Salt

by Jeremy Page

  As the jeers of the group are left behind them, Lil’ falls into listening to the rhythm of the oars. She looks shyly at the concentrated face of her husband and they share a brief, conspiratorial grin. He stops rowing.

  ‘We did it,’ he says.

  ‘Did we miss it?’ she replies, the whole event already behind her down the river.

  Back at the house the guests are waiting under eighty feet of red, white and blue bunting George has stretched across the yard. Lil’ loves the colours against the clouds above, but still can’t think all this is for her. She’s never even met most of them before. After tying her rosebud half-apron, already faded, over her wedding dress, she passes round drumsticks and potato salad sprinkled with dill and gherkins. Occasionally she looks for her own mother, but knows she won’t come. She approaches the two Langore brothers with a food tray.

  ‘What’s there?’ George is asking his brother, noticeably drunk now.

  ‘Nothing much, just a bunch of outbuildings. Used as a storm shelter for cows.’ Kipper’s bought a smokehouse, George tells his wife. It’s clear by the way he shifts his weight and the way Kipper keeps still that George is feeling uneasy. His brother does that to him.

  ‘Not a smokehouse, not yet. But will be,’ Kipper tells her. ‘Between Blakeney and Cley.’

  She hasn’t been this close to him for a couple of years. She still can’t work out his face and how it can change so entirely from one thing to another.

  ‘What will you smoke?’ she asks, the occasion making her too polite.

  Kipper grins back. ‘Bloaters, eel, salmon, cure some hock too.’

  George is drinking too frequently from his glass.

  ‘I’ll bring some next time,’ Kipper says. ‘Shrimp loves bloater pâté.’

  George moves away, pretending to laugh, and when Lil’ doesn’t follow him, he turns back. He points to a wooden box by his brother’s feet.

  ‘Now?’ Kipper says.

  ‘Why not,’ George replies.

  Kipper opens the box to reveal five long tubes on sticks. Some of the guests have already heard about him - that he’s coming from the marshes of North Norfolk with fireworks that he makes in a shed. He holds them in his hand like a bunch of carrots and George sees how tall he walks with them, deciding where to place them, and how the others naturally fall into a neat shape around him, giving him distance. He’s taken charge of the moment, as he always did. He pushes the fireworks into the soft soil and tells people to step back, even though they’re safe enough already.

  They fizz into the sky with a reedy crack of thunder, and immediately the clouds answer back with the real thing. The first thick drops of rain fall in the yard, doors slam in the house with the gust of wind, and then the deluge begins.

  As the guests run for their cars, the wedding couple are left together in the shadows of the house, the plates and streamers scattered around the living room like they’ve been ransacked. From here they watch rain like stair-rods pounding the earth and clattering the tiles of the outbuildings. A deafening roar all round them, making the house feel unearthly and silent. The sharp smell of the wet earth. Hurrying, George dashes into the yard to secure a gate which is banging on its hinges and in an instant he’s drenched, and when he comes back in Lil’ dries his hair with the kitchen towel.

  ‘I’m soaked,’ he says.

  ‘Like a fish.’

  ‘I’d best get out of these clothes, Mrs Langore.’

  And when he’s gone she looks at the puddles of water he’s left on the tiles.

  He goes upstairs, pauses at the doorway to the spare room where Lil’ has now made quite a little space for herself, he smiles at the wedding invite she’s kept on her bedside table, and then continues down the corridor to the bedroom with its wild geometric designs on the wallpaper and the ragged curtains against the window. He listens to the gusts of wind hitting the glass, the sound of water overflowing the gutter. He feels the darkened room in all its technicolour glory beginning to spin with the effects of the wine.

  An hour later it’s completely quiet and he wakes to see his wife’s deep brown eyes looking carefully into his. She moves her silent preoccupied face closer, and kisses him gently on the lips, then slowly moves back into the darkness and she is gone. A few seconds later, he hears the door to the spare room closing.

  That night he stands in the yard under the shattered bunting. He picks one of the used fireworks that has been trodden into the mud, smells the casing, then throws it in the shed. Bloody Kipper. The only light in the yard comes from the one he’s left on in the dining room. The bare bulb shines like a sun on the table, making a pocket of light in there so vivid and awake in all this darkness he thinks it must belong to a life not his own.

  7

  A Rural Scene, in the Fens

  1968, the world in riot, and George Langore attends an auction in Wisbech. It’s a mean-spirited occasion drawn out on a car park slick with puddles and slanting rain. The men in groups, hands deep in pockets, with faces set to drive the bargain. In the middle the auctioneer whips up the lots against the crowd’s better judgement. George liked all this. He liked the way the men behaved in a herd, how they shifted this way and that, picking up miscellaneous farming utensils and trying to break them with their hands. On this day, whether he’d arrived late or whether the rawness of the spring wind had caused the men to huddle tighter than usual, George found himself on the group’s edge while the auctioneer tried to sell a boat. The men jeered the auctioneer, shook their heads to put him off, made false bids as the price fell and fell, told him to hurry up . . . ain’t gettin’ dryer . . . get you on to the egg sorter, the stack of fence posts, the hundred yard of chicken wire. No one bid. But the auctioneer was already soaked and he wanted a sale . . . c’on, Bill, we all got homes to go to. Fen accents, mingling with the singsong of the Norfolk dialect.

  Then, for some reason, perhaps a fleeting memory of the boats in his youth, maybe of the Hansa itself, George raises his hand and says shilling. The auctioneer and most of the group think this is a great laugh, but faced with no alternative the lot’s knocked down and the boat is his. And as the group shuffles off to the next lot, that’s when he sees his boat.

  That evening the Mary Magdalene stood proudly and just a little sadly in the centre of the yard while Lil’ and George tapped it and Gull sniffed it suspiciously.

  ‘Sweet little rowboat, even got a hole, just like the Hansa,’ he says, framing his face in the hole and laughing at her.

  ‘We going to keep it in the yard?’

  ‘No we ain’t! She’s up for fixing.’

  Oddly, they realize they want to share something. It’s the first time in years and the feeling is sudden for her. It makes her giddy. She’s scared she might blush, because after all these years she still doesn’t want to give anything away. She laughs nervously, with her hand to her mouth, and says you’re a one - a real one.

  Now what? she says. The hole’s been repaired, the boards caulked and a new coat of paint applied, and the Mary Magdalene’s there prow down on a mudchute on the bank of the Twenty Foot Drain. Get in, he says, already pushing it, and they both scramble in at the last moment as the boat plunges into the water with a great rush. Instantly its heaviness is gone. The boat comes up, turns and drifts, and they look at each other in wonder.

  Occasionally, when their little boat goes under the shadow of a bridge, Lil’ looks down at the water to see the sky’s reflection briefly vanish. She rests her hand on the picnic basket to show she’s taking good care of it. A precious cargo of rollmops, cheese and pickles. Sometimes she’ll look up to see someone cycling along the bank or crossing a bridge. She watches the cyclist pedalling into the distance, until it’s no longer clear whether his pedals are going round or whether they’re now going up, then down, up, then down. Though it’s not the sunniest of days, the summer haze eventually makes the man wobble on his bike, then disappear entirely, as if he’s fallen off the edge of the world. George’s eye is on t
he Ordnance Survey map and is struggling to decipher the drains and dykes, at right angles and in parallel, the rivers and the sluices. Their symmetry challenges his right to be in charge, and several times he has to scramble up the high riverbank to stand at the top, scratch his head, and privately curse the idiosyncrasies of a fenland where all the rivers actually flow above the level of the fields. It says on the map ‘below sea level’, but it feels like they’re travelling in the sky.

  He soon devises his Fenland Steering Method - it’s brought about the ingenuity in him, this boat business - where he ties up the rudder so it can’t move. They sit at the front of the boat, side by side, away from the noise and smell of the outboard, listening to the water as it passes in a soothing rhythm. And by leaning, in unison, gently - ever so gently - one way or the other, the boat begins to steer itself. And as Lil’ leans into George, he leans away, their distance always kept constant.

  After an hour, her head lolls on to his shoulder. He stares ahead, taking pride in his task, watching the minuscule shifting of the boat’s steering as her body relaxes softly against him. That’s it, Lil’, you close your eyes. He puts his arm round her and she strokes his side tenderly. He reaches further round her, putting his hand on the opposite gunwale so that the weight of his arm rebalances the boat. Men do things while women sleep - he thinks happily - to rebalance the world.

  And like somnambulist lovers, their boat takes them into a dream scene. They’re steering down the Middle Level Main Drain to a village called Three Holes. A high pale blue sky, the sleepy colour of a late English summer. Distantly, the sound of larks. The woody smell of cabbage, which must remind Lil’ of the weeks she spent at the Quaker Cottage Hospital in Emneth Hungate, not so far from this place. In my mind it all slows down in balletic movement. The humming of the engine lowers hypnotically, the water lulls them towards sleep. Ahead, the top of a small house is seen over the bank. Nothing stirs in the air, not even the soft worn collar of George’s twill shirt, or the set dome of his wife’s now fully grown beehive. She sighs, sways softly with the motion of the boat, looks up briefly when she hears the sound of a child’s giggle somewhere along the bank. He hears it too, and is perhaps the first to see the three figures ahead. He startles from his reverie, begins to fuss with the wooden handle of the rudder, feels the hand of his wife being placed on his and, for a moment, they lock eyes.

  ‘George,’ she says. And says no more.

  The three figures on the bank are close now. A man and a woman, perhaps twenty years older than Lil’ and George, dressed in clothes too heavy for the weather. They’ve been eating boiled eggs and haslet and cherry tartlets and a bottle of cordial is propped up in the grass between them. They’re looking calmly at the boat coming towards them down the drain, but the man abruptly stands and calls out a name: Elsie! Elsie, come here, darling!

  I imagine the colours bleaching out at this point. I imagine the sun’s glare sweeps into the channel like an arc light and I see Lil’ and George both looking ahead, their hands raised to shield their eyes. Dazzled and tight-lipped, she glimpses a halo of red light, which turns out to be the hair of a little girl, perhaps five or six years old, playing by the side of the water with an eel-trap. Faintly Lil’ hears the man’s voice again call for Elsie! Elsie! But it sounds so distant, and the girl looks so fragile and beautiful in the light that it surely can’t be her he’s calling. Lil’ reaches out her hand and the girl smiles back at her and the boat gently comes to a halt in utter silence against the soft mud.

  Yes this really is a dream. A dream where little Elsie stands boyishly by the rowing boat, with her hands on her hips and the trail of her eel-trap disappearing into the weeds. Elsie is giggling and Lil’ is smiling back at her, and George has gripped his wife so tight the ridges of his knuckles are showing and he’s trying to fuss with the engine because the steering is still tied up and they’re wedged into the bank.

  The man and woman are walking unsteadily down the grassy slope towards their child. The man reaches the boat first and squats down on his haunches, one hand on the boat’s gunwale, the other on his daughter’s shoulder, steadying both and himself, a man who makes caring gestures.

  ‘Hello, Langore, out on your boat?’ he says.

  ‘Mr Holbeach. Where are we?’

  ‘Three Holes. Just having a picnic.’

  And now the woman has reached little Elsie, and she stands behind her and, with an almost imperceptible nod, the woman greets Lil’. They’ve met once before, at the hospital.

  ‘This, Mrs Langore, is little Elsie,’ the woman says.

  Lil’ makes a strange little noise in the back of her throat and reaches out her hand to the girl.

  ‘Go on, say hello,’ Mrs Holbeach whispers to the child, ‘it’s all right,’ and it makes Elsie shy. She turns her face into her mother’s skirts and twists her eel twine into the palm of her hand.

  ‘Have you been catching eels?’ Lil’ says to the girl, and little Elsie looks back at her and nods. ‘Have you caught any?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mrs Langore . . .’ the woman begins, but her husband looks up at her and she doesn’t continue. ‘Mrs Langore,’ she says again, repeating the name to herself.

  ‘It’s all right, Ethel,’ her husband says. And oddly the girl starts to laugh.

  ‘What is it?’ Lil’ says.

  ‘Your boat’s silly,’ Elsie says, as if it’s something the adults have missed.

  A rural scene, in the Fens. Hello, Elsie, nice to meet you, in your blue-and-white gingham dress with smocking round the neck, eating a picnic of eggs, haslet, tartlets and cordial. It’s so still here; the only movement across the punishing geometry of the landscape has been the boat inching its way down the drain, two people in its prow leaning to keep a straight course. The excited shrieks of a girl as she’s dragged her eel-line through the dark weeds, and then the same girl, giggling as she watches this strange couple floating closer.

  It’s a perfect moment. And then the girl asks her mother whether she can go in the boat and all four adults look at each other, gauging.

  Lil’ immediately looks at Mrs Holbeach, and realizes in that instant that Mrs Holbeach is one of the kindest women she’s ever met. A kind and generous woman who has an aura of trust, of good-will, of peace which has grown over forty years of living on the fen. Mrs Holbeach would make the decision. With her large, slow-moving hands she ruffles the bright red hair of her daughter and then bends to lift up the half-loaf that had rolled down the slope. She picks at the grass clinging to the crust, looks up calmly and says of course, Elsie.

  Elsie winds her eel-line and starts to clamber in. Steady, Elsie, be careful now, and Lil’ puts her hand on the girl’s shoulder and she feels the smallness of the bones there. Then Elsie sits next to Lil’ and they hold each other’s hands and she tells her father to push the boat off and don’t fall in because we’re not going to fish you out.

  Elsie’s immediately dragging her hand and eel-line fast through the water, not looking back once at her parents receding down the drain. It’s unnerving how quickly people vanish in a landscape so large. Lil’ and George sit together, near the engine, in a sudden silence made by the presence of this playful child. Lil’ looks back once and sees Mr and Mrs Holbeach standing at the top of the bank, shielding their eyes against the setting sun, though it looks equally possible that Mrs Holbeach is in fact crying. And then she looks at Elsie. She looks at the tension of pleasure on her face, the girlish pout of adult front teeth her mouth is yet to frame, the pepper of freckles each side of the nose. At the hair, a deep peachy red, so curly, so vigorous it makes her feel all of life has become new.

  The little boat and its odd cargo go another two miles into

  the fen until they come up to the dark weedy iron of a sluice gate. Elsie wants them to go on, but George turns the boat back to Three Holes. Lil’ moves forward and plays with the eel-line, making a cat’s cradle between her fingers for Elsie, smelling the girl’s hot breath when
they laugh together. The shadows lengthen over the water, Elsie huddles closer for warmth, and Lil’ puts an arm round her for the half-hour it takes for them to return. Just before they reach Elsie’s house, they pass the confluence of three water channels that gives Three Holes its curious name. A place of meeting. They tie up and Lil’ climbs out with Elsie, now asleep in her arms. And as they climb up the bank, Lil’ sees the Holbeachs’ strange little cottage for the first time. A simple Lincolnshire two-up-two-down worker’s house, surrounded by a plot of darkly turned soil, immaculately upright in a fen where all the other buildings are twisted as they gradually sink.

  Mrs Holbeach has been looking out for them, and opens the door when George, Lil’ and the sleeping Elsie are halfway down the path. Lil’ puts Elsie into a chair, and they’re offered tea in delicate china cups and slices of Mrs Holbeach’s carrot cake. A Quaker recipe. It seems like Mrs Holbeach has long expected them. While the tea brews, George comments on the framed photographs of tulips on the walls, awards for the prized tulip bulbs Mr Holbeach grows in his smallholding. One of the last of its kind in the Fens.