Fly Away Home Read online

  Fly Away Home is Marina Warner’s third – and eagerly-awaited - collection of short stories. Inspired by fairy tales, legends, and mythology, this timeless selection explores the themes of love and war - in families, and between generations.

  In ‘Mélusine’ a gorgeous mermaid encounters disaster in love and visits her aunt, Morgan le Fay, to pour out her woes ; in ‘Breadcrumbs’ a hospital patient overhears a night nurse recounting an extraordinary tale of family torn apart under terrifying circumstances. ‘Out of the Burning House’ introduces an elderly actor recalling an unusual case of heartbreak at the hands of a TV personality; in ‘The Difference in the Dose’ a young mother becomes increasingly anxious about the rift between herself and her adoptive mother. And in ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’ a thirteen year-old girl writes a heartrending second letter to an older brother away at war, having had no reply to her first…

  Like her award-winning novels, Marina Warner’s stories conjure up mysteries and wonders in a physical world, treading a delicate, magical line between the natural and the supernatural, between openness and fear. An elegant mix of the poignant, the caustic, and the bizarre, Fly Away Home will be treasured by fans and new readers alike.

  Fly Away Home

  MARINA WARNER is a novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth and she has contributed literary and art criticism to many publications over the years, including the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books and artists’ catalogues. She teaches in the School of Arts and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London, and is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In 2015, she chaired the panel of the Man Booker International Prize; in the same year she was awarded both the Holberg Prize and a DBE. Fly Away Home is her third collection of short stories.

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Marina Warner, 2015

  The right of Marina Warner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2015

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-78463-059-1 electronic

  For Joanna MacGregor

  And your music

  Out of the Burning House

  MY DEAR, YOU know that burning house dilemma, when you have to choose what you would take out of it? Forget loved ones, they’re thrown in, like Shakespeare and the Bible on Desert Island Discs. No, what would you take with you, after the wife and sprogs’ve been carried out of the flames in those lovely big burly firemen’s arms? By the way, since when did they turn into fire-fighters? This gender-blind talk, on trend, not like me, like being a chair, or a customer service officer – not my style.

  Making gender visible, that’s more what I fancy. Adds to the gaiety of nations. We need that.

  But that’s by the by. As I was saying, your house is on fire, you can’t fly away home, you have to decide. That artist who did long thin scribbly people – Giacometti – he said, straight off, he’d save his cat. Everything else could be done again. He was that kind of artist, he did things over and over again. But the cat was life. And you can’t have life over again – even if you’re a cat.

  He’s earned lots of Brownie points from posterity for that, for choosing life over art.

  But there’s no doubt in my mind, much as I love moggies, and I’ve had a few of them over the years. I’d take my albums – as many of them as I could carry. That’s why I brought them with me here, after they stopped the treatments. To my new desirable residence, Room 14 in the Ash Court Plaza, a brand-new Community Care Centre. A waiting room, an antechamber, where we sit and listen for the announcement: is your ticket number 47? The angel of death calls you and you wake up from your morphine dreams and say, Yes, Nurse, and then you’re on your way through the door. Bye bye farewell auf Wiedersehen toodleloo adieu – I did think Oh! What A Lovely War fabulous – no more au revoir.

  The knacker’s yard. The Shambles. Oh, it’s lovely here. Brand new, disability approved. Handles on the tub and light switches at goblin height.

  We’re allowed just one cupboard full of personal possessions … I hesitated over the lovely leather toilette box I’ve had since that big first Xmas I played Widow Twankey at the Lyric. I used to take it with me everywhere, and the boys and girls in makeup would be miffed, but then I’d show them a trick or two, and they’d relent. Louis Vuitton, of course. No fake from Taiwan either. Straps and buckles and cleats and stuff. Big enough for one wig tucked under the fitted trays with all the eyelashes and the tubes of glue and sparkle. The Leichners all lined up, shipshape. Leichner No.6 was my standby, a lovely glow it gives you under the lights. But then I had to admit, Louie, my girl, you will never see the face in the mirror now the way it was then: photos are much kinder than reflections in the glass. So with a tear in my eye, I put the box up for auction at Bonham’s in a sale of Theatrical Memorabilia, and my dear, you know what it fetched? Six months in this place. ‘A classic piece of luxury baggage,’ the expert said while making the ­estimate. It was all I could do not to say to him, Darling, I know about luxury baggage.

  Anyhow in my albums you can see me from year dot. My best parts, Spotlight portrait shots, press releases, newspaper cuttings, programmes, the lot: that’s me, there, in the picture. I can be very careful when I want to be, and I kept everything. When I was between jobs I’d buy that lovely almond paste in the tub – sniff, sniff, delicious – and put on my Callas Highlights and I’d … well, the photographs were a pool and I saw myself in them, shimmering in my costumes on the gloss of the paper, the lights moulding my shape and putting life in my eyes so that, darling, I was real. There I was, the real me, the one I’d known was inside me ever since I was a titch and first saw Dame Edna on the telly.

  Here I am in Cinders: I was Hagella, and Bobby Drew, (what a lovely girl she was!) played opposite me as Hidessa. We were outrageous, though I say so myself.

  This picture here is different: it’s me in the cabaret I did for my specials. Used to go round to their houses, for a birthday or some other special occasion. Specialist entertainment, can’t divulge more. Some of my specials are around, you know.

  Now this is something else.

  I was a lad – hadn’t yet discovered my inner girl – and I won the Variety Contest in the local pub. It was for imitating anyone – anyone famous. You’d call them celebs now. New Year’s Eve at The Man in the Moon in Camden High Street: the Lookalike slot. It’s a tradition now and they set different characters every year. Only the other day, my dear, I was the runner up in my Madonna gear: ice-cream cones for my brassiere, slinky earpiece, lots of crotch grabbing. Fabulous.

  Back a bit, 1963 it was, I think, Lesley Peake was a local resident and he’d agreed to come along and judge and then – this was the real attraction – go out with the winner.

  You don’t remember him? He had a TV show, a kind of game show plus variety acts and a bit of
talking heads stuff between him and his guests – it’s become a sad old formula now but then it was new, like everything from America. ‘I like to be in America, Everything free in America.’ So, we’re all a bit sadder now – and wiser.

  Les was universally loved, as they say. Darling, he was just so beautiful. He was a beautiful man. Had eyelashes that didn’t need filling out or glycerine to make them gleam and in real life when I saw him round and about our area, his stunning eyes looked like Elizabeth Taylor’s – kind of violetstrokeemerald. (I can manage that look, just perfect, with the new coloured lenses.) I couldn’t see that on the telly – we only had black and white then – but I studied him on the small screen and he had a way with him, the smile, the toss of the mesh of hair off the forehead, the swivel of the hips.

  I was a natural and there aren’t many voices I couldn’t do – and I had Les to a tee, his little soft ts and ds and his round vowels still peeping through from his early life on a farm, and I could do the way he kind of semi danced forward to meet a guest and as I say, the way he tossed his hair and twinkled his eyes as he said ‘Hello there!’

  So at The Man in the Moon that night I had them in stitches with my impersonation.

  That’s me, there, doing Les, and there’s Les himself.

  Mirror images.

  He’d agreed to go out on the town with the winner, but of course he’d hadn’t bargained for … well, as I say, at fifteen I hadn’t yet found my inner girl.

  One of the local restaurants had donated a free candlelit dinner and the Palace had offered concert tickets – it was meant to be a Big Night Out. Plus there was the taxi fare home. We hadn’t heard of men behaving badly then. No, seriously.

  I begged and I pleaded with Mum to let me go … and I think the crowd in The Man in the Moon thought it was a hoot that Les Peake had to go out with a big spotty girl like me, all six bloody foot of exploding hormonal wanking calf love. But in those distant times we did what we were told by our elders and betters and we didn’t go around effing and blinding like the youff of today and so it was agreed: I could have my treat if Mum came too.

  This is my mum, here: she’s wearing a hat she made, from rabbit skins. She had a stall in the market, Mellow Yellow Designs, floaty and dangly and chiffony. Lovely fabrics. Good at texture, my mum. A line in local T-shirts too, but she complained when the tourists started coming and she was reduced to ‘I Love Camden Town’ with the red heart dingbat bang in the middle. She was creative.

  You can see here how – this is 1968 – she still has that Flower Child look, with the Botticelli hair and the little blue granny glasses. She was always a bird, even though she was my mum. ‘Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom,’ she’d say, when she couldn’t decide what to do. ‘Go with the flow.’

  I took after my Dad. The nose, you know, the build. Poor little me. He was a surveyor, after his dreams of poetry were dashed by the bank manager.

  I’ll skip the details of that evening with Les because it all passed by in a blur. I remember going into the restaurant with Mum feeling really really terrible because I was all at odds with the outer casing that was supposed to be my body, my appearance, the way I looked. The me I knew didn’t fit the me I saw in the bathroom mirror after Mum had approved my hair and my suit (broad lapels, Take Six) and my leather shoestring tie. I looked like a stranger and I didn’t look like Les Peake. And I was so miserable about what Lesley Peake would think of me. I ordered a rum and coke like Mum – who said, no, a Bitter Lemon for you. But Les intervened, and said, Oh, let the boy have a bit of fun, go on. And Mum said, with her blue eyes rolling, Go with the flow.

  That night lying on my bed not even able to get it up to have my usual bedtime you know – you’re a nurse, you’re not shockable – the room lurched about like in a storm at sea. It was my first time – darling – I was drunk as a skunk and madly in love.

  I had it bad – you can see here, all the autograph portraits I collected of Les in his heyday.

  His picture still hangs in the corridor at Broadcasting House, you know, alongside some others who’ve been called out of the waiting room and gone through the door. That pop star – you know, the one who died of an overdose the other day, who found out that her real father was none other than the dear old presenter of Four O’Clock Family Fun: that kind of struck a chord with me.

  There’s nothing like love when you’ve never done it before and you don’t know that it will ever fade or stop. It’s loony stuff, and I was loony with it: Les Peake was on my mind day and night and every minute of both and every instant of every minute and every split second of those moments squared. It was like living with a crowd of him, he filled up my head. The looniest part was that he took an interest in me: he asked after me in the pub and then he began coming round. He’d ask me to perform, and he’d laugh and laugh and give me a ten bob note or sometimes more. I began my costume collection with his help – the moolah, he called it – and I worked up acts that I thought he’d like – skits of rivals in broadcasting, numbers from the hit parade: Sandie Shaw curling her bare feet and peeping out from under her hair. That sort of thing.

  He fostered my talents. He promoted me. He helped me on my way. I never would have made it without him.

  Then someone in my class said to me that he’d seen my mum coming out of the Odeon on the High Street with Les one afternoon. At first, I just shrugged it off. But then I began thinking about times when Les had been round at our house and … they say fear makes your blood run cold and that’s about the way it feels. Shakespeare couldn’t put it better.

  The past is like a movie and I reeled the movie back: the pub, the contest, the dinner, the afternoons when I came back from school and Les would come round … Mum laughing her head off on the sofa at my antics, fixing Les another rum and coke while Dad was watching something on the TV, reading the paper at the same time.

  I went to the school office and was going to ask to use the phone, which was the only one in the building – can you believe it? – but the school secretary wasn’t there. The telephone, all black and chunky, was sitting on her desk. Those were the days, when you didn’t turn around and find your briefcase gone from under the barstool, when schools didn’t lock up their offices. But I was scared to be there, entering without permission, and in the days when you pressed Button A in the call boxes and trunk calls went through the operator and cost the earth and mobile phones weren’t heard of, ringing someone up was something. But everything in me hurt, just as physically as if I’d been run over, and I put out my hand to the receiver and dialled my mum at home and she was there and I said, ‘Mum, you went to the cinema with Les.’

  She didn’t say, ‘Oh yes, it was Jules and Jim and Jeanne Moreau is just fabulous or was it The Pink Panther? Peter Sellers is just hilarious. You could do him. You could do her.’

  Or any of that sort of chatter. Not like she usually did. Of course she didn’t. We weren’t in the way of chatting on the phone like now.

  No, she just said, ‘Oh, Louie!’

  And I knew, from just the way she said it.

  Then her voice went all thick and she began babbling. ‘There are some things, Louie, that just can’t be explained or understood. It doesn’t mean anything, nothing that affects you or what Les means to you and you to him. Or what Dad means to me or me to him. It’s just something, darling, something that happens between a man and a woman, sometimes. You’ll find the same when you’re older. You’ll do things you don’t know why you’re doing them.’

  She was crying. She was crying. I put down the phone. When I turned round the school secretary was standing there and she was about to blast me but when she saw my face she went quiet and asked me if I needed anything.

  I said no.

  ‘Well, Louie,’ she said. ‘You look a bit green.’

  We didn’t have counselling or therapy or pastoral care or any of those things then. Les said to me, ‘Think o
f me as your friend.’

  He could charm the milk out of your tea, I’m telling you, and I would’ve believed anything he said. I wanted to believe him, you see.

  He said I was special, that our whole family was special. My mum was a fantastic personality, he said. And he loved her.

  Loving her, he said, was the same as loving me.

  After that, I went on to Drama School. I extended my range.

  Here I am looking drop dead gorgeous in The Balcony on tour – I played the Chief of Police and we took it to the Festival in Melbourne. I did love Australia.

  Oh my dear, how ever does one get the kind of love one wants?

  Mélusine: A Mermaid Tale

  UNDER THE SEA, mobile signals flutter and fail, and darling Mélusine’s voice was only coming through in coughs and splutters. I do wish they’d improve our reception. It is so tiresome to have to raise your voice to a yell when you’re trying to pour all your tact and diplomacy into your cowrie. But I realised that some of the interruptions were caused by Mélusine’s gasps between her sobs. She loves drama, I know, but even while sighing to myself that she’s still a teenager au fond, I began to be upset for her.

  She was crying, ‘I told him he mustn’t …’ Then her words broke up and vanished. I waited, but nothing more came, so I said to her – or rather I trumpeted into the shellphone, ‘Daarling, it isn’t the end of the world. Why don’t you come and see me and I’ll make us a bite and we can talk …’

  ‘I couldn’t eat a thing,’ she wailed. There was a whirr and a buzz, but then her small voice returned: ‘You’re an angel, Morgan! I’ll be there in – in this weather – less than an hour.’