The Sea House (11 page)

17

Max arrived home with one and a half new houses on his scroll. He’d added a bungalow, simple in its construction, its roof identical to a house he’d already painted in Church Lane. He’d moved on then to a cottage, windows like eyebrows poking from the thatch, but he’d been interrupted by the rain, a drizzle to begin with, and then, like an umbrella collapsing, it had come sheeting down. Max waited under a tree, his jacket wrapped around his precious scroll, the sleeves outstretched, his back bent into the rain, and then he’d given up and run. He didn’t mind being wet. It was trying to avoid it that was tiresome, and he was out of breath and steaming when he arrived in Gertrude’s porch.

Anxiously he unwrapped his scroll. It was undamaged, only a small welt across one edge that could be transformed into a shrub, but as he uncoiled the paper he noticed that he had almost run out of space. There was room for two, maybe three more houses, and as he looked back through the stippled glass he caught the shaky outlines of a cluster of unpainted roofs. Max hung up his jacket, dabbed at his trousers, and walked in. The house was silent, but busy somehow, as if a horde of people were working diligently upstairs. He tiptoed into the dining-room. The table was newly polished, the smell edging at his nose, and on a flat linen-and-lace doily was a vase of formal flowers. Max had bent his nose to them, sucking up their bitter scent, when he saw Gertrude, squatting by the garden doors. The grey bun of her hair was slipping sideways, loosely spiked through with a wooden clasp, and on her face, turned half towards him, was a look of such concentration that he was unable to move. As he watched, she raised her hand and with great precision bounced a rubber ball. The ball flew up, and with its release there followed a flurry of activity as Gertrude scrabbled wildly, and then, in triumph, half sliding her body across the floor, she caught the ball as it came down.

‘Better!’ she exclaimed, and she bounced the ball again. It sped up at an angle, and even Max could see she would never have time to rush over to the fireplace and catch it before it fell. ‘Well…’ She’d seen Max now, and he admired her for flushing only slightly. ‘Alf’s bound to have been practising.’ She held up a handful of dull metal and, taking a bag from the table, she tipped the jacks back in.

Unless you make yourself invisible, you are bound to be observed. What’s the good of bothering about it? The most important thing is to get yourself into the best position for drawing what you want to draw. Listen, I can tell you again and again to lighten this sketch, to darken another, but a discovery you make yourself is worth twenty thousand things that you are taught, even if it is a discovery that everyone else has made. But having said that, a school is the best place to have your drawings pulled apart, to get over the monotony of technique, just like a pianist practising perpetual scales. Couldn’t you just go and get it over with?

Max’s father did not believe in schools. He’d wanted his children to develop their own skills. There had been lessons in the nursery with his mother, and au pairs from Switzerland, England, France and Scandinavia had taught him all they could. Mary had explained the rudiments of English before he was five years old, and the year he was twelve, Mique, a plump girl from Avignon, had given him a French novel to read. They had sat together over it in the blue drawing-room as they read each page in turn.

There was a school in the village, not more than two kilometres away. It was a small school run by a Herr Reeder, where everything, he informed Max’s mother, ‘was done by the book’. Max went there for a week each summer to see whether he was making suitable progress or not, and when he arrived, in the last hot days of June, his fellow pupils greeted him with surprise. Few of them remembered him from one year to the next, and each time they would prod and jostle him, testing him out yet again to see where he would fit in. ‘I want to know,’ his mother said when he came home, ‘if the exercises are easy?’ They were easy, boring too, so that once, finishing early, Max had looked up to see Herr Reeder slipping off one of his socks. He had it pulled over his fist, and he was sitting there, head bent, darning, while the whole class scratched laboriously away.

Max hadn’t told Klaus Lehmann that his father was an officer. Lehmann would know, and Gertrude wouldn’t, that to become an officer his father had had to convert. It was impossible to rise through the ranks of the army if you had any kind of mark against your character, and being Jewish was the blackest mark. Max had had these arguments enacted for him by his father as they worked together in the basement workshop, making the cabinet to hold his sketches, the wide deep drawers that interlocked with fretted teeth.

‘Why suffer the indignities inflicted on Jews, when Christianity is a natural continuation of your faith? It is wrong,’ his father’s mother had scolded him, ‘to remain a Jew simply out of pride.’ Later she had spoken gently. ‘If you are going to convert, then why wait until after your military service? Then it will be too late.’ So Max’s father had been christened, and along with the other young officers he’d been presented with a horse. He’d called it Applesnout and shared with it his roast beef sandwiches. He’d loved his horse, and enjoyed his privileges, but Max suspected he’d always regretted his decision to convert.

Gertrude was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Will you eat?’ she asked, and together, just as he and Kaethe used to do, they worked side by side, cutting and mixing, spooning and stirring, knocking their shoulders against each other companionably as they prepared their evening meal.

18

Lily had promised herself she wouldn’t wave, but as Nick’s car turned the last corner of the Green, her hand shot up and like an idiot she shouted, ‘Bye.’ Nick hooted, startling an old man who was standing by his hedge, and with a revving of his engine he accelerated and was gone.

Lily went back inside. She sat down at the table and made rough slashes with her pen. It was obvious, he’d driven a hundred miles for a fuck, and now, well, he was on his way home again. Lily took a new sheet of paper and more calmly, with softer strokes, she drew a map of the room. There was the window with its eight small panes, the fireplace, its mantel made from tiles. She sketched in the dimensions of the sofa, remembering how when Nick had sat on it, the blanket had fallen over his body in a woollen shroud. He’d looked up at her, his eyebrows raised, as if to say, ‘You want me to stay here?’ Lily drew the table, the three heavy chairs, the bookshelves in the alcove where the wall was at its thinnest between her cottage and next door.

‘What are you doing?’ It was Em, standing in the doorway.

‘Hello.’ She hadn’t heard them come in.

‘Come and see.’ Arrie shuffled forward. ‘We’ve got our new car.’

Lily got up and followed them to the open door, where a black Renault 5 was parked, identical to her own. ‘It’s like a fleet,’ she said, and she could imagine the two cars travelling in tandem, dignitaries, fallen on hard times.

‘Ours has got a dent though,’ Arrie pointed out, ‘and this window won’t quite shut.’

‘Well, look at mine.’ Lily showed them the blemishes on her own car, the scratch that had appeared mysteriously one night, the missing passenger wing mirror.

‘It’s better than our old one, though.’ Arrie stroked the bonnet, and Em gave her an offended look.

Grae appeared, swinging through the gate, the car keys spinning from one finger. ‘Right, who’s coming for a drive?’

‘I am, I am.’ The girls climbed in, and just for a second Grae looked at Lily. The girls wound down their window and looked at her too, their eyes as clear as pebbles. ‘Please come, please.’

‘I should be working’ – Lily smiled – ‘but thanks.’

‘It’s Saturday?’ Em tried.

Grae was standing, waiting, the ring of the keys still looped around his finger. ‘Well?’ he said, as if it wasn’t obvious she had decided no, and for a moment the three of them stared at her, half smiling, half paralysed with hope.

‘OK, I will, then.’ Lily ran into the house to get her purse. What am I doing? What’s going on? But it didn’t stop her rushing.

The new car took a moment to start, coughing and dying before it fired. Lily’s heart, which was skipping, began tumbling over until it hurt, and she had to stare out of the window to calm herself down. No one talked as they left the village, driving along the one straight road, slowing by the top field to inspect the new-born piglets, at least ten to each sow.

‘Left or right?’ Grae asked when they reached the crossroads.

‘Right,’ the girls called, but they didn’t seem to notice when he drove straight on. He followed the road inland until they could see the spire of the cathedral, oversized, the huge body of it turreted like a castle, rising up above the land.

‘Anyone want to go inside?’ Grae offered, but the girls, lying across the back seat, the sun playing over the sand stripes of their skin, said ‘nah’.

Grae drove on through an avenue of oaks, their boughs knobbled, their arms arched over to form the roof of a cave.

‘Wooo,’ the girls sighed as they chugged under the green canopy, and ‘Waaaah’ when they burst back out into the light. There were cornfields now on either side, pale gold and swaying, bordered with poppies, red and orange, their black centres beautiful as eyes. The cathedral was on their left, and they began to curve, speeding along lanes high with hedgerows, the girls now sitting upright, on the lookout for a deer or a fox. ‘We saw an owl on this road once,’ Em told her.

‘Yes,’ warned Grae, ‘but that was at night.’

‘And a rabbit,’ Arrie added. ‘This is rabbit lane.’ They entered a little wood, so thick they could see only the undersides of branches, the ground a den of curving tree roots, moulding leaves and small flashes of green grass. ‘There’s one, and there.’ Everywhere was a scurry of white haunches, dove-brown backs, hind legs bobbing, as a whole colony of rabbits lifted up their heads. Arrie counted frantically, but before she could get to twenty they were out of the wood and crossing back over the main road. ‘The sea, the sea.’ The girls craned forward, and Lily thought how odd it was, to have this chorus, where everything was rounded up into a theme. It was soothing somehow, and took away the need to talk. She glanced at Grae – the dusty side of his face, his one hand on the steering-wheel, the white neck of the T-shirt he wore under his shirt – and felt relieved not to have to make any comment of her own.

They were driving very gradually downhill, along narrow lanes banked high with hedges, straining to catch a glimpse between the gateposts of the marshland that spread out to the sea. ‘There it is!’ But the road forced them round into a village, past a church like that at Steerborough nestled in amongst the ruins of a larger church. There was a shop the size of a garden shed, a pub with latticed windows and, as they turned off down a lane on to the beach, a huge barn spilling out with people.
Fish and Chips
, it said and its doors were open to the sea. There were tables and chairs outside crowded with people, and each table was heaped with overflowing plates of food.

‘I hope you’re hungry,’ Grae said, and at that moment a red-faced girl wearing an overall came out with a tray.

‘Molletts!!’ she shouted, and a family of six all waved their arms.

Lily, Grae, Em and Arrie queued up to order food. Cod and chips, haddock and chips, bread and butter, peas. Peas were the token greenery to brighten up your plate. ‘I’ll get this,’ Lily offered, knowing as she said it that her attempt was doomed.

‘No,’ Grae shook his head, ‘we invited you.’

Lily was pulling a note out of her purse. ‘At least let me get mine.’ She pressed it on him and their hands met in a kind of tussle as Grae tried to push her money away. His fingers were rough and splintery, as if they were part wood, but they were warm and full of feeling, and sent a shock along her arm. ‘If you’re sure,’ she said, her blood stilling, and at the same moment they both saw that the girl at the till was watching them, without impatience, a little swell of laughter at the corners of her mouth. ‘Thankyou,’ Lily said, and she put her money away.

When their food was ready they carried it out of the restaurant, away from the car park, the waitresses, with their perspiring faces, shouting out an endless list of names, and walked with it up a steep bank and on to the beach. The beach was deep and sloped down harshly to a rough brown sea. Along the curve of the coast she could see Steerborough, ash-blonde, flattened, and beyond it, Eastonknoll, its lighthouse, the outline of the Regency Hotel. She didn’t want to see the nuclear power station, its unearthly dome flashing in the sun, but turned instead towards the sea, her tray of drinks, tea and hot water chiming in her hands.

‘Over here.’ The others had huddled into the low cliff wall, were laying their lunch out on a strip of sand. The cliff behind them was curved over at the top, striped in seams of rust red, umber, paprika and mace. There were tufts of grass growing from the overhanging ridges, with slides and gulleys where the sand came drifting down. Grae had placed his tray under a precarious looking overhang.

‘It will fall down,’ he said, noticing Lily glancing up, ‘but probably not today.’

Em and Arrie tore through the white flakes of their fish, the golden batter, the molten chips, and as soon as they’d finished, hardly pausing to catch their breath, they began to climb the cliff. They made a sideways shoot out of the slope, scudding down on their backs, each slide bringing with it a fine layer of ground. Lily sat back against a little dune, her feet nudged and warmed by flat grey stones.

‘This used to be the biggest town on the east coast.’ Grae glanced at her. ‘People used to come here to trade from all over the world.’

Lily looked along the beach. There were three small boats pulled up on to the shingle, and nothing beyond but the one village street.

‘There was a walled city here, with gates, and a king’s palace, fifty-two churches, chapels, hospitals, even a forest. Up there’ – he pointed to the cliff behind him – ‘you can see the last fragments of the outer wall.’

Lily laughed. ‘How do you know all this?’ She turned towards him. ‘I didn’t take you for the local history type.’ As soon as she’d said this, she regretted it. It was a London comment somehow, and it didn’t fit at all.

‘It’s Em.’ The colour in his face had risen. ‘She did a project for school, there’s a little museum…’

They sat and looked at the great mass of water.

‘I suppose the ruins are all under there.’ She tried to make amends. ‘The farms and church spires.’

‘Yes. There are some people who say if you come to this beach at midnight you can hear the church bells tolling out the hour.’

Lily felt a shiver run through her. ‘Stop it,’ she laughed. The sea had calmed as they’d been sitting there. It was so beautiful she felt a pull inside her, as if the tide were drawing out her heart.

‘I suppose it happened slowly?’ Lily had an image of the tall house by the river with its sand bags piled up to form a front wall. It had the date scrawled along what must have been a water line. There must have been floods then, too. In 1953.

‘Yes.’ Grae stretched out, closing his eyes against the sun. ‘Little by little over the last thousand years. And then, every so often, whoosh.’

‘Whoosh.’ Lily echoed him and just then a clod of earth fell down and landed on his head. Lily covered her mouth. She could feel the laughter bursting up out of her, felt it burning, out of her control, and then to her relief she saw Grae’s shoulders rising. He scrambled up and looked at her and, shaking their heads, they began to choke and rock and cry with laughter as they crawled to get out from the overhang of cliff.

‘My God,’ Lily said, when she could speak.

Grae wiped tears from the corners of his eyes. ‘Christ,’ he said, and he crawled back for a last gulp of cold tea.

‘So’ – Lily was shivery with laughing, the walls of her stomach vinegary and weak – ‘are you from here, then? Originally?’

‘No.’ Grae looked away from her. ‘From about twenty miles inland. We used to come to the coast on day trips as children. Sue…’ He paused, and the air grew very still. ‘My… umm…’ He coughed. ‘My wife… She saw an advert for the cottage in the paper. Everywhere else we’d looked at was plain miserable… for the price. You know what it’s like if you rent. And we had to move… needed to get away, have a change.’ He rolled over and lay face down, his arms and legs spreadeagled as if he’d been marooned. ‘Christ,’ he said, and then said nothing more.

Lily got up and went down to the shore. Em and Arrie, their skirts tucked into their knickers, were running in and out of the surf, chasing the tide as it pulled out and then racing to beat each wave as it crashed in. The hems of their skirts were soaking where they’d fallen free, and the narrow lengths of their feet had turned the palest blue. ‘You’re turning into mermaids,’ she told them, but they carried on.

‘Cox!’ The shout of a waitress breezed towards her on the wind, and then a moment later, exasperated, hot and tired and greasy. ‘COXS!!’