My dear Marvellous, the card began.
I hope this letter reaches you and finds you well. Last weekend I went fishing with my grandfather and I talked about you, about your kindness. I am studying now, business, at Atlanta University. It is not a perfect world, the world I inhabit. But I have a future and not so long ago many men my age didn’t. But this time the fight is different.
We were taken by surprise at Omaha Beach. It was chaos. Many boats sank before they could land; often blown up by mines just below the surface. We scrambled from the landing craft and ran into heavy gunfire. We hid behind burned-out tanks and beach defenses and bodies. We were trapped and needed to retreat. To go left or right? That was our choice. In that moment I remembered your words, Marvellous. I went left, as you told me to do. I ran left. Those who went right fell. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you.
Henry
Marvellous held the postcard up to her eyes again and studied his script. She saw gratitude and promise in the flourish of his hand. It had been a long time since she had cried, but she knew she didn’t need her tears any more because there was no point in tears outliving eyes, so she let them fall.
And that was how Drake found her an hour later. As he came towards her, she looked up and said, Henry’s all right.
I’m glad Henry’s all right. But are you all right? he said.
Yes. I think I am, and she reached for his hands and brought them up to her cheek. His cobalt-blue fingertips shone bright under the warmth of a benevolent afternoon sun.
It was late when Peace got back to the bakehouse. She went inside and placed her bags in the cool. She poured herself a glass of water and came back out to watch the spray of colour begin to bruise the evening sky. She felt tired, exhausted in fact, having spent the afternoon away looking for a worthy flour supplier. The millers had been brusque and unhelpful, and she had sifted through bags of flour like a prospector sifting through silt. She knew what was gold and she knew what was fool’s gold, and she knew the price of gold and would not pay a penny more. She taught them more than manners that day.
A blackbird sat on the memorial cross. Its song was bright and incessant, last song of the day. The bird revived her, hopping from the horizontal to the vertical. Hop hop. Song song. She went back inside to refill her glass and she was about to prepare for a night of baking when her sight was drawn back outside to the glinting granite cross. It was coated by the last buttery rays of sun, and it was this evening yellow that brought out the vivid blue of his name.
Not S Rundle but his full name, Simeon Rundle, her brother, for all to see. It was neatly scripted in bright blue paint. She touched the S with the edge of her little finger. It was sticky but dry. She leant against the hedgerow surrounded by primroses. She drank her water and watched the sun slip below the valley casting out tears of red and gold and pink and mauve.
She lay awake in the early hours, restless, spooning the curved back of impatience. She opened the window wide, not a sound stirred. She walked down the stairs into the calm familiar smell of her baking. She opened the back door and knelt down. She leant close to the willow hoop, hoping to hear the rumour of love. A light breeze sifted through the fishing twine, and the razor clams and whelk shells clacked. All she could hear was the sound of the sea.
44
Drinks at 7. No need to dress up. MW
That was the note that was pinned to the boathouse door together with a small trumpet of cowslip.
Drake hadn’t bothered to heat the bath water, the day had been warm enough as it was. He was in a good mood, a light mood. The troughs were dug out on both banks and the first of the slats added. He dried off quickly and moved the metal tub out of the way by the door.
He ransacked the boathouse for a mirror, but only the glass from a carefully positioned balcony door offered up any kind of reflection. His hair was scraggy, he pushed it away from his forehead. It had been weeks since he had thought about the things that kept his hair in place or made his skin smell nice, but he thought about them then, and searched through his suitcase to see if anything from his old life remained.
He took out a white shirt. It smelt of laundry soap. It felt good on his skin. He did up the top button and loosely knotted a blue woollen tie. He rolled up his sleeves because his cufflinks had long gone. He found a small tube of Brylcreem, the end rolled like toothpaste. He squeezed the pomade on to his fingers and smelt it. Thought it would do. He sat in front of the glass door and ran it through his hair. With a comb he styled it the best he could and wondered why he was bothering about his appearance so much. No need to dress up. That’s what she had said. But he was.
Marvellous brushed out her hair and tied it back in a bun. She smoothed her hands over the front and pinched her cheeks as she had always done. She bent down and opened up the cupboard beneath her bed. She took out a clean lavender-smelling fishing smock that had once been red but had now faded to pink. It complimented the tone of her skin well. She slipped it over her head, and in the words of someone-or-other, felt a million dollars.
And then as best she could, she applied lipstick to her wide-smiling lips. At this point she thought a mirror might be useful, but it had last graced the wall back in 1929 – not that she would ever remember the date – and it had been broken up and used in a wind chime. It didn’t make sense to have a mirror; she was an ageing woman and a child at the same time: the confluence of two rivers, and everyone knows that confuses the fish.
No need to dress up, that’s what she had written.
She reached down to the wireless and turned the volume up as high as it would go. The caravan began to vibrate with song. She rocked side to side in Paper Jack’s old boots.
Peace reread the note that had been pinned to her door with a stem of bluebell. She couldn’t remember the last time she had ever dressed up and wondered if the requirement to not dress up was actually harbouring a secret request to dress up.
She stood back from the mirror. She stood in profile and smoothed her bust. She had always had a good bust and Wilfred said she had a better bust than Rita Hayworth. She pulled nervously at the pale yellow cuffs that hung slightly too high above her wrists. Her hands seemed even larger than they normally did, had a strange resemblance to bread paddles. She liked the dress. It was the only dress that had ever suited her and she had bought it for Wilfred’s funeral. In his instructions he had forbidden her to wear black but her grief had forbidden her to wear anything jollier than moss green. Moss green matched her eyes, and between her moss-green eyes and her moss-green dress was her wide mouth, now painted orange. She tried to look objectively at her colour palette but she couldn’t. She knew she looked like a marrow. But a beautiful marrow, Wilfred would have said.
She wished she had unsensible shoes and wished for stockings with seams, and she had never wished for those things before. She combed her fringe and checked that it ran evenly across her brow line. She put on a tailored Harris Tweed jacket, grabbed her handbag and ran out through the bakehouse door.
No need to dress up. The words collided in her mouth like marbles.
She was hot and sweaty by the time the riverbank came into sight. The boathouse door was ajar, and she was aware of how nervous she felt. She waited until her breathing had settled before she called out his name.
Come in, called Drake. It’s open.
She entered the quiet space and found him about to drag a tin bath out of the doorway.
Hello, he said. You look hot.
I think I’m overdressed.
Have some water.
She went over to the earthenware flagon and poured out a large glass of cool water.
Delicious, she said. I feel better already.
Of course you do. Tears of a saint, that stuff is. I’ve drunk it since I got here and I haven’t had worms.
My gosh, said Peace. That is holy. ’Spect yo
u’ll be walking on it next.
And Drake laughed and she removed her tweed jacket and let the cool breeze from the balcony doors blow across the pale hairs on her arms.
Thank you, she said.
You don’t need to thank me. Have another glass.
No. Thank you for Simeon. I wanted to come earlier, but . . . Thank you, that’s all, for putting things right for him. For me. And they are right now. So—
And Drake wrapped his arms around her and she leant into his shoulder and smelt washing powder and Brylcreem, and she drank in the Shh that came quiet from his lips.
Here, let me help you, she said, pulling away.
They took an end each and carried the bath out of the door and poured the water on to the honeysuckle and briar rose that framed the wall outside. Drake looked at the sun, looked at his watch. We should head down, he said.
That’s interesting, said Peace, pointing to the picture above the hearth.
Is it? I did it. When I was a kid.
Who is it supposed to be?
My father.
You look like him.
I’m not sure that I do. I never knew him, you see. It’s just how I imagined him.
And was he kind, your father? In your imagination.
Yes, I suppose he was.
Brave?
I’m not sure about that. I pieced him together from my successes and failures. Bad swimmer but good at running. That kind of thing. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of myself as brave, he said, and he went and picked up his sweater from the bed.
And he’s always watched over you? said Peace.
Yes. I suppose he has.
Like God?
Drake laughed. I don’t believe, I’m afraid.
Hmm, said Peace, putting her jacket back on. But you believed in a man you never knew and never met watching over you? she said.
Come on, said Drake, smiling, holding the door open for her.
And Peace said nothing more as she walked on ahead towards the waiting boat.
45
They set out in the crabber on the dot of seven. the evening was warm, the sky tender, and gulls played tag on the thermals as herons took off smoothly into an iridescent blue westerly sky. Marvellous manned the tiller, looking over now and then to check on Drake whose fear of water had begun to ease over the past weeks. But she knew that it would take nothing more than a small rogue wave to send him reaching for the bowline or gripping hard on to the well-worn seat slats. He ducked down as Peace splashed him with water from her trailing hand. He looked up at Marvellous and smiled.
He looked happy in that moment. And she would remember his smile suspended in that one delectable moment because it was radiant and she knew he had a chance now, to live well.
As they approached Old Cundy’s boat, they stood to attention one by one and saluted the good ship Deliverance as they passed. The soft evening light bathed them, dripped off them, loosened the awkwardness that had initially threatened to stifle the evening, an ill-at-ease quiet caused by strange clothing in familiar surrounds. The old woman tried to catch a glimpse of her long-gone self in the young woman next to her. She studied that dance of attraction, that funny little jig practised by all creatures – the beautiful, the plain, the slim, the big, the unruly – the same exquisite dance handed down by generations and danced flawlessly by all. To Marvellous it was as clear as day that the girl had feelings for Drake. And there he sat, comfortable like a brother. Smiling at her like a brother, unaware of his attractiveness, still bruised by the blows of the past.
Kids, eh? thought Marvellous, and she began to laugh and it was catching, and the three of them laughed as they passed the sandbar and manoeuvred through the narrow way that kept inquisitives out and large craft at bay.
It was here they encountered a world moving forwards and not forgotten. The air tinkled with the sounds of ropes against masts, as pleasure craft swayed on the dividing currents and flaccid sails flapped like washing on a line. Here, the boat turned left into the Great River where they faced open water and the horizon beyond.
Marvellous watched the two young people sit up in unison and look intently ahead, both unaware that their shift was caused by the infinite pull of that unreachable dream, that shimmering silver line that caused hearts to soar, then sometimes to deflate.
It was more like the sea there, wild and erratic. Fierce winds were known to funnel down through the estuary dismantling the unanchored and the insane. But there was no wind that evening. No clouds pulling at the sky and the only ripples across the water were caused by a casually draped hand stretching out from a primrose cuff, tickling the surface as if it was the cool skin of the man opposite.
The small craft hugged the rocky shoreline where fields and trees fell down to lap at water’s edge, where bobbing buoys marked crab pots, and sandy coves enticed the swimmers, the brave and the hardy ones. And always in the distance, the lighthouse keeping watch over the Manacles Rocks, submerged and murmuring beneath the ever-swelling tide, waiting. In 1898 one hundred and six people drowned as those rocks bit deep into the good ship Mohegan and feasted well. Nets were required to pull in bodies not pilchards that week.
There! shouted Marvellous, and there it was, the Great Port with its cranes and tugs and sprawl of lights calling the world to its historic hearth. And there were steam funnels spewing black and pleasure craft and fisher craft – red-sailed luggers, and big sailing vessels from Another Time barely hanging on to seaworthiness.
She remembered again the ghost of the Cutty Sark with its holds of tea, and magnificent sails billowing and racing with the wind, sailors in the rigging unfurling speed. Saw again packet ships with Jamaica sun hot on their sterns, and Mission Boats helmed by chaplains, God’s hand at the tillers, and Big Houses for Important Men who paid thruppence an hour to pilchard-packing girls. And she saw again the fisherman who used to gather along the shores to eye up the morning like a half-dressed woman.
A seagull flew low in front of her, and she followed its path turning left at Henry’s castle where lights from fisher cottages guided them in, twinkling in promenade rows along the coast road. Marvellous pulled back on the engine and the crabber veered gently into the harbour.
She moored easily by a set of stone steps that had been laid down three hundred years before. Cheers and laughter greeted them from the hotel in front. Drake gave Marvellous his arm and said, Come on Vivien Leigh, and the old woman skipped up the granite blocks as if her knees were as light as air. Peace waited for Drake to come back and help her, too, but he didn’t, and she followed behind with an ache in her chest that she initially thought was the hastily eaten bun that she had devoured on her way down to the creek. But when she felt she was as close to tears as she was to a smile, she realised the affliction was something more momentous than heartburn. It was the rare ingredient that Wilfred Gently had once spoken to her about. She paused briefly at the top of the steps, closed her eyes and let the evening sun lick her from head to toe. She felt like a flower whose petals were finally unfurling in the heat of the unknown. Now I have the chance to become a great baker, she thought.
Peace! shouted Drake, from the doorway.
Peace’s heart skipped and so did she. I’m coming! she called, and bounded across the road towards him.
Wondered where you got to, said Drake. I was worried you got lost. Come on in and tell me what you want to drink.
And those were the exact words the young fisherman with blond curls overheard. Ned Blaney had been sitting on a nearby bench overlooking the harbour when Peace had risen like a figurehead into the evening light. He was born knowing the moods of the sea but he was not so good with women – everyone knew that – and he should have spoken to her there and then, whilst she was alone, before the man had come out and called to her. And now here he was, sitting on the bench too shy and too pol
ite to cast for another man’s fish. The view of the sea no longer held him. He turned and looked longingly towards the doorway of the Amber Lynn pub.
It was a simple fishers’ tavern, nothing fancy, a road-width back from the harbour, and up a short flight of stairs. It was originally named after Henry the Eighth’s second wife, but centuries later took on the name of a fishing lugger that had mysteriously disappeared in the famous week-long mists.
A piano still stood to one side with a full ashtray from the night before resting on its lid. At the back was a timid hearth fire, rather heatless. On the floor were sawdust and scraps of discarded seaweed. On the walls, photographs of long-gone men and boats, and some photographs of record hauls of pilchards extending along the harbour front as far as the eye could see. There was a bar with bottles of whisky and rum and barrels of ale, and pewter tankards for the regulars, drinking edges worn smooth by familiar lips. There was a ship’s bell, rung solely for last orders. Pipes spewed smoke, the air was hazy and warm and the soft murmur of conversation was about fishing and women, two subjects that old-timers once said were like acorns and dogs, and should never mix.
It was the last pub Marvellous had been to with Paper Jack and she looked about eagerly for old faces to share that bygone time with. But the old faces were now young faces, hidden by low-pulled caps and ragged beards. Old Crisp the barber would have had a field day with this lot, she thought. Every Saturday with his steady hand and brisk blade he had spewed out so many clean-shaven and ansum men that the women were so giddy with choice they had fought over them in the street like gulls fighting over scraps of fish.
They took the table by the window overlooking the river. They clinked glasses and said, Cheers, just as the moon and sun did the same outside. Drake drank steadily from his pint glass, savouring the rich taste. He lit a cigarette and stared out at the geometric pattern of fishing nets drying over the harbour wall. Boats were bobbing on the corrugated water, and he thought they looked beautiful, as the lowering sun cast a rich and golden light against their tilting multi-coloured hulls. He thought Missy would have loved it, and surprised himself by such a declaration. Maybe this was the moving forwards that the old woman had once spoken about. You move on and bring them with you, she had said. We leave nothing behind and they come willingly. Have you come willingly, Missy? Have you?