The Song House (20 page)

They won’t cut much ice down on the gallops.

I’ve never been one for the pony club, she said, snatching
them up. She could fling them at the glass; that would give
them something to talk about.

Are you one for a barn dance, though, he asked, Only, there’s
one in Shefford on Friday. If you fancy it.

Maggie thought she heard pity in the offer.

Thanks, but as your friend in there says, I might be gone by
Friday.

Aaron fished in the top pocket of his shirt and fetched out a
phone.

Why don’t you give me your number just in case?

I’ve left my phone at home, she said, and seeing his reaction,
added, It’s true! And I’ve no idea what the number is.
He put his hand up to stop her but she wanted him to understand:
she was not a coward.

Really, if I didn’t want to go, I’d say.

Then I’ll pick you up at eight, he said.

She’d watched him walk away, his shoulders pulled back and
the proud way he held his head, and decided at once she
wouldn’t go. She cycled home to the sound of Nell’s voice in
her ear, her mocking cadence. Some local lad. Going to a dance
with a local lad. The thought almost made Maggie change her
mind, as if she could still spite her mother, even now, through
death’s blunt severance. Nell’s inability to keep her opinions to
herself was one of the reasons Maggie left the village in the
first place: that way her mother had, of making her feel very
small whenever she tried to take a step on her own; ridiculed
her if she wore perfume, or lipstick, or mentioned a boy; if she
tried in any way to make herself fit in with the rest or be different
from her mother.

Maggie’s first visit to Charmouth had been a revelation.
Leon had invited her down on the pretext of offering her a
holiday job; he’d assumed, wrongly, that it would force Nell to
follow. Nell didn’t speak about it until the night before Maggie
left, and then she said something that Maggie would never
forget.

That shop was bought at a very high price. Remember that.
Remember he’s not your father. He’s not a blood relation.
Because he won’t have forgotten.

It was meant to frighten her, of course: a malicious last-ditch
attempt to stop her going. Leon was her father in every other
sense, and had been ever since Ed left. Maggie had even taken
his name. So she wasn’t afraid of that, only of Nell: of missing
her or of having to return defeated, having to admit that she
couldn’t manage without her. But Maggie had loved Charmouth
from the beginning, or thought she did, which amounted to the
same thing. So many of the people she met, through Leon, or
at the craft shop or the pub, seemed to have simply landed there,
as if dropped from the sky. She particularly liked the way they
behaved; they were friendly and took an interest, but they didn’t
intrude, didn’t care enough to pry. She was simply who she was,
just like them. In Charmouth, she could be anyone.

She tried once, on one of her return trips to Field Cottage,
to explain to Nell how she felt, hoping her mother would at
least visit them, at least experience what it meant to be away
from the village, to feel unbound, free. She was confused by
Nell’s response.

Have I taught you nothing? Places don’t give you freedom.
It’s what’s inside makes you free. Don’t kid yourself; you’re not
starting a new life, you’re just moving house.

To be near the sea, to be away from Nell: in the end they
amounted to the same thing. The next time Maggie went back
to Charmouth, she stayed.

A spasm of shame jolts through her now. She’d abandoned
her mother. She thought of Nell in those days as a belligerent
sort of guard dog, a creature like Cerberus, all-seeing, ready to
attack. It took death for Maggie to understood that Nell was protecting
her; she was shielding her with her life. No one could
blame a mother for that.

When she thinks of the years apart from Nell – nearly
twenty of them – Maggie gets an odd sensation, as if she’s
emerging from a prolonged and unhappy dream to find she’s
still seventeen, still at Field Cottage, and Nell is downstairs
making toast and tea. And she’s had actual dreams of a time
before Nell was gone, half-glimpsed moments of memory: her
mother bending over in the garden, wrenching up a weed;
breathless and tearful with laughter at some comedy show on
the television; staring into the open kitchen drawer where she’d
kept her medication, saying, No regrets, Coyote, in a fake
American accent. Maggie wakes from this sensation to a heap
of loss; the realization, fresh all over again, that Nell is gone
forever.

Maggie stands in the clearing, lost and absent and ankle-deep
in muddy water. Get a move on, Nell would say, You’ll
take root! She had planned to walk over to the Gatehouse and
leave a message. She couldn’t go to the dance with Aaron; the
thought of it – having to meet people – made her teeth chatter
with fright. They would remember her, of course, as Aaron did,
as that old woman did. They would be polite to her face, but
curious. She sees again those women behind the glass at the
petrol station, their eyes on her. Thinking she can keep out of
sight of the bungalows on the main road, she takes the meadow
path. Except there is no path, just a spill of standing water and
patches of treacherous bog. In her pocket she has the fountain
pen Kenneth gave her and the postcard of the church. She tries
out various phrases in her head; nothing seems right.

As she pushes her way through the dripping willowherb,
nearing the flint wall at the western edge of the Gatehouse,
she knows what she’s going to do. She heads back onto the
main road, ducks under cover of the bus shelter, and takes out
the pen. She writes just three words –
Water over stones
– and
addresses the card to Kenneth. Only when she has dropped it
into the postbox on the way back home does she realize she’s
forgotten to put a stamp on it.

Aah! How very cold it is. Nice and cold. Cools the blood.
Echolocation. Echo location. Echolocation!

Kenneth takes a deep breath and pushes down towards the
riverbed, opening his eyes to a rush of silvery specks, and then
a hand, an arm, greenish, dead, looming in front of his face.
He rears up in fright, choking, scrabbling for the surface. You
fool, he says to himself, It’s your own bloody arm. And ducks
down again. Below is oblivion, sightless, silent. There’s Maggie,
now, dipping one wrist, then the other, under the tap, and there
again, lying on the lawn, her pale hand raised to the moon.
And here, sitting on the edge of the chair in the library, tears
falling in big splashes from her eyes. Afterwards, he noticed a
trail of dark stains down the front of his trousers, thought they
were grease spots, probably, and didn’t much care. But later
in the garden, baffled by William’s attitude, he’d looked down
again and the spots on his trousers had dried into faint blotches,
glittering on the fabric like battered stars.

So strange and quiet. And so green. The current drags at his
legs, pushes him sideways and back, he has to walk rather than
swim through the water. And now he must breathe. He forces
himself up again, feeling the mud slide away under his feet,
sees from underneath how the rain pricks the surface of the
water and the rain looks like a song. Not a song, a musical box,
the one his grandfather had bequeathed him, when he was just
a boy. He’d been so disappointed; it looked like any ordinary
boring brown box, but then he’d lifted the lid and everything
changed. Inside there was a glass plate through which you could
see the cylinder. Shining brass. And when he turned the key,
the metal teeth combed the pins on the cylinder so that he
felt every single tooth of sound on his skin.

You should see me dance the polka,

You should see me cover the ground,

You should see my coat-tails flying

As I jump my partner round!

Standing under the umbrella on the far slope, William waits and
watches as his father wades back through the mud, underpants
grey and sagging, the hair on his chest glinting like wire wool.

They section people for less, William says, holding out a
hand as Kenneth approaches the reeds at the water’s edge.
Kenneth ignores him, grips an overhanging branch and pulls
himself up to the lip of the bank, teeters for a second, then
slips and falls with a flat thwack back into the river. William
tries to find an open spot to wade in after him, but still his
father won’t be helped, shooing him away with a dripping
brown arm. As if he were a dog.

No point in ruining your shoes. I expect they cost a fortune,
mutters Kenneth, finally easing himself up onto a patch of
rough grass. William stares at his shoes, flecked with mud and
strings of slime, and continues to stare at them until Kenneth
is away, walking unsteadily back to the house; and then he trails
him, seeing the long dark slash of red running from his father’s
elbow and wanting it not to be there.

You’re bleeding, Dad, he says, his voice coming very small.

It actually feels quite warm in there, Kenneth replies, Relative
air temperature, something like that. Womb-like. I suppose
it’s not the worst thing, drowning.

William won’t be led into another meandering conversation.
He’s had enough. He makes to pass Kenneth the trousers
he’d left slumped on the lawn, but his father bats him away.

I said it was warm. Didn’t say it was
clean.
I’ll need a shower.
It’s quite stirred up underneath, you know, soupy. What was
the name of that chap who used to look after the river?

William stares at his father’s back, freckled and soft as milk.

Dad, you’re bleeding, he says again, putting a hand out to
touch him.

Kenneth turns so fast, so full of wrath, it makes William flinch.

I said, what was his name? he says, teeth bared.

Cooper, says William.

Kenneth grunts, bending to the lawn to retrieve his belt. He
wraps it round his hand.

The one before him.

I can’t remember.

William shakes the rain from the umbrella and folds it closed.

It’s hereditary, you know, says Kenneth, his eyes hard as
marbles, Don’t think you’ll escape.

Escape from what, being a lunatic? A crazy old bastard? Well,
I’m really looking forward to that, shouts William, launching
himself up the steps and crashing the back door wide, I’m so
looking forward to being you. Roll on dementia!

And there it is again, rising up to hit her as soon as she opens
the door: the unmistakable stink of gas. Maggie slips off her
boots and parks them on the newspaper under the stairs, throws
her coat over the arm of the chair and pads through the house.

She’s had weeks of the smell, trying to endure it, unable to
endure it, checking the bins out the back and the sink in the
kitchen, standing on the doorstep in the middle of the night,
sniffing the air like a fox, wondering if it was a leak blowing
in from the town, whether she should report it to someone:
knowing all the time it was inside, in there with her, but not
knowing what it was. It is worse now than before she left to
go and work for Kenneth, as if the cottage is punishing her
for her absence. It makes her furious, this invasion, and she
longs again for the tawny scent of her room in Earl House,
and for Kenneth, the trace of his cologne on the air.

She knows there’s really no point in searching. She’s been
through the whole cottage, looked under the furniture and in
the cupboards, opened and closed drawers, poked at the drains
with a stick. But still. She kneels in front of the fire, breaks up
the firelighter into smaller shards, relishing the squeak it makes,
the sharp petrol tang, and puts a match to the kindling. Slowly,
she adds sticks of tinder until the blaze is steady enough to support
a log, which she balances on top. Rests on her haunches,
sniffing solvent on her fingers but looking at the electricity
cupboard as if it’s a stranger sitting there, sitting there in the
corner.

She opens the door, as she has done twice, three times before,
but instead of staring at the digits slowly turning over, she
glances down. Pushed against the wall, down low where the
skirting used to be, is a dusty brown box. She knows it well.
Made of wood, it has a carving of an elephant on the lid, the
tusks inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Nell was given it by one of
her travelling friends, before Maggie was born: her dreamcatcher
box. She used to keep feathers in it, and bits of string
and beads, and that’s what Maggie expects to find when she
lifts the lid, some old beads and bits of string. After she’s seen,
she goes into the kitchen and washes her hands, tears some
kitchen towel from the roll and takes it back in with her,
because she doesn’t want to get dirty prints on what she’s
found. Wipes the lid of the box, wipes her fingers, opens it
again and takes out the photographs.