A Year of Marvellous Ways

by Sarah Winman

  The choir stopped singing and he sat on the steps with an empty bottle of vin rouge between his legs. The heavy oaken doors creaked open and a handful of boys ran out, and the birds sang and the sun cast deep shadows that sprang out from the boys’ heels. But when Drake stood up he had no shadow and that’s how he knew that something had died.

  He stumbled back through the trees and the woman came towards him on the way. Her lipstick was smeared and she was limping but it may have been because she carried her shoes in her hand and there were twigs on the forest floor. He stood aside and wanted to say something, but his French wasn’t that good, didn’t know the words for wrong or ashamed. So when she passed by all he managed to say was, Je m’excuse, and she spat in his face, which he knew he deserved.

  She pulled that fine fur coat tight around her and walked on tiptoe as if she had heels, and in the dappled light that fell through the trees she was a goddess – for a brief moment a goddess – because three days later as the village rounded up collaborators she wore tar and jibes and her golden hair was shorn and burned with the locks of others, and the smell – fuck! – the smell. And she was marched into a crowd of men and they kicked her and he never saw her walk out the other side.

  The battle moved east into Belgium towards Germany, but the others never watched his back after that because they couldn’t trust him any more. He wasn’t one of them, he was a fucking poof-nonce-commie, take your pick, they gave him other names too.

  And then war was over and streets were lined with cheering and gratitude. Soldiers marched by and collected a woman in one arm and a drink in the other. Battalions were reassigned, some headed home, most stayed, demob was achingly slow. But what did Drake care? He had nothing to go back to.

  Thirteen months passed before kitbags were packed in bitter silence and soldiers headed for troopships waiting at the coast. And amidst the chaos of departure Drake quietly slipped away. He never got his discharge papers, would get them later from a man who knew a man and they’d be as good as real. Never got his ration books either or shitty little suit. Slipped away instead, he did, and headed back to France. Down to the south where he was told the sun stayed high and stayed high for hours on end, and where he hoped the warm sirocco wind would melt those frozen, irretrievable years.

  Dusk was falling when Drake finished the story. He felt light but it was becoming dark. He heard Marvellous sigh but he couldn’t look at her, felt his face tight with shame and guilt. He felt her warm hand rest lightly on the top of his head.

  The sound of the river filled the silence. Two gulls called to each other from bank to bank. In their cry he heard his name.

  Listen, said Marvellous. And he listened beyond their call and that’s when he heard it, really heard it.

  Tide’s on the turn, she said. He knew what he had to do.

  They stood on the shore and he climbed down the bank and waded into the river. The ice-cold water reached his chest and his shirt and trousers clung to his limbs. And where once was a dark life-long fear, was nothing now: an absence filled only with sorrow and the past. He crouched down and the water flooded his nose and ears and he was overcome by a pressured silence. His shirt billowed and his hair rose and broke the surface like weed, and he felt an overwhelming peace as he lifted his feet off the bottom and floated with the tide and fish, lungs full to bursting.

  He surfaced downriver by Old Cundy’s boat. And he held on to the slats as he took in great mouthfuls of air and he was aware that he felt different. His hands looked young against the vibrant green moss that coated the hull, and he leant his head against the boat and closed his eyes, and amidst the hush of nightfall he heard the boat say, It’ll be all right, and he heard it say, It’s over now.

  IV

  37

  A battered van that had once been an ambulance stuttered along the High Road and stopped outside the bakehouse. The young woman behind the wheel didn’t turn the ignition off right away, but sat staring ahead at the quiet desolation that was now her home.

  She arrived that morning with a wireless, a rocking chair and a jar of sourdough starter. She had come with her mother’s blessing and an old man’s faith. By the age of twenty-nine, Peace Rundle knew that the winds of Fate preferred her to travel light.

  She cut the thick purr of the engine, opened the door and nervously stepped out. The morning sun rested warm on her back and she breathed air she had last breathed as a baby. The cottages stood miserable and forlorn but the hedgerows were well-decorated by spring. She picked a trumpet of cowslip and slipped it into her cardigan.

  She stood in front of the bakehouse door and rested her hands against the weather-beaten wood. No turning back now. Key in the lock and the door gave way easily. On the stone threshold she listened carefully as dust settled and sabres of sunlight cut oblique lines across the gloom. She heard the bakehouse expand a little and welcome her in. It was as simple as that, their union, and when it came to pulling back the shutters and undressing the windows, the building gave up its modesty easily.

  Inside was a vast space with a large oak table dominating the middle. The air smelt of age and damp and the faint whiff of sourdough. The oven took up one side of the wall, a proving cupboard the other, and beyond, extending to the outside was a parlour for the moments when she wouldn’t be baking. There was no electricity switch, no overhead light, and she would wait until the following month to be connected to the cables that lined the roads and fields outside.

  She crossed the ancient flagstones and unlocked the back door. The garden was overgrown but with her large enthusiastic hands she knew she could clear it in a week and eventually keep chickens and grow her own vegetables. There were apple trees, too, and old raspberry canes that might flourish again with a little cajoling and care. As her mother had once told her, she was a Doer and not a Quitter.

  You’re a Doer, my love. That’s why God made you so big. So you could do everything yourself. Girls like you don’t quit till you’re dead. That should be a comfort.

  And in a way it was. Her mother had told her to do things once and do them well. Things like building a dry-stone wall or getting married. Once and well (wonsunwell) was her motto. Wonsunwell became her daughter’s.

  It was her mother, too, who had given her a detailed map of the creek, hastily drawn on the back of a white cotton handkerchief moments before she died. That, for Peace, had been encouragement enough.

  Peace unfolded the map, and like a strong desire to eat, felt an immediate hunger to reacquaint with her past. She didn’t bother to lock up but headed straight out, across the road into a meadow still glistening with dew and pockmarked by the ghostly tufts of dandelions. She ran most of the way, and before long was enjoying the cool of the wood, and the luring scents of ramsons and bluebells and salt. The creek was deserted, and the boathouse and caravan stood quiet and still. Piles of wooden planks rested on the bank. Peace called out to Marvellous, and a flock of collared doves flew off to the east. She thought about leaving a note on the caravan but when she searched her pockets, all she could come up with was a creased photograph, a bent teaspoon and a handful of roughly-milled flour. She would come back. She would come back bearing gifts – a loaf maybe? – and she clambered down the riverbank and began to remove her shoes and socks. She rolled up her trouser legs and waded into the water.

  Her mother, she remembered, had always referred to the secluded church as the Church of the Sacred Heart and it didn’t take a bagful of brains to know why. Because as Peace straddled the doorway – left leg on the holy, right leg on the pagan – she rested her ear against the rotten frame and listened for the faint sound of her brother’s war-scarred heart. A woodpecker quietened and signalled for the other birds to cool it too, and they all watched intently, watched her with curiosity. Ta-dum ta-dum ta-dum. There it was. She pressed her heart against his. They beat in unison. Her and her brother. Together again.

 
She sat with her back against his gravestone, unaware that the carved sentiment In Peace Perfect Peace rose unobtrusively above her head. She looked about at the small cemetery decimated by time and tide, and thought about her mother and felt something she had never felt before, and that something was her mother’s youth, and she learnt more about her mother and her mother’s dreams in that moment than she ever had in her lifetime. Because they were her dreams now: simple dreams about living well and loving well, things she had once thought were out of reach. She had only ever known her mother in the clutch of grief, but once it had been different. Once she had been free. Like her.

  She took out the photograph of a young soldier awkwardly holding a baby. It was her brother, Simeon, of course. He had just returned from war and he was holding her in his arms. She had never known him, he had never known her because they had been the bookends of their mother’s fertility – he came too early and she came too late and nothing came in between. He didn’t look right then, but people had clothed him in heroism and clothes like that were too bright to show the rags of misery underneath. She put the photograph back in her pocket and noticed the fine dusting of flour around her fingers. She closed her eyes and tasted the flour, and the years fell away. Thank you Wilfred, she said, quietly. Thank you.

  Peace was still a baby the day her mother and father left St Ophere, so was too young to remember the horse and cart piled high with pans and chairs and mattresses and an heirloom table. Too young to remember the neighbours’ faces that turned away and didn’t bid them well as they made their way towards St Austell with its glistening mountains of china clay spoils. The day was never talked of again but hung about in their new cottage like worn curtains blocking light.

  But what Peace did remember was a childhood of waiting. She was either waiting for her mother’s grief to subside or for her father’s drinking to stop. But neither did. She was either waiting for her growth spurt to stop or for the other children to catch up, but neither did and she remained an ostrich in a yard full of ducks. It didn’t bother her, at first, this growing difference, but then a shyness took hold, a shyness so acute that at the height of summer even her shadow refused to go out and play. Eventually the waiting wore her out and she took to her bed like a large warming stone.

  One night, however, the smell of freshly baked bread stole in through her window. She followed the scent out of her house across the terraces, past the pub and past the church until she came to the doorstep of Wilfred Gently’s Bakehouse. The windows were as fogged-up as the old man’s eyes, so she knew he was still baking. She knocked lightly and Wilfred opened the door and waved her inside.

  He drew up a stool for her and told her to watch and learn as he began to knead the shining pale grey mound. Peace did as she was told and everything that was wrong disappeared in the muscular folds of kneaded dough.

  There was no money to go with her apprenticeship but there was daily bread and purpose – something the Preacher told her mother would please God – and Wilfred set about teaching her everything he knew.

  He taught her how to add moisture to the oven to help the bread rise and form a good crust. He taught her to listen out to the songs of rising bread and cooling bread. He taught how to use a paddle efficiently and safely, and what baskets hold bread the best. He showed her how to keep a proving cupboard free from mould. He handed down to her his life-long work and she devoured it.

  Three years later he changed the bakehouse name to Gently with Peace. A year after that, he taught her about flour. How it varies according to the season, and sometimes even air pressure. Beware when you bake during a storm!

  Finally, the last thing he needed to tell her about was his recipes. He told her something he had never told anyone: that his secret ingredient was the life he had lived.

  Peace stared at him. What do you mean? she said.

  Wilfred leant in close and whispered, Everything goes into my bread. Names. Songs. Memories. Every batch comes out different to the next but what we are looking for is not consistency but excellence. You have to risk failure to become excellent.

  Peace began to laugh. So what happens if you add songs, Wilfred?

  Dough rises quicker. Produces a light loaf.

  Now you’re teasing me.

  Not at all!

  What do memories do then?

  Add a sweet taste, said Wilfred, smiling. But beware of memories, he said. Other things can creep in with memories.

  What other things? said Peace.

  Things like regret.

  What can you do about regret?

  Add currants! said Wilfred proudly.

  Oh Wilfred! said Peace, wrapping her arms around him. You are daft.

  Here, he said. Try this, and he went to the table and from under a linen cloth produced a small saffron bun. I call it my Peace bun, he said.

  Had a child been named after her, Peace couldn’t have been prouder.

  Baking taught Peace patience. It taught her the value of waiting. Nothing could be rushed because everything had its own time: time for the dough to prove, for the bread to rise, for the bread to cool. Like life itself, baking was its own master. She, merely, its loyal handmaiden.

  One day, however, whilst Wilfred Gently was flouring a new batch of dough, Death crept up behind him and laid its bony hand upon his shoulder. Wilfred fell forwards into the soft beige mass. Not only had life gone into his baking, but now his death had too.

  He died a rich man, and when his Will was read out, his savings were divided amongst his loyal customers. But to Peace he gave no money at all. To Peace he gave five years paid up on the bakehouse lease and the last ever batch of his famous sourdough starter.

  You need to find your own recipe for bread, he stated in his private instructions to her. I have given you five years to hone your craft. Then you must fly free, my love, and discover your own secret ingredients.

  She immediately knew what he meant and she cried into the flour, and that night baked a mourning loaf that sold out the next morning. It was a solemn loaf with a rich taste and reminded people of . . . of . . . but no one could ever say exactly what it reminded them of, though it went perfectly with cheese, everyone agreed. But Peace would never create that loaf again.

  Why not? cried the village. Because she had baked it wonsunwell.

  Peace rose from her brother’s grave. Trees, she noticed, were tipped by an abundance of green clusters, and wrens bobbed nearby and sang just for her. Home, she thought. This really is my home. The word tasted good in her mouth. She would take that word and put it in the first batch of St Ophere bread. The word promised something excellent. She stood up and began to wade back through water that had now risen to her knees.

  38

  Marvellous disappeared a lot more now. She rose with the sun and took her boat up the Great River until she got to her mother. There was a chair waiting for her, and the staff were used to the sight of the small yellow figure shuffling through the large doors, stick first. She had a greeting, a wave for everyone, and many people commented on her rouged lips and she often didn’t hear what they said but she said, Thank you, all the same. And she wore her lipstick every day, and sometimes her hand was steady and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes the colour smudged and sometimes it didn’t. But she didn’t notice these things and neither did her mother because in front of her mother she was beautiful.

  When she returned to the creek, Drake saw she was different, as if the tendrils of age were pulling her down, and he began to imagine the inconceivable; the inconsolable.

  He, once, found her on the mooring stone, sitting upright and immobile like a statue carved from that sacred granite and the sight nearly stopped his heart. Once, he found her fast asleep against the tiller, the engine running, the boat going round in circles, burning miles but going nowhere.

  He began to do things to make her life eas
ier. He cut steps into the riverbank, reinforced by thick planks. A rope handhold he secured around the mooring stone that took her weight when her knees refused to. He learnt to forage along the shoreline and he learnt to cook – stews and broths, foods like that – and he registered at the grocer and butcher in the Other Saint’s Village and brought back weekly rations of meat and butter. He scrubbed pans on the riverbank and pegged sheets between the trees. And yet every night, whatever the state of the river, dry or full, he watched as Marvellous struggled over to the church to light her candle, whoever it was for.

  That was why he started the bridge the first warm day of April. It was to be a simple wooden bridge spanning mainland to the island. He had made one before in France on a farm, and would construct it on the bank like a ladder: two long horizontals with slats in between and deep troughs dug out on both banks to anchor it. It was makeshift, he knew, but it would be sturdy and enough.

  A boat builder delivered the oak planks cut to Drake’s specifications. The horizontal lengths would overlap each other to stretch the twenty feet required. Holes had been drilled and bolts and screws provided. All he had to do was to fit it all together. And to dig out the deep trenches on either bank.

  He started island-side, on the east side away from the graves. The digging was tough going because he was out of condition and tree and shrub roots were as thick as his wrist. After a couple of hours, he sat down with his back against the church wall and lit a cigarette. He ran his hand over the dull edge of the spade and wondered if he’d find a whetstone in a dark corner of the shed.