228. Beer and the Horizon or the Fine Art of Needlework

 

228. Beer and the Horizon or the Fine Art of Needlework

We went Up North, Alpin and I, fleeing from the noise I was making. Alpin was happy to go. He hated not being the centre of attention, but he couldn’t afford to be that either. The last thing he needed was notoriety, being an unchagedling. So he asked a few questions, which I answered thinking how easy it was getting to be for me to lie, or at least tell half truths.

I had convinced Alpin that the PSP was a horticultural club and charity founded by half a dozen old ladies and their gentlemen in attendance. There are a lot of clubs like that in Apple Island and the Fay World in general. And this was what Uncle Gen had told me I had to say if asked what the PSP was. I pause to say he didn’t seem to be at all upset about what had happened, for  he took it in his stride and treated me as nicely as usual.

“Why do the Primrose Seed Planters need ambulances? I imagine they are barmy enough to use the helicopters to cast seeds from. But ambulances? We don’t have hospitals. Where can they take you?”

“Home,” I said. This was true. Ambulances take one home, where you are expected to lie in your bed and wait to recover. Or they take you to the home of a relative or friend who will nurse you, when you are too damaged to look after yourself. And if you are lucky someone like Henny Parry may come visiting. “You know how little old ladies are. They think being taken somewhere in an ambulance makes them look interesting. And they like the priviledged status a siren gives them.”

“But there is no such thing as traffic in the fay world,” insisted Alpin. “Who is the ambulance going to scream out of its way? A flock of geese? Not  even. They can fly above or below that.”

“Well, try explaining that to the little old fairies.”

“Alright. I give in. Let’s go Up North.”

It is very pretty Up North,  even in winter. So it is kind of justified that most members of my father’s family do nothing all day but sit outside before a very long table drinking and watching the horizon, which right now is a lovely scene of blue-violet mountains with snow caps. They do this even in winter, when everything around Grandfa Excelsius’  castle  is snowed down all day and the moat frozen and the front door  snowbound every morning. You have to melt the snow with a spell, and then the resulting water  turns to ice and you have to melt that back again later unless you want to slip to the ground and not get up ever, because no one here helps those that fall get up unless they are feeling very generous, which is usually only on Saturdays. Why on Saturdays? I have no idea. And you had better not roll into the moat. There are no kind of acquatic monsters living there, but should the ice crack, you would fall into the water and it would freeze again over your head immediately, before you could pull out, and no one would think of rescuing you even come Saturday.  

So when we got there  we saw several people sitting before a long fossil wood table staring fixedly at the horizon.

“We’re going to freeze to death, like when we visited Finbar,” prophecied Alpin.

“That’s what the drinks are for,” I explained. “You don’t freeze if you keep drinking what they serve you here. My dad says they have like three hundred kinds of ale or beer or whatever. With or without alcohol. And there are other magical drinks you can have too.”

“These people are already frozen,” said Alpin, seeing how nobody even blinked as we approached. “Arley, I don’t think they are breathing. I don’t see misty clouds of steam coming from their  mouths and noses.”

“Hush! They might hear you and be offended. My dad says they go berserk when offended.”

“Well, at least we would see some action.”

My grandmother  Lady Celestial came out of the palace jumping from a tower. Her skirts swelled out like an umbrella and she landed before us on her feet and asked me, “What does Divina feed you?”

“Hello, Grandma’am,” I said. “I’m glad to see you are well. Grandma Divina doesn’t feed me. She sometimes comes to have lunch or  tea or such with Mum.”

“Humph!” said Grandma’am Celestial. “I should have guessed so. Come in and have tea.”

“I’ll say hi to Grandfa first,”I said. This grandfather one can even call Grumps.

“What for?” asked Grandma’am Celestial. And she grabbed my arm and lugged me off to her dining room, much like an ogress would lug her lunch. Alpin didn’t have to be lugged. He was pleased to see she was interested in food.

I don’t want the dear reader to get the wrong impression. My grandmother Celestial doesn’t look like an ogress. She is my Grandma Divina’s dominant twin sister and  nice-looking, with green eyes like Dad’s and silvery hair, like her sister, and she looks very young. But she is a very brisk and bossy person, and always wants to be faster than anyone else at anything.

There were like fifty kinds of bread on her table, and twelve kinds of cheese and lots of pretty glass containers filled with jam of different flavours. And there was honey, a choice of from rosemary, from eucalyptus,  from  goldenrod, from forest or flower garden and more.  And there were raspberry tarts and apple tarts too and pound cakes and fruit cakes. And huge pitchers of orange juice and pineapple juice. And an assortment of red and blue and black berries with cream.  And of course, tea,  of half a dozen kinds. All this food made Alpin happy.

“Hmm,” she said watching Alpin eat. But she made no further comment. She had seen him before, at parties and I had sent  word he would be coming with me. Instead she asked me how her sons were.

“Dad is fine and so is Uncle Gen,” I said. “Both very busy.”

“That’s not possible,” she said. “Genti, yes. But your father busy? No.”

I wanted to say Dad did more than sit in front of a table drinking and waiting to be offended to move. But that would have been rude, so I didn’t. I let it be.

 “Genti takes after me,” she said.

She always says that because she has to make sure everyone accept the fact that she is Gen’s mother, since she was first to grab him, but everyone holds he is Grandma Divina’s rightful child and it was mean of her to have seized him.

“Well, yes, Uncle Gen is always busier,” I said.

It  is not easy to eat comfortably in front of Grandma’am Celestial because, though she let Alpin take his time, she has the habit of standing next to you watching you eat as if ready to pull your dish away and send it to the kitchen to be washed the second  you are done. Impatience is this lady’s byname. And in this she is very different from both Dad and Uncle Gen, no matter what she says.  Dad is easygoing and relaxed and Uncle Gen is gentle and patient.

“Good,” she said when we were done. “You’ve done your best, both of you. Now you can go sit with the men outside. What will you drink?”

“Elderberry beer,” I said, nodding to Alpin to assure him he would like that.

And for the rest of the afternoon we sat outside at the petrified wood table with my grandfather and my paternal uncles and their wives staring at the horizon. I said hi, but only Uncle Euric made a gesture. He raised his eyebrows.     

When the sun went down we stared at the moon for like forty-five minutes and then we went in to have dinner. Nobody spoke a word. They just ate. Then we sat in silence by the fire staring at the flames until the clock struck twelve and everyone went to bed.

The next morning my grandmother asked me if I was enjoying the company of her husband and her sons. And I opened my mouth to say yes, but the word just wouldn't come out.

“I thought so,” said Grandma’am.

And then I learned where and why Uncle Gen had learned to do all the things house servants and employees of maintenance did. Lady Celestial  was so angry about people not considering him her son that she kept him by her side during all of the months he spent Up North. And he learned to do everything Lady Celestial and her team knew how to do.

“Do you know how to sew?”

I opened my mouth to say I didn’t, but Grandma’am Celestial spoke first.

“Of course not,” she said. “No one teaches children anything useful. Do you want to learn? The tough part is cutting out and patterns.”

So I learned how to sew. At least I felt I wasn’t wasting my time.

“Now you have to embroider that,” she said, when I had sewn a vest.

And when I did, she said, "Now you needn't die of hunger."

As for Alpin, she kept him eating every second he was awake. Later, when we were back home, he would tell me Lady Celestial was the only person who had ever managed to make him feel stuffed.