Canvey Island (11 page)

‘No. It doesn't,' he said. ‘But I have to work.'

‘Yes, but you can't work all the time. When you're not so busy then we can be together.'

The mist was rising. I wanted Martin to put his jacket over me like he always did when he knew I was cold, but now he was staring at the ground. ‘I don't know. Sometimes I'm not sure that I'm right for you. Perhaps you deserve someone better.'

‘What are you talking about? I don't want anyone else. I love you.'

‘And I love you. But it's so hard to live with it all.'

‘No, it's not,' I said. ‘It's lovely. It's the only thing that matters. You said that once. Don't you remember?'

‘But I'm afraid of it.'

I tried to make him look at me but he couldn't. ‘Stay,' I said. ‘Please. Stay here with me.'

‘Do you mean I shouldn't go to university at all?'

‘Sometimes I think that, yes.'

‘But what would I do if I gave it up?'

He stopped and began to kick at the broken shells under his feet, scraping them from right to left and back again, first with one foot, then with the other. Among them was a piece of sea glass. We were the last people left on the beach.

‘I'll come back. It's only three years.'

‘You'll change,' I said.

‘I won't.'

‘You will. You'll get bored with me. You already have.' I could tell, even then, that I was making it worse.

‘I won't get bored, Linda. I'll only get bored if you go on like this.'

‘Well, what am I supposed to say?' I asked.

‘You're the clever one.'

‘You're clever too.'

‘Yeah. But perhaps I'm just not clever enough,' I said.

We walked across sands and shoals of rock; the memory of waves along the strandline. I had such an ache.

Dad came with Vi to wave me off. They stood on the pavement stamping the October cold away. Vi put her blue leather glove to my cheek. ‘God bless, Martin. We're so proud of you. You'd best get on the bus or I'll start crying.'

She leant forward and I kissed her.

My father handed me fifty pounds. ‘I'd like to give you more, son, but it's all I can spare.'

‘You don't have to give me anything.'

‘I wanted to see you right. Have a drink on us. Remember your old dad.'

‘And me,' said Vi. ‘Don't forget your auntie.'

I climbed on to the coach, went past the driver and found a seat halfway down. Dad and Vi waved quickly, their hands close to their bodies, and I wondered what they would talk about when I had gone. The coach passed George's nursing home, Ivy's old shop, the school and the playing fields; all the brief certainties of my former life.

As we drove down the high street, I saw Linda. She had stopped by the side of the road. She gave me a silent stare and I remembered how when she was angry her face reddened slightly, all except for the dent in her forehead where her brother had thrown the toy truck at her when they were small. The scar remained white.

She looked at me without waving or smiling, and it seemed that she was already a stranger. I couldn't understand how quickly I could feel so detached from my own past.

I didn't give up, of course. I borrowed my mother's Ford Prefect and drove up to Cambridge to talk to him. It took me an hour and a half and we sat in a pub, the Baron of Beef I think it was called, and I listened to students talking about their holidays in France and their second homes in Switzerland. They either had Christian names like Crispin and Jasper or nicknames like Rodders and Pimple. Martin told me he had joined the Backwards Club and that once a term they ran a whole day the wrong way round. They started with a brandy and soda and worked their way back to a boiled egg and soldiers last thing at night. It was such a good laugh, apparently.

He said I couldn't stay in his rooms. It wasn't allowed and he didn't want the gyp to find out.

‘What's a gyp?'

‘He's a servant; a type of cleaner. It's what we have here.'

‘I thought a gyp was a bit of trouble: like my mum and her varicose veins. Her legs giving her “gyp”, that kind of thing.'

‘He also comes in to check I haven't topped myself.'

‘I don't believe you.'

‘It's true. Someone did it last year.'

‘I'm not surprised in a place like this,' I said. ‘It's a wonder more people don't do it.'

Martin couldn't get me out fast enough. I suppose he didn't want his posh new friends to see me, even though I was at art school and he should have been proud to have such a groovy girlfriend, for God's sake. We went off to Aldeburgh for the weekend instead.
I could tell that he wasn't that interested in me apart from the sex and even that had a ‘for old times' sake' ring to it.

We pretended to be married – Martin and Linda Turner, we certainly looked sulky enough – and we booked a guest house where the landlady asked questions that we couldn't answer and expected us to be ‘up and out' by half past eight.

There were sheep walks covered with grass, fern and brake furze, and Martin wanted to see how the wind affected each piece of vegetation and how much each could protect the land behind. He pointed out that the trees had been blown back; lilac, privet, sycamore and chestnut were listing badly, the salt of the winds wearing away their easterly sides. Then, when we got to the beach, he kept stopping to find places where he could test the sand, telling me about infiltration and hydraulic conductivity like I really wanted to know. He'd only allowed me to come if I didn't get in the way of his experiments into what he called ‘swash flow' and ‘sediment transport'. I had to hold a cylinder that he was going to insert into the sand to see how quickly the tide drained away.

‘What about us?' I wanted to say. ‘Why don't you give this much attention to us?'

He connected six tubes to the cylinder, pushed it into the sand and asked me to fill it up with water. He got out his watch and we measured how long it took for the water to drain away. Whenever it fell an inch Martin recorded the time taken in his notebook.

‘I want to see how compact the beach is, and how quickly contaminants can infiltrate the coastline.'

Nearby a man was lying down while his wife sat up to look out to sea. She had a pair of binoculars. Although the man's eyes were closed his hand rested on her lower back, checking that she was still there.

The clouds over the sky were suspended like a child's mobile, with low streaks of grey and darkening. Martin told me that if I was bored I could search the beach for other places where the sand varied in texture. He told me he wanted to see how the size of the particles and their compressibility might affect the speed at which the sea was absorbed.

I looked at his notebook and his instructions:

The change of the water level together with the pore water-pressure measurement gives the estimate of K, based on the Darcy Equation
.

As the flow is one-dimensional q can be simply related to
(the rate of change of the water level), i is the vertical head gradient, which can be calculated based on head reading from two piezometers
.

‘How long is this going to take?' I said.

‘Sometimes it can be quite quick.'

‘Good.'

‘You don't have to be here, Linda.'

‘I was only asking.'

Martin pulled out the cylinder and started to look for somewhere else to continue the experiment.

‘Can I help?' I asked.

‘You can make notes when I call out the measurements.'

‘What if I don't understand?'

‘You don't need to understand, Linda. Every time the water in the cylinder falls by one inch I'll call. You note down the time as each inch falls.'

‘As the sand absorbs it …'

‘Not the sand: the bits in between. The sand itself isn't absorbent.'

The tide was on the ebb and a group of women were exercising their horses on the edge of the sea.

‘This isn't going to work, is it?' I said. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I'm not good enough for you. Not supportive. It matters when you say that I don't understand.'

‘It's not like that.'

‘It is. I can't be with someone who's ashamed of me,' I said.

‘I'm not ashamed of you. Look, take the measurements when I call them out. It's going to be fast. We need to be accurate.'

‘You're embarrassed.'

‘I'm not. Don't pick a fight.'

‘It's already over,' I said. ‘You're not the same.'

There were gulls over the rock pools and water was rushing out through the channels in the sand. ‘You don't love me,' I said. ‘I should go.'

‘Don't. Let's finish this and then we can talk.'

‘No. It's best if we don't see each other.'

Then Martin stopped what he was doing and it all came out. I hadn't wanted him to say it out loud because I didn't want to know but now I'd pushed him into it.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘I've tried.'

‘You're not supposed to try. It's supposed to happen.'

‘I know.'

‘And it did …'

I had fallen in love and he hadn't. Or we'd fallen in love at different rates; the lover and the loved. It kept changing but we'd never managed to make it equal.

There was a baby crab at Martin's feet, white like an embryo, dying in the sand.

‘I'm sorry, Linda … I can't do this any more.'

Now you tell me
, I thought.

‘You've changed,' I said. ‘You think you're too good for me. You think what you want is more important than anything else when it isn't.'

‘No, I don't think that,' he said.

‘You made me believe you loved me,' I said. ‘I gave you everything.'

‘Perhaps you gave me too much.'

‘But how was I to know what was enough, Martin? Why didn't you tell me to stop?'

‘Don't cry.'

‘Don't tell me not to cry. Don't tell me to do anything.'

‘I don't know what else to say …'

‘Then don't say anything.'

‘I didn't mean to upset you.'

‘Don't do it to anyone else. That's all I can say.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘What you've done.'

‘What have I done?'

‘You know what you've done,' I said. ‘I've just told you. Don't ever do to another woman what you've done to me.'

I didn't mean to fall in love with Martin. Flirtation, yes, of course, why not, I was always prepared for that, it was one of the reasons I had gone to Cambridge in the first place, but I certainly wasn't ready for any commitment. I was too young and, besides, I was still recovering from Sandro, my Italian boyfriend.

I was called ‘VD' at school so some people thought I was looser than I was, but that meant ‘Vicar's Daughter', and I'd had the nickname long before I knew about the disease. I could always take a joke and I think people almost wanted me to be rebellious. That's what often happens to the children of the clergy, but after Sandro there was no one, no one at all, and I led an almost embarrassingly chaste life.

I wasn't in any hurry to find someone else, and I certainly wasn't looking, so Martin came as a bit of a surprise.

I was asking people to come down to Aldermaston for the CND march in the Easter of 1968.

‘Hello,' I said, ‘I'm Claire Southey. I'm studying music at Girton and I'd like you to march with me for a better world.'

He paused for a moment and then smiled. ‘Well, Claire Southey, my name's Martin Turner, I'm reading engineering at Churchill and I will.'

We sat next to each other on the coach down to Victoria and marched from Trafalgar Square for three days. I carried the banner and Martin brought the food. He nearly blew it when he suggested that it should be the other way round and it took me a while to realise he was joking.