The Sea Gate

by Jane Johnson

  We shake hands and he shows me out. I can feel his gaze follow me as I turn the Clio around and drive onto the road out of Penzance.

  *

  When I arrive back at Chynalls, Mo and Reda’s truck has gone and my mood sinks. Now it’s just me and Eddie and I am going to have to grasp that big old nettle…

  21

  Olivia

  1944

  THE SNOW CAME SWIRLING IN GREAT FLURRIES, COATING the ground instantly. Olivia stood there with her hands spread on the sea gate, watching the flakes fall in a silent, drifting blizzard. Out on the horizon the far, dark shapes of vessels showed against the heavy grey cloud: shipping on the Atlantic convoy. It was all so peaceful, impossible to imagine that, the week before, a German submarine had ghosted into Mount’s Bay and laid mines, one of which had blown up a trawler setting out early the next morning, despite the efforts of the dawn minesweeper. Impossible, too, to imagine a war going on across these waters, on the continent just twenty-six miles away, men pinpointing one another in gunsights and ending another human life with a squeeze of a trigger.

  She shivered, thinking first of her father, then of the life that had ended in her own house. Weeks on, it seemed like an episode in a lurid novel, or the vestiges of a nightmare. She touched the gate’s top bar for luck, remembering her grandmother’s stricture never to touch wood with legs on it for fear her luck would walk away. Trust the Cornish to make their superstitions extra difficult. Granny had been a mine of such rules: don’t put your shoes on the table; don’t pass on the stairs; don’t let your knives cross; always leave a little food on your plate for the knockers; always stir your tea clockwise, never widdershins; never sweep out the dust on a Monday morning. You could hardly turn round without invoking some ancient law. She couldn’t recall anything to do with snow, though. It was such a rare experience in Cornwall: it never settled. This snow was settling, though. She watched it in wonder as it covered a bramble runner in delicate increments till the branch began to bow. Snowflakes were beginning to settle on her jersey, her eyelashes, her fringe.

  She shook her head, picked up the milk churn and ran back up the steps to the house, aware of eyes on her from the bedroom window.

  Even so, she was shocked when the front door opened.

  ‘Stay right there—’

  A click, a whirr, and then Hamid was laughing, waving the camera at her. ‘I caught you! A princess from a fairy tale, a wild creature in the snow…’

  ‘Get back indoors, someone will see you!’ Olivia pushed him inside, closed the front door with a bang and took the Leica away from him. ‘Why are you so reckless? If anyone sees you—’

  He stopped her words with a kiss and Olivia felt the familiar tide of heat rise through her, robbing her of thought. The milk churn gave a dull ring as she set it on the hall tiles and then they were racing upstairs, giggling like children.

  *

  Afterwards, lying on her back, reduced to liquid happiness, Olivia watched the snow drifting past the window. It was coming down in great, twisting curtains of white. Perhaps we’ll be cut off, she thought drowsily. It was an enchanting thought, having the house to themselves without fear of interruption or discovery, able to laze like this for hours as if they were the last people in the world.

  How strange life was, she thought, that she should lose her virginity to a man from Africa whom she would never have met had there not been a war, and who would never have been interned, let alone working up at the neighbouring farm, had it not been for misunderstandings and xenophobia. And yet here they were – male and female, brown and white, the epitome of difference, united in a warm afterglow. She lay bathed in this sense of wonder till it occurred to her that she was not, in actual fact, all that warm, and that despite the low, regular breathing that showed he was deeply asleep, Hamid’s skin was coming up in gooseflesh. How she wished she’d stopped to light the fire up here. But although it was made up ready for emergencies, she hesitated: coal was scarce and what little firewood she had was downstairs. Rather than disturb him, she slipped off the bed and opened the bottom drawer in the chest, was almost knocked backward by the smell of old mothballs, then hauled out the blanket. It was the one her mother had always put on her bed on winter nights. She remembered as she hugged it to her naked body the bewilderment she had felt as a small child at its juxtaposition of sensations on her skin – the rough scratch of the wool, the cool slipperiness of the satin selvedge. Straightening, she glanced out of the window at the swirling snow, then down at the transformed garden, its shapes and zones camouflaged by the blanket of snow. And then something broke into the whiteness.

  Her heart stopped, then beat rapidly.

  ‘Hamid! Hamid!’ She shook him by the shoulder and he came instantly awake, like a cat that had been drowsing with one eye half-open.

  ‘Les autorités!’

  He sat bolt upright. ‘Where shall I—’

  ‘Under the bed, hurry.’

  He took his clothes with him and she rolled the pink blanket and pushed it after him, thrust on her clothes and pulled up the bedcovers, then cast herself downstairs, where she stood for a moment, breathing heavily, in front of the hall mirror, raking her fingers through her dishevelled hair. Her eyes were over-bright, her cheeks flushed. I’d know exactly what someone who looks like this had been up to, she thought, and that made her pinken further.

  The ratchet of the doorbell spun her away from the mirror and she ran to open the door.

  ‘Afternoon, Miss Kitto.’

  It was Sergeant Richards and the man in the trilby. The policeman’s helmet was crowned with white and snow had gathered in the longitudinal dimple on the other man’s hat and on the shoulders of his gabardine.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, miss. You remember Mr… White?’

  The name seemed even more contrived against the backdrop of snow.

  She tried to smile, managed a tight grimace. ‘Won’t you come in? I’ll put the kettle on.’

  ‘Very kind of you,’ said the sergeant, stepping inside. He took off his helmet and shook the snow off it into the porch. The trilby-wearing man followed, not bothering to remove his headwear. Despite wiping their feet, they still tracked wet snow down the hall behind Olivia.

  At the threshold of the kitchen, Olivia stopped dead, remembering. Hell and damnation…

  ‘Won’t you need this?’

  Mr White was holding up the milk churn Olivia had abandoned in the hall.

  ‘Oh, silly me!’ she trilled. ‘I’ll forget my head next!’ She took it from him and lugged it onto the kitchen counter, filled the kettle and set it on the range, then poured some of the milk into a jug. Lucky it was a cold day. Even with her back to them she could feel their eyes travelling around the dingy room in the gloomy snowlight, looking… for what?

  ‘We’re doing the rounds again,’ Sergeant Richards explained, ‘since we’ve not yet apprehended the escaped prisoners, and we still have no witnesses to their disappearance. Can you tell me, miss, if your car is still in your barn up there?’ He indicated the way up through the woods with a tilt of the chin.

  ‘Yes, yes, it is,’ Olivia confirmed, feeling deep guilt at her behaviour in the hour before they had arrived. ‘Would you like to see it?’

  ‘We’ll be passing the garage on our way up to the farm,’ Mr White said. ‘Perhaps you could let us have the keys so we can check it for ourselves, and we can drop them back to you after we’ve talked to Mr Roberts again?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Olivia. The kettle started to whistle: she turned to attend to it.

  ‘And you’ve seen no strangers this past fortnight? No one suspicious?’

  ‘No one at all,’ Olivia replied, pouring hot water onto the meagre tea leaves in the base of the pot.

  ‘I don’t like to think of you here in this big house all alone,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Oh, I expect my mother will be back any day soon,’ Olivia said airily.

  The men glanced at one another. ‘I don’t beli
eve she will,’ Sergeant Richards said, and Mr White frowned at him as if he had spoken out of turn.

  Olivia put the kettle down carefully. ‘What do you mean?’

  The sergeant reddened. ‘I’m sorry, miss, I misspoke. Don’t alarm yourself, nothing’s happened to her.’

  The trilby-wearer was giving him a hard stare, then he turned his flinty gaze upon Olivia. ‘We’re considering billeting some officers with you,’ he said. ‘To give you some protection.’

  Olivia’s gut clenched. ‘It’s really not necessary; we’re perfectly all right on our own, Mary and me.’

  ‘Even so, it’s a big house, and everyone’s got to make sacrifices if we’re to win this war.’

  ‘I’ve already lost my father, thank you very much,’ Olivia said sharply, and turned away to pour the tea before he could see how rattled she was. ‘Mary is very distressed by her abandonment and I really don’t think having strange men in the house would help.’

  ‘Abandonment?’

  ‘Her mother went upcountry to look after her sick mother and we’ve heard nothing from her since.’

  If Mr White had been a dog his ears would have pricked up. ‘And when was this… a fortnight ago, maybe?’

  ‘Much longer than that – back in the summer,’ Olivia said and enjoyed the way his face fell.

  ‘Do you know where she went?’ asked Sergeant Richards.

  ‘Bristol, I think.’

  ‘And her name?’ He got his notebook out and wrote something in it.

  ‘Winnie Ogden. I don’t know her mother’s name or address, I’m afraid, but Mrs Ogden and her little girl were evacuated down here from Exeter after their house was bombed.’ Olivia hesitated. ‘At least, that’s what she said.’

  Mr White was watching her suspiciously. She wondered if it was in his nature, this distrust. How unlikable he must be if so. She wondered if he were married, or had a sweetheart. It seemed unlikely. Fancy sleeping with such a cold fish—She pushed this unwarranted thought away. Since she had started making love with Hamid, which had happened all of six days ago – but goodness, how many times a day? She had lost count – she thought about sex all the time. Truly, what a slut she was…

  ‘And this Mrs Ogden, was there anything… foreign about her? No letters from abroad, no accent or anything?’

  Olivia almost laughed out loud at the idea of Winnie being some sort of Nazi collaborator or spy. ‘Really no, not at all.’

  ‘Did she visit the farm? Did she know the escaped men?’

  ‘She’d have seen them at church. Up at St Pol de Leon, not down-chapel.’

  Sergeant Richards wrote this down.

  ‘We’ll look into it,’ said Mr White. ‘You never know. People can be very… cunning. Perhaps we should interview the daughter?’

  The sergeant looked appalled. ‘She’m only a little ’un,’ he said, remembering the sombre child they had dropped off at the school.

  ‘Leave no stone unturned,’ White said, his tone implying the repetition of an order from on high. He took his cup from Olivia and gazed into its pale contents dispassionately. ‘And how did Mrs Ogden travel to Bristol – did she have a car?’

  Olivia shook her head. ‘She took the train: Jago dropped her at the station. Jago Sparrow – you can ask him.’

  Mr White gave a deep sigh; Sergeant Richards jotted this down, then took a sip of his tea and grimaced. ‘Sorry to ask, bird, you don’t have any sugar, do you?’

  Olivia explained that her ration did not stretch this far, and the sergeant looked melancholy. ‘The sooner this war’s over, the better.’ He glanced back at his notebook, frowning. ‘How two foreign POWs can vanish in this close-knit community, I can’t fathom,’ he said. ‘There’s something odd going on. They’ve not stolen a car or a boat, and they didn’t take the train. So either they’re sleeping rough or they’ve swum for it and drownded.’

  ‘Or someone has taken them in.’ Mr White fixed Olivia with his unblinking gaze.

  ‘Maybe they’ve grown wings!’ the sergeant offered with a chortle, but his companion did not crack a smile.

  Olivia trembled. ‘Gosh, it’s cold, isn’t it? I’m afraid I’m running out of coal.’

  ‘If you were to have the officers billeted with you, you wouldn’t have to worry about such things,’ Mr White said nastily.

  She forced a smile.

  ‘We’re still waiting to hear about deployments – we’ll come back to you.’ It sounded like a threat.

  The two men drained their tea swiftly (it tasted like dishwater) and moved out into the hall, their eyes still roaming. Olivia knew they were scanning for clues, a man’s hat on a hook, a too-large pair of boots, two teacups left on a table. Thankfully, there was nothing. But as they passed the parlour door, Mr White stopped suddenly, then walked in. He looked under the couch. ‘Wasn’t there a rug rolled up under here last time?’

  Olivia’s breath caught. The rug was down in the cellar now, making Hamid’s living quarters a little more comfortable. He had made a decent job of getting the worst of the blood out of it with a scrubbing brush and a bucket of cold water, but you could still see the stains if you looked.

  ‘Oh, it started to smell very bad – from the parrot, you know – so I dragged it outside to clean it and then left it to dry, and then, the snow…’ She spread her hands. ‘Well, I wasn’t expecting it.’

  Sergeant Richards laughed. ‘That’ll take some drying out, but least it shouldn’t smell so bad when you get it back in!’

  They took one more look around, then headed for the door. The parrot jumped from his perch to the bars of his cage to get a better look at them as they passed, his claws rattling against the metal. ‘Fuck the fuck off!’ he cried to their backs.

  Mr White stopped dead and the sergeant had to step smartly aside to avoid cannoning into him. Olivia put a hand to her mouth.

  ‘What disgraceful language. There’s a war on: there’s no food to spare on pets! I shall have to file a report.’

  ‘Oh no, you mustn’t! He’s my only company!’ cried Olivia piteously, looking to Sergeant Richards for support.

  He patted her shoulder. ‘I’m sure he only eats waste, don’t he?’

  ‘Yes, yes, hardly anything, really. It’s probably why he’s so bad-tempered. But I do love him.’

  At the porch, Sergeant Richards paused and let his companion go ahead of him. He turned back to Olivia. ‘Don’t worry about the parrot,’ he said softly, and tipped his helmet to her.

  *

  ‘We have to be more careful!’ Olivia said. ‘It’s your life at stake!’

  Hamid nodded ruefully. ‘It’s my fault. I was excited about the snow.’

  ‘Not just the snow, I hope,’ Olivia said, pulling a face.

  They kissed. Olivia held his skull between her hands: so round, so heavy, his hair so springy and coarse, so different to her own. Yet she felt she knew him better than she had ever known any other human being in the world. They had talked for hours, down in the cellar, where she had set up the little camping stove which ran on methylated spirits, and boiled water in the old tin kettle. She kept all the tea and sugar she could for Hamid – he liked his tea sweet and he drank it constantly. It was pretty down here in the candlelight, romantic even, if you forgot that just on the other side of the door a corpse was buried.

  Over Hamid’s shoulder her gaze inadvertently slid to the door. ‘Oh!’ She slipped from his embrace and stood up, reached out and ran a hand down the edge of the tunnel door. ‘That’s… lovely.’

  Hamid lay back among the cushions, the candlelight gilding the fine-boned planes of his face. He smiled enigmatically.

  The carvings were like a sort of alphabet, she thought, the shapes deliberate and significant: she could feel the power in them. It was as if her fingers tingled. She remembered that day up at the Merry Maidens, the strange shock that ran through her when she touched the stone. But this was wood and even she – who had been terrible at school physics – knew that wood didn’t ca
rry a charge. ‘Does it mean something where… where you come from?’

  Hamid gazed back at her, his eyes dark as night. ‘You could say that. Where I come from, patterns hold power and I’ve carved these on both sides of the door. The points of the triangles, they are there to put out the evil eye. The black is protective against djinns and… the dead.’

  Olivia stepped smartly away from the door with a shudder of revulsion. She gave a shaky laugh. ‘That’s just superstition, though, isn’t it? That the dead walk?’

  Hamid’s smile became tight. ‘I’m sure it is. But to be so close…’

  ‘I know, I know. But it’s really the only safe place in the house. You know, if they search it. At least if they insist on looking down here I can say I’ve made it comfortable for me and Mary in case of air raids…’

  ‘I understand. But sometimes it’s hard to be so far away from you. I think of you lying in the bed upstairs, when I want to hold you in my arms.’

  Tears sparked in Olivia’s eyes. ‘I think of that every night. I fall asleep imagining we are together, with me lying on my side and your arms around me.’

  ‘If we were in my country we would be married and you would wear a silver crown.’

  ‘A crown?’

  ‘Studded with little gems in red and green.’

  Olivia laughed. ‘Crowns aren’t really my style,’ she said, gesturing down at her workaday trousers – a pair of her father’s, cut down rather roughly and unevenly because even necessity didn’t make her a more attentive needlewoman – and her old wool jersey.

  ‘To me you always look beautiful. But sometimes I see you in a long silk kaftan edged with silver embroidery and a wedding crown upon your head, and your eyes…’ he ran his fingers across his own eyes, ‘outlined in kohl, and I pray that one day we will live such a moment.’

  Such a vision stirred Olivia’s imagination. Accompanying it were billows of incense, palaces with forests of marble columns and starlit pools with golden fish swimming in their dark-green depths, wicked viziers and genies trapped in lamps. She smiled a little wistfully. Of course real life wasn’t like that. She couldn’t see a future for the two of them, not here, or anywhere, so she tried not to think about the future at all. ‘Maybe one day. When the war is over,’ she said, cupping his cheek.