The Sea House (3 page)

5

‘You’re back already?’ Gertrude was not displeased to see him, only a little surprised. ‘You must be tired with so much travelling in one day.’ She smiled at Max to show she wasn’t cross and went into the kitchen to see if there was still some food that might be heated up. ‘Did you get the things you needed?’ she called through, swirling the pale circles of a celery soup, but then she remembered he needed her lips to hear her, so she went and stood in the door. Max had a slim leather briefcase that might just possibly contain paints, and as she watched he surreptitiously opened it and peered inside. ‘Shall I bring bread?’ Gertrude asked instead, and Max jumped, startled, as if by the vibrations of her voice.

‘This Saturday’ – Gertrude sat opposite him as he ate – ‘and I hope you’ll still be here, I’ve invited some people to have supper with us.’

‘Oh?’ Max felt a coil of dread unfurling in his gut.

‘You may even know them?’ Gertrude smiled.

Through the soup Max could taste the meaty silver polish of the spoon. ‘It’s most unlikely, I hardly –’

‘Klaus Lehmann, the architect?’ Gertrude spoke over him. ‘I thought maybe you must have come across him in Hamburg… before… might have mixed in the same circles.’

‘I knew of him, of course…’

‘Well, they have a house here. He has a rather beautiful wife – well, known to have been a great beauty, although she must be forty by now.’ Gertrude waved a finger. ‘But no German-speaking, do you promise, or I’ll feel horribly left out.’

‘Of course.’ Max scooped the last thick spoonful, wincing as he attempted to avoid the polish of its shine. ‘Thankyou so much.’ Had she not noticed? Not a word of German had escaped his lips since 1941. He took his bowl through to the kitchen and very thoroughly washed it out.

‘So, do you have what you need now?’ It wasn’t that Gertrude minded Max being in the house, but it was a surprise to her, the proximity of this other person, when she was used to spending so much of her time alone.

‘Yes.’ Max hoped he was being truthful. ‘There’s nothing I need in London now.’

As soon as Max was in his room he slid his hand into the leather briefcase and drew out the letters, the envelopes discarded, the pages of the text pressed flat.

The fault of the drawing is your old fault. It is too much like a map, and not like a solid chair in a solid room with a solid coal scuttle. There are only two classes of draughtsman. The bad ones who have nothing to say and the good ones who have something to say. Say something and make things exist.

Max fell asleep and immediately dreamt of houses. A whole village with all the living-rooms outside. The tables, the chairs, the coal scuttles, the people peeling their potatoes, washing up. Men and women, without the secret panels of their walls, playing cards, cooking and working, talking to the others as they passed by. And what saddened him most about this village was that it was right across the road. It was in London, opposite his and Kaethe’s house, and if only he’d known, if only he’d known about it, he wouldn’t have had to live these last six months alone.

Gertrude wanted to surprise her guests with European food. She bicycled to Eastonknoll and left her bike outside the library. She was worried that since the war anything with a mention of the enemy would have been ousted from the library’s stock, but there was one book, dark red and tall, that must have been overlooked.
Das Beste aus aller Welt
, it was called. She assumed this meant that this food, this German food, was the Best in the World, and then, realizing how strong her prejudice still was, accepted it might very well be a collection of the world’s best recipes. She leafed through it, each page as she turned it, letting out a damp and musty smell. During the war, working alongside Kaethe, she’d picked up a little German, but not, it turned out now, enough to make a meal. Potato, she recognized, over again, and chicken, but nothing of the subtleties she hoped lay in between.

Eventually she gave up and slid it back, and as she did so a small green book fell down into her hands. This book was in English, but had recipes from Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland. The book fell open on a page for goulash, with a recipe on either side, and not for the first time Gertrude told herself how in this small town of Eastonknoll you really could get anything at all. Goulash. Even the word was bound to give the evening an exotic ring. When she’d eaten at the Lehmanns’, they’d served eel that Lehmann had smoked in his outhouse himself, and afterwards some rice, which was delicious but had only the faintest hint of a taste. Risotto, Elsa had said it was, but she couldn’t tell from Elsa Lehmann’s inscrutable mask of beauty whether this savoury rice pudding was for her benefit or not.

Gertrude started cooking early. The first of the two recipes was Polish, with an extensive list of ingredients including sauerkraut and vodka, and the second was Hungarian with nothing more unusual than paprika sprinkled on the meat. But even so, the search for paprika had taken most of a day, and, having found it in the kitchen of an army widow, she knew she’d better just begin. As she browned the meat, she read the asterisked note at the bottom of the page. ‘The word goulash means herdsman, and his method of cooking is ideally suited to preparing food while looking after cattle or sheep.’

‘Hmm.’ Gertrude smiled. ‘For cattle I shall substitute pudding.’ And not wanting to be seen to patronize her guests by serving them with only foreign food, she made an apple upside-down cake, which might be eaten with milk instead of cream.

Max spread a sheet of paper over the table, and closed his eyes to see if he could conjure up from memory all the houses running down Steerborough’s one street. There was the old crooked house, the beams slanting to one side, and the thatched cottage with its moss-green roof tucked in beside a terrace of flint and brick houses, the arched doorways of which led through to gardens at the back. Max made a sketch of the Tea Room, the low red roof draped over a row of dormer windows like a currant-coloured cake, and the tiny window of the maid’s room poking out from under the eaves. Something startled him, knocking at his leg, and Alf appeared from under the table, sliding his small body up on to a chair.

‘Where do you live, Alf ?’

The boy peered over the table at his map. He trailed his finger down The Street, along the edge of the Green, round to the mouth of the estuary and back along the marshes. Max remembered a little collection of wooden houses, white-painted and on stilts. Alf’s thumb tacked back to the river, stopping by the bank from which the ferry sailed. He knew from Gertrude that before the war there had been a pontoon ferry that could take anything across. There was a sign still there with the prices written on it, just legible if you peered close.
For each sheep, lamb, goat, pig – 2d.
But the residents of Steerborough, and those at Eastonknoll, were convinced the ferry might be useful to the Germans, and so it was taken down and dismantled in the first weeks of the war, and now just like in all the years of the last century, and the ones before it, a ferry man in a small wooden boat waited to row you across. He pushed out fast into the current to a point midway between each bank, and then with a guiding oar he let the river bring the boat back in. Alf licked his finger and trailed it once more over the page, to show, Max imagined, how the family had moved.

‘First you were on the riverbank?’ he suggested, and Alf nodded. ‘And then?’

In the dip of a hollow, in the last stretch of green before the sea, Alf made a tiny dot.

Max screwed up his eyes to see it. ‘You moved down here?’ The new family home was conveniently placed below the pub. If you wanted, you could stagger through the door and roll from there into your own house.

The door swung open and Alf’s mother came in with a stack of linen.

Guilty at his thoughts, Max turned to her. ‘Alf has just been showing me where you live.’

Mrs Wynwell looked surprised. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My Harry said we’d better move if we didn’t want to be washed away to sea, so we moved the house, bricks, beams and all, but then, well, he was taken anyway.’ The corners of her mouth turned down, and she pushed her chin up as if to tilt her tears back in. ‘A wave tipped up his boat.’ There was a silence in which they all stared through the walls. ‘And now’ – Mrs Wynwell shook her head – ‘Alf’s learning the piano.’

‘Yes.’ Max placed a hand on the boy’s head, and they stood like that until, with a sudden rush of energy, Mrs Wynwell began beating the curtains with a broom.

Gertrude put the cake into the oven. The goulash had been simmering for over an hour and the liquid was starting to turn a thick and syrupy brown. The onion had melted into the stew and even the paprika, though rather old, was giving off a quite distinctive smell. Mrs Wynwell came in, wrinkling her nose. ‘So what are you stirring up for them, Mrs J?’ she asked, and when Gertrude described the cubed beef and the onion, the tablespoon of paprika stirred into the sauce, Mrs Wynwell’s face widened in alarm and her eyes seemed to swim out to the sides. ‘But they’re all Jews, they’re not going to want to eat meat!’

‘Why ever not?’ Gertrude felt herself flush with indignation. She went to the French windows and looked out. Max had set up a rough workbench with two chairs and a length of plywood, and he was stretching a canvas over a pale wood frame. He’d been cutting and banging and measuring all afternoon. So finally, she thought, he’ll be ready to begin.

‘Well…’ Mrs Wynwell sounded sure. ‘They’re not allowed to kill a living thing, not even a fly. It’s why they put no fight up… you know, in the war.’

‘No!’ Gertrude spun round. ‘That’s not it at all. Hindus, you’re thinking of, or Jains.’ She found that she was shouting. ‘And what could they have done? You went to the cinema. You saw the newsreel. Rows and rows of them, just skin and bone.’

‘Oh, Mrs J, I’m sorry. I thought I was being a help.’ And with a small affronted nod she went off to polish the glass in the front door.

Gertrude was trembling, the image of those striped figures etched in her mind, and she wondered if Hitler had consulted a psychologist, or if he had simply known that if you put a person in pyjamas you turned them into children and had them doubly in your power.

6

Dear Nick
, Lily wrote,
I’m afraid the only phone box in the village is broken
. She bit her lip guiltily and turned the postcard over to gaze into the gaudy scene. Sunset on the Suffolk coast. The picture must have been taken from a boat. The sea, the shore, the sky, all turned to molten gold. She hoped to make him smile with it, but even more, to galvanize him into driving up.
Working hard, making good progress
, she wrote.
Very quiet and peaceful. Average age here – 82. Average colour – beige
. She didn’t know why she was telling him this if she wanted him to come. Nick was allergic to anything dreary. It made him feel his life was running out. She imagined him in the Steerborough tea shop where the old women outnumbered the men by three to one.
We could hire bikes
– she felt optimistic suddenly –
and do an architectural Lehmann tour. Write to me? Please. Love, Lily, XX

Lily looked towards the window, unsure whether to risk Eastonknoll without her jacket or not, when she saw two heads bobbing about below the sill. She tiptoed nearer and glanced out. The two girls from next door were squatting in her front garden.

‘Hello.’ She tapped on the glass. They didn’t look up. They were lining up a row of pebbles, setting them up like sentries on the low wall. As she watched, the elder girl took a large stone and tried to spin it through the barricades. Lily looked down on their bent heads, the sandy partings of their hair, the dusty plaits tied with elastic bands. ‘Hello,’ she said, opening a window, and two sets of pale blue eyes turned up towards her. ‘Would either of you like a biscuit?’ Lily was intending to pass the biscuits out through the open window, but as she rummaged in the bread bin the door behind her opened and the girls trooped in. They stood behind her quietly, waiting, and when she brought out her half-eaten packet of chocolate digestives, they took one each, seriously, and without a word went into the sitting-room and sat down.

Lily glanced at her watch. It was nearly twelve now and if she was going to go to Eastonknoll the last ferry before lunch would be about to push out into the tide. She took a biscuit herself and stood in the doorway, watching them eat.

‘Do you like living here?’ she asked and, still munching, both girls nodded their heads.

‘Yes,’ they mumbled, their mouths full, and then in the ensuing silence all three watched as a fine film of crumbs rained down on to the floor.

Lily tried again. ‘How old are you two, then?’

The oldest one gulped down the last of her biscuit. ‘I’m seven. I’m Em’ – she pointed to herself – ‘and Arrie’s five.’ Arrie looked straight at Lily and quite unexpectedly smiled. She had a heart-shaped face and a soft layer of plumpness that made you want to hoist her up into your arms. But even then she stayed still as a donkey, her legs dangling resolutely from her chair.

‘I was just going down to get the ferry,’ Lily said when they’d all stared at each other for a few minutes more. She picked up her jacket and the one large cottage key and, seeing her waiting there, they filed out of the room. Carefully Lily locked the door and then smiling she walked away towards the river mouth. But the girls were following. Lily turned and smiled, more definitely this time, with a parting nod, but when she walked on, she could still hear their steps behind her, and so instead she slowed a little to accept them, and they all three walked on side by side. It was ten past twelve and from the jetty they could just see the ferry girl tying up her boat on the other side. Lily waved at her, just in case she thought it worth making one last crossing for the sake of thirty pence, but she only waved back, straddled her bicycle and headed away for lunch. Lily stood looking across at Eastonknoll, its light-house as white and bright as an illustration, its houses dotted unevenly over the slope of the hill. Of course you could get there by road, and Lily had driven in on her second day to buy provisions, but the estuary forced you inland for at least four miles before the land was solid enough to take a road across. It seemed wrong to get into her car and do a noisy forty-minute trip, when there it was, just a step away across the water.

‘There’s a bridge.’ Em was pulling at her jacket, pointing her up the river.

Lily shielded her eyes against the sun. There was nothing before her except smooth flat water, bending at the skyline, to the right. ‘Well, I’ll see you later I expect,’ and she set off along the river path, skirting the rotted jetty stumps. When she looked back, she found they hadn’t followed. Instead they were bent over the harbour mouth, dragging up seaweed with long sticks.

All along the river, boats were moored, some dilapidated, some shiny and new, and all with their halyards caught up in the breeze. It was like walking through a world of wind chimes, each one very slightly tinnier than the last. Light cascaded down the river, turning it bright blue, picking up the puddles in the marshland on the other side, dazzling the grazing cows. Lily walked with her eyes half closed, feeling over the uneven ground until the river curved and the promised bridge came into view. It stood out black against the skyline and when Lily climbed up to it she tried to imagine a time when steam trains would shudder regularly over its rails. The whole bridge rattled as she walked, and with each step a spray of seagulls spiralled into the air. Just above her on the Common loomed the water tower, sinister in its top-heavy form. It had long granite legs like a primordial beast, and a high circular belly where the water was held. There was a small door in the foot of one leg and Lily, as she passed, wondered if you opened it, the water would come rushing out.

Saturday was market day in Eastonknoll. Stalls had been set up around the war memorial, their backs to one another, their feet on cobbles. For sale were dishcloths, rubber gloves, and trolleys full of strangely unattractive plants. Busy Lizzies with fat rubbery leaves, dwarf marigolds, and fuchsias with bursting, purple buds. Lily circled the stalls several times and eventually bought some washing-up liquid for half the recommended price. Clutching her brown paper bag, she peered into the tea shops, all serving lunch, the people inside all old, all silent. It alarmed her to think she would be one more silent person ordering her food alone, so instead she wandered down on to the beach. There was a kiosk there that served tea and sandwiches with all the finery of a grand hotel. Tea in a china pot with a jug of milk and another for hot water. Sandwiches cut into triangles and sprinkled with cress. There was even a little vase on her white plastic table, from which sprang a tiny cluster of wild flowers. Lily sat huddled in her jacket as the waves crashed in, watching the sun fight out from behind a cloud. She was the only person eating on the sea front, although the hardier pensioners still strolled up and down.

Dear Nick
… She took out her postcard and read over it again. She had thought she might buy an envelope to conceal its contents, but there was nothing private here.
Average age here – 82. Average colour – beige
. She wrote the address, added a kiss and pasted on a stamp.

Lily was careful to get to the ferry before it stopped at four. She climbed in and took her place and waited while a Scandinavian couple, with two bicycles and a child, arranged themselves beside her. The ferry girl began to row. Her hands and arms were strong and wiry, but her face under a hat was smooth and young. She rowed against the tide, out into the middle of the water and then, with a practised eye for the right angle, she pulled in her oars and let the boat steer itself in. It arrived with a small thud against the Steerborough jetty, flipping the book shut on her lap, and the couple, clutching their bicycles, gave up a nervous cheer.

Home, Lily thought, as she unlocked her cottage door; and, throwing herself down on the brown sofa, she laughed to think how quickly she’d settled in.