by Peter Benson
‘I mean it all right,’ I said.
In the afternoon we walked down to the weavers’ cottages. The sun was bright. Solitary clouds drifted as slow as our walking, their shadows following the feathering of the grass in the fields.
We wandered through the ruins. Weeds were growing where the floors had been, and tufts of grass sprouted from the cracked window sills. Elizabeth stopped to pick up a shard of broken glass, wiped it on her sleeve, held it to her eye and said, ‘My mother could have looked through this.’
I said, ‘I wonder which cottage was hers.’
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes and nodded her head, slowly. ‘This one. This was it.’ It was the second along in the row of five, and she was certain. ‘I can see her here.’ She looked at the broken walls, the piles of stone, a blackened hole where a fireplace had been. Her eyes were glazed and red. ‘She made cloth for a tailor in town. Zennack, I suppose.’
‘Or Truro,’ I said, uselessly.
‘Or Truro,’ she repeated, softly, an echo, and she took my arm. ‘She told me she never wanted to leave a place so much. And then, later, want to return to a place so much. She missed this ocean.’ She looked at the sky. ‘And the light.’
‘A painter used to live here, a long time ago.’
‘Yeah?’
‘For the light.’
We stepped over a low pile of shattered slate, through the gap where the front door had been and into the overgrown waste of the gardens. These sloped to a broken wall, some strands of rusted wire and the beach. A cloud shaped over the offshore stacks, dying as the high breezes ripped its edges, and then its heart.
‘She used to sit here and watch the sun go down. Used to wait for my father to come home and kick her around the block.’
I looked at the ground.
‘Would you fetch some chairs?’
‘Of course.’
She squeezed my arm.
I patted her hand and broke away. ‘Don’t go away,’ I said, and I walked back through the old gardens to my house. As I turned the corner I looked back and watched her for a moment. She was untying her hair, letting it fall over her shoulders. She shook her head and it streamed out, and she ran her fingers through it. She looked towards me and waved. I waved like the boy caught in the bushes, and then went to my house and the kitchen chairs.
19
Cinemas smell the same wherever you are: Singapore, San Francisco, Manila, Truro. Sweet and sour, sticky and human. I did not want to be with Mrs Bell but I could not disappoint her. In the car she had touched my sleeve twice, and as we took our seats, she touched it again. ‘Isn’t this exciting?’ she said. ‘I feel like a little girl again.’ She was looking around like a girl, one hand rustling a bag of sweets, prattling. ‘I remember Father used to take us to the cinema. He called them the flicks. I don’t think he enjoyed them, he thought they were irreligious, but he knew we liked to go so that made it all right.’
I had left Elizabeth sitting outside on an indoor chair, staring at the sea from her mother’s cottage, and as I drove away, her face clinched my heart. Her eyes, her mouth, cheeks and chin: she wore a look of contentment, the one I wore when I found Port Juliet. A stranger, coming down the road with a hat on his head and seeing her there, would have thought that she was an old resident, maybe the last resident. Someone who knew all there was to know but didn’t care. Someone who never asked questions or sucked sweets in the cinema. ‘Enjoy it!’ she called, and for a moment I was fooled into wondering if she had seen it. Her hair blew, and I wanted to stop the tractor, get down and run to her, but I didn’t. You can see a film any time you want, but a promise is a promise. A promise should not fail.
Raintown.
The film opens in Isle of Palms, Florida.
Heat. Sky. Water. Mrs Bell’s first sweet. She popped it in her mouth and sucked.
Elizabeth’s character (Jennifer) is the ageing owner of a roadside diner, ‘BEE HE RT’S’. The ‘F’ and ‘A’ on the neon sign are missing.
One day she gets a call from Philadelphia. Her son has been knocked down by a car, and lies critically injured in hospital.
Jennifer takes off her apron. Mrs Bell stopped sucking and crunched. Two hours later Jennifer is boarding a bus for the journey north.
Robert Mitchum plays Al, who boards the bus at the next stop. As he makes his way to the seat opposite Jennifer’s, we recognise the eyes of a hard and dangerous man. A man who packs attitude and rage. He takes off his hat, and sits and stares straight ahead. His eyelids are like a lizard’s, and his stubble shines. Jennifer holds her bag to her chest, closes her eyes and tries to sleep. Mrs Bell turned to me and said, ‘Makes you shiver, doesn’t he?’
I hate that. I hate that more than eating sweets in the cinema. It’s so rude and I wanted to tell her. Don’t talk to me while I’m watching a film. Don’t interrupt my concentration. Don’t crack me back to real life. Do not break the spell. And Mrs Bell smelt of violets. Elizabeth would never smell of violets. I wanted to be rude back, I wanted to move to a seat on my own but all I did was put my finger to my lips. ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said, and she went for another sweet.
Night shots: passing coach, heads resting against glass, a bird on a pole.
Morning.
Squinting eyes. Al is holding Jennifer’s purse. She wakes, sees it and angrily snatches it back. He protests. It had fallen on the floor. He had picked it up, and was looking after it for her. Honestly. She believes him, and apologises.
A comfort stop at a roadside restaurant. Al plays the perfect gentleman. He shows Jennifer to a corner table and insists on buying her breakfast. She accepts. He doesn’t eat. He drinks coffee, and when he picks up the bill, we notice he has plenty of money in his pocket.
We shiver.
Back on the bus.
Crunch.
A glimpse of the driver’s newspaper, and a story at the bottom of page six. ‘State Police Hunt Murderer. Widow Spencer, 85-year-old Isle of Palms resident, was stayed in what police are describing as “a robbery that went fatally wrong…” ’
Al and Jennifer sit together. They talk about children. She tells him why she is travelling to Philadelphia. He is travelling to Philadelphia too. He is going to visit his mother’s grave, something he does every year on the anniversary of her death. The dutiful son.
Jennifer has a nap. He offers his shoulder as a pillow, and she accepts gratefully. Suddenly he is a nice man. He daydreams but never closes his eyes. Mrs Bell took a deep breath.
Another comfort stop, and he buys lunch. When she talks about her injured son, he is so understanding, such a comfort. She takes his arm as they walk back to the coach.
Night follows day, and arrival in Philadelphia. Rain pours. Al and Jennifer part company, but he makes her promise to meet him the following day.
Hospital scene. Intensive care. Jennifer doesn’t recognise her son, Jim. He is in a coma, swathed in bandages, fully piped up. Machines beep. She sits for an hour, then leaves for a hotel.
A seedy hotel. Jennifer sits alone while people in the next room shout and fight. Rain beats against the window. She tries to sleep, but cannot.
Morning. She checks out and takes a cab to meet Al in a restaurant. When she tells him about her disturbed night, he promises to find her a quiet hotel. He tells her to meet him in a downtown bar. He writes the address on a card, and gives it to her.
Hospital. Jim is no better. The machines beep. Crunch.
Jennifer walks alone through the streets. Rain pours. Umbrellas bloom. She shelters in a doorway. She reads the address Al gave her.
Al is drinking in a bar, a comfortable one. Jennifer enters. All greets her, they drink together. He is a great comfort. They leave together. He takes her to a hotel, books her into a room next to his. She is so grateful, and takes a long bath.
Al sits alone, a wreath on the bed beside him. His eyes stare, he cannot blink. He notices a speck on his sleeve, and brushes it off. Mrs Bell shivered, rustled and touched my hand. I pulled
my hand away. I really couldn’t stand it.
Jennifer out of the bath. She phones home, and talks to Betty, a work colleague. Betty tells her that the police have an important lead in the hunt for the widow-slayer. There are no details, but the police are quietly confident.
Jennifer in bed. Al in the corridor outside. His hand on her doorknob. Her phone rings. It’s the hospital. Could she come in straight away?
Al retreats; Jennifer dresses and leaves the hotel. Al follows, hailing a cab.
Rain.
Crunch.
Al in the cab, reading a newspaper. The headline ‘New Clues: Isle of Palms Widow Slaying’. The police have changed the emphasis of their investigation. Robbery has been discounted as a motive. A witness reports hearing a heated argument, china flying and an old woman (definitely not the victim) leaving the house. When?
An hour or so before the body was found.
Hospital. Jim has recovered from coma. Jennifer holds his hand. He opens his mouth, but cannot speak. Al hovers in the background.
Leaving hospital, a pair of policemen in the hospital reception watch Al as he passes. He puts his hat on and stares straight ahead.
Hotel. Jennifer goes to bed. Al sees her to her room, then leaves the hotel, hails another taxi and disappears into the dawn.
Jennifer sleeps late.
Rustle.
Jennifer wakes, showers, dresses, goes downstairs. Al is waiting in reception. ‘How is your son?’
‘Better. Much better. I have to go home today.’
‘Me too. On the bus?’
Crunch, and Mrs Bell is lucky that I’m a tolerant man.
‘Yes.’
‘Coincidence,’ he says, ‘or just my good luck?’
‘Luck’s just an excuse,’ she says.
He nods, and then they leave the hotel together. He stops to buy a newspaper. Headline. ‘Police Catch Isle of Palms Widow Killer.’
Steam rises from the road, the camera climbs and climbs and a panorama of the city spreads below us. Rain falls but it does not bother Jennifer or Al. They wait for a car to pass down the street, then cross and begin to walk away from us. She takes his arm. They remain in the middle of the shot, getting smaller and smaller and smaller until the credits begin to run, their backs are dots in the street and the music swells.
Mrs Bell was out of her seat, buttoning her coat, sucking another sweet and making smacking sounds with her lips. She looked down at me but I wasn’t moving. Al had turned to say something to Jennifer, who tipped her head back and smiled. That smile. I knew it. Then a laugh, and I knew that too. Robert Mitchum’s face threatened to collapse in love, and she stood ready to catch it. Deeper music and Mrs Bell leaned towards me to say something but I put a finger to my lips and said, ‘I’m watching to the end.’ I could still see Jennifer and Al.
She looked at the screen. ‘But this is the end.’
‘Not quite,’ I said.
She looked at the screen, then at me, then brushed the front of her coat and huffed. ‘I think I’ll visit the ladies’,’ she said. The music soared and pounded. I didn’t move. My feet were glowing, and my cheeks. She turned to go. I said, ‘I’ll meet you outside.’ She crunched and I let the music fill me. She waited one more moment, huffed again and left me alone.
As we walked away from the cinema, Mrs Bell blew her nose and talked. I wanted her to be quiet but she did not stop.
She hadn’t liked the way the red herring of the widow’s murder had kept her on edge, but she’d been pleased that the old couple had found romance together. ‘There’s no reason why old people shouldn’t form attachments, is there?’
‘No,’ I said.
She drove slowly through the dark, away from Truro to Camborne and the coast road. I was thinking that Raintown was the best film I had seen for years, and the best film Elizabeth had made. Missing You was good, but Raintown’s simple story and the understated acting took it out of the ordinary. Mrs Bell said, ‘I’d love to go again.’
‘Would you?’
‘Oh, yes. I see The Crying Game’s on next week. It sounds quite romantic.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ I said, but I didn’t care. I wanted to get home. I wanted to stoke the fire and sit next to a woman who did not smell of violets, whose voice did not rattle around my head. Mrs Bell was a kind woman and I think she wanted to cook me a meal and mend my shirts.
‘Shall we go again?’ she said.
‘I don’t know…’
‘Are you all right?’ She leaned towards me. Her face was close to me in the car, and I could feel the dryness coming off her. The road was desperate and dark. I watched the stars course, and the gibbous moon.
‘Yes.’
‘It was strange, wasn’t it?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Seeing her like that. You wouldn’t have thought she was the same woman. She looked quite beautiful.’
I wanted to say that I had seen her looking more beautiful, that we had been swimming that morning, that the camera did not do her justice, that her skin smelt of cardamom and jasmine, that her lips tasted of music, but I said ‘Yes’ instead, and left it like that.
20
I hung my cap on its hook and my coat over the back of a chair, stoked the fire and poured a glass of whisky. Elizabeth sat with a vodka in one hand and a novel by John Buchan in the other. She had tucked one foot up and draped a navy blue blanket around her shoulders. The fire blew out a clot of smoke that broke and danced in streams around the room. I stepped over the dog, joined her on the couch and said, ‘What can I say?’
‘Don’t say anything.’
‘It’s a great film.’
‘I told you. Please.’ She meant it. ‘Don’t say anything. Not a word.’ She looked at me and smiled. Her teeth were different in real life. They were stained and her lips crept over them. They reflected the lamplight, and spit glistened in their gaps. I could see the veins in her cheeks, and her nose. She straightened her blanket, tapped her book and went back to reading.
I remembered the teeth of a gale in the mad Norwegian Basin. Ice floes, seas the size of any building you want. Stare at them and weep the tears you waited years to shed. You can be trapped in ice but you always break free in the end. Any ship, any heart. Warmth does it. I tried to believe that but it was hard in those waters. I remember leading a gang of men to chip ice from the spars and the deck rails, I remember sending one below when his snot froze and his fingers turned blue. Blue as a baby’s eyes, sweet as a baby’s smile. The ice calmed the storm but the gale blew on, and chunks of solid wind smashed the hull. The clouds grew mad and tragic over our heads, and shaped themselves like false signals, bad directions to screwed places that no longer exist.
‘Elizabeth?’
She tapped the page and said, ‘Not till I’ve finished this chapter.’ Her eyebrows were arched. ‘Please, Michael.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Forget it.’
I read over her shoulder for a moment: ‘The house, as seen in the half-light, was a long whitewashed cottage, rising to two storeys in the centre. It was plentifully covered with creepers and roses…’, but she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and turned the book away from me. ‘And that’s very rude,’ she said. I hung my head in mock shame.
We sat together. The lamps burned softly, the fire crackled, the pages turned. I let my whisky warm in the glass, and I let good luck swill round my head. Elizabeth twirled strands of hair around her finger. Her skin was creased like old paint and as I looked at her I felt a tightening in my chest and a blurring of vision. The lamplight dulled, and the shadows on the walls faded. Her smell sharpened; it sharpened like a blade, and traced its edge around my eyes. I rubbed them and slid a hand inside my shirt. I could feel my heart beating in there, going like it was about to burst or flood or rage or whine. I took a deep breath, and let it out noisily. She looked at me, touched my shoulder and said, ‘I’ll be finished in a minute.’
‘It’s okay.’
She tapped the novel. ‘It’s exciting.’
‘I read it a long time ago,’ and my heart missed a beat. ‘A long time ago,’ I said.
I lived in my own silence after Isabel. I didn’t mess up again but returned to earlier, straighter days. Hard work, navigation examinations, moderate drink, strong novels about men under duress and women in rude health. Steamed vegetables and plenty of fish. No women, a tidy cabin, loose underwear and myself in hand. No thought of redemption through violence. A calm voice, a steady stare. The silence of a mind that knows limits. These were the important things in my life at that time.
But silence is not a natural state. It demands its own release. It has a price. As I held the throbbing skin over my heart, and the hairs there curled around my fingers, I was thinking that the noise of the sea was the noise of the ventricles of my body and the uncoiling of my veins. I was watching Elizabeth read by candlelight and my mind was flirting with her as the light on her cheek.
‘The Thirty-Nine Steps,’ I said.
‘Ssh.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Gimme five minutes.’
‘I’ll give you whatever you want. Whatever takes your fancy. Your fancy’s mine, Elizabeth Green.’
‘Hush, Michael.’
After the gale we turned at the North Cape and steamed into the Barents Sea, and the ocean thickened and calmed. We were racing to catch a berth but the temperature dropped a final ten degrees and we were trapped, frozen in off Murmansk, anchored in the roads to the old port, and the silence of ice fell on the ship. The generators thrummed but did not dent it. The clouds stacked themselves grey and solid. Seabirds came and screamed over the bridge; the crew played cards and lost their wages. The floes fused and the silence deepened. The cargo — coke and coal — settled in the holds. I iced myself in as the ship iced herself in and we watched each other. It was a sweet solution.
‘Three minutes…’
I sat in my cabin and read The Thirty-Nine Steps. I remember hearing the words in my head but the silence filled me. It was a silence of cold and loss, Isabel’s silence and the silence of my heart. Most of all it was the silence of regret, the one that comes when you know you have wronged someone close. I was that someone. I did not want to know myself. I would wash my hands for no reason at all and never touch another woman. My breath steamed and I heard the ship strain against the thickening ice. I wanted to strip and lie on it, I wanted to turn blue and die in two minutes flat. I wanted…