Read A Half Forgotten Song Online
Authors: Katherine Webb
“Maybe I don’t mind so much. If he wants to draw my picture again,” she said at last. Delphine smiled encouragingly.
“You really don’t mind?”
“No. He’s a very good and famous artist, isn’t he? That’s what you told me. So I suppose I . . . I should be honored.”
“I’ll tell him. He’ll be very happy.”
“You should feel
humbled
that he wants to draw you,” Élodie corrected her. But Delphine merely rolled her eyes, so Dimity ignored the remark.
T
wo days later, the thing that Dimity had been most dreading occurred. She was upstairs in her bedroom, getting changed for breakfast after feeding the pig and the chickens, collecting the eggs, and emptying the chamber pots down the privy. Her bedroom had a small window facing north, over the approach along the lane, and as she arranged her hair into a twist at the back of her head, stabbing it with pins to hold it, she saw Charles Aubrey approaching the cottage. He had on his close-fitting dark trousers and a blue shirt with a waistcoat done up against the early morning cool. With her heart hammering, Dimity put her face up to the window glass and craned her neck to watch as he came right up to the door. What had Valentina been wearing? She tried desperately to think; hoping she wasn’t still in her robe, the diaphanous green one that swirled dangerously and let the outline of her body show through, with all its shadows and patterns. She debated whether she should run down herself, get to the door first and make some excuse to send him away. The kitchen table was strewn with dead frogs. She pictured it, and shut her eyes in horror. Dead frogs with their soft bellies slit open and their guts scooped out into a bowl; bodies cast aside with filmed, sightless eyes and webbed feet dangling. Valentina had two charms to make: one to break a curse, one to keep a new baby safe. The pink-and-gray entrails would be packed into glass jars and sealed up with wax; sprigs of rosemary wound around the tops as if the herb could hide the death inside.
Too late. Dimity heard him knock, heard her mother at the door almost at once, and then their voices rising muffled through the floor. His a deep rumble, soft like the hum of a breeze; Valentina’s low and hard, challenging. Dimity inched to her bedroom door and cracked it open as softly as she could, just in time to hear the front door close, and two sets of footsteps move into the sitting room. With that door shut, there was no way she could hear what they were saying. The Watch had walls of solid stone, walls that had absorbed centuries of words, and kept hold of them. Five minutes or so later, she heard him leave. She waited as long as she could force herself to and then went downstairs, wearing her trepidation like a garland.
Valentina was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette with one hand and picking up odd fragments of entrails with the other, flinging them into the bowl.
“So,” she said heavily. “That’s where you’ve been running off to, when you should have been helping me. Tarting yourself around with posh incomers.” Dimity knew better than to try to defend herself. It only made Valentina more angry, more vicious. Cautiously, she pulled out the chair opposite her mother and sank into it. Valentina was wearing the green robe, but at least there was an old apron tied over it, smeared with blood and stains. Dirty, but opaque. Her rough yellow hair was tied back with a piece of twine, and her eyelids were still smudged with last night’s green eye shadow. “There was I, thinking you were out finding us useful things. Wondering what was taking you so long on every errand. Now I know!” Her voice rose to a bark.
“I was, Ma! I swear it—only Delphine’s been helping me—she’s learning all the plants and helping me . . . that’s Mr. Aubrey’s daughter . . .”
“Oh, I know all about her, about all of them. He’s been telling me all about it, though I never asked to be told. Peering into every corner, curious as a cat. I had to shut the sitting room door, because I couldn’t stand his roving eyes no more! He had no business coming here, and you had no business telling him he could.”
“I didn’t, Ma. I swear I never did!”
“Oh, you’ll swear to anything, won’t you? I see that now. I won’t know from one minute to the next if you’re telling me the truth from now on, will I? Shut up!” she snapped when Dimity tried to speak. They sat in silence for a minute, and Dimity looked at her hands and heard her pulse thump in her ears while Valentina took long, aggressive pulls on her cigarette. Then, like a snake, she struck, reaching forwards and grabbing Dimity by the wrist. She pulled her arm onto the tabletop, the soft underside uppermost; held her glowing cigarette an inch from the skin.
“No, Ma! Don’t do it! I’m sorry—I said I was!” Dimity cried. “Please! Don’t!”
“What else have you not told me? What have you been doing up there with them?” Valentina asked, with her eyes screwed up suspiciously and her breasts swaying behind the apron as Dimity fought to pull her arm away. Her grip was like iron. “Stop pulling at me or I’ll cut your bloody arm clean off!” Valentina snapped. Dimity went still, her body slack with fear even as her heart rose up in her chest, perilously high. She didn’t think her mother would go that far, but she couldn’t swear to it. Sweat broke out across her brow, chilly and slick. A glowing ember came loose from the cigarette and landed on her skin, where it sank in and smoked. At once a blister began to form, a white bubble at the center of a bright red ring. Still Dimity did not flinch, too frightened to move even though the pain of it was shocking. Tears blurred her eyes and she had to swallow several times before she could speak.
“It was just as I said, Ma,” she said frantically. “I was playing with the little girl, and teaching her the plants. That was all.” Valentina glared at her a moment longer, then released her.
“Playing? You’re not a baby anymore, Mitzy. There’s no time for playing. Well then,” she said, putting the cigarette back between her lips. “Some good may come of your lies after all. He wants to draw you. Reckons he’s an artist. So I told him he’d have to pay for the privilege.” The thought seemed to raise her spirits, and after a while she got up and put her arms above her head to stretch; then she wandered off towards the stairs, ruffling her fingers through Dimity’s hair as she passed. “Finish those charms while I’m resting,” she said. Only once she had left the room did Dimity dare to blow the ash from her arm. Her chest was so tight it was hard to draw the breath to do so. She turned the blister to the light, saw the way the surface shone. She waited, careful not to disturb her mother with the sound of her crying. Then she got up and went to find witch-hazel ointment to smear onto the burn.
S
o how did your mother react when Aubrey came to ask if he could draw you? I suppose that’s the kind of thing that not everybody would be keen on. Especially with you only being, what, fourteen, was it?” The young man opposite was talking, asking more questions. He had a way of leaning forwards and steepling his fingers between his knees that put her on edge. Overeager. But his face was kind, only ever kind. Her left arm was itching, and she rubbed her thumb along it, pressing the pad into her slack flesh until she found the scar standing proud of the skin. A small, smooth bobble of hardened tissue the exact size and shape of the blister it replaced. She’d kept knocking the scab off inadvertently, kept losing the plasters Delphine stuck over it.
I was frying liver and the fat spat
. Underneath the scab the wound was deep and angry. The silence in the room was profound, and suddenly she sensed more ears than the young man’s waiting for her to answer him.
“Oh,” she began, then had to pause, clear her throat. “She was pleased, of course. She was quite a cultural woman, my mother. And free-spirited. She didn’t hold with all the whispers about Charles and his family, passing round the village. She was happy to have such a famous artist draw her daughter.”
“I see. She sounds like a very liberal woman . . .”
“Well, when you’re something of an outcast yourself, you’re drawn to others in the same boat. That’s how it was with her.”
“Yes, I see. Tell me, did Charles ever give you any of his drawings of you? Or of anything? As a present, or to say thank you for posing for him?”
“Posing for him? Oh no, I hardly ever posed. He didn’t want drawings like that, not normally. He was always just watching and waiting, and when everything seemed right to him, he would start. Sometimes I wasn’t even aware of it. Sometimes I was. He would ask me to stop, sometimes.”
Mitzy,
don’t move. Stay exactly as you are.
Once, when she had been stretching, standing up to look at the sunset after hours of shelling peas. She had been thinking of going home, and how much she didn’t want to. After being at Littlecombe, with all the company and the laughter and the clean smells, The Watch seemed dark and damp and unwelcoming. Her own home.
Don’t move, Mitzy
. So she’d stood for over half an hour with her arms on her head, crossed over her hair, the blood running out of them until at first they tingled, then went numb, and by the end felt like they were made of stone, and no longer belonged to her. But she didn’t move a muscle until his pencil went quiet. This always marked the end—for a while his hand kept moving, making sweeping gestures over the page, but the pencil no longer touched—it simply moved, like a third eye, inspecting. Then at last his hand stopped, too, and he frowned, and it was done; and Dimity felt that cold, tumbling feeling inside each time—the feeling of something wonderful ceasing, and the longing for it to resume. She’d had no inkling then, of what was to come. She hadn’t seen the darkness gathering; hadn’t been prepared for the violence that lay in wait.
Z
ach sat in front of his laptop, surrounded by notes and papers and catalogs, and suddenly realized, almost twenty-four hours later, how neatly Dimity Hatcher had sidestepped his question about Aubrey ever giving her pictures as presents. He was intrigued by her reaction to the picture of Dennis he’d shown her—the way she’d blushed and seemed reluctant to look too long. He opened two magazines and the recent Christie’s catalog to the pages of the Dennis pictures, and set them side by side. He was sitting at a dark, sticky table in the snug of the Spout Lantern, and he’d had two pints of bitter with lunch, which had been a mistake. His head now felt warm and slightly slow. Outside, the sun was a smear of gold over the dusty window glass. He’d been hoping that the alcohol would ease his thoughts; let him make abstract leaps through the stodge of all his notes and come up with a new plan, a plan of brilliant clarity. Instead, his thoughts kept returning to his dad and his grandpa, and the way the silences between them had sometimes seemed to grow to fill the whole room, the whole house. Grow so heavy and tangible that Zach would squirm and twist and find it impossible to sit still, until finally he would be sent to his room or into the garden. He remembered the way his grandpa would criticize all the time, and find fault, and how crestfallen his dad would look with each remark. A bit of car maintenance gone awry, the incorrect decanting of wine, a critical school report for Zach. Zach couldn’t count the number of times he caught his mum glaring blackly at his father.
Why don’t you ever stand up to him?
Then his father would be the one to twist and fidget in discomfort.
“Pete’s sent me over because your long face is putting off the punters.” Hannah Brock was standing by his table with a pint in her hand and a nonchalant air. Surprised, Zach sat up straighter, and was momentarily lost for words. Hannah took a swig from her pint and gestured at the piles of paper and files surrounding him. “What is all this? Your book?” She tapped the nearest catalog with her fingertips, and Zach noticed a bold stripe of dirt under each of her nails.
“One day it will be. Maybe. If I can ever get my head around it all.”
“Mind if I sit down?”
“Not at all.”
“There are plenty of books about Charles Aubrey already, aren’t there? Can’t you just copy one of them?” She gave a wolfish sort of grin.
“Oh, I’ve done all that. When I started this thing years ago, I read them all, then all his letters, then I went to all the places where he’d been—born, grew up, educated, lived, worked, et cetera, et cetera. And after I did all that I realized that my book . . . my book, which was going to be all new and essential and visceral . . .”
“Was exactly the same as all the other books?”
“Precisely.”
“So what’s brought you here now, to finish it?” she asked.
“It seemed to be the best place,” he said. He looked at her, curious. “You’re very interested all of a sudden, for somebody who didn’t even want to give me the time of day before.” Hannah smiled and drank again. She was already halfway down her pint.
“Well, I’ve decided you can’t be all bad. Dimity’s a pretty good judge of these things, and you’ve managed to talk your way in there. Perhaps I was a little . . .”
“Hostile and rude?” He smiled.
“Suspicious, before. But, you know, a lot of people come and go from here. People on holiday, people with weekend homes or summer homes. People with Aubrey fixations.” She flicked her eyes at Zach. “It’s hard on the people who live here. You invest time and energy getting to know people, welcoming them, then off they go again. After a while, you stop bothering.”
“Dimity told me that your family had lived here for generations.”
“That’s right. My great-grandparents bought the farm at the turn of the last century,” said Hannah. “So, what else did she tell you about me?” Zach hesitated before answering.
“That . . . you lost your husband, some time ago.” He glanced up but her face was calm, unruffled. “And that you’re working really, really hard to keep the farm going.”
“Well, that’s true enough, God only knows.”
“But not today?” He smiled again, as she drained her glass.
“Well, some days the sheep are all out eating grass without a care in the world, the to-do list is as long as your arm and the coffers are full of cobwebs, and there really is nothing else you can do but get pissed at lunchtime.” She stood up and nodded at his pint, barely a third empty. “Another?”