A Half Forgotten Song (28 page)

“It went well,” she said, and they went inside.

Over a glass of beer she told him all about the inspection, but he found himself only half listening some of the time, distracted by her connection to James Horne and why she might refuse to talk about it, speculating about what they could have been arguing about. He pictured the way she had stood at the end of the jetty while Horne’s boat—and he was sure it had been his—had swung slowly across the bay. The flash of light he’d seen, as though someone onboard had binoculars. As if she had been marking that spot, demonstrating the end of the submerged platform. These thoughts worried him, but he couldn’t shake them. They caused a deep, ugly unease to settle inside him, increasing all the while.

I
t wasn’t until later in the afternoon that Zach made his postponed visit to The Watch. As he’d promised, Zach didn’t ask Dimity anything about the Aubreys. They talked instead about his own past, his career and his family, and inevitably the subject of his lineage came up. Dimity’s voice turned guarded, almost surreptitious when she asked about his grandmother.

“That summer your gran was here, that was 1939, yes? Well, that was the summer Charles and I were finally together, you see. So don’t you think I’d have known if there was another woman as well?” She picked at a loose thread on her mitten with her thumb and forefinger.

“Yes, you’re probably right,” said Zach, thinking that a man like Charles Aubrey could easily charm a woman into believing she was his only one.

“What was your granddad like? Was he a strong man?”

“Yes, I suppose he was.”

“Strong enough to keep a woman at his side?”

Zach pictured his grandpa, who would sit for hours after Sunday lunch with the newspaper across his knees, and wouldn’t let anybody else look at it until he’d solved the crossword, even though his eyes were shut and his chin dropping down. He tried to remember seeing tenderness, affection, pass between him and his wife, but the more he thought back, the more he realized how rarely they were even together in the same room. When he was in the sitting room, she was in the kitchen. When he was in the garden, she went into her dressing room to look at her Aubrey picture. At dinner they sat at opposite ends of a seven-foot table. Surely it couldn’t always have been like that? Surely it had taken sixty years of marriage for such a distance to grow between them?

“Tell me this,” said Dimity, interrupting his thoughts. “If your granddad really did think she had an affair with my Charles, why on earth did he go ahead and marry her?”

“Well, because she was pregnant, I suppose. That’s why they had to bring the wedding forward.”

“So he must have thought the baby was his.”

“At first, yes. I suppose he must. Unless he was just being . . . honorable.”

“Was he that kind? The chivalrous type? I’ve known few enough men that are. Not really.”

“No, I suppose that doesn’t seem quite right . . . but he might have done it to, you know, take the moral high ground.”

“To punish her, you mean?” said Dimity.

“Well, not exactly . . .”

“But that’s what it would have been. If he knew, and she knew he knew. What better way to remind her of it every day of her life, and to make her suffer for it, than to marry her?”

“Well, it backfired on him, if that was his plan. She made no secret of how pleased she was about the connection. About the scandalous rumors.”

“Well, that was Charles, you see. If she . . .” Dimity paused, and pain splintered her expression, robbing her of words for a second. “If she loved him, she’d have been proud, never ashamed.” She hung her head for a second, and rubbed the thumb of one hand over the opposite palm. “So . . . perhaps she did. Perhaps she did love him, after all.”

“But I’m sure . . .” Zach took one of Dimity’s restless hands and squeezed it. “I’m sure that didn’t mean he loved you any less. Even if she loved him . . . it could have been unrequited. He may well have thought nothing of her,” he said, feeling an odd pull of loyalties to speak that way about a grandmother he loved.

Zach was struck by the idea that Aubrey was the kind of man women were proud of. He thought back and tried to identify a time when Ali had been proud of him—proud to be his woman, his wife—but what came instantly to mind were her expressions of disappointment. That slow exhalation through her nose as she listened to his explanation of some mishap, some missed opportunity; the wrinkle between her brows that she was often wearing when he caught her studying him. With a slight shock, he realized he’d seen the exact same expressions on his mother’s face, before she’d left. While his grandfather had been criticizing his father for something trivial; while the three of them had roamed the footpaths of Blacknowle, years ago, and his dad had searched in vain for answers. Was it in the blood, then? Would men like Aubrey always make men like the Gilchrists seem the poor alternative? Zach was troubled by this idea—that he would inevitably disappoint the women in his life, including Hannah.

“Haven’t you brought any pictures with you this time?” said Dimity, as Zach stood up to leave. “Pictures of me?” There was a hungry light in her eyes.

“Yes, but I didn’t think you wanted to talk about that this time?”

“Oh, I always want to see the pictures. It’s like having him here in the room again.” Zach rummaged in his bag and withdrew the latest set of printouts he’d made. Several drawings and one large oil canvas of a crowd of figures, kicking up dust with their feet. There were blue and red mountains behind them, and the ground was orange-brown, the sky above a vast, clear swath of green and white and turquoise. The people were wrapped in loose robes, some of the women veiled as well, with only their eyes left naked. In one corner was a woman with her hair piled up loosely on her head and many strings of beads swinging around her neck. She was standing, calm and nonchalant, her face turned towards the viewer. She wore no veil, and her eyes were heavily kohled, catlike. She was wearing a cerulean caftan, which billowed in a hot breeze that the viewer could almost feel; the fabric clinging to the shape of her thighs and hips. It was not the Mitzy Zach knew from the early sketches, nor the Mitzy standing in front of him now. It was a fairy-tale version of her, a vision; a desert princess with her face standing out from the crowd like a single flower in a field of grass. The painting was called
Berber Market,
and it had set the record for an Aubrey painting when it sold in New York eight years ago. It was easy to see why. The painting was like a window into another world.

Zach handed the picture to Dimity. She took it with a small cry, lifted it up to her face and inhaled, as though she might be able to smell the desert air.

“Morocco!” she said, with a beatific smile.

“Yes,” said Zach. “I have more drawings of you from there as well, if you’d like to see them . . . Haven’t you got copies of these? In books, or as prints, I mean? Copies you can look at?” Dimity shook her head.

“It didn’t seem proper, to gaze at myself like that. Vanity, I suppose it seemed. And never the same as seeing the real thing, of course, and knowing that your hands were touching where his touched before . . . I haven’t seen this since it was painted. And even then I never saw it finished.”

“Really? Why not?”

“Charles . . .” A shadow dulled her delight. “Charles went up to London to finish it, once my part was done. He had . . . other business there.” She studied the image of herself closely and smiled again. “That was the first time, you know,” she said conspiratorially.

“Oh?”

“The first time we . . . were together. As man and wife, I mean. As we should have been. The first time we realized how much in love we were . . . I’ve never been back there. To
Maroc
. Some memories are too precious to risk, do you see? I want it to always be as it is now, in my head.”

“I understand, yes.” Zach was surprised to hear her use the French pronunciation:
Maroc
. “How long were you over there with him?”

“Four weeks. The best four weeks of my life,” she said.

Dimity shut her eyes and in front of them was a light so bright that everything glowed red. That was her first impression of the desert, the first thing she remembered. That and the smell, the way the air tasted. Nothing like the air in Dorset; different in the way it touched the back of her throat, and the inside of her nose; in the way it filled her lungs and ran through her hair. She felt heat scorch her skin, even as she sat at her own kitchen table with its sticky linoleum top pressing into the heels of her hands. She tried to find the right words. Words that could somehow convey all the things she’d seen and felt and tasted; bring them back to life. She took a slow breath in, and Valentina’s voice echoed angrily down the stairs,
Morocco? Where the
bloody hell is that, then?
In a flash she saw Valentina’s eyes, bloodshot and bewildered, trying to work out how much such a trip was worth.
And how in God’s name has this come about?
Was it her mother, she wondered, who cursed the trip? Was it Valentina’s envy and spite that made the best four weeks of her life also the worst?

CHAPTER SEVEN

D
imity waited. She waited for Charles Aubrey and his family to come back, and waiting made the winter longer than ever. Dimity spent it alone. Wilf spent more and more time working with his father and brothers, and only rarely came to meet her. When he did, he was warm and eager, as ever; but Dimity was distracted, only half present, and he often went away frustrated. Dimity roamed the cliffs, the hedgerows, and the beach. She picked baskets full of smooth white field mushrooms and sold them door-to-door for a few pennies. She loitered in the village, missing the company of other people more than ever before, and seeming to notice more than ever how people’s eyes brushed over her, cold and dismissive. Nobody noticed her the way Charles did.

They came later than usual, not until the beginning of July. In the last two weeks of June, Dimity checked at Littlecombe four times a day, and carried around a weight of dread and worry in her stomach that made it hard for her to eat, or to think. Valentina swore at her. Gave her a shove that cracked her head against the wall one day when she let the potatoes boil dry; shook her; made her drink a tonic of oak bark to improve her appetite, because her collarbones were standing proud above her ribs and her cheeks had lost their fullness and bloom.

“You looked younger than your years till this winter, Mitzy. Better by far to keep that than to lose it. No man’ll want you if you’re old before your time
.
” Valentina scowled as she pressed the cup of bitter tonic to her daughter’s reluctant lips. “Marty Coulson’s been asking after you lately. What do you say to that?” she said curtly, and had the good grace to look away when the implication of this hit home, and her daughter’s eyes widened with horror. Dimity made a choking noise in her throat, and could not speak. Valentina said abruptly: “We all must pay our way in this world, Mitzy. You weren’t born with that face for nothing, and if that artist of yours don’t show this year . . . Well, you’ll have to find some other way to make it pay, won’t you?”

I
t was warm and bright, the morning they finally came. Dimity was sitting on a field gate to the west of Littlecombe when she spotted the chalky sheep wash billowing above the lane—the rising cloud of dust that told of an approach. When the blue car pulled up, she went so boneless with relief that she slithered forwards from the gate and knelt on the dusty ground in front of it. She was crippled by joy, unsurprised to feel tears running down her cheeks. She wiped them away with gritty hands as she made her way down towards the house. She saw Élodie and Delphine run off, together with another girl she didn’t know, through the garden gate and down towards the path to the beach. Élodie had grown much taller, and Delphine’s hair was much longer. Their appearances spoke of the wealth of life they had seen and experienced since their last visit, while Dimity had remained the same, static. She watched their slender figures vanish, and walked up to the open kitchen door with her blood crowding her head so that she could hardly hear a thing.

At that moment Celeste stepped out, saw her, and stopped. The Moroccan woman pressed her lips together and for a moment Dimity thought she saw irritation flash across her face, before a sort of resignation, and then a smile.

“Mitzy. And before the kettle has even boiled,” she said, taking Dimity by her upper arms and kissing her on both cheeks. “How are you? How is your mother?”

“You’re so late,” Dimity mumbled in response, and Celeste shot her a quizzical look.

“Well, we did think about not coming this year. We thought about taking a house in Italy instead, or perhaps Scotland. But the girls wanted the beach, and Charles has been working very hard, and left it too late to organize anything else, so . . . here we are.” She did not invite Dimity in, did not offer her tea. “We probably won’t stay the whole summer. It depends on the weather.” Just then, Charles appeared from the car with a bag in each hand, and Dimity whirled around to face him.

“Mitzy! How are you, dear girl? Come to see Delphine already, have you?” He bustled past her, pausing to brush her cheek with a fleeting kiss as he carried on up the stairs with the luggage. Dimity shut her eyes and pressed her hand to the place on her face where his lips had touched. The kiss sent a bolt of sheer pleasure to the pit of her stomach. When she opened her eyes, Celeste was watching her carefully, and something measuring, something vaguely like suspicion, crossed her face. Dimity blushed, and though she tried to think of something to say, her mouth and her head remained empty.

“Well,” Celeste said eventually. “The girls have gone straight down to the beach. Delphine has a friend to stay this first week. Why don’t you run down and see them?”

Dimity did as she was bid, but it was obvious at once that things wouldn’t be the same, not with Delphine’s friend to make their trio a foursome. The girl’s name was Mary. She had pale blond hair set in a very grown-up wave, and blue eyes that sparkled with amusement as they took in Dimity’s ragged clothes and bare feet. Mary looked at her in the same way as the other youngsters in the village, and in spite of Delphine’s warm greeting, Dimity felt at once that she was not wanted. Mary had on a blouse of soft raspberry silk, which fluttered in the breeze. Mary had jewelry that sparkled, and a touch of paint on her lips.