David made his way over to the house and raised the front door’s cast-iron knocker. The “bang” seemed to lose itself at once inside the gray stone walls. No one answered.
Directly opposite, across the yard, stood a low two-story building, which might once have been a generous-sized cow shed. A steady hammering was coming from inside. David advanced to the only visible entrance, a door split horizontally, and pushed on the top half. It swung open to reveal what looked like an old stable, the rusty manger still containing hay.
He stepped inside. A hole had been knocked in the wall. Through that he could see a large room, barely lit by two windows overlooking fields at the back. A man in a leather apron was sitting astride a bench, still hammering away. He was young, with a faint ginger stubble coating cheeks and chin. Under his apron he wore a vest and a pair of old white jeans, and moccasins on his feet. David looked down to see he was mending a shoe, upended on a last.
“Hello?”
The man went right on working. When David’s shadow fell across the shoe he looked up sharply, but without any sign of alarm.
“Hello,” David repeated cautiously.
The cobbler’s face was ugly. Acne had left its traces
on a skin already disfigured by birthmarks. The pallor of his complexion was heightened by red eyelids and lips, the latter dotted with small blood scabs. His arms looked thick and muscular, and even though he wore a vest, David could see how his chest rippled whenever he moved.
“I’m sorry to disturb you. I just wondered if …”
But the man started to utter noises, groans and little clicking grunts that made no sense. He pointed inside his mouth, then, using both forefingers, at his ears, all this accompanied by an empty grin.
A deaf mute.
David forced his face into an inane smile and tried to work out what to do. But he was distracted by the thought that Juliet had to live here, with this handicapped man, and God knows who else. The cobbler went across to one of the windows, leaned out and made a succession of hoots. Shortly afterward, a quiet step fell on the threshold and a female voice said, “Who are you?”
David was not sure what to expect. She’s living in a commune, Anna had said. They’re doing arts and crafts. Someone’s given them a grant. Her tone had sounded utterly despairing when she told him that, and he sympathized. Lesbian feminists smoking pot and chucking out the aspirins, or maybe not lesbian, maybe she’d get pregnant….
Here, now, was the reality: a bright-eyed, attractive young woman, whose hair had evidently been washed in the recent past, who wore simple earrings and a wooden cross around her neck on a leather thong, whose Indian shawl came down over a tartan skirt nearly as far as soft leather boots, whose accent identified her at once, with ease and composure, as
all right.
Her eyebrows struck the only discordant note. They were thick and slanted upward at a sharp angle. She had plucked them until they occupied only a short midsection above each eye. The effect was brutal.
David, relieved despite the eyebrows, said, “I’d like to speak to Juliet.”
“Why?”
“I’m her stepfather.”
“I asked for a reason, not an ancestry.”
The feeling of relief was wearing off. “I have things I want to discuss with her.”
“Two I’s in one sentence.”
“I asked for Juliet, not an English lesson.”
“Everyone who lives here does so for a reason.” Her voice turned aggressive. “We came to escape from people like you.”
“And what am I like?” His voice had started to echo hers for harshness.
“One of those who make demands we’re not prepared to meet. Not obliged to meet.” She spoke the word “obliged” with her chin thrust forward to challenge him.
“I have news for Juliet.”
“You can leave a note, if you want.”
“Or I can come back with a policeman.”
“Oh yes?” The girl leaned against the door jamb, letting her contempt show. “There’s no crime in not wanting to see someone. Not yet.”
“She’s still under age.”
“So buy a court order. Access.
Then
come back.”
“To find her gone, I suppose.”
“You’re starting to get the idea.”
David counted his options, found them remarkably
few. “All right,” he said. “I won’t bother with a note. Just give her a message, will you?”
“I don’t write blank checks. Tell me what you want to say. If it isn’t racist, sexist, or abusive I’ll probably pass it on.”
“Say: Anna’s disappeared, the police are looking for her, I’m worried about her. I’ll go back to my car, now. I’ll wait a quarter of an hour, then I’ll leave, and I shan’t come back. That’s the message. The whole of it.”
He walked toward the door and the girl made way for him. He did not look back until he was sitting in the Rover, quaking with anger and frustration.
“Hello.”
He jerked his head around to the left. All he could see through the passenger window was a black-clad torso and an arm. The arm was attached to a hand that was trying to open the nearside door. David released the lock. “Hello, Juliet,” he said. “How are you?”
“All right.” The torso bent, acquired a head. “Would you like to come for a walk?”
David got out. “Where shall we go?”
“The sea.”
She sounded anemic; her voice came trickling out of her skinny body without conviction. Despite the spring warmth around them she must have been cold, for she wore a black roll-neck sweater with a zip-up front and thick black woolen stockings. Around each leg was an eye-blinding turquoise muff, not a leg warmer, too short for that, but perhaps a knee warmer. Ankle-length boots with pointed toes heightened her resemblance to an undernourished elf.
“We’ll go through the fields. The farmer doesn’t mind.”
She led the way down the side of the old cow shed to a stile. Half a dozen fence posts were stacked against it, and Juliet somehow managed to dislodge one of them. David, driven by his innate sense of tidiness, stood the post back up again before following her.
Once over the stile the wind came cold off the sea. Juliet folded her arms across her flattish chest, tucking the hands under her armpits in an effort to keep them from turning red. She stumbled awkwardly between the cow pats, as if her boots hurt her.
“I got your message,” she said at last. Her flat, piping voice dissolved away any emotion she might have felt.
“Good. Who was that other girl I saw?”
“Fergie? Did she scare you? She’s Sarah, really. But we call her Fergie. Or the duchess. Not to her face, though.”
“She doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.”
“No.” Juliet sighed. “You wouldn’t, if you’d been through what she has. What’s mum up to, then?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t seen her?”
“Not since Christmas.”
They had reached the stone wall that bounded this field and the girl prepared to climb over another stile leading to the next. Once astride it she stopped and said, “Joe keeps a bull here. He’s not supposed to, because there’s a right of way. You bothered?”
“Are you?”
“No.”
David followed her over. What seemed like a long way away, a huge animal raised its head in his direction and treated him to a thoughtful stare.
“That’s the bull?”
“Yes. He’s all right. He keeps people away from our beach.” But she was moving faster now, and he noticed
how she carefully avoided looking in the bull’s direction.
It looked as though they were making for the end of the world, like lemmings. Ahead of him David could see only blue sky and a black line where the land stopped. At last they came to a wooden staircase, sturdy and painted.
“Watch out here, the rocks are sharp,” Juliet said as they reached the bottom. David took off his shoes and socks.
Huge boulders, two or three times higher than a man, lay scattered over a long, narrow expanse of sand the color of wheat. Rollers creamed in to lose themselves in a mess of suds, leaving the beach washed and shining. David had forgotten how loud, how insistent an interrupter the sea could be.
Halfway down the sands lay a round, flat rock. Juliet sat down on it, facing the horizon, and waited until David had settled beside her before she spoke again.
“You made it, then.” She kept her face to the front, but he was aware of her eying him surreptitiously. “Not very civil servantish.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised.”
“Would I?” Translation: No I wouldn’t, not by you.
David knew better than to rush it. For five minutes he just sat staring out to sea, relishing the feel of salt drying on his face and the deep sough of the sea’s constant movement, like the masses preparing for revolution. An angry, impatient sound. He thought of his Nicholson 38 and wondered when next he would sail. He could not imagine it without Anna, and she wasn’t coming back….
Why did he think that?
“I’m not what you wanted, am I?” Juliet continued
to stare into space, her little-girl voice competing bravely with wind and sea. “Sorry.”
He turned and looked at Juliet then, wondering what he did want and how she knew it wasn’t her. The girl’s red hair hung almost to her waist; it caught the late-afternoon sun in myriad tints, ranging from burnished copper to fine old gold. Her complexion remained pale, despite the healthy outdoor life she mentioned in her rare postcards. Her thin, nervous face still betrayed all the old sensitivity it had shown at five, which was when their destinies had first crossed.
“I thought we got on pretty well,” he said lightly.
“You didn’t chase me, when I left that bloody school.”
“Did you want us to?”
Juliet merely shrugged.
“We discussed it for weeks on end.” My God we did, he thought. The only thing Anna and I ever rowed about was you.
“I’ll bet.”
“Your mother wanted to come after you.”
“And you talked her out of it, is that what you’re going to say?”
“I talked us
both
out of it,” David said firmly. “We thought you were making a mistake. But we decided to leave you to it for a bit.”
“Hoping I’d grow up? Grow out of it?”
“Grow into whatever’s right for you. How are things, anyway?”
“Oh … we live. It’s okay in the summer, Sarah says. People buy our stuff. The weaving. Timmy’s shoes. Pottery.” She hesitated. “There’s hardly any money.”
David heard the note of apprehension in her voice
and felt a twinge of sympathy. “Does that worry you, love?”
“I’m not your love. I don’t love anyone.” She jumped off the rock and trotted down to the sea’s edge, but not before David had heard her say what sounded like “Nobody loves me.”
He made himself sit there, watching her dodge the waves, until at last she tired of the lonely game and came back to stand a few yards away from his perch, not quite looking at him, not quite ignoring him either, just hovering, in case there was something to be said, after all.
“Anna hasn’t visited you, then?” David had to raise his voice against the sea.
Juliet shook her head. “Or phoned?”
“No. Why, d’you expect her to?”
“I just thought she might. Nobody knows where she is.”
“Run away at last, has she?” There was satisfaction in Juliet’s voice. Told you so …
“What do you mean, ‘at last’?”
“Sorry. Can’t help.”
“Don’t you care?”
Juliet must have heard the tightness in his voice, for she looked at him for the first time since her spell down by the sea. “No more than she cares about me.”
“She cares about you a lot. She loves you.”
“That’s why she’s run away, is it, without a word to me—because she loves me? God, thanks!” She came back to the rock, haughtily tossing her long hair. “Does she love you?”
The words “Of course” sprang to David’s lips. But somehow he ended up saying nothing.
“She doesn’t love you.” Another pause. “She wouldn’t have left you otherwise, would she?”
David bit his tongue, managed to stay silent.
“Who knows, with mum? She was always …”
“Say it.”
Juliet shrugged. “I heard her talking to herself, once. At night. After she met you.”
“What did she say?”
“She was wondering what to do with the body, that kind of crap.”
“Body?”
“She had this thing about her body. She didn’t want anyone to find it. If she killed herself.”
Silence. Stillness. No sea. No wind. No breathing. Nothing.
Slowly the world came back to him. First the insistent sound of the waves crashing down to pulverize the sand, then a gull’s shriek, malevolent and dark against the sunny sky, finally the wind.
“Anna talked of killing herself?” he said slowly.
“Once.”
“You’re sure you didn’t get muddled up with something else. I mean, it is a long time ago.”
“It’s not the sort of thing you forget, is it? I’m sure, all right.”
“Tell me.” And when she looked at him, superciliously, without friendship, “Please.”
“She just wanted to … disappear. She didn’t rate herself, mum didn’t.”
“No.” He remembered. “Not when I first met her.”
“You think you changed anything?”
“I think so. I loved her.” He paused. Then he said, almost humbly, “I love her.”
“Maybe. I was never there. Perhaps she … I don’t
know. She was always loopy.” She eyed him as if struggling to work out a complicated piece of mental arithmetic in which he figured somewhere as a cipher. “Have you seen her shrink?”
“Her what?”
“Shrink. Psycho-whatsit.”
David swallowed. “Anna was seeing a psychiatrist? Before we met?”
“Yes.”
“But … why?”
Juliet shrugged. “Don’t know.”
For the second time that afternoon wind and waves receded, to be replaced by the cotton-wool deadness of shock. When he came to himself, Juliet was saying, “… look through her diaries, in the holidays. She never knew. She always had these dates with G., always on a Thursday evening. I just thought it was a friend. But then it bugged me, not knowing. One day there was this phone number against the G., I think he must have changed houses or something.”
He waited, but Juliet seemed to think she had communicated everything of importance. “And?”