A Half Forgotten Song (11 page)

In her head was a simple tune, circling itself again and again. A tune from childhood, beating a rhythm she couldn’t shake off.
A sailor went to sea sea sea, to see what he could see see see, and all that he could see see see, was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea . . .
At first she thought it was the drip of the kitchen tap that had conjured up the ghost of this song; the steady plink of water onto the chipped porcelain. She stood in the kitchen and shut her eyes, and at once the smell of the place grew stronger—a stale smell of bread crumbs and milk, the tang of burning on the hob, the sickly smell of a century of greasy food remains, hiding in cupboards and in the cracks in the floor. A flash of Valentina’s perfume, the violet water she dabbed behind her ears when a guest was due to arrive. If she opened her eyes, she might see the woman, Dimity thought. Catch her standing close to her daughter, smiling.
Mitzy, my girl, you’ve a fortune waiting to be made.
Tucking Dimity’s bronze hair behind her shoulders for her, woozy and affectionate with wine on her breath and her eyes half closed.

Dimity kept her eyes shut, pressed her teeth tight together so the violet smell wouldn’t get on her tongue. The tune hummed itself in her throat, more of a chant than a song.
See see see, sea sea sea,
the beat bouncing, irresistible. It was the sound of hands clapping, of skin striking skin, taut across the palms of young hands. That picture he had held up to the windowpane. She’d only caught a glimpse of it, small, from a distance, but she knew it at once. The first time she met him, the first time he sketched her—sketched her before she even knew he was there, before she’d ever set eyes on him. Made her into a figure on a page; took her inside him and then re-created her, possessed her. That was how she felt, when she saw the drawing afterwards. Possessed.

T
he house was called Littlecombe. It stood in an overgrown garden at the far eastern edge of Blacknowle, along a driveway that jutted out towards the sea. Like an echo of The Watch, like its mirror but not quite: Littlecombe was closer to the village and still a part of it, just about. Not as cut off, but still separate. From it you could walk out across pasture to the cliffs, just as you could from The Watch, and then join the path west towards Tyneham. At the back of the house a small stream cut a miniature ravine into the earth, then descended to the sea as a constant splatter of water down the cliff face, muddy and brown after heavy rain. It was one of the best places to pick cress and catch crayfish, and since the house had stood empty for three years, Dimity felt free to do so.

Before that, an old man called Fitch had lived there all his life, as far as anybody knew. Fitch seemed to have no other name. He creaked and crawled his way to the Spout Lantern every night but Sunday, coughing between puffs on a thin, unfiltered cigarette. The smoke had carved deep, stained creases into his face, and his right hand was fixed in a claw shape—index finger and thumb set a fraction apart, always ready to grip the next fag. When he didn’t turn up at the pub one Saturday night, the people of Blacknowle knew what it meant. They went along to Littlecombe with a stretcher all ready, and found him in his chair, stiff and cold, with a bedraggled dog-end still hanging from his lip. Dimity could have told them he was dead, but she wasn’t allowed into the pub, and people tended not to talk to her if they could help it, so, partly out of nerves and partly out of spite, she’d not told anyone what she knew. That when she had gone to fish that morning, in the stream behind the house, the black windows had screamed out at her and there was a gaping emptiness that made her skin crawl, where once she would have felt the presence of a living thing within the walls. His death was like a strange scent in the air, or the sudden ceasing of a noise you hadn’t realized you could hear.

And so it had stayed for three years, empty, passed on to an estranged cousin who showed no sign of wanting to do anything with it. A few slates slipped from the roof and smashed into the flower beds, beheading the rampant dandelions there. Thistles grew up to brush the ground-floor windowsills, and in winter a water pipe burst, painting a sparkling swath of ice all down one wall. It was a square brick box of a house, three rooms up and three rooms down. Victorian, functional, not charmless but certainly not pretty. Then one morning Dimity was halfway across one of Southern Farm’s fields to it when she stopped. A thin trail of smoke rose straight up from the chimney into the crystalline air. It was early summer, the mornings still cool. She suddenly felt like a spotlight was on her, and braced her feet apart, ready to turn and flee. She hadn’t heard anything about new owners in the village gossip, which she eavesdropped by loitering near the shop or the bus stop. New owners might not like her in the stream. Might see her harvesting as thieving. They might have a dog, and let it chase her, like Wilf Coulson’s mother did when she went up to the door one time, dry-mouthed at her own audacity, to see if he could come out to play.

But just as she was about to retreat, she saw somebody watching her. And it wasn’t a scowling man or an angry woman with a dog, it was a little girl. Younger than Dimity, maybe eleven or twelve, medium height, narrow, square at the shoulders. Feet buckled into tan leather shoes, white socks pulled up to her knees, and her body wrapped in a canary-yellow cardigan. She stood at the rickety gate to the little garden in front of Littlecombe, and they considered each other for a minute. Then the girl came out and walked towards her. When she got up close, Dimity saw she had brown eyes, very frank, and a lot of rebellious hair escaping from the glossy brown plaits at either side of her head. Dimity’s pulse raced as she waited to discover how she would be spoken to, but after a long pause the girl smiled and held out her hand.

“I’m Delphine Madeleine Anne Aubrey, but you can just call me Delphine. How do you do?” Her hand was smooth and cool, the nails scrubbed clean. Dimity had been out since dawn, checking the snares, mucking out the chicken coop, and picking greens, and her own nails were stained and had earth underneath them. Earth and worse. She shook Delphine’s hand cautiously.

“Mitzy,” she managed to say.

“Pleased to meet you, Mitzy. Do you live on the farm?” Delphine asked, pointing past her and down the hill to Southern Farm. Dimity shook her head. “Where do you live, then? We’re living here for the summer. My sister, Élodie, too, but you’ll never see her out this early. She’s a lazy stay-abed.”

“For the summer?” said Dimity, puzzled. She was bowled over by the girl, by her calm, friendly introduction.
Strangers,
she thought. Strangers from far, far away who didn’t know to hate the Hatchers yet. She’d never heard of people who lived somewhere only for the summer—like the swallows, like the swifts. She wondered where they wintered, but thought it might be rude to ask.

“Your accent’s really funny! In a good way—I mean, I like it. I’m twelve, by the way. How old are you?” Delphine asked.

“Fourteen.”

“Gosh, lucky you! I can’t wait to be fourteen—when I’m fourteen Mummy says I can have my ears pierced, even though Daddy says that’s still too young and we should concentrate on being children and not want to grow up so quickly. But that’s stupid, don’t you think? You can hardly do
anything
when you’re a child.”

“Yes,” Dimity agreed cautiously, still unsure how to behave in the face of such overt friendliness. Delphine folded her arms and seemed to consider her new acquaintance carefully.

“What are you going to put in your basket? There’s nothing in it, and there’s not much point carrying an empty basket if you don’t plan to put something in it,” she said.

So Dimity led her around behind the house, from which the sound of pots and pans and movement was emanating, as was the smell of fresh bread, and showed her the stream and the watercress beds, and which rocks to lift to find the crayfish hiding underneath. At first Delphine didn’t want to get her shoes muddy or her hands wet, snatching her fingers back from the water and wiping them hurriedly on the skirt of her pinafore, but she grew bolder as time passed. She squealed and scrambled backwards when Dimity held up a big crayfish, which waved its claws angrily at the world. Dimity tried to reassure her that it was quite safe, but Delphine wouldn’t come near again until Dimity had thrown it farther downstream. She stared after it regretfully.

“It’s all those legs! They’re disgusting! Ugh! I don’t know how you can bear to eat them!” Delphine said.

“It’s no different to eating crab or prawns,” Dimity told her. “My mother wanted some for later. She’s making soup for dinner.”

“Oh, no! Will you get in trouble for letting that one go?”

“I don’t always find them—there aren’t that many. I’ll just tell her there weren’t any today.” Dimity shrugged, a show of carelessness that she didn’t feel. The snares had been empty, too. She would have to find something else, or hope that a visitor came and brought them some bacon or a rabbit; or there would be nothing in the soup except barley and greens. Even at the thought of such poor fare, her stomach rumbled loudly. Delphine glanced at her and laughed.

“Haven’t you had breakfast? Come on—let’s go in and have something.”

But Dimity wouldn’t go inside; she could hardly bring herself to pass the little gate into the garden, it felt so alien. Delphine accepted this with a quizzical tilt of her head, and didn’t press her for an explanation. She darted into the house and came out with two thick slices of bread, smothered in honey. Dimity devoured her slice in seconds, and they sat on the damp grass in the morning sunshine, licking their sticky fingers. Delphine polished the mud from her shoes with a dock leaf, and glanced out at the glittering spread of the sea.

“Did you know that the sea is only blue because it reflects the color of the sky? So it’s not really blue at all?” she said. And Dimity nodded. It stood to reason, though she had never really thought about it before. She pictured it on a stormy day, as gray and chalky-white as the clouds. “The Mediterranean is a different color altogether, so I suppose the sky must be a different blue. Which seems odd, since it’s the same sun and all. But it must be different air or something. Or do you think it depends what’s under the water, too? I mean, what’s on the bottom?” she asked. Dimity thought about it for a moment. She had never heard of the Mediterranean, and was careful not to reveal this to her new friend.

“Doubt it,” she said at last. “A short way out it’s too deep to see down to the bottom, isn’t it?”

“The bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea,” said Delphine. “You’ve got hay in your hair,” she added, reaching out and picking the stalk from Dimity’s head. Then she clambered to her feet. “Come on—stand up. Let’s do the clapping song.” So she taught Dimity the song about the bottom of the deep blue sea, and Dimity, who’d never done clapping before, kept getting it wrong. She concentrated hard, trying to keep up as Delphine’s hands moved faster and faster, and decided that it wasn’t as much fun as Delphine seemed to think it was. But she persevered, to please the strange, talkative girl, and as she did, she felt the prickling weight of being watched. At first she thought it was just her imagination, just the fear of always being the first one to miss a clap and get it wrong, but after twenty minutes or so, a man emerged from the house, carrying a large, flat book.

He was tall and thin, dressed in close-fitting gray trousers and the oddest shirt Dimity had ever seen a man wear—long and loose, and open at the neck to show a sliver of the hairy, tanned skin of his chest. It was almost like the smocks the dairymaids wore for milking, but cut from coarser fabric, some kind of heavy linen. His hair was a deep reddish-brown, thick and wavy. It was parted in the middle of his scalp and grew down over his ears to brush his collar at the back. Dimity stopped clapping at once, took several steps backwards, and lowered her gaze defensively. She expected to be shouted at, told to go. She was so used to it that when she glanced up at him, her eyes were full of venom. The man recoiled slightly, and then smiled.

“Who’s this, Delphine?”

“This is Mitzy. She lives . . . nearby. This is my father,” Delphine said, grabbing Dimity’s hand and pulling her closer to the man. He held out his hand to her. A grown-up had never, ever done that before. Bewildered, Mitzy took it; felt him grip her hand firmly. His hand was large and rough, the skin dry and speckled with paint. Ridged knuckles and short, blunt nails. He held on to her fingers a second longer than she could stand, and she pulled them away, flicking another glance up at his face as she did so. The sun was shining in his eyes, turning them the rich, lustrous brown of newly shelled conkers.

“Charles Aubrey,” he said; his voice rumbled slightly, smooth and deep.

“Are you going out sketching?” Delphine asked. He shook his head.

“I have been already. I drew the two of you, playing your game. Do you want to see?” And although it was Delphine who said
yes
and leaned over the book in his hands, it seemed to Dimity that he had really been speaking to her. The drawing was light, fluid; the background sketched in roughly—just hints of the land and the sky. The girls’ feet and legs disappeared into long grasses described with swift, ragged pencil lines. But their faces and hands, their eyes, were alive. Delphine smiled widely, obviously pleased.

“I think it’s excellent, Daddy,” she said, in a serious, grown-up tone of voice.

“And you, Mitzy? Do you like it?” he asked, turning the drawing right around so she could see it clearly.

It felt strange, and maybe even wrong. Dimity couldn’t tell. The air seemed to fill her lungs too quickly, and she couldn’t breathe all the way out. She didn’t trust herself to speak; had no idea what the right thing to say would be. Clearly, Delphine saw nothing improper about it, but then, she was his daughter. He had captured the shape of Dimity’s body, underneath her clothes; caught the sun shining on the line of her jaw and cheek beneath the translucent veil of her hair. To have caught them so accurately he must have looked very hard. Looked harder than anybody had ever looked at her—she who was used to being invisible to the people of Blacknowle. She felt desperately exposed. Color flooded her cheeks, and with no warning there was a tickle at the top of her nose, and her eyes filled with tears.