Call of the Curlew

by Elizabeth Brooks

  ‘Why didn’t Clem like you being an artist?’

  Lorna raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t go mad, or silent. In fact, she placed her elbows on the table and leaned forward, twisting the half-smoked cigarette between her fingers. Ash floated, like tiny flakes of black snow, on to the cloth.

  ‘I think …’ She leaned forwards even further, until her face was hovering over Virginia’s half of the table. ‘I think Clem thought he’d rescued me from this dreadful, bohemian lifestyle, and that I ought to be grateful. Perhaps I thought the same, at first. Well, I did think that. He was my white knight, snatching me from the jaws of failure and loneliness …’

  Virginia raised her eyes from the plate. ‘And from the jaws of Mr Deering.’

  Lorna began to deny it, but then she sighed and nodded. Neither of them spoke for a while.

  ‘I was horribly young when I got engaged to Max,’ she said eventually, keeping her voice low. ‘Far, far too young. He seemed so awfully glamorous to me at that age – a lonely widower, with masses of charm and wealth. I think I thought I was Jane Eyre or something; I don’t know.’ She laughed tonelessly and the cigarette trembled in her hand. ‘In fact—’

  Lorna looked around at the walls, as if searching for words.

  ‘In fact, as it turned out, he wasn’t very nice at all.’

  She pulled on her cigarette and laughed again – the same bleak and inadequate laugh.

  ‘I wanted to break it off,’ she went on, without meeting Virginia’s eye, ‘but I was too scared. The best I could do was drag the engagement out. I was halfway through my second year at the Slade by then, and I begged Max to let me finish my studies before we married. He didn’t like it one bit, but he agreed. He visited – oh, all the time, every weekend, sometimes more, and occasionally he’d bring along his oldest pal; his fuddy-duddy bachelor friend from Tollbury Point.

  Lorna laughed, as if she was still incredulous after all these years.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder whether Clem really meant to propose at all. Perhaps it was just a gallant jest that I took far too seriously.’

  Virginia stared. Her throat felt tight and she couldn’t have interrupted, even if she’d wanted to.

  ‘Anyway.’ Lorna shook her head. ‘I didn’t question the wisdom of it; I was too relieved. Max couldn’t touch me if I was someone else’s wife – that was my only thought. Whether or not I loved Clem – whether Clem loved me – seemed secondary. He was decent and well meaning, and I believed that was enough.’

  She leaned her chin on one hand and blew a feather of smoke from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Wasn’t it enough?’ Virginia knew it was a gauche question the moment she said it.

  ‘No,’ said Lorna, quietly. ‘No, it wasn’t really enough. But there we were, anyway. Stuck.’ As she said the word stuck, she crushed her stub in the ashtray. It smouldered there for ages. ‘Of course, Clem thought having a child would be the answer to everything …’

  Virginia rearranged the cake crumbs to form a neat ring.

  ‘Which isn’t to say I didn’t want you …’ Lorna realised what she’d said, and laid a pleading hand across the table. ‘Virginia?’

  People came and went from the teashop. From the kitchen at the back they could hear a whistle rising in pitch and someone shouting, ‘Eileen! The kettle!’

  ‘If you weren’t lumbered with me, you’d be free,’ Virginia observed, as coolly as she could. ‘You could do anything; you could go back to London and be a proper artist again. I bet you think that sometimes, don’t you? You must do. I would, if I was you.’

  ‘Virginia!’ Lorna was still reaching across the table, but Virginia kept her hands in her lap.

  ‘Will you send me away?’

  ‘No!’ Lorna hissed, and heads turned all over the teashop. ‘No!’ she repeated more moderately. ‘Of course I won’t!’

  They stared at one another helplessly.

  ‘But then, what will happen? Really?’ Virginia asked. ‘I mean, assuming you don’t get rich and buy a flat in Manhattan.’

  ‘Will I marry Max, you mean?’ Lorna rubbed her temple, the way she did when she was starting a headache. ‘I don’t know why you should mind so much. He likes you.’

  Virginia shifted uncomfortably in her chair. ‘But you wouldn’t do it, would you?’

  Lorna poured the last of the tea into their cups.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, as if she was talking to herself. ‘I just … I don’t know how to …’

  Virginia glanced at Lorna’s left hand. It occurred to her that the emerald engagement ring had not reappeared since that afternoon on Warren Sands. It had been too small – or too big, she couldn’t remember which – and Mr Deering had promised to have it altered.

  ‘If you do marry him,’ Virginia observed, ‘then Jozef will have to go away.’

  Lorna stirred her tea, making slow circles with the spoon.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, eventually. ‘Yes, I know. That had crossed my mind.’

  Unless you knew her well, you’d assume she didn’t care very much, or that her thoughts were elsewhere.

  New Year’s Eve, 2015

  VIRGINIA SALVAGES HER stick with a few breathy curses and frees herself from the chair. She hobbles round the kitchen, setting things straight for the last time – the very last time, now – and whispering to herself.

  The plaster’s always been crumbly round the telephone. It’s because of the damp. I knew it was a bit wobbly, but I didn’t realise it was THAT bad! She tries a throwaway laugh, but it sounds like a canine snarl and she makes a mental note not to use it in front of Sophie. Where was she? Oh yes: I didn’t realise it was THAT bad! But I suppose it’s only a matter of time with wet rot. (Is that right? Wet rot? Or should she call it dry rot? Or some other kind of rot altogether?)

  It’s not a convincing show. Even on her own, in rehearsal, she feels embarrassed, but she hasn’t any better ideas. She’s on edge, waiting for the big outcry; for the thunder of feet on the stairs; for Sophie’s voice shouting that the phone’s been disembowelled. She’s taking a long time about it. Virginia stands still with her fingers round the whisky bottle and listens, but there’s nothing. Not a peep. She decides she won’t tidy the whisky away, after all; she’ll leave it out and have a final swig before they go. Other than that, the kitchen is done. Kettle emptied. Heater off. Table wiped. The place looks stark and flat, as if nothing has ever gone on here; as if nothing much has ever been felt, or thought, or done inside these clammy walls.

  Joe’s note is lying on the table. Virginia turns it round and adjusts the placement of the stone, so as to be sure he’ll notice his name straight away. Her fingertips linger on the corner of the page. Perhaps it’s not too late to soften her words? To deepen them a little? Even if she just crosses out Very best wishes and puts Love instead? She picks it up, but something passes over her face, like a shiver of wind across water, and she puts it down again. It’ll have to do as it is.

  Virginia takes another turn around the kitchen and begins to fancy that this silence is more than strange. It’s alarming. What if the child has taken it into her head to creep away? What if she’s slipped out of the front door while Virginia – foolish old woman – is pottering and wittering in the kitchen? She could be at Tollbury Point by now.

  Virginia shuffles into the hall, where the light is thick and yellow and clings like paste to the edges of things. (It’s been like that ever since the seventies, when she took it into her head to fit a hessian shade.) But Sophie is here, thank God. She’s here, standing on the bottom stair, peering through the window. There’s something unreal about her continued presence in the house, for which Virginia is inclined to blame her own nerves. Just at the moment Sophie looks less like a solid person and more like a loose assortment of shadows and lights. A ghost, in fact.

  ‘Sophie? Did you find the telephone?’ Virginia’s voice is as reedy as a child’s and she imagines, for a second, that the years have fallen away. She has to l
ook upwards, since Sophie is above her on the stair, and that reminds her of childhood too: always having to look up because you’re small; always being a little bit amusing, no matter the strength of your feelings. She pictures herself with a boyish body and brown hair and a red party dress, but at that point her imagination fails. The decay inside her bones and lungs is too insistent, and anyway she can see the white hairs hanging like cobwebs over her eyes.

  ‘The telephone?’ Sophie is pressing her face against the glass and staring into the night. ‘Oh no, not yet, I got side-tracked. Look – there’s a car parking up in your lane. I saw it bumping along as I was going upstairs, and now it’s stopped and there are people getting out. I think there are, anyway; it’s quite hard to tell with the lights on full beam.’

  ‘People?’ That’s the word that bothers Virginia and brings her, muttering and huffing, to the window. ‘Person’ would almost certainly mean Joe, but ‘people’? People don’t call at Salt Winds.

  The first thing Virginia sees, reflected in the glass, is a heart-shaped face with black hair and eyes, and she can’t help thinking how perfectly Sophie’s face would fit inside her own cupped hands. In the same breath she thinks of Mr Deering’s black satin hair, and she pictures clumps of it strewn across the sands tomorrow morning, all muddy and grainy and stinking of fish. But then the child catches her eye and says, ‘Look!’ and she’s forced to refocus on the scene beyond the window.

  The headlights shine like a dragon’s eyes, bright and unblinking, and she cannot stare them out. They don’t belong to Joe’s old heap of metal, that’s for sure. The car – or it might be a van – has stopped halfway along the lane, where its lights pick out bumpy bits of wall, and falling freckles of snow, and the cold, black gap where the old harbour steps start down to the marsh. There are people, just as Sophie said, wandering about like lost souls in the gloom, never straying far from the car. Virginia thinks there are two of them, though it’s hard to be sure: all she can really see is movement in the darkness and the occasional flash of a fur-trim, or a leather boot, when they pass in front of the headlights.

  If someone had placed a rock inside Virginia’s stomach, she could not feel more sick and heavy.

  ‘They’ve just taken a wrong turning,’ she says, with an airy flutter of her fingers. ‘They’ll have got lost on their way to a New Year party. It’s always happening.’

  Only it isn’t. It never happens. Nobody takes that turning by mistake because the entrance is concealed by brambles, the surface is more pot-hole than mud and there’s grass running all the way down the middle, tall enough to tickle the belly of Joe’s ancient Renault. He’s always moaning about it. He prefers to park at the top and walk, unless he’s loaded down with shopping.

  Virginia pulls on Sophie’s sleeve, but Sophie won’t be distracted. Her face and hands are pressing against the glass, as if to push the whole pane outwards, and a patch of condensation flowers and furls with her every breath.

  ‘What if it’s them?’ she says. ‘What if it’s my mum and dad?’

  ‘Wait! Don’t go outside! I want to show you something!’ Virginia thinks she’s never been so aware of her body’s dilapidation – of the papery husks that used to be bones, and the flaking rust that used to be fluid muscle – as she is now, when she tries to hurry. Up the stairs she goes, past the telephone’s hanging corpse, into her bedroom (no time for the light), fumble in a drawer for the book, then off again. She pounds the floorboards firmly enough with her stick, but she has to wait for her slippered feet to catch up, and that’s what slows the process down. BANG, flap, flap … BANG, flap, flap, all the way along the landing and down the stairs.

  ‘Look!’ She waves the book in Sophie’s face and its pages flutter like wings. ‘Never mind the car; I want to show you this.’

  Even now, when everything is rushing towards the end – even now, the book has the power to make her pause. She holds it in both hands, half forgetful of her own urgency, and turns it over for the hundred-thousandth time. It’s been round the world with her, but she’s looked after it well and you’d never guess it was published so many years ago. The cover has faded from red to coral pink, but apart from that it looks new: the pages are creamy, the woodcut prints sharp, and there are no rips or creases or stains. You’d think it had never been read.

  ‘The Witch-Princess and Other Stories, by J. Friedmann,’ she reads aloud. ‘Illustrated by F. L. Leonard.’

  ‘It can’t be them, though, can it?’ Sophie asks urgently, still transfixed by the headlights. ‘How could they possibly know I’d be here?’

  ‘Look at it. Isn’t it beautifully made?’

  Sophie glances absently in the direction of the book and glues her eyes to the window again. Virginia turns to the frontispiece – the picture of the Witch-Princess arriving at the end of the world – and traces her thumb over the wavy lines of the sea. The blocks of ink are strong and yet they’re delicate, echoing the warp and grain of the wood from which they were pressed. Virginia holds the volume out, pushing it into Sophie’s hands, obliging her to take it.

  ‘I’ve always thought it should say “by J. Friedmann and F. L. Leonard”, but Lorna wanted it like this, especially after he’d gone. She reckoned her illustrations were secondary; that it was Jozef’s book first and foremost.’ Virginia knows she’s gabbling, but she can’t help it. Somehow it matters that Sophie should hear all these things before the car starts moving towards the house. ‘The publishers were all for changing his surname to “Freeman” to make it sound less German, but of course Lorna wouldn’t have it. The whole thing almost fell through over that, but she stuck to her guns.’

  Something has got through to Sophie. She’s still watching the car, but she keeps darting glances at the book in her hands.

  ‘Lorna? Lorna, as in your mother? As in the woman in the photograph?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sophie leafs through to the next picture. She studies it properly this time, inch by inch, like someone hunting for clues.

  ‘So, you mean Lorna is the same person as F. L. Leonard? The artist who illustrated this book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The artist you worked for?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I told you that earlier; I’m sure I did. Leonard was her maiden name. Frances Lorna Leonard.’

  It’s Virginia’s turn to take a furtive look at the car. If it reverses down the lane and disappears into the night now, while the girl is distracted, then Virginia will be able to breathe again. Go, she wills it. Go. Why are those people lingering by the old harbour steps? What are they hoping for?

  ‘I don’t think you did tell me that.’ Sophie is as mild as ever as she hands the book back, but there’s a kind of mutiny in her sidelong glance. Silly old bat, she’s probably thinking, and Virginia begins to doubt herself; to doubt what the girl does and doesn’t know. She knows she’s a Deering, doesn’t she? Yes, she does, because it was she who first mentioned it, up in the attic. But does she know what ‘Deering’ means in this house? And does she know about the curlew’s skull?

  ‘You’re crying,’ Virginia observes. It isn’t as if Sophie is trying to hide it, either: she’s sniffing and wiping her cheeks with her cuffs, and can’t seem to decide whether to turn the corners of her mouth up or down. Why should the child weep over any of this? Has something touched the Deering conscience after all this time? Three generations on? But Sophie isn’t thinking about the book. She stopped thinking about it the moment she handed it back and returned to the window.

  ‘It is them,’ she stutters. ‘It’s my mum and dad. I never thought they’d guess, and then drive all this way to find me.’

  It’s obvious that Sophie’s going to break for the door and Virginia is about to seize her by the arm, but her sleeve is so mucky with tears and snot that she wavers. A moment later the girl has her hand on the latch and Virginia is grasping at thin air. It strikes her as a sad sight: her own veiny claws reaching with such eagerness and catching at nothing.

&
nbsp; ‘Don’t go!’ Virginia pleads, and by the tone of her voice you’d think she felt nothing but affection for the child. ‘You know what they’re like; they’ll invent a life for you. You were telling me all about it before, remember? Law degrees and Oxford and all the rest of it. There’ll be no art school if you go with them!’ Nor if you come with me, she might have added, but she pushes that observation aside for now.

  ‘They’re my mum and dad,’ Sophie argues weakly, one hand still on the door. With her other hand she rubs her eyes, like a toddler who’s just about had enough for one day.

  ‘They’re Deerings.’

  ‘I know they’re Deerings.’ Sophie shakes her head. ‘What d’you mean?’

  Virginia glances into the night. The headlights are jolting about and getting bigger; the people must have got back in the car, and now they’re driving towards the house. Perhaps they are just strangers who’ve lost their way and want to turn the car round.

  ‘D’you know what your great-granddad Max did?’

  ‘No.’ Sophie’s voice is small and her fingers are sliding off the latch. This is better; she’s paying attention at last.

  ‘He …’ The brutal truth – the specifics – are on the tip of her tongue, but Virginia catches Sophie’s eye and stops.

  ‘I’ll tell you what he did,’ she continues, haltingly. ‘He tried to break Lorna into tiny bits and fashion her into something new; something better suited to his tastes. He very nearly got his way, as well.’

  Sophie doesn’t move, but she’s taking it all in.

  ‘What stopped him?’

  There’s a question. Virginia waves the fairy-tale book, as if they’re in court and this is her evidence.

  ‘Lorna did. Eventually.’

  Sophie seems to think Virginia is offering her the book, and she comes forward to take it. She looks at it properly this time: at the names on the cover and the contents page and the picture of the Witch-Princess.