The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

I was wholly unprepared for this information. Mrs. Fuller, a mother! But then why not? Simply that she’d given me not a single hint of it. Now a new explanation for the Mercy Room’s appearance came to mind. Rugby ball, cricket stumps, toy galleons, et al. belonged to a flesh-and-blood boy, child of my landlady and her “disappeared” husband?

  “Well I never!” I exclaimed. “And where might Horace Fuller be now?”

  “That’s the burning question, Bridges my friend. It ain’t easy to answer either. Master Fuller was a Black Sheep, you see.”

  It was pointless to pretend I wasn’t curious. “In what sense?”

  “In what sense not? No good at schoolwork, always took a low position in form-orders, embarrassing for Old Fulsome with his vast learning. But that’s a well-known situation, isn’t it? Beak’s son turns out a dunce. But Fuller Junior didn’t make up for his academic failings in other ways, on the playing fields for example. Unlike Yours Truly, he was no Victor Ludorum.”

  “That must have been a bitter disappointment!” And there he’d been in a room enviably full of sporting equipment!

  “We can only pity him. But what I am trying to tell you, Bridges, is no mere matter of failing to conjugate fifth declension Latin verbs or to run the 440 in the proper time. Fuller Junior was a ‘Real Handful’ as the popular expression goes, in constant hot water, to use another one, and nobody knew what to do with him. He didn’t know what should be done either. So he used to run away.”

  Remembering my own unhappy youth, I felt a pang of sympathy for Horace Fuller of whose very existence I’d been ignorant until a few minutes ago. “Running away! Where to?”

  “Not exactly hard to get out of this country from the port of Dengate, is it? More than once he stowed himself on boats just like the ones we can see before us.” For we were now above Dengate’s famous Royal Harbour, looking down through sun-filtered diagonals of rain to its forest of gently swaying perpendiculars: masts of fishing-smacks and yachts. By the small pier on the far side of the harbor a steamer lay in dock, a gleaming black-and-white, sure temptation to any unhappy daydreamer. “But he was no better at stowing away than at anything else, poor young Horace. He was caught and hauled back home—the house Fulsome had named after one of his favorite places, thinking it would bring them all good fortune.”

  But inside that house Horace Fuller had had a room to meet many a boy’s greediest dreams.

  Barton, giving me a mischievous side glance, now said: “Well, Bridges, you haven’t asked what means young Horace had for traveling after he’d crawled out of the holds of scrubby boats. How he could support himself, even as a runaway?”

  Barton Cunningham had a winning card up his sleeve, I could tell from the glint in his eye. We had now turned southwest and were beginning to ascend the rise to the Esplanade. On our right was the prestigious terrace of houses from the Regency, each with a white-painted façade, each with bay windows overlooking the sea, each (from our present perspective) standing a little higher than its neighbor. On our left, the equally white Kentish cliffs fell away to a beach that increased in sandy breadth with every upward step we took. On the seaward side of the Esplanade there stands a little shelter (it has a part to play later on in this history), built in the Chinese or Japanese manner, with red-tiled roof and curved eaves. Here strollers (or town boys out courting) can take a seat and enjoy the splendid view in either direction (or fail to look at it, too preoccupied with other delights).

  “Unfair of me to put questions to you when only I know the answers. Sadly, Horace had no means of self-support whatsoever!”

  “So how . . .?”

  “Use your reporter’s wits, Bridges. We are always meant to be a few jumps ahead of a situation.”

  “He—he appropriated . . .”

  “If you insist on avoiding plain language, yes indeed. Bad Lot Horace appropriated money that by no stretch of morality could be thought his. He stole, in other words. He stole from one of Old Fulsome’s fellow beaks—a distinguished chap, writer of a famous mathematics textbook, one Mr. Azariah Welbeck. As Azzy is the very nicest of men, he wanted the episode to go no further. But then Horace went and stole from Fulsome himself, who had, as ill luck would have it, already reported the theft. I’ve always thought that pretty stupid of the young blade, as well as being against the Good Book’s prescripts. (Breaks at least two commandments, doesn’t it?) The sum was discovered on Horace’s person. So behold, Fulsome Junior was in even hotter water than ever.”

  “But how on earth did Beatrice—Mrs. Fuller—his mother—react to all this?”

  “Well, she can’t have been exactly pleased. What mother would be?”

  “What happened? He didn’t go to prison or anything, did he?”

  “No, they managed to keep it ‘in the family,’ as they say—though not completely so, otherwise I couldn’t be telling you this tale, could I? Nobody in truth wanted the poor lad punished, they just wanted him to mend his ways. Some hope! He was determined never to fit in with anything anybody else wanted of him—and he didn’t budge no matter what others said or did. You could say he had guts! He had his nicer sides, I suppose, but he didn’t let many people see them. He was very friendly, I remember, to a little girl who acted as a sort of skivvy at the Hole. A natural democrat, I suppose.” He didn’t make that sound much of a compliment.

  “So what happened to him? After the—thefts?”

  “The Hole was jolly understanding. The Headmaster and George Fuller joined forces and found some English consul in Rome to take him in for a while. And put him to work. Gardener’s boy, stable-boy, something of that lowly sort. The democratic line again! But I know from Mr. Betterton, my godfather, that Horace is not with that official any longer but has preferred to stay ‘over the seas and far away.’”

  “I couldn’t have deduced any of your story from Castelaniene,” I said, conceding too much advantage to my informer, “but it does shed light on things there.”

  But did it? In finding all those distressed occupants for the Mercy Room was Mrs. Fuller seeking to replace the son who’d deserted her? Or was that clutter of boyhood totems her way of preserving the absent Horace in St. Ethelberga’s Road?

  “Light on what things?” By now I appreciated that Barton Cunningham was a thoroughgoing gossip, who took as well as gave, so I judged it wise to hedge. Looking at him, his pale yet inquisitive eyes, his red hair spangled with raindrops shining in the mild damp sunshine, I felt, as I had several times before, that he was someone I should go carefully with, even though he was the only compensation The Advertiser offered me for those London mates with whom I’d spent so much time these last years.

  “I can’t say without giving the subject a lot more thought,” I said.

  “Well, let me know when you’re ready,” said Barton sarcastically. “You owe me that much, Bridges. Without my revelations you might have remained ignorant of the whole Horace saga, and could have put your foot in things at Castelaniene.”

  I have already done that, more than once, I could well have added. Instead I inquired: “And when did all this take place?”

  “Well, Old Fulsome died year before last, and I’d reckon Horace exchanged our Scepter’d Isle for foreign parts about ten months before that.”

  “He wasn’t back in Dengate for the funeral?”

  “No, he was not. Funny, that!”

  As I was digesting all this, two girls in blue bonnets, both about seventeen, passed us; we were now on the highest point of the Esplanade. Automatically both Barton and I had turned ’round to give their trim healthy prettiness a second glance, which indeed confirmed the favorable first. Had either of us been alone, turning ’round could have been followed by a fleet, cunning retracing of footsteps and some inspired sentence of self-introduction. As it was, we were each hampered by the other’s presence.

  Barton gave a laugh of a distinctly Will Postgate kind. “Now I know a little more about your taste in girls, Bridges.”

  “And me about yours!” I
rejoined.

  Barton stopped in his tracks and took a deep breath. I was about, I appreciated, to learn his real motive for making this roundabout walk with me. He said, “Didn’t I hear Edmund asking you up to his place, for luncheon Sunday-week?”

  I longed to reply: “You know darned well you did! Your ears were close enough to the door!” But instead I nodded a yes.

  “He’s so generous! Asks just about everybody to luncheon some time or other. You will enjoy the occasion, I’m sure. I know Furzebank House pretty well, you see.”

  “Something to look forward to then?”

  “Certainly. You’ll meet his family. I gather they’ll all be at home.”

  How could he possibly have “gathered” this without eavesdropping? And what bally business was it of his anyway?

  “So I understand.”

  “Lucinda will be there.”

  “That’s what Mr. Hough”—I decided to refer to him formally—“told me when he asked me over.” We were now nearing the copious blossoms—almond, pear, cherry—of the Royal Gardens, a place personally dear to the Queen herself as an engraved plaque on its railings proclaims. From the middle of the park tall metal poles of scaffolding reared upwards. A new bandstand, to be ceremonially opened later on in the summer, was under construction, as anyone (everyone) in the town would proudly tell you.

  “You will like Lucinda Hough.” The words came out of my companion awkwardly, almost reluctantly but, I could tell, as the result of a conscious effort on his part. Then, taking another deep breath, and speaking more rapidly than I’d yet heard him do, Barton continued: “She’s a truly remarkable person. She and I have—well, shall we call it an understanding?”

  “You mean you’re beau-ing her about?”

  Barton’s pale face flushed. “I meant what I just said. We have an understanding. So bear that in mind, my friend. She’s not just a lass on the Esplanade for you to fix your greedy lights on.”

  Barton Cunningham and I said goodbye at the side-entrance into the Royal Gardens. Its flowering cherries shimmered in rain-streaked sunlight like a line of girls in some sweet daydream; by now the town end of St. Ethelberga’s Road was within sight. My young colleague had shot his double bolt, and there didn’t seem anything further for us to say to each other. As I had not yet met Lucinda Hough, it seemed foolish and mean-spirited to mind the two of them having this “understanding,” but somehow mind I did, as doubtless Barton had intended. One more proof of what a mere incomer to this society I was! Walking “homeward” along St. Ethelberga’s Road a dreadful thought seized me. What if Hans Lyngstrand, so chatty this morning as we talked across our attic landing, had, during the day, taken a turn for the worse? What if he’d . . . died? The very notion was terrible enough for me to keep my head down for fear I saw drawn curtains or pulled-down blinds in the front bay-windows of Castelaniene.

  I couldn’t dismiss this as melodramatic fancy. Hans provided daily evidence of the seriousness of his condition. And I knew what it was to return home and find blinds down because of Death: one late November afternoon five years ago I found the familiar Walworth Road windows blanked out because my father’s life had come to a sudden end . . . Oh what a relief!—the windows of Castelaniene were no different from when I’d left that morning.

  Back inside the house I discovered Mary, that “delightful little vehicle,” in the hall busy with a feather-duster.

  I had said nothing in letters to London friends about this girl of almost nineteen, whom I found myself unable to call pretty. She had a face like a potato, from which sprouted a button nose, usually raw-red and dripping from a heavy cold, and she invariably had a sty in the eye. She had heavy pendulous breasts not quite commensurate with the rest of her figure. I could well have penned humorous lines about Mary’s failure to fit the hackneyed role of tempting servant wench, but did not. What stayed my hand? Not, I fear, her self-containment and her proud kind of humbleness, merely the fact that, with all her defects, I found the sight of her, especially when engaged on her chores, appealing, if not downright alluring, and did not want to give this truth away. At night-time my thoughts strayed to Mary, lingering on her person far more than was good for me.

  “You’re not usually down here at this time of day, Mary,” I observed breezily and truly. She was, as a rule, upstairs at this hour.

  “Oh no, Mr. Bridges, but today we have had a real turnabout. On account of that Mr. Longstrand.”

  My pulse instantly quickened; my forebodings had been justified after all! “Lyngstrand,” I corrected her, “has anything happened to him? I don’t see any drawn blinds.”

  “Happened? Well, he was taken badly just after luncheon, very badly, Mr. Bridges. Just couldn’t get his breath. Gasping for air like a fish pulled out of the water, he was.”

  “That is bad news, Mary!”

  “But it isn’t all bad, Mr. Bridges,” Mary was looking up at me with a half-smile and an extra shine to her sore little nose. “That Dr. Davies from the Royal came ’round here, and he said Mr. Longstrand had got better more quickly-like from this attack than from any of his earlier ones in the hospital. Real pleased Dr. Davies said he was, for all the poor boy’s cruel puffing and wheezing. But now he’s giving him a thorough going-over just to be on the safe side.” She applied the bunched-up red, green and blue feathers of her duster to the banister rail as if miming Dr. Davies’s attentions to his patient. “Madam says we should look on Mr. Longstrand like some poor wild creature, a deer or a hare, with an injured limb that we’ve rescued from a trap or from them wicked hunters’ hounds. Treat him kind and gentle, and then he’ll be ready to go free, she says. Still, Mr. Bridges”—her small, grayish, sty-afflicted eyes looked soulfully at me—“at one o’clock I felt proper afraid just standing there looking at him. Thought he was about to—disappear, if you get my meaning.”

  Get her meaning. Well, for a second or two I did not. And then—goodness, why had I been so slow on the uptake?

  I must dissemble. “I’m not sure I do get your meaning, Mary, I’m afraid. However could Mr. Hans Lyngstrand . . . disappear?”

  Mary put down the duster and, lowering her gaze, said, “Only too easy, sir. Madam says it’s been Dr. Davies’s view that Mr. Longstrand may likely have done a lot of damage to hisself that can’t be repaired. Through being in the freezing cold sea all that long time.”

  “Terrible! But I still don’t see how he could disappear now he’s safe in Castelaniene and with Dr. Davies still looking after him.”

  “Anybody as ill as him can easily disappear, Mr. Bridges.” Mary’s tone was reproachful.

  “Really! Being ill could make him do . . . what?” I gave a sophisticated little laugh. “Vanish into Dengate Harbour? Fall off the edge of the world?”

  Mary can hardly have cared for the way I was speaking to her, and she glanced up at me with hurt, puffy eyes as if she could scarcely credit such heartless levity. But how else was I going to arrive at the admission I required?

  “Tell me, Mary,” I continued. “Tell me the names of some other persons who have ‘disappeared,’ as Mr. Lyngstrand might, if he’s unlucky.”

  Mary’s mouth dropped open in protest. “But I couldn’t do that, Mr. Bridges. The list would be far too long.”

  “Well, keep to people you know who’ve ‘disappeared’ in the last couple of years. Where is it you live, Mary?”

  “Farthing Lane.”

  “Well, who’s disappeared from Farthing Lane?”

  Mary looked pleadingly at me, but complied nonetheless. “Well, there was my grandpa last November. And poor Aunt Ada at much the same time. And that sweet little boy who lived next door to us—only six years old he was, and the cleverest, most delightful little chap—name of Samuel. And only six weeks ago Mrs. Price at the Post Office, and—”

  No need to listen any further. “Disappeared” was merely a substitute for the hard, disagreeable, frightening word “died.” A euphemism! Helpless, uneducated Mary had adopted it under the in
fluence of her more educated but, in this respect, scarcely more honest, employer. It was, I thought, an even worse alternative to the plain-speech term than the more popular “passed away” or “passed over,” because it had another quite specific meaning, one denoting an altogether different destiny than death. So Edmund Hough and Barton Cunningham had both been right; George Fuller had not gone missing but was dead, was truly “‘the late Mr. Fuller” of Edmund’s initial description. Therefore, my landlady’s coy rhetoric about his “disappearance” was an affectation used to evade the bleak truth, and to ensure that others evaded it also. Nor, I now knew, thanks to Barton, was this the only truth Beatrice Fuller had evaded during my weeks of living under her roof. There was the matter of her son, Horace.

  Indeed, her erratic presentation of her circumstances was enough to vex somebody far less intent on facts than a young journalist such as myself. The woman had had a husband who had died but whom she preferred to describe as “having disappeared.” And she had a son who actually had disappeared, but whom, by never once alluding to his existence past or present, she was treating as though he were—well, dead!

  I was, I realized, standing before the geometrical squares and rectangles of the real Castelaniene’s medieval houses in that framed photogravure in the hall. It occurred to me that the Italian scene contained clues to these problems which sooner or later I would understand.

  I went upstairs after supper, bound for my room with Mrs. Gatty’s famous book on the seashore because I’d been told—by Mr. Thomas Betterton, no less—that, in view of the community our newspaper served I oughtn’t to be quite so obviously ignorant about marine life as I was. But just as I was putting my hand on the doorknob, Hans called out to me. His own door was yet again ajar. Well, wasn’t he himself “marine life”? The survivor from the sea.

  Though the day’s attack had plainly wearied him, deepening those hollows in his face, he was, in general aspect, far better than I’d expected, in fact to use Edmund’s and Beatrice Fuller’s favorite adjective, surprisingly cheerful. Dr. Davies’s honest opinion that his system had coped with the weakness in his lungs more vigorously and effectively than before had acted on him like some fast-working tonic. And doubtless he was pleased to be in a proper house (if Castelaniene could be so called) rather than a hospital, and to have a friendly housemate his own age. Now Hans could see health as something to be reached out for and held on to, like boughs laden with golden apples. Until today it had appeared more like one of those apples-on-a-string with which children torment each other at Halloween, something dangled and then withdrawn.