by Sarah Perry
‘Well, anyway – I’m not going in first,’ said Clare. ‘Will it be cold?’ She was wearing a child’s swimming costume worn to grey netting at the seams. It was far too small, and left red welts on her shoulders. The promise of a swim had woken her early – John had heard someone light-footed run past his door not long after sunrise, slamming doors in the kitchen downstairs and throwing windows open.
‘That depends when you go in,’ said John, remembering his nephews once dragging him towards an incoming tide. ‘Wait till after lunch, and the water will be warm as a bath and you’ll forget you ever stood on dry land.’
She nodded and said, ‘All right then,’ and scooping the cat under her arm followed Eve out into the garden.
‘The trouble with my sister,’ said Alex, turning away from the sink where he was inexpertly washing up, ‘is that she does as she’s told. You have to watch that.’
‘I imagine you do,’ said John.
Late in the morning, on his way to the garden, John found Hester seated on the step where two nights before he’d answered the phone. She was sewing buttons on to a blue and white striped shirt, which showed patches of dust and grease where she held it, her needle flashing in the light coming through the panes in the front door.
‘John,’ she’d said when she saw him, not looking up from her work, ‘is all as it should be, out there in the sun?’ Crouched there with her back pressed against the wooden stairs she looked childish and ancient all at once, and was placed at the centre of things. Her gaze took in the blue dining room and the kitchen, and – if she leant against the banister – along the hall to the door leading out to the garden. Little could happen that would not be seen or heard.
‘Elijah’s asleep in the dining room with the cat on his shoulder, and Walker’s dead-heading the roses. Clare says she won’t go swimming after all – she’s afraid she’ll cut her feet on the stones.’
She nodded twice, and then once more after a pause, as though she had given a problem some thought and reached a conclusion. She broke a length of cotton in her teeth, and sucked at the end to draw it through her needle. ‘And Alex?’
‘I saw him sleeping in the long grass.’
She nodded again, without surprise, and looked up from her mending to give him one of her sudden transforming smiles. It was impossible not to smile in return, and John stood watching the needle slip through the button and the fabric in a deft practised rhythm. Then she said, ‘You’ll look after them for me, won’t you, dear John?’ and this time mischief tugged at her smile, so that he felt irresistibly drawn into a conspiracy.
‘I’m going outside now,’ he said, ‘to brave the sun.’ The needle flashed through the cloth, and he imagined she was sewing not a faded shirt, but a fine net that drew them all together. As he put his hand to the door, she called after him: ‘When you see Alex, will you tell him I found the book he asked me for, and left it in the dining room, where he always sits?’
When he found Alex on the terrace picking moss from the lead face of the sundial, he passed on the message word for word with the accuracy of a clever schoolboy. The younger man frowned, scratching at an insect bite at the rim of the shadow-mark on his arm. ‘A book?’ He shook his head. ‘But I don’t remember any…’ Then he shrugged. ‘Oh well – so often I forget what I’ve done and said, and if I didn’t have Hester to remind me…’ He grinned ruefully, and patting John’s shoulder in thanks stepped through the glass doors and into the dining room behind.
Later still Clare came and sat beside him in the long shadow of the dying elm. She’d covered her swimming costume with a dark green dress that reached to her ankles, its hem splashed with mud from another season. Sweat had darkened the roots of her hair, and she was smeared with cream that lay on her skin like the marks on an animal’s pelt. The lotion smelt a little of honey, and had begun to attract tiny black flies. ‘Thunderbugs,’ said John, lifting one from the back of her hand with his thumbnail. ‘It means the storm’s coming soon.’
‘I don’t think I want to go swimming,’ she said. The cat had broken the string of beads, and she tossed them between her hands.
‘Why – aren’t you hot? Won’t the water cool you?’ He picked up a bead from where it had fallen, and put it in her palm.
‘I went up there just now and there was something under the water, like hair or clothes. Alex says it’s a plastic bag but a plastic bag would float, wouldn’t it?’
‘Aren’t you going to the seaside tomorrow? Then you can swim in the sea.’
‘That would be even deeper, though. Do you like swimming?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘I can’t remember.’ This was true – there must have been swimming, he thought, on those short bed-and-breakfast holidays in Suffolk and Kent, but he was too dazed with heat to remember. He felt sweat collect where the girl’s shoulder rested against his, and moving away from her lowered himself onto the grass. She spread the beads in her lap and began to sort them, chatting idly to him without pausing for breath or answer.
Her undemanding presence soothed him until he lay half-asleep, now and then caught by a word or phrase: ‘The beads are pretty aren’t they, blue like bits of a broken plate – are they glass?… I tried to make him wear them but he wouldn’t – he said they smelt like the skin of the dead man who’d been wearing them but I can’t smell anything, can you?… I remember someone at St Jude’s had beads just like this on her wrist with a bird hanging from it and when she lost the bird I found it for her… oh yes, it’s hot but we mustn’t complain Hester says; it wasn’t like this last year when it rained and rained and Eve was unhappy then and wouldn’t play the piano, and the keys got dusty… well, of course that was before Walker got here but I don’t know why that would cheer her up; she’s always hated him and I heard him call her bitch once when he thought no-one was listening. Bitch, I said, that’s terrible, you can’t say that! and he laughed and said Well, she’s more like a cat really, a dog’s a faithful thing, and kissed me on the forehead like he always does when he’s sorry… and of course that was the year we took Alex away…’
At this she fell silent, so that the sound of the beads clicking in her lap roused John, who looked up between outspread fingers to see her frowning over her shoulder, back towards the house. After a while she began singing under her breath: Oh, thunderbug fly away home, your house is on fire and your children will burn… The low hum went through her and into the hard earth, and became part of the heat and the dry rustle of wind in the dying branches of the elm. Soon after he must have fallen asleep, because when he was woken by Clare shaking him urgently by the shoulder it had begun to grow dark, and the empty garden was in shadow.
The sound of a dog barking frantically reached them from the open windows of the house, and with it an unfamiliar voice raised in hysterical anger or pleading. John sat up too quickly, and felt the blood drain from his head. Specks of light floated in front of his eyes; shaking his head to be rid of them, he asked the girl, ‘What’s that, who’s come here? Who is it?’ His first thought was that he’d been finally found out, and his stomach lurched once and then receded, leaving him breathless and hollow.
Clare twisted the fabric of her skirt. ‘I think it’s that woman again…’
‘What woman?’
‘She never told us her name… She comes sometimes, because –’ She stopped herself, pressing her hand to her mouth as if she’d suddenly remembered there were things she mustn’t say. Then she slid her hand into his and said, ‘You won’t let her come down here?’
‘Of course I won’t,’ he said, thinking of the name written in the notebook upstairs, and engraved into the table in the kitchen. Was this Eadwacer then, come to deliver another of those foolish letters?
‘Let’s stay here.’ Clare crouched beside him clasping her knees, and whispered: ‘She always goes away after a while, let’s just stay here where she won’t see us – where’s Alex? She mustn’t find him.’ Up on the embankment wall, John could see the y
oung man pacing back and forth. The yellow light above the tower had come on, and shed a sickly glow on the grass. ‘It’s all right, he’s up there,’ he said. ‘Who is she?’
‘She’s horrible – she shouts and cries, and always brings her dog. And I don’t like looking at her face – it’s all soft, like she doesn’t have any bones. Alex knew her, you know, back when he went away. She’s always trying to find him.’ She started to cry, and John patted her helplessly on the shoulder.
Then there was a lull in the noise from the house, and instead they heard Elijah’s deep and measured voice. The dog barked once more, in a single threatened yelp, and the cat bolted from the house with its ragged ears flattened against its scalp. Spying John and Clare huddled at the foot of the elm, it slowed to a saunter, and reaching them thrust its head into Clare’s palm and set up an ecstatic purr. The girl fussed over it for a while, and then said, ‘I can see her, look.’
As it grew darker, the lamp-lit rooms of the house became more distinct, and they could make out a small group in the kitchen, stiffly ranged against each other. Hester and Elijah stood side by side, their backs to the window, making a barrier. Elijah spoke, the lights making an untidy halo of the reddish curls on his head, his hand raised in a defensive soothing gesture. In the centre of the room John saw a short woman with thick colourless hair and a pale soft face twisted with anger or misery. She wore a shapeless grey coat buttoned to the neck, and light reflecting from the thick lenses of her glasses gave her movements a blind menacing look. The sight of her fractured John’s false sense of belonging – it seemed to him that she’d come to spite him, and he felt a surge of loathing and disgust, as though he’d woken up to find a spider on his pillow. Eve and Walker stood in the doorway, Eve a little behind the older man as though he’d pushed himself forward to shield her. The fine bones of her face were pale as paper underneath her cap of black hair, and her head was tilted back like a child trying to be brave. It was this, and not Clare crying beside him, that made John stand and say, ‘Do you think we should stay here? Shouldn’t we go in?’
She shook her head, and sniffed at her tears. ‘I don’t think so. They always make her go away. Won’t you stay with me here until she goes?’
‘But don’t you think it must be her, who writes those letters? Perhaps she came to put another through the door, and they caught her at it, and there was a scene…’ The idea satisfied him, as it would if he’d been sitting in his armchair at the shop, idly turning the pages of a book; but all the same there was a nervous twisting of his stomach.
‘I don’t know. Maybe – but stay here, please. I don’t like the shouting, it scares me.’
‘Of course I will.’ Her face, streaked with tears and dust, was suddenly very like his brother’s had been when he’d come to John with the terrible, brief distress of childhood. He patted her shoulder twice, and said, ‘Well then, let’s not think about her. Why don’t you tell me about your cat? How old is he?’
‘I don’t know.’ She wiped her nose on her bare arm. ‘I think he must be very old, look – he has white hairs on his nose.’ The cat shot John a baleful stare, and began to worry at its torn ear. ‘Is it true that all ginger cats are boys?’
‘Toms, yes. They call them toms, I think – look, is she going?’ The little group in the kitchen was slowly dispersing, and he thought he heard the front door close. A moment later the dog’s bark receded into the distance, and after a long silence in which they could make out the footsteps of Alex pacing the embankment wall behind them, Eve began to play the piano. The cat, sensing the crisis had passed, aimed a petulant scratch at Clare and idled back towards the house, pausing now and then to pat at something in the grass.
Clare began to cry again, this time quietly and with a steady fixed look of sadness. She seemed to John less like a child then than she’d ever been, and it made him anxious and unsure of himself and his methods; he took his arm from her shoulder and said, ‘Let’s bring your brother in, shall we? Look, here he comes – don’t let him see you cry.’ She reached up her arms, and he pulled her to her feet. ‘That’s right, everything’s all right,’ he said, patting his pockets for the handkerchief that was always there, forgetting he wore another man’s clothes. ‘It’s just us now, there’s no-one else here.’
SATURDAY
I
With the bright sea at his feet and at his back a black rock, John sat listening on the shore:
‘… warm in the water like a bath, it’s so shallow – Hester do go in…’
‘Look what’s this one then, all spotty like an egg; what is it Eve, did you see one like it before?’
‘… a cowrie, I think – and if I don’t play at all today I won’t be able to do any at all tomorrow – my fingers will hurt and be stiff…’
‘I shall not go in, however warm, however shallow. A cowrie, yes – how many have you there? They’re fortune-teller’s shells, if you know how to use them.’
‘… three… four… five… once I caught a shell alive… Walker give me that one there, there, there by your foot…’
‘John asleep again, I see. What have you done with my cigarettes?’
‘… a necklace of them like this, maybe a starfish in the middle…’
‘A whole day without music. What a waste.’
‘Where else but where you put them – shall we eat? I’m hungry and the bread is still warm… sing then Eve, if you must, there was singing before anything else… No, don’t wake him, don’t be unkind!’
‘… don’t feel like singing, my head aches. Oh, blow it the other way, can’t you…’
‘It’ll keep away flies.’
‘… and besides what have you done with Alex?’
‘Yes, where’s my brother? I want to show him these: thirteen… fourteen…’
‘I recall a poem once in my youth, in those days when we memorised them and they lodged in there – the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, it went – I don’t recall the rest – and at that time I had an opal ring and honestly thought, honestly thought, look hard enough Hester and you’ll see the white waves moving…’
‘Remember we used to keep the shells that were still on their hinges and you’d try and keep pennies inside? Sing for us, Evie, go on… oh, look, where have you been – I’ve been waiting and waiting! Look what I found!’
‘No doubt did you please you could marry with ease…’
‘… still warm, thank you – and is there cheese?’
‘When young maidens are fair many lovers will come…’
‘But you’re not fair, my darling, are you? Clare, now, she’s fair as the moon…’
‘And no maiden either!’
‘But she whom you wed should be North Country bred… give me the knife.’
‘… fair little sister, never growed up – show me your treasures then…’
‘I had thought Elijah might join us this time, really I did, but his times are in his own hands, I daresay – oh, careful now, mind John…’
And John, sand kicked into his eyes and the shade retreating from his feet, sat up, took the bread that was offered to him, and said, ‘It was always a favourite song of my mother’s, that one, though I don’t think she’d ever been north.’
After they’d eaten, and all but Hester had wandered out towards the long shallow pool that lay between them and the sea, John said: ‘I think I’ll go for a walk.’ Hester waved something between a farewell and a blessing, and resumed her watchful cross-legged position on the red blanket.
He’d woken that morning resolved to take his leave – the notebook left for the other man, the letter folded twice, the painted Puritan saluted at the door – but somewhere along the way he’d been caught up again, helpless, Elijah waving them farewell at the door, and delivering (or so John thought) a slow complicit wink. Still sleepy when they set out, he dozed fitfully in the moist hot air of the car, so that he only recalled waking now and then to see rabbits poisoned by farmers shivering at the road
side, and pylons coming at him across the fields like high-masted ships of the line. Stumbling to his feet, he’d seen a car park sloping to a quayside, where a boy sat cross-legged trailing a crab-line in green water. There was the familiar scent of clean air and salt and something deeper underneath, of fragments of fish dropped by gulls and drying out in hidden places, and seaweed dying on beds of rock; and above the calling of the gulls, the rushing and receding he’d once taken home in the coils of a shell that he pressed to his ear in winter, when there seemed no possibility of the sun ever shining again.
Returning now to the car park, uncertain of his way, he looked out to the line of dark squat shrubs that marked the beginning of the salt-marsh. The child had abandoned his fishing lines and now leant against the hull of a blue-painted tender, scratching patterns on the tarmac with a piece of flint.
The marshes were reached from a narrow raised pathway along a bank that formed a kind of sea wall. As John set out on the path he paused to let a toad cross; it splayed out its soft patient feet and crept past, a pulse throbbing in its stomach and its butter-coloured eyes rolling thanks. To his right as he walked were the long narrow gardens of the last houses before the sea; to his left, several feet below, was the low stretch of land that was drowned and revived every day by the industrious tides. It was an indistinct landscape riddled with irregular channels that ran into and out of each other everywhere he looked. Late in the day water would seep from under the soft mud and trickle unhurriedly in fine rivulets, gathering speed until the tide was high.