A Year of Marvellous Ways

by Sarah Winman

  Whatshisname. The American. She had watched him go into the church as a shadow, and when he had emerged he was still a shadow with deep hues of mauve emanating from his dark skin, and from his mouth the glowing tip of a cigarette pulsed like the heart of a night insect. He walked across the dry riverbed lured by a familiar song, and as he pulled himself up the bank, he saw the wireless, sitting in a battered pram parked beneath the trees.

  He said, Louis Armstrong.

  And she said, Marvellous Ways, nice to meet you at last.

  And he laughed and she had never heard laughter like that, not in all her days, and his eyes flashed as bright as torchlight. He sat with her, and the table rocked and the river rippled as bombers flew over and the air raid sirens sounded and bombs fell over the Great Port, over Truro too, and barrage balloons cast deep shadows across the sky, and Louis Armstrong sang of lips and arms and hearts as anti-aircraft guns pounded against the indigo dark, and two strangers sat quietly under a tree that had seen it all before.

  He talked about his grandfather back home in South Carolina in the Low Country, talked about the fishing trips they took along the oozy marshes, how the smell of mud and salt were the smells of home, and Marvellous said, I know what you mean. And he told her of the trestle bridges that glowed pink at dusk and cedars that grew out of the lush wetlands and the heavy scent of tea olive and jasmine, which reminded him of his late mother. He said he missed eating catfish, and Marvellous said, So do I, even though she had only ever eaten dogfish. Together they toasted Life and clinked their mugs and pretended they were somewhere far far away.

  He came often after that. Brought her doughnuts from the American doughnut factory in Union Square, and they ate them with strong black tea even though he preferred coffee, and they listened to the radio Rhythm Club and tapped out rhythms with their jitterbug feet. Sometimes he brought tins of Spam, corned beef, too; he never let her go hungry. And once he brought her a poster of a film she had seen a couple of years before. He was thoughtful like that.

  But then days before the planned invasion of France, he asked her for a charm.

  A charm? she said.

  A lucky charm. To bring me back safely, he said.

  She looked into his eyes and said, But that’s not what I do. I’ve never made charms.

  Oh, but that’s what people said you did.

  That’s what they’ve always said, and she held his hand instead and the only charm she had was hers and it radiated out.

  June 1944 was The Last Goodbye. Those American boys were shipping out. He strutted over whistling, all gabardine trousers and Hawaiian shirt, gosh he looked so smart. He gave her all he had left – chocolate, cigarettes, stockings – and they sat down under the tree and drank tea and listened to Armstrong and Teagarden, Bechet, too, and someone else who would never be as famous. She watched the young man play rhythm upon his knees, watched his mouth turn clarinet. In that moment, either side of him, she saw two futures vying for space. In one he lay still on Omaha Beach. In the other he sat still, head in a book, trying to make something of himself in a country coloured by hate. When he stood up to leave she said, Go left, and he said, What’s that? She said, I don’t know what it means but you will when the time comes. You must go left.

  So long, Marvellous, he waved.

  So long, Henry Manfred Gladstone II, she waved. Henry Manfred Gladstone II. So that was his name.

  It’s been a pleasure, he said.

  The night grew wild with movement. The concrete barges began to depart and thousands of men embarked from piers and beaches, and there was such a kerfuffle, and yet by morning all was quiet. The generators were quiet. The smell of diesel subsiding. The Americans had left and had left behind tales of romance and unborn children, and so much joy, and it was the women who cried because they always did.

  So long, Henry Manfred Gladstone II, she whispered. It’s been a pleasure.

  2

  As Marvellous had predicted, a thick crust of hoarfrost had settled across the river valley by morning. A curlew called out incessantly from the creek until a plume of smoke rose from the gypsy caravan. A moment later, Marvellous opened the wagon doors and carefully climbed down the glistening steps. At the solid crunch of earth, she stretched her arms up towards the trees, down towards her toes, up towards the trees again. For someone so small she took up a lot of space.

  She followed the sloping path down to the riverbank where the pit-fire from the night before smouldered timidly. She sat down heavily on the mooring stone and studied her mood as she did the daily flow of the river. She was troubled; had slept badly. A dream had pulled her from sleep – a blind dream again – one of words not images. Open the boathouse, dream had said. I will not, said Marvellous vehemently, but dreams don’t argue.

  She stood up and waited for the highest point of the tide, the moment when the movement of the river ceased. She slipped out of her yellow oilskin and well-worn boots and shivered as the frosty mud found space between her toes. She unpinned her hair and the limp curls of white fell beyond her shoulders towards a waist once slimmer, once held. One button now, two buttons. Her fingers weren’t nimble and the action took a moment. Her heavy felt trousers slid to the earth. She pulled her wool sweater over her head and her breasts tumbled free and goose pimples rose in the crisp morning air. She lifted the shell box over her head and placed it carefully upon the ancient stone. She slipped from her bloomers. It used to be only the tops of her thighs that touched, now everything touched, but it would feel different in a minute, in the river it would feel different and she knew this because she knew so much because she had been old for such a long time.

  She took off her glasses and stepped carefully to the bank, felt for the edge with her toes. The smell of high water was thick. She raised her arms above her head and the breeze caught in her armpits, at the juncture of her legs.

  Now.

  She bent her legs and dived into the creek, surfacing two yards from shore. She swam downriver with mullet and watched a cunning heron fly low and unseen and make an easy killing in the brittle light. Front crawl took effort so she opted for breast stroke. She liked the feel of chill water between her legs as they parted.

  As she drew level with the boathouse, her stomach tightened as her eyes rested on the stone and clapboard dwelling. It looked majestic and serene, frosted as it was that morning, and it looked like the symbol of love and commitment that it had previously been when her father had built it all those years before. Once white, it was now green with moss, long-jettisoned to the vast maw of her past. Twenty-five years ago she had bolted the door and had imprisoned all that had resided inside just as she had done with her heart. The salt-caked windows pleaded with her as she passed. Open us up, they whispered. Nonsense, she said, and she dived under the water and held herself down with eelgrass. She stayed there as long as she could, surfacing breathlessly back upstream in the shadow of the mooring stone. She struggled up the riverbank and wrapped herself tightly in her oilskin. She turned back towards the boathouse. You can’t speak, she said. No, I can’t, it said. That’s all right then, she said, and she stomped back up to her caravan in a mood as heavy as mud.

  That afternoon, the engine purred as the crabber rode the ebbing tide towards the narrow sandbar that kept the uninvited world at bay. On the sandbar was the wreck of Deliverance, her old friend Cundy’s fishing boat. At low tide the boat tilted portside revealing the wound from which it never recovered. At high tide the stern sat so low in the water that most people thought the boat’s name was actually Deliver.

  Through the sandbar, the vast stretch of Carrick Roads could be seen ahead, glistening as shafts of sunlight cut across the heaving grey waterway. A gunshot echoed beyond the meadows. Marvellous stopped and listened; heard a faint dog bark, too. A flock of gulls took off into the low white sun, patterning the valley with fleeting, half-glimpsed shadows. She raised he
r telescope and studied their flight, looking for unusual signs, but again there were none. She caught a tern surrendering to the current, joyfully drifting backwards on the fast out-going water.

  She lowered the telescope and slipped off her glasses, quite sure now that whatever she was waiting for was not coming by water. There were signs with water – obvious signs – like the unforgettable night when two thousand starfish had crept in on the tide.

  It had been a lifetime ago. A night when loneliness had taken her too early to bed. She had lain awake unable to sleep, willing her life to change as young women do, when all of a sudden she felt the creeping movement of company outside. She got up and when she saw the shimmering pattern of orange stars, she thought the world was upside down and the heavens finally within reach. And in a way it was, and in a way they were, because the following day Paper Jack marched through the shallows and cut a path through fifteen years of thorny silence.

  He came with bluebells behind his ears and ramson stalks in his mouth and was trailed by lovelorn bees who knew the scent of a good man. He stopped outside her caravan and with arms out wide he shouted what the children used to shout:

  Marvellous Ways! Marvellous Ways!

  Is she well or is she crazed?

  She’ll cast a spell and make you well,

  She’ll cast a spell you’ll go to hell.

  Marvellous stepped out from the caravan that day and with as much indifference as she could muster, said, You again!

  And he said, Me, again!

  So what do you want? Wellness or hellness?

  And he quietly said, You-ness.

  And she said, Ain’t no Eunice living here.

  And he said, God damn it, woman, you’ve still got a mouth! Now come down from those steps and let me hold you.

  And they held on to each other until Time Past crept between them and made them shy, and Paper Jack pulled away and smiled at her, and his smile broke like a spring morning and melted the long winter of her heart.

  ’Course he wasn’t called Paper Jack then, the name Paper Jack came much later, as names often do. He was called just Jack or Singer Jack then, and he was quiet and watchful and eyed everything and everyone like the weather. He once called Marvellous a band of high pressure during an argument, and once when his brother, Jimmy, wasn’t around he called her a frosty start to the day. Jack liked Marvellous from the moment he saw her on Jimmy’s arm. Jack liked Marvellous more than any girl he had ever set eyes on. And once, when he was drunk, and she was alone, Jack said he would wait for her because she was worth waiting for, like the first sighting of pilchards in the early morn of a summer day.

  That First Return was in 1900. Marvellous was forty-two years old and Jack, thirty-six. Both had been worn down by life and were an inch shorter than the last time they had met. Marvellous built a fire outside and cooked the crab she had hauled the previous day. They drank in each other’s presence with ale and rum, and became so shy that even the leaves began to blush.

  You got yourself a man? asked Jack.

  No one permanent, said Marvellous. And Jack felt half glad, half jealous.

  He said, A woman like you needs a man –

  – is that so? –

  – because a woman like you needs a child, he said.

  Too late for that, said Marvellous quietly, and she began to clear away the stinking shell. Four hundred and seventeen children she had delivered by then and not one her own.

  She stopped and said, I wanted your child, Jack. I wanted to love and care for your child, and she knelt down and rinsed her hands in a bucket of river water.

  He sat in silence and watched her guiltily, listening to a nightingale in the leafy oak branches above. When Marvellous had finished, he stood up and pulled her towards his chest. They rocked from side to side as the nightingale sang in the leafy oak branches above, and they kissed and she wished they hadn’t because she could taste his sadness on his breath. Could taste his other life and his other women too, and that’s why she knew he wouldn’t stay.

  I’m not staying, he whispered.

  I know, said Marvellous.

  I’m going to make good and then I’ll come back and fetch you.

  I’ll wait, said Marvellous, because she was so good at waiting.

  You’ve only ever been the girl for me.

  I’m not a girl, Jack, and time’s running out.

  You’ve never looked more beautiful.

  Where have these words been hiding?

  Taken me years to find you.

  I never went far.

  The silence was punctuated by bird calls.

  She ran her hands over his face. Where have you been all this time?

  Australia.

  I thought I could see another sun on your skin.

  I ended up south at the copper mines. Place called Moonta – Little Cornwall they called it because there were pasties there and Methodists too.

  Food for thought, said Marvellous. Food for the soul.

  And there were blackfellas, too, and they knew the land and they knew the sea. And I’d go down to the bay and watch them spear fish with harpoons made from stingray barbs. And this blackfella – Bob, he was called – well, he called me a whitefella. Can you imagine it? I’d never thought about being a whitefella before, not until that moment when I stood on that strange shore looking at the biggest bluest sky I’d ever seen, watching a blackfella spear fish for his tea.

  Marvellous smiled. She took his hands and kissed them.

  And he wanted to tell her that was the start of his homesickness: that overwhelming sky and those skinny-looking blackfellas. He wanted to tell her that nothing felt right and he missed his home because how could he make a home in a land that whispered angry words? In a land where flies outnumbered men, in a land where heat rose from the red-parched earth as fiercely as a kiln? How could he make a home in a land that didn’t have her? And he cried on that beach and pretended he had the burning midday sun in his eyes, because when Bob looked over at him he laughed and said, What’s with the fakkin tiss, mate?

  What is it? asked Marvellous.

  Jack fell silent. He pulled out a heavy gold fob watch and placed it between her hands. See, I came back rich, he said.

  You came back a Gentleman.

  I did. And could you love a Gentleman?

  I’d prefer a sailor with no money.

  Jack laughed. How did you know?

  Because I know you, Jack Francis. And I can smell your life on your hands.

  Marvellous refilled his mug from the flagon.

  There was another accident underground and I lost my nerve, Marve. Couldn’t go back down there again. Kept thinking of Jimmy. You ever think of him?

  Now and then. But I think of you more.

  Do you love me more?

  Yes. Because I have more love to give.

  He reached for his ale. I still have guilt, he said.

  Time swallowed mine.

  Lucky.

  No. Just very very tired, said Marvellous.

  I won’t go underground again, said Jack. Just the sea for me now. I’ll take my chances with the waves.

  Swim with me, said Marvellous.

  I can’t swim. Don’t know a sailor who can.

  We’ll stay shallow and I’ll hold you.

  I’m a lot to hold.

  I’m a good anchor.

  They stood by the mooring stone in the lamplight. They undressed each other and they looked all over each other’s bodies and their eyes became hands and their longing caused the river to ripple and when they could look no more she walked him into the cold water, and he was so giddy he had difficulty keeping his feet on the ground.

  As he dressed, she packed his bag with sloe gin and pickled limpets and s
affron buns. Packets of dried sweet chestnut and comfrey leaves, too, to ease the rattling breathlessness he tried to hide.

  That night, before he left, she asked him to sleep with her. Came right out and said it. Said they’d wasted enough time already and she was dying for it, quite frankly. Warmed by the booze, he followed her into the boathouse and in the golden candlelight the heat of the day gave way to the sweat of night. She pulled her shirt over her head and he touched her breasts, and kissed her breasts and reached under her skirt and his hands met no other fabric except her goose-bumped flesh. He unbuttoned his trousers, and she once again unbuttoned his heart. They were no longer shy.

  They clung to each other and loved as if it was their last chance at love and where he entered he never left. And that was the night they began to share dreams because that’s what happens when you both know the weight of another’s soul.

  Jack waited for her to sleep before he disappeared into the rise of dawn. He knew how to do that without making a sound because he filled his lungs like balloons and held his breath so tight they lifted him off the ground. And as he glided swiftly through the trees, her voice broke through the dreamscape and her voice said, I’ll be here when you get back. Be quick, my love. I’ll wait.

  But he wasn’t quick. But she did wait. For twenty years did she wait. And when he returned there would be no bright starfish laying down a golden path to her door. Just the unmistakable sound of rumour.

  3

  Fireworks pulled Marvellous out of a dreamless sleep. She had thought it to be war yet had found it to be peace when she staggered down from her wagon and caught the tail end of the spectacle: the sodden fizz as white and green and red embers disappeared behind the trees, plunging the creek into a soft milky silence, leaving only stars, and plenty of them.

  She stood alone on the shore, confused and dishevelled, pressed upon by the vast inky Cornish sky. She didn’t know if it was because her hand looked so old against the dense cluster of stars or because she didn’t know who or what she was waving to in that perfect night sky, but her eyes began to water.