by Jane Gardam
‘I never saw a child. There’s no child out there. The only child is here,’ and he went over and tapped the Renoir head. ‘Treacle sponge,’ he said.
‘There is a child in the garden, Edwin. Open the windows and call her.’
‘There is a child in the garden,’ said Drinkwater, leaning close to the painting, ‘for ever in the garden. A fat meringue of a child, an éclair, profiterole, spun sugar and strawberry jam child. In a French garden. Thirty years ago. Not appealing. Now don’t offer me it for Christsake. I don’t want it.’
‘I’m not talking about the picture. Edwin—please. Please . . . She’s in the garden now. She must come in.’
‘But she’d drown. She’d drown. Why should she be running about in the garden now? There’s nobody in the garden now—not if they’re in their right mind.’ He peered at the picture and said, ‘No more than there’s anyone here.’
‘She looked half-drowned,’ said Rosalie, and felt a thundering and thumping in her chest, an awkward blundering beat and found she couldn’t breathe easily. There was a terrible pain. When after a long time it passed she found—and it gave her more surprise than the pain which she had after all had sometimes before—she found that she was beginning to weep. As Drinkwater moved out of sight she got confused. ‘Giles,’ she called. The wounded Captain would have known what to do. He had understood her. Oh, the dreadful, shouting woman.
Yet he had gone away. He had let the shouting woman take him away. Suddenly a dazzlingly clear, almost luminous picture, like a picture at the edge of sleep, was in her head—the yattering little woman wrapping the wounded Captain in a rug, settling him in the back of a long, easy-looking motor car. Bobbing and frilly she bustled about. ‘So kaind. So most awfully kaind’—and the car crackling slowly down the gravel drive and the Captain’s head not once, not once, turning to look back as the car moved out past the lodge and through the gates and away south forever.
Standing back at the gate to allow the long car to pass had been Ellie. Ellie coming again—after quite an absence—to visit Charles, waving happily at Charles who went thankfully running to meet her, leaping down the steps where they had all been gathered to say good-bye, leaping, running, calling to Ellie who had come running forward to him.
Which was when I began to hate Ellie.
‘Edwin,’ she said, ‘is there a desk?’
‘Desk?’
‘A little desk. Davenport. Somewhere about in the room.’
There were bumps and crashes. ‘No.’
‘Mother’s desk. It must still be somewhere.’
‘There’s a desk. Yes—a desk. Sort of davenport thing I’d say. Behind the screen with all the jolly old water-slops.’
‘Could you get a piece of paper—there should be pens . . . ’ The rain streamed down the curtain. Far away a second lot of rockets sounded.
‘Ha!’ said Drinkwater. ‘You were right.’
The pain closed over Rosalie’s chest again, now like a fist. Drinkwater scuffled. ‘A pretty pen,’ he said, ‘here in the little side drawer. Pretty paper. Thick as cloth. Do you feel like writing a letter then, Rosalie?’
‘Write,’ she said with difficulty. ‘Write “For Ellie.”’
He wrote slowly, sitting at the davenport among the medicine bottles and pillboxes, bed-pan and feeding cups and wrinkled damp flannels. The top of the davenport sloped. Its panel of old gold leather was uneven and scarred and the pen had a rusty nib, but he wrote in beautiful copper-plate with a mixture of spit and black dust from the misted brass and glass inkwell.
Rosalie was silent and he put his bearded face round the screen. His eyes grew rounder at her stillness and what looked like a dark little metal claw which clutched the sheet. ‘On the picture,’ however she said clearly. ‘Put it on the picture. “For Ellie.”’
‘Ellie who?’
‘For . . . ’ There was such a pause that Drinkwater’s mind wandered. The wind and the rain, he thought, the rockets and the storm. Child in the garden. Ridiculous, child in the garden. Not likely in the least. Then he too seemed to see a child run across the wild wet garden, very small like a blown leaf.
‘Put “For Ellie”,’ said Rosalie,’ ‘“the child who visits the garden”.’
‘Well, maybe, maybe not,’ said Drinkwater and wrote, ‘For Ellie—the child who visits the garden’, and he propped the note on the Renoir. ‘For all we know there may be two or three of them,’ he said, and turned and patted Rosalie’s hand. It was not now clutched like a claw but still, and she was looking quietly and steadily out through the open window.
‘Speak to Booth,’ he said. ‘Get that filthy fool Booth. Witnesses. Notes and legacies no good without witnesses. I’m no witness. Mad as a hare. Or that’s what they think. Dare say they’re right.’
The Chaplain bounced in through the windows shaking an umbrella. ‘Good God, Drinkwater, shut these.’
‘Likes them open.’ Drinkwater was red in the face. ‘Can’t hear meself speak.’ Tears were in his eyes and he was shouting.
‘Dare say not. Calm down, man. What’s all this! What’s this document on the picture? Now then what have the two of you been up to? What have you been up to, Mrs Frayling?’
Then after a moment by the bed he turned and said to Drinkwater, ‘All right, Edwin. All right, old chap. Don’t cry. Go and get Booth.’
24.
And then,’ said Binkie, buttering fish-paste rolls and crossing her ankles which stuck out of old ARP trousers, ‘and then,’ raising her voice against the sea-gulls, ‘your father and one of his friends rushed to the lifeboat house, where the doors were just opening and the men pushing it out. Your father wasn’t a lifeboatman—his friend may have been, I think. He was a bit of everything, Mr Bezeer—your father was only a bank manager. But he was very, very brave. He insisted, insisted on going aboard the boat. He kept shouting and everyone said that it wasn’t a bit like him. He never showed his feelings except in church—he was the other way round from most of us—he kept on shouting, “It is my daughter, my daughter, on the rocks.” No prayers—just that.’
‘Didn’t the lifeboatmen . . . ’ Terence paused. Binkie passed him a fish-paste roll and he opened his mouth to bite it and then put it down on the grass. Eating rolls as you hear details for the first time of the death of your father seemed bad. Even if you had never known him.
‘Is somethin’ wrong with it?’ asked Binkie. ‘Fish paste?’
‘No—just while you were telling me, about . . . well, how he drowned.’ His younger brother Alfred munched on. Binkie said, ‘Alfred doesn’t mind.’
‘You shouldn’t have told him it was fish,’ said Alfred.
‘Shut up,’ said Terence. ‘What I mean is—well, didn’t the lifeboatmen just sort of kick him out of the way? I mean they wouldn’t be allowed to let just anyone in. Was he huge?’
‘He was a very small man, a neat little man. Rather as you will be, Terence. I never knew him of course. I only saw him sometimes from a distance preaching on the sands. A very small man, but with great power. He gathered crowds, you know. I always imagine him to have been something rather like St Paul.’
‘Was he a nutter?’ asked the younger brother, taking a third roll. ‘They say he was a nutter.’ He was a tall boy, much bigger than his brother though over eleven months younger.
‘He believed in his Mission,’ said Binkie. ‘At home I understand he was very silent. But the story goes that he became frantic, frantic at the lifeboat house and somehow got on board. And of course, knowing nothing about ships and storms, he was the one swept off and drowned. So was the friend, poor Mr Bezeer. The lifeboatman. But he had been gassed.’
‘Gassed! On the lifeboat?’ Binkie gave Alfred a long glare.
‘That doesn’t sound much like St Paul anyway,’ said Terence. ‘St Paul told the sailors what to do.’
‘Perhaps my father tried to,’ said Alfred. ‘Maybe he started bossing and they didn’t like it. Maybe they just went swoosh.’
Binkie looked at the pair of them and then leaned back against the monument. It was a squat little black monument with the names of the drowned men cut in shiny new gold letters. The grass had not yet grown up around it again, like a new grave, and the sandy soil was trampled about by yesterday’s ceremony.
It had been called an unveiling though Mabel Danby and the Chaplain who had given the tea afterwards and been a great support all day had said that this was ridiculous. You cannot unveil a stump. ‘Stumps,’ had said Nurse Booth, who had turned up unexpectedly and made herself very agreeable—she had been dressed in khaki with the insignia of a nursing field marshal—‘Stumps cannot be curtained.’ Similar memorials in the Western Desert, she had said, had always been established by the firing of cannon, and Alfred who had said that he didn’t see how you could have monuments to shipwrecks in the Western Desert had been ignored, Booth only glaring at him now and then during the singing of ‘For those in Peril’ by the Eastkirk branch of the British Legion, the RNLI, the Mayor and corporation, a man with a large head who clinked a bag and some members of ever-surviving Turner Street.
The whole occasion had in fact been difficult from start to finish, not least because after talking of the monument for three years after the event, the War had come and put if off for another six, and the cliff-top declared out of bounds for other, and bigger potential shipwrecks. Now, two more years later, the thing had been done at last in a rush, for development was threatened along the cliffs—and big things promised to restore the coastline below them. Already the Hall woods had gone and a maze of roads and little pink houses was growing to waist height all over what had been the Valley Gardens and the swell of the old great lawns. There was to be a funfair where the Hall had stood. Miles of black barbed wire were being cleared from the beaches below and some soldiers even as Binkie and Terence and Alfred picnicked were completing the demolition of the pier which had been put out of action eight years before to deter invaders. Alfred turned on his stomach now and watched a large piece of pier—part of a pretty wooden theatre—tilt and flap. Some frail cries came up from below and the whole thing slid down. Big light flakes of wood fell into the sea.
‘Why are they doing it, Auntie Binkie?’
‘Binkie,’ she said, ‘just Binkie. I’m not your aunt. I am a family friend. As a family friend I thought you should come to the unveiling and as a family friend I am giving you a picnic and having you to stay.’
‘I always thought you were Margaret’s aunt.’
‘If I were Margaret’s aunt I would be your aunt. But I knew Margaret when she was only eight. You are her brothers. I am nobody’s aunt.’
‘Before she nearly got drowned? You knew her?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must have been pleased she hadn’t got drowned?’
‘Yes.’
‘In fact I expect it was quite a shock she hadn’t got drowned, wasn’t it? When even lifeboatmen did?’
‘Yes.’
‘She climbed the cliff, didn’t she? This cliff.’ Terence wormed to the edge of it and looked over. ‘Crikey!’ Alfred worming up beside him said, ‘I could of. Couldn’t you?’
‘Don’t know. She’s funny, Margaret. She looks too sort of quiet to climb a thing like this.’
‘You don’t have to be noisy to climb cliffs. She got cut off by the tide so she just had to. She’s awfully dreamy, Margaret. But she can do things sometimes.’
‘Binkie’—Terence turned round—‘Binkie, what exactly happened? That friend, the one who got drowned too. With the funny wife who came to unveil the monument?’
‘Here comes Margaret,’ said Binkie. The three of them watched an uncertain-looking girl of twenty wandering about in the foundations of the new house below where the cliff sloped down inland to what had been the woods. ‘Funny woman? You mean Mrs Bezeer? Well, she was just the wife of Mr Bezeer. He had a very important sort of name, Mr Bezeer-Iremonger, and well, he was a little . . . just a little . . . ’
‘His wife was a little, too,’ said Alfred. Both boys rolled about snorting on the grass. Although so different in character and appearance, so that it was forever being said that nobody would ever take them for brothers and was it not interesting how posthumous children so seldom resembled the father—although they were so different, Terence and Alfred got on very well.
‘Mrs Bezeer,’ said Binkie sternly, ‘had a terrible life. Terrible. One must be very sorry for Mrs Bezeer. And tolerant.’
‘How pompous old Binkie is,’ Margaret thought, coming up towards them and flopping down on the grass. ‘She’s got portentous. I suppose you . . . ’
‘Paste sandwich, Margaret?’ Binkie looked over her glasses. ‘Where’ve you been? We’ve been talking about Mrs Bezeer and her sad life.’
‘Thanks. Why sad? She’s a dreadful woman, isn’t she? She flutters and shrieks and fusses. She’s all bangles. Says “fraightfully”. She’s all over the place.’
‘So would you be if you’d been married to Mr Bezeer. Now he was all over the place. Literally. Don’t you remember him? All over the place. Round every corner. Cropped up everywhere.’
‘I think he once told me to get off a seat,’ said Margaret. ‘Something about hating me. Hating everything. He dribbled or something.’
‘He grew to dribble. Not at first. He was shell-shocked you know. In the First War. He was still, even after his injuries, the most delightful, most peaceful sort of man at first, but in time quite destroyed. He was sent up here to recover. He was a patient as a matter of fact at the Hall when I was a girl. Where I grew up. Only the lodge left now. I remember him. He didn’t dribble then. He sat all day on the terrace and stared into space. He was very good-looking. I was a bit in love with him. He was not unlike’—she busied herself with Thermos flasks—‘not unlike Father Carter.’
‘What happened after that,’ Margaret asked, sipping China tea, ‘exactly?’
‘I don’t quite know.’
‘Charles would say, “Then what happened inexactly.”’
‘I don’t know inexactly. Something must have done. He got much worse. My mother used to sit with him on the terrace sometimes all day long but they hardly spoke. Mother was always a bit frightening. You know—very tall. Like old Queen Mary. The army nurses used to say she used to scare him. It was rather awful. Then Mrs Bezeer came one day to take him home—such a pretty little thing. Just the same as she is now and it’s over twenty-five years. Very brave and jolly and affectionate—a bit chatty, but a good little woman. He hardly seemed to know she was even there. He looked perfectly normal—well, very much so. A lovely, romantic Galahad sort of face—but he never said one word. The day she got him—Mrs Bezeer—into the car to take him back to Surrey—she was a Guildford woman, I believe—he just stared straight in front of him. My mother and all of us were on the steps. He never even said good-bye. Mrs Bezeer turned to thank Mother, but Mother—well of course, Mother was a snob. She was a bit of a joke really but nobody minded. She belonged to the past. But, oh yes—a fearful snob. I don’t think she had ever heard of Guildford and she turned away and stood with her back to us all until the car passed. I must say Mrs Bezeer took it very well. But there was a frightful atmosphere.’
‘I expect she was very grateful really,’ said Terence.
‘Probably the man just couldn’t feel able to say the right thing,’ said Alfred. ‘People aren’t.’
‘You may be right,’ said Binkie. ‘Your mother said . . . well, your mother was just a girl. She used to come up to see us a good deal. She said—she was standing at the gate that day. She hadn’t been to see us for some time. The car passed her with the Bezeers in it—your mother, Ellie, said that Mrs Bezeer was talking very fast and determinedly and nod-nodding at the Captain—he was a Captain, I’ve just remembered—at Captain Bezeer, and Captain—it was Miles—Miles no Giles Bezeer was quite, quite silent, but he was crying. Crying—tears running all down his face. And a Captain!’
‘But he went to Surrey,’
said Terence after a bit. Margaret put her fingers in the gold lettering of the stump and felt the name of Giles Bezeer-Iremonger whom she had killed.
‘Well,’ said Binkie, ‘a few years later he reappeared in the town. Though he looked quite different. He was all alone. He took lodgings somewhere, not near the Hall, nearer where you all lived—Seaview Villas way. We were not here then—Charles and I moved away for a time. We didn’t move back until you were about eight years old, Margaret. You will remember. People do tend to move back here—and our mother was dying by then. By the time we came back and bought the house in Dene Close, there was this funny, dirty quite old-looking man roaming about. I sometimes thought he reminded me of someone, but he was very changed and the name didn’t ring a bell. Perhaps I’d only heard of him as “the Captain” when I was a girl. He used to push a little cart about the sands and he haunted all the churches. He gathered wood and seacoal. The wife had quite vanished. Then your father took him in hand and got him singing.’
‘Singing?’ said Alfred. Terence rolled.
‘Yes. Hymns. He grew very devout. I don’t think there was a religion here he didn’t take up at one time or another.’
Sounds as if everyone was a bit potty round here,’ said Terence, ‘in those days. They’re not so potty now are they? Maybe this last war cleared the air a bit.’
‘Did he never go back to the Hall?’ Alfred chewed grass.
‘I don’t think so. But he used to wander about the woods sometimes. Yes—I think he may have done odd jobs there, even. But Mother grew very strange, you know. Not many people went back to see her. I don’t think they met again.’
‘The Hall’s gone now,’ said Margaret, ‘I’ve been to see. They’re going to build over where the woods were. A new town or something. They’ve kept the lodge though.’
‘Yes.’ Binkie and Margaret smiled at each other. Binkie said, ‘And put up the blue plaque.’
‘“Edwin Drinkwater, painter, at one time lived near this house.”’
‘I wish you’d known him, Margaret.’