‘I’m sure he’s close by,’ he says. His tone not convincing.
I stand on tiptoe, my ankle wavers on the unsteady stones. ‘Skip,’ I shout into the beach air. My hands drop by my sides.
Mrs Deal is walking along the shingle path, and has turned towards us with a concerned look.
‘Mrs Deal,’ I say. ‘Oh Mrs Deal, have you seen Skip?’ She picks her way across the stones and the sea cabbage and squints towards the sea, glances up to the heavens. When she reaches us her eyes widen at Billy’s wreck of a face. She shakes her head.
‘There’s a policeman waiting for you at Cecilia,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d better come and find you.’
‘Police?’ Billy tenses, being the kind of man who avoids the police if at all possible. I move forwards quickly, but there is a rush of blood in my head. I have always been apt to lose my breath and fall out of my body, to faint at unfortunate moments. I’ve always thought it is a preservation technique: I’m not sure I want to be here, I shall tip myself away, blur myself out, but right now I do not want blackness, I want to be clear, and present. Billy takes my hand and the rough touch of it brings me back. It is impossible to run very fast on a slope of pebbles; together we move slowly away from the sea.
A policeman in his smart helmet and boots is standing next to the wall along the edge of Kangaroo, the bungalow next door. When he sees us coming he stands up straight. He addresses Billy instead of me.
‘Afternoon.’
We all wait in a row, an unnatural group, looking at one another.
‘Is it Skip?’ I say. The policeman tilts his head at me and then gestures to the door of Cecilia. ‘Is this your house?’
‘Yes, come in.’
Inside the small space we all awkwardly try to arrange ourselves around the corners of my bed and table. There is a slippage in time, it seems. This day isn’t proceeding as it should. I see in my mind Skip, ducking my blown kiss as if avoiding a dart and running on to the beach in ragged clothes. Was that this morning? Another day? Looking like a nomad, like a gypsy child. When did I stop dressing him properly? But I already know the answer: it was when Nanny Jones stopped dressing him for me. One of our first nights here I took Skip out on to the beach to see the shooting stars; it was the end of August. He crouched next to me, scrunched his feet in the pebbles, and took it very seriously. He did not speak and stared up at the sky. You’re breathing too loud, Mummy, I can’t hear the stars.
They are all looking at me. Mrs Deal, Billy, the policeman.
‘A message has been sent for you.’
‘What?’
The policeman steps forward as if he’s about to deliver a lecture.
‘We just received a phone call at the station saying you are to come to the aerodrome immediately.’
‘What?’ I say again.
‘Is it the journalist man?’
The policeman shakes his head. ‘Nope. Actually, it’s an instruction from London. Government officials. You are to be escorted to the aerodrome and the message is, and this I confess I don’t know what it means so I hope you do, “bring what has been previously requested”.’ And then the policeman shrugs again. ‘All I can say is, it comes from high.’
‘High?’ Mrs Deal says, scoffing, as if she can’t remotely take him seriously.
‘They are sending a man down, he should get here on the four thirty-six, we’ll have a car waiting for him. He’s coming to meet you, Mrs Miller.’
They all look at me, and I have finally got the breath in my lungs and throat to quieten down, but a new, different sort of gulping for air is rising up in me.
‘Is Skip at the aerodrome?’
The policeman looks confused. ‘Skip?’
‘My son?’
The policeman reads through his notes. ‘I’m sorry, madam, I don’t know anything about your son.’
Billy takes my hand. ‘My guess is, he’ll be there.’
‘Taken, you mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
Skip and I often go up the hill together and look at the roofs of the hangars and the airfield behind. There you can see the tips of the wings of some of the parked planes that were fighters in the war but are now used for joyrides to Hastings or Lydd. Skip has always been obsessed with aeroplanes. He makes them from paper, from wood, from sticks. He flies them, he crashes them, and he dreams about them, he draws them. Yes, I think. It would not have been difficult for Harrington to convince Skip to join him at the aerodrome, where it is always chilly, where the field is prone to flooding.
‘But what is it you are supposed to bring?’ Billy asks, as if I understand why this is happening. As if the holes I used to make in wax, when I was first learning to sculpt, the finger-poked spaces inside the creamy substance, somehow provided a gap-space that linked one part of my life with another. I glance over to the little bureau which rests against one of the remaining original carriage panels. On it is the Hotel Fast photograph. Mrs Deal, in her bright clear voice, takes over.
‘I suggest this,’ she says. ‘I stay here with Prudence and help her find whatever it is this man, or the Ministry, wants. You gentlemen wait outside until we are ready to leave?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘We should go straight to the aerodrome and find Skip.’
The policeman flaps his notes in the air. ‘It does seem important. Whatever it is you are supposed to bring.’
‘I don’t care about that,’ I say, turning to Billy for support, but Billy is agreeing with the policeman, I can tell from the expression on his face. Even Mrs Deal concurs.
They go out, closing the door gently, and the sea behind them is still there, even though Skip is not, and I can hear Mrs Deal rocking on her heels, moving herself forwards and backwards like the tide. I turn quickly to her. ‘I’m just going to grab anything, Mrs Deal. I need to find Skip.’
I go to the wardrobe-trunk where I keep my suitcase full of papers. I can hear her thinking what to say to me, rubbing her dry, weathered hands together. There have been many times in my life when I have looked at the disarray around me and wished, truly wished, I could keep my own affairs in order. Even my sketchbooks and notebooks which are very precious to me are in a muddle, many of them lost.
‘Do you think this fellow will have taken Skip roughly, or just talked him into wandering off?’ Mrs Deal says gently, still with that dry hand-rubbing, still moving backwards and forwards on her heels.
‘I don’t know.’ It is as though there is a hand around my throat, squeezing. A bloody shilling, Mummy. ‘I suspect he went along with him happily.’
‘Really?’
‘I have a feeling he would go anywhere with him if he offered him a coin or two.’
Mrs Deal stands uncertainly near the door.
‘Perhaps he’s angry with me?’ I say. She doesn’t answer, because she is Mrs Deal. She is tactful, thoughtful, aware.
I haul the ancient, battered suitcase from the back of the wardrobe-trunk. It is a repository for all the paper of my life and I am appalled at the chaos of it, the disorder of it. I am the only person I know who lives like this. Even Marguerite once showed me her photographs of statues she had taken over twelve years and they were beautifully filed: an angel in Berlin; Victory Horse; Rome; Giuseppe Verdi; Head of a Girl; Gore Hotel, London . . . all neatly dated and logged. It was odd how her delicate handwriting did not connect at all with the unhinged look in her eye. I heave the suitcase on to the table.
‘The past weighs a lot, Mrs Deal,’ I say, not sure whether I am making a joke or not. Mrs Deal is now quietly tidying, picking up Skip’s clothes from the floor, and if she replies I don’t hear it.
I do not enjoy looking at artefacts from my life. Old letters make me sad. Photographs are worse. Inside the suitcase is a tumble of matter from my past and the first thing I pull out is a black, rectangular photograph album. On its front I have written SKIP – FROM LIFE, my brief attempt at photo-documenting him as mothers should, an experiment that lasted six months.
&n
bsp; A photograph of Skip and Piers sitting in front of a pair of beach huts; a seaside holiday when Skip was about three years old. They aren’t touching but they are mirroring each other, toes poked under sand, chins tipped.
‘I shouldn’t have made him leave Piers,’ I whisper. Discreet Mrs Deal pushes the broken chair under the unwashed table.
When Skip was not quite walking, but dragging himself up on chair legs, I had no choice but to bring him into the studio with me on Nanny’s days off. I was carving with wood. Teak. Carving was the only time I was happy, trite as that sounds. The studio was full of scraps of materials, and mess. Unlike the rooms that Piers chose to occupy which were empty and austere (producing nothing, it turns out). As Skip grew bigger I found every opportunity to pass him over to anyone who would have him, but there were times when there was no choice; I couldn’t find a stranger’s arms to put him in so I would put him under the table. Leave him to play. One day he tugged at a cloth and pulled it and a sculpture called Form, made from crisp, pure white marble, fell and shattered.
I shouted at him. He wasn’t yet two. Fat little wrists, rolls of skin under the chin. He took refuge under the table, his eyes uncertain, but then he was convinced it was a game and began peeking out at me, peepo-ing. He found a small mallet and threw it at my toe. I pulled him out, my body red and snapping; I held him by the top of his arms, gripping him, and screamed at his little moon-face. I smacked him with my palm, and then I kept hitting him, so that he was crying harder. I hit him perhaps three, four times in all.
He crawled away from me and curled up under the table, crying to himself, sucking his thumb. I went back to the carving I had been working on. There was a rushing noise in my head, loud enough to cover up the noise of him, like the sea, like a tidal shift. I was made of stone myself. I had no remorse, and then there was a crash. I turned. Skip had crawled out again and pulled a dust cover from the tabletop and on it a box of nails had fallen. A cascade of sharp little nails. Red marks all over his skin where the points had landed, had poked in and fallen off.
Mrs Deal behind me coughs. I flick through the loose photographs, the letters, the envelopes, and the detritus. There is a jumble of photographs below the album and I pull out one that is printed in a larger format. It is a portrait of me, aged seventeen I think, sitting on a chair. I don’t look very comfortable. I push it back down towards the bottom of the suitcase. There is a note from Marguerite – Dearie, dearie, might you wear diamond earrings and tinted ostrich feathers tonight – and then I find it: the pink Jerusalem envelope. I grab it. What’s in there? Photographs, a few letters, the smell of the past. I don’t care: he can have it, this man. I grab the Hotel Fast photograph too.
‘Oh, Mrs Deal, I’ve got it. Let’s go?’ I already have my trench coat pulled around my shoulders. I tighten the belt, as if trapping myself in, and knot it.
‘Good, good,’ she says behind me.
As we step outside Billy and the policeman in his bobby’s helmet and shiny buttons are smoking cigarettes, deep in conversation. A waxy black police car is parked further along the road and the ladies in Kangaroo are peeping and pointing at us. There is an odd feeling to the weather, as if energy is being gathered and drawn upwards from the sea into the sky. The policeman beckons us towards the car.
From the back seat I can see Billy has a ladder of moles along his neck that I have not particularly noticed before. I look out of the window for Skip but there is just an empty beach. Far out at sea it is possible to see a fret gathering and the feeling of Skip not being with me, right next to me, in my sightline, or with a part of him touching me, is like a belt tightening around my stomach.
It does not take long to drive to the aerodrome. Billy jumps out of the car before I can even move, runs around and opens my door as if he is a chauffeur. His bruises look dramatic in the clarity of the strange, bright light. He takes hold of my hand, and I’m grateful, because the fainting sensation is here again.
‘That fret will stop any flying at least,’ the policeman says. I look up at the sky. It is grey, the clouds low. The part of my palm that touches Skip when he is asleep in my bed burns.
Jerusalem, 1920
The lift was stuck, as it frequently was, wedged on the ground floor, and so instead of waiting Prue ran to the stairs. She wanted not to be in this building but out in the snow, although she was not dressed for it. As she rounded the final curve of the stairwell she stumbled into the back of a person who was sitting directly in the middle of the stairs. They were propelled forwards together, fast, so that she barely realised what was happening, and crumpled in a heap on a small landing. Prue’s hair was around her face. There was a snort of alien breath on her skin.
‘Oh I am so terribly sorry,’ she said into the shoulder of the person wrapped around her, and that person unpicked himself and she saw that it was the concertina player who had tried to warn her, the other week, about the grenade.
He pulled himself upright, shook his head and groaned. He was tall, very skinny. Scattered all over the stone stairs in front of them were tiny green felt circles, and buttons, spikes of wood and pins. It was the inside of his concertina. The main body of the instrument case had fallen a few steps down.
‘I am so awfully sorry,’ she said again.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said in English, but with a strong accent. ‘I was repairing it, you know. I should probably have done it in a more sensible place.’ He hopped down several steps and picked up the instrument case, peered at it. He stretched the bellows, held it to the light, ran his finger along the edge of the wooden case and blew into the bellows. Then held it all up to the light again. Prue helped him gather up the fragments that had spilled all around them, keys and pins; she did what she could, cupping her hand into a hollow and filling her palm with shapes that were like pieces from a puzzle.
‘Is it ruined for ever?’ She couldn’t bear to look at it.
‘Working instruments are always being patched up; they have long complicated lives, don’t worry.’ But his expression was a sad one. ‘I have another one I can use tonight. Not as nice as this, but it will do.’ He introduced himself. His name was Jacob Slonimski; he already knew her name, and that she was Charles Ashton’s daughter.
‘We’ve met before,’ he said and she nodded, remembering his arm on hers behind the curtains. She blushed. He was silent, then, for such a while that she asked, rather desperately, ‘Have you been a musician for a long time?’
He shook his head. ‘To tell you the truth, I only learnt to play the concertina three years ago. When people don’t like you and they chase you from everywhere, it’s helpful to give them something they can recognise, or feel comfortable with. You know? A fiddle. A concertina.’ He gave her a wry smile. It was always this way, here, she felt; she was always just one step behind what everyone else was referring to.
‘Were you in a rush somewhere?’ he said.
‘Not really.’ She pressed herself against the wall. Somewhere above them a door slammed.
‘Prudence, I have something to say but you must keep it to yourself.’ He was a few steps below her now so that they were almost the same height.
She nodded.
‘It wasn’t me who threw that grenade at the Pro-Jerusalem Society meeting, you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘I just . . . I knew it was happening and I wanted to warn you.’
His eyes were the same brown as a feather she once picked up and kept for days and days until it went the way of all feathers, stringy. Was he a person who wanted to kill her father? She now knew the word death in Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, and could write it in shifra, but what about the word kill? She didn’t know that word in any language other than her own.
‘Do you like living here in this hotel?’ he said.
Why did people keep asking her this when she obviously had no choice? She replied honestly, ‘I don’t know.’
He scratched his chin. ‘My advice, not that you are asking for it, but sti
ll, is never to put your faith in a house, or a hotel for that matter.’
She did not know what to say.
‘Any building, I mean. They are all flimsy. We stuff them up with furniture and cupboards and rugs but they end up as dust, blown away.’
‘Yes,’ Prue said, trying to make her face look as if she understood because she half-thought she did. ‘I can see that.’
They smiled at each other.
‘Where do your family live, Mr Slonimski?’ She became confused, self-conscious. ‘Um, I mean, Herr Slonimski?’
He nodded. ‘From a small town near a mountain but my family are no longer there.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘They went for a long walk through a forest but they had to keep going because a fire exploded and created a wall which meant they couldn’t get back that way. So, since then, they have been trying to get back, but have had to go the long, long way round and it will take years.’
He was playing a game with her, she was sure, but his face looked serious.
‘Do they send you telegrams?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But we have a clever trick where we can talk to each other while we are asleep in our dreams, so I can say, “Grandfather, are you well on that furthermost part of the forest, unable to get back?” And he can say, “I’ve been better, Jacob, but I’ve also been worse.” ’
‘It sounds like a fairy tale,’ Prue said and Jacob Slonimski rubbed his fingers along the concertina bellows and made them breathe in and out once as if letting out a sigh. She was still holding bits of broken musical instrument in her hand and she offered them to him and tipped them into his palm.
The Photographer's Wife Page 19