The Sea House (12 page)

19

Gertrude was on the committee for the local history exhibition. It was to be held in the Gannon Room to celebrate the half century, although the half century was already three years old. The idea had come from the Reverend Leweth, who, the previous autumn, while digging in his garden, had unearthed the neck and handle of an ancient pot. It had a grotesque face, like that of a demon, and had been thought by an expert in Lowestoft to date from 1410. The excitement of this find had propelled him into pinning up a notice by the village green urging anyone with relics from Steerborough’s past to enter them for a local history exhibition. Many useless and uninteresting things had been submitted, but among them – and it was Gertrude’s job to sort them out – were some items worthy of display. There was a collection of fossilized bones, some of them elephant, found thrown up on to the beach, and also a piece of granite, although no granite existed nearer than Aberdeen. There was a bronze cannonball from the Battle of Soul Bay, a written account of the barque
Nina
wrecked in Darwich Bight in 1894. Gertrude ran her finger down the names of the men lost and was shaken to see Wynwell, twice. Bert and Alfred Junior, drowned within three miles of their own home. One of these must have been Alf’s great-grandfather, knowing as she did from a plaque on the church wall that his grandfather was one of the fourteen men from the village who lost their lives in the Great War. There was a clockwork spit, a poulterer’s grapple, and a large collection of domestic and farm implements dating back over hundreds of years. There were coins, many of them discovered in the river mud at low tide, and among them were three shillings from the reign of Elizabeth I. There was also the christening gown worn by the retired ferry man, whose grandson now rowed the boat, and both the gown and the ferry man had just turned ninety-six.

The exhibition was set for the middle of July, and it was to be held over a long weekend. The Reverend wanted it to run for a week, but the badminton club, who played in the Gannon Room on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, had protested. Gertrude was enraged, not seeing the point of badminton herself, but the Reverend pointed out that it was membership money from this club that paid for newspapers, milk and tea, and for the cleaning lady, Betty Wynwell, to sweep and tidy for the fishermen who used it during the day.

Gertrude sat in the wide window of the vicarage and wrote out labels giving information on each piece. What was a poulterer’s grapple? she wondered, but she continued just the same. Beeting needles. Braiding needles. A fid for splicing rope. There was a mysterious flat-edged object, rusted green and red. It was either a kiddle, or something else entirely, and had been donated by a person of that name.

As Gertrude worked, she wondered about Alf. For three weeks now they had played jacks. The boy was making startling progress, throwing and catching with remarkable skill, but it began to worry her that this might not be enough. This week she would introduce a pack of cards. She’d teach him Racing Demons, and hoped this game, with its tension and the frenzied slapping of hands, might draw from him another word.

Max examined his new scroll. The lining paper was slick and firm, bought from the building suppliers in Eastonknoll and transported by bicycle to what he had privately begun to think of as his home. Today, he thought, he would start with Alf’s. He remembered the boy’s finger trailing along the river, past the ferry man’s hut, and so he set off, his scroll under his arm, his paints in a bag across his back. As he walked, he stared in at the fishermen’s huts – their nets all meshed and tangled, the planks of their front doors, some painted blue, some stained in salt-proof black. The names of the fishermen were there above the lintels – Blucher, Kitner, Child, Seal, Sloper, Mop and Mabbs. And then he remembered Mrs Wynwell telling him how they’d moved their house inland, put it bit by bit into a wheelbarrow and heaved it away. He turned back towards the river mouth, intending to meander over to the dip of land below The Ship, when he was distracted by the figure of a woman, her head heavy with a bun, her arms wrapped around herself against the wind. She was dressed in dark clothes, her legs in black stockings as narrow as a bird’s, comical almost below a pleated skirt, and then she turned a little and he saw that it was Elsa.

‘Elsa!’ he called, his voice thrown unimaginably into the void, and to his surprise, as if by magic, Elsa turned to face him. He waved and, after a moment’s hesitation, she lifted her hand and waved too. They stood there looking over at each other, the gulls between them shrieking and skittering, and then, as if with one thought, they both turned towards the river mouth and began to walk. Occasionally they glanced across at each other, their faces slowly coming into focus as the river narrowed, until they stood each one on the wooden jetties between which the ferry sailed.

At first Max couldn’t see the boat, and he felt his throat tighten with alarm, but it was there, tucked into the Eastonknoll bank of the river, and there was the ferry man rising up out of it to help Elsa in. Elsa sat in the middle of the boat facing him, engulfed by the man’s broad back as he rowed against the current to a midway point and then let the water ease the boat back in. Max walked along his jetty, feeling the structure shiver with his weight, shift a little and then quake as the ferry bumped against it. The ferry man leant forward to hand Elsa out. He didn’t see Max, hovering behind him, stretching out his own hand, so that for a moment as Max bent forward, both of Elsa’s hands were gripped, making it harder and not easier for her to climb out of the boat.

‘Thankyou.’ Elsa freed herself, taking out her purse to pay, and shyly, now that they were face to face, Max led her along the jetty and on to dry land. In silence they walked along the harbour wall, up to the tip of the estuary where there was a cluster of white houses built out of the marsh. The houses were like storks, with legs of stilts, their underbellies brick and muddy, their wings fluted with windows and slim boards. Until now it had not occurred to Max to paint them. They did not seem to belong to the village, but as they walked to the tip of the estuary where the rough ground, seeded with fennel and cowparsley, turned to mud, then swamp, then sand, he imagined his scroll, billowing with whiteness, unfurling gently into the brown and green of solid land.

‘I’ll show you my favourite,’ Elsa said, as if they’d been talking about houses for the last half-hour, and brushing against his sleeve she walked with him past the Tea Room, past the most recently painted house, its front porch set with a table and chairs, past the boatyard, the salt store and the herring curing shed. They passed Little Haven, where, she told him, the vicar took a holiday each year, packing up the rectory on the corner of Church Lane and moving with his family a quarter of a mile down the road. Elsa stopped by the most easterly house. Once white, and almost square, its stilts were higher than the others, its front door looking out to sea.
The Sea House
, Max read, and below the sign another smaller sign:
To Let
. It had steps up to a wooden porch, the rails of which were peeling paint, and above it was a terrace.

Elsa put one foot on the step and, when Max glanced at her, she smiled at him and walked up to the front door. Max watched her as she pressed her face against the glass, and then with some alarm he saw her turn the handle. ‘Come,’ she motioned to him, and Max followed her in. Inside was a long wooden table, a dresser hung with cups, and just behind, a ladder that led up vertically to a trap door of light.

‘Hello?’ Elsa called to the room above, although they both knew there was no one there, and so she began to climb the ladder, her legs, the shin bones long and narrow, easing up in front of Max’s eyes. ‘Quick,’ she mouthed to him from the top. ‘It’s wonderful.’

Max, one-handed, still clutching his scroll of paper, reeled himself up. Elsa was standing by a round table covered with a cloth. Just behind her was a bed, a cover pulled up over it, pillows curved in towards one another in two mounds. It looked so soft that if you laid one arm across the quilt, you would sink down into it and be lost. Quickly Max went out on to the balcony. He closed his eyes to linger one more moment on that hint of shadow between the pillows’ curves, and when he opened them again he found himself at sea. There was nothing between him and the horizon, only water, shimmering in stripes of blue and grey. Max took a breath of it, sucking it in, and then Elsa came and stood beside him. Her arm, narrow like her leg, hung so close that he felt his whole chest quake with the desire to touch her. It was like a sickness, like the ache, he realized, of his dreams, and he saw himself for an instant at the wheel of that car, searching the lanes and turnings for his perfect home. Max fixed his eye on the fine line where the sea ended and the sky began, a razor’s edge of shading, just thickening a fraction before the two blues parted, and the sea rolled away from them to the next great mass of land. On a day like this it was clear the earth was round. There was the rim of it, curving away, and then, just as he’d hoped she might, just as he’d dreamed it, Elsa pressed her hand against his arm. He turned to her.

‘The door!’ she said. ‘Someone’s coming in.’ She looked back into the room as if she were searching out a place where they could hide, the bed, the wardrobe, and then she recovered herself and let go of his arm. ‘I suppose I’d better go down.’ She shook her head, amused at her own terror, and quickly, feet first, she disappeared from view. Max stood at the top of the trap door. He didn’t want to trample on her hands, so he waited until he could no longer see her, and began descending the ladder rung by rung, turning expectantly, when he reached the ground. But there was only Elsa, standing by the front door. ‘It was just the wind,’ she said, and she put out her hand and drew him outside.

Max could still feel the touch of Elsa’s hand. It hurt him when he thought of it, created a quick spasm of pain, but even so, he wouldn’t let it go. He played it over, his insides quickening, the air around him fizzing as her fingers melted into his. Her hand was light, the bones right near the surface, but in her palm it seemed that there was hope. Max sat opposite the Sea House, drawing in its outline, his mind so full of thoughts he felt half blind. Twice he sketched in the tin funnel of the chimney and twice he rubbed it out. In irritation he pressed so hard down on the paper his pencil snapped its lead. Seagulls wheeled above him, their necks outstretched, their feet skidding out to land. What must it be like, he wondered, to have permission to touch that shoulder whenever you felt the need. Klaus, he thought, and he pushed the image of the man away. He’d be in London, Elsa had said, until the end of the week, and Max made a sudden flurry of bold strokes, sketching in the steps, the railing and the front door.

20

Lily avoided Grae over the next few days. She turned away as he passed the window, as if utterly absorbed by her work, and then spent the next hour distracted, wondering if he might have looked in and smiled at her, only to be met by the cold side of her face. With a huge effort she forced herself back to her letters.

My El,

This morning I woke up suddenly and worried about you. But then I calmed myself. It was much too early for anything to have happened. It’s been snowing here, and heavy, fantastical shapes are lying on the branches outside my window. Please, please don’t let yourself be talked out of coming to visit. As far as the doctor’s advice is concerned, and I have tried hard to suppress this, I think he is completely WRONG. It is over a month now since you lost the baby… and you are young and healthy, and as far as catching a lung infection up here in the mountains, that is ridiculous too. You would have caught a lung infection from me if you were going to catch one. Really! I keep wondering if your mother had a word with the doctor, and turned him round to her point of view. Of course I understand, she wants to keep you in Hamburg, but I need you here. I’ve been working hard, and the preliminary plans for the sanatorium are almost finished. You can look everything over when you’re here, as my companion. Today I had a look at the room in which we’ll stay. I enclose a sketch of it for you so you’ll feel doubly at home when you arrive. As you can see, if you sit up in bed, it will be possible to look out at the mountains, where the snow may even be melting a little by then. Now, will you promise to preserve all your strength for the trip? I’d prefer it if you didn’t go to Gerda’s party, but if you do feel you have to, then don’t dance. That could be dangerous.

Please could you bring me a bottle of fixative and a blowpipe, and also Einstein’s book on the Theory of Relativity? Be well for me, your L.

Lily unfolded the map. The room was large, with an adjoining annexe with tall windows on three sides. There was a desk there, and Klaus had sketched in Elsa’s portrait, royally waiting, on top. The bed, as promised, faced the window, and on it, like two pipe-cleaner figures, were Klaus and Elsa, entwined.

Lily reached for the next letter.

Thankyou for the fixative and the blowpipe, but where is the Einstein book, and more importantly where are YOU? I shall write to your mother, and insist she let you come, and also you must begin to warn her that one day we will be leaving for good. You know that I am right when I say this, don’t you? Am I the only one who has actually taken the trouble to read Mein Kampf, apart from the Semmels and Liebnitzes, of course, who have already left. But you should talk to your mother about leaving too. She could come to us once we are settled, and help with the busy household we will have. I found myself at lunch yesterday with a woman who talked of nothing but her patriotism for the Fatherland, and I sat there, choking on my food, as she looked towards me for a sign of my sympathy! I had the beginnings of a migraine and this made me more than usually sensitive, but then later, as if sent to me as a reward for biting my tongue, I met an architect by the name of Hermann who has already made plans to move to London. He may be able to give us some good advice, and will be a good contact if we decide to go there. Also, and you don’t have to tell the photographer this, but I’m not at all happy with the pictures he sent of the apartment. First of all, he’s moved everything around, and just as you have to make a portrait of a person without changing his looks, one also shouldn’t rearrange a room. The pictures lack everything made so beautiful in reality by light. Well, at least he didn’t photograph you and miss out all the important bits. And once again I beg you to be reasonable, and NOT to dance when you go to a ball. Also don’t go out to the cinema or for a walk. I’m sure you could get a cold that way. I would really prefer it if you slept long on Sunday. Just wait to see all the things I’ve planned
to do with you… the most terrible things! Stay well, my love, and do not be apart from me. Your L.

Elsa must have visited because there were no more letters for some months, and then when they started up again it was the summer of 1933, and Klaus was in London. Lily thought of writing to Nick, begging him not to work too hard, to attend, or not attend the cinema, but instead she doodled with her pen, building a miniature pattern of bricks. What did she want from him, anyway? Or he from her? She felt a stab of envy for the entangled lives of Elsa and Klaus. The men she knew didn’t seem to feel the need to so utterly possess their women. They didn’t want to marry them, or even necessarily to have children, so it was left to the women to want everything, to keep yearning and longing and pushing forward from the past.

When she’d first met Nick she’d framed him with the future. Planes and boats and travel, the limbs of babies, the roof of a house, but he had forbidden it, would not discuss more than a month ahead, and now, four years later, she saw that maybe he was right. The mirage of her hope was clearing, and for the first time, she was looking at his actual face.

Dear Nick
, she wrote in a swirl of anguish, as if at that very moment she had lost her faith.
I miss you. I’m sorry
… She had to scrub the ‘sorry’ out or admit that she’d not really missed him before.
I don’t think I’ve been very happy in London
, she tried to explain. There she was, walking obediently up and down the steps of her college, collecting information, spilling it back out, surrounded by pillars, glass and courtyards, railway stations, monuments, and vents.
I don’t mean ever
… She’d been born in London, had hardly left it in twenty-seven years, and she saw herself sitting on the flaking plaster gatepost of the house in West London where she had grown up. She used to sit there, after school, watching the people come wearily off the main road, and then she’d see her, the most weary of them all, her mother, carrying shopping, her tights always with a hole. When she thought of London she thought of that warm crumbling seat, the taste of sherbet as she sucked the liquorice dipper, the way it fizzed when she dipped it again.

The wide steps of that house narrowed as they curved down to the basement, another land among the pipes and drains, and as she followed her mother down to their side door, she’d catch the drift of currant, intoxicating on the breeze. The flat was dark and damp, and smelt ever so slightly of gas – a grass and urine smell that could never be quite traced. But behind it, stretching down to the railway, was a jungle of a garden. Lily loved the garden, the great lion of the train, and was proud of the waist-high rhubarb, itching you with furry stalks if you attempted to get by. Below its leaves long arms of nasturtiums struggled to find light, trailing and clinging with tiny elbows until a sudden clutch of orange flowers burst out.

Lily knew every inch of her street, belonged there, owned the pavement, felt the corner shop was hers. She sniffed, and tried to summon up the smell of dust and chilli, could feel even now the soft squelch of the rubber matting as you pushed open the door. But her mother had moved away from there as soon as Lily had left to go to college. She had found a bright and sunny top-floor flat in Kilburn, with no damp, no garden, nothing that smelt to Lily of home. It shocked her, this move, more than she could say. She had always assumed they’d lived there, in that gloomy basement, because there was nowhere else to go.

‘Lily, LILY!’ A fist was banging on the window, and when she looked up, she saw Emerald, with Arrie squeezed in beside her. Lily went to open the door.

‘Our mum’s back,’ Em said, her face one smile, and Lily saw pushed in against Grae’s car, half blocking the lane, the long dusty Volvo she’d seen parked there when she’d first arrived.

‘That’s great.’

She turned to go back in, but the girls followed close behind her, creeping on to the sofa when she sat down. It was just the right size for them, and they sat there, upright, like two old men. After a minute Arrie went and switched the television on.

‘Won’t your mum…? Shouldn’t you be…?’ Lily tried. But the girls had their eyes fixed on the screen, a fearsome crackling cartoon, and she knew she would have to go and stand in front of them if she wanted to interrupt the beam.

My dear El
, she read over the jets of noise, surprised to find this letter had been typed. The typing was dense and clumsy, its thick grey letters denting out through the back of the page, and rather than official the words felt intimate, full of effort, the actual impression of Lehmann’s finger and thumb.
Let me tell you about my days here. Each morning I have my English lesson and then I’m off, rushing across London meeting anyone I can. Yesterday I had a proper working day. I visited the Architectural Review, which was a success, and I urgently need you to send photos of the children’s rooms that I designed for the Bermanns. Here there is an exhibition in which there is a quite miserable children’s parlour, so I’m sure people would be interested to see a better one. And please, my El, please don’t take everything I write to you as a reproach. I’m just trying to remind you of things which are important. This afternoon two English ladies came to visit me about plans for another sanatorium, about which we have to be discreet, and in answer to your question about the ladies here, since you ask so jealously, I have to admit their complete lack of interest in me is quite alarming. I sometimes see quite beautiful apparitions dressed in the most splendid clothes, but they seem to me to lack a soul. So none have presented even the slightest danger, and you can be quite calmed. Please don’t miss me too much, I’ll soon be with you, and don’t worry so much if my letters don’t reach you every day. It pains me that they mean so much to you. With all my heart, your L.

From now on the letters were all typed, and Lily found she missed the grandeur of the writing, the swirls and loops of the black ink. She was used to straining for the meaning of a too hurriedly drawn word, missed the satisfaction that came to her when she’d deciphered something she’d first thought impossibly unclear.

Dear Elsa,

I’m so glad you have decided against going to Hiddensee. If you want adventure, just wait, and soon you will have it. I wrote a letter to you in Vitte when I thought you were on your way there, but there was nothing important in it, just a menu, pork chops, roast potatoes, rice pudding and bread and butter, to show how well I am eating. Last night I dreamt I was steering the Stralsund ferry across the strait to Hiddensee. The boatman, old Kolwitz, let me take the wheel, and I was so happy, the wind on my face, the spray of that cold sea, and then I woke up and found that my bedspread had slipped off and I was in fact in an unheated English room. I can’t yet think about my return, and must stay as long as things continue to be busy here. In the meantime, be extremely well, and try to make for yourself the most pleasurable and active life. Your L.

The children had pushed forward the sofa and were using the space behind it as a shop. Lily watched them, wondering why they were here, when their mother was next door, and then through the wall, above the roar of the adverts she heard the woman’s voice. ‘NO, I will NOT!!’ Lily froze, her eyes fixed on Em, who was looking out at her from the blanket canopy of the camp. ‘Get off !’ There was a scream, followed by the crash and ring of what sounded like the phone.

Em dipped out of sight. ‘Arrie,’ she asked, persevering with the game, ‘do you sell frozen peas?’ There was a pause and then Arrie solemnly replied, ‘That’ll be twenty pounds.’

Lily stood up and switched the television off. Immediately she regretted it. She could hear the low growl of Grae’s voice now, and above it his wife’s shouts. ‘I won’t! I won’t.’ A scuffle rose up above the drag of what sounded like a chair and, just as she was about to press the button back on, Em peered over the parapet of the sofa. She looked at Lily, a quiver in her lip, and then, behind her, out of sight, Arrie began to cry.

‘Arrie…’ Lily was on her hands and knees, crawling in to her, relieved to have something to do. ‘Come on out. Come on.’ It was like coaxing out a cat, and eventually the two girls crept into her lap.

Lily helped them with their shoes, buckling and lacing them, although she knew they could do this themselves. Arrie kept her head down, wiping her nose occasionally on her sleeve, and Em looked at her in that curious and distant way in which children regard another in distress. Lily held the door for them and they trooped out. It was spitting very lightly with warm rain, but Ethel was there, in her dressing-gown, standing by her gate. Her hair was wet around the edges and her face shone.

‘Beautiful day for a swim,’ she called to Lily, but Em and Arrie had turned away and were heading off across the Green. Lily followed. Down the lane, beside the river, and out into the reed beds. They walked in single file along the whitened planks, the sedge rustling, the rain rippling the water where it lay in filmy pools. Before them was the sea. A high grey bank of water, so wide and spacious it rolled round on three sides to meet the sky. She had to stop and marvel at it, acknowledge the effect it had on the muscles of her eyes, and she wondered if you would ever get used to seeing to the horizon, after spending a lifetime of having your vision cut short.

‘Come on,’ Em called. She’d stepped off the path and was trudging up a wide green track. Arrie ran after her, struggling to keep up, but Lily was loathe to turn inland from the sea. Mist was rolling in over the sand dunes and above it the grey was turning white. When Lily glanced back towards the track the girls had disappeared.