A Half Forgotten Song (6 page)

Zach knocked again, louder this time. If there was nobody at home, he was back to square one; and pointlessly paying for a room for the night. He turned and looked at the view, which was wide and lovely. The cliff, a short way beyond the cottage, was much higher here, dropping perhaps thirty or forty feet. Below, down the slope, he could see the lane that he had driven along earlier that day—following the crease of the valley down to where the land dipped into the sea. The footpath turned inland from the eastern side of the little car park, crossing pasture and then the track to The Watch farther up towards the village. He couldn’t understand why it did this, instead of simply following the cliff edge, and was leaning backwards, trying to see around the end wall of the cottage, when the door cracked open.

The face that peered around the door was pale, lined, and bright with anxiety. An elderly woman with a thick cascade of white hair hanging loosely around her face. Cheeks limp and deeply scored, and a hump across her shoulders that forced her to turn her head slightly to look up at Zach. She took a step backwards when their eyes met, as if she’d changed her mind and would slam the door again, but froze. Hazel-and-green eyes watched him with such suspicion, such doubt.

“Hello . . . I’m sorry to bother you.” He paused in case she would greet him, but her mouth stayed shut. It was a wide mouth, thin lipped, but the ghost of bow shape, of a delicately pronounced upper lip, was still visible. “Um, my name’s Zach Gilchrist and I was told . . . that is, I was hoping I might be able to have a quick chat with you about something? If it’s not too much trouble, if you’re not busy?” There was a long pause and Zach’s polite smile began to feel too heavy for his face. He struggled to keep it from drooping. The breeze went in through the door and lifted up tresses of the woman’s white hair, moving it gently like seaweed under water.

“Busy?” she said eventually, and quietly.

“Yes, if you’re busy now I could . . . come back another time? Maybe?”

“Come back?” she echoed, and then Zach’s smile did fade to nothing, because he feared that old age had muddled her, and she didn’t understand what he was saying. He took a steadying breath and prepared to take his leave, disappointment gripping him. Then she spoke again. “What do you want to talk about?” She spoke with a Dorset accent so strong the words seemed to buzz in his ears, and had a peculiar cadence that was somewhat hard to follow. Zach remembered what Pete Murray had said, about pitching himself right. He had no idea what might be the right way, and on instinct he chose the family connection.

“My grandmother knew Charles Aubrey—she met him while she was on her summer holidays here, back before the war. The artist, Charles Aubrey? In fact . . . I’ve always wondered if there’s a chance he was my real grandfather. I think they might have had an affair. I was wondering if you might remember him? Or her? If you could tell me anything about him?” he said. The woman stood as still as stone, but then gradually her mouth fell open a little and Zach heard her breathe in; a long, uneven breath like a gasp in slow motion.

“Do I remember him?” she whispered, and Zach was about to answer when he saw that she wouldn’t hear him if he did. Her eyes had slipped out of focus. “Do I remember him? We were to be wed, you know,” she said, blinking and looking up with a sketchy smile.

“Really? You were?” Zach said, trying to square this with what he knew of Aubrey’s life.

“Oh yes. He adored me—and I adored him. Such a love we had! Like Romeo and Juliet it was. But real. Oh, it was real,” she said intently. Zach smiled at the light in her eyes.

“Well, that’s wonderful. I’m so glad to have met somebody who remembers him fondly . . . Would you be willing to tell me a bit more about it? About him?”

“You looked a little bit like him, as you came down the track. Now I think not. I think not. I can’t see how you could be his grandson. No, I can’t see it. He had no other love but me . . .”

“Perhaps, but surely he . . . he had other . . . women,” Zach said haltingly, and then regretted it at once when he saw how her face fell. “Could I come in, maybe? You can tell me more about him,” he said hopefully. The woman seemed to consider this, and a little color came into her cheeks.

“Other women,” she muttered peevishly. “Come in, then. I’ll make tea. But you’re not his grandson. No, you’re not.” She stepped back to let him in, and Zach thought she didn’t sound wholly convinced by her own words. He scrolled hastily through what he knew, trying to recall a list of Aubrey’s lovers, and to guess which one this elderly lady might be.

Inside the door was a dim central hallway from which wooden stairs led up, the boards worn and cracked. Doors opened to the back and to either side, and the old woman led him through the right-hand one, to the kitchen, which was at the far southern end of the cottage and had windows looking south and west, out over the sea. The floor was laid with stone slabs, massive and worn; the walls had once been whitewashed but were now patched and flaking, and the ceiling crowded down, heavy with sinuous beams. There were no fitted units, just an array of wooden cupboards and sideboards and dressers, arranged in the best possible fit. The stove was electric and looked fifty years old, but everything was clean and well ordered. Zach hovered awkwardly behind the woman as she filled the kettle, which was a modern, bright white plastic one, highly incongruous. Her movements were steady and even, in spite of her age and the bulge at the top of her spine. She wouldn’t have been tall, even if her back had been straight, and there was little spare flesh on her bones. She wore a long cotton skirt with a blue-and-green paisley print over what looked like men’s leather work boots, and a long, colorless cardigan and grubby red fingerless mittens. Her white hair swayed behind her when she turned, and suddenly Zach could almost see her in her youth—see the curves her body would have had, the grace of movement. He wondered what color that mass of hair had been.

“I’ve just realized, I didn’t catch your name?” he said. She twitched as if she’d forgotten he was there.

“Hatcher. Miss Hatcher,” she said, with a curious bob of her head, like the ghost of a courtesy.

“I’m Zach,” he said, and she smiled quickly.

“I know that,” she replied.

“Right, of course.”

She lowered her eyes and turned back to the sideboard to fetch clean mugs, and again he got the impression of something almost girlish and coy about her. As if her spirit had remained in its youth, even as the body around it withered.
Hatcher, Hatcher.
The name was familiar to him, but he couldn’t place it.

When the tea was poured, they crossed to the room at the north end of the house, where a sagging, threadbare sofa and chairs were arranged around a hearth black with centuries of smuts. There was a prickling, tangy smell, of ash, salt, wood, dust.

“Sit, sit,” said Miss Hatcher, her accent making the words sound like
zet, zet
.

“Thank you.” Zach chose a chair near the window. On the sill was a ginger cat, small and thin and fast asleep, a drizzle of drool hanging from its lip. Now he was inside the house, Miss Hatcher seemed eager to please, eager to speak. She sat with her knees tight together and her hands resting upon them, on the edge of her chair, like a child.

“Ask away, then, Mr. Gilchrist. What did your grandmother say about my Charles? When was it she thought she knew him?”

“Well, it would have been in nineteen thirty-nine. She came to Blacknowle with my grandfather, on holiday, and they met Aubrey while they were out walking one day. He was sitting out somewhere, painting or drawing. Anyway, my grandmother was very taken with him . . .”

“Nineteen thirty-nine? Nineteen thirty-nine . . . so I’d have been sixteen. Sixteen! Can you believe it?” she said with a smile, raising her eyes to the cracked ceiling. Zach did some quick mental arithmetic. So now she was eighty-seven years old. With her chin raised up he could see fine, downy hairs along her jaw.

“The weather was a bit of a letdown that year, apparently. My grandma always said they’d been hoping to swim in the sea, but it never felt quite warm enough . . .”

“It was gray, most days. We’d had the most shocking spell of late cold—there was snow on the ground into March, and a wind blowing through like someone left the door open on the downs . . . It was bitter, it was. Our sow died—she’d been sickly, but that cold snap finished her off. We tried to cure all the meat but our hands got so cold, rubbing that dead flesh, that we both had chilblains by the end of the day and our fingers went as red as poppies. Oh, you’ve never felt a stinging like it! No amount of parsnip peelings or goose grease could cure them. After that, we all wanted a hot summer, even a drought. A chance to dry out and be warm, but we didn’t get it. No. Sunny days were a rare blessing that year. Even if it was dry, late on, it stayed overcast. The sun seemed a sad and sorry thing.”

“Both of you? Who did you live with then?”

“Aged sixteen? My mother of course! What do you take me for?”

“Sorry—I didn’t mean . . . Do carry on. What was Aubrey like?” Zach asked, amazed to hear Miss Hatcher speak in such detail, as though that summer had been two or three years ago, rather than seventy-one.

“What was he like? I can’t begin to explain it. He was like the first warm day of spring. To me he was better than anything. He meant more than anything.” A delighted smile fell from her face, and the shadow of loss crept in to replace it. “That was the third summer they came. My Charles and his little girls. I’d first met them two years before, when I was hardly more than a child myself. He drew me all the time, you know. He loved drawing me . . .”

“Yes, my grandmother had a painting Aubrey had done of her, too . . .”

“A painting? He
painted
her? A proper painting?” Miss Hatcher interrupted him with a troubled frown.

“Yes . . . it’s in a gallery in London now. It’s quite a famous one. It’s called
The Walker
—you can see my grandma at a distance, walking along the top of the cliff on a sunny day.” Zach fell silent and watched the old woman’s face. There was a desperate look in her eyes, and they were bright, and her lips moved slightly, shaped by silent words.

“He painted her?” she whispered, and sounded so desolate that Zach made no reply. There was a bloated pause. “But . . . from a distance, you say?”

“Yes—the figure is only a couple of inches high, in the picture.”

“And no sketches of her? No sketches done from up close?”

“No. Not that I’ve ever seen.” Miss Hatcher seemed to relax and breathe more easily.

“Well, then—she could have been just anyone he’d happened to meet. He was always very interested in people, very easy to talk to. Perhaps I do remember your grandparents, now . . . perhaps I do. Did your grandfather have black hair? Very black—black as ink?”

“Yes! Yes he did!” Zach smiled, delighted.

They were all together—Charles and Celeste and the two little girls, and this new couple, a pair of strangers Dimity had never seen before. Holidaymakers—there were always some. She’d come along the lane because it had rained in the night and the fields were muddy—the red clay mud of the peninsula where The Watch stood; the white gluey mud of the chalk hills to the west. The strange woman wore loose slacks of a lovely fawn twill, and a fine white blouse tucked into them; and even though her hand was looped through the man’s arm, it was obvious how rapt she was, leaning towards Charles as if she couldn’t help herself. Pulled like the tide. Dimity’s own skirt was torn at the hem, and her sleeves picked by brambles. Sea salt from the breeze had made her hair a wild mess like a crop of bladder wrack, clinging to her skull, and as she approached she tucked it behind her ears, ashamed. She didn’t want to speak to them, to the strangers. She hung back, skirted around them, wished she could hear what they were saying. The stranger spoke and Charles laughed, and Dimity felt hot and angry about it. He looked her way, then—the stranger. The light caught on his hair, or rather, it didn’t. It vanished into it—she’d never seen hair so black before. Blacker than pitch, blacker than a crow’s wing, with no hint of green or blue like the sullen fire of those feathers. He caught her eye but then looked away again, back to Aubrey and Celeste. Dismissing her, like she was nothing. Again, that heat, that anger. But then Delphine saw her, came over to her waving with the fingers of one hand, wanting to go off together. So Dimity never found out how long they stayed together, talking; her Charles and this strange woman who offered herself to him with every tiny move she made.

“So you suppose she broke her wedding vows, do you?” Miss Hatcher said. Zach shrugged.

“Well, they were engaged but not actually married at the time of the visit. It would have been wrong of her even so, of course, to betray my grandfather. But these things happen, don’t they? Life is never black-and-white.”

“They happen, they happen,” Miss Hatcher repeated, but Zach couldn’t tell if she was agreeing with him or not. Her expression was sad, and Zach tried to move the conversation on.

“Perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps she just remembered him fondly, and that was as far as it went. I know I don’t really look like him . . . plus he’s meant to have had this animal magnetism. I sure as hell don’t have it.” He smiled. Miss Hatcher flicked her eyes over him appraisingly.

“No, you don’t,” she said. Zach felt slightly crushed.

“I do . . . paint, though. So perhaps my artistic side . . .”

“Are you a good painter?” Outside, the sun came out and lit her face suddenly, falling into the hollows under her eyes, in her cheeks. Her face was a delicate heart shape, her eyes wide-set, the chin a soft point, now all but lost in pouched skin. Zach felt the sudden shock of recognition, a physical jolt.

“I know your face,” he blurted out inadvertently. The old woman looked at him, and the trace of a smile warmed her expression.

“Perhaps you should do,” she said.

“Dimity Hatcher?
Mitzy?
” he said, astonished. “I can’t believe it! When you said he drew you all the time, I didn’t realize . . .” He shook his head, stunned. That she was alive. That he had found her, and that it seemed nobody else ever had. Now she was smiling, delighted; she tipped her chin up, made some effort to straighten her shoulders. But the sun dipped back behind clouds, and it was gone. That ghost of remembered beauty. She was a bent old woman again, colorless, self-consciously smoothing the length of her hair against her chest like a girl.