A Year of Marvellous Ways (10 page)

18

D
rake slept soundly throughout the following day
and only awoke at the handover of sun to moon when the old woman staggered through the door and placed the pot of steamed mussels and cockles on to the crane above the fire. The smell was divine and his hunger was ragged. He was feeling stronger he could tell, but the old woman looked weaker.

They ate the river stew with stale bread that became less stale in the salty broth. When the shells had been sucked clean, and the bowls wiped clean, old Marvellous took out a small bottle of sloe gin and filled her glass and downed it in one. Her cheeks began to glow. She slipped off her glasses and rubbed her eyes and they squeaked because they were so dry.

Are you all right? asked Drake.

Marvellous nodded and refilled her glass. Tonight I’m old, she said. Most of my life I’ve felt like spring but now I’m winter.

May I? said Drake and he reached over and smelt her glass. Sloe gin, he said.

Make it myself, and she raised the glass to her lips. It usually helps.

To feel young?

She smiled. No, to remember, she said.

Drake drank his ale. I was wondering, he said. Your mother. Was she buried over there? and he pointed to the church and cluster of gravestones.

Oh no, said Marvellous. You don’t bury mermaids. They go back to the sea. My father carried her into the river when the waters were high and on the turn. He said a rogue wave came towards him crested by gold, and the wave enveloped them and the waters unpeeled my mother from his grip and carried her back to the warmer seas of her people and her birth.

And what happened to you afterwards?

To me?

Yes, he said.

Oh. I was sent to London to be brought up by my father’s sister and her husband. It was quite clear by then that my father could barely look after himself, let alone a baby.

Where did you go?

I don’t remember. But we lived in a big house and there was little light but a lot of God, and so many
things
. And they gave me everything a child could want including a new name that I didn’t want: Ethel.

You’re not an Ethel, I think.

No, I’m not, am I? Anyway, I didn’t see my father again until I was ten years old. It was like meeting a stranger, albeit one who had the same smile.

What kind of life had he had? asked Drake.

I suppose I’d have to base a lot on speculation.

I won’t hold you to anything.

That would be a good thing, said the old woman, and she nodded her thanks. She said, From what I gathered – and this is the speculation part – my father went through quite a transformation after my mother’s death. He was a man who, up until then, had not even been known for rudeness. But overnight he became a man full of hate, and most of all, his hatred was for God. Which in truth, I believe, was really a hatred for his father, who was a strict man, very religious, who later became a doctor. No doubt thinking that with feet firmly planted in both camps, salvation could be secured.

Marvellous sipped her gin and smoked her pipe. Where was I? she asked.

God . . . ? Medicine . . . ? Your fath—

Ah yes. Well, either of those two pathways my father was expected to take.

So which one did he choose?

Neither. Choice didn’t really come into it. On one hand he was scared of God and on the other he was scared of blood. He took his inheritance and fled to sea. Made a fortune. Indigo.

So when he woke up one morning and had as his first sight a House of God, you can imagine, it near destroyed him. Kindness made him angry. The sight of the first bluebells made him seethe. And every day at the close of day when the world stilled, the utter emptiness of life alone filled him with dread. So he prayed for a sign from my mother, prayed night and day for permission to end his life.

Did it come? asked Drake.

No, said Marvellous. What came instead was permission to
live
. One morning, he was awoken by a fearful sound coming from the coast. He headed towards the shore thinking a large steamer had run aground, but what he found when he got to the sea was the sight of a large grampus whale wedged between the rocks, tearing off its own skin in the instinctive fight to free itself. That was the sign my father needed, and the following morning he locked up the boathouse and what little remained of his heart, and he took to the road.

Three hours into the journey the rain hammered down. A mile later a double rainbow appeared over the sea. He felt no hatred, no bitterness, he noticed. Just awe. And the first pangs of what he would eventually describe as freedom.

Miles of road became inscribed on his soles, dirt grass moor and sand, a whole history of the Peninsula laid down one on top of the other, like fossils, like prayers. He walked across to Michael’s Mount, around its periphery and walked back undisturbed by an encroaching tide. He walked to the Land’s End, across the jagged cliffs. He often slept standing up, lodged against a wall, his legs twitching, dreaming their own walking dreams. Daybreak he kept on walking, never stopped to have a conversation, a raise of the hat maybe, a quick hello, but those legs never stopped moving.

He covered two thousand miles and had walked the periphery of that county six times. It had taken him nine years. He had seen eclipses and pilot whales. He had seen ships turn into wrecks, raging waves swallow men whole. He learnt from the old wise women who traded in ancient secrets and ways, and from them he tasted herbs and learnt what made him better, what made him ill. He learnt to find fresh water when the landscape told him there was none, and he learnt to deliver the dying. And only then, after those years of seeing so much, did his legs finally stop. He took breath at an ancient stone at the edge of the land and watched the sun fall to earth, and knew it was the end of something, and I think he would have said that something was grief.

And as the sky turned gold he felt the most glorious contentment wash over him. And he thought, Somewhere between God and Medicine there is a place for me. And he put that thought in the small shell box around his neck – this shell box, she said, lifting the one around her own neck. And that’s when he slept, she said. When his legs slept. You see, he had finally caught up with his calling. He had refound his purpose. And that meant he could
live
.

That’s when he brought me back from London. He had bought the gypsy caravan by then and an old dray horse and we travelled the length and breadth of the Peninsula together. In the villages and hamlets he was called upon night or day to sit with the dying. I went too and learnt from him.

I watched him whisper words – usually words that came to him there in the moment, or sometimes words from the Bible if the family requested it. And I watched him administer herbs, and he took their pain, and they thanked him by passing on unencumbered. In those early days, little money changed hands; he was offered food, drink instead. When there was no work we ate what nature provided, and it provides much. The gossips revered him.

What were the gossips? asked Drake.

Village women, said Marvellous. They were the ones who often delivered babies or mourned for the dead, they were the attendees anyway, and they called him to prepare the laying-out, whilst I went with them and learnt about the lying-in, the giving birth.

You delivered babies? asked Drake.

No, no, not at first. Years later I did, but then I just helped to boil water, and to lay out the sheets, and sometimes to tie the cord. But I watched and listened and learnt. Many died, that’s what I learnt. It wasn’t clean then, Drake, you see. Cuffs weren’t clean and sleeves weren’t rolled up. Noses weren’t clean and in the depth of winter they dripped. They didn’t understand how important it was to keep things clean.

Sometimes the dying begged for more time and that was the hardest, and my father would send me out under the cloak of night to release lobsters from their pots, to release lambs and pigs and rabbits from imminent slaughter. Buying life for life, he called it, bargaining with an unseen fate that played his cards too close to his chest. In many ways it was idyllic. Threatened, but idyllic.

Why threatened? asked Drake.

Because it was only a matter of time before the pain he swallowed whole bedded down and nestled somewhere warm until it grew like yeast. He kept little from me except the swelling in his legs. I kept little from him except the fear of our parting.

We need to turn back now, my love, was what he said the day he knew our adventure was over. And at the age of fourteen, I turned the dray round and made my way back to my father’s past.

He was asleep when we arrived back into St Ophere. It was day but he was asleep. I secured the wagon and allowed the horse to wander amongst the trees. I had never been inside the boathouse, and the bolt was easy to pry away, the wood being so rotten. But ten years of damp had rusted the hinges and swollen the door and a violent kick was the only way to gain access to my parents’ private world.

It was so tidy, with little within. The bed was made, as if it had never been slept in. And there were candelabras by the bed. And by the hearth. Red rugs carried a hue of green where mould had settled in the woollen pattern. But what I remember most was that it was a world of two: two chairs, two glasses, two bowls. I felt like a trespasser and not the natural product of their love.

Drake pointed to the soot-smudged outline above the fireplace. What used to be there? he said.

I don’t know, said Marvellous. Something my father couldn’t live with?

A painting?

Yes, I suppose it was. I never asked and he never said and in the end everything was quick.

The old woman reached for her glass. Three days, that was all it took, Drake. On the third and final night, a bright light shone from my father’s body. And in the sublime peace of his face, I saw my mother waiting for him.

I had never seen my mother’s face, and had longed beyond all longing to one day see it. I still do, in fact – that is a desire that age hasn’t softened – because that night her face was hidden, covered by the thick tress of her dark hair. But I knew it was her because she used words like
mine
and
daughter
and her breath was of the sea.

My father said to her: Hello my love. You’ve come back to me.

My mother said: I never left.

And in those three words was a lifetime.

He said: Shall we go then?

And they both turned to me and they said: Can you let us go, do you think?

And I could say nothing. I raised my hand, a feeble attempt at a wave, I think. But I could say nothing. Because I was fourteen years old and all I wanted to say was, Please. Don’t go.

19

T
he next night, Drake waited for her. He waited
for
the old woman but she didn’t come. The birds quietened, the river emptied, the night passed, and she didn’t come.

He fed the hearth a solid pile of sappy logs and they seemed to eat all oxygen from the room and he felt suffocated; couldn’t even eat the salty broth left over from the night before. He lifted the water jug and filled the basin, splashed his neck and face, but still his mind wouldn’t clear. He stood on the balcony; the candle flickered in the church opposite. Maybe he should go out and look for her in case something had happened? He went to the front door and opened it. The cold air pounced on him, fed off him as if he were prey. The trees swayed and the clouds raced north and the need for light was the rarest ache. There was nothing out there but loneliness. He closed the door swiftly. Nothing out there but the sad pull of Missy Hall.

After it had happened, after she’d gone, he’d run. Hadn’t even waited for the police, couldn’t face their questions nor their contempt: What do you mean you couldn’t reach her? How hard did you try, eh? How hard did you
really
try?

He didn’t even go back to her lodging house, heels took off on the wings of guilt and fear. Right along the Embankment all the way to Westminster he ran, kidding himself he was still searching for her, scouring the shingled banks and incoming tide for a body, at least. But he just wanted to get away from it, as far from the horror as he could.

And then as night had fallen, he had wandered aimlessly through the dark with sodden trousers and his pathetic suitcase of possessions, retracing every minutiae of their day looking for a clue, an open door she may have stepped through instead of the one leading to her grave.

He stopped at a lit brazier with the Lost and the Poor and the Broken and he was all of them so he took his place around the flames and when he had given out his sixth cigarette he realised he felt nothing other than cold, so he kept on moving, kept on wandering. He cut through to the quieter streets behind the Strand. Propositions crept from doorways, from alleyways, carried on the scent of smoke and over-ripe perfume, and those propositions were punctuated by a lazy smile and he was so tempted because he felt so fucking lonely but he passed them by, didn’t stop.

He kept going east and soon the sooty tenement streets of childhood loomed familiar between the bomb sites, and his footsteps echoed loudly against the cobbles with the same displaced tread they had always had. He’d gone full circle and was back at St Paul’s and that bloody river, and it was fat and dark and bloated and dozens of craft were moored near and far, and the cranes looked on and the power station puffed and the lights looked beautiful and they shouldn’t have, fuck they really shouldn’t have. He leant against the Embankment wall and drank from a bottle of gin. A single firework exploded overhead. The scattering of forlorn embers across a quiet London sky.

Drake ate in the flicker of firelight. He stared into the flames, looking for truth, but the truth he already knew because it came in the stillness, came as the boathouse creaked in its own sad sea. The truth was he had never known Missy Hall, not really. He had run towards a feeling and the feeling was his, and there had been little else there.

His sight was drawn again to the haunting outline above the hearth:
Something the old man couldn’t live with
. He got up and went to his suitcase. He flicked the catch and took out the folded sheet of paper that had been slipped under his door when he was a boy. He carefully unfolded it. Placed his hand in the drawn outline of Missy’s hand. ‘Not too much, Freddy. Never forget me.’ Her scrawl was erratic even then. He placed the paper gently on to the fire. It curled and danced, rose in the updraught like a small prayer lantern, and disappeared across the sky with the whisperings of childhood love trailing behind like a comet’s tail.

In bed, he listened to the lapping waves and failed to sleep. He rose edgy with the early morning light and as he padded across the cold uneven floor, he looked down at the empty hearth and the dusty mound of clinker. For there, lying alone on the slate stone was the feathered remains of a small piece of charred paper. Two words stood out, dark and clear:
Forget me
.

His chest heaved and he staggered back to the bed. He held his breath and dived into a bottomless pit of sleep.