The Offing

by Benjamin Myers

  ‘Well, I can see the sea from here if I strain my neck. Like you said yesterday, it isn’t going anywhere. It’ll only take me a couple of hours to hack those weeds back a yard or two. It’ll give the garden a bit of breathing space, then I’ll be on my way. I’ve not eaten so well in weeks – or ever, come to think of it – and every other meal has been payment for work.’

  ‘A good meal isn’t payment: it’s a God-given right for all men and women. But if it makes you feel worthy you can spend an hour with the sickle, for all the use it’ll do. I know if I was wanting to see the world – a lot of which I have, as it happens – I would be in a hurry to get out there, rather than stick around with some dusty duffer and her dog. But by all means hack away. I’ll have to pay you, I suppose.’

  I smiled. ‘You have already paid me with the meals.’

  ‘And you’re not listening.’

  ‘But I thought the gardening could pay for the lobster.’

  ‘Don’t undersell yourself, Robert: your conversation and company paid for the lobster. But fine. There are tools in the lean-to round the side of the house. You’ll find what you need.’

  The sickle was as blunt as a fish knife but in the lean-to I also found a mouldy old sharpening stone, which I cleaned and then used to strike a gleaming smooth edge back to the chipped half-circle of steel blade.

  Two summers previously I had been paid a pittance to trim the grass on the village cricket pitch and long dull days on my dad’s allotment had taught me the basics of tending to a plot, so I soon set to work paring back the grass and weeds around the garden’s perimeter. Grasping clumps in one hand and hacking with the other didn’t do much so I took to swinging the blade as hard as I could. I worked my way along the line of the fence, noting that the woodwork was beginning to rot and it was in need of a lick of paint. Again, the salt air and the damp grass had made it blister and peel away, and white flakes fell every time I inadvertently knocked against it. It was losing the battle against the meadow. The fence was merely ornamental now. Symbolic.

  Within minutes I was sweating. Stooping low and then lifting the tool above my head was putting a strain on my lower back so I returned to the lean-to and rooted around. In an old shoebox whose corner had been nibbled away I found a mouse’s nest built from grass and twigs. I carefully replaced it. Right at the back of the lean-to, behind some bottles of paraffin, broken picture frames and a watering can, there was a pair of long-handled shears so old that the pivoted fulcrum had rusted into place. I looked for oil but couldn’t find any, despite there being an abundance of oily cloths and a set of overalls splattered with puscoloured grease and vibrant flecks of paint. I walked round to the side door and tentatively knocked, and when there was no answer I tried a second time, louder, and then pushed the door ajar and called for Dulcie.

  Her voice came down from upstairs. ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Sorry – ’ I said, suddenly feeling like an intruder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said sorry – ’

  Her head peered around the top of the stairway. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘I just wondered if you have any oil. I need some for the tools.’

  ‘Only cooking oil. That should do it. There’s plenty in the pantry. Help yourself.’

  She disappeared again.

  On my way out I saw through into the small sitting room that was dominated by a huge country dresser packed with a full dinner service on display. There was a fireplace and a chair too, and stacked everywhere there were piles of books and papers and two or three empty wine bottles. Above the fire on the mantelpiece there was a photograph of a young woman – Dulcie, perhaps? Another showed two women, but they were too far away for their features to be distinguishable and I didn’t want to pry. A clock ticked loudly.

  I oiled the bolt on the shears and then sharpened the blades with the stone and set to work again, snipping away at the grass, weeds and nettles. For the denser patches I used the sickle again, imagining myself as an executioner of sorts, until I had cleared a run a foot wide around the fence, which I then set to widening further still. Now and then I paused to rake the cuttings, wipe my brow and catch my breath. Sometimes I stopped and moved snails, slugs or worms away from the path of the blade.

  An upstairs window opened and Dulcie called to me: ‘Remember: don’t chuck the nettles.’

  I smiled and gave her the thumbs up. I took my shirt off and hung it from the fence and then carried on with my labours.

  The morning sun rolled slowly across the sky as delicate music floated out over the meadow. I stood and stretched and listened as a playful piano melody loudly introduced a plummy-voiced man singing about Germans. It drifted out from the open windows of Dulcie’s cottage. She appeared in the garden and waved.

  ‘This one’s for you.’

  ‘What?’ I said, not hearing her over the music.

  She held a hand to her mouth and raised her voice. ‘I thought you might like to whistle while you work. It’s satire.’

  I walked a little closer to the house and lifted one leg and then the other over the fence.

  ‘Noël Coward,’ said Dulcie. ‘This one’s a small satire about showing compassion to our supposed sworn enemies. I thought it apropos to our conversation last night. Do you know it?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘That’s because the BBC banned it from the airwaves. Perhaps they couldn’t decide whether it was too cruel or just not cruel enough. Either way, they failed to see the funny side. He’s a friend of mine.’

  I put down my shears and wiped my brow again with my forearm.

  ‘He sends me all his latest recordings,’ she continued. ‘Whether I want them or not. They say he was in the Black Book, you know. That was the list that the little Führer and his SS cronies drew up of all the people they intended to round up and dispense of as soon as they had invaded Britain. It was a sort of Who’s Who of interesting upstarts. I suspect it read a little like my old address book. Let me play it again for you.’

  I listened to the song for a few moments. The voice was posh and slightly effeminate, again belonging to someone from an England that was unfamiliar to me. I tried to imagine its owner hewing a seam or working a wagon or telling blue jokes at the club of a Saturday evening. I couldn’t picture it.

  ‘Why was he in particular on Hitler’s list?’

  She shrugged. ‘Who wouldn’t want to be on a list of dissidents, decadents and intolerably dangerous old fruits?’

  ‘How many people were on it?’

  ‘Oh, hundreds, I imagine. Possibly thousands. Anyone who was anyone. All the bores, of course, would be left off, and those who had crossed over.’

  ‘We’d be ruled by Nazis now if they had got their way,’ I said.

  Dulcie shook her head, tutting. ‘Worse, Robert. Much worse. We would be ruled by those remaining English stiffs employed by the Nazis to do their bidding. Chinless wonders and lickspittles. There would be no room for the poets or the peacocks, the artists or the queens. Instead we’d be entirely driven by the very wettest of civil servants – even more so than we already are. A legion of pudgy middle managers would be the dreary midwives of England’s downfall. Human turds, the lot of them. Stiff, dry, human turds.’

  Dulcie looked adrift for a moment. She shook her head again, then continued.

  ‘So as you can probably imagine, an appearance on the list was the highlight of Mr Coward’s career to date – to be on the cultural radar, so to speak. He’d be the first to admit that he did quite well out of the war.’

  ‘He didn’t serve?’

  ‘Serve? Noël Coward couldn’t serve an omelette. No. He spent half of it at the Savoy after they bombed his home to bits, the other half entertaining the troops – or them entertaining him. And why not, I say. Play to your strengths. Here, let me spin it one more time.’

  Dulcie retreated to the house and then played the song again, only louder this time. The same plucked piano chords rang out as No
ël Coward began to sing again with clear, clipped diction that enunciated every single word of a song called ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans.’

  She leaned out of the window.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Is this the type of music you like?’

  I listened to the song a little longer and heard a line about the Germans’ Beethoven and Bach being worse than their bite.

  ‘It’s clever, I suppose,’ I said, hesitating. ‘Funny.’

  ‘It’s pith,’ said Dulcie. ‘Pith, piss and piffle. But anything that is banned should always be worthy of further investigation. He spends a lot of time abroad now, Noël. Jamaica, mainly. He sends long letters moaning about the heat and the quality of the gin, as if he expected it any other way.’

  She withdrew into the cool interior of the house and a moment later was in the garden again.

  ‘Are you familiar with the other popular song “Hitler Has Only Got One Whatsit”?’

  I smiled as I shook my head.

  ‘Oh, yes, you are,’ said Dulcie. ‘You know. One ball.’

  I laughed at this. ‘Yes, we used to sing it in the playground,’ I admitted. ‘Sometimes some of us sang it in assembly too but the headmaster could never work out who it was, and if he had I doubt he would have punished us for it.’

  ‘Well, I happen to have it on good authority that there is a certain truth to it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Cryptorchidism is what I mean. An undescended testicle. As a child it seems the Führer’s nut bag decided to protest the pull of gravity by staying precisely put.’

  She paused and scratched her chin.

  ‘On the right side, I believe.’

  ‘But how could you possibly know that?’

  ‘I was told by a very credible, highly trusted source.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. Also his hampton was perfectly normal despite the person it had the great misfortune to find itself attached to. And that’s all I can say on the matter.’ She leaned forward and tapped her nose. ‘The walls have ears. Now, are you hungry yet? You must be hungry by now.’

  Only then did I realise how famished I was. ‘I could eat,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You should eat.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘There you are with time again. Is your belly growling?’

  ‘It is a bit.’

  ‘Then the clock of your guts tells us that it’s lunchtime.’

  Once again we ate in the garden.

  Dulcie brought out a board bearing two wedges of cheese, some fresh floury rolls still steaming from the oven, a ball of butter, boiled eggs, more apples, a half-cucumber, a stone jar of pickled onions and another of whelks. There was a pot of nettle tea, and cups with a wedge of lemon in each. I was grateful for the light breeze to cool the sweat on my brow.

  I tore open a roll and filled it with egg and apple and whelks.

  ‘An imaginative combination,’ said Dulcie. ‘How are you getting on with the jungle?’

  I chewed a few times and swallowed before answering. ‘There’s so much of it. I feel like I’ve barely made a dent.’

  ‘I did warn you.’

  ‘It’s going to take a little longer than I expected.’

  ‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘Let the next winter clear it. Let the frost do its worst. Life is limited, why fill it with toil?’

  ‘I quite enjoy it, actually. I thought I’d just finish the fence line and then quickly trim back some of the scrub down at the bottom so that you can see the sea again.’

  Dulcie reached for an apple and cut a slice from it.

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  She put the apple in her mouth.

  ‘I don’t know, really. Because – ’

  ‘Because, as Mallory remarked when pressed upon his reason for scaling Mount Everest, it’s there. But there’s no need. I know it’s there. The tide takes it out a hundred feet and then drags it a hundred feet back in. Day after day. I don’t need to see it to believe it.’

  ‘But don’t you want to enjoy the full view?’

  She frowned. ‘Not especially. I have no great love for the sea these days.’

  ‘Yet you live so close to it.’

  ‘Let’s just say we had a falling-out and leave it at that.’

  Dulcie chewed another slice of crisp apple.

  ‘But how can you fall out with the sea?’

  ‘Because you just can,’ she said, a little more sternly than I expected.

  We fell silent.

  ‘I noticed your kitchen tap is dripping,’ I said. ‘The washer has probably gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dulcie said vaguely, distracted. ‘I expect it has.’

  ‘I could replace it for you.’

  She ignored my deliberate attempt to steer the course of the conversation. She had other ideas.

  ‘Look, I refuse to be at the mercy of the sea’s changing whims, Robert. That’s all. I just won’t do it. The sea is petulant and tempestuous and I have no patience for its daily dramas. Also, sometimes – a lot of the time, in fact – it is just plain bland. The same drab story told over and over again. It tastes of the earth’s detritus. It doesn’t interest me.’

  ‘It’s fine. I won’t trim the scrub if you don’t want me to, Dulcie.’

  A moment passed. She sighed.

  ‘I know you’re just trying to help. Forgive me. Here you are, practically held captive when you want to be out there, feeling the pull of the lunar tide. It’s just that apart from giving up its bountiful lobsters, crabs and tunny, the sea has done me few favours over time. You shouldn’t let my cynicism sour your experience, though.’

  I decided not to press the issue so we sat sipping our cooling tea and digesting our meal in silence.

  ‘I was thinking of taking a quick walk before I finish up,’ I said. ‘Do you think Butler would like to come?’

  ‘I think he’d bite your arm off for a walk. He’s got rather used to skulking about the place these days or watching the lane like a sentinel guard and I’m afraid his territory has become rather limited. But why don’t we ask him all the same? Everyone is equal around here.’ Dulcie shifted in her seat. ‘Butters. Where is that blasted – oh, there you are. Would you like to go for a walk?’

  At this the dog’s ears pricked up and tilted. He gave a small whine of anticipation and his tongue lolled.

  ‘I’d say that’s a yes, wouldn’t you?’

  She tossed him a piece of buttered bread, and then a slice of apple, and a whelk dripping vinegar, all of which he greedily gulped in turn.

  ‘Shall I fetch his lead?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t need a lead, does old Butters. He’s as faithful and reliable as a chaiwala, aren’t you, boy? He’s not one to wander off. He knows he’s living the dolce vita right here.’

  Any lingering wisps of morning cloud had cleared as I climbed the back fence behind Dulcie Piper’s cottage and dropped into a series of conjoined fields sloping up towards the skyline. Butler vaulted the fence like a thoroughbred racehorse and darted ahead, his long wide tongue pink and coarse as it flapped about his face.

  I rose out of the cleft in which the cottage and the meadow sat, and the land once again opened out. Behind me was a billowing blanket of life rippling down to the clustered fishermen’s houses of the bay, and then beyond that nothing but miles of sea, which from this elevation appeared perfectly calm beneath the shallow breath of a sighing afternoon’s sky.

  Observed from above, the cottage sat in a hollow that had most likely been carved by many millennia of running water, the last dribbled remains of the molten ice mountains that once covered the face of Britain, and the sea around it too. As I had already seen, these slopes were shot through with wooded dells and shallow streams in which sticklebacks hovered and darted, and where the water crossed a track or road, a ford had been laid for first horses and their carts, and then automobiles.

  There had been n
o attempt to divert the natural run of the water, or send it underground, unseen, as might happen in a town or city, but instead life had adapted to exist alongside these arterial waterways through which the hundreds of square miles of open marshy moorlands above drained to meet the salt water of the sea in a cocktail of stewed-looking peat water and heavy brine.

  Here I could look upon Dulcie’s cottage, shrunk down to the size of a toytown abode, with its red-tiled roof and parasitic plants working their way across and around it. The way the weeds held the house in a webbed grip made me think of the beautiful ultramarine glass orbs encased in netting ropes I saw in some of the fishing villages, which were used to secure floating nets but would occasionally untether themselves, drifting away for hundreds of miles, bobbing in the shallows before eventually washing up on distant shores neither cracked nor broken, gifted to foreign beaches as alien objects gleaming under the same one sun. Those that did shatter in the rolling wash, as with discarded ale and pop bottles, would have their jagged pieces smoothed away by the stones of the squall and the constant scrubbing of the salt water until they became the rounded glass treasures that are beloved of beachcombers and have filled many a childhood jar. For a long time I thought they were jewels that had drifted up from the jewel box of the seabed, and only became more fascinated with them when I learned they were the remnants of discarded everyday objects.

  I decided I would search for some at the first available opportunity, but while I was inland I thought I might first investigate the badgers’ lane that had inadvertently delivered me to Dulcie’s.

  Her house hunkered down there in the geologically dug green grave, crouched like an animal preparing for hibernation, and everywhere I turned on this hillside above were similar single stone houses with gardens and outbuildings and barns and animal pens, each strategically built to command an unimpeded sea view – all except for Dulcie’s house, where the untamed meadow blocked the way, and which therefore seemed, like Dulcie herself, to have little interest in what lay beyond the perimeter of its vision.