It’s bigger than Virginia remembered, as though it’s been spreading all these years instead of drying as it should. She touches the edge of it with her slipper. It’s big and spattery and black, and if she didn’t know it was blood, she wouldn’t guess. She’d think someone had hurled a bottle of ink across the room and shattered it on the floor. Virginia has to remind herself that none of this is really unexpected.
All the same, she should have allowed herself longer to prepare; should have waited until this evening. To come up here on a sudden whim, after seventy-four years ... She looks for somewhere to sit, but there’s nowhere. The trestle tables are all folded away and she couldn’t use the rocking chair, even if the seat were still intact. As for the settee, it was on its last legs back then, in the early forties, and now it’s just a mound of wet sponge and rusted springs. And she can hardly bring herself to look at the mattress. It used to be yellowy white, but now it’s brownish black and there are mushrooms growing out of the stuffing. She shivers. The whole attic smells of fungus and droppings and rain. It smells of darkness.
Lorna was conscious of this attic, moldering away above the rest of the house, year in, year out. Virginia managed to pretend it wasn’t there and made an uneasy peace with the place, but Lorna never did. Sometimes she used to threaten to sell Salt Winds and move them away for good, and she meant it—though she never did it.
Virginia is shivering persistently now. She’s had enough already, and steels herself for the descent, but then she stops and the hairs on her neck rise like hackles. Salt Winds is creaking—somewhere nearby, beside her, below her—and this time it isn’t the cat, or the weather. It’s the sound of feet on aching boards. Light, stealthy, human feet, making their way up from the ground floor and along the landing.
She had not thought to shut the door behind her. Or even pull the curtain across. The feet pause at the foot of the attic stairs and a small voice calls, “Hello?”
DECEMBER 1940
At Salt Winds, as at the orphanage, there was a proper time to bathe, and a proper time to do homework, and a proper time to go to bed. It was Virginia’s job to lay the table for supper every evening and to do the drying-up afterward, and on Saturday mornings she helped Lorna change the sheets on the beds.
All the boring routines were instigated by Lorna or Mrs. Hill, and all the best ones involved Clem. Virginia used to go along the lane with him and Bracken every morning, early, while Lorna got breakfast ready. He would hang his binoculars around her neck and let her walk on the wall.
“There’s Mrs. Hill, turning into the lane,” he said, a week or two before Christmas, as they trudged toward Tollbury Point with their collars turned up. Virginia squinted into the wind and Bracken yapped.
“All right,” said Clem, “here’s a challenge for you. How many birds can you spot before Mrs. Hill draws level? And you can’t just say you’ve seen one; you have to name it properly. If you get five or more, I’ll give you the top off my egg. Ready? Go!”
“No, no, no, I’m not ready! The binoculars are still in their case!” Virginia had already whipped her mittens off, but she was all fingers and thumbs in the cold, and she couldn’t open the clasp. She jumped up and down and laughed giddily, as if he were going to tickle her. Clem hauled himself onto the wall and stood beside her in the blustery cold, and although his gloved hands looked clumsy, he removed the binoculars from their leather case in no time at all, deftly pocketing the lens caps.
“Now,” he said, as she lifted the binoculars and swept her gaze across the marsh.
“Herring gull,” she squeaked, pointing with her free arm. “Two of them.”
“Oh, all right, but you score half marks for herring gulls.”
“That’s not fair,” she protested, half-indignant, half-amused. Mrs. Hill was almost upon them—she could hear the squeak of the pedals on the wind—and there wasn’t time to argue.
“Oh, oh, oh! There! An oystercatcher!”
“Let’s see ... Very good!”
Virginia swung the binoculars slowly from side to side.
“Oh, over there! Look! Starlings! Thousands of them! I think I just got about a million points.”
She lowered the binoculars and he clapped his hands to his cheeks in mock despair. “Blimey, Vi, I can’t be having that! I’ll be owing you egg tops for the rest of my days.”
Virginia twirled delightedly on her toes. Clem threw his arm around her shoulders, and she had to grab on to his coat to keep her balance. Side by side they watched the cloud of starlings as it rode the wind, twisting and curling over the marsh like smoke.
“Bonus question for an extra million points,” said Clem. “What’s the name for a flock of starlings?”
“Murmuration,” she shot back, before he’d finished asking, and it was his turn to laugh. He pulled her closer and she huddled against the rough wool of his coat.
Mrs. Hill bustled in and out of the dining room as they ate their breakfast. She was full of chatter that morning: there’d been yet more air raids on London, and there was something wrong with the back tire on her bike, and the wind was like a knife today—oh, and she’d met the postman on her way from the village and he’d given her the mail for Salt Winds.
Virginia had never received a letter in her life, so she was puzzled, as much as excited, to receive a cream envelope with a stamp and a postmark, and her name and address in fancy copperplate. It looked too expensive to rip, so Mrs. Hill helped her to slit it open with a clean knife.
Master Theodore Deering requests the pleasure of your company on the occasion of his eleventh birthday.
Tuesday, 31st December, 2 o’clock till 5.
Thorney Grange, Tollbury Point.
RSVP
“Oh,” she said. If she could have pocketed it discreetly and burnt it in secret later on she would have done so, but the others were waiting. She handed the card to Clem, who glanced over it and passed it to Lorna.
“Requests the pleasure,” he muttered, slicing the top off his soft-boiled egg and sneaking it onto Virginia’s plate. “Typical Deering. You’d think the boy was being knighted. Or married.”
Lorna set her teacup down and read the invitation studiously, as if there might be more to it than met the eye. She flipped it over to make sure the reverse side was blank before reading it through again.
Virginia watched and waited, knotting and unknotting her fingers, but nobody seemed inclined to speak. Clem went back to his newspaper.
“I don’t have to go, do I? Please?”
She was so vehement that Clem raised his eyes from the Times and stopped chewing. A question began to form in his expression, but he didn’t have time to phrase it.
“Yes, you absolutely do,” Lorna replied, pocketing the card. “Pass the marmalade, would you? And don’t pout.” She began spreading margarine over her toast with brisk strokes of her knife. The decision had been made, and now they were going to eat their breakfast and talk about something else.
Virginia picked up the marmalade jar and affected an interest in the handwritten label. She’d penned it herself back in February, while Mrs. Hill padded about the kitchen, stirring the preserving pan and grumbling about the shortage of oranges.
“Hello?” Lorna was waiting.
Virginia wasn’t a natural rebel, and her heart thundered as her fingers closed over the lid of the jar.
“I just ... I don’t see why I have to go.”
“Don’t you?” When Lorna shut her eyes like that she became cold and untouchable, like a statue in a fancy garden.
“It’s not going to make any difference to Juliet,” Virginia mumbled, addressing the butter dish.
Clem let slip a quick smile.
“Please don’t be stupid,” Lorna retorted, reaching across the table and prizing the marmalade from Virginia’s grasp. “It doesn’t suit you.” Her voice was languid, but her fingers felt strong and cruel, as if she had it in her to smash the jar against the wall.
A small difficulty ar
ose when Lorna remembered that the Women’s Institute was holding a New Year’s Eve party too, and that she’d volunteered to spend the day making preparations at the church hall. A few days after Christmas the chairwoman rang to remind her, and after she’d put the telephone down she tutted, but couldn’t see a way around it. She couldn’t let the committee down, and therefore she couldn’t deliver Virginia to the Deerings’ house in person. Clem would have to do it.
“Clem?” she called out, on the morning of the thirty-first. She already had her coat on and was stuffing extra pins into her wayward hair: no easy feat with a mock-apricot flan in one hand and a bag of bunting in the other. “You promise you won’t forget about Theodore’s party this afternoon?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“No, I won’t forget.”
Lorna’s eyebrows rose fractionally and she scooped her handbag off the hall table. “It starts at two o’clock. His birthday present is on the kitchen table, as is your lunch. Virginia, I never got to lengthening the hem on your red frock, but I think it’ll look all right. At least it’s clean.”
Virginia nodded. She wished she had trouser pockets, like Clem, so she could stuff her hands inside them the way he did, and lean against the doorframe looking bored.
“Bye,” Lorna called over her shoulder. Sometimes she thought to blow a kiss when she was on her way out, but she didn’t have a free hand that day.
The sky looked hard, like a sheet of hammered metal, and the wind sounded tired, as if it were looking for somewhere warm to rest. After an early lunch, Virginia stole up to her room, lit the gas fire, and curled up on her bed with a pile of books. Even though she was on her own, all her movements were slow and soft, as if by making herself inconspicuous, Theodore’s party would pass her by.
It was no use. She’d just found her place in Tales from the Arabian Nights when Clem arrived, carrying her coat and scarf over one arm. She turned the page, pointedly, but he didn’t go away.
“I suppose we’d better go,” he said apologetically.
Virginia sighed and closed the book, but made no further move. Clem came in and sat on the end of the bed.
“What is it, Vi?” he wondered. “Why don’t you want to go?”
She frowned and leafed unseeingly through her book. If there was anyone she could tell the truth to, she supposed it was Clem, but how could she say it without saying Mr. Deering saw me in my pajamas and made me feel like I wasn’t wearing anything at all? She blushed hotly, but Clem was waiting for an answer and his eyes were on her face.
“I just don’t like him much.”
“Theodore?”
“... Hmm.”
“No. Well, that’s fair enough. He is a bit of a tick.”
Virginia smiled dutifully, but Clem was still watching, and he was so attentive that for a moment she thought he’d understood; actually understood, without being told. She ran her damp hands over her skirt. There was a sour stain on one of the pleats where she’d dripped milk at breakfast, and she fixed her gaze on it while she waited for his reply.
“Look, Vi, I know it’s a bore, but it’s only a few hours. You’ll survive, won’t you? Make believe it’s for king and country. I’ll never hear the end of it if I let you stay home.” He smiled halfheartedly, without quite meeting her eye. “Pop your smart dress on and run a comb through your hair, there’s a good girl. Look sharp, though; we really do need to get going.”
He shook the coat out and laid it over the bedstead. Virginia tried to imagine herself saying no, but it was impossible. She would never be able to refuse Clem anything; there was always going to be too much at stake. You couldn’t be too careful. Sometimes things were lost in the blink of an eye; in the slippage of a second. These things happened. She already knew that, before the plane fell from the sky.
It was merely because she was crossing the room to fetch her dress that she noticed the airplane. The whole thing was over in thirty seconds, and she would have missed it from the bed or the wardrobe.
“Look!” she cried. Clem turned back from the landing and crossed her room to look.
It was the grace of the thing that astonished her in retrospect. You’d expect a burning fighter plane to make a great hullabaloo: howling engines, roaring flames, a great boom as it hit the ground nose first. But if this one made any noise at all, Virginia didn’t notice. All she recalled, later on, was the slow arc it traced through the sky on its way down, like a spark floating from a bonfire. Even the explosion was gentle from their vantage point: a little orange flower that budded, bloomed, and withered, all in a moment, far away on the edge of the marsh.
She thought it was over and turned to Clem, full of astonished questions, but he was shaking her by the shoulder and pointing.
“There!” he whispered. “Over there!”
She looked and saw another bit of bonfire ash, but this one was smaller and blacker than the first, and it drifted very slowly onto the marsh. It didn’t explode as it touched the ground, but disappeared among the long shadows and reedbeds.
“A parachute,” he said.
Virginia stared, and Clem was gone. By the time he returned with his binoculars there was nothing left for the naked eye to see except a thread of smoke and a twisted bit of metal, which might easily be a shrub, or a wooden post, or a bit of flotsam that the tide had left behind.
“I thought so!” he said, lowering the binoculars and passing them to her. “It’s an enemy plane. A Messerschmitt.”
Virginia swung the lenses back and forth over a blur of greens, grays, and browns until she found the piece of metal. It was part of a wing, and it was marked with a black-and-white cross. She searched for some sign of the airman, but there was no movement. There weren’t even any birds cascading through the sky or ruffling the waters. The whole stretch of marshland had an innocent air, as if nothing had happened.
Clem took the binoculars again and stood for a long time, scanning the scene.
“Poor bastard,” he muttered under his breath.
“Do you think he’ll drown?” Virginia asked, noting how grown-up and unperturbed she sounded. This was partly because he was a German airman—not a Mr. Rosenthal, but a proper, uncomplicated, enemy German—and partly because she didn’t quite believe he was real. The plane had swooned so gracefully, from her point of view, and the marsh looked so tranquil, that it was hard to imagine a real man out there, flailing in mud and sweat and parachute silk.
“He must be two miles out, at least,” Clem replied, which was as much as to say, “Yes.”
“Will anyone go to him, do you suppose?”
Clem swept the scene from left to right and back again, as if searching for an answer to her question. “Who, though?”
Looking back, she realized that this was the moment in which everything started to decelerate. Time slipped into a heavier gear the second Clem frowned and scratched the back of his neck and wondered “Who?” He began to pace up and down the room, and she was too slow to follow the direction of his thoughts. She was simply glad that he seemed to have forgotten about Theodore Deering’s party.
The wardrobe door swung open of its own accord, and Virginia remembered she was meant to be getting changed. She hoped Clem wouldn’t spot the red dress and was relieved that he didn’t seem inclined to. He didn’t give the wardrobe a second glance, even when he nearly walked into it, but every time he passed the window he stopped and frowned at the view. He kept taking his pipe out of his pocket and tapping it against his chin.
“You’re right,” he announced suddenly, stopping in the middle of the floor.
“What about?” Virginia was half thinking about the crashed plane. The red dress was dimly visible in the wardrobe behind him, and she was trying hard not to look at it. It was hateful, with its tight collar and sash and fancy sleeves. Worst of all it was too short, which was all right when you still looked like a child, but not when you were starting not to.
“You’re right,” Clem rep
eated. “Of course you are. No one else is going to risk their necks for some Jerry.”
Virginia tore her eyes from the wardrobe and stared at Clem.
“What ... ?” She’d let her attention wander and missed the crucial moment—the link, the key—that would make sense of what he was telling her. He darted from the room and Virginia followed with her mouth open, feeling stupid. By the time she caught up he was sitting on the wooden chest at the top of the stairs, tightening the laces on his walking boots.
“Where does Lorna keep the flashlight these days?” he puffed as he leaned over, tugging on the rusty strings.
“The bottom drawer in the kitchen,” said Virginia. “But—”
“Go and fetch it. And there’s a length of rope in the toolshed: bring that too.”
Virginia hovered uncertainly.
“Go, go! Quickly!”
She obeyed because he was Clem, and because he seemed so certain. As she went downstairs and rummaged in the kitchen drawer, she tried to marshal her own ideas in opposition to his, but it was hard—very hard—like trying to sprint underwater. The coil of rope was hanging on a nail in the shed, and she wondered about thrusting it under the hedge and telling him she couldn’t find it, but even as she wondered, she was unhooking it and running back to the house with it.
The Orphan of Salt Winds Page 8