Salt

Table of Contents

 

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

SALT

Jeremy Page lives in London, where he has worked as a script editor for Film Four, the filmmaking division of the UK's Channel Four.
Salt
is his first novel.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in Great Britain by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd 2007
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2007
Published in Penguin Books (UK) 2008
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2008

 

Copyright © Jeremy Page, 2007

All rights reserved

 

PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

eISBN : 978-0-143-11412-3

1. Germans—England—Fiction. 2. England—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6116.A35S25 2006
823'.92—dc22 2006037568

 

 

 

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means
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For Jacob

1

Finding a man buried up to his neck in mud. That's how it's meant to have started. Him in the mud and her pushing a pram towards him over the saltmarsh. He's on one side of a creek and she's on the other. The pram is full of samphire and there's more of it in her hands and by her feet. Bright green samphire on black, oily mud, the start of this story has very few colours. And against the mud - quite unexpectedly - she's seen the shocking blond hair of the man.

She said she nearly tripped over him. That her wellies nearly kicked him like he was a washed-up fishing buoy, till at the last second - the very last second, which was also their first - he'd smiled politely, and said hello.

 

It's a pretty start to a story. Across the mud slicks and estuary there's a boat, which was wrecked many years before the man was. It's called the
Hansa
, and because it's sinking in mud and a rising tide the man has felt an affinity with it all morning. He's certainly had little else to look at, and the rest of the landscape fails to make sense - the sky is so watery blue and the sea so cloudy grey that just to look at it makes him feel upside down. Of course, what he cannot see - yet - are the clouds. A thin smoke-signalled line beyond the Holkham Meals. But
she
sees them all right, saw them the second they appeared, and for a moment she doesn't know what to do - should she run? She thinks better of it because she knows it's too late. The story of her and the man she found has already started. And another thing, she's seen the tall wooden figure of a longshoreman on the creek's other side, looking like a cracked mast stuck in the mud, tattered rags of sails blowing from his shoulders.

So this young woman, some kind of creek-hopper, in that instant, with mud on her face and a man's coat on her back, boots on her feet, made a decision. She moved quickly, scattering samphire on to the man beneath her, weaving the muddy roots into his conspicuous blond hair and laying out bundles by the dozen along the bits of his arms and chest where they poked through the mud, and as the longshoreman began to wade into the creek she arranged the last of the samphire on the mound of his belly, finally running out when it came to his ‘down there'. No, not even a solitary stalk was unaccounted for. She left that bit exposed, and in the seconds before the longshoreman arrived, she sat on her pile. Three an' six, two shillin' two an' six, she muttered. Needless to say the longshoreman had spent too many years staring at the horizon, talking to fish heads hanging from his hook or herring strung from his belt to notice anything odd about the woman counting her crop.

Though he'd meandered an unnecessary hundred yards across the marsh to see my grandmother, he had nothing in particular to say when he arrived. That being the usual path in Norfolk and this being the usual way of the marsh. They got by in silence, listening to the larks. The longshoreman sniffed, shifted his weight, moved off again. The young woman kept a wary glance on him and the herring swinging from his belt as he began to splatter some drops of weak piss on the mud, and as he shook himself dry she looked at how the fish hanging from his belt danced, their wide-mouthed expressions so close to a smile.

‘Guess what I seen,' he began.

She continued the samphire count.

‘Guess what I seen yes'day.'

‘What?'

‘You ought a guess.'

‘Why?'

‘What I seen.'

‘Well, what was it?'

‘Ain't you guessin'?'

Ill at ease, he ground his foot into the mud like all marsh-men do.

‘I ain't told no one.'

‘Thass because ain't no one listen to you.'

The longshoreman frowned and sucked his breath in. ‘You put me off my count, thass trouble,' she said.

‘Last night,' he said, ‘I seen a man fell right out the sky. Out the moon maybe. Fell right out down here an' I been lookin' for him.'

She saw tufts of that blond hair poking through between the samphire. ‘Five an' six, ha'penny . . .'

‘What them clouds say?' the longshoreman asked, chuckling to himself. He gave her a wink and began to head off. He was, after all, infatuated.

Halfway into the lagoon - known as the Pit - with the water up to the hem of his waders, he turned back, looking a little more like a drowning man than usual, and shouted
I ain't lying no how!
between the circling shrieks of gulls and terns.

And to the man struggling under her samphire pile she whispered you keep it quiet now 'cause that one's got a long tongue. But the man she'd uprooted from the marsh like the samphire itself had other things on his mind. Maybe it's just a story, but the story goes that once he was down there, the man weighed up his options, found to his surprise that this young woman wasn't made entirely of mud, that she was probably still in her twenties, that her skin was smooth and smelled like warm dry flints. The story has it that even while the longshoreman's waders and flapping oilskins were approaching through the creek, the buried man was thinking she must be worth a go, thinking about all a man can think about when he knows his number's up.

 

But maybe this is already far from the truth. Stories start simply enough, but they soon can't be trusted. What's certainly true is that the man did something to put her hackles up, because my grandmother half-carried half-dragged her man from the shore, across the saltmarsh, along the Morston Channel to Lane End, her cottage. To the one room where she slept, ate and washed. And there, in the middle of her room, she threw down the mud-man in near disgust. Crumpled and guilty, he shivered and coughed on her rug while she unhooked the tin bath and placed it on six raised bricks.

‘You stink like cod. Should've gived you to that long-shore-man. I should've chucked you back in the sea on the end of his hook.'

It's possible he never understood a word she said.

For the next ten minutes she talked to herself as she carried water from the standpipe outside, sloshing it on the rug and across the curled-up legs of the man on her way to the tub. The man hid his head in shame as the water and the nonsense and the obscenities poured down round him till the tub was full.

These were the nights when German bombers growled through the sky, their bellies full with steel and cordite. When the moon was low their dark shapes and still-darker shadows came over the coast. Several hours later they'd return again, wearily, lighter in weight, fewer in number, dropping the occasional bomb on the forgotten land of creeks and channels beneath them. On one of those nights it all began for me - crablines and samphire, tulips and bees, fireworks like delphiniums and agapanthus in the sky, smoking fish on racks by the dozen, elm trees and marsh fever, boats and rag clouds and dunes and woods and marshes and the dead sperm whale - war, after all, starts many things, and even though I wasn't born for another twenty-five years, my story, or at least the stories that made my story, began there.

 

Back in the cottage, the odd couple who just met on the marshes are sitting on the rug. Before them there's the blackened shape of the tin bath, under which my grandmother has placed candles to keep the water hot. The man, perhaps wondering whether he's to be cooked, nevertheless cuts his losses and steps - still with his boots on - into the tub. The steam rises lazily into the candlelight of the room. My grandmother kneels by the tub and begins to soap the marsh off his back, occasionally splashing him with water to make him keep still. She uncorks the mud from his ears and for the first time he listens to the murmuring of distant terns, the stirring of the chimney, a rusty weathervane on top of the roof. A lone bomber goes overhead, and an air-raid siren wails mournfully across the marsh. Blackout curtains hang against the windows and my grandfather must think that this woman lives in a cave. He is safe here. No one will ever see her candles.

It is a moment to savour in my family history.