The Partridge and the Pelican

by Rachel Crowther

  Olivia looked up, and noticed an elderly man at the nearest table watching her with a frown of concentration.

  “Morning, Kenneth,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Reasonable,” said Kenneth. “Thank you for asking. Beautiful sunshine this morning.”

  “A lovely day,” Olivia agreed.

  Kenneth never sang, but Olivia often noticed that frown puckering his forehead when she got a note wrong or changed a harmony. Was he a musician, she’d asked Shirley once, but Shirley had said no, a retired doctor. Widowed early; such a shame. But he’d never missed a Wednesday morning, Kenneth. Not in five years.

  Olivia scanned the room for the other regulars (mostly women; that was demographics for you, too). There were about two dozen of them, usually, although the high-ceilinged hall would have held more, and there were always spare chairs pushed back against the wall below the arched windows. In the middle was Elsie, still full of throaty laughter at eighty-five. Olivia could imagine her at eighteen, a proper flirt, as her grandmother would have said. And there was William, gallant and earnest, spitting image of the Colonel in Fawlty Towers; and Emily, in her canary yellow cardigan. No Georgie, though.

  Georgie was one of the oldest of the Wednesday Club regulars – they’d celebrated her ninetieth birthday last year, a fuss she’d endured patiently – and she seemed both fragile and indomitable. A dying breed, Olivia thought now. The generation born into the First World War, who’d lost their youth to the Second and knew what it was to put up with things.

  “No Georgie this week?” she asked.

  Shirley shook her head with a little warning lift of the eyebrows. “Under the weather,” she mouthed.

  It was a strange business, Olivia reflected, not for the first time; a fine balance of capability and disability that brought them all here. People who couldn’t quite manage on their own, needed a bit of respite and entertainment and company, but were fit enough to be driven to and fro by Rex, and with-it enough to remember the basics of social interaction. A study in the slow, protracted business of growing old. How long might you linger at the day centre stage?

  “Until they have a stroke,” Shirley had said, when Olivia asked. “Or a fall; sometimes a fall. Or they move into residential accommodation.”

  Olivia loved Shirley’s use of language. Leisure entertainment, she called Olivia’s contributions to Wednesday mornings. Olivia loved Shirley full stop, her good-heartedness and patience and indestructible cheeriness. I hope there’ll be a Shirley around when I’m this age, she thought. One of those little cherubs from the playgroup, perhaps.

  “All right, everyone.” Shirley clapped her hands as though to staunch a boisterous flow of laughter and chatter, though in reality there was only the same desiccated rustle of conversation as usual. “Sing-a-long time. Olivia’s ready to play for us now.”

  Olivia stood in the kitchen doorway, her mouth filled with the taste of fruit cake and freeze-dried coffee. “I’m sorry Georgie’s not well,” she said. “Will she be back?”

  “I’m not sure.” Shirley was distracted, worrying that lunch was behind schedule, the trays of food not yet at the right temperature. “Health and safety,” she muttered, poking a thermometer into a dish topped with what looked like pale custard. “As if this lot haven’t ever eaten anything dodgy in their lives. Hardly going to be finished off by a plate of lasagne, are they?”

  “Do you know what’s the matter with her?” Olivia asked.

  “Oh, the usual, I expect.” Shirley slammed the oven door shut and turned the knob decisively to its highest setting. “Give it a burst,” she said.

  “The usual?” Olivia lingered, coffee cup in hand. Georgie intrigued her. Georgiana was her full name, bearing a suggestion of patrician origins, but her careful dignity seemed to Olivia hard-won, not inbred. The way she held her face in reserve suggested that she’d worked her way up from somewhere and was still watching her step.

  Shirley straightened up. “She’s had her ups and downs, Georgie. A hard life, poor love.”

  Olivia waited, but Shirley had turned her attention to the bowl of fruit salad in the fridge. “At least that doesn’t need heating up. Come October, it’ll be hot puddings again.”

  “Does she have any family?” Olivia asked.

  “Georgie?” Shirley checked her watch again. Outside, Olivia could hear the shrill chatter of children, and voices raised to warn them to take care, stay away from the road, keep inside the gate. “No, no family,” Shirley said. “She lost a baby, years ago. Never had any more.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll tell you the story one day. Terrible story.” Shirley turned back to the oven. “They must be done by now. Can’t wait any longer, or we’ll play havoc with Rex’s timetable.”

  “What’re you playing havoc with now?” Rex appeared behind Shirley, propping himself jauntily against the door jamb. He winked at Olivia.

  “Get off it, Rex.” Shirley flapped her oven gloves at him. “See you next week, Olivia. Same time, same place.”

  Olivia cycled home slowly, taking the route along the tow-path. She loved the canal, the lazy streak of waterway running through the middle of the city. For a man-made environment it had a convincingly feral air, she thought. A rural idyll overhung by a vague sense of threat, with its ducks and dock leaves and sporadic piles of rubbish, its teal-green water fleeced with scum.

  It was a clear day, still and golden, with blackberries ripe and luscious in the bramble bushes. The tow-path wasn’t busy, but Olivia passed another cyclist and a pair of runners, a young mother pushing an all-terrain buggy. A narrow boat went by, a hire vessel rather than a houseboat, smoke puffing languidly from its chimney.

  As Olivia pushed her bike over the bridge that led back to the road she glanced down again at the boat, at the shimmer of sun across the water and the back gardens ranged along the opposite bank. She wasn’t looking where she was going, and when she felt a sharp blow to her arm her first thought was that she’d bumped into a lamp post or a street sign, some inanimate object she’d failed to notice. But only for a split second. When she swung round, the moving shape of her assailant was clear in her field of view. As her bike clattered to the ground in slow motion and the shock of the impact shuddered through her, he ran on without breaking stride, and was disappearing below the bridge by the time she had collected herself enough to say anything.

  “Hey,” she called, but the sound hardly came out: more an exhalation than a protest.

  Olivia leaned back against the railings and shut her eyes for a moment. Her mind spun like a child’s top, a blur of colour. It couldn’t have been an accident, surely, and her bag was lying on the pavement, thrown out of the bike basket when it fell. Hadn’t he seen it? Or had he meant not to steal but to hurt her: to jolt her out of her complacent reverie? Perhaps she’d provoked him, hogging the path, dallying over the bridge, not thinking about other people. But the road was empty; there was plenty of space for a pedestrian to step off the kerb. Surely there was no cause for such a powerful blow.

  When she opened her eyes again, the figure retreating along the tow-path already seemed unreal and unconnected to her. She’d only had a fleeting view of him, registered short ginger hair, eyes that looked too large in a narrow face. Not a heavyweight thug: a lad not much older than her Tom, wearing combat trousers and a dark hoodie. An archetype, just as she was to him, perhaps. If it wasn’t for the pain in her arm, the racing of her heart and the buzz in her head, she wouldn’t have believed what had just happened.

  Then another figure approached: another man, mounting the bridge in the direction Olivia had come from only a minute or two earlier.

  “Are you all right?” He was close to her age, this man, hair greying reassuringly at the temples, wearing blue and yellow jogging Lycra. “Did he hit you?”

  Olivia nodded. Her eyes, to her embarrassment, were filling with tears.

  “I thought so. Did he take anything?”

  Olivia shook he
r head. “No.”

  The man frowned, looking down at the tow-path. “I could catch him up.”

  “Please don’t. I’m sure it was an accident.”

  He shook his head, puzzled. “I saw him: it was a boxer’s punch. Do you want me to have a look? I’m a doctor.”

  “There’s no need.” Olivia felt foolish now. The attention of this stranger, his solicitude, was more than was needed. She just wanted to get home. “Really, it was nothing. Just a bit of a shock.”

  “Can I walk you home, then? Make sure you’re all right?”

  He was looking at her with concern, and something else. Curiosity, perhaps. Did she look so ruffled?

  She attempted a smile. “It’s no distance. Please don’t worry, I’m fine.” With an effort at composure she lifted her bike upright again. “Thank you,” she said, as she climbed back on and freewheeled down the slope, brakes cautiously applied. “Enjoy your run.”

  When Olivia glanced back from the bottom of the hill, the man had gone. It wasn’t until she was nearly home that she realised why he’d been studying her face so closely. She knew his, too, although she hadn’t seen it for a long time. James, she thought. She was sure it was James.

  Chapter 3

  Suffolk, August 1983

  The fine weather that had followed Olivia and Eve for most of the summer broke just as they reached Aldeburgh. The late summer storms revealed the East Anglian coast at its bleakest: the horizon was pinched thin beneath a heavy sky and the rain turned the stony shore a darker, harder shade of grey. But they were relieved to have arrived; grateful to have somewhere to hole up. After nearly six weeks on the road, a whole house to stay in felt like a luxury.

  Shearwater House was an imposing sight on that late August afternoon, with storm clouds grumbling overhead and the sea marled and mottled with spume. It was a tall Victorian townhouse with Dutch gables, painted a dull pink some years before so that it now had the look of a scuffed seashell. Its name was carved into a slab of stone beside the front door in sharply angled letters, and the sky swam in the old glass of the windows. Olivia could imagine it enduring the changing seasons with settled fortitude: she could imagine it having stories to tell.

  The key had been left for them under a stone on the windowsill. Eve slid it into the lock and the door, warped by years of damp, yielded with a reluctant creak. Inside, the walls were painted white and hung with fading watercolours of sea scenes; blue and white china bowls sat squat and dusty on the tops of chests of drawers.

  “Bit musty,” said Eve, dropping her bags in the hall.

  Olivia could smell salt and mildew, a faint hint of woodsmoke. The shabbiness was misleading, she thought. It felt like a place so well known, so well loved, that everything about it was taken for granted.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said.

  A narrow staircase rose straight ahead and a corridor ran past it to the back of the house, with doors leading off to the right: closed doors, shuttering the interior in a tranquil half-light. Olivia was conscious of the house’s expectations, the familiar faces and routines it was used to, but the feeling wasn’t uncomfortable. There was something about Shearwater House that made her want to belong.

  They’d been best friends at school, Olivia and Eve, inseparable for almost a decade. Olivia’s parents lived abroad. Her father worked for an oil company and they were always moving on: Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, Dubai. Eve’s parents lived near Chichester, barely fifteen miles from the school, but she boarded too; everyone did in her family, she said. At eleven, Eve was already the model schoolgirl, blonde and confident and popular. She could take her pick of friends, and the fact that she chose Olivia was unexpected. People found it hard to see what Olivia, slight, diffident Olivia Conafray, had to offer Eve de Perreville; and so, some of the time, did Olivia.

  They were at different universities now – Eve at medical school in London, Olivia reading music at Edinburgh – but they’d promised each other they’d spend this summer travelling together. There had been talk of Italy or even South America, but in the end they’d settled for a tour of Britain in Olivia’s battered Fiat 126. A quaint idea, their parents had said, secretly glad that they weren’t trekking down the Amazon. Unusual, these days, to get to know your own country first.

  From Chichester they’d made their way along the south coast to Devon and Cornwall, up through Wales to the Lake District and Scotland, then gradually south again until they hit the bulge of East Anglia. Eve had been cock-a-hoop when her friend James offered them Shearwater House. It was always empty in the last week of August, he’d said; the family went earlier in the summer. Where better to end their tour than on the seafront at Aldeburgh?

  There had been a moment, somewhere in the long trek through Lincolnshire, when Olivia had regretted accepting the invitation. It had felt like a long detour to make so late in their journey, and the flat hinterland of the fens was disorientating after weeks of mountains and lakes. But now they were here she was glad they’d come. She was ready, as she and Eve climbed one staircase and then another, finding beds covered in faded counterpanes, bathrooms with bare wooden floorboards and fireplaces filled with rushes, to succumb to the spirit of the place.

  For two or three days they were alone in the house, scarcely believing in their right to be there. Like servants left behind while the family was away, Olivia thought, or evacuees placed in an empty house. The stuff of children’s books.

  “Do you know the family?” she asked on the first day, as they sat hunched over cups of tea in the morning chill of the kitchen.

  “Only James.” Eve poured the last of the milk they’d brought with them into her mug and glanced up at the window. The rain was coming down steadily. “We need to go shopping.”

  “We can explore when the rain stops,” Olivia said.

  But the rain kept falling, and the girls ventured out only for brief walks on the storm-racked beach. They spent the days browsing through the crowded bookshelves, reading novels with battered crimson covers by authors they’d never heard of, and cooking frugal meals in the kitchen. They were careful not to alter anything, though, to replace books and plates and even dishcloths exactly where they’d found them. In the visitors book, which stretched back to just after the war, the same names appeared again and again, childish signatures evolving to adulthood then spawning children of their own to populate the next generation of guests. Olivia liked the idea that the house had looked exactly the same all that time.

  “You know what?” Eve said one afternoon, looking up from the sofa where she was lying flat on her stomach. “You can see from the seams how much these curtains have faded. They can’t have been changed in forty years.” She shifted her weight onto her side with a grimace. “Nor the sofas.”

  “Nor the mattresses,” said Olivia. The sagging beds had become an in-joke: barely two springs to rub together, Eve had said.

  The contents of the kitchen cupboards seemed to have been there for decades, too. The two girls lived on the family’s supplies, heating up out-of-date baked beans in an old aluminium pan.

  “Seaside food,” Olivia said. “This must be what everyone eats here.”

  “This is what we’ve been eating all summer,” said Eve.

  But Olivia knew Eve didn’t care what she ate, especially not just now. Since they’d arrived in Aldeburgh, Eve had given herself up to torpor. She seemed content to lie for hours on the lumpy sofa while Olivia absorbed herself in trying to light the fire, filling the sitting room with the smell of charred paper and damp ash.

  James arrived at the weekend, during the first lull in the rain. Olivia and Eve had gone for a walk that afternoon, following the beach southwards along Crag Path until they reached the Martello Tower and the estuary.

  When they got back, they found a fire in the sitting room grate and jazz playing on the ancient turntable.

  “Well,” Eve said. “You know what they say: it takes a man to make a house into a home.” She smiled, her cheeks flushed with f
resh air. She’d been saving her vivacity for him these last few days, Olivia thought. The idea aroused a mixture of regret and relief.

  “This is Olivia,” Eve said. “My loyal companion.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” James made a little bow. “I’ve put the kettle on. My mother sent a cake.”

  They ate fruit cake off delicate china plates from a cupboard Olivia and Eve hadn’t broached, and drank tea from a huge flowered pot that would have catered for eight. Now James was here the house was opening up, Olivia thought, revealing its secrets. She felt a little shiver of pleasure and possibility.

  James was a medic too, a couple of years ahead of Eve at Bart’s. He seemed to Olivia older than he was, with pale, delicate skin and dark hair, a manner that was amused without being supercilious.

  “So, have you been enjoying yourselves?” he asked, getting up to refill the teapot. “Have you been seduced by Aldeburgh?”

  “By Shearwater House,” Olivia said, and at the same time Eve said, “It’s been too wet to go out.”

  James looked at the window, where splatters of rain were making a teasing pattern again.

  “Well,” he said. “The rain’ll stop now I’m here.”

  After tea, James went shopping.

  “What have you been eating?” he asked, surveying the empty fridge. “Haven’t you found the fish shop?”

  He came back with two newspaper parcels, one containing three small sea bass which he gutted under the kitchen tap, the other a bundle of fleshy green stalks.

  “Samphire,” he said, holding it out to show them. “Taste of the sea.”

  “Is it seaweed?” Olivia asked.