“Drink that,” she says. Sophie opens her eyes and wraps her fingers around the cup. Her hands are small and white, and thick with rings. Virginia has never seen anyone with such bedecked hands, so the tiny flash inside her brain that feels like recognition can’t be anything of the sort, and she ignores her unease.
“Come on, drink up,” she says, and Sophie pretends to take a sip, but Virginia isn’t fooled. The child will never get warm at this rate. Look at her, quaking beneath that big bundle of a coat, with its goose-down lining and furry hood. She’s not even trying. She’s got to try, or the day will be gone.
Virginia comes into the big sitting room to fetch the halogen heater. Perhaps now is the time to say farewell to this room: to the straight-backed sofas and tea tables, to Lorna’s piano and Clem’s bird books. Farewell to the sagging armchair where Max Deering sat one January afternoon near the beginning of the war, when he brought his children to tea and ate scones off a porcelain plate.
Seventy-odd years have passed, and heaven knows this sitting room’s been used since, but as Virginia stands in the doorway for the last time, it’s the only image she can summon: Max Deering, sunk deep in his chair, a hand outstretched.
Ah-ha, Miss Wrathmell. We meet again.
Virginia’s fingers spasm and she drops the heater, startled by the fierceness of her emotions. Over the last few years the wound has begun to close, just a little. She’s managed to persuade herself that events as old as these are practically fictive; that the people involved were never quite real.
It’s the bird’s skull that’s concertinaed time and made everything true again. The curlew has reminded her how to hate.
SEPTEMBER 1940
The Second World War came home to Salt Winds on a hot September afternoon in 1940. Up until then it had meant next to nothing: a murmuring of voices on the wireless, a gas mask gathering dust in the hall, a shortage of butter. Someone had broken the post office window after it was rumored that the postmistress had a German-sounding maiden name, and Clem had spotted a couple of enemy planes through his binoculars, but even these events felt remote. The nearest dogfight had taken place a long way south of Tollbury Point.
There was something ominous about that September day, even before Mrs. Hill came puffing up from the village, full to bursting with her dreadful news. The weather was hot and heavy, and the wind had dropped for once, leaving a silence that felt like expectation. The birds didn’t call across the marsh; the washing didn’t stir on the line; the house didn’t creak or sigh. Bracken lay on his side in the shade and twitched his ears if someone said his name or stooped to pat him.
Virginia had spent the morning making a den in the back garden, propping the clotheshorse against the flint wall and covering it in old curtains. After lunch she went and sat inside it, cross-legged, with a book and an apple, and tried to persuade herself she was having fun. In the dim and musty heat her eyes were as heavy as lead, and she stopped trying to read before the end of the first page. She felt sticky all over, especially at the backs of her knees where her skin was sore, and the smell of her sweat mingled with the fruity stink of seaweed that had been drifting off the marsh for days, ever since the weather turned warm.
Clem had done a couple of hours of writing after lunch, and he’d just come outdoors for a breather. Virginia could see him through a gap in the curtains, sitting on the bench by the back door with his head tilted back and his eyes closed. Lorna sat beside him with a handkerchief balled in one hand, frowning the way she did when she had a headache coming on.
“Would you like some water?” Lorna asked her husband, unfastening the top button on her blouse and mopping at her throat with the handkerchief. “Or a cup of tea?”
“I’ll get it,” Clem murmured, without opening his eyes. “You have a sit-down.”
“No, you’re all right. You’ve been working.”
Virginia liked it when they discussed everyday things: pots of tea and food prices and what needed doing in the garden. It made them sound peaceful and close. Anything bigger or more personal and they were on edge, like a couple of cats. The various scraps Virginia had overheard—I wish you’d just say it outright ... The thing you seem incapable of understanding ... I know exactly what you think I am—made her anxious. She tried to tell herself they didn’t happen often.
Despite their thoughtful overtures, neither Clem nor Lorna seemed inclined to move. Clem kept his eyes closed, and Lorna stared, dull-eyed, at the new vegetable patch under the scraggly hedge.
“I met Mr. Rosenthal this morning,” she said, “pushing his trike through the village.”
Clem yawned. “Oh yes?”
“Apparently he’s still got your shears. He took them away for mending absolutely ages ago.” Lorna dabbed her glistening neck with the handkerchief again. “He was terribly apologetic about it; said he’d drop by before Monday.”
“Righto.” Clem yawned again, stretching his arms wide, as a ship’s horn sounded miles away, beyond the hazy horizon. Lorna dragged herself to her feet and disappeared into the kitchen. Virginia crawled halfway out of the den and flopped onto her stomach with a weary groan.
“Hello there,” said Clem.
“I’m hot,” she complained, pressing her cheek against the hard earth and plucking at the grass.
“Well, if you spend all morning constructing an oven, and the entire afternoon sitting inside it ...”
Virginia rolled onto her back and tried not to laugh as she looked at him upside down. “It’s not an oven, it’s a den,” she began, but before she could go on Mrs. Hill appeared at the side of the house. Virginia scrambled to her feet and Clem stood up slowly.
There was something unnatural about seeing Mrs. Hill at Salt Winds on a Saturday, her big body trussed up in a flowery dress instead of the usual gingham housecoat. It was even more peculiar to see her running. They stared in confusion as she halted on the grass, red-faced and breathless, her hands pressed hard against her chest. After a moment, Clem took her by the elbow and led her to the bench, setting her gently down.
“Oh Clemmy,” she said softly, as she must have done when he was a little boy, and when he made to remove his hands from hers she clung to them, so he sat down beside her. Virginia glanced away, frowning at the oddness of it all. As soon as Mrs. Hill had taken the weight off her feet, her whole body seemed to sag. Even her hair hung in sad strands around her ears, though Virginia knew it’d had a wash and set on Thursday evening.
Virginia didn’t dare ask what had happened, and Clem was too patient. He sat still, with his hands trapped, while Mrs. Hill caught her breath and began to cry. Virginia twisted on one foot and wished she’d stayed inside her den.
“Vi will fetch you some water,” Clem suggested. “Or maybe something stronger?”
“No, no, just water.” Mrs. Hill released Clem’s hands in order to dry her eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m all right. I don’t know why it’s so ...”
Lorna emerged from the dark kitchen with a jug of water and a tray of glasses, and her eyes widened.
“I thought it was your voice,” she exclaimed. “What on earth’s the matter?” She set the tray down on the end of the bench and straightened up, drying her hands on the sides of her skirt. Nobody answered, and she looked rapidly from face to face. “Clem? What is it? What’s happened?”
Clem poured a glass of water. He did it very slowly, as if he relished the suspense, and placed it in Mrs. Hill’s quivery hands.
“Drink that,” he said, with a warning glance for his wife, “and take your time.” Mrs. Hill gulped the water, and it was as though she were feeding a reservoir of tears, because by the time she lowered the empty glass her cheeks were streaming. Lorna fished in her sleeve for a handkerchief and handed it over without a word.
“I don’t know why it’s affected me like this,” Mrs. Hill wept. “She’s not the first to die in this dreadful war and she won’t be the last, and it’s not as if I knew her, not really, but she was part of the village all the
same. And she was such a nice-looking little thing and so terribly young, not yet fifteen—”
“Who?” pleaded Lorna. “Who are you talking about?” But Virginia had guessed, and so had Clem. His shoulders had sunk, and his gaze was turning inward.
“Juliet Deering!” Mrs. Hill was indignant, as though Lorna was being deliberately obtuse. “Max’s eldest! It’s all over the village.”
“But ...” Lorna knelt down on the paving at Mrs. Hill’s feet. “When? How?”
“Yesterday evening.” Mrs. Hill leaned forward, twisting the handkerchief in her hands, her sorrow laced with a storyteller’s relish. “She was on her way back to school for the start of the new term, and Max had just waved her off at Waterloo. This is straight from the housekeeper up at Thorney Grange, by the way, so practically firsthand. Well, according to Mrs. Bellamy, Juliet’s train was just pulling away from the platform when the sirens started up, and a few seconds later the planes were swarming all over, and before you know it, bang.” She smacked her hands against her knees. “A direct hit.”
Lorna placed her hands flat against her cheeks.
“Juliet’s carriage took the worst of it. Completely obliterated. Nothing left at all. No remains to speak of.”
Clem frowned and shook his head slowly from side to side.
“It’s wicked,” Lorna whispered through her fingers. “Wicked.”
Mrs. Hill wiped her eyes and sighed. “Dust we all are, and unto dust we shall return,” she observed impressively.
Virginia crawled back inside her den and pulled the curtains shut.
Virginia went to bed early that night because there was an aching lack of anything to say. She tried to help with the drying up after supper, but Clem took the tea towel off her and kissed her on the forehead.
“Up to bed now, go on,” he said. “Things’ll look brighter in the morning.”
Lorna, up to her elbows in soapsuds, shrugged slightly when he said that, as if shaking off a fly, and didn’t turn to say goodnight.
The bedroom glowed pink in the evening light, and Virginia knew she’d never sleep. She put her pajamas on and flung the covers back, but there was no point lying down, so she paced the rug instead, following the winding patterns in and out, remembering how she’d jumped out of bed that morning, full of plans for building a den and reading Black Beauty and finishing her picture of Bracken.
A den. What a pointless thing to have built. What a very childish way to spend an afternoon.
She yanked her hair ribbons out and loosened her plaits. Black Beauty was lying on her bedside table, and the horse on the dust jacket watched as she began to brush her hair. She’d thought he had a gentle eye, but now that she looked more closely, she saw how mean and glinting his expression really was.
She didn’t cry for Juliet Deering. It wasn’t like that. She’d seen Juliet in passing during the school holidays—four or five times in the village, perhaps, and once at the summer fête—but it wasn’t as if they were friends. They hadn’t even acted like acquaintances, unless they were with their parents, in which case they just about managed a distant hello. Like the wind and the war, the Deerings had become a low-level hum at the back of Virginia’s mind. She hadn’t thought about them much since their visit at the start of the year.
Virginia tugged at a tangle of hair, pulling so hard that some of the strands came out at the root. She couldn’t contemplate the bomb itself; that was so faraway and fantastical that her imagination didn’t know where to begin. All she could think about was the fact that Juliet had been here, at Salt Winds, in January, and that while she was here she’d eaten scones, bent the corners of her novel, bullied her brother—acted, in short, like someone with both feet in this world, and not like someone marked out by death. She’d been alive—entirely, fearlessly, casually alive—and now she was dead. Again and again, Virginia put the two facts side by side and failed to reconcile them. It was like trying to look in opposite directions at the same time.
The brush was full of hairs and fluff because she hadn’t bothered to clean it in ages. She dropped it and went onto the landing, opening other doors, pacing the rooms. Even the attic didn’t feel out of bounds today, and she didn’t climb the stairs especially quietly. Lorna’s den, she thought. She’d been up there once before, in the very early days, so she was familiar with the old mattress on the floor, and the hulking shapes of trunks and bedsteads against the walls, and the big round window in the gable end. Now it felt squalid and messy. The old mattress was scattered with bits of torn paper, blankets, and candle stubs, and there were brown stains all over it, which she hadn’t noticed before. She picked up a scrap of paper, half expecting to find a love letter in Mr. Deering’s handwriting, but there were just a few pencil lines, which might have been anything. The start of a sketch, perhaps? The paper fell from her hand, and she found herself thinking things about Mr. Deering and Lorna; images she didn’t want but couldn’t shake off. She stared at the mattress a little longer, hoping her thoughts would exhaust themselves, but they just got more and more lurid and started muddling themselves up with Juliet’s death. In the end she left rather suddenly and ran downstairs feeling sick and unclean.
She made her way to the spare room, where she knelt by the window and laid her arms on the sill. The sun had just set over Tollbury Point and the village was a gray mass against the dimming sky. Clem had switched the wireless on downstairs, and the Home Service was playing cello music, which made her feel calmer. She gazed at the stubby church spire and the silhouettes of chimneys and treetops, and found that it was hopeless trying to distinguish particular buildings because they’d all melded into one. It occurred to her that every single person in the village was thinking about Juliet Deering at this moment, and wishing they didn’t have to.
Virginia’s gaze wandered down from Tollbury Point to the white ribbon of road that ran alongside the marsh. She leaned forward with her nose to the glass. There was someone there, emerging from the gloom and heading toward her; a man with his arms swinging free and his head bent low. He was moving quickly, charging along like a wounded bull, weaving from one side of the road to the other, sometimes banging against the flint wall, sometimes tripping and staggering on potholes. He might have looked quite funny in a Charlie Chaplin film, but he didn’t look at all funny in real life. When he was halfway along the lane his hat fell off, but though he paused to watch it roll into the verge, he didn’t bother to stop and pick it up. That was when Virginia recognized him and drew away from the window.
Virginia ran on tiptoe along the landing. Her first instinct was to warn Clem of Mr. Deering’s approach. She didn’t want to shout—apart from anything else, Mr. Deering might hear her through the open windows—but there might not be time to run downstairs and back before he began hammering on the door. It was when she heard Lorna whispering across the hallway—“Clem? Where are you? I think I just saw Max in the lane!” and Clem saying, “Max? Oh Lord”—that Virginia remembered he was not Clem’s acknowledged enemy but a childhood friend in dire straits. She waited at the top of the stairs, in the shadows, where no one would see her.
In fact, Mr. Deering did not hammer on the front door. He must have gone to the back of the house and come in through the kitchen, because that’s where their voices gathered. Virginia knelt on the wooden chest and leaned over the banisters. She could hear a chair scraping across the stone flags, and Clem—as calm and soft as if he were talking to her—saying, “Sit down, Max; easy, old chap.” Lorna suggested a cup of sweet tea, and Mr. Deering retorted that he was in the market for something a bit harder than tea, which seemed a rather jaunty thing to say in the circumstances, except that his voice sounded strange and not jaunty at all.
The kitchen door opened and Lorna’s voice grew clearer. “I’ll have a look in the dining room,” she was saying. “I’m sure we can find you a drop of scotch.”
“Lorna ...” Clem’s voice followed her like a warning and she hesitated, but he didn’t elaborate, so she car
ried on.
As Lorna entered the dining room, the sound of the wireless flooded the house. It was still a solo cello, singing long, low notes, enough to make anyone cry, and Virginia’s eyes prickled. She hated having to pity Mr. Deering; she didn’t want to have soft feelings for him. If only he would laugh out loud like a villain and say, “Who cares about Juliet? Thank God it wasn’t me!” She would know for sure, then, that he was a bad person, and she could stop worrying about the secret notes in Lorna’s sleeve, and the charm of his smile, and the way Clem’s expression closed when his name came up. It would be such a relief to dislike him straightforwardly and in good conscience.
Lorna returned with decanter and glasses on a tray. She shut the kitchen door behind her and Virginia stole away.
The stars were starting to poke through the sky, like silver pins through lilac silk, and Virginia could smell the sea. She pushed her bedroom window open, as wide as it would go. It struck her as odd that Mr. Deering—an important man with dozens of friends and acquaintances—had chosen to walk all the way to Salt Winds in the first flush of his bereavement. Perhaps it had something to do with his boyhood, she speculated vaguely. Or perhaps he’d come on the off chance that Clem would be out and he’d find Lorna alone. But that was a mean thing to suppose. The voices in the kitchen must have grown louder, or perhaps everyone had moved to another room, because she began to hear them again, even though her door was shut. When Bracken barked a couple of times, a few minutes later, Mr. Deering shouted and a glass shattered.
All was quiet as Virginia glided downstairs, and she couldn’t tell which room they’d moved to.
She pressed her ear against the kitchen door. There were no voices, but she could hear Bracken pattering across the floor and someone rooting through a cupboard. The dining room door stood ajar and light spilled like honey through the gap.
The Orphan of Salt Winds Page 6