Rule Britannia (16 page)

Someone touched her on the shoulder. It was Wally Sherman. “Mr. Willis says come in out of the cold. He’s perfectly decent.”

She followed him into the room. Yes, the bed was in a different place from yesterday. But the most conspicuous change was not so much the bath in the middle of the room but the garments spread around the fire to dry. She recognized the gray trousers he had worn, and the navy sweater. The oilskin too had been given a soaking and was hanging from a clothesline fixed from the ceiling. Another thing, the gun had gone from the wall…

“Always the same on a Friday,” Mr. Willis was saying. “I give the place a thorough scouring, and myself as well. It’s the lesson my mother taught me. Ten we were in family, and I the youngest. Three of my brothers emigrated, two to Australia, one to Canada. I’ve never visited America, though I’ve long had the wish to do so. Have I left it too late, do you think?”

He smiled at the lieutenant and polished his spectacles. Oh, well done, thought Emma, Mad couldn’t have improved upon it. It must be that the Welsh, like the Cornish, were natural actors.

“Never too late to visit the States, Mr. Willis,” said Wally Sherman. “We’ll get you on a flight just as soon as everyone settles down to the new arrangements. There are going to be flights, you know, between our two countries, that all can afford, not just the wealthy. That’s part of the schedule.”

“I’m very glad to hear it,” replied the beachcomber. “I’ve been a rolling stone most of my life, and have come to anchor here for the time being, but that doesn’t say it has to be permanent, now, does it?”

“No, indeed,” said the lieutenant heartily, with another wink at Emma. “Well, Mr. Willis, to the business in hand. I…”

He was cut short, however, either because Mr. Willis was truly deaf or because he enjoyed his role as narrator.

“I could kill two birds with one stone, couldn’t I?” he went on. “Visit my brother in Canada first, perhaps, and then on to New York. We correspond, of course, but we haven’t seen one another for over forty years. He’s been married twice. The first, Edith, a pretty young woman she was too, she passed away with tuberculosis of the spine, a terrible thing, leaving three young children. My poor brother, heartbroken, he reared those three on his own, and then a neighbor, a widow, took pity on him, and they made a go of it together.”

The lieutenant’s smile, that had become a fixture on his face, began to wear thin. “Sure, sure,” he said, “the best thing they could do. Now, I don’t want to hurry you, Mr. Willis, but I’m on duty, you know, and I’ve got to press on.” He threw an imploring glance at Emma.

“Lieutenant Sherman is searching for one of his marines,” she explained, “a corporal who’s gone missing. That’s why he’s here. He wonders if by any chance you may have seen him.”

Mr. Willis put on his spectacles and stared at the lieutenant. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Excuse me for rambling on, when you live alone it becomes a habit. I talk to myself frequently. Would you tell me the circumstances, if you please?”

Patiently and clearly Wally Sherman related the story of the missing corporal. Mr. Willis heard him to the end without interruption. Then he shook his head.

“Had it been fine yesterday, instead of raining and blowing as it did, I’d have been bound to have seen him, that is, if he walked down to the beach. Always, when it’s fine, I go to the beach for seaweed for the garden, or driftwood for the fire. The wood burns better when it’s been in the salt water, you know, it doesn’t get sodden like it does up here under the trees. I give it a miss when it’s raining because my object would be defeated, don’t you see? Yesterday afternoon I had my pile of driftwood drying here by the fire, knowing I would need a good blaze for wash day. You see the bit of planking in the corner there? I’d say it came from a ship’s boat, and been in the water some time.” He got up from the stool on which he had been sitting and showed the plank to Emma and the lieutenant. “That’s oak,” he said. “Good stuff, too, you can’t do better than build with oak, but I shan’t burn it yet awhile. Can I make you both a cup of tea? I have a primus stove and it won’t take a moment. They laugh at primus stoves these days, and what’s more you can’t get them easily, but I wouldn’t be without mine if you offered me a fortune for it.”

Wally Sherman flashed a look at Emma and rose to his feet. “Thanks for your kind offer, Mr. Willis,” he said, “but this young lady has to get back for lunch and I must get back to my men. I’m sorry you haven’t been able to help us. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

“A pleasure for me too,” was the reply. “Had it not been raining the way it did yesterday I would surely have seen your fellow. I hope…” he paused, and stroked his chin, “I hope he didn’t take it into his head to try and walk by way of the beach round what we call Crane Point and so to the bit of beach the other side, especially with the flood tide. Tourists try it in the summer, and often enough I’ve had to turn them back. It’s the youngsters, you know. They think they have only to see a cliff to scale it. Bad enough holiday time, but in winter, after heavy rain, parts of the cliff fall away, and…” he shook his head slowly, “I wouldn’t want to try and scale those cliffs myself, either up or down.”

They had come to the door of the hut. The lieutenant held out his hand.

“Many thanks for the information,” he said. “We’ve had a helicopter out, and I think if Corporal Wagg had done anything of the sort we’d have known about it by this time. Good-bye, Mr. Willis. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“I would like to think so,” said the beachcomber. “You’d be welcome at any time. And I’d be dressed for the occasion too. I wish you luck in your search for the missing fellow.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Willis, and thank you,” said Emma.

No sign of understanding passed between them. He waited a moment, then withdrew inside the hut.

“Well,” exclaimed Wally Sherman, once they were away from the clearing, “he’s a real old character, but Jesus, does he talk!”

“It’s living alone,” said Emma. “It does it to everyone.”

The lieutenant put his hand under her elbow once again as they trod the muddied path back through the wood. “Then let’s you and I make a pact right now,” he said, “never, never to be solitary.”

They came to the edge of the wood where it bordered the plowed field.

“I’ll take a short cut up to the house,” said Emma. “I’m afraid the visit to Mr. Willis was a waste of time.”

“Time’s never wasted when I’m with you,” he replied predictably, “but you’re right, I’ve not got any information out of the old boy, except not to scale cliffs when it’s raining. Well, Emma, I guess I’ll have to get moving, back to the beach. I’d like to tell you we’ll be seeing each other again soon, but I can’t make promises on duty.”

“No,” she said, “of course you can’t. Anyway… good luck.”

He climbed through the wire that separated the plowed field from the grazing ground below, and, turning once to wave, was soon out of sight. Emma did not immediately strike towards the house. She hesitated on the bank, and on the brink of decision, too, whether to walk straight home or to have a final check with Mr. Willis now that the lieutenant was no longer with her. The latter seemed the wiser course, though instinct warned her not to plunge yet deeper into conspiracy—they were involved enough as it was—and it might be better to know too little than too much.

She retraced her steps through the wood to the hut, and he must have read her thoughts for he was standing there fully dressed, trousers, sea boots, gray turtlenecked sweater, oilskin over his arm, and she sensed he had waited there for her return. He let her approach right up to him before he spoke, and when he did it was in a half-chant, softly.

Emma had the same feeling of discomfort she had known earlier when peering through the window, but now for a different reason.

“I just wanted to thank you,” she said quickly. “The lieutenant’s gone to rejoin his men.”

The gray eyes glowed at her behind the spectacles. “We fooled him, didn’t we?” he said. “You and I between us. Tell your grannie we’re in the running for an award.”

She summoned a smile. “Yes, I will.”

“Never had a desire to visit America in my life,” he said. “Wouldn’t go there if you put the money for the fare into my hand.”

He locked the door of the hut with a key which was threaded through a piece of string, and slipped the string over his head and down under the turtle collar of his sweater.

“I’ll see what they’re up to down under. They won’t find much today, but tomorrow I wouldn’t put it past the fellow turning up a little worse for wear.” He smiled again. “Had to smash his head in a bit more before putting him in the water, and the sea will do the rest. Whatever the verdict, they won’t pin it on us.”

The horror that had been upon her the evening before, when she had her first sight of the dead corporal with Andy’s arrow between the eyes, came upon her once again. It wasn’t over yet. It had only just begun.

Mr. Willis moved towards the path at the edge of the clearing that was his own way of descent towards the beach. He was carrying his old canvas bag for driftwood in one hand and his peaked cap in the other. He bowed, made a little flourish with the cap, and put it firmly on his head. Then he held up one finger, jerking it towards the rear of his hut.

“If you see the boy Terry in hospital,” he said, “tell him all’s well. And I have the gely hidden where they’ll never find it. It might come in useful sooner than we think, you never can tell, can you?”

He was laughing to himself as he went down over the cliffs.

If there could be somebody, Emma thought, to whom one could tell everything. If, when one was in doubt, afraid, unhappy, when things were going wrong, had gone wrong, someone had infallibility, so that one knew, intuitively but logically too, that the right answer would come. This, in days past, was what people had from God. Thy Will Be Done, and if you were burned at the stake you died for the God you had served in the belief that He had once died for you. It was a kind of celestial tit-for-tat. When people no longer believed in God so much, chiefly because it became more and more difficult to visualize God’s day, where He lived, how He spent His time, possibly under such pressure from all that was going on in the world and in other solar systems that He really couldn’t take it anymore, belief in “isms” took His place. The particular ideology of the day held for a time among groups of people and then they got bored with it and passed on to something else.

The point was, even when two people loved each other, even when marriages were happy, when parents loved children and children loved parents, there was this separation, this division, there could never be complete union. That was why the USUK thing would never work. That was why even now, at home at Trevanal, there couldn’t be total understanding among them all. Terry, in hospital, did not know that Andy, back at home, had shot his arrow through the air and killed the corporal. The Trembaths did not know that Terry had spent the night at the hut, and that, without a doubt, he had been as careless of Myrtle’s “under-the-age-of-consent” status as had been Corporal Wagg. Mad did not know that she, Emma, had been what her grandmother lightly called “permissive” on Poldrea beach with Lieutenant Sherman. Nor did she know that Terry, her lamb, her first-adopted, had apparently been carrying gelignite when the fracas took place the night of the firework display. The matron and staff at the hospital did not know that Dr. Summers had deliberately concealed from them the real truth about his patient’s broken leg.

So we all hide something from each other, she decided, we all have secrets we cannot or dare not share, and it’s no use asking advice from God who doesn’t answer; and even when people did believe in God and thought they received an answer, the net result was the same muddle and chaos that we get today. You’re on your own… you’re on your own. That was the lesson to be learned from every encounter. Mr. Willis, last night’s savior, was also a little old man with a grudge against society, a chip on his shoulder from some long-buried past. Emma returned to the house and lunch with her grandmother hiding a questing heart under a flippant exterior.

“I deserve an Oscar,” she said, “and so does your Taffy. We both lied like troopers—and who invented that expression, one wonders? Anyway, it seemed to work. They’re now all down on the beach, and for the moment it’s not our problem.”

Mad, who had apparently left the sofa as soon as her granddaughter and the lieutenant had crossed the orchard, helped herself to liver and bacon.

“You missed the one o’clock news,” she said. “Rationing is to start, it seems.”

“Rationing? Whatever for?”

“Some difficulty with supplies, until USUK have established the new method of distribution, and God knows what that will be, they haven’t told us. Also, no doubt, they’ve got in a fine mess during the state of emergency, with food supplies piling up all over the country and no one to shift them. Therefore it’s to be rationing as a temporary measure, and you can bet that the urban areas will get first pick. Wasn’t this what drove the French peasants wild after the French revolution, when the city dwellers got all their produce and they themselves had to go hungry?”

“Oh well, cabbages forever,” sighed Emma. “Joe has rows of them in the kitchen garden. Colin will get as thin as a matchstick.”

“He’d eat cabbages raw if he were really hungry,” replied Mad.

Which went once more to prove, Emma thought, the correctness of her theory that the old didn’t care, or felt emergencies less keenly than the young. She herself had little appetite for the liver on her plate. She kept being reminded of what Mr. Willis had said about smashing the corporal’s face…

Later, when lunch was over, she went down to the basement in search of Joe. He looked up as she entered. He was laying out beetroot and onion in rows.

“We could get by on these for a time,” he said. “Onions are good for you, I heard that somewhere, and you can make soup with beetroot. Then I’ve got sacks of potatoes in the old scullery. You can’t starve on ’tatties, onions and beetroot, with some green stuff thrown in. The apples will last us through till apples come again, I told Madam that when we were picking them.”

He gazed around him with pride. The root vegetables might have been prize exhibits in some tent at an agricultural show, or even trophies won in a sporting contest.

“I wish now,” he said, “I’d put in a late crop of ’tatties to keep, but you know what Madam is, she likes to eat them when they’re new.”

She comes first, Emma thought, nobody else really matters. He’d die for her, as people in old days died for God.

“Joe,” she said, “what happened on the cliffs last night?”

He turned his back on her and began sorting some of the onions on a shelf. “I don’t want to think about it,” he said. “Please, Emma…”

“You have to tell me,” she pleaded. “I know it must have been awful. When Lieutenant Sherman came before lunch Mad made me take him to see Mr. Willis. He was going anyway to make enquiries, and I thought it best because of the possible danger. It passed off all right, Mr. Willis let on absolutely nothing. But after the lieutenant had gone he said… he said he had to smash…”

She couldn’t finish. Joe turned round and looked at her.

“When Mr. Trembath and I had circled the field, like he told us, we got out of the Land Rover and looked down over the beach. Mr. Willis was there already. The tide had turned. He walked over to the rocks at the far end, beneath where we were standing, and began scrambling over them—there was just enough light for us to see him. He did what we all of us do in summer, started to climb up Crane Point, and when he reached the top he took the sacks off the body, and just squatted there…”

“Yes?” said Emma.

“I asked Mr. Trembath what he could be doing, and he said he thought Mr. Willis was taking off the boots and putting them back on the corporal. We saw him pick up something, you know how some pieces of shale have jagged edges sharp as an axe, then Mr. Trembath said, ‘My God!’ and I suppose I was a coward, I couldn’t take any more, I looked away. There was a sound of a splash a few moments later, he’d chucked the body off the point into deep water, it was still blowing, if you remember, and the tide drift is easterly there. Then he put on his own seaboots and began scrambling back, carrying the sacks under his arm. I said goodnight to Mr.Trembath. Somehow I didn’t want to see Mr. Willis again. I came back home, and I went indoors and was sick. Then later I went up to say goodnight to Madam and to tell her what had happened.”

Joe leaned against the shelf where he had stored the beetroot. There was a small window beyond, grimy, with a cobweb stretching right across it. He stared through the window at his vegetable garden away up the rising ground behind. Emma took his arm, and they looked past the cobweb through the glass together. They saw nothing. They shared an image, each in a different way.

“What’s going to happen?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I think they’ll find the body.”

“Mr. Willis said the same. He said it would turn up.”

“They generally do.”

“What’s so frightening, Joe, is having got Mr. Willis into it, and Mr. Trembath. And there’s another thing, did you know Terry had gelignite on him when he fell? Mr. Willis has got it hidden somewhere by the hut.”

“I didn’t know,” said Joe grimly, “but I’m not surprised. I wouldn’t put anything past a few of Terry’s friends.”

“We won’t tell Mad.”

“No.”

Not that she’d mind, thought Emma, she would even say, as Mr. Willis had done, that it might come in useful sometime.

“Whatever happens,” she said impulsively, “don’t let’s have any secrets from each other, Joe. We must have implicit confidence, that if one of us hears something, or knows something, we tell the other. Don’t you agree?”

“But of course,” replied Joe. “It’s always been like that, as far as I’m concerned.” He seemed surprised at the question.

“Well, perhaps not always,” said Emma. “What I mean is, when things are trivial it doesn’t matter. We’ve never been in this sort of situation before. There has to be someone to trust, someone who never lets you down.”

Joe was silent. He was never a rapid thinker, and he must have been turning her declaration over in his mind.

“That’s what children feel about their parents,” he said at last. “I remember I did when I was small. I couldn’t make it out when mine suddenly went away to Australia and left me, I felt it was my fault, and so it was in a way. I’d let them down by not being clever like them. Do you know, Emma, sometimes I try to remember their faces, and I can’t, and it worries me. I think if they were dead it wouldn’t worry me so much.”

“I wonder,” said Emma, “I wonder… dear Joe,” and impulsively she held on to his arm. Perhaps he was right. It had never worried her much that the photograph of her poor pretty mother in her bedroom, which she still kissed every night from long custom, lacked reality and might have been a character in fiction out of an old book; but supposing Pa, instead of being a widower, had been divorced, and her mother was still alive, a pretty woman well preserved, married to someone else and living in Switzerland or America even. Would she have, as Joe did, a feeling of being let down, of abandonment, and that it had all come about through some fault of her own? This is the awful thing, she told herself, we can’t put ourselves into other people’s shoes. The only one to do that, and quite literally, too, was Mr. Willis last night, when he undid those laces and put on a dead man’s boots. But it was the corporal who went into the water, not Mr. Willis. We throw away things that might harm us, bodies, memories, dreams…

There were shouts and whoops from the sloping ground beyond the window and Colin and Sam ran past above, with Andy and small Ben in hot pursuit. Missiles flew through the air. Black Ben, his shining face grim and determined, hurled an enormous fir cone with a twig on the end of it straight into the back of his boon companion Colin. Colin, with a dramatic stagger, put his hand up to his heart and fell.

“Got him,” yelled Andy, and seizing his three-year-old companion round the waist he embraced him, tugging at his hair, in imitation of members of a football team when one of them has scored a goal. Colin was lying spread-eagled as the corporal had done the day before, and little Ben the marksman ran forward, picked up his weapon and brandished it above his head. Andy wandered over and kicked the recumbent Colin on the ground.

“He’s a gonner,” he shouted. “Let’s leave him to the crows.”

He ran off after the more fleet-footed Sam, tailed by Ben, while Colin, miraculously restored to life, seized the missile Ben had dropped and chased all three of them.

“Joe,” whispered Emma, “it’s not right, we shouldn’t let them.”

“No,” agreed Joe, “I’ll have to stop it. They’re treading down all my young seedlings up there, they must play somewhere else.”

Angrily, he brushed past her and out of the room to the back door to drive off the young fry from his territory, and it’s no use, thought Emma, he didn’t see the point, that was not what I meant at all. I’m still on my own…

It was dark once again, with curtains drawn, the boys in their own quarters, their bath time approaching, when there came the sound of an approaching car down the drive and three prolonged blasts on the horn.

“It’s Pa,” cried Emma, and ran from the music room where she was sitting with her grandmother, out through the front door and down the garden path to meet him. The tall, rather burly, familiar figure was getting out of the car, blond hair as Mad’s had been once but starting to go gray, her same rather beaky nose but more prominent, and then she was enveloped in his arms. He was wearing his hairy, clumsy old driving coat, she knew the smell of it so well.

“Hullo, hullo, hullo,” he said, kissing her on both cheeks—Pa always repeated words and actions—“Well, well, well, what a drive, what a drive. I left at ten, no, ten-thirty, and it’s now seven, continual hold-ups, if I hadn’t had my special pass I should never have got here at all. How is Mad? Is she upstairs? Is she in bed? Has Bevil Summers been again?” Pa never waited for one to answer his questions. He was always on to the next before you could frame your reply. He was lugging his bag from the back seat as he spoke. “Where’s Joe?” he asked. “Will he put away the car? I want a drink, I’m dying for a drink, I must have a bath too before eating. How’s Dottie, is she in good form? Those horrible children won’t be feeding with us, will they?”

“No, Pa darling, of course not. The little ones are probably in bed by now.”

“Thank the Lord for that. One doesn’t want to drive nearly three hundred miles non-stop and be met with a gang of shouting young.” He put his arm round his daughter’s shoulders, and they walked up the path together to the house. “Everything’s so quiet here. I can’t understand it, I thought you said you had commandos under every bush, helicopters springing from the trees. It’s all nonsense, nothing appears to have happened at all. Mother?”

His voice boomed through the house. She was waiting in the hall, arms open.

“My darling Vic.”

Emma, watching, was struck, as always, by the family likeness. Hair, eyes, noses, chins, exuberance, and then finish. Not one thought, one ideal, in common. Only a mutual determination, and, when thwarted, bloody-mindedness.

They embraced on both cheeks, another family custom (Mad said it was French), and then Pa stepped back and looked at his mother.

“But you look very well,” he said, “you look better than when I saw you last. I don’t believe there is anything the matter with you, the whole thing is a plot to get me here. Emma, is it a plot? Hullo, Folly, still alive, good heavens, what is she now, fifteen, sixteen? I suppose when she dies you’ll embalm her. Mother darling, I’m exhausted, isn’t someone going to minister to me, pour me a drink, is there any ice?”