Call of the Undertow (23 page)

‘Have you finished your map yet?’ Mobility Man asked.

She was confused. Was he referring to the maps for the book she’d submitted back in June? Had she even mentioned that to him when they’d sat on the water’s edge talking about a
dead seal? Or perhaps he was talking about Trothan’s map, which would never exactly be complete now.

‘Well, I’ve been to most places around here now, if that’s what you mean.’

He nodded as if in satisfaction.

It was a kind of mapping she’d been doing, she supposed. She was like a Victorian explorer going somewhere for as long as it took to fill the white spaces on the map, and then moving on,
adopting on the way a different hairstyle perhaps, or hair-colour, a whole reinvention of herself for a new place, as Carol would accuse her.

‘Well,’ she said, moving as if to get around his scooter to the gate that he seemed almost wedged up against.

‘You’ll not want to go in,’ he snapped at her.

‘Oh?’

He nodded his head behind him through the gate. ‘It’s her that brings herself here every day. The mother.’ Tight-lipped on the cigarette, his eyes pinched shut and then opened
on her. ‘Miss seeing him about the place. He and I. Two lost souls wandering about.’

Make that three, thought Maggie.

‘Terrible thing that – no grave to visit,’ he said.

‘Is your wife buried here?’ Maggie asked.

He nodded across the road to another gate which she knew opened onto a new, neatly regimented cemetery. ‘Come every day, just like that wifie back there. That’s why they gave me the
scooter – too far from the village.’

Maggie peered over his shoulder again but couldn’t see anyone amongst the old gravestones. She could walk away now and never see Nora again. She’d never spoken to Lizzie
Ginner’s family, never even written to them, despite the number of letters she’d started. She’d never sought forgiveness or tried to be involved in their grief. It was the
Get-On-With-Your-Life practicality of advisers such as Carol that had won the day. But she’d begun to wonder if that was the best way.

She took a decisive stride, wriggled past the scooter and unlatched the gate.

‘Nice to see you again,’ she said with a sense of partial triumph as she re-latched it from inside and turned towards the darkest clusters of iron, ivy, stone and shade at the far
end of the graveyard. As she padded across the grass, she heard the scooter start up and whine away, back towards the village.

As Maggie stepped into the doorway of the roofless church, her shadow loomed over Nora who was sitting on the mossy ground on a folded newspaper. She seemed to be writing in a small notebook.
Maggie noticed that the colour on her perfectly manicured nails had grown out; they were just tipped with scarlet. Nora looked up with a start that wobbled her face and the flesh on her bare upper
arms.

‘Sorry,’ Maggie said. ‘To intrude.’

Nora stared at her.

Maggie saw, as she had in George, a physical change. All the hard, cow-horn strength that Maggie had been prepared for had gone. She looked crumpled.

As if realising this herself, Nora now dropped the book and pencil, flopped onto her hands and knees and started scrabbling to get herself upright, until she was facing Maggie with her arms
hanging at her sides.

‘I wanted to speak to you,’ Maggie said, keen to break the silence.

‘If it’s an apology you’re after...?’

‘No,’ Maggie said quickly.

The insomniac night that had driven her here now seemed inadequate preparation for all the possible things she could say; her certainty dissipated by daylight, the normality of Richard’s
call, George’s soft underbelly exposed. Her undermined sense of purpose made her pre-prepared speech scarcely relevant. She took in the crumbly stone walls that enclosed them, this tiny place
under a roof of swaying branches.

‘Do you come here to pray?’ she asked.

The bereaved left now to their loss: Lost.

‘Call it that if you wish,’ Nora said.

Maggie looked at the notebook and Nora stooped and picked it up, thrust it deep into a pocket as if Maggie might demand to see it. The skin around her lips was white, suggesting a tight line of
force; her eyes averted.

Maggie moved backwards, almost unconsciously blocking the doorway again. ‘My lease expires on the cottage soon.’

Nora nodded vaguely.

‘I’m leaving.’

There was no response.

‘I suppose you already knew?’

Nora made a slight gesture with her head and shoulders suggesting that it was neither here nor there.

Maggie wanted to mention Sally, suggest Nora’s part in her eviction, but was lost for words. Another part of her steel-sure weaponry was failing to hit home.

‘Why did you come to live here?’ Nora suddenly asked.

‘I’d every right.’ Sweat prickling her armpits.

For the first time Nora darted a glance directly at Maggie. ‘It was a genuine question. Why?’

Maggie thought for a moment, accepted she should answer honestly. ‘For a change, I suppose.’

‘And you’ve got it?’

Had she? She seemed to have become an expert at changing other people’s lives. The hardest thing of all seemed to be to change herself, however much she tried. Her silence hung on too long
for her to overcome it. She dropped to sitting on the step, hung her head between parted knees, a dead weight without sleep. Crows cawed above her in the trees.

Struggling to surface, Maggie eventually looked up. Nora was exactly where she’d been before, also apparently lost in thought.

‘He won that competition by the way,’ Maggie said. ‘You probably won’t remember.’

Nora was frowning now.

‘The map-making one,’ Maggie said. A letter had arrived for her the day before the welly was found.

‘I don’t think I got round to entering him.’

Maggie paused, and then said, ‘I did.’

Nora stared at her. White skin taut around her mouth, blinking.

‘I signed the form.’

Nora scrutinised Maggie’s face. ‘I see.’

‘I’ve got the letter here, from the organisers. If you want it.’ She started to forage in a pocket, eager to avoid Nora’s gaze. She held it out, but Nora didn’t
move.

‘Why would I want that?’

Maggie shrugged. ‘He won.’ It seemed that even now Nora was nonchalant about her son’s talents. ‘Surely any mother would be proud. It shows how remarkable he...’
Maggie was silenced by a tussle between ‘is’ and ‘was’.

Nora’s eyes narrowed, reading correctly Maggie’s dilemma. ‘Exactly.’ Her face heaved in an ugly twist against tears. ‘You want to collect your glory, is that
it?’

‘No’.

‘You really think your vanity matters?’

‘Vanity?’ Maggie felt a childish sob taking charge of her body. Even so her voice played back to her with whining melodrama; the shrill cry of uncertain conviction.

Nora put a hand on her forehead. She turned and faced the wall, exposing her ugly, humpish back. Maggie began to think about leaving.

‘It was a private thing,’ Nora then said quietly, turning back.

Maggie waited.

‘The way he came to us.’

Maggie heard in the strange expression an echo of Trothan’s, ‘I was their only gift’.

Nora continued. ‘I came from a family of seven. I always wanted peace. That’s why I started coming here as a child, with my homework and books.’

‘You named him after it?’

Nora nodded. ‘Never did me any harm, roaming about on my own. We didn’t want to restrict him, draw too much attention to him, just because he was...’ she was struggling for a
word.

‘Different?’ Maggie ventured.

‘...the only one. We didn’t want him spoiled and wrapped in cotton wool. We loved his free spirit. We couldn’t always be holding him back, capturing him for
ourselves.’

Maggie wasn’t sure if Nora was implying that she’d attempted to capture him.

Nora paused, breathing audibly, gulping her words. ‘And now of course... we might think. We should have done it differently. There’s many say we aren’t, weren’t, natural
parents. You’ll know that. But we were only ever his guardians.’

Nora parted her hands then and looked up, and for one mad moment, Maggie thought she might be included in that ‘we’, that gesture. And then it seemed to her it might be even more
universal; the village, the whole bay as his guardians.

‘I wasn’t trying to spoil him, or give him too much attention,’ Maggie said. ‘Really I wasn’t.’ She registered that they were both now using the past tense.
It had never occurred to her before that Nora and George might be blaming themselves for his disappearance.

‘Why aren’t you a mother?’ Nora suddenly demanded.

Bang. Maggie caught her breath. A well-aimed strike, just when she thought they’d disarmed.

‘It seems you’d like to be,’ Nora said.

She could take all the blame, the blows raining down on her, the isolation, even her eviction. But she’d heard Nora’s accusation. Childless women: selfish, unloving, and unable to
understand just about anything about life.

Maggie flung herself onto her feet. Her blood surged, fingertips igniting with it, body hurled forward by the storm inside. She flew across the church, right fist clenching. Her arm muscles
exploded to crash the fist against the oncoming wall.

She watched a scallop of sandstone shear off and float down onto the grass.

A gasp in of breath. Pain in the knuckles. The white look of bone amidst broken skin, then blood rising through it, bubbling up on the joints, dripping steadily onto the grass. And then she was
crying, her back to Nora, head bent against the wall, shoulders heaving.

Minutes passed.

Her eyes closed.

The walls had shrunk around her. There was nothing. Nothing there.

‘Here.’

She felt something close by, something soft on her torn, dripping hand. Nora was there patting a wad of tissues onto it.

‘Take it,’ she said. ‘It needs pressure.’

Maggie drew away from the wall, pressed the wad onto her right hand with her left, nodding and wiping snot away with an arm. ‘Thanks,’ she managed.

Nora stepped away, was about to turn from her, and then said, ‘And what I meant, was that you’d obviously like to be a...’ She avoided the word that had been so charged.
‘Because of how you were. With... the lad.’

She went away then, back to sitting on the folded newspaper, head bowed.

Maggie finally followed, sitting back on the step opposite, holding the bloody hand.

Nora looked up. ‘It’s stopping?’

Maggie nodded. ‘Stupid,’ she said. The pain was throbbing in now and she wondered if something was broken. She remained still, breathing hard.

‘There’s a few of us seem to have trouble,’ Nora said, soft again.

‘Trouble?’

‘Conceiving.’ Nora looked up. ‘You were married?’

‘That wasn’t the trouble.’

‘With the marriage?’

Maggie leant back against the stone doorway and took a deep breath. At that moment an explosive cry cackled at her back, and the shock unearthed her words, sent them spilling without thought:
‘The trouble was with me.’ A pheasant scuttering down to land just beyond the church door. She put a hand on her heart.

‘What happened?’ Nora asked.

Maggie bowed her head. Nora’s direct question was like a dense force pressing in, breathing hot gusts on her neck. She didn’t have to tell. But when she looked up, Nora was sitting
with her back against the opposite wall, eyes averted and undemanding. She seemed, herself, incredibly exposed. Maggie felt the imbalance, saw that she owed something in this trading of griefs.

‘She was just tiny.’ Maggie bowed her head again. ‘I was driving to work and had an accident. It was a girl.’

When Maggie drew breath and lifted her head, Nora was staring, her face salt-white. Maggie nodded. ‘She died.’

It was as if Nora was re-living the pain for Lizzy Ginner’s mother, delivering the hideous impact of the accident to Maggie yet again.

‘How terrible,’ Nora said.

Maggie drew in a deep breath, and a frail, coarse whisper came out. ‘I know.’ It had been held down without air for a long time in a chill, green place. ‘I have asked myself
many times since, please don’t doubt it, whether I...’

‘I meant,’ Nora cut in. ‘How terrible for you.’

Maggie held a breath. It burst from her as a small hiccupy sob of surprise. ‘I couldn’t stop. Not in time.’

‘She stepped out?’ Nora asked.

Maggie nodded. The thud and judder of the car, the reverberation through her foot on the brake pedal. She grimaced, her eyes clamped tight in an attempt to block it.

‘Best put behind you, eh?’

‘That’s not easy,’ Maggie said.

‘But best,’ Nora sounded almost motherly.

Maggie had the chance to escape now with the prize of sympathy. But she shook her head against this absolution, and then sensed Nora waiting. ‘I don’t remember very clearly, there
are blanks, but I think...’ She remembered the graze of her hair on her cheek; it had been too long then. She’d been tucking a stray loop of it back behind an ear. Hadn’t she? She
drew breath, and then said it: ‘I think I was looking in the mirror.’

Nora let out an audible breath.

‘Not for long, just a fraction of a second I’m sure, but maybe it was enough.’

Nora didn’t look at her, just nodded.

‘Vanity,’ Maggie muttered, waving a hand at her hair, cut clear of her face now. ‘You were right.’

Maggie dropped her head, sinking down.

Finally she felt Nora pass her, displacing a gust of warm air as she went back through the church door. At first Maggie thought that was it; Nora had left. She saw herself as if from above as
she’d been at the scene of the accident; urine-soaked, standing apart. And now within this corner of the ruined church, she sat alone with bloody hands.

But when she glanced through the doorway she saw that Nora wasn’t far away, standing still and looking down. Her humpish back no longer looked ridiculous but loaded her with a great burden
of grief. Maggie took a deep breath and followed her, stood near her by the funny gravestone with its shimmering rock pool that reflected the tree-tossed sky but also suggested in its shadows
anemones, kelp, crab-shells, the deep. They both stared down into it for a while before going their separate ways.