Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories

  She rested for a while, letting the sun harden her leaves to a dark shiny green and ripen her fruit a little. Then she cried wordlessly to the sun, “Look! Remember our bargain. I am an entirely new kind of tree—as strong as an oak, but I bear fruit that everything can eat. Love me. Love me now!” Proudly she shed some of her three-cornered nuts onto the hilltop.

  “I see you,” said the sun. “This is a lovely tree, but I am not sure what you expect me to do with you.”

  “Love me!” she cried.

  “I do,” said the sun. “There is no change in me. The only difference is that I now feed you more directly than I feed that animal at your feet. It is the way I feed all trees. There is nothing else I can do.”

  Phega knew the sun was right and that her bargain had been her own illusion. It was very bitter to her; but she had made a change that was too radical to undo now, and besides, she was discovering that trees do not feel things very urgently. She settled back for a long, low-key sort of contentment, rustling her leaves about to make the best of the sun’s heat on them. It was like a sigh.

  After a while a certain activity among her roots aroused a mild arboreal curiosity in her. With senses that were rapidly atrophying, she perceived a middle-sized iron-gray animal with a sparse bristly coat, which was diligently applying its long snout to the task of eating her three-cornered nuts. The animal was decidedly snaggle-toothed. It was lean and had a sharp corner to the center of its back, as if that was all that remained of a wiry man’s military bearing. It seemed to sense her attention, for it began to rub itself affectionately against her gray trunk, which still showed vestiges of rounded legs within it.

  Ah, well, thought the tree, and considerately let fall another shower of beech mast for it.

  That was long ago. They say that Phega still stands on the hill. She is one of the beech trees that stand on the hill that always holds the last rays of the sun, but so many of the trees in that wood are so old that there is no way to tell which one she is. All the trees show vestiges of limbs in their trunks, and all are given at times to inexplicable thrashings in their boughs, as if in memory of the agony of Phega’s transformation. In the autumn their leaves turn the color of Phega’s hair and often fall only in spring, as though they cling harder than most leaves in honor of the sun.

  There is nothing to eat their nuts now. The wild boar vanished from there centuries ago, though the name stayed. The maps usually call the place Boar’s Hill.

  The Fluffy Pink Toadstool

  Mother was always having crazes. Since she was a strong-minded lady, this meant that the rest of the family had the crazes too—until, that is, Father put his foot down.

  This particular craze started as a Hand-Made craze. About the beginning of the summer holidays, Mother suddenly decided that they were going to do without things which were made in factories. “We are going to use,” she declared, “things which are made by people who loved every stitch and nail as they made them.”

  This meant that there was suddenly almost no furniture in the house, except the Persian rug in the living room and the stool Paul had made in Woodwork. The stool wobbled. Paul explained that this was because he had not loved every nail as he made it. He still had the bruises. Father told him to shut up, or they would have nothing to sit on at all.

  After that, Mother threw away most of their clothes. The clothes she got instead were handwoven and large, and in peculiar colors. Paul was glad it was the holidays, because he would not have dared go to school in them. Nina wept bitterly. Mother had thrown away her pink fluffy slippers, because they were made in a factory. Nina loved those slippers. They had pink fluffy bobbles on the front, which Nina stroked every night before she went to sleep. Father raised an outcry too, and refused to go to the office in his new trousers. They were baggy, green sackcloth sort of things, with pink stripes round the legs. Mother let him keep a pair of office trousers on condition he wore the baggy ones at weekends. She made all of them wear flat, handmade sandals that fell off when they walked.

  The only one who did not mind was Tim. He was too young to care. He wore his floppy, purple tunic quite happily and, when his sandals fell off, he ran about barefoot, until the soles of his feet were as hard as leather, only rather more yellow. He was fascinated by the clothes Mother wore, too. Mother got a long, long skirt, which looked like dirty lace curtains. Tim found he could see Mother’s legs walking through the skirt. He followed her about, watching for the moment when she bent down and the net-curtain trailed on the floor. When she stood up again, her feet always went walking up the front of her skirt inside, and she had to stop and walk backward.

  Tim was the only one who did not mind going shopping with Mother that summer. Because, naturally, Mother began insisting on Natural Food. She would trail her gray net skirt into the bread shop, with her handmade basket on her arm, and ask sharply: “Is your bread stone-ground?”

  “Oh no,” said the lady. “It’s made of flour. Wheat ground, you know.”

  Mother had almost no sense of humor. She made her own bread after that, and it was rather like stones that had been ground.

  In the butcher’s she asked: “Has this meat lived a natural life?”

  “About as natural as yours, lady,” the butcher said crossly.

  Mother swept out of the butcher’s and did not buy meat again. She did most of her shopping in the vegetable shop instead, where she would prod each vegetable and each fruit and ask: “Has this been grown with natural manure?”

  The greengrocer, who found Mother a valuable customer, always assured her that everything was left entirely to Nature. All the same, Mother never bought anything from abroad, because she was not sure that foreigners had the right, Natural ideas.

  Soon, there was almost as little food in the house as there was furniture. There were a great many nuts and raisins, because Mother had not noticed that these things come from foreign parts, but almost the only ordinary food was cornflakes. Mother kept on buying cornflakes because it said on the packet: Made from finest natural ingredients. But one can get tired of cornflakes quite easily. Father was so tired of them that he used to take all three children for secret trips to the chip shop. Usually they stopped at the ice-cream van on the corner on the way home, and came back feeling much more satisfied.

  It had been a very sunny summer. By the end of it, the brambles at the bottom of the garden were full of ripe blackberries. Mother became inspired. “We should be living off the Fruits of the Earth,” she said. “There is nothing more Natural or more nutritious.” She bought a number of books to find out just what Fruits of the Earth were most good for you, and grew very excited. “We must all go out into the woods and pick things,” she said.

  “Good,” said Paul, who had by now eaten most of the blackberries in the garden. “I fancy a blackberry tart.”

  “Even with ground-stone pastry,” Nina agreed.

  Unfortunately, the nearest woods were ten miles away. Mother would not hear of going by car, because that was not Natural. Her first idea was that they should all cycle there, but she had to give that up when her gray net skirt kept getting tangled in bicycle chain. So she said they must all walk.

  “Nonsense,” said Father. “Tim can’t possibly walk twenty miles.”

  “Besides,” muttered Paul, “people grew quite naturally from apes, so everything people do is natural anyway, even cars.”

  Before there could be an argument, Father put Tim in the car and told the other two to get in as well. Mother gave in with dignity, and they all drove to the woods.

  There, Mother became strong-minded again. She refused to let them pick blackberries, because there were blackberries at home. She gave Paul and Nina a handmade basket each and set them to pick sloes. She set Father to gathering wild onions on a sunny bank. She herself, with Tim trotting beside her, wandered through the shadier parts of the wood with a shiny new book called Toadstools for Dinner open in front of her nose. From time to time she would pounce on an earlike fungus gro
wing on a tree. “These are wonderfully nutritious!” she would call out. “You beat them with a hammer, and then they taste almost like turnips.”

  Tim got the idea. He pattered happily about, bringing Mother yellow toadstools, shiny black fungus, and things like purple mushrooms. Some of his finds even looked like proper mushrooms. Mother looked each one up carefully in her book, and said things like: “Oh yes—but you have to boil those for ten hours,” and “Here they are—Oh, put them down at once, Tim! They’re deadly poison!”

  Meanwhile, Paul and Nina were not very happy picking sloes. First their sandals fell off their feet and their feet got pricked. Then their handwoven clothes seemed too hot. Then too, they soon found that sloe bushes have long spines—sharp ones. Then they tried tasting a sloe each and—Ugh! It was so sour that it made the inside of their mouths ragged.

  Father had a better time. He fell asleep on the sunny bank, with a bunch of wild onions draped over his green striped trousers.

  He never saw the strange brown face that peered at him through the hedge, and grinned a pitying grin. Shortly, the same face peered through the sloe spines at Nina and Paul. It chuckled, but Nina and Paul did not notice it either. Mother, with her toadstool book in front of her face, never saw or heard anything, even though the face burst into peals of wicked laughter when it looked at her. But Tim saw a crooked hand come out of a bush, with a long brown finger, beckoning. He went where it beckoned. He had a marvelous time. He found a long rope of beautiful shiny red berries. Luckily he dragged the rope along to Mother before he tried to eat the berries. “Look! I found some pretty blackberries.”

  “Put them down!” Mother screamed. “Those are bryony. They’re deadly poison!”

  Tim dropped the beautiful berries as if they were red-hot and hurried away, thinking Mother was very angry.

  Maybe this was what made Mother decide they had picked enough of the Fruits of the Earth. She picked up her basket of toadstools, called Paul and Nina, and woke Father up. Then nobody could find Tim. They called and shouted until the woods rang.

  Finally, Tim came trotting up from a quite unexpected direction. He was smiling broadly and clutching a plastic bag with something bright pink inside.

  “What have you got there?” Mother said suspiciously.

  “Mushroom,” Tim said proudly. “A funny man gave it me, with trousers like Father’s.”

  Father was very cross from sleeping in the sun. He hustled everyone back into the car, and, by the time anyone thought to ask Tim about his funny man, Tim had forgotten. He was only very young.

  When they got home, the first thing Mother did was to take the plastic bag in her finger and thumb—with a shudder, because plastic is made in factories—and throw it away. The thing Tim called a mushroom rolled out onto the Persian rug. It was quite round, bright pink, and fluffy like a baby chicken.

  “It looks like the bobbles on my slippers!” Nina said. She stroked the toadstool as she used to stroke her slippers. Everyone stroked it. It felt lovely. Mother looked it up in her toadstool book, but it did not seem to be there. So, because she was busy trying to make sloe jam and chopping the wild onions to cook with the other toadstools, she told Paul to throw it away.

  The others helped Mother. Mother was determined not to make jam with sugar, because that came from a factory. They were all busy scraping out honey jars and trying to suggest that brown sugar was almost Natural, when Paul came back.

  “I can’t throw it away,” he whispered. “It’s grown to the carpet.”

  It had. Nina and Tim went to look. The round pink ball had put out a firm little stalk and was now growing in the middle of the Persian rug.

  “Leave it,” said Nina. “It’s so pretty.”

  After that, they were even busier, leaning over the jam pan scooping hundreds of little tiny stones out from the boiling sloes. Nobody thought about the fluffy pink toadstool, until Tim came shouting proudly: “I got two mushrooms now!”

  He had. There were now two round furry pink toadstool-things growing in the Persian rug.

  “I think,” Father said doubtfully, “that we ought to throw it away now, before it does that again.”

  But Tim said it was his mushroom. Nina said it was exactly like her slippers now, and Paul said it was interesting. And Mother settled it by rushing in with another toadstool book. “I’ve found it! It doesn’t say it’s pink, but I’m sure this is it. It’s called Lady’s Slipper and I think you can eat it.”

  Just then, the sloe jam boiled over, and everyone forgot about the two round pink furry toadstools. When they had wiped up all the black, burnt syrup, Paul thought to go and look at them again. There were now four round pink furry toadstools growing in a neat square on the Persian rug. Paul was so interested that he said nothing.

  Soon after that, the jam was done. They tasted it. And it was clear that a jar of honey, even mixed with a packet of brown sugar, had not done anything for the sloes. It was acutely, horribly, uneatably sour. They all had to clean their teeth. When she had done that, Nina went to look at the pink toadstools. There were now eight of them, almost in a ring.

  “I think they double every hour,” said Paul.

  “Let’s look again in an hour,” said Nina.

  They did, while Mother was cooking the other toadstools for supper. By that time, there were sixteen round pink furry toadstools growing in a proper ring on the Persian rug. But they forgot them again after that, because Mother served the boiled toadstools with the chopped wild onions. Quite a number of them, despite being beaten with a hammer, were as hard to eat as the soles of their handmade sandals. Some of the others did not seem quite as nutritious as Mother’s books said they were. Everyone felt rather unwell. But the worst part of the supper was the wild onions. Father, as he chewed them—they had all got used to good, hard chewing that summer—remarked: “Plenty of taste in these onions.”

  There was indeed plenty of taste. In fact, there was too much. For the rest of the evening nobody could taste anything but wild onion. They could still taste it when they went to bed, and they went to bed rather early, all feeling a little seedy.

  Meanwhile, the sixteen round pink furry toadstools quietly became thirty-two round pink furry toadstools. These thirty-two became sixty-four, and these sixty-four … All through the night, silently and mysteriously, the round pink furry toadstools doubled in number, once every hour. Soon there was no room for a ring of them. Soon …

  When everyone came down in the morning, still tasting wild onions, the floor of the living room was a mass of fluffy pink. Fluffy pink had grown up the walls and was just meeting in the middle of the ceiling around the light. Fluffy pink had begun to spread to the kitchen. That was when Father put his foot down.

  Mother, he said, was welcome to any daft ideas she wanted. But she was to have them on her own. If she tried to make any of the rest of the family take part in her crazes, Father said, he would leave, and he would take Tim and Nina and Paul with him. And, to prove that he meant what he said, he took all three children out for the day and left Mother to get rid of the toadstools.

  Mother’s latest craze is playing the violin. But she does it by herself. If the rest of the family keep all the doors shut, they hardly notice it at all.

  Auntie Bea’s Day Out

  “I shall take the children for a lovely day at the seaside tomorrow,” said Auntie Bea.

  The children felt miserable. Auntie Bea was huge, with a loud voice. She had been staying with the Pearsons for a week then, and they all felt crushed and cross.

  “You needn’t bother to drive us, Tom,” said Auntie Bea. “I can easily go by bus.” This was Auntie Bea’s way of telling Mr. Pearson he was to drive them to the seaside.

  Mr. Pearson looked very cheerful. “Isn’t that lucky? I have to take the car for its inspection tomorrow.”

  When Auntie Bea decided to do something, she did it. She turned to Mrs. Pearson. “Well, you can help me carry the things, Eileen.”

  Mrs. Pearson
hastily discovered that she was going to the dentist.

  “Then Nancy will help,” said Auntie Bea. “Nancy’s so sensible.”

  “No, I’m not,” said Nancy.

  “So that’s all right,” said Auntie Bea. She never attended to anything the children said. “Nancy can look after Debbie, and Simon can carry the things.”

  The number of things Auntie Bea needed for a day at the seaside would have been about right if she was going to climb Mount Everest. Mr. Pearson helped her pile them in the hall, in twenty-two separate heaps. Auntie Bea was so afraid of losing or forgetting some of them that she wrote out twenty-two labels, each with their names and address on it, and tied them to the bundles. Meanwhile, Mrs. Pearson cut up four loaves to make the number of sandwiches Auntie Bea thought they would need.

  “And little jellies in yogurt cups,” Auntie Bea said, racing into the kitchen. “Such a good idea!”

  Mrs. Pearson was so glad to be getting rid of Auntie Bea for a day that she made them two jellies each.

  “I feel like a human sacrifice,” Simon said. “How does she think I can carry all that and manage Honey as well?” Honey was due to have puppies any day now. Simon was too anxious about her to leave her behind.

  Auntie Bea came downstairs shaking out a vast swimsuit. It was electric blue with shiny orange hearts all over it. Nancy blinked, and wondered what Auntie Bea would look like wearing it.