High Island Blues

by Ann Cleeves

  But he imagined that they lived in a tidy semi and thought that Oaklands wouldn’t be much like home.

  The bus drove east down the I10 past the urban sprawl which had developed along the freeway: motels, second-hand car lots decked out with shimmering bunting, huge concrete churches with extravagant names. They had no sense of any country beyond until they crossed the San Jacinto River and looked out at the forest of oil refineries towards the coast. Then there was the Trinity River and views of open countryside: the wide expanses of water of Galveston Bay, rice fields and cattle, and in the distance a water tower, shining like an alien space craft. Ahead of them, along the flat, straight road, they could see almost into Louisiana and watched the huge, chrome-plated trucks appear out of the heat haze.

  They turned off the 110 before Winnie so that they could drive past the National Wildlife Refuge at Anahuac. There marsh and swamp stretched to a horizon which was as straight and even as if it was the sea. They got out briefly to see herons, stilts and wading birds. Some would have liked to stay longer but Rob herded them back onto the bus. Mary Ann would be waiting for them. She would be expecting them for lunch. He would have liked to stay too – he loved the sense of space and the rich smell of the swamp – but he knew better than to take liberties with Mary Ann.

  At the I24 they turned south towards the coast. Two turkey vultures soared above the road. Russell May took out his check-list and ticked off the species. There were more rice fields, more cows.

  Despite Rob’s warning they had been expecting something more dramatic of High Island, perhaps a real hill rising out of the flat land. But as they approached the town all that broke the horizon was the steep, semi-circular bridge crossing the intra coastal canal. Beyond that they reached the town almost without noticing. They came to a field of nodding donkeys, part of the local oil industry, and then they were in High Island, which hadn’t seemed to be a hill at all, just trees floating above the marsh.

  Oaklands was to the north of the town. The bus turned off the highway just after the bridge and drove down a road of single-storey houses without boundary fences, mostly clapboard, some in need of repair.

  Rob, directing the driver, saw the detail as if for the first time, the wooden swinging seat outside one house, basket-ball posts and a kids’ climbing frame outside another. A dog chased out into the middle of the dusty road and barked at them. A woman flapped out in her slippers to call it back. She stopped to wave at the bus. High Island prided itself on being friendly to the birders.

  They came to a gate, already open, and a cattle grid. A track led through huge magnolias with shiny leaves and oaks covered in lichen. The house was surrounded by trees so it seemed that if it let up guard for a moment the woodland would take it over again. Then they saw the house.

  It was bigger and more ornate than any of them had expected, gloriously overdone, all turrets, and verandas and angled roofs. It was three-storeyed, L-shaped with a clock tower and pointed windows in the roof. On the inside of the L there was a magnificent wrought iron veranda and on the long side of the house a new wooden porch, with a view of a lawn which had been cleared from the woodland, and a pool.

  ‘It was built in 1897,’ Rob said, as proud as if he owned it himself. ‘At one time a railway line brought visitors right up to the door. It was very grand. Miss Cleary has brought it back to its former glory. When I first came here it was very different. Falling to pieces. You wouldn’t believe the change.’

  But nobody was listening to him. They had had enough of travelling. They had climbed from the bus and were waiting in the heat to collect their luggage.

  Chapter Four

  When Rob had stayed in Oaklands twenty years ago it had looked like the set of a second rate horror movie. The paint had been peeling and the whole place smelled of decay. It had been run as a boarding house by a widow who had a child to support. Salesmen stayed there and student teachers at the High School, and a couple of elderly long term residents who should have been in a nursing home but couldn’t afford to move.

  It had been Laurie’s idea to stay there, after they’d picked her up on the road from Winnie. They had seen her from a long way off, appearing out of the heat haze like a mirage, watched her hitch a lift, slowed down the car to stop beside her.

  ‘Where are you heading for?’ Rob had asked, trying to sound cool.

  ‘Wherever you’re going,’ she’d said, corny as hell, but somehow carrying it off.

  ‘We’re making for the coast,’ he’d said. ‘High Island. We can take you there.’

  ‘Why not? You got somewhere to stay?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘We could stay at Oaklands. They’re kind of family. It’ll be cheap at least.’

  So they’d stayed there for a week, the four of them. All the time his obsession for Laurie grew and they waited for the weather to change and the migrants to come. There had been plenty to see: egrets and ibises on the salt lagoons and coypu and alligator, but the humidity and the tension of waiting for a fall had made them as bad tempered and fractious as children. The weather was too still and warm and they had flown back to Britain without ever having seen the trees in Smith Oaks crawling with brightly coloured warblers. It was Laurie who said they should meet up in twenty years time. A reunion at the Oaklands Hotel, High Island. Something to look forward to. Something to blow away those High Island blues.

  The woman who ran Oaklands then, Mrs Cleary, had been an aunt of Laurie’s. There had been a tension in the relationship which was never explained. She had been surprised to see Laurie on her doorstep, not hostile but wary. And though she must have been related to the girl’s parents she never asked about them. Laurie’s life was never discussed.

  Elsie Cleary had a twelve-year-old daughter named Mary Ann, who had taken a bit of a shine to Rob. When they left for home he promised to write to her. He had kept his word and sent her postcards from exotic places, funny notes about other birdwatchers, poems and limericks. She wrote back with news of the peninsula. After he’d been appointed leader with the tour company he wrote to Mary Ann to tell her. He still thought of her as a child although by then she’d been away to Business School. She wrote back on smart headed notepaper telling him that her mother had died and she’d taken on the running of Oaklands herself.

  ‘I’d like to run it along the lines of an English country hotel,’ she’d written, so he supposed she must have travelled to Britain, although she had never said. ‘Kind of relaxed and homely. Would your company consider using it as a base for High Island? I’d give you a good discount for a regular booking.’

  The first year he had gone there with some trepidation not knowing what to expect. It would be more convenient than the motel in Winnie where they usually stayed. Oaklands was within walking distance of the Audubon sanctuaries. But most of his customers considered travelling to Texas as adventure enough, and he did not think they would relish the Oaklands he remembered, with ants in the kitchen and lizards in the baths. In fact, the hotel had been transformed. It had been painted gleaming white, the timbers mended, the garden weeded. There were a couple of elderly residents rocking gently in chairs on the porch. Rob suspected that Mary Ann kept them on not out of sentiment but sound commercial judgement. They added to the atmosphere like the hand-sewn quilts on the beds and her grandmother’s furniture. They shared iced tea with the English visitors and talked in soft Texan voices about the old times.

  Mary Ann still managed Oaklands single-handed. There had never been a boyfriend so far as Rob knew, certainly not a husband. She was a slim, dark woman, very smart, never bare legged even in the hottest weather. She reminded Rob rather of some French women he had met – formidable, stylish, independent. He had kept on good terms with her but he would never have dared intimacy though he found her attractive, and he enjoyed a challenge. After all he could not afford to offend her. His clients liked staying at Oaklands. It had become a success. It was hard to get a room there even in the winter and the restaurant was full ev
ery night.

  He watched her walk down the veranda steps to greet his group and thought that she was one of the most successful and contented people he knew.

  Mary Ann was unusually agitated, though neither her guests nor the staff would have realized it. She had learned control from an early age. Her mother was a friendly and easy woman but Mary Ann had seen that she had more than enough to do in keeping the boarding house. She would not have the energy to deal with teenage traumas and tantrums besides. Living at Oaklands meant more to Mary Ann than anything, so she had stayed clear of unsuitable boyfriends and drugs, of mood swings and emotional demands which might have side-tracked her mother from the task of making just enough money to keep the hotel ticking over. And Mary Ann had worked hard at school and worked her way through college so she would learn how to do more than just keep the place solvent. She was determined to make it a success.

  But throughout the morning, as she greeted other guests and waited for Rob Earl’s party to arrive, she found herself distracted. Usually she looked forward to his group. They were undemanding, polite and grateful for the service provided. They weren’t good tippers but the staff liked them. If there were any problems or misunderstandings, Rob was there to help. She’d always admired the British, since that first time when Rob and his friends had come to stay. They were the first foreigners she’d ever met. Later she’d had a vacation job in London, looking after the spoilt kids of a Houston businessman and his wife, and she’d taken to the English, to their coolness and reserve. Even the cold, grey weather had suited her.

  She was grateful to Rob. In the early years of her running the hotel his parties had made all the difference financially. A big booking, right at the beginning of the season, proved to the bank that she was capable of running the place at a profit, that all the investment was worthwhile. And he had spread the word in England. Many of her British guests came there on his recommendation.

  She still looked up to him a bit as she had when she was twelve. She looked forward to showing him the improvements she had made since his last visit and discussing with him her plans for the future. He made her laugh and she didn’t do that very often. She had lots of plans. She wanted to establish a Wildlife Refuge right here in the grounds of the Oaklands Hotel. There was the Birdathon and the party she intended to throw for all the participants. She’d always been good at putting on a show and this would be special. All the Houston media would be there. She imagined the place full of lights and people and music, as it must have been when the hotel first opened.

  Then she thought of Laurie, who seemed so respectable but who was still the street-fighter she’d always been. She thought of Mick and Laurie Brownscombe and wondered if she’d ever be free of them.

  There was a knock at her office door to tell her that the English party had arrived. She straightened her skirt and went out to meet them. There would be iced lemonade and cookies set out on the porch for them and she liked to be available to answer any questions. She had learned that first impressions were important.

  Esme and Joan had been quarrelling all the way from Houston. About the names of the rivers they crossed, the date Sam Houston set out on his march for freedom and whether McDonald’s used the same quality of beef on both sides of the Atlantic. Neither lady had ever tasted a hamburger. They were sisters and they had always argued.

  In childhood Joan had been considered the brainy one and Esme the pretty one and they continued to play those roles though both were now in their fifties. Joan was the older. She was large, big boned, with wild grey hair. She wore sensible Crimplene slacks and loose, brightly coloured patterned overshirts. She was a primary teacher and talked to Esme as if she were a wayward, slightly backward, eleven-year-old.

  Esme was not much bigger than an eleven-year-old and still now there were traces of the prettiness. Her hair was carefully dyed and permed and she always wore make-up, which Joan considered an extravagance. It was something else to argue about. Esme worked in a tea shop in a smart market town in Somerset. She earned very little and Joan resented having to support her. Of the two, Esme was by far the happier.

  Now she was delighted by the hotel. She pointed to the bluejays and to the hummingbird which came to a feeder to drink. She declared that the lemonade and biscuits were almost as good as those supplied by the Copper Kettle at home. Mary Ann accepted the compliments with a smile but as soon as it was polite she left her visitors chatting and went to join Rob who was standing on the grass, looking up into the canopy of the oaks.

  After leaving the air-conditioned bus Rob found the heat intense. It was like stepping out of a plane in Bombay in the middle of the day. He walked over the coarse grass to the trees which marked the boundary of the hotel’s land. He was listening to the unfamiliar bird calls, trying to get his ear in. Behind him he heard the murmuring of English voices, distracting and intrusive, and he wished that he’d been able to afford to take this as a real holiday. It would have been better if it could have been just him and Oliver and Mick. Like in the old days. But he supposed it could never be like that now. There were Julia and Laurie to consider.

  Mary Ann came up behind him, startling him. He stood awkwardly for a moment. He was never sure how to greet her, whether she expected him to kiss her or if she would think that was too forward. In the end he held out his hand, and she kissed him lightly on either cheek.

  ‘Your English friends have arrived,’ she said.

  ‘The Adamsons? Did you recognize Oliver? I’m not sure I would have done.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I remember you all.’

  ‘What about Mick and Laurie? Have you heard from them?’

  He was still holding her hand and she withdrew it.

  ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘ Not yet.’

  ‘I think I explained when I booked. This is special. A kind of reunion. Twenty years after that first time. Though I’m not sure exactly what we’re celebrating.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘ I was expecting it almost. I was there. I heard you plan it.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘Well you wouldn’t, would you? I was only a kid. Sitting outside an open door, listening to the grown-ups talking.’

  He stood for a moment in silence then gave her one of his smiles.

  ‘There you are then,’ he said easily. ‘It’ll be a real reunion of everyone there. Just as it should be.’

  But as she walked back to the hotel and her guests, he was frowning.

  Chapter Five

  Julia was feeling excluded and she thought, really, it was the height of rudeness. All the in-jokes. All that talk about twenty years ago. All the smutty laughter. It made one wonder what had gone on in that dreadful hire car, in this house. Having met Laurie at last she wouldn’t have put it past her to have had sex with all three of them as a sort of dare. And they wouldn’t have minded sharing. Not those three. One never expected men to be that close, Julia decided petulantly. They weren’t supposed to be friends in the way women were. They were supposed to be more restrained.

  Of course she had asked Oliver what had gone on in High Island that week before he had flown home to make an honest woman of her. She had brought up the subject again on the plane. What, she had demanded as he pretended to watch the movie, had been so important that they needed to get together to remember it?

  But he had been as evasive as only Oliver could.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said in his best solicitor’s voice. ‘We were young and we were friends. That was all.’

  It was too vexing. Julia sulked.

  Laurie had made her appearance just before lunch, when most of the bird watching party had gone to their rooms. Rob and Oliver were chatting and Julia was wondering whether she should risk pulling a lounger into the sun. She had recently read an article on UV light and the premature ageing of the skin. She thought that Laurie couldn’t have timed her arrival better if she’d tried. She was obviously a woman who needed an au
dience.

  The Brownscombes had driven up in a big, boxy car like a Range Rover and Laurie had leapt out at once. She’d been wearing a denim skirt, calf length, but only half buttoned up the front. Then she’d put her arms around Oliver’s neck and started kissing him! Not in a friendly, continental way, as even Julia was accustomed to do now that it had become fashionable. More like a long-lost lover, which perhaps she was. Then she had turned her attentions to Rob and if anything that embrace was even more pornographic. Julia had been forced to turn away through embarrassment.

  They had spent all afternoon in reminiscence, sitting on the lawn with binoculars on the grass beside them, jumping up occasionally and exclaiming when they saw an interesting bird. At one point the woman who ran the hotel joined them and Julia was furious to discover that even she was a party to their secrets.

  It was clear, throughout the afternoon, that Laurie had been doing her best to make a fool out of Oliver. At one point she kicked off her shoes and walked over the grass, her hips swaying, mimicking a woman who had tried to pick him up in a bar in Crystal Beach: ‘Oh, I do so like little English boys. I eat them for my dinner.’

  Now preparing for dinner and still sulking, Julia told herself that it was Laurie’s husband she felt sorry for. She had met Mick Brownscombe before the three of them went off to America. Rob and Oliver had treated him as a bit of a clown, with his farmhand’s accent and his stumbling shyness and she had dismissed him as insignificant. Now, she decided, insignificant or not, anyone who lived with Laurie deserved her pity.

  She and Oliver had been given a large, rather dark room on the ground floor. The windows were covered with wire mesh to keep out the insects, and trees and shrubs grew close to the house. Heavy clouds were developing, covering the sun, but to Julia it still seemed unbearably hot. She suspected that she had brought the wrong sort of clothes and would make a spectacle of herself. Suddenly she felt homesick for an English April, for cool blustery showers, primroses in the hedgerows and daffodils.