Virginia glanced at her homework and bit her nail. Tollbury School was her first proper school, and she had been there barely a week. She was anxious to keep up.
“I can picture them both now,” Mrs. Hill said.
This was hopeless. Virginia closed her exercise book and knelt up on her chair as Mrs. Hill sloshed cold water into the rubbed flour and nodded with tight-jawed conviction. “Young Max was always trudging up here with Clem after school. Coming to play at the big house. It counted as a proper treat for him, in those days.” She twisted her wedding ring off and laid it on the table. “His father was a butcher, you know. Deering and Son. Used to have the shop next door to the post office. It’s because of Clem, and Clem’s father, that Max knows the marsh as well as he does. He wouldn’t have a clue otherwise.”
Virginia picked up Mrs. Hill’s ring and slipped it over her thumb, spinning it in the light so that the gold flashed.
“But they’re not friends anymore, are they?”
“What makes you say that?” Mrs. Hill wondered slyly, the fat quivering along her arms as she worked the dough. “He’s coming for tea today, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but I mean they’re not real friends, are they? I know Clem doesn’t like him.” Virginia popped the ring back on the table. “I don’t like him either.”
“Poor Mr. Deering, I think you’re a rotter,” said Mrs. Hill, but she smiled at the dough as if it had told her a good joke. “His wife died, you know, and he’s had to bring up two children all by himself. He can’t be completely bad, can he?”
“Why not? Sad things happen to all sorts of people; it doesn’t make them nice.”
Mrs. Hill laughed, as if she found it a slightly shocking idea.
“Well,” she admitted in an undertone, “some people do say he wasn’t a good husband to poor Mrs. Deering while she was alive, and I won’t argue against them. I knew that girl since the day she was born, and she wasn’t the same after she married him.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just quieter.”
Virginia thought for a while. “Is that why Clem doesn’t like him? Because he was mean to his wife?”
“Oh, well. No. I don’t think it’s just that.”
“What then? Please tell me.” Virginia glanced around, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Is it because of Lorna?”
Mrs. Hill banged the ball of dough onto the floury tabletop and pressed it flat with her palms. She passed Virginia a cutter and took another for herself. They leaned over the dough from opposite sides of the table, their heads almost touching.
“Well,” Mrs. Hill murmured, as they pressed their first circles from the dough. “First of all, you tell me. What do you make of your new mother?”
Virginia hesitated. “She’s very pretty.”
“Oh yes,” agreed Mrs. Hill firmly, “she’s that all right. And? What else?”
“Well—”
But before Virginia could go on, Lorna burst in from the hall, her heels clicking across the stone floor. “I’ve just spotted their car,” she whispered urgently. “They’ll be here any moment.”
“Nearly there, Mrs. Wrathmell.” Mrs. Hill began cutting the scones and transferring them to the baking tray with mechanical efficiency.
Lorna plucked a few dog hairs from Virginia’s sweater and picked up her hands for inspection. Bracken began barking and leaping at the front door, infuriated by the noise of the approaching motor.
“I’ll go and clean my nails,” said Virginia preemptively, as the car braked at the front of the house and, simultaneously, someone knocked at the back door.
“Oh goodness, who’s this?” Lorna cried, dropping Virginia’s hands. “We’re not expecting anyone else, are we? The grocery boy came yesterday.”
Mrs. Hill shook her head and continued cutting scones. Lorna wrung her hands.
“Virginia, go tell Clem the Deerings are here. Quickly. And give your hair a quick brush while you’re upstairs.”
The unexpected knock came again at the back door. Lorna tutted and crossed the kitchen, through the scullery, to answer it.
Virginia went into the hall, where Bracken was yapping and running in circles. She made ineffective soothing noises as she stepped over him and peered through the window beside the front door. She hadn’t seen Mr. Deering since the day she arrived last month, nor had she met his children, though she’d heard about them from Mrs. Hill. The Wrathmells’ lives might be circumscribed by Tollbury Point—work and school, church and leisure all took place within a rustic two-mile radius—but the Deerings seemed to venture farther afield. The children went to boarding schools, and Mrs. Hill said they were regulars at the cathedral.
Though she hadn’t seen Mr. Deering since December, she had seen his car—just once, last week, when she was sent home from school with stomach cramps. It was a Wednesday lunchtime, and she’d walked halfway down the lane before she spotted it—big and black and unmistakable, and parked right outside Salt Winds. She’d climbed into the field and sat against the hedge for a good hour until she heard it purr away. When Clem came back from town that evening, she’d intended to tell him, but somehow she hadn’t.
Mr. Deering was adjusting his hat in the rearview mirror, and the sight of his pale face and skin-tight gloves made Virginia’s stomach flutter. She couldn’t see much of the son, Theodore: just a mouth, talking away in the back of the car, and a bow tie and a fat neck.
Virginia knew she ought to get a move on—Lorna had finished talking to whomever-it-was at the back door, and was crossing the kitchen with a word for Mrs. Hill—but Mr. Deering’s daughter was getting out of the car now and standing upright in the pale sunlight. She wore a blood-red beret and suede shoes, and she was sliding a dog-eared novel into her coat pocket. Mrs. Hill had said, with faint scorn, that her name was Juliet, and Virginia thought the name suited her. She was tall and dark-haired—“the very spit of her poor mother”—and even with her coat on you could tell she had a proper bosom. Virginia looked for as long as she dared, while Bracken ran figure eights around her ankles, but Lorna’s high heels were clacking across the kitchen floor, and Mr. Deering was pocketing his car keys, and in the end she had to race upstairs.
She paused on the landing to listen. Downstairs, Lorna had made it to the front door, and voices were raised in greeting. The two grown-ups cried “Hello!” as if they were pleasantly surprised to see one another, though obviously they weren’t surprised, since they’d arranged this get-together over the phone a few days ago. Mr. Deering said that something smelled delicious; Lorna apologized for the hysterical dog and admired Juliet’s beret. There were sounds of cheeks being kissed and coats being removed. Theodore said, “Daddy, I’m starving,” which gave the grown-ups an opportunity to laugh.
“Vi?” Clem’s voice was calling down the landing. “That you?”
“They’re here,” she whispered, before she’d even reached the study doorway.
“Are they? Oh Lord.” Clem wrote something with a conclusive flourish and screwed the lid onto his fountain pen. She entered the tobacco smog and leaned against him, and he put an arm around her waist with a sigh. “Bother those Deerings.”
“Mother says you’re to come down,” she said, squinting at his manuscript, though there were more crossings-out than words, and his handwriting was impossible to read. “And Mrs. Hill’s made scones.”
“Oh well. Every cloud ...”
Virginia took the top page and read aloud from one of the more legible sections, stumbling over the longer words: “... low oxygen levels in the peat, due in part to the frequent tidal submersion of the salt marsh ...” She shot him a quick sideways glance and stopped. It was silly, because Clem insisted she could say anything to him, but she felt there was a risk attached to the word marsh. He’d warned her about its dangers on several occasions since that first walk home along the lane, and had made her promise, solemnly, that she would never, ever set foot beyond the flint wall. As far as she knew, it was th
e single subject under the sun capable of extinguishing Clem’s sense of humor. Even the war gave rise to black jokes.
Virginia thought about Mr. Deering’s car parked up outside the house last Wednesday.
Clem sighed and put his pen away in its case, and Virginia shut up. Shutting up was almost always a clever move, she’d discovered, not just with Clem but with everyone. People rarely object to a quiet child.
She leaned her cheek against his head and stared out of the window. Lorna would be calling up the stairs in a moment and they ought to go, but neither made the first move. The marsh looked harmless today—dull, even—like a big, puddly field. Clem’s desk was more distracting, littered as it was with curiosities: rolls of typewriter ribbon; tins of tobacco; bottles of colored ink; torn envelopes spilling photographs of birds and eggs; drawings of plants and cross sections of earth. She leafed through the pictures dreamily and pulled one out at random.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, delighted. It was a pencil drawing of a duck in a businessman’s suit, with a monocle and a furled umbrella: not at all the sort of scientific illustration she expected to find. It was very well done, and she was tempted to ask if she could keep it, but Clem took it out of her hand, studied it a second, and dropped it into a drawer.
“Don’t know what that was doing there,” he said, getting to his feet and picking up his jacket from the back of the chair.
“It’s really good,” Virginia protested. “Did you do it?”
“Me?” He shrugged the jacket over his shirt and gave a short laugh. “No, I did not; I can’t draw for toffee. Come on. We’d better get a move on, or there’ll be trouble.”
There was a faint noise coming from the back of the house, and it nagged at Virginia’s attention all the way downstairs. It was a bit like the monotonous wind she’d grown so used to over the weeks, but it was harsher than the wind, and more localized.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Mmm?” Clem wasn’t paying attention.
Whatever it was, it paused before she could ask again, and a sharp laugh rang out from the sitting room.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, as Mr. Deering made some inaudible remark and Lorna laughed again. Virginia squeezed Clem’s hand, and he squeezed back, crushing her fingers so hard that she almost cried in protest.
“Ah, there you are.” Lorna’s tone of voice was dry, but she stood up hastily when they entered, as if she’d been caught doing something wrong.
“Sorry, darling.” Clem placed a hand on the small of his wife’s back and kept it there. Lorna stiffened but managed a smile. “How do,” he added, nodding at the Deerings.
Lorna looked Virginia up and down, and ran a reproachful hand over her hair before turning her to face the room.
“Juliet? Theodore? This is Virginia. Our new daughter.”
Theodore was slouching in the window seat, bouncing his heels against the wall, and Juliet was riffling the corners of the novel she’d brought in with her. Both smiled incuriously and said hello. Lorna put her hands on Virginia’s shoulders and propelled her toward Mr. Deering’s deep armchair. He leaned forward with his right hand outstretched.
“Ah-ha, Miss Wrathmell,” he murmured, as if he and Virginia shared a secret or two. “We meet again.”
There was something insistent about the way he held his hand out, and Virginia didn’t want to take it, but Lorna shoved her in the back, so she did. She dropped it again, as quickly as she could, and Mr. Deering sank back in the chair with a comfortable sigh, his legs at full stretch and a twitch at the corner of his mouth. Virginia felt, obscurely, that he’d enjoyed touching her hand, and making her touch his, and she wondered if they’d have to go through the same rigmarole every time they met.
“Well!” Clem pronounced, hanging back by the door with his hands in his pockets. He scratched his head and sniffed. “Well. What’s your top sport these days, Theodore? I’ll wager you’re a cricket man like your father, eh?”
Theodore stuck his lower lip out and continued to swing his legs. “Not really.”
Juliet stared out of the window, perhaps wishing to discourage any similar conversational gambits, and Virginia followed her gaze. The sky was a delicate yellow, and she could see a cloud of lapwings billowing over the marsh, miles away. She was pleased with herself for knowing what they were, and would have pointed them out to Clem if the Deerings hadn’t been there.
“Juliet’s the sporty one, aren’t you, Jules?” said Mr. Deering. “She’ll be an Oxford Blue in three or four years’ time, just like her old dad. You mark my words.”
“Dad!” Juliet glared, softening slightly as he mouthed her a private sorry. She turned back to the window, and nobody pursued the subject.
“Mrs. Hill will be along in a minute with the tea.” Lorna looked for something to do, but there was nothing, so she sat down at one end of the sofa and laid her clasped hands in her lap. Clem sat close beside her and Virginia perched on the piano stool. There was still something humming, intermittently, around the back of the house. It sounded louder in here.
“What is that?” Theodore demanded. His voice was too loud, Virginia thought, as she looked at him properly for the first time. His hair was as black as crude oil, and the skin at the parting was startlingly white. He was a rudimentary version of his father, though not yet so smiling or so handsome.
“What? That whirring noise?” Lorna seemed grateful for the question. “That’s just Mr. Rosenthal. The knife grinder. He arrived about the same time as you.” She knotted her fingers as if there must be something else she could add. “He’s sharpening the kitchen knives. Oh, and Clem? He said he’d take those shears away for mending.”
“Right.” Clem put his arm around Lorna and rubbed her shoulder gently. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t lean in either. Mr. Deering shifted in his chair, making the old springs creak.
“Rosenthal?” he mused. “Not that dirty itinerant with the tricycle? He was loitering near Thorney Grange the other day.” He stroked a finger along his thin moustache, as if to check that it was still there. “You know he’s a Jerry, Wrathmell?”
Clem took his hand off Lorna’s shoulder. “He also happens to be a Jew,” he retorted, and it was obvious that Mr. Deering had said something stupid. The twist in Clem’s eyebrows was enough to make Virginia squirm, but Max just lounged back in the creaky chair and stretched his legs out until he was practically horizontal.
“A German and a Semite!” he exclaimed in cartoonish horror, making big eyes at Virginia. “Damned on two counts, eh? I’d think twice before letting him anywhere near my knives. What do you think, Miss Wrathmell?”
An expectant stillness fell over the room. Even Theodore stopped swinging his feet. Virginia caught Clem’s eye and he forced a smile for her. She opened her mouth and shut it again. Clem was about to say something when Mrs. Hill came rattling across the hall with the tea tray, and Lorna got up to open the door and the moment passed. Juliet offered to help hand out teacups, and Theodore was distracted by the scones. Even Mr. Deering had the good grace to pull his feet in and sit up when Lorna brought him a plate.
For a few minutes, the drone of the knife grinder was masked by the chinking of teaspoons on china, and innocuous chatter about rationing. It was only a few days since the government had begun rationing bacon, butter, and sugar by weight, so it still felt like a novelty. Clem thought it was a jolly good thing; we couldn’t be relying on imports now Hitler had got his navy up to strength.
“Which is all very well,” Lorna said lightly, setting the teapot down. “Just as long as they don’t start rationing tea.”
Mr. Deering slipped her a wink. “Rules are made to be broken. I’ll make sure you don’t go short.”
This was the first time Virginia had seen the posh tea set in use. Usually it was on display in a glass-fronted cabinet in the dining room, and Mrs. Hill said that’s where it had been kept ever since Clem’s grandfather brought it home from a business trip to Meissen, in the 186
0s. All the pieces were tiny and translucent and painted with periwinkles, and they made a nervous jiggling sound when they were handed out. The Deerings seemed at home, as if they took tea in porcelain cups every day of the week. Mr. Deering balanced his plate on one knee and ate rapidly but neatly.
“So, Wrathmell,” he said, between two gulps of tea. “Been out on the marsh lately?”
“I went shrimping a few times last summer. That’s about it. There’s not been much call for guided walks; I don’t know why. The tourists seem to bypass Tollbury Point these days.”
“Mmm.” Mr. Deering smiled into his teacup, as if he could think of a few reasons why. Virginia stared at Clem. She didn’t want to speak in front of everyone, but she couldn’t let this pass.
“How can you have gone out on the marsh?” she whispered, training her eyes on him and blocking out everyone else. “I thought you said the sand swallowed people up? And what about the tides that come in faster than anyone can run—”
Clem reddened, like a liar. “That’s all true, Vi,” he said. “It really is. But you see—”
“But you see, Vi,” Mr. Deering interrupted. “Your daddy has special knowledge.” His tone was as jovial as ever, but Juliet shifted in her seat and Lorna started gathering up the half-finished plates and cups. “Hasn’t he told you he can bloody well walk on water?”
Clem frowned and scratched the back of his head and barked a kind of laugh, but before he could say anything Lorna banged the stack of plates down on the tray and held them there. It was a punctuation mark; a protest; a hand held up to signal Stop.
“Children? There’s still a bit of daylight left. Why don’t you wrap yourselves up warm and go and get some fresh air?”
The three youngsters hesitated, and Theodore looked as though he was going to complain, but there was something about the way Lorna spoke, and the subdued demeanor of the men, that meant they had no choice. The girls set their empty cups on the table and trooped dutifully into the hall, where their coats and hats were hanging on pegs. Theodore followed, swiping the last scone from the tray and popping it whole into his mouth as he shut the door behind him.
The Orphan of Salt Winds Page 4