Julia Rochester grew up on the Exe estuary in Devon. She studied in London, Berlin and Cambridge and has worked for the BBC Portuguese Service and for Amnesty International as Researcher on Brazil. She lives in London with her husband and daughter.
I owe thanks to readers of early stages of this book for their insight and encouragement: Katie Burns, Leo Klein, Ralph Rochester, Sophie Rochester, Sibylle Sänger, Lydia Slater and, especially, Martin Toseland, who can always be relied upon to re-orient me when my writing goes astray. I am indebted to Kate Rochester, for bringing her book-binding expertise to the manuscript, and to Peter Moffat for drawing my attention to Robert Frost’s poem ‘Neither Out Far Nor In Deep’.
Thanks also to my agent, the unstoppable Karolina Sutton, and to Norah Perkins at Curtis Brown; to my deft and tactful editor, Mary Mount; and to Hazel Orme for her incisive copyedit.
For everything else that matters, I thank Scott and Inês.
The house sits at the centre of the map, framed by the Venton lands as set out in the deeds. One hundred and fifty acres fan around it: to the north, a swathe of wooded valley, tangled branches tumbling into the mill stream; to the south, gorse- and hazel-edged grazing; up and east, where the land settles into wind-washed fields, what was once Thornton Farm. But by the time Matthew painted it, most of that land had long since been lost to the Ventons. The house itself had the bones of a farm, but had been tamed to genteel Georgian proportions, and the Ventons, having forgotten that they had once been farmers, looked only west from their windows, down through the indented fields, to the Atlantic.
Long before Matthew came to contain his life within a circle, that triangle of ever-altering sea was the shape that expressed his world. Later, when he was old enough to be let loose, he added another triangle, the three points between which he ran and played: house, church, cabin. In those days, before he learned to fear the sea, this triangle seemed to point towards an exit – west across the water. Matthew sat on the cabin steps and dreamed himself agile in the rigging, toes gripping rope – a dream unimpaired by the fact that the tall ships were long obsolete.
It was Matthew’s father, the wilful James, who had built the cabin. He also had dreamed of crossing the sea. He was a restless man with ideas of escape. It had been his ambition to travel to America, and he pictured himself striding through birch forests, crunching through snow with a rifle slung over the shoulder of his bearskin coat. James had saved the money for his passage and had been all packed to leave, but he had exercised his strength of will upon Matthew’s mother and, instead of crossing the Atlantic, found himself standing over the Norman font in Thornton church, renouncing the Devil and all his works, with the infant Elizabeth – the first of his four children – in his arms. In the churchyard lay dead Ventons, their bones weighted down by tombstones, while in the church other names were remembered on memorial tablets, which echoed the lament ‘lost at sea, lost at sea’, around the cold walls. James envied them the freedom of their souls.
Matthew was the late, hope-long-given-up-for, son. His mother never quite lost her air of surprise that he should be in the world. Before him were The Sisters. He thought of The Sisters in the singular – an entity that was older and of the world in a terrifyingly practical way. The Sisters made a lot of noise – mainly a six-legged clattering of shoes on the flagstones – and moved at the centre of a storm of flying objects. Pots, pans and preserving jars circled, suspended in the air, always on the point of falling. There were flurries of wet sheets and dry underwear. Rouges, hair-pins, magazines and knitting patterns scattered in their wake like autumn leaves. Matthew often thought that if he hadn’t had so many sisters, things would have been very different: he would not have spent so much time hiding in the woods on the bank of the mill leat.
He burrowed into the spaces formed by storm-tipped trees, which he transformed into earthy dens furnished with wooden crates. He hung lanterns from overhanging roots and hid there with his books and a sketchpad. He sketched the plants and fungi around him and took the pictures home to identify in the large reference books in his father’s study. After a while Matthew began to sketch pictures of the creatures he saw or imagined there. Badgers and foxes became increasingly anthropomorphic; leaf-clad pixies appeared. James, who took an interest in the development of his son’s mind, was horrified – it was effeminate to believe in fairies and talking animals. He called upon the Crab Man.
The Crab Man looked like Matthew’s idea of Long John Silver, but without the peg-leg or the parrot. Instead, his props were the crabs that rattled around in the metal bucket at the kitchen door. Laughing saltily, he would take a couple out of the bucket, one in each hand, and, with a leathery leer, wave them in Matthew’s face. Snippety-snap went the terrifying crab claws within an inch of Matthew’s nose. They smelt of fish-water and engine oil.
James had conceived an adventure for Matthew, a man-making crabbing expedition. One evening, one of the Crab Man’s children appeared at the kitchen door with the message ‘Dad reckons tomorrow will do’, and the following early morning James shook Matthew awake and they walked over to The Sands together in the dark. It was May, turning warm, the scent of ploughed soil rising from the fields and the rooks stirring in the trees. In the Crab Man’s kitchen, Matthew allowed himself to be laughed at by the older children. James had told him to accept some tea and a bit of bread so as not to offend, but to decline any second offers because life was hard for the Crab Man, and it was Matthew’s duty to note this and learn from it.
James came with them and waved from the harbour wall, quickly disappearing from view into the before-dawn. Already, Matthew knew that this was a mistake. The thick, sweet smell of engine oil had travelled through his blood to his gut and no amount of breeze would shift it. Whenever he looked back to that day, which he did often, he saw the ink-black water swelling towards him, and remembered the elastic falling away of the centre of his body as the boat dipped into the shining bowl left by the wave, and the rising and re-springing of his intestines far up into the centre of his chest as the bow lifted. As dawn greyed over, he apprehended, through the misery that burned from his throat to his navel, that the shore, obscured by mist, was not visible. He filled with terror at the vastness of the sea, and began to understand the scale of ocean and, even more terrifyingly, atmosphere and universe. It seemed impossible that this tiny molecule of a vessel could keep them safe, and he believed quite sincerely that he would die and that the sea, in her colossal, insatiable greed, would swallow him whole. The waters will close over me, he thought, and I will leave no trace. The salt water will fill my nostrils, and my lungs, and take my voice, and I will sink. And the fish will nibble at my eyes and my flesh, and my veins and arteries will float and trail like seaweed, and my bones will lift backwards and forwards at the bottom of the sea and grind to sand, and no one, no one, will know that those tiny white grains were me.
He slumped in the boat and, between bouts of hauling himself up the gunwale to empty his stomach, prayed to all the gods that were plausible to him. The Crab Man, who had expected this, did not hold it against him. He and his son dropped their crab pots into the water while Matthew vomited himself dry. Eventually, the son made Matthew a little nest of coiled rope in a locker in the bow and pushed him in with a friendly pat on the shoulder, and there Matthew lay, passing in and out of sleep.
Around mid-morning he woke to an altered pitch of the boat. It was bumping very gently on its fenders against the side of the cliff. He roused himself to see where he was and found that they were in a cove, protected from the wind. The engine was switched off and the Crab Man was holding the boat steady. His boy was standing on the gunwale and reaching into the cliff face. When he pulled out his hand there were two mottled brown eggs in it, which he handed to his father, who, seeing that Matthew was awake, held them out on the flat of his palm for him to look at.
The gulls were strangely resigned to the robbing of their nests, and Matthew, curious enough to overcome his nausea for a moment, emerged to look up the height of the sheer cliff face at the wheeling gulls and the enviably balancing boy. ‘Why don’t they attack?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ shrugged the Crab Man. ‘I’ve often wondered that myself.’ He placed the eggs in a bucket lined with straw. And then, to make sure that Matthew understood, ‘You don’t take from a full nest. You take from the nests with a single egg, when they’ve only just started to lay – that way they’ll lay again, see?’
On the way home, the Crab Man switched off the engine and put up some sail, and he and his son sang, which only increased Matthew’s misery because he could not join in. In the moment that he jumped from the boat onto the harbour wall he experienced an ecstasy of love of dry land and a relief to be alive that left a deep impression on his eleven-year-old mind. The thing about land, he now perceived, was that it could be marked – you could leave upon it scratchings and scrapings, and in the future, centuries after you were dead, an imprint of you would remain and someone who knew how to read it might revive a memory of you. And the more time you spent on land engraving your story upon it, the greater the chance that there you still would be.
Matthew did not paint the Crab Man or his boat into the map, but the cipher for the day he learned to fear the sea is there, for anyone who knows how to read it.
A third of the way up Highcliffe is a ledge.
And on that ledge is a nest.
And in that nest is a single seagull’s egg.
On the morning of his death day my father appeared in the doorway of my bedroom holding a cup of tea. He had already been up for two hours, husbanding his vegetables, but was now changed for work, fastidiously neat in his suit and tie. He always appeared disconnected from his suit, as though he stood in sufferance behind a comedy cardboard cut-out for a seaside-pier holiday photo.
I wondered what he was doing there. He didn’t usually bring me tea in the mornings. It seemed to be an impulse that he was already regretting because now he had to speak to me and, though he loved me, he preferred to engage with me – or anyone, for that matter – in companionable silence. He thrust the cup of tea at me, ready to snatch his hand away quickly if I drew my claws.
He lurked near the door and put his hands into his pockets in case he was tempted absent-mindedly to pick up anything that might, once in his hands, admit some unsettling insight into the female adolescent mind. At last he found a safe place for his fingers at my workbench and they came to rest on the handle of the book press that he had found at a junk yard, taken apart and made work – for me. That was how he expressed love: by fixing things.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, touching the narrow spine between the plates.
‘It’s a leaving present for Corwin,’ I said. I didn’t want to tell him what it was, for no better reason than that I didn’t want to tell him. In fact, it was a copy of our sixth-form Bible, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which I had rescued from its scruffy cover and repaired with cloth binding and endpapers in shades of Orwellian grey. I was unhappy about the endpapers: I had not paid enough attention to aligning the grain and now the book wouldn’t close properly. On the title page I had letter-pressed the words:
Left with nowhere to go on the subject of the book, my father fell silent. I assumed that when he had planned this conversation, he had rehearsed it with the pre-adolescent Me who lived on in his affections, not with the near-adult female who lay naked under the blankets. I took pity on him. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘what are you doing here?’
He summoned up about a morning’s worth of speech. ‘I need to have a word with you.’
‘You’ve forgotten the sugar again!’
‘Morwenna!’
‘I know what this is about.’
My father looked relieved and hopeful of being spared the difficulty of elaboration. ‘Do you?’
‘Do I?’
‘What do you think this is about?’
‘I must be more considerate of my mother,’ I recited.
He appeared exhausted. I could tell that his stamina for this conversation was about to expire. We all failed my mother, he more than any of us – it was somehow connected with why he looked all wrong in a suit. He hated his job. When people asked him what he did for a living, he used to say, ‘I design blights on the landscape.’ Which was a conversation-stopper.
‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘I promise. It’s not easy for me to be considerate of anyone.’
He sighed. He had to love me even though I was not considerate. His shoulders bent a little under the burden of it.
‘Would you like a lift into town?’ he asked.
‘No thanks. I thought I’d walk.’
He seemed to consider placing a kiss on my forehead, but he would have had to breach the gap between himself and my bed. As he went downstairs I called out, ‘Thanks for the tea.’
Over the years I reconstructed this last day. It was not a deliberate effort. But subconsciously I gave it significance. It was as though those twenty-four hours both held and withheld my father in essence – like a moth chrysalis on the point of cracking open. When I was able to articulate this thought, Corwin snapped at me. He said, ‘There’s nothing transcendent about death!’ And, by then, he should have known. Nothing distinguished that day. Even the plea to behave better towards my mother was a regular occurrence, which inevitably followed a row.
They rarely rowed – my father made it difficult for my mother to engage him on points of difference, so their frustration with each other built up slowly until it erupted about something trivial. Corwin and I called them ‘sofa rows’ because the sofa always featured in them: that lumpy, scratchy, Victorian chesterfield, which had been sitting in front of the fireplace on the day that Mum moved in, and had probably been sitting in exactly the same position on the day my grandmother moved in, symbol of the Ventons’ passive tyranny against her. I don’t know how my father and Matthew prevented Mum from placing the slightest personal mark on Thornton – some effort of passive resistance, I supposed. They had conceded the garden room to her in order for her to pursue her crafts. Not that she had any talent for crafts, but it had been the seventies, and it was expected of her: all those poor attempts at quilting, weaving and batik – all in muddy shades of terracotta. And all those pretty, clean, new things patterned with Laura Ashley sprigs, which she sneaked into her room like contraband.
Corwin and I eavesdropped on the end of that last row.
‘I really don’t think,’ Mum was hissing, ‘that it would be extravagant to change a sofa after an entire century.’
‘It would be profligate,’ replied my father, ‘to replace something which so adequately performs its function.’
On the stairs, Corwin and I winced. Our father was quiet in anger, so we measured the level of his rage by the number of sentences completed and how heavy the weight of syllables. Mentally, we translated. What he meant was: ‘It’s part of the house.’ Which sounded fair enough but wasn’t, because Mum wasn’t part of the house. We were all organic to the house, which was organic to the landscape, and she was a foreign body. The sofa represented my mother’s failure to be a good wife and adapt to Thornton, and my father’s failure to be a good husband and adapt Thornton to her. It made her unhappy, we could see that. But we were ruthless. Our sympathies were with Thornton, which was immutable. We thought she should throw in the towel.
Mum retorted that it would be nice – she repeated this louder, hoping that Matthew would hear: he always made such a fuss about the ‘modern insipid usage’ of the word: ‘It would be nice,’ she yelled, ‘to have some say in what is allegedly my own home. And it would be even nicer to enter the current decade before it is over!’
We squirmed with discomfort. To suggest entering the eighties was guaranteed to induce a display of wrath from our father. It was the decade of untrammelled greed, of contempt for the unfortunate, of worship of Mammon and the Devil and all his henchmen, and he would have no part in it.
‘Valerie,’ he said, in a tone of lacerating disappointment, ‘you know how I feel about all of that.’
‘It’s just a bloody sofa!’ screeched Mum. ‘It’s just somewhere to park your arse! It’s hardly the privatization of British Fucking Gas!’
We heard our father move towards the door and we scuttled up the stairs. He always gave her the last word, but by making an exit, so that she was left addressing the empty room.
When I came down to breakfast the chickens had escaped and were running all over the front lawn. Mum was sitting on a garden bench holding her face to the sun, her eyes closed. I sat next to her. She said, ‘I hate those chickens.’
I said, ‘I know you do.’
She smelt of henna, a dry, grassy scent. She had applied it the day before and there was a red sheen upon her dark hair, except where it was naturally grey and had turned a sad pale orange. I considered her too old for henna. She had missed a bit behind her ear when washing it out. I said, ‘Hold still,’ and lifted up her hair and rubbed at the grey-green crust with my thumb.
The chickens charged around on the grass, straggling behind their rust-coloured leader, like a bunch of hung-over squaddies. Mum said, ‘I hate the smell – that chicken-shit smell.’
‘Where’s Hilda?’ I asked. Hilda was my favourite.
‘Behind the fuchsia,’ said my mother. And then, not necessarily referring to Hilda: ‘Poor thing.’ She leaned her head back a little further and closed her eyes, floating on a deep pool of resignation. ‘It smells of dead Tories’ wardrobes,’ she said. ‘Mildewed tweed. That’s what it smells of.’
Under the fuchsia Hilda was just visible, sitting very, very still behind a cascade of red bell flowers. I looked out beyond the combe to sea. There was no horizon: the morning mist was rising from the water.
‘Actually,’ said Mum, ‘what you smell in those wardrobes probably is shit. All that mouse shit under the floorboards. Layers and layers of it deposited there over the centuries. The better the house, the more mouse shit there is – just think how non-U it would be to lift the boards and actually clean it out! You could probably calibrate the entire British class system on the depth of mouse shit under the floor.’
Corwin appeared in the doorway with a glass of orange juice in his hand and smiled at me. Mum sensed the smile and her eyes snapped open. ‘You two and your secret smiles!’ she said nastily, and stood up. ‘Do something about those bloody chickens.’ She pushed past Corwin and went back into the house.
Corwin sat down next to me, stretched out his long legs and laid an arm along the back of the bench behind me. I made to get up to deal with the chickens, but Corwin put out a hand and pulled me back. ‘Let them enjoy the illusion of freedom a bit longer,’ he said. ‘They can’t go anywhere.’
His leg rested against mine. We shared our skin. We were tanned and dusted with gold. This dry world was a revelation, a boon: the pale brittle grass, the hardened soil, the brown crisped leaves. For most of our lives we had been rained upon. From velvety mizzling rains to wind-propelled water darts. Even when it wasn’t raining the droplets hung in the air, patient and immobile as the sheep and cattle that grazed the fields. We had rarely been away from the sound of water moving. There was always a stream or a river churning close by, winding its way, building noise, to thunder over the cliff and join the sea. But that summer, the streams had sunk into the ground. All we could hear were the bees in the lavender.
Corwin was still feeling sorry for the chickens, and was glaring at the flint garden wall. Suddenly he leaped from the bench and started chasing them around the lawn. They shot off in different directions, clucking madly and indignantly. He ran after the leader, bent over with his overlong arms outstretched. They went twice around the garden before he caught her and, grasping her firmly between his hands, returned her to the chicken run in the far corner of the garden. The others reassembled, unsure of their next move now that the pecking order had been upset. Corwin went along the chicken wire, looking for their escape route, and, finding a gap under the wire, took a stone and started hammering it back in. I went to fetch Hilda from the fuchsia. She had laid two eggs. I tucked her under my left arm and picked up the eggs. My father always said that the warmth of new eggs was the most comforting thing he could think of.
I took the eggs as an offering to Mum, who was sulking in the kitchen, martyred by her yellow rubber gloves. The role of peacemaker usually fell to Corwin, but she was angry with Corwin of late, we didn’t know why, something to do with male children fleeing the nest, we assumed. We didn’t assume that she would miss me when I fled the nest, or that either of us would miss her. Still, for the equilibrium of the house, it didn’t do to have Mum sighing at the sink. I felt that I needed to shield Corwin and the chickens from her.
‘Would you like me to boil you an egg?’ I asked her.
She looked at me over her shoulder with suspicion, her hands still in the water.
‘They’re fresh,’ I added. ‘Hilda just laid them.’
Mum pulled the plug. There was a loud suck of draining water. ‘You know, Morwenna,’ she said, turning round, ‘I really hate it when you try to be nice to me!’
I was about to say something tart when the food-timer went off, letting out an almighty wake-up trill. We both jumped. Matthew’s bread had finished proving. My mother’s face twisted and she ran out into the garden. I yelled, ‘Matthew. Bread-timer!’
Matthew shuffled down the hall from his study. ‘Oh, thank you, Morwenna,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d put it in my pocket.’
He took the baking tray from the boiler cupboard, tipped and removed the damp tea-cloth from the mound of dough.
‘Your mother seems to be crying in the garden,’ he said. ‘Do you think someone should do something about it?’
‘No, it’s all right. Just leave her for a bit. It’ll stop.’
‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘All right, then.’
It was hard on Matthew. Neither his mother, his three sisters, nor his wife had ever cried about anything, as far as he had been able to tell. He slashed a couple of lines on the surface of the dough before putting it into the oven. Then, setting his food-timer as he went and putting it into the pocket of his trousers, he disappeared back down the hall and behind the door of his study.
I was sliding both eggs into a pan of simmering water when Oliver appeared in the kitchen.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’
‘We’re going climbing,’ he said, pulling his long hair into a ponytail and tying it with the hairband from around his wrist. ‘Can I have an egg?’
Oliver always seemed to be there – in our kitchen – adoring Corwin from afar, which was vexing. Even so, I loved to look at him, his gentle colouring, the way that he was soft hazelnut brown all over, his hair, his eyes, his skin, his freckles. And I was fascinated by the way that he looked like a plain diffident girl from one angle, and how, in profile, his strong nose and Adam’s apple transformed him into a boy. There was something otherworldly about this shape-shifting, as though he had the power to vanish, but was too modest to do so.
I cut up some buttered toast and we dipped soldiers into our egg yolks, meditatively. Corwin came in with an armful of ropes, karabiners and harnesses, and I permitted myself a moment of jealousy – it was the one thing we couldn’t share. Corwin did his best to teach me to climb, but I had – have still – a terror of heights.
Before I left for work I went to make my peace with Mum. I found her in the kitchen garden, still wearing the washing-up gloves, resentfully pulling up carrots. She ignored me for a couple of minutes, so I said, ‘Mum, let’s be friends.’
She stood up and pulled off the gloves, then swept her right arm around to indicate the garden, palm up, in a movement I recognized from the ballet lessons I had dropped – to Mum’s disappointment. She had enjoyed ballet lessons. She had possessed grace.
The kitchen garden was beautiful, monastically calm, divided into medieval squares. This was what my father’s soul would look like in image: neatly laid out, not a weed in sight, rot and canker at bay, a billowy herbal-medicinal softness around the edges and packed with nutritious goodness. For a moment I saw my mother as she saw herself, banished to the cloister, and I felt a twinge of sympathy. She had been pretty and plucky and working as a secretary and had bought her clothes on Carnaby Street until she went on that fateful camping holiday with her best friend. She didn’t even like camping. And then my father had lured her in with his strong, silent, country-squire act, and before she knew it she was pretending to enjoy long walks in the rain and to share his principles.
‘Do you know why your father married me?’ Mum demanded, moving her feet into third position. She liked to punish me with sudden hysterical confidences. ‘It was for your grandmother. They all knew she had cancer. No one told me, of course. That’s why he married me. I was a death present.’
‘That’s not true,’ I said helplessly. My father never spoke on the subject, which, of course, made her sound shrill and irrational even to her own ears. He seemed ennobled by his silence.
‘How would you know?’ she snapped.
And now, I thought, you will cry. And she did. But she didn’t abandon herself to her tears: instead they rolled silently down her cheeks, and her lips pressed together against the strain of her distress. I picked up the bowl of carrots from the ground by her feet and took them to the kitchen. Oliver and Corwin were still there, waiting for Mickey to pick them up in the VW van. Corwin was laughing scornfully at the newspaper, which meant that he was reading about some disaster in some abandoned part of the world in which thousands of people had died horrible, entirely avoidable deaths because of Western Greed.
‘Your turn,’ I said.
‘For what?’
‘Mum.’
He put down the newspaper. ‘Where is she, then?’
‘Pulling carrots.’
He topped up his mug of tea, and poured out another to take to Mum. ‘Anything in particular?’ he asked, as he added the milk.
‘Dad never loved her.’
‘Poor Mum,’ said Corwin.
‘Poor Dad!’ I said.
That morning the heat had sparked a rush on Slush Puppies at the Sea View Café and we ran out of electric blue, which upset people. ‘It’s all the same shit,’ I told my customers. ‘They’re not flavours, they’re just different combinations of chemicals. The virulent green tastes almost exactly the same and is just as bad for you.’
My boss took me aside and said, ‘Morwenna, you are a bad-tempered, foul-mouthed little smartarse and the only reason I’m not firing you is that it’s the end of the season anyway.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said to my customers, chastened. ‘But we’re out of raspberry.’
The preference for blue began to obsess me. It bore no resemblance to anything found naturally in food. I spent the day imagining us all with fluorescent blue intestines, glowing away invisibly. The beach was packed. Dozens of children ran in and out of the sea. Some of them played together, but many of them, I noticed, had marked out their own private circuit. I remembered doing that: pretending to be the only one on the beach. I served ice cream, asking, ‘Large or small? Soft or scooped?’ and stabbed at Mr Whippys with chocolate Flakes. One badly sunburned man told me to ‘Smile, love! It may never happen!’ And I balanced his ice cream on the cone in such a way that it would fall off before he got back to the beach – a technique I had perfected over the summer.
At four thirty, Oliver came by to pick me up from work. ‘Where’s Corwin?’ I asked.
‘He’s gone back with Mickey. He’ll catch up with us later.’
I was resentful to be an errand of Oliver’s, but we grabbed a couple of pasties and went to sit on the sea wall. I told him about the Slush Puppies.
‘Everyone knows it’s not natural,’ he said, ‘so they go for the most appealing colour.’
‘What’s your favourite Slush Puppy flavour-colour?’ I asked him.
‘Blue. What’s yours?’
‘Blue.’
The tide was very flat, just lapping gently onto the sand, no foam on the edge of the water.
‘But why do they call it raspberry?’ I asked. ‘Why not something bluish, like blueberry or plum or something?’
Oliver ignored me and wrapped his half-eaten vegetarian pasty in the greasy white paper bag and lobbed it into a litter bin, alarming a couple of young seagulls which had perched there. They had not yet mastered the use of their wings and flapped clumsily to the pavement, bouncing once or twice upon impact. Oliver sighed and leaned forward to prop his head in his hand. I assumed that it was Love of one sort or another.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked dutifully.
‘Don’t you feel sad?’
‘About what?’
‘About leaving.’
Stripy windbreaks and ice-cream wrappers littered the sand. I looked out over the rainbow of plastic buckets and spades, the inflatable dolphins, the massed beer guts and blistered breasts, and wondered if I should be feeling sad.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Why? Do you?’
‘I’m not sure I want to go to university. I’m thinking of deferring while I make up my mind.’
I was horrified. For the last two years I had been dreaming of nothing but the filthy city where I would know no one and no one would know me. I was going to wear anonymity like a well-cut trench-coat and conduct life in angular urban grey tones.
‘You can’t be serious!’
‘Why not?’ His heels kicked gently against the wall. ‘I’m just not clear why we’re all in such a huge hurry to leave.’
We both stared hard at the sea. A woman in a white bikini fell from a windsurfer with a loud scream and a smack of pea-green sail on the water. The windsurfing instructors kept a count of breasts exposed in the undignified struggle to get back on the board, and later bragged their tally in the pub. The woman shrieked with embarrassment as she hooked a leg over the board and tried to pull herself back on. The instructor gave her a shove, one hand on her left buttock. He would get extra points for that – they counted hands on buttocks too. She sprawled face down on the board. I was furious with her for making a fool of the entire sex. She should have been made to wear a wetsuit. This was the kind of thing I thought about. Oliver, on the other hand, was busy honing his nostalgia, looking further out to sea, where the light popped on the horizon, and thinking how beautiful it was.
‘So, what will you do?’
He blushed. ‘I’m not sure I want to go to university at all. It’s just more endless chatter. Crow is the only one with the courage of his convictions. He’s going to India to actually do something. The rest of us – we’re not doing anything. I want to do something practical – farming maybe, but sustainable farming.’
‘You are joking!’
‘You’re such a snob, Morwenna!’
‘It has nothing to do with snobbery,’ I said. He moved his head and shifted from female to male. His androgyny seemed to preclude a practical career. ‘I just think of you as …’
‘As what?’
‘I don’t know. I just can’t see it.’
The beach was emptying of families and beginning to fill with damp dogs chasing slimy tennis balls on the wet, rippled sand. The sea was edging out of the rock pools. Old Arthur came down the hill in his blue flannel dressing-gown for his five o’clock swim. We watched him walk out into the shallow red tide, stringy muscles under slack, mottled skin, the white down of his hair lifting in the breeze. He waded right out until he reached a depth at which he could begin his slow, lopsided crawl along the length of the bay. Eventually, Oliver said, ‘Well, I don’t think I can just stand by while we rape the planet. But it’s obviously not something I can talk to you about. And, anyway, we should get going.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I was. I contemplated life without Oliver in it, and came to the conclusion that I was sad about it. ‘I will miss you when I go,’ I said.
Oliver smiled sadly, put his arms around me and hugged me. ‘And I’ll miss you too,’ he said.
We both knew that he didn’t really mean me, but Corwin. I didn’t mind. It was almost the same thing.
Oliver and I made our way up into town and let ourselves in at Willow’s house. A number of small children, some of whom might or might not have been Willow’s half-siblings, scattered up the stairs. The sound of Joni Mitchell drew us into the garden, where Willow’s mother reclined on a picnic blanket, surrounded by a number of her sometime lovers, the last of her beauty evaporating mistily from her. None of them reacted to our arrival. The household was so fluid that we might well be living there, for all they knew.
‘Is Willow around?’ I asked.
‘Oh, hello, Morwenna,’ said her mother. ‘I think so. I think she’s in the greenhouse.’
One of the lovers waved a joint in our direction, which we declined. I wished I were the kind of person who knew how to accept casually offered drugs. I wished, in fact, to be Willow, who was blissfully unencumbered by a conventional family structure, and whose father might or might not have been a Beatle, her mother having been a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi groupie at about the right time. Willow occupied a wonderland of uncertainty in which everything was possible.
We went up to the end of the narrow scruffy garden and found Willow in the greenhouse, spraying the cannabis crop. ‘At last!’ she said, when she saw us. We were not late, but she had little sense of time. ‘Get me out of here!’
Saturdays were always like this. We gathered ourselves up, pub by pub, half cider by half cider. We drank the cider because it was cheap. We found Mickey playing pool in the First and Last, but Corwin had said he was going to the Beacon. Corwin was not at the Beacon but there we found a crowd of school-mates so we stopped there for a while. In the meantime we had lost Oliver at the Ship, but found him again later at the Mason’s Arms where Corwin was reported to have been seen drinking outside the George. By around nine thirty we were all united down at the harbour at the Lighter and that was where I last saw my father.
I had forgotten that he would be playing there, partly because Mum, who ordinarily enjoyed a night out, was smarting in front of the television at home. If I had remembered, I would probably have avoided the Lighter. He was sitting in a corner of the lounge with four or five of his friends, playing his fiddle. Bob Marsden was sitting next to him, holding his ear, and singing in a quavering voice, some ancient song that is certain, either directly or indirectly, to have been about the Green Wood.
Bob Marsden, in the role of ‘Dad’s best friend’, required explanation, but Corwin and I had never been able to find one for him. Since my father’s fortieth birthday party when Bob ‘forgot himself’ (my father’s words at the time) and placed his hands on my budding breasts, Corwin and I referred to him as ‘Fuck Off Bob’ (my words at the time), which enraged Mum and saddened my father. There was a permanent whiff of the locker room about Bob Marsden, a sticky stench of lewd boasts exchanged and female parts appraised and compared. We assumed that he enjoyed spending time with my father because it allowed him to talk about himself uninterrupted, but whenever we challenged my father as to what he gained from the friendship he would just say, ‘We’ve known each other a very long time.’
My father saw me at the bar and smiled. He had three pints lined up in front of him, paid for by appreciative members of his audience, and I could tell that he was still upset, from the speed at which he was drinking them. My father was a good musician, but his elegies didn’t chime with our idea of Britain, which, from our remote white corner, appeared to be populated with Real People, who fought to keep the mines open and suffered class prejudice and racism and sang angrily in industrial accents of life in the suburbs of the big cities. Some of us had even been to a big city and met Real People, some of whom had even been black.
If Fuck Off Bob hadn’t been there, I might have gone over and asked my father to stand me a pint. But instead I just waved and, suddenly irritated by his sprigs of thyme and fair maidens at gates, I thought: Mum’s right. You live in the past. (Afterwards, that thought took on the force of something spoken aloud, and I lived with the sensation of having wounded my father with my last words to him, when, in fact, I had simply thanked him for tea.) And then there was a plan and we turned to leave, Corwin hooking his arm around my neck. We waved at our father, and he, mid-fiddle, nodded, with a sad smile, which might simply have been in response to the passage of music he was playing. My father was a still man. He moved in the same way that he talked: only the necessary minimum. But when he played music he danced, which always made him appear as though under enchantment, and that was my last sight of him as we left the pub: my father seated and swaying, rapt in movement.
Corwin took the lead. We made our way back into town, stopping at the off-licence for a couple of bottles of Strongbow, and at Mickey’s bedsit for a bag of Willow’s home-grown, and we ambled the length of the seafront and up onto the cliff path. The dark was beginning to settle in the hollows of the sand-dunes and on the surface of the sea but the sky was still blue. Three angry weals of red had been scratched into it by the sun. By the time we had climbed to the cliff-top they had faded away. We walked in single file along the cliff, and each of us must have glanced down into the blackening bowl beneath Brock Tor as we began to descend to Thornton Mouth, where night had already wrapped itself around the cabin and was creeping out from the cliffs to meet the water.
That night we built a fire within a ring of white- and grey-scribbled boulders, just above the high-tide mark. Once I had imagined that an ancient language was expressed on the stones that one day I would learn to decipher. We dragged long pieces of sea-bleached driftwood across the shingle and set them on end, carefully weaving them into a cone two metres tall. We stood back and found our work beautiful, seeing there a group of dancers, arms aloft, curves white in the moon, momentarily entwined, on the point of springing apart.
Then Mickey set it alight. The fire amazed us with the speed at which it caught, twisting itself around the wooden limbs, shooting flames twice their height into the sky. I look at eighteen-year-olds now, their unformed faces, their smooth pebbles of certainty clutched tight in their fists, and I remember our faces in the firelight, how, for once, the Atlantic was outdone and the fire entered our senses with the force of an autumn storm and held us in an ecstasy of awe at its destructive power as, one by one, the branches of driftwood submitted, staggered inwards, collapsed glowing into the centre.
When the fire was subdued we swam on the high water. For the last seven years our little group had clung together on our raft of cleverness, navigating a school in which book-reading was considered posh, and to be posh was a congenital and incurable affliction. We were, I think, the whole world to each other. And yet, that night, as we floated in the moonlight, shivering on the eerily tame tide as we counted satellites, the ties between us were lifting. Strand by silken strand, they rose softly from the water.
We warmed ourselves by the fire. Mickey rolled a joint. I remember the tip of his tongue as he patchworked the Rizlas together, the way that he passed the joint to Willow. Oliver was pressing his hair dry with a towel. He let the joint pass him by. He disliked drugs and alcohol: they unleashed words that could not be retracted, and he was usually the first to leave. But tonight was special: it was almost all over and he was making allowances.