Sandlands (27 page)

Agnes says I can take the day off today – which feels a bit funny when I've only just arrived and not actually done anything yet – but she says she doesn't paint every day, or at least she doesn't need to be taken out to paint, because she often brings her canvases back and finishes them off at home in the studio. From memory, she said. And then she said something about getting older and falling back on memories more and more, and I had no idea what to say to that. It was a bit embarrassing. But she didn't seem to mind, or maybe even not to notice. That's a nice thing about Agnes, I've decided – she doesn't seem to get embarrassed about stuff at all, or be bothered if you can't think of the right thing to say. Except that... well, it's also maybe that she's a bit distant, as if she's lost somewhere off inside her own head and not really here with me at all, which could be unnerving if I let it get to me. Probably comes with her living here so long in all this isolation. But she says I should have today to myself, to settle in, or go and explore without her getting in the way. ‘Make your own acquaintance with the marshes' is how she put it, which I thought was an odd thing to say, as if she thinks they're alive and she goes out and communes with the mud or something, but it was also rather poetic. And it means a whole glorious day out on the estuary – just me and my binoculars and, hopefully, twenty or thirty species of waders and wildfowl.

Meanwhile I can hear the curlews again, calling out across the reed beds. It seems to be the regular soundtrack of the marshes at this time of the evening, in the hour or two after the sun's gone down. You wonder what they're doing out there in the dark, sleepless and crying like that. And if you lie still and listen – really listen – there's something so pitiful about the sound, it could nearly break your heart, like someone whistling hopelessly over and over for a dog that's lost.

 

I saw the avocets! I knew they might be here, and did hope autumn would be a good time to see them. Their nesting grounds are mostly nearer the sea – Havergate Island or the reserve at Minsmere – but they disperse inland up the estuaries post-breeding and before they fly off south, fattening up on the rich pickings in the mud here. There might even be a few overwintering here – I do hope so, because they're so beautiful.

You know I've never been just a twitcher, Mum, one of those anoraks only interested because they're rare or to tick them off on a list, like train numbers or something. It's them – themselves, the birds. You look at the pictures of the avocet in the field guides and you think, what is going on with that bonkers beak? I mean, pointing up at the end like that, like they've flown into a brick wall. But it all makes sense when you see them in the flesh, actually down on the mudflats doing their thing. They use it to do a sort of sideways sweepy movement, scooping along just below the surface of the water where it's shallow over the mud, like skimming cream off the top of the milk, or the fat off the roasting tin before you made the gravy, like you used to when you did Sunday dinners for me and Dad. And it's absolutely the opposite of the curlews with their downwards-pointing bills, who look all solemn like short-sighted maiden aunts, as if they ought to have one of those lorgnette things perched on the top, and they move along really slowly, peering down into the water and looking for just the right place before they dig. Then they do it ever so delicately, like a surgeon doing some tricky operation with a pair of long-nosed forceps. The little sandpipers and dunlins are different again; they have those shorter beaks, straight and sharp like sewing machine needles, and they go along stabbing them in and out as if they're hemming a pair of curtains, absolutely metronomic, with their tails bobbing up and down at the other end in counterpoint. I could have watched them all day.

In fact, I more or less did, and totally missed lunch, which Agnes said she always has at half past twelve, but she didn't seem to mind and said it was ‘only cold cuts, my dear' which seemed to mean some leftovers of what I'm guessing was her Sunday roast. She told me to help myself from the fridge so I made a sandwich with some more of the nice granary and a bit of pickle and she made us a pot of Earl Grey again, which she seems to live off, and sat with me while I ate. And I said – just to make conversation – did she often cook a joint when it was just her? After I'd said it I wondered if it sounded rude, as if I was accusing her of being lonely and a bit sad, but she didn't take it that way, I don't think. She just said, ‘Mother always did, every Sunday.' She didn't say it wistfully or anything but she did go rather quiet on me, the way she does, so I wittered on about how you didn't bother much with big dinners these days, since it was just you and me and no brothers or sisters, and she frowned and repeated, ‘No sister?' but in a vague sort of way as if her mind was still on something else. So then, because we were talking about Sunday roasts I told her about the avocets scooping the fat off the gravy and she frowned for a bit longer, and finally blinked a couple of times and nodded slowly and said she knew exactly what I meant.

Dad Skyped me from work at lunchtime (his lunchtime, I mean – Chicago lunchtime, not ours here) but it was pretty hopeless. He'd get three words out and then it would freeze up and just sit there buffering. Agnes does have broadband, supposedly, but it's dead slow – even YouTube is a struggle for it and I can't watch iPlayer at all. So we gave up and Dad emailed instead. Not that he had anything much to say. He was just taking the mickey the way he always does, going on about how quaint he thinks it is, me spending my gap year in the country as a lady's companion as if I'm in an Edwardian novel. It's the painting thing, too – Dad reckons carrying Agnes's easel for her is going to be all E. M. Forster. I think he imagines I'll have to read aloud to her in the afternoons, and she's reclining on a rattan chaise longue rather than stuck in a motorised wheelchair. He was on about how she ought to be taking me to the Riviera to stay at the Hotel Splendide and not just out for tea in Aldeburgh, and if some bloke called Maximilian turns up in a fancy sports car I should check he hasn't been married before. Honestly, he thinks he's so funny. And anyway, that's Daphne du Maurier, isn't it, not Forster? We did it at school.

I told him, though. It's not the job so much – though it can't be as bad as au pairing for some pack of screechy, spoilt kids – it's where I get to be. I can hardly think of anywhere in the whole country that's got such an amazing mix of wetland habitats all plonked in together along one little stretch of estuary: reed beds, intertidal mudflats, salt marsh, saline lagoons with sandbanks, grazed marshland and floodable water meadows, and even the strip of vegetated shingle out at Orford Ness. In ten minutes' walk you can be in native woodland, or cultivated pine forest, or open heath, or farmland bounded by ancient hedgerows. It's like God designed a heaven especially for birdwatchers and dropped me in it. Give me this over Monte Carlo any day.

Dad can joke about what larks I must have here with Agnes, sipping sherry and playing bezique, and I can tell him, that's not the point, the point is the birds. But actually I am glad to have Agnes here, or
someone
here – because I'm not sure even heaven's a place I'd like to be completely on my own in, the way Agnes has been in this creaking old house.

 

I've done my first day's work, and it wasn't exactly arduous. It was one of those misty late September mornings, all pale and gleaming, which tells you it's going to be hottish later on, and Agnes wanted to make an early start. ‘To catch the light,' she said, as if there wasn't about twelve hours of the stuff in front of us, but I suppose she meant the angle of the sun or the particular glow at that time of day. Painters always go on about the quality of the light, don't they? And you could see what she meant, because once the mist lifted there was a sort of crispness to the edges of everything as if it was all newly outlined in fine black ink. I can see why it might make you want to sketch or paint, if I could manage to draw anything that looked remotely recognisable or you could even tell which way up the picture was meant to be.

Today I'd have painted the dunlins. Once I'd helped Agnes to where she wanted to be on the riverbank and got her all set up with her easel at the right height and comfortable in her chair with the brake on and her blanket tucked in, and unpacked her tubes and palettes from her satchel and her brushes and knives so they were all within reach, I was free to wander off and daydream, provided I stayed within hailing distance in case she needed anything. I had my binoculars but there wasn't much about except the dunlins, and I didn't need the bins to spot those. A great flock of them swooped in as the tide started to go out and leave the mud exposed, all freshly pockmarked with air bubbles where the little crustaceans and things were hastily burying themselves, which to the dunlins meant an all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast. They're so funny when they're in a group like that. They run along together in a pack, more like little brown mice than birds, because they sort of hunch their heads down on their shoulders and when they're knee-deep in the sludge they're all foreshortened and you don't see their long legs. There'll be a line of them along the edge of the water and they're all scurrying in the same direction and then for no apparent reason they all turn in unison and go heading off back the way they came, just as if one of them has given a secret signal or it's choreographed. Or it's like the sea on the shingle, with the flecky brown lip of a wave coming rolling in one way and then breaking and rolling out again. I sat there on a patch of sedgy grass with my eyes half shut and the sun on my back and watched them until they were just moving patterns and I could have gone to sleep if I hadn't had prickly stalks of reed sticking in my legs and the damp slowly soaking through my jeans and making my bum wet.

About midday Agnes said her hands were starting to feel cold, although to me it seemed pretty warm there in the sun. She gets arthritis in her fingers, and it's different holding a brush, I suppose, from just sitting about like I was with my hands in my pockets. And she's got a bit of a cough coming on. ‘Besides, you're young,' she said, ‘so you don't feel it the same.' Which I think may be rubbish, actually, because last winter when I went to Chicago to see Dad I was wearing about four pairs of socks, and woolly tights under my jeans, and was still so freezing I thought I'd need thawing out with a blowtorch, but Dad just laughed and Vanessa was only wearing one jumper and a jacket – but then she's Illinoisan born and bred, so she's used to it. I wondered if she'd mind my seeing her painting – Agnes, that is – but she didn't seem bothered whether I did or not. I mean, she didn't rush to cover it up or make excuses about its not being finished yet like I'd have done, but neither did she exactly show it to me or want to talk about it or explain what she was trying to do. It was just there and I could take a look if I felt like it.

It wasn't the usual sort of thing you expect of an East Anglian landscape, with a low horizon and piles of cloudy sky. In fact, it was quite the opposite, almost all foreground, with the reeds forming a sort of fringe at the top and most of the canvas taken up with the mudflats themselves. She hadn't even drawn the dunlins – maybe she'll add them in later. It really was just the mud. She'd picked out all the swirls and squiggles which the tide had left as it trickled out. And the colours! You think that mud is only grey and brown but when you look properly, the way Agnes had, you can see that she's right, and that it's also the blackest black, and pure white, and it holds glints of red and gold and ochry yellow, and reflected blues and greens, and deep, imperial purple. I think she must have used more or less every tube in her satchel just to paint that mud.

Then I had to pack everything up again for her and help her back along the bank to the road, because after that she can get along OK without a push, but she still needs me to carry the easel even though the rest of the stuff stows quite well under the chair. After lunch she said she thought she'd work at home in the afternoon so we didn't go out again but she asked me to go to the shop at Snape and get a few things and suggested that I ‘take the bicycle', which got me all excited because I was thinking, brilliant, I'll be able to borrow it when I'm off-duty and cycle over to the coast to look at seabirds, or over to Rendlesham Forest or even up to Minsmere. Until I opened the shed and saw it. Talk about a boneshaker! It must have been in there since about 1940 if the spiders' webs were anything to go by and when I hauled it out it weighed a ton, as if it were made of reinforced steel. I can just imagine Agnes as a teenager in a peaked cap and big khaki shorts: the Suffolk Girls' Heavy-armoured Bicycle Corps. Who needs tanks? This bike would have seen off Hitler, all right. To be fair, the tyres were pumped up and it was fine once I got going, even if it had no gears and the chain made an alarming grating noise. I think when she sends me to the supermarket at Saxmundham I'll wait for the bus. And maybe get some WD40 while I'm there.

The curlews are at it tonight, as usual. I went out for a walk upstream along the river just as it was getting dark, and was rewarded by a short-eared owl – my first one ever. It's true it's called the marsh owl, but I reckon it was lucky to see one this early in the year, because you mainly think of them as winter refugees from Scandinavia, but perhaps this one had actually summered and bred here. It looked pale underneath like a barn owl, but its wings were dark at the tips, and it was behaving all wrong for a barn owl, too, cross-hatching the water meadows methodically at a height of just a metre or so, a few slow wingbeats and then a glide, more wingbeats and another glide. I don't know what it was finding – maybe water voles or frogs. But it was hunting in absolutely silent concentration, and nothing much else was stirring at all, apart from when a ragged V of geese came over making that rhythmic honking noise of theirs, heading inland to roost for the night.