Salt (23 page)

 

... and I can't help but be there, in the thick fog of the sea-fret, third behind Goose and Bryn on the raised path. Their coats look bulky and grey and beyond them the marsh is glowing with a milky strangeness, which has made the air too quiet. Goose is as nervous as a horse.

 

‘Pip!' Goose says, urgently, breaking the spell. ‘Don't you look too hard out there in that fog. I seen shafts o' light and it's got my hackles up. This ain't nothin' more than a cloud we're in right now - cloud can't float no more so it's down hair on the ground.'

We walk into Blakeney, which looms out of the mist like a lost island. The streets are dripping and the flint walls shine like glass. The village is empty, the streets have an echo I've not heard before. We turn into an alleyway next to the Albatross Inn, where Bryn knocks on a side door of a two-up two-down cottage. Through the bubble-glass of the door a thin man with white hair approaches, his shape rippling as he does so, holding a pair of glasses up to his eyes while he fiddles with the latch and Bryn mutters here comes the saint under his breath. The door opens and Gideon bends his long straight back down to Goose. Good. See you've brought your fine grandson. The kettle is on. Morning, Mr Pugh.

Gideon's house smells of turps and linseed and herbal tea. We sit in the front room, where each wall is covered with paintings of saints, icons and religious scenes. He sells them at country fairs and to occasional visitors, but most of his trade comes in the pilgrimage season where those walking to Walsingham make a detour to Blakeney, pick up an icon of their favourite saint, and finish their walk with it pinned to their chest.

‘When it come to money,' Goose says, ‘nuns are bitches. You tell him, Saint.' He looks like he's been slapped. A comment like this, so early in the morning. Goose is undeterred - she goes on to tell how she'd watched three nuns arguing in whispers over an icon of Saint Francis of Assisi here at Gideon's cottage, white-knuckled with the stress of it, while Gideon brewed vanilla tea and Goose had smoked her pipe. ‘The fat one lost out,' Goose adds, as if it's something to note.

‘Yes, it's all true, I'm afraid,' Gideon sighs. ‘The others settled for Saint Sebastian and Saint Anthony of Padua.'

Bryn lets out a snort. ‘Should paint more Madonnas. Clear as muck that's what they want,' he says, but Gideon won't be drawn by an atheist.

On the walls, Saint Francis and Saint John the Baptist outstrip the Madonnas by a clear margin. Both of them with distinctly pinched Norfolk faces, marching across fields, sitting by rivers lined with rushes and marsh. St John the Baptist stands in the middle of the ford at Glandford, a group of ducks pecking bread by the water's edge and a Morris Minor with a family in it waiting to cross on the far side. Saint Francis stands in beech-woods, magpies and jays perched on his shoulders, badgers by his feet. The disciples are there too, doing the jobs they'd held before Christ chose them: Saint Peter, on a crab-boat at Cromer, pulling in pots and letting lobsters go free; Levi, son of Alphaeus, collecting taxes in the Inland Revenue office in Norwich, looking dreamily at a snowscape paperweight while the forms pile up on his desk. The disciples opt not for a last supper but an afternoon tea at the Pretty Corner Tea Rooms. Christ, in a smock, breaking not the bread but a thick slab of carrot cake - St Peter's greedy eyes on that - while at the end of the table, Judas pours salt in his cup. There are saints running across fields and brandishing sticks at tractors. Seagulls and rooks pecking the sunburned backs of sinners. On Cromer Pier, St Camillus - the reformed gamester - strides past arcade penny-fountains as they spit out coins from their mouth-like slots. Meanwhile, further up in the town of Cromer itself, St Gengulf rescues crabs by lifting them from a vat of boiling water with his bare arm, gratitude clearly seen on their crabby faces. In the background they crawl down Corner Street towards the sea, while a woman backs into a doorway and tries to shoo them off with a walking stick. It's a painting that will have special significance for me - I shall take a second to gaze at it a little longer, just to see if those crabs were revealing their secrets yet.

Bryn has folded the local newspaper with a flourish and is reading aloud an article on Kipper with great glee:

 

‘. . . the boy has made a satisfactory recovery and it is expected he will receive no further treatment. John Langore, known locally as Kipper, released a statement yesterday saying how glad he is this business is now thankfully behind them. He wished the boy a speedy convalescence and urged all to make a fresh start. However, Marge Vickers, aunt to the injured boy, later added a note of caution. ‘‘Although Mr Langore appears to be without blame for this sad incident, he is still on the marsh making unregulated fireworks, and I would ask all mothers to think twice about letting their children wander near him.'' '

 

Gideon's trying not to be interested. Gossip's an evil practice.

‘End of,' Goose says, ‘he's wriggled out, all right. Them Langore brothers always did. Mind - he were always the dark one.'

Gideon sagely raises a finger with a simple hijack: ‘So we have Cain and we have Abel. Here, on the Norfolk coast.'

It's a platform for him to launch into what was obviously a familiar sermon, as he pulls out a half-finished scene of an old man and two young girls sitting in a Norfolk barn: ‘Not far from this humble house we have Lot and his two daughters. We can see them here, in the barn where the Deed happened. Mr Pugh was kind enough to read me the story from the pages of the
Eastern Daily Press
. Lovely daughters, apparently, but given to drink, and lonely too. And the old man, weakened in the head, I believe. But here is the barn where they got him drunk and I shall not tell you more but this is how it is.'

Bryn takes the painting and frowns at it.

‘Is this
before
or
after
they get him in bed?' he says.

Ignoring him, Gideon reaches for another painting.

‘Here, on Yarmouth's Pleasure Front we have Leufredus, rather an ill-natured saint it's said, and next to him this tubby woman and her two overfed children . . . well, look, Leufredus has made them go bald after they poked fun at his own lack of hair. See here, the children can't believe their own reflections in their toffee-apples.' The painting has a SOLD sticker on its bottom-right corner.

‘Shouldn't the old boy's trousers be down at least?' Bryn continues, still looking at the picture of Lot and his daughters.

We drink herbal tea and Bramble eats digestives on the carpet. Gideon keeps looking at me with great sadness.

‘Ahh, silence. Such a . . . such a thing . . . Come with me,' he says, and I follow him into a second room, which had once been a kitchen. Now, like the rest of the house, it's cluttered with frames and canvases. There's a smell of egg. Opened tins of varnish, gesso, acrylic washes, turps and linseed share the cooker with a saucepan in which he's boiled his breakfast.

As with the living room, saints and sinners peer from the frames in a variety of confrontations. Burning bushes and golden calves stand abstractly in fields or in the middle of roundabouts. An old man is being chased by seagulls, his pockets brimming with stolen carrots. In a tall painting leaning against the fridge is Moses himself, making his way between the parted waves of the Wash while seals and cod look on incredulously through the glassy walls of water on both sides. Moses with an easel on his back, a stout pair of waders and Gideon's unmistakable white hair. Saints are being tortured in here; Gideon has graffitied some of the pictures with WHY DIDN'T YOU RUN? or SINS OF FLESH! in bright paints. In here, Lot has Gideon's thin white beard and quizzical expression, being held down by daughters stripped of their clothes and drunk on wine, one pulling his trousers off while her sister pushes him into the straw and kisses him with a fleshy, puckered mouth.

By this time Gideon has vanished between the canvases into a back lobby. I can hear him rummaging from the other side of the wall, muttering to himself and talking to the pictures with affectionate greetings. Ahh! Such a long time . . . Judas, you poor misguided rotter . . . wakey wakey, Lazarus, no point being in that cupboard . . . From the front room I hear Goose laughing with Bryn as he again sings his local tunes -
Always a Dandy, this little Andy, he'll be a naughty boy-oi!

I feel trapped and hot and confused by a cluttered Norfolk I don't understand.

Gideon reappears with two small pictures painted on boards hinged in the middle. On the left, Mary Magdalene, sitting in a boat; on the right, St Lawrence.

‘This man,' Gideon says, ‘protects against fire. When they were grilling him to death he said, ‘‘I'm done one side, best turn me over.'' You'll need them both, he says to me, kindly, giving me a glass of water.

And as he leaves the room he whispers in my ear, ‘Remember, we all need a map to follow in life. Without a map we've got nowhere to go.'

 

From the front room I hear Bryn singing ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew':

 

There by the sink I gulp from the glass and look at the fog outside through a dirty window, partially seeing my mother there, dream-walking into the alley, a crease of concentration on her brow. She comes to the window. Always the worrier, she says, sadly, my little worried boy. She leans her dark head against the glass, wearily. You've brought us back home, Pip, me, your father and you. And something rises through her, bending her body and pulling her softly away from the window. Forever floating under the ice, she drifts away. I'm left with the rising sensation I've had all day. A certainty that something miraculous is about to happen, and then a hot dry feeling in my throat, a feeling of such burning urgent upset, and I lean to the window to stretch for a last glimpse of my mother and I hear the word
muuh
.

For a second, I don't know where it's come from. And then I realize.

I've spoken it.

 

A Norfolk Miracle, brought about by the ceaseless choreography of tides, creeks, birds and salt. Rising in me and spreading across this landscape like my grandmother's quilt, long past the point when I thought my lost voice and all its words had rotted away like dead leaves. Could they still be there, in me, after all these years, waiting to be spoken? Ohh . . . I wished my mother had heard. I wished she'd heard me speak so I could hear her say well done, my love, I knew it, I just knew it!

But it's too late for that. As my first winter there continued, my evenings were in the quietly creaking cottage of Lane End, virtually orphaned, thinking of the wide expanse of marshes outside, holding back the waves with nothing more than mud and grass, of the pure long sweep of the Point as it curved into the North Sea and the calm water of the Pit which it sheltered. How this landscape had turned men into dreamers: Hands with his carvings, Shrimp with his animals, Kipper with his fireworks, Bryn with the seals and Gideon with the paintings. All of those men, and not a father among them.

 

‘Lissen, boy,' Goose said one evening, over a baked ham-and-artichoke pie, ‘I din't want a tell you, but I seen your father's car. On Kipper's lawn. You want a make yourself scarce I'd unnerstand.' Goose went over to the
Thistle Dew
, and as soon as she'd gone I cycled along the flood bank to Blakeney, which was shuttered up against the marshes and the night, with small barred windows glowing like fireplaces in the flint walls. I stopped in the High Street and listened to the sound a small coastal town makes, so utterly silent apart from a soft warm noise coming from the Albatross Inn. Somewhere up the street was the sound of water dripping from an overflow into a backyard it'll never fill. A breeze stirring the weeds growing between houses and pavement - curtains behind windows moving in a draught. More draughty inside than out. And other sounds too, of cables snapping against the masts of boats on the quay, of gulls still in flight up there like the ghosts they are, reminding me of where I am and that this town and this place are right there with me, on the edge of things. Then the door of the pub opened and a lone man came out, lighting a cigarette between cupped hands and pulling his hood over like the faceless men of the mud creatures that day on Bedlam Fen, and I cycled on, past the quay, the car park and along the road till the tarmac gave out and the marsh began again. I approached my uncle's house and sheds, and in their centre, a black shape against a blacker sky, the chimney of his smokehouse. My father's car, dull and unreflective, was parked outside.

I left the bike in the rushes and crawled to the spot where the marsh became a rough lawn. I was close to the house and Kipper had no need for curtains. He was standing there, with my father, by a roaring fireplace, scoffing fish and chips from the newspaper in a room largely filled with smoke, and I saw my father blinking with it. Two tumblers of whisky sparkled on the mantelpiece with their own little fires.

From inside the house I heard the sound of a laugh and the fainter sound of a clock chime eleven. At that, Kipper threw his remaining chips into the fire and called to another room. I heard the latch open behind the house, and a young lad with a crew-cut and a pissed-off expression walked across the lawn to the smokehouse. As he opened its door a thick grey pall curled out. He went inside. Then straight behind him, walking across the same line of the lawn, I watched transfixed as the same lad walked again to the smokehouse. Once more, he opened the door, the smoke came out, and he went inside. What was going on? And there, now, outside, my uncle was also standing on the lawn, leaning against one of the windowsills, calmly looking towards me. My father joined him and stood a little way off, staring at the ground. They didn't speak. Then out of the smokehouse came two boys carrying fish strung up on four long pipes. A dozen herrings; identical twins.