Salt (2 page)

When he stands, the steam rises softly from his skin like he's a man new made, from the mould. He's an impressive sight, youthful and relaxed, arms hanging calmly by his sides. He has the palest blue eyes she's ever seen. But she doesn't wrap the naked man in a warm towel. In fact, she doesn't have a towel. She has a large bunch of muddy samphire stems, and slaps the man on the back of his shins to get his legs out of the way. He steps out, dripping, and her forearms go to work in the soiled water of the bath, washing out the roots.

He stands there dripping, uneasy, unsure what to do. He's confused, what with the watery sky, the cloudy sea, the creek-hopping woman, the longshoreman, the boiling cauldron and the strange green plant.

But she's not without heart, for lying on the bed is a clean white shirt and a dark suit, which has the smell of a wardrobe and marks on the shoulders where she's sponged the dust.

Where had that suit come from, and whose back had it come off ? My grandmother sticks to her story - she claims she'd always had one ready, just for this type of occasion. Every woman, she adds, should have a suit at the back of the wardrobe, just in case. That the man she found was nearly naked - apart from the boots - and buried up to his neck in Morston Marsh - well, that was only incidental, a minor detail, although it certainly proved she'd been right to have a suit hanging up ready. So what happened to the suit, then? Chucked in the sea, my mother says, after he did what he did. Rat, my grandmother adds. Every story heads towards tragedy, given the time.

When the samphire was washed, my grandmother put several fistfuls of the plant into a saucepan set over the fire. The man nervously straightened his collar and waited, unaware of the spells that were about to be brewed. Like all the men in my family, his appetite was to be his downfall. And from the moment my grandmother had spied his ridiculous head sticking out of the mud, she'd known that her cookery would land him. She boiled cider vinegar. With her back to him so that he was forced to peer, she made a white sauce, uncorked an earthenware jar and added a dash of dark brown stock. The vapours rose stealthily into the air like ghosts - chicken bones, fish heads, eyes of cod. She cracked two eggs and poured from shell to shell, letting the muscle and white drip carelessly on to the tiles. The plump yolks went in, and she began a vigorous thickening whisk, while the man's stare became more intent, more desperate, his shoulders beginning to sink with the acuteness of his hunger. She added the vinegar, a slice of butter, and bit by inexorable bit my grandfather was forced to succumb. The air was filled with smooth waves of scent: the creamy almost rancid bitterness of a dairy, the rotten-sweet dust of the summer orchard, the breath of corn, of malt, a whiff of the sea.

My grandmother laid the fleshy green samphire across a large plate and poured a generous puddle of hollandaise next to it. She sat by the man and raised a juicy stem of samphire in front of his eyes. Taunting him. She dragged it across the plate, twisting it like rope to gather the sauce, then she put it in his mouth, closing his hanging jaw with her other hand. She pulled it through his teeth, freeing the samphire and the sauce and the delicious creamy tang from the thin white stem and the still slightly muddy root. His eyes closed in bewilderment, then opened in delight. He was a gonner.

Between them, they devoured the samphire, turning the lush green stems into a pile of stringy roots. The man smelled the suit on his back, he smelled the years of stale air woven into it, he smelled the nets down by the creek, the cheap grease of candlewax and the fear and loneliness that was huddled on this bleak North Sea coast during these long dark nights. He smelled the animals huffing in the stables across the marsh, the children crouching hushed under kitchen tables, and high in the air, he smelled the sweet perfume of engine oil, of dark guns heavily greased and hot to touch, the acrid and compelling smell of war.

The man who would become my grandfather pulled the last stem of samphire through his teeth, wiped the yolky hollandaise off his chin and stared contentedly into the candle-flame. And, for the first time that evening, he took off his army issue boots and placed them carefully side by side under the narrow bed.

2

Before it's even light, the man who was buried in mud the day before has climbed on to the roof of the cottage. He hugs the chimney like it's the mast of a boat and strains to see over the marshes. The tiles feel damp and mossy, and with his ear to the chimneypot he can just make out the eerie sound of the woman's snores coming from inside.

He needs to work out where he is, this misty edge of England, and little by little the saltmarsh reveals itself as the light spreads. At the foot of the garden, a rough mudslide slips into the Morston Channel. Clearly able to carry a sizeable boat, but draining to a trickle at low tide. Beyond it, a flat mile of saltmarsh until the branchless masts of other boats - there must be a channel there too. Yes, leading to a small village with high flint walls against the weather and the cold North Sea. He recalls seeing it on a map, it must be Blakeney. He sees the first of the luggers there, assembled on the quay, deciding which mud pool to dig their bait. A dreadful living. Beyond them the saltmarsh stretches as far as he can see, making its own horizon in a raised bank, which must mean another river is behind it. The Glaven, he suddenly remembers - it's the kind of thing a bomber can follow on moonlit nights. The river flows through a village called Cley next the Sea, an odd name in any language, past serene reed beds and a picture-postcard windmill. Not that serenity lasts long out here - the storm of 1953 will be sent that way fairly soon. They'll be climbing the trees and smashing holes through the tiles before that night is through.

The man knows that none of these channels, all of which point due north like a trident, actually reach the sea. They all drain into a four-mile-long lagoon called the Pit, and on the other side of the Pit is the Point: a low sweeping bank of sand, gravel, mud and dunes, which joins the land at Cley and stretches along the coast like a giant protective arm. Beyond that is the open water of the North Sea.

 

At this moment the sun rises miraculously, seemingly out of the distant mud of the saltmarsh, orange-yolked and unreal, and for a second my grandfather is illuminated like a film star, on set, in another man's suit. Blond hair, thin-skinned, with the neat ordered smile of a calm man. Those eyes seem impossibly clear, their sky-blue colour almost doesn't register in the light.

He scans the marshes, passing the place near by where a boat will be wrecked in 1953, Bryn Pugh's
Thistle Dew
. As he sweeps the marshes he lingers briefly on the spot where he was found buried in the mud, passes the oyster bed where I shall be locked in a cage and nearly drowned one day, over to the wreck that he spent all of yesterday morning looking at. Then, near the rising sun, he sees the silhouette of a pillbox, newly constructed. I'll examine the way shrimp have been eaten after a picnic there. Near the pillbox he sees a small oak copse and an isolated huddle of buildings and outbuildings. Not much to look at. More outbuilding than building at first glance - just a cattle shed used in storms and floods. But it has a good chimney, which is why my uncle will choose to make his smokehouse there in a few years' time. There's the lawn where we will cure the hocks, the room where he will build his fireworks, and there's the thick smokehouse door with its unreliable latch. Ah, yes, the latch. Looking at these buildings, you've really got to hand it to him. My uncle was a man of vision.

My grandfather will never know any of this. He will know nothing about the mouthwatering smell of smoking fish, the massive door with smoke pulling through the cracks like nails being uncurled from the wood, or the fireworks being built in the Lab. But, for the moment, he's happy, he's alive and the sun is shining.

 

He puts his ear to the chimneypot and listens to the sounds of the cottage. Noises rise up at him like he's listening to a well. A shuffle of shoes on the tiles and, suddenly loud, a spit landing in the fireplace right below him. She must be up. He begins to slide down the roof on his backside, is unable to stop the acceleration, so falls the last few feet to land roughly in the garden. She's at the window glaring at him. Falling out the clouds again.
Where've you bin!
she mouths. He points to the sky.
Thassit!
she says, had enough of you. He smiles back, then brushes himself down - it's not a bad suit after all - and opens the door as if he owns the place. She's already turned her back on him.

Once inside, and not knowing what to do, he finds an oilcan and greases the door's hinges. He goes to the fireplace and closes a link in a chain which is giving way, he fixes the rattle on a window by hammering leather into the crack. He begins to whistle with his happiness. My grandmother doesn't want to acknowledge him, but is getting increasingly irritable with a man who can be so annoyed by little things after less than twelve hours in a place. Juss let him try fix my skillet - he'll know about it then. Just who did this perhaps on-the-run, possibly deranged, compulsive handyman think he was?

She unwraps a loaf-shaped block of cold oatmeal porridge and cuts four thick slices from it, melts lard on the skillet and fries the slices till they're golden brown. My grandfather's fixing spree grinds to a halt as the smell of frying fat fills the air. She's at it again, he thinks. He obediently sits at the table. A wonky table - but he even misses that, such is the power of the woman's cookery.

‘You carry on that fidget and I'll clout you with the broom and that's as solid as bugger,' she began, ‘fannyin' round like an old woman. Get your grub in an' go fix the rowin' boot.'

Perhaps he smiles at this point the generous smile of a man grateful for small mercies. His dreamy blue eyes glinting with the sheer pleasure of being alive, being well, being useful. Relaxed by the handiwork and the warmth of porridge he says one word - pointing to himself, he tells her to call him Hans.

‘
Hands?
' she replies.

 

With his belly full of porridge, the hammer was given back to Hands - as he'd instantly become - and he was told to go fix the garden. Get out the house, more like, and Hands knew she meant it. Immediately outside the back door he almost tripped over a small rowing dinghy - the
Pip
- badly in need of caulking, splicing and varnish. Overjoyed with the project he went back to hug the marshwoman, but was met only with her finger pointing ‘out' once more. He would need tools and materials, but other jobs needed doing first. So he vanished with a box of nails and spent the morning fastening wires to the fence and pegging the raspberry bushes, and as his sphere of fixing grew ever wider he returned to the roof, where he hammered down some of the loose tiles and finally, mercifully, ran out of nails. While he was up there he saw the longshoreman winding his tortuous way through the creeks like a man trying either to lose himself or find something he'd lost. A man not comfortable with straight lines.

On the roof, however, tiles had been realigned, coping stones raised and guttering levelled. The marsh was obviously sucking the cottage down, twisting its beams and cracking its walls in the process, but Hands was doing his best to polish the rails of the sinking ship. As he reached up for the slanting chimneypot he spotted the longshoreman had arrived and was leaning against the gate. The gate leaned in turn against the longshoreman.

‘Goose! You got some bloke up the roof. Goose!'

Her real name's Kitty, but it's never used.

Hands looked down, waiting for the marshwoman to come out, but nothing happened.

The longshoreman waited too, nodded a quiet mornin' to the man with the hammer, then began again: ‘Roof, Goose. Got some bloke on the chimney.'

The longshoreman shut up when she came out. He grinned knowingly; not that he knew much about anything.

‘What you grinnin' at?'

‘You're a rum 'un.'

‘You what?'

‘You heard.'

‘What?'

‘What I said.'

The days pass slowly in Norfolk. Hands sat down on his haunches, the hammer idle across his lap.

‘Don't you make my gate stink of fish.'

‘Got you a dab, ain't I,' the longshoreman said, unhitching a pale flatfish from his belt and holding it out.

‘Chuck it down. I ain't coming no closer 'cause of your breath.'

The longshoreman gave his fish a lingering kiss on the lips then chucked it down.

‘Thanks.'

‘That's got grass on it now.'

‘It'll wash.'

The longshoreman pulled out a bit of driftwood from his pocket: ‘And that's a bit of wood.'

He chucked it on to a pile of similar-shaped wood and other bits of flotsam, looked up and nodded at Hands, pushed himself upright from the gate, leaned forward into his stride, and left.

And wrapped round the length of driftwood was a strip of fabric - part of the fine cream of a German silk parachute, woven in Dresden, found in a creek bed, hurriedly buried. Or so the story usually went, spoken either by my mother or my grandmother over the years. Though even this is uncertain: there are irregularities, details that change, inconsistencies in chronology. That fish, for one, seems likely to have been a red herring. Sometimes it's a plaice - a flatfish, admittedly - but other times it's been a whiting, a John Dory and, once, a mackerel. Whiting are never caught at that time of the year, and the longshoreman's bag of tackle never carried mackerel feathers.

 

Hands knew from the start he'd bitten off more than he could chew. However hard he worked, however many things he put right and made level, he knew the woman would sweep him out of the house with her broom one day. And so, up on the roof, I imagine he gazed long and hard at the gleaming roll of parachute silk against the muddy lawn, before turning his attention to the horizon, way beyond the marshes.