Salt (11 page)

Yes this really is a dream. A dream where little Elsie stands boyishly by the rowing boat, with her hands on her hips and the trail of her eel-trap disappearing into the weeds. Elsie is giggling and Lil' is smiling back at her, and George has gripped his wife so tight the ridges of his knuckles are showing and he's trying to fuss with the engine because the steering is still tied up and they're wedged into the bank.

The man and woman are walking unsteadily down the grassy slope towards their child. The man reaches the boat first and squats down on his haunches, one hand on the boat's gunwale, the other on his daughter's shoulder, steadying both and himself, a man who makes caring gestures.

‘Hello, Langore, out on your boat?' he says.

‘Mr Holbeach. Where are we?'

‘Three Holes. Just having a picnic.'

And now the woman has reached little Elsie, and she stands behind her and, with an almost imperceptible nod, the woman greets Lil'. They've met once before, at the hospital.

‘This, Mrs Langore, is little Elsie,' the woman says.

Lil' makes a strange little noise in the back of her throat and reaches out her hand to the girl.

‘Go on, say hello,' Mrs Holbeach whispers to the child, ‘it's all right,' and it makes Elsie shy. She turns her face into her mother's skirts and twists her eel twine into the palm of her hand.

‘Have you been catching eels?' Lil' says to the girl, and little Elsie looks back at her and nods. ‘Have you caught any?'

‘No.'

‘Mrs Langore . . .' the woman begins, but her husband looks up at her and she doesn't continue. ‘Mrs Langore,' she says again, repeating the name to herself.

‘It's all right, Ethel,' her husband says. And oddly the girl starts to laugh.

‘What is it?' Lil' says.

‘Your boat's silly,' Elsie says, as if it's something the adults have missed.

 

A rural scene, in the Fens. Hello, Elsie, nice to meet you, in your blue-and-white gingham dress with smocking round the neck, eating a picnic of eggs, haslet, tartlets and cordial. It's so still here; the only movement across the punishing geometry of the landscape has been the boat inching its way down the drain, two people in its prow leaning to keep a straight course. The excited shrieks of a girl as she's dragged her eel-line through the dark weeds, and then the same girl, giggling as she watches this strange couple floating closer.

It's a perfect moment. And then the girl asks her mother whether she can go in the boat and all four adults look at each other, gauging.

Lil' immediately looks at Mrs Holbeach, and realizes in that instant that Mrs Holbeach is one of the kindest women she's ever met. A kind and generous woman who has an aura of trust, of good-will, of peace which has grown over forty years of living on the fen. Mrs Holbeach would make the decision. With her large, slow-moving hands she ruffles the bright red hair of her daughter and then bends to lift up the half-loaf that had rolled down the slope. She picks at the grass clinging to the crust, looks up calmly and says of course, Elsie.

Elsie winds her eel-line and starts to clamber in. Steady, Elsie, be careful now, and Lil' puts her hand on the girl's shoulder and she feels the smallness of the bones there. Then Elsie sits next to Lil' and they hold each other's hands and she tells her father to push the boat off and don't fall in because we're
not
going to fish you out.

Elsie's immediately dragging her hand and eel-line fast through the water, not looking back once at her parents receding down the drain. It's unnerving how quickly people vanish in a landscape so large. Lil' and George sit together, near the engine, in a sudden silence made by the presence of this playful child. Lil' looks back once and sees Mr and Mrs Holbeach standing at the top of the bank, shielding their eyes against the setting sun, though it looks equally possible that Mrs Holbeach is in fact crying. And then she looks at Elsie. She looks at the tension of pleasure on her face, the girlish pout of adult front teeth her mouth is yet to frame, the pepper of freckles each side of the nose. At the hair, a deep peachy red, so curly, so vigorous it makes her feel all of life has become new.

The little boat and its odd cargo go another two miles into

the fen until they come up to the dark weedy iron of a sluice gate. Elsie wants them to go on, but George turns the boat back to Three Holes. Lil' moves forward and plays with the eel-line, making a cat's cradle between her fingers for Elsie, smelling the girl's hot breath when they laugh together. The shadows lengthen over the water, Elsie huddles closer for warmth, and Lil' puts an arm round her for the half-hour it takes for them to return. Just before they reach Elsie's house, they pass the confluence of three water channels that gives Three Holes its curious name. A place of meeting. They tie up and Lil' climbs out with Elsie, now asleep in her arms. And as they climb up the bank, Lil' sees the Holbeachs' strange little cottage for the first time. A simple Lincolnshire two-up-two-down worker's house, surrounded by a plot of darkly turned soil, immaculately upright in a fen where all the other buildings are twisted as they gradually sink.

 

Mrs Holbeach has been looking out for them, and opens the door when George, Lil' and the sleeping Elsie are halfway down the path. Lil' puts Elsie into a chair, and they're offered tea in delicate china cups and slices of Mrs Holbeach's carrot cake. A Quaker recipe. It seems like Mrs Holbeach has long expected them. While the tea brews, George comments on the framed photographs of tulips on the walls, awards for the prized tulip bulbs Mr Holbeach grows in his smallholding. One of the last of its kind in the Fens.

When Elsie wakes, her sleep has changed her mood. She doesn't know why the boat people are still there, so she becomes over-polite. She walks round the room, eats white bread and jam in the corner and swings her feet together to make the buckles on her sandals jingle.

‘Just tulips is it, Mr Holbeach?'

‘Page Polkas,' he replies, ‘very striking and very tall.' The men are doing their bit at conversation. ‘March,' Mr Holbeach says, sipping his tea.

Lil' continues to sip her tea long after it's gone cold. Mrs Holbeach sits on a piano stool, smoothing her dress over plump knees, suddenly looking tired. And when Lil' and George finally get up to go, Elsie again comes to their aid. Yawning, she says, ‘You're nice.' It's to Lil'. ‘Can I go in your boat again?'

‘Yes,' Ethel says, ‘I think it might be all right.'

 

‘George, turn the engine off.'

A week later. Lil' and George, an hour into a trip going down the Great Ouse.

George leans back to the outboard, unsure what's wrong. He cuts the engine and feels the boat lurch to one side, and when he looks back at his wife she's off the bench and is lying flat on the planks of the boat. The
Mary Magdalene
drifts into the sonorous flow of the big river, begins to turn slowly, and still he looks down at his wife, forgetting the old rule of never standing in small boats.

Looking down at her, he watches her fingers unbutton her summer dress, sees the soft, heavy shapes of her breasts in the bra as she pulls the material aside, and the pale, smooth skin of her legs as she begins to pull the dress up to her waist.

 

And at this point I shall retire to the distant riverbank while they get on with the business of my conception. I leave my father and mother on the rough wooden planks of the
Mary Magdalene
, inches away from the soft fenland water trickling past the hull. A tiny rowing boat, adrift in the muddy swirls of the Great Ouse as the river makes its lazy, final pouring out into the Wash.

That's where I started, on 30 September 1968.

8

I'm there, behind the weird cockscomb of my mother's belly-button, and I must admit I'm a little apprehensive. I know how things will turn out. It was the first few winter months of 1969, and Lil', my mother, was acting strangely: tasting mustard powder on the tip of a spoon, sharp fermented cider vinegar licked from a finger, salt and lemon off the back of her hand. As spring comes she eats radishes by the dozen, a whole raw goose egg sprinkled with paprika, the bitter leaves of wild horseradish. Then she turns to sweet and sour: the heady darkness of molasses syrup, the sweet tang of rollmop herrings, of pickled capers and, once, the beguiling tastes in a spoon of green tomato chutney - fresh onions, cut across the grain, floury tomato pips, soft plump raisins and the sad brown taste of autumn apples. The exotic fire of a single red chilli. She was throwing me off the scent, distracting me from hearing that far-off note which beat like a second distant heart, her own soft boom-boom of secret sadness.

In the spare room she had changed the wallpaper, repaired the bed, replaced the mattress. Unlike my father's room, where the wild curtains still hung like an angry noise, the spare room became immaculate. She could sit by the window and look down the slope to the high fen of Black Ditch Level, Marshland Fen and Stow Bardolph Fen, even further away, with their rigid lines of dead-end roads and drainage channels and isolated sluice-pump cottages. She hung a North American Indian dreamcatcher she'd bought in a bric-a-brac shop in King's Lynn on the window and looked through it like a target.

George, my father, didn't get a look-in during those months. I was
in there
and she was
out of bounds
. He was not wanted. In their separate lives my father had revamped a cupboard off the living room, which had last been used by the previous tenant, Harold Flott. Flott had stacked the shelves with jars of screws and nails, but the screws and nails had been replaced now by books on animal husbandry, balls of string had become journals on veterinary studies, bundles of yellowed magazines had become estate-organizational records on breeding, selecting and bloodstock management. My father had bought a lamp for the evenings, and a desk for his leather-bound science journal, given to him by Kipper on his wedding day. A beautiful book of pristine white paper bound with the softest calfskin. A small brass lock held the album shut. With a tender gesture my father would wipe the front of the journal every time he entered the room.

Each evening, his mind slightly addled with alcohol, my father would sit there and smoke a pipe until he heard the door of the spare room close upstairs. He'd sit among the gently rising curls of his smoke like the proverbial punished man and contemplate the silence of the house. A dying marriage is a calm place to be, and he resigned himself to it, like giving in to illness.

 

On 20 July my mother went into labour. Unlike Hands, twenty-four years before, my father wasn't stricken with panic. He didn't feel the wind in the air and dream of lost horizons, he didn't work out his escape route on a map with his finger. What he did was make the necessary call to the midwife, and then he set up the black-and-white television in the living room. While he fiddled to get a reception my mother gasped for air by the window of her room.

The midwife came within minutes to what must have seemed a deserted house. Gull skulked in shadows by the barn, a solemn heat seemed to fill the rooms, flies turned sharp corners in the air above the breakfast table. Going into the living room she found my father crouched in front of the television where the crew of Apollo 11 were passing under the grey southern hemisphere of the moon. He turned to her, the excitement in his face giving him a deranged, wild look. Ain't it marvellous! he said. She gave him a brief, professional scolding for not being with his wife, then went upstairs with a matter-of-fact purposefulness that scared him to the bone. Just, whenever you need, you know, he whispered, too late, from the bottom of the stairs, before being drawn back to the mesmerizing TV.

It is a long night. At four in the morning the whole world falls silent in front of those flickering pictures. A distant voice and cracks of static perforate an emptiness which seems to stretch from Norfolk right up into the deep void of space.
The Eagle has landed
, says a voice abruptly and is answered with a relieved
roger, we copy, it was beautiful from here, Tranquillity ... we can breathe again
. My father looks up at the ceiling wondering about all the things going on above his head. He's drinking himself crazy. The sheer magic of the footage continues. Unexpectedly, a bulky shape gleaming in harsh sunlight appears on the side of the landing craft. Half man half refrigerator clings dreamily to the rungs of the ladder. And it all begins to happen fast now. The crackle of Armstrong's intercom sounds once, twice, we hear his breath and my father holds his. My mother screams once, then falls silent, staring up at the light-fitting above her bed. The midwife turns to the window and sees the moon framed in one of the panes. Downstairs he looks in awe as that clumsy body seems to float down the steps without touching the rungs does the foot go down has it finally happened and that's when the midwife remembers the job she's there to do. She turns back to my shocked mother and she sees me lying there, between my mother's legs, swapping the weightless dark of her body for an appearance in the midst of a worldwide drama.

From downstairs a hoarse cheer as the astronaut's famous announcement is declared and a rigid American flag is bent into shape, and then an excited silence, as all in the house remember why they're there and try to listen out for a baby's cry. But the only sound comes from the overlapping gabble from the TV and the faint sound of the radio upstairs. Soon, the anxiety spreads to my mother, she lifts her head because she can't hear me, and sees the midwife tying a professional no-nonsense never-to-be-undone knot in the umbilical cord, so unlike that crude granny-slip hanging down across my mother's belly, and then she sees the nurse wrapping the hot, sticky body of the baby in a soft white towel. A baby refusing to cry.