He stopped at a lit brazier with the Lost and the Poor and the Broken and he was all of them so he took his place around the flames and when he had given out his sixth cigarette he realised he felt nothing other than cold, so he kept on moving, kept on wandering. He cut through to the quieter streets behind the Strand. Propositions crept from doorways, from alleyways, carried on the scent of smoke and over-ripe perfume, and those propositions were punctuated by a lazy smile and he was so tempted because he felt so fucking lonely but he passed them by, didn’t stop.
He kept going east and soon the sooty tenement streets of childhood loomed familiar between the bomb sites, and his footsteps echoed loudly against the cobbles with the same displaced tread they had always had. He’d gone full circle and was back at St Paul’s and that bloody river, and it was fat and dark and bloated and dozens of craft were moored near and far, and the cranes looked on and the power station puffed and the lights looked beautiful and they shouldn’t have, fuck they really shouldn’t have. He leant against the Embankment wall and drank from a bottle of gin. A single firework exploded overhead. The scattering of forlorn embers across a quiet London sky.
Drake ate in the flicker of firelight. He stared into the flames, looking for truth, but the truth he already knew because it came in the stillness, came as the boathouse creaked in its own sad sea. The truth was he had never known Missy Hall, not really. He had run towards a feeling and the feeling was his, and there had been little else there.
His sight was drawn again to the haunting outline above the hearth: Something the old man couldn’t live with. He got up and went to his suitcase. He flicked the catch and took out the folded sheet of paper that had been slipped under his door when he was a boy. He carefully unfolded it. Placed his hand in the drawn outline of Missy’s hand. ‘Not too much, Freddy. Never forget me.’ Her scrawl was erratic even then. He placed the paper gently on to the fire. It curled and danced, rose in the updraught like a small prayer lantern, and disappeared across the sky with the whisperings of childhood love trailing behind like a comet’s tail.
In bed, he listened to the lapping waves and failed to sleep. He rose edgy with the early morning light and as he padded across the cold uneven floor, he looked down at the empty hearth and the dusty mound of clinker. For there, lying alone on the slate stone was the feathered remains of a small piece of charred paper. Two words stood out, dark and clear: Forget me.
His chest heaved and he staggered back to the bed. He held his breath and dived into a bottomless pit of sleep.
20
The old woman came back the following night. She came back and Drake felt calmer. He watched her carry the same heavy pot over the threshold and he took it from her straight away and placed it on the cast-iron rest. He laid the table, spoons, napkins and glasses and ale, and put logs on the fire and the fire burned fiercely and the pot bubbled and the boathouse came alive with heat and his expectation. He even asked if she had done something different with her hair. She looked at him strangely and mumbled something about nonsense. He watched her ladle the vegetable stew into two bowls and place them on to the table. Stew! he said. My favourite! he said, and he pulled out a chair for her as she sat down to eat. Thank you, he said. Thank you.
They ate in silence, the stew thick and good, and the old woman didn’t take her eyes away from her spoon and Drake didn’t take his eyes away from her. Eventually, he wiped his mouth and quietly said, You haven’t finished your story, by the way.
Marvellous looked up. What story? she said.
The story you were telling me. I waited for you last night but you didn’t come.
I didn’t?
No.
Didn’t you eat?
Yes I ate. But you didn’t come.
Marvellous broke off a corner of bread and dipped it in her stew.
You were telling me a story and the story’s not finished. You can’t leave a story in the middle.
How do you know it was the middle?
Because it wasn’t the beginning. And it wasn’t the end.
How do you know it wasn’t the end?
Because you were fourteen years old. That’s what you said. And now you’re eighty-nine. There must be more.
I’m eighty-nine? said Marvellous. Are you sure?
I think so.
And Marvellous shook her head and continued to eat.
You have to finish a story, said Drake.
Says who?
Says me. Says anyone. And Drake pushed away the empty bowl and lit a cigarette and stared at her. The old woman finished her last mouthful and wiped her lips. She took out a bottle of sloe gin from her pocket and filled her glass. She drank it in one.
Stories, like nature, tend not to end, said Marvellous.
Drake flicked his ash on to the bowl and said, You got to the part where your father had just died. You had brought him back to the boathouse and had entered it for the first time. You saw what their life was like. And as he died, you felt your mother’s presence and she was waiting for him. And had never left. And they turned to you and said—
Can you let us go, do you think?
Yes, he said. That’s right.
And I could say nothing.
Yes.
The old woman adjusted her glasses and rubbed her forehead. She drummed her fingers upon the table and waited for the memory to return. And I could say nothing, she said again.
She remembered she had to wait for night to grow. It was a new moon, shed little light, and she wore a hat with a stub of candle secured by river mud at the front. It gave just enough light. She lifted her father’s body from the bed and he was no weight at all, for all he was had passed. She carried him down to the river; negotiated her footing easily into the boat and placed him gently on to the bottom boards.
She chose the tides well and kept great pace with the out-haul of the sea. It was quite beautiful. Masthead lights rose and fell like wounded stars in the darkness. She sailed round bays and coves until she found deep water, private depths away from lighthouse beams, and there she lowered the sail and let the boat drift at will.
She whispered words her father had taught her until a fierce cloud of phosphorescence had encircled the boat. She knew then that it was time. She lifted her father and gently rolled him into the depths that immediately became the bright hold of her mother’s arms.
She gripped the side of the boat and stuck her head in the water so she could watch them go. But she was too young and it wasn’t her world to see – clear sight being the privilege of age and passing time, and at fourteen years she had neither.
Sky and sea were one. Each rose and fell at the mercy of the other and she was suddenly consumed by a dark absence that sat in her guts and placed fear at the very core of life to come. She took in the sails, lay down across the seat slats and cried. She knew she was only a day away from an unforgiving sou’westerly gale that would toss the boat like deadwood and she prayed that it would come soon. She prayed that it would take her. So she could join them.
She awoke, not to death, but to the sound of shingle scraping upon the hull, and the anchored stillness of land. There had been no gale. The boat instead had washed up on a lee shore that was immediately familiar in the early morning light. She was alive. The world was still, the sea as calm as a millpond.
She uncoiled the bowline rope and pulled the boat along the shallow shoreline until it joined the Great River. From there she sailed the river past the lighthouse and the castles and the huge sailing vessels of the fleet, past the rotting outlines of hulls whose sailors had rotted elsewhere, until she turned towards the confluence and sandbar into the encroaching shallows. And she dragged the boat up the ancient creek, disturbing shrimp and crabs as she went, and she dragged that boat against the waters as if it was a reluctant pig going to slaughter. And turning the bend she saw the whi
te of the boathouse and the church in the brittle light. She secured the boat and sat down on the old mooring stone. The creek was hers now and yet she felt nothing. It had been the longest walk of her life for no one was at the end waiting for her. She slept through winter. Missed Christmas and awoke to a New Year. She felt so lost. Until the first bluebells and ramsons coloured the green-brown floor of her world.
Hymns lifted the air as she dug in the river mud and uncovered a feast. She filled pails at the well and by the time the people had filed from the church she had a fire going outside, and a pan bubbling, and shells were opening their mouths but nobody looked at her.
She grew vegetables and baited lines that she cast from the shore. She ate well, sold the rest. But still nobody looked at her. And then she grew her hair and began to swim as her mother had swum, and that was when they looked at her. Water has memory. Theirs were stirred, hers reawakened for everything she needed to know was in that water. She scared them as her mother had scared them. Her nakedness scared them as her mother’s had scared them. She was in bloom and everything around her was buzzing, and the men raised their nostrils and smelt her in the air and grinned before swallowing their shame.
Apple don’t fall far from the tree, said Mrs Hard.
That’s right, said Marvellous. Closer it falls, sweeter it tastes.
But she would let no one get close enough to taste.
Three summers had to pass before Marvellous’ life would change. One morning, she awoke to a loud excited knock on her caravan door.
Betsy’s about to have her baby! said a woman from the village.
Does Keziah know? asked Marvellous.
Keziah’s attending a death. She said you can do it. She said, you’re ready.
Five minutes, said Marvellous, and she closed the door to compose herself. Keziah said I was ready, she thought. Her stomach clenched and a cold clammy fear slipped down her back. She had never met a wiser Wise Woman than Old Keziah. She has taught me everything she knows, said Marvellous to herself. She said I am ready. She said I am ready. She said I am ready. And Marvellous repeated the sentence over and over as she gathered together the things she would need to deliver her first baby into the world.
The sun was high as she hurried up through the bosky wood. She caught up with the village woman at the start of the meadow, and together they walked silently through the cornflowers and marigolds and poppies until they got to the edge of the High Road. They saw Betsy leaning on the back wall of her cottage. Her cheeks were flushed, and Marvellous noted the steady deep rhythm of her breathing. She looked at Marvellous and said, Plug’s out and water’s have broke! Nipper’ll have me screamin’ soon.
Marvellous ran her hand down the woman’s inner thigh and sniffed the clear liquid. She looked up and smiled. Come on, she said, and she put her arms around Betsy and guided her back along the road, back past the folded-arm glare of Mrs Hard, back into the expectant cottage.
Water was boiling on the stove downstairs. The air was hot and clammy and the stench of pungent yeast had stolen in from the bakehouse. The gossips were upstairs in the bedroom and the birthing sheet was in place. Betsy groaned as she lay down.
Marvellous placed her bag on a chair by the window. She took off her shirt and from her bag unwrapped a clean smock, a linen square and a neckerchief. She put on the smock and rolled the sleeves high and she took a bar of carbolic soap over to the wash basin. The water was fiercely hot and reddened her skin immediately but she scrubbed her hands and nails and dried them on the linen square. She tied the neckerchief about her nose and mouth and went towards the bed.
She let her hands roam across the bump. The baby’s head was low and she could feel the slow instinctual movement of the uterus; the body knew what it had to do. Her senses came alive to each new alteration. She placed her ear against the bump and listened for the baby’s solitary beat. Nothing. Her mouth went dry, she felt dizzy. She shifted her ear but still couldn’t hear the tiny heart. She felt the eyes in the room watching her, felt the mother’s eyes a heavy weight upon her. She ran her hands over the bump, and coughed and cleared her head and she leant down again and listened for life. There! Oh there it was, the galloping ratatatat of the baby’s beat. She laughed with joy and the women in the room took that joy and swallowed it whole.
Just the one is it? asked the mother.
Just the one, said Marvellous.
Thank fuck, said the mother, and the women laughed.
It was all exactly as she had learnt from Keziah. Watch the face, the face don’t lie. And the face didn’t lie because two hours later the nature of the labour changed. The mother went into transition and the pattern of contractions changed and the cervix opened and amidst a volley of deafening screams and curses, a healthy baby girl popped her head out into the world.
Marvellous tied the cord with black silk and cut the cord and presented the mother with a gift of a girl. That’s when the mother asked if Marvellous would name her baby and Marvellous said that she would gladly. The women laughed and said, Right, Gladly it is!
Hours passed. Shadows lengthened and the sun fell wearily and still Marvellous wouldn’t leave that room. Not till the placenta had come away well, till the baby had suckled well, not till she knew there was no bleeding between mother’s legs. The gossips woke her in the end and said, You’re done. Time now for you to go. All’s good, ducky.
Marvellous left a cottage filled with laughter and a new baby’s snores and a proud returning father and there was so many thanks that day – so many – it was as if she had entered the world once again holding a potential previously unknown.
She stepped out into a warm black summer night. There was a light still on in an upper room of the bakehouse. She saw the looming outline of Mrs Hard at the window. Marvellous raised her hand and waved; it was not a day for recrimination or judgement.
She cupped her hand and drank from the standpipe, ran the excess on her eyes and face. She trekked back across the meadow and down through the trees in possession of the oldest secret known to man. She sat on the mooring stone and surrendered immediately to the down of night. She hadn’t slept long before she suddenly jolted awake. Thought she had heard the sweet call of a lark ascending. Unaware that it was actually the sound of her soul awakening.
Outside the boathouse, the breeze stirred. Shells and metal and bone danced against each other on the hanging twine, music of the night. Marvellous slipped off her glasses and put them next to the oil lamp. She rubbed the bridge of her nose where the plastic had left an indent. She finished the glass of sloe gin, dabbed her lips.
So? Have I given you an ending?
Drake stubbed out his cigarette. I don’t know, he said. I think it might be the beginning.
And she smiled and said, Good. Now you’re getting the hang of things, Drake, and she got up, picked up her glasses and headed towards the door. As the night air streamed in, she stopped and said, Can you hear them?
Hear who?
The saints. They’re up to mischief tonight.
Why?
Because they feel replaced. Ever since you arrived, they’ve felt that. And they’ll keep me awake and that’s for sure.
An owl hooted.
Midnight, said Marvellous, adjusting her gold fob watch and winding it well.
Drake looked at his watch. It was midnight.
Thank you, Marvellous, he said.
She stopped and turned. It was the first time he had called her that. She raised her arm and disappeared into the dark.
The wind picked up, and Drake looked out and saw the trees swaying. He listened to the old woman talking to herself. He thought that’s probably what happens when there’s been nobody around but dead saints for company.
21
It was the first of December when Drake finally emerged from the boathouse. Berries were bright and
red and hard. Winter had arrived.
Marvellous had woken him early and had handed him his slop bucket and a bucket of ash and had pointed to a flattened path up through the trees towards the outhouse and manure pit beyond.
His eyes squinted as they adjusted to the bright morning light. Calls from curlews and oystercatchers echoed around the creek and the air smelt fecund and the creek was not the fearful creek of his night-time imagination, but one of forlorn beauty, of something ancient and serene.
Up through the trees he saw the gentle rise of smoke, then the gypsy caravan for the first time. It was covered by wartime camouflage netting, and the fake leaves stood out unnaturally against the bare branches that surrounded it. Up close, the canvas was faded and patched, and once there had been writing on the side, but nothing of sense remained. A meat safe was secured to a pole at the side, and a small patch of land had been cleared behind, where vegetables now grew. A washing line joined tree to tree, and from old fruit crates a wooden shed had been built, doorless now, and packed with earthenware flagons – some with stoppers others open – fishing rods too and crab pots, tools, all sorts of tools, a tin bath and jerry cans of fuel. Secured to the side of the shed was a large metal-framed canvas kite smelling strongly of the sea.
He put down his buckets next to a battered lamp and climbed the caravan steps. A braid of damp seaweed hung from a telescope that was roped tightly to the outside slats. He pushed the door gently and encountered the strangest world he had ever seen. The room was still and warm, just the muffled sound of fire crackling in the stove, the occasional creak from the wooden wheels long embedded in decades of mud ’n’ mulch. The air was clear and smelt of pine, and something else he couldn’t put a word to, something feminine, something intoxicating. He went over to the bed and sat down. The wall opposite had been covered in shells: a mosaic of periwinkles and limpets mainly, hundreds of shells meticulously arranged in patterns of sea swirls and waves. And at the back, on the ledge below the window, in the dust and dark, a small bookcase housing a single book: a compact lockable ledger, hand-scrawled down the spine: The Marvellous Book of Truths. Drake pulled out the book and ran his forefinger down the words. He looked for a key but couldn’t find one. He put pressure on the lock but the lock wouldn’t budge. He put it back into the dusty chink for another day.