Mr Mac and Me (7 page)

While I’m knotting the string good and tight, Mac begins lifting boxes, carrying them out to the cart that I’ve propped up by the door.

‘What’s in all them boxes?’ I ask, following with my own, and Mac tells me – books mostly, photographs. Articles about architecture and art. ‘You can look at them if you’re interested.’ And he gives a quick glance at my hands which I washed that very morning with water from the well.

When the cart is loaded I leave them to finish packing and push my way, careful as I can, back down the street past the Blue Anchor and to the right along the track that leads to Rabbit House. I have to wait for a herd of young heifers to lumber past, Mr Buck coming on behind with his whip as he brings them up from the low fields where they graze. What you got there? anyone else would have asked. But Buck only has eyes for the thin tails of his cows, swishing away flies, and for all I know he doesn’t even see me.

The lane is rough with stones and troughs, and I catch the wheel of the cart more than once, nearly tipping Mac’s books off to the side. I have to edge it up on to the rise, pushing through herb willow, hoping not to hit a buried brick. I’m quiet, though, the stems of grass softening the grind, so that when I come to the gate I catch a host of rabbits in mid-chew. They freeze, their ears up, their noses twitching danger. And as I push open the gate they turn, every last one of them in the same breath, and streak away over the grass like fire.

I bump the boxes of books up the track. No one has lived in this house since I’ve known it. It’s made from wooden planks, its windows wide and peeling paint, looking out on every side. The key is under a pot by the front step and I leave the cart propped against a rain butt and creak open the door. Light spills in across the wooden floor. And a bee, heavy as a barrel, buzzes noisily around my head. I take a box and step inside. The floors are painted white, and there’s a stove for a fire. There are no shelves or cupboards so I walk through into the next room but here there is nothing but a metal bed. I choose a corner and lifting the books out I arrange them, first in a tall tower and then, thinking better of it, leaning one against the other in a row. I go out for the next box. And the next. I leave the letters knotted as they are, but the last box is full of creamy pamphlets, and as I arrange them I open one and flick through. There are photographs – rooms full of furniture, chairs tall as a man, trees and flowers appearing out of the paper on the walls. I flick to the front of the pamphlet and attempt to decipher the unfamiliar words.

Waerndorfer
. I think that’s what it says
Carl-Ludwigstrasse
. And I wonder what it has to do with old Mac. But when I look more closely at the photographs and search the details of the rooms I see a vase of blackthorn just coming into flower. And that’s when I see his name. Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Written clear as day. Who else would decorate their table with a bunch of sticks?

I get more comfortable, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and look at pictures of a tea room, with a cauldron of daisies hanging from the roof. Wrapped around each cauldron are circles of metal, like the pictures Runnicles once drew for us of the planets moving round the sun. A few pages on is a painting of two women, their hair spun wild about their heads, and at their overlapping hearts, a child lying, curled inside a rose.
Hertz am Rose
, it says. Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. Although the baby is not the same one she was painting on her frieze. Might it be her own baby? And I wonder if it is buried in a short grey grave somewhere, like so many of ours.
Hertz
. I say the word aloud.
Dekorative
.
Wiener Rundschau
. And that’s when I know, without knowing how I know, that the words I’m reading are in German. I’ve been reading German words! Looking at German pictures! And I throw the book down, scuffing it across the floor, and leap to my feet.

The handcart is waiting for me at the door, an old brown donkey, nose down for a bite, and I take it by the arms and rush the slope of garden, rabbits scattering as if I’m the devil himself. I scrape through the gate, dragging the cart behind me, and race with it down the lane until it veers off into a bog of sand. I leave it there and plough my way up through the dunes, the sharp stems of marram grass scratching at my legs, the sea roaring in my ears, and I have to swipe at the salty mash of tears that fills my nose and mouth. Once I’m at the top I lie down in the sand and wait until my heart has slowed, my eyes have dried, and then remembering my duty, I crawl forward, and taking a long, careful look along the coast, I check to see that we’re still safe.

Chapter 19

No one thinks the herring girls will come this year, but there’s nothing the fishermen can do without them, someone has to gut the silver darlings, as they call them, and soon the girls are flooding off the train, in a long crocodile behind their pastor, and making their way into the already overcrowded town. Most go to the lodgings they’ve had before, and a little troupe of them swoop over to us on the ferry. Mrs Lusher always takes some in. This year she packs in three above her shop, in a room she’s lined with paper to keep the oil and fish smell from her walls. And Mrs Horrod fills Vic’s empty bed with two sisters from the Hebrides, although what she’ll do if the war is over before the herring season is done nobody knows, and I imagine the look on Vic’s face if he comes home early and finds them squeezed in there like sardines.

Mrs Horrod stops in the street to tell Mother what she’s done, and how each morning at five she bangs on Vic’s old door to make sure they’re up, and at work in time for six when the fishermen deliver their first catch. ‘Bind your fingers,’ she calls to them, quiet, so as not to wake the soldiers still sleeping next door, and she leaves a hot cup of tea out for them to drink while they take out their strips of linen and bandage up their hands.

I can see from the way Mother presses her lips together that she’d never want herring girls in her best room, and anyway the room is full of soldiers from the Manchesters. Three they gave us this time, with one sleeping on a straw mattress on the floor. But since they’ve been with us her bruise has faded, and there has been a gloomy kind of truce. It’s the sight of their uniforms, I’m sure of it, that keeps Father on the wagon.

The sisters that lodge with Mrs Horrod are new this year. I know that as soon as I see them. They walk around with their eyes wide open, staring through arched doorways at the gardens beyond, sighing over hollyhocks and pansies, leaning down to stroke a snapdragon’s velvety head. They clutch each other’s arms as they pass the big house on the corner, and each time there is a slice of field, rolling away softly to the sea, they seem to say a little prayer. They’re allowed to come as young as fourteen, if they are tall enough and strong, and although the older girl looks ready for any kind of work, the other’s so small and slight she must have squeezed on to the train hidden in her sister’s skirts. I see her dashing up and down the street past the inn, and once when she stops to look at the anchor, huge and rusted, that lies beached below our sign, I happen to come out. ‘Dragged up from the bottom of the sea by one of our own fishermen,’ I tell her. ‘Father swopped it for a bottle of brandy. Danky it was, that dragged it up.’ And I glance at her hands to see if she has suffered any cuts, for most of the girls are scarred with nicks from the sharp blades of their gutting knives. But this girl’s hands are small and strong, freckled as her face, without a mark on them, and she catches me looking and holds one out to me. ‘If you want to buy me a ring?’ she wriggles her third finger, and I blush right up over the top of my head so that my blasted ears beat red.

‘Come along now, Betty,’ her sister takes her by the arm, and they whisk away together, laughing, down towards the beach.

The next afternoon that I have free I slip on to the ferry and steal over to the other side to watch the girls at work. I like to see the speed with which they gut and douse and pack the herrings into barrels, their bound fingers working, their bodies swaying to their songs. I look along the rows of girls, but I don’t see Betty, or her sister. They all appear the same today, in dark skirts and aprons, with scarves over their hair, stooping down to seize their fish. And with the same quick twist of their knives they slit the bellies open and flick away the guts. They work in crews. Two gutters and a packer. And while the gutters are throwing the fish into one of three boxes, depending on its size, the packer lifts them out, douses them down and lays them in the barrel. Sometimes I forget about the gutters and only watch the packer. She is the tallest of the crew, able to stretch to the bottom of the barrel where she lays her fish so carefully, its tail meeting other tails, its head brushing the side of the barrel, resting below a scattering of salt. Then she starts on a new layer, placing each fish sideways, shoulder to shoulder, so that their skins shimmer like a slowly twisting flower. It’s not long before a barrel is full, and then the cooper appears and twists it away to pour in pickling water and press more salt into the top. But the girls don’t waste a moment looking up. And I remember the oath that they must swear to: I’ve stared at it often enough pinned up along the harbour.
You shall make oath that you will well and truly execute your office of a packer of herring within the town of Southwold and mind the laying of all herrings and that they shall be merchantable and that the vessels or casks shall be full and equally packed in every part. So help you God
. They’ve started on another barrel. And another song. Without even taking pause to stretch. So I walk upriver through the harbour, careful not to look across to the far bank, where I might catch sight of Mac and his wife, sitting outside their shed. I’ve managed to avoid them since the move, slipping out through the back door of the inn when Mac comes in, lying low in the dunes if either one of them should pass by on a walk. Should I tell someone about the pamphlets? That’s what I can’t decide. And if so, who? And I worry that by staying silent I am going against Dora and it will be me who ends up guilty of treason.
Hertz am Rose
, I mutter, as I stumble along the bank.
Rose am Hertz
,
Dekorative, Ludwig
, until my eyes are blind. ‘It’s young Maggs!’ Mr Mayhew, the owner of the jetty opposite Thorogood’s shed, is calling to me. Each summer Mayhew and his wife live on this boat while renting out their house in Southwold. Now he’s sanding down the perfectly smooth deck, and I’m reminded how I once asked him if he was planning on a trip, and he shook his head so fiercely his cheeks shook. ‘No time, boy, no time.’ And I look up at the mast, its sails bound tight as bandage, and I imagine slipping aboard in the dead of night, unfurling them, and steering out into the wind.

‘Good day to you, sir,’ I say, and it’s then that I see her, not far from the jetty, working alongside her sister and a tall, broad packer with a squint. She’s the smallest gutter I’ve ever seen, but her fingers flash as she slices open her fish, twists out its guts and flings it into the box. She’s singing too, her eyes half closed, and as I walk by I peer at her round face, a streak of pale hair come loose from her scarf.

‘It’s the wee boy from the inn.’ Betty’s sister has spied me and Betty’s eyes fly open and without losing her rhythm she catches hold of a new fish. I nod. There’s nothing more for me to do, while they smile and nudge each other and without stopping their work they turn their heads and sing their song at me. There’s not a line of it I understand. But all the same I feel the danger of the words. Waves high as a mountain, mermaids crying through a storm. I listen hard, and as I stand there I think maybe I can follow the story. A sailor, forsaken by his true love. The gulls about him, laughing at his despair.

I wait, because it seems I must, and as I listen I push those other words into their song,
Hertz, Rose, Dekorative, Rundschau
. And I flush to think that maybe the pamphlet I’ve been reading is not German at all but Gaelic. My heart lifts and I twist away and stare out over the water, to where the weathered wood of Thorogood’s shed sits in full sun, but I can’t see from here whether Mac and his wife are sitting outside or not. And if they are, whether they are working at pictures of flowers and babies, or whether they are writing letters to friends in foreign countries, reporting on the secret coves and currents of our coast.

There’s a storm in the middle of that week, with hurling rain and lightning slashing down, and when it’s worn itself out there are worms, dozens of them, lying stranded on the ground. They look so bald and pink, washed clean of their earth, that I’m tempted to help them back into the garden, but instead I gather up a few and put them in a box and I take them with a piece of string down to the river. The sky is clearing, although the light is lemony and sour, and I stare into the water and imagine the fish knocked senseless by the storm. They won’t know which is up or down, and sure of my luck, I press a fat worm on to my hook and with a hag stone for a weight, I fling it out. But I’m wrong. The fish have swum too deep, and none are biting. I sit there at the mouth of the river, and watch the clouds roll back until the whole coast is bathed in light. There’s the bald head of the lighthouse and Southwold pier stepping out into the sea. And behind me, the dark smudge that is the lost city of Dunwich with its one remaining church and pub, and the butcher’s shop Father gave up when he came here.

It’s then that I see him. Black against the sky. Old Mac. He’s standing with his binoculars raised, staring out to sea. He steps forward, so that the tide must surely be running over his boots, and I look round to see who else might have seen him for it was only last week that Mr Gory, a newcomer himself, was asking what the man was still doing wandering about the place, when all the other visitors were gone? And his wife too, going about without a hat. And all that hair.