From a Distance

by Raffaella Barker

  Their mother heard Johnnie’s remark, and didn’t let it go. ‘You do things differently, you boys,’ she said. ‘Give Michael his head and he’ll find his way.’ Johnnie winked at Michael, stage whispering, ‘Mum’s softness is only skin deep.’ It became their shared joke, a fast route into familiar territory. Secure.

  Michael pressed his knuckles to his eyes, his cheekbones a ridge beneath the sockets. He didn’t want to see home in his mind’s eye, or any familiar territory. The crush of his hands against his eyelids seeped purple and red blooms across the image of his mother in his thoughts. At Penzance, he hoisted his bag onto his shoulder and walked out of the station. No decision needed there, it was the end of the line. He was dazed, he’d never been to Cornwall, and that in itself was liberating. Striding across the road with a spring in his step, he caught the familiar tang of ozone cut with seaweed and smiled. He had no army timetable to dictate a structure to his day, but his wristwatch told him it was almost six o’clock. He needed somewhere to spend the night.

  Penzance had shut up shop for the evening and although a few windows glowed on to the streets, more had the shuttered look of abandonment. Everywhere displayed some level of dereliction, whether a broken window, a collapsed roof, or a boarded-up doorway. The picture he’d held dear of England as a cosy haven, was a fantasy. The war may have been fought across the sea, but it had come home. Michael hugged his kitbag and hurried on as the light faded. Where could he stay? Rubble spewed out of a doorway and a girl, her head covered with a shawl, threaded her way though and clambered into the house behind. A little boy with fair curls stepped from the shadows and she let her hand rest on the top of his head as she bent to speak. Spinning round to shut the door behind her, she stopped short. There was no door, just a couple of planks propped beneath the lintel. The children moved away into the shadows of the house. Michael dropped his bag and stepped across broken bricks to the shadowy enterance. He found a panel of the old door and propped it in the gap, placing a chair in front of it. At least it gave an impression of a barrier. Whether it would protect the children, and anyone who might be in there with them, was another matter. A glance down the street suggested that this was not the only house without a front door.

  Michael stepped off the rubble and back onto the road. His gaze was drawn to the sea. He would walk along the coast, following the sunset, and find somewhere to stay the night. The evening’s glow pricked through his uniform, and excitement stirred his tired limbs enough to get going. Cresting the first hill, he saw coves and undulating hills, villages tucked into folds falling to the sea, a few houses scattered further away, while to his left a vast grey battleship loomed drunkenly in the sea, small fishing boats floating like toys around it. Lopsided and redundant, it had gone aground on a bank of rocks some time ago, by the look of decay around the rusty portholes and ragged flag. Its colossal scale couldn’t stop it looking foolish and comical, like a set for a Buster Keaton movie.

  Cheered, Michael strode along the road out of town. The departing sun spilled across the surface of the sea, and he was happy to be alone, striking the tarmac underfoot. He was uncertain how long it would take him to find a place to stop, and he quickened his pace, removing his jacket and rolling it up in a ball at the top of his bag.

  The road twisted like a rope into Newlyn. Voices and the chink of glasses through an open door drew him into a pub, a room with a low ceiling, smoke-tinted walls. From out the back wafted a delicious aroma of fresh fish frying. He realised he had scarcely eaten a thing all day and sat down, glad to have got himself somewhere.

  ‘Why Britannia?’

  ‘What?’ Michael twisted his head, unsure if he was being addressed.

  ‘Britannia. She’s on your collar.’

  A man had approached, sunburned, his speckled guernsey textured like chain mail. He stretched a hand in greeting. ‘Forgive me, I was just curious about the badge. It’s your regiment, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, the Norfolk’s 1st battalion.’ Michael was confused, taking in the gentle voice, grey eyes, and sweep of fair hair. He didn’t seem like a fisherman. ‘Britannia’s our talisman, if you like, though she’s landed us in trouble I can tell you.’

  ‘She has? Cigarette?’ His companion put down his beer to offer his pack.

  Michael nodded, mock solemn. ‘We’re the only regiment to have a woman in our barracks.’ He held the match, laughter breaching the awkward gap. ‘Lance Corporal Michael Marker,’ he said. ‘That’s ex-Lance Corporal I suppose now, but I thought I’d keep the badge.’

  ‘Paul Spencer. I was in Italy. You?’

  Michael nodded. ‘Pretty bad there, but then so was everywhere. France, the Middle East, and most recently a bloody great boat we sat on for months. It’s taken a while to get home. What about you?’

  ‘Air Force, but I was lucky, we flew straight back at the end of the war. Out of the planes, back to work.’

  They both laughed. Michael noticed Spencer’s clothes were spattered with flecks of blue paint. ‘What’ve you been painting?’

  ‘Ha! You may well ask. And today I’m damned if I know.’

  Spencer stared abstractedly at the floor. The pipe between his teeth looked as if it belonged to an older man, but everything else about him was packed with energy.

  ‘Not walls then?’

  Spencer grinned wryly, ‘Not walls, no.’

  Looking at Paul, lean but healthy, Michael realised he had forgotten that there was a world still turning, where people laughed without a sense of the gallows attached, they ate meals together, talked and went to work and lived beyond the horror of war.

  ‘Are you an artist?’

  The question sounded gauche as it came out. Spencer grimaced, ‘Some days I think not,’ he said lightly, adding, ‘You heading somewhere local?’

  ‘Not sure, I don’t know this area, but I thought Mousehole sounded good on the sign post.’ Michael grinned as Paul Spencer shouted with laughter. ‘Have I got something wrong?’

  ‘Not wrong. We forget here that people don’t know, but Mousehole is pronounced Mowzul.’

  Michael laughed now. ‘No! The name was the draw for me, it sounded so snug. Right, Mowzul here I come.’ He reached for his kit bag.

  Spencer’s hand was on his arm. ‘Stay with us if you’d like to. Sheila’s at home, it’s simple enough, but there’s food and a bed, and it’s not far.’

  Michael felt the hot sting of emotion between his eyes again, and spun a coin from his pocket, wondering if he would cry about everything now the numbness was beginning to fade. It would be a handicap. ‘Thank you, I shouldn’t impose, but I will. Can I buy you a drink for the road?’

  By the time they rolled in at the gate of Paul’s home, they were merry. Paul Spencer was a fine storyteller, he had grown up in Cornwall and, as the war hadn’t seen him off, he rather thought he’d die here some day. He also had a kind ear for another man’s story. Michael found himself talking, tentatively making sense of his lack of plans, and creating some as he spoke. Meeting Sheila, eating a simple meal of fresh mackerel, bread and some radishes from the garden, and falling into a low narrow bed, was all a blur of new sensation. He’d shared bunks and floors and the cramped berths on the ship for so long, to be in a room alone, in peace, was a sensory experience he scarcely felt able to conceive.

  The room was piled with canvasses, there were no curtains, and he stared out of the window at stars dancing between the branches of a budding tree. The cottage floorboards creaked, and he could hear the occasional murmur of Paul and Sheila’s voices. It reminded him of his childhood, his parents. He couldn’t imagine himself and Janey under the same circumstances. What would a house they lived in look like? A whitewashed cottage by the sea like this? A red-brick house in a terrace? A farm? He tried to put Janey in Sheila’s place in the kitchen. Sheila, a wiry girl with an elfin air, added another place at the table with relaxed friendliness. Echoing Paul’s welcome, she moved back from the table to the light by the hearth after supper an
d picked up the patchwork she was sewing, ‘For the baby.’ She spoke quietly and exchanged a smile with Paul.

  Michael’s thoughts hit a dead end. Janey wasn’t part of him, he didn’t know her, nor she him. He’d sat on the low sofa and his left foot jumped and jiggled, a tic he hadn’t paid much attention to when he was away, but which suddenly stuck out in the company of his new friends. He didn’t know when it had started, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t had it last time he went home. He realised with a jolt that he knew more about the men he had shared the last months with than he did about his fiancée.

  Later he felt as if a curtain was falling, blackout thick, around him, ending an act in his life. He slept, cocooned in rough linen sheets, sedated by the oily smell of turpentine and lulled by the sound of the waves.

  He was surprised by how hungry he was when he woke, the scent of bread fresh from the oven seemed to warm the air. He dressed and went downstairs to find Paul cutting into a loaf, Sheila bringing milk in a small churn from a pantry outside. Michael wondered how long it would take for domesticity to feel real to him.

  Armed with an address, and an open invitation to return any time, and clad in some old clothes Paul had given him until they next met, Michael was on his way by mid-morning. He had a plan for the immediate future, the rest would come later. His nostrils tingled with the salty prickle of sea spray, and he squinted, trying to take in the view. Small colourful fishing boats were moving out from Newlyn harbour towards the horizon, threading past tumbled concrete blocks and barbed wire as incongruous and ugly as scars on bare flesh. Michael was grateful to be out of his uniform, though Paul’s faded blue drill trousers and scratchy knitted jersey contributed to his heady sense of unreality. He was a new man, a ­different one.

  A van passed him as he rounded the final bend and saw Mousehole before him. Slate roofs riding up the hillside, hedges and oak trees suggesting ballast behind the village, the sharp punctuation of the church spire, and streets tumbling towards the sea. Like arms outstretched to catch them falling off the hillside, the harbour walls curved towards one another from each end of the village, almost touching. In the gap, Michael watched a boat bob out in to the glassy sea and the world beyond, insignificant as soon as it passed through the harbour mouth.

  A palm tree bristled in the garden of the house in Cherry Garden Street, and light flooded through the open front door and into the narrow hall. Michael knocked and called a greeting. Paintings lined the staircase and hung from the ceiling to the floorboards, leaving not a square foot of wall visible.

  A voice floated through from the back of the house. ‘Come through, I’m flooded.’

  ‘Verity was my uncle Francis’s second wife – they met in Oxford in the twenties. He was translating ancient Nordic texts and, although no one ever said, I think she may have been his student,’ Sheila Spencer had explained when talking about the owner of this small house in Mousehole. ‘They didn’t have children, and although she’s half-Norwegian she didn’t go back there when he died. I think she missed him so much that she began having lodgers to give her people to talk to in the house.’

  ‘She lives up at the back of the village behind the chapel, she’ll be glad to meet you,’ added Paul. ‘She’s a nice woman, as long as you like cats.’

  Through the front door and out the back was all of half a dozen strides for Michael, and in the yard he found a tall angular figure in blue overalls, a cigarette in one hand, a mop in the other, prodding gingerly at a flooded drain, and watched, with an air of detached disapproval, by two white cats.

  ‘Bloody drains. I suppose I’ll have to bail out the garden, I’m not getting anywhere with my mop,’ she said, waving her cigarette to signify greeting.

  Michael liked her slash of red lipstick and the narrow green snakeskin belt that secured her overalls. The combination, he thought, pepped up the otherwise slightly daunting scene. He wondered if this happened often. Certainly Verity seemed perfectly relaxed in a yard ankle-deep in drain water. ‘D’you have any caustic soda?’ he asked. ‘It’s always worth a try.’

  By the time they had bailed out the garden and poured caustic soda down the drain, Michael and Verity were friends. He swept the yard and stood the broom in the lean-to shed, observing his work with satisfaction. Sunlight hit the far corner and the mauve sheen of wet cobbles faded in front of him, a geranium tumbled from a pot on the wall and stones painted white marked raised steps leading to another terrace. Verity made him a cup of tea and the cats, Ossian and Fingal, moved to the kitchen windowsill to continue their unblinking observation of the stranger.

  ‘They must like you,’ Verity observed. ‘They usually vanish when visitors appear. Come and look at the room.’

  He followed her up the stairs and she opened the door to a small room at the front of the house. A candlewick bedspread, curtains made of plaid blankets and a fireplace filled with pinecones. It reminded Michael of a children’s book he’d had, and was cosier than anything he had seen in years. Through the window, the palm tree waved at the sea.

  ‘You can move straight in if you like,’ Verity folded the note Sheila had sent, and removed the wire-framed spectacles she had put on to read it, absently tucking them into her hair. Michael noticed the glint of a lens from another pair already installed there along with a wisp of a scarf. ‘It’s good to have a soldier here. There’s been too many of them not coming back in this village.’ She was by the mantelpiece where a small watercolour depicted the cottage garden. She picked it up. ‘Francis, my husband, painted this before we planted the palm tree.’ Her shoulders seemed to drop as she held the little painting.

  He didn’t know what to say, but something was required. ‘It’s a view I could imagine painting,’ he offered, ‘though I don’t have experience with art.’

  Verity replaced the painting, and wiped a finger along the mantelpiece. ‘I know. Francis said the same. He was always lost in his books until we came here. Then the sea cast a spell on him. He didn’t go a single day without walking down there, you know.’ She sighed, staring out at the view, which Michael couldn’t really see thanks to the palm tree. Then she clapped her hands on her thighs, changing her mood. ‘Anyway, this place needs a duster. I’ll sort that out now, and give it a good air this morning while you’re out.’

  Michael smiled. She was kind, he thought. ‘I’d better go out then,’ he said, and they both laughed.

  Mousehole’s streets meandered between huddled granite and whitewashed cottages, doors and windows painted bright colours that the sea and sun had bleached to gentle shades, yards and gardens muddling into one another, so the effect was of a whole toy village more than a collection of separate dwellings. The taste on his tongue of sea salt, the cry of gulls and the soft, inimitable presence of the sea, sometimes hidden from sight, sometimes suddenly there in a doorway or through a gate, reminded Michael of his childhood in Norfolk.

  The Ship Inn bustled in the late morning, and the soft spring air was sharp with the smell of fresh fish. Michael glimpsed a skulking cat in an alley beside the pub, carrying something in its mouth. No rationing for felines, he thought. The publican rolled a barrel out of the door and upended it where Michael stood, pausing to wipe the sweat from his face with a large red handkerchief. ‘It’s warm,’ he said in greeting.

  Michael nodded, ‘It’s a great day.’

  ‘There’ll be a big catch coming in for tomorrow.’ The publican pushed his cap back and stuffed his hands deep into his pockets for the inevitable pipe. A smoke and a chat, it was part of every man’s ritual. ‘We don’t get so many now as when the pilchards came in. Lost a lot of work when they left our shores. And the war.’

  ‘Must’ve been difficult for work around here,’ said Michael, realising as he said it that he would have to find a job. He’d already discovered from Paul that he could sell his watch in Penzance, which would tide him over for a few days, but work was the next step.

  He left the pub and took the steps down to the beach in front of him
. The tide was out. He could see, from the wet sand, the starfish and scattered shells, that it would cover the whole beach when it came in. He took in the seaweed on the slipway, a tangle of lobster baskets and the echo of rattling masts, and shut his eyes.

  The sounds and smells of a seaside town were evocative. His memories of being a small boy swept in like the tide, covering everything that had happened since. Of course, he never went as far as this from home. No, it was Cromer on the train with Johnnie and his mother. His father would join them for a couple of days, but mainly the holiday would consist of Michael and Johnnie and his cousin Angela, building sandcastles and shrimping on Cromer beach. They never stayed for long. Summer was harvest time and Michael’s father needed his wife, his sons and anyone else with a spare pair of hands. Johnnie was in his element on the farm, quickest to find the ripe fruit, an expert eye for the weight of a box of gooseberries, a sharp ear listening to hear the rustle of a hen in a bush where he would dive to find a clutch of eggs. Michael preferred the sea, the lick of salt on his lips, the murmur of waves in his ears when he woke each morning. He lined up his shells on the windowsill of his bedroom at home, and hardly had time to look at them as summer days started early on the farm. He’d picked blackcurrants, lifted flints, hefted bales and herded cows between fields, with Angela bossing him and Johnnie always just ahead, shouting to him to hurry and come join him. Edwin, the family collie a shadow on his heel, waiting for a moment when he might turn round and kick a ball for him. Each week of his childhood had stretched like a lifetime, and Michael savoured it now as memories surfaced once again.