A Running Tide

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘So what do you grow, then? Vegetables?’

  ‘Potatoes, mostly. Other things are too labour intensive. And the Maine potato is still a commercial crop. I hire in casual labour for the picking, but otherwise I get by with a hired man on half-time. He works the rest of the time for Hector.’

  ‘It seems a shame,’ said Tirza. ‘This used to be such a varied farm, always something different to do – strawberries, the dairy herd, haying, the vegetable crops, the wild berries, chickens...’

  ‘It might have been possible, if Simon had come back, as he said he would. Grandpa was counting on that. But afterwards I guess he kind of gave up, and I wasn’t able to take on the work.’

  Tirza hunched over in her chair, biting her thumb and trying to see Simon walking across the yard with his swinging stride, the sun glinting off his short fair hair.

  iv

  That summer of ‘64 in Vietnam, Tirza was beginning to make a name for herself as a war photographer. And since her newspaper had no correspondent based nearer than Hong Kong, she had started to file her own reports on her observations of the war. Official war reporting she left to others – she avoided the Five o’clock Follies, when JUSPAO held their daily briefing for the press at the Rex Hotel. Instead, she wrote pieces in which she tried to make sense of the chaos around her by concentrating on scenes she had witnessed herself. In the early days, the helicopter pilots – who would sometimes give a lift to correspondents upcountry to one of the firebases – were unwilling to have a woman aboard, so she explored Saigon and the surrounding country. Her photographs showed the Vietnamese, not the American troops. Women wading through rice fields blown apart by bomb craters. Once-elegant streets of the city, lined by French colonial buildings, where gaunt street hawkers squatted surrounded by their wares – a handful of vegetables, some tattered copies of last year’s Le Monde, three or four cooking pots hammered out from US army scrap. And the hordes of child beggars who swarmed everywhere. Slipping between the fashionable silks of aristocratic Vietnamese ladies. Tugging at the trousers of swaggering US Marines. Their claw-like hands extended. ‘You Numbah One. You gimme money.’

  After a time, she established contacts amongst the helicopter crews. The journeys upcountry in the lurching choppers, the rhythmic ‘whump-whump’ of the rotors, the scrambled landings, the enemy gunfire raking the side as they banked and circled, hanging precariously out to get her shots of the violated country below – all of this became a way of life.

  One day early in May she was making her way wearily home after a mission of three days. She had passed the Opéra and was just turning into the side street where she rented a room of decayed grandeur, infested with cockroaches, when she heard running feet behind her.

  ‘Tirza? Tirza? Wait!’

  It was Simon.

  ‘I see you’re a lieutenant-colonel now, very impressive,’ she said, as they sat drinking an apéritif at an open air café half an hour later. She had showered and changed out of her dun-coloured trousers and jacket into a wisp of thin cotton made up for her into a simple sheath by the Franco-Vietnamese dressmaker who lived on the ground floor of her building.

  ‘Yes.’ He made a face. ‘But I’m stuck here at a desk in Saigon. Not like Korea, where I was in the thick of it. I’m mostly a pen-pusher at headquarters here.’

  She studied him across the table as keenly as he was studying her. It was seventeen years since they had last seen each other, the summer they graduated from high school and Tirza left Maine for good. Simon had filled out since those gawky, adolescent days, but he was still slender, without the solid farmer’s build of his father. The glaring Vietnamese sun glanced off his fair hair and he seemed unable to take his eyes off her.

  He told her about his occasional visits by helicopter to the war zone, where the US army was sweating and thrashing about in the jungle, fighting an elusive, invisible enemy, and he was surprised to discover that she had spent more time there than he had.

  ‘I managed to borrow a motor-bike this time,’ she said, sipping the long, ice-filled drink with gratitude. ‘Rode it out with my interpreter to a village that had just been “liberated”. It’s hard to tell which is worse for the villagers – being overrun by the Vietcong or being liberated by Americans. At least this time the village wasn’t burned to the ground and the women raped by our gallant boys.’

  ‘You sound very bitter.’

  ‘Have you any idea what kind of hell these people are going through? No, probably not. You’re part of the war machine. They talk to me, you see. A woman. And a civilian. They tell me stories that would make your hair stand on end. And of course I can’t send all of it back Stateside – it would be censored. I try to hint at it in the spaces between the lines, and let the pictures do the talking.’

  ‘Hey, hey!’ He reached across the table and took her hand gently in both of his. ‘You don’t need to get mad at me. Some of us feel just as helpless.’

  After that, they met whenever they could. For half their lives they had been separated, and Tirza found she could no longer think of Simon as a brother. Sometimes they were still linked by unspoken childhood memories, but they had grown distant. For the first time she saw him as a distinct person, with his own outline, no longer part of her flesh and blood. There was a space between them which, oddly, they both felt compelled to bridge.

  About a month later, Tirza hitched a lift on an army convoy which was moving up into an area near a short section of the Ho Chi Minh trail which had just been captured by South Vietnamese troops. From their temporary camp, she set off early in the evening to take some pictures of the trail before the rapid tropical twilight fell. The track wound through the jungle, sunk a little below ground level and roofed over with vines which had been woven together into a mat of dense vegetation. From a few yards away, nothing could be seen. Inside, on the trail itself, Tirza felt as though she was making her way along one of the underground tunnels the Vietcong were said to have dug deep into the heart of South Vietnam. The light was poor and green, and despite allowing long exposures she was doubtful whether her shots would show anything but a muddled darkness.

  She kept on going forward, however, past a group of South Vietnamese soldiers who shook their heads at her and tried to turn her back, but she pointed to her camera and to the track ahead until they shrugged and turned away.

  Round the next bend the darkness was deeper, but a sudden crawling sensation on her skin told her there were people breathing nearby. Before she could retreat, in the eye-blink between knowledge and escape, hands reached out and grabbed her. A dirty rag was stuffed into her mouth and a sack smelling of chickens pulled down over her head.

  Her captors tied her hands behind her back, and took away her Nikon and her army boots. Blind and choking inside the chicken sack, she had no sense of the direction in which they forced her to march. She was aware only of the speed, the hushed urgency and the pain of her bare feet stumbling over sharp branches and lassoing coils of creeper. After what seemed like hours, they halted and she sank to the ground with her head between her knees. There was whispered conferring and the clank of rifles laid down. Later, they removed her gag but kept her blindfolded, untied her hands and thrust a bowl of rice into them. With fingers numbed from the cords she stuffed the congealed mess blindly into her mouth.

  It was perhaps two days later when she was pushed to the ground and knocked sideways with the butt of a rifle. She lay unprotesting as her hands were again unbound, waiting for the bowl of rice. None came. Straining her ears, she could catch no movement close by, only – at a little distance – the sound of a cock crowing and women’s voices. Cautiously she pulled off her blindfold, dazed and blinking in a bar of fierce sun that sliced through the jungle canopy. Her captors had melted away into the trees and a few hundred yards ahead was a wide stretch of open ground and paddies, and a small, unkempt village, like dozens of others she had seen.

  Whether the communist guerrillas had lost interest in her, or found her a burden,
she could not tell. Why they had taken her hostage, and then hadn’t used her or put a bullet through her head, she would never know. The villagers were neither friendly nor hostile. They looked at her sideways, then passed her on from hand to hand until eventually she was dumped within walking distance of one of the South Vietnamese forward bases.

  When she managed to reach Saigon at last, Simon was beside himself. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

  ‘Are you crazy? It’s a miracle you weren’t killed! Can’t you at least behave with basic caution, you stupid woman?’

  Then he dragged her into his arms and kissed her painfully, crushing her ribs into his, his teeth driving violently into her lips.

  That afternoon he booked a suite at the Continental Palace and managed somehow – Tirza never knew how – to secure two weeks’ leave. Lying half awake in the wide, sagging bed under the foamy tent of the mosquito net, Tirza watched the fading sunlight falling through the green shutters in dusty bars across Simon’s bare back as he poured out drinks for them. The elderly waiter, spruce and discreet in his white starched uniform, had brought them a light meal and laid it on a bamboo table beside the window. She wrapped the sheet around herself while he set out the tiny bowls with their fragrant and mysterious contents and polished the heavily chased silver on a cloth before arranging it with meticulous care, but he kept his eyes averted from her, merely bowing in silence as Simon slipped some rustling notes into his hand.

  Their room was on the first floor, overlooking the garden, and as Simon sat beside her on the bed, feeding her fragments from the china bowls as if she were a convalescent child, she closed her eyes. The tastes – lemony, spicy, strange – on her tongue mingled with the scents of jasmine and frangipani stealing in on the evening air. Occasional sounds drifted in, the chink of glasses and the murmur of soft voices, the mechanical buzz of the cicadas, a footstep in the corridor outside.

  Later, lying naked in Simon’s arms, she rested her cheek against his gold hair, curling and faintly damp. His sleeping head was burrowed into the hollow between her shoulder and her breast, and his hand rested lightly against the small of her back. Overhead the ceiling fan revolved slowly, hypnotically, like an ironic echo of helicopter blades, while the sweat on her own skin dried slowly until she shivered. Simon stirred, kissed the curve of her breast and fell asleep again.

  While his leave lasted, they wandered in the same dreamlike state through the older, unspoiled parts of colonial Saigon, dined in one of the French or Corsican restaurants, then by unspoken mutual urge, made their way back to the Continental Palace. Sometimes, as they threaded their way through the noisy crowds thronging the terrace along the street, one of Simon’s fellow officers shouted out to them. Their tiny Asian girlfriends looked like children. But Tirza hardly noticed them, sleepwalking with Simon back to the bed with its bower of white net, which stirred and swayed constantly under the rotating fan.

  Simon bought her silks from Thailand and draped them round her naked body. She felt shy of him then, until he took her back into the safe, hollowed-out bed. Then their love-making was fierce, frantic, as though the slithering hours could be held back by its intensity.

  Two days before his leave was over, Simon asked her to marry him.

  She lay back against the pillows looking up at him. The scent of the frangipani was very strong tonight, after rain during the afternoon.

  ‘Oh, Simon,’ she said, laying her hands on his chest, ‘I’m very fond of you. You’re probably the person who matters most to me in the world, but I’m not sure I’m in love with you.’

  He ran his finger over her lips, tracing their shape in the half-light.

  ‘I know. But I think I’m in love with you. It’s been creeping up on me, without my noticing. And I think you might come to love me in the same way. We’re not adolescents. Caring about each other is probably more important than sexual passion, don’t you think?’

  She laughed. ‘We seem to have found our way to that.’

  ‘Yes, we have.’ And he pulled her towards him. ‘What do you say? Will you marry me, or must I work my wicked will on you without benefit of clergy?’

  Laughter bubbled up in her as she pressed her face into his shoulder. ‘All right,’ she said, giddy with a sense of being carried away on a running tide, rudderless. ‘All right, I’ll marry you.’

  In the morning they bought an antique French ring – an emerald the colour of the deep cleft in the ocean shelf out beyond Mustinegus, where Nathan laid many of his traps. They sent telegrams off to their families, and spent the next two days as irresponsibly as two children on an unexpected holiday.

  At the end of that week, Simon had to make one of his visits to the war zone. The uncertain position of the troops had moved once again. The helicopter pilot found himself over enemy territory and before he could regain a safe position, a Vietcong rocket brought the helicopter down to the roof of the jungle, where it hit the tops of the trees and burst into flame.

  The next day Tirza left the Continental Palace for her old lodgings near the Opéra, sent a telegram to Maine, and went back into the jungle with her spare camera.

  v

  Tirza picked up her cold cup of coffee and looked across the rim at Billy.

  ‘I do understand that it’s been difficult for you to run the farm, but I don’t know why you wanted to see me. I’m not sure it has much to do with me, since I walked out on the family all those years ago.’

  Billy cleared his throat and leaned forward, setting his large hands squarely on his plump knees.

  ‘This farm always belonged jointly to the two brothers – my grandfather, Tobias, and your father, Nathan. They made an agreement to share out the income, the bulk of it going, of course, to Tobias, as he was working the land, but some to Nathan because of his share in the ownership and because he always did some work on the farm. As you did, too, of course. Nathan also owned the house in Flamboro and all its contents, and Louisa Mary. The proceeds of their sale were put into a trust for you after Nathan’s death, which Foss’s firm administers.’

  He cleared his throat again.

  ‘You and I are the only ones left of all the Libby family, Tirza. You own half the land already, as well as all of Nathan’s own money. I’ve made my will. I discussed it all with Nathan before he died. I’m leaving the remainder of the property to you.’

  Tirza put down her cup with a crash, so that it fell over in the saucer.

  ‘But I don’t...’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ He held up his hand to silence her.

  ‘I always liked you, Tirza.’

  He laughed, and it turned into a cough which blocked his words for several minutes. When he recovered, he smiled ruefully.

  ‘Oh, I know you despised me. I was an awful kid. Useless and whining. I know that. But I admired you so much, and I wanted to be like you. You were so independent and courageous.’

  Tirza felt shamed. How often she and Simon had pushed Billy away, avoided him, refused to take him with them, even when he could have come too – picking crab apples or visiting the Boston ladies. She started to speak again, but he interrupted her.

  ‘You probably think I’m morbid, talking about wills and all, when I’m only forty-three. But, well, they’ve diagnosed lung cancer. I’ve only got a few months. It would settle my mind if I could know that the land was in safe hands.’

  ‘Oh, Billy.’ Tirza leaned forward and placed her hands over his. ‘What has happened to us all? First Martha, then Simon, now you. Are you sure? Can’t they do something for you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Things have gone too far. And to tell you the truth, I shan’t be sorry to go. I’m so tired these days, I’d just like to lie down and sleep, and not have to get up again. Say you’ll take on the land, Tirza.’

  He looked at her pleadingly, and Tirza felt as though she was trapped.

  ‘I’ll have to think, Billy. I have a career of my own, you know. I’m always travelling.’

  ‘I know.’
He slumped back, as though he had grown smaller. ‘It isn’t really fair of me. But you know what Christina always says about our responsibility to the land.’

  It was a moment before Tirza took in his words.

  ‘What did you say? You don’t mean... Girna isn’t still alive?’

  ‘Ayuh. Still living in that cabin up to the woods. Won’t listen to reason.’ He smiled, half proud, half exasperated. ‘She’s part blind, but still as tough and resilient as an old Indian squaw.’

  Tirza stood up.

  ‘I’ll go and talk to her.’

  By the time she had walked down the farm track and over the headland into Flamboro, Tirza was exhausted. Back at home on her island, talking to Grace on the doorstep while they watched the gulls, or making short forays to photograph Highland buildings, she had thought she had at last recovered from the long-drawn-out effects of the malaria and dysentery which had first driven her to Scotland. Now she realised that she had not fully regained her strength. In her youth she had walked constantly about these paths and cliffs, but now the distance from Todd’s Neck to the farm, and from the farm to Flamboro, had left her knees weak. She sat down on one of the old bollards on the wharf and rested her chin in her hands.

  Billy’s news of his illness had shaken her. In her long years of wandering she had assumed that he had married, that he had a growing family of sons preparing to assume the Libby inheritance. When she had pictured the farm, she imagined a wife for Billy not unlike Harriet, briskly feeding the hens, baking her own bread, helping with the milking and harvesting when she was needed. But, of course, she had been deluding herself. Times change. And though it had been pleasant to invent a happy ending to Billy’s story, she had had a hand in destroying his life.