by Ann Swinfen
So absorbed was she in watching the seal that she found she had wandered on again without thinking, and was now almost at the foot of the headland. Toby was nowhere to be seen. She was suddenly afraid. There was something she ought to remember. Something that had happened here when she was a child. She tried to recall what had frightened her about this place, but could summon up nothing but the fear, and a kind of shrinking guilt.
‘Toby!’ she called, startled that her voice sounded so weak. ‘Toby, come here! Good dog!’
A movement over by the rock pools at the foot of the cliff caught the corner of her eye and she turned and ran forward.
‘Toby!’
It was indeed Toby, leaping delightedly about the edge of a deep rock pool, but he was not alone. An old woman was bent double over the pool, intent on the net she was using to fish cautiously in its depths. At the sound of Kate’s voice she straightened and stood up, holding the net out in front of her. Something was wriggling inside it.
Panic swept over Kate, turning her cold and then hot again. Yet it was nothing but an old woman, out for an early morning walk like herself. Pottering about in the rock pools like a child. Perhaps she was a bit simple.
But there was nothing simple in the bright dark eyes the woman turned on Kate. Strands of unkempt grey hair whipped in the wind, giving her the look of a witch, and her bare feet, gnarled as driftwood, gripped the stones at the edge of the pool.
Kate backed away instinctively, and dropped her length of seaweed. Then good manners reasserted themselves.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘I hope my dog isn’t bothering you.’
There was a claw waving through the meshes of the net, and she saw now that it was a crab the woman had caught. Quite a large one, at least six inches across.
‘Good morning,’ the woman answered gravely, and even in those two words Kate could detect a faint foreign tinge. ‘The dog, he is no trouble.’
The words came out slowly, as though she was reluctant to speak.
They stood hesitantly facing one another. Somehow Kate felt that the usual trite comments on the beauty of the day were inappropriate. The woman kept her eyes fixed calmly on Kate, but said nothing more. Kate whistled to Toby, then said awkwardly, as though she had to account for herself, ‘I must be getting back to make breakfast for the children.’
The woman nodded briefly, then turned away. She dropped the crab into a galvanised bucket half-filled with damp seaweed, and bent again over the pool, as if she had forgotten Kate’s existence. Kate began to retrace her steps towards the castle, oddly breathless, aware that her heart was racing. She was sure she had never seen the woman before, yet those dark eyes were compellingly familiar.
* * *
It is dark. There is no moon, and the only light comes from a few pocket torches carried by the big boys. One, a great hulking fisher lad who already works the nets on his father’s boat, is carrying a bundle of dry twigs tied together with tarred string. Kate can smell the tar, because the bundle is pushed up against her face. The boy has twisted her arm behind her back, and is hurrying her along. She tries to break free, but he jerks her arm higher, and she bites down on her bottom lip to stop herself crying out. She knows that if she makes the slightest sound of pain, they will torment her even more. In the dark she stumbles over the tussocks of grass on the dunes, and feels blood spring out and trickle down her legs. The boy jerks her upright again. He is breathing fast, with excitement and a kind of delight, and the rank smell of his sweat mingles with the smell of the tar. All around them the other boys and girls from the village crowd forward in silence. They are the bigger ones, all of them four or five years older than she, and she has spent much of her young life trying to keep out of their clutches.
* * *
Kate found Stephen in the kitchen, surrounded by spilt cornflakes, toast crumbs and sticky knives.
‘Sorry. I took Toby for a walk on the beach and I went further than I meant to. Did you manage to find everything?’
Stephen shrugged. ‘No sweat.’ He closed a textbook casually and shoved it into the huge black bag he used for books, sports gear, jazz and pop tapes, and almost everything else he had any interest in at the moment. Kate could barely lift it, but she poked it now with her toe.
‘Is that still full of dirty socks and sweatshirts?’
‘No. They’re in my room.’
‘Dumped on the floor?’
‘Sure.’
‘Not in the laundry basket in the bathroom?’
‘Sorry!’ he grinned at her cheekily. ‘You and Dad did say I needed to concentrate all my energies on getting my A Levels.’
‘That doesn’t mean you can’t stagger as far as the bathroom with your dirty clothes. After all,’ she added dryly, ‘I assume you do just occasionally cross the landing to the bathroom for other purposes.’
Stephen sidled toward the door. ‘Sorry, Mum. Got to go. The bus leaves in five minutes.’
Kate shook herself out of the curiously detached mood brought on by her walk. ‘Oh, no! Where’s Roz? Has she had breakfast?’ She sprang towards the hall.
‘Roz! The bus goes in five minutes!’
The front door slammed behind Stephen.
Roz lay curled deep in her bedclothes, one thin arm flung out over her duvet. Kate shook her by the shoulder.
‘Get up, lazy-bones, you’re going to miss the bus!’
Roz groaned and turned over. A teenage novel with a salacious cover slid from the bedclothes to the floor.
‘How late were you reading last night?’ Kate could feel her irritation rising. ‘Get up, will you? Surely you’re old enough to get up in the morning on your own! What would you do if I was still working?’
Her younger daughter sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. Kate looked at her with a mixture of affection and annoyance, in which the latter was rapidly gaining the upper hand.
‘If you’re downstairs in ten minutes flat, I’ll drive you in. Any later, and you can catch the next bus and get a detention.’
A quarter of an hour later they were driving up the coast in Kate’s Peugeot. The corporation bus followed a roundabout route through several villages, and with reasonable luck they would reach the secondary school eight miles away in Charlborough just ahead of it.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ said Roz. She was cradling a bowl of her home-made muesli and spooning it up as they drove. She had been a vegetarian for three years now, and mistrusted most ready-made foods. At the beginning of every month she concocted a batch of this mixture – dried fruits and nuts and the flakes of various grains. By the end of the month she would complain that the amount left in the glass storage jar was lower than it should be. Kate knew that Stephen secretly helped himself to it when Roz wasn’t around, but she hadn’t betrayed him. He considered his younger sister’s eating habits eccentric and ostentatious, and didn’t want to be suspected of sharing her tastes.
‘Orchestra this afternoon, isn’t it?’
‘Mmm.’
‘When will you hear about the music camp in Wales?’
‘Mr Elliot said, within the next two weeks.’
‘Don’t let thinking about it put you off your GCSEs.’
Roz looked at her pityingly. ‘Of course not. I don’t care that much. I’m only going if Angie and Bill and Sandy are accepted too.’
‘I’m glad you’ve made friends here so quickly.’
Roz shrugged and pitched her bowl more or less accurately over on to the back seat. Then she pushed her hands into her pockets and stared moodily out of the window.
‘They’re all right, I guess. But I miss my mates from London. And there’s so little to do in this place. It’s hopeless trying to get to Charlborough by bus, and there’s nothing in the village – no cinemas, no discos, not even a decent café.’
Kate chuckled. ‘There’s always the Castle Café.’
‘Give us a break, Mum. It’s antediluvian.’
‘I remember when they first did it up. I came back for the
summer holidays when I was fifteen, and it was transformed. Before that it was a fisherman’s pub, all ancient dark wood and the smell of beer wafting out through the door. They’d wallpapered it with cream paper covered with red and blue zigzags, and filled it with Formica-topped tables and tubular steel chairs. There was an espresso coffee machine and a jukebox with rock-and-roll records. We thought we were in heaven. There really was nothing for teenagers before that. It must have been – what? –1963?’
‘Have you been in there since we moved up here?’ Roz asked, grinning.
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘As I said. Antediluvian. It’s still got the zigzag paper and the sixties furniture. And an ancient old espresso machine that mostly doesn’t work. It’s like a time capsule.’
‘Really?’ Kate laughed. ‘I must go and have a look. I can’t believe they haven’t redecorated in over thirty years.’
‘Granny’s café is even more ancient.’
‘That’s true enough. Now that really is a time capsule.’
Kate’s mother, Millicent Cartington, was one of a group of formidable matrons in the village who ran the bowling club, the bridge club and the WI. Since her teens, Kate had privately thought of them as the Dunmouth Mafia. They gathered every morning for coffee in the ancient and decorous tea-rooms behind Gamage and Simon’s bakery, where the tables were still covered each morning with starched white cloths, and a generous selection of cream cakes arrived on a three-tier silver-plated cake stand. Woe betide any member of the public who unwittingly sat at one of the tables which had belonged to these powerful ladies for the last fifty years, or who dared to light a cigarette, although of course the tea-room did not demean itself to the extent of displaying a No Smoking notice.
‘Look, there’s the bus, just behind us.’ Kate pulled in beside the school gate. ‘You’ll be in time.’
‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘I’m not prepared to do this every day, you know. You’re really going to have to make more of an effort to get up in the morning.’
‘Sure.’ Roz was climbing out of the car with her bag and violin case, looking for her friends and not listening.
* * *
At the doctor’s surgery in Sopron, the receptionist unlocked the front door and let in the first of the patients. The house was a modern one, painted a delicate lime green with white ornamental plasterwork framing the windows and roofed with fish-scale tiles of russet terracotta. In the waiting room it was cool and pleasant after the heat outside. The Austrian mother gave her name to the receptionist and settled down in a comfortable chair with her toddler on her lap. She had been driving over the border to attend Dr Rudnay’s clinic from the time she had first found that she was pregnant. Treatment was far cheaper here than it was in Austria, and Dr Rudnay was an excellent doctor, particularly good with children. The drive took less than an hour, and she could do some shopping afterwards. The price of goods, too, was lower in Sopron.
In his consulting room István Rudnay glanced over the case files his nurse had put ready for him. It was going to be a busy day. Outside the window the acacias were in full leaf, shading the house from the sun. It was a pleasant enough spot, but he would rather be back in his grandmother’s house, where he had grown up, with the river flowing past the end of the garden, promising adventure. As a boy he had always imagined that one day he would step into a boat of his own and go floating away down the river, borne by the current towards the distant sea. Instead, here he was, tied to his practice and his patients, and no more likely to follow his wild daydreams than he was to fly to the moon.
He sighed and pressed the button on the intercom. ‘Show in the first patient, please, Miss Huszka.’
* * *
Kate drove home slowly. The weather was truly beautiful. The young leaves on the trees shone gold-green in the sun, and the sky was almost cloudless. Only out on the horizon did a low streak of cloud mark where the sky blurred into the sea. She savoured the drive, although she had meant what she said to Roz. She was not going to turn herself into the children’s chauffeur. In London the whole family had got up at the same time, rushing to use the one bathroom, running up and down the narrow staircase in the small terrace house. Noises reverberated from room to room. If you sneezed in the fourth-floor attic bedroom, it could be heard in the basement kitchen. Breakfast had been a free-for-all, and the dishes were piled up in the sink for the evening as they all left together to catch their various tubes and buses. The house had been noisy and claustrophobic, but in her busy life she had had no time and no silences to be filled by her own sombre thoughts.
Kate had loved her work with dyslexic children. Helping them break through the invisible barriers that enclosed them was the most rewarding thing she had ever done in her life. But now she had stopped working she realised how tired she must have become recently. Despite the stresses of the move, and her ambivalent feelings about returning to Dunmouth, she had begun to feel, during the last weeks, that a certain tightness in her muscles was beginning to relax. She had thought she would enjoy being domestic for a while at least, and began to cosset the children – making their beds, picking up their dirty clothes from wherever they were strewn, doing the washing-up without assistance. After years of discipline, Stephen and Roz were taking advantage of it. Next month Beccy would be home from university for the summer, after the first year of her degree in politics and law. Kate must impose some house rules again before then. It was difficult not to turn into a full-time house slave if you weren’t working yourself.
Somehow it had seemed easier these last weeks just to drift around, doing the housework. Occasionally she astonished herself by falling asleep after lunch. Sitting down for a brief break with a book, she would find her eyelids drooping, then wake perhaps as much as an hour and a half later with a stiff neck and a dry mouth. Around her the big empty house seemed dead, its emptiness mockingly emphasised by the deep ticking of the grandfather clock. The loneliness and frustration of her life sometimes rose up like an engulfing tide around her and in these black moods her unease grew at the distance that had widened between herself and Tom. In London she had not allowed herself to think about it.
Perhaps she should try to find some teaching work in Charlborough; then she could go in with Stephen and Roz in the morning. If there wasn’t a vacancy for a special needs teacher, perhaps she might be able to offer her original subjects, French and German. She turned left off the main road at the signpost to Dunmouth, and carried on past the end of the drive to Craigfast House. She might as well go into the village and do the shopping now.
Not that there is any chance of teaching until the autumn, she thought, as she parked the car by the harbour. And I need something now, to pull myself together.
The triple row of fishermen’s cottages which had formed the original village had undergone some changes over the last couple of centuries. The first road, Harbour Walk, immediately facing the water, was still nearly intact – apart from the original cottages it held only the fishermen’s church, two pubs and one larger house which had been converted into a residential home for the elderly. A glassed-in extension had been added to this on the seafront side, forming a lounge where the old people could sit all day overlooking the sea and the activity of the harbour.
The next parallel road, Fisher Gate, contained a few businesses – a bicycle repair shop, a Chinese takeaway, a fish and chip shop and a launderette – but the main shopping street was the third one, St Magnus Street. Here the ground floors of a group of buildings in the centre of the village held independent shops with flats above – butcher, newsagent, grocery, two bakeries, greengrocer – with a sprinkling of building societies and two banks. No supermarket had yet arrived. Having missed the earlier heedless building boom, when the old houses would have been knocked down without a second thought, the major chains were unlikely to try to set up shop here now. There was talk of an out-of-town hypermarket near Charlborough, and the local shopkeepers were already worried about the harm
it might do to their businesses.
To the north of St Magnus Street the ground began to rise, and here roomy houses had been built by prosperous Victorians, looking out over the roofs of the fishermen’s cottages towards the Dun. Nowadays, as when they were built, they were mostly occupied by people who worked in Charlborough, with a scattering of local professionals – doctors and solicitors, one chartered accountant. Dunmouth no longer had a large fishing fleet, as it had in its heyday. The dozen or so families still earning their living from fishing occupied the harbour-front cottages. The remaining cottages either stood empty or had been modernised with varying degrees of care and judgement.
As she walked back to the car along Jetty Lane with two heavy bags of groceries, Kate saw that someone seemed to be working on the derelict cottage at the corner of Harbour Walk and Jetty Lane. When they had first moved to Dunmouth she had noticed its continuing state of disrepair. There were slates missing from the roof, with a buddleia rooted in one of the gaps, and the front gutter dangled down at an angle across one of the windows. Like all of the oldest cottages on the foreshore it consisted of a single storey with a steeply pitched roof, where there was a loft which had provided storage space and a sleeping place for the children reached by a ladder. Downstairs there would be two rooms. One, the kitchen, combined all the functions of kitchen, dining room and sitting room, and in one corner would have a box bed for the parents. The other room, the parlour, always contained the best furniture, shiny with sticky varnish, with a fringed cloth on the mantelpiece, stiff photographs of husbands and sons lost at sea, and a ponderously ticking clock, wound every Saturday night. This parlour would be used to entertain the vicar or distant relatives. And, as the generations passed, the dead lay quietly here before burial.