by F. G. Cottam
‘Not snooping, sir,’ he said.
‘The name’s Michael,’ I said, ‘didn’t think for a moment that you were.’
‘Curious, is all. Recognise the spot, see,’ he said. He gestured with the stem of his pipe, ‘The oaks and that run of poplar trees, I mean. Not the building you’ve put in front of them.’
‘Building isn’t there,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’
He was wearing a watch cap and a reefer jacket, the bone buttons embossed with anchors, a double-run of dull ivory against the blue wool cloth.
‘Very handsome,’ he said. There seemed something measured or calculated, some deliberate neutrality to his tone. It seemed almost menacing and it signalled to me only that I was spending too much time on my own and that in a peculiar sort of way, despite its success, the meeting of the morning with the senior partner at Bullen and Clore had slightly unnerved me, made my senses a bit fraught.
My observer looked up from the outline on the pad to me. He transferred his pipe from his right fist to his left and held out his free hand and said, ‘Charlie Bradley.’
I stood and shook with him and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, Charlie.’ His palm was hard and rough, I supposed from decades of sea-going toil, handling ropes, hauling nets.
‘Might you be the Michael- something doing the restoration work on Ashdown Hall?’
‘Now how would you know that?’
‘Putting two and two together,’ he said, nodding at the pad. ‘There was a longish piece on the restoration scheme in the paper a couple of months ago. You’ll be Michael Aldridge of Aldridge Associates of Hammersmith in London.’
‘You’ve an impressive memory for names.’
He smiled at that. He said, ‘Most of the stories in the local rag concern themselves with upcoming car boot sales and botanical prize-winnings. The Ashdown Hall feature was riveting stuff, by comparison.’
Not as riveting as I thought it might have been, had the paper’s features editor suspected what I’d come to suspect about the Hall’s library. But that was privileged information until I came to discover whether those suspicions amounted to anything tangible. They might and they might not. If they did, my vigilant new acquaintance would one day be reading about their consequences.
He nodded at the pad again, ‘And now you’ve gone and picked up a local commission. Well, fair play to you, Mr. Aldridge.’
‘It’s Michael,’ I repeated. ‘And it’s not a commission, Charlie. There’s no client. This is for me, for my family.’
He gave me another look I couldn’t read, one that made me think I really was tired and probably also a bit stressed. It’s not every day you part with half of your life savings. And I’d just surrendered more information than instinct told me I should have, which was a bit odd. Building, by definition, is something that gets done in public, yet I felt I’d just shared something intimate with a complete and not particularly likeable stranger.
‘Very handsome,’ he said again, eventually, eyes on what I’d drawn. Then he lifted his focus to me and said, ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Aldridge. And now you’ll have to forgive me, because I’m off outside to smoke my pipe.’
‘I’ll see you again,’ I said.
He said something in response to that which I didn’t catch, because he had half turned away from me by then and because the general hubbub in the bar had this audible ebb and flow and just at that moment, had risen.
I didn’t go back to London that weekend. Instead, I booked the best suite at the Hambrough in Ventnor, a lovely boutique hotel, asking Katie to bring Molly down from Friday, departing as soon as she picked her up from school until late on Sunday, when they’d return home. In the event she took her out of school at lunchtime for their weekend away and they were already unpacked and waiting for me when I arrived at the hotel at a quarter to six on Friday evening.
Molly was Molly, adorable with her huge green eyes and cascade of wavy blonde hair. It was my wife who surprised me, as she always did on the rare occasions I saw her framed by the objectivity of unfamiliar surroundings. In our suite, stylish and sophisticated, that was exactly how she looked and how she smelled, with her perfume coalescing deliciously on her skin and how she felt, when I held her in my arms and kissed her ruby-coloured lips.
‘Ugh,’ Molly said, ‘disgusting.’
We had dinner at the Pond restaurant in Bonchurch Village, a settlement so intactly Edwardian it wouldn’t surprise you to see Rupert Brooke or J.M. Barrie strolling through the dusk along its quaint main thoroughfare in the perfect spring evening we enjoyed. There was a sepia stillness to Bonchurch in the gloaming that makes me shudder to recall it now. Back then though, I thought this a charming and wholly innocent quality. Back then, the island’s past hadn’t yet become the stuff of my nightmares.
‘The forecast for tomorrow’s fine,’ I said. ‘I thought we’d take a picnic up to the site at about midday and you two can see for yourselves the place where we’re going to be spending quite a lot of our free time from now on.’
‘And I’ll definitely have my own room?’
It was about the sixth or seventh time Molly had asked this. Katie raised her eyes to the ceiling, but the smile she’d worn at the restaurant all evening didn’t leave her face. She wasn’t a moody woman. She’d get any grievance out in the open straight away, rather than ever dwell on anything, but even so I couldn’t remember having seen her quite so completely happy in a long time.
I’d brought with me the front elevation of my plan for the house, ripped from my pad and folded into my pocket. Now I took it out and unfolded it and spread it out in front of my daughter, shifting her dinner plate so that she could study it. ‘There,’ I said, tapping a finger on her first-floor room, with its facing glass wall and full-length balcony.
Both of them, the two women in my life and by far the two most important people, examined the sketch. Katie ruffled Molly’s hair. Without looking up, she said, ‘Sometimes I forget just what a clever and talented man your father is.’
Then she did look up. Her eyes were a paler green than her daughter’s, flecks of gold in them that caught and refracted in the light from the still flames of the candles at the centre of our table.
‘It’s a simple little house,’ I said.
‘It’s only perfect,’ Katie said.
‘It is, too,’ Molly said.
Handsome, I thought. It wasn’t, either, wholly a comfortable thought; Handsome.
The weather on that Saturday was nothing short of glorious. The Hambrough is luxurious and pampers and lulls its guests and we all slept in late. Then after breakfast, Katie took Molly to Ventnor Rare Books, on my recommendation, while I shopped for the food and drink for our picnic. I bought fruit and bottles of juice and packets of nuts and crisps and one of those plaid petrol station picnic blankets with waterproof plastic stitched onto its underside. I filled flasks with tea and coffee and made sandwiches. I’d lingered over one of those foil tray based instant barbecues buying the blanket, but decided on full-blown English tradition. It just seemed more apt, really. And you have to be cautious with kids around burning charcoal and I wanted Molly to be completely carefree.
The girls returned to the hotel, Katie having bought Molly hardbacks of Alice in Wonderland and The Water Babies and a pre-war Beano annual. It was this last book she was most thrilled with. She was a huge Dennis the Menace fan.
‘How much did that lot cost?’ I asked.
‘It’s educational,’ my wife said.
‘Oh, I know,’ I said, ‘The Bash Street Kids are practically on the English syllabus.’
That remark earned me a prod with her forefinger in the gut.
‘Muscle tone’s improving,’ she said, raising an eyebrow.
‘Celibacy,’ I said.
Katie grinned, glancing sideways at Molly because Molly tended to eavesdrop and then ask about what she’d overheard and failed to understand. But Molly was by then stretched out on our bed, her new-old annual between her elbow
s, her mind on the antique adventures of her comic book heroes and heroines.
I hadn’t been trying to make a serious point in regard to my wife’s extravagance over the books. What I said, I’d said as a joke. There were classic editions of Alice in Wonderland available for a lot less in Waterstones than she’d just paid for something collectible. But while it was often a different story when it came to The Entertainer or Build a Bear, neither of us ever denied our daughter a book.
Besides, Katie wasn’t spending my money. When Molly’s condition had first been diagnosed, she’d given up her full-time PR job and started making and selling lampshades from home. They were cylindrical in shape and came in four sizes, very simple geometrically, but she had an eye for the quirky and stylish fabrics that covered them and those prints were the selling point. It was an idea she’d had more than a decade earlier studying textiles at art school, but never put into practice. After three months, the Not on the High Street internet retail company invited her to sell via their online platform. And six months after that, Liberty asked her to design and manufacture a range exclusive to their stores.
By the time of my island commission, she was still sourcing and choosing all the fabrics for her lampshades but was employing two skilled staffers full time for the actual manufacture. She was giving serious thought to opening a small showroom-cum-shop. She was making a good profit on a healthy and growing turnover. If she hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have handed over half what I’d saved during my working life for a plot with nothing yet built on it.
We went down to Ventnor beach for an hour. Molly had a vanilla cornet from the Minghella ice-cream parlour and after finishing it, gravely pronounced it the best she’d ever eaten in her life. It was still pre-season on the island and though the weather was warm and still and the sky virtually cloudless, there weren’t many visitors to the town. There weren’t more than a couple of dozen people occupying the entire length of the beach and only two or three wind-surfers in their wet-suits out on the sea.
We searched rock pools for crabs and I was delighted to hear Molly quietly singing to herself. She only ever sang when she was happy. She had the most beautiful singing voice, gifted as she was with a lovely tone and perfect pitch. She sang Blue Moon, which seemed an obscure choice for a 9 year old girl. I didn’t know for sure, but thought it probably dated from the same decade as her vintage Beano annual did. I wondered where she might have heard it, but didn’t give the question all that much thought. And then she squealed on seeing a large crab scuttle unexpectedly with a frantic sideways clatter across the pebbles and I forgot about the song entirely.
At about half-twelve we set off southward over the hill at the southern extremity of the town and down to the shoreline en route to the plot I’d bought. I carried our picnic stuff in a rucksack on my back. We didn’t see anyone on our journey of 20 minutes or so. That part of Wight’s coastline is secluded, unspoiled, the odd walker enjoying it I imagined in season, the rest of the time given to a quite beautiful solitude. A white-sailed schooner, pale and majestic, swayed under the wind a couple of miles away, out over the glittering water. And Molly, holding her mother’s hand, was singing again. Nothing from the pre-war period this time; instead that catchy hit song about not minding the cold, from Disney’s Frozen.
We rounded a headland and the oaks and poplars came into view and then we were there and I spread our picnic blanket where I now knew our sitting room would soon be and began to un-wrap the sandwiches, feeling pretty ravenous. The surf was quite high and the waves tumbled audibly onto the shore below us, a hundred metres away. They crashed and hissed into the shingle and there was a rhythm to the sound when you listened that was almost hypnotic.
None of us spoke, eating. Clearly the girls had reached the spot every bit as hungry as I was. Eventually Katie said, ‘It’s just so lovely.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ Molly said. ‘I can’t believe we’re actually going to be living here.’
‘Only some of the time,’ I said. ‘There’ll still be London and school and your friends.’
‘I haven’t got any friends.’
‘But we’ll be coming here and staying here in the holidays.’
‘Starting when?’
‘When you break up in the summer,’ I said.
‘That’s ages away,’ Molly said.
Her mother laughed and reached out and ruffled Molly’s hair. ‘It’s a little over three months,’ she said. ‘In that time, your dad intends to have a house built, furnished, plumbed, powered and habitable.’
Molly said, ‘What’s habitable?’
To Katie, I said, ‘I had thought I’d leave the furnishing part to you.’
She smiled at that but then frowned, stroking the grass growing all around our picnic blanket, running the green leaves of it between her fingers. Then she stood and brushed sandwich crumbs from her lap and folded her arms, studying the ground.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. She walked out towards the shoreline, pausing just beyond the twin oaks, where she crouched on her haunches and again stroked the grass with her palm. ‘Who owns the land surrounding our plot?’
‘It’s common land,’ I said. I gestured vaguely at the poplars, ‘There’s farmland back up there somewhere, a boundary fence, but it’s quite a way off. Sheep farm, apparently.’
‘I think there was something here before, on our land,’ she said. ‘The grass is different.’
‘It looks exactly the same.’
She shook her head. ‘No, it’s coarser. It’s stronger, more fibrous, like a resilient strain was deliberately planted. Which would suggest there was something here before, wouldn’t it?’
I thought about this. I pulled and chewed a blade of grass. Katie was right, it was fibrous and it was slightly salty, where I’d expected it to be greenly sweet. ‘A lot of trouble to go to,’ I said. I’d seen derelict buildings on the island. They weren’t uncommon on sections of farmland visible from the roads. Then again those buildings weren’t adjacent to common land, where an unsafe structure could pose a danger to kids or even to curious adults. It seemed odd, though, to have removed all trace of something, assuming some structure had been there. In so remote a spot, it seemed not just effortful but also a bit extreme.
The thought was unwelcome. I wanted picturesque and sunny, homely and serene. Enigmatic and mysterious didn’t suit the circumstances at all. I stood and spat out my chewed blade of grass and Katie, who must have seen me suddenly slightly crestfallen or sensed the mood-shift in me, strode back wearing her most dazzling smile. This time it was my hair she ruffled. She was a tactile woman, forever reaching and touching and caressing and I loved her for it.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s completely irrelevant. You’ve done brilliantly to find and get this spot for us. We’ll be totally happy here, in our secret place.’
‘Secret?’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Absolutely, or we’ll be inundated with requests from people to borrow it for weekends. Look around you. It’s going to be magical. This is something we share with no one, Michael. It’s for the three of us, exclusively.’ She glanced across to Molly, examining the grass a few metres away in an exaggerated manner, the stooped posture of someone elderly, her hands linked behind her back and her head bowed earthward as she pondered on the apparent puzzle her mother had identified.
‘You’re doing it for her, aren’t you,’ my wife said quietly. It was a statement, not a question.
‘Does that make you feel resentful?’
‘It makes me love you all the more,’ she said. ‘It was always a dream. But it would have stayed a dream, except for Molly’s diagnosis.’
‘And her prognosis,’ I said. ‘I’ll make it the perfect refuge, for after the surgery.’
Katie shuddered slightly, taking in a breath on that thought. She made to say something in reply to me but Molly’s triumphant squeal meant that whatever it was, it never got said.
She placed it in the palm of her hand to show us and I saw that it was an old-fashioned penny piece. It was weather-tarnished, but in terms of the wear it had endured through handling, almost in mint condition. It must have been lost early in its life, I thought, and never been recovered until now. I picked it out of Molly’s palm and saw that the date, inscribed under a rather butch and beefy Britannia, was 1927.
‘It’s treasure,’ she said again, confidently.
‘Today’s the day you found treasure, Molly,’ her mother said. ‘Put it in your diary tonight. Today’s a day to remember.’
‘I’ll remember it anyway,’ Molly said. ‘I’ll never forget today.’
I gave her back the coin.
‘We’ll bring it up like new,’ Katie said.
Molly looked at the penny dubiously back in the palm of her hand. ‘How will we do that?’
‘Leave it in a glass of Coca Cola overnight,’ she said.
‘Honestly mum, you know everything.’
‘She only knows everything useful, Molly,’ I said, ‘in direct contrast to your father.’
Molly’s JIA, which is sometimes called Still’s Disease, had afflicted her lower jaw. Until the diagnosis, we’d thought she just had a weak chin and since neither of her parents was affected in this way, it would grow in its own time and be more or less alright, in proportion with the rest of her features by the time she reached physical maturity.
An orthodontic specialist diagnosed what was actually wrong after taking a dental X-ray and showing it to us. Her lower jaw was not hinged to her upper jaw, only linked by muscle and sinew and it had not developed in terms of growth since she’d been a baby. We made an appointment to see a specialist. It was the surgeon who first referred to what our daughter had as a deformity.