Gull Island

by Grace Thompson

  Still sobbing wildly, she ran to the house where Mrs Stock lived. Banging on that door produced as little result. The curtains were drawn and the house was locked and appeared to be empty.

  She arrived at the Careys’ still crying and unable at first to explain what had happened. Miraculously Luke appeared and calmed her and soon had all the facts.

  ‘Don’t worry, she’s sure to be safe and that’s the main thing. Rosita will be safe. We’ll soon get her back. No one will take her from you.’

  Dressed in his office clothes and with Barbara washed, neatly dressed and calm, they went to the police station and made their complaint. Hours went slowly past as the policeman, seemingly unhurried and lacking a sense of urgency, set about making enquiries. Barbara grew increasingly distraught. Luke sent a message to his assistant Jean that he wouldn’t be in the next day and stayed with her, sleeping under his boat and spending the daylight hours with Barbara.

  For minutes at a time Barbara screamed her hatred of Mrs Stock, who had cruelly refused to help when she was needed, denied her beautiful granddaughter and was now causing her this agony. She called her all the wicked names she could bring to mind. Luke didn’t try to stop her – best she vented her anger on someone and at least Mrs Stock was so far unaware of it.

  ‘I want to hurt her,’ Barbara sobbed. ‘I want to hurt her and see her screaming like I am, and suffer some of my pain!’

  ‘She lost all her sons, remember,’ Mrs Carey said softly.

  ‘That only makes it worse, her knowing how I must feel!’

  Barbara and Luke wandered the streets together, unable to rest, and when Luke was talking to the police and trying to find a crumb of comfort to report, she wandered alone. She frequently ran up to look at a baby, imagining she would see the face of her own child. As the day and night dragged by, she would collapse exhausted into a corner of the sea wall, or under a hedge or on the stony beach and doze, only to wake moments later with panic renewed and intensified.

  She couldn’t go into the house; she felt closer to Rosita if she were outside, as if the baby might be calling her and she would not hear through walls and curtained doorways. Sleep was brief and restless and she would start frequently into wide-awake panic, convinced by some quickly forgotten dream that her baby was dead. Luke was always there to soothe her.

  Luke tried to encourage her to talk, to make plans for when Rosita came home, but her mood shifted between uncontrollable sobbing and sitting unmoving as though in a trance, listening for Rosita’s cries. Her lovely face was drawn and had lost its glow; her blue eyes seemed larger and full of melancholy.

  Richard’s contribution was, ‘Come back she will, for sure. No one could put up with her yelling for long and that’s a fact!’

  After two nights had passed without a word, Barbara found herself thinking of all the brown envelopes that had been delivered around the streets of the town. All the grieving they had caused. She began to think of Mrs Stock in a slightly different way and imagined the poor woman nursing her son’s child and caring for her with love. All those deaths meant more to her now. Without her baby for three days she was almost out of her mind. How could Mrs Stock have survived after losing her sons for ever? The slight sympathy eased her mind a little.

  ‘At least,’ she told Luke, ‘I know she wouldn’t harm her. She’s had enough of death.’

  It took three days for the police to find them. The trail began at the railway station, where they had been seen buying tickets, then, after exhaustive enquiries, they learnt from friends that Mrs Stock had an aunt living in Newport.

  On the morning of the third day Luke woke and couldn’t find Barbara. He searched with increasing concern and after waking Henry and Molly Carey and Richard to help, they found her huddled, shivering and crying outside Luke’s cottage, now locked and padlocked. Luke snapped the padlock on the door and took her inside. He lit the fire and made her sip some quickly heated soup and then held her until she slept.

  She awoke to see a policeman smiling down at her.

  ‘Your baby has been found safe and sound, miss. And if her yelling’s got anything to do with it, she’s in excellent health!’ The policeman’s expression was so full of joy at the happy outcome to the worrying search, she hugged him.

  Barbara and Luke travelled with the police to Newport to collect Rosita. The little girl was crying as usual, a sound Barbara would never complain of again.

  ‘How can I ever thank you, Luke?’ Barbara sobbed as she held the fidgeting, grizzling child close once they were back home.

  ‘I didn’t do anything. It was the police who found her, and quickly too.’

  ‘But you were there. I – I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d gone away. I’ve never needed anyone more than I’ve needed you these past three terrible days.’

  They were sitting on the doorstep of the cottage belonging to Luke’s father. Luke took Rosita from her and held her, and she went straight to sleep. She always settled better when he held her. Barbara leaned her head towards him, resting against him in a slumped contentment, her face close to his. Uneasily, Luke moved away and stood, looking out across the water to Gull Island.

  ‘It’s all right, Luke,’ Barbara said softly. ‘I know you don’t want love from me, not that kind of love anyway. But I do love you, the way you love Rosita and me. You do understand what I mean, don’t you?’

  ‘According to my father, love is an evil emotion, an imp of darkness that should be crushed before it takes its first breath.’

  ‘Have you ever thought, Luke, that your father might be wrong? That the way he thinks about love is the one way he can’t accept?’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Stock loved their son and tried to love Rosita. That hardly brought happiness, did it?’

  ‘Selfish, over-possessive, that can be another side of the complicated thing called love. What d’you think they’ll do now?’

  ‘Move away to hide their shame and grief.’

  ‘I hope so. I won’t be safe until they do.’

  Barbara knew that the temporary arrangements, with Rosita staying with one person then another, must stop. She and the baby needed a settled life if they weren’t to suffer worsening misery. She sat on the windy and grey-shrouded beach one morning and thought about her options. There weren’t many and having discarded ones that meant giving up Rosita to be looked after by strangers, there were even fewer.

  Luke had returned to town but he was unable to concentrate on work. Barbara and Rosita were constantly on his mind. At seven o’clock on Saturday morning a few days after the rescue of Rosita from Mrs Stock, he made up his mind. He didn’t desire her as a man desired a woman, but he cared. Wasn’t that a kind of loving? An acceptable substitute? He would marry Barbara and help her bring up Rosita.

  The room in which he lived during the week wouldn’t do for a family of three, but he’d find somewhere. The first thing was to see Barbara and persuade her of the sense of it. They could use the storerooms behind the shop for a while. Their stock hardly filled the place, even though Jeanie was proving remarkably adept at finding good-quality volumes of their speciality subjects.

  He dressed hurriedly and set off for the station. Now he had come to a decision he needed to act on it immediately. He reached the house on the beach at mid-morning and found Mrs Carey sitting on a rock outside the door peeling potatoes. He waved and hurried towards her. A wall of stones had been built around the front of the house and within its boundaries the youngest children played. Meriel was sleeping in a roughly made wooden crib.

  ‘You look very much at home,’ he called as he approached her.

  ‘We’ve been very lucky.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve lost my laundry work but the rent we save has meant it’s less than a loss than I first thought. The children have a long walk to school but they don’t complain. Living on the beach like this gives them a sense of importance in a child’s world.’ She put down the basket of potatoes and went inside to make him a cup of tea. ‘Thank you, Luke. You
don’t know what this means to us. It’s as though we’ve been transported to another world.’

  ‘Don’t thank me! It was your Richard’s doing. And I’m glad you like the beach. It has always been my favourite place.’

  He sipped the tea for a while, and they chatted about the seagulls and the scavenging crows that had become regular visitors to the lonely dwelling, and the small animals that explored the beach at night in the hope of a morsel of food. Then, unable to contain himself any longer, he asked, ‘What time do you expect Barbara? I’d better change into my normal clothes or she’ll think you’re talking to a stranger.’

  ‘Or that there’s more trouble for you to sort out for us,’ she said, looking at him with a serious expression. ‘What a good friend you are to us all.’

  He sensed there was something unsaid and wondered what new trouble they had found. He waited for her to tell him, but she said nothing more although her face was sad and she looked away from him whenever she spoke.

  ‘I’ll walk down to meet her. She’ll be glad of me taking Rosita from her. She’s getting quite a weight, isn’t she?’

  ‘Barbara won’t be coming, Luke. Gone she has, taken that job with Graham Prothero the farmer.’

  Luke turned and stared at her. ‘What? Why did she do that? She must have known I’d be back to help her.’

  ‘Afraid she was. Afraid of that Mrs Stock coming and stealing Rosita. Thinking of us, too, mind. I can only just cope although she was wonderful – helped as much as she could with extra money and giving a hand with the work.’

  ‘But I wanted to – I would have helped,’ he finished lamely. ‘I came here to – oh, it doesn’t matter.’

  But it did matter. It was another rejection. Barbara refused to accept his help, she would rather face that farmer than take anything from him.

  He didn’t go to the boat and change into his beach clothes but went straight back to the station. In Cardiff he went first to talk to his assistant, Jeanie. She was a young, newly married woman whose sailor husband was missing, presumed killed. She was hard-working and very capable and he knew what her answer would be when he asked her if she could cope alone.

  She readily agreed and he set in motion the legal arrangements to make her an equal partner. Then he went to the recruiting office and, with the aid of a good many lies, enlisted in the army.

  He reached France a year after America entered the war and in time for the fierce battle during which the British were beaten back to Amiens. The losses were equal to those at Passchendaele in 1916. He survived physically unharmed but emotionally numbed by the reality of the insane slaughter he had witnessed.

  Barbara settled into life at the farm and when she saw how genuinely pleased Graham was to have her back she put aside her doubts and took to the heavy, exhausting work with a light heart. Her muscles were painful with the resumption of the chores, but Graham helped her more than when she had been there before. He seemed tolerant of Rosita, who still made her presence felt by long periods of loud crying and tedious, inexplicable grizzling.

  He surprised her with gifts of flowers picked in the fields, and by planting flowers in the small garden at the front of the house for her pleasure. He took her out on walks and showed her things she hadn’t seen before, aspects of the countryside that delighted her. Badgers playing outside their sett at night, fox-cubs romping about like puppies, hedgehogs walking with their young families.

  It took a while to learn to be still and quiet and have the patience to wait and often accept disappointment, but once she had witnessed something of the secret world existing alongside her own, she found pleasure in every day. When the day’s work was finished and they had eaten their supper, he usually sat in his favourite chair and read.

  The books on the shelves fascinated her and she picked up several but found them too difficult to understand. So, while he read, she usually sat with a basket of mending or knitting and thought over the day’s happenings. The silence was not uneasy, with the humming of the oil lamp and the occasional fall of cinders in the fire; she found life was very pleasant, better than anything she had found in her daydreams.

  For Graham, her return was nothing less than a miracle. He knew she was far too young for him and her innocence – even with the baby, which had to prove some worldly experience – made her a person to be cherished and not bustled into a partnership for which she wasn’t ready. No, given this second chance, he was determined to exercise patience.

  He had been surprised at how badly he had missed her once his anger had abated, for it was anger he had felt. He remembered vividly that strong desire to hit her when he realized she was carrying a child. He knew in that moment of fury that if he gave in to the need to hit her, the beating would have been severe, so great had been his disappointment. He was glad now that he had controlled that urge. When she had answered his advertisement for the second time, he had been overwhelmed with sheer amazement. It must have been meant to be.

  He bitterly regretted his harsh and unkind treatment of her, leaving so much of the heavy work to her slender arms, and the way he had tried to force her into his bed. She was young, not more than eighteen, but perhaps if he were kind and thoughtful, she would come to see him not as an older man but someone to whom she could give herself with love.

  Barbara was very happy. Respect and affection for Graham grew day by day. He worked her hard but didn’t ask her to do more than she could manage and he accepted her unwillingness to move into his bed without causing her any embarrassment. Since her return he had been amazingly kind and had made no further move to be anything but a generous employer.

  To her growing delight he took an interest in Rosita, playing with her, making toys and bringing her little treats. Barbara relaxed the last core of apprehension and felt that, hard as life undoubtedly was, it at least offered a respite from the worries of trying to work and find people to look after Rosita. She would stay until Rosita started school. Then things would be easier. Meanwhile, life was full and rather a lot of good fun.

  Cautiously at first, afraid of showing the slightest friendliness in case he misunderstood and took it for encouragement, she eased from her early formality in her attitude towards him. Thoughts of leaving faded away. She and Rosita were happy here and she wanted to stay. She could think of no better way of keeping Rosita with her.

  The farm kept them busy but Graham took a day off once or twice that first summer, leaving a neighbour to attend to the milking of his four cows, taking Rosita and Barbara for a ride and a picnic on the horse and cart. Once he even took her to the bus stop so she could go back and visit the Careys. ‘I know you’re always hoping for news of your family,’ he said.

  Summer gave them longer days and although it also brought more and more work, they had time to talk. He listened with interest and no sign of censure when she told him about her parents and about Bernard and the baby, and the attempted kidnap of the child by Bernard’s mother. She told him a lot about Luke.

  ‘Tell me about this Luke,’ he said one day. ‘I confess I feel a bit jealous when you mention him, yet he wasn’t a man you loved, was he?’

  The hint of jealousy was disturbing, but when she looked at him he was staring straight into the fire without any sign of tension on his flat face, which was ruddy in the glow from the fire. His book was face down on his knees, his large hands continuing to fill his pipe, and he turned and smiled at her, easily, calmly. ‘Tell me about him. He seems a very complex character.’

  She relaxed again. She mustn’t start imagining things.

  ‘Luke’s family didn’t want to have anything to do with him. A bit like mine, really.’ She frowned; it was difficult to put Luke into a few words. ‘His father sounds like a man who is afraid of showing affection and tried to beat it out of his son.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘I don’t really understand, Graham. But it seems that Luke and his friend Roy were really close; Roy’s family was where Luke was happiest. He spent
a lot of time with them. His father told him that such a friendship was wrong, wicked even. He said that love was wrong, especially between two boys, but there wasn’t any harm in it. He loved the whole family and the happiness that filled their home.’

  ‘Boys often develop a fondness for each other, a close bond that lasts all their lives. Why should that be considered wicked? It sounds to me as though there was something lacking in the father.’

  ‘His father beat Luke rather badly on the day his mother died. He found Luke and Roy with their arms around each other, comfort for one given by the other, both in tears.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Poor devil.’

  ‘A similar thing had happened when Luke’s mother died. It was to Roy and his family he went for comfort and his father threw him out of the house.’ She smiled at the big man, who was listening quietly. ‘I wish you and Luke could meet, Graham. I think perhaps you, with all your learning, would help him understand and perhaps forgive his father.’

  ‘Forgiveness? I think you’re right, clever girl. Forgiveness will have to come before anything else.’ He smiled, concentrating on getting his pipe drawing satisfactorily, then lowered his head and returned to his reading.

  Graham surprised her one day by saying she looked tired. ‘I don’t want you overdoing things. I’m going to take on someone to do the heavy work and you can stay indoors and deal with the running of the house. It will give you more time to enjoy Rosita.’

  Forgetting her determination not to give him any encouragement to see her as anything other than an employed housekeeper, she hugged him.

  ‘Graham, you’re so understanding. I do feel I’m missing the best of her childhood, having her fixed in her pram and dragging her around the farm like I do. It’ll be wonderful to have more time to play with her. And I’ll be able to deal with the cooking and preserving that I sometimes neglect. Thank you.’