Beyond the Orchard

by Anna Romer

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, as if reading my mind, ‘your secret is safe with me.’

  ‘Does Coby—?’

  ‘He suspects.’ She got to her feet, hauling me after her. ‘Now, when’s your grandad’s funeral? I’m coming with you.’

  ‘Been and gone,’ I said. ‘According to the solicitor’s letter, Edwin wanted a private cremation. We didn’t get the chance to go.’

  Her face crumpled in sympathy. ‘What a god-awful day you’ve had, poor sweetheart. Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?’

  It was worth a try. ‘Know anyone in urgent need of an old tomcat?’

  She laughed. ‘Morgan already tried to offload him. We’ve got five critters at last count. And one more hungry little person on the way,’ she added, patting her belly. ‘I’ll ask around, though. What’ll you do with him when you go down the coast?’

  ‘Take him with me.’

  ‘In the van?’

  ‘I can’t abandon him.’

  ‘Butter on the paws,’ Nina suggested. ‘Mum swore by it. The butter distracts the cat while it adjusts to a new environment. If all else fails, just keep the van doors and windows shut. You probably will anyway, Stern Bay’s freezing at this time of year.’

  ‘It might get a bit pongy with the litter tray.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll cope. You used to survive at my place, and I only had three cats back then.’

  ‘I’d hate Basil to stress. He’s had a hellish life so far.’

  ‘Basil?’ Nina’s expression melted into a smile. ‘You love him already, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I predict he’ll win your heart. Then you’ll have to stay. You’ll be trapped here forever.’

  I smiled at her scheming. ‘My heart belongs with Adam in London.’

  ‘Oh, Bub,’ she said wistfully. ‘I do wish you were staying. For good, I mean. Now that I’ve got you back, I don’t think I can bear to lose you again.’

  ‘You won’t,’ I said, as we hugged goodbye. ‘Next time, we’ll stay in touch. That’s a promise.’

  Deep inside the castle walls, the child worked tirelessly. The spindle leaped and danced, the spinning wheel hummed. Room after room filled with gold, but still the Queen was not happy. She had more wealth than she could spend in a lifetime, yet the one thing she did not have – the one thing, the only thing she longed for with all her heart – could never truly be hers.

  —The Shell Queen

  9

  France, 1917

  He was thinking of her when his pistol went off; or, more precisely, he was thinking of her lips. Wondering, with the frantic preoccupation of a man who wished with all his heart and soul that he was anywhere but here – here, on this godforsaken brink of hell with its screaming noise and stench of blood and rotting flesh – wondering if lips really could taste like cherries. His brother had kissed her, he reasoned. If anyone knew, it would be Ronald. Hadn’t he taunted Edwin with the knowledge, laughed at the hunger he had surely seen in Edwin’s eager eyes? And Edwin hanging off his every word, unashamed, so desperately did he long to know for himself—

  A shell went off somewhere to the left of him. He staggered sideways, and when the aftershock struck him in the chest he crashed to his knees. For a moment, all he could hear was the sluggish whomp of his heartbeat, dull and slow, as if drifting to him from underwater. He shook his head. His ears popped and noise exploded back around him. Shouting behind, then rapid rifle fire. A shrill scream as a strafe cut down the man beside him. Edwin struggled to his feet, his body numb, his mind ablaze with fear.

  Dear God, he was on the brink. He clutched at sanity. Cherries, he thought. Remember the taste: sour–sweet, rich with sunlight, bursting in the mouth with such impossible goodness that your hunger for them increased tenfold. He had spent every summer in the orchard, gorging on mulberries and cherries, eating his fill of grapes and passionfruit, laughing at his mother’s scoldings for leaving so few strawberries for her afternoon tea. He should have remembered the taste of sun-warmed fruit, he should have been able to imagine – but he was cold and afraid and he itched from lice. And men, men he knew, were dying around him. All he could remember was the taste of mud, the acid tang of fear and blood. No matter how he tried to conjure it, the sweet wild flavour of cherries eluded him.

  He tightened his grip on the pistol. His hand was trembling so hard he could barely feel the weapon’s weight in his palm, let alone the touch of the trigger. Yet when a figure loomed up suddenly ahead of him, he reacted without hesitation. His fingers constricted on the grip, and the handgun wavered. He choked on a sob and took unsteady aim.

  ‘Fire!’ someone shouted, close to his ear. The captain, he thought, though it was hard to be sure. His ears still rang from the blast, but there was been no mistaking the urgency in the captain’s voice, as though he too was on the very edge of panic. ‘—Fire, damn you!’

  A blood-streaked face burst from the smoke haze ahead. Edwin barely registered the mud-encrusted uniform, the wild eyes, the helmet knocked askew—

  An inner voice whispered, For the love of God, hold your fire . . . but it was the voice of a person Edwin had abandoned years ago. A person with a liking for piano music and books and cool dark places into which he could escape. A person he had shed the moment he stepped off the wharf and onto the gangway of the great grey battleship that would sail him to the other side of the world. A person who no longer existed. A weakling, Ronald had called him, a nancy-boy with no right to carry arms. Well, Edwin would show him. He’d prove his worth as a soldier and show Ronald up as a fool. Ignoring the voice, Edwin gritted his teeth and whispered her name.

  Clarice . . . Clarice. The girl he loved. Beautiful, kind Clarice.

  The girl who would, once the nightmare had spent itself and, God willing, they were shipped off home, marry his brother. His taunting, boastful, undeserving brother Ronald.

  The pistol bucked in his hand, he tasted the squirt of cordite at the back of his throat. Before him, the man with the blood-streaked face twitched mid-stride and then crumpled to his knees. As the man hit the ground, a greyness descended on Edwin. The mayhem around him faded, his senses tunnelled. A waft of breeze delivered the scent of overripe fruit, gaggingly sweet, turned to rot by the sun—

  He snapped alert as the dim blare of shouting erupted nearby.

  ‘My God, man. He’s one of ours. Move aside, you mongrel. Someone call a medic!’

  Later, that moment would return to him in dreams. The cries, the blast of weaponry, the choking smoke, the whistle of shells; and beneath it all, the barely audible footfall of the blood-faced man as he scrambled incoherently towards Edwin, his arms thrust forth. He carried no weapon, Edwin now understood. Rather, his hands were outstretched, empty, his fingers splayed as though imploring Edwin to grasp them.

  In these dreams, other details surfaced. Edwin clearly heard the captain’s call. Hold your fire! he had cried. Hold your fire, damn you! A thousand times Edwin had replayed that moment, and a thousand times he had despaired. How had he failed to hear the captain’s warning? How had he not seen behind the man’s blood mask? How had the mud and fear and noise obscured what hindsight now clearly showed him to be true? A face he had seen day after day throughout the long balmy summers and icy winters of his childhood, a face as familiar to him as his own.

  The face of his most hated enemy.

  His brother’s face.

  Kyneton, 1918

  She sensed her mother’s presence in the sitting room, but did not turn around. What was the point? There was nothing Mother nor anyone else could say to change what had happened. There was no one in the world blessed with the ability to bring him back.

  ‘Clarice, darling,’ her mother said carefully. Shoes shuffled on the Persian carpet, and the rustle of skirts seemed overloud in the dusty stillness. ‘A young man is here to see you.’

  Hope spiked in Clarice’s chest, but quickly died. A young man did not mean her young man. She ign
ored her mother. If she sat very still, she felt in control of the pain; it became a solid burn, hollowing her slowly from the inside, unbearable but by no means lethal. The moment she moved – the twitch of a finger, the flare of her nostrils, the too-sudden intake of breath that lifted the position of her rib cage – the grief rose up and threatened to consume her.

  ‘Oh, darling, he’s travelled here especially to see you.’

  ‘Go away,’ Clarice murmured. ‘All of you. I shan’t see anyone.’

  ‘He’s brought something for you,’ her mother persisted, and then added pleadingly, ‘It’s Edwin.’

  A memory knocked softly on the windowpane of Clarice’s closed mind. She flashed on the image of a tall, awkward boy with a pasty face and serious eyes. Eyes that made her think of a rabbit or a fox squirming in the steel jaws of perpetual humiliation. With the memory came laughter; not just any old chuckle or snort, but his laugh, dear Ronald’s laugh – a rich, slightly mocking honey-warm rumble that always made her want to join in. She swivelled her head.

  Her mother nodded, her small, sharp-featured face suddenly flushed. ‘He says he has a parcel for you. It’s from . . . Oh, my dear, will you not see him, just for a moment?’

  Minutes later, the boy was sitting stiffly on the edge of her mother’s good sofa. He was as thin as Clarice remembered, and just as awkward, only now he wore a soldier’s uniform. The jacket rumpled around the shoulders, frayed at the cuff, the trousers hung too short at the ankle. He was gazing at Clarice with those large damp eyes she remembered. More rabbit than fox, she thought absently. Yet there was something hungry in their brown depths, as though the poor creature needed a decent feed. In his sweaty hands, he clutched a small package.

  ‘Is that for me?’ she managed.

  The boy swallowed noisily. ‘He wanted you to have them . . . his medals. He made me promise, if anything happened—’ Edwin’s brows furrowed suddenly, and now he was hawklike, wary. Reaching over, he placed the parcel on the edge of the lamp table, as though eager to rid himself of its burden.

  Clarice frowned. How had this poor scrap of humanity survived, while Ronald – dear, brave Ronald with his fine strong body and sharply intelligent mind – how had he been lost? With a sinking heart, she found herself cataloguing their differences. Ronald was outgoing and cheerful, gifted and witty, while his younger brother seemed to hover on the edge of life like a frightened sparrow. He had never joined in their lively conversations, never coped with their teasing banter. Rather, he had retreated, preferring the anonymity of his own company. If Clarice had been the sort of woman to accept a wager, she’d have placed her last shilling on the odds that Edwin Briar would most certainly have been one of the war’s first casualties. Yet here he was, perched on her mother’s sofa, gazing back at her in apparent terror. Alive and well, while Ronald—

  Clarice swallowed. She dragged in a breath, expecting the pain to shred her, but to her surprise, she no longer felt quite so brittle. Taking another breath, this time venturing to draw it all the way into her lungs, she heard herself say in a rush, ‘You were there, weren’t you, Edwin? What did you see? Did he—’ Her throat closed as the swirling force of her grief tried to break free, but she managed to rein it in. ‘Did he mention me?’

  Edwin drew his fingers into fists on his knees, as though pulling them out of harm’s way. At this strangely vulnerable gesture, Clarice felt her pity for him blossom.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said hastily, ‘I’m being rude. You’ve travelled all this way and I haven’t even offered you tea.’ She began to stand, but Edwin reached out and caught her sleeve in his pale fingers. It was just a gentle tug, but enough to startle Clarice into sitting back down.

  Edwin leaned nearer. ‘My brother loved you very much, Miss Hopeworth. I’d never known him to be as happy as he was in those times he spent with you. I can’t imagine your pain, and I’m truly sorry for it. If you like, I can return in a day or so. It might comfort you to speak of him. Not,’ he hastened to add, ‘what happened over there. Rather, the way he used to be with you . . . when he was happy.’

  Clarice sat back. She had never heard the boy speak so many words in one breath, nor had she expected such kindness. If she were perfectly honest, she would have to admit that something about his presence calmed her.

  She took the parcel from the lampstand and placed it carefully, almost reverently, on her lap. Medals. How she wanted to throw them in the fire, be rid of them. Yet she also longed to hold them to her heart, cling to them, bathe them with her tears. They were her last vestige of Ronald. She looked at the boy. Perhaps the medals were not her last vestige of Ronald, after all. From some forgotten place inside her, a tiny smile emerged and settled hesitantly on her lips.

  ‘I think I should like that,’ she murmured. ‘I’d like it very much indeed.’

  10

  Stern Bay, June 1993

  A cold wind chased leaves and grit along the main street of Stern Bay. The smell of wood smoke and frying fish swirled through the chink in my van window, bringing with it a whiff of diesel. It was late morning and I guessed the fishing boats were returning with the night’s catch.

  Part of me was in a rush to get to Bitterwood, to search Edwin’s gloomy old rooms in the hope of finding the explanation he’d promised. But another more fearful part kept stalling. Being there alone, among the shadows and echoes of the past, would be like sliding back through time into the landscape of my nightmares. A landscape I wasn’t entirely sure I felt ready to face.

  I’d skipped breakfast, so decided to have an early lunch. As I manoeuvred into a park outside the town’s only takeaway shop, I saw the red postbox on the corner across the road.

  Memory engulfed me. I was ten years old again, standing on that windy corner, the card I’d written to my father clutched tight. Get well soon, Daddy. I miss you.

  Edwin had provided envelope and stamp, and printed the address of the hospital where Dad was staying. He called it a sanatorium, a special hospital, he said. He turned away quickly after he said this, but not before I had noticed the tears in his eyes. Later, when he drove me to Stern Bay to send off my card, he was quiet, and his mood infected me. I had lingered beside the postbox, unable to drop the envelope through the slot. That card linked me to Dad, who in turn linked me to my mother. He was the only other person in the world who missed her as terribly as I did, who understood the pain of losing her. I stood there for a long time, the salt breeze flushing my face, before I mustered the courage to let the card drop from my fingers and break the link. When it did, I rested my ear against the postbox. I fancied I could hear all the other letters and cards whispering to the newcomer in their papery voices, asking where it was going and what news it contained.

  I walked back along the street to where Edwin waited in the car, my legs leaden, my heart empty as a seashell. It was only later – many years later, long after I had buried my memories of Bitterwood in the darkest corner of my mind – that the broken link between my father and me had finally begun to heal.

  A door clanged open up the street, and the smell of fish and chips cut through the softer smells of seaweed and ocean air. Basil meowed in his crate beside me.

  ‘My sentiments exactly,’ I said. Grabbing my wallet, I climbed from the car and made a beeline for the takeaway shop. Ten minutes later, I was back in the van with my greasy armload: chips, two large fillets of whiting, three dim sims and a milkshake.

  It was too windy to sit on the beach, so I parked on the foreshore and sat in the van, gazing through the windscreen at the waves. The hot oily saltiness of the chips made me feel better. Peeling the batter off the second piece of fish, I let it cool and offered a morsel to Basil. He nibbled daintily at first, as if astonished that something could be so delicious. Within minutes, the entire piece of fish was gone. He peered at me through the slender bars, and I smiled to myself.

  ‘Plenty more where that came from, boyo.’

  Settling back with my milkshake, I gazed across the wi
ntry beach. In the distance, a dark speck moved slowly along the shoreline. Someone was collecting shells or pebbles, or flotsam – and the sight of them drew me back in time.

  When I was a kid, my family had holidayed near here, in a tiny cottage a mile or so from Bitterwood, right on the beach. Christmas time meant a hamper of sandwiches, cold drinks, fruitcake on the sand. Once or twice we had come midyear, which left indelible memories of huddling out of the wind, scalding our tongues on the sickly sweetness of my mother’s hot chocolate sipped from tin mugs.

  The summer I turned ten, all that changed.

  In my mind, I could see my mother just as she looked that last day. Her blonde hair tied back from her face, her cheeks pink from the sun. She wore her favourite jeans and her threadbare blue cardigan. She adored that cardigan despite the loose cuffs and odd buttons, and refused all my father’s admonitions to throw it away. I could still see her hurrying along the beach, clutching her sunhat to her head with one hand, its brim flapping like a wounded bird. I tried to keep her frozen there, but the inevitable always followed: her fall from the slippery rocks, her plunge into deep water. Her last breath, not of her garden or of the lavender hand cream she wore to bed, or of chocolate cake fresh from the oven, but of salt air, and rotting seaweed, and deep water – smells I knew she tolerated only for my father’s sake. Mum had been a country girl, preferring the gentler atmosphere of mountain air and river water, but had brought us to the coast every year in the hope of repairing Dad’s relationship with Edwin.

  In the years that followed her death, I read anything I could find on the subject of drowning. I learned about people who thrashed so violently they broke ribs or dislocated major joints, or inhaled debris deep into their lungs. Those images of her were the worst. I asked Dad about it years later, when I thought it might have finally been safe to mention her. Dad studied his hands, turning them palm-up, his fingers curled like a limp sea creature.