The Sea House (14 page)

22

Lily left while the girls were at school. She listened for the splutter of Grae’s car, and then watched it wind its way around the corner of the Green. Quickly she piled her work into a folder, her notes and books and letters, the sketches Klaus had made of every room. She scooped up her own drawings, her plan for an extension to Lehmann’s Heath Height Flats. She’d designed a sun terrace walkway with areas for playing cards, a maze with animals carved from box hedge, and at its centre a fountain that ran into a bright blue pool. There was a jungle of bamboo, and a small grove of oleander, and at each level of the building she’d attached wide wooden terraces with steps leading down.

All week Lily had avoided Grae, and the girls, unusually, had kept away. Now she threw a bag of clothes into the car and, taking one last look at the sea, the high straight line of it hardening where it touched the sky, she backed out of the lane.

The nearest station was no more than a level crossing, with two platforms and a white wooden gate that dropped across the road. Lily parked in the small commuters’ car park and walked across the track, treading quickly as she stepped between the rails. There was no one else waiting, and she thought for a moment hopefully that she might have missed her train, but then a high song, like a mermaid calling, rang out and with a flash of orange lights the barriers closed over the road. The cars in both directions stopped, waiting patient as ponies at a fence, and then the train whistled into view. Lily slipped in next to a window. There were only three carriages, and hers she had entirely to herself. Quickly, before she drifted into a daze of fields and trees and flatness, she opened her folder and pulled out some work. With it came Nick’s letter.

Dear Lily
… She’d already read the letter, more than once, but found it impossible not to start with it again.
We’ve got the contract! We have nine months of solid work! I’m thrilled, Tim is thrilled. Could you be just a tiny bit pleased? Pleased enough to come home and start making the tea? But seriously we can’t hire anyone who isn’t qualified. So are you planning to come and do your Pin Up, or have you applied for a job as barmaid at the Ship? They need you, that’s certain, but there are others who need you more. I’ll expect you this weekend, unless the wife-beater is holding you hostage, in which case, good luck. See you then. Love, N.

Lily read the letter again. The more she read it, the more she needed to keep reading it, hoping to get at something underneath.
There are others who need you more
. Presumably that meant Nick, or was he referring to the restaurant in Covent Garden where she’d worked as a waitress all those years? Eventually she pushed the letter away. Pin Up was in the morning. She opened her file, and began to study her drawings, imagining how she would arrange them over the college walls, how they might look, her vision unfolding, a sympathetic, sustainable extension to Lehmann’s world. She flicked through her notes, the names and dates and theories, circled and ticked and underlined. Lists and boxes, capitals and exclamations, arrows pointing on to where she’d made a find. The train was steaming past an estuary hamlet, white sails fluttering on the wind, the water rippling with such definition it looked solid as sand. Lily pressed her face to the window. Soon they would arrive at Ipswich, and she would change on to a long, sleek inter-city train. It made her nervous, the thought of re-entering London, descending those metal stairs into the tube, pushing against the heavy doors of her building, hearing the click of the lock as they snapped shut. For comfort she reached for Lehmann’s letters. He was back in Hamburg, writing to Elsa from their dismantled home, and Elsa, it seemed, was living alone in London, in a room near Goodge Street, waiting for him to come.

My little London El,

It’s not easy to report on my progress as there’s so little of it. The man at the Office for Emigration told me that he’d approve my application, but first he’d have to get it back from the higher authority to which he sent it himself, three weeks ago! I nearly fell to pieces with the impatience of it. I went for lunch with your Mama who read out the letter she’d just received from you. She was so pleased to get it, but I was shocked at the way you describe your situation. Can’t you remember that these weeks will soon be over? Also your note to me of today contains a misunderstanding. You asked recently whether I hadn’t half forgotten you, and I replied, joking, ‘at most, the smaller half’. And you take that as a statement of fact. Oh, Elsa L, what will it take to make you happy? Well, of course I know, and you mustn’t lose hope. In the meantime, have you been studying your English? There is a new method, Basic English, I think you should try. I want to see you again, all of you, very soon, and in good spirits. I Love You, so remember that. Your L.

Have you ever said, ‘I love you’, and not meant it? This was a question asked in a newspaper questionnaire Lily sometimes read. ‘No. Never,’ came the most common reply, laced, she always felt, with a certain self-regard. It reminded Lily how often she’d misused the words. She’d wanted to say them to see how they’d affect her if she ever was in love, but she’d been shocked the first time, when the boy for whom she felt a strange powerful blankness turned to her, amazed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I love you too,’ and Lily felt the first flicker of a disbelieving smile. Dominic, he was called. Dominic Barton, and it had taken her two months, right into the week of her fifteenth birthday, to prise herself away. She wouldn’t do it. She swore she wouldn’t use those words again, but she found they were impossible to resist. ‘I love you,’ she’d said, looking down on the smooth white chest of a boy doing ceramics in his final year at Camberwell, and even as she spoke, she thought, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I did?

But when she met Nick everything was different, and she realized it was only when you actually did love someone the words were difficult to say. She would wait for him. He couldn’t be afraid. It was Nick, after all, who’d steered her round North London, ordered her to stop outside the Lehmann building, had kissed her as the lights flashed on. Any moment now he would tell her that he loved her, and released, her own declaration would come reeling out. For the whole first year Lily waited. She imagined, sometimes daily, that he was about to tell her, whisper the words across the pillow, scatter them through drops of water as they stood together in the rain. She thought she heard them on an autumn walk, whistling down Kite Hill, and then, on their anniversary, a year to the day after they’d kissed, Lily took courage and sighed the words into his ear. Nick squeezed her shoulder, smiled, and then, startled by its sudden ring, fumbled to answer his phone.

Lily moved in with Nick the following month. There was no request, no whoop of acceptance when she said she would, just the assumption, when her landlord raised her rent, that it would be more convenient if she brought her things to his. They had talked about where they’d store her paintings, her clothes, her washbag, even her bag of cotton wool, and somewhere in between their plans to extend the wardrobe right into the corner of the room she forgot there was something that had not been said.

My El,

Today, once again, I am frustrated and horrified by my application. My papers have been handed back to the higher authority! An immediate phone call from me has resulted in another meeting for tomorrow at noon, which will probably only slow the process further. So my visit to the Ministry can only happen on Friday at the very earliest. If all goes well, I’ll send you a telegram. It’s really not that easy any more to remain even-tempered. For two days now the weather has been awful, with such downpours you would think that Mama and Papa were visiting from
Berlin! It’s better today, but I’ve sent my winter coat off to be cleaned and repaired at Zirkov’s. So at least someone is benefiting from my being here.

Yours, always, L.

Lily rang the doorbell, just a short warning ring, as she fumbled for her keys. ‘Nick?’ she called into the hall, but there was no one there. Lily stood and looked around her. ‘Nick?’ she said again just to be sure, and it almost made her blush to see how much their home resembled him. Long and lean with sleek pale floorboards, white walls, and a kitchen as streamlined as a ship. There were oil-blue doors hiding everything from view, so that if you went hunting for a teaspoon, or the fridge, there was nothing to give even the smallest clue.

Lily took her shoes off, and put her bag down on the floor. She felt dusty suddenly and hot. There was sand between her toes, and spores of bright gold pollen clinging to her shins. Her shoes, on the bare floorboards, looked like a Van Gogh. She poured herself a glass of water and marvelled at the power with which the water rushed out of the tap, the weight of the smooth glass, the immaculate steel of the worktop, as if she’d never seen it before.

There was no room in the flat for a bath, just a shower in a tower of glass in one corner of the bedroom. At Fern Cottage she’d become accustomed to lying in a pool of rusted water, drifting and dreaming and thinking about nothing at all, but here, in the funnel of Nick’s shower, she felt her body blazing into life. Her shoulders, striped in every shade of tan, seemed to creak and sigh under the jets, and she smiled at the sight of her legs, so pale at the thigh, darkening and darkening until they reached her feet. Her face, reflected back at her in the bathroom mirror, was freckled gold with sun, and she realized that she hadn’t been able to gauge her appearance in all the weeks she’d been away. This was the mirror by which she judged herself, the mirror she believed in, imagined to be the only true one, as if everyone in the world who saw her was looking through this glass.

She wrapped herself in a thick white towel and lay down on the bed. The cleaner must have been that day, everything was so well folded, sleek and smart, with only her old beaded lampshade, a ladder in its frill, to show that one side of the bed was hers. She closed her eyes and let the sounds drift up to her from the road below, the purr of engines at the lights and the birdsong outside the window in the street’s one tree. Nick must be at work, she thought, yawning, glancing at the clock, as a tube train on the track behind the houses opposite rocked the room as it roared past. She should get up, slide open the wardrobe, discover her lost clothes, get dressed. Nick would be at work till late, he would always be at work. Nine months, he had said in his letter, and she knew that meant a year. Lily closed her eyes. Motorbikes, bikes, cars, the quick clipping of heels, the rushing of flat sandals, the squeal of tyres. A door thudded on the floor below, and then, in the dip of silence that followed, Lily fell asleep.

‘Where shall I put them?’ a woman’s voice rang out, and then another lower voice, not Nick’s, not Tim’s: ‘You can put them over here.’

Lily sat up. The towel was damp around her, and on the grey squares of the quilt, like a shadow where she’d lain, was the imprint of her body.

‘Righto.’ There was the high-pitched voice again, followed by the familiar metal clunk of the flat’s front door. Lily glanced at the clock. It was six, just after, and she was cold. Quickly she slipped out of her towel, pulled on Nick’s dark robe and very slowly, quietly, inched open the door. At first she could hear nothing, but then, when she’d stepped into the hall, she could hear someone in the kitchen, the shuffle of feet over the tiles, the click and shudder of the cupboard doors. She was stretching forward, straining to see, when the footsteps turned and moved decisively towards her. Quickly she retreated to the bedroom. Her clothes were lying in a puddle on the floor, limp and worn, and with unnecessary force she picked them up and flung them out of sight. The panelled wardrobe door slid smoothly open, and there inside were skirts and dresses, a winter coat that skimmed the tops of shoes. Beside them in a stack of shelves were Nick’s shirts. They were sealed each one in plastic, their chests thrust forward, all buttoned up, and like waiters, exaggeratedly bowing, their arms were tucked out of sight. Lily picked one up, the cellophane so new it sparkled, and, as she looked at it, she thought of the orange-crate of toys in the corner of Grae’s room, the dolls and ragged teddies, the clumps of Lego thrown in.

Lily stood on tiptoe to swing her clothes along the rail, remembering as she did so why each item of clothing remained unworn. Too tight, or short, or long. Too flimsy, too low cut at the neck, but none of them were quite hopeless enough to part with, so she kept them, as she had done now for years. Eventually she chose a pair of trousers, black linen that creased as soon as you sat down, and a shirt that tied in at the waist. It was a shirt she’d tried on many times. It looked so pretty on the hanger, its polka dots and sleeveless arms, but even now as she fastened it, she was raking through for something else. She caught a glimpse of white and was just stretching to unhook it when the telephone rang.

‘Holly. It’s Nick.’

Who on earth was Holly? ‘Nick, it’s me.’ Or had he forgotten her name?

‘Lily! What are you…?’ He was gasping, literally, as if the last news he’d had of her she’d been lost at sea. ‘I’m sorry, I mean, it’s just…’ He began to laugh. ‘You’re back. Great. Welcome home.’

‘Where are you?’ Lily asked. ‘I was going to come and meet you.’

‘Oh… Don’t do that.’ Nick sounded distracted. ‘Listen, is there someone there called Holly? I need to have a word.’

‘There might be.’ Lily put her head out of the door and called.

‘OK. Just coming,’ a voice floated back, and Lily waited while the tap was turned off in the kitchen, a cupboard door clicked shut, and then, swishing slightly, a girl, with long, pale hair appeared in the hall. She smiled as she took the phone. ‘A hundred glasses, yes,’ she said, standing perfectly still. ‘No, Pauline’s waiting downstairs for them. Sure, and I’m just doing the bagels.’ Nick must have said something then, because the girl’s face broke into a smile. She smiled with all of her, her body swaying, her hip floating to the side. Lily stared – the strands of treacle in her hair, the little smoothness of her stomach as it rounded out of the waistband of her jeans. ‘All right, then, anything else?’ Lily put out her hand expectantly. ‘All right. See you later, bye.’ Holly pressed the button and, still smiling, handed back the silent phone. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and she turned on her sandalled heel and walked away.