The Sea House (25 page)

‘Listen’ – Nick turned to her – ‘I didn’t want to scare you, but that night when I came to surprise you, when you were camping… Or wherever you were… I saw…’ Nick shivered. ‘I saw a man walk across the Green. I think he came out of the phone box. At first I thought I was dreaming, but he stopped right by the car. He was a kind of tramp. His clothes were all rotten and moulded to his body, and he looked at me… I don’t know, it scared me, and to think you hardly ever lock your door.’

‘OK,’ Lily nodded. ‘OK.’

But just then the recovery van came round the corner and Nick sprang up and ran towards it, pointing and gesticulating, shouting to the driver to turn towards the sea.

‘Is it, though?’ she thought. ‘Is it better to be paranoid than dead?’ But all the same she folded the email carefully and pushed it into the pocket of her jeans.

33

Max stood on the Common in a downpour of rain. It was too wet even to make notes. He examined the low wall decorated with flints, pebbled in stripes of blue and brown, and thought how he must not forget the stones that were angled so neatly along the top. Behind the wall the houses looked ghostly, their windows dark and cold. He’d have to set them in sunlight, tie them to the others if they were to fit into his scroll. He took a shortcut back to Gertrude’s, down a narrow, waterlogged lane, the reeds and grasses overhanging just at the height of his waist. He arrived, dripping, and was surprised to find Gertrude sitting at the table, making a drawing of her foot. She had her stocking off and one leg propped up on a chair.

‘Hello,’ she said, blushing, but she kept her foot where it was.

‘Am I disturbing you?’ Max unrolled his scroll.

‘Not at all, I just don’t usually see you here at this time of day.’ She removed her other stocking and swapped feet.

Quickly, before the sight of her toes erased it, Max took up a pencil and sketched in the wall, the stacks of the chimneys, the row of attic windows and the path. He painted the sky, a light-filled wash of blue, ignoring his last glimpse of the cottages, cold and miserable against a streak of black.

‘Will you be here on Saturday?’ she asked. ‘For dinner, I mean?’

‘Yes,’ he said. Did she know that he’d been using the racket of the weather to slip out of her house each night? ‘Of course I will be here.’

‘A warming meal…’ she was talking to herself now. ‘Soup, I think. Mushroom, or minestrone. And chicken pie. Some kind of crumble, perhaps… we could use up the last of the apples…’

Max nodded. He wanted to get back to mixing colours. Sunshine and the yellow-green of grass before the rain.

‘You’ll be able to meet Thomas Everson. It is ridiculous…’

But Max had begun to paint each pebble and although he could feel that she was talking, could hear the hum and echo of her voice, the inside of each word was lost to him as he worked on.

When eventually he looked up, her feet were done. She had replaced her stockings and was examining her sketch. The feet were a mirror image of each other, looming upright like boulders, the toes a mountain range. Max smoothed out the remainder of his scroll and found the creamy paper barely reached the end of the table.

‘You’re almost there.’ Gertrude came round to face him. ‘Only six or seven houses more?’

He looked at her. So she’d been counting, waiting for it to end, and he saw the colour on her face and neck of a whole summer of sun. ‘I haven’t forgotten our agreement…’

Gertrude shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about that.’

‘But I did promise…’

‘It’s all right.’ She put a hand out to him. ‘It was I that promised. I promised Kaethe that I’d find something for you to do.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I have.’ There was laughter in her eyes, and quickly he looked away.

‘Thankyou,’ he said, and for a moment there was silence.

‘My young artist friend,’ she went on. ‘He’s been giving me lessons in life drawing, and I…’ She looked irrepressibly happy, happier than she’d looked since Kaethe first got ill. ‘I’ve been helping him organize his things. Sorting, clearing, labelling. In fact I think he may be developing the village labelling mania. If it carries on, I’ll have to find him help of quite a different kind.’ Gertrude began to giggle like a girl. ‘This morning, for the first time in a month, he was wearing socks that matched!’

The house was silent when Max stepped out into the night. The rain had lightened but the wind was wild, tearing at the branches, sending leaves and birds and tiny helpless insects gusting through the dark. He slipped out from the shelter of the porch and fought his way along the lane. The wind blew hard against him, trying with each roll to force him back. It took him twenty minutes to reach the harbour, clinging to walls and hedges, stepping side on into the gale, and then it turned and took him with it, rushing him down towards the sea. He felt he could have stretched his arms out and been billowed on, but instead he clung to the railings of the bridge. The houses all around were boarded up and empty. The Tea Room had closed for the winter, and the studios were shuttered up until the spring. A pale yellow beam flickered towards him from the Sea House, a candle stretching out an arm. Max began to run, lurching against the force of the gale, the earth oozing up water, puddles like lakes forming from below. ‘Elsa!’ he warned her as the screen door slammed.

Elsa was in bed. She was leafing through a book of photographs.
Israel: The Founding of a Nation
. Sent to her that morning by a friend. Max peeled off his coat and his jacket. He began to roll away the greased wool of his sweater, when he caught her watching him as if he were performing a striptease.

‘Yes?’ Self-consciously he removed his trousers and his socks, and, his hands still icy, he seized her sleepy form.

‘In three days’ time,’ she said, ‘he will be here.’

‘In three days’ time. Yes.’ Max flung the covers off her and began to kiss each plane and crevice of her body, feeling the sweetness of his lust like honey, the blood in his ears like a storm. ‘We must not waste a minute.’

‘All right.’ She was laughing, her face dissolving into crescents, her eyes, her eyelids and her mouth. Love, I love, ich liebe liebe love, he sang to her with his whole body, and it was only much later that he understood what she had said.

Three days, two nights, and one of them was gone. He got up and dressed himself in the grey light of the morning. His clothes were damp and he felt shivery with grief. He bowed his head and marched back through the bitter weather, setting up his paints and his brushes, linking one cottage to another with a black swirl of sleet. Gertrude found him when she came down for breakfast, sketching the tall brick house that looked out over the river.

‘Have you been out already?’ she asked, noticing the dark ends of his trousers, and in answer he pulled his coat back on and slipped into the rain.

All day he hurried back and forth, memorizing small sections of the building. The two low windows on either side of the front door, the cacti lined along the sills. There was a model of a boat set on the doorstep and a necklace of dusty shells in the porch. Elsa found him by the fishermen’s huts late in the afternoon. ‘You agreed’ – she stood before him – ‘we wouldn’t waste a moment.’

Max looked at her. Two days, he thought, in two days’ time… He was weighted down by the burden of his stubbornness, but he could not shake it off. Instead he shrugged at the weather and made small measuring movements with his hands and eye in order that he might bring the proportions of each building home. Eventually Elsa walked away from him. Her narrow back was wrapped in black, her head bent to pick her way between the puddles. No. He watched her go. Please don’t. Stay. But he made no move to follow her, and his voice stayed tight inside his head.

Max worked right into the evening, giving up on sunshine and painting in the storm. It was satisfying to mix the blacks and greys, to give the rain an angle as it came sleeting down.

‘Did Elsa Lehmann have any advice for you?’ Gertrude asked, laying out a game of patience on a small round table by the fire.

‘Elsa…’ Max caught at the name.

‘Your letters. Did she mention to which publisher you might send them?’

‘No.’ It occurred to him that he had left Henry’s letters on the Sea House table, had painted the last stretch of his scroll without their help.

‘No,’ Max told her. ‘She hasn’t decided on the best place to send them yet.’

‘I see,’ Gertrude nodded and she continued with the cards.

Max lay in bed and watched the water spilling down the panes, his lip jutting miserably to think he need not be alone. He could be with Elsa, could have her body in the warm spoon of his own. Instead, an extra quilt pressed down on him, the blankets so dense and heavy he was unable to get warm. Inch by inch he dared his feet into the ice stretch of the sheet, and then he was asleep, dreaming, striking out through puddles, hoping to land on the shores of Hiddensee although each time the tide swept him away. Halt, halt. His drawer was floating by and he lunged after it, and there, undamaged, was the Renoir. He steered it home, dragged it up to the room which housed his table, and slotted it safely out of sight. His legs now were in a stew of heat. He tried to move them, throw off the quilt, but instead he had gone back to the art dealer in Cork Street, sweat pouring from his face as he listened to the man explain it was a buyer’s market. He wouldn’t get much for his second-rate Renoir, with so many orphaned paintings for sale. The man spoke as if it were a mystery, so many works of art suddenly unowned, carelessness perhaps, stupidity? And then Kaethe’s face in oils was looking down at him from the landing of their home. ‘I am alone,’ he told her through the ceiling, and with a huge effort he forced himself awake.

Gertrude nudged pastry into the curve of the tin. It was strong and springy and gave her small quivers of delight. ‘Alf?’ She thought she heard the creak of the front door. ‘Is that you?’

The boy was sitting on the bench pulling off his boots. His hair was plastered down, water dripping from his fringe. ‘La, la la la la la la laaaaaaa.’ He was singing. A perfect ripple of the scales. Gertrude watched him as he tugged, the notes swelling with the effort of pulling off one boot. ‘La la la la la la la laaaa.’

‘How was Miss Cheese?’ she asked, but his face when he looked up at her was mute.

Gertrude poured mashed apple into the pie dish and began to roll the crust. ‘Would you set the table for me?’

Alf took napkins from the bureau drawer and teased the squares of cloth through wooden rings. He arranged the knives in diminishing sizes, the soup spoon to their right.

‘Thankyou.’ Gertrude lifted her sheet of pastry, floating it down over the apple like a quilt. She dented the sides, dusting them with milk, and slid it on to the larder shelf to wait. ‘La la la la la la la laaaaa,’ Gertrude sang as she boiled chicken and stirred flour into butter for a sauce. So many pies, she worried, but it was too late to start again. She had tried to get fish but, the weather being stormy, the men were unable to get out. ‘Four dabs last week,’ one fisherman told her, ‘that was all the catch,’ and he’d gone back to the Gannon Room to wait.

At seven-thirty exactly Thomas Everson arrived. He was carrying a black umbrella with a malacca handle, and his shirt had all its buttons in place. Gertrude, when she opened the door to him, saw that the weather had changed. The rain had stopped, the wind had calmed and the moon, visible for the first time in a week, was full. ‘Max,’ she called up the stairs, and, irritable suddenly with his inability to hear her, she strode up and knocked on his door. ‘Our guests are arriving,’ she shouted and, bracing herself for what she might see, she peered in.

Max was kneeling on the floor, hemmed in by his scroll. It started by the door – her own house, the walls a wash of raspberry – and ran up and down the village, over his bed, along the floor, crossing itself by the harbour, the gulls flocking by the river mouth. There was the Green, its triangle of grass, the pottery, the row of redroofed cottages winding into Palmers Lane. There were blue roofs and orange walls, great bursts of foliage, and small spiked flowers. Max had unrolled the last stretch under the window and was half-pinned behind the door.

‘I am finished.’ He looked up at her, and she put out a hand and helped him leap across.

‘It’s wonderful.’ Gertrude stood and stared at it, the chimney pots, each one surprisingly different, the weathervanes, the intricate patterns of brick. There were swallows on the telegraph wires, the Dunnits’ dog, its head on its paws, their chickens, scratching, white and grey. ‘Can we exhibit it? Right now? Thomas is downstairs… We could…’

‘NO!’ Max reached for the door, but Gertrude had the handle.

‘Let me have one more look.’ There was the advert for the Natural History Exhibition pinned to the wall outside the shop, and another for the August bank holiday fête. Punch and Judy. Coconut shies. White Elephant and Games. There was the Gannon Room, its weathered boarding so badly in want of repair. But what surprised Gertrude were the people. A boy rolled a ball along Mill Lane, and two women, one pushing a baby, chatted as they ambled across the Green. Three men stood outside The Ship, reckless somehow in their summer clothes, leaning and talking, making jokes. ‘Max.’ she put an arm around him. She had expected his vision to be silent, flint and brick and stone. ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen this year.’