Little, Big Read online

  LITTLE, BIG

  John Crowley

  Dedication

  For Lynda

  who first knew it

  with the author’s love.

  Epigraph

  A little later, remembering man’s earthly origin, ‘dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return,’ they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying ‘We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!’

  —Flora Thompson,

  Lark Rise

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE: EDGEWOOD

  CHAPTER ONE

  Somewhere to Elsewhere

  A Long Drink of Water

  Anonymity

  Name & Number

  A City Mouse

  At First Sight

  The Young Santa Claus

  A Sea Island

  Correspondence

  Make-Believe

  Life is Short, or Long

  Trumps Turned at Edgewood

  Junipers

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Gothic Bathroom

  From Side to Side

  Sophie’s Dream

  Led Astray

  An Imaginary Bedroom

  In the Walled Garden

  Houses & Histories

  Doctor Drinkwater’s Advice

  The Architecture of Country Houses

  Just Then

  CHAPTER THREE

  Strange Insides

  For It Was He

  Strange and Shaded Lanes

  Call Them Doors

  No End to Possibility

  A Turn Around The House

  Tell Me the Tale

  All Questions Answered

  Gone, She Said

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Suit of Truman’s

  The Summer House

  Woods and Lakes

  Touching Noses

  Happy Isles

  A Sheltered Life

  As Quietly As She Had Come

  Suppose One Were a Fish

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lucky Children

  Some Final Order

  Can You Find the Faces

  These Few Windows

  To See What He Could See

  But There It Is

  In the Woods

  By the Way

  Good Advice

  What About It

  BOOK TWO: BROTHER NORTH-WIND’S SECRET

  CHAPTER ONE

  Retreats and Operations

  A Swell Idea

  Some Notes About Them

  What You Most Want

  Something Horrific

  Anthology of Love

  Darker Before It Lightened

  The Last Day of August

  Strange Way to Live

  No Catching Up

  CHAPTER TWO

  Robin Bird’s Lesson

  The End of the World

  Brother North-wind’s Secret

  The Only Game Going

  The One Good Thing About Winter

  The Old Age of the World

  Unflinching Predators

  Responsibilities

  Harvest-Home

  Seized by the Tale

  CHAPTER THREE

  Time Flies

  A Definite Hazard

  Up on the Hill

  Cocoa and a Bun

  The Orphan Nymphs

  The Least Trumps

  Only Fair

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Agreement with Newton

  Letters to Santa

  Room for One More

  A Gift They Had to Give

  Old World Bird

  Lucy, than Lilac

  Little, Big

  Solstice Night

  In All Directions

  BOOK THREE: OLD LAW FARM

  CHAPTER ONE

  Keeping People Out

  News from Home

  What George Mouse Heard

  George Mouse Goes on Overhearing

  A Friend of the Doctor’s

  A Shepherd in the Bronx

  Look at the Time

  The Club Meets

  Pictured Heavens

  CHAPTER TWO

  Old Law Farm

  The Bee or the Sea

  A Wingéd Messenger

  A Folding Bedroom

  Sylvie and Destiny

  Gate of Horn

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lilacs and Fireflies

  That’s a Secret

  Books and a Battle

  The Old Geography

  Hills and Dales

  A Getaway Look

  Two Beautiful Sisters

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Art of Memory

  A Geography

  Wakings-up

  No Going Back Out

  Slow Fall of Time

  Princess

  Brownie’s House

  A Banquet

  BOOK FOUR: THE WILD WOOD

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Time and a Tour

  Rainy-day Wonder

  That’s the Lot

  A Secret Agent

  The Worm Turned

  Hidden Ones Revealed

  Glory

  Not Yet

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tossing and Turning

  La Negra

  The Seventh Saint

  Whispering Gallery

  Right Side Up

  What a Tangle

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Top of a Stair

  Daughter of Time

  The Child Turned

  An Imaginary Study

  Nevertheless Spring

  Let Him Follow Love

  CHAPTER FOUR

  More Would Happen

  Something Going

  Uncle Daddy

  Lost for Sure

  The Wild Wood

  This Is War

  Unexpected Seam

  From East to West

  Sylvie?

  BOOK FIVE: THE ART OF MEMORY

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Hero Awakened

  A Secret Sorrow

  A Year to Place Upon It

  In the First Place

  And in the Second Place

  And in the Third

  CHAPTER TWO

  Not Her But This Park

  Never Never Never

  Doesn’t Matter

  Sylvie & Bruno Concluded

  How Far You’ve Gone

  Bottom of a Bottle

  Door into Nowhere

  Ahead and Behind

  CHAPTER THREE

  Not a Moment Too Soon

  Needle in The Haystack of Time

  Crossroads

  An Awful Mess

  Slowly I Turn

  Embracing Himself

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nothing for Something

  Quite Long-Sighted

  Ever After

  Three Lilacs

  Thinking of Waking

  BOOK SIX: THE FAIRIES’ PARLIAMENT

  CHAPTER ONE

  Winters

  Fifty-Two

  Carrying a Torch

  Something He Could Steal

  Escapements

  Caravans

  New-Found-Land

  Just About Over

  CHAPTER TWO

  What a Surprise

  Walking from There

  A Parliament

  Not All Over

  Lady with the Alligator Purse

  Still Un-stolen

  CHAPTER THREE

  Is It Far?

  Only Pretending

  Where Was She Headed?

  Too Simple to
Say

  Another Country

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Storm of Difference

  Watch Your Step

  A Family Thing

  A Watch and a Pipe

  Middle of Nowhere

  Fifty-two Pickup

  So Big

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Her Blessing

  More, Much More

  Only the Brave

  Quite Close

  Give Way, Give Way

  Come or Stay

  Not Going

  Land Called the Tale

  A Wake

  A Real Gift

  She’s Here, She’s Near

  Once Upon a Time

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the Author: Meet John Crowley

  About the Book: A Little, Big Review by Roz Kaveney

  Read on: Have You Read?: More by John Crowley

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  BOOK ONE: EDGEWOOD

  CHAPTER ONE

  Men are men, but Man is a woman.

  —Chesterton

  On a certain day in June, 19—, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.

  Somewhere to Elsewhere

  Though he had left his City room early in the morning it was nearly noon before he had crossed the huge bridge on a little-used walkway and come out into the named but boundaryless towns on the north side of the river. Through the afternoon he negotiated those Indian-named places, usually unable to take the straight route commanded by the imperious and constant flow of traffic; he went neighborhood by neighborhood, looking down alleys and into stores. He saw few walkers, even indigenous, though there were kids on bikes; he wondered about their lives in these places, which to him seemed gloomily peripheral, though the kids were cheerful enough.

  The regular blocks of commercial avenues and residential streets began gradually to become disordered, thinning like the extremes of a great forest; began to be broken by weedy lots as though by glades; now and then a dusty undergrown woods or a scruffy meadow announced that it was available to be turned into an industrial park. Smoky turned that phrase over in his mind, since that seemed truly the place in the world where he was, the industrial park, between the desert and the sown.

  He stopped at a bench where people could catch buses from Somewhere to Elsewhere. He sat, shrugged his small pack from his back, took from it a sandwich he had made himself—another condition—and a confetti-colored gas-station road map. He wasn’t sure if the map were forbidden by the conditions, but the directions he’d been given to get to Edgewood weren’t explicit, and he opened it.

  Now. This blue line was apparently the cracked macadam lined with untenanted brick factories he had been walking along. He turned the map so that this line ran parallel to his bench, as the road did (he wasn’t much of a map reader) and found, far off to his left, the place he walked toward. The name Edgewood didn’t appear, actually, but it was here somewhere, in this group of five towns marked with the legend’s most insignificant bullets. So. There was a mighty double red line that went near there, proud with exits and entrances; he couldn’t walk along that. A thick blue line (on the model of the vascular system, Smoky imagined all the traffic flowing south to the city on the blue lines, away on the red) ran somewhat nearer, extending corpuscular access to towns and townlets along the way. The much thinner sclerotic blue line he sat beside was tributary to this; probably commerce had moved there, Tool Town, Food City, Furniture World, Carpet Village. Well … But there was also, almost indistinguishable, a narrow black line he could take soon instead. He thought at first that it led nowhere, but no, it went on, faltering, seeming at first almost forgotten by the mapmaker in the ganglia, but then growing clearer in the northward emptiness, and coming very near a town Smoky knew to be near Edgewood.

  That one, then. It seemed a walker’s road.

  After measuring with his thumb and finger the distance on the map he had come, and how far he had to go (much farther), he slung on his pack, tilted his hat against the sun, and went on.

  A Long Drink of Water

  She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind’s eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her.

  It was in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor, the one whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard and whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar and windows. It was that very room.

  She was tall.

  She was nearly six feet tall, which was several inches taller than Smoky; her sister, just turned fourteen, was as tall as he. Their party dresses were short, and glittered, hers red, her sister’s white; their long, long stockings glistened. What was odd was that tall as they were they were shy, especially the younger, who smiled but wouldn’t take Smoky’s hand, only turned away further behind her sister.

  Delicate giantesses. The older glanced toward George as he made debonair introductions. Her smile was tentative. Her hair was red-gold and curly-fine. Her name, George said, was Daily Alice.

  He took her hand, looking up. “A long drink of water,” he said, and she began to laugh. Her sister laughed too, and George Mouse bent down and slapped his knee. Smoky, not knowing why the old chestnut should be so funny, looked from one to another with a seraphic idiot’s grin, his hand unrelinquished.

  It was the happiest moment of his life.

  Anonymity

  It had not been, until he met Daily Alice Drinkwater in the library of the Mouse townhouse, a life particularly charged with happiness; but it happened to be a life suited just right for the courtship he then set out on. He was the only child of his father’s second marriage, and was born when his father was nearly sixty. When his mother realized that the solid Barnable fortune had largely evanesced under his father’s management, and that there had been therefore little reason to marry him and less to bear him a child, she left him in an access of bitterness. That was too bad for Smoky, because of all his relations she was the least anonymous; in fact she was the only one of any related to him by blood whose face he could instantly bring to memory in his old age, though he had been a boy when she left. Smoky himself mostly inherited the Barnable anonymity, and only a streak of his mother’s concreteness: an actual streak it seemed to those who knew him, a streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence.

  They were a large family. His father had five sons and daughters by his first wife; they all lived in anonymous suburbs of cities in those states whose names begin with an I and which Smoky’s City friends couldn’t distinguish from one another. Smoky confused the catalogue himself at times. Since his father was supposed by them to have a lot of money and it was never clear what he intended to do with it, Dad was always welcome in their houses, and after his wife’s departure he chose to sell the house Smoky was born in and travel from one to another with his young son, a succession of anonymous dogs, and seven custom-made chests containing his library. Barnable was an educated man, though his learning was of such a remote and rigid kind that it gave him no conversation and didn’t reduce his natural anonymity at all. His older sons and daughters regarded the chests of books as an inconvenience, like having his socks confused in the wash with theirs.

  (Later on, it was Smoky’s habit to try to sort out his half-siblings and their houses and assign them to
their proper cities and states while he sat on the toilet. Maybe that was because it was in their toilets that he had felt most anonymous, anonymous to the point of invisibility; anyway, he would pass the time there shuffling his brothers and sisters and their children like a pack of cards, trying to match faces to porches to lawns, until late in life he could deal out the whole of it. It gave him the same bleak satisfaction he got from solving crossword puzzles, and the same doubt—what if he had guessed words that crossed correctly, but weren’t the words the maker had in mind? The next-week’s paper with the solution printed would never arrive.)

  His wife’s desertion didn’t make Barnable less cheerful, only more anonymous; it seemed to his older children, as he coalesced in and then evaporated from their lives, that he existed less and less. It was only to Smoky that he gave the gift of his private solidity: his learning. Because the two of them moved so often, Smoky never did go to a regular school; and by the time one of the states that began with an I found out what had been done to Smoky by his father all those years, he was too old to be compelled to go to school any more. So, at sixteen, Smoky knew Latin, classical and medieval; Greek; some old-fashioned mathematics; and he could play the violin a little. He had smelled few books other than his father’s leather-bound classics; he could recite two hundred lines of Virgil more or less accurately; and he wrote in a perfect Chancery hand.

  His father died in that year, shriveled it seemed by the imparting of all that was thick in him to his son. Smoky continued their wanderings for a few more years. He had a hard time getting work because he had no Diploma; at last he learned to type in a shabby business school, in South Bend he later thought it must have been, and became a Clerk. He lived a lot in three different suburbs with the same name in three different cities, and in each his relatives called him by a different name—his own, his father’s, and Smoky—which last so suited his evanescence that he kept it. When he was twenty-one, an unknown thrift of his father’s threw down some belated money on him, and he took a bus to the City, forgetting as soon as he was past the last one all the cities his relatives had lived in, and all his relatives too, so that long afterwards he had to reconstruct them face by lawn; and once arrived in the City, he dispersed utterly and gratefully in it like a raindrop fallen into the sea.