The Sea House (27 page)

35

Gertrude was at the vicarage handing out blankets and warm drinks while Betty Wynwell stood by the window waiting for news of Alf. ‘He’ll be all right.’ Gertrude pressed a cup of tea on her, whisky stirred in with the milk. ‘He’s out with Mabbs, he’ll keep him safe.’ But she felt a stab of worry as together they stared through the black glass.

It was Alf who had woken her. ‘Miss Jilks!’ His voice was familiar, although she couldn’t remember ever having heard it before. ‘There’s a tempest blowing.’ He was shaking her shoulder, ‘Your friends are out.’ It was only then she realized she was no longer dreaming. She rose and drew the curtain at the window. Water was lapping at the edges of the lawn.

‘I’ll wake Max.’ But Alf said no, he was already up.

The boy waited while she dressed, pulling her clothes on over her nightgown, slipping her feet into wellington boots. Hand in hand they hurried towards the harbour. They stooped low, blinded by the wind, feeling for fallen wood, until they rounded the corner by The Ship. Gertrude had been expecting to battle down the hill, cross the bridge on to the mud flats, dash between the scaly stilts of houses until she reached the dunes. But here, a mile early, was the sea. A flat grey surge of water resting at their feet.

‘Alf?’ She turned to him, and he pointed towards the horizon to where there was a light. The Sea House – alone, without its neighbours, a square black shadow, its lower half submerged.

They stood and stared, and then a group of men appeared. Klaus Lehmann at the head of them, his clothes wringing, his face disfigured with alarm. The men were dragging a boat. They slid it into the water and before even one of them could stop him, Alf slipped out from her side and clambered in. Dick Mabbs took the oars, barking to Klaus to sit down, and although Gertrude called to Alf, shouted for him to climb out, he turned away from her and kept his eyes fixed on the light.

‘Klaus,’ she shouted, ‘hand him out to me.’ But Klaus’s back was turned. The other men stood on the shore, shaking their heads, their eyes slanted as if they understood, and then one of them turned to Gertrude and said she’d be needed up at the vicarage to see to those that had been washed out of their homes.

‘Yes, of course.’ But she was afraid to leave. She watched the little boat plunge forward, lift and spin on the waves, until eventually, feeling the hard eyes of the men on her, she turned and made her way up the hill, where the vicarage was a blaze of candlelight and every member of the WI was rushing round with towels.

‘He’ll be back soon now, don’t you worry.’ She put an arm round Mrs Wynwell’s shoulders, and felt the woman take a thorny breath in an effort not to cry.

Behind them the door opened and a family of five were ushered in. They’d been stranded in a holiday bungalow up by the Bailey bridge, and they’d stood on the roof with their baby wrapped in an eiderdown until two men from Eastonknoll had rowed across to them. The oldest boy was shivering and chattering as he told his tale, how they’d watched the river swell on either side, taking with it boats, the rails of jetties, and even a man hanging on to what looked like a door. He had shouted and called to them as he rushed past. Chickens, he’d seen, and the body of a cow, and all the time he talked, his mother stared from one to the other of her children, as if she couldn’t believe that they’d survived.

Elsa and Max stood at the Sea House window waiting for the stilts to give way. There were no lights on land, the storm must have knocked out the electricity, and as far as they could tell the water reached beyond the Ship, trapping the inhabitants of Steerborough up above the Green.

‘Max,’ Elsa whispered, straining past the curve of his arm. ‘Look.’ She turned him around, and there, fighting its way towards them, was a boat. It was a tiny boat, just visible, its oars slashing the water, its prow slamming into hollows, as it fell from the top of each wave. There were three people in it, bent against the spray, and they were forcing their way towards the Sea House.

Elsa pulled Max down below the level of the window. ‘The baby may be Klaus’s.’ She looked him in the eye and, taking one more swig of whisky, she leant out and screamed into the storm for help.

Elsa was the first to climb down. Max watched her as she stepped into the boat and fell into her husband’s arms. He turned his back on them and climbed down too, and it was only when the fisherman turned the boat around that he saw the other figure in the boat was Alf. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked him, taking his wet hand in his, and Alf nodded, watching the disappearing mass of the Sea House as the tide swept them back in to land.

Lehmann was wet, shaking so violently that Elsa, even with both arms around him, couldn’t hold him still. ‘He tried to swim to you,’ Mabbs told her. ‘We had to fish him out with the promise of a boat.’

‘Klaus’ – her head rested on his arm – ‘we agreed you would be careful.’ She turned her eyes away from Max. ‘Your mother was right not to trust me.’

‘No.’ Lehmann was stuttering with cold. ‘You mustn’t say that.’ Max leant forward and offered him the whisky, and he took it, although without seeming to recognize that he was there. There were only a few drops left, wasting as his teeth rattled against the glass, and instinctively both Elsa and Max brought their hands up to hold the bottle still. How long was it going to take them? He peered into the dark, but there was no knowing any more where the water ended and the land began.

Gertrude and Betty Wynwell were folding blankets when the door burst open. ‘We’ve saved them.’ It was Alf. ‘They won’t be drowned.’ His eyes and mouth, his teeth, even his hair glowed with pride. His mother dropped her blanket. She lifted him up, and for a moment Alf seemed to forget he was one of the lifeboat rescue men and buried his face in her neck.

Dick Mabbs, Max and Elsa struggled in with Klaus. He looked as if he had lost the power of his legs and his face was almond-white. They laid him out before the fire. His wet clothes were peeled away, dry clothes were brought for him and he was swaddled in blankets like a child. Gertrude pressed sweet tea to his lips but he coughed and choked and the liquid dribbled out.

‘We need a doctor,’ Elsa whispered, but the news came through that Eastonknoll was cut off by water on all sides. A woman and her little boy were drowned, and three old ladies were last seen trying to reach high ground.

‘Take some tea yourself,’ Gertrude told Elsa, who was crying without pause, but as she raised the cup to her mouth, she began to retch. Mortification flooded her face, and Max, who had been standing by like a sentry, turned away so suddenly that even Lehmann, prostrated between them, seemed to flinch.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Elsa laid her head on Klaus’s chest, her tears, Gertrude imagined, seeping through into his waterlogged lungs. ‘He’s burning up,’ she called, ‘he’s burning.’

Between them she and Gertrude moved him away from the fire. They laid cool flannels on his face and arms, dabbing at his neck and the inside of his elbows as he batted away their hands. ‘What can we give him?’ Elsa asked.

Gertrude looked around. There was no medicine here. Just scones and tea and blankets. If she had her book of cordials, she might find something in it to bring his fever down. ‘Max?’ She could remember only a recipe for cough mixture, vinegar and honey, and a cure for eczema: dock root mixed with lard. Gertrude squeezed herself between the people, eating, sleeping, chattering with high spirits or shock, and went to the door where she’d last seen him. ‘Max?’ she called into the dark, but he had gone.

‘The tide has turned!’ The news came in, and fresh tea was passed round in celebration, slabs of fruit cake and drop scones hot from the range.

36

Lily was still sitting outside the beach hut when she heard music drifting towards her from the Green. She stood up and stretched, and as she did so she kicked the uneaten cornets into the reeds. Where was Grae? She squinted at the horizon, Was he expecting another storm? And glancing up at the clear blue sky, she trudged off through the dunes.

The Green had transformed into a fair. Children, their faces painted – butterflies, leopards, cats and clowns, monsters, bumblebees and princesses – ran from game to game. Some tried their luck at bowling, throwing quoits, while others knocked coconuts from posts which actually fell when they were hit. The littlest ones dug for parcels in the lucky dip or bought tenpence tickets for the tombola. Behind a table two women and a man stood guarding a bowl of fruit. Lily watched as a boy paid his money and picked up a bell. As soon as it rang, the adults pulled blindfolds down over their eyes and began to spin their arms. They spun them fast until the bell rang again, and then they stopped and plunged their hands into the bowl.

‘Bad luck.’ The man smiled, pushing up his blindfold. ‘Two bananas and a pear.’ And as a consolation prize for failing to win on the human fruit machine the unlucky gambler was offered a boiled sweet.

There was a cake to guess the weight of. A doll that needed you to guess her name. And then the music that had led her here started up again. A band was playing right outside Lily’s house. It was the girl from the ferry, singing into a microphone still in her rowing clothes, her heavy boots, her jeans, a short sleeved T-shirt showing the smooth brown ripple of her arms. There was a boy on keyboards with bright white hair, and another, darker boy who played the sax.

‘Now you say you’re sorry,
Now I’m with someone new,
But you can cry me a river…
Cry me a river…
Because I cried a river over you…’

The girl looked up on the word ‘river’ and smiled, and the whole Green smiled with her.

Lily hummed along to the music as she sifted through a stall of clothes. She pulled out polka-dot aprons, rose-patterned dresses in size 20 and up, candy-striped shirts, their cuffs scorched by irons, and a green velvet jacket with ’70s lapels.

‘One pound the lot,’ Ethel called to her, hardly visible over the mountain of remaining clothes, and Lily, rather than throw them back, rummaged for her change.

A little further on, two tables had been pushed together. They were piled with lampshades, napkin rings, dishcloths and bowls. Scattered on the grass around were deckchairs and an old bicycle with rusty wheels. Lily picked up a small tin saucepan with a compartment inside dented like the petals of a flower. What it was she didn’t know, but it was irresistibly pretty. 35p the label said and Lily held out her money.

‘Oh,’ the stall-holder protested. ‘The egg poaching pan. That was from a previous fête. It’s 25p now.’

The window of Fern Cottage was latched open, and Lily pushed her purchases through. What on earth am I going to do with them? she wondered, but she couldn’t help herself, she went out to search for more.

At the far end of the Green the raffle was being drawn, the numbers and prizes ringing out from a loudspeaker – a hamper from Stoffer’s, a bottle of whisky, dinner for two at The Ship! And then a whistle blew and the children flew from every corner of the Green to where the Punch and Judy show had been set up. They arranged themselves in rows, cross-legged, gazing up, and then the Punch and Judy man appeared from behind his booth. He was tall and thin with a striped blazer, and his nose was miraculously hooked to fit his job. The children tensed towards him, their faces alight, and when he had them enchanted, he stepped back inside. Lily moved closer to watch. Bash went Punch. Waaa went Judy. Grrr went the dog. Hurrah shouted the children when the policeman appeared. Bash went Punch. Waa went the baby. Lily looked round for Em and Arrie, trying to identify them in the crowd, but if they were there, she couldn’t tell through the disguise of so much face paint, however hard she stared at the straggled ends of hair.

37

The wind had calmed. It felt almost warm, and Max looked around him in amazement at the limbs of trees, the toppled chimneys, a beach hut lying on its side on the Green. He passed two fishermen carrying an old man in an armchair, and another guiding his blind wife. He expected to find the water receded, but the sea was still there, stretching out from the Wynwells’ wooden cabin, a small wet stride away on its mound. Max raised his eyes to the sun, an angry orange in a slate-grey sky, and there, below it, rising from the water, was the Sea House, still intact.

Very slowly he walked along Mill Lane, round the curve of the drive to Gertrude’s house. The front door was open, the rooms still dark, and he went upstairs and stepped across his scroll. He sat surrounded by it, gathering up his things – his clothes and boots, his paints, his hat. He looked round for the briefcase of his letters and remembered he could do without them now.

People passed him as he walked along the street, nodding as they hurried on their way. He walked past the vicarage, its chimneys pumping out smoke, its candles burning low, past the church, and on along the road until he’d missed the turning for the railway and left the village behind.