Salt (12 page)

There's a hesitant knock on the door and my father pokes his face into the room.

‘She done it, George, better late than never. A little boy.'

And my father breaks into tears.

 

That first day I was weighed, measured, checked from head to foot and dusted with talcum. The midwife would call back later. I was carried round the house, the garden, pointed out to Gull, who was sniffing the front door nervously. And all that time my mouth remained shut. When the midwife called in that evening my mother told her I'd made no sound all day. Birth shock, she was told. Get to sleep 'cause the young 'un's going to bawl his eyes out all night. But the night arrived and my parents fell asleep in their separate rooms in a house that sounded no different from the one two nights before. Both of them listened out for their baby's cry, but it never came.

On the second day I was declared the best baby the midwife had ever delivered, and on the third she arrived with an anxious doctor. The doctor looked in my eyes, ears and mouth with his ophthalmoscope, and - less professionally - tickled me to get a reaction. Under the arms, the soles of the feet. A reputation at risk. The next day he phoned a consultant with the admission he was calling because a baby in his ward, who was in otherwise perfect health, was sleeping through the nights and seemed fit and happy during the day, had totally stumped him with its refusal to cry. He was told to wait. Wait for a baby with a real problem.

 

Towards the end of that first week my father was eating a boiled egg at the kitchen table with me next to him in a Moses basket.

‘She ought to know.'

My mother continued eating her egg, waiting to see if he'd say more.

‘It's just, she's got a right.'

‘I han't spoken to her for eight years, George.'

‘It's different now. Ain't it, Lil'?'

‘It's too late.'

‘No it ain't. She'd like to see the young 'un.'

‘George, I can't. Eat your egg.'

‘I'll call tonight. Shall I call tonight?'

He did. From the phone box in Wiggenhall St Germans by the Great Ouse. He called the Albatross Inn and got one of the lads there to cycle across the marsh to fetch Goose and accept no excuses if she refused to come. My father sat on the bank of the dyke while the errand was done. Some time later, crouched in the red phone box, his head in his hands with tiredness, he finally spoke to Goose.

As the coach pulled up three days later the doors swung open with a thump and she was already climbing down, already talking nineteen to the dozen, complaining of stiffness, draught, braking, exhaust fumes. The sandwiches. My father stood the assault, sensed the woman was nervous, then silenced her by raising his hand. I got to tell you, he said, things ain't right. I ain't talking about you kicking Lil' out. That's all under the bridge and I ain't going to say my pitch, but things with Lil' and the young 'un. He hasn't made a noise since he was born and that's near breaking her heart. He ain't right. And I don't want you mixing it or making things worse or I'll send you packing.

She leans forward and when he kisses her cheek he feels it's warm from the bus but slack with age. Her hand on the luggage has a lattice of purple veins on it. But he knows the last thing he wants is to feel pity for the old girl.

‘You're fatter,' she says. ‘Don't worry, boy, I won't cause no trouble.'

 

Goose and Lil' manage a limp hug on the doorstep, which proved to be such an important moment my father snapped it with his Kodak Retinette. I still have the picture. Is the surprised expression on my mother's face because her hands have overlapped so easily across Goose's back? The woman has shrunk like the marsh she lives on, and her hair's grown bigger, tied up at the back of her head in an awkward knot very similar to the granny-slip in my mother's belly-button. Her eyes had been brown, but they've begun to go grey. As they release each other Goose looks at the house, the yard, the life she's never been part of. She knows not to draw attention to her absence from Lil', but needs to say something none the less. What's with the flowers? she asks, looking at the odd arrangements that have been planted across the garden. And my mother reacts with a knowing-but-not-telling smile - the kind of gesture that has always wound Goose up, and both women know it.

I expect I was shown to my grandmother a few seconds after the picture was taken. There, on the kitchen table, my hand in my mouth. And when the hand was removed no noise came out.

‘He's called Pip,' my mother said, a little unsure what else she
could
say.

‘After my boat!' Goose snorts, before thinking better of it.
Well, blow me!
She tries to conciliate: don't you worry - he'll start bawlin' soon. Lil', you cried solid the whole week, day 'n' night - turn me ragged, you did . . . My mother listened tensely at the ease with which Goose dragged up the old stories. It was a mistake to have invited her. But she said nothing and as the story continued past the images of clouds and Hands's disappearance, she felt a sudden relief to hear all this again. So that bastard pull the quilt off the line, he did, use it as a sail . . . and my mother thinks Goose is right to use her stories this way. After all, stories have bound them from the start. This baby is just the next step in the myth. It makes her look at me afresh, held in the dry leaves of Goose's hands. Seeing me, there, it was a moment of real love. I was silent, but I was hers. Her baby, and all was fine.

 

‘I ain't got no ideas.'

‘How long's it been?'

My father's in a storeroom at the Stow Bardolph Estate. There's a young woman in there, eating an apple and sitting on some stacked trestle tables. With each bite my father looks at the tiny bubble of juice on her lower lip; he leans against the cool white plaster wall, his body so relaxed after a day's work he has the look of a man entirely at ease. Which he isn't.

‘Long enough.'

‘There's not much I can say, George.'

The girl has the habit of deliberately using his name. He wonders why. She's what - twenty, twenty-one? He doesn't even know why he's sharing all this with her. She looks at him with a level gaze while all that moves is the hair she's swept up from her face, falling slowly across her forehead like silk.

 

On the last night of her visit, Goose stood on the back lawn and stared at the sky and then at the moon. Behind her, the eerie silence of the house where a baby should have been crying. My mother came out and stood by the old woman. The clouds passed dreamily in front of the moon, and somewhere up in that view, the astronauts had left their cardboard flag ahead of their long journey home. The moon was empty again.

‘I wonder if they looked at us,' my mother said.

‘These clouds ain't clouds,' Goose replied. ‘All fortnight the clouds been buggered up by this moonstuff. Bad enough up Blakeney, but hair . . . I don't know. These fenland people got dull dreams, that they have.' And the old girl turns to my mother and says, ‘What I don't understand is why you married him.'

My mother feels she shouldn't have to be asked. ‘For Pip,' she says.

Goose lets it lie, but something still brothers her: ‘You still han't told me about these flowers.'

My mother smiles darkly in the night. She's full of secrets.

 

My mother had planted a garden where the flowers grew taller, straighter, had more blooms and lasted longer than anywhere else in the area. Closer to the Wash the salt air burned the petals, while down in the Fens the habit was always to plant edibles. But she'd gone against this local wisdom. Cornflowers and sweet peas wrapped the house in an unbroken garland, while delphiniums, deep blue in the August sun, ran in a straight line across the back lawn. Daisies and marigolds fringed the windows, a hedge of lavender meandered north-east. Beyond them, a single sunflower stood like an obelisk.

On the day my father had brought back his first screaming middle-white piglet, my mother planted flowering sage around the pigpen. Pigs were wise, and sage would improve the keenness of their minds. When he had built a hen-coop - ah yes, the coop that would mean so much to me - my mother dragged it over to the tarragon bushes. Wherever he stood, my mother followed with her trowel, changing his designs with the subtlest of touches. He let it be, and he kept moving.

But anyone stopping by the farm was less tolerant.
That lavender can't hardly be seen from the house
, they said, and
what's that line doing heading off to that bit of ole scrub?
Likewise, delphiniums cut straight through the heart of the lawn, generally bothered the eye and
how the hell she gets the mower round them I don't know
. To the side of the house was the stench of a stinkhorn, growing under my father's study window.
How he put up with her I ain't saying. Fen folk don't piss around like this
. A feeble mind. They still remembered the odd food she ate in the pregnancy - stuff that
poisoned that young 'un though God forgive me saying such a thing
.

 

More than bees, ladybirds and butterflies, my mother was trying to attract another visitor to her garden. And one day, just after my first birthday, as she was carrying potato peelings across the yard in a bucket in one hand, me under her other arm, the visitor arrived. A car drove up and out climbed Mrs Holbeach.

From under her armpit I glimpsed the satisfaction that flickered across my mother's face. The same expression I imagine she had when she caught the weever before the Langore brothers did.

‘May.'

‘Ethel.'

‘About time I came by. Brought some scones.'

‘Pip loves scones.'

‘So does Elsie.'

And in the car we see her messing around with the steering wheel. Clumsy and excited, her fiery hair like the sunflower's ragged petals. And I pictured my mother, in her bedroom, gazing through her dreamcatcher at the petals of her own sunflower, and beyond it, miles away in the fen and in the centre of the dreamcatcher's web, the Holbeachs' cottage at Three Holes.

Those two women became the most notorious flower arrangers in the Fens. Each Saturday they stood in the cool dusty calm of the church, all their flowers smelling green and wet on the tiles where Elsie and I searched for fossils. My mother in her utility dress with the faded rosebud half-apron tied round it, the shine of sheer tights below it, her only concession to luxury. One of the women would go to the church Bible and call out the Sunday service readings and gospel. Ethel Holbeach, big as a turkey behind the lectern, turning the pages of the Bible and her voice sounding nervous just because she's up there talking even though it's only my mother, Elsie and me listening.
Vanity of vanities
,
sayeth the preacher
,
all is vanity
, and my mother says stop, I've got an idea. It's the final passage of Ecclesiastes and it's a difficult one to pull off. How's it go again? my mother says from the back of the church.
God shall bring every work into judgement
. The other bit.
The preacher sought out to find acceptable words?
Yeah - that's it. And my mother's piling up the flowers on the floor. There are thistles and thorns and if you can get beyond them you can find the fragile early buds of a lone agapanthus. Ribbons round the base, distracting and false like serpents' tongues, swirls of gypsophila like as many misleading clouds, but if you try hard enough you'll find it, you'll find the beauty. It's going to be a good one, my mother says, and Ethel Holbeach grins, showing her poor fenland teeth.

 

Elsie spent more time at the farm, sometimes with her mother, more often alone. She had her own stool in the kitchen, and as time went by she and my mother developed their own shorthand communication: the silent exchange of ingredients, a hot spoon passed to be tasted, a sauce to be stirred. Horseradish grated from the root, folded into sour cream and wine vinegar, Elsie squeezing the lemon - hand in front, love, don't let it squirt in your eye - driping tabasco in like a scientist. Arranging it on the plate next to warm peppered mackerel and sourdough rolls. Go and get Pip now, my mother says, wiping her hands on the worn rosebuds of her half-apron. Little Elsie dragging her stool round the kitchen, standing on it in her busy little T-bar sandals as she reaches for the jars, the pots, the ladles and packets before my mother even asked her. And when all the business was done Elsie would watch me eat.

‘There, see, he likes it, I
know
what he likes.'

 

I kept my silence. In my first three years a stream of Ear, Nose and Throat consultants and child psychologists tackled my case. Just how many times was I crept up on and tickled in the ribs, or balloons inflated and popped by my ears? I was shown animals and encouraged to moo and baa in imitation. A dog's bark, a cat's meow. My parents were told to talk all the time to each other, and, when they weren't talking, to sing. So at breakfast they filled the room with talk of what they might do later, what jobs they had to complete, how the weather might change, how fat the pig was getting. As my mother cleared the plates away my father would walk outside, singing a tune until he got into his car, turn the ignition, and fall silent at the wheel.

Forcing a conversation that wasn't there was a great effort. For a month they kept it going for the sake of the child psychologist until my father called the office to tell him it wasn't working only to hear that the psychologist had been transferred to another district anyway. This bit of news was relayed to my mother that evening over cod fricassee and that was the last thing they said that night.