The Woodwitch Read online

  ‘Chasing sheep?’ he asked her innocently, eyeing her over his beer glass. ‘She hasn’t been after the sheep, has she? I hope not . . . I wouldn’t want any trigger-happy farmer taking a pot-shot at her.’ Her brother materialised beside her, and Andrew caught his bitter scent. ‘Hello, Huw,’ he said, feeling the painted skin of his cheeks pulling tightly as he smiled. ‘Your sister was just saying something about . . .’

  But she interrupted him with a shove and a ‘Shut up, Dracula . . .’ so he shrugged and turned the smile into an elaborate grimace. ‘She was just saying how much she liked my vampire make-up. What do you reckon, eh? Reckon this would frighten the sheep more than anything, don’t you?’

  The youth said something smartly to his sister, in Welsh, at which she blushed again and replied in English, ‘You mind your own business, Huw. I can look after myself, thank you. Can’t I, Pinkie?’

  Andrew smiled genially, raising his glass to the two teenagers and saying, ‘Cheers, to a charming brother and sister! Happy Hallowe’en!’

  The boy drifted off and the air cleared, except that the staleness of his clothes was straight away replaced by the clinging sweet smoke of cigarettes. The girl seemed both relieved that her brother had gone and, at the same time, uncomfortable in the presence of the older man. She feigned nonchalance, swigging at her pint of lager and looking around the room as though Andrew were not there. ‘Was it you who said this was a fancy dress do?’ he asked, as much to get her attention as to elicit the information. ‘I feel a right charlie with this stuff on my face. I thought lots of people would be dressed up.’

  Affronted, she lifted her eyebrows and answered, ‘No, it was not. I never said anything about fancy dress. It was Mrs Stone,’ gesturing at the woman behind the bar and raising her voice in mock outrage that she was responsible for his embarrassment.

  Mrs Stone, the languid lady who was to Andrew a hybrid of heron and headmistress, inclined her grey head at the sound of her name and beckoned him closer to the bar. She drew him closer still. ‘Congratulations, young man,’ she whispered into his blond curls, ‘you win the prize for the best costume of the night. Yes, I know,’ she laughed, in response to his indignant look, ‘the only costume of the night and not much of a costume at that!’ She lowered her voice again, so that Andrew strained to catch what she was saying. ‘I knew none of the locals would bother, except that they’re suddenly all here for the cheap beer. Bastards!’ Andrew blinked at the unexpected expletive. She ushered him nearer again. ‘That’s a pretty little dog you’ve got. Keep your eye on her, and keep an eye out for that bastard Huw. He may be the result of chronic in-breeding, but he’s cunning with it . . .’ Then she was busy serving drinks, with just the time for a cryptic nod in his direction.

  Andrew turned his attention back to the girl. ‘You’re very pretty tonight,’ he said to her. ‘I’d hardly have recognised you.’

  She countered his deadpan look. ‘Charming, I must say. I don’t always look scruffy, you know. Just like you don’t always wear make-up. Although we hear all sorts of rumours about you southerners . . . Don’t know what kind of things you get up to down south, especially in London, but if it’s anything like they say in the papers, I dread to think . . .’ She was wearing jeans again, except that, unlike the ones she wore the previous evening, these were clean. They were just as close-fitting as the other pair. Over a plain white blouse, she had on a loose blue pullover, very soft and comfortable, something she might have borrowed from her older brother and thoroughly washed. She wore white training shoes. The overall effect would have been that she was a schoolgirl, scrubbed clean and fragrant with talcum powder, but she had applied a little pale lipstick and had painted some metallic green liner on her eyelids. Nevertheless, Andrew thought, those adult touches were restrained enough to render her still fresh, rather than coarsening her childlike features. ‘Oh, I lead a very boring life in the south,’ he was saying. ‘Don’t believe those newspapers, Shân. I get up and go to the office (without make-up by the way). I slave away at my desk, go home and watch TV, and then go to bed. At weekends, it’s walks in the countryside, a few drinks in the evening, and back in the office on Monday morning. Another drink? I don’t think I can keep up with you, knocking back your pints . . .’ He took her glass with his own and had them refilled.

  Meanwhile, as he and the kennel-maid exchanged more harmless banter by the bar, her brother kept a watchful eye on her and on the Englishman who had painted his face. Andrew knew he was looking. Occasionally, deliberately, he peered over to the boy’s corner, and whenever he met his scowling glance, he winked grotesquely and felt the dried ink around his mouth crinkle with the wrinkles. Then the boy looked away. The girl drank quickly and talked more; it was easy for Andrew to keep her talking, with a few questions to prompt her about her hounds and the work at the kennels, a subject on which it seemed she could enthuse at length. Content to let her go on, he allowed his eyes to wander over the room, wondering, while he half listened to her, that there was no one, no boy apart from her brother, who objected to her being cornered by a complete stranger, furthermore by an Englishman decorated with ink and whitewash. From time to time, he found that Mrs Stone was watching him with the girl, and then the woman would smile and nod at him as though to seal their private remarks, to reinforce their Englishness, she and Andrew alone in a hotel full of Welshmen conversing in Welsh. Phoebe had manoeuvred herself into a position in front of the open fire, where she lay outstretched and basking in the heat, her eyes forever on Andrew. When he looked down at her, she thumped her tail and he would smile.

  ‘You’re not listening to a word I say, are you, Pinkie?’ chirped the girl, her blush no longer transitory. Her face was suffused with drink. ‘Not very flattering, you know, for a girl to be talking to a bloke who’s more interested in a bloody dog, is it?’ But she was amused by his distraction.

  ‘I’m sorry, young lady,’ he blustered, affecting the pomposity of the magistrates he was used to observing, ‘of course I was listening to your every word. Most interesting, most interesting. Please, go on, do . . .’

  She started to giggle and to shove him with her little white hand, until a few slops of lager spilled on to the carpet. And it was when she was giggling that Andrew watched her wet mouth, the way her tongue slipped out and made her painted lips glisten. He felt his stomach go light, as though he were descending rapidly in a lift. She had spilled her drink once more on her jeans, and Andrew watched the stain diffuse across her narrow thigh. The lift accelerated, plummeting downwards, or so it seemed to Andrew’s stomach. The girl controlled her giggles. Catching his look, she suddenly flinched from it as if she were stung by what she saw in his eyes. And there, across the crowded room, her brother had noticed too, for he was fixing Andrew with a stare which said he had recognised the game even from a distance. Mrs Stone was drying glasses, watching, missing nothing, as sharp as a heron. Andrew concentrated on his drink, although when the laughter in the smoke-filled room rose and fell and there was a squall of female shrieking, he was haunted by a memory of Jennifer’s laughter at his impotence; he was troubled by the proximity of the kennel-maid and he juggled uncomfortably with a persistent image which plagued his mind . . . that of the wilting stinkhorn, with its deflated head slithering wetly and meekly down the inside of the jar.

  The evening increased its volume. He did not drink much, but he watched other people drink a great deal. Opposite him, Shân was sitting on a bar stool, with her back against the wall, and the effect of the drink on her was to loosen her features so that her cheeks sagged and her mouth fell into a pout. In spite of her efforts with the make-up, she now looked younger again, because her face resumed the softness and blandness of something which was far from finished. Instead of chattering to Andrew, she smiled a permanently vacuous smile and stared around the milling throng, her cheeks flushed with the smoke and alcohol. Shifting away from the bar, where the traffic had suddenly increased and where Mrs Stone was busy, he detached himself as fa
r as he could from the festivity of the occasion, saddened by the irony that he, the only person in the hotel to have made any effort to match the mood of the evening, was furthest removed from the atmosphere of drunken hilarity. He stared at his wellington boots. Somewhere down there, at that level, somewhere in the lounge was Phoebe, not asleep of course, but stretched out and spectating the uproar in a state of bafflement at the noise and the smells and the press. And instinctively he felt a great surge of envy, that she was no part of this and could never be, however hard she tried. He touched with his fingertips the dried crust of whitewash, the plastic smoothness of the ink on his face, he recalled the idiot-mask he had presented in the mirror in the bathroom, he remembered vividly that instant shock of silence when he had entered the bar and the explosion of mirth which followed, and he envied Phoebe so passionately her detachment from all of this that he felt a prickling of angry tears in his eyes . . . The fiasco with Jennifer on the sofa! All the stupidity and indignity of removing clothes just so that two white and ordinary and unappealing bodies could tangle for a minute of fumbling ineptitude! Then the disentangling of inexpert limbs, the avoiding of each other’s eyes, reaching for clothes which smelled suddenly different and anyway were inside-out from being hurriedly peeled off! All of this applauded by Jennifer’s crowing laughter and the excited accompaniment of Phoebe’s barking . . . No wonder, he thought, mouthing angrily and silently to his boots, no wonder Phoebe started to bark! She was laughing too, at the absurdity of the whole charade, at the incompetence of the whole operation, and most of all at the bogus significance which the players attached to it. Why hadn’t they just got on with it, one afternoon in the forest? Why didn’t they rut vigorously and briefly in the twilight, while they were waiting for the badgers to come out? What was so important and holy about it, that they should approach it with such breathlessness in the tiny bed-sitter and afterwards think it was worth the effort of coming to blows? He stared at the muddy black wellingtons and envied Phoebe her present separateness, her undisturbed vantage point on all this shouting and ribaldry and inhaling of fumes and farts . . . She was down there somewhere, on a different plane from all the baying voices, from all the wet mouths and addled tongues, from eyes which now were shot through with blood and from the features of people which were coarsened and heavy with drink . . . He looked at the kennel-maid. Oh yes, she was pretty, in a childish unfinished way, and yes, when he saw her thin thighs wet with beer he felt the buckling of his stomach. Yes, he could see the evenness of her tiny teeth and the bubbles of saliva on the secret pinkness of her tongue . . . But now she was slack with drink, as if the bones in her neck and her spine and her narrow pelvis were dissolving in alcohol.

  ‘What you looking at me like that for, Pinkie?’ she managed to say, leaning right forward to put her hand on his shoulder. Her face bobbed in front of his, pale and moist and white, like something washed up on a beach, something from which all the colour and texture had been bleached by the sea. ‘Why you looking at me funny like that? Call my big brother if you’re not careful . . .’ Then she reached up her mouth to his, not to peck him with a kiss, but, before he had the wits to recoil, to run her tongue across his lips. He felt her tongue slip all around his mouth, from the right corner and along his upper lip and more slowly over the lower, pausing there a split-second to flicker upwards and downwards like the fluttering tongue of a snake, before it moved on and returned to its starting point. Mesmerised, he inhaled the scent of talcum powder and the faintest odour of her body and her hair while her face brushed on his. All around him, in spite of his sobriety, the noise of shouts and laughter welled up, as though she could conjure a renewed intensity of sound by holding herself close to him. Someone blundered by, stumbling against Andrew. The girl fell back to her position on the wall, her eyes closed, her lips sealed in a snake-like smile. She looked up and released an arpeggio of a giggle at the remarks of the man who had knocked into Andrew, remarks which Andrew did not understand, and there was then a great deal of lascivious winking from man to man and to the girl, with Andrew surrounded by a hilarious mob. He essayed a nonchalant smile, but felt the skin tighten on his cheeks and forehead. The scent of the girl lingered on him, and as he licked his lips he tasted her metallic flavour. The men roared to see him uncomfortable, that he had been sucked into the bottom of a crater of braying faces, faces which were red and blotched and puffed with the heat, all of them discharging their unintelligible cries.

  As more of the crowd assembled at the bar, Andrew decided to take a breather away from them. Unable to make himself understood by shouting against the sudden upsurging of voices, he tapped the girl on one knee and signalled in the direction of the toilets. She responded with a vacant grin, which she then obliterated by fixing her glass of lager once more to her mouth. Andrew manoeuvred his way through the circle of people, having manipulated his features into what he imagined was a buoyant smile, and he shot out of the room.

  It was blissfully quiet and cool in the hotel toilets. He urinated at some length. Then, as he washed his hands, he studied himself in the mirror. He saw the same grotesquely painted face he had decorated in the bathroom of the cottage, the crude ink and whitener quite ludicrous behind the spectacles and under his flopping blond hair. Jesus, what a stupid mess! he thought, while the eyes which met his from the mirror seemed to narrow with contempt for his efforts to ingratiate himself with the local people. What would Jennifer have thought, he wondered, if she had seen him like this, just a little tipsy but not drunk, daubed with make-up in an attempt to entertain a bunch of Hallowe’en revellers for whom the only significance of the occasion was the reduction in the price of beer? And if she had seen him flirting with the kennel-maid, a little schoolgirl of fifteen or sixteen with an electric tongue and thighs as narrow as a boy’s? He could still taste that wet kiss. How long would it take him to remove the ink from his face? Was it supposed to be waterproof, indelible?

  Angry with himself for the silliness of his appearance, angry too because he could not control the stirring of his stomach as he tasted the tang of the child’s tongue on his lips, angry because he was getting angrier, he spontaneously tore off his glasses and prepared, there and then, to try and wash the paint away. He filled the basin with warm water. Muffled now, the sounds of more raucous hilarity rose and fell in the hotel bar, and at the core of the general laughter he heard the cock-a-doodle-doo of the girl’s brother, his falsetto rendition of the cock’s crowing. Bugger them, he mouthed into the mirror, watching the painted face mouthing back at him, appalled by the moist blandness of his eyes now that he had removed his glasses and placed them between the taps . . . Bugger the peasants who could make such mileage out of his foolishness and the spelling mistake on the cottage! If their lives were so humdrum that they needed that sort of banal stimulation, then let them continue their crowing . . . But the eyes in the mirror, wet and unappealing as a pair of pale slugs, stared back, unblinking. They would not excuse him such feeble self-pity. ‘Don’t be so pathetic, Pinkney!’ he said in a clear crisp voice. ‘Have a laugh and a few drinks and stop feeling sorry for yourself!’ So, blotting out a renewed eruption of mirth from the bar, a great uproar of shouting and baying, he plunged his face into the water and started to attack it with both hands.

  Suddenly, the door of the toilet was flung open behind him with such force that it banged loudly against the wall. He straightened up from the basin, spluttering and blowing like a sea-lion. He had no time to reach for his glasses to see if there was any improvement from one attempt to remove the ink, but he squinted into the mirror, blinking at the stinging of soap. All at once, there were three or four people in the room with him, arriving with a tremendous shout and clamour, such a sudden turmoil that Andrew spun around to try and see what was going on. ‘Hey, what’s . . . ?’ he began, and was barged and bumped by the youths, forced backwards against the basin by their shoving. ‘Come on, you lot, what are you . . . ?’ But their hands were on him, on his wrists and elbows, under
his arms, three or four pairs of sinewy hands which wrenched him forward and manhandled him to the door. The shouts rang hard on the bright tiles and porcelain of the room, cries in Welsh from one assailant to another, their clanging urgency more frightening in a different language so that Andrew, practically lifted from his feet, could not possibly judge the cause of the struggle to remove him from the toilet as quickly as possible. All he knew was that he was being half-carried, half-hustled to the door and through it by an indeterminate number of strong youths, one of them the kennel-maid’s brother whom he could recognise by smell. This youth, doing most of the shouting (jabbering like a chimpanzee, for all that Andrew could understand), had his head so close to Andrew’s face that Andrew twisted away from the scent of sweaty hair which brushed his cheeks, from the indefinable sweetness of something animal and rank. ‘Hey, put me . . . !’ but then, amidst louder shouting and more shoving with knees and shoulders and hips, he was borne out of the room. Someone pushed open another door in front of them, and there he was deposited in the bar again, his face running with water and dissolving whitewash, without his glasses, surrounded by a now silent crowd of people. The gripping hands fell away from him.

  The operation of removing him from the wash-room to the bar must have taken less than half a minute. He stood there, panting and squinting, flicking soap and water from his eyes, unable to ascertain the mood of the attack, unsure of how to respond. He straightened his jacket, tucked his shirt into his trousers. His mind raced as the silent faces spun before his myopic stare. Was it a continuation of the joke, and so should he now laugh and buy a round of drinks? Had he just been rescued from some appalling danger, so should he now thank his saviours? Or had he been brought in to answer some charge or other, and, if so, when would someone tell him what he had done wrong? Sensing from the sullen silence that the last scenario was the most realistic, hearing only the shuffling of feet on the carpet and the heavy breathing of the youths who had now drifted into the crowd of onlookers, he exhaled sharply and then asked, ‘Anything wrong? Did someone want me?’ There was no reply. ‘Shân? What’s the matter?’ He could distinguish the shape of the girl, that she had moved away from her bar stool and was now over by the fireplace. ‘Is it Phoebe? What’s up?’ And he walked towards her.