She could barely remember the rest, the two of them running to fetch Clint. “He’ll know what to do.” She had sat there in Win’s kitchen while Clint phoned the ARP. Then she’d hurried back with both him and Win to keep it company.
The bedroll, the bundle. The corpse.
So much for the Clint who had pressed his thigh to hers. This Clint, the one who stepped in, was bossy and gruff, cracking a joke—a joke!—about what she and Win might have done to land some poor nameless bugger in the drink.
A crude, pathetic attempt at comic relief, even if a person were forgiving of Clint, which Una felt forced to be.
“Don’t look at me,” Win had said.
A small mercy, at least, that none of them knew the fellow. “Imagine—recognizing someone” was all Una could manage. Eyeing her a little askance, Win nodded.
“No chance recognizing this bastard,” a voice had piped, descending out of nowhere. Seeing the fellow’s ARP badge and armband, she and Win had stumbled into one another, stepping aside. Win clung to her arm. “I’ll say,” Win had snivelled in a decidedly superior way.
Win’s tone was a sharp instrument. What, exactly, had Win seen beforehand? Before they had come upon each other in the dunes, before all of this.
But why should she second-guess the sequence of things, the way her encounter with the man had obviously gone unseen? Was she punishing herself for what she had let happen? As the sun burned through cloud, brightening then bleaching everything, so would yesterday’s doings sharpen in her memory then just as quickly fade. Alone, level-headed, she walked herself through the previous afternoon’s encounter, as it had unfolded, all but invisibly.
Dropping her things where it had happened—the nameless act, little more than a fantasy—she spread the blanket and stretched out on it, still in her clothes. Once again she was completely alone, not a gawker in view. Overhead the clouds clotted and churned. An offshore breeze crinkled the sea, a deep blue at the horizon. As true a blue as some wild irises Enman had pointed out once by the pond, as some bluets he’d noted in the grass.
What was to be done with such a husband, so guileless, so good—keep on pleasing him? Mrs. Greene had likened marriage to knitting: knit purl knit purl, just keep going like that. But say you dropped a stitch. Did you keep going, letting it marr the rest of the work, or rip it out straight away and start over?
One good reason right there for not being a knitter, Kit would say. Una closed her eyes against the mackerel sky, didn’t dare let herself remember the man’s touch.
She was thinking, grimly, about what to make for supper when something jostled her. A warmth nudged hers. An arm, a hand. There was no chance to stand or even sit up and tell him to disappear, that his company was not wanted. He was kneeling there—“We meet again!”—all muscle and sunburnt skin.
He was no figment of the imagination, offering a twitch of a smile as he picked up her towel and shoes, then dropped them, calmly pulling her to her feet. Before she could pull free, he ran rough fingers over her palm, gripping her hand more tightly, kissed the tips of her fingers. She felt her breath seize, disgust trapped inside her. He gestured towards the marram, the trees behind it, spruce barely a screen against the brewing wind.
“I am glad to see you again.”
“You have no right to—”
He paid no attention to her objections, tugging her along. The stubbled marram driving splinters between her toes. “What is the matter?” His voice was a jeer.
“I’m going to report you.” She knew what he was. Her voice was pathetic, tiny and frail.
“You did not already?” His laugh, for all its boyishness, was bitter. Cruel. “Do you have a husband?” Contemptuous. “But we so enjoyed each other, Oona. Why not again? What is to fear?”
His grip on her wrist was a vise as they reached a break in the evergreens.
“If you let me go I’ll keep quiet. I’ll say nothing. I promise.”
“A promise.” He laughed. Limbs had been freshly cut from the trees, the smell of spruce overtaking that of sand and salted grass.
“You don’t want to keep a man company? Bring him some comfort?”
Her blood pounded in her ears. “I’m old enough to—please.”
They had reached a tiny clearing, with the remains of a campfire and a shelter made of tarps rigged to the branches. A charred metal pot lay on the peat, and some tin mugs and plates. Hanging from a nail sunk into a trunk was a rabbit, red dripped from its mouth. She glimpsed a blanket spread on the ground beneath the tarps, bundled clothing.
She struggled to sound calm. “I am old enough to be your mother.”
“It is not the finest hotel, I am sorry. I suppose you would like fine sheets, champagne.”
“If you let me go, I won’t breathe a word.”
“What, Oona, do you know of mothers? Shall I tell you of mine?” The oddness of his question and the bitterness in his voice frightened her more, if this was possible. “When I was a boy she would take me to Luna Park. I would watch the women like you at the waterslide, parading themselves. Their wares.”
The glint of a gold filling in his stained teeth.
As he spoke the slow patter of rain began. He had let go of her now and glanced up, his eyes hooded, their lids bared to the moisture. He wore a tight smile. Just when she felt her nerves would snap and her heart beat its way out of her chest, she managed to lurch from his reach. He looked stunned.
“I did not mean to frighten you. I am not that desperate a man, believe me.” He laughed again. “You have a husband? A home where a friend could lay his head, enjoy a meal?”
As suddenly as the raindrops had begun to fall, they stopped, and the wind shifted. Who knew he didn’t have a gun tucked somewhere and if she turned and ran, he would shoot?
“A friend in such times is a friend indeed.” His smile had weakened to a grimace, his eyes narrowed. Abruptly he squatted, folding his arms and burying his face. He was laughing or crying. She could not tell which, or whether it was simply a gesture, a ploy, meant to ensnare her. “My family is no longer alive. Kreuzberg,” she heard. Berlin, Hamburg. Firebombings.
Through the branches cracks appeared in the clouds. The sun peeked through them.
“You expect me to feel for you?”
His blue eyes were shallow and cool, surprised. He wasn’t much more than a schoolboy. Beads of moisture on his face were rhinestones, the cheapest.
“Nein. There is no feeling bad.”
In spite of her disgust, a cold terror froze her there.
“Not even over lost ones—?”
He shrugged, gazing at her. His eyes glistened, the strange hint of tears. “The spoils of war.” He lifted his hand, moved as if to rise and strike her, instead, rocked back on his heels. “Go home to your husband. Tell him what you have done.” He reached for her ankle, and it was this gesture that snapped whatever strange, momentary hold he had on her.
“Goodbye, pretty Una. If you change your mind, it might be too late.”
His eyes were the same leaden colour as the horizon melding with the sky.
As she ran, tripping and stumbling over the dune, the sun was a muzzy glow through the clouds sorting themselves into skeins of grey. Fog. A glittery drizzle sprinkled down. Her feet were bleeding, her things left on the beach soaked by the tide, which had crept up and all but claimed them.
Una trembled as she pushed her feet into her wet shoes, wrung water and sand from Mrs. Greene’s blanket. “Forgive us our trespasses,” she imagined Marge Greene whispering, as she had from her sickbed. “Deliver us from evil,” the priest had prayed over her open grave, as Enman threw in a handful of thin soil. “Keep us free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the coming of our Lord.”
She wished she could do as Enman did with his record albums, lift and reposition the needle from one track to a softer,
lighter melody. The kind of melody that might have the power to hold you in its thrall forever, and chase away demons and the disorder of having far too much undisciplined time.
17
This time Una came right out into the yard, attaching herself to him as if he had been overseas fighting, was just returned from France or Holland. She was in her bare feet, her towel and blanket hung on the line, though not her bathing suit. He noticed Cleary’s beads were gone.
“Oh, my darling—put that poor Jerry beggar out of your head, the unlucky sod. Who knows but he got what he had coming? Though you hate to think it. No word yet how he ended up here?”
He could feel her flinch. Now she too had a grisly memory to live with, a memory like a permanent lodger who occupied a bed but paid no rent. As he entered the kitchen, he saw her shoes drying by the stove. “Got caught unawares, did you, fell asleep in the sun?” He felt like a bit of an intruder in his own house, because the spot where he had done his homework, all those years ago, was laid with a scribbler, writing supplies and a smattering of opened schoolbooks.
She wanted things all set for the lesson, she said. Her voice sounded a little like the sap had been drained from it. The water bucket by the counter was filled to the brim, and the sink too. With any luck, hope against hope, this patchy fog preceded a downpour long and hard enough to fill the well.
“So she’s teachable, our Hannah,” he said lightly.
“Nothing some patience and coaxing can’t fix.”
He didn’t quite trust the pluckiness in her voice; it didn’t convince him.
For supper she had gone all out. Ritz cracker pie and scallops perfectly seared. She had picked some daisies and put them in a glass on the table. They had just sat down to eat when Clinton phoned. A meeting had been called, Clint said. Eight o’clock at Finck’s. The ARP and some navy brass were coming out. “Be there or don’t bother showing your ugly mug again, bud.” Enman laughed. But it must be serious, serious enough to keep Iris Finck up past her bedtime.
The pie was tasty and worth lingering over. His “That tastes like having more” a genuine compliment.
Una only took a tiny sliver for herself. “If we were in town we could go to Please You Bakery or Diana Sweet’s for dessert.”
“Who could tell those crackers aren’t apples? My, you’ve worked wonders, Una.” In the city the ingredients would be no better, though it struck him, for the umpteenth time, that things with her would be simpler there.
Una jumped up, barely finished, and rushed to get the dishes done. “Well, you said we were going. I need to get out.”
“What about your pupil?”
“If Hannah was coming she’d be here by now.”
Picturing Finck’s and a swarm of curious, frightened faces, he would have rather stayed in. She ran upstairs to find shoes. Her ropy ones had fallen apart at the soles, he noticed, inspecting them.
He was happy to leave the car parked. With Una’s arm looped through his, they set out. The fog was heavy with moisture, pregnant with it. Its strange chill was a shock to the skin. Savouring it, they took their time. Una slowed to a snail’s pace. Suddenly balky, was she too wishing that they’d stayed in?
Hubley Hill would be there and have everyone asking what Enman had against fiddle. Now there was talk the Labour Day dance was going ahead after all, though it was still more than a month away, square sets and other “down home” stuff he decided he wanted little part of. He guessed Una was coming this evening to back him up, see that he didn’t succumb to Hill’s strange waffling.
“Listen, sweetpea, I know how it feels.”
“What?” Her voice was sharp.
“People. The things they say. They mean well, mostly.”
“Right. What’s the road to hell paved with?” Her face looked piqued, suddenly, her expression weary. “And ‘good things come to those that wait,’ I’ve heard that too.”
“The road would be worse with bad intentions.”
“Bad ones? Well, yes. Hardly a need to point that out, is there.”
Pretty much all of Barrein was packed into Finck’s—Meades, Inkpens, and not just Hubley but Hills Enman hadn’t seen in a dog’s age, even a few O’Leery-ites, as Iris called them, including Flood from the Magnet. Mrs. Finck herself was holding court, wearing her best stained cardigan, flyaway hair in a topknot. Bart Twomey leered in all his odiferous glory, arse-crack on display as he leaned over the counter, blocking everyone’s view of the ARP man and navy fellow tucked safely behind it.
The man in uniform doffed his officer’s cap, peering around at everybody. Ainsley, the fellow in ARP overalls, also from O’Leery, puffed out his cheeks, sighing like there was a jackpot in store and he for one could not wait to claim it.
“Attention—we need your attention, fellas. Ladies too,” Ainsley corrected himself. “It’s come to our attention that—”
Clint could not contain himself. “Come to your attention? Maybe you should listen to my wife here. She and Una Greene here, these gals, they’re the ones that found—”
Win grimaced, then glanced over at Una and gave her a determined smile. The smile was sympathetic, and as Enman saw it, could not have been kinder.
“Yes, sure. Of course,” Ainsley said. “But can anyone tell us what they saw, if they noticed anything suspicious, unusual, leading up to—”
Win looked sharply away then, avoiding Una, it seemed. Was it possible that Win did not want her sharing the limelight? Win glanced back, her expression pleasant. Looking around, Enman couldn’t help feeling that all of Barrein, past and present, was represented. Hints, echoes, of lost parents and grandparents in people’s faces, the voices of the dead and their speech steeped in their descendants’ genes. It made growing old easier somehow, Enman thought, being surrounded by others whose youthful experiences had been much as his had been. He didn’t need to explain himself or his past. Shared experience equalled oxygen breathed in a place where everyone knew everyone else, from whence they had come and whence they were very likely headed. The details were just colouring within the lines, comfort to be taken in the lines themselves, the mix of happenstance and coincidence they contained. Their lives were as layered as the sea, he imagined, a sea whose bottom was immune to tides, its surface bobs and swells only mildly affecting what went on below it. Day to day worries, and such niggling annoyances as Twomey’s presence and the way it piqued Enman’s guilt at neglecting Hannah.
Twomey’s presence now was hardly less troublesome than it had been at the old man’s wake, he decided. Cleary laid out in his dark suit, Ma sitting beside the casket in her drab woollen dress. Whiskey making its rounds through the church hall.
“We have every reason to believe,” Brass was saying, “the deceased was enemy forces—”
In Twomey’s half-cut stance, that attitude of his, was something of his sister’s—before Cecelia had run off and disappeared or died, however the story went. The rumours around Hannah’s begetting a mystery to Enman until Ma had sat him down and trotted out a few sparse details. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she had said, as much to excuse her choice of a husband as to forgive the old man. Win, God love her, had recently filled in more, wondering how Hannah could be the offspring of a woman with “boobs like fried eggs—easy over,” as she’d bluntly put it.
“—Met with foul play…nature of wounds,” Brass’s voice, his fake English accent, wove in and out, rising above people’s murmurs. “At the hands of some vigilant citizen…or one of his own company—?”
Cecelia had been ahead of him and Win in school. The most he remembered of her was how her hips moved in sync with her jaws chewing on spruce gum, which she rolled on the tip of her tongue. Not that he had been looking. Ma would have put his head in a chokehold. Somehow he’d thought the gum kept away scurvy—all the kids chewed it back then, playing Robinson Crusoe or Long John Silver.
“—A member of
the Kriegsmarine—”
Rolling off Brass’s tongue, the foreign name was like a smell that wafted sharply then drifted away, not so different from the way tales of Cleary and the Twomey one drifted. Familiar, outdated, these stories, to most of the village—especially now that the principals were long gone. Bart Twomey had been decent enough to raise Hannah, Enman struggled to convince himself, if being raised by a deadbeat could be considered better than being raised by nobody at all.
“The issue, folks, is that we fear someone—locals—fraternizing, mixing with, aiding and abetting—” the navy man was saying.
Fraternizing: the word sank a hook into him, and he thought—though he’d been trying not to—of his coffee breaks spent chatting with Archibald. At the same moment, Win’s eyes grazed him and Una, looking to them both to bolster her objection. “God. What do you take us for? Who in their right mind would—”
The officer cut Win off. “If coerced, madam.”
Pressed against him, her face a bit pale, Una squeezed Enman’s hand.
He pushed away the image of George the night of the sinking, of George in the chilly room by the vault, polishing his shoes. Pushed away the thought of him dead, because it no longer bore thinking of.
“We want reports, anything unusual,” repeated the uniform’s ARP sidekick.
Excited, hopped up like nobody’s business, Iris Finck slapped the countertop. “I’ve been saying for months—haven’t I, Lester—you can hear those Jerries up to the devil’s business charging their batteries or bombs or whatever. When I’m trying to sleep and Lester says, Hear that?”
Una blushed, staring downwards at her shoes, dressy for the occasion. They were ones she seldom wore, not the best for walking in. Isla Inkpen stifled a smile. Pounding the counter, Twomey made the candies jump in their grubby jars. “I seen them myself, come to think of it—fellas up the lake, not from around here, acting like they owned it.”
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