ALICE IN THE RAIN

A strange little tale involving an elderly lady, (well, late middle-aged) in the rain/

When she’d been young Alice had quite liked the rain. Mother had said it was really good for the garden and anyway it seemed to clean the world, not that her world was in any way dirty, but she really liked the feeling that the back lawn, the flower beds, the rose bush and the row of blackberry brambles, that all were free of dust and grime.

She never even wondered who her father might have been because she must have had one. Mother, her back straight and her face hawkish, told a story of anonymity and harshness, of a man like any other man who had used and abused her, and then gone away leaving her to a life of hard work and loneliness. So when her mother died all connection with her past was gone. She was all alone in the world, and loved the rain.

But the years had passed until she was getting to feel old herself and rain became an obstacle to her living her life in the way she wanted to live it. Fresh air and the world outside her home had been her salvation, had saved her mind from self-destruction, but her flesh became increasingly feeble. She had a sickness that had drained her. Mother had been long gone in her grave, which was a shame, and Alice was totally on her own, but still enjoyed the countryside and the summer sun. But years are more than summers.

Whereas when she was out shopping the young Alice had been able to race along to shelter if a shower came her way, and if she was on the street she could easily find a bus shelter or a corner shop where she could hide from its worst excesses until it blew away on the wind, now she had to pay attention to weather forecasts. She was sometimes even heard to mutter the mantra rain, rain go away, come again another day like she had in the once upon a time of her life on her way to or from school.

But now she was a prematurely old lady, though only in her sixties. And she hated getting wet. She’d stopped being bothered about a dusty lawn or a grubby blackberry bramble and would have been much happier if it never rained again.

And this was a particular day when it did suddenly decide to rain, out of the blue, not even mentioned in the BBC weather forecast. And because she was convinced it would never happen she decided to go for a slow walk among the fringes of Brumpton Woods. This was a familiar place to her. All her life she had spent hours in lonely pleasure under the trees of the forest. Something drew her there. Something almost magica.

Now that she was feeling old it had to be slow because she had a walker, and that took some work when it came to walking through the wilds of the woods.

And she was only a few minutes into the woodland, still within easy reach of her home, when it started to rain. The BBC weather people had got it horribly wrong because it wasn’t only merely raining it was lashing down. It was a long time since she’d seen rain like this, and here she was, actually in it.

Fortunately there were enough trees to provide a kind of shelter if stopping every other raindrop is shelter, and so she huddled up to the trunk of a very old tree. Oak she thought it must be oak, though she had never learned the shapes and names of trees But standing there, close to the bark, she managed to avoid the worst of the downpour, though it did cross her mind that it was odd that someone had fixed a doorknob to the bark of the tree. Who would do a silly thing like that? Kids, she supposed, the brats that sometimes called her names. But then kids will be kids, she philosophised. They’ll put doorknobs anywhere that their fancy takes them. Maybe she’d been a child herself once, though she couldn’t remember when that might have been or fixing doorknobs in daft places..

Mother had taken care of her childhood. Had filled it with fear of the unknown, of people. It was for her own good, she had said, to keep her safe. And Mother had always been right hadn’t she?

“I wouldn’t stay there,” said a voice. She looked around to see who had spoken and there he was. Not very tall, in fact almost dwarfish, a man with a silver beard and long straggly hair, and smiling in the friendliest, warmest way she’d seen anyone smile, ever, in all of her life. Mother would have warned her about men like this. About warm smiles and how rotten they were inside.

“Do I know you?” she asked, curious, because as far as she knew she had never seen anyone like him in all of her sixty years of looking at people in order to avoid them.

“I shouldn’t think so, Alice,” he said, grinning not unlike the mythical Cheshire cat might be assumed to grin. “You don’t come here often in the rain.”

“I don’t come here ever in the rain,” she retorted, because as far as she was concerned she didn’t, and anyway, how did such a strange little man know her name?

“But you’re here now!” he told her with a chuckle, “ and you seem to be getting wet! Come and stand with me: I’ve found a dry spot!”

“But you’re a stranger! I’ve always been wary of strangers!” she protested.

“Shame,” he murmured, “we could keep each other warm and dry if we snuggled together, don’t you think? Then neither of us would catch pneumonia or, curse the thought, double pneumonia, and would both be as dry and toasty as a man or a woman could be if they chanced to be together out of the rain!”

“No,” she said, obstinately, “I don’t know you so you’re a stranger. I’ve been wary of strangers since my mother warned me about them. She was most plain. She said they all wanted to rob me and do even worse things than that to me.”

“Then your mother was a silly mare!” he chided her.

“Now there you go, calling the most wonderful woman I’ve ever known by horsey names!”

“Your mother, wonderful?” he croaked, “that she never was!”

“How do you know what she was like, you silly little man!” she protested, “she must have been dead for thirty years! And for those thirty years I haven’t half missed her. It never poured with rain like this when she was alive.”

“And you never had a walker to help you walk,” he pointed out. “But I know your mother all right. And she was the harshest cow I’ve ever known!”

“First you call her a horse and now she’s cattle,” protested Alice.

“And she can be a rat or a vole or a hedgehog,” laughed the little man, “words are only words! Now come here, you silly old woman, and come to my home where you’ll be dry while it’s raining, and if you’re sweet and good I might even make you a cup of tea!”

She looked around her, and shook her head. “I don’t see anyone’s home near here,” she pointed out, “if I walk out in this I’ll get even wetter than I am.”

“You won’t if you squash yourself like you are against my front door,” he laughed, “can’t you see: this is a hollow tree and I live inside it.”

“You never do” she squawked.

“Now she’s calling me a liar,” he sighed, “I tell you what, Alice, you move round the tree a little bit and hold on there, and I’ll pop into my kitchen and put my kettle on.”

And to her mortification she let him take two steps towards her and gently push her until she had moved almost half way round the tree’s wide trunk.

“You touched me!” she shouted, “you put your hands on me and pushed me, and my mother warned me about men like you, who go around touching young ladies!”

He laughed. “So you’re young now are you, Alice?” he chortled.

And before she could reply to his taunt he opened a door that she hadn’t noticed, with a doorknob that she had spotted, and squeezed in.

“Where are you going?” she asked, shivering because the rain was still lashing down like she’d never known it lash down before, and she was beginning to feel cold as wet penetrated her clothing.

“For a cup of tea and maybe a dish of fish and chips,” he told her, “and seeing as you don’t want to come in with me because your daft mother warned you about people like me and you were silly enough to believe her, then I’ll enjoy it on my own.”

“On your own?” she asked, wondering what her mother might have said to upset this silly little man. Because, and this was quite clear to her, there can’t have been much comradeship between them had they ever met.

“I might just…” she hesitated, “can I really come in?”

“I invited you, didn’t I?” he laughed, “come on in and sit you down!”

“But… aren’t I too big?” she asked, seeing through the strange little doorway into the tiny space he called a kitchen.

“It’s my home and it adjusts itself,” he grinned, “and anyone who really enters with a kind heart can find it easy to come in. See: you’re already past the door! Sit you down while I make a pot of tea, and then you can tell me all about yourself.”

She saw a chair and sat in it. She stared at the little old man and his silvery hair, and almost thought she liked him. Was he a refugee from a fairy tale? Did such magical beings really exist? And were they less dangerous than ordinary men and women?

“Here you are, Alice,” he said while she was trying to work things out, handing her a cup of something hot and steaming.

“How do you know me?” she asked. “I’m called Alice: you seem to know that much about me and yet I know nothing about you.”

“Oh dear,” he sighed, “yet I’ve always known you, dear lady. I was there when you were born…”

“Mother said she gave birth to me all on her own, so you can’t have been!” she exclaimed.

“She didn’t like boys, did she, and she didn’t like men either. Didn’t trust us. Have you never felt that something was wrong, Alice? Maybe even that something was missing?”

Her heart began to beat faster. This was getting scary because, truth to tell, maybe she had felt like that.

“Who are you, mister?” she asked, holding onto her walker frame with firm hands.

“I was there when you were born, my dear, because that’s when I was born too,” he said, “you might look at me and see a stranger, but, truth to tell, Alice, you’re my twin sister and I was rescued by our father when I was born. I’ve waited all these years to meet you again, dear Alice.”

“You’re my…” she gasped. Because in a brilliant moment of understanding, her whole life gained an explanation. She wasn’t alone: she had a twin.

“I think I love you,” she whispered.

© Peter Rogerson 18.03.23

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Reviews

[DIVYA]

This was such a flight of imagination and I absolutely loved it! She met a brother she never knew she had, that too a twin! That too, at an Oak Tree with a door knob. Once again, Loved your story telling and where you took me with the story. Alice will never be the same again. What a universe of possibilities exists out there. We just need to open our minds to it!