by Неизвестный
“I’ll have to report you. Wenderly will be here in a moment with your morphia.”
“I hate that ruddy stuff; makes me feel like I’m drowning in cotton wool. Where are you from?” he asked with a strange urgency.
“Kent.”
“I thought so.” His accent blurred. “I’m from Tenterden.”
“Oh.” Would he know her name if she said it? How far had the story spread? What did it matter now, after all? “My name’s Kendall, Julia Kendall. I’m from Mounts Hill House, near Cranbrook.”
“Only seven miles away and yet we meet here.”
“This might as well be the end of the world for me. I never went above five miles from my home in my life, not ’til the war.”
His pulse was surprisingly slow for a man in pain. She tried to put his hand back on the coverlet only to find him holding on to hers. “It’s good to hear the old accent again, Julia Kendall. Will you come and talk to me some more?”
“Yes. Yes, I will.”
And she did. More often than she should, she slipped behind the white curtains, sometimes just holding his hand if he were asleep, but timing her visits so that Charles would wake to the sound of her voice. She talked about the hills and hedges, how her late mother didn’t care for horses but never minded a pony or a dog, about climbing the fruit trees after apples, and the hours spent playing with her sister and brother. “Nick could always spin a tale. Nell and I were his pirate crew, his Crusaders, his Cavaliers.”
“Were you never damsels in distress?”
“I played Sister Ann while Nell was always Bluebeard’s latest bride.”
“Nick was Bluebeard?”
“Never, but always the brother come to rescue her, just in time for tea. How I used to gobble it all down, always starving for my tea and cakes. He called me greedy-guts and with cause. I was always a roly-poly.”
“Did Nick join the Army?”
“No.” Her voice slowed, victim to some constraint. “No, the last we heard he was in Rhodesia.”
Charles placed his hand over hers, feeling for the bones in her wrist. “Doesn’t feel plump to me.”
Julia breathed a little faster. “Well, the catering here isn’t exactly Simpson’s in the Strand.”
“I don’t suppose it is. Tell me …tell me about the best day you ever had.”
“Are you in pain?” she asked.
“No,” he lied.
“The best day?” she repeated. There had been so many bad days that the good ones were a little harder to recall. “I don’t know if it was the best, but would you like to hear about the time we mistook the junior M.P. from Ashford for a burglar?”
Charles guessed that the adored older brother had blotted his copybook in some way. A vague memory came to him, some whispered scandal about a county bank. Everyone knew the son had done it though the father took the blame before succumbing to a stroke. He himself had been too busy to attend to the gossip for his own mother had just died. Even that unhappy memory had little power to overcome the drugs he was under. The present was pain or half-realized minutes passing with infinite slowness, blurred by morphia, sunk in dreams. The past shimmered like a mirage made real by the sound of a voice, the dear accent of childhood overlaid by the crisp country-house training of governesses. He told Julia about his memories, of his gentle widowed father and cheerful brothers, never realizing that he fell asleep more often than not before reaching the end of a story.
The other women covered her duties without saying a word to Julia, white-capped heads shaking ruefully when she apologized. She tried to be more conscientious but the white curtains called her back again. Her memories became his and his hers. Church-fetes and tennis parties, awkward dance lessons, things they’d done in common at different times and in different places. He was a bare three years older than she and they might have met at any time. She thought there was a good chance she’d met at least one of his brothers.
“What do you look like?” he asked, his voice now barely a thread.
“Not like much in my uniforms, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t suppose you have a dimple.”
Julia touched her cheek. “Are you fond of dimples? I think they look foolish on adults.”
“Depends on the adult. Depends on the dimple.”
Nonsense, frivolous nonsense to bear off the darkness for a few more stolen moments.
When Charles died, deep in his drugged sleep, Julia had stepped outside for a breath of air and a glimpse of the stars. Ward Sister McHugh broke the news, her tired eyes kind. She shed tears. “It’s not right,” the Scotswoman said. “It shouldn’t be like this. If it weren’t for the war, you might have …he might have ….”
“If not for the war,” Julia said. She comforted McHugh, letting the older woman weep against her starched shoulder. She looked past the neatly-folded cap, the stars distant and cold and infinitely beautiful in the depths of the sky.
When Mr. Brightson came, Julia was busy in another ward.
# #
Two weeks later, Constable Ankin sat down in a shed before an open brazier and eased off his boots.
“Hard night?” asked young Phelps.
“Hard enough. A dead girl, one of them nursing volunteers. It’s a waste, that’s what.”
“Zepp?”
“Got the houses instead of the airfield, ruddy barstards. I say if you can’t aim better than that, time to stop trying.”
Phelps passed him a tin mug. “Hard luck on the girl.”
“Oh, she wasn’t there when the zepp came by. She was later, went into the house though it was leaning over like one of them card-houses my brother-in-law builds ever since he came home from France. There was a little girl in the house, you see. We told the nurse not to go in, but she heard the child crying.”
“And the house came down. Well, now.”
“Oh, the child’s all right. Broke her leg. But the girl; we took her out dead. Funny thing.”
“You want some sugar? Bert went and left the lid off again but they do say charcoal’s good for your insides.”
Ankin took a large spoonful of the grayish sugar and stirred it well. “Funny thing, I say. Never seen such a look on anyone’s face before.”
“Horrible? Sometimes when they’ve been frightened ….”
“No. She was smiling.”
“Maybe she took some of the morphine they carry about with them.”
“Not her. Sides, her case was clear the other side of the room. I saw it there. But she was smiling. Had a … whatnot.” Ankin touched a grubby fingertip to the corner of his mouth, a grim mouth that never showed a sign of a dimple.
“A what?”
“One of those little dents girls have.”
“A dimple?”
“That’s right. Never saw a corpse with such a smile before.” He didn’t say how he’d brushed the plaster dust from her soft cheeks, or smoothed the springing dark hair, or how he’d almost expected her to look up and laugh. Phelps would have thought he’d gone soft as marshmallow.
# #
When Julia came back to herself, she’d been walking for quite some time along a narrow road. Hedgerows bloomed to either side and the birds were busying themselves among the branches. She wore a tweed skirt, softened with years, and an old cardigan of her brother’s, the pockets all stretched out. Sensible shoes and rather thick stockings, such as she hadn’t worn for years, finished off her ensemble, precisely right for a long walk. She noticed the sun was falling toward the west. Feeling a bit tired, she wondered where she could stop in for tea.
After walking on a bit more, she started to recognize her surroundings or thought she did. She came to a farm-gate, big enough for a wagon, and saw a barn. Beyond it grew many trees, thick with blossoms. Then she heard someone call.
Walking on to meet the voice, she came to another gate with a young man sitting astride it. He had rather gingery hair and a pleasant face, quite good-looking in an outdoorsy way. His blue eyes crinkled when he smi
led. “There you are,” he said. “I’d almost given you up.”
“Am I late?”
Charles jumped down and opened the gate for her. “You’re just in time. Shall we go up and see what Cook has given us for tea?”
Julia looked back down the lane. It seemed to stretch very far. She couldn’t quite remember it all but this gate, the house she saw at the end of the drive, and this man all seemed more than familiar. “Yes, I’m quite thirsty,” she said, and passed in, pausing to scrape the earth from her shoes.
“Is this your house?”
“It’s ours now, dear.”
Tide Change by Shirley Parenteau
Shirley Parenteau grew up on the northern Oregon coast where her mother wrote newspaper features and her logging father enjoyed tall tales. After years of writing outdoor magazine articles, Shirley turned to children’s books, then to women’s fiction with novels sold to Ballantine Books and Harlequin Historical. More recently, she returned to writing for children with a series of picture books for Candlewick Press, beginning with Bears on Chairs, and she is working on a middle-grade series, also for Candlewick, set in 1927. She enjoyed writing for grown-ups again with “Tide Change.”
“Tide Change” began with a choice of six words from a list of thirty for a story to be read during a local library Read-in. The words I chose were “salty, blue, swirl, brush, song and smart.” Although I usually plot before writing, this story, with its familiar north coast setting, developed as I went along. Later, this anthology’s theme fit so well, the story became one of a woman rediscovering a freer self she had never thought she would see again.
For Linsey Phelps, the sight of the sea felt as comforting as a loving hug on a worried night. When the winding highway through Oregon’s fir-dominated coast range at last gave way to a view of the Pacific, cares washed away.
“Pacific,” the explorer had named it. Peaceful. Of course, Balboa’s first glimpse of limitless blue took place on a high promontory, not from a rocky ridge where the ocean crashed and thundered and hurled tons of water as carelessly as a compulsive gambler with a pocket full of hundred-dollar chips.
Linsey felt pretty much of a mind with Balboa. When the Pacific came in view, troubles lost their power. Go ahead, name them, she challenged herself. Betrayal. Heartache. Shattered dreams. Choosing a career in music was as risky as choosing a man in a rock band. Disappointment was almost certain. Yet where the ocean rolled eternally onto the sand, those bitter words lost their power.
She barely took time to leave her backpack and keyboard in the rental cabin and assure herself the tide was still coming in before she raced through squeaky dry sand to the edge of the foaming waves. All that week, she walked along the wave slope, splashing through the chilly incoming tide, idly checking beach pebbles for agates, watching fishing boats on the horizon, absorbing the sea’s healing strength.
Nothing mattered but the gulls shrieking and arguing overhead while foraging sandpipers skittered seaward with each draining wave. Linsey gazed after the tiny birds while the salty breath of the Pacific tossed her hair. A darker object inside a wave curl caught her eye. At first, she thought a fish swam through the green-bluedepth. Gradually she realized the fish was not a fish, but a bottle. Some careless fisherman, she thought. Wants his boat clean and doesn’t care about the beach.
The bottle rolled near enough to brushone bare foot before she saw it contained a rolled paper. In the same moment, a swirlof riptide carried it out. As much as she loved the sea, she knew its treacherous side, heard it in the constant deep rumble of its song. If she went into the waves, she might step into a crab hole and sink below her depth. She might be knocked over by a cross tide and swept away.
The bottle caught the sunlight, glinting in a glassy farewell.
“Bon voyage,” she said aloud. Yet she couldn’t pull her gaze away. The bottle bobbed and winked and washed closer. Incoming tide, she remembered. Waves rolled over the solid beach she’d seen before without a crab hole in sight.
Without thinking it through, she found herself knee deep in the surf, stumbling from the force of the waves while groping for the now-elusive bottle. She had come to the beach to forget. A message in a bottle must offer at least momentary diversion. She grabbed and missed, grabbed again while the rush and tumble of waves pulled it away, then carried it tantalizingly close.
When she caught it at last, her shorts and blouse were soaked with sea spray. Laughing in triumph — how long since she last laughed? — she carried her prize to dry sand and sat on a driftwood log to pry out the cork.
The paper, unrolled, contained an unfamiliar handwritten piece of music.
The tune danced across the page. All week, she had played tunes that echoed her mood, tunes the opposite of this. Yet it drew her and she took it to her cabin and began to play. Each note lifted her heart, curved her lips, eased the frown too long engraved on her forehead.
A shadow filled the door she had left open to the sea breeze. A man’s voice applauded. “You found your song.”
She looked up startled, but the rejecting words on her tongue remained unsaid or more truthfully, unscreamed, as she absorbed concern behind the laughter in his eyes.
“I have the cabin above you,” he said. “I’ve seen you walk along the beach each day while the tide rolls in. And all week, I’ve listened to you play. Sad tunes, one after another. You need cheering, though it’s clear you mean to be left alone.”
“I did.” She corrected. “I do.”
He relaxed against the doorframe, tall, easy-going, his dark hair curling at the ends and in need of a trim. “I wrote the song to cheer you. Made copies and had a friend toss them from his fishing boat when the tide turned.”
“You’re a songwriter?” She flinched from the thought, yet again recognized concern in his face. How long since anyone had shown concern for her?
His smile looked as open as the appreciation in his eyes. “All those undiscovered bottles must be washing ashore by now. Some of the tunes are different. You may like them.”
His music said more of him than his words. She wondered if the other songs were as joyous.
“Shall we collect them?” he asked. “Clean the beach?”
She looked at the hand he offered. A sensible woman would remember that chance was not to be trusted and rarely turned out well.
As if he read the thought in her face, he said more gently, “Life is a gamble, but every risk taken offers a brand new start.”
A smartwoman would shake her head and turn away — or would she reach for a net collector’s bag?
She hesitated only a moment longer before reaching for the bag, startled to feel more alive, becoming the woman she used to be, a woman she liked much better, a woman she never thought she would see again.
“Linsey,” she said, offering her name, and smiling, held out her hand.