The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (19 page)

Despite this unexpected turn of events, Jim’s expression
was rueful, if a little distracted. As ever, no sooner
had one worry departed than another arrived. It was this
which brought him to Mrs Anderson. So when he pulled
up at her door, an undertow of anxiety prevented him
from enjoying the prospect of chocolate cake and a refreshing
cup of tea. He knocked and when there was no
reply he tried again, two short raps. He peered through
the side window. Although the external door was locked, the
inside one was open as usual, and Mrs Anderson’s
walking shoes were beside the boot scrape; signs of occupancy
. Still there was no reply and he wondered what to
do, his conviction about the wisdom of this visit draining
away.

Perhaps she’d seen him coming. Perhaps she didn’t want a visitor after all.

Just as his nerve was about to fail him, it occurred to him she might have fallen and hurt herself. Emboldened by this idea, he went to the window on the right of the front porch. It was Mrs A’s lounge (sitting room, he could hear her correct him), a room into which he had never been invited. He had only managed glimpses of it when he carried Mrs A’s box of groceries into the kitchen across the hall. Looking through the quartered pane he was surprised to see the mantelpiece and tables empty of photographs. They’d been such a feature of the room, though he’d always thought it rather peculiar Mrs A having so many photographs of William Ritchie, Diana and Alexandra when she had relatives of her own, and living close by too. Hamish Boyd, who farmed on the other side of the ridge, and his brother Duncan were her first cousins. From the bits and pieces Jim had picked up from Hamish or Duncan over the years, it seemed Mrs A had no time for either of them. In Duncan’s case, Jim could understand the antipathy. Not only was Duncan odd, but Mrs A had had to suffer in silence as he wrecked Boyd’s Farm. If Jim had grown up there, as Mrs A had, he would also have found it hard to be civil to the perpetrator of such destruction. In Jim’s opinion now, and the opinion of the villagers, the only thing the land was good for was the shed BRC wanted to build on it.

Mrs Anderson’s frostiness with Hamish was less understandable. Once or twice he had asked Jim about her: whether she was well; whether she needed anything; whether he could help. On each occasion the conversation had ended with Hamish wondering why his offers of hospitality had always been refused. How could she live so close by and yet never have met his two children, Margaret and Graeme? Jim had thought it might be rubbing salt into Hamish’s wound ever to mention the proprietorial way Mrs Anderson spoke about ‘Mr William’, Diana and ‘Miss Alexandra’ or how many of their photographs she displayed in her home, as though they were her real family.

Jim put his hands to the sides of his face, to shelter the window from the sunlight, to let him see inside more clearly. He turned his head one way then the other to make certain Mrs A hadn’t had an accident, that she wasn’t lying immobile on the floor. He noticed the wing chair by the fireplace, the newspaper folded over the arm and the tapestry stool in front: more evidence of Mrs A being there. Puzzled as well as concerned, he went to the other side of the front porch to look in the kitchen window. To his surprise he saw the table had dirty dishes on it, and when he cupped his hand to his face and pressed closer to the pane he saw Mrs A sitting at the table, quite still, looking straight ahead. He wondered why she hadn’t either responded to his knocking or to his appearance at the window which surely she must have noticed. He became more convinced that something awful had happened, that she had suffered a stroke or some other trauma, so he knocked gently on the window, called out her name saying ‘it’s only Jim’, in case she was confused, in case the knocking frightened her.

At first she didn’t react. Then she turned her head slowly, her expression altering as it travelled. By the time she was looking directly at Jim, she had a glower of irritation. Jim was taken aback to see it, but he was still worried about her so he waved and asked if she could let him in. A scowl crossed her face as she rose from her chair and Jim realised he’d done the wrong thing. He returned meekly to the door and awaited her arrival with trepidation. It had been a while since he’d felt the edge of her tongue – it had happened often enough when she’d been housekeeper at Brae. He knew what to expect.

From the other side of the door he heard a series of terse exclamations, none of which he could make out though he imagined he was the butt of them. In anticipation of the ordeal to come, he took a step backwards as Mrs A opened the door. She asked crossly what on earth he wanted and why he was bothering her at this time in the evening. Her mood was so at odds with his last visit that he became awkward and apologetic and hopped from foot to foot.

‘Stand still, Jim, and tell me why you’re here.’ She swiped at a loose filament of cobweb the setting sun had illuminated. Jim imagined he would have been her target had he not been prudent enough to stay out of range.

‘I was just passing – I’d taken a delivery to the big house,’ he attempted to explain. ‘I thought I’d just check how you were.’ Jim knew it was another mistake. Nothing was more likely to put Mrs A in a bad mood than someone taking an interest in her, uninvited. ‘And I’ve got some news,’ he added uncertainly, hoping for salvation.

Her face suggested such a possibility was most unlikely.

‘You know that young woman I told you about?’ Jim blurted.

Mrs Anderson chewed at her lip. ‘What of her?’

‘She’s called Violet Wells.’

‘I know Jim. You’ve told me already.’

‘Wait,’ Jim said. ‘You know I’m doing some work for Turnbull . . .’

Mrs Anderson shrugged as if to imply it wasn’t a concern of hers.

‘Well, there was talk today about this Violet Wells being the daughter of Megan Bates.’ Jim looked at Mrs Anderson, hoping the revelation would soften her attitude, might even tempt her to share whatever she had heard about the young woman, what she was doing in Poltown. ‘She told some retired policeman. He passed it on. The boys were saying Megan Bates mustn’t have killed herself after all, that she must have faked her death and gone off somewhere to bring up the baby.’

Mrs Anderson rubbed at a mark on window sill, as though it was more deserving of her attention than Jim and his tittle-tattle about Violet Wells. ‘I can’t imagine you’re right, Jim,’ she said, still rubbing. ‘She was here this afternoon and didn’t say anything of the kind to me. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve things to be doing.’

After Mrs Anderson had closed the door with a firm bang, Jim returned to the van and made a mental note never to drop in unexpectedly again. He felt the gap in his stomach where anxiety had been gnawing at him, a gap on any other occasion that cake would have filled. Driving away, he thought of Duncan, and wondered whether Violet Wells had told him why she had come to Poltown now, whether that was why he’d run away from her, as he suspected.

Mrs Anderson cleared the table with practised efficiency. The dirty plates went into the Belfast sink to soak, the used glasses put straight into the dishwasher, the leftovers scraped into an ovenproof dish for reheating for lunch tomorrow. Anything clean, the cutlery and the side plates, she placed on a tray over which she draped a clean dish towel. Her habit was only to eat one proper meal a day, usually lunch, unless she had been awake for most of the night and had slept in. Then she’d have breakfast late and high tea as she liked to call it: scrambled eggs and baked tomatoes followed by toast and jam with a cup of tea. This evening, she’d probably make do with biscuits – fig rolls were her favourite – and a cup of leaf tea, Indian for preference. She found it more soporific than China. She put the teapot beside the kettle, followed by a cup and saucer, then the milk jug and the biscuit tin. The sugar bowl was added as an afterthought and she covered the ensemble with another clean dish towel to keep the flies away. Then she went to the window, as she did when a storm was approaching, to wait for a drama to unfold.

Cal told Violet about the oranges, how some of them would have come ashore by now. Where they’d beached would give him a clue to the currents and eddies, to the forces in play the day her mother went into the sea. He climbed into the back of the pickup, talking to himself and, occasionally, to Violet. One minute he was searching for his laptop, the next asking Violet to hold on to his spare mobile phone ‘just in case’.

‘Just in case what?’ she said.

‘The battery should last two or three days,’ he said as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘Keep it on you.’

‘I’ve already got a phone.’

‘I know.’

He turned on his laptop and, between complaints about how slow it had become, he told her that smart phones could be adapted for all sorts of unexpected purposes nowadays. For example, he used the one she held in her hand for tracking currents. He sealed it in a waterproof box, attached a drogue so that it had traction in the water and then launched it. Although he had access to data collected by drifters and gliders, the sophisticated and expensive ocean monitoring equipment deployed by marine institutes, more often than not he needed precise information about particular stretches of coastal water. A friend of his had devised a phone app for that purpose.

‘How does it work?’ she asked.

‘It lets me know where it is. It texts its position.’ He passed his laptop to her. ‘Do you see the map? See the dot flashing?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s it. When the phone moves so will the dot. It means I can watch where currents take it. I can calculate speed, direction and so on.’ He put the laptop in his backpack and rummaged around on the back seat, addressing Violet as well as the objects of his search as though coaxing them into being discovered. ‘Where are you water bottles?’ Having found them, he started another search for the carton of long-life milk he’d bought and the carrier bag in which he had bread, cheese and biscuits. One by one he put them into his backpack and concluded that it shouldn’t be too heavy. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied. She nodded too, letting Cal know she understood why he had been talking all the time. She realised he was trying to divert her from what he had just said about the phone, the implication of it; of him being able to track her every move, should she go missing.

‘Not,’ he said, making light of it, ‘that I’m planning to let you out of my sight.’

He returned to rummaging, finding his camera and binoculars, putting one into a pocket of his anorak, the other around his neck.

‘I don’t have a choice, do I?’

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘But you do?’

‘Well, I’ve chosen.’ He backed out of the pickup. ‘Are you coming?’

They walked in single-file and in silence, South Bay giving way to North Bay, the forestry on the hill looming at them, until Violet asked where they were going.

‘There’s something I want to show you,’ he said. ‘Further up the coast. If we hurry we should be back here by dusk.’

They came to cliffs and Cal stopped to scan the shore below. He moved on and did the same, and again. ‘There,’ he said eventually. ‘See that sandbar.’ He handed Violet the binoculars. ‘There’s an orange on it.’ As she searched, he explained how he’d put it into the sea in South Bay along with seven others. He’d expected some to come ashore where they were looking. If they carried on for a bit he was sure there would be more, because of the curve of the land, because of its exposure to the wind, light though it was, because of the flow of the current which swept up close to that stretch of coast.

After spotting two more oranges, they returned to North Bay. Scrambling over its rock-strewn collar, he asked if she knew precisely where the hat and the bag came ashore.

‘On the beach, I think. That’s what I’ve been told.’

Cal showed her how small it was, how far back from the bay’s mouth, how clean of debris, even sea-weed, and why. He pointed out the narrow sea entrance, the way the high headlands provided shelter from every wind apart from a westerly, and even that had a small target to hit, how the tidal current passed by the bay at between 2-4 knots, fast enough to carry debris beyond it before any wind-assisted divergence could occur.

‘What are you saying?’ she asked.

‘Just that it’s unlikely a raffia hat and a leather bag would drift ashore on this beach and even more unlikely they’d end up together. Come and see.’

They picked their way through the boulders going to the bay’s protruding chin. After a while Cal began to point out a few pieces of flotsam, rope, some netting and a buoy. ‘Stuff like this comes ashore here because a slack water eddy spins into the bay after high tide. Flotsam gets carried on it.’ While Violet watched, he clambered among the rocks, lifting loose sea-weed, searching the sea pools. Suddenly he tossed an orange into the air, shouting ‘catch’ to Violet.

‘That’s what I mean,’ he said as she caught it. ‘The eddy brought it to this side of the bay, but on the day your mother disappeared, the wind had more south in it. Most likely the hat wouldn’t have come in here at all. The wind would have taken it further up the coast.’

‘What about the bag?’

‘The bag, different weight and lying lower in the water . . . it would have gone more with the tidal current. If it passed close by the mouth of the bay around high tide it might have got caught in the eddy. If it did, this is the place it would most likely have beached, where we’re standing now.’

‘So they wouldn’t have come ashore together?’

‘In all probability they wouldn’t have come into the bay. The bag might, but both together. That’s the most improbable.’

‘So how did they get here?’

‘Someone could have left them to make it look as though they had floated ashore.’ He didn’t know the answer. ‘It’s also odd her body was never found.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘In these waters, at these depths, you’d expect a body to be recovered, if not straight away then after a couple of weeks, once decomposition had brought it back to the surface. Out in the ocean you might not see it again, but in here, you’d anticipate it turning up along the coast somewhere.’ He looked at Violet. ‘It might take a few days, or even a few weeks. It might travel a fair distance but sooner or later it would catch in an eddy. When your mother went missing, it was settled weather like this. Afterwards, there were gales on and off, south-westerlies as well as westerlies and north-westerlies. She’d have come ashore, more likely than not she would.’

The right-hand side of Violet’s face glowed golden in the setting sun. Her mouth pulled at the corners. At length she said, ‘What you’re saying doesn’t necessarily prove anything?’

‘No.’

Violet lobbed the orange into the sea. It splashed before bobbing to the surface.

‘Although . . .’ Cal began.

‘Go on,’ Violet said.

‘Well, If Duncan had been involved in her disappearance he wouldn’t have tried to cover it up by leaving her hat and the bag on the beach over there.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘He knows where things come ashore. Even back then, he was collecting flotsam. He’d have known how little came into North Bay.’

Violet wandered off, picking up stones for Anna, turning over shells, reflecting on what Cal had said. On the beach, she crouched and dug into the sand with her fingers, as if trying to disinter its secrets.

When Cal joined her, she said, ‘Who then?’

A few weeks before, Jim had watched a television documentary about the flowering of a desert. The location was in Africa or America, he couldn’t remember which. Duncan’s face reminded him of it now: his cracked and dry skin like the baked earth before the rains; his patchy white stubble like shrivelled stalks of vegetation; his tears like insistent rivulets which pushed out across the arid desert landscape following a thunderstorm in the hills, the trail of wetness colouring Duncan’s deadened flesh a pinky-grey. Jim noticed how the tears from Duncan’s right eye criss-crossed the wrinkled contours of his cheek, going off in one direction then back in another, whereas those from the left eye dropped vertically into a crevasse beside his nose before splitting into a mini-delta of channels at his mouth. Jim became mesmerised by the slow motion progress of Duncan’s silent misery. He could not look away because he felt responsible for it. He could not hold Duncan’s hands, as he might a distressed woman’s, or put his arms around him. He could not leave, not while Duncan was like this.

As he observed the rivulets of tears it occurred to him that this was the first time he had been confronted by a sobbing man, indeed, the first time he had made a man cry. Both these ‘firsts’ had left Jim feeling uncomfortable and hoping that Duncan would pull himself together soon. To Jim’s dismay, the opposite seemed to happen. Duncan reached out and grabbed Jim’s forearms and held them tight, in the manner of a supplicant or beggar.

‘It’s all right Duncan,’ Jim found himself saying, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

He hoped the reassurance would simultaneously calm Duncan and encourage him to loosen his grip. Once again, the contrary happened. Duncan stiffened his hold, his tears flowed more freely and he began a mumbling commentary, only some of which was intelligible. When Jim managed to make sense of a few words, he attempted to engage Duncan in conversation which, after all, had been his purpose for visiting. At one moment, for example, Duncan rebuked Megan Bates for misleading him and Jim asked, ‘How did she mislead you Duncan?’

At another, Duncan mentioned a ‘signal’ and Jim inquired, ‘What signal?’

At another still, Duncan appeared despairing and repeated ‘not coming back, not coming, not coming back’ and Jim said, ‘Who’s not coming back?’

Duncan looked perplexed, as if he could not understand why Jim asked such a question.

‘Megan,’ he answered, as if it was obvious. ‘Megan isn’t coming back.’

Duncan’s puzzlement reminded Jim of the
conversations he used to have with his father, James senior
, in the weeks leading up to his death. Much of
their time together at hospital visiting time would be spent
sorting out whether Isobel, Jim’s mother, would be joining
them or not. Jim would start by changing the subject
or saying he didn’t know when his mother would
be visiting, but he would always end up telling the
truth because his father became enraged at his evasiveness. ‘Mum
is dead,’ he would say. Then he would watch his
father’s anger subside to be replaced by a silent
and inconsolable grief. It was why Jim started out being
evasive: each time he hoped he would be able to
avoid announcing his mother’s death and each time his
father reacted as though it was his first time of
hearing it.

‘Megan died 26 years ago, Duncan,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know,’ he said.

‘You must have forgotten.’ Jim lapsed again into the rhythm of conversation he used to have with his father.

‘I didn’t know. I thought she would come back.’

‘It’s why Violet Wells is here. She’s Megan’s daughter and she’s trying to find out what happened to her mother. Don’t you remember talking to her?’ Jim tried to probe further. ‘What did she ask you, Duncan? When she spoke to you?’ But Duncan’s grip on Jim tightened again.

‘She isn’t coming back.’

‘I’m afraid not, Duncan.’

‘She promised.’

‘What did she promise?’

‘She said she would go away and . . .’ Duncan stared into Jim’s face with disconcerting intensity.

‘And what, Duncan?’

‘She said she would go away,’ he repeated, ‘where he couldn’t find her and then some day she’d come back.’ Duncan pumped Jim’s arms. ‘She promised.’

‘She did go Duncan. She went for a swim in the sea, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember finding her hat and bag in North Bay?’

Duncan regarded Jim as though he was the idiot now. ‘She left them there. She knew I would know.’

‘Know what Duncan?’

‘I would know she had put them there. I would know she was alive.’

Jim asked, ‘Was that the signal?’

‘Yes, yes, the signal,’ he said with animation. ‘The signal that she’d gone away . . . only I would know.’

The turn of the discussion made Jim wonder whether Duncan had understood anything he’d said. ‘You’ve met Violet, haven’t you?’

Duncan’s face registered confusion. ‘She was here?’

‘Yes, she asked you questions about Megan. She upset you. She told me you ran off to North Bay, where the hat and the bag came ashore, where you go when you’re upset.’

Duncan nodded. He remembered.

Jim continued, ‘She’s asking questions because she wants to know how her mother died all those years ago, how her mother is dead when she is alive; why everyone thought her mother had drowned and the baby with her.’

‘Megan loved her baby,’ Duncan said. ‘She wouldn
’t have killed her baby.’ Then, sounding betrayed, ‘She promised
.’

‘What did she promise, Duncan?’

‘One day she’d come back with her baby.’

‘But her baby’s come back without her, Duncan. Her baby hasn’t seen her since the day she was born.’

At last Duncan let go of Jim. ‘Megan’s not coming back.’

‘No.’

‘Not coming.’

‘No.’

Jim patted Duncan on the knee, withdrawing his arm before it became Duncan’s prisoner again. ‘You’ve had a shock,’ Jim said. ‘It’s confusing for you.’

‘I loved her,’ Duncan said.

Jim stood. ‘Well, I’d better be getting back to my rounds and I’ve my sheep to feed.’

He put his hand on Duncan’s shoulder. Later he would remember how bony it felt, how lifeless, as though Duncan’s body was already preparing for what would happen, as though Duncan was dying from the feet upwards and all that remained alive were his neck and head.

* * *

She stood at the corner of the table, her hands clasped together across her midriff, her skin suddenly translucent in the evening light, her breathing quickening, her eyes flicking from one part of the kitchen to another as if searching for something but not knowing what. Ever since Violet’s arrival in Poltown she had been having these turns. Before, they were confined to the emptiness of the night. Now they assailed her at quiet moments during the day too, with memories so vivid she was temporarily paralysed, memories so distressing she felt her chest constrict until she could barely take a breath.