Where The World Meets™
Do you believe in fairies?
 
"The Old Uns are not gone," said Vanessa as we came out of the woods together at the crest of the hill with a view of the distant sea. Then she laughed. "Derek always used to say that when something like that just happened." She paused. Her breath did not always come easily to her, in spite of the glow of energy she always gave off. "Derek was the gardener at the house when I was a little girl. He was as old as the hills... like I am now." To put things in perspective; I must have been twenty-one when this conversation took place. I had gone down into Hampshire to work planting trees through the wet summer. Vanessa, a little old lady, dressed like a bundle of washing, owned the land. She was well over eighty, therefore her childhood was in the opening decade of the Twentieth Century. And if Derek really was as old then as she was now, that would take his childhood back to the Eighteen Thirties. And any octogenarians he encountered as a boy? Perhaps old enough to have grown up in an age when it was taken for granted that brownies prowled the dairy by night.  We are all only a couple of handshakes away from the deep past. Vanessa looked at me sideways.  "Do you believe in fairies?" "Of course not," I said. "One can never tell with your generation," she said. “Some of you seem to want to believe anything. Mine wanted to overthrow everything. Especially fairies: all that Walter De La Mare, Celtic Twilight stuff. Load of twee nonsense." Another, sidelong, searching glance. "But you felt it didn't you?" "Yes," I said. For about one hundred yards, along a stretch of woodland path which ran at the foot of a gully, it had felt as if we were being watched. Some presence or presences had regarded us, not with menace, but with playful curiosity. Or so it had felt. "And you are interested in odd things, aren't you?" she said. "Yes, " I said. The trees were planted. I went back to London. One winter or the next, Vanessa broke her hip, got pneumonia in the hospital and died. I heard of this in a roundabout way. This summer I was back, and the first thing I did was to go and look at the trees. I was surprised they were woodland now - light, shade and twisted limbs, from the weedy rows of saplings I had planted. More time had passed than I thought. I was also surprised to be asked down for the weekend. By coincidence, Vanessa's house has been bought by my friends Jerry and Charlotte as their country place. Jerry, much more successful than I am, usually prefers to be with other successful people. We writers are superstitious. It is an edgy business making a living out of thin air. We must have our pens in the right order on our desks, and our favourite coffee cup. We shun the unlucky for fear that their luck will rub off on us. I thought I understood why I had been invited when I arrived on the first Friday, in fact the first evening in August, and met Holly in Jerry and Charlotte's kitchen. Holly; dark, slender, sinuous and young. When I first saw her, I assumed she must have been Charlotte's nanny. But as Holly helped herself to a glass of wine, sat on a kitchen chair and lit a cigarette while Felix and Emerald, Jerry and Charlotte's children made mayhem on the oak staircase, I realised she was simply another guest. This made matters clear, or so I’d thought. Charlotte, not Jerry had invited me down, so that Holly could snap me up. Ever since Isobel, my wife, died eighteen months ago, Charlotte has been predicting that I will be snapped up. "Probably at the graveside even. It always happens when men your age become available.” n n “IRIS” by John Atkinson Grimshaw Charlotte was Isobel's best friend. It was Charlotte, and not I who was in the room in the hospicewhen it happened. She had sent me downstairs to get some sleep, and came down to wake me in order to tell me of the news. Anyway, whatever Charlotte's intentions, Holly showed no interest in snapping me up. We did not find ourselves together until early on Sunday morning when I came into the kitchen and found her in her towelling dressing gown loading the toaster. "Hi," she said. "I'm just making some coffee. Like some?" "Yes please," I said. And while the kettle boiled we were obliged to stand and make the conversation of two people not much interested in each other. "Been for a walk?" she said. "I've been to Church." "That's fantastic!" "Is it?" "Yes!  If we've had a Church party, we're just like a proper country house party in an Edwardian novel. We should play croquet on the lawn this afternoon with cucumber sandwiches. And you and Jerry should go out and shoot something." "Shoot what?" "Birds of some kind I suppose. I'm not very good with birds." But the main business of the day was lunch. We were to be joined by Paul and Imogen. Paul, a comedian famous for appearing on television quizzes and panel shows, and Imogen, a script editor at a production company currently nursing one of Jerry's projects. They were bringing their four-year-old daughter Scarlett, Emerald's age. This arrangement made for a busy morning for Charlotte. Jerry went out in the car for a copy of The Observer and at half past eleven opened a generous selection of wines, to breathe. Holly sat at the kitchen table, smoking, reading The Observer and chatting about the pictures in the newspaper. I stood around unoccupied, drifting in and out of the house. Charlotte dressed her two children long before she thought about dressing herself, Emerald in a fairy costume with rainbow coloured wings. Then she boiled pasta and tossed salads, still in her dressing gown. Around noon she began drinking wine. Ten minutes before her guests were due, she disappeared upstairs and returned in a light summer dress. She seemed fresh and carefree. Paul dominated the lunch table, as performers tend to do. Jerry and Holly were delighted, and so was his wife. Once it had been briefly established that I was of no importance to either Paul or Imogen's career, nothing was required of me. I was content with that. Charlotte was silent, and listened indifferently to the conversation, as if it was the background noise of the radio. I noticed that in between stacking plates and shuffling serving dishes around, she took several more glasses of wine. It was all informal. For much of the time, Emerald and Scarlett (who had arrived also dressed as a fairy), sat beneath the table and whispered together. There was no threat of any organised activity afterwards, such as a walk together, so as things became looser still, I slipped away into the woods. I followed the path that I had taken with Vanessa twenty years ago. Time and memory were uncertain guides, but I grew more confident as I went along. Eventually I broke out of the woods in sight of the sea. This time I had had no companions, seen or unseen. I turned around, and as I made my way back towards the house, I saw Charlotte coming along the path towards me. She swayed as she walked, the wine catching up with her, I thought. So I was not surprised when she put her arm around my waist for support. We walked a little in silence. Every so often she looked up at me, smiling, her lips trembling as if she was trying to restrain a fit of giggles. n "What were you doing out here all by yourself?" she said. "Looking for fairies," I said. She laughed. "I can never get a straight answer from you." As she spoke, she leaned into me, her mouth hovering close to mine, just as the wasps had buzzed around the children's drinks outside the village pub yesterday afternoon. I pulled away slightly, and she let her arm drop and meandered on a little ahead of me. "Do you have a cigarette?" she said. "Thanks. The children go mad if I smoke in front of them. They hit me. So I might as well make the most of being out here with you." She leaned back against a tree and drew deeply on the cigarette. "Will you come to bed with me?" she asked. I was flustered, and after struggling for words said only what was in my heart, which was for the best. "I can't. I'll break your heart." "My heart's already broken. Please come to bed with me." "Trust me,” I said. "We shouldn't." What was said needed to be unambiguous, no matter what I felt or as much as I wanted to. She snorted and looked away. "You're thinking about Jerry. Why should he care? He's got Holly with him." "What?" "Haven't you noticed?" her voice took on a cold, sarcastic ring. "How he can't keep his eyes off of her? How she snorts like a pig when he says anything that he thinks is funny, and how she puts on her serious face when he's trying to be deep? You still can't believe me, can you? That he parades his tart in front of his wife and children and I put up with it? Pretty sad state of affairs, isn't it?" She looked down, her mouth curved to repress a giggle. "And it is a sad state of affairs, isn't it? I'm sorry, I should have kept my mouth shut. You're much too kindhearted to think about that sort of thing. I've really gone and humiliated myself, haven't I? I only said it because I thought that some ‘honour thing’with Jerry, was holding you back." I did not know what to say. I was surprised and afraid that Charlotte thought I had rejected her. Deeper down, I suspect that I was hurt that I was the means to an end in a score settling game between Jerry and Charlotte. "Come on," she said. "The children will miss me." She took my arm and we walked on along the shady path for a while. "This is really about your loyalty to Isobel, isn't it?" she said eventually. "No," I said. "She was always a jealous woman." "I never noticed," I said. She laughed. "Of course you never did. You only had eyes for her. That's why you two worked so well. And you never saw how she burned if you so much as spoke to another woman. She blamed them, not you." n “PRISCILLA HORTON as ARIEL” by Daniel Maclise “SPIRIT OF THE NIGHT” by John Atkinson Grimshaw After a while she added, "Don't think that's a criticism of her. I envy her for it. I wish I was a jealous woman. I wish I could hurl saucepans. I wish I could take hammers to the wings of BMWs. I wish I could look at Holly and wish her dead, as Isobel would wish me dead if she could see us now." Then once more, for the first time in twenty years, that strange sensation of being watched, playfully, indifferently. And after it had lifted after five minutes or so, Charlotte said, "do you believe Isobel can see us?" "Why do you ask?" I said. "I don't know, you've got a bit funny since she died, going to Church and everything. Perhaps you feel like her eyes are on you." "What do you believe?" I said. "I don't know, but for a few minutes I felt like we were being watched. Guilty conscience, I guess." "The old uns are not gone," I said. She dropped my arm and turned so she stood in front of me. We were back where we could see the gables of the house above the trees now. "What's that supposed to mean?" she said. "I wish I could understand you." And I wished I could make myself understood. Women are supposed to be experts in these matters. How could I say ‘I fell in love with you while we were nursing Isobel. I am in love with you still. I only came down here to see you, and by that I mean see you, watch you as you banged around your kitchen and shouted at your children. But if I took you, even once, I would break up your life, and I could never give you something better instead’? "Can I have a hug, at least?" she said. We embraced and for the first time in ages, I felt the softness and cleanliness of a woman. "Right," she said, "now I've got to face the washing up, and I'm pissed. I only got pissed to seduce you." "I'll help," I said. She squeezed my hand. "Stop being nice to me. I feel bad enough as it is. We'd better go back separately, even if we haven't done anything." She slipped off into the woods. I walked on to the main path where I was ambushed by both Emerald and Scarlett in their fairy costumes, waving their wands. "Stop!" cried Emerald. "Stop!" cried Scarlett. "Do you believe in fairies?" they said together. And since in their eyes, I am as old as the hills, I said "Yes".
by William Saunders
“TAKE THE FAIR FACE OF A WOMAN” (aka THE FAIRY QUEEN) by Sophie Anderson
 
n
 
London based journalist, William Saunders is currently working on a biography of Jimi Hendrix, as well as a remarkable work of fiction, ‘Leah And Her Twelve Brothers’. Much of Saunders’ works of short fiction and poetry have been published in British magazines. He may be contacted via email: fairies@dial.pipex.mailto:fairies@dial.pipex.comshapeimage_31_link_0