Salt

by Jeremy Page

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Mud

  Chapter 2 - Days on the Wreck, Nights on the Quilt

  Chapter 3 - The Sail (or the Map and Sail)

  Chapter 4 - The Rag Cloud

  Chapter 5 - Lil’ Mardler

  Chapter 6 - Dead, Vast and Middle

  Chapter 7 - A Rural Scene, in the Fens

  Chapter 8 - Weightless and Soundless

  Chapter 9 - Bedlam Fen

  Chapter 10 - And the Trees Too

  Chapter 11 - She Went This Way

  Chapter 12 - Fireworks

  Chapter 13 - Ol’ Norse

  Chapter 14 - Saints and Sinners

  Chapter 15 - The Hansa

  Chapter 16 - Four Gotes, Three Holes

  Chapter 17 - The Whale

  Chapter 18 - Norfolk, Oh Yeah

  Chapter 19 - Herrings and Red Herrings

  Chapter 20 - Crabs

  Chapter 21 - Dead Man’s Fingers

  Chapter 22 - Thistle Dew (or, This’ll Do)

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SALT

  Jeremy Page lives in London, where he has worked as a script editor for Film Four, the filmmaking division of the UK’s Channel Four. Salt is his first novel.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in Great Britain by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd 2007

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2007

  Published in Penguin Books (UK) 2008

  Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2008

  Copyright © Jeremy Page, 2007

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-0-143-11412-3

  1. Germans—England—Fiction. 2. England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6116.A35S25 2006

  823’.92—dc22 2006037568

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  For Jacob

  1

  Mud

  Finding a man buried up to his neck in mud. That’s how it’s meant to have started. Him in the mud and her pushing a pram towards him over the saltmarsh. He’s on one side of a creek and she’s on the other. The pram is full of samphire and there’s more of it in her hands and by her feet. Bright green samphire on black, oily mud, the start of this story has very few colours. And against the mud - quite unexpectedly - she’s seen the shocking blond hair of the man.

  She said she nearly tripped over him. That her wellies nearly kicked him like he was a washed-up fishing buoy, till at the last second - the very last second, which was also their first - he’d smiled politely, and said hello.

  It’s a pretty start to a story. Across the mud slicks and estuary there’s a boat, which was wrecked many years before the man was. It’s called the Hansa, and because it’s sinking in mud and a rising tide the man has felt an affinity with it all morning. He’s certainly had little else to look at, and the rest of the landscape fails to make sense - the sky is so watery blue and the sea so cloudy grey that just to look at it makes him feel upside down. Of course, what he cannot see - yet - are the clouds. A thin smoke-signalled line beyond the Holkham Meals. But she sees them all right, saw them the second they appeared, and for a moment she doesn’t know what to do - should she run? She thinks better of it because she knows it’s too late. The story of her and the man she found has already started. And another thing, she’s seen the tall wooden figure of a longshoreman on the creek’s other side, looking like a cracked mast stuck in the mud, tattered rags of sails blowing from his shoulders.

  So this young woman, some kind of creek-hopper, in that instant, with mud on her face and a man’s coat on her back, boots on her feet, made a decision. She moved quickly, scattering samphire on to the man beneath her, weaving the muddy roots into his conspicuous blond hair and laying out bundles by the dozen along the bits of his arms and chest where they poked through the mud, and as the longshoreman began to wade into the creek she arranged the last of the samphire on the mound of his belly, finally running out when it came to his ‘down there’. No, not even a solitary stalk was unaccounted for. She left that bit exposed, and in the seconds before the longshoreman arrived, she sat on her pile. Three an’ six, two shillin’ two an’ six, she muttered. Needless to say the longshoreman had spent too many years staring at the horizon, talking to fish heads hanging from his hook or herring strung from his belt to notice anything odd about the woman counting her crop.

  Though he’d meandered an unnecessary hundred yards across the marsh to see my grandmother, he had nothing in particular to say when he arrived. That being the usual path in Norfolk and this being the usual way of the marsh. They got by in silence, listening to the larks. The longshoreman sniffed, shifted his weight, moved off again. The young woman kept a wary glance on him and the herring swinging from his belt as he began to splatter some drops of weak piss on the mud, and as he shook himself dry she looked at how the fish hanging from his belt danced, their wide-mouthed expressions so close to a smile.

  ‘Guess what I seen,’ he began.

  She continued the samphire count.

  ‘Guess what I seen yes’day.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You ought a guess.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What I seen.’

  ‘Well, what was it?’

  ‘Ain’t you guessin’?’

  Ill at ease, he ground his foot into the mud like all marsh-men do.

  ‘I ain’t told no one.’

  ‘Thass because ain’t no one listen to you.’

  The longshoreman frowned and sucked his breath in. ‘You put me off my count, thass trouble,’ she said.

  ‘Last night,’ he said, ‘I seen a man fell right out the sky. Out the moon maybe. Fell right out down here an’ I been lookin’ for him.’

  She saw tufts of that blond hair poking through between the samphire. ‘Five an’ six, ha’penny . . .’

 
‘What them clouds say?’ the longshoreman asked, chuckling to himself. He gave her a wink and began to head off. He was, after all, infatuated.

  Halfway into the lagoon - known as the Pit - with the water up to the hem of his waders, he turned back, looking a little more like a drowning man than usual, and shouted I ain’t lying no how! between the circling shrieks of gulls and terns.

  And to the man struggling under her samphire pile she whispered you keep it quiet now ’cause that one’s got a long tongue. But the man she’d uprooted from the marsh like the samphire itself had other things on his mind. Maybe it’s just a story, but the story goes that once he was down there, the man weighed up his options, found to his surprise that this young woman wasn’t made entirely of mud, that she was probably still in her twenties, that her skin was smooth and smelled like warm dry flints. The story has it that even while the longshoreman’s waders and flapping oilskins were approaching through the creek, the buried man was thinking she must be worth a go, thinking about all a man can think about when he knows his number’s up.

  But maybe this is already far from the truth. Stories start simply enough, but they soon can’t be trusted. What’s certainly true is that the man did something to put her hackles up, because my grandmother half-carried half-dragged her man from the shore, across the saltmarsh, along the Morston Channel to Lane End, her cottage. To the one room where she slept, ate and washed. And there, in the middle of her room, she threw down the mud-man in near disgust. Crumpled and guilty, he shivered and coughed on her rug while she unhooked the tin bath and placed it on six raised bricks.

  ‘You stink like cod. Should’ve gived you to that long-shore-man. I should’ve chucked you back in the sea on the end of his hook.’

  It’s possible he never understood a word she said.

  For the next ten minutes she talked to herself as she carried water from the standpipe outside, sloshing it on the rug and across the curled-up legs of the man on her way to the tub. The man hid his head in shame as the water and the nonsense and the obscenities poured down round him till the tub was full.

  These were the nights when German bombers growled through the sky, their bellies full with steel and cordite. When the moon was low their dark shapes and still-darker shadows came over the coast. Several hours later they’d return again, wearily, lighter in weight, fewer in number, dropping the occasional bomb on the forgotten land of creeks and channels beneath them. On one of those nights it all began for me - crablines and samphire, tulips and bees, fireworks like delphiniums and agapanthus in the sky, smoking fish on racks by the dozen, elm trees and marsh fever, boats and rag clouds and dunes and woods and marshes and the dead sperm whale - war, after all, starts many things, and even though I wasn’t born for another twenty-five years, my story, or at least the stories that made my story, began there.

  Back in the cottage, the odd couple who just met on the marshes are sitting on the rug. Before them there’s the blackened shape of the tin bath, under which my grandmother has placed candles to keep the water hot. The man, perhaps wondering whether he’s to be cooked, nevertheless cuts his losses and steps - still with his boots on - into the tub. The steam rises lazily into the candlelight of the room. My grandmother kneels by the tub and begins to soap the marsh off his back, occasionally splashing him with water to make him keep still. She uncorks the mud from his ears and for the first time he listens to the murmuring of distant terns, the stirring of the chimney, a rusty weathervane on top of the roof. A lone bomber goes overhead, and an air-raid siren wails mournfully across the marsh. Blackout curtains hang against the windows and my grandfather must think that this woman lives in a cave. He is safe here. No one will ever see her candles.

  It is a moment to savour in my family history.

  When he stands, the steam rises softly from his skin like he’s a man new made, from the mould. He’s an impressive sight, youthful and relaxed, arms hanging calmly by his sides. He has the palest blue eyes she’s ever seen. But she doesn’t wrap the naked man in a warm towel. In fact, she doesn’t have a towel. She has a large bunch of muddy samphire stems, and slaps the man on the back of his shins to get his legs out of the way. He steps out, dripping, and her forearms go to work in the soiled water of the bath, washing out the roots.

  He stands there dripping, uneasy, unsure what to do. He’s confused, what with the watery sky, the cloudy sea, the creek-hopping woman, the longshoreman, the boiling cauldron and the strange green plant.

  But she’s not without heart, for lying on the bed is a clean white shirt and a dark suit, which has the smell of a wardrobe and marks on the shoulders where she’s sponged the dust.

  Where had that suit come from, and whose back had it come off ? My grandmother sticks to her story - she claims she’d always had one ready, just for this type of occasion. Every woman, she adds, should have a suit at the back of the wardrobe, just in case. That the man she found was nearly naked - apart from the boots - and buried up to his neck in Morston Marsh - well, that was only incidental, a minor detail, although it certainly proved she’d been right to have a suit hanging up ready. So what happened to the suit, then? Chucked in the sea, my mother says, after he did what he did. Rat, my grandmother adds. Every story heads towards tragedy, given the time.

  When the samphire was washed, my grandmother put several fistfuls of the plant into a saucepan set over the fire. The man nervously straightened his collar and waited, unaware of the spells that were about to be brewed. Like all the men in my family, his appetite was to be his downfall. And from the moment my grandmother had spied his ridiculous head sticking out of the mud, she’d known that her cookery would land him. She boiled cider vinegar. With her back to him so that he was forced to peer, she made a white sauce, uncorked an earthenware jar and added a dash of dark brown stock. The vapours rose stealthily into the air like ghosts - chicken bones, fish heads, eyes of cod. She cracked two eggs and poured from shell to shell, letting the muscle and white drip carelessly on to the tiles. The plump yolks went in, and she began a vigorous thickening whisk, while the man’s stare became more intent, more desperate, his shoulders beginning to sink with the acuteness of his hunger. She added the vinegar, a slice of butter, and bit by inexorable bit my grandfather was forced to succumb. The air was filled with smooth waves of scent: the creamy almost rancid bitterness of a dairy, the rotten-sweet dust of the summer orchard, the breath of corn, of malt, a whiff of the sea.

  My grandmother laid the fleshy green samphire across a large plate and poured a generous puddle of hollandaise next to it. She sat by the man and raised a juicy stem of samphire in front of his eyes. Taunting him. She dragged it across the plate, twisting it like rope to gather the sauce, then she put it in his mouth, closing his hanging jaw with her other hand. She pulled it through his teeth, freeing the samphire and the sauce and the delicious creamy tang from the thin white stem and the still slightly muddy root. His eyes closed in bewilderment, then opened in delight. He was a gonner.

  Between them, they devoured the samphire, turning the lush green stems into a pile of stringy roots. The man smelled the suit on his back, he smelled the years of stale air woven into it, he smelled the nets down by the creek, the cheap grease of candlewax and the fear and loneliness that was huddled on this bleak North Sea coast during these long dark nights. He smelled the animals huffing in the stables across the marsh, the children crouching hushed under kitchen tables, and high in the air, he smelled the sweet perfume of engine oil, of dark guns heavily greased and hot to touch, the acrid and compelling smell of war.

  The man who would become my grandfather pulled the last stem of samphire through his teeth, wiped the yolky hollandaise off his chin and stared contentedly into the candle-flame. And, for the first time that evening, he took off his army issue boots and placed them carefully side by side under the narrow bed.

  2

  Days on the Wreck, Nights on the Quilt

  Before it’s even light, the man who was buried in mud the day before
has climbed on to the roof of the cottage. He hugs the chimney like it’s the mast of a boat and strains to see over the marshes. The tiles feel damp and mossy, and with his ear to the chimneypot he can just make out the eerie sound of the woman’s snores coming from inside.

  He needs to work out where he is, this misty edge of England, and little by little the saltmarsh reveals itself as the light spreads. At the foot of the garden, a rough mudslide slips into the Morston Channel. Clearly able to carry a sizeable boat, but draining to a trickle at low tide. Beyond it, a flat mile of saltmarsh until the branchless masts of other boats - there must be a channel there too. Yes, leading to a small village with high flint walls against the weather and the cold North Sea. He recalls seeing it on a map, it must be Blakeney. He sees the first of the luggers there, assembled on the quay, deciding which mud pool to dig their bait. A dreadful living. Beyond them the saltmarsh stretches as far as he can see, making its own horizon in a raised bank, which must mean another river is behind it. The Glaven, he suddenly remembers - it’s the kind of thing a bomber can follow on moonlit nights. The river flows through a village called Cley next the Sea, an odd name in any language, past serene reed beds and a picture-postcard windmill. Not that serenity lasts long out here - the storm of 1953 will be sent that way fairly soon. They’ll be climbing the trees and smashing holes through the tiles before that night is through.

  The man knows that none of these channels, all of which point due north like a trident, actually reach the sea. They all drain into a four-mile-long lagoon called the Pit, and on the other side of the Pit is the Point: a low sweeping bank of sand, gravel, mud and dunes, which joins the land at Cley and stretches along the coast like a giant protective arm. Beyond that is the open water of the North Sea.