Salt

by Jeremy Page

  When Elsie wakes, her sleep has changed her mood. She doesn’t know why the boat people are still there, so she becomes over-polite. She walks round the room, eats white bread and jam in the corner and swings her feet together to make the buckles on her sandals jingle.

  ‘Just tulips is it, Mr Holbeach?’

  ‘Page Polkas,’ he replies, ‘very striking and very tall.’ The men are doing their bit at conversation. ‘March,’ Mr Holbeach says, sipping his tea.

  Lil’ continues to sip her tea long after it’s gone cold. Mrs Holbeach sits on a piano stool, smoothing her dress over plump knees, suddenly looking tired. And when Lil’ and George finally get up to go, Elsie again comes to their aid. Yawning, she says, ‘You’re nice.’ It’s to Lil’. ‘Can I go in your boat again?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ethel says, ‘I think it might be all right.’

  ‘George, turn the engine off.’

  A week later. Lil’ and George, an hour into a trip going down the Great Ouse.

  George leans back to the outboard, unsure what’s wrong. He cuts the engine and feels the boat lurch to one side, and when he looks back at his wife she’s off the bench and is lying flat on the planks of the boat. The Mary Magdalene drifts into the sonorous flow of the big river, begins to turn slowly, and still he looks down at his wife, forgetting the old rule of never standing in small boats.

  Looking down at her, he watches her fingers unbutton her summer dress, sees the soft, heavy shapes of her breasts in the bra as she pulls the material aside, and the pale, smooth skin of her legs as she begins to pull the dress up to her waist.

  And at this point I shall retire to the distant riverbank while they get on with the business of my conception. I leave my father and mother on the rough wooden planks of the Mary Magdalene, inches away from the soft fenland water trickling past the hull. A tiny rowing boat, adrift in the muddy swirls of the Great Ouse as the river makes its lazy, final pouring out into the Wash.

  That’s where I started, on 30 September 1968.

  8

  Weightless and Soundless

  I’m there, behind the weird cockscomb of my mother’s belly-button, and I must admit I’m a little apprehensive. I know how things will turn out. It was the first few winter months of 1969, and Lil’, my mother, was acting strangely: tasting mustard powder on the tip of a spoon, sharp fermented cider vinegar licked from a finger, salt and lemon off the back of her hand. As spring comes she eats radishes by the dozen, a whole raw goose egg sprinkled with paprika, the bitter leaves of wild horseradish. Then she turns to sweet and sour: the heady darkness of molasses syrup, the sweet tang of rollmop herrings, of pickled capers and, once, the beguiling tastes in a spoon of green tomato chutney - fresh onions, cut across the grain, floury tomato pips, soft plump raisins and the sad brown taste of autumn apples. The exotic fire of a single red chilli. She was throwing me off the scent, distracting me from hearing that far-off note which beat like a second distant heart, her own soft boom-boom of secret sadness.

  In the spare room she had changed the wallpaper, repaired the bed, replaced the mattress. Unlike my father’s room, where the wild curtains still hung like an angry noise, the spare room became immaculate. She could sit by the window and look down the slope to the high fen of Black Ditch Level, Marshland Fen and Stow Bardolph Fen, even further away, with their rigid lines of dead-end roads and drainage channels and isolated sluice-pump cottages. She hung a North American Indian dreamcatcher she’d bought in a bric-a-brac shop in King’s Lynn on the window and looked through it like a target.

  George, my father, didn’t get a look-in during those months. I was in there and she was out of bounds. He was not wanted. In their separate lives my father had revamped a cupboard off the living room, which had last been used by the previous tenant, Harold Flott. Flott had stacked the shelves with jars of screws and nails, but the screws and nails had been replaced now by books on animal husbandry, balls of string had become journals on veterinary studies, bundles of yellowed magazines had become estate-organizational records on breeding, selecting and bloodstock management. My father had bought a lamp for the evenings, and a desk for his leather-bound science journal, given to him by Kipper on his wedding day. A beautiful book of pristine white paper bound with the softest calfskin. A small brass lock held the album shut. With a tender gesture my father would wipe the front of the journal every time he entered the room.

  Each evening, his mind slightly addled with alcohol, my father would sit there and smoke a pipe until he heard the door of the spare room close upstairs. He’d sit among the gently rising curls of his smoke like the proverbial punished man and contemplate the silence of the house. A dying marriage is a calm place to be, and he resigned himself to it, like giving in to illness.

  On 20 July my mother went into labour. Unlike Hands, twenty-four years before, my father wasn’t stricken with panic. He didn’t feel the wind in the air and dream of lost horizons, he didn’t work out his escape route on a map with his finger. What he did was make the necessary call to the midwife, and then he set up the black-and-white television in the living room. While he fiddled to get a reception my mother gasped for air by the window of her room.

  The midwife came within minutes to what must have seemed a deserted house. Gull skulked in shadows by the barn, a solemn heat seemed to fill the rooms, flies turned sharp corners in the air above the breakfast table. Going into the living room she found my father crouched in front of the television where the crew of Apollo 11 were passing under the grey southern hemisphere of the moon. He turned to her, the excitement in his face giving him a deranged, wild look. Ain’t it marvellous! he said. She gave him a brief, professional scolding for not being with his wife, then went upstairs with a matter-of-fact purposefulness that scared him to the bone. Just, whenever you need, you know, he whispered, too late, from the bottom of the stairs, before being drawn back to the mesmerizing TV.

  It is a long night. At four in the morning the whole world falls silent in front of those flickering pictures. A distant voice and cracks of static perforate an emptiness which seems to stretch from Norfolk right up into the deep void of space. The Eagle has landed, says a voice abruptly and is answered with a relieved roger, we copy, it was beautiful from here, Tranquillity ... we can breathe again. My father looks up at the ceiling wondering about all the things going on above his head. He’s drinking himself crazy. The sheer magic of the footage continues. Unexpectedly, a bulky shape gleaming in harsh sunlight appears on the side of the landing craft. Half man half refrigerator clings dreamily to the rungs of the ladder. And it all begins to happen fast now. The crackle of Armstrong’s intercom sounds once, twice, we hear his breath and my father holds his. My mother screams once, then falls silent, staring up at the light-fitting above her bed. The midwife turns to the window and sees the moon framed in one of the panes. Downstairs he looks in awe as that clumsy body seems to float down the steps without touching the rungs does the foot go down has it finally happened and that’s when the midwife remembers the job she’s there to do. She turns back to my shocked mother and she sees me lying there, between my mother’s legs, swapping the weightless dark of her body for an appearance in the midst of a worldwide drama.

  From downstairs a hoarse cheer as the astronaut’s famous announcement is declared and a rigid American flag is bent into shape, and then an excited silence, as all in the house remember why they’re there and try to listen out for a baby’s cry. But the only sound comes from the overlapping gabble from the TV and the faint sound of the radio upstairs. Soon, the anxiety spreads to my mother, she lifts her head because she can’t hear me, and sees the midwife tying a professional no-nonsense never-to-be-undone knot in the umbilical cord, so unlike that crude granny-slip hanging down across my mother’s belly, and then she sees the nurse wrapping the hot, sticky body of the baby in a soft white towel. A baby refusing to cry.

  There’s a hesitant knock on the door and my father pokes his face into the room.

  ‘She d
one it, George, better late than never. A little boy.’

  And my father breaks into tears.

  That first day I was weighed, measured, checked from head to foot and dusted with talcum. The midwife would call back later. I was carried round the house, the garden, pointed out to Gull, who was sniffing the front door nervously. And all that time my mouth remained shut. When the midwife called in that evening my mother told her I’d made no sound all day. Birth shock, she was told. Get to sleep ’cause the young ’un’s going to bawl his eyes out all night. But the night arrived and my parents fell asleep in their separate rooms in a house that sounded no different from the one two nights before. Both of them listened out for their baby’s cry, but it never came.

  On the second day I was declared the best baby the midwife had ever delivered, and on the third she arrived with an anxious doctor. The doctor looked in my eyes, ears and mouth with his ophthalmoscope, and - less professionally - tickled me to get a reaction. Under the arms, the soles of the feet. A reputation at risk. The next day he phoned a consultant with the admission he was calling because a baby in his ward, who was in otherwise perfect health, was sleeping through the nights and seemed fit and happy during the day, had totally stumped him with its refusal to cry. He was told to wait. Wait for a baby with a real problem.

  Towards the end of that first week my father was eating a boiled egg at the kitchen table with me next to him in a Moses basket.

  ‘She ought to know.’

  My mother continued eating her egg, waiting to see if he’d say more.

  ‘It’s just, she’s got a right.’

  ‘I han’t spoken to her for eight years, George.’

  ‘It’s different now. Ain’t it, Lil’?’

  ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘No it ain’t. She’d like to see the young ’un.’

  ‘George, I can’t. Eat your egg.’

  ‘I’ll call tonight. Shall I call tonight?’

  He did. From the phone box in Wiggenhall St Germans by the Great Ouse. He called the Albatross Inn and got one of the lads there to cycle across the marsh to fetch Goose and accept no excuses if she refused to come. My father sat on the bank of the dyke while the errand was done. Some time later, crouched in the red phone box, his head in his hands with tiredness, he finally spoke to Goose.

  As the coach pulled up three days later the doors swung open with a thump and she was already climbing down, already talking nineteen to the dozen, complaining of stiffness, draught, braking, exhaust fumes. The sandwiches. My father stood the assault, sensed the woman was nervous, then silenced her by raising his hand. I got to tell you, he said, things ain’t right. I ain’t talking about you kicking Lil’ out. That’s all under the bridge and I ain’t going to say my pitch, but things with Lil’ and the young ’un. He hasn’t made a noise since he was born and that’s near breaking her heart. He ain’t right. And I don’t want you mixing it or making things worse or I’ll send you packing.

  She leans forward and when he kisses her cheek he feels it’s warm from the bus but slack with age. Her hand on the luggage has a lattice of purple veins on it. But he knows the last thing he wants is to feel pity for the old girl.

  ‘You’re fatter,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry, boy, I won’t cause no trouble.’

  Goose and Lil’ manage a limp hug on the doorstep, which proved to be such an important moment my father snapped it with his Kodak Retinette. I still have the picture. Is the surprised expression on my mother’s face because her hands have overlapped so easily across Goose’s back? The woman has shrunk like the marsh she lives on, and her hair’s grown bigger, tied up at the back of her head in an awkward knot very similar to the granny-slip in my mother’s belly-button. Her eyes had been brown, but they’ve begun to go grey. As they release each other Goose looks at the house, the yard, the life she’s never been part of. She knows not to draw attention to her absence from Lil’, but needs to say something none the less. What’s with the flowers? she asks, looking at the odd arrangements that have been planted across the garden. And my mother reacts with a knowing-but-not-telling smile - the kind of gesture that has always wound Goose up, and both women know it.

  I expect I was shown to my grandmother a few seconds after the picture was taken. There, on the kitchen table, my hand in my mouth. And when the hand was removed no noise came out.

  ‘He’s called Pip,’ my mother said, a little unsure what else she could say.

  ‘After my boat!’ Goose snorts, before thinking better of it. Well, blow me! She tries to conciliate: don’t you worry - he’ll start bawlin’ soon. Lil’, you cried solid the whole week, day ’n’ night - turn me ragged, you did . . . My mother listened tensely at the ease with which Goose dragged up the old stories. It was a mistake to have invited her. But she said nothing and as the story continued past the images of clouds and Hands’s disappearance, she felt a sudden relief to hear all this again. So that bastard pull the quilt off the line, he did, use it as a sail . . . and my mother thinks Goose is right to use her stories this way. After all, stories have bound them from the start. This baby is just the next step in the myth. It makes her look at me afresh, held in the dry leaves of Goose’s hands. Seeing me, there, it was a moment of real love. I was silent, but I was hers. Her baby, and all was fine.

  ‘I ain’t got no ideas.’

  ‘How long’s it been?’

  My father’s in a storeroom at the Stow Bardolph Estate. There’s a young woman in there, eating an apple and sitting on some stacked trestle tables. With each bite my father looks at the tiny bubble of juice on her lower lip; he leans against the cool white plaster wall, his body so relaxed after a day’s work he has the look of a man entirely at ease. Which he isn’t.

  ‘Long enough.’

  ‘There’s not much I can say, George.’

  The girl has the habit of deliberately using his name. He wonders why. She’s what - twenty, twenty-one? He doesn’t even know why he’s sharing all this with her. She looks at him with a level gaze while all that moves is the hair she’s swept up from her face, falling slowly across her forehead like silk.

  On the last night of her visit, Goose stood on the back lawn and stared at the sky and then at the moon. Behind her, the eerie silence of the house where a baby should have been crying. My mother came out and stood by the old woman. The clouds passed dreamily in front of the moon, and somewhere up in that view, the astronauts had left their cardboard flag ahead of their long journey home. The moon was empty again.

  ‘I wonder if they looked at us,’ my mother said.

  ‘These clouds ain’t clouds,’ Goose replied. ‘All fortnight the clouds been buggered up by this moonstuff. Bad enough up Blakeney, but hair . . . I don’t know. These fenland people got dull dreams, that they have.’ And the old girl turns to my mother and says, ‘What I don’t understand is why you married him.’

  My mother feels she shouldn’t have to be asked. ‘For Pip,’ she says.

  Goose lets it lie, but something still brothers her: ‘You still han’t told me about these flowers.’

  My mother smiles darkly in the night. She’s full of secrets.

  My mother had planted a garden where the flowers grew taller, straighter, had more blooms and lasted longer than anywhere else in the area. Closer to the Wash the salt air burned the petals, while down in the Fens the habit was always to plant edibles. But she’d gone against this local wisdom. Cornflowers and sweet peas wrapped the house in an unbroken garland, while delphiniums, deep blue in the August sun, ran in a straight line across the back lawn. Daisies and marigolds fringed the windows, a hedge of lavender meandered north-east. Beyond them, a single sunflower stood like an obelisk.

  On the day my father had brought back his first screaming middle-white piglet, my mother planted flowering sage around the pigpen. Pigs were wise, and sage would improve the keenness of their minds. When he had built a hen-coop - ah yes, the coop that would mean so much to me - my mother dragged it over to the tarragon bush
es. Wherever he stood, my mother followed with her trowel, changing his designs with the subtlest of touches. He let it be, and he kept moving.

  But anyone stopping by the farm was less tolerant. That lavender can’t hardly be seen from the house, they said, and what’s that line doing heading off to that bit of ole scrub? Likewise, delphiniums cut straight through the heart of the lawn, generally bothered the eye and how the hell she gets the mower round them I don’t know. To the side of the house was the stench of a stinkhorn, growing under my father’s study window. How he put up with her I ain’t saying. Fen folk don’t piss around like this. A feeble mind. They still remembered the odd food she ate in the pregnancy - stuff that poisoned that young ’un though God forgive me saying such a thing.

  More than bees, ladybirds and butterflies, my mother was trying to attract another visitor to her garden. And one day, just after my first birthday, as she was carrying potato peelings across the yard in a bucket in one hand, me under her other arm, the visitor arrived. A car drove up and out climbed Mrs Holbeach.

  From under her armpit I glimpsed the satisfaction that flickered across my mother’s face. The same expression I imagine she had when she caught the weever before the Langore brothers did.

  ‘May.’

  ‘Ethel.’

  ‘About time I came by. Brought some scones.’

  ‘Pip loves scones.’

  ‘So does Elsie.’

  And in the car we see her messing around with the steering wheel. Clumsy and excited, her fiery hair like the sunflower’s ragged petals. And I pictured my mother, in her bedroom, gazing through her dreamcatcher at the petals of her own sunflower, and beyond it, miles away in the fen and in the centre of the dreamcatcher’s web, the Holbeachs’ cottage at Three Holes.