Quiz Night

Mrs Barwell had spent an uncomfortable evening in The Saracen’s Head with the Middle Honing quiz team. The quiz was difficult—obscure questions about The Order of the Dragon and the name of the American poet who Bram Stoker sent fan mail to as an undergraduate. It hadn’t been as she expected, her mind remained blank and when she tried to visualize the answers as the Book had told her she saw a single candle glimmering behind stained glass.

 Ted, the retired teacher who she normally liked, was annoying her: ‘it’s all about edraculation. The Count’s arrival in Whitby, spurting puncture wounds…’

            She wouldn’t be drawn into his talk, predictably about sex and bodily fluids. ‘How’s your wife’s ulcer?’ she said.

            ‘Kate, I don’t believe you’ve got a vampiric bone in your body.’

            ‘I should hope not,’ she said.  ‘Why fill your head with such nonsense?’ and then she flinched a little, wondering if she’d betrayed the Reverend.  

            ‘We’re in the middle of a vampire boom. Can’t avoid it. Stories of vampire abstinence, celibacy, the moral undead…  an insult to the Count’s memory. We don’t need more morality…None of these straight-laced, safe sex fangless wonders,’ and he topped up her glass with tonic. ‘We need someone to put the final nail in the coffin of this whole bloody business, come up with a real fucking anti-hero and then let the undead sleep…’

She was aware of her black bra showing through the white blouse and the scent she’d sprayed, Eau de Sud, was suddenly overpowering. Ted kept going on, ‘I’d love to take you up the castle,’ he said. ‘There’s a fine meteorite shower and the children of the night, well, they make beautiful music.’

She was tempted, the booze and moonshine had lulled her into a state of acquiescence but she had the Reverend’s reptuation to consider. She left after her second gin and tonic, ‘Looks like you’re going on a date,’ Ted said, ‘take the most tremendous care,’ and touched her bottom on the way out.

The moonlit fields were full of barbed shapes and twigs, stones reflecting the light and the hedgerows were luminous with hawthorn, spilling great torrents of white blossom.  In her blood was an unsettled and fizzing feeling, as if those beading silver bubbles were speeding upwards from the gin and tonic and spreading through her body. Not since childhood had she experienced the world as made up of symbols revealing all that was dark inside of her. The blossom was her betrothal to the hidden hedgerow forces, an invisible suitor who walked in step and breathed hot breath on her face and neck. She laughed as she gathered blossom up in her arms and turned into the bridleway.

In this state of playful unprotectedness she felt close to her childhood self,  the part of her that she had long forgotten, the little girl who built a wooden house on the moon and picked fruit from the bare white branches and took evening walks in the long, lunar grasses.  If only it were possible to keep hold of this part of her, not the succession of dreary practical people that cleaned other peoples’ houses and nodded when they moaned about their husbands.

At the crossroads she shivered at the memory of Toby, the eighteenth century black drummer who was hung for rape along the coastal path. On warm nights he banged his drum, gilt buttons flashing on his red tunic, floating above the gorse and heather, beating out a regimental march that quickened desire. It was the Reverend who told her of Toby’s innocence and the walks named after him. The thought of the Reverend’s voice made her feel a lightness inside herself, a settled and fizzy feeling that she liked.

The air was warm.  She unbuttoned her blouse and took off her shoes and stockings to better walk on the grass border.  She trod carefully because she knew that she was in a danger zone. The Reverend’s lectures on Endarklement warned of interim states: pregnancy, walking as she was now between land and water where boundaries could be breached and second sight offered in return for sealed lips and legs only ever opened for her fairy lover.  And she had power. In her cleaning duties she was privvy to all sorts of village secrets.

            It was dangerous to be about in the moonlight, dangerous too to emerge on the path behind the old caravan site and find herself on the narrow strip of sand between the sea and the lagoon, between two types of water: one sweet and one saline.

On the beach stood the bleached trunks of trees, long dead but their roots intact deep beneath the sand. To keep herself occupied she rehearsed her secrets, what she could barter in exchange for her soul.

Tony Avis had a drawer full of his wife’s letters, heartbreakingly they acknowledged that the pain he’d caused her were part of the whole experience of loving him. Saddest of all were his replies which he’d never sent, begging for a reconciliation, promising to be open again and protect her from the world and the worst aspects of himself. She considered them very ‘fine’ writing, full of feeling so unlike the buttoned up man he was now that made her life so difficult. They were powerful things to know. And the Reverend too, among his ornaments was the trophy for cross country running –  fine long legs still visible today folded beneath his desk,  limbs that she joked, in a famine, would be his undoing.

So many secrets lay behind lace curtains and Middle Honing’s dozing retirement population. She dusted shingle on windowsills where wooden avocets eyed the onlooker with the detachment of  Egyptian deities.  And what she had seen in the Reverend’s study, The Book of Power, bound in vellum and eaten away with worm and damp. The Book of Power that promised if she left the milk and sanitary towel buried in view of the barrow and she walked round it thrice, widdershins, she would have a wish granted for a limited and liminal time.

One afternoon while seagulls drifted past the clifftop, squeaking worse than her bicycle brakes, Mrs Barwell had listened to the Reverend whispering of anti-enlightenment forces. ‘Endarklement, Mrs Barwell, endarklement.’ Such a pity, a handsome and intelligent man spouting all this stuff and she needing to get away to Ipswich.

‘We have nothing with which to fight back. In the advent of real evil we have no deep rooted belief.  Mohammedans are at work in the city centres but they have fire in their hearts.’

They faced each other across the walnut desk, the shingle paperweight and the book with the curled up cover. ‘This is the Age of Acquisition. We only have green tea, crystal healing, dietary fads, wind chimes. I have seen real evil at work in the Romanian orphanage.  I have here The Book of Power. The repository of strong magic.’

And he slapped the curled leather and she felt her thighs stinging sympathetically as if the blow was delivered smartly to herself. A handsome man with a voice that murmured and purred. Even in his delusions you were drawn to his heat and the solemn face blasted with strange ecstasies that Mrs Barwell could dream of but never tell.

The Book wasn’t to be taken seriously. It spoke of the men and women in the woods who do the strange dance around the chalk triangle and there was a spell to tumble kitchen shelves. But there were other spells that she didn’t dare speak of, let alone think, because they made the hair stand up on her forearms and say out loud the unclean thoughts and make long and lascivious shapes with names like The Stargazer and The Deep Begetter. The Reverend had explained as he shut up the book that the skill wasn’t so much in the spells and the magic herbs with funny nicknames like Milkmaid’s Sorrow or Gentleman Cutpurse—the skill lay in the intelligence that lurked between the book’s damp boards and its uncanny ability to read you, even things hidden from yourself. She had soon settled the Reverend in his armchair by the window where he could watch the containers crawling across the horizon, where he could sink down into the bottomless depths of his armchair to the sound of the deep water buoy clanging its warning. She poured him his wine, dusted the dandruff from his shoulders, ‘you’re all books and dry dust,’ she said. Later she cooked him a soft boiled egg but didn’t leave for Ipswich. Instead she gave him his pills and watched his head bob in time to the deep water buoy, drifting off between the furrows of the North sea.

It was a damp book smelling like the Reverend of cold coastal mornings and fungal spores that make your lungs itch. Best locked away in the walnut bureau. One little look, and even then, she had it in her mind, half-teasingly, to find a spell that would enable her to win at the pub quiz in a fortnight’s time.  What would the book see in her, Kitty Barwell? Recipes for elderflower trifle?  The dry heat that rose in her body and mottled her chest when she smelled the Reverend’s unwashed hair as he slept with his big toe curled around the radiator tap? Her love for the Reverend was an open secret. None of these things, perhaps.  Go deeper. Her gentleman friend in Ipswich who sold jackets and Panama hats to wealthy Londoners down for a long weekend sailing on the Debden estuary, the little friend with red hair and thick fingers who liked her tugging at him through the thick pleats of his trousers but was, after three occasions, still unwilling to remove them?

The book opened on a woodcut of a wild boar and a man riding it backwards, widdershins, around a mound not unlike King Hlothere’s barrow up by Friday Street. The secrets of Androman are here it said and the pages fluttered while her heart skipped a beat. It said things that she could see in pictures, clear and precise as a row of advent calender windows bursting open. Clearer than her staring into Tony Avis’s window and seeing him crying by his wife’s letters or, further down in the village, where the man with the limp and the grey haired architect kissed by the bed-warming pan fixed to the chimney breast, while their wives drove into Snape to find an antique door knocker. By the time she had put the book down it had got dark and the moon had risen over the ruins of the castle on the hill and the silhouette looked flat and two dimensional as a tarot card.

The next day the village seemed the same. Middle Honing still welcomed careful drivers and its hanging baskets bloomed in the sea breeze. An old couple in see-through macs hovered by The Jolly Sailor staring at the blackboard advertising the ‘Pensioners’ Lunchtime Special’ —Battered Haddock. The village was the same but it had an unreal pasteboard quality, the crow hopping by the black pump on the village green was a little too sleek, the Norman church with its needle-thin spire that scraped heaven with its feeling-fix of prayer was too posed, a little too English heritage.

Mrs Barwell let herself into Tony’s house and passed the hunting prints on the stairs. The Book said nothing of gaining knowledge at a pub quiz but she had the uncomfortable sensation that the doodles in the margin, the fish-headed men that cavorted in tight breeches and buckled shoes, had peered into her and disregarded what she thought she wanted. They knew about the child.

‘The days are getting longer but the weeks seem shorter,’ she said to herself in the living room mirror. ‘Why do I say such things? Only a few months ago the days were shorter but the weeks ­were longer…’ And she remembered the sensation of the child inside her, she was as full of his flesh as the plum is of the stone.