The pansy freaked with jet
The line from Lycidas, about a youth killed in his prime, leapt into his head in the pub bar, with Southampton noisy and harsh around him. Tears scorched his eyelids, a veil across his memory. Poems were scant comfort, but they were something. Michael clung to lines and verses, turning them over in his head when he didn’t want to think of anything else. Whisky burned, licking a path down into his empty stomach. He hadn’t eaten today, no one had, the ship had run out of rations before it left Italy, and the only food on board was black market chocolate and dry bread stolen by soldiers from Italian farms. He couldn’t imagine what men looked like with more than an ounce of flesh on their bones any more. The pub shelves behind the bar were stacked with a few tins of tobacco, and a jar of pickled onions.
Now he was back, he would eat regular meals. Michael imagined days spooling endlessly by marked by plates of sandwiches like the ones at his cousin Angela’s wedding. Fish paste or corned beef. Not egg mayonnaise, Angela had explained to him, laughing, the eggs had been saved for the cake.
Angela’s mother with a slash of orange lipstick and a long pheasant feather in her hat, ‘Would anyone like a top up? There’s another pot brewing.’ A future full of cups of tea and rationed slices of fruitcake over which people would politely nod as they passed the plate. He swirled his whisky in the glass and knocked it back. Rationed cake and tea. Was that what this had all been for?
Angela married an RAF pilot in 1942, the Christmas before Michael met Janey. Soon after, he was called back to his unit and sent into the sky. Had he known, like Yeats’s airman, what was to come?
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above
Angela hadn’t had a lot of time to become a wife. She lost a husband she scarcely knew, and was stricken, bereft of something she’d never had. Their time together measured in slices of wedding cake and sandwiches.
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death
The same story echoed everywhere. Janey’s unfaltering smile, and her kindness steadied Michael. He’d met her then, home on sick leave, a flare up of malaria. His nerves had grated like steel on ice when he woke with a start every night. In the lanes of his childhood, where he strolled with Janey, Michael had listened to her identify honeysuckle and heartsease, pansies again, and ragged robin and love-in-a-mist, she knew all the flowers of the hedgerows. He was soothed. Janey taught piano to the infant class at her local primary school. Michael felt the joy of fluttering impulse, and was led on by the indomitable essence of spring, the rousing cheeriness of blackbirds singing, and Janey’s uncritical friendliness.
No one could imagine the future during the war. Michael looked around Southampton’s broken streets, dusty and gaping, a filmset unreality for the servicemen milling about, these thin ghosts, free to go anywhere, do anything. Maybe he should have married Janey there and then, on that first leave when he met her. Michael had known he was looking for solace when he asked her to come and spend the last nights he had at home at a pub near Angela’s parents’ farm in Suffolk. That short time was an oasis, though, in truth, he could only remember fleeting images. They went to see Angela, the visit to his cousin the excuse for visiting the Suffolk coast. She welcomed them to the farm but her smile was dull. She sighed in the pretty sitting room with its sea view and the vase of sweet williams gay and colourful among the family photographs on the mantelpiece. She waved them off from the door and retreated back into her grief.
The air was sweet, a cloud of gnats hung above the duck pond, and swallows dived and swooped across the water, turning on sharp wing blades. Their spirits flying, Michael and Janey hurried to the sea, played tag on the beach and fell breathless against one another.
‘Shall we swim?’ Her challenge. How could he say no?
‘After you.’ Smooth calves, a flash of skin and she was in the sea. He dived under the first wave beside her, turned to see what she was looking at and a wave towered over them. It hurtled down as his hand caught the jut of her hip and he pulled her deep under him, holding her closely, safely beneath the wave.
At night Michael smoked and paced, he stretched a yawn and brushed against the ceiling of the bedroom. He didn’t fit in the chalky pink room, with its windows hung in sweet frills patterned with grey feathers. He pushed the window wide and leaned out into the velvet night, the damp scent of leaves and soil lingering about him. Janey slept, her skin like petals, so soft he thought it might tear when he touched her. Back in the bed he curled himself around her, reaching for her, face pressed to her shoulder, craving her peaceful sleep. Both nights they stayed, he lay awake, afraid that she might stir and become aware of how much he wished this time would never end.
He returned to the ruined French beaches, and their idyll became fragmented memories, blown from time to time across his thoughts like the wind-tossed apple blossom that had once existed in Normandy’s orchards. Almost two years on, no feeling was attached to his thoughts of Janey except anxiety. They hardly knew one another. He forgot her birthday, she remembered his, and sent a card that smelled of her scent. He loved the waft of sweetness curling out of the envelope, but he couldn’t bring her to life in his mind. She remained a studio image and a crumpled photograph. He hadn’t written much after that, though she sent frequent cards and letters. He kept them, but he didn’t reread them, like the others did. He wasn’t sure if he was different from everyone else. Did he care enough? He couldn’t say. All he knew was that Janey had no idea he was in Southampton today, she didn’t even know he was alive.
Skirting the harbour, Michael began to walk up through the side streets away from the sea. He needed to go somewhere, or at least to look as though he was going somewhere. The town shops were diminished by war but, nonetheless, many of them had taken to exhibiting threads of joy among their usual wares. Faded flags and paper streamers looped along the half-empty shelves, suggesting a victory party to come. Michael suddenly felt insanely tired. A dog sniffed at the base of a wall, then lay down and rolled on the pavement, rising to wag his tail as a group of children advanced from a side street with a ball. The tallest among them glanced across at the ship, and in his face Michael recognised the pinched look of hunger he’d seen throughout Europe.
Someone around the corner was playing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ on a mouth organ. A young girl, aged about nineteen, sauntered past him and down a side street towards a propped bicycle. She smiled at Michael, put the mouth organ into her pocket and lifting the bicycle away from the wall, swung onto it and pedalled away. The sun glanced off her hair as she vanished round a corner. Michael rubbed his eyes. He had a sudden memory of Janey jumping off her bicycle to greet him, flushed, bright-eyed, laughing, on the night he asked her to marry him. She had been setting races and fielding teams of school children in their sports day that afternoon. She was lit up and proud, happy to be leading her life. Michael wanted to lose himself in her vigour and her uncomplicated happiness.
He walked on, his back aching, footsore in the heavy wool uniform. The day seemed endless, he didn’t remember sleeping the last night on the ship. He had lost track of time, but the sun was lower now, coasting behind rows of chimneys fanning out of Southampton across the river and on towards Salisbury. Probably mid-afternoon. It would be nice to lie down on a low wall like the one bordering the churchyard there and sleep the rest of the day away, but he needed to go to the demob station and become a civilian again. Once he had done that, he would catch the train home. Civvy clothes and money awaited him. Michael set his kitbag on his shoulder.
Queuing up in a town hall for the trappings of so-called freedom seemed an irrelevance. How were a few yards of flannel and a meaningless amount of cash meant to prepare anyone for life after a war? Michael scowled at his own shadow, bulky with its backpack, as it moved in front of him up the hill.
Rippling giggles and a frantic bike bell flared up behind him, and he jumped out of the road
as the mouth organ girl meandered past, perched as a passenger on the back, her arms round a hatless soldier who pedalled and swerved across the road. The girl’s pink cheek rested on his khaki shoulder, and they were both singing as they went:
Daisy Daisy, give me your answer do
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you
Her soldier winked at Michael as they passed him, rolling eyes apologetically because he had no hands free to salute. The girl fished her mouth organ out of her pocket and played the melody. The soldier continued singing:
It wont be a stylish marriage
I can’t afford a carriage,
But you’d look sweet
Upon the seat
The mouth organ stopped with a squawk as the girl joined in with the last line:
Of a bicycle made for two.
Michael pushed back his hat and clapped slowly. ‘You’re good, it’s the music hall for you guys,’ he shouted.
They spun a circle in the road ahead of him. The bike wobbled but kept going as the girl leaned to call, ‘I don’t know where you’re going, but the station isn’t far now. Good luck, and welcome back to England.’
With a jaunty trill on the bell, the couple wove away down the road.
The moment of laughter and ordinary human contact was exhilarating. Michael dropped his bag and stretched. What was the rush? Once he was out of uniform, he would be a non-soldier for the rest of his life. A tobacconist was opening up again after lunchtime, in the next street. An old man sat outside with a dog, cleaning his pipe in the sunshine, knocking it on the arm of his chair. Michael negotiated past him into the shop. The woman behind the counter had a brown overall on, a hankie tied around her head and her gaze was direct.
‘Can I help you? We’re out of newspapers but then you’re the big news around here, aren’t you? You lot still coming back, dribs ’n’ drabs ’n’ all that.’ Her mouth was pursed. Michael looked at her curiously. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone might not be pleased they were home.
He spun a coin. ‘Could I have some matches, please?’
The smell of pipe tobacco in this little room was reassuring. Michael glanced around, intrigued by the barber’s shop room through a glazed door at the back. He wondered if he had time for a haircut. Really, he had time for whatever he wanted. He realised the woman was still talking. ‘And I s’pose if you want cigarettes, you just come back and help yourselves. Cigarettes, girls, beer. I don’t know where you think this will all end.’
‘No,’ said Michael. Then on an impulse added, ‘Where do you think it will all end?’
She was arranging a stack of matchboxes next to a photograph mounted on board. She stopped, her arm raised, a red matchbox in her hand. The photograph showed a team of young men in naval uniform. Her crossness drained away under his scrutiny.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said, flustered by the attention, ‘but I do know you’ll miss the train any moment. The two fifteen is due in ten minutes and you’ll want to be on it, won’t you, lad? Got people to be home for. A life to take up. You don’t want to miss it now you haven’t been killed, do you?’
He looked at her, then at the photograph by the till. A sports team, the names beneath. Another photograph pinned to the wall behind her of a young sailor holding a small, smiling dog. Michael looked out of the window. The same dog was scratching vigorously, its whole body shaking with the effort of applying claw to ear. The shopkeeper followed his gaze, and bent to open a drawer behind her. She pulled out a ledger.
‘Your son?’ The question hurt like a new bruise.
She nodded, put a hand to the thin silver chain at her neck, blinked hard. ‘Don’t miss that train, love,’ she said.
Michael felt her courage, warm as the sun when she smiled.
Chapter 2
The new triptych clock above the kitchen door displayed the time in Kerala and New York as well as Norfolk. New York time was straightforward, the clock had come with it. Something to do with Wall Street and the stock exchange, no doubt: six forty in the morning. Five hours earlier than Green Farm House and Greenwich. Glancing up at it gave Luisa a sense of industry and virtue. It was easy to warm to this reality, she was the urban superwoman, ahead of the game. As a New Yorker, she would have got up – no, make that gotten up – especially early to fit everything into her day, she was a busy working mother with an over-flowing life, calls upon her time beaming in from every direction. Listen! That electronic ping was probably a very important email from someone requiring her immediate attention, or was it the oven timer? Domesticity. The enemy of promise to some, but not to Luisa. In her busy life, it was just a quick reminder that Baked Alaska waits for no one, and Version One was ready. Version Two, when she had finished preparing it, would just need a few minutes with a blow torch.
She looked at the dog. ‘You’ll have to eat some you know, Grayson.’ He thumped his tail, opening one eye for a moment. ‘It’ll melt and no one else is here.’ The dog sighed, feigning interest briefly, before tucking his nose back into the sleek coil of his body.
Forgetting the dog for now, and the fact that he was sulking in the hope of reminding her to walk him, Luisa was confidently at the helm with all systems go in the kitchen. She had already created two utterly different Baked Alaska puddings, and conceived a recipe for rosewater and cardamom sorbet that would sit exotically between them. The fact that not a single person was here to eat them was just too bad. Another glance at the New York clock and she was completely in the transatlantic zone. It was still an ungodly hour for most of the world’s population. She loved those golden moments before the day had truly begun, and all that ambrosial pleasure in having achieved so much in the small hours. It was actually almost midday in Norfolk, but who would know or care if they saw her? Ambrosia. How could she translate that into an ice cream? Peaches and marsala? Honeycomb hit with a dash of vin Santo? What was the twenty-first-century version of the Nectar of the Gods? It depended on who you asked. Tom, like any bloke, would say Guinness, or a decent claret, while Mae would probably go for something typically teenage like rum and Coke. Ellie? Difficult to say, chai, probably, or lassi. Ellie hadn’t called for over a week now.
Luisa had last heard from her through a typed Skype message to Luca, ‘Tell Mum I’m fine, and I’ll be off air for a while.’ True, it probably wasn’t cause for concern, but it was odd to think of her daughter experiencing so much that she, Luisa, could never know. Or do.
Everyone else in the family was doing their thing. Ellie meditating away in India, or travelling on a bus or a train, or dyeing her hair or whatever a girl let loose on her gap year might be up to. Luca and Mae were busy with exams at school, and so, of course, was Tom, working harder than ever. Leading the history department no less. It was essential, and expected, that she, Luisa, was busy too. She just had to raise her sights, look at the clock and pretend to be in New York, with bustling people, all, according to her sister-in-law Dora, rising at 5 a.m. to go to the gym and maybe therapy before even thinking about breakfast and work. So inspiring. Why be a rural drop out, a Norfolk housewife with an ice-cream-making habit, when, with New York time on the wall, she could be a Manhattan scenester?
Pulling in her stomach, Luisa corrected her posture, dropping her shoulders, as if she was at Spiritual High, her weekly yoga class. Breathe . . . and breathe . . . It was tricky to keep an eye on the fluffing of the meringue as it rose in the mixer while maintaining her spine in the correct position for Tadasana. Three exhalations felt like a marathon and she gave up. There was a time and a place for yoga, and it wasn’t here or now.
Luisa removed the block of Amaretto-laced ice cream from the deep freeze. Wrapped in cling film, it resembled a lung, she thought, or a small bagpipe. It wasn’t quite the shape she had hoped, it might have been better to freeze it in a mould, but if she chipped a bit away she could make a rectangle. It was the work of a moment to slice a few slivers off it and encase it in the sponge cake she had already cut to shape. The Baked A
laska was going to resemble a swimming pool. That was the plan. She had found the perfect natural food colour on the Internet and turning the meringue blue had worked a treat – Hockney-esque and beautiful, if a little startling. She’d got carried away with the Amaretto, and the whole thing was rather alcoholic considering it was for a taciturn thirteen-year-old’s birthday, but, she reminded herself, this was still the dummy run. Maybe it would turn out to be ambrosial. And actually, young Nick Bryer would probably like a punch-drunk pudding, it was his mother who would worry. Much could be tweaked.
She moved down the table to find her notebook. It lay open among a sea of belongings that came and went from the table as family members collected and discarded items. Ah! There was Mae’s hairbrush, an elasticated gingham scrunchy bunched like bloomers around the handle. Shame it hadn’t surfaced earlier, when Mae, beset by a squall of bad temper, hurtled like a furious bluebottle around the house, banging doors and snatching open drawers in search of the brush. ‘I’m not using yours, Luca brushed Grayson with it,’ she wailed, when Luisa offered her own.
Luca, hands in his pockets, was bouncing a ball on his foot as he waited for his sister to get ready.
He shrugged. ‘Grayson’s as clean as you are. Cleaner probably, so I don’t see why you have to get so stressed.’
Mae, infuriated, had flounced out to sit in the car. Luca’s ball fell off his foot and tipped over the dog’s water bowl just as Tom walked into the kitchen, carrying too many folders. One dropped from the pile. It was at moments like these that Luisa took a deep breath and fixed her attention on an ingredient.
Cherries. She had bought a box of them yesterday. It was easy to make them into a sauce of course, a splash of kirsch and they became a stain like an anemone to pour over vanilla ice cream, but there was always another way to do things, that was what Luisa loved. Making ice cream was alchemy. Luisa had learned early the magic of transformation, as eggs and sugar, cream and chocolate or strawberry syrup or drops of precious fragrant vanilla essence, churned in the kitchen at the back of her grandfather’s shop. She loved the process, the smell, the fluctuation in form as the temperature dropped, the powdery sparkle that attached itself to sorbets and ice creams as they froze. She might easily have lost interest, but, one Easter when she was fourteen, a bevy of aunts and relations arrived from Northern Italy and made hot chocolate the way they made it in the mountains. Luisa could not believe the sensation in her mouth when she drank the rich chocolate then ate a spoonful of vanilla ice cream.
From a Distance Page 2