Daughters-in-Law (14 page)

She lay back in the sand. It was warm on the surface, but cool if you dug your fingers in deeper. The sky above her was divertingly striped with tatters of pale cloud, and there were the steady, unchanging, insistent sounds of the sea and the wind and the gulls, although the air was still down there, flat on the dunes. Petra wriggled her shoulders to make comfortable dips for them in the sand, and breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. Then she relaxed down into the hollows she had made and closed her eyes, and slept.

Steve Hadley finished rolling up the nets and stacked them in a loose pile that he would collect later, after the punters had gone and the reserve was empty. The nets had fenced off a few areas of the beach, during the early summer, to stop visitors accidentally treading on the little terns’ nests, which was particularly heartbreaking when it happened, as the little terns often laid
only two eggs in the first place. And the terns themselves were so tiny too, barely twenty centimeters or so, with their black-tipped yellow bills and sleek black heads in the winter. Steve loved them. But then, he loved most birds, otherwise why would he be here, working with them in all weathers, instead of joining his father and brother in the thriving family opticians’ business in Birmingham?

He paused to take a gum packet out of his pocket. He’d been all over the beach to check all the nests were clear, that every healthy egg had been hatched, and now he was going back up to base, to get a coffee and something to eat before he went off to check the handrail on one of the tower hides on the canopy walk. There’d been some kids—big, heavy kids—swinging on it yesterday, and even though they’d stopped when they were told off they’d been seen there again, later, just to show authority, Steve supposed, that they didn’t give a stuff for it. It was interesting on the canopy trail, but it wasn’t like the marshes and the shoreline. Steve was never happier than when he was within earshot of the sea.

On his way up the dunes to the path, Steve passed a girl asleep in the sand. She was deeply asleep by the looks of her, her hands were entirely relaxed. She was wearing the usual bird-watching gear of T-shirt and pocketed drill waistcoat and trainers, and she had RSPB binoculars slung round her neck, and a canvas satchel beside her with the corner of a sketchbook sticking out, but there was something about her that struck him, something more than the little swallow tattooed on the side of her neck or the jumble of colored ribbons tied round one wrist. It wasn’t really, he thought, her appearance, it was more her attitude. She looked utterly comfortable, lying there in the sand, completely at home, entirely natural. She looked as if she had come to Minsmere with the express purpose of falling asleep there, in the dunes, above the sea.

He thought he really ought to wake her. She wasn’t being a
nuisance or anything, and she certainly wasn’t disturbing the birds, but this was a nature reserve, not a place of recreational relaxation, and the visitors were supposed to be here for bird-watching, not slumbering. He bent down, intending to put a gentle hand on her shoulder and wake her, and found that he couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t, after all, be sleeping like that if she didn’t need to. She looked as if this was the best and most restorative sleep she’d had in ages. In any case, someone would come tramping through the dunes quite soon, as a matter of course, and she’d get woken anyway, so no need for him to get all officious and jobsworthy and wake her for no good reason. Steve straightened up again. He’d probably tell the other guys he worked with about her. “I found Sleeping Beauty down on the beach today,” he’d say. Except she wasn’t really a beauty. Nice face, he liked it, but not a beauty.

“Sleep well,” he mouthed down at her silently, and tramped on through the dunes to the path.

Later Petra bought a cup of tea from the Visitor Center’s café and took it out to one of the picnic tables on the grass. She unwrapped the foil packets Rachel had given her and found egg-mayonnaise sandwiches and cucumber batons and flap-jacks and dried apricots. She spread these out on the table and looked at them. Very delicious. Very thoughtful. The reward for a long morning’s sketching. Except that she hadn’t sketched a thing, she hadn’t even taken one of Anthony’s pencils out of her pocket, she had not done anything except sleep in the warm sand until she was woken by two children stamping past and inadvertently spraying sand in her face. It had been a wonderful sleep. She didn’t think she’d slept like that in years, not since she used to stay with Ralph in his bare cottage at Shingle Street, and slept with the window open to the sounds of the sea, and the wind and the gulls, just like here.

She yawned. She must have slept for two hours or more, in
broad daylight. She felt much lighter and clearer as a result, almost happy. She certainly felt—there were hours of daylight yet—that she could draw, after she’d eaten, she could draw enough to demonstrate to Rachel and Anthony that she had fulfilled the terms of the unspoken bargain, and earned her day off. She took her phone out of her pocket and looked at it. There was no signal. A small feeling of relief stole over her. She couldn’t check on the children, and she couldn’t check on Ralph. She couldn’t, in other words, pick up all the responsibilities concerning other people, which colored her life and sometimes burdened it to an extent that she found very hard to bear. If Ralph was in a mood, for example, she knew it was neither her fault nor her problem, but she could not evade being associated with it somehow, and thus implicated and involved, so that she could feel the energy draining out of her, leaching out into the ground under her feet. But today, sitting in the intermittent sun at a warmed wooden picnic table eating Rachel’s delectable sandwiches, she was having a little holiday from all that, a brief respite in which the mobile-phone company’s signal capacity had kindly conspired.

She finished the sandwiches and cucumber, and her tea, and wrapped the foil round the remainder. Barney would be pleased later to see the dried apricots, and thrilled to see the flapjacks. Kit would whimper over his supper as he did over most meals, put off by any food that was new, or bright, or natural in shape. But she didn’t need to think about that just yet nor, even, about Ralph’s interview. She didn’t need to think about anything except a few slow, quiet hours in the East Hide with her binoculars to her eyes, and her sketchbook open on the wide shelf below the window where Anthony had first shown her, drawing rapidly and in complete silence, how the beginning of bird drawing lay with the triangle.

She settled herself at the very end of the bench, to give herself a good view to the left as well as straight ahead. There was
an absorbed man with a camera on a tripod, and a few people with notebooks, but apart from them the other visitors slipped in and out of the hide with all the respectful lack of obviousness of people visiting churches and cathedrals. In any case, Petra soon forgot to be aware of anyone coming and going, forgot even to notice the bodies that briefly sat on the bench next to hers. It took her only half an hour of sitting and watching and breathing with increasingly slow, deep breaths before she had a pencil in her hand, and she was drawing.

She was drawing a redshank, marveling at its brilliant orange legs, when a voice behind her said, “Sorry to interrupt, dear, but it’s five to five.”

Petra looked up, startled. An elderly man with an enamel avocet pin on his pocketed gilet, and thick glasses, stood beside her, notebook in hand.

He said, “I’ve been watching you. My wife, too. We come here every week when the weather’s good; we love it. And we’re very impressed.” He indicated Petra’s sketchbook.

“Oh—”

“But maybe you’ve forgotten that it closes at five? I said to Beryl, was I being an old fusspot, telling you, and she said better have me tell you than one of the staff, and anyway then I could tell you how good we think your drawings are.”

Petra looked down at the page. Her male redshank was in flight, showing the white edges to his wings.

“Thank you—”

“That’s all right, dear. There’s nothing like birds, is there, nothing. We’ve found them such a comfort since our daughter died.”

Petra stared at him.

“Oh, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s something to do with wings, I expect. Birds and angels. Beryl says it doesn’t do to make too many links like that, but I find it helps.”

Petra began to gather up her drawing things, shoveling them into her canvas satchel. She couldn’t look at the man.

“Yes,” she said, “yes. I’m sure it does.” She slung the satchel over one shoulder. “Thank you for telling me. About the time I mean. Thank you.”

And then she pushed past him, through the door into the reed-lined corridor that led back to the pathway, and fled.

In the car park, she couldn’t find her car keys. She turned the satchel out, and her waistcoat pockets and the picnic bag, and there were no keys. She jumped up and down experimentally, to see if anything jangled in a pocket she’d forgotten, but there was nothing, not even in the buttoned pouches of her combat trousers. She looked at her watch. It was five fifteen. Rachel and Anthony would be expecting her back about five thirty, and she had no phone signal to tell them she’d be later. She raised a fist and hit the car, pointlessly and impotently, on its roof.

She must have lost the keys down among the dunes. They must have slipped out while she lay sleeping in the sand, their chinking obscured by the sound of the gulls and the sea. She would have to go back, running past the pond and along the North Wall to the point where the path turned south, parallel to the sea, and find the spot where she had—so carefree then, so untroubled by any preoccupation—lain down and surrendered her gaze to the wide and empty sky.

She put the canvas bag down beside the car and then, on second thoughts, pushed it underneath, with the picnic bag. The car park was almost empty now, with only the cars belonging to the few paid staff still standing close to the entrance to the Visitor Center. Petra set off at a run, thinking she would ask at the center, to see if anyone had handed in her keys, but the center was shut, its huge glass door closed upon all its goods and services for another day, and no sign of life within, or at
the café, where the tables and chairs had been rearranged with a businesslike regard for symmetry.

Petra ran on, her mind jerked out of the serenity of the afternoon and scrabbling to find a solution to the problem of a locked car and a useless telephone and two little boys needing collecting half an hour away. When she reached the dunes, she found the spot where she had slept, and fell to her knees, raking through the sand with her fingers, hoping and hoping for a glint of metal.

Then someone called. It was not a shout, but more the sound of someone trying to attract her attention in as discreet a way as possible. She looked up. Away down on the edge of the beach, a quad bike with a trailer was parked, and the trailer was piled with rolls of netting, and the young man Petra had seen earlier was waving at her, gesticulating with his hand.

Petra scrambled to her feet. She began to run towards him, stumbling in the sand, and he was moving too, and when he was only twenty feet or so away, she could hear that what he was saying was, “I’ve got them, I’ve got them.”

He held the keys out to her. She was breathless, and beaming. She said, gasping, “Oh thank you, thank you, you can’t imagine, I thought I’d lost them, I can’t phone, I didn’t know what I’d do—”

He said, “I saw them when I came down on the bike. They were just lying on the sand.” His voice was easy, with a Midlands accent. “I passed them, on the bike. I thought they must be yours. I was going to hand them in, tomorrow.” He smiled at her. “I saw you asleep earlier.”

Petra nodded. She held the keys hard against her. She said, “I don’t know how to thank you—”

“You don’t need to—”

“You saved my life,” Petra said.

He shrugged. He said, “Glad to help. Just luck, really.”

“
So
lucky—”

“It looked a good sleep—”

She nodded.

“It was wonderful.”

“It’s the best, sleeping in the open air. By the sea.”

Petra looked past him, at the water. She said, “I love the sea.”

“Me too. And seabirds.”

There was a small silence. Then she said, “What can I do, to say thank you?”

“You don’t need to.”

“I’d like to.”

“Well,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets, “you could make a donation, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Petra said, “yes. I’ll do that. I’d like to do that. Who shall I say helped me?”

He looked at his feet.

“No need for that—”

“Yes, there is.”

He shrugged. He glanced at her. She was breathing more evenly now, and her hair had escaped from her scarf thing and had fallen round her face.

He said, “I’m Steve.”

She nodded. She said, “I’m Petra.”

“Unusual name—”

“I live in Aldeburgh,” she said, “and I’ve got two little boys.” She held the keys up. “Who I’ve got to collect now. Thanks to you.” She took a step or two back, towards the path behind the dunes. She said, “Where d’
you
live, Steve?”

He looked up at the sky for a moment. Then he looked briefly at Petra.

“Shingle Street,” he said.