by Cole Moreton
Thirty Six
Tell her about the bird.
What?
The wheatear. That’s a good one.
‘The bird?’ He says out it loud, too loudly, and Sarah turns to look at him. ‘Er, you know the bird there, that went by the win-dow? The little one there, just for a moment? You were lucky. It’s called a wheatear, and there’s a story. Do you want to hear it?’
She looks away as if it doesn’t matter to her either way.
‘I’ll take that as a yes. There used to be a lot of them. Listen.’ He picks the old green book from a pile and thumbs the pages. The cracked skin on his thumb is sore. ‘Here. “In one season, shepherds on the Downs caught one thousand eight hundred and forty dozen birds. They sold them for a penny a piece.” They hide away in rabbit holes now. You were really lucky to see one.’
Please respond, he thinks. Come on, work with me.
‘Okay, so that’s the bird. The wheatear. It used to be called something else, but the Victorians didn’t like that. White arse.’
Is that a smile? Maybe a hint of one.
‘So, the story. There was a guy called Wilson, who lived in a big house out there. This was during the Civil War. A secret royalist in a landscape full of Roundheads.’ He feels his voice warming up, and takes pleasure in the physical sensation of talking like this. ‘He didn’t get out much. Gout. Leg like an elephant. All that claret, probably. So he was in bed when the soldiers came to get him. A whole platoon, a dozen maybe, I don’t know, on horseback and armed, coming to search the house. The servants saw them coming, the Wilsons were warned.’
Is he getting this right? It doesn’t really matter. There are brown marks on the edges of the page, literary liver spots. Sarah has sat down now, on the window ledge, and she’s studying the hill.
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‘Mary Wilson was there when they arrived. The lady of the house. She was all smiles . . .’
Will he do the voice? No. Not today.
‘She said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Something like that. She was scared. They could take him away and leave her ruined.’ He finds himself walking up and down the room, talking more easily. ‘They would have rushed upstairs, but she had a plan. Well,
a pie.’
Is Sarah listening or just sitting this out?
‘She ordered the cook to bring out food and invited the lieu-tenant to sit down to eat something, it says in here. He was hun-gry. The barracks were half a day away. I don’t know if he was surprised by her hospitality, maybe it was just expected. But he sat down and out came the most enormous pie he’d ever seen in his life. The size of a wheel. The depth of a bucket. It smelt gor-geous.’ The word feels good in his mouth. ‘“What’s in it?” said the soldier. She said, “White arse.” Now he got excited. He thought she was flirting with him. They always do, don’t they?’
Do they?
Is that what he’s doing? His eyes are on the back of Sarah’s head, the tight twists of copper on her crown . . . No, keep going.
‘This was the most expensive pie he had ever seen. He wanted a taste, badly, but he also had a chance to show off to his men. No officer ever turned down one of those. So he commanded them: “Come here and feast.” They made a right old mess of the table. Flakes of pastry and smears of pie all over the place, on the floor, on their uniforms. They were loving it.’
Gabe stops, suddenly too close to Sarah. Within touching dis-tance, looking down on her head. She still won’t turn around. He hears his own breathing and stops it, for as long as he can bear. But then he bursts, of course, and feels like a stalker. He steps back and folds himself down to sit on the floor. Closer to her level. But he doesn’t reach out, doesn’t encroach. He begins to speak again, more at ease with the telling now.
‘While they were filling their faces, Mary slipped out of the room and upstairs to her husband, who was half out of bed, trying
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to hear what was going on. He said nothing, but pointed to the bottom drawer of his chest. Before he could make any kind of ges-ture to tell her there was a secret compartment, she had released the catch and pulled it out. That shocked him. What other secrets of his did she know? She took out a leather folder, emptied it of papers and pushed them into the fire that was heating his room.’
Now Gabe glances down at the book – he wants to get the next line right. ‘Listen to this. “The flames rose once for his love for the king, once for his love of money and once for his love of another. Mary watched them burn.” Lovely stuff.’ He reaches a palm towards the wood stove warming this room, glowing orange, as if to push the papers inside. He knows she’s listening now. ‘So, that’s it. They found nothing. William got away with it because of Mary’s pie. He was made a baronet when the king returned. On his coat of arms he put a wheatear. Least he could do.’
There is silence in the room again, for a long while. Aware of his heavy breathing, Gabe gets up and moves away, puts the book down. The wind rattles a window frame.
‘What happened to her?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just a story.’
‘You must,’ says Sarah.
Oh God. Why did he start this?
Because I said so, Gabe.
He hands Sarah the book, his thumb on a paragraph. She reads out loud, which distresses him. ‘“After the death of his wife at a young age, Sir William asked a clergyman in Kent to take on the education of their six children.”’ The next sentence is underlined in pencil. ‘“It hath pleased God for my” . . . er . . . “sinnes to take from mee . . . my dear wife, one of the best of women, as being too good for me . . .”’
Oh Lord. He wants to be sick.
Sarah looks up from the page and sees his face changed. The desolation makes her go quickly back to the words, smoothing the page, running her thumb along the edge.
‘It is a good story,’ she says, wondering what else to say. Or do. She had not thought about that until now. He’s skinny but tough,
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there is nowhere to run. Is that the cost of staying here? The surge of panic is a surprise, a jangling new sound in the white noise of her non-emotions. She is everything and nothing now, too far gone to care. She will see out her time, see the dawn and take her steps; there is no way to stop it now, nothing can get in her way, but here is this man. In her face. So sad. So hurt. Whatever he is, whatever he wants, he is not dangerous. Time is passing. The day is coming. She has nothing to say, nothing. But perhaps words are what he wants in return for letting her stay. Hopefully they are, anyway. We’ll see. ‘I have a question, actually.’
‘Sure.’
‘Was there a bird? Outside?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘A wheatear?’
‘Ah. Maybe not,’ he says, rubbing his cheeks, feeling warmth return to them. Feeling grateful to her for the jolt, for moving him on. The room is cold now, away from the stove. ‘No, I have to confess there wasn’t.’
‘Pity. I like a pie. One other thing . . .’ Such cool, clear eyes she has.
‘Go on?’
‘What happened to her? Ree, is it?’
‘Yes, Rí. Maria.’
‘Where did she go?’
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Thirty Seven
Can I show her?
Why do you want to?
I have to. I don’t know.
Why?
She wants to know.
I don’t care.
I want to show her.
That’s more like it. Why?
I don’t know.
She won’t shag you.
I don’t care.
You want it then.
I . . . don’t care.
You’re showing off.
Showing off what? Myself? No. You. I’m showing off you, Maria.
I’m proud of you. Who you are, what you did, what you made.
How you saw. How you taught me to see.
Showing off the woman you made?
; No. You made me. You saved me.
I never understood how you could say that.
I never understood how you could not see it.
Show her. I don’t care.
I want you to care. I need you to care.
You’re asking for the moon, my star.
Yes.
Yes, Gabe.
Yes?
Yes.
And so he asks Sarah to follow him up the tight, narrow staircase, conscious of his breathing again. ‘Climb with me.’ One turn and
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another, almost to the top but not quite. And there he stops, with the sky falling down from the lantern room, a cloud of light on the stairs. It is ignored, this time, for the sake of a heavy wooden door opening into a tight room with a high bunk, a curved room with a deep-set window. He lets her go through first. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust and he knows when it is happen-ing for Sarah because she breathes a little faster and she makes a noise, the slightest sound, like a sigh and a gasp together, at the sight of it, the wonder of it.
The room full of glory. The glorious room.
What does she see? First, feathers turning in the air by the door, close to her face. White and grey, silver and black, gossamer crea-tures trembling at her breath. The shadows of birds, the echo of wings, the rumour of angels. Then the faces coming into focus on the walls. Fine line drawings. A haunted old man, an elegant old woman, a young girl with sunshine in her hair, a boy with pride and terror in his eyes, his youth subsiding. There are more. Strong faces and weak faces, handsome ones and ugly chops, cor-pulent or arrow-sharp, each rendered with the same sure marks, the same fine detail.
‘These are . . .’
Yes, wonderful. He waits. Outside, a cloud gives way. Fingers of light tickle the window frame and flick at the colours on the floor, ringing them like bells. Flashes of green and gold, stabs of yellow, fracturing blues, all somehow becoming music, a rising, shimmering, jangling, tinkling collision of colour and sound, and Sarah sees that it is a mosaic of sorts. A magpie mosaic made with scraps of this and twists of that: buttons and brass, fabric and foil, spirals of wire and tiny bells, set out as a picture wider than deep, organized in ways she cannot quite understand.
‘Step back,’ he says.
So she steps back and sees at last. The sea, the chalk face, the cliff tops. The hills, the valleys, the farms. The lighthouse with the lantern shining. ‘That is amazing. It is just . . .’
‘Rí,’ he says, bending down to touch the materials. Caressing them, as if touching a beloved face. ‘This is who she is.’
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Sarah leaves him be and takes refuge up in the lantern room. There are ships in the Channel and clouds drifting back one by one from a moody gathering over France. Just inland, above the slope of the hill, a bird of prey is in her eyeline, hovering over the gorse and heather, letting the wind flow through its wings, looking down, watching and waiting. An angel with claws.
Gabe comes up at last, a lost look still on his face. ‘I didn’t . . .
I haven’t shown that to anyone.’
‘No. Thank you.’
‘She is more than that. More even than that. The one I cried out for, before I even knew her.’
Sarah looks at his hands turning over themselves in front of him, as Gabe sits down on the bench and leans forward. Tanned hands, trembling slightly. Strong wrists, covered by shirt sleeves. Is he strong? She cannot tell. He is burning energy all the time. His hair is like a Big Bang in slow motion, all grown out and left to stick up where it wants, but that’s okay, there’s a messy charm to it. His sideburns are ginger and silver, and his stubble sparkles. There’s a stupid little burst of hair under his lip, a soul patch that makes her smile, how silly, but the scar next to it says no, take me seriously. And his eyes say something else. Look what I have seen.
‘Tell me,’ she says, a teacher again. ‘If you want to.’
‘There was a bomb. A mine. I was in the desert, in a truck with some lads. Embedded. We flipped over. Then it was dark and really quiet. The lad next to me was crying for his mum.’ He looks at her, for reassurance that he should go on. ‘My mum’s gone, Sarah. Long ago. I was crying for . . . this sounds funny. Someone I didn’t know. I’d been looking, all my life. The one who would understand, who would look at me and know me, everything about me and just get it. Accept it. I knew she must be out there somewhere. I wanted to live long enough to meet her. Sounds foolish.’
‘Not to me. Were you hurt?’
‘The lad lost his legs. They flew us home.’
Gabe turns back the cuff of his shirt, then pushes it up to his elbow. The skin underneath becomes hairless, pink and shiny
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like plastic, like the arm of an Action Man melted in a fire and reformed. ‘It’s not much . . .’
People flinch, he’s ready for that, but Sarah wants to touch. ‘After that, I didn’t want to be the fearless war reporter any
more. Turned out I wasn’t fearless. So I stayed at home and made a new career out of talking to the wounded. Helping them to tell their stories. After a while, it was natural to start doing the same for other people: not soldiers any more, but mums and dads, brothers and sisters of the disappeared, mostly. Missing children. Names you might know from the news. When a little boy or girl – it was mostly girls – went missing, I’d go and see their parents, talk to the family, the neighbours, the teachers, whoever.
‘The first time, your heart breaks. The second time, not so much. Third, fourth, fifth, whatever, it becomes routine. “Where was she last seen? Where might she have gone? Who might she be with?” The police are appealing for information, they are all over the reporters, we’re their best friends, everyone in the village loves us because we’re trying to help. Then a body is found, and the miss-ing persons inquiry becomes a murder investigation. Suddenly they all feel like suspects, and we’re prying. We’re vampires. We should be ashamed, apparently. The circle closes, just like it does in the Army after a colleague gets hit or a soldier fires on a boy, by accident. I saw that. The back of his head blooming like a rose on the wall behind. Almost beautiful. Isn’t that a terrible thing to say?
‘I saw terrible things, wrote about terrible things, but writ-ing about it does not remove the guilt you feel, as if you as the observer were somehow making it happen. And it got to me, Sarah. That’s not how it’s supposed to go. But listen . . .’ He rolls down the sleeve of his shirt carefully over the pink, wrinkled skin and stands, moving to the window. ‘I didn’t come here to get away from anything; quite honestly, it was not to escape. It was to live. The Romantics came here to get their kicks, in search of the sub-lime. They felt more alive when they looked over the edge of the cliffs, or even climbed up them, because it was so scary. It doesn’t do that for me, I stay away. But I do feel different here. Better. I did.
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‘I came with her to begin again, in simplicity. We both wanted to be in a place where it was simple – which is funny, because here there is simplicity on a grand scale, strange as that sounds. You know what I mean. Spectacular simplicity. Breathtaking. Look out there. It does take my breath away, still. Huge skies, miles and miles of rolling Downs, immense cliffs, the wide sea. Something about the scale makes it restful. There’s a peace to be had in sitting here, whatever the weather. There was, anyway.’
There was. Before.
‘I have seen some beautiful places. The glaciers of Iceland. A pink lake in Senegal. The bay at the back of the beach on the island of Iona – there you go. But they are not mine and this place is mine, it felt like that as soon as I came here. Our place. We came together, but I was not just being nice or trying to get on her good side, although it was always worth being there. I meant it. I felt it. My place. There is a symmetry that appeals. The sea and the sky. The white and the green, the chalk and the down. The drop and the rise. Falling and rising. Falling again and rising again. The orderliness of the fields, the ordina
riness of that deep, dark English greenery, that thousand-year-old landscape, farmed and tended and walled and sown and ploughed now as it was then. You can remember, here. Things you don’t even know you have forgotten.’
‘How can that be?’
‘The way we were before the engine, the flight to the cities, before the loss of the land. It’s sentimental nonsense, I know. Stop me. I don’t even know the names of the flowers here – what’s a weed and what’s a plant – or the birds. I only know the white arse from a book. I’m a city boy. But even I feel it, Sarah. I can sit out there and feel the calm of a settled landscape. The soft curves and rounded slopes, as a Victorian poet said. Nothing complicates it. Nothing that sticks, anyway.’