by Ann Swinfen
It was a symptom of the times, Harriet thought, that she should be sitting in church in her Sunday clothes at eleven o’clock on a weekday morning watching her best friend’s son getting married. With barely twenty-four hours’ notice, Pete and Julia had informed their families and friends that they had decided to have the wedding at once, while Pete was home, since they didn’t know when he would next have any leave. Julia’s parents had arrived overnight on a train from Philadelphia. Mr Bennett was white-haired and distinguished looking. Her mother, small and plump, seemed the kind of woman who under normal circumstances would have joyfully organised a full-blown wedding with half a dozen bridesmaids and two hundred guests. Instead, she looked hollow-eyed and grey with fatigue after the journey.
Julia, wearing her mother’s wedding dress – hastily taken in that very morning to fit her – was too lively and too bright of eye. Pete was square-jawed and sombre. Mary told Harriet that he had been against the wedding at first.
‘He said he didn’t want to leave her a widow. But Julia said she would rather be married to him for two days than not at all, so they agreed it in the end. It’s terrible they have to think like that, and all these young girls, widowed... Oh, Harriet, I’m so sorry!’ Her hand flew to her mouth.
‘It’s all right, Mary,’ Harriet said. ‘Martha and Will had eight years together. They were luckier than some.’
Sitting here now, watching Pete slip the ring on Julia’s finger, Harriet wondered what her daughter was thinking. Martha had taken a seat in the pew in front of her parents, next to that British airman Tirza had been so taken up with. Since Martha and he had wandered off down the darkened beach on the night of the Independence Day party, Harriet had seen them together twice. Captain Tucker hadn’t been around. Sandy – that was the airman’s name. He was sitting with his arm across the pew, curved behind Martha’s shoulders, almost an embrace – a disgraceful way to behave in church. Harriet caught back a sigh that rose involuntarily to her lips.
All of the Libby family had come to Pete’s wedding, except Tirza, who had run home yesterday morning, Abigail said, complaining of pains in her stomach. She had taken to her bed and been there ever since, refusing all food and only drinking a little water.
‘Well,’ Harriet said delicately, ‘she’s going on thirteen, she’s about the right age...’ She wasn’t sure how much Abigail had informed Tirza about the facts of a woman’s life.
‘No,’ said Abigail briskly, ‘I don’t think it’s that. Indigestion, I expect.’
It wasn’t like Tirza, though. Harriet could not remember her ever being ill, except for a bout of measles. Tirza and Simon had both caught it during their first month at school. On her way to the wedding, Harriet had looked in on Tirza, who lay curled up in a ball, with her face to the wall.
‘I’m OK, I’ll be OK,’ she said snappily. ‘Have you seen the whale?’
‘You saw it, then? Was that what upset you?’
‘No!’ Tirza shouted. ‘I told you, I’m sick to my stomach.’
‘There’ve been crowds going to see the whale. Everybody from round about, and summer people from as far away as Camden.’
‘That’s disgusting.’
‘Well, you don’t often see a whale up that close,’ said Harriet mildly. ‘It’s just harmless curiosity.’
‘I hope they all fall over the cliff,’ said Tirza angrily. ‘Why can’t they leave it alone? Why can’t people just leave people alone?’
She buried her face in her pillow then, and Harriet thought she might be crying, so after a minute she withdrew tactfully.
Something was definitely wrong with her, and Harriet didn’t think it was stomach ache. Tirza had always been such a straightforward girl, even-tempered and poised, grown-up for her years. Yet she still had a kind of childlike innocence that made her vulnerable. This time Harriet was unable to suppress her sigh before it escaped and Tobias looked at her in surprise, with his eyebrows raised interrogatively. She shook her head and picked up her hymn book.
The Fletts and the Bennetts had organised a hasty wedding party in the back yard of the store, but the young couple left very soon for a few hours of honeymoon, which they were spending no further away than the Mansion House. As a wedding present the four parents were paying for them to have two nights of privacy there.
‘After the war, there will be time to be thinking about dishes and sheets and all those matters,’ Mary said to Harriet, wiping her eyes as Pete and Julia drove away in Charlie’s battered old Dodge.
‘Where is Julia going to live?’
‘We wanted her to come to us, but she is staying on in her rooms at Marion Larrabee’s. I suppose she likes her independence.’
‘Will she go on teaching school?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Different from when we were girls, isn’t it?’
‘No harm for a girl to have a job of her own, as long as she gives it up when the babies start coming.’
After three days Pierre came to Flamboro to scold Tirza for failing to deliver her crabs. The Mansion House, he pointed out, had come to depend on her and she was jeopardising his reputation as the finest seafood chef on the Maine coast. She looked at him wanly and said she supposed she could manage to deliver the next day. She was sitting in the parlour, a room she hated, with a blanket wrapped around her. Despite the July heat outside, she was cold.
‘Bien. I rely on you.’ Pierre searched his mind for some gossip to cheer her up. ‘Our friend Sandy, ‘e ‘as made a conquest.’
Tirza lifted expressionless eyes to his face.
‘The beautiful woman on the beach – I did not know that this is your cousin, p’tite. Twice they ‘ave dinner in the ‘otel, and they go for moonlight walks along the cliff. Très romantique.’
Tirza stirred inside her blanket.
‘So what?’ she said rudely.
Pierre peered at her shrewdly.
‘Come – the nose, it is not out of joint? You are ‘is friend. This is just a little romantic adventure. It shows ‘e is nearly well again. But then we will all ‘ave to say au revoir to ‘im. You know this very well, ma p’tite.’
Tirza set her jaw. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow with the crabs.’
Tirza could not escape Sandy’s new infatuation with Martha. When she encountered him in the garden of the hotel the following morning, he seemed not to have noticed that she had been missing for several days. He took her by the arm and told her how lucky she was to have such a beautiful girl for a cousin. He began to enumerate all the aspects of Martha’s beauty, but Tirza shut her ears. She had heard all this before. Instead she hurried towards the pier, dangling the bushel baskets from her hands so that they banged painfully against her ankles. Sandy limped determinedly beside her.
‘Unfortunately, I’m still a little limited in getting about. And now Martha has said she doesn’t want me to keep ringing her at home, says her parents have been making disapproving noises. But I know you are on our side, Tirza. So would you take her this letter?’
He held out one of the stiff, cream-coloured hotel envelopes. It was bulky with the letter inside. Tirza shifted the baskets to Stormy Petrel and took it reluctantly, not looking at him.
‘That’s a grand girl! And you won’t delay, will you? If you stop off at the far end of the beach on your way home, you could just nip up to the farm and slip it to her privately, couldn’t you?’
Tirza climbed wordlessly down into the boat and cast off. She pushed the letter into the pocket of her shorts and laid out her oars.
‘Why are you rowing instead of sailing?’
‘No wind,’ she said shortly. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’
It always astonished her the way he went around deaf and blind to the weather she could read like a child’s primer.
‘Oh. Well, it’ll be easy to stop off, won’t it?’
‘Just add more to a long journey,’ she said, manoeuvring the boat away from the pier and bending to her oars. She wasn’t going to let him see he
r face.
When she reached the farm Martha was lying back in a rocking chair on the porch in a blue sun-dress with a scoop neck. She had her eyes closed but she was humming some dance tune softly to herself. Tirza dropped the letter on her lap without a word and Martha’s eyes flew open. They were exactly the colour of her dress and Tirza had to admit, silently, that she was as pretty as any film star. Martha looked at the writing on the letter and gave a complacent little smile.
‘So, you’re the mailman, are you?’
She didn’t thank Tirza, but she pushed a jug of iced tea towards her on the metal porch table. Tirza was hot and thirsty from all the rowing, but there was no spare glass on the table, so she picked up the jug, tilted her head back and poured the tea into her open mouth.
‘For heaven’s sake, Tirza,’ Martha cried, as some of the tea splashed down on to her forearm, ‘what do you think you’re doing?’
Tirza set down the jug and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘Will there be a reply?’ she asked coolly.
‘Oh, well, if you can wait.’
‘No. I can’t.’
Tirza turned on her heel, jumped off the porch steps and stumped away down the farm track again, her bare feet raising spurts of grey dust in the heavy air. She rubbed her hand over her face again. It was just sweat getting in her eyes.
She decided to retrieve the blueberry pail she had abandoned near the Tremayne place and take a couple of quarts to Miss Catherine for an early batch of blueberry muffins. Someone had kicked the pail aside under a scrubby bayberry bush. There was an interlaced web of footprints in the dust of the clifftop path where people had come to view the dead whale. Empty cigarette packs lay beside a box which had held Kodak film. A sickening smell of decay engulfed the whole place. Tirza climbed over the wall and found the blueberry bushes at the top edge of the gully where the foxes had their den. Today any scent from the den was overwhelmed by the odour of the dead whale. There was a good crop of fat blueberries, though, and Tirza crouched down, picking at a steady pace. Grimly, she pushed away the thought of the house behind her.
By the time she slid Stormy Petrel off the beach, there was a line of cloud building on the horizon and enough wind had picked up to allow her to sail slowly back the rest of the way to Flamboro. She made a wide berth round the headland to avoid the reefs. From out at sea, nothing could be seen of the whale, but even here the scent of rotten sea creature hung in the air.
The Boston ladies were delighted to see her, though she felt as though she carried the smell of the whale on her hands and in her hair. Miss Catherine swooped on the blueberries and carried them off to the kitchen. Miss Molly led her out to the wisteria-covered arbour in the garden where Miss Susanna was sitting propped up by pillows, but looking very spry, surrounded with her orderly piles of fabric strips. She had the new rug laid over her knees and was hooking part of Simon’s red barn.
‘Just the person I wanted to see,’ said Miss Susanna. ‘Everyone else who drew part of the pattern has hooked a bit on the rug. You’re the only one left. Come and do part of Stormy Petrel.’
‘Sorry,’ Tirza mumbled. ‘I should have been to see you sooner.’
Miss Susanna smiled as she selected some white fabric strips for the boat hull and a light tan for the sail.
‘Don’t you worry. I know perfectly well where the burlap backing came from, and I’m very grateful.’
‘Well,’ said Tirza. She laughed suddenly. ‘If those soldiers leave good burlap lying around on the beach, what can they expect?’
‘After all,’ said Miss Susanna, ‘it’s Libby’s Beach. Who has better right to the salvage than a Libby?’ Her laugh rang out as she handed the hook to Tirza. ‘Best not make a habit of it, though. They might notice if the whole line of foxholes disappeared.’
‘I promise. Though most of the bags aren’t good enough to use.’ She struggled with the hook. ‘I don’t know how to do this right.’
‘Here, let me show you. You need to hold the strip quite taut with your left hand while you hook with your right.’
It turned out to be easier than Tirza expected. By the time the other two sisters came out with plates of blueberry muffins and a jug of iced tea with mint floating in it, she had hooked the whole of the boat hull, the sail, and a fragment of blue sky. The blue was part of an old pair of her own dungarees.
Miss Susanna laid the rug aside and gave it a little pat.
‘I’m glad I had this idea for the rug. When it’s finished it will be like a piece of this summer, captured for ever on canvas. When you are grown up, Tirza, you’ll be able to look at it and remember all that has happened this year. Such a strange year. So many changes.’
Tirza said nothing.
‘Have you noticed?’ asked Miss Molly. ‘She’s added the whale, here in the bottom border.’
‘Except I’ve drawn him alive and spouting. That’s how we want to remember him, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Tirza said. ‘I think he was killed by the depth charges. I hate them. They’re ruining the fishing. And I don’t like the soldiers everywhere, spoiling everything. I wish they’d all go away.’
Miss Susanna sighed.
‘In wartime life is bound to change. But when peace comes, I’m sure everything will be all right again.’
Tirza shook her head dumbly.
Martha must have found some way of replying to Sandy’s letter. Perhaps she just posted it. But whenever Sandy could waylay Tirza near the hotel, he asked her to take more letters for him. She changed her times of delivering the crabs to Pierre in order to avoid him, or landed on the north side of Todd’s Neck near the beach instead of sailing around the headland to the pier. This meant hauling the heavy baskets of crabs up over the broken rocks and then along a path through the woods. It left her hot, breathless and cross. One day Sandy came upon her by chance in the woods where she had put down her basket to suck a finger which a particularly vicious crab had nipped.
She was inwardly cursing all crabs and their aggressive habits as she looked over the headland cliff. A scum of dead fish was bobbing about below, covering the water between the rocks. More damage from the depth charges. When the tide went out most of them would be trapped to rot in the sun. The ledges here were angled up at their seaward end and sloped towards the land, so that pools were left when the tide went out. The cliff was almost as high as the one where the whale had washed ashore, although the path was wider and not so treacherous underfoot.
‘Hello,’ said Sandy. ‘You’re a stranger.’
She jumped, taken by surprise. The soft pine needles scattered on the floor of the wood had made his approach silent. She did not answer, but continued to suck her bruised finger and gaze out to sea.
‘What’s so fascinating out there?’
He shifted both sticks to one hand and put the other arm around her shoulders, not for support, but companionably. If he felt her stiffen, he gave no sign.
‘Scenting the weather,’ she said gruffly. ‘Reckon there’s a storm coming up.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Just a feeling in the air. Heavy. And an oily look out to sea, on the horizon. And she’s smurring up to the south-east. But not too soon. Short warning, soon past; long foretelling, long last. ‘
‘You haven’t taken me sailing for ages.’
‘Thought you weren’t interested any more.’
‘Of course I am. And I bought a camera when I went to Portland the other day. Just a Box Brownie, and a few rolls of film, but I’ve been taking pictures – the whale, you know, and some of Flamboro. People too. The lobstermen at work, and Pierre in his kitchen, and your cousin Martha.’
He said it carelessly, but Tirza noticed a change in his voice. She stooped to pick up her basket, so she could pull away from his arm.
‘Don’t know why you bother.’ She swung the basket up and started along the path towards the hotel. He fell into step beside her.
‘Something to remember you all
by. I can’t stay here for ever. You know that.’
Tirza said nothing, but there was a twisting deep in her stomach, and she shivered.
‘I want to take a picture of you and Stormy Petrel,’ he said. ‘Will you let me do that?’
‘Suppose so.’
‘And what about going sailing again? Weren’t you going out to Mustinegus Island to pick blueberries some time soon?’
‘Ayuh, I was fixing on going tomorrow. But I reckon you’ve got better things to do.’
‘Tomorrow?’ He smiled. ‘Tomorrow would be fine. When?’
‘I’ll bring the crabs round first. Meet me on the pier at eight.’
‘Eight! Do we have to leave so early?’
‘Eight’s not early. And it gets some hot picking blueberries by midday.’
‘All right, you’re the captain.’ He gave her a mock salute. ‘I’ll get Pierre to give us a picnic – and no beer, I promise.’
For the rest of the day, Tirza felt more cheerful than she had done since Independence Day, though she kept a sharp eye on the horizon where the line between sky and sea still had that slick oily look she distrusted. In the evening she cycled over to the farm to borrow some extra blueberry pails.
‘Just thought that there’s likely to be a good crop,’ she said to Harriet, ‘going by what I saw a few weeks back. I’ll bring you some too.’
‘Much obliged,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m having a day off myself tomorrow. Martha and I are taking the pickup to Portland. There’s a summer sale on at Porteus, Mitchell and Braun. I’m looking for bedlinen and Martha wants clothes for herself and Billy. That child has really grown some this summer.’
They both looked across the yard at Billy, who was carrying feed to the hens.
‘I guess he’s getting used to the farm,’ Tirza said.