Back at Creek House she hurried to the lavatory under the stairs to wrap her treasure in a page of her father’s Daily Telegraph left folded on the floor. She sneaked upstairs to hide her package in the mess of old tennis shoes, broken toys and salt-sticky flippers at the bottom of her wardrobe.
While having a clear-out the other day she found the axe-head, still wrapped in its bundle of newspaper and buried under heaps of clothes fallen from hangers long ago. There, too, was the bottle of gin: Bombay Sapphire. The bottle was heavy, almost full, and this fact took a while to sink in because she’d expected it to be empty. It seems she’d barely drunk any of the gin that night, after all, whatever story her fragmented memories appear to tell. She didn’t understand. She tipped the bottle end to end. Gin sloshed and gulped, swirling to fill the neck of the bottle and plopping back. She noticed the way the colour of the turquoise intensified where the molten glass had folded and set during the making of the bottle.
She had balanced the axe-head on the shelf above the stopped-up fireplace in her bedroom. Despite all the time since someone first patiently knapped the surface, the flint’s edge remains sharp as a blade.
Nora squats to pick up one unusually large shell. To her surprise, the two halves are still hinged together. The shell is deeply ridged and treacle-coloured spikes run along each raised rib, giving the shell the look of a medieval weapon. Webbed lines in shades of sand and stone remind Nora of growth lines on a tree trunk, but she has no idea how to read them to find out the age of the shell. She looks around between the clumps of bladder-wrack at the other, smaller cockle shells, lying open and empty after the oystercatchers have prised them apart and jabbed away the internal flesh.
The cavity of the shell, when she wipes off the mud with her thumb, is bone-white. No remnant of life. Since oystercatchers search out much smaller, thumbnail-sized shells, it’s most likely this shell has been washed empty by years of seawater currents and tides. The two halves closed together form a fat heart, with spines jabbing into her palm. It will be a perfect addition to her wind chimes, if she can work out a way to attach it without damage.
When her bucket is half-filled with cockles she puts it in the shade where the garden of Creek House drops down to the shore, and continues to walk along the creek path towards the sea. Birdsong is loud, the sky very blue, but today she will not give in to her desire to scurry back into the house and shut the door on the sounds and sights of early summer; instead, she will walk to the sea, right down to the dunes and back.
Years of musical training have taught Nora to tackle limitations of the human physique with imagination and discipline. For a cellist, the most basic weakness is the unequal length and strength of the fingers. Begin with confidence that inherent weaknesses can be overcome, Isaac told students in their first lesson. A weakness of mind, she thinks, might prove less easy to combat.
By the time she draws close to the sea, an east wind is stirring. Clouds gather, the sky pinned low over the stretch of salt marsh where the creek widens as it reaches East Head. Anchoring clumps of marram grass provide footholds for her to clamber up and over The Hinge, a narrow strip of dune which joins the sand dunes to the mainland. A few years ago The Hinge was completely destroyed by autumn gales turning the shifting sand dunes of East Head into an island, cut off from the mainland. Without the barrier of The Hinge there was much fear in the village that the sea would encroach further inland, putting homes under threat of regular flooding. In an attempt to stop this, The Hinge has been bolstered by a rock berm; gradually the narrow strip of dune is reforming. Last New Year, people dragged their Christmas trees to the beach and heaped them in a line to form a barrier which might help to encourage the build-up of sand.
In today’s wind, the sand is whisked up into scoops and ripples which glisten like sugar. The flying grains will be painful so Nora turns away from the dunes, along the top of the shingle bank towards the line of painted beach huts. The sound of an engine straining draws her attention to the car park below, where a black 4×4 is attempting to reverse, wheels churning the mud, while, behind the car, a man in a hat gesticulates, shouting instructions into the wind. His coat billows behind him, the lining flashing red. The wide brim of his hat – a gaucho, the hat Isaac favoured – hides the man’s face until he glances up to where Nora stands high above him on the shingle bank. Her heart pinches. His hair, blown wild by the wind, is longer than when she last saw him, but it is Isaac, she’s almost certain.
Her pace slows. He has turned away. Fighting the wind, he hauls open the passenger door and leans in to speak to the driver, a young woman. One hand holding down his hat, he throws out an arm, gesticulating at the mud, before launching himself into the seat. The hat dips with each jerk as the car jolts over the rutted field.
Nora is at a standstill. Below her, the 4×4 swings around in the car park, carving an arc of mud into the grass. The man in the passenger seat turns to pull the seatbelt across and as he does so he glances up at her again.
She was sure; now she is unsure. How can it be Isaac, because why would he be here? The man’s height was wrong – though she was too far away to see him properly so it’s hard to tell – but the hat, something about the windmill movements of his arm, his gesticulations at the mud. The flamboyance of the coat’s scarlet lining.
Windblown sand is sharp on Nora’s lips as she watches the black 4×4 move away, bouncing over the grassland towards the road which runs inland until, with a final puff of exhaust, it heads north on the tarmac.
He was with a younger woman.
Somewhere on the beach a child cries out, a high-pitched call of panic. A shadow passes overhead and Nora realises it was not a child calling, but a gull, the wind flinging its cry. She remains motionless for a few minutes, for once allowing the surge of music to rise in her mind, the melodic phrases of Granados’s Intermezzo from Goyescas. The bow control required steadies her so that she can walk on, heading east along the shingle bank with the wind at her back.
6
Beneath the floor of the boathouse is the creek. To see between the nail-pocked boards requires an adjustment of vision but since she first glimpsed the water’s ripple under her feet, Nora can’t rid herself of the disorienting sense of its continuous passing below. She makes a conscious effort to notice other things, such as the smell of wet emulsion and freshly sawn pine.
High up a ladder where a web of watery light wavers, Eve is spreading the last of a roller full of pale grey paint on the vaulted ceiling. Her three-year-old son, Zach, pushes a gingerbread man along a line of Smarties in the dip between two railway sleepers joined together to form a low table. He peers sideways at Nora through his blond fringe. She smiles at him but he turns away, chanting, naming colours in a sing-song voice. She tries not to mind. Children, like dogs, sense human unease; she cannot relax around Zach. One minute he’ll suck his thumb and lean his head on Eve’s breast, the next he’ll grit his teeth and kick out at her ankles with his miniature trainers. Zach has the face of an angel combined with a predilection for making guns with anything from Lego to a teaspoon. His moods travel across his face, an expression of concentration forecasting the smash of his plate on the flagstone floor of the Anchor Bleu, something he does whenever Eve takes him in there. He savours the noise, the drama of being at the centre of adult attention. Nora would much rather see Eve without Zach and, through some sixth sense of childhood he’s aware of this, she’s certain.
‘Ignore him. He’s in a mood. Can you see any bits I’ve missed? It’s hard to tell from here. Should I have chosen a more interesting colour, do you think? I thought about blue. There’s a mix called Barbados. I was this close.’ Eve pinches her thumb and finger together and heaves a theatrical sigh. The ladder wobbles. ‘Does it look all right, do you think? How’s your mum?’
Eve climbs down, pausing halfway to tug at her T-shirt, which has ridden up over her stomach. Wrapping her paint-roller in clingfilm, she slings the straps of her paint-splattered dungarees back up ove
r her shoulders before coming over to kiss the top of Zach’s head.
‘He wanted to go out with Stavros, not stay here with me.’ Eve moves round the room, picking up the sheets of newspaper covering the floor, and begins a story about the other day at the supermarket check-out, when Zach asked if Stavros was his New Daddy.
Zach tips Smarties in and out of the tube and rattles them, his face rapt. Eve describes the supermarket scenario in detail – the contents of their trolley; the cashier’s chipped black nail varnish – the memory of which temporarily sidetracks Eve into an elaboration of the term ‘Croydon facelift’. She puts her hands flat against the side of her head, pulling her skin back to illustrate the effect.
The last time Nora babysat for Eve, Zach woke and wailed for his mother. When Nora knelt down beside his bed, his cries rose in pitch. He slid away, twisted himself down into his duvet like an animal burrowing to escape. She offered him a drink, his spouty beaker with warmed blackcurrant juice as Eve had suggested, but he flinched at the touch of her hand on his shoulder and twitched out of reach. His cries grew belligerent in tone and didn’t calm until Nora left the room. She stood on the landing to listen at his door. His cries soon became quieter and rhythmic, almost humming, a four-note phrase repeating and repeating like a refrain until the sound died away altogether.
Eve has switched conversation again, back to paint and the way a certain colour becomes popular at one particular time, how the popularity spreads, from window-frames and doors, to crockery and soft furnishings.
‘Suddenly everyone wants the same colour, everywhere in their life,’ she says, and Nora makes an effort to concentrate, to stop her mind dropping to the slide of water beneath the floorboards, back to Isaac and everything she’s tried so hard to forget.
Yesterday she saw him again, at the bus stop on the main road when she was driving home from school. Of course she surely must have been mistaken – the road was busy, it was rush hour – but as she’d slowed to signal a man lifted his hat to a woman with a buggy, and the dip of his head, a hand doffing a hat, the charm and courtesy of that gesture, made her sure it was Isaac. She braked, foot flat on the floor. The Wolseley stalled in protest, slewing into the curb. A car hooted and swerved round her, the driver leaning out to give her the finger as the bus into Chichester came labouring up the road behind her, signalling to pass. She struggled with her seatbelt, which had jammed, and managed to release herself just as the bus pulled away in a chuff of exhaust. There was no longer anyone at the bus stop.
Eve is still talking. ‘. . . and I thought I was being original. How does that happen with colours? Like some sort of plague. The cups too, even they are sea-green. I just went mad.’ She sticks out her tongue, cross-eyed, to prove her insanity. It’s a relief to laugh with her.
Nora decides not to mention Isaac, to enjoy instead the easy chatter, Eve’s effervescence, the way one topic fizzes into another, from intimacy to generalities and back again. She kicks off her sandals and tucks her feet up. ‘So, what did you say to him?’
‘The man mixing paint?’
‘You were talking about Zach and his daddy.’
‘Oh yeah.’ Eve wipes her forearm across her forehead. ‘I was tempted to say “yes” for simplicity, but – don’t look all superior – I didn’t.’
‘Why would it have been simpler?’
Eve treads on the lid of the tin of emulsion paint to close it properly. ‘What?’
‘Why simpler, when something else is true?’
‘Oh come on.’ Eve rolls her eyes, a mannerism she’s caught from Stavros. ‘Is Daddy the man who cooks your tea and reads you stories every night? Or is Daddy the guy whose genes are the same as half of yours but is not around?’
Nora thinks of her own father and says nothing.
Eve carries the paintbrushes into the narrow kitchen and Nora hears the running tap. Eve emerges with a cloth. ‘I waffled on about how lucky he is to have two daddies, talked about other people, y’know, countless others who don’t fit into your average 2.4 family.’
‘2.4 children.’
‘Whatever.’ Eve picks at a splodge of paint on the back of her hand. She frowns. ‘I for one wouldn’t want point 4 of a child, would you? Tea?’ She laughs as she disappears back into the kitchen.
Nora leans in the doorway. The boathouse kitchen is a corridor of a room with an ivy-covered skylight through which green light filters on to half-fitted kitchen cabinets and piles of plaster-dusted boxes. Eve recites the recipe for the blueberry muffins she baked yesterday. She never wants to eat another blueberry muffin as long as she lives, she says. There’s some left. She wonders if Nora would like one; two. Take some home for Ada. Today there are gingerbread men too. Another recipe she’s trying out, preparing for when the boathouse opens as a café.
‘I met her in the post office the other day; your mum.’
The gingerbread men are cooling on a wire rack. Eve is halfway through icing them with sugary eyes and mouths. ‘Have one,’ she says.
Nora chooses a gingerbread man without a face. ‘She didn’t mention it.’
Eve is looking past Nora in the doorway to Zach, who stands on an old leather sofa gazing out of the tall window, the hair at the back of his head mussed from rolling on the floor, his legless gingerbread man abandoned on the arm of the sofa. Eve shakes her head. ‘Look at him, permanently in a world of his own.’
She darts past and pounces on Zach, scooping him up in both arms, blowing raspberries into his neck as he giggles and shrieks, a bundle of thrashing arms and legs, until he wriggles away and trots at speed to the other side of the room. He flings himself on another sofa, burying his biscuit-smeared face in the cushions, rubbing to and fro.
‘It was lunchtime, I saw her. Has she seen the doctor?’
‘Not as far as I know. Why?’ Nora is surprised Ada has said nothing about meeting Eve. Usually she recounts the minutiae of her adventures in the village, will repeat any conversation word for word, however mundane, but since a bout of flu a few weeks ago she has been a little vague about how she spends her days when Nora is out teaching.
Zach shrieks with laughter. He is opening and closing his hand around a fistful of Smarties and, each time his palm opens, his eyes widen at the sight of the shiny, multicoloured sweets as if their continued presence is a complete surprise.
‘His consolation prize from Stavros. He won’t eat them.’
Stavros is great with Zach, adores him, but has always made it clear he is keen to have his own. Soon, many children, he says, and holds up all ten fingers with a wink. Is Greek way.
Nora pushes the thought from her mind. ‘Why do you ask if Mum had seen the doctor?’
‘She looked a bit flushed. And she said she was going home to have a nap. I just wondered if she is properly over the flu.’
‘She seems OK.’ Though it’s true Ada has taken up napping in the afternoons and is often in bed when Nora gets home just after four.
They have taken their tea to floor cushions in front of the wall of glass which faces the water. Eve sits cross-legged with a hand on her stomach. She moves her hand, round and round, sliding over her belly in idle circles.
‘We came to a decision, me and Stavro: Café Jetsam. Like it?’
The name is perfect. Eve and Stavros are furnishing the boathouse with second-hand bits and pieces from charity shops and skips. Recycling, Stavros says, one hundred percent friendly to environment.
They debated over Flotsam versus Jetsam, Eve explains. Not knowing what either word meant, Stavros checked Wikipedia, his usual source of information. ‘Jetsam’ refers to what people ‘jettison’, or voluntarily throw out, whereas flotsam is things which are lost.
‘Got me thinking,’ she says. ‘In the retirement homes, a lot of them are like jetsam, aren’t they, those people who are somebody’s parents. Sure, some are too ill to be cared for at home, but it’s as if most have served their purpose and their kids don’t want them around any more.’
E
ve’s parents are both dead. Nora thinks Eve’s views might be different if they were still alive and complicating her life with the worry of their increasing infirmity.
‘So, I’m going to run Memory Lane sessions,’ Eve continues. ‘Here, an afternoon every now and again. Ada might come and play the piano.’
Nora can’t imagine Ada being a part of any such thing, but she says nothing. She’s aware of Eve’s scrutiny, of the gaze of Eve’s startling blue eyes with their striated irises, the pupils surrounded by a starry line of white. Eve sees things others don’t, like auras. Though Nora is not sure whether or not she herself believes in the existence of auras, in the face of Eve’s absolute conviction she’s forced to think about the possibility and, sometimes, this makes her uneasy.
The first time they met, for example, on the creek path travelling in opposite directions, Eve had looked her in the eye and said, ‘You have an old soul.’ No introduction or greeting, no comment on the weather. Eve and Zach and Benjie were a tangle of linked hands and dog leads blocking the path. Nora’s belly plunged at the sight of Zach as he splashed in a puddle, his blond cap of hair lifting and falling.
Eve had come close. Goose pimples rose on Nora’s cheeks, the skin tightening across her chest and up her forearms as, like an airport security guard, Eve ran her hands under Nora’s breasts, patted her shoulders and torso.
‘You are an artist; your aura is indigo and vibrating, here, out of your body.’ Eve’s child-sized hands had hovered over Nora’s solar plexus, shaping the air as if she felt something tangible and solid where there was nothing.
‘Maybe she could do some talks about the history of the village.’ Eve is still talking about Ada. ‘She’s lived here all her life. She’ll have a ton of stories.’
The starry line of white edging the blue of Eve’s irises reminds Nora of forget-me-knots, of Harry grunting as he dug up brambles and ground elder in the garden, his shirt off, the hair on his chest curled like bracken.
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