by Ann Swinfen
‘No. Sorry. It comes of just emerging from the parent-of-teenagers period myself – you think everybody else has been going through the same stresses. Anyway, they got married – that would have been in 1927, and I was born in the summer of ‘29. My sister Fiona was born in ‘31, and my sister Gillian in ‘34.’
‘You mean he had three children?’
‘Four, in fact, but I’ll explain about that in a minute. Three before the war, certainly. They were twenty-three, they had three children, and my father could only get a job as a junior clerk in a solicitor’s office in Inverness. We lived in a two-roomed flat and there was never quite enough money for us to eat properly. As far back as I can remember, they quarrelled endlessly.’
Tirza tried to reconcile this picture of Sandy with her memories, but it did not fit. He had seemed free of any constraints.
‘So, what happened?’
‘They split up. But they didn’t divorce. There was a lot of shame attached to divorce, of course, in those days. My mother took us back to live with her parents in 1935, when I was six. There was plenty of room in the big factor’s house, and only one of her brothers and sisters was still living at home – her youngest brother, who eventually took over as factor from my grandfather after the war. The laird gave my mother a job in the estate office.’
‘And Sandy?’
‘He moved to Edinburgh. One of his old schoolfriends had been to university and then became a master at one of the big public schools there. He found Dad a job teaching at a small prep school which wasn’t too fussy about qualifications. Dad was a great reader and he was quite a success as an English teacher. I think he taught some history too. And of course, he was a very good rugby player, which was a great asset.’
‘Of course,’ said Tirza dryly.
‘The moment war broke out, he joined the RAF. It seems he had always dreamed of flying. He came to see us just before he left for basic training. I was ten by then, and I remember his visit very clearly. My parents seemed to be happy to be together, and I longed for him to come home so we could all be a family again.’
‘And did he?’
‘Just a moment.’ Alex paused, as if gathering the pieces of his story together. ‘He spent, I think, two leaves with us before he was shot down in ‘42. He must have had other leaves, but perhaps they were too short for him to come all the way to Scotland, or perhaps he went somewhere else. Then we heard, in the early summer of ‘42, that he was missing, presumed killed.’
‘Wait,’ said Tirza, wanting to postpone this. ‘I’m going to make us some more coffee.’
Leaving him sitting there in the sun, she went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, then she went into the bathroom and locked the door. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair was windblown, and her face looked back at her drawn and pale. She ran a basin of cold water and plunged her face in, then rubbed it roughly dry.
When she came out with the two mugs of coffee, he began again.
‘We had a few bad weeks. My mother cried a lot. Then we got the cable saying he’d been picked up, injured, at sea, and was recovering in some hospital in the States. You can imagine how astonishing that was. My mother sat us all down, even little Gillian who was only eight, and said that when the war was over, she was going to make sure that Dad came back to live with us. He’d find some work on the estate and we’d all be together again.’
Alex took a long drink of his coffee, then rested his chin on his hands.
‘After he got back to Britain he was allowed a short visit to us, before he went back to the RAF. But the autumn of ‘42 – that was a difficult period in the war, and they didn’t allow him much time. He seemed strange to me – distant – though I couldn’t have put into words at the time why I felt that. After the war he did come back, and lived with us for a year. And it was at the end of that year that my youngest sister was born, Heather. In ‘47. By then I was as old as he had been when I was born, and about to go off to university myself. The marriage didn’t last. They began having rows again, and he moved out for good. This time they got a divorce.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ said Tirza. ‘Why is your name Wrycroft, not Fraser?’
‘Oh, well, my mother married again, and I took my stepfather’s name.’
‘Wasn’t that a bit unusual? You must have been quite old.’
‘Twenty-one.’ He smiled at her. ‘There was a reason. You remember I mentioned the old laird? There was a son about the same age as my parents. He was serving in Singapore when it was overrun by the Japanese. Altogether he had a bad war. Afterwards he came to Scotland to convalesce – he’d always spent his summers there as a boy, and he’d known my mother since they were children. Their love affair just grew from that. I think it probably started before my parents finally broke up. Perhaps it was one of the reasons for the final split. His name was Michael Wrycroft and he adopted all of us legally when he married our mother. And he decided to live permanently on the estate and farm it himself, with my uncle’s help. He was a dear man, and he made me heir to the estate, as if I had been his own son. In fact he was much more of a father to me than Sandy ever was, though he started a bit late.’
Tirza turned all this over in her mind.
‘But you didn’t lose touch with Sandy, did you? What became of him? And how did you know about Maine?’ She stared at a flock of black-headed gulls diving into the bay for fish, and began to bite the side of her thumb. ‘I suppose Sandy could still be alive. He’d only be sixty-nine.’
‘No,’ said Alex, and he took her other hand gently. He began tracing patterns on her palm. ‘No, I’m sorry, Tirza. He died just last year.’
‘I always thought,’ Tirza whispered, ‘that he must have been killed in the war.’
They sat for a long while in silence, and Tirza felt a sense of darkness welling up inside her. I have lost him again. And to have come so close...
‘I kept in touch with him,’ Alex said. ‘He went back to his teaching job in Edinburgh after the divorce. He was good with children, and he retired only three years before he died. It was kidney failure.’
He sighed heavily.
‘I sat with him a good deal when he was dying, and it was then that he began to talk about that summer in Maine. He’d never spoken of it before. He talked a great deal about you, how you helped him recover, what good friends you were, as if you were the same age and had known each other for ever. About your Indian grandmother who lived in the forest. About sailing your boat to some island, and how you put your hand right on an Indian arrowhead – as if you could see it inside your mind, he said.’
After a moment’s silence, Alex felt in the breast pocket of his jacket, then held out his hand, palm up. The small arrowhead glinted against the work-roughened skin.
‘And he told me about his affair with your cousin Martha.’ Alex cleared his throat. ‘He said she was unstable after the death of her husband, and very demanding. In a way, I suppose he saw parallels with his own situation and my mother alone back in Scotland. He and Martha became lovers, and he didn’t try to excuse his part in it, but he said she was haunted and hungry, that was his phrase, haunted and hungry. He said he left a letter with you because he was afraid of what she might do if he told her he was going back to Britain and to his wife and family.’
‘But she did it anyway,’ said Tirza.
‘Yes. But he didn’t know that until much later, some years after the war. He met one of the American officers who had been stationed near Flamboro, Tucker I think his name was. He was in Edinburgh for the Festival. That’s when he heard about your cousin’s suicide. Was that after she read his letter?’
Tirza twisted her hands together. She had never told anyone what had happened that day. When the police had come asking questions, no one had thought to speak to her, and she had kept silent.
‘I never had a chance to give her Sandy’s letter. I told her he had gone, and she just went crazy. She drove off in the pickup. I banged on the side and s
houted to her, but she ignored me.’
‘So what became of the letter?’
‘There was this enormous fire. A big country house, standing empty. It caught fire that same evening. The soldiers had been using it – looting, drinking the wine, seducing local girls. There were three fatherless babies born to village girls later. The firemen reckoned one of the soldiers had left a cigarette burning and it had set alight the brittle old bed hangings. When I heard about Martha, I was still at the fire with the others. I didn’t know what to do. I guess I went a bit crazy too. And I wanted to protect Sandy – I didn’t want them to think that he had caused her to jump off that cliff. So I dropped the letter on part of the fire that was still smouldering, and watched it burn away.’
Alex put his arm around her shoulders. She was shaking, despite the warmth of the summer day.
‘I don’t know how you coped. You were only twelve, weren’t you?’
‘It was my thirteenth birthday.’
‘Of course. The same date as Dad’s birthday.’
‘Was that all he told you?’
‘No. There was one last thing he said, the night before he died. He had been talking to me about my own marriage and saying that I should be grateful for what I had had, even though I had lost my wife, because our love was based on what he called “kinship of the spirit”, not just sexual gratification. Then he started talking about Maine again. He was very tired and weak, and he would talk for a few minutes, then have to rest again. He said Martha satisfied his frustrated sexual needs, which had grown out of the failure of his marriage, but the recollection brought him nothing but shame.’
Alex tightened his arm around Tirza’s shoulders, and cleared his throat.
‘He said that it was in Maine he had found someone he really loved, despite the difference in age. He was in love with you, and wanted you, but persuaded himself it was in your best interests never to contact you again, because he was afraid he would ruin your life.’ He drew a breath.
‘I have to be honest with you, Tirza. When I learned that my father had been in love with a twelve-year old girl, I was appalled. A child the same age as his own son. But now that I’ve met you, I think I understand.’
Tirza covered her face with her hands, but tears trickled down between her fingers and fell into her lap.
‘You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘It’s much worse than that,’ Tirza answered.
iii
Tirza’s second morning at the Mansion House dawned to a pale misty curtain of rain, opalescent and pearly as the inside of an oyster shell. She ate her early breakfast alone on the porch, watching the curtain waver and fade. The sun broke through hesitantly. The few scattered spruces along this side of the promontory sparkled as if each individual needle was threaded through a splinter of rock crystal. By the time she left the hotel, the ground was steaming gently, and wisps floated up through the woods along the northern cliff and blew away like smoke. It was the first day of October. Her birthday. The day the Tremayne house had burned down all those years ago and Martha had thrown herself from these cliffs.
Tirza was on her way to the Libby farm, but before taking the path over the rocks down to the beach, she turned aside where the narrow track had once led to the old Victorian summer cottage. It was difficult to find the traces of the path. Alders had encroached on it and brambles, heavy with fat blackberries, snagged at her hair and ankles. Eventually she emerged into a familiar flat area, the clearing where the summer house had stood. The fieldstone foundations were still here, enclosing a space which seemed not much larger than a sheep fold. But the timber frame and the shingled sides were long gone. A wild cherry tree had taken root within the space where older generations of Libbys had sat at their ease on wicker furniture, admiring the picturesque view and the remarkable water spouts.
The ocean still shot vertically into the air up the rock gullies. Tirza stood at the edge of the Spouter, looking over, and the spray spattered down on her, soaking her hair and the shoulders of her new anorak. The drop to the sea was not so great here as from the cliff by the Tremayne house, where the whale had been washed ashore, but the rocks were much more vicious. It was somewhere here that Martha had thrown herself on to the jagged outcrops below. Tirza had never known exactly where. She had never again come to this place after the day when she had seen Martha and Sandy in the summer cottage.
She had felt an inner compulsion driving her to this spot, as if by coming and standing at the top of the cliff it would be easier, or at least clearer, to come to an understanding of her own place in that confused web of events. Despite the sharp rocks below, there was nothing sinister about this stretch of cliff. There was the drip of moisture off the trees, the soft compost of pine needles and rotting leaves underfoot, and a clean, sea-smelling breeze flowing in from the north-east over the running tide. Fragments of mica in the granite rock glinted and beyond the headland the sands of the beach shone silver where they lay above high-water mark.
Tirza made her way back to the path and down to the beach. She walked briskly, keeping to the hard wet sand until she came to the end where the ledges jutted out into the sea, and the farm track met the coastal path. The rutted damage caused by the army jeeps had been repaired long ago, but she noticed as she walked up between the fields that the farm had a neglected air. The bottom field was not the only one in need of ploughing before winter. There was an empty pasture studded over with thistles and other pestilent weeds, and the gate to it hung open and broken from the gatepost.
There seemed to be no stock on the place, and no people. No living thing but the crows winging from the woods and a gull perched on the rusty remains of a harrow, oiling its feathers. The farmyard was deserted, except for a coon cat and a three-colour money cat lying in the sun where the half-wild farm cats had always basked, against the south-facing wall of the cow barn, sheltered from the wind. Did each generation learn from the one before? Or did they have to make the discovery of this haven afresh for themselves?
Her feet slowed to a stop. The buildings were all perfectly sound, although the white paint on the shutters and doors of the house was beginning to flake, and the red paint on the barn was dull and weathered. The grey-brown shingles were all in place. The yard and the farm drive down to the county road were no longer beaten earth. At some time they had been tarred, but not recently. Weeds were beginning to find a toehold in small cracks and in hollows where earth had collected.
A man was sitting in one of the rocking chairs on the porch, watching her. He got slowly to his feet and came to the top of the steps, and stood looking across at her. His resemblance to her uncle Tobias was strong, but his build was more bulky, and a heavy belly bulged over his belt, suggesting a heavy eater or a beer drinker. He walked with a pronounced limp.
Tirza crossed the yard to the bottom of the steps and tilted her head back to look up at him.
‘Hello, Billy,’ she said.
They sat facing each other on the porch. Billy had resumed his seat in the rocking chair, but Tirza had taken an upright chair with a worn rush seat. She had avoided the easy posture of a rocking chair – she wanted to remain in control of this conversation.
‘Mr Foss in Portland contacted me,’ she said. ‘I saw him in his office two days ago, and he told me you were very anxious to speak to me, but he didn’t say why.’
‘Ayuh,’ said Billy. ‘I asked him to let me explain. But let’s have some coffee first.’ He turned and shouted through the screen door, ‘Patience! Can you bring out some coffee?’
‘No call to shout, I’m right here.’
The woman elbowed the door open and it snapped shut on its spring behind her. She was carrying a tray neatly covered with a green and white checked cloth, with coffee pot and cups, and a plate of English muffins.
‘Well,’ she said, eyeing Tirza curiously, ‘you’ve taken long enough to come home.’
‘You remember Patience Warren, don’t you?’ said Billy. �
��Patience Potts, as she is now.’
‘Of course. How d’ye do, Patience?’
‘Not too bad.’
‘Patience has been my housekeeper since she was widowed fifteen years back.’
‘Seem to have spent more of my life living in this house than any other. Will that do you, Mr Billy?’
‘Ayuh, that’s fine.’
Billy waited to speak until she had left, pouring out the coffee and passing Tirza sugar and cream, which she refused.
‘Aren’t you married, then, Billy?’
‘Never seemed to find anyone.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Except Simon,’ he said.
‘Well.’ She took a sip of her coffee.
‘That would have sorted things out just fine, I’ve often thought, as far as the land was concerned. You’d have had kids, no doubt, and we’d all be able to see the future.’
Tirza put down her cup and looked at him.
‘Is that what this is all about? The land? The farm doesn’t seem to be in very good heart to me.’
‘No. Well, things have never been easy for me, with my injury. And after Grandpa died and I had a spell of ill health, it’s got worse. We had sheep for a while, but I couldn’t shear them myself. I was paying more out in feed and vet’s bills and shearers’ wages than I was making out of them.’
‘Uncle Tobias always had cows. There’s good pasture on this land.’
‘Sure, but things aren’t what they were when we were kids. Round about the sixties, the government started interfering more and more. They made you put in all this new equipment. Regulations a mile long. No hand-milking. No way. The milk had to go down a tube from the udder to the tank – no contact with the air, or the whole lot had to be thrown out. There was no way I could sustain a herd large enough to cover the cost of the machinery.’
‘But I saw cows over on the fields by Swansons’ farm.’
‘I rent out all that land to Hector Swanson. He’s the big noise in this part of Maine for dairy farming. One of the first to put in a milking machine, do you recall? He cuts the hay on some of our scattered fields too. I let him have the hay cheap, in return for him keeping the land clear.’