know the story,’ she said, ‘of the Black Bull of Norroway?’
He hammered a nail into place and glanced up at her, sideways, with two nails still held softly between his lips. He paused before answering her, pinching the nails between the thumb and index finger of his left hand and holding them away from his mouth so he could speak.
‘I don’t know that I do,’ he said. ‘But if you tell me what it’s about, perhaps I’ll recognise it, all the same.’
‘It’s about a young woman who, by her own small error, finds herself abandoned in the Valley of Glass. The floor and walls of the valley are all made of glass, and the more she tries to scramble up the sides, the more she slides back. In the end, she can do nothing but crawl on her hands and knees around the edge of the valley, looking for a way out.
‘Just as she is about to give up, to curl up and wait for death to come to her, she finds a blacksmith’s forge tucked deep into the side of the valley. The blacksmith – he can be young and handsome or old and gnarled, whichever you wish – listens to her story and takes pity on her. He promises to make her a pair of iron shoes to help her climb out of the valley, but first she must work for him for seven years without complaining.
‘And so the young woman – she can be any age you please, really – pumps the bellows and holds the tongs and passes the blacksmith his tools for seven long years without once complaining, though it is hard and heavy work, and the heat from the furnace scalds her skin red and raw.
‘Finally, at the end of the seven years, the blacksmith thanks her for her work and makes her a pair of iron shoes whose soles are set with spikes. But he knows no way of fastening them other than to nail them to her feet, which is what he does.
‘Of course, the young woman is in agony, and every step she takes sends pain shivering through her body. But, as we already know, she is a stalwart soul and she clambers up the smooth side of the Valley of Glass until she reaches its rim and is free. The End.’
‘You mean that after all that she doesn’t even get to marry a prince?’
‘Well, of course she does, but it’s a long story and I’ve told you the interesting bit.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘But I’d like to hear the ending, nonetheless.’
He drew the pony’s leg forwards and upwards, placing its foot on the metal tripod. He clenched the tips of the nails and rasped them smooth and safe. Like a manicurist, he filed the edges of the hoof tight to the shoe, sending slivers of horn falling to the ground.
‘There,’ he said. ‘All done.’
She slipped the head collar from the pony’s head and they sat on the top bar of the gate to watch as the pony went back out into the field. It moved slowly at first, as though getting the feel of its new shoes. Then it dipped and tossed its head – like a ballerina, she thought – before arching its neck and trotting away towards the herd, its steps slow and e
levated and its tail raised like a fine plume behind it.
He turned to her and smiled. ‘So,’ he said, ‘she marries the prince in the end. But how did she come to be in the Valley of Glass? What was her own small error? And who is the Black Bull of Norroway?’
She stared at him. ‘So many questions,’ she said. ‘And I am not Scheherazade.’
He jumped down from the gate. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just—’
She watched him as he wiped his hands against his leather chaps and gathered his tools, ready for the next pony. He was a very kind young man, she thought. Perhaps there was something about him that reminded her. Perhaps that was why she had started to tell him the story. She had lied about the prince. And the beginning of the story had never been told.
In the beginning, she had felt as though she had been saved from herself, though she had not understood quite what she meant by that, at the time. He had been tall and strong and big of bone and heart. She had felt safe. She had imagined she might be looked after for the first time. For the first time, she had imagined she might be looked after. But he had gone away and he had not come back, though she had waited and waited and waited.
‘The girl and the bull,’ she said, ‘are travelling together. At first, she is uncertain of him and has no idea of their destination. But he carries her gently and safely, and she finds that she can lean against his great, black shoulders without fear.
‘They have been travelling some time together in this way, in quiet companionship, when they come to a dark valley overhung with brooding cliffs. This is the Valley of Glass and the Black Bull of Norroway must fight its guardian if they are to pass through safely.
‘“Sit on this rock,” the bull tells her. “If the sky turns blue and the sun begins to shine, you’ll know the battle is won. But should everything turn red, you’ll know I’ve lost. Above all, don’t move. If you so much as wriggle your toes, I’ll never be able to find you again.”
‘So the girl sits on the rock and waits. And when the sky turns blue and the sun begins to shine, bathing the valley around her in blue-gold light, she smiles. She watches as the bull comes ambling back towards her, his broad shoulders flecked with blood. But he cannot see her. She calls to him, but he does not hear. And he never sees or speaks to her again, although she sees and speaks to him all the time.’
There was a long silence between them. The ponies had settled to grazing beneath the line of oak trees that ran across the centre of the field. A chaffinch hopped around the edges of the manure pile, seeking delicacies. Traffic hummed on the main road through the village.
‘So her one small error wasn’t an error at all,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘She didn’t do anything wrong. But she broke the spell that joined their worlds. The door was still there, but it had been closed on her. And even if she had been able to open it, perhaps she would have found nothing on the other side.’
‘Nothing?’ he said.
‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘Some doors are better left closed, and all that. You never know what you might find behind them. And nothing is always a possibility. A blank, impenetrable wall, perhaps. Sometimes it’s better to leave the door closed than to contemplate what is, or might have been, behind it. The door might be very beautiful in itself. An ancient oak door, say, with a single extraordinary hinge. The hinge, of course, is not a hinge, any more than the door is a door. But it is also very beautiful. It is a hinge forged of horseshoes. You can see the curving shapes, the nail holes; the groove that provides the grip. The ends of the shoes are hammered into simple flowers, like daisies. The door goes nowhere. It does not open. The hinge serves no purpose. It is pure ornament. It is all a comforting deception.’
‘Like the prince?’ he said.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘the prince. I suppose I must tell you that the girl has rather cannily held on to three magic fruits, each of which she has been instructed to cut when she meets the first great need of her life. I never fail to wonder why she doesn’t cut at least one of them to avoid those seven years of mourning in the Valley of Glass, or at the very least to avoid the agony of that hideous shoeing of iron. But she’s right, you know, because in the end she needs all three of those magic fruits to conquer the demons who would see her finally vanquished and to secure her love.’
‘Hmm,’ he said.
‘Well, precisely,’ she said. ‘I did say I’d told you the interesting bit. Shall we get this last pony’s feet trimmed? At least this one doesn’t wear shoes.’
She held the lead rope, standing first on one side of the pony’s head, and then on the other, and then back again, depending on which foot he was working on. It was a dance, choreographed over time, and the three of them knew the pattern of the steps and their pacing. They did not falter.
I should like to acknowledge Kenneth McLeish’s superb version of ‘The Black Bull of Norroway’ in Tales of Wonder and Magic by Berlie Doherty (ed).
My inspiration: In February 2009 I was one of the lucky few to get through the snow to Chawton House to attend a writing workshop. There I found my horseshoe motif in the single hinge on the ancient oak door set against a wall in the Long Gallery. Jane Austen’s life and work provided my central theme: sometimes through our own choice or error, sometimes because of external events and circumstances, doors close on relationships. In life, they might never again open, even if we wish them to; in fiction we might hope for redemption in a prince or a Mr Darcy.
MISS AUSTEN VICTORIOUS
Esther Bellamy
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,’ Mrs Bennet announced.
Mr Bennet, wedged between the wings of a Sheraton armchair, lowered his newspaper, which bore the headlines ‘72 killed in V2 rocket attack’, and inquired cautiously over the top of it, ‘Is that his design in settling here?’
Mrs Bennet nodded vigorous encouragement in his direction, before throwing back her head and hands in order to signal exasperation.
‘You take delight in vexing me; you have no compassion on my nerves.’
Mr Bennet gave a sort of bleat and peered frantically at Miss Bates, who was squeezed uncomfortably behind the curtain on a camp stool, but whilst trying to find her place in the script she had dropped her spectacles and, whilst groping for them frantically, she was unaware of the emanations of distress from the armchair, or indeed of anything else.
Mrs Bennet, almost equally unaware, blundered on. ‘Ah you do not know what I suffer—’ She stopped abruptly as it finally occurred to her that she had not given Mr Bennet the chance to make her suffer. He had not refused to wait upon Mr Bingley and, mouth half open from anxiety, showed not the faintest signs of doing so. Mrs Bennet leapt in to the breach and extemporised furiously.’ ‘Since you have already said that you will not visit Mr Bingley what use is it if twenty such men visit the neighbourhood?’
Inspiration came to Mr Bennet and he assured Mrs Bennet with the glee of a man who sees the end of a scene in sight, ‘depend upon it, my dear, when there are twenty I shall visit them all.’
They stared at each other in delight at their mutual cleverness. Lady Baverstoke, realising that the scene was over, clapped.
Mrs Bennet turned to her husband also clapping, ‘Oh well done, Gerald! Well done! You see, I told you you would remember the lines on the night.’
Mr Bennet muttered something about its only being the dress rehearsal.
Polly, relentlessly modern in trousers, despite Lady Baverstoke’s protests, trudged onto the set and began moving the furniture back for the ball at Netherfield. Mr Bingley, aged not quite seventeen, trailed after her, transfixed by the uniform trousers. She completely ignored him. Mr Bennet was chivvied out of his armchair and it was pushed to the side.
‘Are the girls ready?’ Mrs Bennet asked Polly. She did not bother to lower her voice being rather keen to emphasise her role as actor and director to Lady Baverstoke.
‘You’ve got them all except a Mary,’ replied Polly.
‘Oh really! She absolutely promised me to be here on time tonight.’
‘Well she’s not going to be here at all. One of the chaps she does fire-watch duty with is ill, so Muriel said she’d stand in tonight. She asked me to tell you but I didn’t get a chance before. She said she was sure you would understand.’
That was not quite true.
‘Really it’s too bad, the dress rehearsal, I do think Muriel could have made the effort.’
Polly attempted to be conciliatory.
‘Well Mary doesn’t say much does she? She just has to look disapproving most of the time.’
‘But the piano! Muriel’s the only one who can play the piano.’
‘I could play the piano if you like, Emma,’ interjected Lady Baverstoke, ‘I know the music and,’ coyly, ‘I certainly know the piano.’
Mrs Bennet looked put out but while she felt that it was very much her play and her cast she could hardly deny that it was Lady Baverstoke’s double drawing room and Lady Baverstoke’s piano. It had also been Lady Baverstoke’s idea to put on a play ‘for the war effort.’
Lady Baverstoke’s house, and double drawing room in particular, had had a very quiet war and, despite a front of magnificent indifference, she was not deaf to acid comments from the WVS and others of that ilk. Baverstoke Park was housing the contents of an important portrait gallery, rather than evacuees, for the duration. On the whole Lady Baverstoke considered the portraits a wonderful addition to the house; in the drawing room an eighteenth-century lady in yellow now went beautifully with the watered-silk curtains. By this ruse, acres of carpet, yards of curtains and masses of furniture remained jealously protected from hoi poloi by her ladyship. She spoke vaguely of ‘preserving standards’ and shook her head with regretful decision when asked if she had any material to donate for the making of clothes for bombed-out families.