CHAPTER EIGHT: AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

In which a weary Grisleda Entwhistle becomes reunited with Henrietta Blackboil in her most reprehensible form

It was getting late in the day by the time that Griselda Entwhistle, still in the persona of her own niece and with the start of a headache rumbling round the craggy parts of her ancient brain, found her way to her room. She needed a rest before any hijinks and revelry took over.

Scrumblenose University had been built at a time when students invariably “lived in”, and so one wing was devoted to three floors of little bedrooms-cum-studies, each offering minimal accommodation to a devoted academic and his or her pile of books.

Although small, her room contained everything she might be expected to need. The bed was big enough for her, all right, though she had spied one or two students in her short time in the great hall who might have found it somewhat restricting, for in an age of plenty even young people can develop a fondness for pies, chips and chains of sausages with the inevitable consequence that they develop an unhealthy corpulence. And Scrumblenose University, apparently, had its fair share of those, as did everywhere else in an age when half the world was starving.

She stretched out on the bed, and sighed. The day had been a tad on the tiring side. Even as a wizened old witch she had always found that meeting new people was exhausting. She liked to struggle into their minds (metaphorically) and understand what motivated them and why they were the people they plainly were. And all that took effort, and even she found the expenditure of effort to be somewhat exhausting.

The trouble with new folks, she thought to herself, the trouble with meeting them is you have to keep yourself on your toes! Because at exactly the same time as you're trying to discover what's in their mind, they're invariably doing the same to you, and after all you don't want to give them any wrong impressions, do you?

Not that wrong impressions mattered much to her. She had the powers to put things right, something she'd had to do in the past more than once.

She grinned to herself when she remembered some of the odd things she'd had to do in order to correct what she fondly looked on as “wrong impressions”. Like the time when she'd been walking down the lane past her own cottage when a pie-man had happened to be peddling his wares to the Picknoses, who lived next door to her.

This family (already alluded to in this account|) was one of those that seemed to live on pies, and not the good, tasty and quite delicious sort that you might get at the Crown and Anchor when Thomas the Greek was away on his holidays and somebody else took over, but the cheap sort that were made of mostly tasteless pastry and congealed gravy with the odd sliver of gristle lurking somewhere, waiting to sicken the unwary eater.

Anyway, she had spied the pie-man and snorted at him that he should be ashamed of himself making fat people even fatter because this particular tribe of fat people also got to be smelly when they bloated up. They exuded the substance of rotten pies in a noxious cloud of Picknose. Then the whole neighbourhood knew where they were, which might have been all right for those about to be robbed by them but didn't please old ladies like herself at all. Even though she had long been looked on as a wicked old witch, in her mind she was almost refined.

That would have been okay because the pie-man knew the contents of the pies he sold, which is why he never ate one himself, and he would have merely winked at her in the knowing way he had and continued to press ever more of his produce into the sticky hands of Amelia Picknose. But that good lady heard what Griselda (appearing as herself for once) had said, and virtually exploded with possibly justified rage.

“You!” she shrieked, “You calling me fat and smelly? How dared you, you old shrivelled bat! I'll have the law on you, I will, calling a good honest woman like me fat and implying that my kids stink! Of all the bleeding cheek!”

“But they do,” Griselda had said, mildly. “You must know they stink because even you, with your desensitised nose, are surely be able to smell them! Why, your own cat got fed up with the stench of grubby armpits and unwashed feet and ran away!” That last bit wasn't strictly true and Griselda knew it, but she wasn't going to explain her part in that feline's demise in front of a pie-man and his overweight customer.

“How dared you!” howled Amelia Picknose. “I mean, how dared you? And here's me, an innocent in the world, a proper, caring mother to my sweet-scented bairns, and having to put up with foul abuse from one who's no better than an old witch she's unfortunate enough to have to live next door to...”

“If they're sweet-scented then horse-s**t's like roses and cow-dung's like violets,” snarled Griselda. “Anyway, it's nothing to do with you! I was just telling the pie-man here what I reckon to his rotten old pies, and I don't see him disagreeing with me!”

Anyway, the whole incident, having started ugly had rapidly become both noisy and irksome and a small crowd was showing interesting signs of gathering round, so she had muttered the devil take you both back half an hour and forget what's been said in the interim and sauntered off.

“What was I saying?” asked Amelia.

“Pies,” said the pie-man, seeing an entrepreneurial opportunity. “You said you wanted a dozen big ones.”

“I did?” she asked, puzzled. “Why would I have said that when I came out to tell you I'm going on a diet and won't need any pies next week and only the two now while I acclimatise to starvation.”

“None next week?” the pie-man had asked, but he'd heard it before and knew that next week never came.

Griselda grinned to herself and yawned. The woman had forgotten the row but somehow it had left a shadow of itself in her mind and the very next week, when the pie-man had come she had turned him away without buying a single unhealthy pastry crust. He wandered away scratching his head and she started showing signs of becoming healthy.

Anyway, it had all been in the past, and best left there.

She was about to revert to her own (and more comfortable) shape when there was a stentorian knock at her door, and she scowled because at that precise moment she had decided to stretch out on her bed and get a few minutes shut-eye. Even little old ladies with a penchant for witchcraft need to rest from time to time, and one thing Griselda hated above most other things was an interruption to her beauty sleep.

“Who's there?” she called.

“Only me!” came a voice that was both familiar and overwhelmingly welcome despite the fact that it shouldn't have been anywhere near the outside of its cosy perambulator. There could be no doubt about it. The voice belonged to none other than Henrietta Blackboil who should have been enjoying a second childhood under the loving tutelage of one very caring Janine Stretchmark, the only woman under the sun who filled the gap between biological mother and foster mother.

It had been a year since Griselda had used one of her more potent spells to reduce the craggy old hag to her earliest incarnation, an embryo in the womb of one Janine Stretchmark, who had tried and tried and tried to conceive the natural way, and had failed. The idea had been to give Henrietta a new start in life, one without the encumbrances of the repulsive family she'd been nurtured by in her own infancy, whilst at the same time providing Janine with a long sought for pregnancy. You see, Griselda could be a caring old woman when she chose to be! But Henrietta should be safely in the Stretchmark pram in Swanspottle and not knocking and shouting at Griselda's University door, and Griselda was at a loss to understand what was going on.

She flung open the door in order to check the evidence of her own ears, and there stood the reprehensible Blackboil woman, all warts, grubby skin and the unmistakable fragrance of old woman mixed with decomposing cod. No other could smell quite like this. It was, in the flesh, the foulest and most wicked character she had ever met and suddenly she was about as welcome as guardian angels bearing gifts of Turkish Delight on a golden platter. She had about her the flavour of Swanspottle, her home village. She gave off suggestions of Tom Coppley's vomit in the Crown and Anchor on a Saturday night and the old rag that Thomas the Greek used to wipe it up with before apparently absently but in truth deliberately polishing glasses with it, glasses that would never be properly clean again. It was the sight and fragrance of home and suddenly and for a tiny moment Griselda Entwhistle felt unbelievably homesick.

“What are you doing here, hag?” she almost exploded. “I thought I left you comfortably tucked up in Janine Stretchmark's best perambulator where you were enjoying a fresh start in life and the chance to make something of yourself!”

“Sod that for a game of pansies!” hacked Henrietta, pushing her way into Grisleda's room. “I had a visit from a bold gentleman with a horns and a tail and he told me that things of an unnat'ral nature were on the move and that you'd need my 'elp sooner than pissin' soon. Anyway, I got fed up with that soddin' pram and the stink o' Johnson's baby soap an' fresh nappies, so 'ere I am!”

Griselda sighed. Something wasn't quite right, but for the moment she couldn't work out what and felt that little bit too tired to be bothered to try. Which she was to look back on as a mistake before too long passed in the world.