The Undertow

by Jo Baker

  The confidence of it. The sheer bloody confidence of it. Will hadn’t even realised Ollie was there until a large hand clapped onto his shoulder. Conversation was dropped into so smoothly: the girls like pop music? Ollie has a cousin in the record business. Scandal of the family. Uncle had wanted him to go into banking. Cousin has met—has had nights out with—the boys at the Ad Lib club, the Bag O’ Nails. He means The Beatles, of course. And then he twists the conversation sideways, before any detail can be gone into, and they’re hearing about a place out at Boar’s Hill that Ollie would just love to show them. Will has got a car. And they are out of the warmth and smoke of the college bar, and in the chill of Will’s little old Singer Gazelle (six months’ wages), Ollie weighing down the back left-hand suspension, next to the slim girl in green. Madeline.

  “Thought Singer just made sewing machines,” says Claudia, buttoned up to her chin in a yellow coat.

  “They do,” says Ollie, and lets out a great guffaw.

  Madeline, in the back, says nothing. They pull out of the town. The car hums along the pale road between the fields. Will’s hands are cold on the steering wheel, but his cheeks burn.

  “Take a right,” Ollie says. “Keep on this road.”

  Moonlight. Faint trails of fog here and there, but mostly it’s clear stubble fields, dark and bristly; skimming hedges; a tree slowly traversing the corner of Will’s sight. Claudia wriggly on the other side. Picking off lint, settling skirt and hair and hands into place. And Madeline in the back, curled into a corner by Ollie’s bulk, and him talking away to her and laughing. Will notices the quiet from her. Asks, over his shoulder, whether she’s comfortable.

  “Yes,” she says faintly, and then, “thank you.”

  And he warms with the words. He likes her.

  • • •

  The road is direct—up ahead there’s a sudden steepness and then woodland.

  “Boar’s Hill,” Ollie pronounces, as if he’s produced it from a hat.

  They climb into the woods, the little engine struggling. With every gear change, Will’s uneasy that his knuckles will brush against the mustard wool of Claudia’s flank.

  “What now?” Will asks.

  “I’ll tell you when,” Ollie says.

  “If you could just give me some indication—”

  “I’ll know it when we get there. It’s been a while.”

  Will bites back a sigh. The tunnel of trees whisks along through the headlights. Claudia’s gone still. The headlights skim a gateway.

  “Ah …” says Ollie from the back.

  “Was that it?” Will glances up at Ollie’s blank face in the rear-view mirror. Ollie’s eyes skip along the road. His mouth hangs open.

  “Ah—no. There!”

  And Will turns his eyes back to the road, just in time to spot the gateway, and a house sign. He slams on the brakes, crunches down a gear. Spins into the drive with a rattle of gravel.

  “But this is someone’s house …” Will says.

  In the mirror, Ollie nods him onward.

  “But won’t they …?”

  In the mirror he catches the side of Madeline’s face, a curve of pale cheek, the drift of her hair. The car bounces on along the chalk track, white in the moonlight.

  “S’all right. My aunt’s place,” Ollie says. “Used to come here when I was a nipper.” Ollie glances at Madeline to include her in his pleasure. “Lovely grounds here. Acres. Won’t disturb the old dear.”

  There’s a bend, and Will’s caught off guard, his attention on the mirror. He brakes, jerks the car round. Eyes on the road from now on. Eyes on the road.

  They have reached the far side of the hill. To the left, there are woods: tall, slender trunks grey in the moonlight, deep shadow in between. To the right, the countryside opens wide in a sweep of grey-blue fields. Here and there stand broad, spreading trees. Far off, there is a speckling of lights. A village or a town; Will doesn’t know. He doesn’t know where he is, where anything is.

  “Anywhere here,” Ollie says. Meaning, park the car.

  “Right,” Will says. He can feel his neck, the bare back of his neck, tight as twisted rope. He wonders if it’s obvious.

  A hundred yards more, and there is a field gate. He slows the car and bumps up alongside the gate. Jerks up the handbrake, switches off the engine. For a moment, there is silence. Then the creak of the suspension as Ollie opens the back door and levers himself out. Packed in there like Spam in a tin. Then Will is out of the car too, and the night air brushes him like silk. His leg has frozen up with the drive, and he half hops, half skips round the car to open the back door, while Ollie stands, looking speculatively up the steep bank into the woods.

  The space is massive. The sky and the emptiness and the cool, and the moon standing bare and bright.

  Ollie heads up the bank.

  Will opens the car door and Madeline lays her hand on his arm, stretches a leg out of the car. He doesn’t let himself look at it. She stands up. The length of her unfolding. She’s an inch or so shorter than him. He can smell her hair, the faint scent of lemon like a memory. And then she smiles at him, and he smiles back. But then Claudia’s getting out. He has to offer her his hand.

  “Gentleman,” Claudia says, smiling up at him. She closes the door, doesn’t let go of his hand.

  “Come on, you sluggards!” Ollie stands at the top of the bank. In the moonlight he is just a big fawn rectangle of tweedy coat, a tangle of silvery-blonde hair. His arm waves them over. Claudia maintains her grip on Will’s hand. Squeezes it even. He looks to Madeline, who gives him what looks like a smile, but it’s hard to tell in this light. She heads off across the road, and up the bank, towards Ollie.

  Claudia talks. He helps her up the bank. His hip hurts. He must have trapped a nerve: it spins pain up his back and down to his knee. As they move through the woods, Claudia keeps reaching up to touch her hair, and exclaiming over her shoes, her stockings. She’s excited, he realises. About the dark, about the isolation, about him. It’s a weirdly disappointing thought. They stumble on, Will straining after the paler shape of Ollie’s overcoat and hair; the dark flitting figure of Madeline is harder to keep tabs on. And then through the branches Will glimpses quicksilver, and smells mint and mud and damp. He comes up beside Madeline. Her coat makes her a deeper darkness in the dark. Just her face glowing, catching moonlight.

  “There it is,” Ollie says. “Auntie’s lake.”

  Ollie’s auntie has a lake. Will’s mum has a bit of garden. His dad has talked about digging her a pond. He hasn’t got round to it yet.

  “Fancy a swim?” Ollie says.

  Claudia’s hand flexes in Will’s. Clammy-damp. Anxious. Eager.

  “It’s October,” Madeline says.

  “And if it were August?” Ollie turns his attention to her so completely that Will wants to punch him.

  “Well, that would be different,” she says, and there is a rich insolence in her tone, making Will remember that passage in Lawrence, can’t remember which book now, or even which of the Brangwen girls it was, stripping off her clothes and stepping into a moonlight pool, followed by her soldier lover who can’t quite keep up with her, can’t quite be what she needs him to be.

  But Ollie has taken Madeline’s hand, and they are moving off through the trees.

  Damn.

  Claudia tugs on his hand. She talks. Will looks round after Ollie and Madeline, but Claudia draws him on, into the dark. He can hear their voices still; low, moving further off.

  Claudia’s telling him something. About taking the bus down to London, about going to the Flamingo Club to see The Ronnie Ross Quartet. He realises with a flash of horror that she’s talking about the two of them, that they might do these things together. Does he have people they could stay with in London? All her people are in Gloucestershire. His parents? Would they mind a girl staying in their guest room overnight? Would they be scandalised? She’s only half joking. He’d be mortified if he wasn’t at that moment deciding that
he would never see her again, that if he ever bumped into her in the street he would turn and run away. Literally, spin on his heel and sprint for it.

  “Shall we go and look for them?” he asks.

  “They’ll meet us back at the car.”

  How does she know that?

  They continue along the path, his hand in hers. But he’s thinking of Madeline and the slender contours of her legs. The weight of her hand on his arm. The bulk of Ollie, and what he will want to do to her, what he’ll try to do to her, what she might let him do. He doesn’t know what she might let him do, because he doesn’t know her. She seems nice, but Ollie is confident, convincing, overpowering. Maybe she even likes him. She went with him, after all, not Will. Does she like Ollie? He realises now, himself, how intensely he does not.

  Somewhere a bird cries in its sleep, and far off a dog barks.

  Claudia, fortunately, doesn’t need him to talk. She tells him about the family home near Gloucester, the horses, the brothers. He follows the path without thinking. The trees thin; moonlight blots through. They step out, look down on the metal shell of the little car, and beyond across the grey counterpane of fields. They stand at the top of the bank. She squeezes his hand again. She waits breathily.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” she says. She wants him to kiss her, he realises.

  “We should go looking for them,” he says.

  “She’ll be fine.”

  He looks round at Claudia. Her pale face looking up at him. A blink.

  “She’ll be fine,” she says again.

  How does Claudia know she’ll be fine? Has this kind of thing happened before? Is this what Madeline does? Go off into the woods with men?

  “How do you two know each other?”

  “We’re next door. In halls.” But now she doesn’t want to talk. Her eyes have gone all hooded.

  He is not going to bloody kiss her.

  He drops her hand, slithers down the first yard of the muddy bank, then reaches back up to her. “C’mon.”

  They scramble down the bank together. Will’s hip hurts badly, but he got out of kissing her. Back at the car, and he opens the door for her, so she has to get in straightaway. She drops herself down into the seat, hooks in her legs, and he slaps the door shut and goes round to his side, and stands there for a moment, looking out over the moonlit woods, the faint ghosts of tree trunks and the heavy mounded canopy. No sign of their return. He can’t delay it for ever: he’ll have to get in. And then they’ll be in the car together, alone, her sliding up to him across the front bench seat.

  He gets out his cigarettes, ducks down to offer her one. She shakes her head. He was banking on that—gives him another few minutes safety, standing smoking outside the car.

  “I’ll just—” he says, and she nods for him to go on ahead.

  He stands and smokes. He scans the woods. Time ticks by. The cigarette flares in the darkness, and he sucks it down to a sharp red coal. He crushes out the stump.

  “There she is!”

  Madeline steps out of the woods, hands extended as if feeling her way blind. Her face, from this distance, is just a blur. The relief is extraordinary. She makes her way down the bank, crosses the track to them. She has a look of someone who’s tidied herself up without a mirror. Head high, alert for how people look at her, for signs of something being amiss. Instinctively he starts towards her. Then Ollie’s there too, ploughing out of the woods, taking the bank with one sliding stride. Madeline goes straight past Will. He twists round after her, and opens the rear door for her. She gives him a tight little smile. She doesn’t get in.

  “Claudia,” she says.

  Claudia looks up through the window. Madeline gives a rap on the glass: “Claude.”

  Madeline gestures her out. Claudia winds down the window. “What is it?”

  “I’m in the front,” Madeline says.

  Claudia looks to Will. Will looks away. She tuts, swings her legs out of the car. He doesn’t think to offer his hand till it’s a fraction too late. She ignores it, slides into the back seat.

  He closes the door on her. Ollie drops himself on the other side of the back seat and claps the door shut.

  Madeline and Will stand eye to eye on the track. Actually he can’t look her in the eye; his gaze dips away to her hands, which are white and beautiful. She has a big oval-stoned ring on one finger.

  “You all right?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Shall we?” he gestures to the car.

  “We’d better.”

  He offers her his hand.

  “Gentleman,” Madeline says. It’s almost a question.

  “I try,” Will says.

  She considers this a moment. She takes his hand. Her fingers are as cold as silk. “That’ll do then.”

  It’s as if something’s agreed between them. He doesn’t know what the agreement is, but he knows that he can never ask what happened: not Ollie, not her. She slides into the seat. He lets go of her hand, tries not to look as she slips those legs into the footwell.

  Cricket Green Road,

  Mitcham June 6, 1966

  WILL PULLS THE CAR into the side of the road, yanks up the handbrake. Madeline peers up the street, then glances across her shoulder: a parade of shops down one side, a cricket green on the other, cars motoring past. She can’t see why they would be stopping here.

  “Is this it?”

  Will just sits. He just looks out the windscreen, hands on the wheel. She looks at him a moment, the clear line of his features, and underneath, that shadow. She is reminded again why him, why not anybody else. He doesn’t glance round at her, so she looks ahead, where he is looking—the suburban high street, the cricket green, a junction where a street peels off to the right.

  “Will? Why are we stopping here?”

  He looks tired. There’s a line between his eyes.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “It’s not good for you, sitting in one position like that for so long. You should have let me drive.”

  He turns then, and fixes his dark eyes on her. Smiles. “We’d still be doing rings round Abingdon.”

  “Cheeky sod.” She wallops him on his shoulder.

  He shrugs. “It’s the simple truth.”

  “You’re simple. It’s your directions.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my directions.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my driving.”

  Will lets a breath go, seems to slump.

  “Do you think they won’t like me?”

  “They’ll love you. That’s half the problem.”

  “I don’t understand.” She lets her hand slide down the muscle of his upper arm and rest in the dip of his elbow. “What is it?”

  His face bunches up oddly. She can’t work out what’s bothering him: it’s just dinner, it’s just a visit, it’s nothing. He was fine at her mum and dad’s.

  “I’m not them,” he says.

  “Okay,” she says. “I know that.”

  “Good,” he says. “Right then.”

  He lifts his arm to put the car back into gear, and her hand falls away. He looks up into the rear-view mirror, finding his place in the traffic. “So long as we’re clear.”

  The house takes up so little space it seems to be standing on one foot. There’s a small bow window on the ground floor, and on the first floor the two windows have a raised brick ridge above them, so that the house looks like it is grinning at her, eyebrows raised.

  She follows him through the hall, straight into the sitting room, and a skinny girl, Janet presumably, stares at her from a leatherette pouffe. The air is warm and dry and smoky. The girl stands up and seems almost to back away.

  “All right, Jan,” Will says. Janet nods back.

  His accent has changed: the l’s sound like a w and there’s a glottal stop now too. Madeline looks at him, but he doesn’t meet her eye.

  There is an archway through to the dining room. A slidin
g door opens onto the kitchen beyond, and there is daylight from the garden. A woman is coming up the step from the kitchen. She has Will’s dark colouring, his clarity of feature: that’s where he gets his good looks from. She must have been beautiful once, but her skin is deeply lined now—a smoker’s face.

  “Mads, this is Mum.”

  “Mrs. Hastings.” Madeline moves towards the woman, hand extended. She half anticipates a foreign accent, even though she knows, South London, Jewish.

  “Ruby,” the woman says, shakes Madeline’s hand.

  “Where’s Dad?” Will asks.

  “Be down in a minute,” Ruby says, and ducks to pick a smouldering cigarette from an ashtray. There is pink lipstick round the butt of it. She draws on the cigarette; she’s very precise in all her movements, carefully elegant. She speaks to Madeline over the smoke: “Won’t you sit down?”

  But then there are footsteps on the stairs, and the hall door opens. The man there has the same light build as Will, but an entirely different presence. Will is measured, considered—but there’s a muscular acuity here, a pent-up fierceness.

  He nods.

  She smiles. “Hi.”

  Then he comes over towards her. He offers his hand to be shaken, and she takes it. She glances to Will, but Will has taken himself over to the windowsill, and is leaning there, a dark shape against the white nets, unreadable. It’s easier for him, leaning like that; it’s less strain on the damaged joint than if he were to sink into a soft chair. And he’s sore already, after so long stuck in the driver’s seat. But it feels somehow unfair, as though he’s taken a step back from everything, and left her to get on with it.