Salt (28 page)

No sooner had he sat down than he was up again, saying there was interesting birdlife here - when swans come landing at Welney Marsh you see them flying over several hundred a time. A flight path, that's what it is - they follow the Nene, I reckon. Whooper and Bewick's - sun's on them up there even though it's just gone dark. He opened a packet of Swiss roll and cut several thick slices and put them on a plate. There was a picture of the Alps on the label and it looked odd, so green and snow-capped with a bright blue sky, there, on the table in the middle of the Fens. He didn't like chocolate, as I remember, but he ate the roll.

He made tea and the pot had a top from a different pot on it and he poured mine in a cup and saucer and his in a mug that said Wingate's Agri Seeds on it. I still make a good cup of tea, he said, the faint sound of an old boast in his voice, reviving his spirits. Secret's to scald the pot, most people don't have time for that now. You've got to have time for tea, that's what I say.

Something moved in the room I guessed to be his bedroom and through the doorway I saw Gull, as old as the hills, lying on a blanket. The blanket was so full of the old dog's hair it seemed he was lying on a second skin, the pelt of his own vanished life at the farm. Hates the hens, my father said, looking at the dog. Can't stand them, and Gull gave a single, lazy thump of his tail because he knew he was being talked about. I showed him some sketches I'd drawn of the marsh and one of the
Hansa
, which I gave to him. He told me about the days he'd spent on the wreck with the brother who'd just renamed himself as Kipper, and how they'd been scared at first of the young girl who called the shots. She were a right miss, that's true, used to sit in the wheelhouse with her feet up. He smiled when he told me about all that, and when I wrote down a question about him and his understanding of birds and animals he looked at the notebook eagerly and said yeah, that's something I just can't explain. Always had this way with animals, 'specially birds. Some way I've got of looking them in the eye, make them friendly. There was this time with a gull, 'spect you know the story, that's why I called that old pile of bones through there Gull. This gull lands out of nowhere and it gets all caught up in your mother's hair. She was right scared. He ain't a bad dog, he added, for some reason. We sat in silence for a while. Our tea was finished. Then he said mind you, hens are different, ain't got no way with them, that's for sure.

 

Outside the pylons spat with sudden loudness as a heavier rain fell, and as I looked up I couldn't even see the wires that had seemed to stretch in such a sinister embrace above the bungalow. He led me into the chicken enclosure and before I went he lifted the lid of a coop and pulled out three warm eggs. He gave them to me, pretending it was a great crime, hiding them with his cap as he dropped them carefully into my pocket, even though it was dusk and no one was watching anyway. Don't tell no one, he said, and then made a noise deep in his throat which sounded like an apology.

I left him there, watching him getting wet while he settled them for the night, halfway through a routine I'd interrupted, a routine which had such a definite start and finish his attention had never entirely been away from it. The coach growled its way into the village and as it approached I watched him a little longer through the hedge. Turning this way and that, ticking boxes on his clipboard. Imprisoned by chicken wire, almost half-bird himself.

 

Sitting down in the coach after a day of little other than sitting down made me weary. The landscape was entirely flat, but the old bus lumbered and growled its way through the gears, its dark oily engine full of sand. I thought of the life my parents had made for themselves here, of my mother and father driving back from the Quaker hospital - the road too long and too straight for the couple they'd become. The skies all round deepened, stained by the fields beneath them. Gathering, ominous clouds like the storm at Bedlam Fen. A small boat in a vast landscape. Three people in the boat, so unbearably fragile, the whole lot of it.

A couple of large fenland women had hauled themselves into the bus at a village stop and their clothes gave off a damp vegetable odour. I rubbed the window with my elbow, then made the cleared patch into the shape of a neat picture frame, and through the smeared glass I saw the darkening furrows of fields spreading into dusk, the monstrous shapes of root vegetables hidden deep in the earth, buildings collapsing into the fen, then a glimpse of my father, standing by his bungalow in the cruciform shape of a wretched scarecrow, and finally, my mother sinking into the weeded depth of a passing drain, holding her breath and pinching her nose.

I shut my eyes and listened to the women's thick brown accents. Sumbody made rite muck o' that job - called it off till Sat-day - thass right? - says 'e won't cum no more - bess get Tommy down fix it - jokin'! That lazy bugger! - still got that van though. Their talking gave off the iron smell of strong tea, so similar to the rooty smell of the fields and the tobacco odour of the bus seats; their words, their breath, the laboured progress of the bus and its dying engine, all part of the same.

The sign for Three Holes was flashing past the window, and the driver was grinding the bus through the gears while he watched me in his mirror. He left me at the stop and drove off into the envelope of fenland night. No one was about. People were inside their houses, in their living rooms, with heavy-curtained windows, protecting the preciousness of their own individual pockets of light from an overwhelming darkness.

I went to the bridges at the confluence of the three drainage dykes and as I stared down at the water I remembered my mother saying can you see the three holes? The three holes here? Now, some say there's a fourth hole, a secret channel, a secret river going deep into the earth. Where do you think it is? A child's game. And now nothing, nothing but three miserable water channels stretching into the night like the points of a compass. But a compass without direction because it pointed to nowhere. We used to stand on that bridge and love the three holes, at their ability to take you instantly to three different horizons, but there, that lonely night, I felt the drains were not so much leading me away as holding me at their empty junction point.

As I walked off the road, on to the soft mud path, I saw the landscape was glowing with a cold, bone-like greyness. The blank fen had the vertiginous, expansive feel of a desert, with lights dotted in the distance like cattle's eyes caught in headlights. By my side was the dark oily water of the drain and, soon, the black brick shape of Elsie's house, with its rows of tulip beds lit by light spilling from the windows.

A simple gate and a path to the door. And a long time ago, my father and mother, carrying the sleeping Elsie along that same garden path, and the front door opening and there had been Ethel Holbeach, pretending she hadn't been looking out for their return. The same front door opening now, warm interior light flooding out into a vast winter landscape, but it's not kindly Mrs Holbeach with her flushed face this time; it's Elsie. Elsie, who had also been looking out, this time for me. Elsie framed in the glorious soft light of the hall, dark-eyed, her hair wound up tight behind her head.

‘Hello Elsie,' I said.

‘Hi. I'm so glad you're here. How was the old man?'

‘Pecked.'

I hadn't been inside their house for years, but little had changed. And no sign to show Mrs Holbeach had died just a couple of weeks ago. The same photographs, awards and tulip paintings on the walls in rows as neat as the real ones outside. China cups on the dresser like I remembered. A full set of fine bone china, but a feeling that there'd never be guests to use them. The smell of beeswax and ironing. The trappings of a life carrying on regardless. As if Mrs Holbeach had popped out for shopping and never returned, and that that didn't really matter because the chores of the house had somehow continued without her.

Elsie was wearing a pair of faded blue dungarees and her father's tartan slippers. She had made cakes and, unsure about what she was to do with me, sat me straight down at the table. Through the back I could see Mr Holbeach at the scullery sink, running cold water over a shiny galvanized bucket. He lay it on its side, checked the back-door lock, picked up the bucket and began to rinse it again.

‘Does he . . . know I'm here?' I said, my voice bringing out a smile in Elsie which crinkled the sides of her nose. She shrugged nicely.

‘I doubt he'd be interested. Not my father, anyway.'

‘Why?'

‘He talks to himself in the tulip beds. Says God'll punish him for not having children.'

‘He's . . . ill,' I said.

‘It's these fucking fens, more like. Like Auntie May,' Elsie said, then flashed an apologetic smile at me. ‘I mean, she didn't really talk any more, did she? Towards the end.' She looked at her father. ‘And I don't care about him,' she said, loudly, pushing bits of cake round her plate with the flat of her knife.

‘Ill, Elsie. That's all.'

‘Pip,' she said, softly, ‘we've both lost mothers now.'

I tried to brighten things by telling her where I'd been, and when the words came too slowly I wrote them down. How I'd found my father in a field of chickens and how he'd become so used to chickens that his concentration had been shot to pieces.

‘I went to see him,' she said. ‘He gave me some eggs. It's really sad, he used to be a funny man.'

Funny? I thought. I'd never seen him that way.

I showed her the eggs he'd given me too.

In the scullery, Mr Holbeach checked the back-door lock again.

 

I slept on the couch in the living room, listening to the coots on the drain outside and Elsie in her room upstairs. I thought I'd stay up all night, listening to the sounds and silences of a strange house, three people and a thousand prize tulips tucked up in beds. But a stealthy exhaustion overtook me, and I drifted into its warmth and heaviness and felt I was on the edge of knowing something, feeling some shape that was just there, just beyond reach, a shape that had shadows and angles, which had been there all along. Travel had clarified it for me, and as I searched for it I was abruptly awake, some time in the middle of the night, lifting my head from the cushion and seeing Mr Holbeach sitting in the chair opposite me.

‘You're the one caused all the trouble, ain't you?' he said in his sad, church-pew voice.

I lay there, looking at him, too tired to reach for my notebook, too uncertain to move, till I fell asleep again. In the morning he was gone.

 

We ate those eggs for breakfast and then Elsie and I cycled to the Saints and along by the Great Ouse to Wiggenhall St Peter Church. Elsie sat on the floodbank, plaiting grasses, while I went to see my mother's grave. Since the funeral a tombstone had been set. It said ‘A Loving Wife and Mother' below her name, chosen by my father from a book of sample inscriptions. May Langore. At least he'd finally used your real name.

I remembered how her coffin had looked in the aisle. How terrified I'd been that at any moment it might start dripping river water.

Elsie walked off down the bank and I put my hand on the earth and in my strange, scratchy voice I said hello. The word felt huge. And after that it was easier. Easier to let the words come out, dropping them on to my mother's grave alongside a couple of tears as surprising and as hot as blood. I told her about the months I'd spent in the farmhouse living a feral life alongside my father's. Of the burning chicken coop and the Rhode Island Red, of the night-time flight to Norfolk and the big man in the lorry with the soft voice. I told her about Goose, her clouds, of Gideon's house where I'd discovered my voice and about practising it among the dunes and that I could speak to Elsie. And then I told her about Kipper, about the things I'd learned, of fireworks and fish, and how I loved the marsh and knew just how she must have loved it too.

I saw Elsie's shadow approaching, weaving between the tombstones. She sat down next to me and kissed my neck. It was a windy day, and her hair kept blowing in front of my eyes, obscuring my mother's name on the stone.

‘Is that better?' she said.

 

We cycled to the Flags Café, about four miles away, built next to a giant sluice which separated the dark muddy water of a drainage channel from the green salt water of the Wash. We propped our bikes up against the sluice and watched flotsam circling in the eddy below. Always polystyrene caught there; like ice from a winter which never thawed. The wind made the iron resound with deep hollow echoes, and closer, putting our ears to the metal, we could hear barnacles below the high tidemark popping in the air. The flags themselves were on a row of poles alongside the A17, so windtorn and ragged from a wind which blew two hundred times a year that some were little more than half their original size.

Inside the café it was full of the urn's steam, frying fat and the smells of sugar and fags. I had a hot chocolate and Elsie had a cappuccino, which I'd never heard of before. The waitress made a big fuss of doing it in the kitchen, and when she came back she brought a black coffee alongside a bowl of whipped cream. Elsie spooned the cream on to the surface then spooned it into her mouth. She told me she was coming back to Blakeney.

‘When?'

‘June. I can't stand it here. I'll go mad and then I'll have to grow tulips the rest of my life.'

‘Your dad,' I said, ‘last night.' Then I wrote down:
He said I was the one caused all the trouble
.

‘What's he saying that for? He says that all the time anyhow.'

‘What's he mean?'

‘Meaning he's a mixed-up old man who blames everyone but himself. Don't listen to it. He says all sorts of stuff about me and you.'