The Sea House (18 page)

They walked back to the fire and Grae gave Lily, Em and Arrie a sausage each on a pointed stick. ‘Hold it out over the heat,’ he said, ‘and keep turning.’ They waited while their supper blackened and burned. They ate the rest of the sausages wrapped in folds of bread, with apples, and marshmallows melted into ghostly shapes.

‘It’s wonderful out here,’ Lily said, as Grae poked at the fire, and, copying the girls, she took up a blunt knife and began whittling sticks, stripping the thin bark, shredding the heads to form a pointed spike. Do you like living in a beach hut? she wanted to ask. Is it an adventure? But what if the girls said no, they didn’t. They missed their bedroom, their garden and their mum. So they sat in silence, watching the crystal-dripping stars until eventually Em and Arrie wrapped themselves in blankets and curled up in the sand.

‘I’ll carry them in.’ Grae stood up and he bundled Em up in his arms. Lily followed with Arrie, her cheek so silken-smooth against her own. They slid the girls into their bunks and stood for a moment, squeezed into the narrow room, their arms, childless, unsure what to do. Lily walked back and stood looking up the dune, listening to the sea, high on the other side.

‘It’s calm tonight,’ she said, and then Grae reached out and touched her. A spark shot through her, hurting, exquisite as his hand rested for a moment and was gone. ‘I thought you’d left the village,’ she said.

‘And you’ – Grae hung his head – ‘you did leave.’

‘Only for a few days.’ She laughed and her laugh came out as a quiver.

‘But…’ they both began at the same time, and not knowing what she was about to do she stretched out her hand. Grae reached forward and took it. The touch of him fizzed along her arm, and he was drawing her towards him, folding her up, cradling her head in his hands, his fingers sweeping her cheek, her neck, her ears.

‘Why didn’t you find me?’ he asked, but before she could answer his mouth was on hers, his breath as sweet as air, his stubble warm and rough, prickling her chin. He was pushing her down into the tall soft grass, his hands sending sparks over her body as they slipped under her clothes. He was easing her, kneading, whispering in her ear, and she thought nothing ever in the world felt so good as this. Who invented it? she thought. Who invented sex? The sheer, pure smell of him, heat and salt and wood smoke all mingled with desire. And then he stopped. He straightened his arms and leant above her. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘Yes.’

He let his elbows bend and lay beside her. She slowed her breathing, imagining the stars spinning and falling as they began to land.

‘Go easy,’ he said, as if to himself.

They lay side by side, staring into each other’s faces, as if, before then, to look at each other had been banned, and then for hours and hours they kissed and sighed and murmured until their lips were frayed.

‘I suppose I’d better go,’ Lily said, when light began to seep into the sky.

‘Crawl in with me.’ He held her tight, but she imagined Em and Arrie, peering at her, furious, in a few hours’ time. ‘Sleep in the top bunk, then.’ He’d guessed her mind, and so they stamped out the fire, still smouldering, and trailed inside. Grae fastened the door and, stopping in the galley between beds for one last kiss, Lily climbed on to the narrow bunk and fell into an ashen sleep.

When Lily woke she couldn’t think where she was. Sun was streaming through an open door, and the wall beside her bed was wood. She turned and almost fell on to the floor and then she remembered, she was in a hut. She lay back down. There was the sound of a radio and the clatter of someone washing plates. She recognized Grae’s whistle from listening to him work and the cat jumped up and looked at her with yellow eyes. She reached for it, but it rounded its back, haughtily, and leapt on to the ground. Lily lay and looked up at the ceiling. How could they have spent so many hours together and leave so much unsaid?

27

You can only understand things by constantly drawing them,
Henry had written at the very start of their correspondence, and Max wondered if, after more than half a village, he should put some people in.
If you feel certain of destruction, go to destruction cheerfully and often,
Henry advised.
Give up any conventional ideas as to what a head is like. If it looks like a potato with two eyes in it, make it so. You might try and treat the chair and figure as one object. I think of your reverence for the human figure as a kind of stage fright. This is the figure. Look at it as if it were a lump of clay. But, and I’m talking now about your sketch of ‘Helga’, why draw her so faintly, and why leave off her hair?
But Max had had no choice. Her hair had looked like marble, had sat on Helga’s forehead like a hat. He’d scrubbed at it until it was a shadow, and then, later, when he’d appealed to her to let him try again, she’d made him too uneasy to go on. ‘Your father…’ she wanted to know. ‘Is it really true he was an officer?’

‘Yes. He fought at Loos, and then after that, when he recovered… He risked his life to be a scout.’

‘But he was made an officer?’ Her hair was plaited. It hung down one side of his picture like a rope. Max knew what she was asking him, and, disloyal, to whom he wasn’t sure, he explained about his father’s conversion, his military service, Applesnout the horse. ‘He was awarded a medal for bravery.’

‘That I knew.’ She looked at him as if he were an idiot. ‘We all know that. Everyone on the island. It was the other part I wasn’t sure of…’ And absentmindedly she twisted her plait on to the top of her head. ‘The mother,’ she said more slowly, ‘if your mother is…’ – she shivered at the word – ‘then you must be too.’

Max felt himself grow heavy. He put his pencil down and sat beside her, reaching for her hand. ‘My parents are liberal, tolerant, they won’t mind. Our children…’

Helga withdrew her hand. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

After some moments Max stood up and continued to draw, but it was hopeless, her hair was like a curtain cord, and eventually he accepted there was no point going on.

What kind of day was it? How was the sky?
Henry demanded.
Show me, was the grass fresh and green? Or all burnt up and yellow?

A week later Helga cycled past his window. Just behind her was the son of a fisherman, Gottschalk, a fisherman himself now, with a share in a new boat. He was gaining on her, steering with nothing but his knees, and Max could see from the way Helga’s head was thrown out sideways, that she was urging him to hurry on. Max leapt up and threw open the front door, dodging past the pear tree, and out into the lane. But Helga and her fisherman were skidding round the corner, the spokes of their wheels like sun dials, their tyres a flash of black. He pounded after them, up to the corner, round the side of the bakery, but they had gone.

Max gulped down the last of his egg sandwich, packed for him by Gertrude and slipped into his bag. He was almost at the end of Palmers Lane now, outside Teal House, its huge windows like a chapel, looking out over a field. He had almost reached the end of his second scroll. Slowly, he thought, sizing up the chimney stack, if he didn’t go more slowly he’d have to go home. The walls of Teal House were a deep red, its roof rounded like a bowler hat. It reminded him of the boss of his old firm where, ever since the end of the war, he’d worked on the accounts. He’d been given a week’s leave after Kaethe died, and although he’d intended it he’d never written to say why he had not gone back. He could manage, if he was careful, on what he and Kaethe had saved, and then maybe he’d do what Kaethe ordered him not to, find his way back to Heiderose and see what was left.

On the first of September it started to rain. It started early, just as Max was dressing. He stood at his window and thought of the Sea House key. It was kept for safety by a Mrs Cobbe at number 17 Church Lane. She would go over the property in the morning and give it a good clean, and then at midday Elsa could officially begin her lease. Of course Mrs Cobbe could leave the key for her at the house, but she insisted Elsa walk up and collect it, she was adamant that things should be done right.

‘Well,’ Gertrude told Max, ‘Elsa Lehmann has packed up the most tremendous amount of things. Books and plates, and two huge suitcases of clothes. I shall have to take the car out and help her move. She says she’ll manage, will take one thing at a time, and I suppose when Kett comes in to start the work he could always put the boxes on a cart.’

Max looked at her blankly.

‘Kett. The local builder. He’s working on the Lehmann house. Redoing the slope of the staircase, some idea of Klaus’s, to give a more luxurious feel to the steps.’ Gertrude laughed and shook her head. ‘Why else did you think they should have to move into a hut?’

‘I hadn’t thought.’ He frowned, and he turned away.

By mid-morning the rain had not let up and Max, unable to bear the suspense of waiting, pulled his hat down over his ears and went out. He didn’t take his scroll for fear it would be ruined, so instead he wandered up and down the village, collecting information, choosing summer colours for the last house in Palmers Lane. It was his village now, he thought, and it was true, the few people that he passed nodded to him and waved as they hurried to keep dry. Max closed his eyes. He wanted to test himself, prove he knew each inch of lane and hedgerow, each bend and over-hanging tree. Slowly he moved forward, relying on his remaining senses, the feel of the lane beneath his feet, the smell of each front garden, until the smoothing of the ground told him he had reached his view. He turned into it and opened his eyes. The grass was shorn, the wheat field stubble, the sedge razed to the ground. Brambles clung to the wire of the tennis court, scattered with blackberries, and everywhere there was the smell of wood smoke, curling through the rain.

Max began to edge along the track. The sea was right ahead of him, a sheet of silver, beaten into flatness by a sudden streak of sun. Max skirted the edge of a field until he reached the wood where the track doubled back, taking him inland, ploughing through hillocks and over green mounds until he came out on the salt marsh directly above the mill. There were three men working there, repairing the roof. Max ducked along a narrower path and found himself by the opening of a lookout shelter, its granite greyness uneasy in the ancient ground. Max wound himself into it like a snail re-entering its shell and, as he stood by one of the narrow windows, he wondered which of the village men had taken their turns here, on guard for the enemy, night and day. Not a single house in Steerborough had been bombed, and maybe it was thanks to this small bunker that the Germans had been too fearful to come. Max leant against one wall. Today he had no energy for anything but Elsa and he checked his watch again to see if it must surely be one. Eventually he rose back above ground, and, keeping his eyes turned away from the workmen, he walked along the swollen gulleys and on to the thick slick of a path that ran parallel to the sea.

Three swans were sitting on the water, huge and white, the third still flecked with brown. As he approached, they began to beat their wings, and, with the maximum amount of effort, they lifted off above the water and flew. Max picked a cane of sedge and used it to beat his way along the river, through mud and reeds, emerging on the bridge, a cattle gate barred over its middle, the only manmade object between the Sea House and the sea.

The glass of the front door shivered as he knocked. It was past one, but there was no one in. He tried the handle, but the door was locked. Max retreated to the dunes. The sun was gaining strength, the rain had stopped, and he lay back against coarse grass, watching the mud on his shoes crust over into hardness, the hems of his trousers drying in dark rings.

‘My Good Lord.’ Gertrude was afraid she’d come across a body, the legs of which were half buried by sand.

Max uncrumpled himself. ‘Good day.’ He glanced at the sun, shocked to see it far out over the village, hanging above the spire of the church. He scrambled up and stood beside her, tiny stars of fennel holding resolutely to his clothes.

‘Well, she’s in,’ Gertrude sighed. ‘All settled with her things.’

Max turned towards the Sea House, but Gertrude looped her arm through his. ‘It’s been days,’ she said, ‘since I’ve seen the beach.’ Was it a shadow or Elsa herself who was standing at her window, straining towards him as she waved? ‘Let’s walk.’ And unable to resist, Gertrude began brushing the husks of flowers from his sleeves.

Max let himself be led. Along the beach, around the small curved bays. ‘There’s one old man, lives up on the Green,’ Gertrude told him. ‘Fifteen years since he’s been to the sea. “Don’t have the time,” he said.’ Max nodded although it was almost impossible to watch her mouth and walk. ‘It’s only us Londoners who think we have to worship nature night and day,’ she went on. ‘Who daren’t pass a lilac or a crab apple tree without stopping to admire its scent. We’ve been starved, that’s the truth of it, and when people retire here from the city, they spend the rest of their lives trying to catch up. My aunt, you know who left me the house, she went out walking every day until she was ninety-one.’

Max almost lost his footing as they climbed the narrow path, past the jetty where the ferry was moored. Gertrude tugged at him, heaving him up, and their hips bumped against each other hard. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said as she unclasped his arm.

Surreptitiously Max glanced behind him. The Sea House had disappeared from view. There was nothing to his left but a great waterlogged meadow, and no way forward but to carry on. Max saw the hours drift on without him. The thinning light, the midges thickening to a swarm, and he imagined Elsa accepting he was never going to come.

Eventually they reached the bridge and turned inland beside the railway. The path ran over a rise of hills until it joined the village. Gertrude stopped occasionally to tug at a blackberry, smiling at him with blackened teeth. They did not talk, and slowly, as they walked into the sunset, Max began to breathe more easily. He was resigned to Gertrude now, and the fact that when eventually they arrived back in the village it would be too late to pay his call. But Gertrude did not stop at the turning to Marsh End. ‘My car,’ she said, ‘I left it at the harbour,’ and so they walked down towards the sea.

It felt strange to slip on to the leather of the seat, to rest back against a cushion, and feel the rain and salt and sunshine of the day dissolve as they drove up the lane. Together they made supper, mashing potatoes, grilling chops, picking parsley and small sweet tomatoes from a vine by the back door. Max laid the table and Gertrude carried the plates through and at the same moment they looked up and nodded to each other, content. After supper they played cards, one game and then another, and Gertrude, flushed from her string of wins, insisted on reading to him from an anthology of Suffolk verse. She read him a poem, not a single word of which he understood.

‘Ye four bright wires, so slender and so smooth,
How many wakeful nights y’ve helped to soothe!’

It was, she explained, a poem about knitting.

‘Nor have you fail’d, through many a darksome day,
To keep the potent fiend, Ennui at bay:
Affording occupation mute and kind,
Taxing no powers of body or of mind,
Leaving them free their higher due to pay
Fresh air to breathe – to meditate or pray.’

It was after ten by now and Max looked out at the black night. ‘I shall go up and read,’ he said, standing, stretching, and Gertrude stood up too. ‘Yes you’re right,’ and in single file they climbed the stairs to bed.

Max sat up in a cloud of light. He’d forgotten to draw the curtains and the first rays of sun were dappling the glass. ‘Will you visit me?’ Elsa’s words were in his ears, and he could hardly believe that he’d squandered his first chance.

Quickly he pulled on his clothes, the clock showed half past five, and, as delicately as he could, he crept downstairs. Exhilaration hit him with the first sweet air. The morning was blue, just rising out of black, and the sky was flecked with the dark formation of migrating birds. He ran along the lane, up to the corner where the Lehmann house stood empty, and on across the Green. It was still night on the Green, but the river was alive. Small boats worked back and forth, unloading nets of fish, with gulls, hysterical, wheeling above.

Max took cover in the shadow of the huts, flitting from stilt to stilt, his eyes fixed on the Sea House window where there was a light. The light, he was sure of it, was on for him. He hurried towards it, dragging the air into his body, only stopping to catch his breath when he was on the wooden steps. He climbed up to the porch and knocked, and waited, and then he turned the handle and stepped in. The downstairs room was empty. ‘Elsa?’ There was a square of lamplight at the top of the stairs, and just possibly she was calling down. One hand, one foot, following the other, he was in his dream. Climbing, each rung of the ladder warm under his hand, until, blinking, he came up.