Call of the Curlew

by Elizabeth Brooks

  ‘You’re good at keeping quiet,’ she observed wistfully, when she could bear it no longer. The man stirred, which encouraged her to go on. ‘I suppose you’re pretty exhausted though, from your escape. You must have had to walk a long way.’

  She had a feeling that he’d turned to face her, and that his eyes were searching for her through the darkness, but she couldn’t be sure. He didn’t say anything. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was still asleep.

  Her fingers closed round the little matchbox in her pocket, and with a guilty start she remembered the candles she’d lit last night, all over the house, for Clem. Carefully, and pausing with every creak, she slid off the mattress and went to the window, where she felt about for the jam jar. Here it was – and there was still a lump of wax at the bottom, with something of a wick, but it was difficult to reach, and she wasted four matches and burnt two fingers in lighting it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ The man’s whisper was more alert than she expected.

  ‘It’s for Clem,’ she replied. ‘He went out on the marsh yesterday; that’s why you’ve not seen him.’

  His eyes were definitely on her now: she could feel them.

  ‘Clem,’ he repeated warily.

  ‘Yes. You see, an aeroplane came down on Tollbury Marsh, and Clem went to try and rescue the airman. I didn’t want him to, because it was a German plane – I mean a proper enemy German, a Nazi, not like you – but he went anyway. And now he’s having trouble getting back. I mean, he’ll be all right, because nobody knows the marsh like Clem does …’ She stopped for breath, conscious that she was gabbling.

  The man was watching her intently, and in the jagged candlelight his face seemed to gape like a tragedy mask.

  ‘Clem?’ he asked, hoarsely. ‘This … Clem … this is your father?’

  ‘He’s – yes, sort of. My actual parents died when I was two weeks old, so I grew up at Sinclair House, but then Clem and Lorna …’ The explanation petered out. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t necessarily know about me. I’ve not been here very long.’

  The man stared at her, and then at his feet. Slowly, he began to nod.

  ‘I am very sorry to hear it,’ he whispered. ‘He was a good, good man.’

  ‘Is a good, good man,’ she retorted, forgetting to keep her voice down. ‘He’s not dead, Mr Rosenthal.’

  ‘Is good,’ he repeated, raising his hands in the same gesture of surrender he’d used when they found him in the shed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  His apology was so heartfelt that Virginia felt bad for having snapped. She sat down beside him again and patted his sleeve, and in return he tried – not quite successfully – to smile.

  ‘Please, I want you to call me Jozef,’ he whispered, holding out his right hand as if intending her to shake it. She did so, though it was rather awkward because they were sitting side by side. ‘And your name …?’

  ‘Virginia.’

  Another burst of wind rattled the slates, but this time there was a noise hiding beneath it: a short, fierce note; a cry of protest; a ‘No!’ They both lifted their heads and looked towards the attic door, but Virginia closed her fingers round Jozef’s sleeve.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It was something from outside.’

  Quickly, in her head, she ran through all the things it might have been. There were enough possibilities. It might have been a fox, or a stoat, or a bird. It might have been the wind, singing at a strange pitch. Revellers drinking on the wall. A ship’s whistle.

  ‘It came from inside the house,’ Jozef insisted, staggering to his feet.

  ‘No, no.’ Virginia held on to the raggedy hem of his blanket and tried to remember some of the bird facts Clem had taught her. They’d been so firmly fixed in her brain before, but now they felt shaky. ‘It was a bird. Maybe … maybe a curlew. I’m not sure. Clem will tell us when he gets back. Please sit down. Please. If Mr Deering sees you here, that’ll be bad for all of us. Me and you and Lorna …’

  Jozef didn’t sit down at once, but he didn’t break away either. Virginia hung on to the corner of the blanket and tried to ignore the images that kept flashing through her mind: Mr Deering’s teeth shiny with spit; his lips moist with drink; his fingers strong and hungry, snaking through Lorna’s hair, and down her neck, and inside her clothes. Virginia clenched her teeth and shut her eyes tight, but all she saw in her mind’s eye was Mr Deering’s face moving over her own, like a big, yellow moon. It was horrible, the way he seemed to look down on her, with his lips hanging open in a smile. She couldn’t push the image away, even after she opened her eyes.

  The cry came again, with no gust of wind to disguise it. Virginia remembered the empty shotgun in the kitchen and tried to stand up, but her legs were empty and they wouldn’t bear her weight. She sank back down again, and pressed her knees with the flats of her hands to try to stop them from shaking. Her breathing had gone ragged, but she forced it to settle and declared, firmly, ‘That was a curlew.’

  ‘A bird?’ Jozef wasn’t convinced.

  ‘Yes. I know it. I’ve heard it before.’

  He tore his eyes from the door and sat down slowly. Virginia slumped against him, as unceremonious in her exhaustion as if he were a wall or a post, and he put a tentative arm around her shoulders. She shivered, pulling her cardigan tight, and promptly went to sleep.

  It was strange, waking underneath the rafters in the ghost light before dawn. The candle had burned out by then and all the darting shapes and shadows of the night were gone, leaving the attic grey and calm.

  Virginia sat up squinting and massaged her stiff neck. Lorna must have been here during the night because there were fresh blankets and pillows, and Jozef was sprawled, face down, in a pair of Clem’s pyjamas. His left ear – which was as much of him as she could make out beneath the jumble of blankets – was pink with warmth, and he smelled all soapy and healthful. His hair had dried into soft tufts, like a teddy bear’s fur, and she couldn’t resist touching it, which made him twitch.

  Virginia found she’d been asleep at the foot of the mattress, curled up in a ball, like a cat. It took a few limping circuits of the attic to get rid of the cramp in her legs, and she finished up by the window, rubbing the crust from her eyes. Her head felt empty, as if all her thoughts had drained away overnight, slipping like spilt water through the bare floorboards. Everything – Clem’s disappearance, and the cries in the night, and Mr Deering’s monstrous car – seemed like fragments from an absurd dream, which would break apart any moment now, dispersing in the morning light the way dream fragments do.

  She cleared a bit of the moisture from the window and looked out. Grey snow lay along the flint wall and on the shed roof and in long, uneven patches across the marsh, while black smoke twisted upwards, passing close to her face. She watched it dispassionately for a while as it whirled in the thin wind and dispersed in the sky, but then the stench of petrol hit, and it occurred to her to wonder – and then to worry – what exactly was burning.

  Lorna was in the corner of the garden with her back to the house, leaning on the garden fork. The bonfire roared a few feet away, and currents of heat competed with the wind to lift threads of hair from her face. Virginia stopped in the kitchen doorway, her chest thumping, and allowed herself to breathe again. It was all right. The house wasn’t in flames and Lorna wasn’t dead. There hadn’t been a bomb.

  Lorna looked unexpectedly gaunt from this angle. Despite her winter coat and proximity to the fire she was hugging herself and rubbing her upper arms, and there was something about the way she stood that made her seem spiky and alien. Virginia decided to shut the kitchen door quietly and retreat, but before she had a chance Lorna turned round and saw her. They stared at one another for a moment, like two trespassers caught out, but then Lorna raised her hand in greeting and Virginia had no choice but to cross the grass and join her.

  ‘I’m burning his clothes,’ Lorna explained dully, thrusting the fork into the fire and giving it a stir. She didn’t say ‘Jozef’s c
lothes’, or ‘Mr Rosenthal’s’ – just ‘his’ – and, at first, Virginia wondered whose clothes she meant. She thought, stupidly, of Mr Deering’s expensive pinstripes, and her stomach lurched.

  ‘You’re burning them?’

  ‘It’s all they were good for. He’ll have to borrow some of Clem’s.’

  ‘Oh … Yes.’

  Virginia narrowed her eyes against the smoke and stared into the depths of the bonfire. That flash of grey might have been Jozef’s coat, but the holly-green knit was surely Lorna’s sweater, much darned at the elbows – the one she’d been wearing yesterday – and wasn’t that a scrap of yesterday’s blouse, and a flash of pattern from yesterday’s skirt? And there, wasn’t that a length of stocking, twisted up with something else in oyster-pink silk? Virginia blushed like the accidental intruder she was, and tried to look away.

  ‘Why—’ she began, but she couldn’t finish the question out loud. Why are you burning your own clothes? Lorna would only have to come up with a lie in order to hide the answer. It seemed silly to put her to the bother.

  ‘Mr Deering’s gone to London for the week,’ said Lorna, and Virginia nodded. She almost said, ‘Thank goodness!’ but that felt risky too, so she said nothing. Lorna usually snapped when Virginia was being unresponsive, but she didn’t seem to mind this time.

  The smoke was stinging Virginia’s eyes and making them water, so she turned to face the marsh. She stared at the luminous horizon, willing herself to see a tiny, moving speck, growing and thickening and assuming human features the closer it came to the house, until there could be no doubt it was Clem. She stared until her eyes were dry, and promised the Fates she wouldn’t shout out until she was sure. There were several specks in her line of sight, and she followed them all avidly, but they turned out to be birds or particles from the fire.

  ‘Is he still asleep?’ Lorna interrupted, jabbing at the heap with her garden fork. Big black flakes and motes of ash flew in her face, but she didn’t stop or turn aside. The scrap of oyster-pink underwear flickered into flame and fragmented in the black heart of the fire.

  ‘What? Oh, yes.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Virginia licked her dry lips and glanced at Lorna sidelong.

  ‘We don’t really have to hand him in, do we?’ she asked.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Can’t we keep him?’

  ‘You make him sound like a stray cat.’ Lorna stuck the fork into the ground again and leaned, with both arms, on the handle. It was good that she could still smile, but on the other hand something odd had happened to her eyes overnight. They’d lost their glassy depths and become opaque, like two grey pebbles.

  ‘No, but really,’ Virginia persisted. ‘Can’t we?’

  Lorna plucked the fork from the ground and stabbed it in again, hard. ‘No, of course we can’t.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No! I said no!’

  There was a long, nervy silence. Lorna sighed and looked away, wiping her sooty sleeve across her forehead.

  ‘We’ll make him a nice breakfast,’ she conceded, as if that would make all the difference. ‘But that’s as much as we can do. As soon as he’s eaten, I’m going to telephone the police.’

  Virginia nodded, because she had no choice, and they remained there, side by side, watching the fire burn itself out. Strange, she thought, that a bonfire could be such a depressing thing; she wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t found herself standing over this one. She’d loved Clem’s autumn bonfires, when he burned dead leaves and hedge clippings: she’d loved the hiss of boiling sap and the snap of sticks and the sweet, pervasive fragrance of the blue smoke. This one was as hot as anger, with a bitter stench like a burning car, and when you breathed it in you felt as though you were lining your lungs with poison.

  ‘Well.’ Lorna dragged her gaze from the dying reds and blacks. ‘I suppose we must get on.’

  It was a nice breakfast – almost pre-war in its niceness – with bacon and eggs, tea and toast, and the last of Mrs Hill’s marmalade. They carried it up to the attic on two trays, and Virginia led the way.

  The sun was rising as they entered the attic, and for a minute or two the light was lovely – not glorious or bright, but lovely; the palest of pale yellows. Jozef was sitting up in Clem’s stripy pyjamas, with one arm in a bandage and a heap of papers on his lap, and he started talking the moment they came in. None of this struck Virginia as strange, even while part of her acknowledged that it was. Perhaps it was because she was still tired that everything felt so oddly familiar, as if she and Lorna had been bringing breakfast trays up to the attic for years.

  ‘Look!’ Jozef cried, waving a handful of papers in the air. ‘Look at these drawings. They’re extraordinary. They were lying just here, under the mattress. Have you seen them?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Lorna set her tray on the floor with exaggerated care. She glanced very briefly at the papers before turning to the window with a shrug and sticking her hands in her pockets.

  Jozef was undeterred. ‘Look!’ he insisted, holding them out to Virginia. She plumped herself down on the mattress, near his feet, and began to skim through the pile. Lorna – who was still at the window – said something curt about the scrambled eggs going cold, and Jozef began to eat, but he kept his eyes on Virginia’s face, as if he couldn’t wait for her reaction.

  ‘Aren’t they good?’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s wrong, but when I look at these drawings I am happier than I’ve been for months. For years.’

  Virginia wouldn’t go that far, but she was impressed. They were such self-assured creations – each pencil line so perfectly balanced between precision and energy – that she’d have been less surprised to find them published in an art book, or framed on a gallery wall, than lying in a crumpled heap on the attic floor. She moved carefully from page to page, from portraits of people to careful studies of birds’ heads and flowers, to pictures of goblins, fairies, castles, crooked trees, witches and strange animals. There was something familiar about the style, but she couldn’t think what it was until she turned a page and saw a stout guinea pig in a gingham housecoat, and remembered a drawing she’d found on Clem’s desk last winter. What had it been, again? A bird of some sort. A duck. Yes, that was it. A duck in a businessman’s suit. She’d wanted to keep it, but Clem had bundled it into a drawer as if he found it embarrassing.

  ‘Did Clem do these?’ she asked, looking up.

  ‘Clem?’ Lorna had kept her back to them all this time, feigning an interest in the view, but at this she spun round. ‘No, he did not. They’re mine.’

  She faced them with a kind of defiant glee, her hands fidgeting inside her pockets, the corners of her mouth unsteady. She had the uncomfortable look of someone who hasn’t the right to be happy – not even briefly – but can’t quite prevent a smile from flowering. When Jozef looked at her and said, ‘I take my hat off to you; I think they’re truly wonderful,’ she bobbed her head and turned back to the window.

  ‘Where did you learn to draw like this?’ Virginia asked out loud. And why didn’t you tell me about it? she added internally, surprised by the strength of her own resentment. The pictures amazed her. It was as if she’d discovered the house had a secret wing full of treasures that no-one had bothered to mention before. Jozef offered her a triangle of toast and she accepted it absent-mindedly.

  ‘London,’ Lorna replied. ‘The Slade.’

  Virginia must have looked blank.

  ‘The Slade School of Fine Art.’

  Lorna took the pages out of Virginia’s hands and returned to the window, where she began to leaf through them slowly.

  ‘These ones aren’t from my student days. I did all these up here, in the attic, when—’

  She stopped herself abruptly but continued to turn the pages, one by one. Virginia watched the fluid motion of her fingers as they plucked the top corner of each sheet, and realised there was a sureness about them that she’d never noticed before. She’d always assumed – never
having looked properly – that Lorna’s hands were pale and flaccid, a bit like Mr Deering’s.

  ‘I used to come up here at odd times to draw,’ Lorna explained rapidly, as if anxious to forestall questions. ‘Clem didn’t really—’ She hesitated. ‘Art never seemed to mix very well with married life.’

  Virginia picked uneasily at a strip of loose skin on her thumb. Whatever that was meant to imply, she couldn’t worry about it now. She filed it away at the back of her mind, for consideration at a later date, and smoothed her thumb against her skirt. Jozef passed her his teacup, and after she’d taken a sip and handed it back, he offered it up to Lorna.

  ‘Have some,’ he said.

  Lorna glanced from the teacup to his face, as if she suspected foul play.

  ‘Go on,’ he urged.

  Lorna placed the pictures on the floor and took the cup from his hands with a small ‘thank you’. After she’d sipped once or twice she became less prickly and sat down, not on Jozef’s mattress, but on a dusty packing case, with her back against the wall.

  ‘Please finish it,’ he said – and she did. He watched as she drank, tilting his head to one side, as if he was trying to work something out.

  ‘You know what they remind me of?’ he said, as Lorna set the empty cup on the floor by her feet.

  ‘You mean the drawings? No. What?’

  Jozef leaned back against the pillow with his sound hand behind his head. He, too, wore a shame-faced smile – like a man at a funeral who finds himself suddenly, helplessly awash with joie de vivre.

  ‘Well, you see, I used to write stories in the evenings, after work.’ He hesitated, suddenly unsure of himself. ‘This was before the war, when I was still living at home with my parents. They were children’s stories, you know. Fairy stories, for my little nephew.’

  Lorna stared, sightlessly, at the patch of wall above his head, and it was impossible to tell whether she was listening or not. Virginia frowned as she readjusted – again – all her ideas about Mr Rosenthal, knife-grinder. She felt embarrassed by her own lack of judgement. She’d had him down as someone else; someone old and weather-beaten and unschooled.