The Partridge and the Pelican

by Rachel Crowther

  “Nice to see you smiling,” he said.

  They keep you locked in the present. You are not supposed to remember the past and there is nothing to anticipate except the blankness of a future that is always the same. Each day is an empty space, indistinguishable from the one before and the one after. Row upon row like a hall of mirrors, they taunt you if you lift your head to look at them. Each week, each month, a chain of identical images that slip through your grasp, allowing no finger hold. Time here has no beginning and no end: you go on existing; that is all they allow you.

  But the past is still there, washed on the tide of drugs and sorrow. There are glimpses, sometimes: a flickering image beneath the surface, the sharp glitter of something bobbing in the distance. And when you least expect it the tide goes out, leaving pictures you could call memory. A memory without words, but it is simpler that way.

  There is a girl you know to be you, a child with plaits, buttoned into a winter coat, her hands held by a sister and a brother. Older: twice her size, they seem. She seems happy, this child, and you are glad for her, although her happiness arouses a dull rage that you cannot locate.

  You see her again, always the same child, sometimes younger and sometimes older. A sickly child, often in bed. The kind brother who sits with her; the sister who runs off to play, who dresses up for parties. The father who looms and sways, leaning against the door frame. The mother with a hard life and a hard face. The coldness of the house, always.

  She is rarely at school, this child, but she reads and reads and one day, one hot summer, she finds a way out of the chilly house and the flat, bare land that runs all the way to the sea. Her family do not understand how, or why, but she goes, with her parcel of books and her clothes packed into a leather bag. She goes, but she takes with her something that none of them know about, none of them suspect. Something that will end in disgrace and despair, in the long blank corridors and white rooms where there are no books. No words. No explanations.

  Something else penetrates your dreams. A horror like the birth: another passage you resisted with silent screams, that ended bloodied and torn. In the darkness you sense it coming and you can do nothing. None of them will save you: the kind brother, the sister who is married and gone, the silent mother. The father sways and lurches and you have always been powerless, a sickly child with pale limbs and hollow eyes. A child lost in other worlds, dreaming of escape.

  Chapter 35

  1983

  It seemed to Olivia, driving south, that the seasons had turned overnight: that summer had yielded, after the furious stormy battle of the last week, to a peaceful autumn. Fields bleached brown through July and August showed a shimmer of green again; crops steeped in sunshine all summer were swelling, burgeoning, ripening towards the harvest. The chill in the air and the cool grey light in the sky were welcome after the stifling heat and its tempestuous aftermath.

  The atmosphere inside the car, however, wasn’t the companionable quiet she and Eve had often shared that summer, or even the wordless communion of the previous night, but a silence in which powerful emotions were barely contained. It surrounded them, Olivia thought, like a bubble. Memory and misunderstanding spun and merged on its iridescent surface, the past and the future dissolving into the emptiness of the present.

  The seed of it had been there when they fled from Shearwater House the previous day, a tiny bubble that sealed away the echo of the shouting and the ugly words as she and Eve drove without purpose through the featureless landscape. During the afternoon – at the phone box, the petrol station, the hospital – it had swelled and strained to enclose all the things they couldn’t talk about, couldn’t dispel or ignore or acknowledge. And last night, when Olivia had left James in the kitchen and climbed the stairs and opened the door not of her bedroom but of Eve’s, it had settled around them as they slept, pressed together for comfort in the dark, like a canopy hung about the bed. It was the last thing they could share, Olivia thought, the last thing they had in common, this shroud of silence. Glancing at Eve now, she remembered with a clutch of stark regret their camaraderie earlier in the summer, the nights in the tent or the incommodious double beds of guest houses when proximity had been effortless and unremarkable.

  As the hours passed, two, then three, then four, Olivia coaxed her mind away from the events of the previous day and the past few weeks. In two days she would be in Dubai with her parents. It felt as odd to be leaving the English autumn for the subtropical heat of the Arabian Gulf as to be leaving a person who felt like a stranger after a whole summer spent in each other’s company. But when she thought of the colours, the smells, the sounds of Dubai, she felt a pressing impatience to be elsewhere. Surely the weight of loss and guilt would feel different in another context, a place where there were no fields, no grey horizon, no steep pebble beaches. The foreignness of the Middle East would be welcome, this time. The expat routine of her parents’ life would be a comfort.

  Before that, though, they had to get Eve home. Olivia had driven to the de Perrevilles’ house before, but she didn’t know the way by heart. As they drove west along the A27 she braced herself to speak, but it was Eve who broke the silence first.

  “You need the next exit,” she said. “We turn off before Chichester.”

  There was something adult in her voice, a world-weary overtone, as though she’d tired of the adolescent game they’d been playing all summer. It had been there when they’d said goodbye to James that morning, the kind of disappointment parents betray when their children misbehave. A mixture of I-should-have-known and I’d-hoped-for-better. Olivia had felt implicated, even though she had held Eve in her arms all night; even though she could have accepted the invitation to James’s bed, and had not.

  She clicked the indicator and pulled off onto the slip road, following Eve’s staccato instructions until they reached the outskirts of Eastmere.

  “Strange to be back here,” she said, “after all the places we’ve been.”

  Eve nodded; a barely perceptible movement. She looked ill again, her face drained and pale. Like mother of pearl, Olivia thought, an unearthly sheen to her skin. It occurred to her that neither of them would ever look as wholesome and innocent again as they had at the beginning of summer.

  “There’s a right turn in the village,” Eve said. “After the pub.”

  “I remember.”

  The de Perrevilles’ house wasn’t huge, but it had the approach, the setting, of a house on a grander scale. Stone gateposts flanked the entrance, and the façade, blamelessly symmetrical in the pale sunshine, was first seen across a sweep of lawn fringed by silver birch trees. It ought, Olivia thought, to constitute a happy compromise between domesticity and gracious living, but it looked to her at that moment like a doll’s house forgotten in the corner of a playroom, unprepared for visitors.

  They hadn’t rung ahead to let Eve’s parents know they were coming. Neither of them had thought of using the telephone at Shearwater House, and after yesterday a phone box was out of the question. As the car hit the gravel in front of the house Olivia felt a qualm of misgiving.

  “Have you got a key?” she asked.

  Eve shook her head. “My mother will be here.” She was leaning forwards now, craning her neck, taking no trouble to conceal her impatience.

  And as they drew to a halt the house sprang to life. A dog came bounding round from the back, a stiff little wire-haired dachshund barking furiously, and then the front door opened and there was Eve’s mother, framed between neo-Classical pillars and wearing the kind of pale draping clothes that would have suited a statue of Diana or Athena.

  “Darling!” she called, “what a lovely surprise!” There was a wobble in her voice that made Olivia feel instantly excluded; she thought of the cool welcome her own mother would offer at the airport in Dubai. While Eve ran up the steps, Olivia opened the boot of the car and lifted out Eve’s bags, setting them down carefully on the gravel.

  “What have you done, Mummy?” she heard Eve say,
and the laughing reply: “I slipped on the stairs, clumsy me.”

  Olivia glanced over, and realised that the impression of flowing garments was partly due to the sling that supported Mrs de Perreville’s right arm.

  “Is it broken?” Eve asked.

  “I’m sure not, just bruised. And a black eye too: such drama! Would you believe it, all the way down with the tea tray in my hands?” She laughed again, and pressed her daughter against her chest with sudden ferocity. Eve nestled in like a little girl, all her resilient independence gone as she gave herself up to her mother’s embrace.

  Then Mrs de Perreville lifted her good hand behind Eve’s back to greet her daughter’s friend. “How lovely to see you too, Olivia, safe and sound.”

  Olivia smiled, mumbled greetings. The closeness of these two was familiar, the hermetic bond between mother and daughter that she’d always – what? Envied? Admired? Watching them now, she was conscious of another perception: for a moment she saw the survivors of some natural disaster, clinging together on the threshold of their ruined house.

  Olivia turned away, dispelling this fanciful notion. The house stood square and solid; Eve and her mother had nothing but a sprained wrist and a lingering bug between them. If they were holding tight to each other, it was because they’d been separated all summer, because they depended on each other in a way Olivia could never completely understand.

  “Will you stay for supper?” Eve’s mother said, when the bags had been carried up the steps. “We can rustle up a homecoming feast.”

  Olivia shook her head. “I’d better not,” she said, even though she was very hungry. They hadn’t stopped for lunch; negotiating that would have been too difficult.

  “At least a cup of tea,” Mrs de Perreville pressed.

  “I should be getting on.” It was what her father said, on these occasions. An allusion to other demands on one’s time.

  “But where are you going, Olivia? Are your parents in the country?”

  “I’m going to stay with my guardian for a couple of days.”

  A schoolfriend of her mother’s had looked after Olivia for half terms and exeats while she was at school, and her sprawling, low-ceilinged cottage had become a familiar refuge over the years. Olivia’s last postcard, sent the day after they arrived in Aldeburgh, had suggested that she might have a day or two to spare before her flight, and she knew she’d be welcomed without any more notice. If she left now she’d be in time for supper, she thought. The only fixed point in that pleasantly unstructured household: supper at half past seven, when Frank returned from the station in Liphook after his day in London. Steak and kidney pudding, perhaps. The associations of Margaret’s stolid English cooking were suddenly heavy with nostalgia.

  Eve disentangled herself from her mother then and came down the steps, like a child remembering her manners at the last minute.

  “Goodbye, Olivia,” she said. “Have a nice time in Dubai.”

  They hugged awkwardly, standing beside the car under the languid evening sky, and then Olivia climbed back into the driver’s seat. She circled the little car around the wide oval of gravel and tooted once as she headed back up the drive.

  As she approached the gateposts again she glanced over her shoulder to catch a final glimpse of the house, and was surprised to see Eve and her mother still standing at the top of the stone steps, two willowy blonde figures leaning in to each other, gazing after the retreating car. She was the last person they needed, Olivia thought, but even so she couldn’t avoid the feeling that she was abandoning them.

  Chapter 36

  2008

  It was Robert who suggested a long weekend away – an early birthday present, he said. He did it delicately, courteously. Olivia’s birthday was close enough to Christmas that it was easily overlooked, but he didn’t labour the pretext. It was one of his skills, that sort of tact; the kind that could almost pass for absent-mindedness, for missing the point altogether.

  Olivia wouldn’t have chosen Suffolk, but Robert had already booked the Swan in Southwold. A colleague had recommended it as the perfect place for a winter break, citing the sea, the Adnam’s brewery, the excellent food. And it lived up to his description, a place of luxury and gentle pleasures, of craft shops and beach huts, open grassy spaces and fine Georgian houses. Olivia and Robert walked along the beach, read newspapers on the comfortable chintz sofas in the lounge. The days passed slowly but too fast, one running into another.

  On the final day, they drove down the coast to Aldeburgh. This was Robert’s idea too, and it occurred to Olivia that it had been part of the plan all along. Did Robert understand, she wondered, that the associations were unavoidable for her? Did he mean her to face them? As they drove out of Southwold she thought of asking, but the words wouldn’t come together. Since the momentous night of her confession there had been a strange shyness between them; a sense, on Olivia’s side, that she shouldn’t push her luck. Instead she stared out of the window, remembering a documentary she’d seen about evacuees being taken back, in old age, to the windswept village where they’d spent the war years.

  She hadn’t been back to Suffolk since 1983, but she remembered the A12, the tangle of lanes on its seaward side. She’d got better at navigating since then: it was hard to imagine how lost they’d been that day, she and Eve, even though she could see the spider’s web laid out on the map now. This must have been where they were, somewhere in this circle. Theberton, Leiston, Knodishall, Sternfield, Carlton. Olivia remembered Theberton, but none of the rest. Were they Viking names, she wondered?

  She spoke them under her breath, hearing the chink of armour, the rush of the wind. And Knodishall was in two different places, either side of the B1119: how was one supposed to manage that?

  The route was straightforward today, in any case. All on main roads, and well signed.

  The weather had looked promising earlier, one of those misty winter mornings that often lead on to sunshine. Olivia glanced in the direction of the sea as they drove, hoping to see patches of blue sky, but the mist lingered until it was absorbed by swathes of cloud blown in from the North Sea. Those heavy skies, Olivia thought, and the flatness of the land: she remembered that. The great stretch of it, punctuated by those extraordinary churches built in the region’s wool-trading heyday. Blythburgh, with its angels. All of it ready to be swallowed in one bite if the sea level rose, as they said it soon would.

  “Do you want to stop at Snape?” Robert asked as they approached the turning. “Explore the Maltings?”

  They’d never made it to Snape, in 1983.

  “No,” said Olivia. “On the way back, perhaps.”

  Nothing about the outskirts of Aldeburgh looked familiar. Had it changed so much, or had she forgotten?

  She hadn’t meant to look for Shearwater House, but when they turned right, looking for a place to park along the seafront, there it was. Olivia recognised it instantly, although it wasn’t exactly as she remembered. She felt one of those little jolts of memory, where what is recalled and what is before you are superimposed for a moment, before the brain latches on to hard reality.

  Robert swung the car into an empty space. “That’s lucky,” he said. “I didn’t expect to be able to park so close to the sea.”

  Olivia sat in the car while he researched the parking regulations. The beach was a few feet away over a concrete ledge, the steep ridge of pebbles blocking the view of the sea.

  “Pay and display,” Robert said, when he opened the passenger door to attach the ticket to the windscreen.

  Robert rarely spoke unnecessarily; it was petty of her to notice.

  “Whereabouts did you stay, that summer?” he asked, as she climbed out of the car.

  Olivia pointed.

  Shearwater House was blue now, not pink, although the paintwork looked as weathered as ever. A faded flower, not a scuffed seashell: an end of season forget-me-not. The plaque beside the door must be the same, made from some hard stone to resist the salt and the wind, but it lo
oked different too, the lettering sharper and more deeply engraved than Olivia remembered. She could see the clouds reflected in the plain, square windows, and behind them the faint edges of curtains, pulled back. It was impossible to tell whether they were the same ones whose seams Eve had examined twenty-five years before.

  Then, as she stood, not immediately in front of the house but quite obviously staring at it, the front door opened and a woman emerged, carrying a battered canvas shopping bag. Olivia looked past her into the hall. The ancient chest of drawers was still there, but with a vase of flowers on top instead of the bowl of seashells Olivia remembered. The woman hesitated for a moment, as though wondering whether to say something to someone inside the house, then she pulled the door shut behind her. In that moment she noticed Olivia and smiled, and Olivia stepped forward.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “are you – “

  Then she stopped. She couldn’t remember the name of James’s aunt, and anyway she must be in her seventies by now, and this woman was closer to Olivia’s own age. She could be anyone, Olivia thought; at best the connection between them was trifling.

  But the woman was waiting, her face open and enquiring. I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake, said a voice in Olivia’s head, but the words that came out were different, seizing on the only name she remembered.

  “I wondered if Amelia was here,” she said.

  The woman looked puzzled, but she smiled again.

  “I’m Amelia,” she said. “Do I know you?”

  Robert didn’t understand. They walked in silence along the beach, stones scrunching as they gave way beneath their hard-soled shoes, but Olivia could hear the questions that hung unspoken in the air. Picked up by the seagulls, perhaps, as they swooped, elegant and ugly, to and from the horizon. Olivia said nothing because she didn’t know where to begin, how to explain her desire to speak to the woman or the mistake she’d made. She felt the same tumult of confusion and shame and embarrassment she’d felt on that long-ago day, slipping out to fetch the map from the car. The same feelings, and the same backdrop of sea and sky and pebbles. She let the wind lift her hair, the waves fill her head, and she took Robert’s arm as people do when they walk along the beach.