by Julie Mayhew
The man went out to the waiting area beyond another door, where Viola knew, from her first moments on the island, there was a counter with tide times and a shipping schedule, a white, flaking wall and an uncomfortable bench. She hadn’t needed to give him her name, it was right there, written in his ledger the day they arrived. He was the one who had driven them to the farmstead, and delivered Mr Crane to their door when the headmaster had tried to enrol her in the school. He knew who she was. Yet, there was the sense that all those tasks had been carried out by the Customs Officer in his official capacity, and this encounter was something different, so he was different too.
‘I’m Saul Cooper,’ he told her, returning with a blue, fusty blanket, holding it out and examining it on both sides before draping it over her shoulders. ‘I should have said.’
He pulled up a chair by an electric radiator and guided her to sit.
Saul Cooper. More dots joined up for Viola – the Customs Officer and the male subject of Michael’s spying mission were the same person. Somehow in Viola’s mind the two had become disconnected. She looked about her with a keener eye, took in the orderliness of Saul’s desk: documents stacked in wire trays. In the corner of the room, there was a low camp bed made up with white sheets and a rough, grey blanket, and beside it, a stand with a sketchbook and pencil. At the sink, shaving equipment and a toothbrush.
‘You live here?’ she said, unable to hide the pity in her voice. This man had seemed impressive that first day on the island, indomitable, with his barked questions and superior silences. Now, he was reduced – nothing but a grown man playing house, building himself a den.
He turned and regarded the bed, seeing perhaps how she saw it.
‘I only sleep here when things get busy,’ he told her. He set his eyes on the mugs, dropping in teabags and pouring on water.
Viola looked out the window, to the yawning, churning sea that surrounded them, wondering when ‘busy’ ever came to be.
‘So, you were thinking of following Bethany Reid, were you, cherub?’ he said gently, handing her a mug, the term of affection blindsiding Viola. Poppet was what her mother used to call her, before, when she spoke easier; her dad had called her Vee-vee.
‘Thinking of showing fate a thing or two, were you?’ Saul went on.
‘Fate’s fate,’ said Viola, a quick, mechanical response, a pull-back from her grief. She blew across the surface of the tea.
‘I need to be having a word with your mother, do I?’
He kept his tone light, and so did she.
‘Probably. She thinks she can run away from it – fate.’
Saul pulled a face, confused: ‘I mean, do I need to be telling Dr Bishy about you?’
Viola’s attention was snatched from the steaming tea. ‘Oh, no!’ she protested. ‘Don’t do that!’
She watched him take this in, her censure of the man. Saul’s face fell, became serious.
‘I mean, I’m not, like, depressed or anything,’ she countered, desperate to soften what she’d said, not to have her words reported back to Dr Bishy himself. ‘I just wanted to sit there for a bit. I’m very happy right now. Things are going really well.’ She meant it, strangely. ‘I just needed to have a bit of a cry after the funeral, you know.’
Saul nodded. He looked to the door that led to the front desk – the route towards the chapel and the gamekeeper’s lodge where everyone would be eating sandwiches now. Viola waited for him to speak again, the moment stretching out uncomfortably. She blew across her tea once more, so she might gulp it down faster and be gone.
‘I, er…’ He coughed, started again. ‘I hope Leah Cedars is bearing up okay.’
He did not look at her.
Viola’s senses were snagged by the name, by the quality of his voice when he used it. More dots joined up. The younger woman crying at the front of the chapel was Peter Cedars’ daughter, who was, of course, the same woman who had come to the farmstead with him that time when he’d warned Viola about the snare. More importantly, this was the same woman Michael was spying on. This was Miss Cedars, the lovely Miss Cedars, who the Eldest Girls talked of sometimes, disparagingly so because of the way she fawned over Mr Hailey, the male teacher who was giving them practical demonstrations of the ways of the mainland.
Leah Cedars had managed to exist as several separate women in Viola’s mind, but now, like that science trick with the coloured filters, circles of red, green and blue slid on top of one another to become a single white light.
They’re definitely doing it – that’s what Michael had said. Leah Cedars and Saul Cooper are definitely doing it.
‘So, she’s…’ Viola did not know how to phrase it. Leah Cedars was being consoled by a different man at the funeral, in a way that suggested they were definitely doing it. Had Michael got things wrong? Viola found herself falling easily into the guise of childish innocence. ‘So, Leah Cedars, she’s your girlfriend, right?’
Saul’s eyes were on her. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said…’ Viola faltered. The man looked pale, vulnerable. ‘I said, she’s your girlfriend.’
Viola expected him to deny it, to shift their conversation back to the funeral or her stupid act on the harbour’s edge, but instead there was a palpable shift in him – a lifting of the chest.
‘How do you know that?’ he asked. He was trying out a certain swagger, a boyish smile playing at the corners of his mouth. It was touching, almost sad.
Viola took a breath to speak.
I saw you chasing the woman once or twice, heard her telling you to go away, so I sent a boy to spy on you, by accident really, as a distraction for him, and he came to the conclusion that you two are definitely doing it, which is odd because it seems to me she’s definitely doing it with that man at the funeral today.
Viola couldn’t say that. She knew how it felt to be hopeful, and how it felt to be lonely, to be crushed. She liked Saul. She wanted him to be happy, and that was likely within her powers, now that she knew how strong they were. It could be as simple as driving a nail into the softness of a heart.
‘I know she’s your girlfriend,’ was what Viola said to Saul, ‘because Leah told me herself.’
THE BOOK OF LEAH
I needed a back-up, a witness, perhaps even a lucky charm. The voice of two women equals the voice of one man – that is what I had been brought up to believe. It couldn’t be the girls themselves, nor their mothers; they were too close, too vested. It amused me, I suppose, to speak for our island in the company of a coycrock redhead.
It was exactly as it had been the last time I visited the Reunyon Farmstead: she was ready with her defences. As soon as my feet crunched the gravel, she came thundering down the steps of the porch, spilling out a plea for vindication. Nothing to do with livestock this time, or the behaviour of her dog; she wanted to justify something she’d said.
‘I felt under pressure and I didn’t know what to say and I felt sorry for him and –’
‘Felt sorry for who?’ I cut in.
Her mouth clamped shut. She realised that she had done it again – spoken too soon. We looked one another up and down.
I appeared sallow and tired, I’m sure. I’d spent the past week living at the lodge, guiding my mother through her grief with very little space to navigate my own. She moved beyond shock and began excavating her anger – her husband’s promised retirement years had been stolen. He was off, as she put it, ‘lamping foxes for the rest of eternity’. This image – completely of her own creation – enraged my mother, yet it soothed me. To think that he was still out there, working the land, and at some point, when he was hungry, he would head on home for his tea.
I had decamped to the lodge with nothing but the black funeral clothes I stood up in. I’d sent Ben away; he seemed so surplus to what was going on, having never known my father. My mother was an enigma even to me. I wanted no witnesses as I failed, over and over, to find the right way to soften her pain. While staying there, I wore her clothes, along
with some leftover items from my teenage wardrobe – a bobbled sweater, some wide-legged trousers with a forgiving, elasticated waist. On one occasion, I pulled a red checked shirt of Dad’s from the clean laundry pile to wear.
‘Take it off!’ my mother snapped. ‘Do you think I could even bear it?’
Moments before she had admonished me for not talking about Dad enough, for not keeping a sense of him alive. I knew then that it was time for me to go home. Her anger had cooled into an indiscriminate petulance about everything I did. I bundled the red checked shirt into my bag when she wasn’t looking, and I was wearing it – symbolically, perhaps – as I stood before Viola Kendrick in the yard of that rundown farmstead. The sleeves were rolled up, the tails tucked into one of my neat teaching skirts. On top, I’d unbuttoned my heavy winter coat and loosened my scarf. January was merciless with its temperatures, as always, yet I’d broken into a sweat from trekking up the hill.
Viola wore an oversized checked shirt too, a blue one, the coincidence feeling like a sign – a good omen. The rest of her was less appealing. Her jeans were muddy at the knee and her hair was a heap of curls, an orange candy-floss haze. I considered asking her to change, to bind her hair into a long, fat plait of the kind I’d seen her wear in chapel.
‘Viola, isn’t it?’ I said.
She nodded.
‘And you know who I am?’
She gave a nod to that too.
‘Well, I hear you’ve been hanging out at the stones with the Eldest Girls,’ I began.
This came out more accusatory than I had intended and Viola was ready with her next defence.
‘Don’t worry,’ I leapt in. ‘I’m not here to tell you off.’
She glanced furtively back at the house; her mother was there, an outline at the window.
‘What are you here for then?’ she asked quietly, rubbing at her arms, jigging in her trainered feet to beat back the cold.
‘Support,’ I said.
She had been unsure about coming with me; I’d expected that. I didn’t need to wonder what the Eldest Girls had told her. They despised me for stealing away their beloved Mr Hailey, and by rights, they could consider me in league with Mr Crane.
I had thought in the days since my father’s death of the times they had asked me questions in class, seemingly innocent things – tangents, I’d assumed, to draw us away from the tedium of GCSE exam practice. How come you wanted to teach here after being a pupil, didn’t it put you off? Is Mr Crane as strict with you as he is with us? I thought how easily I’d brushed theses enquiries aside. No wonder the girls had taken their fear and confusion to a stranger, to Ben.
Just as my father said, we, the island, had let them down.
I told Viola what I planned to do. I asked her to trust me.
She asked if she could bring her dog.
‘People think of that animal as a familiar, you know,’ I warned, ‘they don’t like it.’
But it was a deal-breaker. If Viola was to be my support, the dog was to be hers.
Our walk was illuminated by a perfect half-slice of moon, no need yet for the torches that we all, without a second thought, carried in every coat pocket. The dog gave us pause to stare out across the water, making us halt every few yards so it could squat low in the grass verge.
‘What is it doing?’ I asked.
‘Peeing,’ Viola replied cautiously, as if there might be a trick to my question.
‘But can’t it just go all at once, so we don’t have to keep stopping?’
She shrugged, suggesting there probably was a way to correct the animal, if only she had the desire to do it.
During our stuttering progress towards the harbour, I summarised my case, what I intended to say. I asked her if she was happy to back me up.
She puckered her lips in thought, then said, ‘It’s beautiful here really, isn’t it?’, which felt like an agreement, an understanding of what I was trying to do. Beside us, the waves were picked out silver by the particular glow of the moon, and I sensed that Viola was seeing this for the very first time, that she had been looking out across that ocean all these months and seeing no splendour, only distance.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘it is beautiful here, despite everything.’
We passed the smokehouse, breathing in the salty, ashy taint that it left on the air, heading onto the cobbles, well lit ahead of us. On nights when the Counting House was to be occupied, they switched on the line of lanterns, strung across building fronts and from poles around the harbour mouth. Tonight, those lights winked at us, they waved.
‘I really am sorry about your dad,’ Viola said, a rush of words, as if it was important to state this before we stepped into the ring.
I’d heard the phrase so many times in the past few weeks – I’m so very sorry for your loss – and still had no idea how to answer. Thank you. Are you? I know. Yes, me too. All responses seemed cursory, pointless; the ‘sorry’ in the first place did me no good.
‘Where’s your dad?’ I asked her.
‘Dead too,’ she replied, and I almost laughed when ‘sorry’ made its way to my tongue like a reflex.
I blocked it, asked instead: ‘And you don’t have any brothers or sisters?’
She sniffed, licked her lips and looked out beyond the boats that nestled against one another within the harbour walls.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You?’
I followed her gaze, onwards, to the straight black line between water and sky.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Same.’
We were being watched. The figure of Saul Cooper was picked out by lantern light against the front wall of the Customs House as we neared our destination. He was smoking, though he had given up years ago and become notorious for his sermonising.
‘They’ll be using the insides of your lungs to resurface the path to chapel,’ he’d yell to the boatmen who kept up the habit, saying it in good humour, but meaning it, and the boatmen would mutter to one another about how there were none so holy as the recently converted. Saul’s abstinence had led to his excessive consumption of fishermen’s mints, a sweet always sliding across the front of his teeth. The hot, peppery flavour of them had passed from his tongue to mine on All Hallows’ Eve. An intrusive thought came – what would it taste like to kiss him now, his mouth sullied by tobacco? I chased that thought away.
Viola stalled at the sight of Saul, peeling his back from the building, stubbing out his cigarette with a toe.
‘Keep walking,’ I instructed, and Viola did, making for the stocks where she would tie up her dog. She stooped low to fasten a double knot, petting and calming the animal before she was willing to stand again. Then, in an action incongruous with her earlier hesitation, she gave Saul a tentative wave. This was all the invitation he needed. He jogged towards us, the length of his oilskin coat flapping like the wings of a bat.
He nodded and greeted the girl – ‘Viola’ – then turned to me, smiling oddly. ‘Miss Cedars,’ he said pointedly. His unctuous smarm had returned and perhaps it was a blessing; soft, attentive Saul, the one who called out, ‘Leah! Leah!’ in a plaintive voice, was so much harder to handle.
I stared him down. He was not to say anything compromising in front of this girl, one whose word had a direct route back to the students of St Rita’s.
‘Where are you two ladies off to?’ he asked.
‘Viola and I are attending this evening’s Council meeting,’ I said. I put my arm around the girl and felt her, quite rightly, flinch at this gesture, at my drawing up of sides.
‘Oh, are you!’ He began to laugh.
‘I am,’ I said, stone cold. ‘Just like you.’
I could feel Viola’s eyes travelling from Saul to me, and back again. I wanted to pull from her mind, like a length of magician’s scarves, all the conclusions she was leaping to. I let my arm drop from her shoulders.
‘I don’t go anymore,’ he said airily. ‘Neither does Bob Signal, nor the Reverend.’
‘What?’ This was news to m
e – and I supposed to most people on the island as well. ‘But you’re on the Council, so… Why not?’
His affected lightness dissolved. He sighed heavily and looked at his feet.
‘Oh, I dunno, it became… Let’s just say, there didn’t seem to be much point.’
‘“Not much point”?’ I repeated. I was aghast. ‘“Not much point”!’ My father’s words were there, ready to direct him. Remove the beam from your eye, Saul! But the beam wasn’t there, I could see that; it was long gone. He knew decay had set in, but had chosen the path of least resistance; he had decided to look away.
‘Well, I will be attending.’ I despised myself for the childish pride in my voice, diminishing what I was about to do. ‘I shall be sitting in my father’s place.’
‘You know they won’t let you do that. His place will be open to Paul only and –’
‘Do you see Paul anywhere?’ I glanced at Viola, to see if she had been alerted to my earlier lie about not having a brother.
Saul raised his palms in surrender. ‘Come on, Leah, you know it won’t be me making that decision.’
I bristled at his use of my first name.
‘Then why are you not making it your decision?’ I demanded. ‘Why are you not banging on the door of the Big House, you and Robert Signal and Father Daniel, and forming your own Council?’ He hung his head again. ‘The Earl is the leader of this island, not that lot in there. You should be returning him to power, overthrowing this rot.’
‘Look, Leah,’ he said, weary of speech, ‘don’t you think that we –’
I didn’t want to hear it – his pessimism, his excuses – I had urgent business.
‘The reason you’re not doing anything,’ I told him, my parting shot, ‘is because you’re a coward. Your stepping back makes you nothing short of a collaborator.’
I strode away, towards the Counting House, feeling Viola vacillate behind me, before deciding to follow, matching me in step. Ahead of us, in the yellow light of the windows, two silhouetted tableaux were playing out. In the meeting room on the left, four men were taking their seats, ready to mete out justice for the consequences of a punctured heart. In the scullery on the right, a trio of women clustered, chatting and gesticulating, fussing around a tea urn.