The Travellers and Other Stories (23 page)

I have taken out my heart and put it in a box where no more harm can ever come to it.

Magdalena's words had terrified us all when we were children. The thought of her warm wet heart in its chilly little box, fluttering and beating beneath the lid like some small, frightened animal—it was like something out of Grimm.

Every once in a while, she came into town for something—a bag of tea from Gephardts' or a ball of wool from Greta Fahr's shop, matches or fuel from Dortmund's—and always at some point she'd alight on someone, Greta Fahr or Herr Gephardt or one of the Dortmund girls or one of our mothers if they happened to be in any of those places when she was there, and she would tell them in a confidential whisper what she'd done and sometimes, crouching down in her old black coat and her long skirt and her funny smock, she'd confide in one of us children as well.

We used to wonder what had made her do it, but she never told us that part. Whatever it was that had happened to her she'd never spoken about it. There was no gossip, no rumours or stories. Whatever it was, it was buried in some dark place, as secret and hidden as the heart she said she'd pulled from her body and locked away, out of sight and out of mind, and when we'd asked our parents, or Herr Gephardt or Fräulein Fahr, or any of the other grown-ups if they knew, they just shrugged and shook their heads and said she was just a poor creature who should have gone years ago to the hospital in Euskirchen where she could be looked after instead of living out in the woods in that little cabin by herself.

I didn't hear her come in.

I didn't hear her set down the logs on the floor next to the hearth, I didn't hear her step onto the woven rug and walk up behind me. I didn't know she was there until we were standing together in front of the mirror, the two of us, me in front and her behind, me and Magdalena Hirsch.

I had never seen her up close before and it was ages since I'd seen her in town; years since I'd happened to be there when she'd paid one of her rare visits to the shops in the Hauptallee. She looked, to me, neither young nor old. She was slender and tall and her brownish-greyish hair was very straight and soft-looking. Her eyes were grey and the skin of her face was pale from living in the woods. She still had on her black coat from being outside but the buttons at the front were open and I could see her smock underneath. It was dark and rough looking and loosely woven and hung in folds from her shoulders and behind the folds I could see her shape. I thought of Trude. Trude with her starched white blouse and her straw-coloured plaits and the stingy kisses she'd sold to me in the cave above the weir. My face had grown suddenly very hot, I could see it in the mirror, red and burning beneath my short dark hair that was still damp from the rain. Behind us I could see the bed, the white pillow and the flowery eiderdown that had been cold when I'd touched it, and I could feel Magdalena's breath, very quick and warm on the back of my neck. She smelled of milk and woodsmoke.

‘You?' she whispered, bewildered, amazed.

A rose-coloured flush had spread into her waxy face and her mouth was open. I didn't know what to say. Her eyes were wide and her face was taut and very still and she was staring into the bamboo mirror at my reflection as if she had seen a ghost. I swallowed and waited and she said it again—
You?
—and then her arms came up around me and quick as a snake she reached past me to the dresser and snatched up the little fist-sized box that was on top of the cloth and sprang away from me.

‘Get out,' she said softly, clutching the shiny black container against her open coat, hugging it and pressing down with her thumbs on its lacquered lid as if her life depended on it, and then her voice rose and she shouted at me at the top of her lungs, to get away from her, right now, and never come back, to go back through the woods the way I'd come, back to my wife and my baby son, she didn't want to see me ever again, she didn't need me anymore, everything was fine now just the way it was and if I ever tried coming back to her ever again, she would kill me.

THE COAT

SOMETIMES WHEN I
arrived she'd open the front door and just stand there as if she'd hardly noticed I'd come—her arms folded beneath her breasts, watching the empty battered garment fill with the breeze from the open door, the body swelling up and moving about, as if it were alive. I wondered if she took it down at night from its curved hook, put its soft arms around her neck, its hips against her hips, and danced with it across the room and told it she loved it.

In the evenings, when I sat with her in the lamplight, I could see it out there, hanging in the passageway. The three scuffed leather buttons down one side, the nub of thick pewtery thread where a fourth had gone missing. It made me think of a roughed-up dog after a fight.

‘You should fold it away, Evangelina,' I'd say then, as gently as I could. ‘Pack it up with your memories and put everything in a box and start again.'

When she didn't say anything I'd reach out and cover her hand with mine.

‘Forget him, Evangelina.'

‘No.'

It was grey, a soft dark grey like old heather or the sea at Duddon in winter. Broad-shouldered and long-armed like Joseph himself. She kept it on a hook next to the front door like some kind of charm, a lure that would bring him home, like one of the lamps in the windows of the inn that were there to guide the carts and carriages safely across the bay.

It was more than a year since Joseph Hine had walked out of the door and left without a word of goodbye or explanation of any kind and Evangelina kept dreaming up all kinds of reasons why he might have gone. Once, in a flood of tears, she asked me if I thought there might be some far-off war she'd never heard of he'd felt called upon to fight; another time, if I thought it could have been something religious, some difficult question to do with his soul he'd gone away to figure out.

‘Don't be daft,' I wanted to say.

I don't think it ever entered her head, what everyone thought: that her good-looking husband must have another woman somewhere, in Blackpool or Manchester or Liverpool. Somewhere glamorous and busy she'd never been, someone Joseph had met when he went off carousing three times a year with his uncles and his brothers and his sisters' big loudmouthed husbands.

Once, not long after he took himself off, there'd been a report of a horse out on the sands with its saddle hanging down under its belly and the body of a man trailing beneath. Sonny Peen had seen it from his little hut above the shore and come running into town making frantic shapes with his arms and bellowing from his long wordless mouth. Sonny always liked to be the first with news of anything interesting or unusual out in the bay and when Evangelina heard his awful bellowing—that terrible donkey-sound of his that was like an ancient see-saw, or the slow drawing up of a bucket on a rusty winch from the bottom of a cavernous well—when she heard it she went running down there with a shawl pulled on over her nightgown but it wasn't Joseph it was only a poor traveller attempting to cross over in the dark without a guide. Since then there'd been nothing, no rumours or sightings or reports or false alarms; Evangelina the only person who didn't believe that the emptiness out in the bay, the mist, and the water creeping soundlessly back and forth beneath the moon, in and out over the sands, were the silence of a man who was doing his best to disappear.

It was the minister at Bethesda who first asked me to visit Evangelina, to sit with her from time to time and keep her company.

‘It will do her good, Margaret,' he said, ‘to have someone there. Another voice, another face.'

We all knew by then what had happened when the schoolteacher, Mr. Gardiner, had gone to visit her in his best clothes with a bunch of snowdrops in his fist.

‘Are you blind?' she'd shouted at him from the open doorway, not even asking him across the threshold, and pointing at Joseph's coat. She snatched hold of one tattered grey lapel and shook it in the schoolteacher's face. Didn't he know she was waiting for her husband to come home? Couldn't he see that? Her voice shrill, indignant, amazed. The schoolteacher blushed, he was young like she was and thirteen months must have seemed a long time to him for a good-looking husband to be gone and for his wife to believe he was ever coming back. When she carried on shouting at him he dropped his flowers and hastened backwards down the path. He hadn't argued with her. If that's what she wanted to believe, he'd told people afterwards, let her.

We didn't talk much, Evangelina and I, and hardly ever, after those first few months, about Joseph.

We sat, we sorted laundry, we quartered fruit and cooked it and packed it in jars. We walked, we planted out her garden for winter—onions and kale and some pale flat wrinkled beans I'd never seen which she said wouldn't mind the frost and would be soft and tender and delicious by early summer, and I remember thinking that it was a good sign, that she was talking about the summer as if she looked forward to it, and a picture came into my head then of me and Evangelina Hine sitting down to a plate of new beans on a table in her garden in summer. Later, too, another picture came: in my mind, winter has always appeared like a big, dark shoulder, or the long curve of a road up ahead, and once you are round it, it is all downhill and I remember standing on the ridged earth in Evangelina's garden between her quiet house and Joseph's empty forge behind it, seeing the two of us, me and Evangelina Hine on a sledge, in the last of the winter's snows, somewhere up on the fells, Evangelina clinging on tightly behind, our heels stuck out to the side, our toes pointing up, hurtling down, shrieking and crying out and laughing.

I began to hate the stupid coat. The way she clung to it, its woollen crust. Its grey shell. All her hopes crowded into it, all her passion and all her faith, as if just by hanging there, all limp and droopy and old, it was some kind of promise or pledge, a sign that he would come back to her one day, warm and safe and whole.

I made up my mind to tell her what I thought, what everyone thought, about Joseph having another sweetheart somewhere and her being too blind to see it.

‘Evangelina,' I began slowly, but there must have been something in my voice that suggested I was about to say something she didn't want to hear. She was sitting opposite me at her kitchen table, peeling the apples we'd brought in from the shed behind the forge where we'd stored them in the autumn. I thought how thin and tired she looked.

‘What?' she said, keeping her eyes down. I watched while she picked up a fresh apple and dug the blade of her knife into its wrinkled skin and carried on, more briskly and fiercely than before. She had never looked so stubborn. She began dumping the peeled apples into a pan and drawing the loose peel together into a mound between her hands.

‘Perhaps, Evangelina—' I began, but she cut me off.

‘How is Harold?' she said, in a bright way.

I took a breath.

‘Harold is fine,' I said. ‘Busy at the bank.'

Harold is fine, I wanted to say, but he is not you.

Harold and I lived then, as we do now, in a large house in the village, a half mile walk to Evangelina's place. Being the forge, hers is the last of all the houses and beyond it is open country and the sea. I always loved that walk to her house, once in the morning, and then again in the early evening, when I said goodbye to Harold and set off from our house to see her. The water and the big sky and the hills rising behind.

Harold would always ask me, when I came home after my visits how ‘the poor woman' was. He would always say how good I was to keep going there and spending so much time with her. Then he would kiss me on my forehead and pat my hand and tell me some story from the bank.

Spring came and in Evangelina's garden we put in peas and raspberries and potatoes, a quince against the wall at the back of the house. The beans were getting so tall we had to support them with ropes strung between pairs of stakes, one at either end of each row.

It was Sonny Peen who saw Joseph Hine walking back across the bay.

Harold and I were away.

The Ulverston bank had closed for a day's holiday and Harold had arranged a trip to Maryport. It seems foolish now, but as we walked about through the streets and around the harbour and sat over our lunch in the Golden Lion, I actually found myself looking out for Joseph Hine to see if this might be where he'd decided in the end to begin his new life away from Evangelina. It seems foolish now, in view of everything that has happened, that in a kiosk near the harbour wall, I bought Evangelina a china thimble with
A Present From Maryport
written along the bottom in tiny blue script.

Sonny Peen's wooden hut is perched on the rock above the shore, something like the lookout on a rampart. It has a chimney made of beaten metal, one small window at the front made of pieces of bottle-glass stuck inside a shellacked frame. From there he can see all comers, which is what he likes. He likes to see the travellers coming in when the tide is chasing them, when they have to cluster around the guide's white horse and cling to the edges of his floating cloak, like rats on a cheese. He likes to see the shapes of the people and the carts and the carriages looming up through the mist like creatures from the deep, and when he spots something out in the bay he makes a circle with his forefinger and his thumb, as if he has a telescope, and then he presses his good eye to the imaginary glass and closes the other eye and squints through the hole. He does this several times a day, and, depending on whether the tide is in or out, he sees carts and carriages and wading birds, herons and egrets picking their way delicately through the muddy sand; fishing boats and seagulls afloat on the rocking grey surface of the water.

Perhaps Sonny had his own theory all along about what had happened to Joseph Hine; perhaps he'd studied the big blacksmith from afar through his make-believe telescope and perceived some unusual sort of anguish; perhaps it had seemed to him that Evangelina's husband was not well, that he was suffering or sickening for something and had gone away, like a cat or an elephant, to die. Perhaps, when Sonny Peen spied the tall powerful figure of Joseph Hine approaching across the shimmering sand, and saw his long weird clothing, snapping and guttering in the salt wind, he thought he was looking at a shroud.