Learning to Dance (30 page)

Judith put her bag between her feet and held out a hand.

‘I’m so pleased to meet you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone writing with their eyes closed before.’

Paula Anderson laughed. ‘I see the print that way – and then I simply have to copy it down on to my laptop. I always feel it’s cheating, somehow.’

‘I don’t think it is. It’s one of the exercises I did at art college, but it just seemed to make everything far more difficult.’

The woman, middle-aged and very obviously shy, said, ‘I was looking at your work just then. It’s beautiful. That wonderful colour … I wondered … I asked your husband whether you might consider illustrating my children’s book.’

Judith gaped. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course. It’s whimsical. Which might put you off.’ Paula scuffed with the toe of her shoe at the sandy soil. ‘It’s a story about a family of puffins who can talk.’ She looked up, plainly embarrassed. ‘I went to Castle Dove for one of their weekend shows. Mr Hausmann spoke of your work. And your husband seemed to think – but of course I shall completely understand if you find it a bit too … unreal.’

‘I would love to do it … if you think … listen, I’ll do some bird sketches and let you see them …’ Judith was still so surprised that she laughed loudly. ‘I’ve never ever sold a painting, and here I am, forty-eight years old, and you are offering to …’ She stopped suddenly. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps you can’t afford to pay me unless the book is a success, and I am quite willing to wait and see.’

‘We shall own joint copyright. There’s not a fortune in children’s stories, but the whole idea delights me, and I think it will delight you. Talk it over with your husband. But one thing – you must finish what you are doing before starting on my puffins – the Puffies. I cannot interrupt you in mid-flow.’
She scuffed the ground again; she reminded Judith of an Exmoor pony. ‘I’d better go. I am helping with the lunches today. Kitty Davies has a visitor – you know how it is.’

She was gone as suddenly as she had arrived, leaving Judith staring at the marks she had made on the ground, hardly believing the short interview had taken place.

Jack confirmed that it had. He was almost fizzing with excitement, and kept telling her it was ‘all happening’, until she began to feel nervous and pointed out she had never worked like this before, and why on earth had Hausmann recommended her? And what if … what if … her work didn’t hit the right button?

He shut her up with a kiss, then held her close and told her how wonderful she was, and how much she deserved this, and that if she could draw a Fish-Frobisher strip and sell it to a canny old millionaire like William Whortley then she could do anything. Anything at all. And then he showed her the beginnings of ‘Maurice the Mole’. The photograph that was still on the table where it had fallen showed an unmistakeable likeness to the large garden mole Jack presented to her. Half the animal’s face was hidden by a mask, but it was obvious to Judith that the plump, well-fed yet squat creature with whiskers almost twitching from the drawings was indeed Moss Jessup.

She started to laugh. ‘Sybil will enjoy this – have you got a cloak and a dagger somewhere in the hallway?’

Jack kissed her. She put both her arms around his waist and pushed the two of them away from the table.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Trying to get you to dance!’ she said.

He spun her round and steered her towards the bed.

‘We started to dance the moment we came here – perhaps before then.’ He chuckled into her ear. Then he lifted her bodily and put her down on the bed. ‘Judith Freeman. I love you, and always will.’

She took a deep breath. ‘Likewise,’ she said.

Hausmann arrived a week later. He appeared with Kitty, holding bread and milk under one arm and her ample shoulders in the other.

The weather had stayed warm – ‘mellow’, as Paula Anderson called it – and both Judith and Jack had revelled in it, working with a sense of joy they both recognized and appreciated from a long time ago. Paula had insisted that Judith’s painting of the south light should be the frontispiece for the new children’s book. ‘You need my text for the chapter-by-chapter illustrations,’ she pointed out. ‘And they won’t be ready for a few weeks yet. Plenty of time to complete your stunning sea and landscape. You are painting the place where it all happens. Puffins versus rats.’

Paula had talked of the time when Lundy had been taken over by pirates, and the terror they had spread up and down the coasts of Devon and Cornwall and even as far as Bristol itself.

‘The Puffies are in the same boat, their burrows invaded by rats. They have a meeting and decide to become pirates, and they recruit the gannets and the auks to help them.’ She spread her hands. ‘That’s all there is, really.’

She sounded deflated, but she had already inspired Judith.

‘I can see them!’ Judith enthused. ‘Their little parrot faces become suddenly stern and the black-and-white eyes full of cold menace! And the bit where the auks harry the rats into the sea and the gannets go for them! Great stuff!’

During almost ten days of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ while Jack worked with all his old intensity and Judith mixed her wonderful colours and painted with growing confidence, the mainland world slipped further into the background. It was difficult to realize that home was half an hour away by one of the new Freeman helicopters; almost impossible to imagine Len and Matthew already part of the team patrolling the motorways. Martha’s phone calls were reassuringly down-to-earth. ‘Judith, I’m really, really sorry … I broke that vase that is on the landing windowsill … can’t think how it happened … Len wants to know if he can borrow Jack’s navy-blue sweater … half-term is coming up, thank God …’

Judith said to Jack, ‘I am going to love that girl. She is sending sub-messages. I think they need us back home, Jack.’

Jack looked up. ‘We’re part of Lundy now.’

‘Not really. Winter is coming, and that is when Lundy can only manage to tolerate the non-migrants.’

He nodded. ‘I know. It’s just …’

She said, ‘We can do what we do anywhere, Jack. Anywhere at all. We’re together again. We’ve learned to dance.’

His face broke into a beam of delight. ‘We have, haven’t we?’

It was the next morning when Hausmann came in with Kitty. She stood just in front of him, almost protectively, then stepped aside as if revealing a surprise.

‘Look who is staying at the farm with Davey and me! Turned up last night just as the tide was starting to ebb –
no phone call, nothing. Just the man himself, hungry as a horse.’

Jack went to him with all his old vigour and shook his shoulders. Kitty rescued the bread and milk and put them on the table. Judith stared, shocked by his jack-in-the-box arrival, but also because this man who she hardly knew was so familiar.

Jack said, ‘We’ve expected you every day since we arrived – knew you’d have to check on the tenants at some point!’

‘Oh, he’s checked all right!’ Kitty unloaded eggs from her pocket. ‘Phoned every day and wanted a call back if there was any change in Jack’s condition, and I mustn’t say a word because you needed peace, perfect peace!’ She sighed. ‘And now, here he is, so I s’ppose winter is just round the corner.’ She met Judith’s questioning glance and enlarged. ‘He spends most of the winter on the island. Painting like a demon.’

‘Ah. I didn’t know that.’ Judith met Robert’s dark, dark eyes over Jack’s shoulder and smiled gently. ‘Lundy offers peace with solitude. Western Australia only offered solitude.’

Robert cleared his throat and spoke. His voice was the same, deep and rough at the edges. ‘Not really. Australia was where I met another crazy man.’ He grinned at Jack. She could see their union of opposites. Dark and light.

She laughed. ‘Kitty, pass me two more mugs, can you? We need tea.’

They sat around the table talking for over an hour until David arrived, wanting to know what had happened to breakfast. So then Kitty and Judith scrambled eggs and made toast for all five of them while they put David into the picture.

He looked darkly at Robert. ‘I might have guessed it. Half-Jewish,
half-Welshman. Trying to make real life look like one of your pictures. Course it’s all going to die away, that’s what it’s all about, you great lummock!’

Jack said, ‘All I know is he saved my life and arranged things so that Jude and I could … could—’

‘Learn how to dance,’ Judith supplied. She smiled again at Robert. ‘We think we’ve done it, Robert.’

He smiled back. ‘I thought you might.’ He turned to David Davies. ‘And you’re a fine one to talk, half-Welshman and half-sheer-Lundyite! You and Kitty have helped me out often enough, and enjoyed doing it! You said to me once that we were all put on this earth to help one another.’

‘I think I said we were put here to get on with it!’ David said sturdily.

Kitty nodded vigorously. ‘It’s what God says too, Davey. You didn’t invent that one!’

Jack clapped Robert on the shoulder. ‘You went a step further, then, Robert Hausmann! How often did you have to do the trip between Surrey and Cardiff?’

Robert suddenly grinned. ‘Not that often. Sybil admitted she had promoted her husband to some kind of wonder-man, and Nat thought she needed another year or two to get used to being without him.’ He turned to the Davieses. ‘Sybil lived in a house with Nathaniel Jones on one side, and my family on the other. She was very close to her father, and Nathaniel is like him. Gentle, formal in many ways.’ He turned to Jack. ‘You have no idea what Moss Jessup was like.’

Jack nodded. ‘Actually, Sybil wrote to Jude. And on the strength of that and other evidence, I am uncovering the hacking mole. His name, of course, is “Maurice the Mole”, and he is sort of Pickwickian in shape.’

Hausmann laughed. ‘Ridicule is a wonderful weapon. And
if Sybil told Jude about him, then she obviously wants it to be used.’

Kitty said, ‘How exactly did you get Sybil and Nat together, then?’

‘She agreed to tell it to Nat just as she had told it to me. The whole story. It took time to persuade her. Even when she knew the contents of Jessup’s will, there was still this lingering feeling of loyalty.’ He shrugged. ‘Relationships. Difficult.’

David nodded vigorously, glanced at Kitty and growled, ‘I’ll say!’

And Kitty came back smartly, ‘Too right!’

Judith looked around the table, smiling, full of deep affection for these people. When she came to Jack, the affection welled up into all the old tenderness. And more. Was that possible? Could the pain of this past year be giving something back – something extra? Her gaze settled on Hausmann, and she realized he was watching her.

She shook her head gently at Kitty and said, ‘Worth all the effort, though. Yes, Kitty?’

And Kitty’s face, so like a russet apple, creased into a grin as she repeated, ‘Too right!’

Eventually David mentioned he had a farm to run, and Kitty remembered she was preparing cold lunches at the hotel. Hausmann, it seemed, had already offered to work in the garden. ‘He always sorts out the garden about this time of year.’ Kitty touched his arm gratefully. ‘Makes a bit of room for the winter stuff, stores enough potatoes for winter, that kind of thing. He’s a good lad.’

Hausmann barked a laugh, and for an instant Judith could see how he had looked when he was indeed ‘a lad’. She had thought of him as being in Jack’s age bracket, but of course
he was younger, about the same age as Sybil; therefore so was Nathaniel – they had played together as children. It made his restless energy seem different; more youthful, an eagerness to help rather than to control.

She grinned at him, and then turned to Jack. ‘Let’s all have dinner together tonight, shall we? You could join us, couldn’t you, Kitty?’

‘I certainly could – that lummocky boy from over Exeter way can finish off the desserts for me – give him something else to grumble about!’

After they had gone, Jack put away the crockery and cutlery – each piece in its proper place – and she cleaned the table ready for him to spread his work out at one end. Len phoned Jack from the hangar at Filton to tell him where he and Matt would be that day. Apparently, Martha had started her half-term holiday and was looking at the cottage on the Somerset Levels. The owners were considering the offer Matt and Martha had made them, and had left a key with the neighbours in case she wanted to do some measuring for furniture.

‘Sounds as if they intend to accept the offer,’ Jack relayed to Judith.

Judith said guiltily, ‘I’d forgotten all about it. And I’d also forgotten about half-term! Lundy really has got inside us, Jack.’

Jack nodded. ‘That’s why Paula can write her stories here. She turns the clock back, closes her eyes and she’s away!’

‘Literally with the fairies!’ They laughed as if it were a joke.

‘Actually …’ Judith was assembling her painting gear at the other end of the table, ‘… I’m beginning to look forward to seeing everyone again. Len and Matt, and Martha of course.
But Sybil and Nathaniel as well. And Beattie McCready – Arnold’s wife. I meant to ring her before we came here, and never did. And Bart and Irena, too.’

‘Who on earth are Bart and Irena?’

‘Robert’s brother and his wife.’

‘Of course. Robert bought the lease on Castle Dove for them, didn’t he? She disapproves of him.’

‘He was drinking every night … he was disrupting her dream of a perfect hotel. But at some level or other, she is fond of him. And he of her. And he is close to his brother.’

‘Like Len and me. I’m looking forward to seeing Len.’

She came round the table to kiss him. She said, ‘I love you. Don’t work too hard, just let it happen.’

‘That’s what is so good. It is just happening.’ He smiled. ‘Are you going to our rock corner? Will you be warm enough?’

‘Yes. And another yes.’ She held the door against a sudden gust of wind. ‘I suppose our meal tonight is a farewell dinner?’

‘Not in any sad sense, Jude. It’s a celebration.’ He tipped his chair back and waved his left hand in the air. ‘We can dance together really well – but only two can tango. Now we’re going to join the others. A sort of maypole effort.’