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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Elizabeth Brooks 2018
Cover design by Leo Nickolls
Elizabeth Brooks has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473555297
ISBN 9780857525574
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For Mum and Dad, with love
VIRGINIA WRATHMELL KNOWS she will walk on to the marsh one New Year’s Eve, and meet her end there. She’s known it for years. Through adolescence and adulthood she’s spent the last days of December on edge, waiting for a sign. So when one finally arrives, in her eighty-sixth year, there’s no good reason to feel dismayed.
The sign is lying on her front doorstep, and she very nearly treads on it as she emerges around ten o’clock for a blast of night air. She feels its friable curve under the sole of her slipper, and hears a tiny crack, but she pulls back before her foot can come down and grind it to unintelligible dust.
Everything aches when she stoops, but she grunts and clings to her stick and succeeds in scooping it up. Whatever it is, it sits in the hollow of her hand as light as a ball of tissue, and at first the only thing that frightens her is its fragility. She can’t see it, with her back to the hall light, but she holds it tenderly in case it’s something wounded and alive. It doesn’t move, but when she strokes her thumb across its surface there’s a purposeful intricacy to its shape, which makes her think it’s a creature of some kind.
The wind makes to snatch it away, and Virginia’s fingers form a protective curl. She holds it into the light and sees that it’s a bird’s skull, unfeathered and unfleshed. Virginia knows the marsh birds well – if she had her own children she couldn’t have known them better – and she recognises the curlew by its long and gently curving bill. The recognition is paralysing, and the skull almost falls and breaks on the doorstep. Briefly it occurs to Virginia that a shattered sign would no longer be a sign, but that doesn’t ring true. She can’t unsee what she’s seen.
Virginia raises her other hand and touches the papery bone, running a gnarly finger round the empty eye sockets. The skull looks like a tiny rapier; a doll’s sword. All these years she’s been wondering what the sign will turn out to be, and she’s come up with the strangest ideas. Words forming on a misted window. An anonymous note. A ghost. She’s never imagined anything as perfect as a curlew’s skull.
There’s a faint warmth at her back, from the electric heater in the sitting room, but Virginia shuffles down the steps, away from it, and away from the wedge of light. There is a semi-circle of gravel in front of the house, and the stones hurt her soles; it is easier to walk on the grass that grows thick and long against the flint wall. When she reaches the wall, she leans against it, and the edge digs into her waist. She lays her stick along the top and cups the curlew’s skull in both hands.
Ribbons of white hair flutter across Virginia’s face, and the lapels on her dressing-gown flap. The wind is from the north, gritty with the threat of snow and painful to breathe. She faces the marsh and tries to feel excited; to remember the Decembers past when she’s prayed, in vain, for this very thing. There is nothing to see out there, in the vast blackness, but when she shuts her eyes she imagines she can hear the sucking sands and the boom of distant tides.
It will be cold out there, on Tollbury Marsh. It will be a cold way to go. These bedroom slippers won’t last long; they’ll be in shreds before she’s walked ten yards, and they’ll get lost in the reeds, and then she’ll be barefoot in the mud. She’ll struggle on, ankle-deep, until the mud turns to sand, and the sea begins to sound on every side, now rushing, now creeping, in predatory circles. She’ll stop and brace herself for the icy slap on her shins and thighs. The tide will rise and race, and by the time it’s level with her waist she’ll have lost her stick, and her footing. She wonders if she’ll shout their names; she’s not sure.
Of course, she’s thought about it all before, but the cold has never presented itself so vividly. It’s a shame this has to happen on New Year’s Eve, instead of a balmy evening in July, but there’s no point quibbling.
Virginia runs her hand along the bumpy wall and finds a handful of loose stones, which she pockets. Perhaps she should fetch the torch from the kitchen drawer and look for more stones; after all, if the point is to die, then she’ll be better off weighted down. The prospect of returning to the house, even for a minute, is giddying. It’s a miniature reprieve. Now that she thinks about it, there are other things she’d like to take. There’s Clem and Lorna’s wedding photo, though she’ll have to remove the frame in order to fit it in her pocket with the stones. There’s the book of fairy tales, which will take up all the space in her other pocket. And of course there’s the manuscript, but that will fold up very small, so long as she can persuade herself to crease it. She’ll carry the curlew’s skull in one hand; the other she will need for her stick.
Virginia has everything worked out, and yet she doesn’t move from the wall. She’s hypnotised by the cold, and the fingers of wind that comb her hair. It’s silly to feel rushed, when she’s waited so long, but she can’t help thinking that if the sign had come earlier in the day she’d have had time to say goodbye to Salt Winds, room by room. She’d have been able to make arrangements for the cat.
A mile away, at the other end of the lane, the lights of Tollbury Point are pricking like pins through the darkness. It’s only when she glances over in the direction of the village, picturing the fireworks that will flare and flower for 2016, that Virginia remembers the date. Today is the thirtieth of December. Stupid woman – it’s not the thirty-first, after all. New Year’s Eve isn’t till tomorrow.
She’s been granted twenty-four hours’ grace. Virginia doesn’t know what to do with herself. She closes her eyes and presses the curlew’s skull to her cheek, taking care not to hurt it.
THE CHILD HELD on to Clem’s hand throughout the bus ride. There were lots of stops and the brakes were jerky, and after an hour she murmured, as if to herself, ‘I feel sick.’ Back at Sinclair House it would have been a risky admission, but Clem didn’t seem cross at all. ‘Nearly there,’ he said, elbowing her as he rummaged in his coat pocket. ‘See if you can’t hold on another ten minutes.’ She nodded as Clem blew the fuzz off a mint imperial and pressed it into her mitten.
She was glad of the new mittens when they got off the bus. Clem didn’t wear any gloves, but his hands had the impervious look of old leather, so perhaps they repelled the cold by themselves. Apparently Lorna had knitted the mittens specially for her and they’d bought the coat brand new, last Saturday, from the big department store in town. It was navy blue, with a square collar like a sailor’s, and a bit tight round her shoulders, but thank goodness she hadn’t sicked on it. She shivered with relief as the bus pulled away and Clem said, ‘Warm enough?’ She nodded and he stooped to straighten her scarf, which had got tangled with the strap on her gas-mask box.
The bus had dropped them by an old church with a tower like a stubby finger pointing at the sky and a sign that said St Dunstan’s, Tollbury Point. The little girl turned round slowly, taking in the bare trees and the whitewashed cottages, and tried to guess which one was her new home. Most of the cottages already had their blackout curtains drawn; one risked an uncurtained window and an open fire, and that one looked the nicest in the raw dusk. But Clem adjusted his hold on her slippery mitten, picked up the suitcase and led her away, down a different road.
Beyond the village, the silence was immense. At Sinclair House there’d been no such thing as total silence, even when Matron ordered it; there’d been too many children and too many echoes in the tall, bare rooms.
Clem wasn’t one for talking. When they were trudging down the drive, away from Sinclair House, he’d said, ‘Best do the buttons up on that coat, Virginia,’ and she’d obeyed, but perhaps she should have smiled as well, or made some reply, because he’d not said anything after that; not until the mint imperial. When they were on the bus, and now, as they were walking along the road, she kept trying to scrutinise his face without being noticed. It wasn’t easy; he kept catching her eye and winking.
There wasn’t much traffic. Clem nodded at a woman on a bicycle and they pressed into the hawthorn hedge as a tractor rattled by with an empty trailer. While they were walking, the afternoon became evening, and when Clem said, ‘Here we are,’ she was puzzled. She thought there must be a tiny house hidden in the hedgerow and she looked for it, warily, all along the verge, but the only thing she saw was a narrow turning on to a pot-holed lane. The lane was bounded by a low wall, and now she knew where the great silence was coming from.
Virginia stood on tiptoe to see the silence beyond the low wall. What she saw was a silhouette-bird perched miles away, on a tilting wooden post amid horizontal strips of earth, air and water; black and pearl and grey. She saw an emptiness that she could actually taste on her tongue, although it wasn’t the sea. She moistened her chapped lips and gathered herself to ask her first question.
‘Clem?’
But a car was coming towards them on the main road, a sleek, quiet car with dimmed lights. It drew up beside them and Virginia forgot what she’d been going to say.
‘Wrathmell? That you?’ The driver had to lean across the empty passenger seat in order to shout through the window. It would have been easier for him if Clem had gone round to the other side of the car, but Clem stayed put at the top of the narrow lane, holding Virginia’s hand. He didn’t even stoop so as to come level with the window.
‘Evening, Deering.’
The driver’s face was white and shiny, like a Cheddar cheese, and it seemed to glow in the twilight.
‘I gather you’re taking delivery today?’ he said, indicating Virginia with a nod of his head. ‘Congratulations.’ He ran his tongue over his gums as he looked at her, and when he smiled his teeth gleamed too.
Clem nodded.
‘Marvellous thing for Lorna,’ the man went on. ‘The maternal instinct and all that; mustn’t thwart it.’
‘No.’ Clem’s quietness was beginning to sound like parsimony, as if talking was charged at tuppence a word.
Virginia looked at the murmuring car, with its great curling wheel arches, and longed to touch it, just to see what it felt like. It was shiny black, like a patent-leather shoe.
‘Well?’ said the man, looking her over once more. ‘Do I get an introduction to the new Miss Wrathmell, or not?’
Clem lifted his gaze over the roof of the car and squinted at the sky. ‘Virginia, this is Mr Deering,’ he said. ‘Mr Deering, Virginia.’
Mr Deering pulled his driving glove off with his teeth and stretched even further across the passenger seat in order to proffer his hand. Clem nudged her gently in the back, so she approached the car and gripped the outstretched fingertips. Mr Deering laughed and said, ‘Honoured, I’m sure,’ and Virginia was surprised by a squeamish desire to remove her mitten and touch his moustache, to see what that felt like. It was the same shiny black as the car, and it didn’t look as if it was made of hair. Perhaps he painted it on every morning, with a thin brush and a little pot of lacquer.
‘What age?’ said Mr Deering pleasantly, over her head.
‘Vi was ten in August.’
‘Ah ha. Same age as Theo. Perhaps a spot of matchmaking is in order? What d’you say, Miss Wrathmell? It’s his birthday party on New Year’s Eve.’
Virginia stepped back to the verge and Clem reclaimed her hand.
‘Next year, perhaps.’
Virginia thought it a rather awkward refusal, but Mr Deering didn’t seem to mind.
‘Well,’ he continued smoothly. ‘Hop in, both. Won’t take a minute to run you down to Salt Winds.’
Clem tightened his hold. ‘Thanks, Deering, but we’ll walk.’
‘Bit of a stretch for little legs, isn’t it?’
Something whistled across the silence – a rising, bubbling echo that repeated again and again – and the men stopped talking in order to listen. Virginia could only think of a piccolo and when Mr Deering murmured, ‘Curlew,’ she wondered what he meant.
Clem took a quick breath and looked up, as if he’d heard a cautionary whisper in his ear. There was a new resolution in the way he said, ‘Listen, Deering, we should catch up properly, and soon. Perhaps you’ll bring the children to Salt Winds in the New Year, once Vi’s had a chance to find her feet? Afternoon tea, or something?’
Mr Deering withdrew from the passenger window and sat up properly in his own seat. Virginia could see him in silhouette as he pulled his glove back on, wiggling the fingers until they were straight and tight.
‘That would be marvellous, Wrathmell,’ he called. ‘I’ll hold you to it.’ It was difficult to detect the gaiety in Mr Deering’s tone when his smile was invisible. He pushed some pedal, or pulled a lever, and the purring motor roared, drowning out his ‘Cheerio,’ so all they saw was the shadow of a wave. Clem didn’t have a free hand, but he raised the little suitcase in salute as the car disappeared round the bend in the road.
Virginia shivered. Clem squeezed her hand and led her into the narrow lane. She was pleased Mr Deering had gone, although she wouldn’t have minded a ride in his car because her shoes were pinching and the lane seemed to stretch on for miles, straight as an unrolled ribbon, without let-up. If you followed it for long enough you came, eventually, upon a grey square, which might be a house – but it was a long way away.
‘Here,’ said Clem, putting the suitcase down and poking about in his coat pocket. ‘Have another mint to keep you going.’
This one was a humbug, and it had stuck, over time, to the bottom corner of a paper bag. Clem peeled most of the paper off in tiny, white shreds, and popped it into her mouth.
‘D’you want to walk on the wall?’ he said. Virginia responded with the beginnings of a smile, and he helped her clamber up on her hands and knees, both of them careful not to scuff the navy coat, or catch it on bird muck. The top of the wall was wide and undulating, like a stone road, and when she stood tall and looked down on the lane, the top of Clem’s hat was lower than her shoulders.
They started walking and Virginia glanced at the flatness to her left, where the silence lay. It was too dark to see the silhouette-bird now. The deep, arctic blue of the sky was reflected, here and there, in streaks of water, and there was a single star in the sky, but everything else was black. There was a low, cold wind that Virginia hadn’t felt when they were coming from the village, and it numbed the left side of her face as she walked.
The humbug flooded her mouth with minty saliva as she passed it from cheek to cheek, but it hardly shrank at all so she bit down on it with a loud crack.
‘Steady on, old thing,’ said Clem. ‘You’ll have no teeth left.’
She actually laughed at that: a breathy, stifled sound, which encouraged Clem to go on. ‘Lorna will be put out if you arrive without teeth. I can hear her now: I could swear that girl had teeth when I last saw her.’
‘What will you say?’
‘I’ll say, “Stop your nagging, woman, she had them all in this morning. I reckon she must have taken them out and left them on the bus.”’
Virginia was outraged; she could barely speak for laughing. ‘I don’t have false teeth! Look!’ She stopped and bared her teeth in a fierce grimace.
Clem looked, but before he could say anything the curlew whistled again, sounding its repeated echo across the emptiness, and Virginia forgot about her teeth. She looked left, across the void, and fixed her scarf so that it covered her chin as well as her neck. Her breath dampened the knitted wool, and made it prickle against her lips.
‘Clem?’ she said. ‘May I ask you something?’
‘Anything,’ he said. ‘Fire away.’
Virginia hesitated, because he’d said ‘anything’, and she took him at his word. She saw half a dozen questions lined up like fancy chocolates in a box, and it was hard to choose a favourite. She was tempted by the chance to find out something about Mr Deering, but her nerve failed and instead she plumped for, ‘What’s a curlew?’
‘It’s a type of wading bird. There are lots of birds on Tollbury Marsh; they like it here. I can tell you all about them, if you’re interested. All their names, and so on.’
Virginia nodded eagerly and, as if by agreement, they stopped walking and stared into the wind. She already knew that he made his living by writing books about wildlife. It had surprised her, when she first found out, because Clem didn’t look like a writer; he looked too sturdy and weathered, as if he spent all his days outside. Of the two Wrathmells, it was Lorna who came across as the rarefied, indoorsy one, and on one occasion Virginia had plucked up the courage to ask whether she was a writer too. The three of them had been sitting round in the visitors’ room at Sinclair House, and Lorna had smiled at the question, but before she could answer Clem had said, ‘I think Lorna’s got enough on her plate, looking after me. Wouldn’t you say so?’
‘Is this the marsh?’ Virginia asked, indicating the darkening vastness with a nod. ‘When you say “Tollbury Marsh”, d’you mean all of this?’
‘Indeed I do, and Tollbury Marsh is good for birds but bad news for people, so you must promise me that you’ll not set foot on it. Never ever. You understand?’
Clem made her look at him. The upper half of his face was hidden by the shadow of his trilby hat, but she could see how his jaw had set and she nodded quickly. The follow-on question (Why not?) died on her lips.
Clem stuck his free hand in his pocket after that and walked with his head down, like someone absorbed by private anxieties. Virginia worried she’d done something to make him cross and trotted to keep up with him, her gaze fixed on the trilby hat, and before very long she tripped on a raised stone and banged her knee. Clem noticed straight away, even though he was well ahead and she hadn’t cried out. Her skin was grazed and, worse, the navy coat had picked up a smear of mud, but she managed not to blub and Clem seemed himself again as he helped her up. He spat on a handkerchief and dabbed at the broken skin.
‘Piggy-back?’ he suggested, and she wrapped her arms timidly round his neck and shuffled on to his back. He hitched her up and they were off, much faster now, the gas mask bouncing against her hip. She laid her head gingerly against his neck, and watched the world through the space between his hat and his collar. They were closing on the grey square now, and she could see that it was indeed the front of a house, with long windows and tall chimneys. There wasn’t so much as a chink of light, and the only proof that the place wasn’t boarded up and abandoned was the smell of woodsmoke that grew stronger the nearer they came. Virginia stared up at the gaunt windows, searching each one for a sign of life, but there were only reflections of the evening sky, or the backs of curtains.
She closed her eyes and let her head loll on Clem’s shoulder. The drone of the wind and the rhythmic swing of his steps made a kind of lullaby. As cold and tired as she was, she didn’t want their walk to end.
‘Lorna won’t be cross, will she?’ Virginia was careful to speak softly, so close to his ear.
‘What? About the coat?’ His words vibrated against her cheek, from somewhere deep inside his chest. ‘She’ll have me to deal with if she is. Anyway, I’m sure she won’t be. It’s only a bit of mud.’
Salt Winds. Virginia raised her head in time to read the name of her new home, carved in a stone gatepost. The lane petered out after that. There was a semi-circle of dusty grass, with room for a car to turn, and then the house.
Clem flicked the hall light on and eased Virginia off his back. She blinked and swayed in the brightness as Clem set her suitcase down and tossed his keys into a bowl. It felt warm and muted inside the house, and there was a strong smell of cabbage and gravy. As soon as she could see well enough, Virginia searched for the mark on her coat and began to scrape at it, furtively, with her thumbnail.
Someone was tearing about on the floor above them, slamming drawers and making the floorboards squeak underfoot. A terrier came bounding and yapping down the stairs, wagging its stump of a tail, and a woman’s voice shouted after it, ‘Bracken!’
Clem took his hat off and called up the stairs, in much the same tone of voice, ‘Lorna!’ He ignored the dog, though it was racing round his feet and worrying his shoelaces.
‘Clem? I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m sorry.’ There was a final flurry of sound and a pause, as if she’d stopped to gather herself, and then Lorna was coming towards them down the stairs.
‘Virginia,’ she smiled, her hands outstretched in a gesture of welcome. ‘How wonderful to have you here, at last!’
She wore an emerald-green dress with a narrow belt and a necklace of pearls, and she made the stairs and hallway, and even the dog, look drab. Virginia had met Lorna several times at Sinclair House, so she was familiar with that oval face; with the creamy skin and the pencil-thin eyebrows and the plump mouth. She hadn’t seen the yellow hair before, though, or not properly, because Lorna had always kept her hat and coat on when they were sitting in the visitors’ room or walking about the orphanage grounds. It was the only part of her that didn’t seem quite in control. Despite her obvious efforts to keep it combed and lotioned and pinned, curly strands kept flying loose all over, and she kept trying to poke them into submission.
‘Welcome, welcome!’ Lorna held Virginia at arm’s length, her hands trembling ever so slightly. She surveyed the child with a fixed smile and planted a perfumed kiss on her cheek.
Virginia’s voice had jammed in her throat, and she didn’t dare return the kiss, for fear of marring the powdery perfection that was Lorna’s face. She cobbled together an awkward, blushing gesture instead, something between a bow and a curtsey, which made Lorna laugh uneasily.
‘You must be hungry as a hunter!’ she said. ‘Dinner won’t be long.’
Clem was on one knee, trying to extract his shoelace from the jaws of the ecstatic terrier. ‘How long?’ he demanded, frowning up at his wife. ‘The poor child’s walked her legs off on the strength of a sandwich lunch; she needs a quick supper and straight to bed.’
Lorna’s hostess smile barely wavered. ‘It’ll only be five minutes; ten at most. Mrs Hill made a splendid rabbit pie this morning, while I was doing the beds. It’s in the oven now, and coming along very nicely.’ She turned back to Virginia and bent down, so that their faces were level. ‘We usually eat in the kitchen, but I’ve laid in the dining room today, as it’s a special occasion. D’you want to come and see? I’ve put a white tablecloth out, and the silver cutlery, and it couldn’t look smarter if we were expecting the king to dinner.’
There was nowhere for Virginia to look, other than her new mother’s expectant face. She felt the tears rising at the back of her eyes, and contorted her lips into odd shapes, in a futile effort to stop them falling. It was impossible to explain how she much she feared the sumptuous dining room; impossible to confess she wasn’t hungry.
‘I got a mark on my new coat,’ she faltered, as the first drops slid down her face. It was the only sensible-sounding apology she could think of. Bracken chose this moment to notice her, and busied over to inspect her ankle socks.
‘Let’s have a look.’ Lorna studied the offending patch of coat and brushed it with the back of her hand. ‘Well, not to worry, it’s only a bit of mud. There’s surely no call for tears?’
Clem came up behind Virginia and shuffled the coat off her shoulders. ‘Told you she wouldn’t be cross,’ he murmured in her ear. Virginia slipped her mittens off, and Clem popped them in the coat pockets, one on either side.
‘But of course I wouldn’t be cross!’ Lorna exclaimed, her smile hardening. ‘Goodness, I’m not a dragon, am I?’
Lorna was so patently un-dragonlike that it seemed pointless to say so, but perhaps someone should have bothered to state the obvious because the ensuing silence felt heavy. A tear dropped off Virginia’s chin and splashed on the dog’s nose. It gave a shrill bark and jumped up at her, like a jack-in-the-box.
‘Oh Bracken, give it a rest,’ said Clem, touching the dog’s belly with the toe of his shoe. Bracken snarled and pounced, cat-like, on his master’s foot. Virginia smiled at that, and sniffed, so Clem teased it all the more, moving his foot round the wheeling terrier, always with one eye on the child’s tear-stained face.
All at once Bracken stopped chasing and began to bark in earnest.
‘Stop it!’ Lorna swooped on the dog, smacking it hard across the nose. Clem winced. When Lorna hoisted the animal into her arms, its back legs scrabbled and pulled threads from her dress, but she didn’t seem to notice.
Virginia shuffled closer to Clem until she was half hidden by his arm, and Lorna glanced at the pair of them, a blush rising up her neck. ‘I’ll check on the pie,’ she muttered, stalking off with the wriggling terrier still in her arms. Clem ruffled Virginia’s hair. ‘I’d better go and offer my services to the chef,’ he whispered.
First he showed her into the dining room, where a snow-white cloth was laid, as promised, for three. A wood fire crackled in the grate and the silence was like velvet, except for the occasional clatter from the kitchen. ‘Have a seat, Vi,’ said Clem. ‘Give those poor old feet a rest.’ He hovered in the doorway for a moment, as if reluctant to leave, and she managed to smile at him over her shoulder.
After he’d gone she stood by the fire for a moment, with her back to the warmth. The dining chairs were made of dark wood with tapestried seats, and she had to tense both arms in order to pull one out. At first she was content to sit on her hands and watch the firelight dance on the cut-glass water jug, but after a while she picked up her knife, in order to find out if it was as heavy as it looked. It was even heavier, so she tested her fork, and her crystal glass, and after that she slid the silver ring off her linen napkin, and rested it on her flat palm.
Salt Winds was a large house; she hadn’t expected that. It was large enough to be a small-scale orphanage, if someone wanted it to be, although it would have to be stripped and sterilised first. The ivy-patterned wallpaper would have to be painted over, and the threadbare carpets replaced with linoleum. The greenish curtains would have to be mothballed, and replaced with safety bars. There would be no more leather-bound books on the shelves, no glass-fronted cabinets, no china shepherdesses on the mantelpiece. She twisted round in her chair, perversely pleased by her snap calculations. Some of those age-dulled oil portraits might stay on the walls, but the framed photographs – the family weddings, the men with dogs and guns, the sepia babies in sailor suits – would have to go.
She jumped when the door squeaked, but it was only Bracken nosing his way in. He padded across the carpet, ignoring her proffered hand and friendly cluckings, and slumped down in front of the fire. The voices in the kitchen were a muddle of sound. A tap gushed, and when it stopped she caught the end of Clem’s question.
‘… that the two of you enjoyed your little tête-à-tête in my absence?’
Virginia barely recognised his voice, it was so stony and hard.
‘I don’t know what you mean!’ Lorna hissed. ‘Where did you get that from?’
‘Straight from the horse’s mouth. He came cruising by when we were walking from the bus, and said he gathered we were taking delivery today. Well, who told him, if not you? He even gave me a little lecture on satisfying women’s “needs”. He being the great expert on such matters, of course.’
‘I’m sure he did no such thing,’ said Lorna tightly. ‘Mind out of the way, this is hot.’ Her voice moved to a different part of the kitchen. ‘If you must know, we met by chance in the queue at the post office. He asked after you, and naturally I told him you’d gone to fetch Virginia. What’s wrong with that? She’s not some unmentionable secret, is she?’
Clem sighed and there was a long silence between them.
‘No, of course she’s not.’
An oven door slammed shut. Three china plates were fetched from a rack and stacked angrily, one by one.
‘I’m surprised he didn’t offer you a lift,’ Lorna observed.
‘He did.’
‘But you walked?’
‘I wanted to. It was our daughter’s first view of Salt Winds, Lorna; I’d pictured it so often in my head.’
‘You made Virginia walk all the way up the lane, when Max could have driven here in five minutes flat?’
‘I’d rather not be beholden.’
‘Beholden? Oh, for God’s sake—’ Lorna’s voice stopped abruptly. There were scuffling noises and fierce whispers, and the sound of someone trying not to cry out. Then there was silence.
Bracken raised his head from his paws and cocked his ears. Virginia held tight to the sides of her chair and fixed her gaze on the water jug. The cut glass made a miniature world, so beautiful and complex that if you stared at it for long enough you could lose your way among its flickering mirrors and slivers of light.
‘Bed?’ Lorna suggested, scraping the pie remains from Virginia’s plate. It was by no means the first time she’d spoken during dinner – she’d asked Virginia whether she had a favourite book and she’d told her about Mrs Hill, who bicycled up four days a week to ‘do’ the house – but it was the first thing she’d said with any conviction.
‘Good idea,’ Clem agreed, poking about in the scraps for a morsel of rabbit, and holding it out for Bracken. Virginia had been afraid they’d insist on her leaving a clean plate, but they didn’t; they couldn’t, in all fairness, when Lorna herself had scarcely managed a mouthful. Clem sighed contentedly and the chair creaked when he pressed against its back; he was the only one to have done justice to Mrs Hill’s pie (‘though you wouldn’t say no to a proper slice, would you, you daft dog?’). Lorna reached for her husband’s plate while Bracken finished licking his hand, and she watched as he wiped his slobbery fingers on a napkin.
Virginia leaned down and patted the terrier’s head as Lorna piled the dirty plates and glasses on to a tray. ‘I think we’ll let you off washing-up duties, this once,’ she smiled, her fist full of greasy knives and forks, and Virginia felt wrong-footed because it hadn’t occurred to her to offer.
‘Switch the wireless on, would you, Vi?’ said Clem, once Lorna had gone. He nodded at the box on the sideboard. ‘Left-hand dial.’
Virginia had never seen a wireless close-up before, let alone touched one. She turned the left-hand dial gently, with the very tips of her fingers, anxious not to leave prints on the polished wood. The machine whistled and hummed and suddenly there was dance-band music all over the dining room. When she turned round, half laughing, Clem was fishing through his pockets, a pipe gripped between his teeth.
‘Bet you’ve never filled a pipe before?’ he said, placing a leather pouch and a box of matches on the tablecloth.
‘No, and she’s not about to.’ They both looked round. Lorna was watching them from the doorway. ‘Virginia? Bed.’
It was strange, climbing up the carpeted stairs behind Lorna; like a dream that goes on and on. Their shoes made no sound, the music faded, the wind was nothing but a murmur. There was even something hushed about the way Lorna walked, with a silky rustle and a languid sway of the hips. She went ahead, carrying the suitcase, and Virginia was surprised by the way its weight seemed to drag on her arm, because there was barely anything in it. A few scraps of clothing. A New Testament. A ‘Best Wishes’ card ‘from all at Sinclair House’.
Downstairs, the music gave way to the clipped voice of a BBC man.
‘Mrs Wrathmell?’ said Virginia, at the top of the stairs. ‘Clem won’t have to go and fight, will he?’
Lorna led the way down the dimly lit landing. ‘No,’ she replied, with a faint snort. ‘Not unless they raise the conscription age.’
‘What about Mr Deering?’ Virginia wasn’t sure what had provoked her to ask, but she wished, straight away, that she hadn’t. She wanted to say and do all the right things so that Lorna would stop looking so tired and uncertain.
Lorna turned her head, her expression illegible in the poor light. ‘Mr Deering? What makes you ask about him?’
They stopped outside a door halfway along the landing and Virginia shrugged at her shoes. ‘I don’t know.’
They stood face to face, momentarily stuck, unable to address the awkwardness of Virginia’s question and unable to leave it be. Downstairs, the noise of the wireless expanded as the dining-room door opened, and terrier paws pattered across the hall floor. The front door opened, and they could hear Clem blowing on his hands and shifting from foot to foot while he waited for the dog to wee. A chill draught invaded the house, smelling of tobacco smoke and rain.
Lorna shivered. ‘Come on. Come and see your room,’ she said, opening the door and switching on the light. She set the suitcase down at the end of the bed and led the way round, her face flickering with animation as she smoothed imaginary creases from the baby-pink bedspread and adjusted a stem of yellow jasmine in a jar. ‘I had so much fun getting it all ready.’ She smiled at the memory, as if it were an old one.
It was a big room: newly papered, newly curtained, newly furnished. Virginia followed Lorna from bed to chair to wardrobe, trying to take it all in; trying to find the right thing to say. She stopped at the dressing-table mirror and stared at herself in the unfamiliar light: a whey-faced thing with messy pigtails; eyes hooded with exhaustion. Words failed her.
Lorna picked up a knitted doll from the pillow and flicked at its woolly plaits. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You’re probably too old for pink, aren’t you? And dolls.’ She tossed the doll back on to the bed and took a cigarette from her pocket.
‘No!’ Virginia protested inadequately, squeezing her hands together. She couldn’t remember what her feelings were for the colour pink, if she had any at all.
Lorna put the cigarette back in her pocket and went to the window, where she pulled the curtain aside and stared into the black night. Her face lost all its clarity in reflection; the light and the wavy glass made it seem broken and hollow-eyed. It made her look even younger than she was. There had been girls at Sinclair House with the same gawky configuration of bones, the same haunted stare.
‘Mrs Wrathmell,’ Virginia began, gathering up her shoulders in a deep breath. ‘Thank you very much for having me. I’m sorry I didn’t say it properly when I arrived. I like the room very much. I like pink.’
They were like badly delivered lines from a badly written play, expressive of nothing but her own discomfort. Lorna made no response, except to lean her forehead against the glass and feel in her pocket again.
‘Why don’t you go and have a wash and get into bed?’ she said eventually. ‘I’ll tell Clem to come up and say goodnight. The bathroom’s at the end of the landing.’
She moved towards the door, a trace of the hostess smile still visible on her features. ‘You’ll find a clean nightie under your pillow.’
Virginia nodded dumbly.
‘Oh, and yours is the pink towel on the bathroom rail.’
After she’d gone Virginia stood and stared after her, her fingers pinching and twisting at the skin around her wrists.
Virginia locked herself in the freezing bathroom and took off all her clothes before remembering to run a basin of water. Her teeth chattered as she held her hand under the hot tap, feeling it turn from cold to tepid to cold again. When it turned icy she gave up on the idea of a wash and just dabbed at her face and neck with a smear of coal-tar soap, before pulling the new nightie over her head. It was made of white flannel with a pink ribbon at the neck and it was meant for a smaller child, judging by the way it strained across her ribs and dug into her armpits. She wondered what kind of little girl Lorna thought she’d seen in that high-ceilinged visitors’ room at Sinclair House. Perhaps miscalculations occurred quite often. Perhaps children had a tendency to look small in the context of an echoey orphanage.
Virginia emerged from the bathroom unable to remember where her bedroom was, and as she stood there, trying to think, she listened to the wind over the last gurgles from the basin. Or was it just the wind? It sounded different now: all rhythmic and juddery, like someone who can hardly breathe for crying. She bent her head to listen, before creeping along the landing to the top of the stairs and peering over the bannister.
It was Lorna. She was sitting on the bottom stair with her knees hunched up and her head tucked inside her arms, and Clem was standing over her with one hand over his eyes, pelting her with whispered words.
‘… so you always say,’ he was whispering, ‘but if that’s true, then why are you always hiding from me? I come into the room and you shove a bit of paper on the fire. I ask what you’ve been doing all day and you say, “the usual”. I ask you what you’re thinking and you say, “nothing”.’ He threw his hands in the air. ‘It’s enough to make a man commit … Lord knows what. And now this.’
Lorna held herself more tightly, like someone waiting for a storm to pass. She didn’t reply.
‘I thought all women wanted children? I thought that was the whole problem with – with us? This is the best I can do, Lorna. I’m sorry, but it’s the best I can do, and you can’t even … For God’s sake, what kind of human being are you? Do you want me to take her back? Is that it? Is that what you want?’
When Lorna only shrugged, he grabbed her by the shoulders, but she flung him off and backed up the stairs, hissing like a cat.
‘Get off!’ she whispered. ‘Go away! Why won’t you just go away?’
Clem came after her, but halfway up the stairs she sat down abruptly and wept into her hands. He stopped – equally abruptly – and closed his eyes. ‘Oh God,’ he muttered, pulling a handkerchief from his sleeve and tossing it into her lap. After a minute Lorna shook it out and blew her nose and Clem said, ‘Sorry,’ but he said it in the same bitter tone he’d been using all along.
Virginia leaned over a little further, anxious to try to understand what she was seeing, and her own shadow loomed on the wall above their heads, sliced through by shadow-bannisters. She moved back quickly, before they could notice it too, and though she stayed a little longer she couldn’t make out what they were saying any more, and wasn’t sure she wanted to. It was bad enough to intuit the gist of it; actual words might stick like splinters in her mind and fester there.
She tiptoed back along the landing and forced herself to imagine another cold walk along the flint wall, back towards the bus stop and Sinclair House. It might not happen – she had a feeling that the orphanage didn’t countenance refunds or returns – but it was better to picture it all now, so as to be ready if it did. She found her pink-lit room and stood in the doorway, picturing the scene with all her might. Lorna would ask her to keep the mittens, out of sheer politeness, but she was sure to want the navy coat back. Clem would feel sorry for her and offer up fusty sweets, but he’d be disinclined to hold her hand this time, or call her ‘old thing’.
The curtains were still half open and Virginia went and stood between them, resting her face against the glass like Lorna had done. The wind from the marsh made a constant drone, which you hardly noticed at all until you thought about it. It never whistled or gusted, it just went on and on, as if the whole house was falling through space.
If Clem did come and say goodnight to her, then she was going to ask him, straight out, whether or not they’d keep her. It had to be better to know one way or another. She stood her ground when she first heard his feet on the stairs, but as he reached the landing her nerve failed. When he was a few paces from her room, she switched the light off and darted between the cold sheets.
‘All right, Vi?’ he whispered, lowering himself on to the end of the bed. He sat there quietly for a while. Virginia breathed slowly and made no answer, but perhaps he could feel her pulse drumming through the mattress springs, because he knew she was awake.
‘Listen, Vi,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t worry about Lorna. She’s pleased as Punch you’ve come.’
Virginia opened her eyes. Clem was sitting hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his face turned towards her. The landing light was behind him, so she couldn’t see his expression, but she could feel his gaze as if it was a tangible thing, with a reach and weight all of its own. She gave up pretending to be asleep and sat up.
‘Tomorrow’s a Wednesday, isn’t it?’ he said.
Virginia nodded.
‘Well, Wednesdays are Mrs Hill’s day off, and my day for going up to town, so you two will have the house to yourselves. You’ll be the best of friends before the morning is out, mark my words.’
He fell silent after that and Virginia waited nervously. He had something important to say – she knew it – but he was too kind to get to the point.
‘I was thinking …’ he began, at last, and she leaned forwards, readying herself, the tight seams of the nightie boring into her underarms like wires.
‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘if you’d mind calling her “Mother” or “Mum” or some such? I think she’d like that.’
Virginia let out a long breath. Was that it? She nodded, quite calmly and slowly, and heard herself saying, ‘Yes. Yes, all right.’
The mattress wobbled as Clem sat up straight, placing his hands on his knees. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s very good.’ He paused, as if he was going to say something else, but he thought better of it and stood up to go.
‘Clem?’ Virginia leaned so far forward that she could have seized his hand, if she’d dared, and there was a tearing sound in the vicinity of her left armpit. ‘Shall I call you “Dad”, as well?’
‘You can if you want to,’ he replied. ‘Do you want to?’
Virginia pretended to think. ‘No, not really.’
She sensed his smile in the darkness, just as she’d sensed his gaze before.
‘Well, that’s all right with me,’ he said, as he stood up. She tensed, expecting the awkwardness of a goodnight kiss, but he mussed her hair instead and she burrowed under the sheets.
She thought he’d gone, but he was still there when she surfaced, standing in the open doorway.
‘Vi?’ He ran his finger over the doorframe, like a craftsman in search of minute defects. ‘Keep an eye on her for me, will you? I don’t just mean tomorrow but generally, if there’s ever anything – I don’t know – anything odd, just be sure to tell me. Will you?’
Virginia nodded, anxious to show how helpful she could be, and how lacking in natural curiosity. Clem nodded back, though he didn’t seem particularly satisfied.
‘I worry about her,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
A moment later he went away, leaving the door ajar and the landing light on.
She fell asleep thinking about names and colours. ‘Lorna’ was a green and gold name, like sunlit trees in summer, but ‘Mother’ was white, like a blank piece of paper. ‘Virginia’ was as clear as water from a tap, while ‘Clem’ was black, like peat, and smelled of smoke and leather and wet earth.
IT ISN’T THE dawn that wakes the old woman, but the lessening of the darkness that begins an hour or two before, as lengths of grey and silver start to show in the sky.
As soon as she opens her eyes she sees the curlew’s skull on top of the dressing table. Even in the deepest depths of sleep she hasn’t forgotten, but it’s still a shock to see it sitting there, so full of its own significance, with its watchful eye sockets turned towards her. She could lie here and contemplate it for hours, like a holy woman at a shrine, but she decides to get up, and the cat yowls and clings to the sheet with his claws as her legs move from underneath him. She continues to stare at the skull while her feet are searching for slippers, and the cat jumps to the floor with a thrash of his tail.
Virginia fumbles for her stick and shuffles to the window: one of the rags must have worked loose overnight, because the frame is trembling inside its casing like a bird in a trap. She pulls a pile of tights from the back of the armchair and rips off one of the feet with her teeth. The nylon scrap fits nicely between frame and casing, and she jams it down with her fingers until the breath of outdoor air is stifled and the window falls still. She will continue to perform such little routines today. Tomorrow, the house will have to take care of itself.
Clem’s desk?The dining room?Lorna’s mothball-smelling wardrobe?The attic?