The Orphan of Salt Winds

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

  Jozef was undeterred. “Look!” he insisted, holding them out to Virginia. She plumped herself down on the mattress, near his feet, and began to skim through the pile. Lorna—who was still at the window—said something curt about the scrambled eggs going cold, and Jozef began to eat, but he kept his eyes on Virginia’s face, as if he couldn’t wait for her reaction.

  “Aren’t they good?” he said. “Maybe it’s wrong, but when I look at these drawings I am happier than I’ve been for months. For years.”

  Virginia wouldn’t go that far, but she was impressed. They were such self-assured creations—each pencil line so perfectly balanced between precision and energy—that she’d have been less surprised to find them published in an art book, or framed on a gallery wall, than lying in a crumpled heap on the attic floor. She moved carefully from page to page, from portraits of people to careful studies of birds’ heads and flowers, to pictures of goblins, fairies, castles, crooked trees, witches, and strange animals. There was something familiar about the style, but she couldn’t think what it was until she turned a page and saw a stout guinea pig in a gingham housecoat, and remembered a drawing she’d found on Clem’s desk last winter. What had it been, again? A bird of some sort. A duck. Yes, that was it. A duck in a businessman’s suit. She’d wanted to keep it, but Clem had bundled it into a drawer as if he found it embarrassing.

  “Did Clem do these?” she asked, looking up.

  “Clem?” Lorna had kept her back to them, feigning an interest in the view, but at this she turned. “No, he did not. They’re mine.”

  She faced them with a kind of defiant glee, her hands fidgeting inside her pockets, the corners of her mouth unsteady. She had the uncomfortable look of someone who hasn’t the right to be happy—not even briefly—but can’t quite prevent a smile from flowering. When Jozef looked at her and said, “I take my hat off to you; I think they’re truly wonderful,” she bobbed her head and turned back to the window.

  “Where did you learn to draw like this?” Virginia asked out loud. And why didn’t you tell me about it? she added internally, surprised by the strength of her own resentment. The pictures amazed her. It was as if she’d discovered the house had a secret wing full of treasures that no one had bothered to mention before. Jozef offered her a triangle of toast and she accepted it, absent-mindedly.

  “London,” Lorna replied. “The Slade.”

  Virginia must have looked blank.

  “The Slade School of Fine Art.”

  Lorna took the pages out of Virginia’s hands and returned to the window, where she began to leaf through them slowly.

  “These aren’t from my student days. I did all these up here, in the attic, when—”

  She stopped herself abruptly but continued to turn the pages, one by one. Virginia watched the fluid motion of her fingers as they plucked the top corner of each sheet, and realized there was a sureness about them that she’d never noticed before.

  “I used to come up here at odd times to draw,” Lorna explained rapidly, as if anxious to forestall questions. “Clem didn’t really—” She hesitated. “Art never seemed to mix very well with married life.”

  Virginia picked uneasily at a strip of loose skin on her thumb. Whatever that was meant to imply, she couldn’t worry about it now. She filed it away at the back of her mind, for consideration at a later date, and smoothed her thumb against her skirt. Jozef passed her his teacup, and after she’d taken a sip and handed it back, he offered it up to Lorna.

  “Have some,” he said.

  Lorna glanced from the teacup to his face, as if she suspected foul play.

  “Go on,” he urged.

  Lorna placed the pictures on the floor and took the cup from his hands with a small thank you. After she’d sipped once or twice she became less prickly and sat down, not on Jozef’s mattress, but on a dusty packing case, with her back against the wall.

  “Please finish it off,” he said—and she did. He watched as she drank, tilting his head to one side, as if he was trying to work something out.

  “You know what they remind me of?” he said, as Lorna set the empty cup on the floor by her feet.

  “You mean the drawings? No. What?”

  Jozef leaned back against the pillow with his sound hand behind his head. He, too, wore a shamefaced smile—like a man at a funeral who finds himself suddenly, helplessly awash with high spirits.

  “Well you see, I used to write stories in the evenings, after work.” He hesitated, suddenly unsure of himself. “This was before the Nazis—before their evil war—when I was still living at home with my parents. They were children’s stories, you know. Fairy stories, for my little nephew.”

  Lorna stared, sightlessly, at the patch of wall above his head, and it was impossible to tell whether she was listening or not. Virginia frowned as she readjusted—again—all her ideas about Mr. Rosenthal, knife grinder. She felt embarrassed by her own lack of judgment. She’d had him down as someone else; someone old and weather-beaten and unschooled.

  “A few of them got published,” he went on, glancing shyly at his audience. “It was all on a small scale, you understand, in magazines and so on, but I used to fantasize about a beautiful book with all my stories collected together inside. Just my stories, no one else’s, and my name in big letters down the spine and across the front. I can see it now in my head: it has a bright red cover—hardback, of course—and creamy pages and illustrations. Lots of illustrations. One for every chapter.”

  He sat up again and reached for Lorna’s drawings, shuffling through the pile until he found the one he wanted. Virginia could see it upside down from where she sat, but it looked like an illustration for “Rapunzel”—at any rate, there was a tall, ivy-clad tower and a woman sitting behind a window, reading a book. Privately, Virginia thought it a bit muscular for a fairy-tale illustration. The lines of the woman’s face were strong and hard, and not as pretty as you might expect.

  “This one I like very much,” Jozef enthused. “I wrote a story just like this, called ‘Die Hexe-Prinzessin.’”

  Lorna’s eyes came into focus and she stared at him, if not quite kindly, then at least observantly. “‘The Witch-Princess’?”

  Jozef nodded and passed the paper over.

  Lorna studied her work critically, narrowing her eyes. “I didn’t see it as a pencil drawing, when it was in my head,” she said. “I was planning a whole series of woodcut prints, but obviously I couldn’t really ... Printing’s just so big and messy, and I didn’t have the materials. Or the time.”

  Jozef picked more pictures out of the pile, and they passed them back and forth as the sun appeared in the window, edging everything with a fragile light and making Lorna’s hair glow like a halo. It ought to have been a drab scene with all that grubbiness and dust, and everyone’s eyes hooded with exhaustion, but somehow it was anything but. The sun didn’t reach Virginia’s end of the mattress, and she felt like a shadowy observer on the edge of a charmed circle. She’d been wearing the same clothes ever since Clem disappeared, and it hadn’t bothered her up until now, but the sudden brightness made her skin feel prickly and sour smelling.

  “Will you tell us the story?” she asked, in case they’d forgotten she was there. She didn’t expect a yes because she thought she knew adults and their prosaic ways of looking at the world. There would be lots of weary sighs and they’d say, What? You mean, now? and Lorna would stand up, all businesslike, and announce that she needed to get on.

  But Jozef smiled as if Virginia had handed him a gift. “You want me to tell you the story of the Witch-Princess?”

  Virginia nodded and Jozef glanced across at Lorna, who didn’t make any objection. In fact, she shrugged and folded her arms, like somebody settling down to listen.

  “All right.” Jozef lay back again, his bandaged arm across his chest, and fixed his gaze on the cobwebbed ceiling as if he were stargazing. He thought for a long while, but his audience was patient.

  “Once upon a time,” he beg
an, “there was a forest where the beech trees grew so tall and green that they hid the sky. In the daytime the light fell through the leaves like a shower of emeralds, but at nighttime the darkness fell like pitch, and that was when the witches came down from their tree houses and stalked the forest floor in search of prey.

  “Now, late one afternoon as the sun was starting to set, a young traveler entered the forest and lost his way among the many winding paths ...”

  Jozef flopped back on his pillow, laughing at Virginia’s applause. He kept one eye on Lorna too, as she got to her feet and began gathering up the breakfast things. She made no comment at all—she didn’t even look at him—but there was a faint smile on her lips, which was, perhaps, enough.

  He rolled onto his side and closed his eyes, and they lingered by the door with their trays, waiting for him to drop off. It was strange to watch the pleasure draining from his face the deeper he fell, and Virginia wondered what he was seeing in his sleep. He looked scary, with his mouth plunging at the corners and a frown flickering across his forehead. She was half inclined to wake him up again, but Lorna whispered, “No,” and jerked her head in the direction of the stairs.

  The house got darker and colder the farther down they went, and by the time they reached the landing it seemed as though the sun had never risen. The air down here was thick with the stink of lilies, and Virginia wondered whether the flowers were still lying broken on the bedroom floor, or whether Lorna had put them in a vase to please Mr. Deering. She didn’t dare mention his name.

  “I suppose we ought to have some breakfast too,” said Lorna, shutting the attic door behind them with her elbow.

  “Can I have a bath first?”

  “Yes, if there’s enough hot water.”

  Virginia righted the teacup on her tray before it tipped. They both seemed stuck, too tired to move on.

  “I suppose there’ll be lots to do today,” said Lorna. “About Clem, I mean. People to talk to, and things to sort out ... goodness knows what, exactly. Everything’s so strange.”

  Virginia nodded. Lorna spoke like one grown-up talking to another—as if she’d finally shrugged off her ill-fitting role as mother—and Virginia replied in the same spirit.

  “Jozef should stay then, don’t you think?” she said cautiously, as if she didn’t much mind, except for convenience’s sake. “I mean, when there’s so much else to think about. And he’s not in anyone’s way, up in the attic.”

  Lorna didn’t answer. She seemed transfixed by the egg stains on his empty plate.

  “Please?” Virginia hated the childish resonance of that. Real adults never said please in such a wheedling way, but she wasn’t sure how else to put it. “You won’t send him away, will you?”

  Lorna sighed and took Virginia’s tray, balancing it precariously on top of her own.

  Virginia sat upright in three inches of bathwater and sloshed her legs to create waves. She’d washed her hair with soap and squeezed it dry, and although she was very cold she felt cleaner and better. If Clem were to come home this minute—and he might—he would surely be pleased with her behavior over the last twenty-four hours.

  A spider dropped off the ceiling into the bath, and she scooped it up in her hands. Above all, she thought, she’d done the right thing by Mr. Rosenthal. Lorna had been altogether too eager to summon the police, and Clem would not have approved of that.

  The water seeped out between her fingers, but it was too late for the spider—its legs were all awry, its body crushed and saturated. Virginia poked at it with her finger, but it just floated in her palm, as repulsive as a smear of dirt now that it was dead. She clambered out of the bath and ran onto the landing, slipping and dripping as she adjusted the towel around her body.

  “What now?” Lorna was measuring porridge oats into a saucepan, but she paused when Virginia burst into the kitchen. “Well?”

  Virginia shivered and pulled the towel tight around her shoulders. Bracken was gobbling his breakfast in the corner by the door, his collar clanging against the metal bowl. She felt like an idiot.

  “It’s just ... I was just thinking about Jozef.”

  “What about him?”

  Virginia lowered her eyes and watched the drips that tumbled off the ends of her hair and flattened themselves on the tiles by her feet.

  “He is ... I mean, he is Mr. Rosenthal, isn’t he?”

  Lorna took the saucepan to the sink and stood with her back to Virginia. She turned the tap on and ran water over the oats.

  “Who else could he be?” Lorna asked, after the water had stopped.

  Virginia moved from one foot to the other and shivered.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. The colder she got, the more stupid she felt. “Nobody.”

  NEW YEAR’S EVE 2015

  Virginia has to kneel on the floor to reach the bottom drawer of the dressing table. It’s a painful process, bending her body against its grain, and if she were on her own in the house she might shout a bit to help things along, but she mustn’t do that now. She doesn’t want to alert the Deering girl.

  There. Success. She’s down, without so much as a squeak.

  Virginia rests her arms and head on top of the dressing table and closes her eyes. When she opens them again she finds her face is on a level with the curlew’s skull. It looks different from this perspective—larger, of course, but also more sure of itself—and she studies it. Now she understands why its stare is so blank. It’s urging her to be blank too; to be cold-eyed and clear; to see beyond Sophie’s charm to her inherited essence. Justice. That’s what it’s telling her.

  “Justice.” Virginia repeats the word in a whisper to show she’s understood, and then she stoops to open the bottom drawer.

  There’s a spiral-bound photo album on top, and a bundle of orange Kodak envelopes, and a few photos that are curled and bent because she’s stored them loose.

  Lorna used to roll her eyes at Virginia’s hoarding habits. “Things with sentimental value I can understand,” she used to say. “But why hang on to everything?” Virginia had just shrugged.

  Most of the photographs are benign records of her adult life: the trips abroad, the family Christmases, Joe’s fortieth birthday party. If today had turned out as she’d imagined, she would be lingering over these, but Sophie is waiting downstairs and there isn’t time. Virginia knows which one she wants.

  It’s right at the bottom, of course, upside down and damaged at the corners. She stares at it for a long time, although her knees are starting to feel like bruises. It’s much smaller and crisper than those bright, soft snaps from the 1970s and ’80s, and the people in it are not so free and easy. They make her feel scrutinized. She realizes she hasn’t looked at it once since the day Mr. Deering gave it to her all those years ago, and she’s suddenly unnerved by the sureness with which she’s laid hands on it.

  Sophie has put a cozy on the teapot and set two matching mugs beside it. Silver is arching his back and wreathing himself around her legs, but she’s not paying him any attention; she’s too busy frowning and sniffing at the milk. She jumps when she notices Virginia, as if she’s been caught stealing.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I just thought it smelled a bit funny.”

  Virginia winces—not because of the milk, but because her knees hurt. She gestures to Sophie to sit, but the girl can’t seem to relax. She continues to stand with her back to the fridge, and although she forces her lips into a smile, she forgets to remove the frown. It’s possible she overheard something when the phone came off the wall. It must have made some noise—all that jingling and cracking, and the plaster coming off in gobbets.

  “Do you want me to do anything else?” Sophie wonders. “I could get you something to eat?”

  It strikes Virginia that Sophie is a nice girl, judged by any ordinary standards. Nicer than she was at the same age. Virginia can see the girl’s school report as clearly as if it were lying open on the table. Sophie is a pleasure to teach, it reads. Sophie is consc
ientious and thoughtful. Sophie is an asset to the school. Oh yes, Max Deering has disguised himself well over three generations—but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there. Ordinary standards are all very well, but they don’t apply at Salt Winds. Not today.

  Justice, she thinks, to bolster her resolve.

  Sophie looks nervous. “Sorry?”

  “What?”

  Virginia is startled. She wonders whether she often says things out loud without meaning to. How would she know? She used to worry all the time about going mad, especially after Joe started talking, with casual frequency, about care homes. Right up until ten o’clock last night she worried about it; picturing herself lining an armchair in the TV lounge with no teeth, no space, no sense of herself. Now, thanks to the curlew, she’s free to think, So what? So what if I’m mad?

  “Look at this,” Virginia says. “I’ve found something that’ll interest you.” She huffs and puffs, doing battle with stick and legs and hands, until she’s managed to sit herself down. Sophie brings the mugs across and puts them on the table before sliding into the opposite chair. There are white spots floating on the surface of the tea.

  Virginia pushes the photo across the table and something seems to loosen inside the girl, the way it did in the attic when she first caught sight of the view. She picks the photo up, careful not to mar it with fingerprints. Silver jumps up and starts treading circles on Sophie’s lap, and she pushes his tail out of her face.

  “Your Granddad Theo took that picture,” says Virginia. “May 1941. The little girl is me.”

  “Oh!” Sophie stares hard at the girl with skinny plaits and a Peter Pan collar. She doesn’t say, Weren’t you pretty, just to be polite; instead she says, “You look very intense.” Virginia tries to resent it but she can’t.

  “OK,” says Sophie. “So that’s you on the left. And of course I recognize Great-Granddad Max in the middle, and then, on the right ... that’s the woman in the wedding photo, isn’t it? Your adoptive mother?”