There were more of them now than at the beginning of the evening. Mag and the dog walked along the spine of the dunes, which was deserted. The sea was black and lacteous: but what animal secretes nourishment so sombre?
Then the dog gave a joyous bark and hurled itself towards the beach. Mag ran after it. The tide was ebbing; there was foam at its breast.
We could give it as food to the baby. It would be better than these packet soups on this aimless journey of ours, and what are we going to do when our supply runs out?
Once they were on the beach the sea could no longer be seen; only the big bonfires and the shadows of men and dogs. Approaching some piles of firewood, Mag could also make out faces, bare shoulders and bottles that passed from hand to hand.
‘Sparks! Sparks!’
A man stood up and took her by the arm. On the other side of the fire some dogs were fighting over a piece of wood, and among them was the enterprising Sparks. She squatted down beside the man, and he passed her one of the bottles. What she drank was neither water nor wine but a sugary kind of spirits, cheap bottled punch coco or batida. The man threw some small sticks on the fire and his friends started to laugh, and lay down on the sand. Mag was soon drunk, and when the men stood up, she did the same and followed them in the direction of the waves.
***
They were silent now, some with cigarettes on their lips, eyes shining. They walked straight on and others joined them, some, however, hesitating and some on all fours—men and dogs. One of Mag’s companions, who had furnished himself with a burning torch from the fire, dropped it presently into a warm pool where it went out with a hiss. Away from the fires beach and sea reverted to the same greyness. The dogs were now running between their legs. One of them, a gigantic beast with bristling fur, brushed so close to Mag that it nearly knocked her over. An arm held her up, then released her. In their attentions to Mag the men were quite delicate. One of them gave a kick to the dog which made it yelp and run off into the waves.
They stopped. Mag, drawing herself up, swayed backwards and forwards. The alcohol inspired her with senseless hopes. She placed her hands flat on her stomach, breathed deeply and waited.
‘Look!’ said a voice.
‘Where?’
‘Ssh.’
Those who had been running held their sides; the man who had made Mag drink took her by the waist, rested his chin on the young woman’s shoulder and calmly nibbled her skin.
‘Yes.’
The dogs leaped into the waves. A few yards from them a woman swimmer came out of the water, skin and hair glittering, arms spread. The men chuckled gleefully.
‘D’you see?’
Mag could see. The largest dogs had seized the swimmer by her throat and forearms. Several men pressed after them brandishing sticks and broken bottles and shouting with laughter.
‘You see okay?’
The man’s tongue insinuated itself into her ear. He slipped both hands into her trousers and squeezed the fleshy part of her thighs. The swimmer had disappeared, buried under the pack, which more and more dogs joined.
‘Are you for it?’
Mag trembled but she followed him. Below the surface of the water she saw the remains of the other woman, wounds and torn skin, bones sticking out from muscle, jaws and paws of the dogs scrabbling in her bowels, a white hand which plunged into the seaweed, parted it, and emerged gloved in blood and other matter.
‘Come on,’ said the man, thrusting Mag into the crowd.
***
The man accompanied Mag back to the opening that led down to the beach. Sparks followed, having soaked himself in the same water. Mag was weeping. For a moment she had seen herself under the hounds, dismembered in her turn; then Em in her place, and finally the infant. At the foot of the dunes they looked back. Between the wood-piles and the waves men and dogs were passing to and fro, full of joy.
***
Em and the baby girl were sleeping in the blue light from the television. Mag washed the dog in the basin and rubbed its fur thoroughly with one of their bath-towels. Before she fell asleep she heard the sounds of engines starting up and excited laughter. With the television turned off, the skylight appeared more and more distinctly to her staring eyes, and through it a greyness increasingly clear, increasingly tender and tangible, that drove away what was left to her of drunkenness and misgiving. This is as far as we’ll go.
I
LOST GIRLS
MEANNANAICH
for Xavier Legrand-Ferronnière
‘I HAVE heard tell,’ said Whimbrel, after an evening passed in turning over other memories, ‘of a man of Plodish who, having lost his daughter, made her come back to life by putting out mirrors in the house where she had lived.’
‘Tell us,’ said Innes; their other recollections were beginning to make him yawn.
‘I think I know the story,’ said Fellowes, ‘but I’d be glad to hear you tell it.’
‘Plodish,’ began Whimbrel when the last of the four, Gissen, had closed his eyes to allow the story to pass into his sleep, ‘was then just a little village beside the sea. I say “then”; but that, after its hour of glory, is what it has again become. If you go there today, once you have passed the remains of the army huts you will find things just as they were at the time of the grocer Mackay ten or twenty years ago. The shore of those northern parts is so broken that to go from one house to another—and often these houses are built at the end of peninsulas with meadows and salt marshes around them—whatever the state of the tide one has to make great detours. In those days, however, the land was not as poor as you might think and the houses of the people of Plodish were large, comfortable and warm. It was a life you would find simple. In winter everything was shut up: men and animals in houses and byres. The days were dark and short, much more than with us, and wind and rain revelled over the fields. But spring, and above all, the very end of spring at Plodish, the days of May and June! That, you must realise, was the return of Paradise. There was one day, towards the end of April, often, after Easter, when the door, one did not know quite how, would come to be standing open. A little more sun, a slightly longer light in the evening; and in the clearer skies, suddenly, the songs of birds reawakened.
‘It was on the day after a day like that, however, that the daughter of the grocer Mackay fell from the bridge. I must tell you of the bridge; I must tell you of the grocer.
‘The grocer of Plodish was named Mackay. At thirty, coming back from the war, he married his childhood sweetheart and took over his father’s grocery shop. In the port of Plodish this was the centre of the village in every sense you can give to that phrase. Like his father before him, Mackay was a devout, quiet man. Mrs Mackay, a Morrison from Otter Bay, helped Mackay at the till and talked with the women; Mackay served more the men and the older women, who preferred him. The Mackays, as people of some substance, did not live in the village. The father had built a house with two storeys on the sea-shore beside a large meadow where they grazed their sheep and their cow.
‘But Mrs Mackay died two years after the birth of their only daughter, I can’t tell you how or why. Mackay didn’t remarry. After a short time the waters closed, so to speak, over the memory of Mrs Mackay, and father and child forgot their grief.’
‘Often’, Whimbrel resumed, after a long silence for which there was no reason, ‘often the child, now older—the child was called Flora—used to help her father at the shop after school. Often too she would go and play with the other children of Plodish in the recesses of the shore, on the strips of sand, on the peninsulas which the sudden tide would separate from the land. She drowned falling from a bridge that had been built some years before her birth and which, for the convenience of the inhabitants, joined two of these peninsulas together. It was just at the end of April, a morning. A man of the village who was in a boat out at sea saw something red fall from the bridge. He made every effort to go and see what it was, but he found nothing. The following day Flora was thrown up by the sea a
nd buried beside her mother on the far side of Plodish in a cemetery which the village shared with several hamlets along the coast.’
‘It is a curious place,’ said Fellowes. ‘The sands reach up to the bottom of the cemetery. A sculptor from the town, they say, made her a crown of roses.’
‘Of roses and thistles,’ said Whimbrel. ‘She was a very young child. Poor Mackay seemed to recover pretty well from this second bereavement. He only, to keep house for him, took from the nearby village a girl of not more than twenty, and rather pretty. At Plodish people looked a little askance, despite the misfortune of the man. But the child was not forgotten as the mother had been. Mackay used to go to the cemetery to speak to Flora and recall faithfully the day when he had held the little drowned girl in his arms, after the women had dried her hair and put a little colour on the dreadful livid face, or that other day when the men and some very young boys had followed the child’s coffin through the village street. It was borne by two relations, two uncles who lived far away. And the days too when the child was alive. He passed long months in remembering and revisiting in this way the child’s tomb. On a Saturday he would stay all afternoon, and the child, for Mackay more and more alive, never sank below the surface of things.
‘I’ve already spoken of those days of awakening after winter. It came about almost exactly two years after Flora’s death that Mackay, finding himself one evening near the cemetery, heard that very particular sound that a snipe makes, what we call “drumming”; the French call it “tambourinage”, but at Plodish it had another name that is not even in the dictionaries. It is a delicate sound not like anything else, a low sawing, a plaintive tremor in the air, and often the bird, which makes this sound with the feathers of its tail—it’s a mating invitation—cannot itself be seen.’
‘The people of Plodish that you’re talking about call it meannanaich, actually,’ interrupted Fellowes in a low voice. The others did not hear him.
‘Ah, you know that do you?’ Whimbrel again took up the story.
‘That evening there were several of these birds drumming, and hidden, as usual, in the depths of the sky, quite out of sight. Mackay heard them with a new ear, and when he entered the cemetery it seemed to him the snipe followed. And one of them, when he was in front of Flora’s tomb, made its noise and departed with a short cry.
‘The following day they were there again, their sound more graceful than the day before, and more of them, it seemed to him, but even less visible. So the following Saturday Mackay brought a little pocket mirror and put this at his feet while, sitting on a square stone that always served him as a seat, he spoke to the tomb of his daughter. He wanted to see if the birds were approaching him in real truth.
‘I don’t know what Mackay used to say to his daughter. I think it was little stories of the day, things his customers had told him, probably also news of the children Flora had known and played with. Mackay was not too certain that his daughter heard him. The war and the deaths in his house had thrown his beliefs into confusion. But speaking to Flora always gave him pleasure and that day he saw in the mirror a cloud that was not in the sky, and the almost continuous sound of the snipe gave him the sensation of a cool hand that was stroking his cheek.
‘Later, pondering uneasily on the cloud in the mirror, he thought he remembered having seen that cloud—round, flat, ragged at the edges—some other day at the cemetery. For a long time he walked in the hills round about watching for the snipe, but he did not hear them again. He sat down beside a stream to reflect on these new aspects of his trouble.
‘The following day it occurred to him that his visit to Flora had been heavy with expectation. He first put the mirror on the little mound which formed the tomb of his daughter. He sat on the stone and hardly knew what to say. At the bottom of his heart he was afraid of scaring away his visitor, and if the snipe had not made themselves heard he would never again have taken out the mirror, he would have even killed in its infancy the hope that had come to him. But the snipe flew high in the sky about the cemetery and in the mirror he saw—not daring, however, to look for too long—a colour in the sky which was not that of the moment, but a greenish yellow as of late evening.
‘Timidly and little by little Mackay accustomed himself to these occurences, even if he did not yet know how to mention them in his one-sided conversations with Flora. And on Sunday at church the severe sermons of the minister—you know how it is in the churches of the north—no longer awakened in him either fear or consolation. He felt himself afloat on a vast summer sea, at one with the waves and swamped, presently, by them and all their seething inhabitants. Of course, there came to him once or twice the idea he was the sport of an evil demon; but in the face of his new exultation these thoughts evaporated. He continued to hear the flight of snipe although the season for that had long passed; and day after day the mirror on Flora’s tomb showed him stars, lights and clouds that were certainly not in the sky at that moment. A day came at the end of summer when he heard, without seeing them, snipe flying round his house. That was something they had never done before, from fear, perhaps, of his two dogs. He took out the mirror which he had always in his pocket, put it on the door-sill, bent over it, saw a spring sky crossed by the flight back and forth of birds. That day he sent away the servant-girl who had drawn on him the village’s reproaches. This girl, who was fond of him, left with regret; she feared that in his melancholy he was longing to die alone and undisturbed.
‘That was not Mackay’s intention. The following day he went to the shop and kept it open, his heart beating fast, till four o’clock. Then he went to Flora’s tomb and spoke to her as usual. The mirror showed him a sky that changed gradually to the violet of a misty night. Mackay heard the drumming of the snipe and a curlew called—he saw it fly above the wall of the cemetery and its open beak give out the cry. In the warm air of this summer’s end many things were alive, and among them Flora, surely, said Mackay, Flora too.
‘Mackay went home, set up the first mirror on the window-sill of his kitchen, then another above it, and a third slanting against the window that caused there to appear on the dark wall of the kitchen a pale, roughly outlined circle on which there moved lights that were more distinct.
‘In this third mirror that evening Mackay saw a rook pass, such as often comes at bad times. Then, accompanied by the clear noise of the snipe’s feathers, there passed a miniature boy whom Mackay recognised as one of the favourite companions of his daughter. With the help of his mirror Mackay followed for a moment the steps of this child, but no one and nothing came to meet him, and Mackay dared not look for long. He had lost all certainties. The night about his house fell rapidly. Round its chimneys wheeled a gull with a sombre croak—heu-heu, heu-heu. You know the cry of these birds, the perpetual moodiness they manifest. Mackay listened to it for a moment, a smile, surely, on his lips. Then he took a piece of paper and a pencil, and worked out through part of the night the arrangement of further mirrors. The task finished, he went to the sea-shore, though heavy rain was falling, threw himself on his knees, and prayed confusedly to a god who was not the one whose vengeful decrees were hammered home on Sundays.
‘He slept a little, and all through the night he saw the child in red trousers walking under the rain. The following day the village people found him distrait, and put down the change to the servant he had discharged. He had already forgotten her. Before leaving he unhooked the various mirrors in the shop and went home, but first visited the cemetery and Flora’s tomb as usual, and at the moment when he spoke to her there came to him so great a happiness that again he did not know how to tell her.
‘He disposed the other mirrors round the house in such a way as to be able to see the play of things seven or eight times reflected. The last mirror, gilt-surrounded, a present for Mrs Mackay once bought in the town—threw squarely on the wall the image held by the last reflection.
‘He went to bed without eating, though he had taken care of the animals—the cow was relieved of
its milk night and morning, and Mackay secretly threw most of it away in a ditch behind his house—and his last act was to turn his eyes on the final mirror. Late in the night Flora passed across it. She was carrying a box. It was almost dark and she had on her winter coat, a black coat buttoned up to the chin. He did not try either to detain her or to follow her. The following night he saw her again. To tell the truth, he saw her every night at the end of that summer, then on every night that autumn, and every dark, interminable night of winter.
‘Things always happened in the same way. Mackay lowered the shutter of his shop, greeted the postmaster, who closed his window a little later, set off for the cemetery and spoke to Flora. His tongue was never tied; all the stories of the day came easily to his lips. At the end of the conversation he got up saying: “So, dearest Flora, dearest girl, till we meet again.”
‘He understood well, he thought, that the Flora of the mirrors was not that of the tomb, but he did not imagine for an instant that the child of the night could have appeared to him unless the other, the child who was dead and yet living, knew it and authorised it. Then he went home and had supper opposite a place he had set for Flora. The bread and milk used to disappear in the night, something that Mackay naturally attributed to the child’s nocturnal allies.
‘After eating Mackay read a little, went to the child’s room, where the servant too had slept, then felt his heart gently quickening. It was the time to go to bed and wait for the moment when Flora would pass into the mirror, and when her outline, dimmer, would appear on the wall. Sometimes this was at the darkest hour of night. But Flora always seemed to be passing in the morning, her arms full. She was going to school, that was it, she was going to school. She would stop beside the sea, shrug her shoulders, throw stones at a dog that was following her and frightening her—sometimes she would walk with head held high but sometimes smiling, and Mackay would see that little smile and smile too. Sometimes Flora would pass running; wind or rain was hurrying her on.
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