“Maybe we could buy him a present?” Virginia went on. “Just something small, I mean, to make up for not coming.” She had a horrible feeling she was saying all the wrong things, without knowing how, but when Lorna turned from the window she was still smiling.
“Good idea. I wish I’d thought of that.”
They linked arms again and walked on down the street. The cathedral clock boomed over the medieval rooftops: three o’clock.
“You like him, then?” It seemed such a trivial question, but the way Lorna said it you’d think she was dredging it up from the dark depths of her soul. Virginia wriggled uneasily.
“Yes, of course I do.”
“Good. I was only asking.”
The bookshop was a few doors down, across the street, and this time they went inside. Virginia hovered uncertainly near the children’s section, wondering where to begin, but Lorna took the first volume that came to hand, opened it at random, and read for a couple of seconds before putting it back and taking another. Virginia wished she could keep up with Lorna’s excitement; wished she could be sure it was just about blue August skies and sunshine.
“What about this for a birthday present?” Lorna held out a copy of Black Beauty. “I used to love this; I was a big fan of horse books at your age.”
Virginia hesitated. “You got me Black Beauty last year.”
“Oh.” Lorna grimaced ruefully and put it back. “Sorry.”
“I haven’t read it yet,” Virginia confided, taking another book from the children’s shelf and turning it over in her hands. “The horse on the cover puts me off. His eyes are sort of ... rolling in his bony head, and he’s baring his teeth. He looks more like something from the book of Revelation.”
Virginia expected to be laughed at, but Lorna gave a sympathetic shiver and said, “You’ll have to show me when we get home.”
In the end Virginia chose a copy of The Snow Goose, and the shopkeeper wrapped it in a paper bag while Lorna rooted in her purse. They returned to the stationer’s after that, where they bought a box of editing pencils for Jozef, and then they went to Delafield’s for tea.
“It was lovely in here before the war,” Lorna whispered, leaning across the table. “Really, it was. Quite posh.”
Virginia tried to imagine what Delafield’s had been like in the days before rationing and make-do-and-mend. The ghost of the old days was there, right enough; you didn’t have to look too hard. The lace curtains were greasy and yellow now, but you knew they’d been frothy white once upon a time; and if the fine bone china was chipped, you could still picture it in its perfection. The old ladies, sipping tea with their hats on, would have sipped just the same before the war, but Virginia couldn’t help thinking they’d have looked less tired in those days, and their hats would have sat more plumply on their heads.
She prodded her Victoria sponge experimentally with a fork.
“What do you think of the cake?” Lorna’s whisper lowered even further. “It’s not too awful, is it? Though it’s a shame they didn’t manage to mix the egg powder in properly. It sort of ... clags on the tongue, doesn’t it?”
It was true, and Virginia got the giggles. One of the ladies shot her a horn-rimmed glare, but Lorna didn’t seem to mind; she was on the brink of laughter too.
They ate another forkful and Lorna said, “Isn’t it nice to be away from Tollbury Point for a bit? I love towns. I love the bustle and noise and ... just the life of them.”
She paused, waiting for some casual assent, but Virginia busied herself over the last few mouthfuls of cake. She didn’t love the town. She loved Salt Winds and the marsh.
“Lorna?” she asked, as she finished. “What’s going to happen to you and me? I don’t mean today, I mean ... you know, in the future.”
Lorna sat back with a sigh and opened her handbag.
“What’s going to happen?” she repeated, rummaging for her cigarette case. “Well, let’s see. What’s going to happen is that I’m going to become a world-famous illustrator, and everyone’s going to want my pictures in their books, and as a result I’ll make pots of money and buy a fancy flat in London. Or ... no, not London. Manhattan.” She slung an arm over the back of her chair and smiled through a cloud of smoke. “What about it?”
Virginia moved the cake crumbs about with the tip of her little finger, until they formed a thin line across the plate.
“Manhattan,” she echoed, without smiling back.
“Mmm. Or San Francisco. Or both. What’s the matter? I’m being silly; you don’t have to look quite so scandalized.”
Virginia tried to excise the passion from her face and her voice. “I just ... I don’t ever want to leave Salt Winds.”
Lorna narrowed her eyes. “Why not?” Through the smoke she could have passed as a film star—one of the ones who manage to look sharp as a tack and half asleep, both at the same time.
Virginia pressed her teeth together hard and stared at her plate. Lorna reached for the ashtray and tapped her cigarette on the rim.
“Because of Clem?” she said, softening.
Virginia nodded stiffly, but under the table she was knotting her fingers. The bell tinkled over the door as people went in and out. The till rang, voices buzzed, and crockery chinked. One of the waitresses came over with a jug to top up their teapot, and Virginia waited until she was done.
“Why didn’t Clem like you being an artist?”
Lorna frowned, but she didn’t go mad, or silent. In fact, she placed her elbows on the table and leaned forward, twisting the half-smoked cigarette between her fingers. Ash floated, like tiny flakes of black snow, onto the cloth.
“I think ...” She leaned forward even farther, until her face was hovering over Virginia’s half of the table. “I think Clem thought he’d rescued me from this dreadful bohemian lifestyle, and that I ought to be grateful. Perhaps I thought the same, at first. Well, I did think that. He was my white knight, snatching me from the jaws of failure and loneliness.”
Virginia looked up from the plate. “And from the jaws of Mr. Deering.”
Lorna began to deny it, but then she sighed and nodded. Neither of them spoke for a while.
“I was horribly young when I got engaged to Max,” she said eventually, keeping her voice low. “Far, far too young. He seemed so awfully glamorous to me at that age—a lonely widower, with masses of charm and wealth. I think I thought I was Jane Eyre or something; I don’t know.” She laughed tonelessly and the cigarette trembled in her hand. “In fact—”
Lorna looked at the walls, as if searching for words.
“In fact, as it turned out, he wasn’t very nice at all.”
She pulled on her cigarette and laughed again—the same bleak and inadequate laugh.
“I wanted to break it off,” she went on, without meeting Virginia’s eye, “but I was too scared. The best I could do was drag the engagement out. I was halfway through my second year at the Slade by then, and I begged Max to let me finish my studies before we married. He didn’t like it one bit, but he agreed. He visited—oh—all the time, every weekend, sometimes more, and occasionally he’d bring along his oldest pal; his fuddy-duddy bachelor friend from Tollbury Point.”
Lorna laughed, as if she was still incredulous after all these years.
“Sometimes I wonder whether Clem really meant to propose at all. Perhaps it was just a gallant jest that I took far too seriously.”
Virginia stared. Her throat felt tight and she couldn’t have interrupted, even if she’d wanted to.
“Anyway.” Lorna shook her head. “I didn’t question the wisdom of it; I was too relieved. Max couldn’t touch me if I was someone else’s wife—that was my first thought. Whether or not I loved Clem—whether Clem loved me—seemed secondary. He was decent and well-meaning, and I believed that was enough.”
She leaned her chin on one hand and blew a feather of smoke from the corner of her mouth.
“Wasn’t it enough?” Virginia knew it was a gauche question the mom
ent she said it.
“No,” said Lorna, quietly. “No, it wasn’t really enough. But there we were, anyway. Stuck.” As she said the word stuck, she crushed her stub in the ashtray. It smoldered there for ages.
“Of course, Clem thought having a child would be the answer to everything ...”
Virginia rearranged the cake crumbs to form a neat ring.
“Which isn’t to say I didn’t want you ...” Lorna realized what she’d said, and laid a pleading hand across the table. “Virginia?”
People came and went from the tea shop. From the kitchen at the back they could hear a whistle rising in pitch and someone shouting, “Eileen! The kettle!”
“If you weren’t burdened with me, you’d be free,” Virginia observed, as coolly as she could. “You could do anything; you could go back to London and be a proper artist again. I bet you think that sometimes, don’t you? You must do. I would, if I were you.”
“Virginia!” Lorna was still reaching across the table, but Virginia kept her hands in her lap.
“Will you send me away?”
“No!” Lorna cried, and heads turned all over the tea shop. “No!” she repeated more moderately. “Of course I won’t!”
They stared at one another helplessly.
“But then, what will happen? Really?” Virginia asked. “I mean, assuming you don’t get rich and buy a flat in Manhattan.”
“Will I marry Max, you mean?” Lorna rubbed her temple, the way she did when she was starting a headache. “I don’t know why you should mind so much. He likes you.”
Virginia shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “But you wouldn’t do it, would you?”
Lorna poured the last of the tea into their cups
“I don’t know,” she whispered, as if she was talking to herself. “I just ... I don’t know how to ...”
Virginia glanced at Lorna’s left hand. It occurred to her that the emerald engagement ring had not reappeared since that afternoon on Warren Sands. It had been too small—or too big, she couldn’t remember which—and Mr. Deering had promised to have it altered.
“If you do marry him,” Virginia observed, “then Jozef will have to go away.”
Lorna stirred her tea, making slow circles with the spoon.
“Yes,” she said, eventually. “Yes, I know. That had crossed my mind.”
Unless you knew her well, you’d assume she didn’t care very much, or that her thoughts were elsewhere.
NEW YEAR’S EVE 2015
Virginia salvages her stick with a few breathy curses and frees herself from the chair. She hobbles to the kitchen, setting things straight.
The plaster’s always been crumbly round the telephone. It’s because of the damp. I knew it was a bit wobbly, but I didn’t know it was THAT bad! She tries a throwaway laugh, but it sounds like a canine snarl and she makes a mental note not to use it in front of Sophie.
It’s not a convincing show. Even in rehearsal, she feels embarrassed, but she hasn’t any better ideas. She’s on edge, waiting for the big outcry; for the thunder of feet on the stairs; for Sophie’s voice shouting that the phone’s been disemboweled. She’s taking a long time about it. Virginia stands still with her fingers around the whisky bottle and listens, but there’s nothing. Not a peep. She decides she won’t tidy the whisky away, after all; she’ll leave it out and have a final swig before they go. Other than that, the kitchen is done. Kettle emptied. Heater off. Table wiped. The place looks stark and flat, as if nothing has ever gone on here; as if nothing much has ever been felt, or thought, or done inside these clammy walls.
Joe’s note is lying on the table. Virginia turns it and adjusts the placement of the stone, so as to be sure he’ll notice his name straightaway. Her fingertips linger on the corner of the page. Perhaps it’s not too late to soften her words? To deepen them a little? Even if she just crosses out Very best wishes and puts Love instead? She picks it up, but something passes over her face, like a shiver of wind across water, and she puts it down again. It’ll have to do as it is.
Virginia paces the floor and begins to fancy that this silence is more than strange. It’s alarming. What if the child has taken it into her head to creep away? What if she’s slipped out of the front door while Virginia is pottering and muttering in the kitchen? She could be at Tollbury Point by now.
Virginia shuffles into the hall, where the light is thick and yellow and clings like paste to the edges of things. It’s been like that ever since the seventies, when she took it into her head to fit a hessian shade. But Sophie is here. She’s here, standing on the bottom stair, peering through the window. There’s something unreal about her continued presence in the house, for which Virginia is inclined to blame her own nerves. Just at the moment Sophie looks less like a solid person and more like a loose assortment of shadows and lights. A ghost, in fact.
“Sophie? Did you find the telephone?” Virginia’s voice is as reedy as a child’s and she imagines, for a second, that the years have fallen away. She has to look upward, since Sophie is above her on the stairs, and that reminds her of childhood too: always having to look up because you’re small; always being a little bit amusing, no matter the strength of your feelings. She pictures herself with a boyish body and brown hair and a red party dress, but at that point her imagination fails. The decay inside her bones and lungs is too insistent, and anyway she can see the white hairs hanging like cobwebs over her eyes.
“The telephone?” Sophie is pressing her face against the glass and staring into the night. “Oh no, not yet, I got sidetracked. Look—there’s a car parking up in your lane. I saw it bumping along as I was going upstairs, and now it’s stopped and there are people getting out. I think there are, anyway; it’s quite hard to tell with the lights on full beam.”
“People?” That’s the word that bothers Virginia and brings her, muttering and huffing, to the window. Person would almost certainly mean Joe, but people? People don’t call at Salt Winds.
The first thing Virginia sees, reflected in the glass, is a heart-shaped face with black hair and eyes, and she can’t help thinking how perfectly Sophie’s face would fit inside her own cupped hands. Then the child catches her eye and says, “Look!” and she’s forced to refocus on the scene beyond the window.
The headlights shine like a dragon’s eyes, bright and unblinking, and she cannot stare them out. They don’t belong to Joe’s old heap of metal, that’s for sure. The car—or it might be a van—has stopped halfway along the lane, where its lights pick out bumpy bits of wall and falling freckles of snow, and the cold, black gap where the old harbor steps start down to the marsh. There are people, just as Sophie said, wandering about in the gloom, never straying far from the car. Virginia thinks there are two of them, though it’s hard to be sure: all she can really see is movement in the darkness and the occasional flash of a fur trim, or a leather boot, when they pass in front of the headlights.
If someone had placed a rock inside Virginia’s stomach, she could not feel more sick and heavy.
“They’ve just taken a wrong turn,” she says, with an airy flutter of her fingers. “They’ll have got lost on their way to a New Year’s party. It’s always happening.”
Only it isn’t. It never happens. Nobody takes that turn by mistake because the entrance is concealed by brambles, the surface is more pothole than mud, and there’s grass running all the way down the middle, tall enough to tickle the belly of Joe’s ancient Renault. He’s often moaning about it. He prefers to park at the top and walk, unless he’s loaded down with shopping.
Virginia pulls on Sophie’s sleeve, but Sophie won’t be distracted. Her face and hands are pressing against the glass, as if to push the whole pane outward, and a patch of condensation flowers and furls with her every breath.
“What if it’s them?” she says. “What if it’s my mum and dad?”
“Wait! Don’t go outside! I want to show you something!” Virginia thinks she’s never been so aware of her body’s dilapidation—of the papery hus
ks that used to be bones, and the flaking rust that used to be fluid muscle—as she is now, when she tries to hurry. Up the stairs she goes, past the telephone’s hanging corpse, into her bedroom, a fumble in a drawer for the book, then off again. She pounds the floorboards firmly enough with her stick, but she has to wait for her slippered feet to catch up, and that’s what slows the process down. BANG, flap, flap ... BANG, flap, flap, all the way along the landing and down the stairs.
“Look!” She waves the book in Sophie’s face and its pages flutter like wings. “Never mind the car; I want to show you this.”
Even now, when everything is rushing toward the end, the book has the power to make her pause. She holds it in both hands, half-forgetful of her own urgency, and turns it over for the hundred-thousandth time. It’s been around the world with her, but she’s looked after it well, and you’d never guess it was published so many years ago. The cover has faded from red to coral pink, but apart from that it looks new: the pages are creamy, the woodcut prints sharp, and there are no rips or creases or stains. You’d think it had never been read.
“The Witch-Princess, and Other Stories, by J. Friedmann,” she reads aloud. “Illustrated by F. L. Leonard.”
“It can’t be them, though, can it?” Sophie asks urgently, still transfixed by the headlights. “How could they possibly know I’d be here?”
“Look at it. Isn’t it beautifully made?”
Sophie glances absently in the direction of the book and glues her eyes to the window again. Virginia turns to the frontispiece—the picture of the witch-princess arriving at the end of the world—and traces her thumb over the wavy lines of the sea. The blocks of ink are strong and yet they’re delicate, echoing the warp and grain of the wood from which they were pressed. Virginia holds the volume out, pushing it into Sophie’s hands, obliging her to take it.
“I think it should say ‘by J. Friedmann and F. L. Leonard,’ but Lorna wanted it like this, especially after he’d gone. She reckoned her illustrations were secondary; that it was Jozef’s book first and foremost.” Virginia knows she’s gabbling, but she can’t help it. Somehow it matters that Sophie should hear all these things before the car starts moving toward the house. “The publishers were all for changing his surname to ‘Freeman’ to make it sound less German, but of course Lorna wouldn’t have it. The whole thing almost fell through over that, but she stuck to her guns.”
The Orphan of Salt Winds Page 19