Call of the Curlew

by Elizabeth Brooks

  ‘A few of them got published,’ he went on, glancing shyly at his audience. ‘It was all on a small scale, you understand, in magazines and so on, but I used to fantasise about a beautiful book with all my stories collected together inside. Just my stories, no-one else’s, and my name in big letters down the spine and across the front. I can see it now in my head: it has a bright red cover – hard-backed, of course – and creamy pages and illustrations. Lots of illustrations. One for every chapter.’

  He sat up again and reached for Lorna’s drawings, shuffling through the pile until he found the one he wanted. Virginia could only see it upside down from where she sat, but it looked like an illustration for ‘Rapunzel’ – at any rate, there was a tall, ivy-clad tower and a woman sitting behind a window, reading a book. Privately, Virginia thought it a bit muscular for a fairy-tale illustration. The lines of the woman’s face were strong and hard, and not as pretty as you might expect.

  ‘This one I like very much,’ Jozef enthused. ‘I wrote a story just like this, called “Die Hexe-Prinzessin”.’

  Lorna’s eyes came into focus and she stared at him, if not quite kindly, then at least observantly. ‘The Witch-Princess?’

  Jozef nodded and passed the paper over.

  Lorna studied her work critically, narrowing her eyes. ‘I didn’t see it as a pencil drawing, when it was in my head,’ she said. ‘I was planning a whole series of woodcut prints, but obviously I couldn’t really … Printing’s just so big and messy, and I didn’t have the materials. Or the time.’

  Jozef picked more pictures out of the pile, and they passed them back and forth as the sun appeared in the window, edging everything with a fragile light and making Lorna’s hair glow like a halo. It ought to have been a drab scene with all that grubbiness and dust, and everyone’s eyes hooded with exhaustion, but somehow – just in that moment – it was anything but. The sun didn’t reach Virginia’s end of the mattress and she felt like a shadowy observer on the edge of a charmed circle. She’d been wearing the same clothes ever since Clem disappeared, and it hadn’t bothered her up until now, but the sudden brightness made her skin feel prickly and sour-smelling.

  ‘Will you tell us the story?’ she asked, in case they’d forgotten she was there. She didn’t expect a yes because she thought she knew adults and their prosaic ways of looking at the world. There would be lots of weary sighs and they’d say, What? You mean, now? and Lorna would stand up, all businesslike, and announce that she needed to get on.

  But Jozef smiled as if Virginia had handed him a gift. ‘You want me to tell you the story of the Witch-Princess?’

  Virginia nodded and Jozef glanced across at Lorna, who didn’t make any objection. In fact, she shrugged and folded her arms, like somebody settling down to listen.

  ‘All right.’ Jozef lay back again, his bandaged arm across his chest, and fixed his gaze on the cobwebbed ceiling as if he were stargazing. He thought for a long while, but his audience was patient.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ he began, ‘there was a forest where the beech trees grew so tall and green that they hid the sky. In the day-time the light fell through the leaves like a shower of emeralds, but at night-time the darkness fell like pitch, and that was when the witches came down from their tree houses and stalked the forest floor in search of prey.

  ‘Now, late one afternoon as the sun was starting to set, a young traveller entered the forest and lost his way among the many winding paths …’

  Jozef flopped back on his pillow, laughing at Virginia’s applause. He kept one eye on Lorna too, as she got to her feet and began gathering up the breakfast things. She made no comment at all – she didn’t even look at him – but there was a faint smile on her lips which was, perhaps, enough.

  He rolled on to his side and closed his eyes, and they lingered by the door with their trays, waiting for him to drop off. It was strange to watch the pleasure draining from his face the deeper he fell, and Virginia wondered what he was seeing in his sleep. He looked scary, with his mouth plunging at the corners and a frown flickering across his forehead. She was half inclined to wake him up again, but Lorna whispered, ‘No,’ and jerked her head in the direction of the stairs.

  The house got darker and colder the further down they went, and by the time they reached the landing it seemed as though the sun had never risen. There was no longer enough light to make Lorna’s hair glow, and it was as if all the colour had been sucked from her body in one instant, turning her hair and skin prematurely grey. The air down here was thick with the stink of lilies, and Virginia wondered whether the flowers were still lying broken on the bedroom floor, or whether Lorna had put them in a vase to please Mr Deering. She didn’t like to ask. She didn’t dare mention his name.

  ‘I suppose we ought to have some breakfast too,’ said Lorna, shutting the attic door behind them with her elbow.

  ‘Can I have a bath first?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose. If there’s enough hot water.’

  Virginia swallowed and righted the teacup on her tray before it tipped. They both seemed stuck, too tired to move on.

  ‘I suppose there’ll be lots to do today,’ said Lorna. ‘About Clem, I mean. People to talk to, and things to sort out … goodness knows what, exactly. Everything’s so strange.’

  Virginia nodded. Lorna spoke like one grown-up talking to another – as if she’d finally shrugged off her ill-fitting role as ‘mother’ – and Virginia replied in the same spirit.

  ‘Jozef should stay then, don’t you think?’ she said cautiously, as if she didn’t much mind, except for convenience’s sake. ‘I mean, when there’s so much else to think about. And he’s not in anyone’s way, up in the attic …’

  Lorna didn’t answer. She seemed transfixed by the egg stains on his empty plate.

  ‘Please?’ Virginia hated the childish resonance of that. Real adults never said Please in such a wheedling way, but she wasn’t sure how else to put it. ‘You won’t send him away, will you?’

  Lorna sighed and took Virginia’s tray, balancing it precariously on top of her own.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘He can stay until his arm’s better. Now, go and run that bath.’

  Virginia sat upright in three inches of bathwater and sloshed her legs to create waves. She’d washed her hair with soap and squeezed it dry, and although she was very cold she felt cleaner and better. If Clem were to come home this minute – and he might – he would surely be pleased with her behaviour over the last twenty-four hours. I knew I could trust you to hold the fort, he’d whisper in her ear when Lorna wasn’t listening, and throughout the day, when he was supposed to be paying attention to grown-up matters, he’d send secret smiles in her direction.

  A spider dropped off the ceiling into the bath and she scooped it up in her hands. Above all, she thought, she’d done the right thing by Mr Rosenthal. Lorna had been altogether too eager to summon the police, and Clem would not have approved of that.

  The water seeped out between her fingers, but it was too late for the spider – its legs were all awry, its body crushed and saturated. Virginia poked at it with her finger, but it just floated in her palm, as repulsive as a smear of dirt now that it was dead. She sat looking at it for minutes on end and then, all at once, she stood up. She clambered out of the bath and ran on to the landing, slipping and dripping as she adjusted the towel around her body.

  ‘What now?’ Lorna was measuring porridge oats into a saucepan but she paused when Virginia burst into the kitchen. ‘Well?’

  Virginia shivered and pulled the towel tight round her shoulders. Bracken was gobbling his breakfast in the corner by the door, his collar clanging against the metal bowl. She felt like an idiot.

  ‘It’s just … I was just thinking about Jozef.’

  ‘What about him?’

  Virginia lowered her eyes and watched the drips that tumbled off the ends of her hair and flattened themselves on the tiles by her feet.

  ‘He is … I mean, he is Mr Rosenthal, is
n’t he?’

  Lorna took the saucepan to the sink and stood with her back to Virginia. She turned the tap on and ran water over the oats.

  ‘Who else could he be?’ she asked, after the water had stopped.

  Virginia moved from one foot to the other and shivered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. The colder she got, the more stupid she felt. ‘Nobody.’

  Lorna set the pan on the stove and stirred it with a wooden spoon. Nothing more was said.

  New Year’s Eve, 2015

  VIRGINIA HAS TO kneel on the floor to reach the bottom drawer of the dressing table. It’s a painful process, bending her body against its grain, and if she were on her own in the house she might shout a bit to help things along, but she mustn’t do that now. She doesn’t want to alert the Deering girl.

  There. Success. She’s down, without so much as a squeak.

  Virginia rests her arms and head on top of the dressing table and closes her eyes. When she opens them again she finds her face is on a level with the curlew’s skull. It looks different from this perspective – larger, of course, but also more sure of itself – and she studies it for a long time. Now she understands why its stare is so blank. It’s urging her to be blank too; to be cold-eyed and clear; to see beyond Sophie’s charm to her inherited essence. Justice. That’s what it’s telling her.

  ‘Justice.’ Virginia repeats the word in a whisper to show she’s understood, and then she stoops to open the bottom drawer.

  There’s a spiral-bound photo album on top, and a bundle of orange Kodak envelopes, and a few photos that are curled and bent because she’s stored them loose.

  Lorna used to roll her eyes at Virginia’s hoarding habits. ‘Things with sentimental value I can understand,’ she used to say. ‘But why hang on to everything?’ Virginia had just shrugged. She didn’t hang on to everything – she wasn’t that bad; she wasn’t one of those mad people who stockpile junk. But the traces left by the passing of her life mattered, whether palatable or not. It was all evidence – that was the crux of it – but she couldn’t have asked Lorna to understand. Lorna would have said, ‘Evidence of what?’

  Most of the photographs are benign records of her adult life: the trips abroad, the family Christmases, Joe’s fortieth birthday party. If today had turned out as she’d imagined, she would be lingering over these, but Sophie is waiting downstairs and there isn’t time. Virginia knows which one she wants.

  It’s right at the bottom of course, upside down and damaged at the corners. She stares at it for a long time, although her knees are starting to feel like bruises. It’s much smaller and crisper than those bright, soft snaps from the 1970s and ’80s, and the people in it are not so free and easy. They make her feel scrutinised. She realises she hasn’t looked at it once, since the day Mr Deering gave it to her all those years ago, and she’s suddenly unnerved by the sureness with which she’s laid hands on it.

  Sophie has put a cosy on the teapot and set two matching mugs beside it. Silver is arching his back and wreathing himself round her legs, but she’s not paying him any attention; she’s too busy frowning and sniffing at the milk. She jumps when she notices Virginia, as if she’s been caught stealing.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I just thought it smelled a bit funny.’

  Virginia winces – not because of the milk, but because her knees hurt. She gestures Sophie to sit, but the girl can’t seem to relax. She continues to stand with her back to the fridge, and although she forces her lips into a smile, she forgets to remove the frown. It’s possible she overheard something when the phone came off the wall. It must have made some noise – all that jingling and cracking, and the plaster coming off in gobbets – and it’s possible Virginia shouted out loud when the screws were refusing to budge.

  ‘Do you want me to do anything else?’ Sophie wonders. ‘I could get you something to eat …?’

  It strikes Virginia that Sophie is a nice girl, judged by any ordinary standards. Nicer than she was at the same age. Virginia can see the girl’s school report as clearly as if it were lying open on the table. Sophie is a pleasure to teach, it reads. Sophie is conscientious and thoughtful. Sophie is an asset to the school. Oh yes, Max Deering has disguised himself well, over three generations – but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there. Ordinary standards are all very well, but they don’t apply at Salt Winds. Not today.

  Justice, she thinks, to bolster her resolve.

  Sophie looks nervous. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What?’

  Virginia is startled. She wonders whether she often says things out loud without meaning to. How would she know? She used to worry all the time about going mad, especially after Joe started talking, with casual frequency, about care homes. Right up until ten o’clock last night she worried about it; picturing herself lining an armchair in the TV lounge at Thorney Grange with no teeth, no space, no sense of herself. Now, thanks to the curlew, she’s free to think, So what? So what if I’m mad?

  ‘Look at this,’ Virginia says. ‘I’ve found something that’ll interest you.’ She huffs and puffs, doing battle with stick and legs and hands, until she’s managed to sit herself down. Sophie brings the mugs across and puts them on the table, before sliding into the opposite chair. There are white spots floating on the surface of the tea.

  Virginia pushes the photo across the table and something seems to loosen inside the girl, the way it did in the attic when she first caught sight of the view. She picks the photo up, careful not to mar it with fingerprints. Silver jumps up and starts treading circles on her lap, and she pushes his tail out of her face.

  ‘Your granddad Theo took that picture,’ says Virginia. ‘May 1941. The little girl is me.’

  ‘Oh!’ Sophie stares hard at the girl with skinny plaits and a Peter Pan collar. She doesn’t say, Weren’t you pretty? just to be polite; instead she says, ‘You look very intense.’ Virginia tries to resent it, but she can’t.

  ‘OK,’ says Sophie. ‘So that’s you on the left. And of course I recognise Great-Granddad Max in the middle, and then, on the right … that’s the woman in the wedding photo, isn’t it? Your adoptive mother?’

  ‘Lorna. Yes.’

  Sophie keeps looking at the photo.

  ‘Is that a picnic hamper in the bottom corner?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It looks cold for a picnic somehow; maybe it’s just the way you’ve got your hands scrunched up inside your sleeves. Are you at a beach?’

  ‘Warren Sands. It’s a few miles down the road from here. Your great-granddad took us all in his car.’

  ‘That’s nice. I love old photos. Everything looks so … like something out of a film. All the old-fashioned clothes and hairdos.’

  Virginia knows where Sophie’s eye is drawn and she’s tempted to say it for her, but she waits. A hush falls over the table as the child keeps on staring. They ought to have the light on, really. The daylight is failing and it’s making them both monochrome, like the figures in the photo.

  ‘Great-Granddad Max has his arm round your mother’s waist,’ Sophie remarks, bashfully. She turns the picture round, and Virginia leans forward to inspect it, as if this is news to her. The sunlight is making Lorna squint, giving her smile a mischievous slant. She is leaning into Max and his hand is sliding, like the head of a snake, round her back and over the belt of her jacket.

  ‘Hmm.’ Virginia nods. She watches closely as Sophie takes the photo back for another long look.

  ‘So they had an affair?’ she asks, in the end, scandal-hungry. ‘I kind of guessed it would be something like that. What happened?’

  ‘An affair?’ Virginia bridles at that. ‘No, it wasn’t an affair. Quite apart from anything else, they were both widowed by then. Or at least …’

  No, widowed will do. She doesn’t like it, because Clem was never as dead as all that, but it serves a purpose. It discourages awkward questions.

  ‘Oh.’ Sophie is only disappointed for a moment. Her face softens and she grows wist
ful. ‘They look so quaint.’

  ‘Quaint,’ Virginia echoes. She takes the photo out of Sophie’s hands and studies Deering’s face properly for the first time in seventy-odd years. She’s struck by the fact that he doesn’t have any whites to his eyes. Presumably it’s a trick of the shadows, but it’s as though his eyeballs are black through and through, without so much as a pinprick of light to give them life.

  Virginia looks at herself across the years and the eleven-year-old looks right back. She isn’t smiling – then or now – but there’s something complicit about the child’s gaze that makes the old woman nod. Lorna, she notes, is smiling – but tightly, with her lips closed. Max is baring his teeth at the camera.

  ‘… And so in love,’ Sophie adds.

  Old Virginia locks eyes with young Vi and smiles slightly. Quaint and so in love. Oh, this is going to be easy, after all. No need for qualms. The person sitting at the kitchen table is nothing but a Deering – a Deering with a smile and a soft voice, clever but not-so-clever-as-she-thinks, charming and well bred and hateful and blind – and it’s such a relief. Such a relief, not only to have this long-awaited revenge, but to want it. Oh, this is more like it. This is how it’s meant to feel. Justice doesn’t have a flavour, but revenge bubbles up like blood from Virginia’s lungs and floods her mouth with a coppery tang. She’s careful, this time, not to say the word out loud.

  ‘In love?’ Her voice has gone gravelly, but she doesn’t clear her throat.

  ‘Oh, but there must have been more to it, to make him leave the village and everything,’ Sophie protests. The quaint love story is starting to pall; she’s after something more gutsy. ‘What happened? They can’t just have fallen out. He didn’t murder her, did he?’

  Silver has settled on the girl’s lap now; Virginia can see the tips of his ears above the table edge, and hear his purr. She takes a sip of tea while she thinks, but she has to spit it straight back into the mug. It tastes sour. The milk must be off.