Mary liked the city and her garden. She could walk across the garden in six steps and walk from its top to its bottom in eight steps. On some afternoons she would take very tiny paces and this would allow the garden to seem twice the size and much more beautiful. The grown-ups she explained this to became confused.
They would tell her, ‘The garden is the same size, no matter how many paces you squeeze into it.’
She would tell them, ‘Not at all. The longer I take to cross the garden, the larger and more extremely wonderful it becomes, in the same way that ice cream becomes much more magnificent when you eat it very slowly with a little spoon.’ As I said, the girl was very clever.
‘Then your ice cream will melt,’ said the grown-ups.
And Mary would shake her head and start to skip and hum a tune to herself, because grown-ups expect children to do such things and it pleases them much more than questions they can’t answer. She did not mention that if she stood perfectly still in her garden then it went on for ever, because she could never reach its end. That would have made the grown-ups frown.
This – as it happened – made the grown-ups the exact opposite of the little girl.
Anyway, as I said at the beginning, if you remember, this little girl called Mary was one day walking in her garden. She believed it was hers because she loved it. She believed that loving something should make it a part of you, in the way that your feet are a part of you. (And you would, of course, be very foolish not to love your feet – should you have any – because they can be quite useful.)
On this particular afternoon, which was a wintry Sunday, the girl was taking extra-tiny steps so that her garden stretched for miles, almost into other countries. This made the four rose bushes into four giant rose trees and the three flowerbeds into vast prairies and the tiny pond into an inland sea of impressive dimensions. Sadly, it still had no crocodiles.
The little girl put her hands in her pockets to keep them warm because she preferred this to wearing gloves. This was definitely not because she had lost her gloves, as her mother had suggested earlier. The girl also watched her breath appearing in ascending, steamy clouds, as if her body were somehow burning the dead leaves from autumn, or perhaps washing a large number of sheets and producing steam like a laundry. She was perfectly absorbed by what she was doing and so it took a while for her to notice that one of her ankles was feeling slightly unlike the other.
When she looked down to her left she saw that, snugly fitted around her neatly darned woollen stocking, a golden bangle had appeared. There were two jewels in the bangle that glittered, and from time to time the bangle itself seemed to shimmer, almost as if it were moving.
It was immensely handsome.
She knew this because it told her so. Because she was very sensible, the little girl had not yet acquired the silly habit of talking only to people and would happily address objects and animals that seemed to be in need of conversation or company. ‘Good heavens,’ she said to the bangle. And then, ‘Where did you come from?’ And after that, ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ replied the bangle. ‘I am immensely handsome.’
‘Oh,’ said the girl. ‘Hello, Mr Handsome.’
The bangle rippled round her ankle and glistened and its two jewels gleamed like two pieces of jet or perhaps very dark rubies. ‘No, no. I am not called Immensely Handsome – that is just one of my many qualities. I am handsome, wise and agile. I also have a beautiful speaking voice. And I am extremely fast.’
At this point Mary thought that the bangle was also rather boastful and she interrupted it, even though it did have a very lovely speaking voice.
‘What is your name, then? And you don’t seem that fast to me.’
‘Oh, don’t I . . . ?’ And at once the bangle disappeared.
It moved so quickly that Mary was still listening to its delightful voice, chuckling to itself and left behind, while its body had gone somewhere further away. She had to search about before she saw the bangle hanging from one of the rose bushes’ branches. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t do that – the rose might not like it.’
‘Oh, the rose won’t mind me,’ said the bangle, grinning a tiny grin and swaying slightly. ‘I am the fastest thing you will ever meet,’ the bangle confided, once again right there on her ankle and not even slightly out of breath.
‘That is impressive,’ admitted Mary.
‘I know.’
‘But what is your name?’
‘Maybe I will tell you in a while. You should always be careful about giving your name to anyone and not do it straight away.’
‘Well, if you won’t tell me your name, what kind of bracelet are you?’ Mary sat down very carefully under one of the rose bushes to look more closely at her talkative new friend.
‘I’m not.’ The bangle unfastened itself and – quickly, but not so quickly that Mary couldn’t watch – shifted its golden shape along until it was wound around her wrist a few times as if it were a bracelet after all.
‘Ah,’ Mary said, ‘I see.’
The bangle slid and wriggled and tickled until she was cupping most of it, neatly coiled in her palm, and the two flecks of colour which she had thought of as jewels were looking at her from a slender, gilded head.
The red jewels blinked like clever, tiny eyes. This was because they were clever, tiny eyes.
‘Yes,’ said the snake, ‘I am a snake.’ And he smiled for an instant as much as someone can with no lips and flickered out an elegant bright red tongue that was forked at the end and licked the air around it. ‘You taste of sweets and soap and being good.’
Mary stuck out her own tongue, but couldn’t taste anything about the snake.
‘I taste of nothing,’ the snake told her. ‘Aren’t you afraid? People usually are afraid of snakes. When they see me they frequently run up and down and wave their arms and scream.’
‘Would you like me to do that?’
‘Not especially,’ purred the snake. ‘But shouldn’t you be terribly afraid?’
‘Why? Are you terribly frightening?’
The snake waggled his tongue and sampled the air again. ‘Well, I could be . . . Snakes can be incredibly dangerous. Some of us crush large animals in our muscular convolutions and slowly swallow whole crocodiles, or maybe canoes, or canoes with people in them.’
‘But you’re only small.’
‘I can get bigger.’
Mary thought this might be a lie, but she didn’t want to hurt the snake’s feelings.
The snake stretched up his little spine and raised his small head so that he could look straight at her. He swayed his neck back and forth as if he were listening to music and stared into her blue eyes with his dark red eyes and his strange narrow pupils which were blacker than the back of a raven and which seemed to go on for ever if you concentrated on them and really paid attention. ‘Some snakes can bite you once and fill you with enough poison to kill twenty men, fifty men, maybe even a hundred men.’
‘I’m not a man,’ said Mary. ‘I’m a little girl.’
The snake blinked. ‘You are being difficult. A snake could poison you even faster than a man because the poison would have less far to travel.’
Mary nodded. ‘I know. Although I think even a very huge and ferocious snake might not kill a hundred men.’
‘Definitely at least twenty.’ The snake sounded slightly cross.
‘But I have learned all the poisonous snakes and their stripes