A Half Forgotten Song (19 page)

Hannah was looking at something on the hood of the jeep, and the way she jumped reminded Zach of himself, seconds earlier. She’d been looking through his sketchbook, and now she closed it with a defiant expression and a tilt of her chin, as if refusing to be embarrassed at being caught out.

“Find everything you needed?” she said. Zach folded his arms and smiled, glancing at his sketchbook on the bonnet.

“Yes, thanks. Lovely house.”

“Thanks. I grew up in that house.”

“You must have an incredible immune system,” he said, and struggled to keep a straight face.

“Careful, now. I did warn you.” Hannah balled her fists for a second, but her expression was amused. She gestured at his sketchbook. “I didn’t mean to pry. I just didn’t want you to leave your bag behind in the jeep. And, you know . . . the curiosity of a fellow artist and all that . . . But don’t worry—I don’t really feel like I’ve seen into your soul,” she said. He thought of the only drawing he’d done so far—his failed attempt earlier that morning.

“I was trying to draw the view from the top of the hill,” he admitted.

“And that’s as far as you got?”

“I think I may have . . . lost my mojo,” he said. She looked at him shrewdly, eyes screwed up against a sudden flare of sunshine.

“Is that so?” she murmured, not unkindly. Zach held his ground, but could think of no succinct way to elaborate. “Well, I always think it helps to remember why you’re drawing the thing you’re drawing. Why did you climb the hill and try to draw the view, for example?”

“Um . . . I don’t really know. Because it was beautiful?”

“But was it? Did you decide to draw it because it was beautiful, or because you thought it ought to be? Because you thought it was the sort of thing you should want to draw?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Stop to ask yourself next time. You might not get the answer you thought you would.”

“I’m not sure I know what I want to draw anymore.”

“Then perhaps try to think about why as well. Or, in other words, who. Think about who you’re drawing it for. That might help,” she suggested.

“Why did you run out on me the other day?” he asked, surprising himself. Hannah handed Zach’s sketchbook back to him with a cautious smile.

“I didn’t run out.”

“Come on. Yes, you did. It was when I asked about there being anybody else at The Watch.”

“No, no, I just had to get on, that was all. Really. There’s nobody else at The Watch. I know that much for a fact.”

“Have you been upstairs there?”

“Hey—I thought you wanted a tour of the farm, not to quiz me about my neighbors.” She started to turn away, but Zach put out his hand and caught her arm. He dropped it again at once, startled by the thinness of the limb beneath the fabric of her shirt. The warmth of it.

“Please,” he said. “I was so sure I’d heard somebody moving around up there.”

Hannah seemed to consider carefully before answering.

“I’ve been upstairs. And there’s nobody else living there,” she said. “Now, do you want the tour or don’t you?” She eyed him sternly for a moment, arching her brows, but somehow even her fiercest expressions brought a smile to his lips.

T
he winter months were a blur of aching fingers and numb, stiffened toes. Dimity had heavy boots, the leather of which was rigid with age and the damage done by winter weather. They were too big for her—they’d been left at The Watch by a visitor, one who had exited swiftly by the back door as the sound of his wife’s fist on the front door reverberated through the cottage. He never came back for them, so now the boots were Dimity’s. But her socks had worn through at toe and heel, and her repairs rarely lasted longer than a few days. She could feel the gritty innards of the boots through these holes when she walked; they caused blisters to form, then calluses. When she met Wilf Coulson in Barton’s hayloft, she would sink down into the loose hay and pull the boots off, rubbing her toes with her hands, massaging heat and movement back into them as best she could.

“I’ll do that, if you want. My hands are warmer,” Wilf offered one time, when rain was falling outside in straight rods of chilly gray. Barton kept his cattle in the barn when the weather was as wet as it had been. His fields drained badly, and were churned to an impassable quagmire otherwise. The heat from the cows rose up to infuse the hayloft, along with the sweet, shitty stink of them. Half sunk in the hay, it was possible to feel warm at a time when it seemed like the sun would stay weak and wan forever.

“It tickles when you do it,” said Dimity, snatching her feet away from his bony hands. She and Wilf were fifteen by then, and he seemed to grow even while she watched him. He was still thin, but his shoulders were wider, sharply angular; his face was longer, more serious, heavier across the brows. When he spoke, his voice wavered between a soft tenor and a hoarse, ragged squeak.

“Let me try,” he insisted. He took her feet firmly, and she was embarrassed by the dampness of her stringy socks, and the unwashed smell coming from them—imprinted there by the boots’ previous owner. Wilf clamped her chilly toes between the palms of his hands and for a blissful moment she felt the heat of him flood into them. She shut her eyes for a second, listening to the rain hammering on the tin roof, and beneath that the shifting and breathing of the cows. She and Wilf were out of sight, out of earshot. Untouchable.

When she opened her eyes, Wilf was looking at her that way. It was appearing more and more frequently, this look of his—intent and serious, mouth a little open. At once vulnerable and threatening, somehow, and in his lap the strain of trouser fabric across the bulge at his crotch. Dimity scowled and snatched her foot away again.

“And what’d your mother say, if she caught you up here with me, then?” she demanded. Wilf frowned and looked down through the barn doors, as if he half expected Ma Coulson to appear on the boggy, rutted mud of the threshold, amid puddles the color of tea and pocked by the rain, with her face every bit as grim.

“She’d box my ears and no mistake. No matter that I’m half a head taller than her already,” he said sullenly. “She gets crosser every week that passes, my ma.”

“And mine. Last week she belted me one for leaving shit on the eggs when I brought them into the house—never mind that there was hail coming down outside fit to smash them all before I could wipe them.”

“Shame they can’t be friends. Or at least meet up and box each other’s ears instead of ours.”

“Who do you think would win?” Dimity asked, rolling onto her side and smiling.

“My ma’s not afraid to use a stick, if she has to. You should’ve seen the state of our Brian’s behind when she caught him stealing from her purse!”

“Valentina would use whatever she could set her hands on,” Dimity said, falling serious, no longer liking the image of the two women fighting. “I do think she would kill a person, if they caught her at the wrong moment.” Wilf laughed and threw a handful of hay at her, which Dimity swatted aside crossly. “I mean it! She would as well.”

“If she laid a hand on you, I would have words with her. No—I would!” Now it was Wilf’s turn to insist, when Dimity laughed.

“You would not, for she does lay hands on me, regular as the tide, as you well know. But I don’t blame you for it, Wilf Coulson. If I could steer a course right around her, good and wide, I would. When I’m old enough, I will.” She rolled onto her back and held a stalk of hay up in front of her eyes, knotting it as carefully as she could without breaking it.

“Would you marry, then, Mitzy? To be away from her? You could soon enough. If you wanted to. Then you’d never have to go back there again, if you didn’t want.” Wilf’s voice was so laden with casual curiosity that it shook with the strain.

“Marry? Maybe.” Dimity pulled the knot tighter with a sudden jerk; snapped the stem and threw it to one side. Suddenly, the future rolled out in front of her like a long, unsettling thunderclap. A future that seemed to suffocate her. Her stomach twisted beneath her ribs, and she realized she was afraid. Horribly afraid. She swallowed, determined not to let it show. “Depends if I meet anybody worthy of marrying, I suppose, don’t it?” she said lightly. There was a long pause. Wilf fiddled with the waistband of his trousers, and his shirt beneath his sweater, which had come untucked.

“I’d marry you,” he muttered. Words pitched so low that the sound of the rain almost swallowed them.

“What?”

“I said, I’d marry you. If you wanted to. Ma’d come around once she got to know you. Once you weren’t living down at The Watch no more.”

“Shut up, Wilf—don’t talk like an idiot,” said Dimity, to hide her confusion. Better to laugh, better not to take it seriously, in case it proved to be mockery of some kind. A trick, which she did not think Wilf would play, but still could not be sure. Her heart was banging so loudly she was glad of the roaring overhead to hide it.

“I wasn’t. I wasn’t talking like an idiot,” Wilf mumbled, still examining his clothes, his hands, then gazing across the barn as if the far flint wall, smeared with manure, held some vast and crucial wisdom. Neither of them spoke for some time, and neither could have guessed the other’s thoughts. Eventually the warmth and the steady racket lulled Dimity into a doze, and when she woke a while later, Wilf’s head was on her shoulder, one hand resting lightly on her stomach. His eyes were shut but she could sense, somehow, that he was not asleep.

That winter was long, with late snows driving in on bitter north winds, killing off the first green shoots that had dared to show themselves. Dimity’s chilblains got so bad that she could hardly stand it; she was forced to sit, shuddering in disgust, with her feet in a basin of piss to cure them. She had a stabbing pain in her ears where the frigid air had seeped into them. There were hardly any visitors, except the two men that Valentina called her bread and butter, and so fewer gifts of food or coins; no sitter’s fees earned by Dimity, and far less for her to find, out foraging. They ate the eggs fried in old dripping that tasted bitter and burned from reuse, on slices of bread that Valentina made herself—she had a rare skill with dough. Dimity thought it was the anger with which she kneaded it. They were both tired, and their skin grew sallow and chapped. Dimity came home from delivering cold remedies to the people of Blacknowle with her lips cracked by the wind, and her fingers curled into reddened claws.

In those deadened days, Valentina kept to her bed, vague and listless. There was a knock at the door late one evening, but she wouldn’t come down. Dimity peeped out around the door in the end, because the man wouldn’t stop knocking. She didn’t recognize him. His face was dark, pitted, and lined, with ragged black stubble all over his cheeks. His eyes were watery and gray.

“What about you? You’ll do. I was told this was the place to come,” he said, in a hoarse, reedy voice, when Dimity told him Valentina wasn’t available for guests. She stared at him in shock, frozen.

“No, sir. Not tonight,” she said softly. But he gave the door a shove, caught her around the waist, and pushed against her with all his strength, pinning her with the door frame biting into her back. He dropped one hand down, ground it hard between her legs.

“Not tonight, she says? Filthy teasing harlot . . . Come on, the apple never falls far from the tree,” he rasped into her face, and Dimity cried out in fear and surprise. His breath reeked of fish and beer.

“Ma!” she shouted out in panic.
“Ma!”
And, against all odds, Valentina appeared on the stairs, her face clogged with sleep but such a fire of rage in her eyes that the man put Dimity down and was already backing away when she fell on him, raining blows and hurling curses that would shock a sailor. The stranger scurried away up the track, muttering furiously all the way.

Afterwards they lay down together, in Valentina’s bed. Dimity wasn’t usually allowed into her room, with its veiled lamps and pink candlewick bedspread, but that night they lay down and Valentina wrapped herself around her daughter, lying close like two spoons. She didn’t stroke her hair, or sing, or speak. But when she saw that Dimity’s hands were shaking, she clasped one in her own hand, tightly, and didn’t relax her grip even when she fell asleep. The skin of her palm was tough and smooth, like leather. Dimity stayed awake for hours, her heart still bumping from the shock of the man’s rough touch, and from the alien unfamiliarity of Valentina’s embrace. She welcomed it, though, enjoying the warmth that grew between their two bodies, the feeling of safety married so uneasily with the knowledge that it all might end at any second. Which it did, come morning. Valentina woke her abruptly, with a slap on the thigh.
Get out of my bed, you useless lump. Go and make breakfast
.

Then, on a glorious day in mid-April, spring blew in off the sea on a warm breeze as sweet as the taste of ripe strawberries. Such a blessed relief that Dimity laughed, out loud and all alone, standing on the cliff path on the way back from Lulworth with a bag full of sprats and a bottle of cider vinegar in which to cook them. The sea shimmered with life and the land looked up at it, like some great animal befuddled by the cold, slowly coming out of deep sleep. Dimity thought she could hear the sap rising, fizzing up into the trees and the grass like a massive inward breath, held, poised for the flourish of summer. Sap rose in the men of Blacknowle and its surrounding farms, too, and sent them to knock on the door of The Watch, so that suddenly the residents of that cottage were surrounded by abundance. But it wasn’t the food or the warmth that Dimity yearned for the most. Even the welcome touch of the sunshine couldn’t fill the space in the world that the Aubreys had left when they departed. Dimity longed for the summer because she longed for them to come back. She longed for their bright chatter and their affection, the way their love for each other spread out around them, and the way she had been allowed to step into that world, and be part of it. She longed to see them, so that she wouldn’t be invisible anymore.

CHAPTER FIVE

D
imity blinked, and hummed a little in her throat, and Zach roused himself from reverie. The silence had grown so long as she’d studied the picture that his attention had wandered, and he’d let himself notice the isolated grains of sand on the floor, glinting in a shaft of sunlight; the gentle sound of the sea coming down the chimney with a faint, tunneling echo to it; a huge, thin spider sitting as still as an etching between the beams above his head, surrounded by the tiny, speckled cloud of her young. In the old woman’s hand was a piece of paper, a color printout Zach had made, borrowing Pete Murray’s computer, of a large oil canvas of Mitzy standing amid mossy ruins, so highly textured by the dappled light that she seemed a part of the forest, a part of the land, like some mythical creature merging with the hues and foliage around her. There was a gargoyle above her head, distorted and ill-defined, but it seemed to have her face; an echo in stone of the same lovely girl standing beneath it. Dimity’s mouth moved again and this time words almost formed, so Zach cleared his throat.