by F. G. Cottam
‘I’m really sorry I involved you.’
‘Yeah, well, probably we both are.’
‘I’ll write you a cheque.’
‘You think I qualify for compensation? Don’t bother.’
Meat sizzled on the griddle in front of me. It smelled good but I’d slightly lost my appetite. I glanced back towards the house. Molly, in her tiger-striped onesie, was still reclining in her chair reading. Katie was no longer in sight. She’d be in the kitchen, cutting bread and preparing salad and a dressing for the salad for our dinner.
‘I found out what happened outside Boston in 1925, Michael. The FBI keeps comprehensive records and they’re archived. The G-men located the Jericho Society’s temple there and raided it after dark with bulldozers and had the rubble taken away in a convoy of trucks that dumped it all in the harbour. They had with them two powerful exorcists from the Diocese of Boston that night. The priests recited their liturgy and then they sowed the ground with salt.’
The taste of grass, saline and fibrous, was suddenly remembered in my mouth.
‘Yeah, I know, all very biblical,’ Ruthie said. ‘I think something similar happened on the island a couple of years later, obviously minus the fedoras and the tommy guns. Prominent citizens such as Charlie Bradley were no doubt party to it. Charlie was 20 years older than Edward Gillespie and Eddie always looked up to him. My granddad would only have been about 19, but even if he wasn’t involved personally, I’ll bet he knew all about what happened to the redoubt.’
‘Your grandfather was personally involved, that was why Charlie Bradley said I should come to you.’
‘It was one of the reasons’, Ruthie said.
My eye caught movement and I glanced towards the house and saw Katie a hundred feet away, walking towards me with a burdened tray between her arms and a smile on her face, her hair a halo of gold in the early evening sunlight.
‘I saw you playing happy families on the beach today,’ Ruthie said. ‘You were hammering the staves of a windbreak into the shingle with a mallet and saying something that made your wife and daughter laugh. In spite of myself, I care about what happens to you. I think that place is bad news and you need to get out of it as soon as you can.’
Three
The improvement in Molly’s health was pretty much immediate. The perfect weather held until the end of July and showed no sign of breaking as the beginning of August approached. People who’d lived through it began to compare that summer to the summer of 1976, which had been the hottest and driest for 500 years and had seen a Minister for Weather appointed by the British government and forest and grass fires burn out of control on the Sussex Downs. Sharks had played in the tepid sea under the iron pillars supporting Brighton Pier.
Forty years on from that, despite the heat, I considered the shark-risk off Ventnor Beach remote. Always supervised by one of her parents and under the vigilant watch of the lifeguards, Molly swam every day. She got stronger and her skin, despite the sun-cream, gained a tawny hue that made her firming physique look much healthier.
‘She’s a different girl,’ Katie said, on our balcony one early August evening. She reached across from where she sat and kissed me, ‘and my husband is a genius.’
I was looking at Molly. She had reclined on her sun chair and fallen asleep under the tented book she’d been reading when drowsiness had overcome her. It was about 8.30, I wasn’t wearing my watch, but this was becoming our pattern, Molly slipping off to sleep after an action-packed day and me carrying her to bed for a peaceful night of slumber. The book had fallen to the floor and I studied my daughter’s profile and my wife watched me do it, I could sense the scrutiny.
‘Her lower jaw is growing,’ I said. ‘I thought it was just the attitude of her head, the angle, but it isn’t. There’s actual growth.’
‘It’s a miracle,’ Katie said, quietly, in a tone that told me I’d been slow to observe something my wife had already become aware of.
‘The diagnosis can’t have been wrong,’ I said. ‘She’s got JIA, which is sometimes called Still’s Disease and it’s caused a deformity.’
Katie didn’t answer for a moment. I became aware of the ambient noises beyond where we sat, the gulls crying in the sky, the surf distant on the shingle. She said, ‘It’s this place, Michael. She’s blossoming here. She’s never once complained about her knees and they’ve stopped swelling despite all the walking and climbing she’s doing. She’s stopped getting the headaches too.’
‘Her lower jaw can’t just start growing of its own accord,’ I said.
‘Why can’t it?’ Katie said. ‘The rest of her is.’
This was true. Molly hadn’t just developed better muscle-tone and a tan since their arrival. She seemed to be in the middle of a growth-spurt. She was almost ten and her mother was tall and long-limbed and that was just what happened and what would continue to happen until she reached maturity.
We did the Tennyson Trail. We visited Blackgang Chine and toured Osborne House and rented bicycles and biked the scenic coastal route to Freshwater Bay, where we picnicked. Ashdown Hall was open to the public again by now and I bored both the girls thoroughly through a hot afternoon during which I insisted on showing them the work I’d supervised back in the spring. We went on the rides at the fun fair at Shanklin. We viewed the Needles from the cable car as it climbed the headland cliff. We pony-trekked and took a flora and fauna guided tour of what grew under the leaf canopy in Brighstone Forest. I didn’t think much about work, with both the big, hands-off projects apparently going well.
Molly was constructing castles in the sand on the beach at Ryde halfway through August, when studying the subtly lengthening line of her jaw and improving strength of her chin, I noticed that her eye colour was lightening. It wasn’t just the weather. Eyes didn’t fade in bright sunlight. Her mother was absent that afternoon, window-shopping the antique shops on the picturesque cobbles of Cowes.
I said, ‘Look at me, darling.’
‘Just a jiffy, Dad,’ she said. She was excavating her moat, which she’d fill from the sea with her plastic bucket.
‘Jiffy’? Where’d she got that from? Maybe it was from The Bash Street Kids or she was reading Enid Blyton.
‘Is your moat tricky, Sweetpea?’
‘Frightfully so,’ she said, sounding like some posher, arcane echo of the Molly I knew.
‘Look at me, Molls,’ I said.
She lifted her eyes. They were no longer the deep see-green of my sometimes melancholy, disease-stricken daughter, they were instead a bright emerald. Just for a fraction of time and intuition, the face of a stranger stared back at me. Then a smile creased her face and she was Molly again, a shade stronger-featured and lighter-eyed, but loving and familiar nevertheless.
‘Be a brick, Dad, and lend a chap a hand?’
Enid Blyton, I thought, had to be. No one in real life any longer calls anyone a brick. And in modern parlance, chaps are exclusively male. I tried to remember the name of the one I always thought of as the tacit lesbian in the Famous Five. She was George, wasn’t she, short for Georgina? Against all the demographic odds, those books had come back into fashion. I’d seen them on the display tables in the children’s section at Waterstones. They had those alluringly retro covers. I hadn’t bought Molly any, but that didn’t mean her mum hadn’t in the six weeks I’d been mostly away on Wight prior to their arrival.
That night, I took a look at the titles on the bookshelf in Molly’s room after she’d gone to sleep on the balcony as usual and I’d picked her up and carried her in and tucked her up in bed. She had dozens of books at home, of course and it wasn’t really a representative selection. There were six Jacqueline Wilsons, two Michael Morpurgos, a Michelle Paver, a copy of Treasure Island and the Alice in Wonderland she’d been bought at Ventnor Rare books when our dream home was still a front elevation I could show her by candle light at the Pond Restaurant in Bonchurch Village.
There were no stories by Enid Blyton. The most intriguing
title, the one that caught my eye and attention, was a book entitled The Sea Dragon’s Lair, by an author named Ruthie Gillespie. So she wasn’t only published digitally. I opened the book and saw that it was illustrated and that she’d done the illustrations too. And that she could really draw. In another life, I’d have known that about her, because I’d have made it my business to get to know Ruthie far better all around. But we only get the one life and at that moment my own still seemed, in most ways, blessed.
I didn’t mention Molly’s speech anachronisms or my Enid Blyton theory to my wife, that evening. The moment to do so never really presented itself. And I didn’t mention either the subtle change in our daughter’s eye-colour. I had the sense that Katie wasn’t only keenly aware of the physical changes in Molly, but that she approved of and was grateful for them. I’d put it stronger, in retrospect. I believe she quietly thought it was some kind of willed-for intervention from above. Perhaps it was something she’d prayed for. Faith was not a subject we ever consciously discussed.
Towards the end of August, Katie was summoned Back to London for a few days by Liberty. Apparently there was some sort of retail crisis concerning the lampshades they wanted for their Christmas stock. Ordinarily, I loved time alone with my daughter, but Molly seemed preoccupied in her mother’s absence and a bit distant and detached. I went into her room at 10 o’clock one evening while Katie was away and thought I could smell tobacco smoke. That was impossible of course, nine-year olds don’t smoke and couldn’t even if they would wish to. Nobody right-minded would sell them cigarettes.
I could smell something else, which was the suggestion of a woman’s fragrance. It wasn’t Joe Malone, which was all my wife ever wore. It wasn’t that fresh or exuberant. It reminded me of Christmas visits and birthday cards containing five pound notes and the sputter of a Morris Traveller engine with the choke fully pulled out on the walnut dashboard. It was the Guerlain perfume, Mitsouko, in which my elderly aunt had drenched herself throughout my childhood. Then it and the tobacco, the scent memories, were gone. In the stillness of her room, I was anxious for my daughter.
‘Okay, Sweetpea?’
‘Absolutely,’ she said, her voice huskier than I was used to hearing it.
Something, some unseen obstacle, hung between us in the darkness. ‘Are you really okay, Molls?’
‘I’m hunky dory, Father,’ she said. ‘I’m the full shilling, really I am.’ She was very still against the last of the dusk leaching out of her room. She looked poised and reposed sitting up on her bed and completely and utterly strange. She had never in her life referred to me as ‘Father’ before. I was certain of that.
I held her to say goodnight. She was slight and rigid in my arms.
The following morning I called Ruthie Gillespie.
‘I’ve been expecting this.’
‘Then maybe you should’ve got in touch.’
‘I was working out what to say.’
‘Go on.’
‘The woman in the Barrett paintings you discovered was Blanche Underwood. She was the same age as the century in which she lived her not terribly long life. She died in 1928.’
‘That’s tragic.’
‘Don’t jump the gun, Mr. A. Blanche was the reason Barrett took up in the first place with the fascists. She was the zealot. He was the cunt-struck convert to his lover’s cause.’
‘That’s a crude way of putting it.’
‘It’s a bit late in the day for prissiness.’
‘So she was his lover?’
‘And his muse. He reckoned he couldn’t paint unless she was somehow present in his life.’
‘He painted after 1928.’
‘Yeah, well, there’s an explanation for that.’
I closed my eyes. Despite everything, I was enjoying the sensation of hearing Ruthie’s voice. There was just so much spark and humour and life in her. She was bright as well as beguiling. I said, ‘Tell me.’
I heard the click of her Bic lighter. I heard her exhale smoke, then, ‘I will, face to face.’
‘I think face to face would be unwise.’
‘I’m not offering you a choice, Michael.’
‘At least give me a clue.’
There was a silence. Then Ruthie said, ‘I spent seven years at secondary school with Ollie Taplow, your master carpenter on the Ashdown job?’
‘What on earth has this to do with Ollie Taplow?’
‘You’ll find that out that when you meet me, face to face.’
Katie still hadn’t returned from the mainland. We’d enrolled Molly in a kids’ club. For as long as her health held, she could join in with their activities and of course, her health was holding. The following morning, from ten till 12, she had group tennis coaching with the club, then from 12 till 1pm they’d scheduled a picnic lunch. This was at Freshwater. My wife still hadn’t returned from what I’d come to think of as her Liberty Lampshade Crisis Summit. Given that her lampshade sales were contributing to the family coffers, this was a bit unfair. But in times of stress you find humour wherever you can.
I met Ruthie outside the Minghella ice-cream parlour at 10.30 after dropping Molly off. The drive back to Ventnor was only a scenic 20 minutes. I was slightly delayed by the tennis coach, buttonholing me to tell me my daughter was proving to be a total natural at the game. She was a real talent, he said. She was a find.
Ruthie hadn’t bothered to brush her hair. Her lipstick had been carelessly applied and there were bruised smudges of sleeplessness under her dark eyes. I think wanton unnecessary comma is the old-fashioned word which best describes how she looked that morning. She was wearing jeans and a frayed denim jacket and a white shirt tight across her cleavage that hadn’t been ironed. She was pale and disheveled and altogether so gorgeous, I felt faithless just noticing the details on display.
I sat down and sipped my espresso and pushed across the flat-white I’d bought for her. She looked at me and I looked directly back and felt no discomfort doing it. I knew her now.
She said, ‘There weren’t only paintings, hidden behind that false ceiling, Mr. A. There was a journal or memoir, I don’t know quite which of those you’d call it, but Barrett kept it and a lot of it concerns Blanche Underwood and her life and approaching death.’
‘And Ollie Taplow took it.’
‘He did it on impulse. He thought you’d get all the credit for the find as well as any reward going. He couldn’t take a painting, but he could fit the diary into his tool bag.’
‘Which no one would touch because a master carpenter’s for consistency tools are so valuable and prized and personal to their owner.’
‘Yes, he knew the book was safe in his tool bag. But he regretted taking the notebook almost as soon as he smuggled it off the site. It maybe had scholarly value but no intrinsic worth, like the paintings did. We’ve stayed pally since school. He handed it on to me because I’m a writer, panic, more than logic, I think.’
‘And he trusted you not to betray him, because you’re trustworthy, and because you’re essentially a nice person.’
The pink Bic came out. Ruthie lit a cigarette. She did this with a downward tilt of her head and her straight black hair shifted to either side of it, silky strands caressing her jaw. She said, ‘There’s stuff in the journal about the Jericho Society. Barrett had links with them. I didn’t read it at first. I didn’t read it until after I called you that evening and told you about the Cease and Desist letter Bullen and Clore sent me.’
‘When you also told me I should abandon the house I’ve built.’
‘I think you’ll agree with that when you’ve read what Barrett wrote.’
‘What made Blanche Underwood a fascist?’
‘She was a champion tennis player. She was playing in a clay court tournament in Italy in 1922 when Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome. Lots of people in Europe were hugely taken with fascism in the 1920s and early 1930s. It seemed virile and honest and energetic to them.’
‘Then Hitler came alon
g.’
‘Blanche was very taken with him. She read Mein Kampf the year it was published, in 1925.’
‘She knew German?’
‘Fluently, Italian, too, taught herself both languages.’
Ruthie’s shoulder-bag hung from the back of her chair. She reached into it and took out a note book and slid it onto the table. It was marble-backed and faded and old fashioned looking and I was loathe to touch its pages, contaminated as I sensed they were with some awful pestilence fate was about to inflict upon my family.
‘I’ve stuck a post-it note to the inside cover,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to read all of it, but you do need to read the pages I’ve listed. And you’d be well advised to do it straight away.’
I didn’t say anything, just stared at the book. Ruthie stubbed out her cigarette on the zinc bed of the ashtray on our table and exhaled smoke at the sky and pulled her fingers through her hair and rose to go. She said, ‘I’d hate Ollie to get into trouble.’
‘He’s nothing to fear from me,’ I said. Whatever baleful lesson was contained in those pages, I’d reduce the book to ashes once I’d learned it. There’d be no evidence for anyone to find of theft.
Ruthie cleared her throat with a cough. She said, ‘It’s a shame, Mr. A. I mean, it is from my perspective. In another life we could really have had something, you and I.’ She leant forward across the table and kissed me lightly on the lips and turned and walked away along the seafront, her hair swaying in sunlight with her stride. She tasted of coffee and tobacco and of a promise unfulfilled. I put the Barrett account into my bag and pulled the car key from my pocket to go on back to pick up Molly from Freshwater Bay.
They were eating their picnic lunch when I got there, a gaggle of girls and boys seated on the grass in the sunshine beside the fenced-in courts. They had their backs to me as I approached the group, their attention taken by a singles being played by two boys who looked to be in their late teens. They were using those oversized Babolat racquets and both possessed two-fisted backhands and they were hitting with a lot of topspin on both flanks, rallying from the baseline and grunting as they powered through the ball. They were evenly matched and very good. Then one of them came in behind a kick-serve and stretched at the net to put the return deftly away.