Authors: Margaret Drabble
Such a mood could not last unbroken – there was dispute about the exact location of the picnic site, some of them feeling it feeble to sit down so close to the frontier, some refusing to move an inch further. Marcus managed to enrage Konstantin by flapping at him with his muddy towel: Konstantin hit Marcus, Christopher hit Konstantin
for hitting Marcus, Rose shouted at Christopher for hitting Konstantin, and then at Maria for smiling so smugly because the other two children were in trouble. They were all hungry. In the end they tramped for another ten minutes, towards the sea, and settled themselves down on a high bank by a wooden post. The beach was strange, undulating, full of curves, crossed by inexplicable dips and channels, here hard and flat to the feet, there dipped and rippled in lumps that rose painfully against the instep. Rose, opening the packets, beginning to distribute the picnic, explained that it was one of the best beaches in the district for cockles, but that few people used it, because it was so inaccessible. Miles away, on the horizon, they saw the two tiny figures of the men who had preceded them: they were cockling, bending and stooping in the hot sun at the eye’s limit. We’ll get some ourselves after lunch, she said, or they can while we have a sleep. She was beginning to feel tired: the sun, the sandwiches, the fresh air, the lack of sleep the night before, were all telling on her. She roused herself enough to boil up the samphire, a job done to amuse the children, bending over the primus, watching it green and bubbling: Simon, watching her, thought of the holiday in Cornwall, and the watercress that had grown in the stream by the sea, and his mother’s views of watercress. His mother would not like the idea of eating samphire unwashed, either. He was not at all sure that he did himself, it was one thing to nibble the stuff experimentally, it was another to treat it as a foodstuff, and put butter on it, as Rose was now doing.
‘It’s quite like asparagus,’ she said, proudly, as she handed him his portion.
‘Yes,’ he said, and ate it up. It wasn’t bad, eventually. But he was relieved to learn that the cockles, as they required soaking, would not be cooked and consumed on the spot.
When they had all finished eating, the children went off with their buckets to look for a cockle bank, unable to sit still for one moment except while in the act of feeding themselves. Their bitter complaints of fatigue had been entirely forgotten: so too had their ill-will. Rose, Simon and Christopher took off some of their clothes and lay out in the sun, staring up at the sky. Simon was thinking,
how like children adults are, they squabble and fight because they are hungry or tired or cold, but they lose the faculty for forgetting, forgiving. They nourish their resentments. The thought was banal, it did not quite satisfy him. What I am really thinking, he said to himself, is that there is nothing much wrong between Rose and Christopher. She accepts him, now.
Rose, for her part, was thinking, Oh God, how can I face it. It may seem all right, now, in the sun for an hour or two, with Simon to keep the peace, but if he weren’t here we’d have been in the shit already, we’d have quarrelled about the way I distributed the sandwiches, about the way we each treat the children, we’d have been locked right now into some bitter ideological dispute about this empty beach and the relative merits of Southend and conservationism and Fabian pamphlets and expanding economics and Galbraith. I can hear it going on in my head, that dreary bitter row. I am like a child, I can no more keep my temper than a child can, I can no more resist provocation than a child can.
I want to go home, thought Rose.
Christopher was thinking, she’s stubborn, but she’ll give in. Twenty-four hours of space will have been enough. She’ll never want to endure that squalid little dump again. How can she? How can she?
He really did not see how she could.
Rose was thinking, I want to go home, I want to be home.
Then she fell asleep. They all fell asleep.
They woke at the return of the children, laden with cockles, excited, triumphant. I picked
millions
, said Maria, and the boys conceded that she had not done too badly, at all. Rose felt again the sensations of childhood, the fingers sinking into the wet sand, the cockle, a little knob, its hiding place revealed by the small breathing hole in the surface above. It had never seemed very cruel, catching cockles. One couldn’t feel much emotion about a cockle. There was always a nasty moment in the pan, when they started to put their grey and orange tender feet out and walk about, but that was all. They weren’t very vulnerable, cockles.
After a while they all went swimming, except for Simon, who said
that he hated the sea, meaning that he didn’t like to be seen without his trousers. The sea itself was nearly a mile away: the children lost interest in reaching it, and made do with lagoons and lakes, that the tide had left. Rose and Christopher set off for the open sea, but they too gave up, swimming for a few minutes in a deep channel, then returning, shivering, complaining of the cold. While they were dressing, Simon looked out across the water, and saw suddenly, quite close in, a yacht, sailing northwards. It was a pretty sight: white, with white sails. He pointed it out to the children: they all turned to watch its progress. ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ said Christopher, drying his hair elegantly, staring out through his dark glasses – he had swum in his glasses. ‘I’d like a yacht.’
‘Why don’t you buy one, Daddy?’ said Konstantin.
‘It’d be fun, wouldn’t it?’ said Christopher, idly, quite innocently, or so Simon thought: but Rose turned on him with a look of fury, and said sharply, ‘Piss off, would you?’
There it was, in a nutshell, their domestic life. Rose, distorted by rage from all her virtues: Christopher, idly provocative. Simon felt a chill in his bones: he shivered.
They set off back, shortly, having watched the yacht out of sight. The picnic bags were lighter to carry, but the swimming things heavier, because wet, and the buckets were full of cockles. But the route seemed shorter, going home; as routes always do. On the way they paused, on a little wooden bridge over one of the deeper crevasses: there were two boys, fishing for crabs with a string and a bent pin. The crabs were so intent on destruction that they would cling to the pin with only the merest suggestion of a bait to tempt them. The boys put them in a large pail. The pail was nearly full. ‘What do you do with them, when it’s full?’ asked Rose, gazing at the heaving mass. ‘Oh, we just put ’em all back in again,’ said one of the boys, and smiled happily. ‘Then we catch ’em all over again.’
It seemed a satisfactory arrangement, to both boys and crabs, endowed with the repetitive futility of joy. As they moved away from the ditch, Rose found herself walking between the two men, on the widening, hardening track – they were nearly back now, to the solid ground – and said suddenly, ‘Once I saw a corpse, in that ditch.’ She
had only just remembered it, and was surprised by the effect that her words produced: she hastened to correct herself. ‘Well,’ she said, as they continued to look awed and horror struck, ‘I didn’t actually
see
the corpse, I just knew it was one, if you know what I mean.’
‘Not at all, we don’t know,’ said Simon. ‘Tell us more.’
‘Well,’ said Rose, ‘I was out here one day, on my own I was, I must have been quite old, about sixteen or seventeen, and I was walking with Jack’s dog, a Dalmatian she was, a really nice dog, and anyway just as I was going over that bridge back there the dog disappeared. I called her, but she was barking away, and had obviously found something interesting, so I went after her, and there she was a bit further up this creek, getting all excited about a sack.’
‘A sack?’
‘Yes, a sack. It was a very wet, muddy sack, and it was carefully tied up with rope, and it was half in, half out of the water. The dog was mad with excitement, she kept whining, and nosing and scratching at it. It was just the right shape for a corpse. And I remember saying to myself, I bet that’s a corpse in there. And then I got the dog away and put her on the lead till she forgot about it.’
‘Didn’t you tell anyone? Didn’t you ring the police?’
‘No, of course I didn’t. The thing is, I didn’t really think it was a corpse. I mean, I thought it was, but I didn’t think it really was. But the more I think about it now, I think it probably was. It was a good place to dump one after all. And what else could it have been?’
‘How very odd of you, not to have told anyone.’
‘Do you think so? Perhaps it was. Do you know, I haven’t thought of it from that day to this. I didn’t even remember on the way out this morning. I only remembered when we stopped to talk to those boys.’
‘It could have been a sheep. Or a cow.’
‘Who would put a sheep or a cow in a bag and tie it up with a rope and dump it? Anyway it was too small for a cow. It might have been a sheep.’
‘Perhaps it’s still there. Shall we go back and look?’
‘The skeleton, you mean? No, I don’t think so. I didn’t look any closer that last time because I was afraid it was what it was. Why
look for trouble? Mrs Sharkey once found a dead baby in a carrier bag in a ladies lav in the park. She wished she hadn’t looked, you know. She said to me, if only I wasn’t so nosy.’
And reminiscing in such a vein, it was in a way a shock, and in a way somehow unsurprising, when they came in sight of the car, and found it accompanied by a police car, and two policemen, who were standing at the edge of the ploughed field deep in consultation.
‘They’ve found your skeleton at last,’ said Christopher. ‘Taken them a long time, hasn’t it?’
‘It’s not my skeleton they’ve come for,’ said Rose, putting two and two together rather quickly. ‘It’s you.’
And at that they all stopped, because it was obviously true. The children were way behind, lagging again, poking in ditches and kicking stones. The adults looked at each other in alarm, until Rose started to laugh.
‘They won’t take me away, will they?’ said Christopher. ‘After all, I haven’t done anything.’
‘I should think they’ll lock you up for ever,’ said Rose. ‘And serve you right.’
‘However did they track us down here?’ said Christopher. ‘And more to the point, why ever did they bother? You two haven’t been engaged in any criminal activities, have you? Simon, what on earth do you think is going on?’
‘I really don’t know,’ said Simon, truthfully: he had forgotten all about injunctions and contempt of court orders in the warmth of the afternoon. He could not imagine what those two policemen were up to, standing there in a field. Had they come with a writ of attachment for Christopher? Was he about to be taken off to jail before their very eyes? Surely not. He hadn’t even done anything. The more one thought about it, the clearer it became that he hadn’t done anything, except send a threatening telegram. It was even by now his official day for seeing the children: Sunday. It seemed, on reflection, that everybody had panicked in a ridiculous way, lawyers included. How harmless he looked, Christopher, standing there with a bathing towel round his neck and a string bag in his hand.
But then, so had Mr Calvacoressi, on the television on Friday
night. He had looked harmless enough, until he had got talking. They were all under his shadow, all of them. He had spread panic through them all – father, mother, children, friends, vacation judges, barristers, solicitors, the lot – and now, from the look of it, the police as well had panicked, the Home Office too had lost its calm. Such is the force of precedent, the king-pin of the law.
They stood there for a few moments, hesitating, the two separate groups, in the bright sunlight. The turned earth of the massive furrows glinted blue back to the sky: the earth itself was blue. The police had noticed them, were studying them – noticing, too, the children, now running up behind.
‘Come on,’ said Rose. ‘We’d better go and see what they want.’
And she made her way across the field towards the two cars, stumbling on the uneven ground. The two men followed her. As she approached, the police began to look extremely uneasy: they communicated indecision. It was reassuring.
‘Hello,’ said Rose, cheerfully, bravely, nervously, arriving in range. ‘Is anything the matter?’
The policemen, curiously, did not answer. They looked by now acutely embarrassed. One of them coughed, the other kicked at a pebble. The younger looked reprovingly at the elder, who coughed again, cleared his throat, and with a note of agonizing effort managed to speak. His words had the air of being picked at random.
‘You do realize,’ he said, ‘that this field is private property, not a parking lot?’
The younger policeman exhaled a breath of relief, and shot his colleague a glance of deep admiration. The spokesman himself, having spoken, appeared remarkably pleased with himself, quite suddenly: his anxious gloom gave way to a certain jauntiness and enjoyment. Rose, for her part, was quite enchanted.
‘But of course, of course,’ she said. ‘We know it is. It belongs to Mr Cooper. He doesn’t mind us using it, we’ve been using it for years, he really doesn’t mind.’
‘You live round here, then, do you?’
‘I used to,’ said Rose. ‘My parents do.’
‘Well, that’ll be all right then,’ said the policeman. He was smiling
broadly, as at some private amusement, and at the same time giving Christopher a funny look. ‘You’ll excuse us asking, won’t you. We have to keep an eye open, with it being holiday time. You wouldn’t believe the damage we get.’
‘That’s quite all right,’ said Rose, opening the car door, bundling the children in. The policemen were still standing there, as they drove off, over the bumps and furrows. They were laughing. One of them slapped the other on the back, and they were laughing.
‘
They
were up to no good,’ said Rose.
‘No,’ said Christopher, ‘I think you’re wrong. I think they thought we were up to no good. They probably thought I’d dumped the car in the field and was abducting you all on my private yacht.’
And they all laughed, but not more loudly than the policemen in the field, for that – owing to the Sunday papers, and crossed messages from the Home Office, one about illegal immigrants and one about a threatened kidnapping – was precisely what they had thought. And while they were slapping each other on the back, the little white yacht moored on a deserted stretch of beach a few miles north and landed ten bewildered Pakistanis.