The Sea House (17 page)

26

Friday came and Nick did not appear. Lily felt angry, then relieved, so preoccupied with whether or not to call him that she didn’t notice until it was almost five o’clock that the postman had left something for her by the door. It was a large padded envelope that must have come while she was out, shielded from view by a straggly arm of ragwort that had grown up by the drain. The envelope was worn and brown, and on the back Nick had scrawled a message:
This came for you, I thought it looked important
. Lily turned it over, noticing with surprise that it had originally been sent to her from Suffolk. There’s no one here I know, and her throat tightened, and she thought of Grae.
Sorry, sorry
, Nick’s writing snaked round the paper rim.
I won’t make it this weekend. Usual reasons. Maybe next? RING ME. Love, N.

Lily stood in her kitchen and slipped her finger inside the paper seal. The package felt soft and hollow, but when she tipped it up small bundles of cream envelopes fell out on to the fridge. Small and worn with the addresses typed. Mrs Elsa Lehmann. There were twelve of them, and a note for Lily on a sheet of lined paper, the ring binder leaving torn circles along one side.

Dear Miss Brannan,

I found these letters tucked away and thought you might like to see them. Hope they are of use.

Yours, A. Lehmann

Lily released the letters, easing out their ruffled sides. The first was postmarked 1953, September, and the rest spanned the autumn of that year. ‘Mrs Elsa Lehmann. The Sea House, Steerborough.’ Lily traced the words of the address, said them to herself out loud. Steerborough. It gave her such a twist of pleasure to see it written down, although of course she’d known the Lehmanns had lived here. It was why she’d come. Tentatively she pulled the first letter out. It was headed ‘Architect’, in English now, and there was a London address in NW3. But first she had to find the house, she could not wait a moment more, and putting the package on a shelf, preserving it for later, she pulled on her shoes and ran out of the door.

The Sea House. She’d seen it. Saw the sign now in her mind. She ran into the middle of the Green and twisted round. Where was it? Signs and gates and porches flashed before her, and then, there it was, the white hut that stood on stilts. The last house in the village. Lily ran towards it. Past the Ship, down the hill that led towards the harbour, and then up again, over the sea wall. Below her was the car park. A flat land of puddle dips and stones, separated from the marshes by a river, slick with the dark mud of low tide. There was an ice-cream van, and a scattering of children fishing for crabs, and for a moment she thought she saw Em and Arrie hanging off the end of the bridge.

The river wound round and doubled back to join the estuary, and standing white and solid in its bend was the house. It looked ugly from here, its weathered bulk, its thick legs moulded green. There was a boat tied up under its belly, and a bicycle lay rusting on its side. Lily picked her way along beside the river. Wooden steps rose up to a porch, and there in the window was a sign:
To Let
. The porch was glass and so was the front door and she could see through into a kitchen with a long table and a dresser full of plates. Beyond her, straight ahead, was a steep ladder that led to a trap door. Lily pressed her face against the glass, peering in, up, craning to the side, and then the door swung open, and she tripped and stumbled in. She jumped up and swung around, but there was no one there. ‘Hello?’ she called, as if she’d been intending to visit, and with her heart beating she walked across the room. ‘Hello?’ She stood below the trap door, and, biting her lip, she began to climb.

The room above her was spectacular, a round table, pictures of flowers on every boarded wall. Lily stood, her legs still on the ladder, and twisting round, she found that she was in a boat. Wooden to the ceiling, water stretching away on every side. There was a bed, a wardrobe, and it occurred to her that she’d been living in a small brown world, when she might have been here, sailing the high sea. She caught hold of herself then, remembered she was trespassing, and quickly she climbed down. She skidded across the room, slid through the front door, and only stopped for breath when she was outside. Very slowly she walked across the car park. She stopped at the bridge and stared at the children, too neat and tidy to be the ones she knew. ‘Em?’ she called, ‘Arrie?’ But rather than look up at her they swung their long lines out into the river, trailing their bait of bacon, hauling up the same grey crabs.

My dear Elsa,
Lily read, the sun striking in as it sank to the level of her window.
I thought you’d be back with me in London by now or I’d never have made such arrangements for building work with Kett. But if we don’t have the work done now, then we’ll only have to do it next summer, and next summer I have reserved for us. So, my sweet one, how do you like living in a hut? I wish I could be there with you, but as always, I must get these plans approved, must start on the project for Bermanns, and the chairs I promised to design for Jones. Keep well, write to me about ALL moments of your day. I want to know that you are getting everything that can be had from this one precious life.

Next summer, Lily thought, next summer Lehmann had reserved for them, and in a sudden rush of energy she leapt up and ran across the Green. She tugged open the phone box door and slammed her change into the slot. ‘Nick,’ she said, almost before he answered, ‘I do miss you, you know.’

There was a small pause on the other end. ‘Good.’ He sounded pleased.

‘Come and spend a few days here.’ It occurred to her she’d spent months trying to reel him in. It was so much easier just to ask him to come. ‘Reserve it. Book it in if you have to. Think of it as work.’

‘It’s booked,’ he said. ‘Thankyou, I’ll try and be there next Friday… for six.’

‘Try.’ Lily spoke soft into the low cup of the phone. ‘It’s the most beautiful evening… If you were here, we could walk along the beach…’

‘Lily,’ he said, ‘I’m actually in a meeting.’

‘Oh. So I’ll see you next weekend?’

‘Ring me before then.’

Why? Lily thought. So you can tell me what’s just happened that makes it impossible to come? ‘Bye, then.’ Her unused coins rattled down into the slot. She scooped them up.
Call 999. Wait by the wall
… The note was still there, and in one corner the tiny mark she’d made. She felt for a pen and added another, a little L right in the middle of the page. She eased open the phone box door and as she did so she had the uneasy sensation that she was being watched. Was the note checked? Did someone come nightly to see that it was there? And then she stopped. The paper. It was the same. Lined and ripped from a ring binder of the exact same size as the note she’d received from A. L. Lehmann that day. Lily looked towards the marsh. Her hair, she could feel it, was crawling on her head. There must be a thousand pads of paper the same size, every newsagent stocked one, and to prove she was not afraid, she pushed her way out of the phone box and walked down towards the sea.

Its beauty caught her every time. The unexpected flatness of it as you came over that last hill. It stretched your eyes, relaxed the muscles of your heart, forced you every time to stop. The beach was almost deserted. It had been cooler that day, the first after a long, hot week of sun and, as if glutted with pleasure, the holiday-makers had seemed relieved to stay away.

Lily sat on the sand. The tide was coming in, shortening the shore, lapping high and calm at a thread of shingle on the sand. She collected pebbles in a salty pile and thought how never in her life had she spent so much time alone. As a child she’d been almost constantly with her mother, huge swathes of time set aside for them to share. Her mother, possibly to make up for the absence of any other family, seemed intent on filling her whole world.

‘I,’ she had once said, when Lily asked about her father, ‘do promise to love, cherish and support you,’ and she’d handed her a spaghetti ring on the tip of her fork. When Lily thought of this she imagined herself in a high chair, shrouded by the rhubarb that pressed against the panes, but she knew she must have been older, sitting on one of those yellow-bottomed chairs that clustered round the table. Her mother
had
cherished her,
had
devoted every minute of her time to her, so that they had grown towards one another, sometimes spending an entire weekend drawing and shading and reading library books to each other in the damp nest of their front room. In the long summer holidays they had roamed through Portobello Market, scooping scraps of material off stalls, digging their hands into a mound of jackets to draw out a lining of pink silk. They made outfits for Lily’s dolls, sheets and blankets, knitted scarves, and then, when she was older, they bought suits, dresses, outsized jeans, and rushed home to rip and alter them, using each other’s bodies as models, spending whole evenings stitching and unpicking, searching for the scissors, while jokes and rippled laughter fell from the TV. Lily had thought she might apply to fashion college, create a line made exclusively from other people’s cast-off clothes, but she ended up at art school, on the other side of London, and when she was offered a room in a flat on the estate behind the college she decided to move in with three friends.

‘It’ll be all right.’ Her mother’s face was swollen up with crying. ‘Of course it’s the right thing.’ And she began, quite unnecessarily, to divide up the knives and forks. Lily couldn’t imagine how her mother would survive, and at first she’d call her several times a day, promising to visit each weekend, sending her short notes, but soon, it became clear, this attention was unnecessary. Rather than destroy her, Lily’s absence had rejuvenated her mother. She sold the basement and bought the top-floor flat, painted it yellow, and within weeks, although it may well have been a year, she’d met and married Clive. Now they rarely spoke. Lily’s mother had vowed to love and cherish her, not until death, it seemed, but until she was eighteen. It embarrassed Lily, made her sad, as if it were she, through all those years, who had held her mother down. Now her mother had gone travelling, set off to India with Clive.

‘I had other considerations when I was young,’ Lily heard her state matter-of-factly at a party they’d held to say goodbye, and the last news she’d had of her was a postcard, signed from both of them, with a picture of the holy sea temple at Chivanundra, faded on the front.

Lily stood up and stretched. It was getting dark, the light gone from the sea, and the faint smell of cooking was drifting towards her on the breeze. Purposefully she’d not bought any supplies, hoping that by being unprepared, it would hoax Nick into coming, and now as she walked into the wind, she thought of her bare cupboard, the half-empty egg box in the fridge, the wilting carrots. She could make an omelette with some sort of salad, and then as she rounded the dunes she saw the drift of smoke from a fire.

It was coming from the row of beach huts, unused mostly as sand blew down and blocked shut their front doors. Some had sunk so far below the level of the beach that men spent half their summers digging just so they could get in to make a cup of tea. There it was again, the smell of sausage, rich with meat and herbs, and like an animal, sniffing, she followed the scent of it. She walked fast, stopping only to shake out her shoes, and then ahead of her was a small figure, running with a bundle of wood. Lily followed, silent in the sand, and rounded a ridge of scrub to see a wide flat clearing and a fire. The girl dropped her wood, turned, and Lily saw that it was Arrie. She ducked out of sight, and then the door of a beach hut opened and Grae stood in an oblong of light. The inside of the door was blue, and behind him she could see the corner of a bed.

‘Em,’ he shouted, ‘Arrie,’ and, not knowing what else to do, Lily walked towards the fire.

Grae stepped forward, squinting into the dark, and then as if from nowhere the girls were on her, their arms around her, their heads butting her waist. ‘You came back,’ they said. ‘You came back.’

Lily laughed. ‘I was hardly gone.’

‘Will you have supper with us?’ Em hung from her arm. ‘We’re toasting marshmallows.’

‘Oh.’ she looked towards Grae, bent over the fire. ‘If there’s enough.’

Grae walked back towards the hut. She could see him, bending down, opening boxes, taking out a cup. There was something languid in the way he moved, and she remembered his shoulders, shaking silently before he laughed. Untangling herself from the girls she followed him. The hut was tiny, twelve foot square, two sets of bunk beds built in against the walls. There was a table, a one-ring cooker, a kettle, bookshelves, even a jug of flowers.

Lily stood in the door. ‘Is this where you’re living?’ She swallowed, not wanting to show that she was shocked.

Grae straightened up, a string of sausages dangling from one hand. ‘No. We’re not living here. Law of the parish council. It’s not allowed.’

‘But people must know?’ The black and white cat jumped down from a bunk, stroking itself as it swept against her leg.

‘As long as no one complains.’ Grae shrugged. ‘We’ll see how long we last.’ He looked at her, and she saw the thin line of the scar where his cut had healed. ‘It’ll be fun in the winter.’

‘You’re not serious?’ She’d spoken before she’d had time to think.

‘Yes,’ he said and he handed her a cup.