The Wilful Eye (17 page)

Gerda knew she'd made her choice, but everything depended on Kai. Was she destined to spend eternity heartbroken?

Now Kai sensed the boulder she'd wedged between them. He walked beside her, his hand sweaty in hers. He must be nervous: of saying something she didn't want to hear.

‘Kai . . .' she started sadly, caressing the dog's head with her free hand.

But Kai cut her off.

‘Gerda, did you mean it? What you said?'

Gerda studied the slush at her feet, face burning.

Kai lifted her chin gently. Little diamonds glinted in his eyes.

‘Gerda, I love you,' he said. ‘I've loved you secretly since we were nine.' Now
everything
burned, especially her ears. The snow dazzled underfoot.

‘. . . I was afraid to say anything, because I didn't think you loved me, not like that, and it might have spoiled our friendship,' Kai continued. ‘I thought having you as a friend would be better than not having you at all. Even if it was torture.'

Gerda wanted to laugh and cry at once. Her heart was a bird, freed from the undersize cage of her ribs. Its feathers fluffed and its wings whirred experimentally. As their lips touched, she felt the soaring fusion of their souls. Gerda whispered: ‘Kai . . . I love you too.'

They walked clasping hands, Gerda never wanting to let him go. And as Rudolph padded beside them, Gerda understood she'd become braver and wiser and
older,
somehow. She realised she and Kai had grown up, and she grinned as she saw in her mind's eye how the light would go on in Grandma's face when they came through the front door together. As they walked hand in hand, the road was crisp with jewels, and a rainbow beckoned them forward, painted over a steel-grey sky.

I
can remember feeling an irresistible urge to walk inside a book of fairytales. The book was old, with black and white pictures that brought that other world to life. A girl stood on a forest path. Luminous stars hung in the sky and deep drifts of snow coated the Christmas trees. The sparkle of stars and snow and freezing night was both fascinating and forbidding. Years later I think I remember that picture because it captured the duality of fairytales.

Fairytales are full of ambiguity; equal doses of menace and enchantment. They warn us not to stray off the forest path, strike a bargain with the strange little man, or taste a forbidden treat. But temptation always leads to a journey, adventure, and ultimately, growth. That is, growing up. Fairytales entice us as kids because we're the heroes. Somehow, we outsmart evil enemies, wield powerful magic, and solve impossible riddles. As bedtime stories, fairytales can be pretty bloodthirsty. They should keep little kids awake at night, petrified. But maybe kids can sleep because all the bad people end up dead.

I wanted to write a story capturing some of these ambiguities; something rich and sumptuous, yet gritty and fierce. I hoped to create a world we might recognise, while building a story that echoed earlier tales.

A story about drugs – the thought hit me straight away while reading Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Snow Queen'. I'd never read the tale as a kid, so maybe that's why it seemed so strange. As a kid your imagination carries you along the forest path, enticing you to nibble the gingerbread house, bargain with the beautiful fairy, or follow the talking raven. When you're older, walking into the fairytale world is more difficult. To an adult, fairy stories can seem trite. Reading some of the Grimm tales in their earliest forms, the characters seem two-dimensional, the plots far-fetched, the messages either blindingly moralistic or mysterious and convoluted.

But telling stories is as old as humans talking. Fairy stories talk to us across time, and we can't help being intrigued.

The Grimm brothers began collecting tales in Germany in the early 1800s. ‘The Snow Queen' was written later (first published 1845), but follows the Grimm tradition. There's no middle ground for women in fairy stories – they are either evil witches (the Snow Queen), or young, fair and innocent, like Gerda. But ‘The Snow Queen' is unusual because, instead of the handsome prince rescuing the princess, the boy is saved by the girl. I found a translation of Hans Christian Andersen tales at home, not a shortened, sanitised, modernised, illustrated story for kids.

Reading ‘The Snow Queen' as an adult, I thought:
What kind of drug was that Hans Christian Andersen on
?

What was weird? Everything . . . wicked elves fly away with a looking glass that distorts everything people see, making beautiful things ugly, and vice versa. High above the earth, the mirror shatters, lodging shards in people's eyes (so everything good they see seems bad or wrong) and turning their hearts to ice. Immediately I thought of drugs. And that's just the prologue.

The story introduces little Gerda and Kay, the girl and boy next door. Later, the Snow Queen snatches away Kay (whose name in another telling is spelt Kai) and Gerda goes on a complicated, fantastical quest to find him. When she finally tracks him to the Snow Queen's lair at the North Pole, Kai is almost frozen to death. The Snow Queen has set him a task he struggles even to remember: to spell the word ‘eternity' from icicles. If he succeeds, the Snow Queen promises, he will be his own master, and she will give him ‘the whole world' . . . and ‘a pair of new skates'! Paralysed in the Snow Queen's thrall, Kai seemed a potent allegory for somebody trapped in a half-life because of drug addiction. In my head the fairytale morphed from the Snow Queen to the ‘Ice Queen', an evil witch peddling methamphetamines. The image of Kai numbly trying to spell ‘eternity' became my springboard for the story.

I also began wondering about the Eternity Man, Arthur Stace. I knew very little about him except that he came from Sydney and chalked the word ‘eternity' on pavements. It became known as his ‘one-word sermon'. That alone seemed a great reason to set the story in Sydney. But I had to turn the city into a bleak snowfield. Increasingly wild weather and predictions of global dimming made an endless winter in Sydney seem fittingly sinister and even plausible.

I wondered about the life of Arthur Stace, and why he kept writing ‘eternity'. Was it some message he took from reading ‘The Snow Queen'? I did some research. He was a poor man in soup-kitchen queues during the Depression. He may have been hardly literate, so he probably hadn't read ‘The Snow Queen'. My mum gave me the vital clue, which I wrote into my story. During the 1930s, religious organisations ran soup kitchens (as many outreach organisations do today). As they handed you your bowl of soup, my mum said they asked you: ‘Where will you spend eternity?' Chalking the pavements was Arthur Stace's way of making people remember to confront that vital question in their lives. I'm not religious, but again, the idea hit me between the eyes – take drugs and you might take the fast track to eternity.

Ultimately Gerda's goodness and innocent love for her childhood friend defeat all the Snow Queen's evil defences and her shape-shifting sentries. As the original story ends, Gerda and Kai have grown up, but I did
not
want them falling in love and living happily ever after. I did some reading about methamphetamines – ‘ice' – and about the speeded-up, obsessive behaviour of users. Violence, self-harm and premature ageing go with prolonged use of the drug. I wanted to write a rich, layered tale with a seamy underbelly. In my mind, the boy doing drugs was rescued, but didn't get the girl and didn't live happily ever after, because that would be very unlikely in real life. But the editors wanted something more like a fairytale. I gritted my teeth. I thought furiously. I did nothing. Finally, I tried two endings: rewrote the original and created the one they suggested as well. I was surprised to find theirs worked better. After the ice queen was killed off, Kai's secret hope of love and Gerda's disbelief built another crest of dramatic tension before the story closed.

Almost as an afterthought, I remembered the little book I was desperate to walk inside, all those years ago. Now I saw it through adult eyes. In ‘Eternity', I wanted to create an undercurrent, something beyond the delight of seeing crisp foreign snow and a forest full of Christmas trees. I wanted to evoke the way a child in Grimm times would feel. I see the child now, trudging in the snow, alone in the dark, straining to hear the howl of a wolf on the wind.

‘ T
here,' he said, breath steaming in the icy air. ‘Look there between the trees.'

In the winter twilight, the snow was no longer sparkling white, but grey as a dim tide between the trunks. The lights of the chateau blazed from every window through a lattice of bare branches. Belle caught her breath. What wealth! What waste and extravagance!

‘Same as before,' her father muttered. He fumbled at her elbow and hurried her forward. ‘I thought I was dreaming then. I was ready to curl up and die, I was so cold.'

Belle was cold right now. She had no feeling in her fingers and a constant, dull ache in her feet. No layers of clothing could keep this cold at bay, not even the extra woollens and cloaks taken from Belle's older sisters. They had left Delphie and Elise snuggled up in bed at home, the only place to stay warm in the freezing cottage.

‘Miles from anywhere here,' said Belle.

‘Yes, I took a short cut that didn't work out. But it was all meant to be, don't you see? For you and your prince.' Her father was impatient. ‘What do you think of this for a front door?'

It was three times as high as the doors of their cottage. Belle followed her father up the stone steps, so wide and deep they seemed made for giant feet. He turned a massive iron ring in the door, and pushed it ajar.

‘Shouldn't we . . .?' Belle ventured.

‘Knock? I never knocked last time. See, he doesn't get up till after nightfall.'

What about servants
? Belle wondered, but held her tongue.

The warmth inside was wonderful. They stood in a hall like a long church nave, with endless stone columns that met in arches overhead. Between the columns were niches enclosing busts and portraits. A smell of burning candle wax hung in the air, and some other smell less easy to define: a kind of thick animal musk.

Behind them, the door creaked shut as if moved by an invisible hand.

‘Don't worry, don't worry.' Belle's father was keyed up with nervous excitement. ‘You're going to be a prince's bride. The luckiest girl in the world.'

He marched down the hall as far as a circular table on which lay a small glittering casket. The sides and top of the box were decorated all over with miniature mirrors.

‘Aha, here it is,' he muttered.

He lifted the lid and peeked inside, taking care to shield the contents from Belle's view. When he snapped it shut again, an avid light shone in his eyes.

‘The bride price?' Belle asked. She was only a month past sixteen, and had never contemplated marriage until two days ago. Now she was curious to know what she was worth.

‘Yes, yes.' Her father didn't want to discuss it. ‘For the good of the family. Your marriage saves us from freezing to death this winter, Belle.'

For the time being, he left the casket lying where it was and continued on to an open door further down the hall.

‘Hurry up, slowcoach.' He looked back with an ingratiating smile. ‘I'll show you where I went.'

The dining room was warm and bright, with a great fire blazing in the hearth. Reflections of a dozen candelabra danced on the polished wood surfaces of sideboards, cabinets and a huge oval table. Velvet drapes tied back with golden cords framed a darkening scene of snowy trees through the four tall windows.

Belle and her father had eyes only for the feast spread out on the table. There were soup tureens, salvers laden with cold pies and ham, silver-wrought baskets containing bread and pastries, bowls of grapes, peaches and strawberries, impossibly out of season. Most enticing of all were the rich savoury aromas of roast meat that escaped from under the lids of the covered dishes.

Belle's father clapped his hands. ‘Same as last time. Sit down and eat.'

‘What about the prince?'

‘Prince Arrol Torayne de Lanceray. No, he won't eat with us. This is for any weary passing traveller. But specially for you.'

He pulled out a chair and Belle sat down at the table. Surveying the magnificent spread before her, she noticed a flower vase in the middle of all the silverware. Instead of flowers, it held a single, leafless, thorny stalk: the stalk of a rose with its bloom snapped off. It looked completely out of place, like a cry of penury in the midst of plenty.

‘Go on, eat,' said Belle's father. He was already gulping down pies and pastries as fast as he could. He sat perched on the edge of a chair as though ready to spring up and leave at any moment. What was his hurry?

‘You'll stay until he comes, won't you?'

Her father shook his head. ‘No need. He never comes down before nightfall.'

Belle looked out through the windows. ‘It's nightfall now.'

Her father's only response was to stuff even more food into his mouth until his cheeks bulged. He was like an over-wound clockwork doll, every act performed with feverish urgency.

She knew these moods in him. Most of the time he was sunk in embittered gloom, but every now and then a burst of optimistic energy would seize him. Over recent years, the periods of gloom had grown longer and longer, the periods of energy less and less frequent. Perhaps her marriage and bride price would reverse the decline and allow him to set up in business again . . .

A strange sound came to her ears. Muffled and obscure, it was a long dull roar like far-off thunder.

Belle's father shivered. ‘Just the wind in the chimneys,' he said. ‘A place like this has enormous chimneys.'

Belle's feet were tingling with the warmth, and the feeling had returned to her fingers. She took a slice of bread and a slice of ham for herself.

‘Describe my husband-to-be,' she said. ‘Is he handsome?'

‘Handsome as a prince.'

‘Tell me more.'

Speaking with his mouth full, her father sprayed crumbs over the table. ‘Oh, um, he wears a mottled coat, yellow and brown. And, er, a ruff around his neck.'

‘I meant his face.'

‘You'll see.' An evasive look came into her father's eyes. ‘I'm not very good at describing faces.'

Belle considered. ‘I don't care so much if he's handsome, so long as he's gentle and kind.'

‘Oh, very gentle and kind. Do you think I'd part with my youngest daughter to someone who wouldn't be kind to her?'

Belle's doubts weren't entirely set to rest. She caught the tone of the merchant he had once been, seeking to coax a customer, seeking to close a deal.

She was about to question him further when she heard the sound of someone pacing the floor in a room over their heads. Great soft footfalls:
pad . . . pad . . . pad.
The carpet must be very thick to produce a sound like that.

‘Is that him?' she whispered.

Her father had already jumped up from his chair. He nodded and forced a smile. ‘Time I was off.'

‘But . . .'

‘I'll just take your sisters' clothes with me.' He pointed to her layers of woollens and cloaks. ‘You'll be inside a good warm house from now on.'

Belle saw the sense in that. She peeled off her outer layers and handed them to her father, who draped them over his arm. Still he stood waiting.

‘More,' he said.

She frowned. Surely he could use some of the bride price to buy firewood and heat up the cottage through the rest of this winter?

‘These are my clothes,' she said.

‘Yes, and they make you look lumpy and ugly. You have to show yourself off to your husband-to-be. I described your attractions to him in every detail. The prettiest face, the loveliest figure, the most beautiful of all my daughters. He has high expectations.'

Belle could have objected that only a moment ago he'd declared himself not very good at describing faces. But he stamped his foot with impatience. ‘Quickly!'

He helped her remove her surcoat and her fleece-lined jerkin. Then he wanted her shawl too.

‘Show him your shoulders,' he said. ‘He'll like to see your shoulders.'

Belle shook her head, but he snatched it from her anyway. He kissed her on top of the head and muttered vague words about good luck and happiness.

She rose and followed him into the hall. The
pad . . . pad . . . pad
of footsteps sounded louder out here, echoing back and forth between the stone columns.

‘Don't worry.' He looked worried himself as he gazed towards the staircase at the far end of the hall. ‘He's still in his bedroom. My bedroom was up there, when I stayed overnight. He'll come down when he's ready.'

He snatched up the casket from the circular table and tucked it under his arm. Belle went ahead and opened the door for him.

‘Go back and wait for your prince,' he said.

He seemed almost afraid that she might try to leave with him. A momentary blast of freezing air blew in through the door. Then he was gone.

A million doubts gnawed at the edges of Belle's mind. She heard her father drive away in one of the prince's carriages. Was that part of the bride price too? Just what sort of a deal had he struck?

She felt better when she returned to the fire in the dining room. The footsteps continued overhead, but her husband-to-be still showed no signs of coming down. Belle smelled the aromas wafting from the covered dishes on the table and realised that she was very, very hungry. She lifted the lids and discovered roast mutton, venison stew, fish soup and some type of small fowl she'd never seen before. She ladled portions onto her plate and set to, drinking half a goblet of wine to soothe her nerves.

She ate and ate until she was full. At the cottage, they had not only run out of firewood but were also low on food. She didn't refill her goblet, being unused to wine.

She would miss her home by and by, she knew she would. Right now, though, she was glad to have escaped her father's unpredictable moods and her sisters' grumbling resentments. She could have been happy growing up in their small cottage; unlike her sisters, she didn't really remember the time when her father had been a prosperous merchant and they'd lived in a great house in Rouen. She'd been four years old when his business collapsed, and they'd been forced to move to the country. But the weight of disappointment hung over the family like a black cloud.

Their mother had taken it hardest of all, as though the disaster had broken some spring inside her. She was a pale, shrinking figure in Belle's memory, always on the margins. When she died, her absence was hardly noticeable.

Her father still had high hopes for himself. When in the mood, he would gather everyone round the kitchen table and talk of his latest project. With Delphie and Elise spurring him on, his plans became more and more brilliant: a triumphant return to Rouen, a magnificent new establishment in Paris itself. For hours on end, the family sat under the spell of his wild glittering eyes. He could perform miracles – or so it seemed to Belle. As she grew older, however, she understood that none of the miracles ever came true. Even Delphie and Elise, though they shared in his flights of fancy, didn't actually believe in them.

Drowsily, she gazed at the rose stalk standing in the vase in the middle of the banquet. It looked sad and bare and diminished, like the story of her family.

She shook her head, left the table and crossed to the windows. The night outside was black and the cold radiated through the glass. She felt half-naked with her shoulders bare. She unfastened the cords to let the drapes close out the bitter weather.

Then she turned back and pulled a chair up to the hearth. For a long while she sat staring into the leaping, twisting flames, the glowing red logs.

Even the old people said this was the worst winter in living memory. The cold would claim many poor victims before it was over. But not her family, not now. Salvation had arrived out of nowhere.

It wasn't the salvation they'd expected two months ago, when news of the ship reached the cottage. Her father had half-ownership of that ship, which had suddenly returned to port after being long since given up for lost. If it had brought back the cargo of spice for which it had been sent out, the family would be rich again. Her father had set off at once on the long walk to Rouen.