Mr Mac and Me (3 page)
Authors: Esther Freud
Mr Runnicles is losing patience with me. When he looks through my book he says I must copy out my work at home, with no sketches and no blots. Neat and tidy, that’s what he wants from me, without a single picture of a boat.
There’s a table in the public bar set against the wall, just big enough for my ledger, and I like to sit there on a Saturday morning when Father is away over at the brewery ordering the ale. But this Saturday a man comes in, not anyone I’ve seen before, and he stands at the bar talking to Mother. He’s got a gruff voice, low and hard to understand, with rolling Rs and sudden lifts and burrs, and if I close my eyes I can hear the chimes and rises in it just like the girls who come down from the Highlands every year to gut and pack the herring. But those girls are mostly red and pink and jolly, whereas this man is dark, with a stern, pale face, and eyes as black as bark. Glasgow, he tells Mother, is where he’s from. Scotland’s first city. A great bustling place. The best there is. Although he’s ready, just for now, to be leaving it behind. He coughs then and a shudder runs through him, even though it is July, and warm. He orders a pint of beer, and a half of stout to take back to his wife who’s preparing a picnic at Millside, and he hands over two stoppered flasks to be filled. Millside. I cease my copying and I listen hard to see if he says anything about the Millside ghost. I want to ask him if he’s ever heard the sound of apples falling. A woman had been buried there, a tall woman – they found her remains when they put a new mill shaft in, and the sound of apples falling, heavy as a cart tipped up, is the sound that’s been heard just before they see her gazing in at them through an upstairs window.
Before I have a chance the man is standing at my table looking down. ‘Very nice,’ he says to me, and I feel myself heat up as I try to push the mess of my first copying out of the way. ‘No,’ he bends closer. And asking if he can, he lifts the paper with the smudges and inspects my margin full of boats. There are yawls and wherries, barges, smacks, and one long yacht with a cabin and a galley.
‘Do you make these sketches from memory?’ he asks, and I have to look up at him to catch the oddness of his speech.
‘Yes,’ I say, because I don’t want Mother knowing how often I sit beside the river and copy the boats that are moored there, or how many hours I spend staring into the glass cabinets of the Sailors’ Reading Room where models of all the greatest ships are on display. Schooners and frigates, warships and cruisers, and one big old fishing boat Danky made one winter when there was no fishing to be done. There’s a painting too of the Battle of Sole Bay with the fireships blazing and the cannons crashing into the wooden hulls of the frigates, as alive to me now as when George Allard first told me the story.
‘Very nice indeed.’ The Scotsman hands back my book and he pays Mother her money and goes out with his flasks.
It is only a day or two before I see the Scotsman again, walking along beside the river. Mac, he is called, at least that’s what they call him when they whisper his business in the bar. And now I see why he is making so much talk. He looks for all the world like a detective. He’s wearing a great black cape and a hat of felted wool, and he is puffing on a pipe as if he’s Sherlock Holmes. He has a bad foot, I hadn’t noticed that before, his shoe is all stacked up, although it doesn’t stop him walking fast with his stick hitting the ground so that I have to hurry after, with my own twisted foot, to keep him in my sights.
He crosses the bridge and I keep down behind the dunes as he heads for the beach. Every few minutes he halts and looks back, as if he suspects he might be being followed. But it can’t be me he sees. I know the land too well.
It’s getting dark. There is a big moon, pale as cloud, hanging over the sea and for a long time he walks along the tideline. I keep to the high land, dipping down into the marram grass whenever he looks round, but then it seems that he accepts he is alone because he stops and stares out at the waves. He must be searching for clues of some kind. Just like Mr Holmes. And he’s looking so hard he doesn’t seem to notice how the water is washing in around his boots. I leave him to it, and go back to the harbour to see if any of the night fishermen have come to untie their boats, but all is quiet so I sit there on the wall, wondering what Mother will say now that I’ve missed my chores, and wishing I hadn’t seen that look on Father’s face which means it is a drinking day and there’s nothing I can do. I’ll wait, I think, until he’s too unsteady to lash out, and then there he is, Mac, standing right in front of me, the pipe puffing white into the night. ‘Enjoy your walk?’ he asks, and without even the flicker of a smile he limps away up the street and over the green so that for a long while, even though I’m half starved for having missed my supper, I’m too frightened to follow.
The strange thing about Mac is that you don’t see him all day and then just as it starts getting dark there he is, in that great cape, striding out on his walk. But he isn’t a detective, I soon discover that. He’s an artist, and he has a wife who is an artist too, with thick red hair piled on top of her head and fastened with a pin. They’ve taken a studio, a hut it is, although you’d never know it now they’ve made it their own. They’ve cleared it out and painted the wood white and they have tea parties in there, sometimes just the two of them. That’s when I first saw her, Mrs Mac, sitting outside on a crate, painting a row of poppies and below it a row of babies, fat and laughing on a scroll. I stop to have a look. And through the half-open door I see tea laid out with white fluted cups and a jug with a black stripe and everything so beautiful even though underneath I can still see it is a hut, Bob Thorogood’s it is, with the coils of rope hung on the wall, and a hank and an eye splice left behind.
‘You’re the boy from the Blue Anchor,’ Mrs Mac catches me looking. ‘My husband says you’ve made some fine drawings of boats.’
Blood gushes to my face. I want to run, but if there’s one thing that Mother’s proud of, it’s the manners she’s cuffed into me. I stare at my boots.
‘Will you have something to eat?’ she asks me, and I flush again because it’s not as if I haven’t noticed there are sandwiches on the table beside the pot of flowers, the finest wild ones you could find that won’t last till nightfall. I say I will because I don’t want to give offence, and I take my sandwich on its petalled plate and I eat the little triangle of bread, so fast that I have to search myself for what is in it. Honey. There’s a string of it on my lip.
‘I’ll be off now, thank you.’ And I take my leave of Mrs Mac and keep walking till I’m at the mouth of the river where it meets the sea.
Father’s on the run again. That’s what Mother calls it. When he starts in on the ale at lunch and drinks till there’s a fight. I go to Mother in the scullery where she’s busying herself with the scrubbing of a pan, and I would have stayed there to defend her, if I’d not seen the rolling pin she had to hand. ‘You go on up to bed now, Tommy,’ she says quiet, and we listen to him, from the empty bar, roaring out commands.
It’s too early for bed. Instead I slip into the evening and, keeping to the shadows, I run down to the sea. The tide is out, and green webs of seaweed trail across the blackened harbour wall. Don’t ever climb there, Mother has warned me, but I’m tired of her warnings and her endless fears, so I catch hold of the rough stone and pushing with my one good foot, I force my way up. Towards the top there is a ridge of wall. I’ve seen boys up there, babbing for fish, although I’m never asked to join them, but even so, I know it can be done. I strain and pull, my fingers scraping against the smashed-up shells, and the higher I get the louder I can hear the sea, surging below me through the gulley between groynes. And then I’m up. I swing my legs over and find the wall is narrower than it looked, the water below dark and deep, the tide about to turn. I edge myself around to face the comfort of the dunes and that’s when I see him, Mac, walking away from me along the beach. I sit quite still, but he is trudging over the shingle, his gait uneven as he sinks into the stones, his black-caped back towards me. What is he looking for? I wonder as Mac turns to the tideline and stares out at the sea, and as he lifts a pair of binoculars, I imagine his eyes straining all the way to Holland and on to Germany to see if what they say about a war is true.
School is finished for the summer and George Allard has me turning the handle long hours for his rope. ‘This strong twine’ll be in demand,’ he tells me, ‘when the trouble comes. Horses and string, barley and grain. That’s what we’ll need. Not beer. Folks’ll turn their backs on beer. They’ll see it was the ale that distracted them, misted up their eyes, and they’ll spit it out and curse it for the bad luck that it’s brought.’
I take his money but I don’t say a word. And I don’t pass every penny on to Mother either as I usually do. Instead I keep a thruppence in a knot under the mattress, and the following month I do the same. Now, when I find myself alone, I lift the mattress and I count my coins. There will always be people who need a drink, I tell myself, to see them through the day, you don’t grow up around an inn without learning that, but even so, if times are pressed and guests are short they might just stop at the Bell and not come on to us, and so I keep counting, and count again, for it eases me to think there is something small laid by.
The next time I pass the huts down on the river, Mac himself is sitting outside with a board across his knees. He has a jug before him stuck with a few sticks and he is using a tin paintbox like a child’s. I stand and watch him. He’s drawn the outlines first in pencil and now he’s using the tip of his brush, spreading colour, filling the dry wood of the twigs from inside. I squat down beside him. He has a stem of larkspur, must have picked it from the Millside garden, and he squashes the brush into the powder, stirs and flattens it until the pink is mixed, and then he lets it spread out inside the pencilled lines so that the edges catch it like a dam. He uses blue, the crushed blue of canvas, and yellow and red for spots and creases that I don’t see are there, overlapping each other and ballooning into buds, so that they seem to be growing right there before us, the stalks silvery, the leaves grey.
I sit there for an hour, my breath still, myself forgotten, until Mac looks up and asks if I need tea. I say I don’t, but my stomach growls in contradiction, and Mac goes into the hut. ‘How’re the boats?’ he calls, his voice like a song, and I look around to check that we’re not overheard.
‘Coming on,’ I lie, thinking of the ink scratches and the scribbles of my vessels, and I search his larkspur with my eyes to see how it is done.
The bread, in four triangles, is arranged on a china plate, with one coloured petal set into its design. There is cheese inside, and a sprinkling of cress. I look into the hut for Mrs Mac but she’s not there. ‘Thank you,’ I say again. And I turn away so he won’t see how hungrily I force it in.
Mother is out, and Father is upstairs sleeping off his lunchtime ale, when an old woman pulls open the door of the inn. Her face is scored with lines and a thick white whisker stands out on either side of her chin. I’ve never seen a witch before but even so I know she is one. ‘Spare me a sixpence,’ she says and her voice is an inland voice with no trace of the sea. Ann, who is sitting at the table sewing, says we haven’t a sixpence to spare, and even if we had we wouldn’t part with it. But the old woman looks at me as if she can see the knot of money tucked under my bed, and she waits. I wait too, so long that Ann puts down her sewing and comes to stand beside me.
‘If you cross my palm with silver,’ the witch-woman tries again, ‘I’ll tell you the man you’re going to marry.’
‘What if I don’t want you to?’ Ann flushes. ‘For it may not be the one I’ve chosen.’
‘Whether it’s the one you’ve chosen or not,’ the woman smiles, ‘it’s the one you’re going to hev. He’s on a ship right now, standing there with a knife in his hand, splicing roope and thinking on you.’
The blood drains from Ann’s face. And I know, because I’ve heard her mention it to Mother, that she’s set her heart on Jimmy Kerridge who left Southwold on the
Flying Horse
and hasn’t come back for more than a year. ‘So I’ll be marrying a sailor?’ Her voice rises to a gasp.
‘He’ll be back,’ the old woman nods, ‘to claim you for his own. Sure as this boy here has two moles above his elbow, a half an inch apart.’
‘I do not!’ I say. ‘I’d knowed if I had.’ But later, once Ann has given the woman red herring and a dish of tatters, and she’s sat inside and had a rest, I climb the ladder and creep through the room where Father is snoring on his back. I duck down through the low door to where I share the bed with Ann, and I strip off my shirt. See, I hiss, there’s nothing there. But when I squeeze the skin around and twist my chin over my shoulder, there are two brown bumps, soft as velvet, on the side of my arm.
I lie down on the bed and wish I’d thought to ask what the future holds for me. Not whether I am getting married, I don’t care anything for that, but whether I’ll get aboard a vessel and sail away like Jimmy Kerridge out over the horizon to where I’ve never been.
It’s Mary who hears it first, borrows a bicycle from the gardener up at the big house and races here so fast her cheeks are red and her hair hangs loose out of her cap. But she still has her white apron on, and her boots are gleaming with the polishing she gives them last thing at night. ‘It’s the war,’ she says as she flies in, ‘we had it on the radio at Blyfield House. Someone’s been shot. Not just the King of Greece. An Archduke of somewhere.’ She’s panting fit to burst. ‘It’ll come to me. But that’s what’s started it, and now Germany’s declared war and the master says there’s no avoiding it. He’s sent his two oldest boys to Southwold, to offer their services at the town hall. He says he’ll be proud if they’re the first to be called up.’