by Ann Swinfen
‘If you were out all day on Saturday puppy-hunting, I suppose you missed the excitement.’
‘What excitement?’
‘A little boy of eight – he’s in Lucy’s class at school – was swept out to sea. I can’t think what his parents were thinking of, letting him play on the estuary in one of those inflatable boats that are meant for swimming pools. The tide was on the ebb, and you know what it’s like, with the river current and the tide both running. In minutes he was swept right out beyond the mouth of the river and into the shipping channel.’
‘What happened?’
‘They launched the lifeboat, of course, but before they had it manned and under way, that chap from the water sports centre, Harry Stannard, got on one of those awful jet bikes and reached the child first. I must say I’ve always disliked jet bikes in the past, with the noise they make, but I feel differently about them now.’
‘The little boy – he was all right?’
‘Fine. A bit cold and frightened, though not as frightened as his parents. The odd thing was that it should have been Harry Stannard.’
Kate looked at her enquiringly.
‘Didn’t you know?’ said Linda. ‘He’s the son of Eddie Stannard, who was coxswain of the lifeboat which was lost with all hands in ‘78. Grandson of that old devil who lives in Barometer Cottage. Odd sort of family. Dad used to say that they always had to be leaders of the pack amongst the lads in Dunmouth – always a bit wild, but brave as well.’
‘I’ve met the old man. I didn’t realise Harry was his grandson.’
‘Ed Stannard brought Harry up after his father was drowned. His mother had gone off with a lorry driver from one of the seafood wholesalers, when Harry was two. Ed’s a difficult man. He’s always had a chip on his shoulder because he was declared unfit to serve in the navy during the war. He’d had rheumatic fever, I think. Dad said he went a bit daft afterwards.’
Linda sipped her tea thoughtfully, and fed Toby another biscuit.
‘Ever since Chris came up with those newspaper cuttings, I’ve been wondering... I bet Ed was behind those attacks on Sofia’s cottage during the war. It would be just like him to jump to the conclusion that they were German spies. He’s paranoid about foreigners.’
Kate was staring at her. Things seemed to be clicking together in her head.
‘Ed Stannard would be about the same age as our parents, wouldn’t he?’
‘Yes, or a bit older.’
‘So Eddie Stannard was our age?’
Linda looked at her curiously. ‘Surely you remember Eddie Stannard? He was the ringleader of that gang of older boys and girls who used to bully you. Do you really not remember?’
A face swam into Kate’s memory. Was it Eddie? Or was she remembering Harry, from the sports centre?
‘And he was drowned, going out in that terrible storm, to save people from a ship drifting in the North Sea?’
‘Yes.’ Linda looked at her in concern. ‘Are you all right? You’ve gone as white as paper. Have some more tea.’
Kate accepted the mug absently. ‘I was just remembering something.’
But it wasn’t a memory, not really, she thought. Just images floating in her head.
Three customers came into the shop then, and Kate slipped away, leaving Linda to attend to them. She walked along the harbour front and paused to look at the lifeboat station and Barometer Cottage, with the fishermen’s church just beyond. Was there some clue here to her nightmares? Her mother must have been about nineteen when the first attacks on Sofia’s cottage took place. Ed Stannard, the old man in Barometer Cottage, must have been older. He was already a married man with a son. How had Millicent come to be involved with what Howard had called the ‘bad business’ at the cottage? She didn’t come from one of the fisher families, but from snobbish, middle-class Castle Terrace, and in the Dunmouth of those days the social dividing lines were much more rigid than they were now. If Millicent had been caught up – accidentally or otherwise – in the tormenting of the Hungarians which had ended in Eva’s death, it would explain her anxiety ever since to dissociate herself from Ed Stannard and his like. Probably they had never seriously meant to hurt the women. If Eva had not already been ill, the blow on the head might not have killed her.
Kate walked on, and paused again in front of the plaque on the side of the lifeboat station. It was difficult to sort out her own jumble of feelings. If Eddie Stannard was the boy who had been forcing Kate along with her arm twisted up her back on that night – that night which came back to haunt her with the smell of burning and the howls of the trapped dog – could he really be the coxswain who drowned twenty years later?
She would have to face her parents. For too long she had been running away from the past. Millicent must be made to explain the events at the cottage in 1944. And surely they must know something about what had happened to Kate in her childhood? Had she managed to hide the terrors of that night successfully from them even then? As she now seemed to have buried the memory so deep that she could not recapture it without help? She needed someone who had been an adult at the time.
Tonight she would tackle Tom about their future. Later, when she felt strong enough, she would tackle her parents.
She had reached the three Georgian houses at the end of Harbour Walk. Toby sat down heavily on the pavement and scratched his ear, looking at her to detect where their walk was going from here. The largest house, she saw, was still for sale. The board was leaning over even further now, and was so swathed with weeds and stained with rain that it was almost illegible. She heaved the sign up out of the tangled growth and made out the name of a local Dunmouth solicitor, located in St Magnus Street, who was acting for the owners. Dunmouth had no estate agent.
‘I wonder,’ said Kate to herself, gazing up at the house. It was comfortable-looking but shabby, badly in need of affection and brisk care. ‘I wonder.’
Mr Tarbert, in the solicitor’s office, was busy but obliging. He knew Kate’s family. He was quite happy to give her the keys of the house and let her go off to examine it on her own.
‘It’s been standing empty for nearly two years,’ he said frankly, ‘and it needs a lot of decorating. But you’ll find that the essentials are sound – the roof, the wiring and plumbing. And to be honest, Mrs Milburn, I think you’ll find my clients will accept any reasonable offer. They had to move to Bristol two years ago and they’ve been paying two mortgages all that time. I’m sure we could come to some satisfactory arrangement.’
He did not, Kate noticed, show any sign of surprise that the new owners of Craigfast House should be showing an interest in a much less desirable property. As she had known all her life, it was difficult to keep a secret in Dunmouth. The entire village had probably heard about Tom’s redundancy before she had even arrived home from Hungary.
She walked back along the seafront to the house. Toby sniffed with interest at the door frame as she turned the key in the lock and stood for a moment with her hand on the handle. Under the weather-beaten paint was a solid six-panelled door. It moved smoothly on its original hinges, and admitted her to the central hall of the house. Toby followed her inside, his nails clicking on the bare boards. The layout was very simple. On the ground floor were four rooms leading off the hall, one in each corner of the house. Behind the back room on the right a passage led to a collection of small rooms which would once have been pantries and larders but which appeared to have been used in recent years as junk rooms, not cleared out by the previous owners. From the hall a broad staircase led up to an identical arrangement of rooms above, with four bedrooms leading off the landing and a bathroom – plain but modern – located over the pantries. A narrow staircase behind a door led up to the top floor, which held two attic rooms with dormer windows. The house was more roomy than it appeared from the outside.
Kate stood at the window of one of the front rooms upstairs and looked out at the river. The harbour was to her left, and beyond it she could see the castle on the promon
tory which formed one wing of the harbour. To the right past this last house in Harbour Walk the road petered out into a grassy track which served as a foot-path and cycle track along the edge of the river. She could hear the raucous calls of the gulls, and straight in front of the house half a dozen swans were clustered in a curve of the shore. The house smelled empty, but not damp, and it seemed to be waiting, with breath held, for her to pass judgement. She turned around and smiled at the room. She knew this would be a friendly house.
Out at the back of the house was a jungle. There might have been a garden once, but now it seemed to have become a communal rubbish tip for Dunmouth. Looking down from one of the back bedrooms she could see rusty tins and bicycle wheels, plastic bottles, broken pieces of concrete slabs and torn carrier bags. The wall on to Fish Lane at the back was low, and it was clear that many people found it convenient to toss their rubbish over into the garden of the empty house. Still, a skip and a few days’ hard work would take care of that.
Suddenly there rose before her eyes a picture of Szentmargit, a village much poorer than Dunmouth, without a scrap of rubbish in sight. Why have we become so dirty in our habits in this country? she wondered. Is it because we are always expecting someone else to come along and clean up after us? Szentmargit was immaculate, apart from the dust blowing from the unmade streets. But at least that was just earth, not this kind of litter. In Budapest, she remembered, there had been an army of old men sweeping the streets and pavements with old-fashioned whisk brooms and capturing any stray scraps in long-handled dustpans. They moved with dignity about the city, taking a pride in keeping it clean.
As she pulled the front door of the house closed behind her, and checked that the lock had engaged, she gave the handle a surreptitious pat. ‘I’ll be back,’ she promised.
* * *
‘I’ve bought a boat.’ Tom was staring at her defiantly, like a guilty child caught in a misdemeanour.
His words made no sense. They were sitting in the drawing room of Craigfast House beside the first open fire of the autumn. Toby and Sarah lay sprawled in front of it, warming their stomachs. Stephen had gone out with Mick to a football match, so Kate had judged that it was at last time to have matters out with Tom. No money had been paid into the bank account since the last salary payment at the end of August, more than two months ago. Kate had just explained to him that she had received a phone call during the afternoon with an offer of two days’ language teaching a week at Charlborough High, standing in for the regular teacher during maternity leave. She would start at the beginning of December and continue until Easter. It wouldn’t mean a lot of money, but it was something. Whenever, during recent weeks, she had asked Tom if he had sorted out the matter of unemployment benefit, he avoided her eye and changed the subject. She had thought he was still too ashamed to talk about it – but now he confronted her with this.
‘What do you mean, a boat? A dinghy? How can we afford it?’
‘I used my redundancy money. And it isn’t a dinghy, it’s a thirty-foot sloop. I’m going to sail it round from the marina at Charlborough Bay next week.’
She was aghast. ‘But we need the redundancy money to live off until you get another job, or start drawing benefits. Have you done anything about either? Oh, my God, Tom, have you gone completely crazy?’
He smiled complacently to himself. ‘Thought you’d be surprised. I’m not going crawling on my hands and knees to some arrogant clerk wanting to know all my personal business. I’ve been enquiring about the grants and loans available for setting up your own business. Once I’ve been unemployed for six months I’ll be eligible for several things.’
‘What are you talking about? What business?’ Kate felt her grip on reality was slipping.
‘I’m going to run fishing trips in the estuary, and sailing trips for those who aren’t interested in fishing. Advertise in the posh magazines and Sunday supplements. I’ve been looking into it. You can charge a fortune. We’ve plenty of room here, we can provide accommodation for parties of up to six.’
Kate felt herself flushing as her anger mounted. ‘What about me?’ she shouted. ‘Why haven’t you discussed any of this with me? Where do I fit into all of this?’
He shrugged. ‘I thought you’d be glad I was doing something positive. If you’re only going to be teaching two days a week, you should have plenty of time for a bit of cooking and bed-making. It won’t mean a lot of work.’
‘Tom,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady, ‘have you really thought this all through?’
Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to know about business plans and financial forecasting?
‘It’s almost winter. You can’t run these trips in winter – the estuary is terribly dangerous during the winter storms. You wouldn’t be able to start until the spring. What are we going to live off in the meantime? There are three of us to feed, clothe and keep warm in this great house for the best part of six months – and the girls as well during the holidays. It just won’t work.’
‘We’ll have your teaching salary. And I might get a start-up grant. I can set the business up, even if I don’t start running the trips till later.’
With a sigh Kate fetched her folder of household bills and her calculator from her desk in the corner. She started estimating as best she could what their running expenses would be during the winter, but this was difficult without a previous year’s figures for Craigfast House. However optimistic her calculations, the columns of figures she passed over to Tom always ended up negative.
She could understand his need to manage his own life and make his own decisions about a job, better perhaps than she would have done a year ago.
‘I just don’t see why you have been so secretive,’ she said. ‘We could have talked it over, worked things out.’
He looked at her and then his eyes slid away. ‘You’ve been pretty secretive yourself since you came home.’
She could find no answer to that, but instead told him what she had been thinking about when she looked over the house in Harbour Walk that morning.
‘If we sold Craigfast House, which we own outright, and bought this other house, we’d have money left over which we could put in an interest-bearing account. It would be a cushion against disaster. We’d get the house for a very reasonable price – the owners are desperate to sell. And Mr Tarbert said Craigfast would sell like a shot. There’s a company wanting to develop the land at the top of a hill as a golf course. They’ve got planning permission, and he thinks they’d like to get their hands on this as a club-house.’
Kate wondered why she felt no emotion at the thought of parting with the house, which was beautiful and had such wonderful views. But she had not been happy here. The house made her think of loneliness and the slow deterioration of her marriage. She felt no warmth towards it.
‘I bought this house because I thought you’d like it,’ said Tom bitterly, ‘but I never seem to have been given credit for that.’
‘I know, I know, I’m sorry. The months since we moved here have been so stressful. But this house in Harbour Walk, Tom – I’m sure you’ll love it. It’s right by the harbour, so it would only take you five minutes to get to the boat. There are six bedrooms, if we use the attic. In fact one of the ground-floor rooms could be a bedroom too. And the garden is much smaller. It’s a tip at the moment, but once it’s tidied up it won’t need much looking after.’
It might be possible for them to mend their life together, after all. If she was prepared to spend all her free time catering and cleaning. Don’t think about that for the moment. Take some action, she thought, so at least we can survive the winter.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and look at the house. I know it’s dark, but you can see what it’s like from the outside – there’s a street lamp in front of the house next door.’
* * *
If they had been lucky with little else recently, they were lucky in the matter of buying and selling the houses. The company developing th
e golf course was keen to have immediate possession, so they would have time to convert the building ready for the scheduled opening of the course in June. They were prepared to pay a little over the odds in order to settle matters quickly. And the owners of 24 Harbour Walk accepted £20,000 less than the official asking price. By the third week in November Kate, Tom, Stephen and the two dogs found themselves camping out in the new house. The survey had been cautiously approving and they decided to do nothing to the house apart from putting in some inexpensive DIY kitchen units and redecorating the main rooms.
Stephen was enthusiastic about the move. His new bedroom was smaller but warmer than the room he had occupied in Craigfast House, and the proximity to the middle of the village – with its fish and chip shop only five minutes’ walk away – was a clear advantage. The Harp and Anchor pub in St Magnus Street had recently acquired a snooker table which was proving an irresistible attraction on Friday evenings. Beccy and Roz, busy with their lives elsewhere, had shown little interest when Kate phoned to tell them of the decision to move to Harbour Walk.
‘It’s fine by me,’ Beccy said cheerfully. ‘After all, you don’t need such a big house now that we’ve left home. And Stephen will be gone soon.’
Kate felt chilled by such finality. Did they really no longer feel that home was with the family? Beccy’s tone was not consciously cruel, but it cut deep.
Unable to do much to further his planned business venture, Tom was prepared to spend some of his time, when he could be prised away from his boat, helping Kate paper and paint. At the weekends she had enthusiastic if messy assistance from Stephen and his friend Mick, whose mother was a busy freelance accountant with little time to cook. Mick regarded substantial meals as adequate payment for his decorating efforts. The furniture which had seemed sparse and inadequate in Craigfast House filled the new rooms satisfactorily, and curtains stored after the move from London could be taken out and rehung. After three weeks the house was beginning to look as Kate had hoped it might, and when she arrived home in the dark from her teaching days in Charlborough, the house glowed welcomingly.