A Running Tide

by Ann Swinfen

  The breakers came rolling in with all the weight of the Atlantic behind them, threw themselves against the narrow gulf between the vertical rocks and burst upwards like the fireworks on Independence Day. Tirza became so absorbed in watching them, she almost forgot about her pictures, but then when she remembered she kept taking more and more shots until she had nearly finished her film.

  With a groan she rolled over from her cramped position and looked around. The old summer cottage was just beyond her at the edge of the woods. If it was still standing. She took a few steps towards it, and then stopped. She could hear voices, and smothered laughter. Someone had broken into the summer house! Filled with indignation, she approached it at a diagonal, so she could not be seen from the big double veranda doors or the windows, most of which faced the sea. She heard a cry, as though someone was being hurt. She stopped, her heart beating fast and fear rising in her throat. There was an odd, grunting noise, like the noise Tobias’s pig made when it settled down to a trough full of swill, a rhythmic snorting sound.

  The doors of the summer house stood open on to the veranda. Whoever they were, they were making pretty free with the Libbys’ property. She crept nearer, anger overcoming her apprehension, and looked in the door. At first all she could see was a naked back, a man’s back. He was stretched out face down on the cane sofa and he was moving with that grunting rhythm she had heard. Then she saw a sheet of golden hair spreading down over the side of the sofa on to the dusty floor. Her cousin Martha was lying under the man, her naked right breast squeezed sideways under his armpit, and she was giving those animal squeals of pain. But her arms were clutched against the man’s buttocks, pulling him down on top of her.

  Tirza pressed her knuckles against her mouth, but some noise must have come out of it because the man turned his head and looked around with queer, unfocused eyes.

  It was Sandy.

  Tirza scrambled backwards and began to run down towards the beach. She missed the path and went crashing through the trees, bouncing from one to the other, bruised and bleeding. When she reached the main path she veered off again over the rocks. They were slippery with seaweed and she found herself falling, scraping her arms and legs on the barnacles. The camera flew out of her hand as she hurtled head first over the last of the rocks and landed, all the breath knocked out of her, on the beach. She wasn’t sure how long she lay there, winded, her mouth full of sand. Then she rolled into the shelter of the rocks, clutching her knees against her chest, trying to make herself as small as possible. Dry, uncontrollable sobs broke from her in spasms, burning her throat and ribs. At last she pulled herself painfully to her feet. Her camera was lying on a patch of rockweed. Automatically she picked it up, dusted off the sand, and put it in the case. There was no way of telling whether it was broken or not. Blindly she began to stumble back up the beach. She felt dirty, as if she had been flung into the filth of a bait tub. All she could think of was to wash herself clean again.

  Simon never knew afterwards why he had decided, that first Sunday evening after starting at high school, to blurt out his plans to his parents. Well, decided wasn’t the right word. He’d blundered into it. They had been discussing the courses he was doing at high school and suddenly he found himself talking about how you could enlist as an officer if you graduated from high school... West Point...

  ‘The army?’ Tobias stared at him as if he had taken leave of his senses. Harriet’s hands, occupied in mending a pair of Billy’s trousers, fell to her lap.

  ‘Ayuh,’ said Simon defiantly. ‘I’m going to join the regular army straight after high school.’ He felt the air growing uncomfortable. ‘And get out of this God-forsaken place.’

  ‘Simon!’ Harriet said.

  ‘Well, it is, Mom. God-forsaken. What is there to do here but just plod along like a draft ox ploughing a furrow? I don’t want to spend my life like you. Ploughing, planting, hoeing, milking, mucking out, harvesting, chopping wood, cutting ice. Year in, year out. Always the same old chores, round and round. Look at you! It’s back-breaking work. The land is poor. It’s all you can do to pay the taxes and keep the buildings together and barely eat and clothe yourselves. All those years you were saving for the tractor, neither one of you had any new clothes, excepting boots. One bad year and Dad is worrying about getting into debt. There’s never a year good enough for you to put any money aside.’

  ‘This is as good a farm as any in Maine,’ said Tobias. His voice was dangerously quiet. ‘As trim and well run as any you’ll find.’

  ‘Oh, Dad!’ Simon sighed. ‘I’m not saying you don’t do your best. I know you do. That’s what I’m saying. You work as hard as any slave, but the land isn’t worth it. I might feel different if the land was better. Not full of stones and frozen for months on end and soaked with salty mists and rain. But I don’t think I would. I don’t want to be a farmer.’

  He put his head between his hands and grabbed two fistfuls of hair, as if by doing this he could pull back his words out of the air.

  ‘Now listen, boy,’ said Tobias. He only ever called Simon ‘boy’ when he was really angry. ‘This land has been in our family for three centuries, father to son. Ten generations. You’re the only son to inherit, with Nathan having no boy. It’s your duty to take on the land. And it’s your duty to hand it on to your son in turn. And it’s your duty to provide for your sister and her son.’

  ‘My sister?’ Simon shouted. ‘My sister! Why should I provide for her? She couldn’t wait to get out of here. You didn’t try to stop her leaving. She’s only here now because there isn’t anywhere more convenient to go. As soon as she finds herself another man, she’ll be off. You know that.’

  ‘If that happens,’ said Tobias between his teeth, ‘then, no, you won’t need to provide for her. But otherwise, when you are head of the family, it will be your responsibility.’

  ‘Head of the family! This is the twentieth century, Dad. Martha doesn’t feel any obligation towards me, and I don’t feel any responsibility for her. She’s nearly thirteen years older than me.’ Shamefully, his voice broke. ‘I won’t be tied to this farm. It’s not fair!’ he shouted, aware that he sounded like Billy. ‘If Martha can leave, so can I. And I will. Maybe I won’t even stay to finish high school.’

  He jumped to his feet. Tobias stood up more slowly. Harriet lowered her head and pulled a handkerchief out of her apron pocket.

  ‘Are you defying me, boy?’ Tobias’s voice shook. ‘Are you asking for the belt?’ He was rarely angry, but Simon began to be afraid.

  ‘Please, Dad. This is what I really want to do.’ Simon scrambled for thoughts, trying to remember what he had said to Tirza. ‘I wouldn’t stay in the army for ever. I could come back later and take over. After all, you’ve got years to go yet. Twenty-five? Thirty?’

  ‘In thirty years I’ll be seventy-five. I reckon I’ll still be working, but this farm will need a younger man as well.’

  The air trembled between them. Simon wasn’t sure if his father’s anger was abating. He held his breath.

  They all heard the slam of the kitchen screen door and the tap-tap of Martha’s heels along the passage. She walked in the open door of the living room and glanced around at them with heavy-lidded eyes. She looked sleek, somehow, Simon thought, like one of the farm cats after it had eaten an oily mackerel and polished its fur till it shone. There was a gloss about her, although her hair was tumbled and her clothes had an appearance of disarray, as though she had just got up in the morning in a hurry. Yet, he recalled, when she had gone out earlier she had been as elegant as a fashion magazine. He wondered where she could have been.

  He said the first thing that came into his head.

  ‘Martha, you don’t expect me to support you, as head of the family, do you?’

  Her eyes swung round to him and she gave a little laugh. She chucked him under the chin in a way that had particularly annoyed him when he was younger. Now she had to reach up to do it.

  ‘Support me, little brother? Of co
urse not. Whatever gave you such a silly idea? There are plenty of real men ready to do that.’

  She gave a little twirl of her skirts and went stepping lightly out of the room. Simon ought to have been able to give his father a look of triumph. Why was it, then, that he felt suddenly so heavy and sad?

  On a morning in mid-September, Susanna Penhaligon woke just as dawn was colouring the sky over the ocean. She had slept deeply and well, and she lay still, feeling grateful. All her life she had slept in this room which, when they were small, had been the nursery, presided over by a fierce Scottish nanny clad in white linen so starched that – if it was dented by a child’s hand or the edge of an ironing board – it would spring back into shape with a twang. When her sisters grew up and moved into other rooms, Susanna had taken sole possession of this one.

  As children they had been obliged to have their beds lined up against the wall away from the window, with a screen around them. Their nanny believed in fresh air and an open window at night. Her only concession to the Maine winters, which could surpass in ferocity even those of her Aberdeenshire youth, was to erect a folding screen decorated with cut-out scraps between the three small beds and the Atlantic gales whooping through the window. When Susanna was a young woman, she moved her bed against the wall below the window. In deference to her upbringing, she still kept it open except on the wildest of nights. Captain Penhaligon had built the windows of his house deep and wide. The bottom of the window was level with the top of the mattress and it was as wide as the bed was long, so that Susanna could look out without even raising her head from the pillow. Below the window the garden sloped away down to the road. Molly’s roses were almost over, but there were two fine hydrangeas in full bloom, one a deep blue and the other the colour of ripe plums.

  Beyond the garden the roofs of Flamboro tumbled down to the harbour, already busy even at this hour. With the days shortening the lobstermen and trawlermen moved at a faster pace in the mornings, anxious to be off so they could finish a day’s work before darkness forced them home. Ben’s boat was the first away, but Nathan was right behind him in Louisa Mary. Then a cluster of other boats followed. One of the Towson boys was having trouble with his engine. He climbed back on to the wharf and went off home to fetch something.

  The church clock struck seven. Susanna twisted her head round to look up at the gilded weathervane. It was pointing south-west, but the trees stirred only a little in the breeze. A light wind. The boats would have a safe day’s fishing. The morning bus clattered down Schoolhouse Lane and pulled up beside the wharf. It spent the night a few miles inland where the driver lived, and started its day’s journeys to and from Portland with this trip from Flamboro at a quarter past seven. She could just see the heads of the high school children as they climbed the steps into the bus. Then it gave a toot of its horn and started back up the hill to the Portland road.

  She leaned back against her pillows. The day before yesterday she had sat up later than she should, finishing the patchwork rug. She had worked the last of the border, and then sewed the binding round all the edges. It was a bit of an oddity. Not as beautiful as most of her rugs, designed on a whim really, but an interesting project. Molly had hung it over the footboard of the bed where she could look at it. Leaning forward now, she stroked the closely hooked pile of Wayne’s picture. She sighed.

  Yesterday, after the rug was finished and with no new project planned, she had felt suddenly tired. All day she had sat around with her hands loosely clasped in her lap, too weary even to read. Never in her life could she remember spending a day of such idleness. Her sisters, she knew, had been worried about her. But after her lazy day and a good night’s sleep, she felt wonderful this morning. There was very little pain, nothing she couldn’t will herself to ignore. For the first time in months she felt energetic.

  There was a knock on the door and Molly came in with an early morning cup of tea for her. Molly and Kitty drank coffee in the morning, but Susanna had always preferred tea.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Molly. ‘How are you feeling today?’

  ‘Splendid! I’m going to have a bath after my tea and come down to the garden. I want to see what you’ve been doing with the pergola.’

  ‘Arthur has repaired it for us quite well, and we just need to tie the clematis and wistaria back in place.’ Molly put the tea down on the night stand and looked across her sister at the view from the window. ‘It’s going to be one of those glorious fall days – all bright colours and glitter. Give me a call if you’d like an arm along to the bathroom. I’ll just be getting dressed in my room.’

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ Susanna said. ‘I’ll do that.’

  Half an hour later, when Susanna still had not called her, Molly went back to her room. The tea was untouched. The rising sun spread a swathe of light across Susanna Penhaligon’s pale face and her hands, resting lightly, palm upwards, on the patchwork quilt Molly had made for her twenty-first birthday.

  ‘Oh, Susanna, my dear,’ said Molly. She laid one hand on her sister’s cold one. Her mother would have shut the curtains, but Molly left the sun brightening Susanna’s room.

  Flamboro gave Miss Susanna a walking funeral.

  It was not often done now, but the Penhaligons were one of the oldest and most respected families in the town, and they had always had walking funerals. There were eight men to carry the coffin, Ben and Charlie Flett, Nathan and Tobias Libby, Mr Wardour, the retired schoolteacher, Mr Foss, the Penhaligons’ lawyer from Portland, and two distant cousins from Augusta. Not that it needed eight bearers, as Charlie Flett said when they started off down the steep path through the Penhaligons’ garden. Miss Susanna had always been slightly built, and the last three years she had dwindled away to a mere wisp. Still, it showed the proper respect to have the full complement of bearers.

  The Reverend Bridges led the procession, followed by the coffin. Then came Miss Molly and Miss Catherine, with the wives of the two cousins. They were followed by the church choir, who sang Miss Susanna’s favourite hymns as they walked. Behind them came the rest of the mourners. It was difficult for the choir to keep together and stay in tune as they criss-crossed Flamboro, up one street and down the next. There was a strong cold wind blowing, which snatched their voices away and tossed them up to mingle with the desolate mewing of the gulls and the soughing of the trees in Christina’s forest. Sometimes the last row of the choir was so far behind the first that their voices sounded like an echo repeated back and reverberating: ‘Oh, Lord, our help...our help... help...’

  When the minister reached the far end of the town beyond Nathan Libby’s house, at the foot of the steep path leading up to the Tremayne estate, he brought the procession around in an arc and began to retrace his steps along the edge of the sea. As they walked along the harbour, the moored boats danced in the tossing waves and seemed to acknowledge their passing. The strong east wind was throwing the breakers halfway over Shore Road, and they were all soaked to the knees by the time they reached the steep steps up to the church.

  The bearers, as always on these occasions, had some difficulty manoeuvring the coffin up the steps, which were almost too narrow for two people to walk abreast. Then they continued up the path and into the church itself. The church had never been so full of flowers, not even for a wedding. Love for Miss Susanna had stripped every garden in Flamboro of the last flowers of the season – chrysanthemums, late-flowering lupins, a few treasured roses and gladioli. Any gaps had been filled up with bright rowan berries and rose hips.

  The service was short, as Miss Susanna had herself requested. A reading, two hymns, and a brief address from the minister. Then they all moved out to the burying-ground, presided over by the grotesque shape of the anti-aircraft gun with its sheepish gun crew. There was a small hard rain in the wind now, and the town shivered and huddled into its coats as the minister spoke the final words of the burial service.

  ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes...’

  A large herring gull, swooping in on
a gust of wind, fluttered down shrieking and found a foothold on the church roof.

  ‘In the sure and certain knowledge...’

  The gull shrieked again, drowning the minister’s words, and his cries were answered by a flock of gulls coasting out over the grey, thrashing ocean.

  18

  Maine: Fall 1942

  By the third week in September, the last of the summer people were gone. The two houses in Flamboro which belonged to out-of-towners were shuttered and locked for the winter. The Mansion House extension had been closed until Memorial Day next year. Tirza no longer ran her crab lines. Mrs Larrabee had covered her stock with soft old sheets, arranged a few items in the bay window with a curtain behind them, and hung a narrow board, painted in black with the word closed, from two hooks screwed into the bottom of her shop sign. Charlie Flett packed away the tin buckets and children’s spades, the rubber rings, suntan lotion and cheap sneakers into cardboard boxes in his storeroom, and wrote summer in thick red crayon on the outside of them.

  Flamboro’s ninth-graders, high school freshmen, fell into the rhythm of travelling to Portland each day with their older schoolfellows, and the lobstermen and trawlermen into the rhythm of a shorter, more intense working day. Fall was always an anxious time for them. The movements of the fish were more unpredictable than ever, the weather became more treacherous. Flamboro harbour froze over regularly each winter and an early onset of the cold weather meant a curtailment of the fishing season.

  The farmers had finished the harvest and started the winter ploughing; their wives, exhausted with the long days of putting by all the produce for winter, surveyed their packed shelves with some complacency, and thought of quieter times ahead when they could catch up with their sewing and knitting. On Libby’s Farm, as on their neighbours’, the pig was slaughtered for bacon and ham, and a few of the hens sold off to cut down on the winter feeding. Tobias had sent most of this year’s heifers to market. He kept four. With the general shortage of food as the war continued, it would be worth his while to produce more milk and butter, and go back to commercial cheese making. They had not sold cheese since Martha was small, but Harriet had now hunted out her bulk equipment. She was prepared to make more cheese than they needed for themselves once the milk yield increased next spring.