In Another Country (10 page)

 

6 January

 

An orange wellington boot (the right foot), cuttlefish, a double sachet of emergency fresh water made by a firm in Bergen, a net tangled with its rope and plastic floats, a doll's head, the plastic handle of a knife, a packet of rusks from Belgium, an orange starfish (dead and stiff), ribs and vertebrae of, I think, a dolphin, plastic bottles (milk, bleach, shampoo, antifreeze, marmite), one trainer (left foot), one green rubber glove (left), cotton buds, a gin bottle, a very soft grapefruit, chunk of polystyrene, bamboo pole, twelve-foot length of four-by-four, dogfish egg, cube of wood off a pallet, plastic fish-crate from Coruna and another (a yard away) from Goedereede, plastic clasp for a downspout, biro, oiled-up guillemot, plastic tulip, lid off a funerary urn, a cork, a condom, three cartidges, a black plastic bag, claws.

 

I had another visit from Eddie, earlier than last time, I was at my table, breathing in the steam of my coffee, watching the light becoming strong enough for a winter's day, and suddenly there was his face again, in the glass, as though mirrored, and again it shocked me to the heart and in a bad state some moments passed until I understood that what he wanted was my friendship. He tapped at the window, pointed to his face, then at me, smiled—the smile of a clown—showed me his palms, nodded his head, pressed his right hand on his heart, again with the pointing finger indicated me, and raised all the features of his face in a question. I let him in, and between glee at that and wonder at the place he had been let into, he got into a sort of ecstasy beyond the power of his hands and face to express. I sat him down on my chair, gave him coffee in my other cup, and cut him a slice of the cake that Mary had given me the day before. He can't really speak. At least, he can't make recognizable words. Instead he makes a great variety of sounds such as infants do when they are used to the babble of adult language all around them but can't or don't wish to imitate it yet—gurglings, pipings, chuckles, little runs of chirrups, squeals and cries, all in the timbre of a grown man's voice, wonderfully expressive. In a deep sense I at once knew what he meant. I've never been in the presence of such good nature and simple happiness before. Nothing in all his noises, gestures, bearing qualified in the least his joy and his goodwill. For that time he was absolutely good and joyful, unconditionally, without any safeguard, wholly open and delivered up in it. Everything about my shed delighted him. He gripped and stroked the plain chair, knelt at the bed (where I was sitting) and laid his hands flat on the rough blanket and on the cold white sheet folded back in a band across it. Fleetingly he laid his cheek on the pillow. Then he resumed his seat, crammed the cake into his mouth and gulped the coffee. His very pale eyes have the sags of idiocy under them, he drools, his hands are big, a stray white tress of hair falls over his eyes and he wipes it away. After a while he became quiet and fell to studying the objects in the room with a grave seriousness. My finds along the one shelf, arranged in a line next to the few books, attracted him, he rose, lifted up each in turn with extraordinary care, examined each, looked from it to me and back again to it, as though to understand the connection. So I watched myself being appraised in my finding, taking up, bringing home, setting down to live with: the long delicate skull of a gannet, the skull of a seal, three of its vertebrae, the severed and entirely desiccated wing of a tern, a fragment of wood honeycombed by shipworm… I could hear the wrens, the sparrows, the thrushes, the starlings, the blackbirds that with their various noises begin my every day. And the breeze in the tamarisks and the surf up under the dune. The light became strong and bright. Eddie stood at the shelf, his big hands were so considerate they could have cradled the skeleton of a shrew, and he looked at me and at the object in question and made the noises of his wondering and pondering.

He was there an hour, then Lucy came, anxious as ever, found him, scolded him and said she was sorry I had been intruded upon. I said he should visit whenever he liked, I'd be glad of his company and if he didn't find me in he should make himself at home and stay as long as he wished. And you'll know where to look for him, I said to her.

 

16 January

 

New moon. Brian has gone to the mainland to see his wife and children. He made an appointment. He is staying in a B&B just around the corner from the family home, though his wife said there was no need to go to such lengths, he could have slept in the spare bedroom. He says she wasn't unfriendly when he spoke to her, but quite definite that she doesn't want to live with him, not here, not over there, not anywhere. But she agrees it is only fair he should see the children now and then. She has emailed him some recent photographs of them (not of her) and promises to do that at regular intervals.

It is not just because he misses her and Amy and Zoë that he has arranged this interview (as he calls it). He also wants to ask her some questions for his family history, about her childhood in a village on the Lancashire coast. He spent his own childhood scarcely ten miles away, but inland, in a small town, and of course their experiences were very different. He admits her origins and her local habitation always did have, in his eyes, a romance quite lacking in his. The coast there is very flat. It is a queer zone of brackish water, salt grass, little channels, thousands of peewits, and the sheep graze, as it seems, far out on a terrain that belongs by rights to the Irish Sea. He and his wife went back there sometimes when they were courting and it has haunted him ever since. So now he has drawn up a list of questions—seventeen in all—which he hopes she will answer for him, before it is too late. He showed me the list. Among his questions are: What was her mother's Co-op number? What was the name of her Gran's farm where she used to look for eggs and where the pig burst out of its sty and scared her half to death? Which uncle was it who got stranded in his car—a Ford Popular?—on the dyke road during the 1953 flood? Were the toilets in her primary school outside in the yard? What was the name of the woman who walked seven miles to the nearest railway station and took the train to her mother's each time—nine times in all—she felt her baby was about to come?

I could remember the rest of Brian's questions if I lay on the bed under my army coat and thought. And not seventeen but seven times seventeen are the questions I could think of to put to you.

 

The tides are big. Brian left early, while there was still water for the launch, and we, his workforce, took the day off. Chris sat down at the office computer to plan the next few months of his life. He still tries for Elaine, but rather half-heartedly. Not that he's doing any better with anyone else. Sarah, Elaine and I went out on the Merrick Bay flats.

The islands make a broken rim around a sunken plain which floods on the incoming tide and empties on the ebb. At low water the walls of the lost fields continue downwards and out of sight under the sand. The maps still show the vanished causeways. There are obliterated hearths and wells. The tombs are on the surviving hills. And rammed up into the roots of the tamarisks, quite close to the boathouse that was his home for fifteen years, are the few remaining bits of Alf's boat, held down by the stones that smashed it.

Going out on the flats is like trespassing. You know you mustn't be found there when the owner returns. I've been out on my own, at Merrick Bay and elsewhere, several times, and always with that feeling of brief licence. In the two young women it excited a hilarity rather as the wine and the dressing up had done at Brian's party on Christmas Day. Poor Brian was away, they had the day off, they were pleased with themselves, they said I shouldn't go working in the fields for Nathan but should come out with them, on the flats. The day was cold and very bright with a breeze that gave the look of hurry to the ebbing water and an edge to their elation. In fact I had already decided I wouldn't work for Nathan. I was intending to go out, but alone, to get some idea of where Alf had vanished, and I kept to that purpose, but kept it to myself, and in a way I should perhaps be ashamed of I cherished it all the more in the company of Sarah and Elaine.

Sarah, at least to begin with, had her own serious purpose for which she carried a chart, a notebook, an indelible pen, a dozen small plastic jars, a lens and a sharp knife in a hard leather satchel slung across her shoulder so that it rested on her hip. Her idea was to collect some specimen periwinkles, of the four species, from different tide zones, and also fronds of serrated wrack to study what grew on them. Elaine helped her for a while. The tide was still falling. I watched the birds—two spoonbills, a rare arrival; the more and more common egrets; the local heron and swans; the countless waders I don't have the knowledge to distinguish; all in their characteristic fashions going about the endless business of probing, uncovering, stabbing, scooping, an intense almost leisurely concentration on getting enough to eat, the sea having withdrawn its protection from millions of edible fellow-creatures. Such grace and menace. The birds moved away from us only as far as they judged necessary. They kept to their purpose, warily.

I watched, walked on, halted, watched. But really I was drifting towards the diminishing channel that still made two islands of Enys and St. Nicholas, I felt pulled as the waters were, so easy has it become to lapse out of human company. Then the girls called out, not my name, just a crying, not gull or tern or curlew or oystercatcher, but of that order of cry, not-human, fit for the bubbling and coursing of salt water and the stink of weed. I waited, they came over. Like me, they were barefoot, their boots on the laces around their necks, trousers rolled up. Sarah said, We've done enough work. Elaine said, We've had an idea. Her tone was like Sarah's when at the party she asked was I obedient, would I do what they asked, was I chaste? I nodded. Yes, a drink. There's time if we're quick.

The channel was a wide river, shallow and flowing fast. Odd, an ocean quaffing a lagoon. The girls let go of me—they had me by either arm—and paddled through at once, wetted no higher than the knees. From the other side they called across. But for an interlude I was going into myself, into the room in my imagination where Alf stumbled, went under, surfaced, struggled and the cold tide like a shark took hold of him and dragged him off, never to be seen again. The girls hallooed, they were as strange to me as selkies. I splashed through and gathered them against me. I was high on the thought of Alf as he began his afterlife. Drinks, I said. We've got an hour.

The Dorrien Arms is no distance. We went there barefoot with our boots around our necks. A brandy each, quickly. Then wine, with bread and smoked mackerel. Monk, said Sarah, we like you when you get us tipsy. Their faces burned, from the flats. I never knew such proximity of life. The two young women, they might decide anything for the good of their lives, they might turn their gaze in a sweet and predatory way on anything, and take it. And there I sat, close and opposite, in pure admiration. You and you, I said. I drink to you. And Alf, already dead, turned in the current and set with it out towards nowhere, towards never being apparent to anyone ever again, he turned with the acquiescence of the dead and headed away and in the solemnity of our bread and fish and wine I took their hands, felt their warmth, kissed their fingers, relinquished them. Monk, said Elaine, you're nice when you've had a drink or two. The hour passed. There was no fog but it was winter and the afternoon did not have long to live. Another half hour. Come on, I said. Drink up. Your mothers would not forgive me.

And so we left, barefoot, the light of outdoors, brilliant, chased with breeze, leapt at everything, jaunty and careless, and all the phenomena were flung into keen appearance and the light that did it to them shouted triumphantly. And we walked out through the coils and spurtings of lives that live under the sand, over popping wrack and the harsh debris of shells to the channel we had to wade. The tamarisks of Merrick Bay were clearly visible but at a distance that looked too great ever to traverse. The tide had turned, the current had reversed, but if you slipped it would not deposit you safe on an islet within the inhabited ring. The ring is broken, the gaps are large and many, the suction of deep water will take you out. I thought we were not where we had crossed. Almost certainly we were not at the shallowest fording place. Wait, I said. But the girls stepped in and went knee-deep at once. Sarah took off her satchel, held it high and proceeded, Elaine following. The water split in a briefly cresting wave around each in turn, rose to their breasts, then lapsed. They stood on the far side shrieking with laughter. I took off my coat, held it in a bundle above my head. I could not have imagined the cold and the force of the water, the two together as one embodiment, and now I can, it went into my stomach, so now I shall remember it and in the imagination feel it again. An army coat, if you let it get sodden through, would take you under at once. I've told nobody—till you—anything at all of what I learned.

We hurried. Elaine, who could hardly speak for shivering, said Sarah said I should come back with them and be warmed up. But I parted company when we were near the beach. In my shed among my papers on my table top there was a gift for me: a vase, I guessed from Eddie and from the tip. My coat was dry, I went to bed in it. The vase was more than a bit chipped around the rim, but none the less beautiful—like a gourd in shape, with red poppies on a black glaze. For some time I shook with cold and my mind ran as fast as the water in a delirium. I wanted to hold the vase, have its roundness between my hands, offer its darkness and its poppies to a beloved person. And in my fever of cold that seemed to me an entirely reasonable wish and I felt sure it would be granted. Then I must have slept and when I woke it was dark and I was warm, glad, hungry.