Drown My Books

by Penny Freedman

  We are an eclectic bunch in age and background, which makes for wide-ranging, if somewhat shapeless, discussions (I have had to abandon all ambitions for critical rigour). Until recently there were eight of us, ranging from eighteen-year-old Dora to eighty-year-old Eva Majoros, who came to England with her husband in 1956, escaping the consequences of the failed anti-Soviet revolution in Hungary. After some years in London, leading the precarious lives of émigré intellectuals, they moved here, where her husband, a semi-successful writer by this time, could find remoteness, quiet and a cheap house a two-hour train ride from London. She established herself as a translator, specialising in translating English Golden Age crime novels into Hungarian. He died some years ago but Eva lives on amid the mementos of her literary and European past. When it is her turn to bring refreshments to a meeting of the group, she brings almond cakes and strudel.

  The other members of the group, besides me, are Lorna, Kelly Field, a nice woman called Lesley, who used to work for Dover Council, was made redundant in her early fifties and now has plenty of time for reading, and Alice Gates, a neighbour of mine, who teaches at the primary school. We had an eighth member but we have lost her, and this is the crux of what I need to discuss with Lorna, and the thing I have avoided talking about to you while I wittered on about dog-walking and the possible sex life of our village shopkeeper.

  Lily Terry was our eighth member. I bullied her into joining, I suppose, because I wanted Dora to join and I didn’t think she would unless we had someone else young in the group. Lily and her husband, Jack, lived in the end cottage, next door to the Greek church. Lily and her husband makes them sound staid and respectable but they were just kids, really. Lily was twenty-two I learned yesterday, as I sat with the rest of the group in St Martin’s Church and looked at her dates on the front of the order of service: Lily Charlotte Terry 18th September 1991 to 5th February 2014. Jack is a few years older, I guess. They were married for about eighteen months and getting married was pretty much at odds, I suppose, with the rest of their lifestyle, but they seemed blissfully happy in the way only the young can be. They ran a window-cleaning service – in demand around here, where the windows get salt-caked in no time – and they were cheery in even the vilest weather. But that was just the day job; what they wanted was to be rock stars and what they loved was their band, Bad Lads. Jack was quite a bad lad, I’ve been told, until Lily came along to audition for the band and everything changed. Everything must have changed for the band, too, I think, because Lily’s pure, true voice became its trademark sound.

  Lily died a week ago in an accident that was both predictable and utterly shocking. As she and Jack were cleaning the windows of the pub – he at the front and she at the back – her ladder slipped and she fell, hitting her head on a low stone bollard that marked the edge of the car park. Jack heard the fall and rushed round there. He called an ambulance and sat with her, talking to her, as a small, silent crowd gathered. She was dead by the time she reached the hospital.

  I have been more upset by her death than I would have thought possible, to the extent of sudden floods of tears and bursts of rage that have had me stomping around the house, kicking the furniture and demanding of a God I don’t believe in why He thought killing Lily off was a good idea. I have wanted to help Jack but he looks so wild in his grief that I can’t begin. I think I am actually afraid of him.

  I’m worried about next week’s meeting of the book group. I’m uncomfortable about going ahead with it as though nothing has happened. In fact, I rather dread it, but I think that’s because I’m not sure that I shall be able to keep my feelings under control. So I need to talk to Lorna. I like Lorna, and I think she likes me. If so, it is an attraction of opposites: she is quiet and calm where I am noisy and turbulent. She has a soft, musical Scottish accent while I am all bossy Home Counties. She is a person who considers and weighs her words where I frequently don’t know what I’m going to say until I’ve said it. We share a sense of humour, however, and hers is quietly subversive in a way that I love. She was a school librarian for thirty years and we bond from time to time by rerunning scenes of horror from our teaching pasts. She took early retirement (she has a heart problem) just at the time when our library was threatened with closure, and she offered to run it on a voluntary basis. It is she, really, who keeps the book group going. I run the meetings, insofar as they are ‘run’, but she does all the ordering of books and the chasing up, with quiet persistence, of those that don’t get returned.

  This morning, as I step inside the library, she greets me with an unexpected hug.

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know what to do about next week’s meeting,’ I say. ‘I don’t think we can just carry on as if nothing has happened.’

  She leads me over to the staff desk, where we pull out chairs and sit down. As usual, she looks as though she has dressed to play the part of a librarian in a 1950s play. Her hair, which is hardly touched with grey, is cut in a neat bob and she favours slim skirts of modest length, low-heeled court shoes and pastel twinsets – where can you buy those these days? – sometimes accessorised with a string of pearls. Occasionally her skirt is a kilt – a tribute to her Scottish origins, I assume. Perhaps she gets the twinsets too on her annual holiday in Scotland. I have never asked her about her style choices because I could find no way of doing it politely, but, knowing her as I do, I am pretty sure that they are ironic, a private joke about other people’s stereotypes.

  ‘I was worried about you yesterday’ she says.

  ‘Why me particularly? We were all upset.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ She smiles. ‘You were such a mother to Lily.’

  ‘A mother?’ I protest. ‘No! She was very bright and she’d given up on her A levels, and I just felt – it was more of a teacher thing, if anything.’

  She has taken off her glasses, which hang on a chain round her neck, completing the librarian motif, and she is looking hard at me.

  ‘If you say so,’ she says.

  ‘I do say so.’

  She gathers up some request slips from the desk and pats them into a neat pile. Then she looks at me again, smiling but intent. ‘So your feelings for Lily had nothing to do with the fact that her own mother is in Australia and you have a twenty-two-year-old daughter whom you hardly ever see?’

  ‘I do!’ I protest. ‘I see her. We talk on the phone.’

  ‘But you saw Lily nearly every day.’

  ‘Of course I did. We lived three doors away from each other.’

  ‘I think that’s my point.’

  ‘That she was a daughter substitute?’

  ‘One you could have a much easier relationship with because you weren’t her mother.’

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘perhaps we should go through into the office and I’ll lie down on the couch and you can psychoanalyse me properly and I’ll pay you three hundred pounds.’

  I mean this to be light-hearted but it comes out sounding sour and hurt. She puts her glasses back on.

  ‘How about going into the office and having a cup of coffee?’ she suggests.

  ‘I’ve got the dog outside,’ I say ungraciously. ‘I can’t leave him out there forever while we discuss my pathological need to mother.’

  She looks around. ‘Well, there’s nobody here,’ she says, ‘and he’s house-trained, isn’t he?’

  Caliban shows more animation about being admitted to the library than I have ever seen him show about anything, except, possibly, for the unwary rabbit he once hunted down among my cabbages. I suspect that the reason for his joy is the same in both cases – a pleasure in the illicit. He has intuited that rules are being bent here, and that delights him. We settle in the office, which used to be the staff common room and has two easy chairs and a lumpy sofa, and Caliban’s cup runneth over when Lorna gives him a Rich Tea biscuit.

  ‘He r
eally shouldn’t,’ I say.

  ‘Peace offering,’ she says. ‘For you, not him. I really didn’t mean to suggest that there was anything pathological about your feelings for Lily. I just meant that you will take it harder than the rest of us. You were close to her, you knew her in a way the rest of us didn’t. You shouldn’t feel you have to bottle up your feelings but you should try not to get angry with the rest of us because we’re not grieving in the same way.’

  ‘So you think we should go ahead with the meeting?’

  ‘I think we should. It won’t get any easier if we leave it.’

  And there it is. No flailing about and going round in circles; just a quiet decision. In my next life I’m going to be Lorna.

  If you are a worrier by nature, the removal of a worry affords only the briefest moment of relief. In the mind of the compulsive worrier, anxieties line themselves up in strict priority order and as soon as the first is dismissed, the next steps up smartly to replace it. Thus it is that, on the walk home, I start worrying about Farid and Dora. I have been very slow to spot the problem here. I’m not blind – I could see that Farid was interested by Dora in that brief moment of meeting in my hallway. Why wouldn’t he be? He sees no one except fellow asylum seekers, who are traumatised, guilt-ridden, damaged in all kinds of ways, and hardened to an uncaring world. Dora is the most innocent eighteen-year-old I have ever come across, a butterfly just stretching her damp, new wings, untouched by the world. I don’t mean to imply that Farid wants to despoil her; I trust him to behave well, but I can see how he would want to breathe in that innocence. As for Dora, well, Farid is good-looking, charming and clever, and she doesn’t get to meet boys like that in this village – or at her Dover convent school.

  So, it shouldn’t surprise me that they have started meeting. I hoped that I had stopped Farid in his tracks by telling him that she was a priest’s daughter, but I reckoned without the drive of the young to the forbidden, the attraction of being star-crossed lovers. What I have been slow to catch onto is the way they have managed to meet, given the eagle eye that Dimitris Karalis keeps on his daughter. When I found my bike back in my garden, neatly wrapped in its plastic shroud, two days after I gave it to Farid, I was puzzled. Had he not understood that it was a gift, or at the least a long-term loan? I asked him about it the next time I saw him in class and he said he was worried about its being stolen from his B&B but would like to borrow it again if I didn’t mind. ‘Feel free,’ I said and noticed, vaguely, that it came and went over the next week. Once, I looked out of the kitchen window at seven-thirty in the morning and noticed him returning it. I offered him some breakfast but he declined and hurried away. Then, the day before yesterday, I caught an early bus back from Dover after the English class. Going in twice a week, I usually take the opportunity to go to the Co-op before getting the bus but it was the day before Lily’s funeral and I didn’t have much appetite. At the bus stop, I witnessed the happy meeting of the young lovers and I understood how they were managing to use Dora’s only unchaperoned time. Farid would travel on the bus with her and return on my bike. And then do the opposite in the morning. I doubt he did it every day because he couldn’t afford the bus fares, but they had developed a little routine and I was a facilitator in this – if not Juliet’s nurse, at least Friar Lawrence. They didn’t see me and I waited for them to get on the bus and move to the back before I got in and sat at the front. There would be a chance, I thought, for me to talk to Farid as he walked round to collect my bike. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say but we would at least have things out in the open.

  As it turned out, however, whatever I was going to say was superseded by what Dimitris Karalis had to say. As the bus drew in to its stop opposite the village shop, he emerged from the shop and swept across the road in all the magnificence of his black robe and patriarchal beard. He did not shout or threaten; he simply stood on the pavement waiting, and when Dora dismounted he just said, ‘Dora’, and put out a hand to her. She didn’t take it but she walked away with him without a backward look at Farid, who came down the step behind her. Farid watched them go and I watched him watching. Then he turned and noticed me. We stood and looked at each other, and he looked baffled and angry and desolate all at the same time. I just looked stupid, I imagine. Certainly what I said was hardly adequate to the occasion.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I asked.

  He refused the tea but he came back for the bike and rode away. I watched him disappear into the evening gloom and I have been worrying about him ever since.

  Chapter Three

  OFFSHORE

  Tuesday 11th February 2014

  Kelly

  Stupid bloody woman. Smug, patronising, know-all. Typical teacher. Kelly Field stood at the door of the shop, watching Gina whatsername untie her nasty dog and walk away. ‘Nice lad,’ she had said, as though Kelly needed her approval for a bit of recreational sex on a cold morning. Thought she knew everything, didn’t she? Thought Matt was actually a boyfriend. Didn’t know that he was nothing to the real man in her life. Know-all didn’t know it all. She allowed herself a smile. Wouldn’t they all be surprised when it was out in the open?

  She went back to her till and her hand went to her phone, lying beside it, but she pulled away as though it might electrocute her. Not yet. She had promised herself that she would wait, and she would. Maybe tonight, though. If she didn’t hear from him, maybe tonight. In the meantime, there was the day to get through: a few people in for papers, then the old people tottering in around eleven, taking an age to buy nothing much, and then just the odd stay-at-home mum until the after-school flurry – whiny little kids wanting sweets and crisps first, and then a few kids off the Dover bus – light-fingered, some of them, needed watching – and people on their way home from work. Boring, boring, boring. She could remember how her father used to chat to everyone and actually seemed to like it, until the Alzheimer’s got too bad and he got embarrassing. Thursday she would go and see him as usual. Close up early and go and have tea with him. Sometimes he knew her, sometimes he didn’t. Either way, she didn’t know him any more.

  She went to the door and stood, looking out. She could see the Greek priest coming up the road for his paper. Well, she was glad she had told him about his precious daughter and that Arab boy. It turned her stomach seeing the two of them at the bus stop there, all love’s young dream. Time they got real. Time everyone got real…

  Chapter Four

  BRING UP THE BODIES

  Thursday 13th February 2014

  Caliban and I sleep late this morning and I would like to be able to say that this rings alarm bells for me, but I have to admit that it doesn’t; I am too preoccupied with the vileness of the weather that is revealed when I open the curtains. Under the blackest of skies a ferocious wind is whirling rain around and flinging it at the window, and as I pull on my clothes I ask myself aloud – living alone does this, I find – why the hell I thought becoming a dog-owner was a good idea. I munch a couple of slices of toast while Caliban paces and whines, and then, booted and anoraked, I step out with him into the full fury of the gale.

  I negotiate the slippery steps down to the beach with care, clinging to the handrail; it is twenty feet, I guess, from top to bottom. When I step onto the beach and turn into the teeth of the gale, I am blinded by the rain and the breath is knocked out of me by the wind, but Caliban goes galloping off, undeterred. The tide is high, so we are forced to walk on the pebbles and I am making very slow progress as I see, through my dripping lashes, that he has found something high up near the sea wall. I can’t see what it is from here but I do see a blur of bright pink and deduce that it is something man-made – something washed up high on the beach by the boiling sea, I assume. Caliban doesn’t like it; he is barking in short bursts and making little runs at it, as though to try and drive it away.

  I toil over the pebbles with the breath beginning to burn in my chest as
I push against the wind. As I get closer, Caliban runs to me and then runs ahead of me, urging me on. I can see now what it is, though not yet who, and my mind is doing all sorts of refusing in the face of the evidence that what my dog has found is a body. Not necessarily dead, my mind tells me, but not lying there voluntarily, not in this weather. So, injured or unconscious? I feel in my pocket for my phone. An ambulance. I shall ring for an ambulance. And then I get close enough to see the hair. I stagger the last few yards and kneel down beside her. She is lying face down and I neither want nor need to turn her over. The chemical purple of her hair and the bright pink anorak tell me that this is Kelly Field. Even then, I am desperate to normalise this. Hypothermia, I think. Swimming in this weather. Ridiculous. She must have staggered out of the sea, put on her tracksuit and then collapsed. Queasily I reach for her hand and try to feel for a pulse. I can’t feel anything but my fingers are so numb with cold that they’re not much good. Then I see the blood. It was quite obvious; I just wasn’t seeing it. It spreads out from under her head into the pebbles, diluted by the rain but indisputably blood. I haul myself to my feet and get my phone out. On my screen Orange is welcoming me to France, of course, and it occurs to me to wonder if I shall be charged at the international rate for making a 999 call. I am impressed by how calm I am on the phone, though I am breathing rather hard. I tell them where Kelly is to be found and who I am. Then I look around. No one else is stupid enough to be on this beach this morning. I am on my own. In spite of the blood, the hypothermia idea stays with me and I wonder if I should take off my sweater and anorak and spread them over her. Or should I lie down beside her and try to impart some of my body heat, such as it is, to her? The fact that I don’t do either of these things tells me that I know, in fact, that she is dead.