The Orphan of Salt Winds

by The Orphan of Salt Winds (retail) (epub)

  The cord rips apart, leaving bits behind in the socket, and now Virginia begins to grapple with the rest of the machine, tearing at the casing, the dial, the wires. She snags several of her nails, but she doesn’t care. The telephone creaks and pings and rattles; bits of plastic crack under her hands and skitter across the floor; wires spray from broken fibers; plaster tumbles off the wall. The phone is unrecognizable by the time she’s finished: a mutilated corpse still screwed to the wall, with its spilling entrails frozen in midair.

  Virginia stumbles backward and leans against the opposite wall to see what she’s done. There’s the sound of the kitchen tap gushing: thank God the girl didn’t witness this. Virginia covers her eyes with her crooked hands. A moment ago she wanted to laugh with elation, but now she wants to cry quietly, with someone’s arms around her.

  JANUARY 1941

  “But we can’t send him outside again!” Virginia whispered fiercely. “He’ll freeze to death out there. Mr. Deering might be here for ages.”

  As she spoke, the Austin 12 curved out of the lane and braked in front of the house with a gentle squeak.

  “Where then? Where?” Lorna was twisting her fingers in her hair, on the brink of tears. “Oh Lord ...”

  There was a shuffling noise behind them, and they turned to see the stranger standing at the kitchen door, wrapped like a pilgrim in Bracken’s rug. He swayed slightly and his lips started to move, but no sound came out.

  “Don’t you dare collapse on my kitchen floor.” Lorna grabbed him by both elbows and hauled him away from the lighted doorway.

  “All right,” she said, turning back to Virginia. “You can take him upstairs, but for goodness’ sake be quiet. I’ll keep Max outside for as long as I can.”

  Mr. Deering’s voice sounded horribly close, and he hadn’t even come inside yet. He was peeling his driving gloves off—Virginia could hear the leathery flourish—and locking the car, and saying how disappointed Theo was that the snow wasn’t going to stick. He didn’t even ask for news of Clem.

  “I think it is sticking, a little,” Lorna rejoined brightly. “Look there, on top of the wall. And you never know, there may be more tonight.”

  Virginia gripped the man’s hand. He was leaning on the wall at the top of the stairs with his eyes closed, listening carefully to something inside himself. He scarcely seemed to register Mr. Deering’s arrival on the scene, let alone show special alarm. Only when the wind blew the front door open with a bang did he jump, and his teeth started chattering.

  “Shh!” Virginia whispered, squeezing harder on his hand. His teeth were absurdly loud, like a handful of dice rattling in a cup, but he looked at her helplessly and shook his head, unable to stop.

  “Let’s get out of this blasted wind,” Mr. Deering was saying. “I could do with a shot of scotch, if there’s any left.”

  Virginia dragged the man away from the staircase and propelled him along the landing. He moved willingly but clumsily, and the floorboards shrieked beneath his stockinged feet. She glanced at every door they passed but none was safe. If she took him in there, they’d be right over the kitchen; in there they’d be over the sitting room, or the dining room, or the library—and who knew where Max Deering would decide to settle with his glass of scotch?

  Footsteps crunched over snowy gravel toward the front door.

  “Bother, I’ve lost my headscarf,” Lorna called, half laughing and faraway. “The wind just whirled it off ...”

  Well, we’re not looking for it now.” Mr. Deering stopped to wait for her, but he was beginning to sound testy. “Drat it, Lorna ...”

  There was no more time to think.

  The attic. Of course, the attic.

  They sat down on the mattress, side by side. Mr. Deering’s voice had vanished now, and there was nothing to hear but the wind in the eaves. The man held his bent legs against his chest and laid his head on his knees. There were a few twisted blankets on the mattress, decidedly moth-eaten and damp to the touch, but Virginia gathered them up and bundled them over his rounded back.

  “Danke,” he murmured, without moving.

  Virginia smiled, even though they were invisible to one another in the dark. Somehow Mr. Rosenthal’s presence was a good sign; a message from Clem that all would be well, if she kept faith. It was the first time she’d managed a smile in hours, and the muscles in her cheeks felt stiff and strange.

  “Mr. Deering is always getting in the way,” she explained, after a while, anxious to signify her dislike of Mr. Rosenthal’s enemy. “Lorna finds it difficult to get rid of him. I don’t know why. I don’t think she likes him, really, it’s just ...”

  She trailed off. The man made no response, and she thought perhaps he’d gone to sleep. He should have a proper wash and something to eat. There was something unsettling about the state he was in now; he seemed to be exuding cold from the very core of his body and chilling the entire attic. He smelled unhealthy too: like mud and stagnant water and rotten vegetation. For half a moment, before she could dismiss the idea as stupid, Virginia thought he smelled of drowning.

  Virginia shivered and fidgeted with the bits and bobs inside her cardigan pocket: a handkerchief, a pencil stub, a box of matches. She spent hours on her bed with a book—stillness was her usual preference—but this particular evening, stillness hurt. All her muscles ached to walk about and chatter, and do somersaults across the mattress.

  “You’re good at keeping quiet,” she observed wistfully, when she could bear it no longer. The man stirred, which encouraged her to go on. “I suppose you’re pretty exhausted though, from your escape. You must have had to walk a long way.”

  She had a feeling that he’d turned to face her, and that his eyes were searching for her through the darkness, but she couldn’t be sure. He didn’t say anything. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was still asleep.

  Her fingers clutched the little matchbox in her pocket, and with a guilty start she remembered the candles she’d lit last night, all over the house, for Clem. Carefully, and pausing with every creak, she slid off the mattress and went to the window, where she felt about for the jam jar. Here it was—and there was still a lump of wax at the bottom, with something of a wick, but it was difficult to reach, and she wasted four matches and burnt two fingers in lighting it.

  “What are you doing?” The man’s whisper was more alert than she expected.

  “It’s for Clem,” she replied. “He went out on the marsh yesterday; that’s why you’ve not seen him.”

  His eyes were definitely on her now: she could feel them.

  “Clem,” he repeated warily.

  “Yes. You see, an airplane came down on Tollbury Marsh, and Clem went to try and rescue the airman. I didn’t want him to, because it was a German plane—I mean a proper enemy German, a Nazi, not like you—but he went anyway. And now he’s having trouble getting back. I mean, he’ll be all right, because nobody knows the marsh like Clem...” She stopped for breath, conscious that she was babbling

  The man was watching her intently, and in the jagged candlelight his face seemed to gape like a tragedy mask.

  “Clem?” he asked, hoarsely. “This ... Clem ... this is your father?”

  “He’s—yes, sort of. My actual parents died when I was two weeks old, so I grew up at Sinclair House, but then Clem and Lorna ...” The explanation petered out. “I suppose you wouldn’t necessarily know about me. I’ve not been here very long.”

  The man stared at her, and then at his feet. Slowly, he began to nod.

  “I am very sorry to hear it,” he whispered. “He was a good, good man.”

  “Is a good, good man,” she retorted, forgetting to keep her voice down. “He’s not dead, Mr. Rosenthal.”

  “Is good,” he repeated, raising his hands in the same gesture of surrender he’d used when they found him in the shed. “I’m sorry.”

  His apology was so heartfelt that Virginia felt bad for having snapped. She sat down beside him again and patted his sleeve, and in r
eturn he tried—not quite successfully—to smile.

  “Please, I want you to call me Jozef,” he whispered, holding out his right hand as if intending her to shake it. She did so, though it was rather awkward because they were sitting side by side. “And your name ... ?”

  “Virginia.”

  Another burst of wind rattled the slates, but this time there was a noise hiding beneath it: a short, fierce note; a cry of protest; a “No!” They both lifted their heads and looked toward the attic door, but Virginia grabbed Jozef’s sleeve.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It was something from outside.”

  Quickly, in her head, she ran through all the things it might have been. There were enough possibilities. It might have been a fox, or a stoat, or a bird. It might have been the wind, singing at a strange pitch. Revelers drinking on the wall. A ship’s whistle.

  “It came from inside the house,” Jozef insisted, staggering to his feet.

  “No, no.” Virginia held on to the raggedy hem of his blanket and tried to remember some of the bird facts Clem had taught her. They’d been so firmly fixed in her brain before, but now they felt shaky. “It was a bird. Maybe ... maybe a curlew. I’m not sure. Clem will tell us when he gets back. Please sit down. Please. If Mr. Deering sees you here, that’ll be bad for all of us. Me and you and Lorna ...”

  Jozef didn’t sit down at once, but he didn’t break away either. Virginia hung on to the corner of the blanket and tried to ignore the images that kept flashing through her mind: Mr. Deering’s teeth shiny with spit; his lips moist with drink; his fingers strong and hungry, snaking through Lorna’s hair, and down her neck, and inside her clothes. Virginia clenched her teeth and shut her eyes tight, but all she saw in her mind’s eye was Mr. Deering’s face moving over hers, like a big yellow moon. It was horrible, the way he seemed to look down on her, with his lips hanging open in a smile. She couldn’t push the image away, even after she opened her eyes.

  The cry came again, with no gust of wind to disguise it. Virginia remembered the shotgun in the kitchen and tried to stand up, but her legs were empty and they wouldn’t bear her weight. She sank back down again and pressed her knees with the flats of her hands to try to stop them from shaking. Her breathing had gone ragged, but she forced it to settle and declared, firmly, “That was a curlew.”

  “A bird?” Jozef wasn’t convinced.

  “Yes. I know it. I’ve heard it before.”

  He tore his eyes from the door and sat down slowly. Virginia slumped against him, as unceremonious in her exhaustion as if he were a wall or a post, and he put a tentative arm around her shoulders. She shivered, pulling her cardigan tight, and promptly went to sleep.

  It was strange, waking underneath the rafters in the ghost light before dawn. The candle had burned out by then and all the darting shapes and shadows of the night were gone, leaving the attic gray and calm.

  Virginia sat up squinting and massaged her stiff neck. Lorna must have been here during the night because there were fresh blankets and pillows, and Jozef was sprawled, facedown, in a pair of Clem’s pajamas. His left ear—which was as much of him as she could make out beneath the jumble of blankets—was pink with warmth, and he smelled all soapy and healthful. His hair had dried into soft tufts, like a teddy bear’s fur, and she couldn’t resist touching it, which made him twitch.

  Virginia found she’d been asleep at the foot of the mattress, curled up in a ball, like a cat. It took a few limping circuits of the attic to get rid of the cramp in her legs, and she finished up by the window, rubbing the crust from her eyes. Her head felt empty, as if all her thoughts had drained away overnight, slipping like spilled water through the bare floorboards. Everything—Clem’s disappearance, and the cries in the night, and Mr. Deering’s monstrous car—seemed like fragments from an absurd dream that would break apart any moment now, dispersing in the morning light the way dream fragments do.

  She cleared a bit of the moisture from the window and looked out. Gray snow lay along the flint wall and on the shed roof and in long, uneven patches across the marsh, while black smoke twisted upward, passing close to her face. She watched it dispassionately for a while as it whirled in the thin wind and dispersed in the sky, but then the stench of petrol hit, and it occurred to her to wonder—and then to worry about—what exactly was burning.

  Lorna was in the corner of the garden with her back to the house, leaning on the garden fork. The bonfire roared a few feet away, and currents of heat competed with the wind to lift threads of hair from her face. Virginia stopped in the kitchen doorway, her chest thumping, and allowed herself to breathe again. It was all right. The house wasn’t in flames and Lorna wasn’t dead. There hadn’t been a bomb.

  Lorna looked unexpectedly gaunt from this angle. Despite her winter coat and proximity to the fire she was rubbing her arms, and there was something about the way she stood that made her seem alien. Virginia decided to shut the kitchen door quietly and retreat, but before she had a chance Lorna turned and saw her. They stared at one another for a moment, like two trespassers, but then Lorna raised her hand in greeting and Virginia had no choice but to cross the grass and join her.

  “I’m burning his clothes,” Lorna explained dully, thrusting the fork into the fire and giving it a stir. She didn’t say “Jozef’s clothes,” or “Mr. Rosenthal’s”—just “his”—and, at first, Virginia wondered whose clothes she meant. She thought, stupidly, of Mr. Deering’s expensive pinstripes, and her stomach lurched.

  “You’re burning them?”

  “It’s all they were good for. He’ll have to borrow some of Clem’s.”

  “Oh ... Yes.”

  Virginia narrowed her eyes against the smoke and stared into the depths of the bonfire. That flash of gray might have been the coat that looked so much like Clem’s—Jozef’s coat—but the holly-green knit was surely Lorna’s sweater, much darned at the elbows—the one she’d been wearing yesterday—and wasn’t that a scrap of yesterday’s blouse, and a flash of pattern from yesterday’s skirt? And there, wasn’t that a length of stocking, twisted up with something else in oyster-pink silk? Virginia blushed like the accidental intruder she was, and tried to look away.

  “Why—” she began, but she couldn’t finish the question out loud. Why are you burning your own clothes? Lorna would have to come up with a lie in order to hide the answer. It seemed silly to trouble her.

  “Mr. Deering’s gone to London for the week,” said Lorna, and Virginia nodded. She almost said, “Thank goodness!” but that felt risky too, so she said nothing. Lorna usually snapped when Virginia was being unresponsive, but she didn’t seem to mind this time.

  The smoke was stinging Virginia’s eyes and making them water, so she turned to face the marsh. She stared at the luminous horizon, willing herself to see a tiny, moving speck, growing and thickening and assuming human features the closer it came to the house, until there could be no doubt it was Clem. She stared until her eyes were dry, and promised the fates she wouldn’t shout out until she was sure. There were several specks in her line of sight, and she followed them all avidly, but they turned out to be birds or particles from the fire.

  “Is he still asleep?” Lorna interrupted, jabbing at the heap with her garden fork. Big black flakes and motes of ash flew in her face, but she didn’t stop or turn aside. The scrap of oyster-pink underwear flickered into flame and fragmented in the black heart of the fire.

  “What? Oh, yes.”

  “That’s good.”

  Virginia licked her dry lips and glanced at Lorna sidelong.

  “We don’t really have to hand him in, do we?” she asked.

  “Mmm?”

  “Can’t we keep him?”

  “You make him sound like a stray cat.” Lorna stuck the fork into the ground again and leaned, with both arms, on the handle. It was good that she could still smile.

  “No, but really,” Virginia persisted. “Can’t we?”

  Lorna plucked the fork from the ground and stabb
ed it in again, hard. “No, of course we can’t.”

  There was a long, nervy silence. Lorna sighed and looked away, wiping her sooty sleeve across her forehead.

  “We’ll make him a nice breakfast,” she conceded, as if that would make all the difference. “But that’s as much as we can do. As soon as he’s eaten, I’m going to telephone the police.”

  Virginia nodded, because she had no choice, and they remained there, side by side, watching the fire burn itself out. Strange, she thought, that a bonfire could be such a depressing thing; she wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t found herself standing over this one. She’d loved Clem’s autumn bonfires, when he burned dead leaves and hedge clippings: she’d loved the hiss of boiling sap and the snap of sticks and the sweet, pervasive fragrance of the blue smoke.

  “Well.” Lorna dragged her gaze from the dying reds and blacks. “I suppose we must get on.”

  It was a nice breakfast—almost pre-war in its niceness—with bacon and eggs, tea and toast, and the last of Mrs. Hill’s marmalade. They carried it up to the attic on two trays, and Virginia led the way.

  The sun was rising as they entered the attic, and for a minute or two the light was lovely—not glorious or bright, but lovely; the palest of pale yellows. Jozef was sitting up in Clem’s stripy pajamas, with one arm in a bandage and a heap of papers on his lap, and he started talking the moment they came in. None of this struck Virginia as strange, even while part of her acknowledged that it was. Perhaps it was because she was still tired that everything felt so oddly familiar, as if she and Lorna had been bringing breakfast trays up to the attic for years.

  “Look!” Jozef cried, waving a handful of papers in the air. “Look at these drawings. They’re extraordinary. They were lying just here, under the mattress. Have you seen them?”

  “Hmm.” Lorna set her tray on the floor with exaggerated care. She glanced very briefly at the papers before turning to the window with a shrug and sticking her hands in her pockets.