I skulk meanwhile in the kitchen, my hands daubed with flour. For if Dick can step into Dad’s lock-keeper shoes, I put about me Mother’s apron. On this chill Saturday afternoon I am endeavouring to make scones as Mother once made them. I am engaged in culinary
necromancy. With the aid of that swaddling apron, with the aid of the mixing bowl which she once held in the crook of her elbow, with the aid of the wooden spoon which she once— I am trying to conjure, to absorb into myself, the spirit of my dead Mummy. So that when Dad returns, pinched with cold from all that standing around in the graveyard, he will bite into his warm scone and—
But I have tried this remedy before. My kitchen travesties have only brought pain to my father’s heart. And stomach. While he smiles at me thinly for the tenderness of the gesture, my leaden and hapless scones have stuck in his already lump-laden throat …
And there’ll be no scones today, in any case, like Mother made or not. Because Dick comes down the stairs and catching me, all ears, in the kitchen doorway, grips me by the shoulders and jostles me along the hallway to the front door. The cold air of the tow-path strikes my oven-toasted face.
‘You do,’ says Dick, flinging out a hand to indicate the lock. ‘You do. I go.’
By which I gather that Dick is delegating in turn the power delegated to him. He wants me to mind the lock – me with my flour-covered hands – while he apparently has business of his own.
‘Yes, Dick,’ I say, ‘all right.’ More with the intention of not appearing to question this curious command than of obeying it. For there’s something undoubtedly fraught about Dick’s voice, and, moreover, there’s something – something bulging and hard – hidden under his navy blue sweater, held there by a cradling hand. I see what it is when, while I pretend to be busy in the kitchen, removing Mother’s apron, he quickly transfers it, first to the little hall table and then, after donning his coat, to his coat pocket.
A bottle. A bottle, of all things. Brown glass …
Buttoning his coat with his left hand, thrusting his right into the already loaded pocket so that its cargo can no
longer be spotted, he steps out on to the tow-path and turns, without a further word, in a downstream direction.
I emerge too on to the tow-path and watch him stride away along the southern bank of the river, with the slightly hunched and encumbered gait of someone walking with something much on his mind – which is not Dick’s way of walking at all.
A backward glance. I adopt an air of vaguely vexed responsibility.
But my concern is not with my dubiously conferred – and, for a ten-year-old with a fetish for his mother’s apron, unlikely – assignment.
That afternoon (raw, misty: an unmelted frost) the Atkinson Lock cottage lay deserted. Neither lock-keeper nor lock-keeper’s sons were in occupation – though each, in his own way, was intently occupied. If the lightermen of the Gildsey Coal Company had chosen that time to require admittance through the lock, they would have had to assist themselves. And if Mrs Henry Crick did indeed still linger in some unseen way about her former home – though how could she have been in three places at once: in the cottage, in the churchyard, and in that bottle Dick was carrying? – she would have smelt, with spiritual nostrils to match those of a certain fire-sniffing forebear, the smell (for I forgot one little thing) of over-baking, nearly burning scones.
What hope for stealth in a flat land? What hope for detective work in the featureless Fens? What hope even for a four-foot high, ten-year-old detective in this level country where all is conspicuous and nothing is hidden from God?… Were it not for the fact that drained land sinks and the rivers get raised; and this means high banks.
For while Dick walks, with that walk that is not his usual walk, along the crest of the southern bank of the Leem, who walks simultaneously on the northern side? Though not along its crest but, concealed, on its landward side – having first crossed the river by the lock and sluice
and, by means of a little hasty sprinting, drawn level with his brother. Who scrambles every so often up the hoary northern slope of this northern bank, pokes a furtive head above the ridge to check on the other’s progress, then scrambles, slips back down again? Who, when his brother on the southern side halts at a certain watery junction, namely the mouth of Stott’s Drain, halts also on his side; not only halts, but in perhaps the very spot where six years later Mary Metcalf will make her own observations of this same brother, clambers to just beneath the summit of that northern-facing slope and lies chest down, sniper fashion, on the frost-sugared grass – a position scarcely wise for a boy only recently recovered from a bout of flu? But so warmed is he from running and scrambling and by the heat of curiosity, and so scornful, anyway, of any discomfort the world can muster after the loss of a mother, that he feels neither cold nor damp.
Dicks stares at the water. Stares around him at the wintry landscape as if to confirm that he’s quite alone. Then he takes the bottle out of his coat pocket and stares at that too.
Across the river, while ice melts beneath him, his brother thinks: So Mother’s secret legacy to Dick is nothing more than a few old bottles … So that chest up in the attic is no more than a fancy beer-crate.
No more? Dick unscrews the stopper from the bottle; lifts the bottle to his lips. Never in his life, so far as I know, has Dick drunk a bottle of beer. Even an ordinary bottle of beer …
He swallows; wipes his mouth. Squats down on the bank. Stares hard at the river. Swallows again; drains with a sudden voracity the whole bottle. Stares. Tries suddenly to get up, but squats down again. Tries again; falls; staggers at last to his feet. Breaks suddenly into a wild laugh, then into wailing, wordless, unmelodious song. Does a sort of dance, a slow and clumsy waltz with himself; laughs again; hoots, cackles. And then, simultaneously
cutting short his dance, stops hooting and cackling, sinks to his knees, puts a hand to his belly; feels his arms, his legs, his head to see if they are still there. His eyelids have never whirred so fast. A look of disbelief – of guilt, terror – crosses his face. A look not unlike the look he will give on a certain day by the Hockwell Lode, when something inside his woollen bathing trunks starts to stir unsuspectedly. He sits, but can’t stay still, as if he’d never guessed quite what dangerous stuff he was made of, and he has to get away from it. But the only way to get away from it is to leap out of his own skin. He bobs and bounces, wriggles and rolls his eyes (across the river, his younger brother can hardly keep still either, and his eyes pop too in amazement). Then he realizes he’s still clutching the bottle. It’s not him at all; it’s the stuff inside the bottle. But how could his mother—? As a last, parting gift—? And with a confused and anguished cry – as if, for all his terror, he is throwing away some potential parcel of bliss, some part of his own unconsummated flesh – he hurls the bottle in a lofty, arcing trajectory into the river. Where, floating, tilting, slowly replacing its former potent contents with plain river-water, it sinks …
And that’s why Dick never touched again a drop of anything out of a bottle, including Freddie Parr’s proffered tots of purloined whisky. And why, perhaps, though he still possessed the key, he never opened again that extraordinary chest, till he realized how its contents might help him.
Minus the bottle, Dick still reels and staggers, still can’t decide whether to sit or stand, to move this way or that. Against a background of toneless beet fields, against the mistily receding perspective of Stott’s Drain, against the grey neutrality of the winter sky, he makes a bizarre, an engrossing picture … But, careful, little detective. Perhaps you’ve seen enough. Time to make your secret get-away. Time to slip back to the cottage, before either Dad or Dick returns, so that neither will suspect—
And so he does – slips literally, aided by those frost sprinklings which quicken his descent down the bank and almost result in a sprained ankle – and, with clothes wet from lying on winter grass and thoughts in a whirl from what he has witnessed, returns along the foot of the northern bank.
But something else happens after that strange performance of Dick’s with the bottle. Something else starts to make itself felt, faintly and scarcely noticed at first, after the plunging of that same brown-glass vessel, like a mock-Excalibur, into the river. A breeze gets up. It gets stronger by the minute. It disperses the mists. It ruffles the Leem. No doubt it rustles the holly bushes in Hockwell churchyard and shakes the ivy on Hockwell church tower. It’s blowing hard, fanning raw embers from the ashes of the western sky, by the time I get back – to rescue from the oven, before they too catch fire, a dozen blackened scones.
The East Wind.
39
Stupid
A
ND that same East Wind – or rather not the same, but its summer sibling, its winsome, hot-breathed sister (for, as any Fenman will tell you, the East Wind isn’t just one wind, it’s twins, and one twin kills and the other ripens) – was blowing one Thursday afternoon in August, 1943, blowing, in visible waves, across the
poppy-splashed wheat fields of Polt Fen Farm, blowing through the poplars by the Hockwell Lode, making their dry leaves shimmer and jingle, as I followed the familiar route yet again to our decapitated windmill.
Because though we had made no more arrangements to meet, though the last time we had met, Mary had walked away as if our windmill assignations were over for ever, and a whole week had passed since then – a whole week since Freddie Parr was accorded an official cause of death – I still hoped to find Mary. And I had to talk. Because for three days now I’d been playing this game of fear with Dick, this bottle game, and I didn’t know if Dick was more afraid of me or I of him. And it couldn’t go on like this. So should we tell? Own up? Go to the police? Because, sooner or later, all our little secrets are going to come out, aren’t they? Should we tell, Mary? Mary, what—?
(You see, even then, the historian’s besetting sin: he ponders contingencies, he’s no good at action.)
And another thing, since we’re speaking of secrets, that bottle came out of a chest, an old chest up in the attic which belonged to my grandfather, and Dick’s the only one with a—
But I stop at the edge of the poplar spinney. For though it’s gone five o’clock, though it’s late in that magic interval – three to five-thirty – in which, in those never-to-come-again times, we would regularly meet, Mary is indeed at the windmill. And she’s doing something very strange.
She’s standing at the very edge of the brick emplacement, where it drops, five feet or so, beside the old scoopwheel housing, to the end of the grassed-over drain. She stands, hair tousled by the breeze, and then, throwing her arms forwards and upwards, she jumps. Her skirt billows; brown knees glisten. And she lands in what seems a perversely awkward posture, body stiff, legs apart, not
seeming to cushion her fall but rather to resist it. Then, letting her body sink, she squats on the grass, clasps her arms round her stomach. Then gets up and repeats the whole process. And again. And again.
I loiter in the trembling poplar spinney, trying to interpret this bizarre ritual. Is this some kind of solitary game? Some kind of exercise routine? And hadn’t she better be careful? After all – with that baby inside her?
I cross the wedge of pasture between the spinney and windmill. Warm wafts of meadowsweet sail through the air. The wind carries away my first shout, so that by the time Mary’s aware of my arrival, she’s poised again for another jump.
‘Mary, what are you—?’
She hasn’t expected me to appear. I see that straight away. A little wince of vexation tightens her face. She’s come all alone to the windmill. On private business.
‘You’d better go away, Tom Crick. You’d better just get you gone.’
‘What’s all this – this jumping? You’ll hurt yourself.’
‘Stupid. Go away!’
‘I’ve come to talk—’
And she jumps again, ignoring me, as if in serious practice for something, swinging her arms, screwing her eyes resolutely; as if she’s not going to be deterred, as if this jumping’s more important than anything else. And lands, in that abrupt, staggering fashion, then sinks on to her haunches.
I run to help her up. There’s a little bruised depression in the grass from her successive landings, as if she’s been jumping like this for a good while already.
‘Why—? Isn’t it dangerous? With—’
‘Stupid. Get away.’
And then, as Mary turns her head, I see that her face, for all the weeks of summer tanning it’s had, is pale, and it’s glistening with sweat. Not the trickly sweat of exercise and heat, but a cold-looking dew of sweat. What’s more,
in the corner of each of Mary’s eyes are bright, exasperated drops which aren’t sweat at all.
‘Stupid! Stupid!’
Like a scolding, pestered mother. Like a—
I realize.
(Ah, the budding student of history. So clever at analysing events …)
‘So you’re—?’
‘Yes. Stupid. Out of my way.’
‘You really mean—?’
(So little aware, till now, that Mary can be a real Mummy, that that thing in Mary’s tummy is really there. But she can. It is. He’ll see.)
She clambers once more, panting, past the weed-choked culvert, on to the brick emplacement.
And I don’t stop her. I don’t put out restraining hands or shout outraged words. For while for the second time in two weeks reality comes up, just as the ground comes up to meet Mary, and gives me a dizzying jolt, and while as the ground meets Mary it seems simultaneously to leave me, to make my vision reel and my stomach turn – what hard and sharp little thought am I none the less thinking?
It must be Dick’s. If she wants to kill – if she wants to get rid of it. It must be Dick’s. Because she doesn’t want the baby of a— Because she wouldn’t kill our—
And as she turns again that waxy, glistening face, I catch her by the arm and suddenly scream, ‘It’s Dick’s, isn’t it? All along. Dick’s. Dick’s!’
‘Why don’t you just get out of here?’