by Moir, Tanya
I am pleased to tell you that Mother seems more herself. I think she begins to reconcile herself to our situation. I am sure that, as you say, a holiday would benefit her greatly;— if only we could take the train to Southampton, or Brighton, as we used to! Alas, even if such places existed here (which they do not), we have neither time nor means to visit them.
Hester shakes her head. The words seem to belong to someone else, an old acquaintance left behind her. She picks up her forbidden pen.
It is his fault, she writes.
She underlines this, twice. After a time she adds:
We should not have come here. Nothing has changed.
Twenty-Seven
A morepork calls. Hester feels a cold draught on the back of her neck. She does not wish to read more of this. She skims quickly over Teone’s bleak vision of the afterlife, its empty heavens and shadow-dwelling souls, and is thankful to turn the page.
Twenty-Eight
It is the rats that get Letitia in the end. The kiore gives a high shriek as Daniel’s broom descends upon it, and leaps for the safety of a higher shelf. Its urgency dislodges the flour jar behind which its mate is hiding, and both rats flee to the back of the cupboard, the contents of the pantry tumbling in their wake.
There is a certain inevitability, Letitia thinks, to what happens next. Daniel makes a jab with his broom. The kiore twist and leap again. A tin falls to the ground. From it comes the clash and slide of metal, the unmistakeable jangle of copper change. Daniel stops. The rats listen, breathing hard.
‘What’s this?’
Letitia watches as he takes off the lid. His back stiffens. Letitia’s potato profits pour out onto the pantry floor.
‘Lettie?’
‘I’ve been saving.’
‘For God’s sake, Lettie.’ Daniel has gone without lunch for the last two weeks, his belly shrinking to his spine as he watches other men eat their bread and cheese. ‘Saving for what?’
Letitia studies the pile of coins, seeking reassurance. ‘For the passage home.’ She smiles uncertainly.
‘How much is here?’ Daniel spreads the coins over the floor.
‘Three shillings and sixpence.’
‘How long have you been saving?’
‘Since February.’
‘Six months?’ The arithmetic whirrs angrily in Daniel’s mind. ‘You’ll be dead before you have enough for a single ticket.’ He stands. ‘Pick them up.’
She kneels, and does as she is told.
‘Give them to me.’
Slowly, she holds up the tin. Their eyes do not meet. Daniel takes it from her without a word. Letitia watches his boots as he turns and leaves the pantry. There is a hole in the toe of the left. She hears him call out for Robbie. Then the door slams, and they are gone.
Letitia remains on the floor. She expects to cry, but does not. Gradually, the wreckage around her reasserts itself: spilled flour, sugar, rat droppings, tea. Daniel has done more damage than the rats. Such a waste. It will take hours to clean up. Letitia sighs. She had so much to do already.
The breakfast dishes are still on the table. The stove needs to be stoked. The washing must be started so that it can be got out in time to dry. It is so hard to see what should be done first. Work is everywhere. There is no hope of it ever ending.
In any case, she must heat water. Cautiously, she walks out to the washhouse. The morning is perfectly still. Frost lies in the shadow of the house; its timbers steam in the sun. The sky has a pale yellow clarity, and the hills behind the house seem flat as a theatre backdrop. At any moment it might rise, to reveal a London bus, or a Clapham terrace. For once, Letitia cannot hear the sea.
She only goes to look.
The wet rock is smoking in the sun. Far below, the sea is a slow, limpid green. So calm. Letitia finds she cannot take her eyes off the swell, caught in the rhythm of its breathing. Across it, the backs of the gliding gulls glow silver and lemon-white. Just beneath her, a mollymawk launches from the cliff, its graceful downward arc arrested by spreading feathers. She has felt such a thing, sometimes, in dreams. The fear, and then the flying.
Twenty-Nine
Hester is running. Horror is filling her ears and throat, like water closing over her head. The ocean lunges up at her, the suck and clutch of empty air, the wild shove of vertigo, snatching at her balance. She hears herself sob. On hands and knees she crawls out, across the thin lip of earth, to the edge.
She cannot see Letitia.
Hester leans out. A rock gives way beneath her hand. She watches the long seconds of its fall, skipping down the sheer black cliff to be swallowed by the waiting sea, too far below for sound. There is nothing to impede its progress.
The swell circles lazily, replete.
She calls out. Her voice falls through thin air into silence. A part of her looks down, from high above, on this scene: the small, pale figure on her belly at the edge of the world, crying for her mother. This cannot be her story. Below, the gulls settle back on their ledges.
She begins to think there has been a mistake. A trick of the light, a dream. If she goes back to the kitchen, her mother will be there, putting on the kettle. Nothing has changed. The day is sunny.
The kelp stirs. A paleness is rising through it. Letitia surfaces slowly, floated free by the mounting tide. Her hair has come loose. It moves around her, a dark and weedy halo, flowing with the swell. Hester watches this for a while. She knows that what she sees is not real, for it would be too much to bear. She waits, for the world to take some other turn.
After a time, she backs away from the edge, and looks around her. There is no one to help. There is no one to tell. She thinks she must find her father. It is impossible that her mother should be there, like that, and Daniel and Robbie somewhere out in the world, not knowing.
Hester starts to feel angry. It is not fair that she should be left alone. It is not fair that she has to tell them.
She should do something. But she cannot just walk away. There is no one else. She must stay with her mother.
Hester sits on her heels in the grass, while the shadows creep up and the day grows cold around her. The wind is rising. She can hear it along the cliff face, stirring up echoes of the sea. She calls to us, Great Hine of the Dark. She drags her children down into the shadow.
Hester thinks they should have brought the piano. If there had been music, if there had been other voices, raised and joyous in the dark, then perhaps Letitia would not have heard the calling. In the clatter of Clapham High Street, in the terraced din of neighbours’ children, in the rumbling, hissing gaslit night, Hine-nui’s voice would surely have gone unnoticed. But here, it is so quiet. Hester can hear it herself, Great Hine’s song, in the silent space that was her mother.
‘He was not taught where it lies,’ wrote La Rochelle, ‘this region of shades, but Teone believes it is here, beside us. They call it the Freezing Cold.’
‘Hester? What are you doing out here?’ Her father’s voice is sharp. Behind him, there should be lamplight, but the cottage is in darkness. ‘The stove has gone out. Where’s your mother?’
It is a long time before Daniel understands. Hester watches it swing in on him, like a door slamming shut, the swift and silent gust before the shudder.
‘No,’ he says. He leans out, so far, over the edge.
Hester is silent. She cannot feel afraid for him.
‘Where is she?’
It is not so dark that he will not see for himself. A paleness in the weed, riding the swell, in and out. Like breathing. Her father looks for a long time. She wonders if he hears it, too, the sucking call. The undertow. Its dragging.
‘But how?’ he asks her. ‘How? What was she doing?’
Hester has no answer for this. Beneath Daniel’s arm, she sees, is a fat white hen. It clucks softly, quite forgotten.
‘Hester! How did she fall?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t see it?’
Daniel is staring at her. He
looks half wild. Hester shakes her head, dislodging the image of Letitia, arms spread, on the sunlit edge. She did not look back. ‘She wasn’t doing anything. She just fell.’
There it is, at last.
She sees something shift in her father’s eyes. ‘Go inside,’ he tells her.
Thirty
On the beach, Robbie is crying. The sobs travel through his body, as if he is drawing them up from the ground. Only his shoulders are still, held fast by Hester’s arm. Tommy stands at his elbow, making himself soft, making himself quiet.
‘I don’t want her here,’ Daniel had said, when George brought up the body. ‘You should have left her where she was. That’s what she wanted.’
‘Can’t do that.’ George had shaken his head. ‘Your wife needs to be buried.’
‘You bury her then. I’m busy.’
George had waited a while, expecting Daniel to return. Hester made him a cup of tea. They had sat in the kitchen, Robbie, Hester and George, where they could not see the load on George’s wagon. For a long time, no one had spoken. Then, Robbie had begun to cry. He made no sound. He did not bow his head, but carried on looking straight ahead, at the boards over the kitchen window, as if the tears were happening to someone else.
Hester had looked at George, and asked, ‘What should we do?’
And George had turned his cart around, and driven them down to the Bay.
George has said he will take their mother as far as he can over the ocean. Out past the northern head, to a spot where the sea floor falls away, and there is only thick green water going down and down, to nothing. And maybe it goes right through, this hole, to the other side of the world. Maybe a spirit can get through it.
Robbie has helped with the rocks to weigh her down. They are good rocks, the heaviest he could find, in hours of looking. He hopes they’ll sink her all the way home; he hopes they’re enough to do it.
He can’t see George’s boat any more. And then he can. It’s getting bigger, coming back into the shore. It’s empty. She’s gone again, back into the sea. That’s it. His mother is over.
There’s a woman singing behind him, a wild, thin song that runs into the sea, like weed fronds, trailing.
That night, in the silence of the house, Robbie thinks of the fathomless hole, and wonders if his mother is still falling.
Thirty-One
It could be anything, the scrabbling, outside. A wood hen, most likely; a rat, maybe. It is almost certainly not her mother, climbing back up the cliff, pale-eyed and dripping, with the smell of the kelp all about her. But Hester does not wish to get up and look. She lies still, and hopes the noise will not wake Robbie.
The roof is creaking, though the night is calm. Hester needs sleep herself, but she is not inclined to blow out her candle.
When she sleeps, she sees her mother. They peel potatoes together, or knead the bread dough. Sometimes they embroider cushions. Letitia is quite chatty. All the while, Hester knows that something is wrong, but she can’t quite put her finger on what it might be. Then comes a shift, like the earth giving way, and suddenly Hester is in the parlour, walking through shadows, towards a chair. Its back is towards her, but she knows that it is not empty; she does not want to go closer, but her feet keep on moving in the darkness, while she waits for the sitter to turn.
So far, Hester has always managed to wake before she sees what is in the chair. Robbie is not so lucky. He has taken to screaming himself awake, though he will no longer say of what he has been dreaming. The first night, Hester went down to him, and held him while he cried huge tears of terror and shame.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispered, although she knew this was not true. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’
‘How can I be afraid of her?’ Robbie had pleaded. ‘She’s my mother.’
‘It’s just a dream.’
‘I know she wouldn’t hurt me. Not on purpose.’
‘She loved us.’
‘You think so?’
‘Of course,’ Hester sighed. ‘Father shouldn’t have said that. He’s not himself — it’s to be expected.’
The second night, she could think of nothing else to say. So she stayed in the attic.
Now there’s a draught blowing in through the boards with the smell of the sea, a scraping noise on the window below, and a soft pitter-pat that is leaves, but could be water. Quickly, Hester reaches beneath her pillow.
Part
Three
One
It is raining hard when they bring Daniel home, the noise of Jean Delacroix’s wagon lost in the storm. When the kitchen door is flung open, Hester knocks over her pan in fright, and the grey stew she has been boiling spills onto the floor. She sucks her scalded fingers, and feels the tears begin again.
It is Frank who has caused her injury. He has his shoulder beneath her father’s arm, propping up one side of Daniel, while the other slumps, at a rakish angle, against the breast of Mary Halloran. Together, Frank and Mary half-carry, half-push Daniel across the kitchen and into a chair.
‘Evening,’ says Frank. He looks at Hester’s face, and blushes. ‘Sorry about your mum.’
Hester does not explain that, on this occasion, her tears are caused by the ruin of their last salt pork, which Portia is now licking from the floorboards. She stares at her father.
‘Is he all right?’
‘He’s drunk.’ Frank takes off his wet coat and hangs it over the chair. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’
Hester watches the coat drip onto the floor.
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ says Mary Halloran. ‘Looks like you need it.’
Hester understands the slur implied. But she is tired, and her fingers sting. She surrenders the stove without a fight, and sits down at the table, as far away as she can get from Daniel. She can still smell him, the sweet and sour reek of beer and vomit rising above wet wool, and the sharpness of Frank’s oilskin. She has no idea what she should do.
By the time Robbie comes in, Mary has the kitchen well in hand. ‘Take this to your dad,’ she orders him. ‘See if he’ll drink it.’
Daniel appears unconscious, head back, mouth hanging open. Robbie hesitates, the hot tea in his hand.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ snaps Mary Halloran. ‘Have you never seen a man drunk before? Go on, give him a shake!’
But Daniel will not be roused.
‘Well,’ says Frank, ‘I’d best be off, then.’ He nods to Hester. ‘Tell him I paid his bill at Waeckerle’s, when he wakes up. But he still owes three and six at the Crit.’
Hester and Robbie look at each other. Mary is not getting her coat. There is a long pause.
‘Thanks, Frank,’ says Robbie, and gets up to see him out.
The door shuts. A little drool makes its way across Daniel’s cheek. Hester jumps as he begins to snore.
‘Right, then,’ says Mary, slipping herself under Daniel’s arm, ‘let’s get you to bed.’ She glares at Hester. ‘Well? I can’t lift him myself, you know. Come on, girl, lend a hand!’
Two
It takes Daniel a moment to place the curtains. Rooms he has known run through his mind: the pink tea roses hang, unlikely, across a mildewed Norwich sash, tremble with Southwark trains, and linger, briefly, against a high grey view of Clapham yards, before they settle at La Rochelle’s Road.
Daniel is relieved. Like the curtains, he is in his proper place. His mouth is thick and sticky, vomit-sweet. He does not know how he got here. But it seems that he is home. He turns his head towards Lettie.
Pain lands a boot to his temple. Daniel flinches, and the room turns black. He opens his eyes slowly.
Mary Halloran looks back at him. She is wearing Lettie’s nightgown. Daniel lunges for the side of the bed, and retches into the chamber pot. His stomach, it seems, is empty. But the waves of nausea take him again and again, shaking tears from his eyes as he clings to the pot, and shivers.
‘There, there.’ Mary Halloran is stroking his heaving shoulders. He feels the hug of
her knees around his hips, the weight of her breasts on his back. They are warm, and solid. ‘There, there,’ she says, ‘you get it all out.’
He does not look up when she takes the pot from his hands.
‘Lie down for a bit now, there’s a good man.’
Daniel reaches out to touch Letitia’s nightgown. He wraps his fists in its whiteness. It smells of lavender and skin. He pushes his sour, wet face into the cotton, and breathes her in.
‘There now.’ Mary Halloran holds his head to her body. She strokes his hair. He presses his tears into her thighs. ‘You’re alright,’ she says. ‘I’ve got you.’
Three
‘Christ, you’ve hands like a baby’s,’ says Mary to Hester a week later. ‘Did your mam never work you at all?’
She is inspecting the blisters, soft and whitely weeping, that are slowing the pace of Hester’s digging.
‘Girl like you’s no call to be having skin like that,’ she continues. ‘The sooner it comes off the better. Scare off every man in the district, looking so work-shy.’
Hester says nothing. This, she has learned, is the best way to ensure that Mary does the same.
She works her way in like a splinter, she writes in her journal, rough and sharp. Lacking the courage to prise her out, we do not press on the wound.