Elementals Read online

  In a year, or so, twin children were born, a dark boy, who resembled his mother at birth, and became, like her, pale and golden, and a pale, flower-like girl, whose first days were white and hairless, but who grew a mane of dark hair like her father’s and had a glass-blower’s, flute-player’s mouth. And if Fiammarosa was sometimes lonely in her glass palace, and sometimes wished both that Sasan would come more often, and that she could roam amongst fjords and ice-fells, this was not unusual, for no one has everything she can desire. But she was resourceful and hopeful, and made a study of the vegetation of the Sasanian snow-line, and a further study of which plants could thrive in mountain air under glass windows, and corresponded – at long intervals – with authorities all over the world on these matters. Her greatest discovery was a sweet blueberry, that grew in the snow, but in the glass garden became twice the size, and almost as delicate in flavour.

  Baglady

  Composition, Darren Haggar, 1998

  Baglady

  ‘And then,’ says Lady Scroop brightly, ‘the Company will send cars to take us all to the Good Fortune Shopping Mall. I understand that it is a real Aladdin’s Cave of Treasures, where we can all find prezzies for everyone and all sorts of little indulgences for ourselves, and in perfect safety: the entrances to the Mall are under constant surveillance, sad, but necessary in these difficult days.’

  Daphne Gulver-Robinson looks round the breakfast table. It is beautifully laid with peach-coloured damask, bronze cutlery, and little floating gardens in lacquered dishes of waxy flowers that emit gusts of perfume. The directors of Doolittle Wind Quietus are in a meeting. Their wives are breakfasting together under the eye of Lady Scroop, the chairman’s wife. It is Lord Scroop’s policy to encourage his directors to travel with their wives. Especially in the Far East, and especially since the figures about AIDS began to be drawn to his attention.

  Most of the wives are elegant, with silk suits and silky legs and exquisitely cut hair. They chat mutedly, swapping recipes for chutney and horror stories about nannies, staring out of the amber glass wall of the Precious Jade Hotel at the dimpling sea. Daphne Gulver-Robinson is older than most of them, and dowdier, although her husband, Rollo, has less power than most of the other directors. She has tried to make herself attractive for this jaunt and has lost ten pounds and had her hands manicured; but now she sees the other ladies, she knows it is not enough. Her style is seated tweed, and stout shoes, and bird’s-nest hair.

  ‘You don’t want me on this trip,’ she said to Rollo when told about it. ‘I’d better stay and mind the donkeys and the geese and the fantails as usual, and you can have a good time, as usual, in those exotic places.’

  ‘Of course I don’t want you,’ said Rollo. ‘That is, of course I want you, but I do know you’re happier with the geese and the donkeys and pigs and things. But Scroop will think it’s very odd, I’m very odd, if you don’t come. He gets bees in his bonnet. You’ll like the shopping; the ladies do a lot of shopping, I believe. You might like the other wives,’ he finished, not hopefully.

  ‘I didn’t like boarding-school,’ Daphne said.

  ‘I don’t see what that has to do with it,’ Rollo said. There is a lot Rollo doesn’t see. Doesn’t want to see and doesn’t see.

  Lady Scroop tells them they may scatter in the Mall as much as they like as long as they are all back at the front entrance at noon precisely. ‘We have all packed our bags, I hope,’ she says, ‘though I have left time on the schedule for adjustments to make space for any goodies we may find. And then there will be a delicious lunch at the Pink Pearl Café and then we leave at two-forty-five sharp for the airport and on to Sydney.’

  The ladies pack into the cars. Daphne Gulver-Robinson is next to the driver of her Daimler, a place of both comfort and isolation. They swoop silently through crowded streets, isolated by bullet-proof glass from the smells and sounds of the Orient. The Mall is enormous and not beautiful. Some of the ladies have been in post-modern pink and peppermint Malls in San Diego, some have been in snug, glittering underground tunnels in Canadian winters, some have shopped in crystal palaces in desert landscapes, with tinkling fountains and splashing streams. The Good Fortune Shopping Mall resembles an army barracks or a prison block, but it is not for the outside they have come, and they hasten to trip inside, like hens looking for worms, jerking and clucking, Daphne Gulver-Robinson thinks malevolently, as none of them waits for her.

  She synchronises her watch with the driver, and goes in alone, between the sleepy soldiers with machine-guns and the uniformed police with their revolvers and little sticks. Further away, along the walls of the Mall, are little groups and gangs of human flotsam and jetsam, gathered with bags and bottles around little fires of cowdung or cardboard. There is a no-man’s-land, swept clean, between them and the police.

  She is not sure she likes shopping. She looks at her watch, and wonders how she will fill the two hours before the rendezvous. She walks rather quickly past rows of square shop-fronts, glittering with gilt and silver, shining with pearls and opals, shimmering with lacquer and silk. Puppets and shadow-puppets mop and mow, paper birds hop on threads, paper dragons and monstrous goldfish gape and dangle. She covers the first floor, or one rectangular arm of the first floor, ascends a flight of stairs and finds herself on another floor, more or less the same, except for a few windows full of sober suiting, a run of American-style T-shirts, an area of bonsai trees. She stops to look at the trees, remembering her garden, and thinks of buying a particularly shapely cherry. But how could it go to Sydney, how return to Norfolk, would it even pass customs?

  She has slowed down now and starts looking. She comes to a corner, gets into a lift, goes up, gets out, finds herself on a higher, sunnier, emptier floor. There are fewer shoppers. She walks along one whole ‘street’ where she is the only shopper, and is taken by a display of embroidered silk cushion-covers. She goes in, and turns over a heap of about a hundred, quick, quick, chrysanthemums, cranes, peach-blossom, blue-tits, mountain tops. She buys a cover with a circle of embroidered fish, red and gold and copper, because it is the only one of its kind, perhaps a rarity. When she looks in her shopping bag, she cannot find her camera, although she is sure it was there when she set out. She buys a jade egg on the next floor, and some lacquered chopsticks, and a mask with a white furious face for her student daughter. She is annoyed to see a whole window full of the rare fishes, better embroidered than the one in the bag. She follows a sign saying CAFÉ but cannot find the café, though she trots on, faster now. She does find a ladies’ room, with cells so small they are hard to squeeze into. She restores her make-up there: she looks hot and blowzy. Her lipstick has bled into the soft skin round her mouth. Hairpins have sprung out. Her nose and eyelids shine. She looks at her watch, and thinks she should be making her way back to the entrance. Time has passed at surprising speed.

  Signs saying EXIT appear with great frequency and lead to fire-escape-like stairways and lifts, which debouch only in identical streets of boxed shop-fronts. They are designed, she begins to think, to keep you inside, to direct you past even more shops, in search of a hidden, deliberately elusive way out. She runs a little, trotting quicker, toiling up concrete stairways, clutching her shopping. On one of these stairways a heel breaks off one of her smart shoes. After a moment she takes off both, and puts them in her shopping bag. She hobbles on, on the concrete, sweating and panting. She dare not look at her watch, and then does. The time of the rendezvous is well past. She thinks she might call the hotel, opens her handbag, and finds that her purse and credit cards have mysteriously disappeared.

  There is nowhere to sit down: she stands in the Mall, going through and through her handbag, long after it is clear that the things have vanished. Other things, dislodged, have to be retrieved from the dusty ground. Her fountain-pen has gone too, Rollo’s present for their twentieth wedding anniversary. She begins to run quite fast, so that huge holes spread in the soles of her stockings, which in the end split, and begin to work th
eir way over her feet and up her legs in wrinkles like flaking skin. She looks at her watch; the packing-time and the ‘delicious lunch’ are over: it is almost time for the airport car. Her bladder is bursting, but she must go on, and must go down, the entrance is down.

  It is in this way that she discovers that the Good Fortune Mall extends maybe as far into the earth as into the sky, excavated identical caverns of shop-fronts, jade, gold, silver, silk, lacquer, watches, suiting, bonsai trees and masks and puppets. Lifts that say they are going down go only up. Stairwells are windowless: ground level cannot be found. The plane has now taken off with or without the directors and ladies of Doolittle Wind Quietus. She takes time out in another concrete and stainless-steel lavatory cubicle, and then looks at the watch, whose face has become a whirl of terror. Only now it is merely a compressed circle of pink skin, shiny with sweat. Her watch, too, has gone. She utters faint little moaning sounds, and then an experimental scream. No one appears to hear or see her, neither strolling shoppers, deafened by Walkmans or by propriety, or by fear of the strange, nor shopkeepers, watchful in their cells.

  Nevertheless, screaming helps. She screams again, and then screams and screams into the thick, bustling silence. A man in a brown overall brings a policeman in a reinforced hat, with a gun and a stick.

  ‘Help me,’ says Daphne. ‘I am an English lady, I have been robbed, I must get home.’

  ‘Papers,’ says the policeman.

  She looks in the back pocket of her handbag. Her passport, too, has gone. There is nothing. ‘Stolen. All stolen,’ she says.

  ‘People like you,’ says the policeman, ‘not allowed in here.’

  She sees herself with his eyes, a baglady, dirty, unkempt, with a bag full of somebody’s shopping, a tattered battery-hen.

  ‘My husband will come and look for me,’ she tells the policeman.

  If she waits, if she stays in the Mall, he will, she thinks. He must. She sees herself sitting with the flotsam and jetsam beyond the swept no-man’sland, outside.

  ‘I’m not moving,’ she says, and sits down heavily. She has to stay in the Mall. The policeman prods her with his little stick.

  ‘Move, please.’

  It is more comfortable sitting down.

  ‘I shall stay here for ever if necessary,’ she says.

  She cannot imagine anyone coming. She cannot imagine getting out of the Good Fortune Mall.

  Jael

  Jael and Sisera, School of Rembrandt

  Jael

  I remember very clearly, Mrs Hodges said, ‘What a lovely colour, Jess,’ and I spread it further and further across the page of the Scripture book. If you got five As in a row, you got sent to the head-mistress to be congratulated, and I had got as far as four, though none of us thought Scripture counted, compared to English, or History, or Science. It was a lovely colour, it was a true vermilion, and I spread it and spread it, all over the page. I had a good box of pencils, about twenty-four colours, including some unusual pinks and turquoises. You could get quite convincing flesh colours with those pencils, but I wasn’t much good at drawing. In fact, I had made Jael’s headdress fall forward over her face, and concentrated on her arm and the hammer, and the tent-peg, and the great sheet of blood stemming out like a great river into a sheet, or a cloth, over the couch he lay on, and the floor of Jael’s tent, and the greyish, over-absorbent lined page of my exercise book. I don’t really think I asked myself at the time why we were being asked to illustrate this very odd tale. I really don’t think so. Nor do I really think there is any reason why I remember that drawing more than any other in that exercise book. I can’t, for instance, remember what I got the four As for, or even whether I got an A for my rendering of Jael’s neat and bloody disposal of Sisera. I wasn’t particularly trying to please Mrs Hodges, who was not religious, she was a history teacher doing her stint at Scripture, as most of them did. Scripture didn’t have important teachers, either, and got shared out as a chore. She was unusual, in those days (the early 1950s), for being married. She had a lot of long curly dark hair, and red lips, and wickedly pointed very high heels, on which she clipped along between our desks. Youngish, for a teacher at that good, ancient establishment for girls. Not a good teacher, you remember those. I am quite sure, though I don’t remember a word she did say, that she gave us no explanation of why we had to study and illustrate that peculiarly disagreeable and morally equivocal story. Anyway, for some reason, the experience of making that pool of red with my good pencil on the bad paper has stayed with me. I was telling the cameraman in the studio in Brussels about it, over lunch. We were talking about how your past life is mapped two ways, with significant things that of course you remember, births, marriages, deaths, journeys, successes and failures, and then the other sort, the curiously bright-coloured, detailed pointless moments that won’t go away. He’s in his early thirties, he looked a bit sorry for me, when I told him about Jael, that I was old enough to have memories so far back. So small and bright and faraway, like illuminations in manuscripts. We discussed the horrible story, and he was very struck by it. (He had a completely religion-free upbringing, I don’t think he ever opened a Bible in his life.) I said, and I’m sure I’m right, that I didn’t think I was remembering it for its shocking morals, I said I was sure I was remembering it because of the excitement I’d felt over spreading more and more of that red over the paper. Like the blown-up-and-up shot we used in the Spanaranja commercial, all those glistening exploding sacs lying together in a segment of a blood orange. You didn’t get much intense sensuous excitement at Armadale High School, Girls’ Public Day School Trust, GPDST.

  Anyway, that caused me to think, not for the first time, about Jael and Sisera. I’m sure all those Scripture stories we did at the ages of nine and ten are the reason I find religion not only incredible, but disgusting and dangerous. At that stage, you’re already doing bits of Shakespeare, at least at the kind of segregated high-powered school I was at, and even if you say, or believe, you’re bored or indifferent, there are all those passionate people, all those complicated motives, all that singing language, all the power, and, later, you know it changed you for ever. But the Scriptures were both dead and nasty. And all we did was illustrate them, frame by frame, the Coat of Many Colours, the Manna in the Wilderness, the Plagues, Jael and Sisera.

  Explaining it to Jed, our cameraman, I said, it’s not even a story about treachery or loyalty. I told it him from memory, as it came into my head whenever I saw that red sheet. It happens in the Book of Judges, when the Judge, unusually, is a woman, Deborah. (No, we were not offered her as a rôlemodel for leadership qualities. I’m not sure the concept existed in the early 1950s. If it did, she wasn’t it, more likely Florence Nightingale or Elizabeth Fry.) The Israelites as usual had done evil in the sight of the Lord who sold them into the hands of Jabin, King of Canaan, whose captain, Sisera, mightily oppressed them with nine hundred chariots of iron for twenty years. Then Deborah traps Sisera in the river of Kishon. The Bible says ‘The Lord discomfited Sisera and all his chariots, and all his host, with the edge of the sword.’ The Lord did his own killing at that point of the Bible, but Deborah organised it. Sisera got out of his chariot, and fled away on his feet, and came to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, who was at peace with Sisera’s King Jabin. And Jael said to Sisera, ‘Turn in, my lord, turn in to me; fear not.’ And he went in, and when he asked for water, she opened a bottle of milk, and covered him, and invited him to rest. And he asked her to stand in the door of the tent, and say no man had come that way. The next bit I have always known by heart.

  ‘Then Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.’

  Now I think about it, it’s a story about the breaking of all the primitive laws of hospitality, and kindness, laws we learn even from fairy-stories. Jael was not Sisera’s enemy; she entic
ed him in, and gratuitously betrayed him. The next chapter of the Bible (Judges 5) is Deborah’s song of triumph. It is full of amazing rhythms, in the King James Bible. It is a nasty piece of work. Listen.

  Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.