Richard went out in one of the boats, wrapped in oilskins. They didn’t want him to go because the conditions were so bad, but he went anyway. I watched the boat slip and rock on the water with the tide running anyhow and the storm still roaring. When Richard came back he was shivering.
‘It’s so black,’ he said, ‘You can’t see anything.’ His eyes were shocked and wide. ‘There’s so much water,’ he said, ‘you’d never find anyone out there. And the lights make it worse.’ The policewoman brought him some tea, her face saying that he shouldn’t have gone. Antony was grizzling and I put my finger in his mouth to keep him quiet, the way I’d seen Susan do. He sucked hard. Three nights ago Isabel was in the bath while I washed out her bras and pants in the wash-basin. ‘Look, Neen,’ she said, and she squeezed the skin around her breasts until milk came out into the water like thin smoke. We watched the milk roll away through the bath water until it dissolved.
‘Have you tasted it?’ I asked her.
‘Mm.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Sweet. A bit like Milky Bar. You can try if you want.’
The storm has growled away inland now, beyond the Downs, but it’s still raining, a fine, steady rain. The helicopter’s back again, trundling low in the air, with its big white beam spreading down to the water. The rotors make a noise like an electric whisk at full power. Things are happening here which belong safely on the news, but we can’t switch them off. Richard’s just walked down to the edge of the water for the hundredth time. There’s his hunched shape, tramping down the pebbles with a big searchlight shadow thrown behind it. I glance down at Antony, asleep in his car-seat. He’ll be fine for a few minutes.
I am wet by the time I get to Richard. He’s standing on the shingle a few feet above the water’s edge. I come up behind him and put my arm through his. He jumps, jerking my arm, sending the jar all through me.
‘It’s all right, it’s me.’
‘Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to pull you like that.’
‘I should have thought.’
‘You were so wet, you see –’
‘You thought it might be her.’
‘Yes.’ His face shines with rain.
‘I’m sorry. You were waiting and thinking –’
‘I wasn’t.’ He says it abruptly, with hostility. ‘I wasn’t waiting for her, if that’s what you think.’
I listen to the waves break. The tide’s turning. It has that wildness water has at the moment when it changes direction. You should never bathe on a falling tide. If I stepped into that water now it’d take me to where Isabel’s gone. I could find her now.
‘She’s gone,’ Richard says, his voice flat and final. ‘She’s done what she wanted.’
‘They think it was an accident.’
‘Of course it wasn’t. You know that as well as I do.’
A long tongue of sea rushes in, spilling white over my feet. It’s cold. The last big wave before the tide turns. I think with horror that he believes Isabel killed herself because she knew about us.
‘It’s been coming for years,’ says Richard. The hard, dull thumps of my heart are so loud I can hardly speak over them. Heat floods me. ‘She’s got what she wanted,’ he repeats.
‘Nobody wants this,’ I say.
‘If you cut out all the other options, then this is what you’re left with.’
‘She had the baby. She can’t have meant to kill herself. Women with babies don’t kill themselves.’
‘God knows why she had him,’ say Richard. ‘But she was always so fucking obstinate. She always had to do what she fucking well wanted. Everyone else could go and fuck themselves.’
He is crying, making that raw belly-noise men like him make when they cry.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I shout over the noise of the sea. ‘It was nothing to do with you.’
But he goes on crying and the sea grinds the stones as it goes down, and the wind slaps my face.
A different policewoman comes in with a baby bottle in her hand.
‘Here you are.’ She is proud of herself. I ran out of bottles for Antony, so she’s driven five miles and got a chemist to open up and sell her some baby-milk. I find the money for her and think how strange it is to be buying baby-milk from a policewoman in the middle of the night. ‘Is this café always open so late?’ I ask.
‘Oh yes. It’s the only place round here so they do good business. The kids come in, so we usually keep an eye. There was a bit of trouble with drugs a couple of years ago. Joe boiled up your bottle for you, so you don’t need to worry, it’s sterile.’
She talks as if I am Antony’s mother. The milk is just the right temperature, and Antony’s moaning in his car-seat, not yet awake but sensing hunger below the threshold of sleep. Or maybe it’s the noise of the helicopter that’s disturbed him. He’s slept for hours. I’ve never known him sleep as he’s slept this evening. The whack of blades gets louder as the helicopter sweeps in over the sea towards the café, and the baby’s face twists as he lets out his first cry. I think, ‘They’re searching for your mother. That’s what woke you,’ but I can’t believe in it. The policewoman goes to the window and looks up as I rub the teat against Antony’s lips and then nose it into his mouth. Without opening his eyes, he begins to suck greedily.
‘Where are they going now? Are they going to try inland?’
She looks at me, her face guarded. ‘I don’t think so.’ She pauses. ‘It looks to me as if they’re calling off the search for tonight, but I could find out for you.’
‘But they haven’t found her.’
‘The thing is, once it gets this dark it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, even with the lights.’
‘So they aren’t going to look any more.’
‘I didn’t say that. They’ll start again at first light, and they’ll go on all day if they need to.’
‘But it’ll be too late. She can’t possibly –’
My mind blanks. I think of Isabel out there in the streaming darkness. It’s cold after the storm, and in the sea it’ll be colder. The waves are chopping up against the beach, and that means it’ll be rough farther out. Even a strong swimmer like Isabel would find it hard. ‘If she’s in the water, things don’t look so good,’ says the policewoman, ‘But then we don’t know that she is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘People do go off. They get upset. They hide out somewhere. You’d be amazed how often a missing person turns up.’
‘But nobody’s seen her. Where could she have gone to?’
Maybe she walked farther along the beach than anyone believes she could walk. She might have found a crack in the chalk cliffs where the overhang kept her dry in the storm. She might be there still, huddled on herself, waiting. The policewoman doesn’t answer. She’s been here for hours and she must be tired too. She’s saying the right things by rote while her eyes want to be elsewhere.
‘He’s enjoying that bottle,’ she says.
The way she says it makes me ask, ‘Have you got children?’
‘One. A little boy, he’s two.’ She almost smiles at the thought of her child, then straightens her face again. They still think Isabel’s had an accident. Or that’s what they tell us they think. It was hot and she suddenly decided she’d like to go for a swim. They know that when she left Pat she didn’t go to the café. No one saw her again at the café or the shop or in the car park. The buses have been checked, and local taxi firms. Nothing. She might have walked along the beach in that heavy heat just before the storm, and thought that a quick dip would make her feel better. She didn’t realize it wasn’t safe to swim outside the flags. Isabel, who lived in St Ives until she was eighteen, didn’t realize what a red flag meant. There are never many people down that part of the beach, and so it’s not too surprising that no one saw her. She went into the water and off the shelf, out of her depth. There’s an undertow. She was still weak after the birth, and she could have got into difficulties very quickly. Th
at’s their story.
‘She was a strong swimmer,’ I said. ‘Isabel got her gold survival medal when she was ten. We were brought up by the sea.’
I was afraid they’d give up too soon, while Isabel was still swimming, her hair spreading out on the sea around her with each stroke, up then down, her face wet but still above water. The salt water would hold her up. She wouldn’t panic, she’d keep swimming. I must hold on to that picture of Isabel swimming, or she’ll give up. She’ll sink, and try to cry out, and drown.
Richard comes in and sits beside me. His face looks empty now and almost peaceful. It is so quiet we hear the wheeze of air escaping from the bottle as Antony sucks. Then Richard says, ‘There’s nothing out there, Nina. They say we should go back. They’re starting again as soon as it gets light.’
They’re stopping. They’ll turn out the lights, and the easy black of sea at night will sweep over everything. Maybe the helicopter’s already landed. Everyone’s going to go home, and tell the story to their wives or husbands, and then have a drink and talk about something else.
‘Let’s wait a bit,’ I say.
‘You’ll be better off at home,’ says the policewoman, ‘and we’ll contact you the moment we hear anything. You need a hot bath and some dry clothes.’ She keeps telling me to call her Elaine but I forget. She says the right words but her voice is tired and she wants to be at home, too, stripping off her concern with her uniform. She’s had enough of us. I turn to Richard, ‘But we’ve got to wait, Richard, because Isabel–’ I don’t want to say this in front of the policewoman, but she sits stolidly on. She’s listening. She’s been trained to wait a long time for what she wants to hear.
‘– Isabel wouldn’t come back while there was all this light and noise. You know how she’d hate it. She’d wait until it was dark again. She might have fallen asleep somewhere. You know how tired she was.’
There’s a tap at the door and the policewoman gets up. ‘I won’t be a moment,’ she says.
‘Nina,’ says Richard, ‘We’ve got to get back. Susan and Edward are still waiting.’
‘Jesus. I’d forgotten about them.’
‘Yes, I know, but they’ve been waiting for hours. Edward would’ve come down if I hadn’t said he ought to stay at the house in case Isabel phoned.’
The door opens again and the policewoman comes back in, with a different policeman, one we haven’t seen before. He nods, and sits down on the other side of the table.
‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid we’ve had a call in response to an item we put out on local radio a couple of hours ago, and it’s not good news.’ He pauses and the air in the room thickens, as if it’s filling up with water. I pick up a cigarette butt from the ash-tray and shred the paper. Tobacco falls out in golden threads. The policeman looks at Richard, and then at me, his big seamed face close to us as he leans forward. I have the strangest feeling that I know this policeman well, that I’ve slept with him once long ago, but I can’t remember it clearly. The atmosphere is charged, sexual, appalling. I want to stop his mouth with my lips.
‘A gentleman has phoned in who recognized the description of your wife. He said he saw a woman answering to her description walking down towards the water, in the red flag area. She waded in and although he was just leaving the beach he ran back down to warn her that it wasn’t safe to bathe there. He said he thought she looked ill. She told him not to worry, she knew the coast and would be quite safe. She wanted to–’ The policeman clears his throat.
‘What?’ Horror swarms over my skin. What had Isabel said?
‘She wanted to get cool. He said something about having had enough of this hot weather, and she said she had too, she’d be glad when it was over.’
‘Is that all she said?’ Richard asks.
‘That’s what he told us, sir. Just chit-chat about the weather. But he looked back when he got to the top of the beach, and she was still standing there in the water, looking out to sea. It stuck in his mind. So as soon as he heard the news item, he rang in.’
The oily sea licks round Isabel’s thighs. She’s the only one in the water. The bulge of shingle and the breakwater hide her from the main beach. The man stands and watches her from the top of the beach. If he put up a finger he could blot her out, but she sticks in his mind. He sees the deep scooped back of her black swimsuit, her yellow sarong hanging limp around her, the cloth dragging and wet. Everything is grey and horizontal and still except Isabel.
‘People make these things up,’ says Richard harshly, ‘trying to get in on the action.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. It was definitely your wife he was talking to. He gave us details that weren’t in the description we put out. I’m very sorry.’
He sits back, and I know he thinks it’s over. When the man went out of sight she would have moved. She would have waded deeper and deeper into the lifeless water. She might have thought how different it was from the purple and turquoise sea we grew up in, or she might have thought of nothing at all. I know there comes a point when you think of nothing at all. Then suddenly the shelf of pebble ended and she walked on water. She walked in and the water went over her head. But it’s not so easy to drown, and Isabel knew that. Maybe that’s what she was thinking of when she told the man she would be glad when it was over.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Here I am in Isabel’s garden. The rain has stopped, but everything is wet, drooping over with the weight of water. There’s a smoky smell in the air, like the smell of chrysanthemums. I walk down the path to the cherry tree. A small, misty moon gives enough light for me to see where I’m going. Behind me, every window of the house blazes. Susan turned all the lights on, waiting for us to come back.
Edward’s gone. When Richard told him the search had been called off he said, ‘I’m going down there.’ I thought Richard would try to argue him out of it, but he didn’t. He said, ‘I’ll take you.’
‘Don’t bother. I’ll get a taxi,’ said Edward.
‘But you must have something to eat first,’ Susan said. ‘You look, terrible.’ Margery has been here, making soup. Every sign of Isabel’s feast has been cleared away: the table, the cloth, the flowers. There’s a black bin-bag slumped by the cooker. I picked it up and it weighed next to nothing. It was full of sunflowers and Japanese anemones and black dahlias. I’d already thrown all the food we bought in Brighton into a council bin down at the Gap. More figs than I’d ever had before, perfect inside their bloomy skins. In the rush we’d chucked them into the back of the car anyhow and they were jammy, discoloured, oozing seed.
Margery is wonderful in a crisis. She was made for wars and sieges, not the Young Farmers. The house throbbed like a general’s headquarters, with Margery fielding the telephone. She came in from the kitchen carrying a tray of strong coffee and her gaze swept us all, Edward, Richard, me. ‘I’ll ring for a taxi,’ Edward said, and he disappeared into the hall. I heard him moving about upstairs, and when he came down he had his bag with him. ‘The taxi’ll be here in quarter of an hour,’ he said.
‘But what will you do down there? There’s nowhere to sit. They’ve shut the café.’
‘I’ll wait. It’ll be light again in a few hours.’
He wanted to be near Isabel, in the last place where she’d been, and he didn’t want us there. ‘Richard,’ he said, and then stopped.
‘What?’
‘I want to go in Isabel’s room.’
‘Isabel’s room?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, of course, if you want to.’ Why are you asking me? hung in the air. After all Edward was in the house all evening. He could have been in Isabel’s room for hours if he’d wanted.
‘The door’s locked.’
‘It can’t be. She never locks her door.’
‘I’ve tried it. And I can’t find the key.’
‘I didn’t even know there was one.’
But there is. It was Susan who found it. She looked up on the lintel and saw an edge of metal. ‘There it is!�
�
It fitted and turned and the door opened. There was the bed she shared with Richard, with the covers pulled smooth and tight. She slept there alone before he came. It’s always been Isabel’s room. The air smelled of Isabel: her body, her perfume, her clothes. Her nightdress hung loose over a chair. The window was wide open, letting in the cool night air, and there was a patch of damp on the boards where the rain had blown in. Isabel hadn’t expected rain, even though she’d been saying every day that the garden needed it. I looked at the stain on the boards. The carelessness of it, the way rain could fall there as if on to an upturned face.
‘I’ll stay here for a bit, if that’s all right,’ said Edward, ‘until the taxi comes.’ He wanted us to go. We backed out of the room and as the door closed I realized that this was probably the last time Edward would ever be in this house, where he’s come time after time, spending days and weeks here. Why should he come any more? This house meant Isabel. We shut the door and left Edward standing in the middle of Isabel’s room.
He came down ten minutes later, silent, his face stiff. The taxi was waiting at the top of the track with its engine running.
‘We’ll be down later,’ said Richard, and Edward nodded, but still he said nothing. Susan was crying. We all waited in the hall, listening to the taxi turn and then go off down the track, and then Margery came and said she’d made bacon and eggs, and the best thing to do was eat them and go to bed. We’d have a long day tomorrow.
But the long day of today is still going on. My clothes are soaked from brushing against wet leaves. I am by the dahlias now. I run my hands over the bristling stems where Isabel cut off the flowers with her secateurs, and then I walk on. All the scents are coming out in the wet air. I walk past jasmine, and tobacco flowers. Everywhere there’s the sharp smell of rain on parched earth, and the garden sucks and rustles around me. I keep thinking I can hear the river, though I know I can’t. If I climbed up and stood on the wall I might see the shine of it as it makes for the sea five miles off. I sit down on the seat and listen to drops of water falling off the leaves around me and pocking on the ground.
Talking to the Dead Page 18