Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter
He rises up on his elbows once and gasps at me: “Mimic the murder of the rats, Puss! Mask the music of Venus with that clamour of Diana!”
A-hunting we shall go! Loyal to the last, I play catch as catch can with Tab’s dead rats, giving the dying the coup de grace and baying with resonant vigour to drown the extravagant screeches that break forth from that (who would have suspected?) more passionate young woman as she comes off in fine style. (Full marks, Master.)
At that, the old hag comes battering at the door. What’s going on? Why for the racket? And the door rattles on its hinges.
“Peace!” cries Signor Furioso. “Haven’t I just now blocked the great hole?”
But milady’s in no hurry to don her smock again, she takes her lovely time about it; so full of pleasure gratified her languorous limbs you’d think her very navel smiled. She pecks my master prettily thank-you on the cheek, wets the gum on his false moustache with the tip of her strawberry tongue and sticks it back on his upper lip for him, then lets her wardress into the scene of the faux carnage with the most modest and irreproachable air in the world.
“See! Puss has slaughtered all the rats.”
I rush, purring proud, to greet the hag; instantly, her eyes o’erflow. “Why the bedclothes so disordered?” she squeaks, not quite blinded yet, by phlegm and chose for her post from all the other applications on account of her suspicious mind, even (oh, dutiful) when in grande peur des rats.
“Puss had a mighty battle with the biggest beast you ever saw upon this very bed; can’t you see the bloodstains on the sheets? And now, what do we owe you, Signor Furioso, for this singular service?”
“A hundred ducats,” says I, quick as a flash, for I know my master, left to himself, would like an honourable fool, take nothing.
“That’s the entire household expenses for a month!” wails avarice’s well-chosen accomplice.
“And worth every penny! For those rats would have eaten us out of house and home.” I see the glimmerings of sturdy backbone in this little lady. “Go, pay them from your private savings that I know of, that you’ve skimmed off the housekeeping.”
Muttering and moaning but nothing for it except to do as she is bid; and the furious Sir and I take off a laundry basket full of dead rats as souvenir—we drop it, plop! in the nearest sewer. And sit down to one dinner honestly paid for, for a wonder.
But the young fool is off his feed again. Pushes his plate aside, laughs, weeps, buries his head in his hands and, time and time and time again, goes to the window to stare at the shutters behind which his sweetheart scrubs the blood away and my dear Tabs rests from her supreme exertions. He sits, for a while, and scribbles; rips the page in four, hurls it aside. I spear a falling fragment with a claw. Dear God, he’s took to writing poetry.
“I must and will have her for ever,” he exclaims.
I see my plan has come to nothing. Satisfaction has not satisfied him; that soul they both saw in one another’s bodies has such insatiable hunger no single meal could ever appease it. I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.
“How can I live without her?”
You did so for twenty-seven years, sir, and never missed her for a moment.
“I’m burning with the fever of love!”
Then we’re spared the expense of fires.
“I shall steal her away from her husband to live with me.”
“What do you propse to live on, sir?”
“Kisses,” he said distractedly. “Embraces.”
“Well, you won’t grow fat on that, sir; though she will. And then, more mouths to feed.”
“I’m sick and tired of your foul-mouthed barbs, Puss,” he snaps. And yet my heart is moved, for now he speaks the plain, clear, foolish rhetoric of love and who is there cunning enough to help him to happiness but I? Scheme, loyal Puss, scheme!
My wash completed, I step out across the square to visit that charming she who’s wormed her way directly into my own hitherto-untrammelled heart with her sharp wits and her pretty ways. She exhibits warm emotion to see me; and, oh! what news she has to tell me! News of a rapt and personal nature, that turns my mind to thoughts of the future, and, yes, domestic plans of most familial nature. She’s saved me a pig’s trotter, a whole entire pig’s trotter the Missus smuggled to her with a wink. A feast! Masticating, I muse.
“Recapitulate,” I suggest, “the daily motions of Sir Pantaloon when he’s at home.”
They set the cathedral clock by him, so rigid and so regular his habits. Up at the crack, he meagrely breakfasts off yesterday’s crusts and a cup of cold water, to spare the expense of heating it up. Down to his counting-house, counting out his money, until a bowl of well-watered gruel at midday. The afternoon he devotes to usury, bankrupting, here, a small tradesman, there, a weeping widow, for fun and profit. Dinner’s luxurious, at four; soup, with a bit of rancid beef or a tough bird in it—he’s an arrangement with the butcher, takes unsold stock off his hands in return for a shut mouth about a pie that had a finger in it. From four-thirty until five-thirty, he unlocks the shutters and lets his wife look out, oh, don’t I know! while hag sits beside her to make sure she doesn’t smile. (Oh, that blessed flux, those precious loose minutes that set the game in motion!)
And while she breathes the air of evening, why, he checks up on his chest of gems, his bales of silk, all those treasures he loves too much to share with daylight and if he wastes a candle when he so indulges himself, why, any man is entitled to one little extravagance. Another draught of Adam’s ale healthfully concludes the day; up he tucks besides Missus and, since she is his prize possession, consents to finger her a little. He palpitates her hide and slaps her flanks: “What a good bargain!” Alack, can do no more, not wishing to profligate his natural essence. And so drifts off to sinless slumber amid the prospects of tomorrow’s gold.
“How rich is he?”
“Croesus.”
“Enough to keep two loving couples?”
“Sumptuous.”
Early in the uncandled morning, groping to the privy bleared with sleep, were the old man to place his foot upon the subfuse yet volatile fur of a shadow-camouflaged young tabby cat—
“You read my thoughts, my love.”
I say to my master: “Now, you get yourself a doctor’s gown, impedimenta all complete or I’m done with you.”
“What’s this, Puss?”
“Do as I say and never mind the reason! The less you know of why, the better.”
So he expends a few of the hag’s ducats on a black gown with a white collar and his skull cap and his black bag and, under my direction, makes himself another sign that announces, with all due pomposity, how he is Il Famed Dottore: Aches cured, pains prevented, bones set, graduate of Bologna, physician extraordinary. He demands to know, is she to play the invalid to give him further access to her bedroom?
“I’ll clasp her in my arms and jump out of the window; we too shall both perform the triple somersault of love.”
“You just mind your own business, sir, and let me mind it for you after my own fashion.”
Another raw and misty morning! Here in the hills, will the weather ever change? So bleak it is, and dreary; but there he stands, grave as a sermon in his black gown and half the market people come with coughs and boils and broken heads and I dispense the plasters and the vials of coloured water I’d forethoughtfully stowed in his bag, he too agitato to sell for himself. (And, who knows, might we not have stumbled on a profitable profession for future pursuit, if my present plans miscarry?)
Until dawn shoots his little yet how flaming arrow past the cathedral on which the clock strikes six. At the last stroke, that famous door flies open once again and—eeeeeeeeeeeeech! the hag lets rip.
“Oh, Doctor, oh, Doctor, come quick as you can; our good man’s taken a sorry tumble!”
And weeping fit to float a smack, she is, so doesn’t see the doctor’s apprentice is most colourfully an
The old booby’s flat out at the foot of the stair, his head at an acute angle that might turn chronic and a big bunch of keys, still, grinned in his right hand as if they were the keys to heaven marked: Wanted on voyage. And Missus, in her wrap, bends over him with a pretty air of concern.
“A fall—” she begins when she sees the doctor but stops short when she sees your servant, Puss, looking as suitably down-in-the-mouth as his chronic smile will let him, humping his master’s stock-in-trade and hawing like a sawbones. “You, again,” she says, and can’t forbear to giggle. But the dragon’s too blubbered to hear.
My master puts his ear to the old man’s chest and shakes his head dolefully; then takes the mirror from his pocket and puts it to the old man’s mouth. Not a breath clouds it. Oh, sad! Oh, sorrowful!
“Dead, is he?” sobs the hag. “Broke his neck, has he?”
And she slyly makes a little grab for the keys, in spite of her well-orchestrated distress; but Missus slaps her hand and she gives over.
“Let’s get him to a softer bed,” says Master.
He ups the corpse, carries it aloft to the room we know full well, bumps Pantaloon down, twitches an eyelid, taps a kneecap, feels a pulse.
“Dead as a doornail,” he pronounces. “It’s not a doctor you want, it’s an undertaker.”
Missus has a handkerchief very dutifully and correctly to her eyes.
“You just run along and get one,” she says to hag. “And then I’ll read the will. Because don’t think he’s forgotten you, thou faithful servant. Oh, my goodness, no.”
So off goes hag; you never saw a woman of her accumulated Christmases spring so fast. As soon as they are left alone, no trifling, this time; they’re at it, hammer and tongs, down on the carpet since the bed is occupé. Up and down, up and down his arse; in and out, in and out her legs. Then she heaves him up and throws him on the back, her turn at the grind, now, and you’d think she’ll never stop.
Toujours discret, Puss occupies himself in unfastening the shutters and throwing the windows open to the beautiful beginning of morning in whose lively yet fragrant air his sensitive nostrils catch the first and vernal hint of spring. In a few moments, my dear friend joins me. I notice already—or is it only my fond imagination?—a charming new portliness in her gait, hitherto so elastic, so spring-heeled. And there we sit upon the windowsill like the two genii and protectors of the house; ah, Puss, your rambling days are over. I shall become a hearthrug cat, a fat and cosy cushion cat, sing to the moon no more, settle at last amid the sedentary joys of a domesticity we two, she and I, have so richly earned.
Their cries of rapture rouse me from this pleasant revery.
The hag chooses, naturellement, this tender if outrageous moment to return with the undertaker in his chiffoned topper, plus a brace of mutes black as beetles, glum as bailiffs, bearing the elm box between them to take the corpse away in. But they cheer up something wonderful at the unexpected spectacle before them and he and she conclude their amorous interlude amidst roars of approbation and torrents of applause.
But what a racket the hag makes! Police, murder, thieves! Until the Master chucks her purseful of gold back again, for a gratuity. (Meanwhile, I note that sensible young woman, mother-naked as she is has yet the presence of mind to catch hold of her husband’s key ring and sharply tug it from his sere, cold grip. Once she’s got the keys secure, she’s in charge of all.)
“Now, no more of your nonsense!” she snaps to hag. “If I hereby give you the sack, you’ll get a handsome gift to go along with you for now”—flourishing the keys—“I am a rich widow and here”—indicating to all my bare yet blissful master—“is the young man who’ll be my second husband.”
When the governess found Signor Panteleone had indeed remembered her in his will, left her a keepsake of the cup he drank his morning water from, she made not a squeak more, pocketed a fat sum with thanks and, sneezing, took herself off with no more cries of “murder” neither. The old buffoon briskly bundled in his coffin and buried; Master comes into a great fortune and Missus rounding out already and they as happy as pigs in plunk.
But my Tabs beat her to it, since cats don’t take much time about engendering; three fine, new-minted ginger kittens, all complete with snowy socks and shirtfronts, tumble in the cream and tangle Missus’s knitting and put a smile on every face, not just their mother’s and proud father’s for Tabs and I smile all day long and, these days, we put our hearts in it.
So may all your wives, if you need them, be rich and pretty; and all your husbands, if you want them, be young and virile; and all your cats as wily, perspicacious and resourceful as:
PUSS-IN-BOOTS.
The Erl-King
The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast acorn cups underfoot in the russet slime of dead bracken where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lancinating cold of the approaching of winter that grips hold of your belly and squeezed it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush.
The woods enclose. You step between the fir trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the subtle labyrinth and nobody comes. The trees stir with a noise like taffeta skirts of women who have lost themselves in woods and hunt round hopelessly for the way out. Tumbling crows play tig in the branches of the elms they clotted with their nests, now and then raucously cawing. A little stream with soft margins of marsh runs through the wood but it has grown sullen with the time of the year; the silent, blackish water thickens, now, to ice. All will fall still, all lapse.
A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny’s house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the wood is exactly as it seems.
The woods enclose and then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another; the intimate perspectives of the wood changed endlessly around the interloper, the imaginary traveller walking towards an invented distance that perpetually receded before me. It is easy to lose yourself in these woods.
The two notes of the song of a bird rose on the still air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound. There was a little tangled mist in the thickets, mimicking the tufts of old man’s beard that flossed the lower branches of the trees and bushes; heavy bunches of red berries as ripe and delicious as goblin or enchanted fruit hung on the hawthorns but the old grass withers, retreats. One by one, the ferns have curled up their hundred eyes and curled back into the earth. The trees threaded a cat’s cradle of half-stripped branches over me so that I felt I was in a house of nets and though the cold wind that always heralds your presence, had I but known it then, blew gentle around me, I thought that nobody was in the wood but me.
Erl-King will do you grievous harm.
Piercingly, now, there came again the call of the bird, as desolate as if it came from the throat of the last bird left alive. That call, with al
I walked through the wood until its perspectives converged upon a darkening clearing; as soon as I saw them, I knew at once that all its occupants had been waiting for me from the moment I first stepped into the wood, with the endless patience of wild things, who have all the time in the world.
It was a garden where all the flowers were birds and beasts; ash-soft doves, diminutive wrens, freckled thrushes, robins in their tawny bibs, huge, helmeted crows that shone like patent leather, a blackbird with a yellow bill, voles, shrews, fieldfares, little brown bunnies with their ears laid together along their backs like spoons, crouching at his feet. A lean, tall, reddish hare, up on its great hind legs, nose a-twitch. The rusty fox, its muzzle sharpened to a point, laid its head upon his knee. On the trunk of a scarlet rowan a squirrel clung, to watch him; a cock pheasant delicately stretched his shimmering neck from a brake of thorn to peer at him. There was a goat of uncanny whiteness, gleaming like a goat of snow, who turned her mild eyes towards me and bleated softly, so that he knew I had arrived.
He smiles. He lays down his pipe, his elder bird-call. He lays upon me his irrevocable hand.
His eyes are quite green, as if from too much looking at the wood.
There are some eyes can eat you.
The Erl-King lives by himself all alone in the heart of the wood in a house which has only the one room. His house is made of sticks and stones and has grown a pelt of yellow lichen. Grass and weeds grow in the mossy roof. He chops fallen branches for his fire and draws his water from the stream in a tin pail.