by Ann Swinfen
‘Ayuh. But what if you get hit, when you’re under water?’
Wayne shrugged. ‘Drownin’ is drownin’, in a fishin’ boat or a submarine. Don’t make no difference.’
Simon did not answer, but he had a sudden picture, sharp and clear, of being trapped beneath the ocean in a holed submarine with the water coming in slowly and no way of escape. He clenched his teeth, and the grass stem snapped, laying a sour-sweet green taste over his tongue.
‘Anyways,’ said Wayne regretfully, ‘I guess the war will be over before we’re old enough to enlist.’
‘I guess so.’
Tirza had not joined Simon and the others watching the soldiers installing the gun. She could not understand what they found so interesting about it. The foxholes along Libby’s Beach had been bad enough, but it turned out that they were not going to be manned all the time. Once a week a jeep containing two soldiers bounced down the track from the farm to the sea. The soldiers would get out, stretch, have a smoke, and then stroll along the top of the ledges, glancing casually into each foxhole to check that everything was in order. Then they would saunter on. By taking their time, they could make the walk along to Todd’s Neck fill the entire morning. Several of the regulars on these patrols soon made friends with the chef at the Mansion House, who would invite them into the hotel kitchen for a bite of lunch.
In the afternoon they would inspect the cove where Eel Joe had his hut, and pass the time of day with him. Their route terminated at the inlet leading into the sea-fed lake where Joe caught his eels. Beyond that the land was too boggy for foxholes and was guarded offshore by rocks like gaping teeth. There was no risk of an enemy craft attempting to land there. The less squeamish of the soldiers would finish the inspection by partaking of a cup of Eel Joe’s coffee. There was nothing wrong with the coffee, but the old man, his upturned boat, and his thick white mugs all shared the same potent perfume of dead eel.
As afternoon wore on, the soldiers would usually return along the beach to their jeep and drive back to camp. If, on the other hand, they walked smartly up the coastal path past the Tremayne place, there might be time to go on into Flamboro for a beer before returning. There were some pretty girls to be whistled at, and the townsfolk were inclined to be friendly. All in all, being assigned to inspect the foxholes south of Flamboro was soon regarded as a plum day’s job.
Tirza kept out of the way of the soldiers, whether they were inspecting the foxholes or installing the gun or strolling around Flamboro visiting the two bars and peering in the window of Mrs Larrabee’s store, looking for gifts for their wives and sweethearts. She resented their presence. Even though they went nowhere near Libby’s Beach six days out of every seven, she felt as though they had contaminated it. When she walked that way, she stayed down on the fine silver sand of the beach itself, under the sheltering wall of the ledges, where she could not see the rough ramparts of the sandbags and could pretend to herself that things were the way they used to be.
About halfway along the beach to Todd’s Neck the wall of rocks thrust out a wedge suddenly into the sand, before curving back again. Most of the rock along the shore was made up of the sloping layers of granite that form the Maine coastline and lie beneath the soil further inland as well. But here in this one place the rocks were different. Petrified trees which had grown here millions of years ago had left a strange cluster of stumps. Ancient dry land had once spread out where the ocean now rolled. The fishermen hereabouts still thought of the sea-bed in terms of lost hills and valleys, and Christina had told Tirza old Indian tales of the vanished lands under the ocean.
It was at this spot, where she could lay her hand against the petrified side of a tree once surrounded by meadows and valleys, that the sense of time and change became real for Tirza. Once, the thought had simply given her a thrill, as she strove to understand such a gulf of time. Now, though, the ancient trees with their stone roots deep in the shifting sand partly comforted and partly frightened her. They had endured, and they would continue to endure. The coast itself had slipped, heaved and sunk, but only gradually, over aeons of time. But now, it seemed, the war, the army, the strangers coming here, were violently rearranging the face of the land. Tirza felt unsafe.
It was about this time that Tirza began to dream.
Usually, her sleep was deep and dark, and she awoke with no memory of the night-time hours. The dreams at first left no more than fragments in her waking mind – a sense of unease, of a conversation interrupted or some task of inexplicable importance left unfinished. Waking, she felt driven to recapture the dream, to complete whatever she had left undone, but sleep would elude her, leaving her tired and peevish.
Later, the dreams became longer, clearer. She was running through blackened streets and the buildings on every side leaned slowly towards her. There were no explosions, no noise, yet she knew that she ran through a bombed city whose walls collapsed lazily, like heavy waves, behind her. As they fell, they threw up spumes of white powder, like wild water out at sea, but she knew she was on land from the heat and the dust-filled air that choked her. She had been charged with some task, and failed. But what it was or where she was going, she could not tell.
It seemed at last that she was dreaming all night. The flight lasted for hours till she woke gasping and exhausted. There were flames now in the city. They reared up behind the buildings, towering into a sky that was silver and black in ragged patches. Her sheets were soaking with sweat in the morning. Her hair plastered flat against her skull.
Tirza avoided the farm these days. She had not visited since her bicycle ride in the dark along the coast path, and she had hardly seen the family there. Abigail reported that Martha kept to her room. Harriet and Tobias were busy with the spring seasonal work on the farm, and when Simon came into Flamboro he spent his time with Wayne or hanging around the soldiers, who were now manning the gun permanently, sleeping and keeping watch in shifts.
Nathan was glad of Tirza’s help on Louisa Mary, and their catches of lobsters were middling good this year. Her own crabbing had fallen off a little after the early days, but it was picking up again. Now that the school vacation had started, the summer people were arriving, and visitors were thronging to the Mansion House as if they had never heard of the war. Tirza planned to lay a second crab line so she would have more crabs to sell to them. Flamboro was accustomed to this annual influx of summer people. Most of them had come for years, and the outbreak of war did not seem to be deterring them. Some stayed in rooms in Flamboro and others rented cottages on the surrounding farms. There were even two small houses in Flamboro itself which belonged to outlanders who spent their summers down Maine every year. One was owned by an elderly couple from Boston who were friends of the Penhaligons, the other belonged to a French family from Quebec.
One bright morning with a promise of real heat later on, Tirza set off in Stormy Petrel with two bushels of crabs. She didn’t like her fishing gear messing up her catboat, but it was the easiest way to transport the crabs to the Mansion House. As she hoisted the sail the breeze was light, but once she rounded the headland south of Flamboro harbour it freshened and Stormy Petrel heeled over. The baskets slid to the lee side and some of the crabs started to scrabble frantically. With her hands full, Tirza had no time to attend to the crabs and as the basket leaned one or two of the bolder ones managed to climb out and skittered about the bottom boards, snapping their claws and blowing bubbles amongst her tackle. Her feet, as usual in warm weather, were bare, so she propped them up on the opposite gunwale and kept one eye on the sail and the shore line and the other on the ranging crabs.
The east-north-east wind carried her past Libby’s Beach on one long reach, then she came about and began tacking along the narrow causeway to the island-like promontory of the Neck itself. The Mansion House stood at the very end of Todd’s Neck, with its wide wrap-around porch overlooking the ocean. The pier that served the hotel was a little further on, and Tirza headed south again, fetching up against the smart r
ed and white fenders hung alongside the damp barnacled timbers on festoons of rope. The wharf at Flamboro had fenders made of old tyres, but the owners of the Mansion House kept rather higher standards. Tyres or fancy fenders made no difference to Tirza. She took a pride in laying Stormy Petrel so gently alongside the piers that she did not even brush them.
She climbed on to the pier and secured the painter to a post with a round turn and a couple of half hitches, then she knelt down and fished around the bottom of the boat for the escaped crabs. She caught three of them and piled them back into one of the bushel baskets. The others could wait till she came back. She lifted the basket out of the boat and, balancing it on her hip, started up the path to the kitchen door of the Mansion House.
‘You bring me nice fresh crabs, eh?’ said Pierre Lamotte, head chef, standing hands on hips in the centre of his great kitchen and regarding her with his head on one side.
‘Great crabs, Monsewer Lamotte,’ said Tirza.
Pierre maintained the pretence to the management and guests that he had trained in one of the top restaurants in his native Paris, but late one evening, when Tirza had delivered some of her father’s lobsters, he had admitted – after a consoling bottle of Bordeaux – that he had taught himself to cook in his mother’s workmen’s café in Montreal, a town to which his family had emigrated in the twenties.
‘These Philistines,’ he said now, shaking a mournful head, ‘they do not know a crayfish from a prime lobster. They would not recognise a filet mignon if it jumped up and kissed them in the eye, so!’ He snapped his fingers in front of her nose.
Tirza wouldn’t have recognised a filet mignon either, but she certainly understood shellfish. She had a mutually pleasing agreement with Pierre that she would supply as many of her best crabs as possible to the hotel restaurant, and he would pay her only ten per cent less than he would pay the adult fishermen – more than she could sell them for anywhere else. In return she respected his confidences, which were many.
‘Is this all you bring me today?’
‘I have another basket down in my boat. Some of the crabs escaped. I’ll go get the rest of them.’
When she had retrieved the remaining crabs, including one which managed to nip her as she felt for it under the foredeck, Pierre counted out her money from a roll of creased dollar bills and she stowed them in the hip pocket of her shorts. She always delivered the crabs at his quiet period, around ten in the morning, when the breakfasts were cleared, but before the rush for lunches began. The Mansion House had been built to the highest standards of Victorian gourmandising, back in the days when the Todd family still lived here. In addition to the vast central kitchen – where six modern electric stoves now formed an island in the middle with tables and sinks arranged around the walls – there were specialised rooms for every kind of food. Pierre’s assistants were busy preparing vegetables in one of these and filleting fish in another, which boasted solid marble slabs and an underground stream to keep it cool. There was a game room and a cheese room, also cooled by the stream, and a whole range of larders. Along the centre of the corridor which ran from the main kitchen between these subsidiary rooms was laid a set of rails, like a miniature railroad track. A heavy wooden trolley, made of solid oak and holding four tiers of shelves, ran on wheels along these rails to serve all parts of the kitchen wing. When Tirza had first been shown the Mansion House’s kitchen arrangements she had been astonished, but now she took it for granted.
Having delivered her crabs to the fish room, Tirza sat down with Pierre at one of the scrubbed pine tables in the main kitchen and drank the citron pressé he always gave her. There was usually a bowl of leftover dessert from the previous night’s dinner as well. Today it was some complicated confection of meringue, hazelnuts and chocolate.
‘When will your uncle’s strawberries be ready?’ Pierre asked, sipping his small cup of black coffee. For a chef besotted with cooking he was remarkably abstemious of both food and drink except when life became particularly trying.
‘Not for a few weeks yet. I’ll let you know as soon as we start picking.’
Tirza plunged her fork into the hazelnut mixture and sampled it carefully.
‘This is great – crunchy and fluffy at the same time.’
‘I was desolé to hear about your cousin’s ‘usband, ma p’tite.’
Tirza stared down at her plate. She did not know how to respond when people referred to Will’s death, but Pierre did not seem to expect anything from her.
‘Always it is the young lost in war, and their families left to mourn.’ He swirled the coffee in his cup. ‘My young brother, ‘e went back to France when war was declared. We have ‘eard nothing since the Nazis overran the country.’
‘Oh, Pierre, I didn’t know. You never told me.’
Pierre shrugged, making an odd, despairing gesture with his hands, as though his thoughts slipped away through his fingers.
‘Perhaps ‘e is safer there than with the Free French in England. Have you ‘eard about our new guest?’
Tirza shook her head. The guests at the Mansion House were of no interest to her, except as consumers of her crabs.
‘It is an English pilot. Convalescing.’
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘It is very exciting, very romantic – like a John Buchan novel, yes? This young man, ‘e is a fighter pilot, and ‘e is in one of these so-called dogfights.’
‘Dogfights?’
‘Tiens, p’tite, do you take no interest in the war? This is when the planes on both sides fight one-to-one in the sky, like old-fashioned warriors. Only sometimes it is not so sporting. Three German planes attacked this pilot’s Spitfire, and ‘is plane caught fire. ‘E managed to land the plane on the water and get out, with ‘is rubber raft. Me, I don’t see ‘ow you can land a plane on water. It seems impossible – you might as well say you can walk on water. But this is what they say ‘e did.’
‘But why is he here?’
‘The plane crashes a long way off the west coast of Cornwall. That is the bottom left corner of England, tu comprends? Doubtless you are also ignorant of la géographie. Then ‘e drifts in ‘is raft for a week, and is discovered by one of the convoys carrying supplies from America. The convoy, it was on the return journey west, so the ship’s doctor, ‘e mends this pilot as best ‘e can and they bring ‘im with them. They cannot turn back for one man.’
‘Was he hurt?’
‘‘E breaks both legs when the plane ‘its the sea, and there is much tearing of flesh and muscles. Also, ‘e suffers from exposure. They keep ‘im in ‘ospital for some weeks in New York, then someone suggests the Mansion ‘ouse for ‘is convalescence.’
‘I guess he can’t go back to England till he’s well.’
‘No. ‘E still cannot walk properly. In the meantime ‘e stays with us, and for once I have a guest ‘oo understands good food.’
‘Well, I hope he likes my crabs.’ Tirza was losing interest in the English pilot. ‘What time is it? I have to go help my dad.’
‘Mon Dieu! It is nearly eleven! Away with you.’
‘See you tomorrow.’ Tirza picked up her two empty baskets and ran down the path back to the pier.
It was time to paint the inside of the cow barn. Tobias had already painted the outside in the same dull rusty crimson as every other barn in the State of Maine. Hector Swanson had just had his barn painted in the same red by the company which made Beech-Nut Chewing Tobacco.
‘It’s a prime deal, Mr Libby,’ Hector had assured Tobias. ‘They come back and paint your barn every year for free.’
‘Not for free,’ Tobias grumbled. ‘They cover one whole side with advertising. On my barn that’d be the side facing the road. The same side as everyone coming up the farm track sees when they come to the house. I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t even hold with chewing tobacco. Dirty habit.’
‘It’s the way things are going. Farmers have to be commercial these days. Those who can’t move with th
e times aren’t going to survive. Look at all those ruined places up on Mount Manenticus. Nothing left up there but cellar holes now.’
‘That was the Depression. And folks trying to farm land that wasn’t ever meant for farming. That’s timber land.’
‘True enough. But if you can cut down on costs, it increases your profit margin, or else it frees the cash for other improvements. Like my new milking machine.’
Tobias snorted. Conversations with Hector always ended up with his new milking machine these days. Hector Swanson was the first farmer in the county to install an all-electric milk operation, and he was as pleased as a dog with two tails.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Tobias. ‘Don’t think I’ll be going over to the electric. It costs extra diesel to run the Kohler system to produce the extra electricity. Milking the cows yourself doesn’t cost anything.’
‘It costs your time – or Sam’s or Mrs Libby’s.’
‘Got to pay Sam his wages anyhow. And Harriet and me might as well do the milking by hand as stand around waiting for a machine to do it. Besides...’
He gave Hector an ironic look.
‘Read in my farming magazine the other day about a farmer in Kansas. He gets his cows all hooked up to one of those machines and starts it running. There’s a storm coming on, but he doesn’t think anything to it. Then lightning strikes his generator and all his cows are electrocuted along the wires. Act of God, that’s what it was. Whole thing’s against nature.’
Tobias was glad he did not have a load of machinery to move now he was going to whitewash the inside of the cow barn. It needed to be done fast, between morning and evening milking, for the minimum disruption. Yesterday Simon had forked the remaining hay down from the hayloft into the hayrack and Sam had hauled it round the back of the barn out of the way. Then the two of them had swept the place clean after evening milking. Harriet, looking round after they were done, had clicked her tongue but said nothing. She tied a bunch of damp rags to the end of a long pole and went round the barn again, sweeping down the spiders’ webs and the dust that lurked around the rafters and the window frames. Tirza and Nathan were coming to help with the whitewashing, so with all of them working it should be possible to finish in the one day.