Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 Read online

  AFTERWORD

  In its original form, ‘Birthing’ is not one of those widely known and popular fairytales – perhaps because of its unexpectedly savage ending; perhaps, too, because nineteenth-century popularisers found it an impossible story to sentimentalise. Yet for all that, it has endured, and even the briefest of internet searches soon reveals multiple versions of it. What all those versions have in common is a deceptively simple tale of a midwife who accidentally discovers that the ancient faerie folk are not just the stuff of legend. In the guise of poor fringe dwellers, they continue to exist within her rural community. The midwife soon pays dearly for her discovery when the Faerie retaliate by cruelly blinding her in one eye – the eye which peered in upon them and saw them for who they really are. This savage act usually brings the original story to an abrupt end, and readers are left to make of it what they will.

  So what are we to make of it? That was the first question I posed to myself when I set out to retell the story. At the most obvious level, it seemed to me that the taking of the eye is a warning of what the midwife can expect if she reveals the Faeries’ existence. But it is surely more than just that. It is also an enactment of the ancient lore, ‘an eye for an eye’. By looking past the human disguise and peering into the magical world of the Faerie, the midwife has awakened her ‘inner eye’; and for that gift, she must give up a portion of her earthly vision. In one sense she still has two eyes: one capable of ‘seeing’ into the wonderful and terrible faerie realm; the other restricted to the workaday ‘surface’ life we all lead.

  All of which raised a further issue: in the end, is she cursed or blessed? This struck me as a vital question, which many writers before me have struggled to answer. The poet, Keats, for instance, would probably have considered her cursed. In his well-known poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, his ‘knight-at-arms’, having once crossed into the land of Faerie, considers ordinary existence drab and colourless. All he can now perceive with his outer eye is a pointless wintry landscape in which ‘the sedge has withered from the lake,/And no birds sing’.

  Frankly, and with due respect to Keats, I find this puzzling. Peering into the enchanted heart of nature, into the vibrant world of the ‘other’, would surely add lustre to the ordinary, not render it drab, and it is this belief that I’ve tried to build into my retelling. Despite her suffering, Lucy, my young midwife, is blessed by her new-found vision. Deliberately, I’ve avoided trying to describe precisely how she now sees things – the ineffable, after all, can’t by its very nature be described. Rather, and in keeping with the unresolved spirit of the original, I’ve left her transformed world for the reader to imagine.

  In part, I suppose, I’m already explaining why, out of a feast of old stories, I chose this one. Yet it did have other attractions. For one thing, it is not so much a fairytale as a tale about the Faerie – and it is the Faerie, that elusive image of the ‘other’, which I find most compelling. Also, with its cruelly abrupt ending, it strips away that pretty nineteenth-century version of fairies which has so impoverished our reading of old stories. What the midwife sees, when she peeks through the crack in the door, is something both terrible and beautiful. It is akin to the Old Testament prophet Isaiah’s experience in the temple, when confronted by the awesome and terrible image of the seraphim. After such an experience, the world can never look the same again.

  For this reason I began my retelling with Lucy’s naïve, childhood notion of the fairies found in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and then deepened that experience into a moment of tragedy. This is partly intended as a preparation for what is to come; partly as a childlike version of Gretel’s earlier encounter; and partly, too, as an ironic means of undercutting later events. For if I’m to be honest, ‘Birthing’ is more a sequel to Gretel’s story than a simple retelling of it – a sequel that contains the original, but takes it several steps further. In my sequel, Gretel, like any surrogate parent, tries to protect her successor by choosing someone half blind. Ironically, that ‘someone’ has already encountered the true spirit of the Faerie once before, to her cost, and no amount of clumsy benevolence on Gretel’s part can shield her from a second encounter. The fact remains that Lucy’s subsequent adult glimpse of faerie splendour is simultaneously an act of theft and a moment of transformation, and for both she must pay by giving up any hope of a normal existence.

  A final word about the bonds I have invented to tie the two worlds of the story together – bonds that don’t exist in the original. First and foremost, there is the bond of honour, symbolised by the handshake near the end, a reaching across the gulf, with human and Faerie pledging their word and thereby guaranteeing their coexistence. Without this act of good faith, there can be no ongoing story, no intertwining of the magical and the real, only the eventual destruction of the ‘other’ and the loss of all wonder.

  There is, however, also a second, darker bond, one of mutual fascination, symbolised by the unnatural lust that draws humans and Faeries into a single embrace. (And on this point, I fancy, Keats and I agree!) Herein, for me, lies the importance of the original image of the midwife. She is the lynchpin of the story, for she is the one with an ‘eye’ for the needs of both peoples, whose duty it is to deliver the uncertain results of their dangerous union. Lucy’s task, in short, is to emulate Gretel and grow into the traditional witch-cum-midwife-cum-holy woman, into the archetypal wise old woman of many old stories; to accept the role of outsider whose secret knowledge alone can ensure the safe passage from one order of being to another.

  Or rather, that’s what I’ve tried to hint at!

  The sound of the key in the door surprises him. He has forgotten that she is coming home tonight. He is engrossed in work, moving sentences around and searching for better words. It is important to get exactly the right words.

  No, he has not forgotten that she is coming home. It has just slipped his mind.

  He is writing a review. The editor of one of the national broadsheets offers him a review maybe four times a year, maybe six. His reaction is always the same. It is easy money for a few hundred words of prose, and it is good for him to exercise his analytical skills. When he actually gets down to work he discovers, every time, that it is not so easy, and he remembers that it was like this last time, and the time before, and that he always underestimates the amount of work involved. It is not criticism that is the problem. Criticism is the language of the circles he moves in, and he is never short of opinions. It is analysis that is more difficult. Analysis requires a different set of muscles entirely, and his are slack.

  He knows immediately whether he likes a person’s writing or not. It works for him or it doesn’t. That is simple. The reason why is not so simple. But that is what reviewing is all about, and more often than not it’s a struggle.

  No, it has not slipped his mind that she is coming home tonight. It is just not uppermost in his mind. But earlier in the day it was. When he was waiting at the ATM on Upper Street he was thinking about her coming home. He had got the date wrong, initially, and had bought flowers a week ago; flesh-coloured lilies with a deep pink blush at the centre and a powerful scent. When the ATM rolled out his cash, he went into the supermarket and bought a nice bottle of bubbly to go with them.

  The other important thing to be taken into account when writing a review is the tone. The tone has to reflect his position in the literary world. It is important not to be condescending, but at the same time the reader should not be under the illusion that he is considering the work of an equal. He is a statesman of the poetry world, giving a helping hand to both the reader and the young, or not-so-young, aspirant. He is seldom, if ever, given the work of established modern poets to review.

  He is surprised when he hears the sound of her key in the lock, but it is a pleasant kind of surprise. He has missed her and he is glad she is back. And it means he can forget about his review, for the time being at least. And later, when she has finished telling him about her time in New York, he migh
t talk to her about the book, because sometimes that helps him to get his ideas straight. A description might come out of his mouth in a way it never came out on the page. Or a comparison, when he tries to give her an impression of what the book is like. ‘Kindergarten Freud’ came about like that a few months ago, and the editor used it as the title of the review.

  He hears the door close and her footsteps in the hall, the pause while she takes off her coat and scarf, the thump as she drops her bag at the foot of the stairs. He comes through from his study at the back of the house into the kitchen.

  He probably won’t tell her that he doesn’t believe women should waste their time trying to write poetry. He won’t put that in his review, either, or mention it anywhere in public, though he believes it wholeheartedly. It isn’t that he thinks women are inferior. Not at all. But as far as he is concerned, poetry is about men struggling with things that come easily to women. And the things that women poets seem to write about would be better kept as gossip to pass over the garden wall to their neighbours.

  He has his face on, his eager ‘darling’ face, but it freezes when she opens the kitchen door. The shock hits him like a snake-strike in his entrails. Its venom shoots out along his nerves, stretching his scalp, even weakening his knees.

  ‘What’s up?’ she says.

  He opens his mouth. It is not a fair question. She knows what is up because she has done it.

  He needs something light. A quip. He needs to toss it off as if it were nothing, rally the nerve-endings and carry on, buying himself a bit of time to adjust. But there aren’t any words to be found that are not obscenities. Ordinary speech has abandoned him.

  ‘It’s not that bad, is it?’ she says.

  No. Say no. Of course not. But it is that bad. It’s worse. It’s so bad that it hurts.

  ‘I . . .’ he says.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ she says.

  He can see that his reaction is frightening her, but he can’t fix it. She has brought it upon herself, after all.

  ‘I need cigarettes.’

  He can’t even pass her to get into the hall. He goes the long way, through the dining room and past the door to his study, then back through the hall and past the door of the kitchen where she stands with that frightened look on her face, watching him as he snatches a coat and scarf and goes out into the night.

  {2}

  In the jaundiced gloom of the street he turns the wrong way for the corner shop. He doesn’t need cigarettes, not yet anyway. What he needs is distance and time, to work the venom out of his system and allow some sense to come in.

  Why?

  The leaves are dropping. He hasn’t noticed until now. He thought it was still summer but it isn’t, it’s autumn.

  Why would she do a thing like that?

  The streets are wet, but it isn’t raining now. A taxi slows hopefully, then speeds irritably away. Two young women are talking under a street lamp on the other side of the road.

  Why didn’t she warn him? Or did she? Maybe she did warn him, and he didn’t notice. What was it she said in her last email? Don’t bother to come to the airport. You won’t recognise me. Should he have guessed from that?

  It’s not as if he didn’t know. She told him on the first day they met, when they found themselves squashed up against the wall together at the launch of Turtle Shore. She did not read poetry, she explained, but she was with some friends who did. She liked to know everything that was going on in the publishing world. That was her job. She even liked to know what was happening on the fringes.

  It wasn’t a proper party. Publishers of poetry could not afford lavish launches. He had done an after-hours reading in an independent book shop in Camden and followed it with a general invitation to the pub. All evening strangers had wanted to talk to him. Some of them wanted to talk to him about his new collection and about the life of a poet in the televisual world. Some of them wanted to talk about their own love of poetry, and about how sad they were that it was a genre in such decline. But most of them, in the end, really wanted to talk to him about their own attempts to write, and what they wanted him to discuss was not the gritty day-to-day realities of a modern poet but how they might go about getting their own work into print.

  So, much as he would have liked to take umbrage at her reference to the ‘fringes’, he couldn’t. This was indeed the fringes, not just of publishing but of society. The people he met on occasions like this were like earnest members of some tiny cult, as anachronistic and out of touch as those head-bangers who dressed up in medieval clothes and played recorders. Poetry was an archaic language, deader than Latin and read by far fewer. It had both feet in the grave, and only that great juggernaut of a life-support system, the Arts Council, was keeping the earth from closing over its corpse.

  She loved poetry, she told him, but she had no time to read it. She was busy. She had a hectic job. But poetry was the pinnacle of the written arts and deserved far more attention than it got.

  There was, he thought, a little electric charge between them, from the first moment they were washed up against the wall together. He despised people who worked in publicity. They were all, male or female, media tarts. But she had a kind of energy he seldom saw. Vivacity was an ugly and polluted word, not to be touched. Vitality. That was what she had, and that was exactly what he lacked. He was drawn to it like a mosquito scenting blood. It was love at first sight.

  {3}

  She stands in the middle of the kitchen floor in a state verging on panic. What she needs is a drink. On the table, in a ceramic jug full of melted ice and surrounded by a careful arrangement of ageing pink lilies, is a bottle. It is shaped like a wine bottle but she knows, before she pulls it out, that it doesn’t contain wine. There has been no alcohol in the house for more than six years, except for the rare occasions when they hold dinner parties. She has never minded. She likes a glass of wine but she willingly forgoes it so as not to put him in the way of temptation.

  There are good neighbours up and down the street, any of whom would happily lend her a bottle of wine without a moment’s hesitation. But she can’t face anyone now. She would have to pretend to be her usual, jaunty self and for once she finds she can’t do it. She is disarmed. Or if not disarmed, then disrobed. She would have to stand naked and vulnerable at her neighbours’ door. She would have to face that same moment of shock at what she has done. Not the cruelty, though. No one could deal her the kind of blow that he has just done.

  The realisation produces a little surge of anger. She is adept at restraining her temper – any job she has ever had has required it – but this is more comfortable than fear and for once she lets it loose. How could he do that to her? Just stare and stammer and run? How dare he treat her so callously?

  Energised, she puts on the kettle for coffee, and for a minute or two she patrols the kitchen, aimlessly opening cupboard doors and slamming them shut again. She picks up the paper and tosses it down. She begins to compose a speech for when he returns, but she doesn’t get very far. As rapidly as it arrived, her anger evaporates, and she slumps onto one of the ladderback chairs and rests her head against its top rung.

  No, she is not disrobed, she is disempowered. The com- parison with Samson is too obvious. Or is it? He didn’t look at her as if she were Samson. He looked at her as if she were Methuselah.

  {4}

  He suddenly realises where his feet are taking him and stops, appalled. Quite unconsciously he has been following the sweet, hop-and-barley scent-trail laid by Dionysus. It is alluring, but he is wise to it as well. He knows the other stinks it masks: the vinegary sweat, the stale bedclothes. His body remembers, too, and he gets a bilious flashback taste in his throat.

  All the same, he hesitates for an instant. He doesn’t believe that he is an alcoholic but he does believe what the doctor told him a few years ago about the state of his liver and his heart. A unit or two here and there would do him no harm, he was told, but he doesn’t take even that. He can’t, because if he empties
a glass he empties a bottle. If he enters a pub he is always the last to leave, unless someone succeeds in dragging him away. He knows that oblivion is only a short-term answer to the horror that has entered his life, but he still longs for it.

  He won’t yield. It isn’t the fall he fears so much as the long, arduous climb back out again.

  The gods are everywhere around him these days. Not just Dionysus, but Eros and Hermes and Zeus and Ares. And the Irish gods, too, and characters from his schoolbooks that he has scarcely thought of since. Fionn and the Fianna, who roamed the ancient forests of Ireland, hunting and hobnobbing with the fairy folk. Bran, the dog with a human mother. The Children of Lír, who were turned into swans for four hundred years, and Oisín, who fell off the horse and turned to dust. Some nights they all crowd round him so intensely that he feels suffocated by them. They enter his dreams and try to elbow their way into his poetry, but he won’t allow it. He doesn’t write that kind of poetry. He despises that kind of poetry.

  He threw off that backward-leaning yearning for the old myths along with his Catholic religion when he was a student. He replaced them with radical politics and a hatred of empire. His early poetry blazed with anarchic rage and idealism. His middle era pulled no punches either; was full of meat and bone and machetes. It writhed and sweated on the page. It prophesied the deadly effects of the capitalist system and free-market enterprise. His best-known collection, the one he was launching when he met her, was written from the viewpoint of an Aboriginal woman who watches the eradication of her people for the sake of sheep and gold, and whose voice he studied during a two-month visit to Australia, funded by the Arts Council.

  And his recent work? It unnerves him to see his attention trying to veer away from the subject. He rebukes it. It is true that he has only published two collections since he moved into the house in Islington with her, but so what? They are fine. They are good. He is happy with them.