WINTER GARDEN
A NEW ICE AGE
A LUNAR ECLIPSE
IN THE DAYS OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM
THE BROKEN LANDS
HALLOWED GROUND
THE EARTH MADE OF GLASS
ELYSIUM
IN DESOLATE HEAVEN
THE SWORD CABINET
THE BOOK OF THE HEATHEN
PEACETIME
GATHERING THE WATER
THE KINGDOM OF ASHES
IN ZODIAC LIGHT
SALVAGE
THE LONDON SATYR
THE DEVIL’S BEAT
THE MONSTER’S LAMENT
SANCTUARY
FIELD SERVICE
CRADLE SONG
SIREN SONG
SWAN SONG
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Robert Edric 2018
Cover photograph © Alamy
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Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Tony and Teresa Armitage
JIMMY DEVLIN WOKE to the sound of an engine in the yard below, followed by a man shouting. Devlin rubbed his eyes, yawned, stretched, waited. The engine was switched off and then stuttered for a few seconds, the noise like stones rattling in a tin. The same voice shouted again, louder, angrier. What was it his mother used to say? Only bad news ever arrived before noon.
Devlin went naked to the window and looked down. The stale smell of the bed clung to him, as though he’d draped one of the unwashed sheets over his shoulders.
Beneath him, the man climbed from the cab and walked to the door. A Bedford, probably ex-Army. Definitely ex-Army, which would account for the engine noise and the over-run. The flat wooden back was empty except for a tarpaulin and a pile of rope. Blue smoke hung in the still air.
The man knocked on the door with the side of his fist and shouted again.
Devlin opened the window and leaned out. ‘What you after?’ he shouted down.
‘You Jimmy Devlin?’
‘What if I am?’
The man shook his head and turned back to the lorry.
The passenger door opened and a fat, blonde woman swung her legs to hang awkwardly above the running board.
‘What’s he saying?’ she called to the man.
‘Another smart alec who wants me to guess if it’s him or not.’ The man shook his head again, spat heavily and turned back to Devlin. ‘You coming down or what? I’m getting a crick standing like this.’
‘Who’s she?’ Devlin shouted.
The woman was fitted close into the tight space, her heavy thighs pressed against the stripped dash.
‘None of your business who she is,’ the man shouted. ‘She’s my wife.’
‘And who are you, while we’re at it?’
The man grinned at this. ‘I, sonny-Jim, am the man whose letters you don’t answer.’
‘What letters?’ Devlin knew exactly what letters.
‘Landlord’s letters, bailiff’s letters. Notice of Eviction letters. That’s what letters. Starting to ring any distant bells in that tiny little skull of yours?’
‘No idea what you’re talking about,’ Devlin said, his mouth dry, knowing he’d said too much.
The man went to the small window beside the door, shielded his eyes and looked inside. ‘Probably them same letters you’ve got stacked all neat and tidy on the mantel wishing they’d go away. Which they won’t. A bit like me in that respect, because I’m going nowhere, either. You coming down or what? I spend half my life shouting through walls and doors at idiots like you and it’s starting to wear a bit thin. I’m Skelton, by the way, seeing as how you’re asking. Bailiff.’
Devlin ran a hand down his pale chest and stomach. He took a step back from the window and left it swinging open.
It was already warm. Not yet six on a summer’s morning. Sunlight fell in a beam across the dust-filled room, over the threadbare carpet and on to the faded, peeling wallpaper. A pattern of roses. It seemed to him as though nothing had ever changed in that room for fifty years past, longer.
He dressed and went downstairs.
He opened the door and pointed the slender rifle he now held at Skelton.
The man had gone back to where his wife sat and the pair of them were sharing a cigarette. The woman’s hair was piled high beneath a transparent headscarf.
‘What’s he got that thing for?’ she said loudly, indicating the rifle.
Skelton turned and looked Devlin up and down. ‘You think I never been threatened before, boy? And by bigger men than you. Besides, look at it. What is it?’
‘A gun,’ Devlin said.
Skelton laughed. ‘Steal it from the funfair, did you? It’s a rat gun, that’s all. And even they wouldn’t run too fast at the sight of it. You wouldn’t even touch a rabbit at twenty yards with that thing.’
‘Don’t you be too sure of that,’ Devlin said. ‘Plenty of rabbits already made that mistake.’ One rabbit. Wounded, and already diseased when he finally caught up with it at the Moulton drain. Killed with the rifle stock and then thrown into the water.
‘Apart from which,’ Skelton went on, nudging his wife, ‘it’d probably have to be stuck halfway up the rat’s arse for the poor little bugger to even feel it.’ The pair of them laughed.
Then the man came to Devlin, put his hand on the end of the thin barrel and pushed it to one side. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’ve made your point, son. Time to get down to business. Fact is, Jesse James, I’ve taken a bit of a shine to you, and so because of that I’m going to do you a big favour here and pretend none of this gun business ever happened. I’ve seen it all, me, and I know where trouble lies deepest and where it blows away on the first wind. And bear in mind I’m talking about your trouble here, boy, not mine.’
Devlin lowered the rifle. ‘It’s not even six o’clock,’ he said.
‘Ten past. What’s that got to do with anything? Besides, best time of day for this kind of work. You have worked out, I suppose, that I’m here on behalf of Harrap to evict you.’
‘Evict?’
‘Don’t push your luck, son. Even you know what that means. And if you don’t, then you’ve seen it written out often enough over these past few months to know what was coming. You’re out.’ He gestured at the rundown farmhouse. ‘By order of the Court. Old man Harrap wrote to you about your arrears. I wrote to you about your arrears, and then the County Court wrote to you about your arrears.’
‘Harrap said when he rented me the place that I’d get good pasture on the bottom half,’ Devlin said. ‘I was going to let it on.’ It was a pointless, futile argument, and he knew this before he’d finished speaking.
‘Not my problem,’ Skelton said. ‘Besides, look at you. Since when were you a farmer? None of you Devlins were ever farmers. You might have played at it, once, but that’s all. What, you think good pasture just grows and the money pours in on the back of a bit of cutting now and then?’
‘Harrap said—’
‘Don’t matter one jot what Harrap did or didn’t say. You were the one who signed the lease on the place and he’s the one still shy five months’ rent.’
‘I was going to pay him—’
‘When the cows came home. You already said.’
Beyond the man, in the lorry, the woman slid heavily from her seat on to the running board and then to the ground. ‘Just tell him to go, and have done with it,’ she shouted to her husband.
‘She’s right,’ Skelton said. ‘I’m not here to argue the toss. I’m here because I’ve got a legal duty to throw you out and then to retrieve goods to cover all costs and—’
‘Costs? What costs?’
‘“What costs?” he says. What costs? Well, for a start there’s the unpaid rent, then there’s the costs of the Court, the costs of old man Harrap’s solicitor’s clerk, and then my costs in coming all this way out here to waste my fucking breath in telling you all this and to carry out my legal, Court-sanctioned duties. All of which, incidentally, you would already have known if you’d opened even one of them fucking letters.’
Devlin considered all this. He had known it was coming, but had not expected it to come at six o’clock on a summer’s morning. He usually woke around eleven and got up an hour or two later.
Skelton’s wife came to him. She wore heels and walked unsteadily over the cobbled yard.
‘Why don’t he put that thing right down?’ she said, nodding to the rifle Devlin still held.
‘He won’t fire it,’ Skelton said. ‘Peacetime hero, that’s all he is.’
The rifle felt like a toy in Devlin’s hands.
‘He’s let the place go something rotten,’ the woman said. She looked around her and pulled a face at everything she saw.
Lines of tall grass and overgrown nettles and dock grew along every building. Windows were broken. The door hung off the barn, and its tile roof sagged along its entire length.
‘Too busy shooting rabbits, probably,’ Skelton said.
‘Since when was he a farmer?’ the woman said. ‘None of them Devlins ever amounted to anything.’
‘We already done that bit,’ Skelton said.
Devlin thought he detected a note of lukewarm sympathy in the man’s voice.
‘Why don’t you go back to the cab?’ Skelton said to his wife. ‘Me and Al Capone here just need a few words in private.’
The remark angered the woman. She started walking away, but then stopped and turned back to face them. She looked directly at Devlin and grinned.
‘I only came to see what this one looked like,’ she said, her smile growing. ‘You do realize that this was the mouthy little bastard that knocked up Mary Collet’s youngest, Barbara. Kid was born two months back, a girl.’
‘You sure about that?’ Skelton said. ‘Don’t look as though he’s got it in him. You sure? She’s ripe enough, I’ll give you that. Word is, she gets about a bit. Flighty. It could be anybody’s.’
‘She’s lying,’ Devlin said.
‘You watch your mouth,’ Skelton said.
‘Not her,’ Devlin said. ‘The Collet girl. And that bitch of a mother. Besides, it wasn’t me. Last I heard, it was a man from Wisbech way. You seen the colour of my hair, my eyes? Well? You want to take a closer look at the kid. Pound to a penny neither of you got the first idea about its eyes.’
A baby girl. Two months. The first Devlin had heard.
Skelton and his wife exchanged a glance.
‘He’s got a point,’ Skelton said.
‘It’s science,’ Devlin said. ‘The eye-colour thing. Medical. You want to get your facts straight before you start accusing people of things.’
Skelton took out a cloth and wiped his face. Then he held open the jacket he wore to reveal a brown envelope.
What else was it Devlin’s mother used to say? And if it is bad news arriving before noon, then it’ll come in brown.
‘This is for me to give to you.’ Skelton pushed the envelope into Devlin’s free hand.
‘Telling me what?’
‘Telling you what you’ve long since known and expected. Besides, I know all about you – I make it my business. You’re a man who won’t be told.’ He flicked the envelope. ‘It’s to inform you that I’ve been here and that I’ve carried out my designated duty and kicked you out on your arse.’
‘And all the other stuff?’
‘What other stuff?’
‘“Goods to the value” stuff.’
‘I’ll take whatever I can find and then let those bastards at the Lynn auction house sell it off cheap to everybody who knows what you’ve been up to here these past months.’
It had never been Devlin’s intention to become a farmer. All he’d wanted was somewhere to live and to settle himself for a few months. He’d known the day he’d arrived at the place – a walk of two miles from the nearest bus stop; one service a day except Sundays in either direction – that nothing would ever come of it. And he’d been proved right.
‘There’s nothing in there,’ he said, motioning to the building behind him.
‘Oh, there’s always something,’ Skelton said. ‘I took all the clothes from a defaulter in Whaplode last week. Rag value. Just about covered the diesel, but it was something.’ He looked around him at the dilapidated buildings. ‘You’ve probably got some bits and pieces of equipment worth a few quid to somebody.’
‘All here when I came,’ Devlin said. ‘Harrap’s.’
Skelton spat again, waving a hand at the corn flies gathering close to his face. ‘I thought the old bastard was just that little bit too keen to get you out.’
‘What?’ his wife said.
‘Told me we could sort out all the reimbursements later.’
‘You could have this,’ Devlin said, raising the rifle.
‘That? Scrap metal. Besides, I got a box full of real guns and rifles already.’
‘Go in and have a look round if you don’t believe me,’ Devlin said. ‘I brought nothing with me. Nothing to bring.’
It was a victory, of sorts, and for the first time during their encounter, Devlin felt pleased with himself.
‘He thinks he’s got one over on you,’ Skelton’s wife said. ‘And I’m telling you here and now – Mary Collet will swear in a Court of Law that he’s the father.’
But that was the mother, not the daughter, and Devlin sensed his second small victory.
‘And once she knows you’re out on your ear,’ the woman went on, ‘she’ll send one of her boys – or perhaps all three of them – to keep you moving on. By all accounts, you’re a nasty little piece of work and nobody will shed any tears when you pack up and disappear.’
Devlin raised the barrel of the rifle until it was pointing at her face.
‘You should have left her at home,’ he said to Skelton. ‘Where she belongs.’
‘You going to let him talk to me like that?’ the woman said.
‘I was talking to him,’ Devlin said.
Skelton rubbed his unshaved chin and sighed. ‘You know where all this is going, boy?’
‘No, you tell me. Where is all this going?’
‘Well, the way things stand, straight back to the Court and the magistrate who signed Harrap’s eviction order in the first place. One thing you should have learned by now – you don’t ever get to turn your back on debt. I suppose that comes of you being a Devlin. And before anything even gets anywhere near the magistrate, it goes first to the police over in Boston, Spalding and Lynn. You don’t know it, but you just made everything that much worse for yourself. There’s always something to seize against a debt.’
‘The police?’ Devlin said.
‘Now he’s listening,’ the woman said. ‘Now you’ve got his attention.’
‘What have they got to do with anything?’ Devlin said. ‘You said it was between me and Harrap.’
‘Never said any such thing. You owe money. And if there’s something else that should have penetrated that thick skull of yours by now, then it’s the simple fact that the law is always on the side of money and them what has it and them what’s owed it. Always has been, always will be. Harrap’s got it and he’s owed it. And he’s got some big friends, that man.’
‘The law won’t waste its time on me,’ Devlin said.
Skelton laughed. ‘Oh, you’d be surprised what they waste their time on.’ His face was slick with sweat again. ‘Look, we’re the only ones wasting time here. You just pay me something on account – one month’s rent, say – and all this can be pushed back into the paperwork. I’ll stick my claim in to Harrap and then he can take it back to the Court. Pay nothing and we’re all on a different path completely. Pay nothing and even if—’
‘Assault with a deadly weapon,’ the woman shouted suddenly, surprising them both.
‘What?’ Devlin said.
‘You heard me. You’re still waving the thing around. Always gets them moving a bit faster – the police and the Courts – if there are one or two other charges to tack on, especially charges concerning weapons.’
‘I haven’t even fired it,’ Devlin said.
‘Not the point. You still threatened us both with it.’
‘Hardly,’ Skelton said, seeming to surprise himself with the word in Devlin’s defence.
Angry at the woman’s interventions, especially after all she’d said before, and now that the encounter was surely coming to its end, Devlin raised the rifle and jabbed it towards her.
Uncertain what was happening, Skelton said, ‘Don’t be stupid, son. You got all the letters. Truth be told, you probably even read them and started to work things out. You brought all this on yourself. The last thing you want to be doing now is waving that thing in people’s faces. Ask me, you’re your own worst enemy.’
‘He don’t need you to tell him that,’ his wife said.
Devlin almost laughed, and he slowly swung the rifle from the woman to her husband.
Seeing this, Skelton shook his head and said, ‘Go on then, son, do us all a big favour and pull the trigger.’ He spread his arms, opening the front of his jacket.
‘For God’s sake, don’t encourage him,’ his wife shouted.
‘He won’t fire,’ Skelton said. ‘He’s not got that in him, either. In fact, I doubt if he ever—’
And before the man could say any more, Devlin raised the rifle a few inches and pulled the trigger and Skelton shouted and clutched the top of his arm.
‘The little bastard’s only gone and shot me,’ he said. He inspected the cloth of his jacket and shirt and then the palm of his hand for any sign of blood.
‘He drawn any blood?’ his wife said.
‘Not that I can see.’
It seemed yet another insult to Devlin.
‘He still fired it. He still threatened you and then aimed it and fired it.’
‘Shut up,’ Skelton shouted at her.
There was a moment of silence.
‘What?’ the woman said eventually.
Skelton pulled a finger from beneath his armpit. The faintest smear of red. ‘He did, he shot me. That’s a first.’
‘And there’ll be a hole. Two holes,’ the woman said.
‘What?’
‘In your jacket, your shirt.’
Skelton took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeve. The small-calibre bullet had grazed him. Nothing had entered his flesh.
‘I can feel it,’ he said. ‘The bullet. In my shirt. You stupid, vicious little bastard. You think the law are going to ignore something like this? I was giving you a chance up until this, but now you’ve got everything you deserve coming to you.’ He spat on his finger and wiped his small wound. Then he rolled down his sleeve and put on his jacket.
The man and the woman went back to the lorry and climbed inside. Skelton shouted for his struggling wife to get a fucking move on.
Beside the doorway, Devlin propped the rifle by his leg and raised his arm to wave at them. And he stood like that, still waving, until the lorry left the yard and turned back along the top of the embankment in the direction of the Spalding road.
HE CAME BACK to the abandoned tin chapel at the end of the Bystall Bank road. It was another hot day and he carried a sack. Sweat ran in circles beneath his eyes and in lines across his cheeks to his chin. He stopped at the first sight of the sea beyond the road. All around him boundaries were lost and the sea, land and sky were confused in a shimmer of heat haze.
A distant figure stood at the chapel wall and Devlin dropped his sack and crouched behind a low bank of levelled thorn. It was unlikely that the man would have seen him from that distance. A few sheep grazed the open marsh on either side of the isolated building.
Devlin lit a cigarette and lay back, careful not to let the smoke form above him.
When he looked ten minutes later, the figure was gone. Devlin searched all around him, but saw nothing. The dry clay where he lay stained his clothing and he brushed at this, but to little effect.
He waited a few minutes longer, then picked up the sack and continued towards the chapel. The disused path ended as he walked and the marsh grass felt soft beneath his boots. The sheep raised their heads to watch him, but none of them was alarmed by his sudden presence among them.
He waited again at the toppled fencing which had once marked out a small graveyard and searched the open land beyond for whoever might have been there. The high sun was reflected in the remains of the chapel’s only window, most of which was broken and gone.
The grass between where he stood and the chapel door had been recently cut. When he’d left the building six hours earlier, the stems had risen to his knees; now everything was flat and drying.
He went to the seaward side of the building and pushed at a piece of loose sheeting to let himself inside. At the height of the day, the place was like an oven, and even now, late in the afternoon, it remained uncomfortably warm. Throughout the night, the tin walls and roof cracked and ticked as the flimsy structure cooled.
He went to one of the few remaining benches and stretched out on this. A lidless drum full of water stood beside the simple pulpit. Devlin dipped a jar into the drum and poured the water over his face, repeating this several times before examining the jar and drinking from it.
‘I knew it would be somebody.’ The voice came from the door end of the chapel.
Devlin froze, and then continued drinking. ‘It’s always somebody or other,’ he said. He turned slowly to see an old man holding a scythe, its blade on the floor between his feet.
‘I saw you coming along the sea road. You saw me at the grass and so you stopped. You waited and smoked. Then you thought I’d gone, so you come on.’ The man came to another of the benches and lowered himself on to it. ‘Old bones,’ he said. He propped the scythe against the wall.
‘Who are you, then?’ Devlin said. ‘Old Father Time?’
‘I’ve heard that said often enough. That or the Grim Reaper. Take your pick. I keep an eye on the place, that’s all.’
‘What for? Been deserted for as long as anybody can remember.’
‘Fourteen years, not that long. Nineteen forty. Wartime regulations. Cleared the congregation out to Friskney or Wrangle. Happy to go, most of them.’
‘So why bother now?’
‘My father used to preach here. My mother was treasurer for the Chapel Guild. She was baptized in the sea here. Name’s Samuel. I was supposed to inherit wisdom.’
‘I see,’ Devlin said. He didn’t, not really.
The old man half raised his hand and then lowered it. Then he indicated the jar Devlin still held. ‘I wouldn’t mind a taste of that.’
Devlin refilled the jar and went to him.
‘It’s warm,’ Samuel said.
‘What were you expecting?’
Samuel shrugged and went on drinking, handing the jar back to Devlin to fill again. Water ran down his chin on to the vest he wore.
‘You got one of them fags going begging?’
Devlin gave him one and lit another for himself.
‘Where you get your tobacco?’ Samuel said.
‘Scrounged, mostly.’
‘Tastes it.’
Devlin shook his head at the remark.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Smith,’ Devlin said. He tapped his nose. ‘Keep that out.’
‘I had three brothers,’ Samuel said. ‘Solomon, Amos and Isaiah.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing. I was just saying. How long you been sleeping here?’
‘Who says I’m sleeping here? Hardly a hotel, is it?’
‘That’s your blanket pushed up the back. The place is full of empty tins, bottles and ash. Somebody’s sleeping here, and I’m guessing by the state of you that it’s you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Devlin said. He brushed again at the clay on his legs and arms. ‘It’s only a bit of mud.’
‘And the rest,’ Samuel said. ‘Don’t worry, son, I know when to keep it buttoned. You’re on hard times, that’s all, and we’ve all known them.’
Devlin wanted to tell him that he’d got it all wrong. ‘Hard times all round,’ he said.
Three weeks had passed since he’d left the Harrap place. And in all that time, no one had come looking for him. All of Skelton’s threats had evaporated into thin air.
On the day he’d gone, he’d walked seven miles; the next, four. He’d considered following the Witham to Tattershall and landing at his sister’s place. But he hadn’t seen the woman for three years, and he doubted her husband hated him any less for all that passed time. Absence and the heart and all that. And so instead he’d turned at Boston and followed the signs for Wainfleet. At the end of the second day he’d fallen asleep in a sluice shed, and when he’d woken he’d seen the chapel in the distance, remembered it from his solitary Sunday-school visit as a child, and had come to it as though it were a sign, a beckoning, comfortable home.
The smoke from the cigarettes filled the warm air above the two men and was marbled in the dim light. In Devlin’s mind, he had left Harrap’s of his own free will. No one had followed him and no one was looking. The tie was severed and that was all that mattered. And every day that passed convinced him further of this. That bastard of a bailiff had said nothing to nobody. And certainly not about his scratched arm. And why hadn’t he said anything? Because he’d be a laughing-stock, that’s why; stood to reason. You could get injured worse than that any night of the week in any bar between Grantham and Lynn. And besides, he probably wasn’t even supposed to have had that fat tart of a wife in tow. Probably breaking half a dozen regulations just by having her stick her nose into the official proceedings.
‘Soldiers,’ the old man said unexpectedly, drawing Devlin back to him.
‘What about them?’
‘They’ve had it harder than most. Do your bit, did you?’
Devlin nodded.
‘You hardly look of an age.’
‘I’m twenty-nine,’ Devlin said, making his own quick calculation.
‘Where were you?’
‘Germany. Crossing of the Rhine. You heard about that, I suppose?’
‘Heard about it all, one way or another. You settle to anything since?’
Devlin leaned forward, his head low, his eyes on the floor. ‘You ask a lot of questions,’ he said.
‘I suppose I do. It’s not even as though I don’t already know the answers to most of them. I’m sixty-nine. If I don’t know it all by now, when will I? You’re here, aren’t you? As far as I can see, all you’ve got to show for the past nine years is a blanket, the clothes you’re stood up in and whatever else you’re humping around in that sack.’ He nodded at the sack still standing beside the loose panel.
‘Potatoes, mostly,’ Devlin said.
‘Be the size of peas this time of year.’
‘They are.’
Neither man spoke for a moment.
‘I look after the sheep,’ Samuel said eventually. ‘Out on the marsh. Lambing time. Used to be a full-time job before the war came along. Now they only want me at lambing, and sometimes to help at the markets. There’s still every shortage you’d care to mention and yet the price of mutton is half what it was ten years ago. It makes no sense. Or if it does, then it makes no sense to me.’ He paused and looked away from Devlin. ‘You get any idea about touching one of them and I’d be obliged to bring the law to you.’
‘Everybody threatens the same.’
‘Perhaps, but I’m serious. There’s still a Police House in Wainfleet. They’d be here in the hour.’
‘But only once you’d spent three hours walking to get them,’ Devlin said.
‘There is that. What, and you’d be long gone by then?’
‘What do you think? Stop worrying. Killing a sheep – more trouble than it’s worth. Not at today’s prices.’
It was a joke and Samuel smiled. ‘My daughter’s eldest was out there. Italy. Killed. You can’t begin to imagine the grief that landed on us all. Buried over there. She hasn’t so much as laid a bunch of flowers on his grave. Imagine that. Nineteen, he was. Same as you, probably, when you did your bit. Grief like you was living in a constant storm of wind and rain. A year to the day, she tried to kill herself. Cut her wrist. Boston hospital for two months. They wanted to move her to a place towards Gainsborough, but I told them I wasn’t having any of that. Been looking after her more or less ever since. Her husband – call him that – went off with a woman from Grantham way. Biggest waste of space I ever knew.’
‘You hear it a lot,’ Devlin said, as though he too had a tale as dark and as all-consuming waiting to be told.
‘I suppose you do,’ Samuel said. ‘I cut the grass over at Saint Margaret’s, and once a fortnight at Saint Mary’s. Summer work, mostly. The winters are long.’
The names meant nothing to Devlin.
‘Keep yourself busy, that’s the main thing.’
‘If you say so,’ Devlin said.
‘Not exactly the life and soul, are you?’
‘And you are?’
Samuel laughed again. ‘No, I don’t suppose I am, come to think of it. Overrated, happiness.’ He handed the empty jar back to Devlin. ‘I wouldn’t mind another.’
Devlin fetched him more water.
‘What will you do?’
‘Do?’ Devlin said.
‘When you leave here. I don’t suppose you’re planning to live here for ever.’
‘I’m waiting to see what turns up,’ Devlin said.
‘Oh, that always happens. Good or ill, something always turns up. Good or ill, there’s always something coming along the road towards you. I suppose all your plans are gone. My daughter’s boy, he wanted to be an engineer. Studying for the work when he got his call-up. He said we had to build for the future. Every word he said, you could believe in. When he was killed, all that went with him. Her, me, everybody. Each time I go out, I tell her when I’ll be back, and then I have to make sure I get back to the house on the dot. Sometimes, when I’m early, I go and sit somewhere and wait. Speaking of which …’ He rose stiffly to his feet. ‘I ache in every joint,’ he said. ‘You can hear me creaking.’ He stood and flexed his shoulders, swinging his thin arms. ‘I suppose I should wish you luck, but the stuff’s in short supply these days, especially for the likes of you and me. And even when it does show its face, it rarely comes up to muster.’
‘You got that right,’ Devlin said.
The old man walked to the chapel door. ‘You want to draw your water from beyond the Bystall pump. Cleaner. That stuff you’re drinking will sicken you in a week.’
‘I’ll be long gone by then,’ Devlin said.
Samuel pushed open the chapel door and stood framed in the afternoon light. ‘I can’t even ask you back for a proper night’s sleep and some decent rations,’ he said. ‘The girl. Strangers, see?’
Devlin said he understood.
‘We all have our cross to bear,’ Samuel said. He looked hard at Devlin for a moment, and then at the building around him. ‘You wouldn’t believe how full this place used to get on Chapel anniversaries, celebration days.’
After that, he let himself out.
When Devlin went to the doorway a few minutes later, the old man was a distant figure on the bank road, already half lost in the heat, and looking to Devlin as though he were legless, somehow floating above the lost course of his own path home.
DEVLIN WENT TO retrieve his rabbit gun. He hadn’t been thinking straight on the day he’d gone from Harrap’s, but straight enough to know that if either Harrap or Skelton had set the police on him, they would be easier to dodge without the actual weapon in his hand. He was a smarter man than most, and certainly smarter than either Skelton or Harrap would ever give him credit for.
But approaching the Outmarsh Bank, he knew even from a mile away, from beyond the old brickworks, that everything was wrong, that everything had changed since he’d hidden the gun.
A dozen pieces of earth-moving machinery – bulldozers, mostly, and a pair of bucket dredgers – were lined up across the top of the bank above the drain, and at least a hundred men either sat on these or worked across the nearby slope.
He drew closer, until the noise of the machinery and shouting voices filled the air. He climbed the bank and watched the slow progress of the dredgers, their belts of buckets scooping the heavy grey clay from the water and laying it behind them in a saturated trail.
He had hidden the rifle inside a pile of pipes beside a deserted brick-built store a hundred yards from the old pump. Now there were no pipes and no store and no pump. Everything had been flattened, churned to mud and then flattened again. The land for another hundred yards on all sides was criss-crossed with the pattern of the giant tyres.
He went closer to where the store had been. Not even its foundations remained. A convoy of lorries carried lengths of cast-concrete piping to the drain alongside him. The men sitting on these looked down at him where he stood, and Devlin watched them go by.
A solitary man wearing a shirt and tie beneath his overalls and carrying a rolled chart walked a short distance behind the final lorry. He came to Devlin and stopped beside him.
‘Lost something?’
‘There used to be a shed here.’
‘Used to be.’ The man swung his chart from side to side.
Devlin considered the distant men for a moment. ‘You’re widening the drain,’ he said.
‘Among other things. Should have been done decades ago. The flooding, see?’
The flood had come last winter, covering a wide area, drowning livestock, ruining livelihoods, killing people.
‘What happened to the shed?’
The man shrugged. ‘You looking for work?’
‘What kind of work?’
The man nodded at the men now gathering by the lorries. ‘Labouring, mostly. The machinery does most of it these days and you won’t be let anywhere near any of that.’ He stamped his feet on the ground as though testing something. ‘Well?’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Devlin said. ‘For a few weeks. I could use the money.’
‘Everybody gets paid a week in arrears. You got your cards?’
Devlin shook his head. ‘Lost everything in the flooding. I’m still waiting for them to come through.’ He surprised himself at the ease with which the lie came.
‘We’ve been told to take on casuals. Locals.’
‘That’s me,’ Devlin said. ‘Both counts.’ He held out his hand to the man.
‘You ever done this kind of work before?’
‘Worked all my life on the land. Apart from a bit of soldiering.’
The last remark made the man look up at him. ‘We’ve all done a bit of that,’ he said. ‘One way or another.’ He leaned to one side and looked up and down the drain, sighting something along his outstretched arm. ‘See that man standing on the bonnet of that lorry? Foreman. Go and see him. Tell him Mister Tindall can vouch for you.’
‘You hardly know me,’ Devlin said.
‘Perhaps, but I see enough men like you to know you better than you might think. Besides, we have rotas to fill. What was it you were looking for?’
Devlin turned to look at the man on the distant lorry, waving his arms and shouting at the labourers around him.
‘Nothing much. I was just looking, that’s all.’
‘Go and see him. He’ll tell you when and where to get started. Tell him the bit about being flooded out. He’s ex-military himself, so …’
‘Right,’ Devlin said, and set off towards the lorries.
Upon his approach, the man on the bonnet shouted down for him to stay where he was. A succession of smaller tipper lorries came slowly up the low bank and then along its rim. They carried sludge from the dredgers and laid it in mounds over the adjoining fields. When they had passed, the man climbed down and approached Devlin.
‘Tindall sent me,’ Devlin said, as though he already knew the man well. ‘I’m looking for work.’
‘That’s Mister Tindall to you.’ The man considered Devlin and shook his head at what he saw. ‘We only take on bona fide grafters.’
‘I can graft.’
‘Go on.’
‘I worked on the Steeping Bank and then the Wainfleet Staunch at the Havenhouse Station. Dug the channel and laid the rail bed.’
‘I can check up on all of that easy enough.’
No he couldn’t.
‘Feel free,’ Devlin said. ‘Went straight into the work when I was demobbed. Forty-six. After two years’ Active.’
The man nodded at everything he said. ‘And since then?’
‘Bits and pieces. The flood put an end to most of it.’
The man screwed up his face. ‘I can start you as a casual,’ he said. ‘Paid weekly. You just do what you’re told and no complaining.’
‘It’s what I’m good at,’ Devlin said.
‘We’ll see. You got any work clothes?’
‘Not on me. I wasn’t expecting to be here.’
‘Follow me,’ the man said, and led Devlin to a caravan parked below the embankment.
He pushed open the door and then pulled a face at the smell inside. ‘There’s overalls, boots and hats. New regulations say we’ve got to wear hats. No one does. If we’re due a Ministry inspector, word will get round. If there is an inspection and you’re not wearing a hat, then that’s you gone, capiche?’
‘Capiche,’ Devlin said. He wondered if he ought to salute.
Beyond the caravans a line of men had been digging into a ditch and throwing the wet clay into one of the waiting tippers. At the foreman’s approach they’d all been sitting on the slope, smoking and talking.
‘Find something your size and then come and get me. I’ll fill in your forms.’
Devlin explained about his cards.
‘I hear that same old story ten times a week. All I really need is a name and an address.’
‘“No Fixed Abode” do?’ Devlin said.
The man clicked his lips. ‘Smart lad like you – you’ll find somewhere.’
Devlin went into the caravan and searched among the scattered, mud-stained clothing for a pair of overalls that fitted him. He found boots and a helmet, and a belt which he pulled tight at his waist. He put on a pair of stiff gauntlets and considered his reflection in a dirty mirror. He looked like a different man completely and smiled at what he saw.
Going back outside, he sought out the foreman.
‘At least now you look the part. I’m Thompson, by the way. I’m the one who tells you what to do, and I’m the one you say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” to. Are we clear on all that?’
‘As water,’ Devlin said.
Thompson looked into the water below them and shook his head. He told Devlin to join the men digging nearby.
Devlin went to the men and those closest to him introduced themselves. It was clear to Devlin that they were all just waiting for Thompson to leave before stopping work and settling themselves back on the bank again.
When Thompson finally went, the man beside Devlin asked him where he lived. When Devlin said he was looking for somewhere, the man took him along the slope and pointed to the high frame of the distant Crescent Sluice.
‘See that? Track on the left, running in from the coast. Half a mile on the right. Ray Duggan’s farm. Flooded out and never properly brought back. He lets out rooms to make ends meet. If you’re interested.’
Devlin thanked the man and memorized the directions.
He worked at the shovelling for the rest of the day. At noon the others ate the food they’d brought with them. Seeing Devlin had nothing, the man who’d told him about the farm shared his own dry sandwiches.
They worked until four, when a whistle blew and everyone immediately stopped what they were doing. Devlin followed the others back to the caravan, where they all took off their work clothes and then washed themselves at several nearby standpipes. Devlin did the same, rinsing the worst of the mud from his overalls and boots.
Setting off towards the sluice, he carried the overalls on his back, drying them in the sun as he walked.
He followed the bank to the sluice and then turned along the track. Every muscle and joint in his body ached. He was expected back at the drain at six in the morning, another half-hour’s walk. Men did this day after day after day of every month of every year of their long working lives.
As he walked, the caked mud peeled and fell from his clothing and boots and skin. The rotting-vegetable smell of the drain stayed with him every step of the way.
ARRIVING AT THE farmhouse, Devlin waited at the gate and studied the place. The fields around it were unploughed and weed-filled. Furniture and waste were piled and scattered in the yard surrounding the building. Another flooded farm not yet recovered. Devlin’s first thought was that the place was empty, but as he watched, the door opened and a woman came out. She carried a wicker basket and started pegging washing to a line.
Devlin watched her, careful not to attract her attention. But something caught the woman’s eye and she stopped pegging. She raised the sheet she had just hung and looked directly at Devlin.
She watched him for a moment before taking a few paces towards him. ‘What you looking at?’
Devlin unfastened the tied sleeves of his overalls and shook more dirt from them. ‘I’m looking for Duggan,’ he said.
‘Which one? There’s my husband and there’s his father.’
‘I was told there was a room to rent. I’m working on the drainage.’
The woman said nothing in reply to this.
Devlin guessed her to be in her mid forties. Her hair fell loose over her face. There was dirt on her cheeks. Her legs were bare. She wore canvas shoes, a pinafore and an apron.
‘You want my husband,’ she said.
Picking up his helmet and gloves, Devlin went closer to her.
‘What’s your name?’ she said to him, and Devlin told her.
‘I’m Alison Duggan. I can’t say anything one way or another until Duggan gets home.’
‘You got a room or not?’ Devlin suddenly felt weak on his legs. ‘I’ve been either walking or shovelling all day.’
‘So? I still can’t say. Look around you. We’re not in a good way here.’ She motioned to the discarded furniture. ‘Can’t even get it to burn with petrol.’
Devlin saw where several of the mounds had been scorched and then left.
‘Duggan poured it on, but the stuff was saturated. Under water for a week, most of it. We lost everything.’
‘It’ll dry in time,’ Devlin said, turning his closed eyes to the sun.
‘I daresay. Last man we had staying here went off owing a week’s rent.’
‘I can’t give you a penny until I get paid, but after that I can give you something in advance.’
‘It’s not open to negotiation. My husband will tell you exactly what and when you pay.’
‘Where’d you learn long words like that?’ Devlin said.
‘“Negotiation”? Oh, I know words much longer than that. And soon I’ll be living somewhere where I get to use most of them.’
‘Boston?’ Devlin said, causing the woman to smile.
‘Yeah, that’s right. Boston.’
She was still considering the remark when a much older man appeared round the side of the house behind her. He called out to her and she immediately fell silent.
‘Who’s he?’ the man shouted, coming to stand beside her, almost as though to protect her from Devlin.
‘He’s looking for a room.’
The man embraced her and kissed her cheek. The woman stiffened at the gesture, her eyes fixed on Devlin.
When the old man released her, she returned to where the basket of clothes still stood beneath the line. Water had already pooled on the ground around it, drying at its edges.
The old man came to Devlin.
Devlin saw that he carried a heavy book which he had so far held behind his back.
‘I’m Duggan,’ he said. ‘Any business here, I’m the one you’re seeking.’
‘The drainage sent me,’ Devlin said. Seeking?
‘The drainage. I see.’ Then the old man raised the book he held and waved it in Devlin’s face. ‘Know what this is?’
Behind her father-in-law, the woman covered her mouth and shook her head in amusement.
‘I’m going to guess at a Bible,’ Devlin said.
‘Then you’re guessing right. You’re a shiftless, know-it-all smartarse – I can see that much just by looking at you in your hand-me-downs – but if you can’t put your hand on this book and swear to act honest and decent and pay everything you owe, then you can turn right round and walk all the way back to wherever it was you started from. And after that you can walk ten miles further and forget you were ever here.’
‘I’m as honest as the next man,’ Devlin said, more to prolong the woman’s amusement than to appease the old man.
‘That’s not saying much in this part of the great wide world.’
Devlin shrugged. Another pointless argument. ‘You sound like a preacher,’ he said.
‘That’s because I am one.’
Devlin doubted this. ‘Ordained?’
‘What’s that ever been worth? I’m a man of God.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Devlin said, but in a low voice that only the woman heard, causing her to turn away from the pair of them.
‘The world hereabouts is changing faster than men can walk,’ the old man said. ‘Especially since the flood. The simple fact is, even honest men need to be led back to firm ground every now and again.’
‘And that’s what you do, is it – show them the way, all those lost and wandering honest men?’
The old man looked at the piles of waste all around him. ‘This, all this – this was God’s lesson to us all. You don’t agree with that – I can see that, too – but that’s what it was. What else would it have been?’
‘If you say so,’ Devlin said. He turned to the woman, who moved along the sagging line, hanging out smaller pieces. ‘That what she believes, too, is it?’
The old man seemed suddenly uncertain of himself. ‘I know she laughs at me,’ he said. ‘Both of them do, her and Duggan. It’s an easy thing to do – mock a man of conviction. You and all your engineers and diggers, you think you’ve got all the answers, all the power and reckoning in the world. Well, that’s exactly what you thought and believed until the water came overtopping everything you’d put in place last time to keep it out.’ He ran out of breath and wiped a sleeve across his face.
‘I’ve only been at the work a day,’ Devlin said. ‘Nothing to do with me.’
‘Makes no odds.’
Devlin wondered what the old man’s rant had achieved. ‘I only came looking for a room,’ he said.
‘Then come in and look at it,’ the old man said. He called for the woman to accompany them and she picked up the empty basket and followed them into the house.
‘You smell that?’ he said when they were inside. ‘Floodwater. Take a house this old five more summers to get rid of that smell. And then it’ll be back at the first bit of dampness. You’ll never keep the wet out of the bones of a place like this.’
The sharp odour caught in Devlin’s throat.
‘You get used to it. Keep a few doors and windows open. It’s worst in the early spring when the first heat comes. The winter will kill it off again.’
Devlin wafted the air with his hand. He’d smelled the same in a dozen other houses. He looked at the waist-high tide mark around the room. In places, the plaster had already been scraped away to reveal the lathwork beneath.
‘Duggan started to strip the place out,’ the woman said. ‘Not much point, to my mind.’
The boards beneath Devlin’s feet sagged where he walked and he tested the spring in the wood.
‘Joists are still good,’ the old man said. ‘You might go through the boards in a few places, but that’s all.’
‘And here’s me thinking you’d have people queuing back to the road to rent that room.’