The Summer of the Bear

by Bella Pollen

  ‘And lived happily ever after,’ Jamie finished.

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘People in stories always live happily ever after, don’t they?’

  Georgie’s eyes slid to her dressing-table mirror, where a small snapshot was wedged between glass and frame. Their parents on honeymoon, leaning against the rail of the ferry, wearing sunglasses and grins. What a happy-ever-after day that had been, with a flat sea and a bronze gong of a sun slowly sinking into it.

  ‘Go to sleep, Jamie.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but his eyes remained open long into the night.

  17

  Bonn

  Protected from hard facts about his father, Jamie began to hoard scraps of information. He stitched each precious snippet together into a patchwork quilt which he used to keep himself warm at night, but it hadn’t been until two weeks after the accident that the first significant clue came his way. A party was being given at the Ambassador’s residence. Jamie understood neither what the party was for nor why he’d been required to attend. All he knew was that it was boring. Everyone was old and wearing black. There had been no music and no other children invited except Georgie and Alba.

  A man wearing a black tail-coat handed round plates of cucumber sandwiches with neatly trimmed crusts. Jamie crammed four into his mouth, trying to satisfy the hollow feeling inside him, which he incorrectly identified as hunger.

  He’d felt a hand drop onto his head and looked up to find Tom Gordunson standing beside him. Jamie liked Tom. He reminded him of a wolf with his shaggy head and crumpled suits. Tom was his father’s oldest friend, the best man at his parents’ wedding, and he always gave Jamie presents at Christmas even though, technically, he was supposed to be Georgie’s godfather.

  ‘How are you doing, old boy?’ Tom asked. ‘God supports us in our troublous life,’ Jamie intoned. ‘Ah, I see you’ve been talking to the vicar.’ ‘He said Dada has gone to a better place.’ Jamie followed Tom’s gaze to where the vicar was now chatting with the Ambassador, holding a cup of tea poised in the air. ‘Has he?’

  ‘Yes, I think he probably has.’ ‘Better than Bonn?’

  Tom smiled faintly. ‘Yes, better than Bonn.’ ‘But then why didn’t he take us with him?’ ‘He couldn’t take you with him,’ Tom said gently. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘But I miss him, and I want him to come home.’ ‘Of course you do, old chap, of course you do.’ ‘He was going to take me to the circus,’ Jamie said forlornly. ‘He promised I could see the bear. He promised to help me with my homework.’

  Tom dropped to one knee. ‘Listen to me, Jamie.’ He laid his big hands on Jamie’s shoulders. ‘Your father will always be with you. Always. Every night when you go to bed and say your prayers you must believe that your father can hear them.’

  ‘Even now he’s gone away?’ Jamie noticed that Tom had missed a button on his shirt. Tom was always buttoning his shirts wrong. ‘Tidy mind, though,’ his father liked to say. ‘Frighteningly tidy mind.’

  ‘Especially now that he’s gone away.’

  ‘How though? Does he have special powers?’

  ‘Yes . . . I suppose in a way he does.’

  ‘Like a spy? Like James Bond?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tom smiled again. ‘A little like James Bond.’

  Jamie sucked in a breath. He knew it. His father had gone on one of his secret missions.

  Tom Gordunson worked for the Foreign Office. He had one of the most important jobs in the whole of England. If Tom didn’t know what he was talking about then no one did. ‘I’m going to tell Mummy’ He tried to wriggle free but Tom held him back.

  ‘Why don’t we keep it hush-hush – just between you and me, eh?’ He touched a finger to his nose and winked.

  And there it was. His father’s secret sign.

  Tom did indeed work for the Foreign Office. Known as an intense, honourable man, he was a passionate defender of his country’s sovereignty. He boasted a First from Oxford, a natural aptitude for maths and the kind of agile, lateral-thinking mind that allowed him to finish The Times crossword puzzle without bothering to fill in the answers; still he couldn’t have known that this one simple gesture, coupled with the boy’s fierce desire to believe, would harden into an unshakeable conviction that his father would be coming back.

  Jamie hurried off. If he couldn’t tell his mother, he would find Georgie. He bumped into a woman with a thickly powdered face and tight grey bun. She was a long-term intimate of Bonn society whose husband was a political commentator on the radio. Had anyone asked her, she would have crisply informed them that she did not approve of the Ambassador’s ‘wake’ for Nicholas Fleming. There were few secrets in Bonn’s diplomatic circles and a suspected traitor was as good as an actual traitor. Now, caught unawares by the turncoat’s living, breathing offshoot in front of her, she reacted instinctively with a step backwards, then rallied with a fatuous question about school. Jamie answered politely. The fur stole around her neck interested him far more than social chitchat. The fox’s head nestled on her shoulder while its legs dangled slackly down her back. The fox’s eyes were glassy but alive-looking. He wondered about the nose. You could tell if a dog was sick from touching its nose and the fox looked pretty sick to him, but just as he stretched out his hand to test, he felt the acute sharpness of Alba’s fingers.

  ‘Don’t do that, Jamie.’ She pinched him again. Jamie started crying and the woman’s awkwardness was dispelled. The relief seemed universal as everyone turned to look at the children – the one wailing, the other shushing. For the first time in this whole sorry event there was a focus for their embarrassment and pity. Poor bereaved children. Poor little fatherless boy.

  Jamie never got to tell Georgie and he didn’t dare tell Alba. Instead, he carried his secret with him wherever he went. To school in the mornings, to bed at night. It accompanied him on his mother’s trips to the Marktplatz or her dreamy meanderings along the Rhine. In every one of these places he looked for his father, secure in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time.

  But then they had left Bonn.

  ‘Does everyone know we’re going to London?’ he asked his mother the night before they sailed. The house looked bare and unfriendly, stripped of their possessions.

  ‘Everyone, who?’ She labelled a trunk. ‘Friends from school, you mean?’

  ‘Will Dada know where we are?’

  Letty stopped packing and drew him into a hug. ‘Of course, darling.’ He could feel her breath warm on his neck. ‘Daddy will always know where we are.’ And his heart had soared. His father had not lied. Tom Gordun-son had not lied. His father was indeed on some kind of mission, and what’s more, his mother knew about it.

  ‘Mum,’ he whispered. ‘It’s all right. I know.’

  ‘Know what, darling?’

  ‘Daddy’s a spy, isn’t he?’

  It was as if he’d burnt her with a poker iron. Letty stiffened and held him at arm’s length. ‘Why do you say that, Jamie? Who told you that?’

  ‘No one,’ Jamie said, frightened. ‘I mean, Tom said . . .’

  ‘Tom?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘Our Tom?’ Two red petals of anger bloomed in her cheeks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he said that? That Daddy was a spy?’

  ‘Sort of, I mean, yes.’ He had never seen his mother like this. Her mouth twisted, her eyes stormy. ‘I’m sorry, Mummy, I was just trying to . . .’

  ‘Don’t you ever believe that.’ She shook him, her fingers digging into him hard. ‘And don’t you dare say it, either. Not to me, or anybody. Not ever. Do you understand?’

  He had understood and he had felt ashamed. You were not supposed to talk about secret things.

  18

  Ballanish

  It was five a.m. but Letty was glad to be up. She felt Nicky’s loss in every part of her life but it was as if an icy draught now occupied the other side of the bed and she couldn’t prevent the cold from seeping into her, no matter how m
any blankets she slept under. Nights no longer promised the temporary respite of sleep but instead presented her with a marathon ordeal to be conquered in sections. Every time she switched off the light, she prayed for a means of fast-forwarding to morning. Mornings gave her some mindless chore to do – coffee to make or a letter to write – but night shackled her with its physical inactivity and her restless soul allowed her only short nightmarish dozes punctuated by long periods of wakefulness in which to forensically analyse them. Her dreams were always uneasy or suggestive. She rode on empty trains which travelled in circles. She was visited by a mutual friend, long since dead, as though his world was suddenly relevant to her. Then there were the recurring nightmares, always a variation on a theme. At times Nicky was standing on the roof looking down. Others, he was already falling in his endless drop through the weightless air. In this morning’s version she was waiting with the girls at the top of the embassy stairwell when she’d heard her name being shouted and she had turned to find Nicky running towards them. He’d been agitated, as though burning with some vital news to tell her, but he’d come at them so fast that as they’d stepped out of his way the weight of his body propelled him over the metal guardrail and she’d watched him falling in dreadful slow motion, his white shirt flapping around his stomach. She hadn’t screamed. Within the context of her dream, she had somehow known that Nicky was already dead. But then, from several floors beneath her, Jamie had suddenly stepped forwards, his thin arms extended to catch his father, and the force of Nicky’s plummeting body had taken Jamie over the edge with him and Letty had woken herself with an anguished wail.

  It was a beautiful morning, soft and gauzy with mist. A bird was beating a few plaintive chords from its chest. At the gate she turned west onto a sandy path lined by cotton grass and embroidered with cowpat splatters. Past the ruined croft, past the rusting carcass of the plough, until the road tapered out into a wide stretch of machair, pockmarked by rabbit holes and blanketed in wildflowers of every colour. Corn marigolds, purple clover, thyme, ragwort, wild pansies, kidney vetch and silverweed, she trailed a hand through them until there it was – the faintest tang of salt on the wind.

  The Ballanish township was close to a strikingly beautiful beach, a mile-long curve of bone-white sand, free from the usual banks of seaweed or highways of tiny broken shells. Even its jellyfish were discreet and minimalist, squatting in transparent domes in the shallows. Letty stood on the tide line and stared out to sea. Around her, a scattering of ringed plovers and dunlins stalked the break of the waves on pin legs, pecking at the sand for lugworms and other juicy breakfast treats.

  She felt quite dazzled by loss. The island had always acted on her emotions in the most elemental way and here, alone, she gave way to a backlog of noisy weeping. When Nicky had died she’d felt almost nothing. Shock, the body’s natural anaesthetic, had kicked in. But then, alongside the numbness, there was guilt and then anger. More recently she had found herself banging her head against a wall of regret. She had tried climbing over it or crawling under it, but she always came up against the same irreversible truth. Nicky was dead and there was nothing she could do about it.

  A wind was rising off the sea and along with it, the noise of quarrelling gulls. She turned and stiffened. There was somebody standing on the far point of the bay. Ballanish wasn’t her beach, of course, but it had always felt that way. As she drew closer, the stick figure enlarged and thickened into a male form with a robust gut and pigeon chest. Closer still and she recognized the ginger beard and unclipped sideburns of Dr John. He was bent over a dead whale, his legs apart, hands on his knees, as though bracing himself against the stench, which even at a hundred yards almost took away her ability to breathe. The whale was nearly thirty feet long and half-embedded in the sand. The flesh had already been stripped from the bones, leaving the exposed ribcage arced skywards like a skeleton bridge anchored by a carriageway of vertebrae. The knuckles of each flipper were still attached by shreds of skin but at some point, the entire skull had been cleaved from the body. It was lying a few feet away, already picked clean by the birds and now acting as a handy stool for Dr John’s tweed coat. He stood up at her approach and wiped the blade of his knife against his trousers.

  ‘Why, Letitia,’ he said, ‘what a surprise indeed, and how are you keeping?’

  ‘Fine, Dr John. How nice to see you.’ She shook his outstretched hand. ‘And you? You’re well, I hope?’

  ‘Oh aye, not so bad, not so bad.’ He squinted down at the whale, then sank to his haunches and raised the skin off the head with the tip of his knife.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Letty asked.

  ‘I’m looking for his teeth.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ There was a short silence. ‘Do you collect whales’ teeth then?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking I might sell them. Whales’ teeth can be quite valuable, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Letty agreed, wondering who on earth he might find to buy a whale’s tooth on an island where bones and skulls could be picked out of the ground as easily as potatoes. Watching him work she was reminded of her honeymoon, when poor Nicky had woken up with tonsillitis, a condition that had plagued him since childhood. After two nights without a break in his temperature she had sent for Dr John, who arrived holding what looked like old-fashioned sweetie jars, one under each arm, filled with a colourful pic ’n’ mix of medicines. He’d shone a torch down Nicky’s throat more or less from the doorway, then put an enormous and very thick-fingered paw into the jar and brought out a handful of pills.

  ‘What exactly are you giving him?’ Letty had asked.

  ‘Why, penicillin, to be sure.’

  ‘No, you mustn’t.’ She sprang forward. ‘He’s allergic’

  ‘Ach, no matter,’ Dr John said cheerily. He poured the pills back into the first jar and sank his hand into the second. ‘These others will do just as well.’

  The doctor was still on his knees beside the dead mammal. ‘It’s early for you to be up and about.’

  ‘I like the mornings,’ Letty said. ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Yes, they are that.’

  ‘How do you think the skull got separated?’ She held her scarf to her nose.

  Dr John grunted. ‘Well now, I can’t be sure, right enough. I expect the poor beast became disorientated and got hit by a trawler. There now.’ He opened his palm to show her two lumps of gristly bone.

  ‘Oh, well done!’

  ‘Aye, a fine pair,’ he said with satisfaction, slipping them into his jacket pocket. ‘I was sorry to hear about Mr Fleming,’ he added. ‘He was a good man indeed. Well liked on the island.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ She tried to smile but it was as though some neuralgic affliction was preventing her from calibrating her expressions. Had it been a mistake to imagine she might find peace here? Everywhere she turned the island reflected memories back at her. Behind them was the sand dune where Nicky liked to read. Anchored in the bay was the little green-and-maroon fishing boat and on the beach in front of it she could see Nicky writing in the sand with a stalk of seaweed. ‘Lobsters for Ballanish House. Two, please.’

  An awkward silence had grown around them but Dr John was a nice man and she wouldn’t dream of offending him. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I never realized that whales had teeth. I rather thought they swallowed plankton or krill.’

  ‘That’ll depend on the kind of whale,’ he said sagely.

  ‘Of course. Of course . . . and what kind of whale is this?’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t a clue about whales.’ Dr John scratched at the wiry hair on his cheeks. ‘Not a clue at all.’

  19

  Seventeen years old and she knew nothing. Her entire life Georgie had been bookish, above-average clever. She thought of the sheer variety of knowledge she had absorbed – the layers of sedimentary rocks studied, the vocabulary memorized and grammar mastered, all those ghastly verbs and their petty little conjugations. And for what? What use was any of it? Okay, so maybe the cur
e for cancer would be found in the backbone of a stickleback, but it was a long shot and everybody knew it. No, she’d been taught everything, except the one lesson she really needed – what to do when your father died. Now, to add to her confusion, her mother had turned turtle. Pulled in her arms and legs and drawn a hard shell over her head and Georgie didn’t know how to reach her.

  Letty was sitting at the table, a pile of blank white envelopes scattered in front of her. She had always been an inspired letter writer. She picked up a pen the way a violinist might take up a bow but whereas letter writing had once been a hobby, now it was an obsession; lawyers, the Home Office, banks, insurance firms. She had written to every person Nicky had ever worked with or studied alongside, looking for answers they might give or clues they might offer. She wrote looking for a resolution, praying for absolution, waiting for intervention and, yet again, Georgie was overcome with an urge to grab her and tell her about Berlin – because the knowledge was heavier than she thought possible and she was sick of hauling it around with her, day and night. Christ, her mother already had emotional blood leaking from so many wounds, what difference would one more quick stab make?

  ‘Mum.’ She laid an emphatic hand on her mother’s shoulder. Forgive me, Georgie, her father had begged.

  Startled, Letty turned. ‘Darling, sorry, million miles away’

  Georgie searched her mother’s face. The wide forehead, the freckle high on one cheek. She was as beautiful as she’d always been. Her features remained unchanged – except there was nothing behind them. It wasn’t indifference, or disinterest. Just blankness.

  ‘Who are you writing to?’

  ‘Oh, you know . . .’ She gave a dismissive little wave, but Georgie knew. She hadn’t been writing to anyone. There was no one left to write to.

  ‘Mum,’ Georgie whispered. You realize we’re being watched, don’t you? her father had said. Strange how she’d once thought this a joke.