by Angela Huth
We found a carriage to ourselves.
‘Are you glad we’re going to Norfolk?’ Joshua seemed distant, irritable.
‘I wouldn’t mind where we were going.’ Witless answer, I thought. But he kissed me. The map on the wall of Southern England and the B.R.’s embroidered on the antimacassars spun about.
It was a clear, hard day. The fields we rattled through were mistless, the trees and hedges turning brown and gold. People on the platforms of small stations stamped their feet and rolled their hands about in their pockets. Joshua read the law reports in The Times. Jonathan’s enthusiasm for train journeys was too devouring to allow him to read. Not one acre of the country we passed through could escape some boring observation.
‘Darling, look at that spire – Norman, I should say.’
‘The last time I passed through Cambridge Timothy was telling me about his electronics business…’
‘Look! There’s a ‘28 Sunbeam Talbot just like the one my father had … darling, do you ever listen to me?’
If by chance he was not sitting by the window the steward and the ticket collector would become his prey. As the steward approached the carriage Jonathan would tap a coin on the door and signal to him to stop.
‘Let us know in plenty of time when the second lunch is ready, will you?’ he would ask.
‘That is my job, sir,’ the steward would reply – He had been snubbed by many stewards on many trains, but it made no difference – Joshua was quite quiet all the way to Norfolk.
At the station an old taxi, whose seats were worn into deep shabby troughs, waited for us. The driver greeted Joshua with enthusiasm and reminded him of past holidays. The hotel was a rambling, pebble-dash building hidden from the main road by a high wall. A short gravel drive edged with trim grass led up to it. Chrysanthemums the colour of vintage marmalade were clumped in neat borders at each side of the heavy front door. Inside, the hall smelt of wet mackintoshes. The receptionist welcomed Joshua with no less pleasure than the taxi driver.
‘I’ll get Rita to show you to your room,’ she said. She rang a small brass bell shaped like a labrador’s head, and a young, plump girl wearing a short black skirt and a bad op-art shirt appeared. She had dark curly hair, slanting brown eyes and dimples even before she smiled.
‘Hello, Mr Heron,’ she dimpled. ‘I heard you were coming so I persuaded them to put you in your usual room. I know you like it best.’ She giggled, and glanced at me without interest.
‘That was very thoughtful,’ Joshua said. We followed Rita along husky passages whose floors, like the taxi seats, were worn into troughs, but shallower. Rita waggled her fat behind and trailed her pudgy fingers provocatively up the oak banister.
‘There.’ She opened the door and walked ahead of us. ‘You’ll find it just the same. Nothing about the room has changed.’ She giggled again.
‘Thank you,’ said Joshua briefly, and for a moment held her glance.
‘If there’s anything you want, you know where to find me.’ She closed the door behind her slowly.
The room was furnished very simply: two scrubbed pine chairs, a painted chest of drawers, a desk, two single beds which sank in the middle. Their covers were white damask, like unstarched table cloths. The air wasn’t positively damp, but the carpets, the beds, even the walls gave the impression that if you touched them they would feel softer than you would expect.
I went to the window. A lawn sloped down to the creek. The tide was out. Small boats lay on their sides in the mud and a couple of seagulls rose and fell across the grey sky as if perched on an invisible wave.
‘How many girls have you brought here?’ I asked, crossly.
‘Will you do something for me?’ Joshua came up behind me, his voice patient. ‘Will you, while we are here, stop imagining my past? Can’t you stop being jealous of my past?’
‘I’m not jealous.’
‘What difference would it make if I had brought a hundred different girls to this very room? It wouldn’t take away from how it will be here for you and me.’
‘But that girl, Rita – ’
‘If you’re silly enough to be upset by anything she says, I’m surprised. Come on, don’t be silly.’ He took my hand and dragged me from the window, smiling. ‘Do you know what I like best about this place? It’s the only hotel I know where they provide free sealing-wax. Look here.’ I laughed, forgetting Rita.
We went to the desk. Two sticks of red sealing-wax and a small, half-gutted candle in a china holder lay on the blotter. Joshua sat on the chair at the desk and lit the candle.
‘I used to play a game with sealing-wax when I was a child. I wonder if I can do it now?’ He opened a pad of soggy writing-paper, cheaply stamped with the name of the hotel, and held a stick of wax over the flame. It softened, curved, and dripped into a large blob on the paper. A string of white smoke rose up to us, with the crisp mystical smell peculiar to hot sealing-wax. Quickly Joshua picked up a sharp pencil, also provided free, and wrote on the wax I am Josh… it hardened. Another letter was impossible.
‘I used to be able to write my whole name,’ he said. ‘You try.’ I sat on his knee and he made a new pool of wax for me. But I only managed as far as I am Cl… Then he wrote We are… in a third blob.
‘I can’t think what,’ he said, watching the wax harden while he thought. I took the pencil from him and on yet another pool of wax wrote We are us.
‘What silly things people do,’ Joshua said. I slipped on to the floor and sat there with my head on his knee. A thin shadow of smoke still hung in the air, and the candle spluttered out. We stayed there, without speaking, till darkness filled the room. Then we had to stumble about, tripping over things, looking for the lights.
After dinner we went into the lounge. It was not conducive to a gay evening. In one corner a middle-aged woman vigorously attacked a piece of tapestry, as if she were mending a sail. In the other corner her husband’s thick-set tweed legs and a beam of pipe smoke stuck out at different angles from behind a sporting paper. Joshua suggested we should go down to the quay.
The night was cold, almost frosty. A full moon lit our way down the narrow village street, and then down the cobbled way to the quay. No-one else was about. Joshua wore rubber-soled shoes and walked quite silently. My shoes made an irritating clatter.
Several large fishing boats were drawn up on to the quay: they sheltered round a huge Tarmaced barge. It was turned upside down, and looked like a prefabricated hut. In the water, the collection of small boats which had been cast on their sides in the mud had now regained their dignity. From time to time they twitched a little, when the water moved beneath them, then fell back into stillness.
Suddenly Joshua, who had been holding my arm, let go and ran away. I spun round to see what had happened.
I called him. No answer. I was faced by more empty boats, standing like high empty husks, and a confusion of thick black shadows. I looked up to the sky. For a moment the full moon balanced on a mast, a saucer on a juggler’s stick. Then a black cloud straggled across its face, hiding all but the barest outlines of the place. I called again. This time there was a weird, high pitched wail for an answer:
‘Here I a – m.’ It was impossible to tell where the voice was coming from. I felt my way over to the upturned barge, stumbling through the smaller boats, bumping their sides.
‘Where?’
‘Here.’ The voice was behind me now, not near the barge after all. I turned. The clouds cleared the moon again. The boats were empty. Then a figure leapt from the bottom of one of them, screaming with laughter, a ragged silhouette against the sky. It flopped back and the laughter stopped. I jumped with fright, knowing at once the stupidity of my fear. I put out a hand, groping for something to hold on to, and hit the hard belly of the barge. It was lumpy and damp. I shivered and tried to laugh.
‘Please come out now. You gave me an awful fright. … Joshua?’ No answer, and new clouds increased their speed towards the moon. Clumsily I ran to the boat
he had jumped from. He was not hiding in the bottom. Nothing there but a long thin pool of water shining flatly as old glass.
‘I didn’t see you get out,’ I called, and repeated myself louder. ‘Come on, let’s go back. Don’t let’s play this game any longer. I’m cold. Please….’
‘Please come out now’ A high treble voice mocked mine. Once more it seemed to come from behind the barge. But the moon was re-blotted out, and the darkness more intense after the spell of brightness. All sense of direction left me. I clung to the boat I stood by, shivering with cold.
‘You can go on playing your silly game by yourself. I’m going back …’ I shouted, and didn’t move. Long, slow moments passed. Then an ice-cold hand touched my cheek. I screamed. Joshua laughed.
‘Don’t you like playing hide-and-seek?’ he asked, in his normal voice. I flung myself against him, angry and relieved.
‘No, not in a place like this. Not in a place I don’t know. And anyhow I can’t see in the dark, and I hate boats out of water.’
‘Did I really give you a fright? I’m sorry. It was just a game.’ He was incredulous. He kissed my forehead and eyes.
‘You do unsettling things.’ For the third or fourth time, I had lost count, the moon reappeared. I could look up and see the reassuring hulk of Joshua’s shoulders and jaw. Relief that the game was over was almost as unbearable as the former silly fear.
‘You could have come down here on your own,’ I heard myself saying, ‘if you’d wanted to be alone.’ Joshua laughed.
‘That wouldn’t have been any fun,’ he said. ‘The fun was running away from you.’ He took my arm. ‘Come on, laugh. I’m back, aren’t I?’ I laughed. ‘I’ll bet you anything you like,’ he went on, ‘I can guess what Jonathan’s game is. – Golf.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘And what’s more, if Jonathan changed from golf to hide-and-seek, he wouldn’t be very good at it, because he’s not a very sprightly man, is he?’
I laughed again, and in response Joshua speeded up his fantasy.
‘He’d have a handicap, wouldn’t he? – His running.’ He broke away from me and ran a few paces ahead, the fat waddling run of a man clumsy on his feet. ‘Like this?’
‘Quite like that.’ I was laughing hard now. ‘Cruel, you are.’ He wobbled back to me.
‘And I have no doubt,’ he said, ‘that in the end you will go back to a man who runs like that, won’t you?’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. Pause. ‘What makes you think that?’
He didn’t answer. We were almost back at the hotel now. It was flushed by orange floodlights: tame, secure, warm.
In our room the coral bar of electric fire was no more than a faint reproach against the cold. Our single beds were intolerably narrow. We pulled all the blankets from one bed on to the other and arranged ourselves to spend an uncomfortable night.
For the time being, we spoke no more of Jonathan.
Chapter Seven
For several days it rained. We went for long walks in the rain, through wide cabbage fields. The huge cold cabbage leaves, some almost plum purple, clacked and clattered against our gum-boots. Joshua said he felt about cabbages like vegetarians feel about meat. He picked a large leaf and shook it, holding it like a bowl. A thousand balls of rain skidded about among the hillocky surface, looking for their holes, like the plastic balls in those children’s games in crackers. He could not eat cabbages, Joshua said.
We walked over the sodden marshes smoked up with mist and slimy underfoot. Joshua was mellow, benign, almost expansive. He made me laugh. He held a piece of tarpaulin from a haystack over my head while I wiped his steamed-up glasses on my shirt. We went to the graveyard of a Norman church where he climbed the slippery black trunk of an old yew tree. When he reached the top he battered the coarse branches, so that for a moment part of the tree was shaken out of its lethargy and a few rain drops leaked through its great hood on to the soft, dry earth beneath.
Then at last there was a clear morning. The sky, drained of its cloud and rain, was pale and weak. We went to the beach. There, the high, wind-breaking dunes ran into the sand, and the sand ran into the sea indeterminately as the meeting of water colours. It was still cold, and Joshua began to run. I kept up with him for a while, then he began to outpace me. The wet sand made the going heavy. I slowed down, walked. The distance between us quickly increased. Soon he was no more than a small moving figure.
I turned my back to the sea and walked towards the dunes. Sudden desolation cut through me, like wire through cheese. They were scrawny dunes here, with bald patches of grey white sand between clumps of tough, skinny grass. Twenty years ago, as a melancholy child, a group of children cast me out from their ball game in dunes like these. I had run from them, tears cutting down my cheeks, into the fir woods behind the dunes. I had stamped on the earth and flung myself on the ground, stupidly enraged. Then I found primroses. It began to rain, and I picked them. A long time later I went back to the dunes. The children had gone and the tide was out. I found half a biscuit in my pocket and ate it, and lay on the sand uncaring about time, looking at the flat wet landscape. And then the melancholy rolled away and I was left ashamed.
I looked at the sea now. It didn’t work like that any more.
‘Joshua!’ I shouted out loud. The voice lay flat on the wind, somebody else’s voice.
Lumps of drying sand flaked off my boots. I could taste salt on my lips. Where was he? Why clouds again?
It hadn’t been like this with Richard Storm. We had been fond of each other. Fond of each other like elderly relations who are accustomed to one another’s ways. I was in awe of his age, obedient to him. When he had written to say he was staying in Barcelona with Matilda I had been surprised, but not hurt. He wasn’t breaking up a great life between us.
It hadn’t been like that with Jonathan. His consistent attention, often claustrophobic, was a contrast to desertion. He was always there, a habit, secure, harmless. The November afternoon we married in Caxton Hall was no more elating than many other afternoons we had spent together. We went to the Savoy for dinner and he insisted I ate à la carte, although I wanted the plat du jour. Within three days of living with him it was obvious he had preconceived ideas about what should be done on what occasions. The plat du jour on the honeymoon night was only the start. But marriage with him was just as I imagined it would be, for two years. It was only lately that its emptiness and its irritations, impossible to imagine, had become apparent and then intolerable.
And now Joshua. Why had he run away again? Why did he always tease? I lay down, my face against the chill sand, and the wind scattered my hair over my eyes so that it tickled. Then a hand pulled it away with a tug. I rolled over. Joshua was squatting.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ he said. ‘There weren’t any ice creams.’ I sat up.
‘I didn’t want an ice cream. I didn’t ask for one. Why did you go? I couldn’t keep up.’
‘You might have liked one if I’d got one. But they told me the man packed up his stall last week.’ The season’s over.’ He lay beside me. ‘I must have run a mile.’ He smiled, he was pleased. ‘I haven’t had any exercise like that for ages. I feel marvellous.’
‘You’re lucky.’
‘Why, don’t you? What’s the matter?’ ‘You keep running away.’
‘Not very seriously. And anyhow I haven’t run away for four days – not since the first evening.’
‘I don’t know what’s the matter, really. I’m being inarticulate.’
‘You funny, pretty thing. You look nice in the wind.’ He brushed sand off my shoulders and pulled me down to join him. ‘Nobody ever comes here at this time of year. We’d never be caught.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely sure.’
The tough spiky grass bent all round us and the sand, which was dry in the dunes, swept about us.
*
It was at lunch that Joshua had his idea.
‘Why d
on’t we ask Mrs Fox to join us? She must be feeling low.’ I had almost forgotten Mrs Fox. Lunch was Irish stew and apple crumble. Rita poured Joshua a glass of lager without asking if he wanted it.
‘I don’t think she’d want to come. There’s not enough noise in Norfolk.’
‘I think she’d like it. We could entertain her.’
‘We’re quite happy entertaining ourselves, aren’t we?’ I was drinking cider and my head was fuzzy. Rita was polishing spoons very slowly at the sideboard, putting them down silently so that she could hear what we were saying.
‘Why don’t you want her to come?’
‘I’m happy as we are.’
‘I thought you weren’t.’
‘I am.’
‘Oh.’ I fiddled with the salt, making little mounds with the spoon, then squashing them flat again. ‘I’d like to ask her just for a few days,’ Joshua said. ‘Think how pleased she’d be.’ I sighed.
‘Mrs Fox’s great message is that she never wants to be a nuisance to anybody. You can ask her, but I don’t think she’ll come. Do what you like, though. But I think it’s silly, asking a dotty old woman like her to Norfolk in the autumn. Why don’t you ask your mother?’ I heard the sarcasm in my voice.
‘My mother died when I was seventeen,’ said Joshua, ‘and I never did anything for her.’ Rita started on a pile of knives.
‘Oh, I see. You think that making benevolent gestures towards one old woman will compensate for doing nothing for another.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. But, no, I don’t think that. I’m not a do-gooder, and that’s their line of thinking. Charity suddenly comes upon them like religious mania, and they cram in a few years of the gooseberry jam stuff to make up for all the years the idea hadn’t occurred to them. – No, the thing is, about Mrs Fox, I like her. She doesn’t make me feel guilty if I don’t do anything about her. And she doesn’t make me feel heroic if I do. You can’t say anything more than that about any old person, can you?’ I nodded. ‘Can I ask her, then?’ I said yes.