A Running Tide

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘Or lit a fire to keep warm,’ said Tirza slowly, ‘now that the weather’s colder.’

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ said Simon in a tight voice. He mounted her bike and rode off.

  Tirza ran on up the hill, past the end of the Libby land, past the gully where the foxes lived, and stopped short where a group of women were standing by the stone wall looking across at the mansion. A thick column of smoke was rising now, and she could make out a flicker of flames in one of the upstairs windows, the one where she had read from the book of Robert Frost’s poems.

  ‘Can’t we do something?’ she demanded of Mary Flett.

  ‘Not much we can do, Tirza dear. We’re all bringing buckets up from the village till we have enough for a bucket chain. We can throw water from the well on to it, but it won’t make any difference, try how we will.’

  ‘By the time the fire engines get here from Portland,’ said Marion Larrabee, ‘it will be too late. And they’ll have to cut through the chains on the gates before they can bring the engines in from the county road. I’m afraid it’s finished.’ She wiped her eyes on her apron. ‘It’s a sad sight. I remember how it used to be in the old days – a fine house and a fine family.’

  There were one or two murmurs of agreement, but then a crowd arrived from the village with more buckets and everyone climbed over the stone wall and ran across the garden to see what could be done.

  The people of Flamboro worked hard to try and save the house of the absent Boston owners. They formed four lines to pass the buckets from the well to the house. Ben had managed to rip off the old well-cover and found the water as good as ever inside, although the house had had piped water for fifty years. The buckets travelled back and forth in disciplined order, but the feeble splashes could do little against the blaze. One or two of the fishermen climbed up the walls and tried to dampen the roof, but the flames leaping out of the windows drove them back. Tirza thought of the bed curtains spangled over with sparks and shrivelling away into ashes, and the proud canvases of old Tremaynes curling at the edges and dropping from their frames. She was sorry about Everard Tremayne with his jaunty hat and merry eye.

  By the time the fire engines arrived and broke down the gate, darkness had fallen and the fire seemed to burn all the more fiercely red against the black sky. The townsfolk were ordered brusquely back out of the way by the firemen, who unrolled great festoons of hose and ran about with their axes and helmets, but twenty minutes after they arrived the house gave a sigh like a hurt animal, and the whole roof collapsed inwards. Everyone stayed to watch, drawn by some strange fascination with the destruction. The firemen’s hoses made no appreciable impact on the blaze, which roared up into the sky after the collapse of the roof, then settled down to a steady, determined devastation until the walls had fallen outwards, one by one.

  It must have been ten or eleven o’clock before the fire subsided into sullen coals. There was nothing left of the two-hundred-year-old house but the cellars, the chimneys and the stone steps, and over all the rest a heap of ashes and charred timbers. One by one people shook themselves, gathered their families together, and talked about going home to bed. It was then that the big black Chrysler that belonged to the Mansion House nosed up the weed-grown driveway and parked behind the fire engines. The manager of the hotel came stepping carefully over the sprawling maze of hoses, looking for someone. Everyone turned round, surprised at this late arrival on the scene, because the Mansion House usually kept to itself. He sought out Tobias and drew him aside from the crowd.

  Tobias’s pickup had been found blocking the north path leading over Todd’s Neck to the Mansion House. No one had been concerned at first, but when it had been there for a couple of hours, some of the staff had investigated. They had discovered Martha Libby. She had jumped from the cliff near the Libby summer cottage on to the sharp rocks below, with her son Billy in her arms.

  19

  Coda

  Maine: Fall 1980

  i

  Tirza followed Route 1 out of Portland for a few miles before turning on to the side roads. Portland had aroused no emotions, it was so changed. It had grown upwards and its modern skyline gave her a sense of walking around an unknown town. She had not lingered. After her brief meeting with the lawyer, Gabriel Foss, she had done no more than visit the harbour. This was less altered than some other parts of the town, though the majority of the boats in the harbour – even at this late season of the year – were pleasure craft and not working boats. She wondered whether the pattern was repeated all over Maine, the native Mainers no longer independent farmers and fishermen, like the men on either side of the state crest, but vendors of hamburgers and skippers of pleasure cruisers.

  She began to regret coming back.

  She retrieved her rented car, which was parked near a modernistic building housing the state art collection, and worked her way on to the ubiquitous Route 1, which for so many years had threaded together the towns of the eastern seaboard. There were motels and fast food stops and ‘genuine craft’ outlets on both sides of the road, and she began to doubt whether she would recognise the Flamboro turn. Where were the children selling small cardboard cartons of laboriously picked blueberries laid out on their mother’s borrowed card-table? Where were the pickups loaded with pumpkins, which used to flaunt signs saying, big as you can lug, only 50¢ !!

  The turn off to Flamboro was clear enough when she reached it, although the county road at first looked quite unfamiliar, despite her daily bus journeys to and from the Portland high school. The late afternoon was warm with Indian summer weather, so she rolled down her window. The road began to climb a gentle hill, and suddenly its shape unrolling in front of her was familiar. She knew the exact moment when she would catch her first glimpse of the sea, from the top of the hill, glinting between two folds in the landscape. And at the same moment she smelled it, the rich seaweed and salt-water savour of it, stronger for some reason than it was in Scotland. Then the road dipped down and she lost the sight of it, though not the smell. Her heart had begun to beat unevenly.

  She took a left turn marked Flamboro, then a right signposted for Todd’s Neck. A few minutes later, and she was running along Libby land. As she neared the farm gate she slowed the car to a crawl and studied the left-hand side of the road. The gate was there, sagging and unpainted, and under a sprawl of bridal wreath vine there was something that might have been the remains of the farm sign. Fifty yards further, on the right, the drive to Swansons’ farm was a neat tarred strip curving away between tidily pruned fruit trees. Beyond, she could see the end of the barn, though it no longer carried advertising for chewing tobacco. The house had always been hidden from the road, but a freshly painted white five-barred gate closed the drive. Beside it, on a post, hung a white sign with black letters, also newly painted: SWANSON. So they lived here yet. Tirza wondered whether Hector was still farming. He would be, oh, sixty-five or so. Too young for a Maine farmer to retire.

  Then the road looped away to the right. On the Libby side of the road, farmland gave way to the woods which lay inland from the marsh. They looked totally unchanged, disconcertingly so. The Libby fields a little further on, lying on Swansons’ side, where Tirza had made hay with Tobias that hot summer of ‘42, were turned over to grazing now. A fine herd of Jersey cattle was placidly cropping the grass or standing sleepily chewing the cud. The quality of the beasts seemed at odds with the unkempt air of the old Libby farm. Perhaps the Swansons owned these fields now.

  A bend in the road took her to the left again, and as she came round it she saw a large black and gold sign, full of antique curlicues, which pointed to the Todd’s Neck turn and the Mansion House Hotel.

  The road through the Libby woods to Todd’s Neck was shorter than she remembered, but then she had never driven it before, only walked it, walks which remained in her mind as always hot and plagued with mosquitoes from the marshy fringes of the wood. The meadow at the end of the woods, where the road started out over the Neck itself, also s
eemed diminished by time, unless the wood had crept over part of it. Alders would lead the way, quickly colonising the edges of a field when the farmer’s back is turned. The larger, slower-growing trees would follow, until the land became unusable, and had to be hacked free of the forest again.

  The meadow seemed too small now to accommodate the wagons of the Shakers. Tirza remembered suddenly the Shaker girl in the over-sized sunbonnet. Had she remained in the community? There were only a handful of Shakers left these days. Rich folk paid ridiculous prices for their simple and beautiful pieces of furniture, but people no longer wanted to follow their austere mode of life. The Shaker girl had been Tirza’s own age. Probably she had turned her back on her people, deserted them as Tirza had done.

  She drove on to the beginning of the Neck. The path down to Libby’s Beach still led off on the left and looked well trodden, though the summer people would be gone by now. She wondered whether the out of season guests at the Mansion House were the same retired rich outlanders, come to be pampered at great cost here on the coast. Suddenly she marvelled what could have possessed her to book a room here. Was it just that she wanted to prove something? That she now belonged to the world which patronised the Mansion House?

  The reception area in the hotel was unchanged from the day she had walked through it and up to Sandy’s room with her arms scratched from picking cranberries and her bare feet covered with sand. There was the same mahogany panelling, the same dim, gilded lamps, the same vast old reception desk, the same bellhops in maroon uniforms with gold piping. The carpet must have been replaced, but it could have been the same. The heels of her shoes sank into it as her sandy toes had once done.

  As the bellhop showed her to her room on the second floor, she felt a moment of panic. She hoped they had not given her Sandy’s old room. No, this one was two doors away. As the door was unlocked, a young couple came out of Sandy’s room and murmured a polite greeting to her as they passed. They were holding hands. A honeymoon couple, surely. Not able to afford the Mansion House in the ordinary course of things.

  The bellhop handed her a card with meal times listed on it, and left her alone. She went to the window. The room had the same view as Sandy’s. Mustinegus rode out there offshore, the cliffs tumbled away at the foot of the hotel, and when she flung open the window, which groaned as though it had not been unsealed for some time, the cries of the gulls washed up to her, and the pounding of the breakers ran through the movement of her blood. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. She must not let herself give in to this, to the insidious way the place was working on her.

  Tirza got up next morning determined to take things at a slow pace, to allow herself time to think. As usual, she woke early, before breakfast was served in the hotel, so she went outside to explore the grounds. The garden layout was different, she thought, but she had not paid it much mind when she was younger. A shortcut still ran through it to the pier, though. This had been rebuilt and extended, and a breakwater constructed on the offshore side to provide shelter for the throng of boats now moored here. It almost amounted to a marina. On this side, the south side of the Neck, several small cottages had been built in traditional style along the shore, each with a small pier of its own. She remembered some people in reception last night talking about going over to the cottages. These must be an addition to the hotel facilities.

  At breakfast, eating her waffles with maple syrup, she asked the waiter, a middle-aged man, whether Pierre Lamotte was still the chef. He was polite, but baffled. He had worked at the hotel for twenty-five years, he said, but had never heard of a Pierre Lamotte. So, Pierre, did you return to Montreal and marry your French Canadian girl and start your own restaurant? Pierre, with his French accent and his worldly-wise ways, had always seemed immensely old to Tirza, but thinking back she supposed he must have been about the same age as Hector Swanson. Why had he not been drafted? Or perhaps he was, later. After that summer she had never again come here to sell crabs.

  The first thing she would do after breakfast, she decided, was to walk along the beach to Flamboro and look things over anonymously. No one there, she was sure, would recognise her. She took the path down over the rocks to the beach, but kept well away from the place where the side turning had led off to the Libby summer house. It was not difficult, because there was no sign of the old path. Everywhere under the trees along the cliff was an unbroken undergrowth of ferns and sapling trees.

  She had forgotten the bright silver of the sand on the beach. Accustomed for the last few years to the small pockets of coarse yellow sand round her part of the west Scottish coast, she had not remembered that this sand was so fine and silky. She ran handfuls of it through her fingers for the sheer pleasure of it. And like an omen, it seemed, she found a perfect sand dollar. She hid it carefully behind a distinctive rock to collect later, then she took off her socks and shoes and hung them round her neck by the laces. The tide was halfway out. She rolled up her jeans a few turns and waded into the edge of the water. And caught her breath. As a child she had learned to swim from this beach, but she hadn’t swum often from choice. Three hundred and fifty days of the year the breakers struck the breath from your body with an icy slap. By comparison, the sea around Caillard was almost balmy.

  Halfway along the beach she climbed up the ledges near the petrified trees. The marsh stretched away, unchanged, towards the woods, with its treacherous clumps of green, its cranberries, and over there a glimpse of Libby’s Pond. She followed the thin path along the top of the ledges, and tried to make out where the foxholes had been, but there was no trace of them at all – no depressions in the ground, no fragment of burlap trailing from the encroaching sand, no abandoned piece of equipment. Christina had been right. This desecration by the army might never have been.

  In fact from Todd’s Neck to the end of the Libby farm track, she could see nothing to indicate that any time had passed while she had been away. It gave her a strange sensation, like a sort of Rip Van Winkle in reverse. She had grown older, but the place had stayed the same.

  The last of the Libby fields, nearest the sea, had been used for a crop this year. Early potatoes. She could see a few ragged leaves left flapping under the lee of the stone wall. It needed ploughing, though. And parts of the old wall had tumbled over and not been rebuilt. She stopped at the far end to climb into the gully. The foxes’ den was still there, but she could see no sign of life about it. Intentionally she had left her cameras behind in the hotel, fearing they might identify her, but she wished she had them now, just in case the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of her foxes should come skipping out to play amongst the undergrowth.

  On the far side of the gully she clambered cautiously out on to Tremayne land. It seemed likely that the property, in such a beautiful spot, with its wide view of the ocean, would have been sold and built over. But there was nothing here except the desolate ruin of the garden. Further on she found what must be the remains of the orchard. Many of the trees had died and fallen. Those that remained had grown into grotesque twisted shapes. There was something pathetic about them. If they had been wild trees, they would have grown to their natural shape from the start, but these trees had been shaped and pruned, and then abandoned, and they were as forlorn as a pet dog turned loose to fend for itself in the wild.

  There was a gap in the orchard which had once been a path, and she followed it back towards the house. Or where she thought the house ought to be. She found it at last, a raised mound of rough grass and weeds growing over rubble. It was almost impossible to identify even the floor plan, but the marble front steps remained, with clumps of weeds spurting out of the cracks. On the side away from the sea she found the opening leading to the cellars. Leaning over the dank hole she could just make out a rubble of broken flowerpots, from which rose the same dank smell as she and Simon had smelled on that cold winter’s day when they had first climbed in.

  Why had no one built here? Clearly the Tremaynes had never returned. Did they stil
l own the land?

  At the top of the steep stretch of the coast path leading down into Flamboro, Tirza paused, sitting on a rock and putting her shoes and socks back on. Well, she had expected changes, and here they were. There was just one lobsterboat in the harbour, and she could see only two more hauling offshore. There was no sign of any trawlers. The bait shed had been pulled down and replaced by a smart new building with a sign saying flamboro yacht club. The lovely old road surfaces of broken oyster shells, which used to glint like a rainbow after showers, had gone. The roads were all utilitarian black now. The houses gleamed with new paint, and Tirza wondered whether it was still as difficult to maintain in the teeth of the salt-laden storms, or whether modern paints were impervious to this bane of the householders’ lives. The town had grown very little, though she could see some new houses up where Schoolhouse Lane led inland. The church was unchanged, and the gilded weathervane was pointing south-west. With a curious mixture of reluctance and eagerness, she climbed down the last stretch of path and came out on the wharf side next to her own house.

  She tried to look at it dispassionately, but that was impossible. The boat shed had been turned into a three-car garage. A single-storey extension had been built on to the opposite side of the house, with a big picture window overlooking the ocean, which seemed grotesquely out of character beside the sturdy shuttered windows of the old house. The porch, which had always been too narrow, had been widened too, and from an open window she could hear the shrieks and applause of a TV game show. Turning firmly away from the house, she walked on along the harbour front.

  The working boats left might be few, but there were plenty of sailing boats, and her heart lifted a little at their lovely lines. She had not owned a sailboat since Stormy Petrel, and something like envy stirred in her as she saw a man slotting a mainsail on to a mast, ready for hoisting. She watched as he tidied his lines into neat coils and slipped the mooring ropes. He looked up and caught her eye.