The Sea House (7 page)

‘And how about you, Elsa?’ Gertrude was asking. ‘Was your house near by?’

‘There were Nazis in the hills at Kloster,’ Klaus answered for her. ‘And nudists in the south. Vitte was the only place for a nice artistic family like Elsa’s.’

‘Nudists?’ Gertrude was amazed.

‘We were discouraged from going,’ Max cut in. ‘But all the same…’

‘Well…’ Gertrude shook her head. ‘It must make Steerborough seem rather dull.’

‘No. Not at all.’

Max wondered if Elsa had seen the carriage of drunken men, their insignia blazing as they rattled through Vitte in their cart. His mother was playing Boccia with two friends and he was sketching, shading the heavy balls as they thudded to the ground. He was rubbing with his pencil to create the sprays of dust. And then the cart had stopped and the men were leaning out. ‘That boy’ – they seemed to be falling half out of their cart as they pointed at him, sitting on his step – ‘that is a rather Jewish-looking boy.’ Max turned to his mother just in time to see her face flush red.

‘It was a sort of idyll,’ Klaus was telling Gertrude. ‘With no cars. Just horses, bicycles and boats.’

‘Do you remember the people always searching for amber on the beach.’ Elsa was laughing now. ‘And then the poet Ringelnatz put up a sign, “Amber. Lost on beach. Please return to Ringelnatz.”’

‘Yes,’ Max smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘And twice a day the steamer came.’ She was talking just to him. ‘There was
Swanti
, and there was
Caprivi
.’ Elsa said their names so tenderly, like long-lost friends.

‘
Swanti
and
Caprivi
,’ Max repeated, remembering how he’d waited at the harbour to see which one it would be.

‘We were going to build a house there when we were first married,’ Klaus said. ‘We even chose a spot for it and drew up plans.’ There was a silence while the four of them looked at their plates. ‘But who needs Hiddensee when we can be here? For that one thing, we can be grateful. Thankyou, Adolf, for forcing us to Steerborough, where the sea is infinitely more refreshing, the summers full of… shall I say suspense?’ Klaus raised his glass. ‘Herr Hitler, I thank you again.’

Max stared at him.

‘How about some coffee?’ Gertrude stood up, although it wasn’t her place to provide help.

But Elsa was collecting dishes. ‘No, no, I’ll bring it.’ And she disappeared into the house.

12

Everywhere Lily looked now she saw Grae. Without the car, she supposed, he was bringing his work home. The back garden had turned into a workshop. A workbench was permanently set up and lengths of wood and half-finished constructions were propped against the shed. He wore the same checked jacket and the same hat through sun and rain, and one evening when she went out to fill the coal scuttle he offered her a box of kindling for the fire. Soft white ends of wood that needed to be burned. The rain was falling, it was starting to get dark, but he carried on sawing and measuring, never breaking his stride even when Em and Arrie called to him, hungry, from the back door.

It was May bank holiday and Nick was driving up. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a pen. How do I get out of London?’ Lily stood in the phone box and weighed the pebble in her palm. It was brown and unexceptional, probably to stop anyone replacing it, like she had, with a twopence coin. ‘Christ,’ she heard Nick sigh, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to me…’

‘Well,’ Lily said. ‘You head for the M25… and go east… you know… the opposite direction from Heathrow?’

‘East… Not… to… Heathrow,’ Nick murmured as he copied her instructions down.

‘And Nick…’ she warned him as gently as she could, ‘bring some warm clothes… and no… no white trousers.’

‘No white trousers.’ He paused to make a note of it and they both began to laugh. The year before they’d spent a week in Cornwall, during which Nick had almost immediately run out of clothes. He’d packed two T-shirts, no jumper, and one pair of oatmeal-coloured jeans. ‘How was I to know?’ Nick had protested. ‘I’m a city boy. I’ve lived my whole life in Shepherd’s Bush. Yes, yes.’ He’d looked at her. ‘You’re from West London too, but you’ve got some kind of hiking, rambling blood, I’ll swear to it. It must be in your genes.’

‘So…’ Lily could hardly believe that he was really coming. ‘I’ll see you tonight, then. About nine?’

Nick had been unusually attentive since his return from Paris. He’d even sent her a postcard. Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Pompidou Centre and the Seine.
You see
, he’d written,
we could do an architectural tour here. We could go by taxi. Just think of the money saved on hiring bikes!

‘Yes, I’ll ring you from the car… Oh, bollocks… I forgot, you don’t have a phone.’

‘Sorry to deprive you of that call to say you’re nearly there.’

‘Cheek.’

‘See you later, then. Drive carefully.’ Her money was running out.

‘Lily…’

‘Yes?’ But the last coin made a hollow echo as it dropped into the box.

Lily stood in Stoffer’s wondering what she could possibly give Nick to eat. Everything that had seemed tempting to her before now seemed inedible. Crumpets, bacon, vacuum-pressed salami and ham. There was shortcake and treacle tart in silver-foil cases, one over-ripe tomato, a cluster of cauliflowers, a sack of onions and three leeks. Instead she hired a bike from the rack outside the shop and set off for Eastonknoll, taking the back lane that cut across the river. It ran through fields of cows penned in by ditches and was edged in places by huge flowering bushes of bright yellow gorse. Lily rattled over the Bailey bridge and set off across the corner of the golf course, glancing up at the shadow of the water tower, careful to avoid being hit by flying balls. She came out on the Common and swooped down towards the sea. The wind was fierce on the promenade, rippling the beige macs of the pensioners, ruffling their dogs, forcing them to clasp each other hard against the rails. Lily wheeled her bike along the sea front and bought tea at the kiosk, where the chairs were stacked three deep to weigh them down. She sat, as if in a high chair, her legs dangling inches from the ground, and watched the woman shutter up the hut. Above her, at the top of a steep flight of steps, she could see a ship’s figurehead arching out from the wall of a large house.

‘I might as well close up.’ The woman stood before her, her apron flying, her sleeves flapping as she rolled the tables in.

Lily carried her bike up the steps towards the figurehead. It was not, as she’d imagined it, a mermaid or a queen, but a neat girl with a hat on, an umbrella at her side. Was she the captain’s daughter, or the ship owner’s young wife? and Lily saw that she had lost one of her arms, leaving a clean white plaster stump. Beside the building a mast was planted in the ground. Arrows fluttered from it, pointing the way towards Ramsgate, Zeebrugge, Holland.
The Sailors’ Reading Room
. The words were moulded on to a plaque and Lily realized the house was a museum, open to the public, with arched white doors, and a well-worn copper catch. There was no one inside the reading room, and nothing very much to read. Just three copies of the
East Anglian Times
and two brown chairs. Around the walls in high glass cases were models of ships. Punts and schooners, battleships and yawls. Each plank of wood, each tiny rope and sail, minutely replicated, washed down, painted and oiled. Above the glass cases were photographs of fishermen and sailors, notebooks held open at the records of each voyage. There were lists of names, Harper, Seal, Child. Harry, Bertie, Mabbs and Mops. And beside each name the dates their lives spanned. There was another door at the back of the room, marked private, covered in green baize. There was a round window halfway up, not much bigger than an orange, and Lily pressed her face against it. To her surprise she saw two men playing billiards, a third reading a newspaper, a fourth doing nothing at all. She squeezed closer, peering to the side, catching sight of a ship’s wheel balanced on a bench, and then someone tapped her on the arm.

‘We’re closing up now.’ The man had a peaked hat, braided with blue cord, and he was wearing rubber wellingtons turned over at the knee. The clock behind him chimed as it reached five, a rich deep gong that warmed the room. ‘Thankyou.’

Lily glanced around her at the photographs of men, the tools and scrolls and telescopes, the doomed faces of Seal, Harry, Child, all drowned in 1951. ‘I’ll come back when there’s more time.’ The man watched her until she was out of the room and then she heard him locking himself in.

There was a delicatessen in the market square that sold fresh parmesan, black pasta, Greek yoghurt and organic crisps. Lily filled two bags and topped them up with lamb’s lettuce and fruit. She glanced into the window of the Regency Hotel, where an old man was dozing in a room of chintz, and noticed an advert for a waitress.
Urgently needed. Please apply within
.

Slowly she cycled home, her shopping hanging from each handle like the saddlebags of a mule. The wind had dipped, the sun hung low and warm, and in each hollow hovered the thick, sweet coconut smell of gorse. Lily meandered up and over a tiny ridge of hills, stretching her legs as she reached the top and letting the bike coast down. She was a child again. Warm and safe and happy, skittering and playing, bathed in breeze and birdsong and the Ambre Solaire smell of a beach. And then a man stepped out of the hedge. Lily’s heart jolted so violently it strained against her ribs. Her blood spiralled, and as if it were a horse shying, her bike lurched over to one side. The man stood in the narrow path, so squarely that she couldn’t pass. She was caught halfway down a slope, too weighted to pedal backwards, too frightened to go on. A tin of tomato purée rolled into the hedge and she heard the crunch of the spaghetti as the strands began to snap. The man took two steps towards her. He was wrapped in strips of plastic bag, his feet, his body, the top half of his head wound round with black. There was a sound, like hissing, rising from his legs, and his face was grizzled, camouflaged by beard. Lily glanced behind her. There was no one, nothing, as far as she could see. The scream that had been rising in her died. Keep calm, she told herself, keep calm. The man had picked up speed. He was lumbering towards her, his body squat, his eyes rimmed round with red, and then just as he was almost upon her, he keeled away through a thicket of tall grass. Lily gasped. It was possible he hadn’t even seen her. His eyes, as he passed, were fixed on something else. Lily hauled up her bike and watched him go. He was walking through a field of heifers, following a path ridged up out of the ground. Ahead of him on the horizon was a clump of trees, a white wooden signpost where the path split into three, and beyond that, just visible, a cottage, the roof of which was bare.

Lily scrabbled the lost shopping back into her bag. Her legs felt weak, her arms stiff and painful, but as she cycled on she found that she was laughing with relief.

At eight o’clock Lily moved her car. She hadn’t used it for almost two weeks and it took her hands and feet a moment to find their way around the gears. She backed it out and then parked it again, right over by the wall, so that when Nick arrived he’d be able to glide in beside her, and wouldn’t block the lane. She made a fire, and found an old checked blanket to throw over the sofa, softening at least some of the brown. From time to time she went to the door and looked out, in case – just in case – Nick might be planning to surprise her and arrive early. She could, she thought, go to the phone box and find out how far he was on his way, but she had an image of him racing over the Orwell bridge, the wind tugging at his car, forcing him to swerve into a line of trucks as he reached out for the phone.

My sweet El
, she read instead. She had become an expert on Lehmann’s handwriting, the curls of it, the widened lines of his pen as it swept down. It amused her to think of the agonies of her school German, the endless repetitions of the grammar, the feminine, the masculine, the neuter, and how finally they had proved to be of use.
Today
, Lehmann wrote,
your first letter to arrive here was brought to me as I ate breakfast and all the tears that would have rolled down my cheeks because of your being alone were swiftly dried up by the sun. It sounds like you have been working very hard, my El, and you’ve told me about it all so beautifully, apart from the meals, which hopefully you haven’t forgotten to have? Last night I couldn’t sleep and I thought of all the things I wanted to tell you. Are you shopping properly for yourself? And when the doorbell rings, do you always look through the spyhole before you fling open the door and welcome whoever is there? Won’t you get a chain put on? Write it down now so that you don’t forget. And please don’t get up too early, and don’t race around after any trains. I could fill up this whole page writing to you with cautions and good pieces of advice. Don’t forget, my El, love, my sweet body El, I want this child as much as you.

PS. You’ve forgotten to tell me about your evenings. AND what you had to eat!

Lily was woken by a pounding on the door. The fire had died down, and when she jolted up, letters and deep purple flashes of the undersides of envelopes scattered to the floor. ‘I’m coming,’ she called, and then, remembering where she was, ‘Come in, come in. It’s open.’ She turned, running her fingers through her hair, straightening her clothes. ‘How was it?’ she called out and then she gave a little yelp. Grae was standing in the hall. ‘Oh.’ She caught sight of the kitchen clock, and her face in the mirror below it, creased and red on one side where she’d been lying on a seam. It was ten-thirty. ‘I’m sorry. I was expecting somebody else.’

Grae looked uncomfortable, his broad shoulders hunched a little in the narrow hall. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, so late… it’s just… your car… it’s parked too close to the gate and I’ve got to bring some wood through, not now, but first thing in the morning. I saw your light on… and… well… I thought it would be better than knocking at six.’

Lily stared at him. She was only now starting to wake up. Pins and needles were tingling in one leg and her pulse was racketing. Where’s Nick? she thought. He can’t still be on the road?

‘Of course. I’ll move it now.’ Like a sleepwalker she backed the car away from the side gate. ‘Is that enough, it’s just I’m expecting someone.’ Lily peered at the black mass of the Green. ‘My boyfriend.’ She didn’t want him to think she was alone. ‘I’d better call.’ But more than any fear of Grae was her terror of stepping into darkness, of being inside the phone box, sealed into its tower of light, the only object visible while all around was night. ‘Excuse me… Would it… could I use your phone?’

The back door of Grae’s cottage opened straight into the house. A tiny kitchen, neat and tidy, and a sitting-room with a patterned bedspread thrown over the sofa.

‘It’s on the windowsill,’ Grae said, and she sat on the arm of a chair and dialled. What if no one answered? She imagined Nick’s phone flung away from him, his car a shattered wreck, the ringing the only sound on the black road.

‘Yup.’ Nick’s voice was confident and gruff. Lily felt so angry tears sprang into her eyes.

‘Where are you?’

‘In London.’ Nick sounded as if he was entirely in the right. ‘Sitting here, waiting for you to ring!’

‘You said that you’d be here by nine.’

‘Listen, five minutes after I spoke to you something came up.’ He lowered his voice as if to lure her. ‘An unbelievably exciting project. I even tried ringing you back in that bloody phone box, but… well, I… with the exception of sending a carrier pigeon… Lily, I’m sorry. You’ve got to get a mobile phone.’

Lily sat in silence in Grae’s sitting-room. In the corner was an orange-crate full of the girls’ toys. Teddies and stripped naked dolls, and a thread of cotton reels strung in a long line. ‘So, when are you coming?’

There was a pause at the other end, and the unmistakable buzz and chatter of a bar. ‘I don’t see how I’m going to make it now. It’s a huge project. If we start straight away, work on it all weekend and every second of next week, maybe there’s a chance of winning the account.’