by Rose Tremain
But there was a change in Estelle.
Instead of going out and staring at the river, instead of walking alone in the brown dusk, she sat quietly in the darkened room waiting for the programmes to come on. She no longer cried in her sleep but talked. Her voice was girlish and happy. ‘Hello, Pop-pickers,’ she said one night.
Her suppers were on time. She prepared them in the early afternoon before the programmes started. Some of her forgotten neatness returned. And now and then, her forgotten ravishing smile.
She said to Sonny: ‘There’s only one thing, and that’s the tree.’
‘Sonny said: ‘That tree is a hundred years old.’
She said: ‘Trees are cut down all the time.’
‘Not by me,’ he replied. ‘Not on my land.’
The night Lindsey arrived to stay was the night which decided the fate of the tree. It was a beech tree. The tops of its grey roots spread out in a perfect fan.
Mary’s preparations for Lindsey’s visit had been arduous. She felt ready to lie down and sleep and let a dream of Lindsey replace the reality. In a dream, there would be no lie about the pony.
She had gone to the Loomis’s slaughtering yard in search of swords for the box tricks. Knives, she decided, would create greater fear in her audience than swords. Swords caused an old-fashioned kind of death, knives a modern one without any chivalry.
She had hoped to find Walter and begin a conversation by enquiring about his teeth but only Pete was there, swabbing out the blood gulley in the sunshine. In so bright a light, Pete’s wall eye moved about crazily, the way living cells move about under a microscope lens. When he found Mary in his vision, he looked perplexed. ‘What d’you want, then?’ he said.
She asked for Walter and was told he was working in the shop. She explained that she was an apprentice magician who needed ten lethal knives for the most ambitious trick in her brief conjuring life. Pete took out a red and white rag and wiped his face.
He said that as a slaughterer he’d had some queer requests but none so odd as this. Then he said: ‘How old are you, Mary Ward?’
‘Twelve,’ said Mary.
‘Twelve,’ said Pete, ‘and you want me to furnish you with not one but ten knives sharp enough to cut off a man’s head?’
‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘Only for one night.’
He laughed. He rubbed his neck with the rag and then his forearms and his hands. He said some people in Swaithey thought he was daft on account of his eye but he wasn’t daft enough to do a thing like that. Then he said: ‘I saw a conjuror once. He read minds. But he was no good. All he knew were telephone numbers.’
Mary stood there waiting for Pete to change his mind. He put his rag into his pocket and walked away.
She went home through the village and she heard the sound of lawnmowers and this gave her an idea. And it was this idea – the transformation of lawnmower blades into knives – that cost a night and a half of sleep. She worked by torchlight in the machinery shed. There were six blades, not ten, and she had to remove each one and make a wooden handle for it and fix the wooden handle to the blade. Only the thought of the fear she would create kept her from lying down on the earth of the shed and sleeping like a soldier.
And then, the manufacured knives were not as long as the bedpost irons. She had to make a smaller box. The space for Timmy’s body in it grew less. She had to explain to him that if he moved a single inch he would be cut. So he sat like a stone mannequin in the dark. On Mary’s orders he sang: ‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi/miserere nobis pacem/Agnus Dei, dona nobis pacem …’
Lindsey arrived in the afternoon. Her father drove her to the farm in his Humber Super Snipe. There was no one to greet her except Mary. Estelle was watching television with the curtains drawn and Sonny and Timmy were out in the harvest fields where the air was dusty and bright.
Mary showed Lindsey her room. In a corner of it, covered by a dust sheet, were the magic box and the six knives made from the mower blades.
Mary said: ‘You can have my bed and I’m going to sleep on cushions.’
Lindsey said: ‘Okay. But you look ill, Marty. You look awful.’
Mary said: ‘Yes. I’m sorry, Lindsey, but I’ve had some sad news. My pony died.’
Lindsey was unpacking a framed photograph of Ranulf Morrit. She set it gently on the bedside table. She crossed to Mary and put her arms round her. Mary’s face was pressed against her chest that was no longer quite flat. ‘Bad luck,’ said Lindsey. ‘Horrible luck. Cry if you want to. What was his name?’
With her face buried in Lindsey’s angora jersey, Mary couldn’t think of any ponies’ names so she said nothing, knowing that Lindsey would interpret her silence as grief. After a while, Lindsey moved away and began to unpack some brand-new riding clothes. Mary watched her and waited but she did not know for what.
Later, she waited for the evening to come, for the moment of performance of The Incredible Sword Box Trick.
She lined up three chairs. She wished her audience were larger. She sat her mother down and then Lindsey and Sonny. The ribbon on Lindsey’s hair was green. She thought, I will have absolute power over the three of them for as long as it takes to put the six knives in and take them out again, and then it will be gone.
She produced the box which she had covered in gold and silver stars. She turned it round to show them its six sides. She called to Timmy, and said: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, my assistant in this amazing trick is a chorister and he is going to sing the Agnus Dei for you to show you that he is still inside the box. Now, Timmy, it’s time to go into the box.’
He forgot the bow Mary had taught him to make to the audience. His mouth hung open. Mary wondered if he was afraid, if he knew she had once tried to kill him with Flit.
She closed the door of the box. Hidden behind an armchair were the knives. Black’s Book had advised her: ‘Reveal your swords with a flourish. Try to hold them in one hand and fan them out,’ but the mower blades with their wooden handles were heavy and couldn’t possibly be fanned. It was much as Mary could do to lift them.
She showed them clumsily. At her signal (a kick on the side of the box) Timmy started to sing his Agnus Dei. His voice sounded thin and frightened. The audience began to look afraid. Mary smiled to herself. She walked forward.
‘Now, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ she began, ‘you see here some of the most lethal knives ever sharpened – sharper than swords, sharper than scimitars …’
‘Wait a minute!’ Sonny barked. He stood up.
Mary went on as if nothing were happening.
‘This I can promise you,’ she said, ‘that my assistant the chorister is going to come to no harm!’
‘Stop!’ said Sonny.
‘Let her finish the trick,’ said Estelle.
‘Oh gosh …’ said Lindsey.
Sonny came to Mary. He grabbed her wrist, holding the swords. Timmy’s Agnus Dei petered out. ‘What are these?’ said Sonny.
‘You’re spoiling the trick,’ said Estelle.
‘Shut up!’ shouted Sonny. ‘What are these, Mary?’
‘Blades …’ said Mary.
Sonny snatched them out of Mary’s hand. Mary noticed how light they seemed to him.
‘And?’ he said.
‘They’re part of the trick.’
‘No, they’re not. They’re not part of any trick. I’m not fooled. You’ve been trying to make an idiot out of me ever since you could walk, but you haven’t succeeded. These are part of my mower and you’ve stolen them and if you think any of us are going to sit here like monkeys and watch your so-called trick you’re stupider than I already thought.’
Timmy had crawled out of the back of the box and stood gaping at Sonny.
Sonny cuffed Mary’s head and she fell backwards onto the box which collapsed under her. Timmy let out a shriek of frightened laugher.
Estelle covered her eyes with her hands.
Mary and Lindsey lay side by side in Mary’s room in the dark.
‘I’m sorry the trick was such a failure,’ said Mary.
‘It’s okay,’ said Lindsey. ‘I’m not that fond of conjuring really.’
It was more or less as Mary had imagined it would be: Lindsey in the bed, Mary on the floor on sofa cushions.
But she’d also imagined a colossal silence, a silence like the end of the world falling upon everything, except the two of them in the room, as if they were the only people alive. And it wasn’t silent at all.
Next door, in their bedroom, Sonny and Estelle were arguing about the tree. It was embarrassing. Mary had to apologise to Lindsey. She had to say: ‘Don’t listen.’
But there they lay, listening.
Estelle accused Sonny of caring more about a tree than he cared about a person’s sanity. He said she cared more about a flickering box than she did about a beech that had been growing for a hundred years.
Estelle began to cry. She said: ‘A tree does nothing, tells you nothing, never makes you laugh.’
Sonny banged on the bed-end with his fist. He said he would fell the tree in the morning, but that was the last thing he was going to do for her, the very last thing of all.
It was quiet after that.
Mary heard an owl calling out in the empty dark, and she thought, it’s like my childhood, near and yet far, stopping for a moment to call and then flying away, who knows where.
Part Two
CHAPTER SIX
1961
A Storm
On a May morning and in silence Gilbert Blakey’s nurse fell down on the surgery floor and died. Gilbert and his patient heard a thud. He paused in his drilling of an upper pre-molar five and turned round, and the patient turned, and they saw Nurse Anstruther fallen to the lino like a waxwork with a smile on her face.
Gilbert set the drill down. He went to a cupboard to search for sal volatile.
The patient was a trout farmer. The trout farmer noticed that there was a cloudy look to the nurse’s eyes. In his shocked, half-drilled condition, he saw her body float to the surface of some imaginary water. He said to Gilbert: ‘I don’t reckon this is a faint, Mr Blakey.’
That night the storm came. In ten hours it rained seven inches. The apple trees were stripped of their blossom by the wind. The telephone lines and the power lines fell onto the lanes and fields. The shoulders of the ocean hurled themselves at the undefended shore and the cliffs at Minsmere began once again to slip and fall away.
Waking to this storm, finding his room in darkness, Gilbert Blakey’s thoughts went to the precipice. He tried to gauge how near it might have come. His room faced out to sea. He lay quiet and listened for cracks underneath him. He wasn’t afraid. He stroked his moustache. He felt ready for a thunderbolt, for a cataclysm. The death of Nurse Anstruther had elated him, its suddenness and its swiftness, its glorious finality. He had thought, if this can happen, then so can anything. So can anything at all.
His mother came tapping on his door. She had lit a candle in a jam jar. Her hair was in yellow rollers. ‘There’s no electricity,’ she said.
She was worried about her pear trees. She didn’t mention the cliff. She said she hoped the fishing fleet wasn’t out.
Gilbert put on his silk dressing gown. They went down to the kitchen and Margaret Blakey got out her wartime primus stove and boiled water for tea. Gilbert smoked a du Maurier. In his silk robe and in the candlelight and with his elegant hands he could have been at some exclusive London club, playing a little Baccarat.
Margaret thought, he shouldn’t be here and with me but far away and with women his age.
After a while, when she’d made the tea, she said: ‘Did they forecast this storm, Gilbert?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but in any case what they forecast is never to be believed.’
Margaret offered her son a biscuit, but he refused. He wished she wouldn’t put her biscuits into a tin that smelled of lard. The death of Nurse Anstruther had made him suddenly impatient with pathetic routines.
The storm woke everyone in Swaithey.
Edward Harker’s cellar had been flooded in a deluge in 1950 and, when he found himself awake, he thought about everything left lying on his workshop floor, the piles of willow planks, the sawdust and shavings, the oily rags, the ends of string. He saw the water pouring in through the ventilator brick and through the hinged edges of the street-level window. He sighed. He hated water. He had never been out on the Broads or travelled to the Lake District. Until his meeting with Irene, he would have described his entire life as dry.
It felt cold in his room. He woke Irene on the pretext of comforting her. He wanted them to lie together and chat about cricket or sputniks till the storm passed. But she was up and tugging on her housecoat and searching for night lights the moment he touched her. Her first thought was for Billy, to snatch him up from his little cot and keep him with her so that he wouldn’t be afraid.
‘Is he crying yet?’ she said to Harker, as she lit a night light. ‘Can you hear him crying?’
‘No,’ said Harker. ‘Billy sleeps like a lead soldier.’
‘Lead soldier?’ said Irene. ‘What a thing to say!’
Then she opened their bedroom door. ‘Edward,’ she said, ‘I can hear water indoors somewhere.’
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘In the cellar. Will you fetch the Tilley lamp and I’ll go down?’
‘You fetch it,’ said Irene. And she was gone. Her role as Harker’s servant was in the past.
They came back a few moments later, a ghostly trio, casting enormous shadows: Irene carrying Billy asleep on her shoulder; Pearl in a white nightdress holding on to her brother’s foot.
‘Edward,’ said Pearl, ‘what if the roof gets blown off?’
‘Well,’ he said gently, ‘we’ll get a good view of the sky.’
Pearl got into the large bed. Her long, lemon hair spread out on Irene’s pillow. People in the village had expected Pearl’s baby prettiness to vanish as she grew, but it hadn’t. She was ten now and she knew she was beautiful.
Billy woke up. He looked at his mother and at the flickering light. He sneezed. Irene stroked his hair and told him not to be afraid of the storm. He smiled and waved at his family like a little fat emperor. Fear wasn’t a thing he often felt.
‘Aren’t you going down?’ asked Irene.
‘Yes,’ said Harker. ‘I’m going down.’
Billy trampled his way out of Irene’s arms and ran to him and held on to his leg. ‘I can find the cellar,’ he announced.
‘No, Billy,’ said Harker. ‘Stay with Mum and Pearl.’
‘No,’ said Billy.
He was holding Harker’s leg so tightly that Harker couldn’t move it.
‘It’s cold in the cellar,’ said Irene. ‘You’ll catch cold.’
‘I can find the cellar,’ repeated Billy.
‘I’ll take him with me,’ said Harker.
Irene lit another night light and gave it to Harker. He carried his son in one arm and held the small light out in front of them. Together, they moved through the dark house and heard what the storm was doing to the street, making the lids of dustbins fly and milk bottles fall over and sending pantiles sliding off the roofs.
In the kitchen, Harker lit the Tilley lamp.
He opened the door to the cellar. It felt cold. It sounded as if there were a burn down there rushing down a hillside.
‘Water,’ said Billy.
Harker sat Billy down on the steps and told him not to move. Not moving was an unbearable condition for Billy Harker. He saw his father wade out into the black lake. He saw twists of wood-shaving bobbing on the water like boats. He began to laugh.
‘It’s not funny, Billy,’ said Harker, ‘it’s a flood.’
But then he thought, well, perhaps it is. Perhaps it is funny. Not just this river coming into my workroom, but all of it. Because here I used to be, a quiet person with passion for nothing except bats, a former nun, fond of silence and order. And now there is not only Irene. There is not
only that. There is Billy. He rampages through the house pretending he’s a car. He uses his cot as a trampoline. He does somersaults on the landing.
Pete Loomis had smelt the storm long before it came. He made coffee and sat in the bus and waited for it.
The bus rocked. After all its years of service on the trolley route and then as his home, was it going to get blown into the sky?
Pete sipped the scalding coffee and decided to remember Memphis. He hummed a Gospel tune, ‘Dust on the Bible’. He sat himself at the bar in his favourite honky-tonk called Jo Ann’s Lounge. Outside in the night beyond the bar, a storm was coming. The lights kept flickering out. He hadn’t known it then, but in this night of the Memphis storm Pete Loomis was going to meet the girl who would bring to an end his lovely life in Tennessee.
She came into the honky-tonk. She sat down by Pete and ordered a chocolate milk. She was shivering. She wore a cotton dress with short sleeves.
Pete was drinking coffee and chatting to Jo Ann. Tennessee was a dry state back then. Jo Ann said she didn’t have any candles but she had a ton of soap. Could you burn soap if the lights went out? Pete said, Yes, if you had a lamp, you might be able to burn it. If you melted it down and put it in a lamp and lit the wick. The girl on the stool next to him in her cotton dress said: ‘That’s baloney, mister. Why y’all talking baloney about soap?’
He laughed. He had noticed the girl had a pretty face. He said that seventy-eight per cent of what human beings talked about was baloney, but it kept them alive.
She looked at him hard. She had a thin moustache of chocolate milk. Pete could feel his wall eye wandering round like a compass needle, searching for a contact with her hard stare. He knew what she was going to say and he didn’t want her to say it. If he let her speak, she was going to make a comment on his ugliness and this was – at that moment, in that bar with a storm creeping on and there being no candles to burn – more than he could stand. So he said: ‘I know what you’re thinking, miss. But you’re wrong in your thoughts. My name’s Pete and I’m from England and I can tell you there’s plenty of goodness and beauty in me, it’s just that the beauty don’t show.’