‘That isn’t a real place, you can’t be a real person,’ she said.
‘It is a real place and I am from there,’ he said.
As well as teaching her about light he taught her how to waltz. They danced in a club called the Dead Cat, as if he didn’t come from Jerusalem, as if she didn’t come from Wales. Pentrohobyn, to be exact. He said it like a dream, a mystical otherness, as far from the desert as it is possible to get. Rain, clouds, the flint and the chop. Ferns. Clay and limestone. ‘How magical,’ he said.
‘But I’m not really Welsh,’ she explained. ‘My family are English but live in Wales. So the Welsh hate us. The English hate us. We are in-betweeners, but we own a lot of land there.’
‘Let’s waltz, and not think about land?’
‘Let’s do that.’
Khaled worked for his photography master, Keller, who was employed by Louise-Elisabeth de Meuron to take photographs for Eleanora’s father of Amsoldingen Castle. Its curves, its cellars, its garden were all of a style that her father craved for Pentrohobyn Hall. When she had heard of this project she begged to be allowed to go, to learn a little about photography. Her father was sick of her. He walked out of the room when she came in. He was appalled at her refusing the debutante balls. She assumed he would say no.
‘These are not the times to travel.’
‘Switzerland is neutral.’
In the end, her father had agreed, but only because his brother was travelling there, and because he was exhausted with thinking about the problem of her and, yes, it might be better for everyone if she went to Switzerland.
The journey was uncomfortable. Awkward for both Eleanora and the resentful uncle who had not welcomed the company. He deposited her at Zürich and she was left to become the assistant’s assistant. Keller couldn’t stand photographing Swiss castles. He would rather be photographing soldiers. A war was coming. It made him sick to be photographing crumbling castles. Madame de Meuron made him sick.
Eleanora sat on Willie’s bed as she told him this story, speaking into the air between them. He tucked the sheet around him further to cover his flawed, revolting body. On the wall opposite, a framed illustration of a series of medicinal plants native to Palestine. Inula viscosa. Foeniculum vulgare. Urginea maritima. He stared at them, to avoid roaring.
‘And you were gone, Willie. To fly. Off to Greece, or other places.’
‘To war, Ellie.’
‘Well. Yes.’
What he felt as she spoke was: a terribly empty, hollow feeling. An inside-out undoing.
She continued:
Eleanora Roberts and Khaled Rasul waltzed at the cabaret and drank most evenings with a mime artist who was often accompanied by an odd woman who claimed to make love to parrots. By this time, military officers moved in lines with beautiful women in their arms. They danced, sang, drank jugs of beer. Eleanora picked up a button she saw fall from an officer’s coat sleeve once and put it in her pocket. When the third of their friends, a painter called Stael, and his model were both killed in an unexplained incident near their studio, Eleanora said, ‘Can we go to Jerusalem now, to the house you told me about? The one that your family have owned for generations and generations?’
Khaled said, ‘Maybe, maybe soon.’
He tried to convince her to come dancing with the parrot lady who lived in the same building as him, who kept summoning him down at midnight. ‘Come down,’ she would say, and Khaled always went to her as if towards a magnetic pull. ‘Let’s drink.’ He hadn’t drunk under the Turks in Jerusalem, he hadn’t drunk all his life and so he was making up for it now.
‘Why not come dancing?’ he asked Eleanora.
‘I don’t like the soldiers. I don’t feel safe.’
Zürich is neutral. They said it again and again. As neutral as Wales.
‘What would make you feel safe, Eleanora?’
‘That you will love me for ever, that I have enough food, though I will remain thin, that I am in a library surrounded by books, the pages are curled and the ceiling is covered with maps, the blue lines on the maps link from one page to the other and there is no separation, no end to all the countries and connections in the world, and men in overcoats following orders they don’t agree with will not kill tiny children.’
Khaled had looked strangely at her and then he had laughed.
‘I don’t want to bring children into a world where soldiers kill them.’
Khaled continued to look at her, with his odd expression, as if trying to understand what language she was speaking, even though, as he told her so many times, with his secular education at one of Jerusalem’s best schools he spoke English better than the English.
‘Also, I don’t trust the parrot lady. There is something about her shoes, they are boots. Men’s boots.’
Khaled continued to leave at midnight, disappearing through the door, moving, slipping out slowly and then running down the wooden stairs, but then one night he came home and fell headlong on to the bed. His face was swollen; she crouched over him to examine his cheek. When her finger touched his skin he groaned. This was when he’d said: ‘It is time to leave. I have a letter from my aunt’s cousin. She has died; the house then, despite the family moaning about it, is mine. It is full of cousins and uncles and family but he will remove them, and it will be for us, if we want it. Our own studio. I will not be conscripted if I am married to you.’
‘Oh, let’s go, let’s go.’ Because the officers who danced scared her now. The one who had dropped his button made a point of catching her eye.
‘Yes. We’ll go to Jerusalem, but first we must marry.’
That was how she explained it. Willie lit a cigarette. her face was hovering in front of him. Her skin pale and bloodless and it occurred to him that she always looked like a daughter in a state of mourning.
There was a night, Eleanora continued, in the room of one of the artists on the run from the front line; several men, many of them French, an aristocratic French prince of something or other, Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, and lying on the sofa in the centre of them all was a young woman from Skopje. The men were taking it in turns to stroke her ankle with just one finger. First an elderly Frenchman, his knees snapping as he crouched down, and then a younger man, an Austrian with a bald head and pointed beard. Eleanora sat and watched; the girl’s face remained still. She was older than Eleanora but not by much, perhaps twenty years old, and of a higher social class than all of the men. She was unmoved, if her face were to be read.
Eleanora had leant towards Khaled and said, ‘That would be a photograph.’
‘I was thinking the same thing.’
‘I hear you are going to Jerusalem,’ the woman from Skopje said, her thin voice rising from the heart of the chaise-longue.
‘Yes.’
‘I too have been promised rooms there. On Saint Francis Street. I feel the breath of war on our necks here.’
‘Then we shall be neighbours,’ said Khaled.
Eleanora finished her story. Her hand was resting on her stomach. ‘And now we are here.’ Was that the end? Where did she go from there? He looked at her, and then down at her hand. They were silent. Then she made an exasperated noise.
‘I need your help,’ she said, staring at him with red eyes. ‘You are the only person I can talk to about this, it is terribly haram. I’ve tried all the usual things: jumping off the bed, steamed onions.’
Reeling, dying inside from the story of how she fell in love with a photographer from Jerusalem, Willie didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘If I have this baby I will die,’ she said simply.
‘You don’t know that. Just because of your . . .’
‘I do.’
The whistling in Willie’s head changed tempo, became more of a thud.
‘I’m sure there are potions, but how do I get them here? Mohammedan doctors? Can you imagine?’
It finally unravelled in his mind what she was talking about.
‘Darling W
illie,’ she took his hand. ‘you have to help.’
‘What? I don’t have the remotest idea how to.’
She took off her fur coat. The blue dress she was wearing underneath had buttons along its front. She stood next to the bed and looked down at him. Underneath the sheet, the dead tortured skin on him came alive: nerve endings forcing their way through. With shaking fingers, she began to undo the buttons above her navel. She opened five or six and revealed the pure white area of her delicate stomach.
‘You need to hit me here, as hard as you can, as terribly as you can. I am so sorry to ask, I know it’s dreadful, but you can do it for me.’
The sinking inside him was exactly that of realising the cockpit is on fire; that he himself was on fire.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s the only solution I can think of.’
All the days of their lives strung together like beads on a wire, entwined. This was something entirely different.
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
She said nothing.
‘Eleanora, I absolutely refuse, I just . . .’
She did not move; her hand hovered in front of the fabric of her dress as if she were showing him a wound of her own to match his scars, but all he could see was the skin he had thought about all his life. She looked like a statue, apart from her shaking bottom lip.
‘You are my only hope, the only possible solution.’
‘It’s not possible. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t.’
‘I know. I know, darling, but I am asking you, it is the only time in my whole life I will ask you to do something like this for me. I am begging you.’ Her face, high up at the top of the sycamore tree all those years ago; the soft cry she made when she pushed herself back and allowed herself to fly.
‘I need to think about it,’ he said, sinking backwards into the bed. Wishing he could continue to fall.
Shoreham, 1937
Billy is standing in front of me, speaking, but I can’t hear the words. All I can think of is Skip crouched over his starfish.
I forced him to leave his father. I did that. I packed the clothes into the little brown suitcase, told him that his toys would follow, in a trunk. That was a lie. I stole him, bundled like a package, away from Nanny Jones, who loved him. Loves him. Away from Piers, who loved him. Loves him, and I thought I had enough love to fill the places of all these people?
Billy, with his large fat fingers, tugs me out of the rain and into Alfred Snelling’s front room. The butcher himself emerges from the back of the house, his apron covered in blood-red finger marks and purple smears.
‘You’re a pretty sight,’ he says. At first I think he is talking about me, but he is looking at Billy’s bashed-up face. I turn, to have another look at the damage: my fault. The right eye got the worst of it, swollen, purple-black, and when he manages to open the eyelids, inside the eyeball is scarlet.
‘Who did it?’
As Billy tells Mr Snelling the story, I see in my mind the image of a seagull, black-eyed and devious, picking at Skip, tugging his cardigan with its beak, using its feet to pick him up and fly away, the opposite of a stork: a child-stealer rather than a baby-deliverer.
‘Listen, Prue, what does he want?’ Both men look at me.
I cough, and then answer. ‘He had a few more questions, and then he was after papers relating to an old friend of mine, a photograph in there.’
‘A friend?’ I remember now that Billy had mentioned a ministry. A Ministry of what? Information? Intelligence? Mr Snelling, who hasn’t invited us to sit down, goes to his rocking chair and flops into it while we both stand, bowing, as if the ceiling is lower than it actually is. There is a line of framed photographs along the mantelpiece, all droopy-eyed dogs apart from one at the end which I guess is a freshly married Mr and Mrs Snelling: him looking pinched and spivvy, her face apprehensive, as if worrying about the conjugal night to come.
‘Will he be back?’ Mr Snelling says. ‘That’s the question.’ They send a signal to one another, a masculine code which I try to read: we’ll get him. Revenge will be ours. That sort of talk. As foolish as it might be to build a home out of sticks on a windy beach, I realise now that it might be even stupider to seek out a safe haven in bed with a man who smashes up bodies for a living.
‘Prue?’ Billy says.
I jump as if pinched.
‘Oh God, Skip. I don’t think I should have left him today, I’d better go back to Cecilia.’ I push my way towards the door, just as Mrs Snelling comes in with a plate of scones. Sorry. Sorry. Outside, I squint into the Shoreham sky. Run over to my bicycle, Billy is calling from Mr Snelling’s door, but I don’t listen. I give him a wave. Fly away.
I cycle as fast as I can over the bridge. The river below is a silver path and further along the banks of the Adur terraced houses peter into sheds and makeshift lean-tos for horses. The air smells very strongly of salt and I try to remember what Skip has told me about his perambulations, the roaming and exploring I have allowed him to do. The tide is low; my fingers on the handlebars are numb.
Hair in my eyes, the rain has finally stopped. I cycle towards Cecilia which sits like a gingerbread house by the sea being nibbled by beach mice. He is not on the veranda and why would he be? Sitting there like a boy in a storybook, waiting for me to come back? A bucket full of starfish gasping their last breath. I throw the bicycle on to the ground, panting a little from the exertion of pedalling. I put my hand on my chest and wonder at the choice I made, coming here with Skip. All the stack of twiggy choices, piling up together, making kindle wood, useless moves in life. Pointless. Dry old sticks. Every day adding up to be good for nothing, apart from setting on fire. Turning to smoke.
In Cecilia the blanket from Skip’s cot-bed is on the floor. The perfect white balls of chalk that he spends hours arranging and rearranging into specific constellations in front of the wood burner are in position. I pick up Mrs Deal’s long-ago-drained teacup. Put it down again. Skip is often out alone. No need to worry. Really, it is no different to any other day when I banish him to play, to roam, to do whatever he does, to fill up his hours until I have finished working. Yet the feeling is there; a mother’s instinct if one believed in such a thing. I open the door and stand again on the veranda. The light from the sea is glaring, harsh, as if actively wanting to inflict eye-trouble and slices of headaches. There are children on the beach, further down towards the shoreline, huddled together by the chalk boulders, and I run towards them. The crunching of my feet on shingle alerts them to me while I am still quite a distance away and they spring up like puppies on defence, watching out. They are poking sticks into a found-thing, but Skip is not with them, I see that at once. They all look up. Three wild boys and one scraggy-haired girl, guilty as cats caught scavenging in a bin.
‘Have you seen my boy?’ They flinch and lean together to hide whatever it is behind them and shake their heads, saying nothing. I glance away from them, along the beach. The clouds in the sky are low and heavy-looking.
‘He was collecting starfish, in a bucket.’
‘We dipped him.’ It is Walter, and I step closer, crouch down to see him properly. He seems surprised at this sudden concentrated attention and his lip curls a little, his head pulls back away from me, the wind takes his light brown curls and flaps them about his face. It is not hard to see the combined traces of Billy in his eyes and the straggle-haired woman full of cider in the club. He is the same age as Skip. I suspect he’s not the only one of the children of Shoreham who has had a go at damaging my son.
‘When?’
‘That was yesterday,’ the girl says, the eldest-looking one, and she – I can tell accurately now – has the freckles of the woman but not the sharp jaw of Billy. It has clearly been a while since any of them have seen a facecloth. ‘Today, I mean. Have you seen Skip today?’ They shake their heads, the whites of their eyes bright. I can see they are lying, or hiding something.
‘What is that, behind you?’
&nbs
p; ‘Nothing.’
The wind comes up, and carries a rancid smell. I push the girl out of the way and they all spring backwards as if connected. In a gap between the chalk boulders there is a coil of grey matter and for a moment I think it is Skip, crushed like a crab, but then I see that it is a baby seal cub, its face half-eaten and pecked by gulls and the chalk beneath the blubber of it stained pink. So he was right, seals can be found here.
I turn from the children and look inland, ignoring their whispers and sniggers behind me, ignoring the narrow-eyed stare of the eldest girl who has the most fearless expression of all. I look down again at the seal cub and jump backwards. Something is eating it, from the inside; its skin swells outwards.
‘Well, if you see him can you tell him I’m looking for him please?
I tramp back across the shingle and pause for a moment, looking up towards the row of seaside chalets and the railway carriages. I call him again, but the wind simply gives his name to the sea. There is a sting, on the back of my head. I turn; another sting on my cheek. They are pelting me, with sharp pieces of flint. A shower of them now and I put my arm over my face, move backwards, the little stinging flicks against my ear, against my neck, vicious and horrible.
Up on the higher shingle path Billy is sheltering his eyes and looking in my direction. He must have followed me. He waves, beckons, and I think of mermaids and of sailors gone awry following the wrong signal. I run towards him, the boxer. He touches the blood on my face. ‘What’s this?’
‘Your son, Walter.’
Billy’s eyes widen a little at the words your son, and then he looks down the beach at the cluster of children.
‘The naughty little blighter,’ he says, but I shake my head.
‘It’s all right.’ I want to say: you don’t have to explain anything to me, Billy.
‘I can’t see Skip.’ I put it lightly, and turn a circle on the shingle, as if to prove that my son is not in any direction. Then the shadows of Billy’s face change and I realise what he is going to say. I think of the shilling Harrington gave to Skip. I shake my head, look all around as if another person might come out of the mist and put a stop to bad thoughts. Listen! I want to shout at him. He will be close by. Billy looks at the sea, as if he is listening for a particular sound, but it’s not there. He can’t hear it, and neither can I.
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