In Another Country (8 page)

A minute later, while I still stood there in my borrowed army greatcoat, I heard a woman's voice calling from behind my shed, from in among the old bulb fields, calling his name, Eddie! Eddie! in a tone which sounded familiar with the tribulation but still not able to bear it. I turned, she appeared, she was bare-headed, wearing a big coat, which she huddled around her unbuttoned, over a long floral dress, and her feet in wellington boots. Her hair was as white as the sea when it slides back off the headland down the sheer cliff into the making of the next assault. Everything in the child-man who had lumbered off towards the shore was written in the lines and in the aura, in the whole spirit and bearing of her face. My son, she said. He's gone towards the shore, I said. She made a little cry, called out again, Eddie! Oh Eddie, don't go hurting yourself! and hurried away. I followed and saw her find him, scold him, wrap him in her arms, lead him by the hand down the sand path between the Pool and the sea.

 

17 December

 

I witnessed a thing last week you might have liked. There's a spit of pebbles at the south end covered at high water but running out to a lichened castle of rocks that stinks of birds, grows a rank verdure and is never covered. I came over the hill, one of the pocked-and-blistered-with-burials small hills, and saw a man out there on that low-water rope of stone and he was busy building. I got off the skyline quick, to watch. I was in the dead bracken, blotted out of view, like a hunter, watching him. About midway, where it would be covered a fathom deep, he was building an arch. I watched two hours, wrapped in Mary's father's army greatcoat, while the man exposed and utterly intent worked at his arch. I saw that to get the thing to stand he must build inside it also as it grew, supporting it all the way and especially, of course, where the curves, the desire of either side to meet in a keystone on thin air, began. He, by his cleverness, aided those pillars in their wish to curve, become the makings of an arch and meet. How he worked!—with tact, with care, with nous and cognizance of what any stone of a certain size and weight and shape could do and couldn't do. And when it was made and the arch was fitted around and relying on the merely
serving
wall of stones, I prayed a prayer such as I hardly ever prayed in all my time with the monks, that his keystone would hold and the two half-arches, so needing one another, so incapable of any life without, would by their meeting and their obedience to gravity (their suicidal wish to fall) over the void would hold when one by one he took his servant necessary stones away. It held: stone rainbow on its own two heavy feet, because the halves of its bodily curve had met and all desire to fall became the will to last miraculously forever. The man, the builder-man, stood back and contemplated it and nodded. Walked all round it, pausing, viewing it from every angle, nodded again, glanced at his watch (acknowledging he would die) then set off fast from the spit of pebbles to the path, I suppose to catch a boat. And I crept down from hiding to have a close look at his work.

The tide, far out, had turned. I came back later and watched by starlight till the waves, washing in from either side, had entered under the arch and it stood in them. Any big sea would have toppled it but that was a quiet night, the ripples worked as the man had, little by little, very gradually and as it were considerately turning air to water. I watched his work disappear. Back in my bed I thought of the two curves meeting, the keystone weighing them secure, the water flowing and swirling through and over and all around. And I got up early, before it was light, and found my way down there again, past the Pool with its lapping and its queer aquatic voices, past the hotel with its anxious manager, to see the stranger's arch, whether it still stood. And it did! It had withstood the reflux and stood there draggled with green weed under the flickering beginnings of an almost lightless day.

The arch survived two more tides, then the sea got rough and when I went next there was a heap of stones and only its maker or a witness of its making would believe that such a thing had ever been.

 

Sunday 20 December

 

Some foul weather, I've been confined, for work, in the hotel. Chris is trying to persuade Elaine not to bother with university—waste of time—but to continue round the world with him. At the end of March he will resume his plane ticket. He thinks he will skip the rest of Europe and head straight for Goa. She should come with him, he says. Elaine isn't sure. She might stay on here, she says, if Brian offered her work for the season or if there was anything going in the café or at the post office. Chris says she should think bigger than that. Europe's finished, he says. She should come along with him, he'll show her a different life. Sarah is furious with Chris. She has short black hair, very bright eyes. He tells me she's probably a lesbian. She tells me she knows for certain he's made the same offer—what exactly is he offering?—to a Polish girl who works in a bar on Halangy, a Lithuanian girl helping at the school on St. Nicholas, and doubtless a few more. She tells Elaine she should go to university, get a degree, and consider his ‘offer' after that, if she must. Elaine points out that Sarah, with her degree, is painting the hotel kitchen, same as her. That's for now, says Sarah. I've got better ideas than trailing round the world after a beach-bum. Chris denies he's a beach-bum. He's got a diploma in hotel management. Any woman coming along with him might do very well for herself, in Australia.

They have these discussions while we work or around the table at coffee time. I like all three of them. Sarah is very forthright, Chris is a bit afraid of her. He must be ten years older than Elaine but when Sarah is speaking neither he nor Elaine looks very self-confident. Chris tells me his mother came from Essex—Chelmsford, he thinks. She was in a home with her little brother and the home sent her, without her brother, to Australia, to another home, somewhere in the outback. She had a bad time, Chris says. She died when he was ten. He doesn't know who his father is. The Christian Brothers looked after him. He says in his opinion he did pretty well to survive all that and get to college and come out with a diploma in hotel management. I agree. All I say is Elaine needs some qualifications too, for her self-defence. Really I meant self-realization but I couldn't think how to put it. Anyway, self-defence isn't far wrong. Chris shrugs. Elaine tells me the holidays she had on Enys were the best times of her life. The family was happy then and she values the holidays even more now that it isn't. When she has an afternoon off she visits the old places again. They stayed in a house by the beach where the bonfire was. I asked her did she remember Eddie at all. Yes, she said, poor Eddie and his poor mother. The first time she saw him she screamed and ran away but after a while she got used to him. He was only a child, she said, although a grown man. Once he gave her a wedding-cake shell, the way a little boy might. I've still got it, she said.

 

Christmas Eve

 

Brian's passion is family history. One good thing about being closed, he says, is it gives him time to work at that. He spends hours online. Even when he opens the bar for an evening he'll go to his room after they've all gone home, switch on, and at once he's back in 1911 or 1901. Those censuses, he says, are a lifeline to him. He shakes his head over the superabundance they open up. Last a lifetime, he says. He is very anxious to get things right, but, of course, having worked at it for some years now, in fact since the children were born, he's well aware that absolute certainty is impossible. Before the censuses and all the other resources came online, when he and his wife were still living in Guildford, he'd go down to the National Archive and root around for hours, whenever he could. And he wrote to surviving relatives in Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, to get their stories. He has an impressive collection, still being added to, of wills, deeds, private correspondence and certificates of births, marriages and deaths. Mostly he researches his wife's side of the family, it is more interesting than his, he has got much further back on her side than on his own, to 1685, to be exact, and he expects in the end he'll be able to prove they came over with the Conquest. Herself, she wasn't a bit interested in her family's history and whenever he told her something he'd found that he found very interesting—for example, that her maternal great-grandfather, a carter in Lower Broughton, was illegitimate and very likely the son of a priest—she looked at him in a way he remembers vividly now she has gone. Still he carries on with her side of the family more than with his, he still wants to know where she came from, so to speak. Of course, when the censuses were put online and you could spend all the time you liked in your own bedroom studying them, you pretty soon had to face the fact that an awful lot of things just didn't tally. Family stories handed down as gospel were quite often flatly contradicted by those lists of people resident or visiting at a certain address on 31 March 1901 or 2 April 1911. A Thomas Huntley, for example, dealer in calico, on Brian's side, always said to have abandoned his wife, a Gracey, daughter of a clerk in a tram company, and to have fled to Ireland on the day of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, is recorded in 1901 at 14 Goole Road, Tadcaster as head of the household with his wife and four children, among them Brian's great-grandmother through whom, presumably, the story that he was the black sheep had come down. On the other hand, you couldn't always assume the official record was right and the family story wrong. Surely not everyone told the truth on census day (many told nothing at all) and as a hotel manager Brian knew perfectly well that what people said about themselves wasn't always the truth. It only started to look like the truth if you wrote it down. And of course, if it ever got on to an official record card or on to a police computer then it looked very true indeed, until somebody proved it false.

Now Brian thinks I'm interested in family history, and perhaps I am. He thinks I'm as interested in his family history and his wife's as he is himself. So he might say, for example, without any preliminary, By the way, their first house wasn't where I thought it was—11 Littleton Road, near the river, in that very insalubrious area—it was 311, one of the newest, out near the racecourse, almost in open country, so they must have been better off than I've been supposing—they being his wife's great-grandparents.

He is trying to forget it's Christmas. Well, that's not true. He's going to open the bar tomorrow and give everyone a drink and a mince pie who cares to come. That's typical of him, he does what he thinks he ought to. But for himself he's trying to forget it's Christmas.

 

I've been wondering would I have been quite useless as a father.

 

I counted thirteen swans on the Pool today. The water was very turbid, the wind blowing strongly. I saw them through the hotel window, I was painting the frames inside. It moved me to tears, how white they were on the turbid water and how they held steady against the wind, or tacked and steered into it, or let it drift them when they chose.

 

Elaine tells me that Sarah isn't in the least a lesbian, not that it would matter if she were. Men, especially men like Chris, always call women lesbians if they answer back. Sarah's degree is in marine biology. If
she
stayed, Elaine says, it would be to do some good.

 

A hedge of pittosporum when you've trimmed not just the tops but also the face of it there in a bright sun if the wind comes across, it shivers as though the shorn condition were hard to bear.

 

I've noticed that for some days after rough weather the sea may continue to be very troubled. The wind has lessened almost to nothing, but great rollers ride in from somewhere far far out. There might be no wind at all but a sea arrives that looks worked up by a tempest. I had taken to calling it the phenomenon of insufficient cause but that's not quite accurate. It's more a want of explanation. Such a sea and not a breath of wind. No apparent reason. That's closer. Of course there's an explanation, but far out, far deeper out, beyond my wits and senses.

 

Some nights you are as clear as the brightest and most definite among the many constellations. Other nights you look threadbare, the winds of space blow through you, your shape is still just about discernible but only by me and only because, even breaking up, it reminds me of something.

 

Mary tells me that before the war her father made the children's toys. She told me this when I told her I'd found an old treadle fretsaw and thought I could get it working again. He made a big dolls' house for the first two girls, all just right, very exact, with the proper furniture in every room, everything neatly and brightly painted. He made a monkey dangling on a wire between scissor sticks and when you pressed the bottom ends together the wire tightened and the monkey did acrobatics. And he made a yacht for the first boy, Joseph, with all the rigging perfect. He called her
Star of the Sea
. Mary remembers a day when Joseph—he's dead now—sailed that yacht on the Pool and the wind blew her right out among the swans and how upset Joseph was to see her out there in the middle among those big creatures. And Father said not to worry, and fetched the little punt up from the beach and launched it on the shallow Pool. That was the first time he gave Joseph an oar and said they should row back from the middle together, once they'd rescued the yacht. At first they went round and round like a leaf, not advancing at all, but then Joseph got the hang of it and they came in and was Joseph proud of himself! I said there were a couple of hulls I'd found in the workshop and also some rigging but that had perished. Mary said, You'll find all sorts in there. I found his marquetry knives, I said, and two or three packs of the veneers you need for marquetry. He made my mother some beautiful things, Mary said. One was his own boat heading out down the channel at dawn for the pots out near the lighthouse. We've still got that one. What became of the others I don't know. I don't suppose many do marquetry nowadays. He was often down here in his shed after the war, but he didn't make much, less and less in fact. Or he would go out in his boat but not really for the fishing.