We walk home slowly to the house that we have taken up in the New Shoreham side of town: Mrs Deal on the ground floor, me on the top, and the children, in bunk beds, in the room at the back of the kitchen. We are still very close to the ‘zone of invasion’ and Billy is fond of saying that if Hitler comes to Britain we will be meeting him first. Looking out at the wide sky, I think of William Harrington. Billy, obsessive and tenacious, tracked him down through channels at the Ministry: interned by the Germans in Jersey and I wonder what the sky looks like from there; whether he regrets being trapped on that side. I suspect, somehow, that he has always been lost without Eleanora Rasul. Perhaps it didn’t matter altogether, where he was?
‘Should you have stayed, do you think, in London? All those people wanting to interview you and talk to you?’ Mrs Deal says, putting cups of tea down for us. We have let the children drop where they are tonight rather than struggling with them into bed. Skip is flat on the rug, his face turned to the side and resting on the paper he was drawing on. Betty is curled in a nest with her doll tucked deep between her knees on the comfiest chair near the fire.
‘Probably,’ I say, but I have let my Saint Helena go: the heavy twists and turns of it inside me nearly undid me and I have no desire to talk about it any more. I hope the hut will sell too; that one is a requiem for my father – not that any of the critics with their sniffing snouts have picked up on that yet. Now, for my next work, I am thinking of something new, lighter. Taking inspiration from a large print from some fractured negatives: views from the air, but I need to find a way of making them my own. I’m planning to use chalk, and Piers of course is horrified: the most malleable, crumbling, unsuitable of substances.
I bite into an apple and swallow a pip. Funny how the old childish fear of an apple tree growing in the stomach never fully disappears. Along the window ledge of our kitchen pane is a row of skulls, collected by Skip. Most of them are bird skulls, yellowing, and I fear the odd one is a mouse or a rat. Next to them is a little cemetery of Skip’s balsa aircraft that have come to bad ends. Broken tails, snapped wings, dented noses, but loved too much to throw away.
We do not have a sea view in this house, which we still call the new house even though we have been here now for three years. Piers visits if he is in the country and relieved of his mysterious war duties and Skip adores him and has come to accept the way things are. I meet Billy when he too is discharged from duty, and we have come to an arrangement: when and as we fancy, a drink, a talk, a fall into bed. I tell him my troubles, he doesn’t tell me his. Like Mrs Deal, he found the loss of Bungalow Town particularly hard, much harder than I would have imagined. I don’t know where he is stationed or what he does at war, and I haven’t told him this, but I’ve made a little shrine for him, on my windowsill. A circle of charms. A feather, a stone, childish things. A prayer to keep him alive.
When he’s home he opens up the houseboat on the Adur because for some reason the army haven’t moved it. I visit some nights, and we spend an eternity covering gaps with blackout materials and when that is done listen to the honking of the geese and the ducks out on the black water. I sometimes have the disquieting sense that Billy, in other places, with other people – by which I mean boxing men, although possibly women too, I don’t ask, but somehow, I doubt it – has quite another way of being when I am not with him. But there we are; we can only be the person we can be in that particular company.
I pick Skip up, he is huge now, so heavy, especially with his limbs dead-like and asleep, but I can just about do it. There is a chalk-trace from his map on the side of his cheek, the course of a river and the edges of the land, the shadowing he made of places he wants to go to and the corners of houses he plans on building. I use my finger to rub it off and put him into his bed. On his pillow is my old Eastman Kodak. I have given it to him recently, along with the manual. Take pictures any way you like, I say. There are no rules. Throw the rulebook out! But he scours the sections. Landscapes. Portraits. Snapshots. Close-ups.
When I come back into the living room Mrs Deal is asleep, too, on her chair, so I cover her with a blanket and stand by the window, and listen to the wind and for the air-raid sirens. We live in brick now, but I know, from the rubble and dust of the church that Skip found today and the hotels that are gone – the Fast, and even the Warnes was badly damaged last week – and from the sound of the Luftwaffe flying above us and discarding its final cargo, that brick is as delicate and vulnerable as rackety old wood on shingle, or limestone corroding in the sun, so I’ve stopped trying to hold on, and as a consequence I am no longer afraid of the wind.
Mrs Deal said today, ‘I think we’ll be evacuated from here, if it goes on like this.’
‘But they sent us Betty,’ I said. ‘Why would they make us move? Where to?’ Do we shunt to the city or move to another place: where is safe? An island; oh, but this is an island. A place on the other side of the map: a city with walls and minarets? Oh no: there are wars there, worse than any we have here, and I remember that they are all gone: Eleanora, with white jasmine flowers in her hair, and Ihsan. Skip makes a noise then, cries out, like he does sometimes when bad dreams come. I go to him. Put my hand on his cheek.
‘What?’ he says.
‘Just checking.’
‘Checking for what?’
‘That you are all right.’
‘You were checking to see if I was dead, weren’t you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Did I look dead?’
‘No. Alive. Definitely alive.’
He smiles, points down to the floor under his bed. I look. There is a bucket, with water, and inside a sole starfish, waving one of its arms up and down, resignedly.
‘Poor starfish,’ I say.
‘You don’t think he’s happy?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You don’t think he’s safe?’
‘I don’t think he thinks he’s safe.’
Skip frowns. I take his hand, and put it on my own face. His hot palm, his fingers curl.
‘He doesn’t know that he’s got you looking after him, though, does he?’
Skip smiles at this. ‘Sleep,’ I say. ‘Sleep.’ And he turns away and I cast my wish – and may you dream of flying – and when I go downstairs I pick up all the gull feathers that Betty and Skip have collected and listen to the sea for a while.
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to Arts Council England for a residency at the Shoreham Airport, particularly Kieran Phelan and Jon Prebble. Thanks to the Kenyon Institute, Jerusalem, for housing me on research trips. Thank you to Professor Roberto Mazza, Suad Amiry and Professor Salim Tamari for advice and feedback. Thank you to Kevork Kahvedjian and Varouj Ishkhanian for talking to me about the history of photography in Jerusalem and also to The American Colony Hotel, East Jerusalem for letting me stay. Thank you to Suheir Khoury for support and help and to Nadia Kara’a for the tour of the old city and for kindly allowing me into her home. In Malta thank you to Adrian Grima for inviting me to Malta and Savio Deguara who generously showed me his sculpture studio and working methods.
I researched this book at SOAS and the British Library. I edited and wrote much of it in my local libraries in Worthing and Shoreham, West Sussex; many thanks to the staff of all of those institutions, particularly Jackie Manners and her team of librarians at Worthing library and Chris Desmond and his team in East Sussex.
A huge thank you to my parents John and Lynda Joinson for love and help and for enduring years of trouble from me and thanks to Dave, Ruty, Ms Helena Rebecca Howe, Marion and David, Laila Hourani, Tamera Howard, David Parr and everyone else who has provided support, shelter, friendship, tea, babysitting and love.
Thank you to Rachel Calder for being both the loveliest and the wisest of agents and to Helen Garnons-Williams for so much help, sympathy and for continuing to believe in me. Thank you to everyone at Bloomsbury, in particular Nigel (and Joanna) Newton for the inspirational flight to Le Touquet and kind wor
ds along the way, to Nancy Miller for such wonderful support and for championing me in the US, and Alexandra Pringle for taking me under her glamorous wing. Thank you Elizabeth Woabank, Imogen Denny, Isabel Blake and the rest of the team. It has been an enormous pleasure to work with you all.
A special thank you to Florence McKinney, my grandmother, age ninety-something, who used to watch Amy Johnson land her plane near Monaghan, Neville Joinson and the rest of my family.
Thank you to all the people who have facilitated residencies, workshops, writing commissions and projects which have enabled me to live as a writer over the last few years, including Kate Griffin, Chris Gribble, colleagues Paul, Joel, Sally and Karen at the University of Chichester, Rachel Stevens and Sinead Russell at the British Council, Sarah Matthews and James Shea at CAS, Lydia Bell, editors at the New York Times, Aeon, Independent on Sunday and Don George at Lonely Planet. Thank you to Elizabeth White for a stay in a wonderful apartment in Baku and thank you kind hosts and colleagues from various places I was lucky enough to visit in the last couple of years, in particular Kuala Lumpur, Myanmar, Istanbul and Huangshan.
Most of all, my thanks and love go to Woody, Scout and Ben Nicholls, for everything.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Suzanne Joinson is an award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction whose work has appeared in, among other places, the New York Times, Vogue, Aeon, Lonely Planet collections of travel writing and the Independent on Sunday. Her first novel, A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar (2012), was translated into sixteen languages and was a national bestseller. She lives in Sussex.
suzannejoinson.com/@suzyjoinson
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar
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First U.S. edition 2016
© Suzanne Joinson, 2016
From DUINO ELEGIES by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by David Young. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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