Fabulous

Fabulous
Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Not since Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber have old stories been made to feel so electrically new. Not since Wim Winders’ Wings of Desire have the numinous and the everyday been so magically combined.   It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love. They’re ordinary people, preoccupied, as we all are now, by the deficiencies of the health service, by criminal gangs and homelessness, by the pitfalls of dating in the age of #metoo.   All of their stories, though, are inspired by ones drawn from Graeco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folk-lore. The ancients invented myths to express what they didn’t understand. These witty fables, elegantly written and full of sharp-eyed observation of modern life, are also visionary explorations of potent mysteries and strange passions, charged with the hallucinatory beauty and horror of their originals.

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Copyright (#u19ccbdf2-12fb-5197-adbe-2fc7132ba724)

Dedication (#u19ccbdf2-12fb-5197-adbe-2fc7132ba724)

For Dan, with love

Author’s Note (#u19ccbdf2-12fb-5197-adbe-2fc7132ba724)

Each of these modern stories is a variation (a very free one) on a much older tale.

The original fables are summarised at the end of the book.

Contents

1  Cover (#u8949f613-edb7-5c12-b9c8-b0542d765752)

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Author’s Note

6  Contents (#u19ccbdf2-12fb-5197-adbe-2fc7132ba724)

7  ORPHEUS

8 ACTAEON

9 PSYCHE

10 PASIPHAE

11 JOSEPH

12 MARY MAGDALEN

13  TRISTAN

14  PIPER

15  The Fables

16  By the Same Author

17  About the Author

18  About the Publisher

LandmarksCover (#u8949f613-edb7-5c12-b9c8-b0542d765752)FrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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ORPHEUS (#u19ccbdf2-12fb-5197-adbe-2fc7132ba724)

There was no forewarning.

She was in the park with her friend.

Every Wednesday they went, with their dogs. ‘What do you say to each other?’ he asked. She couldn’t answer. But he knew that they talked all the way round.

Once he went looking for them. There was something he was worried about. Something that couldn’t wait until she got back, at least that’s what he thought. He saw them coming towards him between the silver birches and she was talking, hands in the pockets of her old velvet coat, head down watching her feet, talking non-stop. When she looked up and saw him she waved, and after that it was her friend who was talking, looking at him, as she did so, in a way he thought rude. When they came up to him he explained about the thing. Was it the heating? He wanted her to hurry home with him, but she didn’t seem to care about it. She wasn’t a worrier the way he was. Sometimes he found her insouciance maddening.

Anyway, that was a while ago. But then she was out with her friend again and the earth cracked open and an arm reached up from the chasm and dragged her down.

The friend, she was called Milla, came and rang the doorbell. He could hear her over the intercom but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. He could have just pressed the little button, but he didn’t want her coming in for some reason – he’d get annoyed with Milla, the way she was always wanting his wife to go out with her and leave him on his own – so he took his keys like he always did, in case, and went down the stairs quite slowly. Through the stained glass he could see Milla jerking around, and he could hear the bell ringing and ringing upstairs in the flat. He opened the front door. He’d probably been asleep. That would be why he hadn’t noticed she was late back, and why he wasn’t sensible enough to let Milla in with the little knob.

Milla said, ‘Oz, I’m so sorry. Oz, Eurydice’s … She’s in St Mary’s. I’ll take you. Let’s go and get your coat.’

The terrible arm dragged Eurydice out of the light. She, who had always slept with a lamp left on in the corridor because darkness pressed against her eyes and smothered her sight. She, who would fuss about restaurant tables, who always wanted the one by the window. She, who would shift her chair around the room throughout the day, dragging it six inches at a time to be always in the patch of sunlight. She sank into blackness. She was obliterated.

Milla didn’t see it happen. Oz saw it as they drove to the hospital. He saw it over and over again. He saw the hand slipping itself around Eurydice’s knees as a snake might wrap itself around its prey. He saw it descend on her from above and lift her by her hair so that the skin of her gentle face was pulled tight over sharp bones. He saw it grasp her around the hips and heave her up, head and feet flopping down undignified. Fee Fi Fo Fum and down she goes. Into the crevasse she went, into the valley of death, into the foul mouth.

Where is she? He kept asking and asking. Milla was patient with him. Milla said, ‘She’s in St Mary’s. We’re on our way there. We’ll see her very soon.’ ‘I know, Oz, I do too, but the doctors are with her. We just have to sit and wait.’ ‘I don’t know how long, but the nurse will tell us as soon as she can.’ ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea, shall I?’ ‘Don’t drink it yet, it’ll be hot.’ ‘I’ll wait outside. Here. This gentleman will help you.’ ‘She’s in the Greenaway Ward. We’ll see her in a minute or two.’ ‘In here.’ ‘She’s here, Oz. Look. Here she is.’ But Eurydice was gone.

What had been left lying among the pliable blades of coming daffodils was something as frail and pretty and futile as the feathers from a plucked bird. He was grateful to Milla for caring so much about it. He knew she was right – the conventions governing human civilisation required them to pick the remnant up, and rush to find help for it, and keep watch by it – but it was no longer Eurydice, no longer his wife. He saw the hands, dry and pale, with the tiny wart at the base of the third finger on the right, and her grandmother’s pearl ring on the middle finger on the left, and the broken nail she had complained about as she was putting on her scarf to go out that morning and the nail caught in the woolly stuff. They were her hands, but she had left them, along with her thinning hair and scaly elbows (I’m like an old tortoise, she said, when she felt them) and the ankles which still, when she wore black tights or even more when she was bare legged in summer, were worth showing off. These things had been hers, but they failed to contain her, to keep her safe.

Gluck has him singing at the moment of loss. A lament, generalising from the particular, meditating upon lovelessness and how it annuls life’s meaning. Stuff like that. Monteverdi was wiser. Monteverdi asks him only to sing a word that is barely a word even. ‘Ahimè’. A sigh. A sigh which brings the lips together, which says mmmm’s the word from now on for evermore, and then relents into that plangently accented vowel.

He had a remarkable counter-tenor voice. The critics said Suave Silvery Ethereal Limpid. When he was young he was afraid women would think he was gay, or weird, because his voice was as ungendered as an angel’s, but he needn’t have worried.

All that afternoon he sang. He felt too shaky to stand but his powerful lungs drew in air and converted it into music. He was a clarion. Milla tried to hush him but he didn’t even know that he was singing, so how was he to know that he should stop? They gave him a chair and placed him by the bed where they said Eurydice was lying, but she wasn’t there.

He could see her neck, and the softly puckered skin where it met her shoulders. He knew that part of her so well – so well – but this afternoon it was no longer hers. She’d left it behind, as she left clean hankies in the pocket of his coat when she borrowed it. Her favourite mug, the colour of violets, upturned by the sink. Clues as to her presence. He tried to tell one of the nurses how touched he was to see that piece of her neck, how much it reminded him of her, but the nurse thought he was worried that she might be cold, and pulled up the blue blanket so that even that memento of her was hidden from him.

The face was a perfect replica of her face. He touched it very lightly from time to time and felt the warm dryness of it, and he ran his fingers over her eyelids, and felt the fluttering movement beneath, just as though she was still there.

Milla left and other people came. A young couple, Eurydice’s nephew and his wife. They said to each other, ‘Shouldn’t we take him home?’ When he heard that he sang louder and for a while they let him be. When it was night, though, they led him down the long luminous corridors and out into the spangled dark.

They fed him and stayed the night in the spare room, her workroom, and when he sat up in bed and sang again the young woman came, wrapped in Eurydice’s cashmere shawl, and lay down on his bed beside him and held his hand and said, ‘You need to sleep. Sleep now. In the morning we’ll see if we can bring her back.’ He couldn’t remember how to sleep but he lay down when the niece made the pillows right for it, and then the singing moved from his chest to his mind, and all night his head rang with sounds as clear and dazzling as sunlit seawater seen by one swimming an inch or two under.

For most of his life he had been a middle-aged person’s kind of artiste. He sang, with his friend Marcia accompanying him, at the Maltings, the Wigmore Hall, places like that. He used to wear formal dark clothes, or sometimes, for Handel, silk frock-coats and breeches. He liked the costumes. He took a luxurious pleasure in the heaviness of lined and interlined satin. He enjoyed being someone other than himself. Then he accepted an invitation to sing with a group of clever young people who told him how much they admired him. He hadn’t much liked the music but he let his voice glide like quicksilver over the rough ground of the drums and sharp peaks of the electric guitars. Less than a week from first approach to recording studio, but afterwards strangers began to talk to him in shops. They were amazed, they said, by what he could do with his voice. As though they had no idea how often he’d done far better things, as though they had never heard of coloratura. ‘Enjoy it,’ said Eurydice. ‘Don’t grouch.’