Impossible Causes

by Julie Mayhew

Yet, that day in the Provisions Store…

  ‘God damn you!’ she yelled into her mother’s face, her cheeks as pink as if they’d just been slapped, before striking out at a display of Egremont Russets, sending the crate to the floor, reducing them to a crop good only for cider, making all of the collected shoppers gasp.

  The following Monday, Adrien Duchamp was seen at St Rita’s School, waiting in the corridor outside Mr Crane’s office. His daughter’s insolence had spread to the classroom, it was said – backchat to the teachers, laziness with her homework (the detail of the crimes depended on to whom you spoke). Her punishment: Anna was banned by her father from spending time with Britta and Jade-Marie outside of school. Yet the very next day the three of them were seen together on the harbour cobbles, making their way towards the track past the East Bay, coats zipped to the chin, arms linked, wearing shoes unsuitable for the terrain that lay ahead.

  The other version of events was that Adrien Duchamp was visiting Mr Crane merely to discuss an insurance claim, and not his daughter at all. Anna’s father, with the assistance of accountant Robert Signal, managed the finances of almost everyone on the island. Everyone, that is, who had finances beyond the stash in their biscuit tin.

  ‘Because didn’t you hear, the school roof fell in!’

  This was the talking point at Hope Ainsley’s monthly pop-up hairdressing salon in the scullery of the Counting House.

  ‘It collapsed on the head of that handsome new teacher,’ continued Elizabeth Bishy, the doctor’s wife. Her audience was the line of women who waited their turn. ‘A whole classroom utterly destroyed!’ she proclaimed.

  Hope Ainsley worked pin waves into Mrs Bishy’s peppery black hair and nodded her agreement, while Martha Signal, beneath the heat lamp, put in: ‘He was almost killed, you know, that new teacher, so says Huxley’s wife.’

  And this was not the only well-travelled story involving the handsome Mr Hailey.

  The Eldest Girls had been seen communing in the senior corridor one breaktime, voices too hushed to be overheard. Britta Sayers was doing most of the jawing, confidently flipping those ropes of black hair over her shoulders as she spoke. The other two made noises of encouragement, geeing her up for the task ahead, then they scattered as if choreographed – Jade-Marie outside to the playground, Anna towards the infant and juniors’ block, Britta into Mr Hailey’s classroom.

  ‘Ah, Miss Sayers!’ was the greeting that was reported, its warmth suggesting Mr Hailey knew Britta well. Which he shouldn’t have – since the Eldest Girls had no teaching contact with him yet. Mr Hailey was still involved in the business of setting-up his science lab, rigging up gas canisters (‘Stolen gas canisters,’ said some), decanting and storing chemicals. There was much to be done before he was ready to branch out from his day-to-day teaching of the younger seniors and share his specialism across the whole school – and with the Eldest Girls.

  Perhaps he had sought them out. Perhaps the girls had been drawn to him, this Pied Piper from the mainland, with his shiny gadgets and fancy shirts and waxy way of styling his hair.

  No one could say what went on in that classroom that breaktime with Britta Sayers – the door was closed – but a certain spy, who had been better placed on a separate occasion, said Mr Hailey liked to use coin tricks as a seduction technique, had said the black hair of Lark women aroused him and – whisper it – had been seen trying to stick his tongue down the throat of that lovely Miss Cedars.

  Britta Sayers was alone with him for a good twenty minutes. A low mumble of voices came from behind the door but with ominous gaps. Britta emerged flushed with colour, all the breath in the top of her chest.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said meekly, her voice an uncharacteristic squeak. That she had been heard to address him as ‘Ben’ alongside her thanks, was likely an embellishment added to the story later.

  Sympathies regarding the situation were proffered over drinks at the bar of the Anchor. A young man in the classroom was certain to confuse the feelings of such impressionable girls. He was nothing but a cat among the pigeons, they said, or should that be, a pigeon among the cats?

  ‘That poor, new teacher,’ ran the popular line, ‘arriving on the island just when those Eldest Girls were ready to pounce.’

  FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

  Viola Kendrick sits in the Customs House and waits, a musty blue blanket draped across her shoulders. In her grip is the walkie-talkie, at her feet lies Dot – curled up, chin on paws, making a damp print of herself on the sanded boards.

  From the back office drifts Saul Cooper’s voice. Viola cannot make out the sentences he’s using, just the music of them. First, the staccato codes of communication – letters, digits, short forms – then, longer phrases, affirmations, contradictions. He will be using the satellite phone, she presumes – the Atlantic line can be unreliable. The Marine VHF is of no use here, unless there was to be the most fortuitous alignment of boats and masts. Saul has explained all of this to Viola, an age ago it feels, back when he was happy to humour her.

  They had stepped free of the Land Rover and Viola dictated the next move: ‘Now we call the real police.’

  As she spoke, she held the walkie-talkie in clear sight, as a reminder, as collateral. Do what I say, and no one gets hurt. The phrase was on the tip of her tongue; Saul wouldn’t have recognised the cliché. There were monthly cinema screenings in the Counting House, a carefully curated selection of the obscure and the inoffensive, with regular popular repeats. No one on Lark was fluent in film speak.

  We can do this the easy way or the hard way.

  I could tell you what I know, but then I’d have to kill you.

  You just don’t get it, do you?

  Viola has these phrases rehearsed and ready, should she be stuck for something to say.

  They had gone inside – Saul first, Viola behind, resisting the urge to push the walkie-talkie into the small of his back like a weapon. The bald wooden floor of the Customs House had echoed their arrival, magnifying their footfalls and the rustling of their coats. Viola had started to follow Saul into the back office, like always, but he’d stopped her, put up the palm of his hand – ‘No, you wait here’ – before gesturing to the bench below a browning pastel map of the island. This had thrown her off-guard. She’d given him a look that asked, Really? He’d nodded, waiting for her to move away and sit. That was when he’d taken one of the blue blankets from the wire basket by the door, provisions for occasional overboard fishermen, and arranged it across her shoulders, paternally, almost. She was dealing with official Saul, Saul-at-work.

  He’d raised the hinged front desk, the section bearing a taped-on laminated timetable for this year’s mainland ships, closing it behind him, and then disappeared into the office beyond.

  On the opposite wall to the bench there is a series of framed black-and-white images of the estate – the Big House in some long-gone heyday, the seat of the reclusive Earl. Viola has heard so much about this invisible sovereign, this silent ruler of the island (or rather she has heard the same small slices of information on repeat), that the man has morphed, in her mind, into the fickle, fairy-tale giant who bit a chunk out of Lark and pushed it out to sea. At his whim, might the Earl push the island right back again – if he were ever to show his face?

  Viola looks down. The toe of her boot skims the coastline of an old stain on the otherwise pristine blond-wood floor, a stain that wasn’t there last time she rested on this bench, limp and ocean-tired, the day she arrived on Lark. It would be easy for her to think that she is different now, that these ten months on the island have transformed her – once bewildered and full of sorrow, she is now upright, focused, and in possession of the ball – but it would be a lie.

  The two-way radio is growing sweaty in her grip. Her back is slowly slumping. Dot has given up all hope of breakfast and fallen sleep.

  Viola isn’t in charge. She called one shot and then landed herself on the wrong side of the counter, away from the action.

>   Get up, instructs a voice inside. Go into that back office!

  But here comes another voice, slicker, more practised, telling her that she hasn’t been blindly obedient to Saul, rather she’s chosen to put her faith in his clear authority. She must not fall into the trap of assuming that every man is up to no good.

  But he IS up to no good! screams the first voice. We know this!

  Do we? asks the second voice in all reasonableness. Can we really trust your opinion on that?

  Viola stays put, desperate to know how the morning’s discovery is being retold, desperate to hear snatches of the mainland coming down the line, even though those sounds of home might derail her, bring on a dreadful, gasping claustrophobia of the kind she experiences sometimes when the fog closes in and she allows herself to think how very far away everything is.

  Before Lark, before the terrible incident back on the mainland, Viola used to cocoon herself in the darkness beneath her duvet, pretending that she was in a stricken submarine, miles below the water’s surface, or in a small pocket of air beneath a fallen building. A test. Could she breathe deep and not panic should the very worst thing happen to her? Her method for counting seconds was robust – one- elephant, two-elephant, three-elephant… But she could get no further than twenty before throwing off the duvet and gulping for oxygen. The very fact that Viola is able to draw breath every day on the island feels like a pure miracle.

  She sits back against the damp-encrusted wall, fragments of the plaster attaching themselves to the roughness of the blanket, making her think of the peeling balusters of the farmstead veranda. She must plan, formulate her next move. She returns to the language of film. She could mimic the suspects she has seen on screen who grab power by demanding a phone call – to their family, to a lawyer. But she is not a suspect, Viola reminds herself, a little belatedly.

  And there is no one she can call.

  The farmstead is out. Her mother would likely collapse on the other end of the line, shifting the locus of the tragedy to herself.

  The Eldest Girls cannot be contacted. To bring them into this now would result in a fait accompli, confirming suspicions too easily, too quickly. The girls must be kept at arm’s length for as long as possible.

  There is only one person left, someone Viola half-expected to be pressing his nose against the window of the Customs House right now.

  She could call Michael.

  SEPTEMBER 2017

  Their new start was going so well.

  Viola and her mother walked to chapel every Sunday, and sometimes on Saturday too for Evening Mass. The services seemed to gratify her mother, lift her up. They stood in line to receive the host, Deborah Kendrick meeting every wary glance from the congregation with her warmest smile, her intention behind this clear – she would settle for nothing less than complete acceptance, for herself and her daughter.

  After service, Viola’s mother joined in with the preparation of teas and coffees in the nave, didn’t wait for an invitation. She fussed, she bustled, she made herself useful. Viola would sit in a pew, at a distance, cup, with a saucer and biscuit on her lap, banging her heels against the wood until it was time to go, an audience to her mother’s convincing performance of eagerness. It was hard to believe this was the same stricken woman whose head had rested in the cradle of her hands for days on end at the kitchen table back home.

  Then one Sunday morning in July, there was a shift. Viola watched as a small, busy-looking woman pulled Deborah Kendrick aside for a quiet word. The woman started speaking and her mother’s enthusiastic smile twitched, then tilted, before righting itself into something not even passably genuine. Viola understood straight away that she was the subject of this exchange; her mother’s eyes skittered towards her in the pew, then back to the woman. It was a nervous action, one of someone who was all of a sudden on guard. It was a chink through which Viola glimpsed once again the broken, tormented woman her mother had been on the mainland.

  Later that same week, the busy woman had landed on the doorstep of the farmstead. Out of the kitchen window, Viola saw the Customs Officer leaning against the bonnet of his Land Rover – acting as taxi driver again. His head was down, which she translated as embarrassment at being there.

  The woman announced herself formally to Viola’s mother – ‘Miriam Calder, the school administrator’, her emphasis hitting the definite article – and Viola’s mother had responded with a sweet but terse reminder that they had met several times before and this introduction was unnecessary.

  ‘You need to enrol your daughter in school,’ Miriam said, in lieu of any pleasantries.

  ‘More forms!’ came Deborah Kendrick’s reply, the humour forced. ‘Goodness me! When does the paperwork stop?’

  Viola had slid into the hallway then, had seen how Miriam took in the yellowing wallpaper and the trail of dry leaves blown in from outside. Her mother attempted to close the front door, keeping her voice bright as if this might soften the rudeness of her actions. ‘I’ll be sure to pop up to the school soon and get that done!’

  ‘I have the forms here,’ said Miriam, her hand meeting the wood of the door, its peeling paintwork. ‘We can fill them out now.’

  Her mother had reluctantly let Miriam in, but not offered her tea. She filled out the lines and boxes of the forms briskly, belligerently, her pen piercing the paper every time it encountered a deep groove in the battered kitchen table. Miriam stood over her, casting an eye about the room, collecting its details – the bread left out on the board, the sleeping dog, the dripping tap.

  Viola had wanted to stand over her mother too, find out which class she was being enrolled in. She had failed her GCSEs on the mainland, missed too much school in the wake of the incident and fallen behind. She had come to think of herself as a dunce, a div.

  As it was, whatever Deborah Kendrick put on those forms was of no consequence at all.

  On their trip to the Provisions Store that weekend, Viola’s mother had enquired of one of the aproned women behind the counter how she might go about ordering something to arrive on the last August ship. The aproned woman had pointed them towards the Counting House, where upstairs they had waited in line to use a computer. Deborah Kendrick had clicked, scrolled, bought.

  A chill lifted the hairs on Viola’s skin, despite the clement weather that final summer month, when she watched her mother unpack the box that arrived. Teaching materials for Maths, English, Geography and French were arranged neatly in their corresponding piles on the kitchen table.

  ‘I’m really going to enjoy this,’ her mother had trilled, breaking the spine on a Tricolore textbook. ‘Et toi?’

  There they were, on the remotest property on the remotest island, and now Viola was to be home-schooled. Yet, she said nothing – could find no way to protest. Just as she was careful not to wake Dot as she dozed in the radiating warmth of the kitchen Rayburn, Viola could not risk disturbing her mother from this lightness, this reverse of sleep. She had seen how delicate Deborah Kendrick’s mindset was in that brief moment with Miriam in chapel. She was under a precarious spell, one that could be easily broken.

  So, the battered kitchen table became Viola’s school, her pencil now piercing the paper whenever a sentence crossed a groove in the wood.

  ‘Do you think they used to butcher animals on here?’ she asked her mother. ‘Slaughter them, even?’

  ‘It’s a timed test, you know,’ was Deborah Kendrick’s reply, ‘you shouldn’t be even thinking about chatting.’

  Viola only spoke to break the silence, make the situation feel normal and not a step too far, an isolation within an isolation.

  In the timed tests her mother set, Viola felt no urgency. The pink grains of the hourglass flowed slower on Lark. One – eeeeeeelllllleeeephant. Two – eeeeeeelllllleeeephant…. With no distractions – no texts from friends, no radio, music or television – the silence stretched. It made Viola restless.

  In the afternoons, lessons done, she clipped on Dot’s red lead and headed out
, south, down the main track from the farmstead. Her mother had been uneasy the first time she had pulled on her boots in the hallway.

  ‘But this is why we’re here, isn’t it?’ Viola had argued, as steadily as she could, not wanting to give away how desperate she was to escape the confines of the farmstead and her mother’s company. ‘It’s safe here, we know that. I can wander where I want.’

  Deborah Kendrick had given a reluctant nod – heading out herself to turn the lumpy soil and mark out vegetable beds, cursing at the midges and the slugs as she went.

  At the end of the farmstead’s dirt track, Viola turned right and headed towards the East Bay. She had entertained thoughts of paddling along the shore, combing the line of seaweed for interesting shells. That was before she’d discovered the true close-up violence of the waves; the bay could only be enjoyed as a view, from the raised lawn above.

  Sometimes she trekked across the green estate land that spilled down from the Big House upon its rocky promontory, the acreage sectioned by woodland, given over in part to allotments. There she came upon a small cluster of stables and two enclosures for dogs, Dot greeting her fellow animals with sharp, delighted barks. There were half a dozen muscular beagles in one pen, and in the other, two grey-faced whippets with hostage eyes. Viola had reached over to caress the long, smooth nose of one of the whippets, while its companion leant against the fencing, trying to access the warmth of her thigh.

  ‘What are you doing?’ a man had bellowed at her, striding across the stable yard, making Viola’s hand fly guiltily away. He was a thin, stooped shape beneath his waxed jacket and khaki trousers. Old – though not quite granddad age, with a wiry beard, almost white.

  ‘I’m just stroking them,’ she’d said, and though he had made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t welcome, Viola tried to keep the conversation going, realising only then how hungry she was for talk. She asked if the dogs were working animals? (Yes, the beagles for the hunt, the whippets for catching rats) and if they had to stay in their pens at all other times (they did).