Clem was in the hall, buttoning up his coat—the big gray one that went all the way down to his shins—and Bracken was prancing about in expectation of a walk, his stubby tail aquiver. Virginia stood and watched as Clem pocketed the flashlight and slung the rope over his shoulder. All of his movements were quick and calm, but he was breathing rather heavily, more like someone returning from a long walk than someone about to set out on one. “Rope, flashlight, brandy ...” he muttered, patting his pockets.
“Don’t go,” Virginia pleaded, pointlessly, when the time for protest was long gone. He ruffled her hair, smiling faintly, and reached for his hat and gloves. She looked up at the folds of skin at his jaw and the graying hair at his temples and felt love rising like sickness from her stomach. If she opened her mouth to speak again she thought she might retch, so she didn’t risk it.
“Now listen,” said Clem, as he batted the dog away. “If I do find this poor chap alive, he’s likely to be in a bad way, so you’ll need to be ready when we get back. Can you see to it?”
Virginia stared at him dumbly.
“Can you see to it, Vi? Light a fire in the spare room, put some blankets on the bed, boil up a big kettle of water ... that sort of thing? Maybe root out the first aid kit; I think it’s in the bathroom cupboard.”
She nodded.
“If I’m not back before your mother, she’s not to fret. Just tell her—”
“Can’t I come with you?” She had to ask, although it wasn’t what she really wanted. What she really wanted was to wind the clock back ten minutes so that she could watch in absolute silence as the Messerschmitt crashed and Clem—none the wiser—wandered off down the landing. There’d be no jumping up and down this time; no childish “Look what I can see!” She’d delve inside her wardrobe while the explosion flowered and wouldn’t breathe a word.
“Don’t be soft,” Clem replied. There was an edge to his gentleness; a testy reminder of all he’d ever told her about the dangers of Tollbury Marsh. “Off you go now, and do as I say. Tell your mother I won’t be long. If there isn’t any sign of the poor devil after—” he looked at his watch “—after an hour, I’ll give it up and come straight home. All right?”
Virginia followed him outside, shivering in her pleated skirt and cardigan. They both lowered their heads against the wind before setting off down the lane, Bracken bounding back and forth between them. Clem’s boots made prints in the thin mud, so she placed her feet in them, like the page boy in “Good King Wenceslas,” and tried to imagine a miraculous warmth coming up through the soles of her shoes. It didn’t work. Her legs were bare above her ankle socks, and she could feel the goose pimples on her thighs where they brushed against one another.
A little way along the lane there was a break in the flint wall and a flight of steps—the old harbor steps, as they were known—that led down to the marsh. Clem stopped and turned.
“Listen, Vi, I’ll be fine. The marsh is in a good mood this afternoon.”
She glared at her shoes and nodded.
“Go back now,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. He looked huge in his coat and boots, and Virginia was suddenly afraid of him. Everything around them looked dead: the empty lane, the church tower, the treeless horizon. She wondered whether anyone else had seen the German airplane. She half wondered whether she and Clem had made it up between them, but she could still see the wing, like a deep dent in the steel sky, and a twist of smoke above it.
“Theodore’s party will be starting,” she observed wanly.
Clem held her at arm’s length and squeezed her shoulders. They stood like that for a moment and looked at one another, while Bracken scuttled through the dry grasses and weeds at the foot of the wall, urgently sniffing and cocking his leg.
“Take Bracken back with you,” Clem said, as he let her go. “I could do without him under my feet.”
They hadn’t brought a lead, so Virginia had to pick the dog up, and by the time she’d done it Clem was several yards out from the wall. Bracken whimpered and scrabbled and twisted in her arms all the way back to Salt Winds, and she kept thinking she was going to drop him. When they got home she gave him a biscuit from the tin. He wasn’t supposed to have them at odd times, but he sounded so unhappy and she wanted to cheer him up.
Bracken took the biscuit and carried it to his bed, where he set it down between his front paws and licked it. Virginia leaned against the stove and tried to massage some warmth back into her ears. “Hot water,” she said aloud. “Hot water, blankets, and a fire.”
Theodore’s birthday present was lying, neatly wrapped, on the kitchen table. It was obviously a book. Virginia picked it up and turned it over in her hands, and hid it behind the flour bin so that it wouldn’t be the first thing Lorna saw when she came in. Lorna was going to be livid about the party, and no doubt Mr. Deering would make sure they felt awkward about it too. It was hard to worry about all that and at the same time remember everything Clem had asked her to do. Hot water and blankets, and a fire in the spare room. And where did he say the first aid kit was kept? And when would Lorna be back? And how was she going to explain what had happened?
She found the first aid kit and put the kettle on the range to heat, but then she lost track of what she was meant to be doing and wandered back to her bedroom. The gas fire had been blazing all this time, so she turned it off and let the chilly colors of the marsh invade her room, changing all the pinks into grays and blues. Clem had left his binoculars on the windowsill and she picked them up, but just to hold them on her lap and mess about with the focus.
She shut the wardrobe door but it swung open again, and she kept glimpsing the red dress inside, turning gently on its hanger.
When the front door banged Virginia lifted her head and dug her nails into her palms. “Clem?” she said, quietly inquiring. She hadn’t realized how dark it had gotten: the marsh and sky were almost merged.
“Clem?” Lorna cried, leaping up the stairs two at a time. “Clem? Where are you? Did you hear about the German plane?”
Lorna ran along the landing and burst into his study, but then her footsteps halted.
Virginia heard uncertainty in the sudden stillness. She stole along the landing and watched from the doorway as Lorna unwound her scarf and dropped it, absentmindedly, over the back of Clem’s chair. Downstairs, the sitting-room clock began to strike, and Virginia counted all five of the chimes in her head before Lorna sensed her presence and turned.
“What on earth—” Lorna reached for the light switch and they both screwed up their eyes against the dazzle. “What’s going on? I thought you were at Theodore’s party?”
Virginia didn’t reply.
“Why are you in your old clothes? Where’s Clem?”
Virginia had been calm up until then—almost lethargic—but now her heart began to flounder like a fish caught in a net.
“He felt sorry for the airman,” she said. She wanted to sound cool and reasonable about it, but her voice had taken on a breathy vibrato that she couldn’t seem to control. “I tried to stop him. He said not to worry if you were back first; honestly and truly he said not to worry—”
Lorna took Virginia by the shoulders and sat her down in the desk chair. It was obvious she felt frightened, but her hands didn’t shake as some people’s might; they gripped very tightly.
“Look at me,” Lorna said, but Virginia couldn’t raise her eyes beyond the pale green collar of Lorna’s blouse and the silver necklace that dangled in the shadow between her breasts. When she breathed in, she could smell the cold outdoors on Lorna’s skin and clothes.
“Tell me exactly what you mean,” Lorna went on. “What did you try to stop him from doing?”
“From going out on the marsh. He went to help the German pilot.”
Lorna didn’t ask anything else, but Virginia could see the pulse flickering in her neck and feel her grip growing ever more rigid.
Lorna made a telephone call and people began arriving at the house: a pol
ice constable on his bike, several neighbors from the village, a woman with an apple cake, the vicar. Mrs. Hill came, ashen-faced, in a taxi.
Virginia weighted the front door open with the umbrella stand and people drifted in apologetically, glancing at one another and whispering—if they dared to talk at all. Lorna paced up and down the kitchen, fiddling restively with an unlit cigarette, and barely seemed to register their arrival. She kept picking at her lower lip, and it started to bleed.
Mrs. Hill slumped at the table and wept into a red handkerchief, while the woman with the apple cake wondered aloud where she should put it. The young policeman fumbled in his pocket for a strip of matches, cleared his throat, and asked Lorna if she needed a light, but she stared back at him as if he were speaking in Chinese and carried on pacing.
The vicar opened the back door and a few people, including Virginia, went outside and leaned over the wall. The wind had got up, and the stinging smell of the sea blew in their faces. One of the men had brought a flashlight, and he broke the blackout rules by switching it on, but there was nothing to see except a few bleak yards of grass. “Clem!” he shouted, and the others joined in—“Clem! Cle-em!”—but their voices were guzzled up by the wind, and after a couple of minutes they gave up and trooped inside again.
Mr. Deering rolled up to the house eventually, with a smooth crunch of tires, and Lorna went outside to meet him. She let him kiss her on the cheek, and they talked for a few minutes on the doorstep. A few people got to their feet when he entered the kitchen, and the vicar shook his hand. He sat down at the table, his fingers steepled against his lips, and everyone grew more alert. The policeman took out a notebook and licked the lead of his pencil.
“So,” said Mr. Deering, his eyes falling on Virginia. Someone pulled out a chair and pressed her into it, and she thought how sleek and sober he seemed tonight, with his black eyes gleaming like shards of coal. She tried to picture him the way he had been in September, dissolute with grief and vomiting on their lawn, but all that was gone; it seemed impossible, unthinkable—a delirious dream. He stretched his legs under the table and crossed them at the ankle, and as he did so his shoes brushed her bare legs. He sighed, as if weighed down with anxieties, but Virginia saw the minute smile that lurked beneath his heavy eyelids and under his moustache.
“So, Vi, Clement left you on your own while he set off on this ‘mercy mission’? Is that correct?”
Nobody called her “Vi,” except for Clem. Virginia wasn’t going to answer, but Mr. Deering seemed prepared to wait, so in the end she nodded briefly. The policeman began making notes in a laborious longhand.
“I must say I’m surprised,” Deering remarked, accepting a cigarette from Lorna. “I know Tollbury Marsh as well as he does, and I wouldn’t have risked it today, with the tides as they are.” He put the cigarette between his lips and removed it again. “Not without exceptionally good cause.”
“Oh, but that’s not true!” Virginia leapt from her chair. “Clem said the tides were all right today; he said the marsh was in a good mood.”
Mr. Deering laughed bleakly and shook his head.
“Mr. Deering knows the marsh better than most,” someone said, reprimanding her, and there was a murmur of agreement around the table.
“Clem knows the marsh,” Virginia retorted, gripping the sides of her chair. “And he promised he’d be back. He said we absolutely mustn’t worry, even if Lorna—I mean, Mother—even if she got back before him, and she’s barely been back an hour, so ...”
Her voice petered out and she shrugged. She’d offered exactly the same reassurance when everyone was arriving, and she was aggrieved that nobody seemed inclined to give it weight. The apple-cake woman shuffled uneasily, as she had done before, and the vicar smiled at Virginia without quite meeting her eye. The police constable stroked his moustache and made a half-hearted note in his pad.
“Right enough, Vi,” said Mr. Deering, the words drifting lightly from his lips and twining with the cigarette smoke. “Hope springs eternal.”
The police constable cleared his throat and put forward a few questions of his own—“What time did Clem leave? Which direction did he take? Was he carrying anything with him?”—which Virginia answered as best she could, although she hesitated over the question of time.
“It was after one o’clock and before two, but I’m not exactly sure ...”
The policeman rattled the pencil against his teeth and told her to think carefully and try her best to remember. He wrote down everything she said, read it out loud, reread it in silence, and closed his notebook.
“Well,” he sighed, sitting down and accepting a slice of apple cake. “I think we’ve done what we can for now?” He shot Mr. Deering a querying glance, and Mr. Deering nodded his assent.
Virginia looked at them all: the familiar, the semifamiliar, the strange. They seemed large and looming, like creatures of a different order whose ways she’d never understand. She sought the plainest English words she knew.
“Aren’t we going to go and look for him?”
A burst of wind made the kitchen window shudder, and the pulsating orange embers inside the range glowed red. A piece of coal crumbled and fell. Nobody looked at Virginia, not even Mr. Deering. He just smoked and scattered ash on the tabletop and gazed into space.
“You heard what Mr. Deering said.” The vicar looked at her over the top of his glasses, as if he thought her impertinent. Mrs. Hill mopped her cheeks and took a long, shaky breath. “It’s too risky, love.” She screwed the handkerchief into a ball and pressed it against her mouth.
Virginia narrowed her eyes and berated them soundlessly, barely moving her lips. What did you come for then? She stared at one of the whorls in the wooden tabletop and made it into an island, a solid fragment amid miles of sliding sands and waters.
“Will you excuse me?” Lorna stood up very suddenly and her chair rocked backward. “Sorry.”
Mr. Deering glanced around and started to stand, but Lorna walked out of the room and ran upstairs before he could even say her name, or try to stop her.
“You can come home with me tonight, if you’d rather,” said Mrs. Hill as she and Virginia stood by the open front door. She’d folded the red handkerchief into a tidy square and put it in her pocket, as if to say enough is enough, but she couldn’t stop her eyes and nose from watering, and she kept swatting irritably at the drips.
“No.” Virginia hugged herself and shivered. “Thank you.” People were starting to drift away now, and they all seemed to want to touch her as they squeezed past. Some of them patted her on the back or the head; others squeezed her shoulder.
“Are you quite sure?” Mrs. Hill peered back inside the house as she knotted her headscarf. Mr. Deering was making himself at home, strolling about the downstairs rooms with his hands in his pockets and a freshly lit cigarette in the corner of his lips. His hat and coat were still hanging in the hall. Virginia listened to his silky tread for a moment and pulled her cardigan tight, but in the end she shook her head.
“I can’t. I promised Clem I’d be here when he gets back.”
Mrs. Hill stared at her, and slowly nodded.
“All right,” she said, placing her damp palm against Virginia’s cheek.
Virginia left the front door on the latch so that Clem could get in without knocking. She scurried upstairs, keeping close to the wall where the shadows were deepest, and didn’t stop to spy on Mr. Deering until she was almost at the top.
As soon as the neighbors were gone he went back to the kitchen to cut himself a second wedge of apple cake, and then he resumed his tour of the ground floor, dropping a trail of crumbs and ash behind him. He paused every now and then to look at the photos, or the Meissen teacups, or the sliver of night between a pair of half-closed curtains. Of course people eat and smoke and fidget when they’re on edge, but all the same he didn’t look like a man whose oldest friend was lost on Tollbury Marsh. She wished Clem would burst in now and catch him at it.
&nbs
p; Mr. Deering popped the final piece of apple cake into his mouth and unstoppered the whisky decanter, emptying what was left into a clean glass. Something squeaked and bumped upstairs in the bathroom, and Virginia heard the slosh and spill of water. It happened again—the squeaking, bumping noise—and she recognized the sound of enamel pulling on skin. Lorna must be taking a bath.
He’d heard it too; she could tell by the way he looked upward, toward the noise, as he drained his whisky. Oh God, thought Virginia, crossing her fingers. Come back, Clem; come now. Perhaps she said part of her prayer out loud, or perhaps she moved too quickly, because all at once Mr. Deering was gazing at her over the rim of his glass. He raised it a little, as if to drink to her good health, and smiled like a man who’s been gifted with good fortune.
The bolt on the bathroom door was inadequate; she’d always thought so. She’d point it out to Clem just as soon as he got back. It was tiny, and the screws on the bracket were loose, too; anyone trying to break in from the landing could do so with a modest shove—as she had just done. All the same, she wiggled it across as far as it would go and leaned back against the door.
She thought Lorna would be angered by the intrusion; that she’d bring her knees up to her chest in a swirling flurry and hide her nakedness as best she could. But she just lay in the bath with her legs straight out in front of her, her hair floating around her shoulders like pale seaweed, and said, simply, “Have they gone?”
Virginia had never seen Lorna so unguarded; so lacking in ceremony. It unsettled her because she wasn’t sure what it meant.
“You’re having a bath.”
Lorna closed her reddened eyes. “Sorry. I just had to get away. Have they all gone now?”
“All except Mr. Deering.”
“Oh.” Lorna fished a cloth out of the water and laid it, dripping, across her face, so that nothing was visible but her mouth. “Oh, hell.”
The Orphan of Salt Winds Page 9