From a Distance (29 page)

Across the room Felicity’s red dress became a blur. The music was overwhelming, insistent in a way Michael had never experienced before. He thought he could drown in it, never come back. Felicity saw his tears before he felt them, and crossed the room to him. Her strength radiated through him, and her arms and warmth enveloped him. Michael thought that they could be one entity with the warm beating heart of the baby safe at their centre.

‘I love you, Felicity, I love you. I’ll never forget you.’ he whispered into her hair.

They sat on the sofa, no gap between them.

Felicity replaced the magnificent sorrow of the choral music with by the liquid sound of jazz saxophone, and honeyed notes flowed in and out of Michael’s thoughts, smoothing every jagged nerve. She had a blue silk pouch in her hand. ‘Here’s your Christmas present.’ She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, her eyes bright with excitement. He looked at the pouch, at her, back at it again. He wished he could paint. He wanted to remember her as she was at that moment, beautiful and strong. He untied the cord, excited like a child again, he hadn’t expected this. Whatever it was. The moment felt solemn, limitless. He reached slowly into the small silk pocket without taking his eyes off Felicity, and brought out a silver watch. Heavy, but with delicate hands, a worn leather strap, the silver buckle tarnished a little and the glass on the face scratched. A watch that had been worn and loved.

The inscription on the back read: ‘CWD.
Time will run back and fetch the age of gold.
TWD’

‘It was Christopher’s. It’s Milton. I mean the words are. My father loved Milton. The watch was his present to Christopher on his eighteenth birthday.’ Felicity turned the watch over on her palm. ‘They brought it home when he died.’

Michael stroked her hair, ‘I can’t accept it. You mustn’t give me this. It’s not for me to take. You’ll regret it. You should keep it to protect yourself. You and the baby, I mean.’

He hated himself for bringing a shadow to hover above them, like a bird of prey biding its time.

Felicity shook her head, ‘No, I’ve thought about it. I want you to have it. You sold your watch when you came to Cornwall. This is something from Cornwall for you to have wherever you may find yourself. No matter what.’ Her conviction was like a shield, her cheeks pink. ‘It should be part of someone’s life, not sitting in a drawer in my bedroom. Please.’

She was irresistible. He wondered if this was how every man felt who had ever loved a woman. Surely not. Michael had the sense that this was unique. He couldn’t imagine his father feeling like this about his mother, or Esther and Reg in The Ship. How did anyone ever experience love though? And then again, how did they not?

Felicity threw him a mischievous look, and held the watch to his ear. ‘Listen! It’s ticking like a heartbeat. Like the baby.’ She put his hand on the drum of her stomach, and he felt the flickering movement within. ‘The baby’s in time with it. Punctual already, like you, like a soldier. I expect he or she will be born exactly on time.’

‘Not if she, or he, is anything like you,’ teased Michael.

Felicity put her finger on his lips, and turned his face to hers. ‘I want you to have this because I want you to remember us with every passing moment.’ Her sadness was delicate and solemn as a wedding veil between them.

He read the inscription again. ‘Time will run back and fetch the age of gold.’ He cupped her face in his hands. ‘Our age of gold,’ he repeated.

He handed her a flat package, the wrapping colourful and intricately drawn.

‘Here’s yours.’ He got up and walked around the room, shy. He hadn’t known how much he wanted her to like it until it was in her hands.

‘Oh! It’s already beautiful, and I haven’t seen what’s inside. I love this, I could make a design from it.’ The brown paper was decorated with little drawings of Felicity, miniature stick portraits of her busy doing all the things she liked. Picking flowers, painting, slicing vegetables in the kitchen, sitting in a chair, reading, with her cat on her knee, stirring dye in a tub, leaning across the screen-printing table, walking on the hill, her scarf flying, and finally, one quick sketch of her hugging Michael, a whirl of stick arms and legs and him with his cap on, a smiling pin man.

Felicity bent her head over the parcel, still not opening it. ‘This must have taken for ever. It really could be a design, you know. I can’t believe you did this and I didn’t see you.’ The paper crackled as she carefully undid it, folding the layers, unveiling the rectangular board within. ‘Oh Michael,’ she said.

He had painted a lighthouse, red and white in a cornfield on chalky cliffs. He had painted it simply but with much detail, secretly stealing time over the past weeks. He had hauled out his memories of childhood and among them found himself back at a place he’d loved. He would share it with Felicity. The lighthouse stood on the cliffs near his own home, and was the place he had held most dear in his childhood. As he painted his memory, he wished with all his heart he could take Felicity and their child there.

She propped the painting on the sofa. ‘It’s lovely. Like something out of a children’s book. Is it real? A real place, I mean?’

He nodded. ‘It’s Kings Sloley in Norfolk, I played there as a child with my brother. The lighthouse keeper’s sons were in both our classes at primary school. Then they moved away, and the next one, Mr Perkins, wouldn’t let any of us near the place.’

He peered at his picture. He hadn’t thought much about what it would actually look like to someone seeing it for the first time, and he was relieved. It looked all right.

‘The Lighthouse was where I first flew a kite, and where I learned to ride a bike. I dream about it sometimes, but it’s always distant.’ He stopped speaking. That music had got right under his skin. All of this was new. He realised how little he had shared of himself with her, how generously she had shared with him.

Felicity’s eyes sparkled. ‘I’d love to go there. I’d love to go with you there.’

He squeezed her hand. Opened his mouth to say something eloquent, meaningful, but he couldn’t. He dropped her hand, ‘Anyway, I thought it might be useful. You need an image for your business, and I was thinking a new name might be the thing. You know, “Lighthouse Fabrics” or “Lighthouse Designs” or something? I can adapt this to make it your insignia, if you like it.’

She hadn’t spoken. Oh damn, he’d got it wrong. He’d had a nerve hadn’t he? Trying to get involved? Ah well, the picture would look okay hung somewhere in the house. Wouldn’t it?

‘Don’t worry my love,’ he said softly. ‘You don’t have to like it.’

Felicity threw her arms around his shoulders, her smiling kisses engulfing both of them. ‘Like it? I love it, I love it. It makes such perfect sense.’ But you haven’t signed it. Come on.’ She let go of him and turned to the inkstand on the desk in the corner. ‘Make a mark, Marker,’ she said and twirled the canvas to show the back. Michael signed it, scratching his initials on the canvas, circling them. Felicity took it, removed a watercolour of a church seen through foxgloves, and hung it on the wall. ‘Lighthouse Fabrics it is,’ she said. ‘You’ve given me something to last a lifetime, you know.’

The baby, Christopher John Mohune Delaware, arrived at dawn on a spring morning. Michael and Felicity had spent the evening before writing his names, changing the order, arguing over where the Mohune should go to sound the most dashing. Michael balled up the paper they had scrawled on and threw it into the bin as the midwife bustled in. Audrey Castleton, Arthur’s sister-in-law and the village midwife in attendance. A brisk woman with a firm manner, she helped Michael stay calm.

‘It’s all right, you know,’ she glanced at him as she filled the kettle for the tenth time.

‘It is?’ Michael stared back, and clenched his fists at his side to stop himself clutching her arm.

‘You’re boiling the kettle again.’ She laughed, ‘I’m only making a cup of tea for you and me. There’s nothing to worry about, you know.’

Occasionally he found himself laughing at his fears. He was every man. Thousands had been there before him, and thousands were still to come. Men who had been through war and pain, yet found themselves floored at the prospect of someone they loved in discomfort. From the sounds Felicity made, when he entered the room to see her, it was clear that ‘discomfort’, Audrey’s word, was a ridiculous understatement. Felicity’s hair was sweaty and lank, and her eyes hollow with exhaustion. It had been a long night. He wondered when he might be hit with a sense of elation at the prospect of new life beginning, but frankly, it seemed terrifying. So when Michael found a pair of sloe dark eyes gazing at him, solemn and lit with surprising gravitas, he wasn’t expecting to feel anything. A clawing, soaring, sky high, primordial rush of love swirled and settled in a cavity of his heart that had, little though he’d known, rattled with emptiness. Love expanded, filling the aching emptiness left by Johnnie’s death. Michael sat on the bed next to Felicity, staring at the extraordinary new being who had arrived in their midst. They were complete now. And Michael suddenly knew just what his mother and father had lost.

‘He’s called Kit,’ said Michael. ‘This is our son, Kit,’ and he tucked him in Felicity’s arms and the three of them slept.

Kit was an equable soul, and his tiny presence prised open the protective shell of closely guarded intimacy that Michael had built around himself and Felicity. Now there was a living embodiment of their love. Their friends and neighbours breathed a sigh of relief and welcomed Kit into their hearts. In the first weeks of his life, Sheila Spencer visited almost daily, sometimes accompanied by Paul. Sheila brought warm loaves, newly baked; Paul helped Michael put up a lean-to porch on the house to shelter the pram Michael’s former landlady Verity had given them. No matter how the rain squalled that spring, baby Kit lay asleep, snugly wrapped and dry, covered by the big navy blue pram hood, dreaming of the sea he didn’t yet know.

Felicity, to her own surprise, took motherhood in her stride, though her focus changed. Now she worked intensely for shorter stretches of time, and she brought her life into her designs, so whatever she was doing, she would look for the shape or form of it and transcribe it onto paper and then to a screen. She and Michael spent summer hours with Kit kicking his legs on a blanket spread on the grass, and Felicity drew the wild flowers, dissecting speedwells and buttercups, forget-me-nots and purple loosestrife, ladies smocks and the vivid pink flowers of the wild sweet pea to find the forms for her designs.

Kit’s arrival opened another channel in Felicity’s creative vision. Sketches of everything flowed from her: spoons and bars of soap, sea birds and even a line of kitchen chairs dancing along the border of a wavy stripe. Sometimes Verity offered to take the baby for a walk. She wasn’t the only one to give Felicity help. Michael, raised on a rural farm with few neighbours, had not realised how a community looks after its own. It wasn’t uncommon for Michael on his way back from the workshop to see his baby son sailing down the hill towards the harbour in his pram, pushed by Esther from the pub. Or, when Michael stopped by the grocers in Love Lane, he might find Kit’s pram again, and Kit, propped on a cushion, regally accepting all attention from housewives queuing with their ration books, while Verity bustled with pride and love for this baby.

September came. Felicity and he had talked so much about what would happen when he went, it had almost lost its significance, but since Kit arrived, Michael felt every beat of his heart bringing the moment closer. He could no longer let his mother suffer his loss as well as Johnnie’s. The baby was flourishing, Felicity was well, happy, engrossed in her son and her work, and Michael knew that the life he loved was becoming too real. Soon it would be all he knew, he was ready to lose himself, to dive into the fathoms of love and never leave. It was becoming more difficult every day.

Walking to the workshop, he took a detour early one morning up to the top of the hill. A skein of geese, their silhouettes soft indigo against the sky, flew over him, the rhythmic scraping of their cry like a bow pulled across a violin. The light changed imperceptibly as the days drew in, and low rays poured onto the sea, tinting the familiar view sepia. At high tide, the ocean glimmered like a glass pane, and it seemed fuller than Michael had ever seen it before. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock and the day was warm already. He’d left Felicity dressing Kit in their bedroom. Michael lit a cigarette, and smoked it hard so the ember burned bright and looked back at the cottage. It contained everything he held dear. He wondered where he would find the heart to take with him.

Later that morning he returned home to find the baby lying on a rug in the garden kicking his legs beside Felicity. Her skirt, a newly finished design, was decorated with ripples of migrating geese in blue, grey and purple flying across the fabric. It felt significant to Michael that it mirrored what he’d seen up on the hill. Her hair tangled loosely down her back, her arms were tanned from the summer outside, and she drew quickly, covering pages of a sketchbook with line drawings, while Kit played beside her. Michael took a snapshot in his head. A memory. A piece of his heart to take with him.

He knelt beside her. ‘Come on, we’ll go for a picnic. Let’s get our things now, and swim at the cove before the tide turns.’

She put her pencil down. ‘What about work? I’m so behind, I—’

Michael pulled her to her feet. ‘We’ll leave work behind for today.’