The Dragon Charmer (11 page)

“It’s beautiful,” said Gaynor, touching it admiringly. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. What is it a scarf?”

“Something old,” said Fern. “Like it says in the rhyme. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. This is very old.”

“What will you do for t’rest of them?” asked Mrs. Wicklow.

“A new dress, a borrowed smile, the three-carat sapphire in my engagement ring. That should cover it.”

Gaynor started at her flippancy; Mrs. Wicklow found excuses for it. “Poor lass. Happen it’s all been too much for you. It’s always hard on t’bride just before t’big day, specially if she hasn’t a mother to help her. You don’t want to go drinking so much coffee: it’ll wind up your nerves even tighter.”

Fern smiled rather wanly, pushing the empty cup away. “I’ll switch to tea,” she said.

After a breakfast that only Will ate, Mrs. Wicklow departed to make up beds and bully Trisha, and Will and Gaynor went out in search of Ragginbone.

“You won’t find him,” said Fern. “He’s never there when you want him. It’s a habit of his.”

She went to the upstairs room where the dress waited in solitary splendor. It was made of that coarse-textured Thai silk that rustles like tissue paper with every movement, the color too warm for white but not quite cream. The high neck was open down the front, the corners folded back like wings to show a glimpse of hidden embroidery, similar to the neckline worn by Mary Tudor in so many somber portraits. The sleeves were tight and long enough to cover the wrist; the waist tapered; the skirt flared. Further decoration was
minimal. It had beauty, simplicity, style: everything Fern approved of. If I was in love, she thought irrationally, I’d want frills and flounces and lace. I’d want to look like a cloud full of pearls, like a blizzard in chiffon. No woman in love wants understatement. But there was no such thing as love, only marriage. On an impulse she took the dress off the dummy and put it on, wrestling with the inaccessible section of the zipper. There was a hair ornament of silver wire, fitting like an Alice band, in order to secure the veil. She arranged it rather awkwardly and surveyed herself in the mirror—Alison’s mirror, which Will had moved from Gaynor’s room. In the spotted glass the sheen of the silk was dulled, making her look pale and severe. Her face appeared shadowed and hard about the mouth. I look like a nun, she decided. The wrong kind of nun. Not a blossoming girl abandoning her novitiate for the lure of romance, but a woman opting out of the world, for whom nunhood was a necessary martyrdom. A passing ray of sunlight came through the window behind her, touching mat other veil, the gift of Atlantis, which she had left on the bed, so that for an instant it glowed in the dingy mirror like a rainbow. Fern turned quickly, but the sun vanished, and the colors, and her dress felt stiff and cumbersome, weighing her down; she struggled out of it with difficulty. I must have time to think, she told herself. Maybe if I talk to Gus…

She could hear Mrs. Wicklow coming up the stairs and she hurried out, feeling illogically guilty, as if in trying on the dress before the appointed hour, she had been indulging in a culpable act. Mrs. Wicklow’s manner was even more dour than usual: Robin, Abby, and Robin’s only surviving aunt were due later that day, and it transpired that although Dale House was lavishly endowed with bedrooms, there was a shortage of available linen. An ancient cache of sheets had proved to be moth eaten beyond repair. “It’s too late to buy new ones,” Fern said, seizing opportunity. “I’ll go down to the vicarage and see if I can borrow some.”

She felt better out of doors, though the sky to the east looked leaden and a hearty little wind had just breezed in off the North Sea. At the vicarage, she explained to Maggie about the bedding and then enquired for Gus.

“He had to go out,” Maggie said. “Big meeting with the archdeacon about church finances. It’s a funny thing: the smaller the finances, the bigger the meeting. Did you want him for anything special?”

Maybe she would be better off talking to Maggie, woman to woman, Fern thought, tempted by the hazy concept of universal sisterhood. Haltingly she began to stammer out her doubts about the forthcoming marriage. She felt like a novice curate admitting to the lure of religious schism. Maggie’s face melted into instant sympathy. Her normal Weltanschauung combined genuine kindness and conscientious tolerance with the leftovers of sixties ideology at its woolliest. In her teens she had embraced Nature, pacifism, and all things bright and beautiful, Freudian and Spockian, liberal and liberationist. She had worn long droopy skirts and long droopy hair, smoked marijuana, played the guitar (rather badly), and even tried free love, though only once or twice before she met Gus. At heart, however, she remained a post-Victorian romantic for whom a wedding day was a high point in every woman’s life. Relegating the loan of sheets to lower on the agenda, she pressed Fern into an armchair and offered coffee.

“No, thanks, I…”

“It’s not too much trouble, honestly. The percolator’s already on. What you need is to stop rushing around and sit down and relax for a bit. All brides go through this just before a wedding, believe me. I know I did. It’s all right for the men—they never do any of the work—but the poor bride is inundated with arrangements that keep changing and temperamental caterers and awkward relatives, and there always comes a moment when she stops and asks herself what it’s All For. It’s a big thing, getting married, one of the biggest things you’ll ever do—it’s going to alter your whole life so it’s only natural you should be nervous. You’ll be fine tomorrow. When you’re standing there in the church, and he’s beside you, and you say ‘I do’—it all falls into place. I promise you.” She took Fern’s hand and pressed it, her face shining with the fuzzy inner confidence of those fortunate few for whom marriage really is the key to domestic bliss.

“But I’m not sure that I”

“Hold on: I’ll get the coffee. Keep talking. I can hear you from the kitchen.”

“I had this picture of my future with Marcus,” Fern said, addressing the empty chair opposite. “I’d got it all planned—I’ve always planned things—and I knew exactly how it would be. I thought that was what I wanted, only now I—I’m not sure anymore. Something happened last night it doesn’t matter what that changed my perspective. I’ve always assumed I liked my life in London, but now I wonder if that was because I wouldn’t let myself think about it. I was afraid to widen my view. It isn’t that I
dislike
it: I just want more. And I don’t believe marrying Marcus will offer me more—just more of the same.”

“Sorry,” said Maggie, emerging with two mugs in which the liquid slopped dangerously. “I didn’t catch all that. The percolator was making too much noise. You were saying you weren’t sure—?”

“I’m not sure I want to get married,” Fern reiterated with growing desperation.

“Of course
you’re not.” Maggie set down the mugs and glowed at her again. “No one is ever one hundred percent sure about anything. Gus says that’s one of the miraculous things about human nature, that we’re able to leave room for doubt. People who are too sure, he says, tend to bigotry. He told me once, he even doubts God sometimes. He says that if we can deal with doubt, ultimately it strengthens our faith. It’ll be like that with your marriage: you’ll see. When you get to the church”

“Maggie,” Fern interrupted ruthlessly,
“I’m not in love with Marcus.”

The flow of words stopped; some of the eager glow ebbed from Mrs. Dinsdale’s face. “You don’t mean that?”

“I’ve never been in love with him. I like him, I like him a lot, but it’s not love. I thought it didn’t matter. Only now—” Seeing Maggie’s altered expression, she got to her feet. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have saddled you with all this. I’ve got to sort it out for myself.”

“But Fern—my dear—”

“Could I have the sheets?”

*  *  *

Equipped with a sufficiency of linen, Fern and Trisha made up the beds together while Mrs. Wicklow prepared a salad lunch for anyone who might arrive in time to eat it. Marcus and his family were to stay in a pub in a neighboring village, maintaining a traditional distance until D-Day—something for which Fern was deeply grateful. Having to cope with her own relations was more than enough, when all she wanted, like Garbo, was to be left alone. Shortly after one the sound of a car on the driveway annouced the advent of Robin, Abby, and Aunt Edie, the latter an octogenarian with a deceptive air of fragility and an almost infinite capacity for sweet sherry. Robin, at fifty-nine, still retained most of his hair and an incongruous boyishness of manner, though where his children were concerned he radiated an aura of generalized anxiety that neither their maturity nor his had been able to alleviate. Abby, in her forties, was getting plump around the hips but remained charmingly scatty, easily lovable, impractical in small matters but down-to-earth in her approach to major issues. They had lapsed into the habits of matrimony without ever having formalized the arrangement and Fern, suspecting her father of a secret mental block, had never pushed the subject. Abby had received her seal of approval long before and Fern was content not to disrupt the status quo. However, even the nicest people have their defects. Abby had a passion for pets, usually of the small furry variety and invariably highly strung to the point of psychosis. There had been a vicious Pomeranian, a sickly Pekinese, a succession of neurotic hamsters, gerbils, and guinea pigs. Unfortunately, she had brought her latest acquisition with her, a Chihuahua salvaged from a dogs’ home whom she had rechristened Yoda. Fern tried not to fantasize about what might happen if the canine miniature came face-to-face with Lougarry. There was much cheek-to-cheek kissing, hefting of luggage, and presentation of presents. Fern felt she was functioning increasingly on automatic pilot: her mouth made the right noises while inside her there was a yawning emptiness where her uncertainties rattled to and fro like echoes in a gorge. At Abby’s insistence she showed her the dress, thrown in haste back over the dummy, and while Abby touched and admired it, a sudden cold fatalism told Fern
that all this was meaningless, because she would never wear it now She would never wear it at all.

“What’s this?” Abby enquired, picking up the drift of gossamer on the bed.

“It’s mine,” Fern said quickly, almost snatching it from her. “It was given to me—ages ago. Ages ago.” And then, seeing Abby’s expression of hurt: “I’m sorry if I… It’s very fragile. I must put it away. I shouldn’t have left it lying about.”

The intrusion of Yoda put paid to further embarrassment. Abby scooped him up in her arms to prevent him soiling the dress and marveled aloud how he could have managed to climb so many flights of stairs when the treads were nearly his own height. Fern could not resist a sneaking hope that he might slip on the descent and roll all the way to the bottom.

   Will and Gaynor walked up the hill toward the moors. The same gleam of sunlight that spun a rainbow from the Atlantean veil as Fern gazed into the mirror danced across the landscape ahead of them, pursued by a gray barrage of cloud. The sun’s ray seemed to finger the farthest slopes, brushing the earth with a fleeting brilliance of April color: the green and straw-gold of the grasses, the brown and bronze and blood-purple of thrusting stems, vibrant with spring sap, and in an isolate clump of trees the lemon-pale mist of new leaves.

“Spring comes later here than in the south,” Gaynor said.

“Like a beautiful woman arriving long after the start of the party,” Will responded. “She knows we’ll appreciate her that much more if she keeps us waiting.”

He seemed to know where he was going, changing from track to track as if by instinct, evidently treading an accustomed route. In due course Lougarry appeared, though Gaynor did not see from where, falling into step beside them. Her coat was scuffed and ruffled as if she had slept out, the fur tipped here and there with dried mud, burrs and grass seeds adhering to her flank. Gaynor tried to imagine her and her owner living in an ordinary house, sharing a sofa, watching
Eastenders;
but it was impossible. They were, not quite wild, but outsiders: outside walls, outside society, outside the normal boundaries in which we confine ourselves. She sensed that Ragginbone’s knowledge, his air of culture, had been acquired
by watching and learning rather than taking part—endless years of watching and learning, maybe even centuries. She could picture him standing sentinel, patient as a heron, while the tumult of history went rushing and seething past. The wind would be his cloak and the sky his shelter, and Lougarry would sit at his heels, faithful as his shadow, silent as the wolf she resembled.

“If Ragginbone is a retired wizard,” she asked Will, “where does that leave Lougarry? Is she a retired werewolf?”

“Reformed,” said Will.

Gaynor had spoken lightly, her manner mock-satirical; but Will, as ever, sounded purely matter-of-fact.

They found Ragginbone on the crest of a hill where the bare rock broke through the soil. Gaynor did not know how far they had come but she was tired and thirsty, grateful for a long drink from the flask he carried. It was cased in leather like a hip flask, though considerably bigger, but the contents tasted like water the way water ought to taste but so rarely does, cool and clear and straight off the mountain, without that tang of tin and the trace chemicals that so often contaminate it. But afterward she thought perhaps its purity was mere fancy: thirst can transform any drink into an elixir. Will related most of her story, Gaynor speaking only in response to direct questions from Ragginbone. He made her repeat the description of Dr. Laye several times.

“Could he be an ambulant?” Will suggested.

“Maybe. However … You are sure his skin was actually
gray?
It was not an effect of the television?”

“I’m sure,” said Gaynor. “When his hand reached out I could see it quite clearly. I can’t describe how horrible it was. Not just shocking but somehow … obscene. The grayness made it look dead, but it was moving, beckoning, and the fingers were very long and supple, as if they had no bones, or too many …” She broke off, shuddering at the recollection.