Undercurrent

by Frances Fyfield

  She paused. Henry could see white fists, protruding from her coat sleeves, gripping.. the black rail.

  'Francesca pushes the kid through a gap too narrow for his body,' he said, surprisingly calm as if he were voicing a question of merely scientific interest. 'She shoves him. The kid's five years old.

  They're strong. Damn strong.'

  He could sense, rather than see, how she shook her head, the curls almost touching his face.

  'Not this one. Not very. He had paralysis down the right side, malfunctioning right arm and leg.

  She said she stamped on the weak side and down he went. Gentle encouragement.'

  Henry moved away from her abruptly and vomited. His stomach was empty; the involuntary effort produced nothing but bile.

  'I did what I could for her at trial.' Maggie's unfamiliar voice continued crisply. 'At least 1 got them to leave out some of the more gruesome facts. Not that it makes any difference in a guilty plea to murder. Life imprisonment, regardless of the age of the deceased. At least we don't hang people any more.'

  He wanted to disbelieve her and he wanted to get away from her. Henry began to walk back towards the seafront. He folded his arms and clutched at the comforting leather of his jacket. He watched his own polished shoes putting one step in front of another and made himself concentrate on keeping his feet marching at a regular pace and in a straight line, realizing as he concentrated that he was moving faster and faster and any moment now he might break into a run and hit something, unless he slowed down and looked up.

  Heard the sound of a car on the road, and found she had kept level with him all along. He felt furiously inclined to take a swing at her, simply bat her away and listen to her fall, but then there was a dim memory of violence, so recently described, which made him ashamed of that impulse, too. Not that he believed a word of it.

  Henry had come in search of a good woman, or at least an interesting sinner, not a bitch who killed children.

  He let her take hold of his coat. She was smiling at him and all he wanted to do was spit.

  'You don't have to believe me, Henry,' she was saying. 'You can check it all out in the library. You never have to believe what you see. And then you can go home, if you want.'

  He was leaning against a lamppost, the pier behind him. There was a stone in his shoe.

  'You will go home, won't you?'

  It sounded like a plea, but he could not guess what it was she was hoping he might do.

  Henry could see his suitcase in the hall, today or tomorrow, but soon. He hesitated.

  'I can't believe a woman like Francesca was could ever be so barbaric.'

  'We've all had difficulties with that, Mr Evans. Which has nothing to do with anything, does it? She believes it.'

  'But 1 knew her,' Henry said. 'I loved her.'

  'Loving someone,' Maggie said bitterly, 'has never been a guarantee of their virtue.

  CHAPTER FIVE.

  There was no one walking, other than those accompanied by dogs. Henry formed the impression of a series of dogs leading their subservient owners on well worn routes. The dogs seemed alert, the owners on autopilot. Henry concentrated on the dogs to suppress the bile which kept gathering at the back of his throat.

  It was the dogs that got the owners out of the houses. Henry was realizing that he knew very little of how other people lived. He would have to maintain a twenty-four-hour surveillance, repeated at intervals during all four seasons of the year, to get a single idea of how they behaved, and even then all he would have observed was public habit, peculiar enough in its own right but not particularly revealing. You learned so little by simply watching. You could learn how to rob a place, but not what was in it. All he could see at the moment was the fact that the few stalwart elderly and early-rising occupants of Warbling, en route to the newspaper shop, were roughly the same shades of grey as their dogs, and all of them needed grooming.

  He felt angry and sick.

  'Coffee?' Maggie was saying briskly, clutching his arm again, as if she belonged, or as if he himself wasa wilful pet. 'Awful coffee, but warm?'

  'Who did you say you were?'

  'I told you. I'm Maggie.' She was standing with her hands on her hips, impatient, but not unsympathetic. That look of annoyance again, as if she was disappointed in him. 'By definition, a very part time lawyer of this parish, colleague of Edward Burns.

  Status: recently divorced and deliberately homeless. A fellow lodger of yours, in case you hadn't noticed.

  But I'm much more famous for being Francesca Chisholm's cousin. Do you want this filthy coffee or not? Or are you just going to stand there looking pale and interesting?'

  He nodded.

  There was one establishment open, although 'functioning' was how Henry might have described it in a more lucid moment, but only just. A burger bar with steaming windows, facing the road, and next to the newspaper shop which was attracting the dogs.

  There were three occupants, with faces variously hidden behind the Mail, the Times and the Express. Beneath a sign which announced NO DOGS, he and she stepped over the large, unleashed specimen which lay draped over the step, eyes glaring mournfully through the glass. When Henry sat, he could feel the sad eyes of the dog scrutinizing him. Maggie came back with a tray. As she sat opposite, he was wondering how it was he could ever have confused her with Francesca.

  'Where did you get that shawl?' was all he could ask, sipping coffee which was even worse than she had hinted, weak but bitter at the same time. She fingered the fine, creamy wool round her neck, with the hint of embroidery hidden in the folds, and looked at him in surprise, temporarily lost for words.

  'Francesca gave it to me,' she said hurriedly. 'She had several of them. They were part of her hallmark, really. When Harry was a baby, she would wrap him in one--'

  ' Harry? He was called Harry? Why the hell would she call him Harry?'

  'I've no idea,' Maggie said. 'But I doubt it was a tribute to a long-lost friend. He was born in the shadow of the castle, and she once lived in the castle and a King Henry built the castle, I suppose.

  And we have a Prince Harry .. .'

  'Oh.' He felt foolish, even imagining there could have been the slightest association between this dead child and himself, some half-assed, sentimental memory of his existence influencing her choice. Silly thought, stemming only from Maggie's remarks about shawls. Something he'd done right, then, giving Francesca those shawls. She had obviously liked them, made them into a lifelong habit, might have appreciated the one he had brought with him. She had wrapped her baby in a shawl, killed it...

  Henry's hand trembled round the rim of his mug. Anger. He was incredibly angry with her for besmirching her own memory; remembered what that other lawyer had advised him for free: better regard her as dead. He sipped the coffee and absorbed a smell of burning toast. There was a king size loaf of saggy white bread on the counter; Henry shuddered.

  The food he had eaten at the House of Enchantment was the best; he had interspersed it with the worst. It was not only his mind that was being poisoned.

  'I can take you to the castle if you like,' Maggie was saying, over-brightly. 'It's interesting if you like that kind of thing. I presume you do, or you wouldn't be here. I mean, you didn't come all this way to find Francesca, did you? There must be something else about us, I mean about this place, which captured your imagination.'

  She was speaking so quickly, accelerating as she went, that he had difficulty following, but the voice was so clipped and effortlessly patrician he wanted to mimic it, the way he had once tried to mimic Francesca's, and she his, although he had never been able to master her ability to produce sentences as if they were fully formed. She never said, it's kinda like this, if you know what I mean . .

  She never said I dunno, or I just need to think about this. She had spoken her statements and her observations as if she had thought about them first, even if she retracted them later. It had seemed archaic to him then, her articulate and entirely certain ma
nner of speech, but all it had been was fluent.

  'Can I ask you something?'

  'Certainly.'

  'She told me, I mean, Francesca told me, that when they sat around as kids, having meals and all, her dad would correct them if they didn't get their grammar right. I mean, when they were three or four he started doing that. And he made them learn poetry by heart. Do you know if he did? Sounds like some kind of tyrant to me.'

  She shook her head. A stray hair floated across his vision and landed on the Formica table top. He stared at it, trying in his mind to describe the colour, attempting at the same time to recall some of Francesca's anecdotes about her father which had coloured his opinions of the man, made it so inexplicable that she should be so distraught at the late-arriving news of his death. Then he remembered how he had spent so much of his time slagging off his own parent for being a reactionary jerk who liked fishing and understood nothing. It was only time which had altered his perceptions and allowed admiration to intrude.

  'Did he do that?' he repeated.

  She shrugged. 'Yes. I wasn't his daughter and I was a few years younger than her. All I know is that if he corrected his wife and daughter and yes, he was a stickler for all kinds of protocol, even at the breakfast table, he married it with a quite uncanny charm.

  He insisted on good manners and clear speech, no mumbling. Strict about that. Talk in phrases, child, that's what they are for, you must make yourself understood. That aside, he taught me how to cheat at cards and play a tune on the recorder in an afternoon.

  He was a rather charismatic man, I recall, a feature certainly inherited by his daughter. There was nothing tyrannical about him. He was a born teacher, like her. Could've taught pigs to fly.

  Probably did.'

  Henry spooned sugar into his coffee. An improvement to the taste which he could feel, furring a tube somewhere.

  'I could tell you all sorts of things about the locality,' Maggie went on. 'And all Francesca's people if you want to know. They're all over the place. Over there -' she pointed to where a dark-haired man sat with his newspaper. 'That's Neil. He was married to Angela, who was Francesca's best friend.' She waved at him; he waved back, dismissively. 'Not very sociable this morning, he'll be thinking of his fishing. And then there's - oh, I'm sorry, you're upset.' She drank her coffee with gusto. 'Forgive me for eavesdropping on your conversation with Edward Burns yesterday but eavesdropping is a necessary habit.'

  'Yes. I can tell.'

  'You've so much to see before you leave, Henry may I call you that? You should start at once. The castle opens at nine; Angela does Sunday mornings, so they'll let us in early, and anyway, you've just consumed enough sugar to energize a horse. Shall we go?'

  'Why not?' She was bossy, but he did not want to be alone. Anything was preferable to that. Alone he would slump; accompanied, he could listen, recover his wits.

  The mist had cleared into a haze and the sun persisted in adding a benign and gentle glow. Inside the steaming burger bar, there was an illusion of warmth, dispelled as soon as they hit the air. The February sun cheered without heat, nothing but a teasing foretaste of spring.

  'We can walk, or drive,' Maggie said. 'I've brought my car, but normally I walk everywhere.'

  'Like most people, I guess.'

  'Isn't that strange for you?'

  'No. Yes. No stranger than anything else. I mean it is strange, but it doesn't feel strange,' Henry said, thinking of the daily routine he had abandoned at home. Into the car in the morning, back home in the car in the evening and he remembered his fear of the traffic jams. He had not been behind the wheel of a car in days and liked not having to think about it. He felt incapable of hurrying, just as on the day before he had felt incapable of running. He looked at Maggie, walking on his left on the outside of the pavement as if she was protecting him, slowing her steps to match his own. In the normal run of events, it would have been he who was brisk and precise; now he felt weighted down with dismal knowledge.

  'The best way to approach the castle is from the sea,' she was saying. He followed her down steps on to the beach. The beach banked steeply; the sea was close and calm. The walking was slower still: Henry could see this heavy-footed treading over loose stones as a punishing exercise. The shingle yielded at each step with a crunching sound which reminded him of someone eating breakfast cereal. It was a satisfying noise, marking slow progress which could not be hurried.

  He stopped, picked up a pebble and lobbed it into the water. She followed suit: hers went further.

  Henry selected a larger, more aerodynamic stone, flung it. This time it outdistanced hers and disappeared with an audible plop, encouraging him to follow with another and another. So did she.

  Then they threw simultaneously and the stones entered the water at almost the same spot and same second.

  'A draw,' she said, slightly breathless, turning up the slope they had slithered down.

  'Quits,' he said. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I'll do that whenever I'm tired. Henry thought. Come down to the ocean and toss pebbles into it. Such a pointless, therapeutic activity, they should make a drug to match it.

  'No one could make an exactly quiet approach to this castle, could they?' he volunteered through the noise of their steps. 'How could anyone get close enough to take them by surprise? They'd be heard right away.'

  'And seen.'

  'If I were the enemy,' Henry said, 'I'd ignore the damn castle, get my men ashore further down the coast and come around the back way.'

  'You'd still have to get into the castle.'

  'That's what bribes are for.'

  'You know what. Henry? You talk like a woman.'

  They were walking the circumference of a massive wall, low enough for them to stare over the fifty feet of wintry grass which separated it from the main body of the castle. The whole edifice began far below them, lower than sea level, and looked as if it had been excavated from beneath the ground, discovered complete and fully formed, exactly as it was. Henry paused to remove a stone from his shoe and when he looked up again, the grey-green walls of the bastion seemed higher and darker than before.

  The muzzle of a black cannon peeped at him over a plain parapet, the mouth of it filled with red.

  It looked like a toy placed carefully on a model, ready for someone to play with. The wooden drawbridge was quaint and the great iron-studded oak doors were almost beautiful below an arched ceiling of figured red brick.

  Maggie pointed out the holes in the mellow stone above.

  'Those are for the boiling oil on your head if you got this far. Did she tell you she lived here?'

  'Yes, she did.'

  'Well, it was true.'

  And she turned into a murderess. Henry thought, trying not to think about it. Maggie kicked the door as if she owned the place, and as if in tribute to her command the right side moved outwards, slowly, pushed from behind. It was not fully opened, but enough for a child to step through. The most beautiful girl child he had ever seen, her face so purely medieval that in this setting, it shocked him.

  The skin was white with lips so red they could have been painted; she had enormous, unblinking eyes which regarded him with hostility, and a mass of chestnut curls sprang from her neat skull. She was dressed entirely in black: black trainers, leggings, black bomber jacket - all one, chic piece which made her seem more like a miniature adult, although the voice and the pout were entirely that of a ten-year-old.

  'Hi, there Tanny. What are you doing here?'

  Maggie's voice was full of warmth.

  'I'm opening the door,' the girl said, matter of factly. 'I'm on duty with Mummy. Only till Neil gets in, but I might stay all day, 'cos Mummy goes to see Uncle Joe ...'

  'Can we come in?'

  'Yeah.'

  Another forbidding door, then a comfortable shop area, illuminated by yellow sunlight from a window set deep in the wall, where a woman, also with auburn curls, was tending a kettle steaming behind a counter, looking up without smiling.


  'Aw, come on, Maggie . . . What the f-- are you doing here?'

  The expletive was choked back. Not in front of the children, although Tanya looked as if she had heard it all before and was grinning appreciation.

  Henry was easily charmed by children and he found her enchanting. The girl twitched with suppressed energy, every inch the child despite the design-consciousness of her clothing, eyeing each of them in turn as if to judge which would supply the most attention.

  'I'm just here with an early bird of a tourist,'

  Maggie was saying, talking too fast again. 'Angela, this is Henry Evans, our visiting American I was telling you about yesterday. Henry, this is Angela Hulme, and this is her daughter, Tanya.'

  'Hallo.' The greeting from Angela was perfunctory. She did not present to Henry as a happy person.

  'I want to go out, I want to go out,' Tanya was chanting, hopping from one foot to the other.

  'Look, I haven't organized the tapes or turned on the lights yet. It's too damned early for a proper tour round. What the hell do you think you're doing, Maggie? I suppose bloody Neil lets you do as you please.'

  'I should apologise,' Henry said, spreading his hands. 'I guess this is my fault.'

  'Perhaps Tanya can show Henry the cannons,'

  Maggie interrupted smoothly. 'And Mummy can make her tea.'

  'Yeah,' Tanya yelled. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah!'

  Angela gave Maggie a venomous look. Her hair glowed titian in the shaft of light, making her strong features seem harder. Henry wanted out of there. He liked kids although he felt so unskilled in their company that he never sought it, but anything was better than seeing women suppressing a quarrel. It made the walls of the room close in and inspired him to do something. He doffed an imaginary hat, and bowed low to the girl, with a flourish.

  'Would Mademoiselle lead on?' She laughed, responded with a full curtsy, daintily lifting an imaginary skirt as she put left foot behind right and sank in a parody of a courtly lady.